"For a few weeks... If they need a systems administrator, they should realize it pretty quickly."
I've been working as a system administrator and consultant for quite a few years and I can say something: if by him leaving for a few weeks they "know" they need him, that's because they don't want him.
You know a system administrator is doing his work properly in just the opposite: he can leave for a few weeks (even months) and nobody will notice. Certainly no new goals are achieved, but what's currently deployed just keeps humming.
I say bullshit. I can accept *less* people probably will watch the second show, but not *nobody*. "Nobody" means there can't be an Aristotle or a Newton since "nobody will spend his time on those terribly boring things".
So now you have two choices: 1) Mythbusters: where you get higher audiences that maybe will end up thinking that science is about blowing things out and incredulity (not that this is not *part* of science), and that their "science" is about as good as that from academia (for an analogy, just look at what laymen usually think about informatics and their general respect for the professionals of this field -it's not so difficult, even I am able to deal with Ms Word). 2) A serious production: much less audience (still as many people as really want to watch it), but made up of youngsters that really take the feeling of "the real thing" on a young age (for an analogy, think about a youngster that sparks on some sport and goes by the age of 10 or 12 to a high level training center) -can you imagine the impact on whole humankind if we managed to have 10 newtons or einsteins per generation instead of one about each 250 years?
"The show would be one more example showing that 'science is boring.'"
The fact is most things are boring for most people. There's no problem that most people find science being boring, just like I find american football, stamps collecting or kabuki theater being boring: other people find them appealing and all is well and good. I don't see crowds saying "he thinks american football is boring, we must do something to remedy that!". It's more than enough giving chances to people to form their own opinion -not pre-judicing against it, and showing them that science is respectfull -even if it seems boring for most of them.
"Actually, the inches/centimeters conversion is one of the few which has "infinite" precision in spite of the fact that it's fractional."
I think you should refresh your theory. We are talking about *measures*, not math. What is the measure about converting inches into centimeters (or the other way around? No one. That's a math operation, not a measure. So you can be asked how many inches 13.7 centimeters are, and then say with all the reason that the answer is 5.3937007874 inches.
But *then*, what if you *measure* the length of a box and you say it's 13.7 cm? How many inches makes that? Does it make 5.3937007874 inches? Of course not! the proper answer is 5.39 inches, since that's the accuracy of your original *measure* and you can't add any more imprecission (nor precission, by the way) by means of a pure math calculation.
"Yes, that's the theoretical upper limit. However, for the most part spaghetti code went out along with Disco. Nowadays we have various techniques (abstraction, organizing into libraries, etc.) specifically for the purpose of reducing the number of those interactions. Therefore, the actual number should stay manageable."
It is manageable in fact: Debian does quite a good work, for instance. But still even if the base is 1.01 instead of 2, you would have 3.7^34 interactions, bazillions of them. For a more reasonable number let's imagine the average package links just to 3 others (a very conservative stimate -just try to install kopete in Debian to name one, after a barebones setup and see what happens), that makes 24000 links; truly manageable but still about 24 interactions to take into consideration by each developer on the Debian case. The fact that it's possible (and it is actually really possible) is almost a miracle. Still, not the kind of miracle you can expect from an everchanging environment like Gentoo.
"Whatever. As an admin, I'm still at least a client of the developer, not a developer myself. Happy now?"
Even if you are client you are still an administrator. Which on a unix-like environment means you must understand the lay-out of the system and have some basic script capabilities as a bare minimum. You maybe don't like it, and certainly nobody can or will force you to adopt it, but that's the way it is; if you still don't like it, there are other alternatives that maybe fit better to your taste.
Do you reall thing Debian's people take *months* to stabilize a distribution because they are unkownledgeable, lazy or just too few? The fact is that if you have n packages there will be a number of interactions among them that will fastly tend to be 2^n (and then think about 8000 packages and do the math). Fixing integration bugs on a frozen package tree is a hard task; trying to do it on an ever evolving tree is just impossible.
"as a user, I shouldn't have to..."
You seem to forget that you are not a user. Since you know the root password you are a system administration (maybe not a for-the-money one, maybe not on a heavy duty or difficult environment, but that's what you are), take it or leave it.
Anyway, Gentoo was still an open source-meritochracy based project last time I reviewed, so you just can offer your man power to take it wherever you prefer or look for a different project that better fulfills your interests and needs. Gentoo doesn't fulfill mines and I am not in mood to try to drive it to a different direction so I don't use Gentoo, but I'd never try to bash the efforts *others* are doing to try to reach their very own goals. I can offer my opinion, but that's all.
"The fact that the choices are update frequently or fall behind and have serious pain when you do finally update or install something new really does indicate that portage isn't doing a very good job."
Portage has nothing to do with this (or at least, I can't see any evidence of portage being the culprit of its stability or unstability). The problem, if you want to consider this a problem (I do) is with Gentoo itself. I see no showstopper on portage so it's used to build a distribution as stable as, say, Debian just like I don't see deb/dpkg/apt/aptitude/you-name-it being the guardian of Debian's stability (just try Debian's unstable/experimental branches and you'll see what I mean). The main difference between Debian and Gentoo is not portage vs aptitude but the mentalitly and goals of their respective development teams.
"If I wanted a system to be stable, but not that far behind current stuff. I'd probably be updating once a year"
I bet you didn't try. Except for the simplest scenarios this will probably mean reinstall from scratch is probably much easier and faster.
