Maybe you should look up the phrase "grey area." You're probably living in one.
Only when Mount St. Helens blows ash to the north.
[NOT free market economy] is not the same as [Marxism]
I agree that the US economy isn't *completely* a free market economy, but it is *principally* one. And what I meant by my original comment is that I believe that market forces should for the most part be allowed to operate unimpeded. If MySQL wants to make a few bucks selling their database solution then let them do it. The market will ultimately determine the value of the product. Since MySQL derives much income from the F/OSS community, I personally think it's a stupid decision to hook up with SCO, much in the same way that I thought Red Hat was stupid for adopting a Microsoft-style licensing model for their distro.
Now, tell me: how do you evaluate my contribution to the company's bottom line? Let's say I spend a year with requirements clarification (in a team of 5, four other colleagues were working on other parts of the system), on a strategic project, which can not make any profit. After that, 6 months development, 2-3 months installation/integration/support/whatever. We have lost money, but in the end, the customer is happy. If the customer is happy enough, AND if he gets his budget approved, in a few years he might order a new system, based on our original work, which we then can sell for profit. If he is *not* happy enough, we mostly never find out why it was so (luckily, as far as I know, it only happened once so far).
Couldn't you have asked an easier question? Really, I'm being serious here. If you CEO has half a brain, he's got a business plan that says something like this: "We invest $500K in R&D and another million in sales and marketing. If we achieve our goal, we make $15 million." So from here we just break it down. Each dollar invested returns $10, so your team's contribution is worth about $5 million to revenue. Actually it's worth a little more since you're a dependency for everyone else, but you get my drift. If you succeed, you can say that you contributed $5 million to the bottom line. If you fail then you cost the company the same amount. This assumes that your bosses didn't change the target market along the way. If that happens, all bets are off.
Now as for how you evaluate team members, that's more of a hand-waving exercise. I say this because it's as much about perception as numbers. You could have been in the office 80 hours per week, but if you didn't contribute to the project then you're screwed. If you played DOOM all day long and came up with the key ideas for the project then you're doing ok. Of course it's your manager who makes these calls, so you'd better make sure that you suck up along the way.:-)
As a zealot GNU person who is a member of the religious right and believes in free market economics, I'm just not sure what to think of your comments.:-)
How do you now evaluate the people on the team? Have they all failed? After all, the company bottom-line has suffered, even if a part of the team has done a marvelous work.
Yes and no. Obviously the guy in charge of them is ultimately responsible and should pay the price. If he had crap people on his team then too bad for him. He should have spoken up, fired some folks, or otherwise attempted to mitigate the problem.
Not everybody works in a place where they can "write a program that makes it possible for your sales force to be 10% more effective". As the matter of fact, I could bet almost *nobody* has such a job.
You're wrong. I've seen more of these kinds of opportunities than I can shake a stick at. The problem is that most people just expect them to fall into their lap. I bet you that if you were to go to the head of your sales force and ask him what's the biggest computer-related issue holding back his team, you'd get a pretty long list. The problem is that no one ever seems to ask the question. (If you do decide to try this, please make sure to send me a portion of the huge raise that you're going to receive for solving real problems for your company rather than working on what your "analysts" tell you is important.)
Quite a few people have tried to come up with means of measuring a software developer's productivity. All failed the real-life check miserably...
Agreed. Measuring lines of code is stupid. How many lines of code are there in BitTorrent? I always tell people that number of lines doesn't matter. It's whether the application meets the need. Which is my whole point.:-)
The problem with what you're talking about is establishing an initial metric. For example, how many machines should your sysadmin be able to manage? And what happens when technology improves to the point where you sysadmin can do something else for a living?
I think the better metric is in how a person contributes to the company's bottom line. That doesn't mean how much they sold, but rather how much they contributed. You could write a really cool report that your customers love and that improves customer retention. You write a program that makes it possible for your sales force to be 10% more effective. Those are the real metrics to use. "Getting a job done" is only as good as what that job contributes to the greater good.
Hmm, interesting. Here's an experiment to try. Go to all of the non-banking sites that you frequently visit and type in a super huge string. See what the behavior is. I bet more sites truncate data (or give a really ugly error message) than trap and handle the long string.
Much in the same way that one man's "insightful" comment on slashdot is another man's "troll", so too is one man's "weakness" in a database another man's "strength". I refer you to my comments to the thread immediately above.
