"you just killed a man. Why?"

So, why did you kill him? ;)

I was offered a job at my current work *after* I passed the interview, but before I could sign the paperwork.

I found it a bit strange that I sat in an interview, impressed them enough to get hired, and then they - what? wanted to know if I was an axe murderer?

The one question that stuck in my mind was "Have you ever felt so angry you thought you couldn't control your violent actions?". Seriously WTF? I would have thought that was covered in "No I don't have any violent crime convictions..."

I like it where I work though. Great company - but that psych test was amongst the wierdest set of questions I've ever been asked.

It's more likely she'd just give him a car.

Oprah and this guy are in the pre-trial conference...

Oprah: "Look under your seat!"

So would the solution then be to have a database replicate live to another machine, then take your daily dumps off the replicated machine, so that the forward facing database is unaffected?

Where I used to work we had a replicated database on a different box for most of the live systems for reporting. The reporting would kick off at a regular time and grind the replicated machine almost to a halt, but the live system would experience no slowdown.

Ah! Thanks for the clarification.

Backing up a live database can be a bit tricky.

Hmmm. "pg_dump -D" usually does the trick for me.

Or am I missing something?

Excuse my ignorance, but what happened in 1926, 1939 or 1942? I always thought Australia became a nation in its own right in 1901 with federation and the passing of the british Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act. Indeed, I remember a WWI documentary about Australia's war effort and the fiancial and socio-economic hardship it had on "such a young nation, barely 13 years old".

My daughter was born 7 weeks premature and spent 2 weeks in an incubator. As a side effect of spending so much time with her in the neonatal unit, I got to know what every switch and readout on her machine did. It was a very impressive piece of equipment designed to do one thing very well - keep a helpless human alive.

I would hazard a guess as to say that the insides of the machine are built with all sorts of hardware redundancy checks inside to ensure that its critical mission is carried out no matter what (I'm pretty sure it even had a UPS); which probably contributes somewhat to the high cost. That and the liability aspect inherent with any machine that keeps humans alive (from auto-respirators to space-suits).

I am fortunate enough to live in a country with a high standard of health care, and my daughter's stay in her expensive machine saved her life; however if a lower cost alternative that does the core functions of the expensive machines can be built for countries that are not as well off as we are, I am all for that. Expensive machines are also expensive to maintain, and if the TCO can be lowered to the point that poorer countries can operate them comfortably, that's got to be a benefit. It just goes to show that ingenuity knows no bounds.