Flying isn't a God-given right, it's a damn privelege
Actually, all people have the God-given rights to do WHATEVER THEY PLEASE, so long as it does not harm others.
Those rights do not have to be specifically listed in a Constitution or Bill of Rights. They exist quite independently of any government, and inhere solely by virtue of our existence.
They do not come from government. They do not depend on approval by you, me, society, government, or anyone else.
Governments are instituted to protect those rights, not to violate them.
In this particular situation, there is no real conflict of rights, so long as the airline informs the passengers that they are being monitored. No one is being forced to be monitored in this situation. The passenger does have the right to choose another airline.
However, please do not ever again make the mistake of saying that "_____" is not a God-given right. I don't care whether it's freedom of speech, freedom to fly, or freedom to wear purple underwear.
If it does not harm others, then it is your right, and everyone else's.
The success of Free Software, and for that matter the Internet which depends on Free Software, is pretty ample evidence that the ideals of software freedom do work.
If there was ever a compromise that seemed reasonable at the time, especially to those to whom openness is more important than Freedom, then the decision to move the kernel to BitKeeper was it. If you recall, at the time, Larry and Linus and other BK supporters made every possible concession to placate the concerns of Alan Cox, and others, who saw it as jeopardizing both the Freedom and the openness of the entire project.
But this debacle shows very clearly that compromise on fundamental moral issues, such as Freedom, has a way of making hypocrites of us all.
Thank God for people like Alan Cox and RMS, who "got it" even when Linus himself didn't.
Next time, when RMS warns about things like this, I for sure am going to listen carefully.
I disagree with many of RMS' political views, but with regards to software freedom, my respect for him, which always has been immense, continues to grow. He clearly foresaw every one of the battles we are fighting today, against who would attempt to deny us such basic human rights as the right to read. He tried to warn us, but most of us didn't listen.
And while I'm not sure how much software he writes nowadays, let's not forget that he did more than just talk about software freedom: he not only founded the FSF, wrote many of the tools such as GCC and the GPL that make freedom possible.
RMS is living proof that one person can change the world for the better.
Of course MySQL is the weakest of the Free relational databases, but the fact that it is "good enough" for many Web-based applications, and that it can be easily replaced with any of the others you mentioned, speaks volumes about the nightmare that Microsoft will face if it ever tries to truly compete in this space.
You of course missed the point completely. Your failure to grasp the difference between "right" and "legal" is exactly the kind of thing that empowers the tyrants of this world, and, make no mistake, the RIAA and Hitler are both tyrants, different in the level of power and "success" they attained perhaps, but tyrants both nonetheless.
There are ways to migrate to Linux without abandoning the investment in Windows-based custom software. The simplest is to keep Windows boxes running that software, but access them through VNC or rdesktop. Running under WINE may be a possibility. Sometimes Web-based front ends for custom apps exist, or can be written, and with some care these should run just fine under any OS. And you can get people under Windows running OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, etc. *before* you move to Linux, so when you do switch, the transition will be less painful.
Gee, I guess Rosa Parks wasn't entitled to her choice of a seat on the bus, and the protesters at Tianamen Square weren't entitled not to be massacred, and the brave people who hid Jewish people during the Holocaust weren't entitled to do so.
Never, ever, ever confuse what is "legal" with what is right. Those are two sets which overlap to some degree in just societies, but little or not at all in unjust, corrupt ones such as ours.
While I prefer free and/or Java-based solutions, much of my current work involves Microsoft tools, and I can assure you that they will support more than 100 concurrent users IF you architect and design appropriately.
If it doesn't, then my first suggestion is to profile your app and figure out where the bottleneck is occurring. This will help determine where to look for the real source of the problem.
I am guessing that you're dealing with some combination of (a) locking, concurrency, or transaction isolation issues with your database, or (b) passing information, such as state, unnecessarily between tiers. Either problem tends to manifest itself first during load testing, typically as a performance curve that approaches O(n^2) or worse. It usually is the fault of the design, not the tool, and if so, then porting the app to a stronger toolset or beefier hardware would not improve the situation very much. On the other hand, profiling should show you exactly where performance-related optimizations need to occur.
I am not inclined to steal a candy bar or anything else, even if there were no chance of being caught. I have known since I was about 2 that stealing is wrong and therefore no law is necessary in order to prevent me from doing it.
