It reminds me of a discussion that I was involved in a while back.
That reminds me of a whole lot of discussions I've read.
People simply can't answer the fucking question. "I need to use product A, how can I accomplish B?" "Well, you need to use product C and then you wouldn't need to worry about B!"
I really hate the idea that you have to be an all-knowledgeable ubergeek, or else stay completely away from computers.
You have to have a thick skin. The person reading your question might be bored, impatient, a troll, or might have exactly the answer you need. Don't take it personally.
All colleges that don't stand by their students...
What colleges *do* stand by their students nowadays? They've been extorting vast sums of money from them for a while now, and they treat them like children, they take away their right to defend themselves and they let cheating run rampant. Granted, I'm disgruntled, it was frustrating and lonely finishing my degree, but I hardly think my situation was unusual. "Alma mater" my ass.
I think she wanted to commit suicide-by-cop and chickened out at the last minute. That's not sane behavior, but it fits the facts of the story better, for example, her ignoring the police when they asked her to stop.
MIT pumping out the best and brightest I see.
She might be almost the best and brightest, which would be a very high stress situation, and would explain why she wanted to kill herself.
Zeus, for example, was not a creator god, but simply an usurper.
Yeah, he usurped his godhood from the creator gods...
Any religion with cyclical time can also work without a creator god, however some repair is typically required when the cycle comes full circle.
Only example I know of would be Hindu and I'll state rather than display my ignorance of it.
It's true that belief in god doesn't logically mandate creationism, but older religions all evolved from prehistorical myths. There's a thorough (and rather impenetrable) book by Robert Graves about the Greek myths that examines how they started as stories passed around by various tribes and later coalesced into the pantheon that was written down by Greek authors. And one of the standard myths that every religion has is a creation myth, because that's always where the story starts.
There is more, but by now you should be getting the flavor of why I think the legal and political system has been co-opted by Christians.
I'd grant you the no-drinky because that's an obnoxious movement that just won't go away, but even there it's become a secular and bipartisan "save the children" movement. "In God we trust" on the money is just whining; what about all the Masonic stuff on there? And when was the last time you recited the pledge or were even asked to? These guys say you don't have to swear on the bible, and the US Code says an oath or affirmation is valid and these notes indicate that it's specifically for atheists and such. Your taxes go to churches, and they also go to subsidize ethanol, farmers get special tax breaks and there are ten million other handouts. Welcome to rent-seeking, hardly a problem confined to or caused by religion.
What I advocate is a religious and political system that is absolutely free of religious rules, religious oaths, religious slogans, religious tax breaks, religious marriage rationales...
What you advocate is a political system that ignores the interests of religious voters and throws out all kinds of history and conventions because of some abstract offense you take that you can't really explain or some right you feel is violated without being able to demonstrate a tangible injury.
Certainly there were many issues; but slavery was prominent among them and to claim otherwise denies enormous parts of the historical record.
Ultimately, it was *the* issue. For a war to break out, some group has to believe they are facing invasion or starvation, and the men in the South did. The slave economy had been abandoned by the rest of the world, but in the South the slaveholders held most of the votes (because slaves voted the way the slaveholder wanted, hence the reason for the 3/5ths clause) and money. They were an oligarchy controlling all three branches of government and the press as well.
Southerners went to fight because they believed that the North was stealing all their money and they would eventually starve or be taken over if they didn't. What they knew for certain was that their quality of life was steadily degrading while the North was getting richer. What they didn't know was that it was because the North was industrializing while they were stagnating.
Why did the North go to war? The whole "to preserve the union" is a circular answer. Economically, if you are a semi-industrialized nation, you're going to want to preserve your hard earned progress. As long as the South was a backwards oligarchy they would continue to press for federal legislation to preserve their backwardness and even inflict it on the North. Moreover, the people of the North enjoyed a Constitution that guaranteed them certain rights and unprecedented liberty. If States could secede because they thought some group didn't deserve a particular right, those rights would not be "inalienable" for long. I'm not sure how much the abolitionists pushed for war, personally I doubt they did because most of them weren't particularly warlike.