"One thing to note, [...] check for things that have been broken by updated libraries (and fix them)"
One thing to note: why on hell should one admin after another have to go through *exactly* the same bugfixings due to broken interactions when one developer/sysadmin can do it for once and hundreds benefit from this effort freeing a lot of manpower to expend on other cute things -that's what packages were invented for. This "gentooism" strongly remembers me the economic "broke window" myth.
"I don't know if it's portage itself or poor quality ebuilds"
You can bet that for the most part it's because poor quality ebuilds. That shouldn't make Gentoo maintainers to rush, since it's the logic outcome of the way they decided to "make" their distribution. When you expend most of your avaliable manpower just fighting against dependency hell as it does happen when you just want to be bleeding edge on every package all the time, it's not only that no manpower rests for the not so easy task of integrating all those packages over there, but you are just not interested (version x+1 of the program for the ebuild you maintain it's already there, so it's time to focus on it and forget about all those nasty integration bugs with version x. If you are lucky maybe some of them vanished because the upgrade -of course a whole new lot will appear, and that's the point of it).
"When it breaks, portage doesn't tell you why"
Some other will tell you upon experience what I can say from common sense (I don't use Gentoo; all my experience on it comes from installing maybe twice or three times and suffering having to maintain a short number or "inherited" boxes): on such an unstable environment you need to upgrade the nearest of one package at a time as it's possible since interaction problems grow at a ceiling 2^n rate, that is, exponentially. Not because it's Gentoo but simply because it's a system with interacting units (each package becomes one).
That means that you need to update almost daily to maintain the changeset low (thus being able to fastly find what broke this time). Of course this means too much babysitting to worth it but in very specific and narrow scenarios.
All in all, Gentoo has a nice toolset over a nice idea (sadly, this isn't enough. Not for me, at least).
"it is a strong level of pressure against a government and would be exceptionally bad for a country who's economy relies so strongly on trade and manufacturing such as China."
It surely would force China government to drastically change their economic plans but don't fool yourself: you just *can't* boicott the economy of a country with 1200 million people the wide China is. They could just close their borders for forty years and they even wouldn't notice (not to say they haven't more opportunities opening their borders than closing them, but that a country the size of China is a whole world on and by itself: their internal market is enormous and they are aplenty of raw materials).
"The public have a right to know about the behavior of its political leaders and public figures"
No, they don't.
"as that behavior is indicative of their values and of their aptness to represent the electorate"
No, they are not.
You can rephrase it: "the public have a right to know about the behaviour of their political leaders and public figures *IF* that behaviour is indicative of their values and of their aptness to represent the electorate".
Certainly there will be cases where the "if" is debatable (does really indicate anything about his values and his aptness to represent the electorate his hobby about having sex with pinguins? maybe, or maybe not. And what about if he is a francmason or and ex-smoker? Maybe or maybe not); that's what the courts are for.
"...but reporting on public figures is almost always justifiable."
Ah! so you are with me on this. "almost always" is not "always".
"I find it hilarious that the OP asked how to educate him/her-self on this topic"
I find it hilarious too for different reasons: 1) He is saying that he is looking some kind of "open" license. Open licenses are, well, open. What limits him in order to just *read* the license and form and opinion? It's everything there, on quite clear terms. 2) Apart from reading the licenses and choose the one that best fits their intentions, what else does him wait for? If he needs more than what he himself can get from reading the licenses its obvious he won't get it from Slash-IANAL-dot. He will need counsel from an attorney. 3) And... uh... there's no point three: you all can close their threads becauses this' all that there's.
"I think if you actually researched how browsers worked "from the very first day of HTML" you'd find that the client's ability to control the appearence of content was minimal"
I'm one of those that wrote their very first HTML on vi to look at it on Mosaic (on HP-Ux to be precise) and knew that the important part was not the client's factual ability to render the content but the client's *potential* to process it in anyway the need arose. And I'm one of those old farts that know that a "browser" is more than IExplorer or Mozilla and that it can be a websearch bot indexing on HTML headers and tags or a text-to-speech app for blind people, as well as being one of those that when the "semantic web" wave came could only say "what the f*? that's what the web is from 1992 -only it has been forgotten".
Do put critical enforceable bussiness logic (and I mean *bussiness* logic, not application logic) as near as possible to the data (and that usually means SP).
"The second that you place a business rule into a sproc, the users will want the rule changed"
That's true. And that's an advantage of stored procedures: they won't be able to change them (that's why I talked about Critical-Enforceable-Bussiness-Logic).
"Why is this bad? Because sprocs are almost always under the control of the DBA"
Why is this good? Because sprocs are almost always under the control of the most data management knowledgeable techie round there.
"most of the time there is a layer of politics involved between DBAs and Software Developers"
And that's good because that refrain them from their need (either because management pressure or pure ignorance) to do the thing the Real Stupid Way just because it's the fastest/the only way they know.
"What usually happens is that the dev will make the change to the business logic in the middle (or even worse, GUI) tier, thereby doing twice as much work"
So you say that such a bussiness logic should go into the middle tier instead of the RBDM because in that case the developer would do a stupid thing -like expressing it in the middle tier? This is both a circular argument and one more reason to put those kind of rules *out* of the reach of such a stupid developer.
"Adding Database servers to a cluster isn't cheap. If you have a lot of users, and you have had to cluster your servers to accommodate more users..."
Then you need to add more database horsepower. If you need to push or pull more data from the place the data is stored... well, you need it. No middleware is going to change that.
"Adding more middle-tier servers is much cheaper"
Yes. And buying a 1GB pen-drive is even cheaper than that, having in common with your "solution" that they both have nothing to do with the problem at hand. You either need to pull/push more data from where it resides or you don't. In the first case you always need more database horsepower; in the second you won't need it (and if cacheing is a good solution to your current problem then no, your problem is not that you need to push/pull more than provided and no, a cacheing solution is not a "middleware").