I think you'll find no amount or kind of laws are sufficient if we as a society truly are willing to steal (or lie, or cheat, or enslave, or rape, or murder) as long as "there's no law against it," or as long as "we won't get caught."
There can't be true freedom without morality, nor true morality without freedom, and this whole discussion is pretty powerful evidence of both of these facts.
I wasn't aware of this project but based on their Web page they seem to have had some success deciphering the Jet.MDB format. That's good to know, although so far, I've had good success working from within MS Access when necessary to export data to more readily accessible formats.
Nothing useful can read the.MDB format as far as I know, but you can fairly trivially write VBA macros that can run from within Access to export the data and queries, as well as many aspects of other objects (forms, reports, and VBA modules, although those objects won't be useful outside Access).
Nope . . don't like guns . . . but do acknowledge the right of all people to defend themselves, which generally requires guns.
I do have traditional values that have been called "liberal" at some times in history and "conservative" in others, but both of those ideologies as they are represented in "government" today are as repugnant to me as to any other thinking person.
Really no label fits perfectly, but I'm more of a minarchist-bordering-on-anarchist libertarian than anything else.
As for being a Christian, I would describe myself as a student of Christ, but nowhere near worthy of being called a follower.
so, by implication, you're saying that it is ok for a woman to hit a man, no matter what? sorry, you can't have it both ways. it's either ok for both to punch each other out or it's not.
It's not right either way, but on average, men tend to be a lot physically stronger than women.
Also, call me old-fashioned if you'd like - I'll take it as a compliment - but I was raised to believe that God gave men a little extra strength so they could protect women and children, not hurt them.
The lack of understanding of the 2nd Amendment is hardly limited to California - thanks to decades of government "education" it is pretty much universal.
If you want to see what the rest of the country will be like soon, you need to watch two places - California, and your friendly neighborhood inner city. These are the places where limitless, lawless "government" has grown the fastest, and while there is resistance in both places, neither community by and large has either the means nor the will to resist effectively.
OK . . not a flame, just a question, albeit one that perhaps suggests its own answer . . . how exactly do you guarantee Openness, without Freedom, especially in light of recent antics by "intellectual property" owners?
In one sense CRM is more than just hype - it's an answer to a very real problem, which is that in many large organizations, customer information is spread across numerous poorly integrated systems, and companies desperately need a way to tie this information together.
However, in my view, much of the time, CRM is the wrong answer to this problem. You won't ever get a CRM package to tie information together if you don't know where it is, but if you do know where it is, then creating a centralized data store to house it is invariably much cheaper than any CRM package.
What usually happens is that a CRM package is deployed, and people are forced to use it. Data that doesn't "fit" ends up being discarded, even though it may be tremendously valuable, and the valuable business rules and processes encapsulated in the legacy systems are lost, thereby creating problems in great abundance. Managers initially are happy that their information is now "centralized." Problems are blamed either on user groups or the CRM vendor. Eventually it usually becomes clear that a CRM package was not the "silver bullet" that would cure all IT woes, but by the time the PHBs realize this, it's way too late to turn back.
My personal opinion is similar to the other poster, in that I say STAY AWAY FROM CRM PACKAGES!!!!!
My experience is that while CRM/ERP packages can work if you're willing to modify your business processes around them, they are horrendously difficult to customize and integrate with other systems, and if you need to do this, you're almost always better off rolling your own.
If you need to do customization and integration, the amount of work that requires will far exceed the cost of simply building an internal data warehouse with a variety of custom, mostly Web-based and workflow-oriented, front ends, all accessing this same data backend, and all inherently integrated with each other for that reason.
Also, the problem of vendor lock-in is enormously worse for any CRM/ERP package than for almost any other type of software. CRM and particularly ERP systems claim to be able to run your business for you. The reality is that you will end up altering your business to at least some extent to support your CRM solution, and if you want to change it, or even upgrade to the latest and greatest release which is incompatible with some of your customizations, then you're in for a very serious world of hurt.