I disagree primarily because the creation myth preceded religion proper, but any belief in god requires some sort of creationism. Even the simplest Aristotelean view of god as "prime mover" is, strictly, a creationist belief.
Also, if you look at the other side, there are many non-religious views that have a very clear eschatology. Marxism, for example, posited that history had to move through various stages and eventually reach a workers' paradise. That's an *ideology* that talks about the eschaton. The modern environmental movement is infamous for warning about the end of the world, which is an idea that is normally considered religious.
People have valid reasons for speculating about things they can't possibly know and it's not reasonable to lump everything that isn't validated by the scientific method into superstition.
Sorta like how the US government has been complaining about the difficulty of hiring Arabic translators, despite the statistics from a few years back saying that there were several million US residence who were fluent in Arabic.
Try 600,000, by the last census. I've worked with Arabic linguists before. The problem in recruiting is that the pay isn't all that great, the job is incredibly boring and has no career advancement. You basically have to be smart, but not too smart (or you'll already have a better paying job) and be able to get top secret clearance, which involves the government going through your affairs for the past 7 years. (Maybe that's for secret, I forget...) Also, I've spoken to guys trying to pass the test in Chinese and Portugese. It's not just a matter of being fluent in the language, you have to be fairly knowledgeable of the grammar of it. You know how most English speakers don't know what an adverb is? That's a problem in other countries, too.
The US also feeds babies medicine(infant "formula") instead of food (breastmilk), cuts off functional parts of the male anatomy at birth out of tradition and ignorance.
Western medicine doesn't advise either of these practices. Families in the US tend to use formula because mothers are trying to work, that's a societal issue. And circumcision is mostly done due to a cultural bias that it's cleaner.
Setting that precident
You didn't set any precedent. You came up with two practices that happen to occur in postnatal care.
Example: US has one of the most medicalized Birth process of any country, and one of the worst infant mortality rates of any modern world country.
And the reason for that is that the US tries to save more infants than most countries. Other countries keep their mortality rates down through abortion.
BTW drinking so much water that you do this is REALLY HARD. It requires a lot of will power to drink much beyond your thirst.
Or it has to be really hot, and you have to be exercising a lot. It happens in Army training on occasion, and it's part of the reason canteens are being replaced with Camelbaks. It's much easier to gauge how much you need to drink if you're sipping over time rather than gulping down a canteen.
"which frees the intelligence community from pesky things like judicial oversight while they eavesdrop on international conversations,"
The core of the Patriot act is not intelligence gathering but sharing. This was prompted because different agencies had information about 9/11 which, had they been able to share that information, they would have been far more likely to prevent the attack. There were situations where one person down the corridor from another couldn't share their notes.
Lacking hard evidence to go by, let's give privacy advocates the benefit of the doubt and say that in principle Patriot overreaches. The fact remains that the core of it is reform of our intelligence operations that was prompted by a very real attack and any reforms need to preserve the codification of that hard won lesson.
He asks for specific people by name. And isn't happy if the wrong person responds.
No, he squawks out something that your very adaptable human hearing associates with the name, and he does whatever song and dance you've trained him to do when the wrong person responds. And then once the handful of tricks you've taught him are exhausted, he will repeat them to get more praise or food.
Compare him to a dog. A dog has much more humanlike behaviors because it's a social animal. Dogs will play, hunt together, bond, etc. The parrot never does anything close to this. And a dog can be taught far more sophisticated imperatives, showing that it has superior linguistic abilities. But a dog doesn't have as well evolved an ability to reproduce sounds, so you actually think the parrot is smarter!
Would you call this simple operant conditioning?
Yes.
And if so, how much more than operant conditioning are we?
"From what I have heard" some slashdotter's think they know more about things they have never heard of than the actual scientists who have spent decades studying the subject.
In my case, "what I've heard" comes from reading linguists who have spent decades studying the subject and also think it's bunk.
Of course the owner also needs a modicum of intelligence before the animal goes to the trouble of communicating with them.
Right, I'm an idiot because I don't talk to my dog. Mmmkay.
