I don't see that as very likely. Of course China very much would like Taiwan back, but it has little to gain and much to lose if any kind of military conflict should result in or near there. Taiwan has an economic importance, not only to the region but to the world, far out of proportion to its modest size. But if it were devastated by war, it would become a drain to the regional economy, not an asset. I really don't see a military solution to the conflict, but much more likely some kind of negotiated settlement (perhaps along the lines of what happened with Hong Kong, "one country, two systems").
I don't see many "conventional" scenarios which would not escalate or deteriorate into an attempt to forcibly take and hold Chinese territory . . . i.e., an invasion. Preventing Chinese attack, however, should be relatively simple: don't do anything to threaten its vital interests. At the present time, China is not particularly aggressive, at least not toward nations outside its immediate sphere of interest. Chinese leadership is well aware that the resources that would be needed to fight an offensive war can be put to better use helping to grow the economy, especially at this stage of its economic development. It has no reason to go around looking for fights.
On the other hand, it does seek a greater role within its region, as befitting a nation of its power and influence. It also seeks eventual reunification, an effective defense against possible Japanese aggression should it eventually rearm, an effective defense against Russian incursion, and various other local/regional threats. We need to be aware that our ability to influence these trends is limited, and can best be accomplished through persuasion and economic cooperation, not threats of violence and death.
China currently shows many signs of becoming an excellent world citizen and leader. It needs improvement in some areas (human rights, Tibet, religious freedom, extreme rural poverty, etc.) but frankly I think that given the right kind of friendly persuasion and incentives, China could potentially lead its region and the entire world into a century or longer of relative peace and prosperity, which would be a welcome change given the war and other conflict and suffering that characterized much of the previous one. The U.S. will not play the dominant role that it once did, but it is not yet too late for it to take its place as one great, peaceful, prosperous nation among many others, and to learn to lead or at least persuade through example rather than force.
I'm not sure whether the concept of a "conventional conflict" is valid anymore. We have less ability to project conventional forces halfway around the world, in the numbers we would need (to fight an army potentially a BILLION strong), than is commonly believed. Of course, China has even less, which is why they already plan to bring the war to us in other ways should it become necessary. They are well situated to defend their current territory, not to take or occupy territory half a globe away.
But let's assume a conventional conflict for the sake of argument. We decide to invade China. Rest of the world doesn't much like this, and probably would respond, BUT . . let's also make every reasonable assumption that is favorable to your argument as possible: that Russia and India remain neutral for the time being, that Japan stays out, and that both Russia and China's Middle Eastern allies continue to sell energy to the world at around today's prices.
Command economies produce less, not more, than free ones. But again, let's assume that, given the same workforce and little to no damage to factories, we could continue to produce the current GDP under a command economy, only with manufacturing shifted toward military production to the greatest extent practical. (This is a HUGE assumption but I am granting it solely to show that it changes nothing.)
China could cripple critical components of our existing production, including nearly all of our warmaking ability, merely by disrupting oil shipping in the Gulf, bombing or otherwise disrupting semiconductor factories in Taiwan and Japan, and using the conventional warmaking capabilities that is *also* more than likely has already staged here, just in case. Eventually, we could switch to coal and nuclear, but that would take a long time, and would be very vulnerable to targeted Chinese attacks, which could be done through saboteurs or in any number of other ways.
It is an open secret that the entire U.S. surface fleet is vulnerable to ballistic missiles (e.g. Sunburns). Yes, countermeasures obviously exist and are deployed, and might work against a relatively underdeveloped foe such as Iran. China on the other hand can build more than enough, even if it does not already have them on hand, to sink the entire surface fleet. Now, how do we get troops and supplies back and forth? Do we simply take them from nearby countries, all of which understand that if they permit this, they will be seen as having committed an act of war against China?
Now, imagine that each side had the same gender ratio (they do not, and the difference is in China's favor). Also assume that they have the same age distribution (again, they do not, and again, the difference is very much in China's favor). Assume we can manage to not only "man up" the 150 million people in the U.S. of potentially fighting age, but also thin them down, teach them to shoot, equip them with weaponry, and somehow get them over to China. China has SIX TIMES our population, and most of their people are neither lazy, fat, nor stupid. They would be fighting not to gain wealth for their rulers, but to defend their homes and families. They would be fighting on familiar ground, and would have the advantage of being able to prepare themselves, the terrain, the potential battlefields, and whatnot.