My recommended approach, which is not popular but which will yield the best results in most situations, is to analyze your needs, including integration with existing systems, write documentation and specs and so forth, do an internal estimate for the cost of building it yourself, including maintenance over say a 10 year period, and then talk to your friendly neighborhood ERP vendor. Make sure it is willing to expose all data so that you have a migration path if you choose to migrate (it usually won't be). Make sure it does not tie you into relationships with some proprietary software vendor you may not want to do business with (believe it or not ERP systems usually do support multiple database backends, so this one won't necessarily be a problem). And last but not least, make sure that the ERP vendor offers you something you can't do for yourself at the same or less cost. Typically, for all but the smallest businesses with no IT staff, it won't.
The end result of this analysis is usually that it is faster, cheaper and better to build your own centralized data mart and then write departmental custom apps tying into it. This is especially true if you're willing to leverage Free Software projects like Apache, PostgreSQL, or Firebird DB to reduce development time and costs.
97% for the U.S. may have been true in 1979 but my experience suggests that it's probably below 90% today. There are huge numbers of people, especially in the poorest areas, who don't come close to being able to read or write standard English or Spanish, and even among "college-educated" people I have met quite a few who could not construct an intelligible sentence.
We have that already. Older ATI chipsets (like Rage 128) have decent support from the DRI project (http://dri.sourceforge.net) and give quite acceptable 2D and hardware-accelerated 3D performance for most uses, at a quite reasonable cost. DRI supports some newer ATI cards as well. However, it can't support chipsets whose makers won't release specs, such as those made by NVidia.
Freedom is what makes Linux special, and "tainting" the kernel by linking in closed-source software directly compromises that freedom, together with security, maintanability, and upgradeability.
Linux works just fine without "commercial companies" (by which I'm sure you mean developers of proprietary closed-source software that denies its users the freedom to use, study, modify, and share it) and will continue to do so.
On the other hand, many successful companies (including IBM, Red Hat, SuSE, Oracle, Sun, and even M$) do manage to make money selling software that is free as in freedom, proving that freedom and commercial success are far from mutually exclusive.
More commercial support would be nice, but only insofar as it is consistent with freedom.
Closed source is the past. Open source is the present, and it is my hope and prayer that FREEDOM will be the future.
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Flying isn't a God-given right, it's a damn privelege
Actually, all people have the God-given rights to do WHATEVER THEY PLEASE, so long as it does not harm others.
Those rights do not have to be specifically listed in a Constitution or Bill of Rights. They exist quite independently of any government, and inhere solely by virtue of our existence.
They do not come from government. They do not depend on approval by you, me, society, government, or anyone else.
Governments are instituted to protect those rights, not to violate them.
In this particular situation, there is no real conflict of rights, so long as the airline informs the passengers that they are being monitored. No one is being forced to be monitored in this situation. The passenger does have the right to choose another airline.
However, please do not ever again make the mistake of saying that "_____" is not a God-given right. I don't care whether it's freedom of speech, freedom to fly, or freedom to wear purple underwear.
If it does not harm others, then it is your right, and everyone else's.
The success of Free Software, and for that matter the Internet which depends on Free Software, is pretty ample evidence that the ideals of software freedom do work.
If there was ever a compromise that seemed reasonable at the time, especially to those to whom openness is more important than Freedom, then the decision to move the kernel to BitKeeper was it. If you recall, at the time, Larry and Linus and other BK supporters made every possible concession to placate the concerns of Alan Cox, and others, who saw it as jeopardizing both the Freedom and the openness of the entire project.
But this debacle shows very clearly that compromise on fundamental moral issues, such as Freedom, has a way of making hypocrites of us all.
Thank God for people like Alan Cox and RMS, who "got it" even when Linus himself didn't.
Next time, when RMS warns about things like this, I for sure am going to listen carefully.
I disagree with many of RMS' political views, but with regards to software freedom, my respect for him, which always has been immense, continues to grow. He clearly foresaw every one of the battles we are fighting today, against who would attempt to deny us such basic human rights as the right to read. He tried to warn us, but most of us didn't listen.
And while I'm not sure how much software he writes nowadays, let's not forget that he did more than just talk about software freedom: he not only founded the FSF, wrote many of the tools such as GCC and the GPL that make freedom possible.
RMS is living proof that one person can change the world for the better.
Of course MySQL is the weakest of the Free relational databases, but the fact that it is "good enough" for many Web-based applications, and that it can be easily replaced with any of the others you mentioned, speaks volumes about the nightmare that Microsoft will face if it ever tries to truly compete in this space.