I don't think one needs to be politically left-of-center to find this to just be exasperating shit. Most of the complaints about poor editorial judgment and general irrelevance on Slashdot are greatly exaggerated, but when someone wants to make a serious case for Slashdot's decline, this article is going to be one of the examples they use.
He could answer simple questions and interpret human language.
From what I've heard, he made prelearned sounds in response to certain shapes or sounds. That's nothing like answering any kind of question or interpreting any language, let alone human language.
Human language is a unique feat of evolution and it's not arrogant to say so, it's simple fact. Our trying to find it in other species would be the same as a bunch of giraffe scientists looking at a human and saying "wow, he stretched his neck a whole quarter inch! He's just like us!"
Unfortuantely, those who make the most noise about "smaller government" usually mean...
Stop right here. The basic principle of debate is that you debate what the person actually says, not what you invent. If you can't do that, you can take your ass back to a lefty echo chamber like DailyKos where you belong.
I'll just pass on reading your blog and instead ask the moderators why the Hell this article was accepted at all (let alone promoted to front page material).
Wow, someone struck a nerve. And, not surprisingly, it's the "ignore and censor any contrary views" nerve.
It should be noted that if you've designed a database (rather than an Excel abomination) with more than 255 columns, chances are, you're doing it wrong.
Or that particular entity has a lot of attributes. I've seen schemas that had a ton of columns and gone through the normalization process... and often find that only 10% or so have any dependency, functional, join or otherwise. For example, if you have a personnel table the fact is that there tend to be a lot of simple facts about a person, like date of birth, height, etc. The Right Way to handle these is as attributes because each person has one and only one associated with him/her.
The big problem is usually that the UI for the DBMS doesn't handle lots of columns well. They should allow "bundling" of columns, which could be entirely orthogonal to the relational model. That way "the hat size of Bob" can be bundled with "the inseam of Bob" rather than splitting them into a clothing sizes table and going through the rigmarole of enforcing a 1:1 relationship.
Therefore, pick your method depending on your needs. Are you storing massive amounts of data? Column stores are probably not for you...Your application will run better on a row store, because writing to a row store is a simple matter of adding one more record to the file, whereas writing to a column store is often a matter of writing a record to many files...Obviously more costly.
And the Way It Should Work is that the DBMS offer both modes of storage, profile query performance and choose the best mode of storage without user intervention.
Not as stupid as the author of the column. Seriously, what he's saying is like saying that the advent of powerful graphics cards means that the von Neumann model is going away. Well... I'm interpreting "the one-sized fits all concept" to mean "the theoretical underpinnings of general purpose DBMSs."
But since he's so vague about exactly what he's making obsolete, it's impossible to really contradict him. So give yourself credit for this: by risking sounding stupid, you said something worth saying.
Since when is a column store database and a relational database mutually exclusive concepts?
They're not comparable. Stonebreaker is making the standard mistake of confusing logical conception with physical implementation.
The relational model dictates a mathematical structure, relations, and an algebra that works with and only with those structures. It deals with the logical aspect of a DBMS (where S stands for System!) and says nothing about how the data is to be stored on a computer. It doesn't require that the DBMS use SQL (which is not really relational to begin with) and it doesn't care what kind of data you put in the relations, whether it is numbers, text, pictures or video.
A column store DBMS (btw, a DBMS is different from a database in the same way word.exe is different from foo.doc) is simply a particular implementation of the relational model. It shouldn't even be called a column store or row store DBMS because a DBMS shouldn't be classified by how it stores data. (And there's really no reason why one DBMS can't do both!) I understand that operating systems are often called, for example, 32-bit or 64-bit but a DBMS is specifically designed to hide implementation issues. It should be named after the logical model it implements because that's going to tell you what you can do with your data.
An article on myths becomes an exposé on bias
on
Why Myths Persist
·
· Score: 1
It's bad enough that the Post repeats the tired old canard that the administration "linked" 9/11 to Iraq... that they bring in the Arab conspiracy nuts for balance is just absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
It reminds me of a discussion that I was involved in a while back.
That reminds me of a whole lot of discussions I've read.
People simply can't answer the fucking question. "I need to use product A, how can I accomplish B?" "Well, you need to use product C and then you wouldn't need to worry about B!"