Who is left to run our factories, assuming China can't find a way to bomb them to smithereens, or starve them of the natural resources they require to run? Keep in mind we'd have to conscript not only men, but women as well, to come close to matching a sixth of China's numbers. Also keep in mind that we lost much of the raw and semi-finished materials we used to import. Much of what didn't come from China came through Chinese-controlled waters. Not anymore.
China could maintain production at pre-war levels fairly easily, and could probably greatly increase it if necessary. Most of their population would not in fact be needed for defense. Most of their raw materials and other neede
War between developed and/or large nations is a negative-sum game. No one wins; everyone loses.
I think people tend to ignore the ease with which China could activate WMDs that very likely already exist in the heart of every major urban area, likely disguised as very ordinary devices like refrigerators and shipping containers, and thereby end Americans' will to fight a war before it even starts. Come on, do you really think they lack this ability, and, assuming they have this ability, do you really think they would fail to use it when the alternative might very well be the exact scenario you suggest?
They also ignore that in a sustained conflict between nations with grossly different economic capacities, the one with the bigger capacity wins. And we're screwed on that front as well. True, China's current economic output is not yet comparable with the U.S., but it is still early in its growth phase; and, even now, who could doubt that in a life-or-death struggle to produce manpower, energy, weapons (REAL weapons, not make-work for unemployed engineers) or any other supplies, China would easily roll over the U.S., even without the help of Japan, Russia, India and South Korea, all of whom, when the rubber meets the road, would side (or be forced to side) with China? Many Americans are arrogant enough to believe they could easily defeat any of those powers, but do even they think they can defeat them all, at the same time?
Also, the fact that China could not win a war against the U.S., does not imply the opposite: the U.S. would not have a net gain in any such scenario either. Occupying or holding a nation with 6 times the population (probably more like 15-20x the population within a few hours after the war starts) is not something we have the money or power to do. We can't defeat a handful of "insurgents" in Iraq or secure the Green Zone there, and the effort to do so is rapidly bankrupting us. We will not be winning a war against any large and/or developed country anytime soon. All we will do is, at best, make sure that they do not win either. The only winners will be those who were smart and/or lucky enough to stay out of it.
Very tempting, but what Joe might not be counting on is the tendency for governments to revalue certain debts (but not others) to lessen the pain to those who fund them.
In my view, all terrorists are collectivists, by definition, because terrorism is, again by definition, an attack against civilians carried out for political motivations. It is a form of group punishment, which is the very essence of collectivism.
Unfortunately, Joe Sixpack's ignorance of economics doesn't confer immunity to its consequences. Mr. Sixpack may not have directly bought CDOs, but he was probably MORE exposed than those who actively traded them, via (a) his retirement fund, (b) the health of his employer (assuming he still has an employer and a retirement fund), and (c) the consequences of a declining dollar which will purchase much less food and energy, if any at all, on world markets once lending and hence inflation begin in earnest.
What could he have done differently? Most forms of hedging would not have worked well due to Joe's lack of financial knowledge, as well as the excessive amounts of leverage and counterparty risk that prevailed at the time (and still do). But if he knew enough economics to know that the current situation was and still is unsustainable, he might have (a) bought gold; (b) paid down debt; (c) internationalized his investment portfolio, or at least greatly reduced exposure to U.S. and European bonds and equities and (d) considered retraining, retooling, or whatever was necessary to ensure that he'd continue to have marketable job skills even during a protracted period of financial, economic, political and possibly military instability. If he'd done those things, he'd likely have come out AHEAD of the day traders and even folks like me who were heavily invested in the financial services industry.
Yes, true and very useful, but you still don't get to defeat the Second Law. You can't transfer the atoms into a higher energy state without that energy coming from somewhere (in this case, apparently sunlight).
Actually, any given mutation very likely does occur, in any sufficiently large population . . . the problem is whether the creature will survive any nontrivial mutation. That's what's rare.
Re:paradigm of having to restart the computer?
on
Ubuntu on a Dime
·
· Score: 1
YMMV. I run Gentoo, and usually reboot only for kernel updates, which I tend to do no more than once every few months. I'm running realtime audio processing, database and Web servers, sshd, Samba, and a lot of other stuff, and my experience is that once configured properly it is rock-solid, although getting it there can be a bit of a pain.
