And where can I obtain this "tat" people speak of?

Agreed. Personally, I'm waiting for Android Napoleon to come out.

If you're old enough, you might remember a time when that joke was funny.

I was 14 years old when the GOES-1 satellite was launched. At the time the most powerful computer in the world was probably the CDC 7600, which ran at 34 MHz, had 64 Kilobytes of RAM, and delivered 10 MFLOPS. Today the highest end desktop delivers over 100 GigaFLOPS, and supercompuyters deliver into the PetaFLOPS -- that's eight orders of magnitude faster.

So until I was a teenager forecasts were essentially done by hand without computers or sattelites, and these early forecasts had an interesting property: the next day's forecast was not significantly more accurate than assuming tommorow's weather would be like today's. In my experience, today's three day forecasts are more accurate than next day forecasts were back then. In the early 70s we'd maybe get two days of warning that a storm like Sandy might hit our region, and we wouldn't know for sure until hours before it made landfall. With Sandy the track was predicted within fifty miles accuracy five days ahead.

We can still complain about next day's forecast because we're now expecting hourly predictions. We're holding weather forecasts to the standard that we can almost set our watch by them -- or at least our sundial. The problem with that is that at any given moment it might be raining in one spot and not raining in another spot a mile away. But I have a feeling that that kind of pinpoint geographic precision is coming someday.

It's important to remember these advances didn't happen because the problem was easy; they're an immense human accomplishment. When GOES-11 failed three years ago I remember having an argument with a young guy who claimed that the government shouldn't be in the weather satellite business, and (I am not making this up) if it wants satellite weather maps it should get them off the Internet like everyone else.

I've used Oracle (as well as practically every other major RDBMS platform) on and off since v4. Oracle has been around a long time and over that time it has acreted features and along with them complexity. For example it's got excellent features for storing and querying geographic objects. One of my favorite neat-o features is "virtual private databases" -- fine grained row-level security. You can set it up so some logins can't even see certain rows of a database -- e.g. if you log in as a regional manager you can see and manipulate only your region's records.

But of course if you've learned to program apps in the last fifteen years or so, you're probably thinking, "How are you supposed to use that feature when the connections are pooled?" And there's the rub. The way people typically use a database is different than the way they did 25 years ago. Now often what people are lookign for is a data store for a handful of object types in their website, and Oracle is overkill, and if you're thinking about serving thousands of users a minute it'll cost you a fortune for features you probably aren't going to use.

So for many if not most apps today really doesn't matter much which RDBMS you choose -- or whether you choose an RDMS at all, so long as it provides the performance and reliabilty you need. The nastieness of MSSQL's Transact SQL and the idiosyncracies of PL/SQL are hidden away by peristance providers so you hever have to deal with them. There are stills some apps where you have dozens or even hundreds of tables that are continually being combined in queried in idiosyncratici ways, and this is what a traditional RDBMS is designed to solve. If you've got dozens or even hundreds of tables and millions of records with a modest number of users, it's hard to beat Oracle.

Within the traditional RDBMSs, Oracle provides rich feature sets that are irrelevent to many developers today. Some of its SQL was non-standard (don't know if this is still true), and some of its JDBC driver features were non-standard (BLOBS -- again don't know if this is still true), but this doesn't matter to users who are working with some kind of persistence provider like Hibernate that papers over the differences.

As for performance, it's very good for an RDBMS out of the box -- which is to say mediocre. That's the deal with RDBMS: guaranteed mediocre perofrmance for no programmer effort. As load climbs, Oracle in my experience works very well if you have someone who is a capable Oracle DBA. If not Oracle performance has a way of collapsing catastrophically due to resource starvation (e.g. exceeding the memory allocated to the System Global Area etc). Managing an Oracle database that will get hammered is not for amateurs. Oracle databases have all kinds of parameters to tweak, many of which can cause disaster. Beware.

On top of that Oracle's licensing practices are (or at least were) ridiculously complicated and predatory. They don't care if you screw up and it costs you a ton of money, once they have their hooks into you. I've been to Oracle offices many times, and the corporate culture always gave me the creeps. Of course, if I had to pick a competitor for creepiest corporate culture, I'd have to name Amazon. That may be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.

