But what of parasites like fleas and mosquitoes that cannot reproduce without a source of blood to suck, in order to nourish and develop their eggs until they're ready to be layed?
So, when will these guys start flying their rag-tag rocket to the Moon to fetch left behind hardware from Apollo and all the lunar probes, and sell them on Ebay when they get back? They were so advanced, though, in that they had a SSTMAB (Single Stage To Moon And Back) rocket...
(this was the main plot line of a cheezoid TV series in the early 80's).
Why? from a development/query/dbgeek perspective, it's kind of like this: oracle:sql server:: legos technic:duplo.
While administration on Oracle can be a pretty fine-grained pain in the ass (as in, the rice is spilled all over and you have to pick it up with chopsticks, one grain at a time), actually working with it is fun, if you can get past the "railroad tracks" documentation. There are just some awfully powerful constructs (no, the hierarchy functions are not) that work quite well.
It's fun seeing all the "innovation" in SQL Server 2005 being touted that is been in Oracle since 8.0 days (2000).
Why the hostility? I don't like SUVs, or jacked-up 4x4 pickup trucks, or things that imply some sense of "utility" but in practice have about zero.
At least you don't live in Oregon, where "fairness" in road usage will soon be that, at least for cars, road taxes are calculated by miles driven on them, because there are "too many" Priuses and other more fuel-efficient cars on the roads, and revenues from fuel taxes in Oregon are "going down".
Which is odd, really. Most of Oregon's road miles are in very rural areas, except for perhaps the I-5 corridor between Portland and Eugene (but you don't have to go very far off of I-5 to find dirt roads...). Even driving in Portland, there are still relatively few Priuses and other hybrids. Lots of cars, trucks, minivans and SUVs.
What it really indicates is that most people in Oregon are pretty averse to taxes. Hell, I moved here rather than Washington so as to not pay god-damned sales tax. Given the choice, I'd much rather pay Oregon's personal income tax than Washington's sales tax, or both, like in California or many states in the midwest, like Wisconsin and Illinois.
So what will happen is that the Legislature will increase the gas tax (which they should, because larger vehicles eat up the roads more than smaller vehicles at a slightly geometric rate, not linear) which should encourage less unnecessary driving of unnecessary large vehicles. That, or get rid of the flat-rate car registration fee, and go to vehicle weight or something. Yeah, I have a big pickup truck (which I would register then as a farm vehicle), a Honda Odyseey and a Saturn wagon, so I'm promoting something that would bite me in the ass a little bit, because it would be simpler to implement, not require me to install (and probably buy...) GPS systems in my cars, etc.
While it's nice living in Oregon, state affairs in Oregon are pretty screwed up. At least in Illinois (and California), things were corrupt, but most stuff still got taken care of, even if you knew someone was getting rather rich at the state's expense. In Oregon? No, there is as much bureaucratic fighting amongst state offices as there is in the Legislature, and all the while, shit just stays broken and dysfunctional, and people argue and worry about red herrings to no end, and various tails do their damnest to wag the dog to pieces.
One of the local sports talking heads was blathering on about the Columbia River and the dams on it on Saturday. "Drop the dams, save the salmon!" and essentially arguing that agriculture does nothing for the economies of Washington and Oregon (and Idaho), that the state should do nothing to protect ag. Hmm... running fishing tours brings how much into these states' economies per year? Sorry, saving sports fishing should be one of the lesser worries for this region, because it's not suddenly going to blossom into a billion-dollar chunk of the region's economies, ever.
Microsoft is trying to jump headfirst into the Web 2.0 pool and coming this late to the party makes them look pretty stupid. Also can we all stop saying Web 2.0, podacst, blog, and mashup?
Maybe to you, and most other non-ASP/ASP.Netters, but to them, who have equally been as "What is this Rails bullshit?" and head-in-the-sand, they can now rejoice because they can play in this new game too.
Except it's like inviting NY Yankee fans to watch baseball over if you're not a NY Yankees fan yourself...
Do you know how ASP/ASP.Net work? the server-side code spits out a bunch of JavaScript code to the client page. This client-side JavaScript is what talks back to the server. Hmm... AJAX.
MS got bitch-slappedn in the ASP days because its server-side objects (even though you're invoking them from VBScript, you're invoking COM objects) were emitting browser-detecting code and not playing nice with Not-IE, or emit Not-IE hostile JavaScript (i.e., MS' DOM model). With work, it is possible to get around this.