I really hate the idea that you have to be an all-knowledgeable ubergeek, or else stay completely away from computers.
You have to have a thick skin. The person reading your question might be bored, impatient, a troll, or might have exactly the answer you need. Don't take it personally.
All colleges that don't stand by their students...
What colleges *do* stand by their students nowadays? They've been extorting vast sums of money from them for a while now, and they treat them like children, they take away their right to defend themselves and they let cheating run rampant. Granted, I'm disgruntled, it was frustrating and lonely finishing my degree, but I hardly think my situation was unusual. "Alma mater" my ass.
This person is insane and has a death wish.
I think she wanted to commit suicide-by-cop and chickened out at the last minute. That's not sane behavior, but it fits the facts of the story better, for example, her ignoring the police when they asked her to stop.
MIT pumping out the best and brightest I see.
She might be almost the best and brightest, which would be a very high stress situation, and would explain why she wanted to kill herself.
I used a lowercase 'c', so you are a non-reading, non-comprehending fucktard.
Zeus, for example, was not a creator god, but simply an usurper.
Yeah, he usurped his godhood from the creator gods...
Any religion with cyclical time can also work without a creator god, however some repair is typically required when the cycle comes full circle.
Only example I know of would be Hindu and I'll state rather than display my ignorance of it.
It's true that belief in god doesn't logically mandate creationism, but older religions all evolved from prehistorical myths. There's a thorough (and rather impenetrable) book by Robert Graves about the Greek myths that examines how they started as stories passed around by various tribes and later coalesced into the pantheon that was written down by Greek authors. And one of the standard myths that every religion has is a creation myth, because that's always where the story starts.
We went from ~0.69 greenbacks per loonies to 0.98 greenbacks per loonie.
This just means that Canadians will buy more American stuff. Is that supposed to bother me?
Did you see the post claiming that the telecom industry is unregulated and a free market? I loved that one.
No one has actually observed a fingernail changing from not needing to be clipped, to needing to be clipped.
You just weren't stoned enough.
There is more, but by now you should be getting the flavor of why I think the legal and political system has been co-opted by Christians.
I'd grant you the no-drinky because that's an obnoxious movement that just won't go away, but even there it's become a secular and bipartisan "save the children" movement. "In God we trust" on the money is just whining; what about all the Masonic stuff on there? And when was the last time you recited the pledge or were even asked to? These guys say you don't have to swear on the bible, and the US Code says an oath or affirmation is valid and these notes indicate that it's specifically for atheists and such. Your taxes go to churches, and they also go to subsidize ethanol, farmers get special tax breaks and there are ten million other handouts. Welcome to rent-seeking, hardly a problem confined to or caused by religion.
What I advocate is a religious and political system that is absolutely free of religious rules, religious oaths, religious slogans, religious tax breaks, religious marriage rationales...
What you advocate is a political system that ignores the interests of religious voters and throws out all kinds of history and conventions because of some abstract offense you take that you can't really explain or some right you feel is violated without being able to demonstrate a tangible injury.
Certainly there were many issues; but slavery was prominent among them and to claim otherwise denies enormous parts of the historical record.
Ultimately, it was *the* issue. For a war to break out, some group has to believe they are facing invasion or starvation, and the men in the South did. The slave economy had been abandoned by the rest of the world, but in the South the slaveholders held most of the votes (because slaves voted the way the slaveholder wanted, hence the reason for the 3/5ths clause) and money. They were an oligarchy controlling all three branches of government and the press as well.
Southerners went to fight because they believed that the North was stealing all their money and they would eventually starve or be taken over if they didn't. What they knew for certain was that their quality of life was steadily degrading while the North was getting richer. What they didn't know was that it was because the North was industrializing while they were stagnating.
Why did the North go to war? The whole "to preserve the union" is a circular answer. Economically, if you are a semi-industrialized nation, you're going to want to preserve your hard earned progress. As long as the South was a backwards oligarchy they would continue to press for federal legislation to preserve their backwardness and even inflict it on the North. Moreover, the people of the North enjoyed a Constitution that guaranteed them certain rights and unprecedented liberty. If States could secede because they thought some group didn't deserve a particular right, those rights would not be "inalienable" for long. I'm not sure how much the abolitionists pushed for war, personally I doubt they did because most of them weren't particularly warlike.
