There is no need for the government to "fix" shortages by importing desperate labor in the form of H-1B workers or illegal aliens. When the government "fixes" a shortage, the government is damaging the normal operation of the free market. The free market works fine without government intervention.
This is incoherent gibberish: if there is a shortage of a good (in this case IT labor) in one place and a surplus in another place (i.e. India) then a government that allows free movement of the good from the surplus location to the demand location is facilitating a free market. It is the artificial imposition of borders and boundaries that you would like to have that impede such travel that hamper any kind of free market.
Reality is: tech-monkey skills are cheap and easy to acquire, as witnessed by a hundred million perfectly-qualified folks in China, Korea, India etc. IT skills in the US are vastly overpriced, if anything or otherwise the free market wouldn't be moving the demand for these skills away from the US.
Does "Libertarian" really mean "mentally retarded moron" or does it only look that way?
web 4.0 -... ? What's next? Almost everyone is online socially and professionally. They can do just about everything online that they do in real life. Aside from the direct neural interfaces and "consensual reality", what is left? And who is left off-line who would need to get online to do it?
This question itself shows a shade of business thinking: we've done the information-access thing, we're in the middle of the information-structure thing and the "social web" -- what's the next thing that'll earn someone a billion dollars using the web and how would I have to position myself to be that someone (or one of the someones).
Unfortunately most folks at/. think only in terms of technology and imagine the next thing will be a new technology. Which is why nobody on/. has ever made much money.
Well, I moonlight for a company that thinks they have the answer to that question. We may be wrong, we may be right. You can come to your own answer and maybe you're even willing to put effort into your idea. Or maybe you prefer to be a follower like 99.9% of the population. Let things happen as they may, then whine about the inept implementation. We're betting on a certain something that'll be there five to ten years down the road and I'm convinced we're right. Will it be a million-dollar business? A billion-dollar business? What fraction of it will we be able to capture just by being first movers? How will we have to market ourselves? What shade of the general principle we're working on will actually become dominant and how shall we capture it?
In the end, people will post a million blogs telling us how not-innovative we were. How this was soooo predictable and how there's nothing particularly new or interesting in it. But if we manage to become billionaires through a hundred million satisfied repeat-customers who cannot imagine leading a life without our system again then we'll know that they're wrong. (And if we go bust, then at least we've tried to be innovative, instead of just sitting on our asses and complain how nothing new ever happens on the WWW).
There hasn't been any innovation on the web in the last 5 years anyway.
There has been dramatic innovation. The problem is that you are a tech-monkey without any grasp of the real world, so you imagine the word "innovation" to mean "technological innovation" and thus Gmail, for example, isn't an "innovation" to you because it doesn't do anything that some local mail client couldn't do in '01 already. To the reality of humanity, however, "innovation" doesn't mean that someone invented something. It means that something new and innovative is available, accessible, affordable. How many people used email in 2001? (and that's already at the end of a big bubble). How many gmail accounts are there today?
You may scoff at social innovations or business innovations or even political innovations; but these are what have an actual influence on human society. Not the invention of a new networking protocol. The entire WWW is not "innovative" from a tech perspective: just packets routed via TCP/IP -- old tech. But the innovation of technology usage is every bit as innovative as the invention of the technology itself. There may not be anything "tech innovative" about fusion power -- after all the principle was developed and confirmed with the hydrogen bomb. But getting to infuse this into actual day-to-day human activity is still going to change our lives every bit as much as the original development did. Maybe even more.
Feel free to declare the billion-dollar revenue streams through adsense "not innovative", but be prepared to be left behind by a society that acts a lot more on dollars than transistors. Maybe you don't see anything innovative in Myspace, but how many places have there been for seven and eight-digit numbers of people to interact with each other before. Not places that maybe some huge investment might have been able to buy (say usenet) but places that were in fact accessible and available; places that were actually used by these people?
Technologists tend to imagine that innovation is in having the bright ideas. Everybody else understands that ideas are cheap; Innovation is all in the execution. In the "actually making it happen".
Uncounted billions have been earned on the web in the last couple years. If you weren't the one who earned them, what does that say about your ability to judge innovation on the web?
Seriously, I never even noticed this supposed Web 2.0. Who decides these arbitrary numbers for a continuous process?