The really hard part is getting an ASP/ASP.Net page to POST to a 3rd-party server, say, like if you're trying to send an XmlSignature to a 3rd-party...
How many "old farts" (i.e., 35+ yrs old) like me are perfectly happy having our TV service only at home, on one TV, our Internet service provided by another company (wireless DSL works great. At least my provider, OnlineNW, has a pretty much wide-open connection, unlike cable or telco DSL, which of course are not physically possible options for me anyways) or are still happy with, dare I say it, dial-up, and don't want/need today's uber-complicated, overburdened cell phones, because we just use it to make the occaisional telephone call, not peep at Slashdot through a straw or workout our thumbs, etc.?
All you w/should probably need is OpenDoc->Office XML Doc format XSLT script... Better than OpenDoc XML->RTF (RTF, although not XML, is a tagged-text format).
Probably apocryphal, but I remember a story of a Compaq being demo'd with its mostly unique, but primitive, voice command interface. Somewhere in the speil, someone in the audience yelled out something like this after the demodroid opened a DOS window:
"C-colon-backslash, enter"...promptly followed by someone else of like mind:
"delete star-dot-star, enter, yes"...with much humor and glee by most of the audience, and who-knows-what on the demoer's face...
This was, of course, in the Windows 3.1 days. Security? Who needs that?
Remember the guy who was doing some system administration with his hacked Doom/Wolfenstein3D? Processes would be cast into the room as bad guys, with some logic to factor in exactly which picture to use. To kill a process, he shot the image of the bad guy. Seem to recall he wrote a thesis on it as well...
Funny, though, is that saying repeatedly, "I don't recall", "I don't remember", etc. often works well for US Presidents (like Reagan) testifying in front of Congress, CxOs, etc. in not really being helpful in a legal case. It certainly seems to be how the Libby defense is trying to go: Libby was too preoccupied to recall the details of his various conversations with any clarity for the days in question. If he did let slip VP's name, it was an innocent mistake. Blah blah blah.
Like this was communicated by e-mail? If so, still no reason to subpoenae the reporters' computers. Look at e-mail server logs and backups from the Coroner's office, duh. Or maybe they did the Hotmail trick (i.e., Coroner composes e-mail, but leaves it as a draft. Reporters login to same Hotmail acct, and "recover" the message from the Drafts folder).
If it was communicated "electronically", it probably was by phone, or less good, fax. About all the State would be able to get then would be that perhaps someone used a phone in the Coroner's office to call the newspaper (wouldn't want to use a direct line to the reporter...) on a certain date range. Not sure if the PBX at the paper could then record if the receptionist transferred the call to the reporter's phone. But this (unless the NSA gets involved...) can't tell anyone WHAT was communicated. Better would be a fax (both sides destroying their paper copies afterwards, right?). Did they subpoenae all of the Post-It notes and paper pads also that might have been used by the reporters?
It is a fishing expedition by the state, because if there was "hacking" involved, there should be enough evidence on the state's computer systems not only regarding the alleged activity, but where the activity originated from. "proving" that the tools are on the reporters' computers isn't needed, but would be icing on the cake.
Besides, how many socially important reporting tasks do not involve some measure of pushing the limits legally, if not totally going across them, in order to get the story out that others do not want told?
Were Woodward and Bernstein acting illegally by writing about the ostensibly illegal information they were getting from Deep Throat? Probably. Is a reporter trespassing on land he otherwise shouldn't be on, to secretly photograph or record illegal activity, well, doing something illegal? Yep. What about the reporters/journalists who have gotten in trouble for publishing photographs of the coffin reception hanger at Dover AFB?
How many reporters have been given casual, but otherwise highly illegal, access to file cabinets, etc., when someone has left to get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom?
Yes to all of the above, except no other report writer has done the ONE thing that is nice about CR: If you have a Label control, you can embed a field-based control inside it, set its autoexpand properties, and voila. The two controls now move as a group, resizing the border of the label control in design mode can resize also the field control, etc. Sure beats combining multiple fields, either in the database query itself or in the report writer's coding layer.
I'll expand on the dipshitness of CR. If you change your datasource, and you mess up field names in the datasource so that the controls in the report can't find their associated field references anymore, "fixing up" the report will delete those controls from the report, instead of leaving them there and giving you a chance to manually remap them to the right field. F'ing great if you have had to type in a bunch of stupid logic, conditional formatting, etc. on them, especially when it happens to a LOT of fields.