Resuming: You will want stored procedures for your critical enforceable bussiness logic because:
*Developers tend to suck regarding data access/management (design, integrity or efficency); DBAs a little less so (it's the work they are focused on, after all).
*No matter how good your bussiness logic implementation on your new shiny app is, tomorrow it will be developed a new app that will access the same dataset (like the example you talk about people pumping data from Excel -presumably instead of through your pretty web app that tried to enforce this or that rule) and will surely break some bussiness logic or at the very least you will need to reimplement them again. If you don't want this to happen, enforce the rules as near to the data as possible so there's no way to overrun them.
*Your managers are crazy. It's much more probable that your new manager (or the old one if it happens to read the last shiny brochure from "PHB's IT") decides to rewrite all your.Net software to Java or the other way around than to move from Oracle to DB2 (if just because -as you already said, privative RBDM licenses and support are *very* expensive to play with them and they are buried more profoundly in the caves of the black teachies so they make for not as good PR as a new front end with a new brighter colorset and round corners). Go defensive and give your bussiness rules a sanctuary against crazyness within your RBDM (I now this seems to be against common wisdom: the most you program as SP, the most locked to the RBDM you are. But while that's true in theory, my experience in the Real World-TM is that more often than not it is the datastore the one that lasts longer than the apps over it).
*Anyway, your mileage is your mileage: think it hard, think it deep and reach your own conclusions.
"Put it to you this way: If the features of MySQL are "good enough" for the application you want -- which arguably goes for most of the Web apps out there -- why would you not choose MySQL? There are times when swimming upstream is a noble effort, but generally all it gets you is tired."
Yes. But here the problem seems to be to decide what direction the water goes.
I'll rework your question: If you expect to develop in any reasonable future a database-driven app that might need proper RBDM functionality -- which arguably goes for most of the people earning a life on the "informatics thingie" -- why would you choose to thrash away time learning a tool you will have to abandon in the near future when the "proper" tool (ie: postgresql or firebird) will serve you in your hard tasks as well as in your easier ones with any drawback?
"There is still no full consensus over how certain things should be displayed."
The heck with it. Of course there's a consensus; there's a consensus from the very first day of HTML! "All things will be displayed the way the f* client finds proper". That's the one and only consensus, and that's the way things should be. HTML is about semantics, not presentation, and even things like CSS should do no more than *propose* a way to present the information ("oh, this new style sheet looks wonderful, doesn't it?" "Maybe, but I'm blind, you insensitive clod!"). If a CSS layer (or the absence of it) makes the information unreacheable or unusable then you are doing something utterly wrong.
"but probably so that they only have to test for one browser's compatibility"
Not even that. 1) "If you are a webmaster..." Heck *I* am a webmaster. I know because *I* am the master of the web server: I am the one with the keys to turn the web server on and off. We are talking here about managers and web *developers*, but webmasters? in more than a decade I never gave a damn about the servers I master being accessed by Explorer, Mozilla, Mosaic, or even telnet to the port 80. 2) Main responsible is not the web developer, but the manager at charge. He/she is the one that takes the decision to cut expenditures by not taking the time for properly test developments under their charge for "quirks" on commonly used browsers, as they don't do for accesibility by bots or people with disabilities or even to hire knowledgeable people (how many web developers do you know that try their code *first* against an html/ecmascript/css validator and *after* that work out the few specific quirks of this or that browser but instead they load the page on their browser of choice, on the monitor and colour depth of choice and "validate" by saying "Hummm... it seems OK to my eye", for instance?). 3) Anyway, as a web user I still don't give a damn (except for public/government sites). IE only, you say? Well, sorrily my money votes for non f* bussiness that are not interested on my wallet; maybe your competition likes the smell of my money more than you.
"But with just appropriate food and proper living conditions, people were able to live way past that age -- yes, already at the dark ages of middle age and also during Roman or Greek times."
You only now do *live* past forty/fifty at much; all you managed to do prior XIX century was *survive*. And you didn't survive because your body was "designed" to live sixty or seventy years but because *society* as a "panorganism" allowed you to survive. It has not too much to do with proper food or living conditions but about society protecting you; if ever society dismantles, how old do you think you have to get before the wolves run more than you?
But then you could say I'm talking about prehistory, too far away. Then I tell you need to remember that while our "current design" is more or less 100.000 year old roman days were about 2000 years ago, roughly a 5% percent of that time. If you want to go older than this, OK, I'll take 10.000 years for the whole "civilization thingie"; still just 10% of the time. The other 90% time, that of "natural environment" (in fact, the part when you can expect natural selection to show her force), and you went off at 40 at most, quite curiously the age when even a healthy sportive guy clearly knows that the "good days" are really a thing of the past.
"On the topic of gun control: So let's take all the guns away from law-abiding citizens"
That's the mistake in your rationale. Is not "take them all from law-abiding citizens" but "take them all. Full stop". Just as an example (and it's not going to be car-based for once) during past decades it was very easy to find fraud on USA meat due to anabolizants -because there were so many legal uses for them it was easy to "distract" part of the lot towards illegal activities. Meanwhile Europe was much more restritive: since it was very hard to find anabolizants *at all* it was hard to find them for illegal uses too.
On this very case you said the weapons were probably stolen. But stolen to whom? To Al Qeda? To SPECTRE? Or, more probably, to a very law-abiding citizen? No short guns, no people killed by short guns; quite an easy equation. The only problem? short gun makers, of course. The real "pusher" in the USA are the producers via NRA just the same as entertaiment companies push their way through RIAA.