You have to disaggregate statiustics before you use them to evaluate a policy.

For example, I think we can agree that forcible rape is a violent crime. Violent crime rates are down, does that mean we should be less concerened about forcible rape? No, because we need consider the specific rape statistics, which might possibly have risen even if the overall rate for violent crime has dropped.

In this case, you need to show that the rate of school shootings has dropped. You can 't lump them in with all violent crimes and then use statistics about the larger group to reasonable about the smaller; that's the fallacy of overgeneralization.

Which is not to say your conclusion is wrong, only that your argument is specious.

School shootings are "black swan" events. It's a near statistical certainty that you won't have one in your community. This does not necessarily mean, however, that communities shouldn't prepare for them. How far to go is a complex question that depends among other things on what *else* is on the community's plate.

On the plus side, think what this will do for the journal's impact factor!

Sounds like a character from the newspaper comic strip, "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith".

The punishment for cheating on CS201 should be having to get through CS330 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms) without cheating. If you can't get through a 200 level data structures without cheating you're going to be roadkill when you face your first dynamic programming problem.

Bad form, calling "whoosh" on a response your own attempt at a joke. Only a third party can call "whoosh".

I think you answered your own question as to why religion ought to be protected. It should be part of a more general right to hold unpopular opinions without unreasonable discrimination.

Well, this is the dark side of competition. Without regulation, you find yourself competing with bottom feeders.

It's one thing to be competing with bottom feeders who simply externalize costs -- e.g. shipping waste to countries with weak environmental regulations. It's another thing to be competing with bottom feeders who undermine trust in your industry. You can't just copy them and say, "everyone does it, that's life." Winning that race to the bottom is actually bad for your bottom line.

Then make qualifying to serve in a silo and spending at least a year in the silo a requirement for anyone who wants to make a certain level, say full colonel. That would guarantee that *every* general officer would have first hand experience with that part of the service. It'd be an unpopular policy because it's a shit job, but maybe it wouldn't be such a shit job if everyone had to do it.

Since you typically need post-graduate education to be a colonel, and boredom is the biggest problem in the job, maybe you could combine the two -- study and mind the missile at the same time.

If you read the article you'll see that the senators from states with missile silos don't want any of them closed. That's why the airforce will be manning all 454 ICBM silos, even though 54 of them will be empty.

It's basically welfare for Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming. It would make more sense to cut 2.4 million checks for $819 and send them to every man, woman and child in those three states every year for perpetuity, rather than spendin that same 2 billion dollars on a half-assed job of maintaining these dangerous "assets".

I learned to program in Lisp -- specifically scheme, because that's what they taught at MIT. I spent many years working in K&R C. I belong to the generation that learned to do actually useful programming from The Unix Programming Environment and Software Tools in C -- God help me, I actually spent a year programming in Ratfor targeting Fortran IV as a back end.. I've used most of the major languages that have come down the pike since -- C++, Java, Python, PHP, blah blah blah.

Javascript feels an awful lot like Scheme to me. Ugly but workable syntax. Powerful stuff under the covers. Yes, you can use Javascript to write trivial little event handlers, and it's no better or worse than any other scripting language for that. But it supports higher order functions, for Pete's sake. Can you think of any other language that has popularized an advanced programming concept like that?

I was an MIT student when Reagan was elected. A lot of us had work study jobs in research labs. The change in research wasn't so much a cut in funding a change in focus. "Deaths per dollar" became a familiar metric.

There was a guy who came to work in the same lab as me as an engineer. He'd been the PI of a project that developed an advanced electron microscope that was fifteen years ahead of its time. His project was discontinued because under the Reagan philosophy of science research the government shouldn't do applied research except into weapons -- thus the "deaths per dollar" metric. We used the microscope -- his life's work basically -- as a spare vacuum tank. In the mid 90s under Clinton funding was restored, and electron energy loss spectroscopy made rapid advances again.