Obama is cut from the same cloth. Much of his staff grew up as part of Chicago Politics. As a rule, what is popular in Chicago does NOT play well in the rest of the country. So Obama can't say these things himself. But watch how he governs. His mindset and agenda are the same.
I'm sorry to say it does play pretty well here in other Rust Belt cities (Cleveland, Detroit, Youngstown, etc.). It's the last thing this region needs though. We've already taxed and regulated productive businesses literally to death, leaving government and its close associates (the highly regulated medical, financial, and legal industries) as the chief if not only major employers. We need to reverse 50-60 years of creeping socialism/fascism, and allow free enterprise to bring economic growth and opportunity back to this region. They don't realize it yet but in 10 more years Chicago, New York and other larger cities will be in the same predicament. For economies to prosper, businesses must be allowed to create jobs.
It's a perfectly acceptable alternative spelling of the proper noun "Fizzbin," which does not exist yet, but will a couple hundred years from now, when it will be used to describe a fictional card game which will be invented by Captain Kirk.
I'm something of a generalist; I do Web, desktop, database, embedded, and other kinds of development on the Java, FLOSS, and.NET platform stacks, among a handful of others. I certainly know how to design and implement a proper relational database (and I do know what "relational" means).
But I also can see a place for people who specialize more in the Web side of things. They might be interacting with an application server, ORB, O/R mapping layer, Web services, or any number of other things rather than having to touch the database directly. They might also be able to do stuff with Ecmascript or CSS that I would never have thought possible, and in a standard-compliant, cross-browser fashion to boot. I would not necessarily expect them to be full-fledged DBAs, any more than I'd expect my DBAs to be CSS experts. I do expect them to be able to know how to get at the data they need. I also expect them, and anyone else in IT, to be able to learn new things, including things outside their usual areas of expertise, if that is the fastest/best/cheapest way to get the project done. But just as generalists like me have their place, specialists do as well, and the good ones can usually pretty much name their price if they can find a good market and make their abilities known.
I'd appreciate if you could elaborate. I'm guessing that there is a very significant human cost to pornography that most people don't see, and that perhaps their attitudes about it might be different if they understood that.
My roughly 20 years of development experience in litigation, publishing, financial, brokerage, Web, and embedded systems have only very rarely presented me with a data persistence problem for which some type of RDBMS was not an acceptable solution.
I handle data models similar to those in the medical industry through the "EAV" (entity/attribute/value) model. In fact, the linked article discusses clinical findings as a typical example of where EAV might prove useful. There are tradeoffs for sure, but generally speaking, it works very well when you have a very large number of potential attributes that each entity *might* have, but a much smaller number of attributes that any particular entity *will* have. For instance there are hundreds of thousands of illnesses or courses of treatment a patient might have, but no one will ever live long enough (or have enough money) to go through all, or more than a tiny fraction, of these.
What's great about EAV is that you still get most of the benefits of the relational model, as well as most of the benefits of indexing. The tradeoff is that you do end up having to write more complex code, and sometimes querying can get tricky if your values are of multiple, incompatible types (lots of casting, etc.). Also, your querying and reporting tools, and your PHBs, all need to be aware that attribute data is being stored as rows rather than columns, and sometimes naive ones aren't.
Opposition to Chavez and opposition to U.S. empire are orthogonal. I happen to oppose both, for similar reasons. Both Chavez and the U.S. empire are committed to a policy of forced collectivization, and to an apparent belief that today's problems resulted from free enterprise (in spite of that the fact that it hasn't existed in either place for a very long time), and can be solved through central planning.
The fact that Chavez has the wit and the cajones to tweak Washington's nose from time to time is among the few things I actually do respect and admire about him.
The lesson should be more than just "Microsoft might drop support for Silverlight." That is just a special case of the more general and worrisome problem: "any proprietary, single-vendor solution leaves you at the mercy of that vendor, and you as a developer or end user are no longer in control of your computing experience." Our best defense against that problem is first to recognize it as a problem, then try to build on open standards and tools to the greatest extent possible, preferably using small, simple tools that do one thing well and flexibly, rather than "one size fits all" solutions that try to do everything, try to solve every problem, but in the process rob us of the flexibility and transparency we need in order to build and maintain great solutions for our business clients.