"or so only the government has guns. Not sure what the difference is there but that's better"
I'd say the times of the "popular militia against government" ended up few many years ago. While it's quite a romantic idea, short guns and semi-automatics against M-16? Against F-18?
"I hope we never trade our freedom for safety"
It'd be fun if it weren't so serious that is *precisely* from USA that the "Terror Era", the DMCA, the Patriot Act... kind of policies are coming from. It is the USA more than any other civilized country the one that is trading freedom for safety and it's USA government the one most eroding civil rights in all the civilized world. Maybe you should reread your own words.
"since the government is controlled by corporations bent on profit at any cost, then we need to be able to defend ourselves from criminals who don't have our best interests in mind."
That's a very serious idea. The problem is that against those that can harm your society the most and that surely don't have your best interest in mind, the very corporations you named, a short weapon is no defense means at all.
"But it'll never happen because they are so obsessed with guns."
Well, not exactly. Yes, it might be the "macho feeling" in part, but I'd say it's more about prissioner's dilemma: general access to short guns it's overall bad to society, but in a society where access to short guns is so easy you can see an advantage owning one too: as I already said in other post, in a war area you want to have a weapon, don't you?
But sorrily they forget about a very "little and simple" fact: chances to be violently killed per million inhabitants. One would think that's an easy and clear number, isn't it? But, hey, they seemed to forget about it in the NRA-supported articles you kindly cite.
Well, here come some numbers http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-c rime-murders-per-capita (to say the truth, this is data from 2000, so quite old):
United States: 0.042802 per 1,000 people
France: 0.0173272 per 1,000 people
Australia: 0.0150324 per 1,000 people
Canada: 0.0149063 per 1,000 people
United Kingdom: 0.0140633 per 1,000 people
Germany: 0.0116461 per 1,000 people
Japan: 0.00499933 per 1,000 people
So, your chances to be killed in the USA were x3 those from "wild Australia", "violent UK" or "mad Canada", or x10 those from "samuray Japan".
But, hey, this is old data!
Well, here comes the "2005/2006 Home Office Statistical Bulletin for England and Wales" (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs07/hosb0207. pdf), quite up to date, uh? Well, let's see 746 murders in that period (including the 57 victims from the 7/7 London bombs), which makes 14.0 per million.
And what about the USA? Well, disastercenter (http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm) says there were 16,692 murders in 2005, or 56 murders per million. Hummm... how much it does 56/14? Well, it's even WORSE THAN DATA FROM 2000! Your bets of being murdered in USA are 4x those from the "wild UK". Isn't it soooooooo strange after the "facts" from our friends of the NRA?
When I lived in Japan, I knew two people who were murdered. Their killers used knives. It's not the tool, it's the criminal."
You must be kidding.
What are the chances for a criminal armed with a knife to kill 20 people on a single incident, even if they are children?
"Look at any of the states with shall-issue CCW permits and note their lower crime rates than areas with extensive gun bans."
Look at epidemiology and percolation. As it has been stated the "gun free" areas within the States (like schools or malls) are most sensible to massive killings; the same correlation you can find among states in vecinity. Compare this with the violent murdering statistics from, say France. The difference here is that you can't easily find a short gun in France... nor in Spain, Italy, Germany and all the other surrounding countries.
In the States it's very easy to find and own a short gun: that makes it somewhat as a war scenario: of course in a war scenario your bets are higher if you own a firearm (and know how to properly make use of it); still your overall bets are worse than in a peacefull country -even if you don't own a firearm there.
"Firearms are used in personal self-defense all the time [...] Just keep it [the gun], with ammo, in a place that's sensibly secure"
I don't pose a doubt about your argument about responsible posession of firearms being beneficial but then there's something I can explain to myself.
How is it then in the one civilized country where it's easier to legally own a short gun is the country in the civilized world where it's the easiest to be killed by a firearm and short guns are the worst problem of them all?
Canada, UK, France, Norway, Italy, Holland, Spain, Germany... you name it; noone of them seem to have such a problem with short gun violence even if almost all population (statistically *all* population, since the ones that are allowed to port a short gun are so few as to be not statistically significant) are "unarmed victims".
"I said if you want to read the book, kick some money the author's way"
And I answered I see no reason to pay for a book that's already written and published. If the author wants money for his writing, that's OK to me; he just need to find someone who wants to stablish how much he will receive for it, just as any other productive profession in the world. Once a book is published, it's, well, public.
"A substantial portion of the "AIDS research" is in fact done by private companies"
Yes. To some extent I add the AIDS example as a "flamebait". Due to AIDS affecting first world citizens you can see a lot of research going on it....But curiously enough, instead of some cure to AIDS what you have are treatements to chroniquize it with the net result of hundred of thousands dollars of revenue on each long-lived patient. And, of course, those treatments don't manage to reach third world people where is where most people are dying from this illness.
"And why is malaria such a killer? A bunch of governments buy into some scare story about DDT"
Yeah sure. DDT is all well and good and all evidences about its theratogeny come from the red-masonic consortium for world dominance with Rachel Carson in head... that somehow avoids vaccines and cheap treatments "just in case" someone gets infected, DDT or not DDT (even if DDT has been too heavily banned -you're right that properly used it more than probably made more good than bad in third world countries, it does nothing to do with the fact that while pharma is expending tens of millions of dolars on say, cosmetic research they expend peanuts on third world epidemias like cholera or malaria).
Slashdot Mirror
"For a few weeks... If they need a systems administrator, they should realize it pretty quickly."