Sybase's database WAS "SQL Server" until they forked with Microsoft. Why Microsoft didn't have to rename its product and Sybase did is a mystery (probably more money from Microsoft when they negotiated their parting of ways), because it was Sybase that brought the product to the table, not Microsoft.
So now it's Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, or whatever they're calling it now.
I think part of this also is a play on words against Ingres, as in postfix vs infix notation.
Borland already took Delphi away (Oracle at Delphi? Oh forget it).
Temple of Nike (this would probably get Phil Knight's underwear in a bunch), Parthenon, Athena/Athens, Mt Olympus don't sound good as database names, either, for Postgres, given its tendancies to want to emulate most things Oracle.
Uhh.... that's right up there with "How do I get Microsoft [Word, Excel, whatever] to print out my file?" and "Yeah, I use Microsoft [Windows? Office?] a lot."
Uh...SQL Server's install isn't complex or difficult, unless you mean that you have to assign a password to 'sa' now. Hasn't been for...oh, a long time.
Oracle's install on Windows isn't bad, either, unless there are specific things you want included or not included, which force you to pick and choose from every single bloody possible installation detail, much like installing Linux can be if you only want one particular application installed from a group of like applications.
I burned PostGres 8.x onto a CD, too, so now it's "one CD" to install it as well.
My top demotivator for the change is the inherent weird feel of using PostgreSQL. Call me flamebait, but the problem is that it is just not MySQL.
Thank the gods for that. Coming to Postgres from any other SQL database is nice. The goofy MySQLisms just plain blow.
Access, MySQL "feels" more natural than Postgres
Bzzzt. Wrong. MySQL feels about as unnatural and artificial as SQL does in Foxpro if you've used Access, which is far more ANSI-89 and ANSI-92 compliant than MySQL is.
"Postgres for MySQL users".
There is at least one Sourceforge project where someone is writing "MySQL for Postgres": rewriting most of the mysqlisms in Postgres' stored proc language. At least he's not trying to reimplement MySQL's great ACID compliance, though.
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but isn't just about everything over an extended WAN, except perhaps BITNET or UUCP batch transactions (you know, pre-old school stuff), hopelessly lag sensitive and extremely painful at best?
At some point, it's hard to beat the bandwidth of dropping a CD (or DVD or tape) in the mail, even though the latency sucks.
Visual SourceSafe? I'd rather give myself paper cuts over my body and then roll around in a briny vineagar solution, perhaps with a bunch of cayenne pepper sauce thrown in for good measure.
What annoys me is the lack availability of a cross-platform, cross-database system.
Well, part of is it they (Oracle, MySQL, PostGres, DB2/Ingres, SQL Server, et al) are all different enough each in their own annoying little ways that it does not really seem possible to do. Add to this now that for some of them, you can write stored proc code in different languages besides the legacy language (i.e., Pl/SQL ->Java, T-SQL->C#/CLR langs), and it really does seem to be of Tower of Babel proportions.
As much as Oracle's admins tools blow, compare them to SQL Server Enterprise Manager, and they work great. SQL Server Query Analyzer is more useful than SQL Server Enterprise Manager.
Well, our drills were 100 problems/sheet. At first, we had a week or so to do them. By the time I was in 4th grade or so, we had 10 minutes to do them. Addition, subtraction at first, then multiplication. They were random. Of course, one quickly learns how to spot similar equations, i.e., repetitions of 7+5 (like 5+7), etc., so that usually knocked out 5-10 problems as fast as you could move your pencil to them and write the answer down. Then it was just repetition. I didn't "memorize" the tables per se, but just through sheer brute force repetition.
It's fun having kids to share this with them. I don't know if it helps or hurts, but I think it's good that they know that it's just part of the process. A boring, dull part of it, but ultimately it pays off, even if it means being able to add numbers in your head when your hands are full...
Maybe if we started treating them like equals and not idiots we would get along a lot more.
No, maybe if they, and we, stopped acting like idiots (we're adults, right? Then why is it we adults tend to resolve our...issues...less ably than kids on a playground usually do?), things would be better.
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But what of parasites like fleas and mosquitoes that cannot reproduce without a source of blood to suck, in order to nourish and develop their eggs until they're ready to be layed?