I see, you're a SQL purist. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that I come at things from a bit of a different perspective. For example, I just worked on a project where I had to use MSSQL instead of MySQL. In one instance, I put too much data into a char field and I got an error back saying that data would be truncated. In MySQL, the data would silently be truncated and the user would be none the wiser. In a mission critical app where data loss is intolerable, the MSSQL approach is right. In most of the stuff that I work on, however, silent truncation isn't an issue. I think that people kind of inherently understand this when dealing with certain types of applications. (For the record, this was a one byte char which held gender information. So if you typed "male" then you'd get "m" back.)
I find the NULL argument kind of interesting. I was expecting something like "it doesn't work right when you sum or average". Again, I'm more than happy to let MySQL pick a default value for me if I didn't provide any. I guess that I just don't find it unreasonable that if I don't provide a value for a char/varchar/text that it'll just default to an empty string. Of course you're talking to a guy who thinks that PHP is great because "" == 0 == false.
I'll admit that the first item on the "broken foreign key" list is a little lame. The thing I find with foreign keys is that they have to be used with care. With a given subsystem, foreign keys are great. Where I tend to push back is when they cross subsystems, even when they're valid. The reason that I say this is that I once worked on a project where we had three distinct entities, and we decided that we should be able to modify the code for each of these independent of one another. When I proposed that we break a few FK relationships so that we could break apart the code, I immediately received pushback from the DBAs. I certainly understood their concern, but I didn't feel like they were looking at the bigger picture. Anyways, I lost the argument and the project died, in part because we couldn't fix the problem. (On a related note, I feel the same way about stored procs. There are times when you really need to have them, but the associated penalty is that version control virtually goes out the window. Every time I tell a DBA that I'll use stored procs when they can tell me how to version the code, they walk away without an answer. For as much a DBAs expect developers to work with them to make the database better, it's not unreasonable for developers to ask DBAs to meet their time-tested standards for good code development.)
I guess in general there are two ways to look at the world. One is to trust that everyone knows what they're doing, and what you risk is that something will snap you in the ass later on. (I freely admit to spending time tracking down misspelled variable names in PHP because there is no equivalent to "option explicit".) The other is to trust no one and validate every piece of data that comes your way. I prefer the former, you (appear to prefer) the latter. Each is valid, depending on how you view the world.
I do have one follow up question for you. You mention that you don't like having to get the PK after an insert into an auto_increment field, but I still didn't see any reason why this system doesn't work. Do you have an example where it's necessary to get the PK before the insert? Or is this just a matter of preference?
Beyond the ubiquitousness of MySQL due to great marketing
Don't discount the importance of marketing. Although I've heard good things about PostgreSQL, you seldom ever see it mentioned in articles. It could be the greatest tool around, but if the user base is limited then you start to ask yourself questions like "Is this really well tested?" or "Are they going to be around tomorrow?" I don't know what the answer is for PostgreSQL, but I believe the answer for MySQL is "yes".
It sure is nice being able to just call a simple function to get the next value in an automatic sequence, unlike MySQL and its "auto_increment" behavior.
Why do think that this is better? In one case you call the function and then use the value, and in the other case you insert the row and then ask what the new PK is. I'm not sure how one is better than the other. Could you explain?
If someone is a MySQL fan, they may regard this as a troll
MySQL works for me, but if you can make a compelling case as to how it's better than MySQL then we'd certainly give it a look.
Plus, they'll never live down their discouraging remarks about foreign keys in the old MySQL manual.
Details please? I'm not trying to pick on you here. I'm just trying to figure out what your complaint is. The MySQL manual is huge, so you can't expect everyone to know what you're talking about.
For what it's worth, MySQL has some features that we really love, like the binary logs. We have yet to lose a single row because of database corruption. Performance is good. I'll agree that some things suck (like the way innodb handles files, even after the introduction of file_per_table), but all-in-all it's a great tool.
Since this is/., I was trying to find a way to prevent the discussion from degrading into a Bush-bashing fest. Personally, I liked Rehnquist and thought he did a good job. It doesn't, however, mean I agreed with every decision.
But a good number of current appointees seem to be chosen based on their personality, while their qualifications come in at a very distant second.