I've been working as a system administrator and consultant for quite a few years and I can say something: if by him leaving for a few weeks they "know" they need him, that's because they don't want him.
You know a system administrator is doing his work properly in just the opposite: he can leave for a few weeks (even months) and nobody will notice. Certainly no new goals are achieved, but what's currently deployed just keeps humming.
"Nobody will watch this show"
I say bullshit. I can accept *less* people probably will watch the second show, but not *nobody*. "Nobody" means there can't be an Aristotle or a Newton since "nobody will spend his time on those terribly boring things".
So now you have two choices:
1) Mythbusters: where you get higher audiences that maybe will end up thinking that science is about blowing things out and incredulity (not that this is not *part* of science), and that their "science" is about as good as that from academia (for an analogy, just look at what laymen usually think about informatics and their general respect for the professionals of this field -it's not so difficult, even I am able to deal with Ms Word).
2) A serious production: much less audience (still as many people as really want to watch it), but made up of youngsters that really take the feeling of "the real thing" on a young age (for an analogy, think about a youngster that sparks on some sport and goes by the age of 10 or 12 to a high level training center) -can you imagine the impact on whole humankind if we managed to have 10 newtons or einsteins per generation instead of one about each 250 years?
"The show would be one more example showing that 'science is boring.'"
The fact is most things are boring for most people. There's no problem that most people find science being boring, just like I find american football, stamps collecting or kabuki theater being boring: other people find them appealing and all is well and good. I don't see crowds saying "he thinks american football is boring, we must do something to remedy that!". It's more than enough giving chances to people to form their own opinion -not pre-judicing against it, and showing them that science is respectfull -even if it seems boring for most of them.
"Actually, the inches/centimeters conversion is one of the few which has "infinite" precision in spite of the fact that it's fractional."
I think you should refresh your theory. We are talking about *measures*, not math. What is the measure about converting inches into centimeters (or the other way around? No one. That's a math operation, not a measure. So you can be asked how many inches 13.7 centimeters are, and then say with all the reason that the answer is 5.3937007874 inches.
But *then*, what if you *measure* the length of a box and you say it's 13.7 cm? How many inches makes that? Does it make 5.3937007874 inches? Of course not! the proper answer is 5.39 inches, since that's the accuracy of your original *measure* and you can't add any more imprecission (nor precission, by the way) by means of a pure math calculation.
"Yes, that's the theoretical upper limit. However, for the most part spaghetti code went out along with Disco. Nowadays we have various techniques (abstraction, organizing into libraries, etc.) specifically for the purpose of reducing the number of those interactions. Therefore, the actual number should stay manageable."
It is manageable in fact: Debian does quite a good work, for instance. But still even if the base is 1.01 instead of 2, you would have 3.7^34 interactions, bazillions of them. For a more reasonable number let's imagine the average package links just to 3 others (a very conservative stimate -just try to install kopete in Debian to name one, after a barebones setup and see what happens), that makes 24000 links; truly manageable but still about 24 interactions to take into consideration by each developer on the Debian case. The fact that it's possible (and it is actually really possible) is almost a miracle. Still, not the kind of miracle you can expect from an everchanging environment like Gentoo.
"Whatever. As an admin, I'm still at least a client of the developer, not a developer myself. Happy now?"
Even if you are client you are still an administrator. Which on a unix-like environment means you must understand the lay-out of the system and have some basic script capabilities as a bare minimum. You maybe don't like it, and certainly nobody can or will force you to adopt it, but that's the way it is; if you still don't like it, there are other alternatives that maybe fit better to your taste.
"so updating it shouldn't break anything."
Do you reall thing Debian's people take *months* to stabilize a distribution because they are unkownledgeable, lazy or just too few? The fact is that if you have n packages there will be a number of interactions among them that will fastly tend to be 2^n (and then think about 8000 packages and do the math). Fixing integration bugs on a frozen package tree is a hard task; trying to do it on an ever evolving tree is just impossible.
"as a user, I shouldn't have to..."
You seem to forget that you are not a user. Since you know the root password you are a system administration (maybe not a for-the-money one, maybe not on a heavy duty or difficult environment, but that's what you are), take it or leave it.
Anyway, Gentoo was still an open source-meritochracy based project last time I reviewed, so you just can offer your man power to take it wherever you prefer or look for a different project that better fulfills your interests and needs. Gentoo doesn't fulfill mines and I am not in mood to try to drive it to a different direction so I don't use Gentoo, but I'd never try to bash the efforts *others* are doing to try to reach their very own goals. I can offer my opinion, but that's all.
"The fact that the choices are update frequently or fall behind and have serious pain when you do finally update or install something new really does indicate that portage isn't doing a very good job."
Portage has nothing to do with this (or at least, I can't see any evidence of portage being the culprit of its stability or unstability). The problem, if you want to consider this a problem (I do) is with Gentoo itself. I see no showstopper on portage so it's used to build a distribution as stable as, say, Debian just like I don't see deb/dpkg/apt/aptitude/you-name-it being the guardian of Debian's stability (just try Debian's unstable/experimental branches and you'll see what I mean). The main difference between Debian and Gentoo is not portage vs aptitude but the mentalitly and goals of their respective development teams.
"If I wanted a system to be stable, but not that far behind current stuff. I'd probably be updating once a year"
I bet you didn't try. Except for the simplest scenarios this will probably mean reinstall from scratch is probably much easier and faster.
"One thing to note, [...] check for things that have been broken by updated libraries (and fix them)"
One thing to note: why on hell should one admin after another have to go through *exactly* the same bugfixings due to broken interactions when one developer/sysadmin can do it for once and hundreds benefit from this effort freeing a lot of manpower to expend on other cute things -that's what packages were invented for. This "gentooism" strongly remembers me the economic "broke window" myth.