This fallacy is exploited in a number of little riddles that kids usually ponder. Where exactly is the line between a tadpole and a frog? There is none, of course. If you give a poor man a penny, he won't be rich - he'll still be poor. But if poverty cannot be removed by acquisition of a penny, then it can't be removed by another penny and another and another...
Most people grow up at some point and realize that it doesn't really matter where the lines are drawn. Nobody cares when exactly a tadpole turns into a frog, except retarded sophists. There's clear, unambiguous differences between the one and the other and so we give them different names and when we're faced with something in between then we say "it's somewhere in between".
A frog can breathe air. A frog has legs. A frog has no tail. There's no sharp transition when any of these somehow "suddenly" happen, but they're clear distinctions from a tadpole.
The "old web" was all about information. Access to information. Bringing information "online". Putting information out on the web. That was a new concept. The big battles were about information-access. Between the ISPs and the ISP-alikes. And between the browsers and similar information-access infrastructures. The AOL and IE quasi-monopolies were forged then. This was a new concept and a multitude of schemes were hatched to see how one might make money of this. Some even successful.
The "new web" isn't about information and its access any more. We've figured that one out. Something like Firefox can still make a splash, but there's never going to be a "Netscape vs IE" battle again. Todays battles are about finding information, organizing information, structuring information. Search engines. Portals. Web-directories. And "web-communities". Anybody could have seen that one coming. As we already knew back in '92: The killer-app of the nineties is -- people.[1]
And the extremely thinly veiled admission that a thousand people contributing a little here and there beat any silicon infrastructure any day of the week. That's the Google admission, the DMOZ admisssion, the wikipaedia admission and in the end, yes, the MySpace admission. Don't try to solve any big task -- structuring the web itself, the encyclopaedic knowledge of mankind or even just simply to entertain your visitors -- when there's a million people out there who'd be happy to lend a hand here and there and the harvest of these little bits will create a better yield than anything any mega-corporation could produce. Any self-respecting nerd should recognize this as the open source model.
We all know these things.
And sufficiently complex systems cease to be binary: there's no sharp transition when a tadpole suddenly becomes a frog, but the differences between tadpoles and frogs are so obvious that we have different words for them. And in the same vein there's no particular single thing that marks the new web -- it's just that anybody with eyes in their head can see that this is a whole different critter from 10 or 15 years ago and so we give it some name to refer to this change: "Web 2.0". We could have done worse.
"nano particles of water vapor in the atmosphere to kill you"
I don't think it's that which kills you...
Shh, I want to see if they'll experiment with breathing non-oxygen atmospheres [...]
What exactly does water vapor have to do with oxygen? That's just incoherent.
Yeah, some molecules can pass the blood-brain barrier.
The whole point of the statement you quoted was that it is not necessary to pass the blood-brain barrier if you can enter the brain through the nose. But that might have been to subtle...
It's not clear to me from your articles whether you actually need ownership. This sounds like the kind of thing you might be able to get some gradstudent at the next medical college interested in. Voila: access to reasonably good and usually well-maintained equipment. Maybe someone is going to get a seniors thesis out of it. Heck, there may even be a way to get some small internal tech-development grant or some such to cover operational costs.
You don't think you're the first one to think of this, right? Heck, there may even be literature left behind from one or a couple other folks who've tried similar things in the past.
My personal experience in the past has been that it is smarter and cheaper to befriend an astronomy grad student for access to some real telescope than spending thousands on buying your own (which will never hold up quality-wise). I can't quite see why this shouldn't hold true for medical equipment as well.
There was a time when I understood what exactly Sun makes money on. They had some proprietary hardware (the sparc achitecture) and they had an OS that took advantage of the strengths of that HW. Fine. But these days, sun servers are just Opteron boxes, no? And the OS is opensourced.
Wouldn't a "Pro Female Gamer" be someone who professionally plays female characters? Or did they mean "a female pro gamer"? Admitted, that combination of words is so unusual as to give people pause when typing it, but I think the rules of English grammar back me up on this one...
In reality isn't this a design limitation rather than a bug in the implementation?
It is. It was a deliberate choice to do things this way when the system was conceived of. Ignore the retards who keep calling this a "bug".
Every last little detail of spaceflight depends on reliable timekeeping. Quick: you want to talk to Houston and... where is Houston right now? How do you have to adjust your antenna and how do you have to move it per second to create a reliable link? There's just so many things that require knowing where everything is at what time that clocks are NOT something anybody wants to tinker with. Imagine the headlines if the cooling system was pointed at the sun rather than away from it because the computer had the time off by a couple minutes. And the shuttle overheated and killed everybody. All of slashdot would fall over each other telling us how "easy" it is to keep a proper clock running.