Pearl Harbor was a "surprise" only to those unaware that the U.S. Navy was already engaged in blocking access to oil and other supplies from southeast Asia. There is no excusing Japanese behavior during the war (particularly toward China), but, nonetheless, Pearl Harbor was neither a surprise attack, nor unprovoked. Well before it occurred, events had been set into motion that made war inevitable. The poor state of readiness at Pearl was well-documented and inexcusable, and greatly contributed to loss of life there. The ignorance, arrogance, callousness, and hatefulness of ALL sides in the resulting conflict, and the bogus "justifications" given for the above by all sides, are a sad testament to the fact that the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced, far greater than any natural disaster or famine or earthquake or hurricane or even all of them combined, is humanity itself. Unless human nature changes, or we learn to control it, mass murders masquerading as "wars" will continue and will become increasingly destructive and horrific.
One can tire of mediocre or even fairly good music quickly, but truly great music is another story.
I compose music in the Baroque style, and also listen to and/or play Bach (badly I'm afraid) for probably 10 to 15 hours per week. I have his complete works on CD, and am very familiar with most of his organ and keyboard work as well as much of the rest.
I tire quickly of my own music, but could listen to any of Bach's well-known works a hundred times in a row and still hear something new or differently each time.
A computer could easily supersede any "genius" or creativity I could be said to have, even though the best of my work could fool someone unfamiliar with the genre. However, not only do I not think a computer will ever replicate Bach, but I don't think any person will either. I think his genius was not merely human, but divine, as he himself believed as well (he inscripted a number of his works with the initials 'SDG', short for Sola Dei Gloria or roughly "Glory only to God." He as well as most others in his day grossly underestimated that genius, but he at least knew where it came from!
Slashdot Mirror
It's not like there aren't much bigger and popular Web sites peddling much more harmful and destructive products.
I don't see that as very likely. Of course China very much would like Taiwan back, but it has little to gain and much to lose if any kind of military conflict should result in or near there. Taiwan has an economic importance, not only to the region but to the world, far out of proportion to its modest size. But if it were devastated by war, it would become a drain to the regional economy, not an asset. I really don't see a military solution to the conflict, but much more likely some kind of negotiated settlement (perhaps along the lines of what happened with Hong Kong, "one country, two systems").
I don't see many "conventional" scenarios which would not escalate or deteriorate into an attempt to forcibly take and hold Chinese territory . . . i.e., an invasion. Preventing Chinese attack, however, should be relatively simple: don't do anything to threaten its vital interests. At the present time, China is not particularly aggressive, at least not toward nations outside its immediate sphere of interest. Chinese leadership is well aware that the resources that would be needed to fight an offensive war can be put to better use helping to grow the economy, especially at this stage of its economic development. It has no reason to go around looking for fights.
On the other hand, it does seek a greater role within its region, as befitting a nation of its power and influence. It also seeks eventual reunification, an effective defense against possible Japanese aggression should it eventually rearm, an effective defense against Russian incursion, and various other local/regional threats. We need to be aware that our ability to influence these trends is limited, and can best be accomplished through persuasion and economic cooperation, not threats of violence and death.
China currently shows many signs of becoming an excellent world citizen and leader. It needs improvement in some areas (human rights, Tibet, religious freedom, extreme rural poverty, etc.) but frankly I think that given the right kind of friendly persuasion and incentives, China could potentially lead its region and the entire world into a century or longer of relative peace and prosperity, which would be a welcome change given the war and other conflict and suffering that characterized much of the previous one. The U.S. will not play the dominant role that it once did, but it is not yet too late for it to take its place as one great, peaceful, prosperous nation among many others, and to learn to lead or at least persuade through example rather than force.
I'm not sure whether the concept of a "conventional conflict" is valid anymore. We have less ability to project conventional forces halfway around the world, in the numbers we would need (to fight an army potentially a BILLION strong), than is commonly believed. Of course, China has even less, which is why they already plan to bring the war to us in other ways should it become necessary. They are well situated to defend their current territory, not to take or occupy territory half a globe away.