"I don't know if it's portage itself or poor quality ebuilds"
You can bet that for the most part it's because poor quality ebuilds. That shouldn't make Gentoo maintainers to rush, since it's the logic outcome of the way they decided to "make" their distribution. When you expend most of your avaliable manpower just fighting against dependency hell as it does happen when you just want to be bleeding edge on every package all the time, it's not only that no manpower rests for the not so easy task of integrating all those packages over there, but you are just not interested (version x+1 of the program for the ebuild you maintain it's already there, so it's time to focus on it and forget about all those nasty integration bugs with version x. If you are lucky maybe some of them vanished because the upgrade -of course a whole new lot will appear, and that's the point of it).
"When it breaks, portage doesn't tell you why"
Some other will tell you upon experience what I can say from common sense (I don't use Gentoo; all my experience on it comes from installing maybe twice or three times and suffering having to maintain a short number or "inherited" boxes): on such an unstable environment you need to upgrade the nearest of one package at a time as it's possible since interaction problems grow at a ceiling 2^n rate, that is, exponentially. Not because it's Gentoo but simply because it's a system with interacting units (each package becomes one).
That means that you need to update almost daily to maintain the changeset low (thus being able to fastly find what broke this time). Of course this means too much babysitting to worth it but in very specific and narrow scenarios.
All in all, Gentoo has a nice toolset over a nice idea (sadly, this isn't enough. Not for me, at least).
"it is a strong level of pressure against a government and would be exceptionally bad for a country who's economy relies so strongly on trade and manufacturing such as China."
It surely would force China government to drastically change their economic plans but don't fool yourself: you just *can't* boicott the economy of a country with 1200 million people the wide China is. They could just close their borders for forty years and they even wouldn't notice (not to say they haven't more opportunities opening their borders than closing them, but that a country the size of China is a whole world on and by itself: their internal market is enormous and they are aplenty of raw materials).
"The common definition of anarchy "a state of lawlessness and disorder.""
*A* common definition of anarchy, if you please.
"The public have a right to know about the behavior of its political leaders and public figures"
No, they don't.
"as that behavior is indicative of their values and of their aptness to represent the electorate"
No, they are not.
You can rephrase it: "the public have a right to know about the behaviour of their political leaders and public figures *IF* that behaviour is indicative of their values and of their aptness to represent the electorate".
Certainly there will be cases where the "if" is debatable (does really indicate anything about his values and his aptness to represent the electorate his hobby about having sex with pinguins? maybe, or maybe not. And what about if he is a francmason or and ex-smoker? Maybe or maybe not); that's what the courts are for.
"...but reporting on public figures is almost always justifiable."
Ah! so you are with me on this. "almost always" is not "always".
"I find it hilarious that the OP asked how to educate him/her-self on this topic"
I find it hilarious too for different reasons:
1) He is saying that he is looking some kind of "open" license. Open licenses are, well, open. What limits him in order to just *read* the license and form and opinion? It's everything there, on quite clear terms.
2) Apart from reading the licenses and choose the one that best fits their intentions, what else does him wait for? If he needs more than what he himself can get from reading the licenses its obvious he won't get it from Slash-IANAL-dot. He will need counsel from an attorney.
3) And... uh... there's no point three: you all can close their threads becauses this' all that there's.
"I think if you actually researched how browsers worked "from the very first day of HTML" you'd find that the client's ability to control the appearence of content was minimal"
I'm one of those that wrote their very first HTML on vi to look at it on Mosaic (on HP-Ux to be precise) and knew that the important part was not the client's factual ability to render the content but the client's *potential* to process it in anyway the need arose. And I'm one of those old farts that know that a "browser" is more than IExplorer or Mozilla and that it can be a websearch bot indexing on HTML headers and tags or a text-to-speech app for blind people, as well as being one of those that when the "semantic web" wave came could only say "what the f*? that's what the web is from 1992 -only it has been forgotten".
"Don't put any business logic into sprocs."
.Net software to Java or the other way around than to move from Oracle to DB2 (if just because -as you already said, privative RBDM licenses and support are *very* expensive to play with them and they are buried more profoundly in the caves of the black teachies so they make for not as good PR as a new front end with a new brighter colorset and round corners). Go defensive and give your bussiness rules a sanctuary against crazyness within your RBDM (I now this seems to be against common wisdom: the most you program as SP, the most locked to the RBDM you are. But while that's true in theory, my experience in the Real World-TM is that more often than not it is the datastore the one that lasts longer than the apps over it).
Do put critical enforceable bussiness logic (and I mean *bussiness* logic, not application logic) as near as possible to the data (and that usually means SP).
"The second that you place a business rule into a sproc, the users will want the rule changed"
That's true. And that's an advantage of stored procedures: they won't be able to change them (that's why I talked about Critical-Enforceable-Bussiness-Logic).
"Why is this bad? Because sprocs are almost always under the control of the DBA"
Why is this good? Because sprocs are almost always under the control of the most data management knowledgeable techie round there.
"most of the time there is a layer of politics involved between DBAs and Software Developers"
And that's good because that refrain them from their need (either because management pressure or pure ignorance) to do the thing the Real Stupid Way just because it's the fastest/the only way they know.
"What usually happens is that the dev will make the change to the business logic in the middle (or even worse, GUI) tier, thereby doing twice as much work"
So you say that such a bussiness logic should go into the middle tier instead of the RBDM because in that case the developer would do a stupid thing -like expressing it in the middle tier? This is both a circular argument and one more reason to put those kind of rules *out* of the reach of such a stupid developer.