When the lives of people are dependent on a million-and-one decisions all of which have to be timed correctly, you don't lightly tinker with the clocks. If a valve has to be opened once a day, you don't just reset the "day" counter back from 365 to 1. That's just retarded. You need to be able to rely on the fact that it is exactly one hour later now than it was an hour ago. And not suddenly 364 days and 23 hours earlier.
If someone designed a schoolbus and said "well, this design means we're not going to use it on New Years", nobody would think anything terrible about it. Nobody would call it a "bug". But that's what the shuttle was supposed to be: a shuttle. Something that goes up, delivers a couple folks and some equipment. Then return. So you'd avoid shuttle service during one day of the year. What's the big whoop? Why do peaople call this a "problem" or a "bug"?
The designers of the shuttle decided that they could avoid all kinds of costly and dangerous complications by not flying through the end of a year. And? This is a civilian transport vessel, fer cryin' out loud. Where is the so-called "problem" here?
We're talking about a local county election with a sum total of 36 votes cast.
No, we aren't. Let me advise you not to attempt to contribute to conversations you don't understand.
We're talking about an election in which 36 votes were reported. How many votes were cast is completely open and entirely unknown. Maybe one. Maybe 18. Maybe 72. Heck, maybe 500. There's no way for you to know one way or another, since the only mechanism by which the number "36" is already known to produce false results.
Certainly, if these results are the result of fraud, it is almost certainly not due to party involvement.
To the contrary: if there is a piece of software that skews voting outcomes towards one party it would show up in all machines and its action would be to shove the occasional vote from the occasional independent or {!$party}-candidate to the {$party}-candidate. That would be close to invisible in most places -- who'd ever notice, say, 1% less votes for the green candidate or the {!$party} against the 51% "win" of the {$party} candidate? The only way to catch that kind of thing is in precincts where there is such a small number of votes for a candidate (like in the given case) that it becomes numerically verifiable.
You keep assuming that this is an isolated incident. When it is much much more likely to be the isolated incident of visibility in a sea of invisible fraud.
Apart from that, this applies also to personal firewalls (imparing access to a program, bad), spyware (good), MS windows (well... good;-), any other OS (bad), any update with bugs (bad), failing hardware, DRM (good!), copy protection software (good),...., and a lot of other things.
You forgot the doozy: Slashdotting.
It is now illegal for/. to write about British computer system as the ensuing reduction of said systems to smoldering piles of rubble by the combined global power of/. constitutes "impairing the operation of any program or data held on a computer"...
Couple years back the was an article in EE Times about a Swiss(?) company working on something like this in Quatar(?). Memory is hazy here, but the idea was that there was a certain amount of concentration, PV cells were used and water-cooled. The water-heating power was not used for power generation, though, but to facilitate evaporation (which cools splendidly) in a desalination process cycle. In essence you put sea water and sunlight in (both of which southern Arabia has a lot of) and get power and fresh water out.
At the time they were writing about that, the whole thing existed on paper only and they had just started laying pipes and such. I haven't heard about it since and don't know what happened.
The Sun has provided every last shred of energy that created an entire biosphere and a complete human civilization. It has been without a iccup or outage for four and a half billion years. The very word you just typed were powered by the sun.
Anybody who calls that "unreliable" is beyond retarded.
If you offered me a new F-16 at half price it would be a remarkable bargain, but I still couldn't afford it with my combined lifetime earnings., let alone its upkeep.
I am sure there will a few hundred posts pointing this out, but XP seems to do the job just fine for now. Just wait till Microsoft releases Vista SP2 or SP3, if that. What intelligent person would really want that DRM OS on their box anyway?
Here's how it's going to happen: Our IT folks at work will hear that Vista is supposedly better at keeping viruses and trojans and such at bay than XP. Which doesn't really mean a lot, given XPs performance. So I'm very much inclined to believe MS when they say Vista is going to do better (i.e. less awfully). Given that this crap is what gives the IT folks one of their biggest headaches, they'll tell us to run Vista on the machines here at work. Then they'll insist that laptops connected to the (internal) network run Vista as well. Then the people who somehow manage to cling to XP will find that they cannot open the documents that were sent to them from Vista boxes any more because Office-007 (with the license to kill) is going to be just a smidge incompatible with Word-XP. Just enough to force everybody to upgrade their stuff and re-(re-re-re-re-)learn how to do some simple thing in Excel because the UI was changed just enough to obsolete all the keyboard shortcuts you finally learned.