So, when will these guys start flying their rag-tag rocket to the Moon to fetch left behind hardware from Apollo and all the lunar probes, and sell them on Ebay when they get back? They were so advanced, though, in that they had a SSTMAB (Single Stage To Moon And Back) rocket...
(this was the main plot line of a cheezoid TV series in the early 80's).
Why? from a development/query/dbgeek perspective, it's kind of like this: oracle:sql server :: legos technic:duplo.
While administration on Oracle can be a pretty fine-grained pain in the ass (as in, the rice is spilled all over and you have to pick it up with chopsticks, one grain at a time), actually working with it is fun, if you can get past the "railroad tracks" documentation. There are just some awfully powerful constructs (no, the hierarchy functions are not) that work quite well.
It's fun seeing all the "innovation" in SQL Server 2005 being touted that is been in Oracle since 8.0 days (2000).
Why the hostility? I don't like SUVs, or jacked-up 4x4 pickup trucks, or things that imply some sense of "utility" but in practice have about zero.
At least you don't live in Oregon, where "fairness" in road usage will soon be that, at least for cars, road taxes are calculated by miles driven on them, because there are "too many" Priuses and other more fuel-efficient cars on the roads, and revenues from fuel taxes in Oregon are "going down".
Which is odd, really. Most of Oregon's road miles are in very rural areas, except for perhaps the I-5 corridor between Portland and Eugene (but you don't have to go very far off of I-5 to find dirt roads...). Even driving in Portland, there are still relatively few Priuses and other hybrids. Lots of cars, trucks, minivans and SUVs.
What it really indicates is that most people in Oregon are pretty averse to taxes. Hell, I moved here rather than Washington so as to not pay god-damned sales tax. Given the choice, I'd much rather pay Oregon's personal income tax than Washington's sales tax, or both, like in California or many states in the midwest, like Wisconsin and Illinois.
So what will happen is that the Legislature will increase the gas tax (which they should, because larger vehicles eat up the roads more than smaller vehicles at a slightly geometric rate, not linear) which should encourage less unnecessary driving of unnecessary large vehicles. That, or get rid of the flat-rate car registration fee, and go to vehicle weight or something. Yeah, I have a big pickup truck (which I would register then as a farm vehicle), a Honda Odyseey and a Saturn wagon, so I'm promoting something that would bite me in the ass a little bit, because it would be simpler to implement, not require me to install (and probably buy...) GPS systems in my cars, etc.
While it's nice living in Oregon, state affairs in Oregon are pretty screwed up. At least in Illinois (and California), things were corrupt, but most stuff still got taken care of, even if you knew someone was getting rather rich at the state's expense. In Oregon? No, there is as much bureaucratic fighting amongst state offices as there is in the Legislature, and all the while, shit just stays broken and dysfunctional, and people argue and worry about red herrings to no end, and various tails do their damnest to wag the dog to pieces.
One of the local sports talking heads was blathering on about the Columbia River and the dams on it on Saturday. "Drop the dams, save the salmon!" and essentially arguing that agriculture does nothing for the economies of Washington and Oregon (and Idaho), that the state should do nothing to protect ag. Hmm... running fishing tours brings how much into these states' economies per year? Sorry, saving sports fishing should be one of the lesser worries for this region, because it's not suddenly going to blossom into a billion-dollar chunk of the region's economies, ever.
Microsoft is trying to jump headfirst into the Web 2.0 pool and coming this late to the party makes them look pretty stupid. Also can we all stop saying Web 2.0, podacst, blog, and mashup?
Maybe to you, and most other non-ASP/ASP.Netters, but to them, who have equally been as "What is this Rails bullshit?" and head-in-the-sand, they can now rejoice because they can play in this new game too.
Except it's like inviting NY Yankee fans to watch baseball over if you're not a NY Yankees fan yourself...
Do you know how ASP/ASP.Net work? the server-side code spits out a bunch of JavaScript code to the client page. This client-side JavaScript is what talks back to the server. Hmm... AJAX.
MS got bitch-slappedn in the ASP days because its server-side objects (even though you're invoking them from VBScript, you're invoking COM objects) were emitting browser-detecting code and not playing nice with Not-IE, or emit Not-IE hostile JavaScript (i.e., MS' DOM model). With work, it is possible to get around this.
The really hard part is getting an ASP/ASP.Net page to POST to a 3rd-party server, say, like if you're trying to send an XmlSignature to a 3rd-party...