"Adding Database servers to a cluster isn't cheap. If you have a lot of users, and you have had to cluster your servers to accommodate more users..."
Then you need to add more database horsepower. If you need to push or pull more data from the place the data is stored... well, you need it. No middleware is going to change that.
"Adding more middle-tier servers is much cheaper"
Yes. And buying a 1GB pen-drive is even cheaper than that, having in common with your "solution" that they both have nothing to do with the problem at hand. You either need to pull/push more data from where it resides or you don't. In the first case you always need more database horsepower; in the second you won't need it (and if cacheing is a good solution to your current problem then no, your problem is not that you need to push/pull more than provided and no, a cacheing solution is not a "middleware").
Resuming:
You will want stored procedures for your critical enforceable bussiness logic because:
*Developers tend to suck regarding data access/management (design, integrity or efficency); DBAs a little less so (it's the work they are focused on, after all).
*No matter how good your bussiness logic implementation on your new shiny app is, tomorrow it will be developed a new app that will access the same dataset (like the example you talk about people pumping data from Excel -presumably instead of through your pretty web app that tried to enforce this or that rule) and will surely break some bussiness logic or at the very least you will need to reimplement them again. If you don't want this to happen, enforce the rules as near to the data as possible so there's no way to overrun them.
*Your managers are crazy. It's much more probable that your new manager (or the old one if it happens to read the last shiny brochure from "PHB's IT") decides to rewrite all your
*Anyway, your mileage is your mileage: think it hard, think it deep and reach your own conclusions.
"Put it to you this way: If the features of MySQL are "good enough" for the application you want -- which arguably goes for most of the Web apps out there -- why would you not choose MySQL? There are times when swimming upstream is a noble effort, but generally all it gets you is tired."
Yes. But here the problem seems to be to decide what direction the water goes.
I'll rework your question: If you expect to develop in any reasonable future a database-driven app that might need proper RBDM functionality -- which arguably goes for most of the people earning a life on the "informatics thingie" -- why would you choose to thrash away time learning a tool you will have to abandon in the near future when the "proper" tool (ie: postgresql or firebird) will serve you in your hard tasks as well as in your easier ones with any drawback?
"There is still no full consensus over how certain things should be displayed."
The heck with it. Of course there's a consensus; there's a consensus from the very first day of HTML!
"All things will be displayed the way the f* client finds proper". That's the one and only consensus, and that's the way things should be. HTML is about semantics, not presentation, and even things like CSS should do no more than *propose* a way to present the information ("oh, this new style sheet looks wonderful, doesn't it?" "Maybe, but I'm blind, you insensitive clod!"). If a CSS layer (or the absence of it) makes the information unreacheable or unusable then you are doing something utterly wrong.
"but probably so that they only have to test for one browser's compatibility"
Not even that.
1) "If you are a webmaster..." Heck *I* am a webmaster. I know because *I* am the master of the web server: I am the one with the keys to turn the web server on and off. We are talking here about managers and web *developers*, but webmasters? in more than a decade I never gave a damn about the servers I master being accessed by Explorer, Mozilla, Mosaic, or even telnet to the port 80.
2) Main responsible is not the web developer, but the manager at charge. He/she is the one that takes the decision to cut expenditures by not taking the time for properly test developments under their charge for "quirks" on commonly used browsers, as they don't do for accesibility by bots or people with disabilities or even to hire knowledgeable people (how many web developers do you know that try their code *first* against an html/ecmascript/css validator and *after* that work out the few specific quirks of this or that browser but instead they load the page on their browser of choice, on the monitor and colour depth of choice and "validate" by saying "Hummm... it seems OK to my eye", for instance?).
3) Anyway, as a web user I still don't give a damn (except for public/government sites). IE only, you say? Well, sorrily my money votes for non f* bussiness that are not interested on my wallet; maybe your competition likes the smell of my money more than you.
"But with just appropriate food and proper living conditions, people were able to live way past that age -- yes, already at the dark ages of middle age and also during Roman or Greek times."
You only now do *live* past forty/fifty at much; all you managed to do prior XIX century was *survive*. And you didn't survive because your body was "designed" to live sixty or seventy years but because *society* as a "panorganism" allowed you to survive. It has not too much to do with proper food or living conditions but about society protecting you; if ever society dismantles, how old do you think you have to get before the wolves run more than you?
But then you could say I'm talking about prehistory, too far away. Then I tell you need to remember that while our "current design" is more or less 100.000 year old roman days were about 2000 years ago, roughly a 5% percent of that time. If you want to go older than this, OK, I'll take 10.000 years for the whole "civilization thingie"; still just 10% of the time. The other 90% time, that of "natural environment" (in fact, the part when you can expect natural selection to show her force), and you went off at 40 at most, quite curiously the age when even a healthy sportive guy clearly knows that the "good days" are really a thing of the past.
"On the topic of gun control: So let's take all the guns away from law-abiding citizens"
That's the mistake in your rationale. Is not "take them all from law-abiding citizens" but "take them all. Full stop". Just as an example (and it's not going to be car-based for once) during past decades it was very easy to find fraud on USA meat due to anabolizants -because there were so many legal uses for them it was easy to "distract" part of the lot towards illegal activities. Meanwhile Europe was much more restritive: since it was very hard to find anabolizants *at all* it was hard to find them for illegal uses too.
On this very case you said the weapons were probably stolen. But stolen to whom? To Al Qeda? To SPECTRE? Or, more probably, to a very law-abiding citizen? No short guns, no people killed by short guns; quite an easy equation. The only problem? short gun makers, of course. The real "pusher" in the USA are the producers via NRA just the same as entertaiment companies push their way through RIAA.