At least that's kinda how we were forced from 98SE to XP.
With all teh funnae posts about it, let me be the first one to ask: why were you using 3-byte integers to begin with? Why would anybody anywhere ever use these for any reason at all? What advantage to these have? Why was this table laid out like this? This doesn't make sense to me at all. Were you really imagining that shaving a byte off each post was going to save you DB space? I can't quite believe that. But than what exactly would be the motivation for using such an odd integer size?
According to wikipedia, the number of jokes on the internet making reference to something that has tripled in the last six months according to wikipedia, has tripled in the last six month.
Slashdot Mirror
This is incoherent gibberish: if there is a shortage of a good (in this case IT labor) in one place and a surplus in another place (i.e. India) then a government that allows free movement of the good from the surplus location to the demand location is facilitating a free market. It is the artificial imposition of borders and boundaries that you would like to have that impede such travel that hamper any kind of free market.
Reality is: tech-monkey skills are cheap and easy to acquire, as witnessed by a hundred million perfectly-qualified folks in China, Korea, India etc. IT skills in the US are vastly overpriced, if anything or otherwise the free market wouldn't be moving the demand for these skills away from the US.
Does "Libertarian" really mean "mentally retarded moron" or does it only look that way?
There's millions of Indian programmers employed by American companies.
This question itself shows a shade of business thinking: we've done the information-access thing, we're in the middle of the information-structure thing and the "social web" -- what's the next thing that'll earn someone a billion dollars using the web and how would I have to position myself to be that someone (or one of the someones).
Unfortunately most folks at /. think only in terms of technology and imagine the next thing will be a new technology. Which is why nobody on /. has ever made much money.
Well, I moonlight for a company that thinks they have the answer to that question. We may be wrong, we may be right. You can come to your own answer and maybe you're even willing to put effort into your idea. Or maybe you prefer to be a follower like 99.9% of the population. Let things happen as they may, then whine about the inept implementation. We're betting on a certain something that'll be there five to ten years down the road and I'm convinced we're right. Will it be a million-dollar business? A billion-dollar business? What fraction of it will we be able to capture just by being first movers? How will we have to market ourselves? What shade of the general principle we're working on will actually become dominant and how shall we capture it?
In the end, people will post a million blogs telling us how not-innovative we were. How this was soooo predictable and how there's nothing particularly new or interesting in it. But if we manage to become billionaires through a hundred million satisfied repeat-customers who cannot imagine leading a life without our system again then we'll know that they're wrong. (And if we go bust, then at least we've tried to be innovative, instead of just sitting on our asses and complain how nothing new ever happens on the WWW).
There hasn't been any innovation on the web in the last 5 years anyway.
There has been dramatic innovation. The problem is that you are a tech-monkey without any grasp of the real world, so you imagine the word "innovation" to mean "technological innovation" and thus Gmail, for example, isn't an "innovation" to you because it doesn't do anything that some local mail client couldn't do in '01 already. To the reality of humanity, however, "innovation" doesn't mean that someone invented something. It means that something new and innovative is available, accessible, affordable. How many people used email in 2001? (and that's already at the end of a big bubble). How many gmail accounts are there today?
You may scoff at social innovations or business innovations or even political innovations; but these are what have an actual influence on human society. Not the invention of a new networking protocol. The entire WWW is not "innovative" from a tech perspective: just packets routed via TCP/IP -- old tech. But the innovation of technology usage is every bit as innovative as the invention of the technology itself. There may not be anything "tech innovative" about fusion power -- after all the principle was developed and confirmed with the hydrogen bomb. But getting to infuse this into actual day-to-day human activity is still going to change our lives every bit as much as the original development did. Maybe even more.
Feel free to declare the billion-dollar revenue streams through adsense "not innovative", but be prepared to be left behind by a society that acts a lot more on dollars than transistors. Maybe you don't see anything innovative in Myspace, but how many places have there been for seven and eight-digit numbers of people to interact with each other before. Not places that maybe some huge investment might have been able to buy (say usenet) but places that were in fact accessible and available; places that were actually used by these people?