But let's assume a conventional conflict for the sake of argument. We decide to invade China. Rest of the world doesn't much like this, and probably would respond, BUT . . let's also make every reasonable assumption that is favorable to your argument as possible: that Russia and India remain neutral for the time being, that Japan stays out, and that both Russia and China's Middle Eastern allies continue to sell energy to the world at around today's prices.
Command economies produce less, not more, than free ones. But again, let's assume that, given the same workforce and little to no damage to factories, we could continue to produce the current GDP under a command economy, only with manufacturing shifted toward military production to the greatest extent practical. (This is a HUGE assumption but I am granting it solely to show that it changes nothing.)
China could cripple critical components of our existing production, including nearly all of our warmaking ability, merely by disrupting oil shipping in the Gulf, bombing or otherwise disrupting semiconductor factories in Taiwan and Japan, and using the conventional warmaking capabilities that is *also* more than likely has already staged here, just in case. Eventually, we could switch to coal and nuclear, but that would take a long time, and would be very vulnerable to targeted Chinese attacks, which could be done through saboteurs or in any number of other ways.
It is an open secret that the entire U.S. surface fleet is vulnerable to ballistic missiles (e.g. Sunburns). Yes, countermeasures obviously exist and are deployed, and might work against a relatively underdeveloped foe such as Iran. China on the other hand can build more than enough, even if it does not already have them on hand, to sink the entire surface fleet. Now, how do we get troops and supplies back and forth? Do we simply take them from nearby countries, all of which understand that if they permit this, they will be seen as having committed an act of war against China?
Now, imagine that each side had the same gender ratio (they do not, and the difference is in China's favor). Also assume that they have the same age distribution (again, they do not, and again, the difference is very much in China's favor). Assume we can manage to not only "man up" the 150 million people in the U.S. of potentially fighting age, but also thin them down, teach them to shoot, equip them with weaponry, and somehow get them over to China. China has SIX TIMES our population, and most of their people are neither lazy, fat, nor stupid. They would be fighting not to gain wealth for their rulers, but to defend their homes and families. They would be fighting on familiar ground, and would have the advantage of being able to prepare themselves, the terrain, the potential battlefields, and whatnot.
Who is left to run our factories, assuming China can't find a way to bomb them to smithereens, or starve them of the natural resources they require to run? Keep in mind we'd have to conscript not only men, but women as well, to come close to matching a sixth of China's numbers. Also keep in mind that we lost much of the raw and semi-finished materials we used to import. Much of what didn't come from China came through Chinese-controlled waters. Not anymore.
China could maintain production at pre-war levels fairly easily, and could probably greatly increase it if necessary. Most of their population would not in fact be needed for defense. Most of their raw materials and other neede
War between developed and/or large nations is a negative-sum game. No one wins; everyone loses.
I think people tend to ignore the ease with which China could activate WMDs that very likely already exist in the heart of every major urban area, likely disguised as very ordinary devices like refrigerators and shipping containers, and thereby end Americans' will to fight a war before it even starts. Come on, do you really think they lack this ability, and, assuming they have this ability, do you really think they would fail to use it when the alternative might very well be the exact scenario you suggest?
They also ignore that in a sustained conflict between nations with grossly different economic capacities, the one with the bigger capacity wins. And we're screwed on that front as well. True, China's current economic output is not yet comparable with the U.S., but it is still early in its growth phase; and, even now, who could doubt that in a life-or-death struggle to produce manpower, energy, weapons (REAL weapons, not make-work for unemployed engineers) or any other supplies, China would easily roll over the U.S., even without the help of Japan, Russia, India and South Korea, all of whom, when the rubber meets the road, would side (or be forced to side) with China? Many Americans are arrogant enough to believe they could easily defeat any of those powers, but do even they think they can defeat them all, at the same time?
Also, the fact that China could not win a war against the U.S., does not imply the opposite: the U.S. would not have a net gain in any such scenario either. Occupying or holding a nation with 6 times the population (probably more like 15-20x the population within a few hours after the war starts) is not something we have the money or power to do. We can't defeat a handful of "insurgents" in Iraq or secure the Green Zone there, and the effort to do so is rapidly bankrupting us. We will not be winning a war against any large and/or developed country anytime soon. All we will do is, at best, make sure that they do not win either. The only winners will be those who were smart and/or lucky enough to stay out of it.
