>> Well, except for buddhism, that has a fat man instead.
> I spent a year in Thailand, a Bhuddist country, and learned quite a bit about their religion. Obviously you know little about Bhuddism.

I'm no expert on the various forms, no; but I do realise that pure, godless buddhism has in many places been mixed into the local god-based religion - so also in Thailand.

None of that was the point, however.

Unfortunately, the NoSQL people come over as if - and many actually do - believe that RDBMSes are utterly useless now that they have found Je- err, their new toy.
Of course what is now suddenly known as NoSQL has it's place - hell, how many of us haven't been using Memcached or something similar? Mozilla (and many others) uses RDF stores - yep, that's also NoSQL now. It's just not the ONLY solution, let alone always the BEST one - and of course you need to pick the right tool for the job.

There's been a kentering, fortunately - and the more moderate and/or smarter specimens have retconned NoSQL to mean Not Only SQL. Still pretty obvious where it came from, but at least that's an acknowledgement of what life is like in the real world.

I have no problem with using NoSQL or whatever tech where it's appropriate. Almost all our sites have memcached fronts. We've been using Redis and AWS (ZOMG! Cloud!) for specific high-burst things. We've got a Cassandra (although I question if that was the right choice for that bit...) and we're going to be looking at MySQL Cluster (which, yes, is also NoSQL even though a regular SQL can also be used to question it).

I just have a problem with the religious conversion types who usually have barely a few years and one or two technologies in their fingers and suddenly need to convince the world that they've seen the light and so should you because pancakes.

Because when it's raining, they're off to the puddles to make sweet, sweet love and deposit thousands upon thousands of eggs, I suspect.

Also, I may well be able to survive a good batting with a foam LART, but that doesn't mean I like it.

Well, the mosquito would probably survive (the impact, not the drowning) when the drop it is in hits the ground, too. I often hit when I swat at flies (which are bigger and heavier than mosquitos), and they simply butt into the wall (with, relatively, quite some force), shake their head, curse at me and simply continue buzzing about.

These little things are built like tanks, I tell you.

Ah, so *that's* where all that vacuum comes from - they mine it!

> What do you mean? We shouldn't use ASCII? Or Unicode? How about what we in the West know as the Arabic numbering system?

None of those *are* one-size-fits-all. ASCII and Unicode are very good at encoding text in human-readable forms; but I wouldn't want to encode my porn in them. The arabic numbering system is very good at expressing discrete quantities, but kindly refrain from writing a whole novel in it.

The point is that this NoSQL stuff is being hailed as the next big thing, which shall Smite the Relational Unbeliever with Fire, Brimstone and JSON. It isn't - it's merely a network-aware reiteration of an old idea - and it's not like NoSQL is just one thing, either - there's dozens of them, each with their own strong and weak points. In the end, it's webdevelopers who didn't /quite/ grasp something they thought was cool, and that then got turned into managementspeak.

Excellent. I love explaining to veg*ians how that excellent wine they're so fond of is most likely cleared with egg whites or gelatine. The little things are what makes life worth living :-)

Yeah, but what really caught me is the comment about the basketball court. Polygamy AND basketball? Where do I sign?

And, just like both Redhat and Ubuntu apply their own patches to the standard kernel, so do the different sects within the same brand twist the rules to suit them - Jehovas can't receive blood, anglicans seem to have little problems with gays and women, et cetera.

It also depends on where you grip the various sects together to get bigger brands. You talk about Christianity as a big one; but why not grab just one branch higher and group the christians together with the jews and probably a few others under the Abrahamic religion? In the end it comes down to one or more beards in the sky. Well, except for buddhism, that has a fat man instead.

Here in Bellgium, paper tax forms don't come pre-filled, but if you opt to enter your taxes electronically, most things are pre-filled and you also get an estimate based on the final values you've entered.

> We are making conscious, informed decisions to eat too much of the wrong things

I must object to that. You'd be surprised how many people swallow the mcMarketing bullshit about how their stuff is balanced and good for you.

What I don't get is, if you say there's 25M of damage, isn't that supposed to mean it would cost 25M to repair? If you have an estimate for the repair, that means you can repair it; so why is it written off, instead?

Because obviously none of the Wikileaks documents offered clear evidence of US involvement in the Spanish download laws? Shill.

> getting carted off to the gulag by the Belgian military

Oh, that's rich, that is. Last thing you lot saw of our military was the then-minister of defence getting drunk off his arse in a bar in NY, and then getting the (belgian) barmaid who blogged about it fired. Google translated article here: http://preview.tinyurl.com/7zl5o2v

The only thing the Belgian military is likely to do is have a pint with you while explaining how a 10 million inhabitant country has no less than six governments.

Apart from that, you're making valid points, of course :-)

As long as you get the job done, you are NOT a slacker.