You can blame both Republicans and Democrats for this. But then again, what do expect when you vote in a bunch of lawyers to run the country? Lawyers don't care about the truth - they care about winning their case. They seldom look at what is in the interest of the common good. If they did, we wouldn't see the mess that we've seen in New Orleans this past week. Congress (and the White House) cut funding for levy improvements and directed money for other purposes. And no, I'm not talking about the war in Iraq. I'm talking about building sections of interstate highway in the middle of nowhere because the local elected official has influence on some committee and wants to bring home the bacon. We waste millions of dollars on stupid stuff and don't fix what really needs attention. If it weren't for the fact that people are dying, it would almost be laughable. It makes me think of the phrase, "penny wise, pound foolish".
I think we can do a little better than to merely settle for a lawyer who is "dedicated" to his work.
I wasn't suggesting that we settle. I was merely trying to say that the man had admirable attributes. Too often in Washington politics, we're inundated with the "there is nothing good about this guy" attitude. I heard it about Clinton, and about Bush. I'd like for once to think that we can recognize someone for their service, regardless of how we feel about their positions on the issues. The sad fact is that Washington is full of power-hungry people, and we should be encouraging people to step up and serve their country. I don't know if Justice Rehnquist enjoyed his position of power, but the fact that he served 33 years makes me think that he was doing this more than just for his own personal gain. He could have quit the court years ago, written a book, and earned millions. Kudos to him for his willingness to serve his country.
This was exactly our strategy, although we haven't gotten past #3 yet, mainly because Overture isn't delivering our daily limit of clicks. The biggest problem with adding a third player is that it's just another thing to have to deal with. I get calls frequently from people wanting me to list with their suite of sites, and I just tell them that I'm not interested.
I now have this mental image of Byrd standing to the left of the Court, arms crossed, waiting for one of the Justices to say "Isn't that right, Byrd?" She can also teach the Court marvelous phrases like, "I'm speaking!", "Do I look stupid?", and "Umm is not an answer!"
When can we get someone who wasn't in line to buy grandkids Pong when it first came out?
I was just having a conversation with a friend about technology when this news came out. I was asking him whether technology was really making our lives better, or whether it was making them different. While I'd like to have someone on the court who understands how to boot a machine (or better yet, what mkinitrd does), in some ways I wonder whether that would really be better. After all, we owe our whole existence as a nation to documents that are more than 200 years old (even older than that if you include the Magna Carta), so why should we think that the technological revolution that we're currently undergoing is making that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. While I think that Rehnquist was wrong with siding so strongly with copyright holders as he did in the Grokster case, I think that it was good to have someone considering the case who didn't have a copy of BitTorrent running in his office.
I, for one, would welcome another appointment like Rehnquist. Whether you agreed with his decisions or not, he was a man who was dedicated to his work.
It's not that Microsoft is scared of Google, but rather what Google represents. Microsoft has never quite figured out a business model that they liked for delivering service over the Internet, and they have clung to their shrink-wrapped product mentality. It's why they don't like Linux. It's why they don't like Google. It's why they don't like iTunes. And the problem is that unlike the OS/boxed-product-software business, they can't control the delivery channel. In some ways it reminds me of why politicians hate bloggers. If you can't control it, you can't make insane amounts of money from it.
What I find interesting about all of this is that unlike the previous businesses that Microsoft has faced, Google is a completely new competitor. They can't just buy their way into it. "Google" is now a verb, as in "I googled the web for the answer". (Old timers will remember this as "grepping" for things.) Can you ever envision a world where someone says, "Yeah, I microsofted for the answer"?
as opposed to just bla bla bla'ing about how games they've never played are evil.
Isn't that what they do about everything? Very little news is actually "eyewitness" any more. If you put it in a court of law it'd be labeled as hearsay. But then again, we get what we deserve. When was the last time most people contacted their local news organizations when they know that something is false? I'll send an email, but I suspect that I'm in the minority.
But don't stop there. Type the name of the package into Google and look at the number of results that come back. Browse the results and see how many of these are requests for help. Check the answers to see if they make sense, which means that there are knowledgeable people willing to help. Finally, check the date/time stamps to find current queries.