Creationism itself is a subset of religion.
I disagree primarily because the creation myth preceded religion proper, but any belief in god requires some sort of creationism. Even the simplest Aristotelean view of god as "prime mover" is, strictly, a creationist belief.
Also, if you look at the other side, there are many non-religious views that have a very clear eschatology. Marxism, for example, posited that history had to move through various stages and eventually reach a workers' paradise. That's an *ideology* that talks about the eschaton. The modern environmental movement is infamous for warning about the end of the world, which is an idea that is normally considered religious.
People have valid reasons for speculating about things they can't possibly know and it's not reasonable to lump everything that isn't validated by the scientific method into superstition.
Sorta like how the US government has been complaining about the difficulty of hiring Arabic translators, despite the statistics from a few years back saying that there were several million US residence who were fluent in Arabic.
Try 600,000, by the last census. I've worked with Arabic linguists before. The problem in recruiting is that the pay isn't all that great, the job is incredibly boring and has no career advancement. You basically have to be smart, but not too smart (or you'll already have a better paying job) and be able to get top secret clearance, which involves the government going through your affairs for the past 7 years. (Maybe that's for secret, I forget...) Also, I've spoken to guys trying to pass the test in Chinese and Portugese. It's not just a matter of being fluent in the language, you have to be fairly knowledgeable of the grammar of it. You know how most English speakers don't know what an adverb is? That's a problem in other countries, too.
The US also feeds babies medicine(infant "formula") instead of food (breastmilk), cuts off functional parts of the male anatomy at birth out of tradition and ignorance.
Western medicine doesn't advise either of these practices. Families in the US tend to use formula because mothers are trying to work, that's a societal issue. And circumcision is mostly done due to a cultural bias that it's cleaner.
Setting that precident
You didn't set any precedent. You came up with two practices that happen to occur in postnatal care.
Example: US has one of the most medicalized Birth process of any country, and one of the worst infant mortality rates of any modern world country.
And the reason for that is that the US tries to save more infants than most countries. Other countries keep their mortality rates down through abortion.
BTW drinking so much water that you do this is REALLY HARD. It requires a lot of will power to drink much beyond your thirst.
Or it has to be really hot, and you have to be exercising a lot. It happens in Army training on occasion, and it's part of the reason canteens are being replaced with Camelbaks. It's much easier to gauge how much you need to drink if you're sipping over time rather than gulping down a canteen.
"which frees the intelligence community from pesky things like judicial oversight while they eavesdrop on international conversations,"
The core of the Patriot act is not intelligence gathering but sharing. This was prompted because different agencies had information about 9/11 which, had they been able to share that information, they would have been far more likely to prevent the attack. There were situations where one person down the corridor from another couldn't share their notes.
Lacking hard evidence to go by, let's give privacy advocates the benefit of the doubt and say that in principle Patriot overreaches. The fact remains that the core of it is reform of our intelligence operations that was prompted by a very real attack and any reforms need to preserve the codification of that hard won lesson.
He asks for specific people by name. And isn't happy if the wrong person responds.
No, he squawks out something that your very adaptable human hearing associates with the name, and he does whatever song and dance you've trained him to do when the wrong person responds. And then once the handful of tricks you've taught him are exhausted, he will repeat them to get more praise or food.
Compare him to a dog. A dog has much more humanlike behaviors because it's a social animal. Dogs will play, hunt together, bond, etc. The parrot never does anything close to this. And a dog can be taught far more sophisticated imperatives, showing that it has superior linguistic abilities. But a dog doesn't have as well evolved an ability to reproduce sounds, so you actually think the parrot is smarter!
Would you call this simple operant conditioning?
Yes.
And if so, how much more than operant conditioning are we?
Lots.
"From what I have heard" some slashdotter's think they know more about things they have never heard of than the actual scientists who have spent decades studying the subject.
In my case, "what I've heard" comes from reading linguists who have spent decades studying the subject and also think it's bunk.