Technologists tend to imagine that innovation is in having the bright ideas. Everybody else understands that ideas are cheap; Innovation is all in the execution. In the "actually making it happen".
Uncounted billions have been earned on the web in the last couple years. If you weren't the one who earned them, what does that say about your ability to judge innovation on the web?
Seriously, I never even noticed this supposed Web 2.0. Who decides these arbitrary numbers for a continuous process?
This fallacy is exploited in a number of little riddles that kids usually ponder. Where exactly is the line between a tadpole and a frog? There is none, of course. If you give a poor man a penny, he won't be rich - he'll still be poor. But if poverty cannot be removed by acquisition of a penny, then it can't be removed by another penny and another and another...
Most people grow up at some point and realize that it doesn't really matter where the lines are drawn. Nobody cares when exactly a tadpole turns into a frog, except retarded sophists. There's clear, unambiguous differences between the one and the other and so we give them different names and when we're faced with something in between then we say "it's somewhere in between".
A frog can breathe air. A frog has legs. A frog has no tail. There's no sharp transition when any of these somehow "suddenly" happen, but they're clear distinctions from a tadpole.
This is quoted directly from here:
What exactly does water vapor have to do with oxygen? That's just incoherent.
Yeah, some molecules can pass the blood-brain barrier.
The whole point of the statement you quoted was that it is not necessary to pass the blood-brain barrier if you can enter the brain through the nose. But that might have been to subtle...
It's not clear to me from your articles whether you actually need ownership. This sounds like the kind of thing you might be able to get some gradstudent at the next medical college interested in. Voila: access to reasonably good and usually well-maintained equipment. Maybe someone is going to get a seniors thesis out of it. Heck, there may even be a way to get some small internal tech-development grant or some such to cover operational costs.
You don't think you're the first one to think of this, right? Heck, there may even be literature left behind from one or a couple other folks who've tried similar things in the past.
My personal experience in the past has been that it is smarter and cheaper to befriend an astronomy grad student for access to some real telescope than spending thousands on buying your own (which will never hold up quality-wise). I can't quite see why this shouldn't hold true for medical equipment as well.
New Scientist: the Weekly World News of science reporting.
Remember, SUN makes money on hardware.
Do they?
There was a time when I understood what exactly Sun makes money on. They had some proprietary hardware (the sparc achitecture) and they had an OS that took advantage of the strengths of that HW. Fine. But these days, sun servers are just Opteron boxes, no? And the OS is opensourced.
So how exactly are they making money?
Wouldn't a "Pro Female Gamer" be someone who professionally plays female characters? Or did they mean "a female pro gamer"? Admitted, that combination of words is so unusual as to give people pause when typing it, but I think the rules of English grammar back me up on this one...
1995 called, and it wants its slang back.
Except for "like" and "dude". For some reason they say we can keep those.
In reality isn't this a design limitation rather than a bug in the implementation?
It is. It was a deliberate choice to do things this way when the system was conceived of. Ignore the retards who keep calling this a "bug".
Every last little detail of spaceflight depends on reliable timekeeping. Quick: you want to talk to Houston and ... where is Houston right now? How do you have to adjust your antenna and how do you have to move it per second to create a reliable link? There's just so many things that require knowing where everything is at what time that clocks are NOT something anybody wants to tinker with. Imagine the headlines if the cooling system was pointed at the sun rather than away from it because the computer had the time off by a couple minutes. And the shuttle overheated and killed everybody. All of slashdot would fall over each other telling us how "easy" it is to keep a proper clock running.
When the lives of people are dependent on a million-and-one decisions all of which have to be timed correctly, you don't lightly tinker with the clocks. If a valve has to be opened once a day, you don't just reset the "day" counter back from 365 to 1. That's just retarded. You need to be able to rely on the fact that it is exactly one hour later now than it was an hour ago. And not suddenly 364 days and 23 hours earlier.
If someone designed a schoolbus and said "well, this design means we're not going to use it on New Years", nobody would think anything terrible about it. Nobody would call it a "bug". But that's what the shuttle was supposed to be: a shuttle. Something that goes up, delivers a couple folks and some equipment. Then return. So you'd avoid shuttle service during one day of the year. What's the big whoop? Why do peaople call this a "problem" or a "bug"?
The designers of the shuttle decided that they could avoid all kinds of costly and dangerous complications by not flying through the end of a year. And? This is a civilian transport vessel, fer cryin' out loud. Where is the so-called "problem" here?