Bankruptcy rules will change so that it's no longer possible to write off most forms of consumer debt.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. It's mainly the banks and other credit card lenders who have pushed this legislation through. What I don't think they're thinking about it what the long term impact will be. If you think about it for just a minute, you'll realize that there could be a huge resulting backlash. I picture this scenario - lots of people get into trouble with really high interest rates but can't escape the debt. En masse, these folks say "the government should have protected me". Congress, pandering to the squeakiest wheel, enacts new legislation to control interest rates, thereby regulating what is currently an unregulated industry when it comes to rates and fees. Unlike previous Supreme Court decisions on usury laws which effective said one state can't set rates for another, this time the Court agrees that Congress is regulating interstate commerce. Ultimately the banks lose and the mafia reclaims their old domain of lending to people who can't find money elsewhere.
In case you can't tell, I think that this was really bad legislation. And this is coming from a person who is socially/economically conservative.
That may well happen for a large number of people, just like what happened in Florida last year. There were lots of people who just said "screw it", packed their bags, and moved out. If you have a large mortgage and limited insurance coverage then declaring bankruptcy and moving away is an attractive option. I also suspect that given the number of dead bodies laying in the streets, there will also be a contingent of people who will move away just because they're unable to deal with the thought of those images.
And that's why I, like other scientists, believe that what's really important is determining the truth.
I do too, which is why I asked the initial question. To me, getting to the truth in the global warming debate means two things: (1) demonstrating that it's real, and (2) determining the cause. Sadly, I feel that these two things have been linked together by most scientists, in part because they can use their theories to get grants. Personally, I'd like to see a lot more published on actual temperature fluctuations without the requisite "and here's why we think this is happening" noise that comes along with it. Then we can take each theory and apply it to the data to see if it fits.
What's really a shame in all this is that many scientists believe that in order to get any funding for their project that they have to make as loud a noise as possible. It's much like the news media that uses disaster to sell newspapers. How about doing global warming research in the same way that we've handled the ozone hole? Get some real data that the problem exists independent of any speculation, make the link between freon and ozone destruction, then give people suitable (but solid) deadlines for replacement.
And it'll snowball -- as more and more of the polar ice caps melt, more heat will be collected by the Earth, helping the polar ice caps melt even more...
I have trouble believing that the Earth is really all that fragile. It certainly is susceptible to abuse and I'd never advocate purposely destroying it, but it's really a lot more resilient than we're lead to believe. If the Earth really was a delicate balance, wouldn't we have experienced a complete system failure long before this? With all the evidence of major catastrophic events in the past (i.e. major asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions, etc.), the Earth should be totally dead by now.
hang it into a glass of water so half of it is still sticking out
So you're saying that approximately 50% of the polar ice cap is riding above sea level? I'm sure that would be news to everyone who was aboard the Titanic. You might also want to edit the page on Wikipedia since that's wrong too. Be especially careful to edit this picture.
For what it's worth, I believe that ocean levels would rise very slightly. The additional fresh water would lower the salinity level of the worlds oceans by a very small amount, thereby reducing the overall density of an average gallon of ocean water. Since the number of gallons remains constant, it will take slightly more space to contain it. But that increase is pretty small.
Slashdot Mirror
Only when Mount St. Helens blows ash to the north.
[NOT free market economy] is not the same as [Marxism]
I agree that the US economy isn't *completely* a free market economy, but it is *principally* one. And what I meant by my original comment is that I believe that market forces should for the most part be allowed to operate unimpeded. If MySQL wants to make a few bucks selling their database solution then let them do it. The market will ultimately determine the value of the product. Since MySQL derives much income from the F/OSS community, I personally think it's a stupid decision to hook up with SCO, much in the same way that I thought Red Hat was stupid for adopting a Microsoft-style licensing model for their distro.
Couldn't you have asked an easier question? Really, I'm being serious here. If you CEO has half a brain, he's got a business plan that says something like this: "We invest $500K in R&D and another million in sales and marketing. If we achieve our goal, we make $15 million." So from here we just break it down. Each dollar invested returns $10, so your team's contribution is worth about $5 million to revenue. Actually it's worth a little more since you're a dependency for everyone else, but you get my drift. If you succeed, you can say that you contributed $5 million to the bottom line. If you fail then you cost the company the same amount. This assumes that your bosses didn't change the target market along the way. If that happens, all bets are off.
Now as for how you evaluate team members, that's more of a hand-waving exercise. I say this because it's as much about perception as numbers. You could have been in the office 80 hours per week, but if you didn't contribute to the project then you're screwed. If you played DOOM all day long and came up with the key ideas for the project then you're doing ok. Of course it's your manager who makes these calls, so you'd better make sure that you suck up along the way. :-)
Wow, you really don't believe in free market economies? Are you like a Marxist then?