"or so only the government has guns. Not sure what the difference is there but that's better"
I'd say the times of the "popular militia against government" ended up few many years ago. While it's quite a romantic idea, short guns and semi-automatics against M-16? Against F-18?
"I hope we never trade our freedom for safety"
It'd be fun if it weren't so serious that is *precisely* from USA that the "Terror Era", the DMCA, the Patriot Act... kind of policies are coming from. It is the USA more than any other civilized country the one that is trading freedom for safety and it's USA government the one most eroding civil rights in all the civilized world. Maybe you should reread your own words.
"since the government is controlled by corporations bent on profit at any cost, then we need to be able to defend ourselves from criminals who don't have our best interests in mind."
That's a very serious idea. The problem is that against those that can harm your society the most and that surely don't have your best interest in mind, the very corporations you named, a short weapon is no defense means at all.
"But it'll never happen because they are so obsessed with guns."
Well, not exactly. Yes, it might be the "macho feeling" in part, but I'd say it's more about prissioner's dilemma: general access to short guns it's overall bad to society, but in a society where access to short guns is so easy you can see an advantage owning one too: as I already said in other post, in a war area you want to have a weapon, don't you?
Yeah, quite interesting readings.
c rime-murders-per-capita (to say the truth, this is data from 2000, so quite old):
. pdf), quite up to date, uh? Well, let's see 746 murders in that period (including the 57 victims from the 7/7 London bombs), which makes 14.0 per million.
But sorrily they forget about a very "little and simple" fact: chances to be violently killed per million inhabitants. One would think that's an easy and clear number, isn't it? But, hey, they seemed to forget about it in the NRA-supported articles you kindly cite.
Well, here come some numbers http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-
United States: 0.042802 per 1,000 people
France: 0.0173272 per 1,000 people
Australia: 0.0150324 per 1,000 people
Canada: 0.0149063 per 1,000 people
United Kingdom: 0.0140633 per 1,000 people
Germany: 0.0116461 per 1,000 people
Japan: 0.00499933 per 1,000 people
So, your chances to be killed in the USA were x3 those from "wild Australia", "violent UK" or "mad Canada", or x10 those from "samuray Japan".
But, hey, this is old data!
Well, here comes the "2005/2006 Home Office Statistical Bulletin for England and Wales" (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs07/hosb0207
And what about the USA? Well, disastercenter (http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm) says there were 16,692 murders in 2005, or 56 murders per million. Hummm... how much it does 56/14? Well, it's even WORSE THAN DATA FROM 2000! Your bets of being murdered in USA are 4x those from the "wild UK". Isn't it soooooooo strange after the "facts" from our friends of the NRA?
When I lived in Japan, I knew two people who were murdered. Their killers used knives. It's not the tool, it's the criminal."
You must be kidding.
What are the chances for a criminal armed with a knife to kill 20 people on a single incident, even if they are children?
"Look at any of the states with shall-issue CCW permits and note their lower crime rates than areas with extensive gun bans."
Look at epidemiology and percolation. As it has been stated the "gun free" areas within the States (like schools or malls) are most sensible to massive killings; the same correlation you can find among states in vecinity. Compare this with the violent murdering statistics from, say France. The difference here is that you can't easily find a short gun in France... nor in Spain, Italy, Germany and all the other surrounding countries.
In the States it's very easy to find and own a short gun: that makes it somewhat as a war scenario: of course in a war scenario your bets are higher if you own a firearm (and know how to properly make use of it); still your overall bets are worse than in a peacefull country -even if you don't own a firearm there.
"Firearms are used in personal self-defense all the time [...] Just keep it [the gun], with ammo, in a place that's sensibly secure"
I don't pose a doubt about your argument about responsible posession of firearms being beneficial but then there's something I can explain to myself.
How is it then in the one civilized country where it's easier to legally own a short gun is the country in the civilized world where it's the easiest to be killed by a firearm and short guns are the worst problem of them all?
Canada, UK, France, Norway, Italy, Holland, Spain, Germany... you name it; noone of them seem to have such a problem with short gun violence even if almost all population (statistically *all* population, since the ones that are allowed to port a short gun are so few as to be not statistically significant) are "unarmed victims".
"I said if you want to read the book, kick some money the author's way"
And I answered I see no reason to pay for a book that's already written and published. If the author wants money for his writing, that's OK to me; he just need to find someone who wants to stablish how much he will receive for it, just as any other productive profession in the world. Once a book is published, it's, well, public.
"A substantial portion of the "AIDS research" is in fact done by private companies"
...But curiously enough, instead of some cure to AIDS what you have are treatements to chroniquize it with the net result of hundred of thousands dollars of revenue on each long-lived patient. And, of course, those treatments don't manage to reach third world people where is where most people are dying from this illness.
Yes. To some extent I add the AIDS example as a "flamebait". Due to AIDS affecting first world citizens you can see a lot of research going on it.
"And why is malaria such a killer? A bunch of governments buy into some scare story about DDT"
Yeah sure. DDT is all well and good and all evidences about its theratogeny come from the red-masonic consortium for world dominance with Rachel Carson in head... that somehow avoids vaccines and cheap treatments "just in case" someone gets infected, DDT or not DDT (even if DDT has been too heavily banned -you're right that properly used it more than probably made more good than bad in third world countries, it does nothing to do with the fact that while pharma is expending tens of millions of dolars on say, cosmetic research they expend peanuts on third world epidemias like cholera or malaria).