Of course the owner also needs a modicum of intelligence before the animal goes to the trouble of communicating with them.
Right, I'm an idiot because I don't talk to my dog. Mmmkay.
I don't think one needs to be politically left-of-center to find this to just be exasperating shit. Most of the complaints about poor editorial judgment and general irrelevance on Slashdot are greatly exaggerated, but when someone wants to make a serious case for Slashdot's decline, this article is going to be one of the examples they use.
On reflection, I tend to agree with you.
He could answer simple questions and interpret human language.
From what I've heard, he made prelearned sounds in response to certain shapes or sounds. That's nothing like answering any kind of question or interpreting any language, let alone human language.
Human language is a unique feat of evolution and it's not arrogant to say so, it's simple fact. Our trying to find it in other species would be the same as a bunch of giraffe scientists looking at a human and saying "wow, he stretched his neck a whole quarter inch! He's just like us!"
Unfortuantely, those who make the most noise about "smaller government" usually mean ...
Stop right here. The basic principle of debate is that you debate what the person actually says, not what you invent. If you can't do that, you can take your ass back to a lefty echo chamber like DailyKos where you belong.
I'll just pass on reading your blog and instead ask the moderators why the Hell this article was accepted at all (let alone promoted to front page material).
Wow, someone struck a nerve. And, not surprisingly, it's the "ignore and censor any contrary views" nerve.
It should be noted that if you've designed a database (rather than an Excel abomination) with more than 255 columns, chances are, you're doing it wrong.
Or that particular entity has a lot of attributes. I've seen schemas that had a ton of columns and gone through the normalization process... and often find that only 10% or so have any dependency, functional, join or otherwise. For example, if you have a personnel table the fact is that there tend to be a lot of simple facts about a person, like date of birth, height, etc. The Right Way to handle these is as attributes because each person has one and only one associated with him/her.
The big problem is usually that the UI for the DBMS doesn't handle lots of columns well. They should allow "bundling" of columns, which could be entirely orthogonal to the relational model. That way "the hat size of Bob" can be bundled with "the inseam of Bob" rather than splitting them into a clothing sizes table and going through the rigmarole of enforcing a 1:1 relationship.
Therefore, pick your method depending on your needs. Are you storing massive amounts of data? Column stores are probably not for you...Your application will run better on a row store, because writing to a row store is a simple matter of adding one more record to the file, whereas writing to a column store is often a matter of writing a record to many files...Obviously more costly.
And the Way It Should Work is that the DBMS offer both modes of storage, profile query performance and choose the best mode of storage without user intervention.
Okay, at the risk of sounding stupid...
Not as stupid as the author of the column. Seriously, what he's saying is like saying that the advent of powerful graphics cards means that the von Neumann model is going away. Well... I'm interpreting "the one-sized fits all concept" to mean "the theoretical underpinnings of general purpose DBMSs."
But since he's so vague about exactly what he's making obsolete, it's impossible to really contradict him. So give yourself credit for this: by risking sounding stupid, you said something worth saying.
Since when is a column store database and a relational database mutually exclusive concepts?
They're not comparable. Stonebreaker is making the standard mistake of confusing logical conception with physical implementation.
The relational model dictates a mathematical structure, relations, and an algebra that works with and only with those structures. It deals with the logical aspect of a DBMS (where S stands for System!) and says nothing about how the data is to be stored on a computer. It doesn't require that the DBMS use SQL (which is not really relational to begin with) and it doesn't care what kind of data you put in the relations, whether it is numbers, text, pictures or video.
A column store DBMS (btw, a DBMS is different from a database in the same way word.exe is different from foo.doc) is simply a particular implementation of the relational model. It shouldn't even be called a column store or row store DBMS because a DBMS shouldn't be classified by how it stores data. (And there's really no reason why one DBMS can't do both!) I understand that operating systems are often called, for example, 32-bit or 64-bit but a DBMS is specifically designed to hide implementation issues. It should be named after the logical model it implements because that's going to tell you what you can do with your data.
It's bad enough that the Post repeats the tired old canard that the administration "linked" 9/11 to Iraq... that they bring in the Arab conspiracy nuts for balance is just absurd.