As a zealot GNU person who is a member of the religious right and believes in free market economics, I'm just not sure what to think of your comments. :-)
I never said that it would be easy. :-)
How do you now evaluate the people on the team? Have they all failed? After all, the company bottom-line has suffered, even if a part of the team has done a marvelous work.
Yes and no. Obviously the guy in charge of them is ultimately responsible and should pay the price. If he had crap people on his team then too bad for him. He should have spoken up, fired some folks, or otherwise attempted to mitigate the problem.
Not everybody works in a place where they can "write a program that makes it possible for your sales force to be 10% more effective". As the matter of fact, I could bet almost *nobody* has such a job.
You're wrong. I've seen more of these kinds of opportunities than I can shake a stick at. The problem is that most people just expect them to fall into their lap. I bet you that if you were to go to the head of your sales force and ask him what's the biggest computer-related issue holding back his team, you'd get a pretty long list. The problem is that no one ever seems to ask the question. (If you do decide to try this, please make sure to send me a portion of the huge raise that you're going to receive for solving real problems for your company rather than working on what your "analysts" tell you is important.)
Quite a few people have tried to come up with means of measuring a software developer's productivity. All failed the real-life check miserably...
Agreed. Measuring lines of code is stupid. How many lines of code are there in BitTorrent? I always tell people that number of lines doesn't matter. It's whether the application meets the need. Which is my whole point. :-)
The problem with what you're talking about is establishing an initial metric. For example, how many machines should your sysadmin be able to manage? And what happens when technology improves to the point where you sysadmin can do something else for a living?
I think the better metric is in how a person contributes to the company's bottom line. That doesn't mean how much they sold, but rather how much they contributed. You could write a really cool report that your customers love and that improves customer retention. You write a program that makes it possible for your sales force to be 10% more effective. Those are the real metrics to use. "Getting a job done" is only as good as what that job contributes to the greater good.
Hmm, interesting. Here's an experiment to try. Go to all of the non-banking sites that you frequently visit and type in a super huge string. See what the behavior is. I bet more sites truncate data (or give a really ugly error message) than trap and handle the long string.
Much in the same way that one man's "insightful" comment on slashdot is another man's "troll", so too is one man's "weakness" in a database another man's "strength". I refer you to my comments to the thread immediately above.
I find the NULL argument kind of interesting. I was expecting something like "it doesn't work right when you sum or average". Again, I'm more than happy to let MySQL pick a default value for me if I didn't provide any. I guess that I just don't find it unreasonable that if I don't provide a value for a char/varchar/text that it'll just default to an empty string. Of course you're talking to a guy who thinks that PHP is great because "" == 0 == false.
I'll admit that the first item on the "broken foreign key" list is a little lame. The thing I find with foreign keys is that they have to be used with care. With a given subsystem, foreign keys are great. Where I tend to push back is when they cross subsystems, even when they're valid. The reason that I say this is that I once worked on a project where we had three distinct entities, and we decided that we should be able to modify the code for each of these independent of one another. When I proposed that we break a few FK relationships so that we could break apart the code, I immediately received pushback from the DBAs. I certainly understood their concern, but I didn't feel like they were looking at the bigger picture. Anyways, I lost the argument and the project died, in part because we couldn't fix the problem. (On a related note, I feel the same way about stored procs. There are times when you really need to have them, but the associated penalty is that version control virtually goes out the window. Every time I tell a DBA that I'll use stored procs when they can tell me how to version the code, they walk away without an answer. For as much a DBAs expect developers to work with them to make the database better, it's not unreasonable for developers to ask DBAs to meet their time-tested standards for good code development.)
I guess in general there are two ways to look at the world. One is to trust that everyone knows what they're doing, and what you risk is that something will snap you in the ass later on. (I freely admit to spending time tracking down misspelled variable names in PHP because there is no equivalent to "option explicit".) The other is to trust no one and validate every piece of data that comes your way. I prefer the former, you (appear to prefer) the latter. Each is valid, depending on how you view the world.
I do have one follow up question for you. You mention that you don't like having to get the PK after an insert into an auto_increment field, but I still didn't see any reason why this system doesn't work. Do you have an example where it's necessary to get the PK before the insert? Or is this just a matter of preference?