Very tempting, but what Joe might not be counting on is the tendency for governments to revalue certain debts (but not others) to lessen the pain to those who fund them.
In my view, all terrorists are collectivists, by definition, because terrorism is, again by definition, an attack against civilians carried out for political motivations. It is a form of group punishment, which is the very essence of collectivism.
Unfortunately, Joe Sixpack's ignorance of economics doesn't confer immunity to its consequences. Mr. Sixpack may not have directly bought CDOs, but he was probably MORE exposed than those who actively traded them, via (a) his retirement fund, (b) the health of his employer (assuming he still has an employer and a retirement fund), and (c) the consequences of a declining dollar which will purchase much less food and energy, if any at all, on world markets once lending and hence inflation begin in earnest.
What could he have done differently? Most forms of hedging would not have worked well due to Joe's lack of financial knowledge, as well as the excessive amounts of leverage and counterparty risk that prevailed at the time (and still do). But if he knew enough economics to know that the current situation was and still is unsustainable, he might have (a) bought gold; (b) paid down debt; (c) internationalized his investment portfolio, or at least greatly reduced exposure to U.S. and European bonds and equities and (d) considered retraining, retooling, or whatever was necessary to ensure that he'd continue to have marketable job skills even during a protracted period of financial, economic, political and possibly military instability. If he'd done those things, he'd likely have come out AHEAD of the day traders and even folks like me who were heavily invested in the financial services industry.
I'm sorry for your loss.
https://myhomeserver.example.org/stealSensitiveData.php?data=SENSITIVE_DATA_I_WANNA_STEAL
Yes, true and very useful, but you still don't get to defeat the Second Law. You can't transfer the atoms into a higher energy state without that energy coming from somewhere (in this case, apparently sunlight).
Actually, any given mutation very likely does occur, in any sufficiently large population . . . the problem is whether the creature will survive any nontrivial mutation. That's what's rare.
YMMV. I run Gentoo, and usually reboot only for kernel updates, which I tend to do no more than once every few months. I'm running realtime audio processing, database and Web servers, sshd, Samba, and a lot of other stuff, and my experience is that once configured properly it is rock-solid, although getting it there can be a bit of a pain.
Obama is cut from the same cloth. Much of his staff grew up as part of Chicago Politics. As a rule, what is popular in Chicago does NOT play well in the rest of the country. So Obama can't say these things himself. But watch how he governs. His mindset and agenda are the same.
I'm sorry to say it does play pretty well here in other Rust Belt cities (Cleveland, Detroit, Youngstown, etc.). It's the last thing this region needs though. We've already taxed and regulated productive businesses literally to death, leaving government and its close associates (the highly regulated medical, financial, and legal industries) as the chief if not only major employers. We need to reverse 50-60 years of creeping socialism/fascism, and allow free enterprise to bring economic growth and opportunity back to this region. They don't realize it yet but in 10 more years Chicago, New York and other larger cities will be in the same predicament. For economies to prosper, businesses must be allowed to create jobs.
It's a perfectly acceptable alternative spelling of the proper noun "Fizzbin," which does not exist yet, but will a couple hundred years from now, when it will be used to describe a fictional card game which will be invented by Captain Kirk.
I'm something of a generalist; I do Web, desktop, database, embedded, and other kinds of development on the Java, FLOSS, and .NET platform stacks, among a handful of others. I certainly know how to design and implement a proper relational database (and I do know what "relational" means).
But I also can see a place for people who specialize more in the Web side of things. They might be interacting with an application server, ORB, O/R mapping layer, Web services, or any number of other things rather than having to touch the database directly. They might also be able to do stuff with Ecmascript or CSS that I would never have thought possible, and in a standard-compliant, cross-browser fashion to boot. I would not necessarily expect them to be full-fledged DBAs, any more than I'd expect my DBAs to be CSS experts. I do expect them to be able to know how to get at the data they need. I also expect them, and anyone else in IT, to be able to learn new things, including things outside their usual areas of expertise, if that is the fastest/best/cheapest way to get the project done. But just as generalists like me have their place, specialists do as well, and the good ones can usually pretty much name their price if they can find a good market and make their abilities known.