How many "old farts" (i.e., 35+ yrs old) like me are perfectly happy having our TV service only at home, on one TV, our Internet service provided by another company (wireless DSL works great. At least my provider, OnlineNW, has a pretty much wide-open connection, unlike cable or telco DSL, which of course are not physically possible options for me anyways) or are still happy with, dare I say it, dial-up, and don't want/need today's uber-complicated, overburdened cell phones, because we just use it to make the occaisional telephone call, not peep at Slashdot through a straw or workout our thumbs, etc.?
All you w/should probably need is OpenDoc->Office XML Doc format XSLT script... Better than OpenDoc XML->RTF (RTF, although not XML, is a tagged-text format).
Probably apocryphal, but I remember a story of a Compaq being demo'd with its mostly unique, but primitive, voice command interface. Somewhere in the speil, someone in the audience yelled out something like this after the demodroid opened a DOS window:
...promptly followed by someone else of like mind:
...with much humor and glee by most of the audience, and who-knows-what on the demoer's face...
"C-colon-backslash, enter"
"delete star-dot-star, enter, yes"
This was, of course, in the Windows 3.1 days. Security? Who needs that?
Remember the guy who was doing some system administration with his hacked Doom/Wolfenstein3D? Processes would be cast into the room as bad guys, with some logic to factor in exactly which picture to use. To kill a process, he shot the image of the bad guy. Seem to recall he wrote a thesis on it as well...
Funny, though, is that saying repeatedly, "I don't recall", "I don't remember", etc. often works well for US Presidents (like Reagan) testifying in front of Congress, CxOs, etc. in not really being helpful in a legal case. It certainly seems to be how the Libby defense is trying to go: Libby was too preoccupied to recall the details of his various conversations with any clarity for the days in question. If he did let slip VP's name, it was an innocent mistake. Blah blah blah.
Like this was communicated by e-mail? If so, still no reason to subpoenae the reporters' computers. Look at e-mail server logs and backups from the Coroner's office, duh. Or maybe they did the Hotmail trick (i.e., Coroner composes e-mail, but leaves it as a draft. Reporters login to same Hotmail acct, and "recover" the message from the Drafts folder).
If it was communicated "electronically", it probably was by phone, or less good, fax. About all the State would be able to get then would be that perhaps someone used a phone in the Coroner's office to call the newspaper (wouldn't want to use a direct line to the reporter...) on a certain date range. Not sure if the PBX at the paper could then record if the receptionist transferred the call to the reporter's phone. But this (unless the NSA gets involved...) can't tell anyone WHAT was communicated. Better would be a fax (both sides destroying their paper copies afterwards, right?). Did they subpoenae all of the Post-It notes and paper pads also that might have been used by the reporters?
It is a fishing expedition by the state, because if there was "hacking" involved, there should be enough evidence on the state's computer systems not only regarding the alleged activity, but where the activity originated from. "proving" that the tools are on the reporters' computers isn't needed, but would be icing on the cake.
Besides, how many socially important reporting tasks do not involve some measure of pushing the limits legally, if not totally going across them, in order to get the story out that others do not want told?
Were Woodward and Bernstein acting illegally by writing about the ostensibly illegal information they were getting from Deep Throat? Probably. Is a reporter trespassing on land he otherwise shouldn't be on, to secretly photograph or record illegal activity, well, doing something illegal? Yep. What about the reporters/journalists who have gotten in trouble for publishing photographs of the coffin reception hanger at Dover AFB?
How many reporters have been given casual, but otherwise highly illegal, access to file cabinets, etc., when someone has left to get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom?
Yes to all of the above, except no other report writer has done the ONE thing that is nice about CR: If you have a Label control, you can embed a field-based control inside it, set its autoexpand properties, and voila. The two controls now move as a group, resizing the border of the label control in design mode can resize also the field control, etc. Sure beats combining multiple fields, either in the database query itself or in the report writer's coding layer.
I'll expand on the dipshitness of CR. If you change your datasource, and you mess up field names in the datasource so that the controls in the report can't find their associated field references anymore, "fixing up" the report will delete those controls from the report, instead of leaving them there and giving you a chance to manually remap them to the right field. F'ing great if you have had to type in a bunch of stupid logic, conditional formatting, etc. on them, especially when it happens to a LOT of fields.
Sybase's database WAS "SQL Server" until they forked with Microsoft. Why Microsoft didn't have to rename its product and Sybase did is a mystery (probably more money from Microsoft when they negotiated their parting of ways), because it was Sybase that brought the product to the table, not Microsoft.