Would you care to elaborate?
Beyond the ubiquitousness of MySQL due to great marketing
Don't discount the importance of marketing. Although I've heard good things about PostgreSQL, you seldom ever see it mentioned in articles. It could be the greatest tool around, but if the user base is limited then you start to ask yourself questions like "Is this really well tested?" or "Are they going to be around tomorrow?" I don't know what the answer is for PostgreSQL, but I believe the answer for MySQL is "yes".
It sure is nice being able to just call a simple function to get the next value in an automatic sequence, unlike MySQL and its "auto_increment" behavior.
Why do think that this is better? In one case you call the function and then use the value, and in the other case you insert the row and then ask what the new PK is. I'm not sure how one is better than the other. Could you explain?
If someone is a MySQL fan, they may regard this as a troll
MySQL works for me, but if you can make a compelling case as to how it's better than MySQL then we'd certainly give it a look.
Plus, they'll never live down their discouraging remarks about foreign keys in the old MySQL manual.
Details please? I'm not trying to pick on you here. I'm just trying to figure out what your complaint is. The MySQL manual is huge, so you can't expect everyone to know what you're talking about.
For what it's worth, MySQL has some features that we really love, like the binary logs. We have yet to lose a single row because of database corruption. Performance is good. I'll agree that some things suck (like the way innodb handles files, even after the introduction of file_per_table), but all-in-all it's a great tool.
Since this is /., I was trying to find a way to prevent the discussion from degrading into a Bush-bashing fest. Personally, I liked Rehnquist and thought he did a good job. It doesn't, however, mean I agreed with every decision.
But a good number of current appointees seem to be chosen based on their personality, while their qualifications come in at a very distant second.
You can blame both Republicans and Democrats for this. But then again, what do expect when you vote in a bunch of lawyers to run the country? Lawyers don't care about the truth - they care about winning their case. They seldom look at what is in the interest of the common good. If they did, we wouldn't see the mess that we've seen in New Orleans this past week. Congress (and the White House) cut funding for levy improvements and directed money for other purposes. And no, I'm not talking about the war in Iraq. I'm talking about building sections of interstate highway in the middle of nowhere because the local elected official has influence on some committee and wants to bring home the bacon. We waste millions of dollars on stupid stuff and don't fix what really needs attention. If it weren't for the fact that people are dying, it would almost be laughable. It makes me think of the phrase, "penny wise, pound foolish".
I wasn't suggesting that we settle. I was merely trying to say that the man had admirable attributes. Too often in Washington politics, we're inundated with the "there is nothing good about this guy" attitude. I heard it about Clinton, and about Bush. I'd like for once to think that we can recognize someone for their service, regardless of how we feel about their positions on the issues. The sad fact is that Washington is full of power-hungry people, and we should be encouraging people to step up and serve their country. I don't know if Justice Rehnquist enjoyed his position of power, but the fact that he served 33 years makes me think that he was doing this more than just for his own personal gain. He could have quit the court years ago, written a book, and earned millions. Kudos to him for his willingness to serve his country.
This was exactly our strategy, although we haven't gotten past #3 yet, mainly because Overture isn't delivering our daily limit of clicks. The biggest problem with adding a third player is that it's just another thing to have to deal with. I get calls frequently from people wanting me to list with their suite of sites, and I just tell them that I'm not interested.
I now have this mental image of Byrd standing to the left of the Court, arms crossed, waiting for one of the Justices to say "Isn't that right, Byrd?" She can also teach the Court marvelous phrases like, "I'm speaking!", "Do I look stupid?", and "Umm is not an answer!"
I was just having a conversation with a friend about technology when this news came out. I was asking him whether technology was really making our lives better, or whether it was making them different. While I'd like to have someone on the court who understands how to boot a machine (or better yet, what mkinitrd does), in some ways I wonder whether that would really be better. After all, we owe our whole existence as a nation to documents that are more than 200 years old (even older than that if you include the Magna Carta), so why should we think that the technological revolution that we're currently undergoing is making that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. While I think that Rehnquist was wrong with siding so strongly with copyright holders as he did in the Grokster case, I think that it was good to have someone considering the case who didn't have a copy of BitTorrent running in his office.
I, for one, would welcome another appointment like Rehnquist. Whether you agreed with his decisions or not, he was a man who was dedicated to his work.
