STOP THAT NONSENSE! Lithium is CHEAP. You can extract it from the saltwater for $50-70 per kg. if all else fails, but right now it's just easier to buy it for $20 per kg. in Bolivia.
Lithium so far is SO CHEAP that it makes no sense to make geological surveys specially for it.
Let's suppose that we have 1000 customers and each customer has 100 bids, and each bid has 5 sub-items.
If we retrieve all of them using inner joins - we'll have to transmit and read 100*1000*5 rows. Quite a large number.
If we first fetch customers and then fetch their bids (using a second query) and then sub-items we'll have to read 1000+1000*100+1000*100*5 rows. However, each time we fetch only relevant data which can result in huge savings of bandwidth (some database protocols are naive enough to transmit full rows).
I do not want hierarchical data storage. I want to create trees from relational data.
I don't see anything that prevents me from doing this in theory. In fact, ANSI SQL already has support for hierarchic queries (which makes it Turing-complete, BTW).
The idea of RDB is cool, relational algebra is quite neat. But SQL itself is horrible.
I'd like to have a language which will allow me to access intermediate tuples cleanly and return hierarchic structures. For example, if I want to fetch all customers and all their bids in one query I have to use inner join. And that results in LARGE number of rows (Cartesian product of customers and their bids).
Also, I'd like to see stuff which is not easily expressed in relational algebra, like running sums or grouping on a computed field.
It's unlikely. Another star (the size of our Sun) needs to pass about 2 light-years near the Sun to significantly disturb the Oort cloud. And Sun-like starts are not that common.
However, Sun's gravitational field is so weak in the Oort cloud that even _Galactic tides_ can eject objects from it. Few years ago I helped my friend to write a computer simulation of this for his thesis.
"And see you are hopelessly wrong. Your citations of a left leaning blog or wiki do not impress me one bit."
Well, reality has a well-known left leaning...
"When you have your people already saying that the end game is socialism regardless of the cost, your cost savings are pretty much guaranteed to be completely made up, and they always have been. It doesn't matter if it is better or it is worse, ultimately, to liberals, just so long as it is socialized."
S-word, again. France seems to be doing just fine, by almost all accounts. They spend _less_ then US and have better outcomes.
"Health care costs are climbing roughly exponentially because care is getting more complex."
Quite the opposite. Healtcare gets _cheaper_ all the time. Mostly because good preventative care makes complex treatments unnecessary for a lot of cases.
"In order to actually divvy up the pie, pretty much, you have to not pay for some treatments, and basically block new medicines and new technologies from hitting the market, and that's really what government will do."
Bullshit. Nobody would stop you from paying to a pharmaceutical company for the best treatment.
Suppose that tomorrow you will suffer in a traffic accident. For example, you'll get 30% body burns.
That will incapacitate you for about 6-9 months. If your insurance expires while you're incapacitated, then you're screwed.
Oh, and nobody later will cover you. So if you get, say, staph infection later (a fairly common complication after major burns) then you're royally screwed.
"Oh really? If they were cheap, they could buy them, and there would be no need for public insurance now, would there?"
No. Even cheap treatments are way too expensive in the US. Because of insurance-based money-grabbing medicine.
Also, nobody bars you from buying expensive treatments using your private insurance. What's the problem?
Single payer system is not even necessary. The best healthcare system is in France, and it's not even single-payer (it has a public insurance which you can augment with private insurance).
USA has great cancer research facilities, like National Cancer Institute. Which sponsors trials of about two-thirds of all approved drugs. Oh, and it is funded by the government, not private industry.
Slashdot Mirror
You're in luck: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Njk1NA
STOP THAT NONSENSE! Lithium is CHEAP. You can extract it from the saltwater for $50-70 per kg. if all else fails, but right now it's just easier to buy it for $20 per kg. in Bolivia.
Lithium so far is SO CHEAP that it makes no sense to make geological surveys specially for it.
Also, it's almost perfectly recyclable.
Inner joins are expressed in relational algebra as a selection and projection over a Cartesian product of two relations.
It's OK if I get a lot of data. That's what I ask for.
But I can't get it optimally. And that's the problem.
Nope. It DOES result in a Cartesian product of tuples.
Notice, I never said that it results in a Cartesian product of the whole tables.
Why do I need to do several queries? It would be nice to be able to do this in a single query.
Let's suppose that we have 1000 customers and each customer has 100 bids, and each bid has 5 sub-items.
If we retrieve all of them using inner joins - we'll have to transmit and read 100*1000*5 rows. Quite a large number.
If we first fetch customers and then fetch their bids (using a second query) and then sub-items we'll have to read 1000+1000*100+1000*100*5 rows. However, each time we fetch only relevant data which can result in huge savings of bandwidth (some database protocols are naive enough to transmit full rows).