So now it's Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, or whatever they're calling it now.
for most Microsoft fanboys, it's simply, "SQL".
I think part of this also is a play on words against Ingres, as in postfix vs infix notation.
Borland already took Delphi away (Oracle at Delphi? Oh forget it).
Temple of Nike (this would probably get Phil Knight's underwear in a bunch), Parthenon, Athena/Athens, Mt Olympus don't sound good as database names, either, for Postgres, given its tendancies to want to emulate most things Oracle.
Hmm... here's one that I enjoy:
"I need to access an access database"
or...
"how do I query [the] Oracle to get this data?"
But the topper is:
"We installed SQL [Server] on our server for you"
Uhh.... that's right up there with "How do I get Microsoft [Word, Excel, whatever] to print out my file?"
and "Yeah, I use Microsoft [Windows? Office?] a lot."
Uh...SQL Server's install isn't complex or difficult, unless you mean that you have to assign a password to 'sa' now. Hasn't been for...oh, a long time.
Oracle's install on Windows isn't bad, either, unless there are specific things you want included or not included, which force you to pick and choose from every single bloody possible installation detail, much like installing Linux can be if you only want one particular application installed from a group of like applications.
I burned PostGres 8.x onto a CD, too, so now it's "one CD" to install it as well.
My top demotivator for the change is the inherent weird feel of using PostgreSQL. Call me flamebait, but the problem is that it is just not MySQL.
Thank the gods for that. Coming to Postgres from any other SQL database is nice. The goofy MySQLisms just plain blow.
Access, MySQL "feels" more natural than Postgres
Bzzzt. Wrong. MySQL feels about as unnatural and artificial as SQL does in Foxpro if you've used Access, which is far more ANSI-89 and ANSI-92 compliant than MySQL is.
"Postgres for MySQL users".
There is at least one Sourceforge project where someone is writing "MySQL for Postgres": rewriting most of the mysqlisms in Postgres' stored proc language. At least he's not trying to reimplement MySQL's great ACID compliance, though.
So, you just call it "Postgres" then.
At least this is better than being unable to say "SQL Server", and calling it simply "SQL" instead.
Didn't a whole bunch of State Dept files get reclassified recently?
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but isn't just about everything over an extended WAN, except perhaps BITNET or UUCP batch transactions (you know, pre-old school stuff), hopelessly lag sensitive and extremely painful at best?
At some point, it's hard to beat the bandwidth of dropping a CD (or DVD or tape) in the mail, even though the latency sucks.
Visual SourceSafe? I'd rather give myself paper cuts over my body and then roll around in a briny vineagar solution, perhaps with a bunch of cayenne pepper sauce thrown in for good measure.
What annoys me is the lack availability of a cross-platform, cross-database system.
Well, part of is it they (Oracle, MySQL, PostGres, DB2/Ingres, SQL Server, et al) are all different enough each in their own annoying little ways that it does not really seem possible to do. Add to this now that for some of them, you can write stored proc code in different languages besides the legacy language (i.e., Pl/SQL ->Java, T-SQL->C#/CLR langs), and it really does seem to be of Tower of Babel proportions.
As much as Oracle's admins tools blow, compare them to SQL Server Enterprise Manager, and they work great. SQL Server Query Analyzer is more useful than SQL Server Enterprise Manager.
Well, our drills were 100 problems/sheet. At first, we had a week or so to do them. By the time I was in 4th grade or so, we had 10 minutes to do them. Addition, subtraction at first, then multiplication. They were random. Of course, one quickly learns how to spot similar equations, i.e., repetitions of 7+5 (like 5+7), etc., so that usually knocked out 5-10 problems as fast as you could move your pencil to them and write the answer down. Then it was just repetition.
I didn't "memorize" the tables per se, but just through sheer brute force repetition.
It's fun having kids to share this with them. I don't know if it helps or hurts, but I think it's good that they know that it's just part of the process. A boring, dull part of it, but ultimately it pays off, even if it means being able to add numbers in your head when your hands are full...
Nah, if you call an Iranian an Arab, he/she will be rather quick to correct you.
Maybe if we started treating them like equals and not idiots we would get along a lot more.
No, maybe if they, and we, stopped acting like idiots (we're adults, right? Then why is it we adults tend to resolve our...issues...less ably than kids on a playground usually do?), things would be better.