You of course missed the point completely. Your failure to grasp the difference between "right" and "legal" is exactly the kind of thing that empowers the tyrants of this world, and, make no mistake, the RIAA and Hitler are both tyrants, different in the level of power and "success" they attained perhaps, but tyrants both nonetheless.
There are ways to migrate to Linux without abandoning the investment in Windows-based custom software. The simplest is to keep Windows boxes running that software, but access them through VNC or rdesktop. Running under WINE may be a possibility. Sometimes Web-based front ends for custom apps exist, or can be written, and with some care these should run just fine under any OS. And you can get people under Windows running OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, etc. *before* you move to Linux, so when you do switch, the transition will be less painful.
Nobody is entitled to do stuff that is not legal.
Gee, I guess Rosa Parks wasn't entitled to her choice of a seat on the bus, and the protesters at Tianamen Square weren't entitled not to be massacred, and the brave people who hid Jewish people during the Holocaust weren't entitled to do so.
Never, ever, ever confuse what is "legal" with what is right. Those are two sets which overlap to some degree in just societies, but little or not at all in unjust, corrupt ones such as ours.
Ask any minority whether we live in a tyranny. You might be surprised to hear the answer.
"Nucular."
:)
While I prefer free and/or Java-based solutions, much of my current work involves Microsoft tools, and I can assure you that they will support more than 100 concurrent users IF you architect and design appropriately.
If it doesn't, then my first suggestion is to profile your app and figure out where the bottleneck is occurring. This will help determine where to look for the real source of the problem.
I am guessing that you're dealing with some combination of (a) locking, concurrency, or transaction isolation issues with your database, or (b) passing information, such as state, unnecessarily between tiers. Either problem tends to manifest itself first during load testing, typically as a performance curve that approaches O(n^2) or worse. It usually is the fault of the design, not the tool, and if so, then porting the app to a stronger toolset or beefier hardware would not improve the situation very much. On the other hand, profiling should show you exactly where performance-related optimizations need to occur.
I am not inclined to steal a candy bar or anything else, even if there were no chance of being caught. I have known since I was about 2 that stealing is wrong and therefore no law is necessary in order to prevent me from doing it.
I think you'll find no amount or kind of laws are sufficient if we as a society truly are willing to steal (or lie, or cheat, or enslave, or rape, or murder) as long as "there's no law against it," or as long as "we won't get caught."
There can't be true freedom without morality, nor true morality without freedom, and this whole discussion is pretty powerful evidence of both of these facts.
I wasn't aware of this project but based on their Web page they seem to have had some success deciphering the Jet .MDB format. That's good to know, although so far, I've had good success working from within MS Access when necessary to export data to more readily accessible formats.
Nothing useful can read the .MDB format as far as I know, but you can fairly trivially write VBA macros that can run from within Access to export the data and queries, as well as many aspects of other objects (forms, reports, and VBA modules, although those objects won't be useful outside Access).
Nope . . don't like guns . . . but do acknowledge the right of all people to defend themselves, which generally requires guns.
I do have traditional values that have been called "liberal" at some times in history and "conservative" in others, but both of those ideologies as they are represented in "government" today are as repugnant to me as to any other thinking person.
Really no label fits perfectly, but I'm more of a minarchist-bordering-on-anarchist libertarian than anything else.
As for being a Christian, I would describe myself as a student of Christ, but nowhere near worthy of being called a follower.
so, by implication, you're saying that it is ok for a woman to hit a man, no matter what? sorry, you can't have it both ways. it's either ok for both to punch each other out or it's not.
It's not right either way, but on average, men tend to be a lot physically stronger than women.
Also, call me old-fashioned if you'd like - I'll take it as a compliment - but I was raised to believe that God gave men a little extra strength so they could protect women and children, not hurt them.
The lack of understanding of the 2nd Amendment is hardly limited to California - thanks to decades of government "education" it is pretty much universal.
If you want to see what the rest of the country will be like soon, you need to watch two places - California, and your friendly neighborhood inner city. These are the places where limitless, lawless "government" has grown the fastest, and while there is resistance in both places, neither community by and large has either the means nor the will to resist effectively.
OK . . not a flame, just a question, albeit one that perhaps suggests its own answer . . . how exactly do you guarantee Openness, without Freedom, especially in light of recent antics by "intellectual property" owners?