I'd appreciate if you could elaborate. I'm guessing that there is a very significant human cost to pornography that most people don't see, and that perhaps their attitudes about it might be different if they understood that.
My roughly 20 years of development experience in litigation, publishing, financial, brokerage, Web, and embedded systems have only very rarely presented me with a data persistence problem for which some type of RDBMS was not an acceptable solution.
I handle data models similar to those in the medical industry through the "EAV" (entity/attribute/value) model. In fact, the linked article discusses clinical findings as a typical example of where EAV might prove useful. There are tradeoffs for sure, but generally speaking, it works very well when you have a very large number of potential attributes that each entity *might* have, but a much smaller number of attributes that any particular entity *will* have. For instance there are hundreds of thousands of illnesses or courses of treatment a patient might have, but no one will ever live long enough (or have enough money) to go through all, or more than a tiny fraction, of these.
What's great about EAV is that you still get most of the benefits of the relational model, as well as most of the benefits of indexing. The tradeoff is that you do end up having to write more complex code, and sometimes querying can get tricky if your values are of multiple, incompatible types (lots of casting, etc.). Also, your querying and reporting tools, and your PHBs, all need to be aware that attribute data is being stored as rows rather than columns, and sometimes naive ones aren't.
Communism is a very bad thing as well. McCarthy's methods were bad, but his concerns were very legitimate and in fact were vindicated over time.
"News just in! Obama caught *!&@($*&cking a goat!!!"
You could get sued by the goat.
Opposition to Chavez and opposition to U.S. empire are orthogonal. I happen to oppose both, for similar reasons. Both Chavez and the U.S. empire are committed to a policy of forced collectivization, and to an apparent belief that today's problems resulted from free enterprise (in spite of that the fact that it hasn't existed in either place for a very long time), and can be solved through central planning.
The fact that Chavez has the wit and the cajones to tweak Washington's nose from time to time is among the few things I actually do respect and admire about him.
High-fructose corn syrup is strongly suspected to play a role in making people diabatic . . . couldn't it conceivably work the same way here?
The lesson should be more than just "Microsoft might drop support for Silverlight." That is just a special case of the more general and worrisome problem: "any proprietary, single-vendor solution leaves you at the mercy of that vendor, and you as a developer or end user are no longer in control of your computing experience." Our best defense against that problem is first to recognize it as a problem, then try to build on open standards and tools to the greatest extent possible, preferably using small, simple tools that do one thing well and flexibly, rather than "one size fits all" solutions that try to do everything, try to solve every problem, but in the process rob us of the flexibility and transparency we need in order to build and maintain great solutions for our business clients.
Pearl Harbor was a "surprise" only to those unaware that the U.S. Navy was already engaged in blocking access to oil and other supplies from southeast Asia. There is no excusing Japanese behavior during the war (particularly toward China), but, nonetheless, Pearl Harbor was neither a surprise attack, nor unprovoked. Well before it occurred, events had been set into motion that made war inevitable. The poor state of readiness at Pearl was well-documented and inexcusable, and greatly contributed to loss of life there. The ignorance, arrogance, callousness, and hatefulness of ALL sides in the resulting conflict, and the bogus "justifications" given for the above by all sides, are a sad testament to the fact that the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced, far greater than any natural disaster or famine or earthquake or hurricane or even all of them combined, is humanity itself. Unless human nature changes, or we learn to control it, mass murders masquerading as "wars" will continue and will become increasingly destructive and horrific.
One can tire of mediocre or even fairly good music quickly, but truly great music is another story.
I compose music in the Baroque style, and also listen to and/or play Bach (badly I'm afraid) for probably 10 to 15 hours per week. I have his complete works on CD, and am very familiar with most of his organ and keyboard work as well as much of the rest.
I tire quickly of my own music, but could listen to any of Bach's well-known works a hundred times in a row and still hear something new or differently each time.
A computer could easily supersede any "genius" or creativity I could be said to have, even though the best of my work could fool someone unfamiliar with the genre. However, not only do I not think a computer will ever replicate Bach, but I don't think any person will either. I think his genius was not merely human, but divine, as he himself believed as well (he inscripted a number of his works with the initials 'SDG', short for Sola Dei Gloria or roughly "Glory only to God." He as well as most others in his day grossly underestimated that genius, but he at least knew where it came from!