We're talking about a local county election with a sum total of 36 votes cast.
No, we aren't. Let me advise you not to attempt to contribute to conversations you don't understand.
We're talking about an election in which 36 votes were reported. How many votes were cast is completely open and entirely unknown. Maybe one. Maybe 18. Maybe 72. Heck, maybe 500. There's no way for you to know one way or another, since the only mechanism by which the number "36" is already known to produce false results.
Certainly, if these results are the result of fraud, it is almost certainly not due to party involvement.
To the contrary: if there is a piece of software that skews voting outcomes towards one party it would show up in all machines and its action would be to shove the occasional vote from the occasional independent or {!$party}-candidate to the {$party}-candidate. That would be close to invisible in most places -- who'd ever notice, say, 1% less votes for the green candidate or the {!$party} against the 51% "win" of the {$party} candidate? The only way to catch that kind of thing is in precincts where there is such a small number of votes for a candidate (like in the given case) that it becomes numerically verifiable.
You keep assuming that this is an isolated incident. When it is much much more likely to be the isolated incident of visibility in a sea of invisible fraud.
Why am I stuck with the musty-sounding Vista start-up sound clip that Microsoft thinks I will like?
You aren't. You have been able to choose your sounds through Control Panel | Sounds since as far back as at least Win95.
I'd say installing Norton 'security' software on someone's machine could now be illegal too, by this...
I challenge the claim that Norton Internet Security has ever prevented anybody's access to a computer or the data stored on it.
Oh, you mean the legitimate user of the computer. Hum. You got a point there...
The first 4 lines of my .alias file:
alias a alias a xs cd a mc mv a grpe grep
You forgot the doozy: Slashdotting.
It is now illegal for /. to write about British computer system as the ensuing reduction of said systems to smoldering piles of rubble by the combined global power of /. constitutes "impairing the operation of any program or data held on a computer"...
number of cores per die ramping up at incredible rates,
Yeah, we're already up to ... uh ... four...
why haven't I seen yet a combined system.
Couple years back the was an article in EE Times about a Swiss(?) company working on something like this in Quatar(?). Memory is hazy here, but the idea was that there was a certain amount of concentration, PV cells were used and water-cooled. The water-heating power was not used for power generation, though, but to facilitate evaporation (which cools splendidly) in a desalination process cycle. In essence you put sea water and sunlight in (both of which southern Arabia has a lot of) and get power and fresh water out.
At the time they were writing about that, the whole thing existed on paper only and they had just started laying pipes and such. I haven't heard about it since and don't know what happened.
My point is that solar is unreliable.
The Sun has provided every last shred of energy that created an entire biosphere and a complete human civilization. It has been without a iccup or outage for four and a half billion years. The very word you just typed were powered by the sun.
Anybody who calls that "unreliable" is beyond retarded.
How's this: Making an F-16 from a cereal box, some Scotch tape, and a penny. That cheap'nuff fer ya?
Here's how it's going to happen: Our IT folks at work will hear that Vista is supposedly better at keeping viruses and trojans and such at bay than XP. Which doesn't really mean a lot, given XPs performance. So I'm very much inclined to believe MS when they say Vista is going to do better (i.e. less awfully). Given that this crap is what gives the IT folks one of their biggest headaches, they'll tell us to run Vista on the machines here at work. Then they'll insist that laptops connected to the (internal) network run Vista as well. Then the people who somehow manage to cling to XP will find that they cannot open the documents that were sent to them from Vista boxes any more because Office-007 (with the license to kill) is going to be just a smidge incompatible with Word-XP. Just enough to force everybody to upgrade their stuff and re-(re-re-re-re-)learn how to do some simple thing in Excel because the UI was changed just enough to obsolete all the keyboard shortcuts you finally learned.
At least that's kinda how we were forced from 98SE to XP.
With all teh funnae posts about it, let me be the first one to ask: why were you using 3-byte integers to begin with? Why would anybody anywhere ever use these for any reason at all? What advantage to these have? Why was this table laid out like this? This doesn't make sense to me at all. Were you really imagining that shaving a byte off each post was going to save you DB space? I can't quite believe that. But than what exactly would be the motivation for using such an odd integer size?
According to wikipedia, the number of jokes on the internet making reference to something that has tripled in the last six months according to wikipedia, has tripled in the last six month.