In one sense CRM is more than just hype - it's an answer to a very real problem, which is that in many large organizations, customer information is spread across numerous poorly integrated systems, and companies desperately need a way to tie this information together.
However, in my view, much of the time, CRM is the wrong answer to this problem. You won't ever get a CRM package to tie information together if you don't know where it is, but if you do know where it is, then creating a centralized data store to house it is invariably much cheaper than any CRM package.
What usually happens is that a CRM package is deployed, and people are forced to use it. Data that doesn't "fit" ends up being discarded, even though it may be tremendously valuable, and the valuable business rules and processes encapsulated in the legacy systems are lost, thereby creating problems in great abundance. Managers initially are happy that their information is now "centralized." Problems are blamed either on user groups or the CRM vendor. Eventually it usually becomes clear that a CRM package was not the "silver bullet" that would cure all IT woes, but by the time the PHBs realize this, it's way too late to turn back.
My personal opinion is similar to the other poster, in that I say STAY AWAY FROM CRM PACKAGES!!!!!
My experience is that while CRM/ERP packages can work if you're willing to modify your business processes around them, they are horrendously difficult to customize and integrate with other systems, and if you need to do this, you're almost always better off rolling your own.
If you need to do customization and integration, the amount of work that requires will far exceed the cost of simply building an internal data warehouse with a variety of custom, mostly Web-based and workflow-oriented, front ends, all accessing this same data backend, and all inherently integrated with each other for that reason.
Also, the problem of vendor lock-in is enormously worse for any CRM/ERP package than for almost any other type of software. CRM and particularly ERP systems claim to be able to run your business for you. The reality is that you will end up altering your business to at least some extent to support your CRM solution, and if you want to change it, or even upgrade to the latest and greatest release which is incompatible with some of your customizations, then you're in for a very serious world of hurt.
My recommended approach, which is not popular but which will yield the best results in most situations, is to analyze your needs, including integration with existing systems, write documentation and specs and so forth, do an internal estimate for the cost of building it yourself, including maintenance over say a 10 year period, and then talk to your friendly neighborhood ERP vendor. Make sure it is willing to expose all data so that you have a migration path if you choose to migrate (it usually won't be). Make sure it does not tie you into relationships with some proprietary software vendor you may not want to do business with (believe it or not ERP systems usually do support multiple database backends, so this one won't necessarily be a problem). And last but not least, make sure that the ERP vendor offers you something you can't do for yourself at the same or less cost. Typically, for all but the smallest businesses with no IT staff, it won't.
The end result of this analysis is usually that it is faster, cheaper and better to build your own centralized data mart and then write departmental custom apps tying into it. This is especially true if you're willing to leverage Free Software projects like Apache, PostgreSQL, or Firebird DB to reduce development time and costs.
97% for the U.S. may have been true in 1979 but my experience suggests that it's probably below 90% today. There are huge numbers of people, especially in the poorest areas, who don't come close to being able to read or write standard English or Spanish, and even among "college-educated" people I have met quite a few who could not construct an intelligible sentence.
If you value freedom, you won't purchase hardware that "needs" unfree drivers, especially when better, cheaper, faster, free alternatives exist.
We have that already. Older ATI chipsets (like Rage 128) have decent support from the DRI project (http://dri.sourceforge.net) and give quite acceptable 2D and hardware-accelerated 3D performance for most uses, at a quite reasonable cost. DRI supports some newer ATI cards as well. However, it can't support chipsets whose makers won't release specs, such as those made by NVidia.
Freedom is what makes Linux special, and "tainting" the kernel by linking in closed-source software directly compromises that freedom, together with security, maintanability, and upgradeability.
Linux works just fine without "commercial companies" (by which I'm sure you mean developers of proprietary closed-source software that denies its users the freedom to use, study, modify, and share it) and will continue to do so.
On the other hand, many successful companies (including IBM, Red Hat, SuSE, Oracle, Sun, and even M$) do manage to make money selling software that is free as in freedom, proving that freedom and commercial success are far from mutually exclusive.
More commercial support would be nice, but only insofar as it is consistent with freedom.
Closed source is the past. Open source is the present, and it is my hope and prayer that FREEDOM will be the future.
Ever hear of competition?