I do not want hierarchical data storage. I want to create trees from relational data.
I don't see anything that prevents me from doing this in theory. In fact, ANSI SQL already has support for hierarchic queries (which makes it Turing-complete, BTW).
The idea of RDB is cool, relational algebra is quite neat. But SQL itself is horrible.
I'd like to have a language which will allow me to access intermediate tuples cleanly and return hierarchic structures. For example, if I want to fetch all customers and all their bids in one query I have to use inner join. And that results in LARGE number of rows (Cartesian product of customers and their bids).
Also, I'd like to see stuff which is not easily expressed in relational algebra, like running sums or grouping on a computed field.
Sun is more massive than an average star.
In fact, our Sun is more massive than 90% of stars (I might misremember this number, but it should be pretty close).
It's unlikely. Another star (the size of our Sun) needs to pass about 2 light-years near the Sun to significantly disturb the Oort cloud. And Sun-like starts are not that common.
However, Sun's gravitational field is so weak in the Oort cloud that even _Galactic tides_ can eject objects from it. Few years ago I helped my friend to write a computer simulation of this for his thesis.
"and the ozone hole is actually not nearly as bad as we imagined when we started banning things"
Uhm. No, it's as bad as was predicted (http://vort.org/2009/05/14/world-avoided/). And banning CFCs in cooling systems was also necessary.
Implausible. Changing just one bit results in an 'avalanche effect' in good ciphers, so quite a lot of bits will be changed.
You won't be able to derive any useful information from that.
Go on use your handguns against tanks and unmanned killer drones.
Yep. And bread is not food, it's food made of flour and water.
Representative republic is a _form_ of democracy.
You still won't be able to bear the costs of healtcare, especially if you are incapacitated by illness.
So insurance policy of some form is still necessary.
"C64 emulator - run arbitrary executable code - big fucking deal."
What's the BFD? It runs it inside a completely isolated sandbox. There's no way you can exploit iPhone by coding in BASIC.
How is that different from JavaScript on webpages?
"And see you are hopelessly wrong. Your citations of a left leaning blog or wiki do not impress me one bit."
Well, reality has a well-known left leaning...
"When you have your people already saying that the end game is socialism regardless of the cost, your cost savings are pretty much guaranteed to be completely made up, and they always have been. It doesn't matter if it is better or it is worse, ultimately, to liberals, just so long as it is socialized."
S-word, again. France seems to be doing just fine, by almost all accounts. They spend _less_ then US and have better outcomes.
"Health care costs are climbing roughly exponentially because care is getting more complex."
Quite the opposite. Healtcare gets _cheaper_ all the time. Mostly because good preventative care makes complex treatments unnecessary for a lot of cases.
"In order to actually divvy up the pie, pretty much, you have to not pay for some treatments, and basically block new medicines and new technologies from hitting the market, and that's really what government will do."
Bullshit. Nobody would stop you from paying to a pharmaceutical company for the best treatment.
So let the market work.
Fail.
Return on equity is just _clear_ profit. You're forgetting all other overhead: salary for insurance workers, advertisment, etc.
All this overhead adds up to about 30%. So you immediately slash one third of expenses just by killing insurance companies.
Then you'll need to slash administrative overhead in medical facilities by moving to electronic records. That'll give you another 10%.
See:
http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2006/01/us-health-care-system-administrative.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States#Administrative_costs
Yeah, good idea. Let's kill all cripples!
Suppose that tomorrow you will suffer in a traffic accident. For example, you'll get 30% body burns.
That will incapacitate you for about 6-9 months. If your insurance expires while you're incapacitated, then you're screwed.
Oh, and nobody later will cover you. So if you get, say, staph infection later (a fairly common complication after major burns) then you're royally screwed.
"Oh really? If they were cheap, they could buy them, and there would be no need for public insurance now, would there?"
No. Even cheap treatments are way too expensive in the US. Because of insurance-based money-grabbing medicine.
Also, nobody bars you from buying expensive treatments using your private insurance. What's the problem?
Single payer system is not even necessary. The best healthcare system is in France, and it's not even single-payer (it has a public insurance which you can augment with private insurance).
Because 'productive' in your sense means 'earns a lot of money' and that doesn't work great?
Strawman.
People already die _now_ because they can't have access even to _cheap_ treatments. Never mind expensive ones.
Also, what stops you from _paying_ for expensive treatments?
"But here's the thing, if health care is so important, why can't people pay for it themselves?"
How about: because they are in constant pain and are not able to work?
You are comparing a single data point...
USA has great cancer research facilities, like National Cancer Institute. Which sponsors trials of about two-thirds of all approved drugs. Oh, and it is funded by the government, not private industry.