It's not that Microsoft is scared of Google, but rather what Google represents. Microsoft has never quite figured out a business model that they liked for delivering service over the Internet, and they have clung to their shrink-wrapped product mentality. It's why they don't like Linux. It's why they don't like Google. It's why they don't like iTunes. And the problem is that unlike the OS/boxed-product-software business, they can't control the delivery channel. In some ways it reminds me of why politicians hate bloggers. If you can't control it, you can't make insane amounts of money from it.
What I find interesting about all of this is that unlike the previous businesses that Microsoft has faced, Google is a completely new competitor. They can't just buy their way into it. "Google" is now a verb, as in "I googled the web for the answer". (Old timers will remember this as "grepping" for things.) Can you ever envision a world where someone says, "Yeah, I microsofted for the answer"?
Isn't that what they do about everything? Very little news is actually "eyewitness" any more. If you put it in a court of law it'd be labeled as hearsay. But then again, we get what we deserve. When was the last time most people contacted their local news organizations when they know that something is false? I'll send an email, but I suspect that I'm in the minority.
But don't stop there. Type the name of the package into Google and look at the number of results that come back. Browse the results and see how many of these are requests for help. Check the answers to see if they make sense, which means that there are knowledgeable people willing to help. Finally, check the date/time stamps to find current queries.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. It's mainly the banks and other credit card lenders who have pushed this legislation through. What I don't think they're thinking about it what the long term impact will be. If you think about it for just a minute, you'll realize that there could be a huge resulting backlash. I picture this scenario - lots of people get into trouble with really high interest rates but can't escape the debt. En masse, these folks say "the government should have protected me". Congress, pandering to the squeakiest wheel, enacts new legislation to control interest rates, thereby regulating what is currently an unregulated industry when it comes to rates and fees. Unlike previous Supreme Court decisions on usury laws which effective said one state can't set rates for another, this time the Court agrees that Congress is regulating interstate commerce. Ultimately the banks lose and the mafia reclaims their old domain of lending to people who can't find money elsewhere.
In case you can't tell, I think that this was really bad legislation. And this is coming from a person who is socially/economically conservative.
That may well happen for a large number of people, just like what happened in Florida last year. There were lots of people who just said "screw it", packed their bags, and moved out. If you have a large mortgage and limited insurance coverage then declaring bankruptcy and moving away is an attractive option. I also suspect that given the number of dead bodies laying in the streets, there will also be a contingent of people who will move away just because they're unable to deal with the thought of those images.
I do too, which is why I asked the initial question. To me, getting to the truth in the global warming debate means two things: (1) demonstrating that it's real, and (2) determining the cause. Sadly, I feel that these two things have been linked together by most scientists, in part because they can use their theories to get grants. Personally, I'd like to see a lot more published on actual temperature fluctuations without the requisite "and here's why we think this is happening" noise that comes along with it. Then we can take each theory and apply it to the data to see if it fits.
What's really a shame in all this is that many scientists believe that in order to get any funding for their project that they have to make as loud a noise as possible. It's much like the news media that uses disaster to sell newspapers. How about doing global warming research in the same way that we've handled the ozone hole? Get some real data that the problem exists independent of any speculation, make the link between freon and ozone destruction, then give people suitable (but solid) deadlines for replacement.
I have trouble believing that the Earth is really all that fragile. It certainly is susceptible to abuse and I'd never advocate purposely destroying it, but it's really a lot more resilient than we're lead to believe. If the Earth really was a delicate balance, wouldn't we have experienced a complete system failure long before this? With all the evidence of major catastrophic events in the past (i.e. major asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions, etc.), the Earth should be totally dead by now.
So in all seriousness, do you believe that scientists have nothing to gain personally by supporting the theory of global warming?
Try this for density numbers.
So you're saying that approximately 50% of the polar ice cap is riding above sea level? I'm sure that would be news to everyone who was aboard the Titanic. You might also want to edit the page on Wikipedia since that's wrong too. Be especially careful to edit this picture.
For what it's worth, I believe that ocean levels would rise very slightly. The additional fresh water would lower the salinity level of the worlds oceans by a very small amount, thereby reducing the overall density of an average gallon of ocean water. Since the number of gallons remains constant, it will take slightly more space to contain it. But that increase is pretty small.