Can you imagine the lawsuits the replicator would create? I mean the ability to copy music and movies has caused a shitstorm... What would be the value of a BMW if I could just copy my neighbors?

"Earl Grey Tea... Hot."

I watched it out of desperation - I never thought it was great, but I want some sci fi that is actually thought-provoking and it was much closer than crap like Eureka. It was just getting interesting with the chick turning into an alien, the mysterious message in the background radiation of the Universe, etc.

Oh well. Here's hoping the Walking Dead stays good/gets better.

Why is it no matter how short the message involved in a scam, somehow the English is mangled? It seems like a good malware defense is simply a good understanding of the English language. Please WAITING?

Shatner might have almost been a character actor, except that all the characters he has played are so *different*. I was a fan of Boston Legal, and I'd occasionally stop and look at this Denny Crane character and have to think "Thats the same guy who player Kirk!". Granted, they were 35+ years apart, but his skillset is anything but one-dimensional.

I can't wait to see "Shit my Dad Says".

And he cracks me up, the way he signs all of his tweets "My best, Bill"...

Interesting article )and yes, I read the article), but the point of the NoSQL movement isn't so much about SQL, or ACID, as much as it is about Schema.

Most applications today are written in object-oriented languges like Java, C#, Ruby, etc... and most common frameworks in these languages use object-relational models to essentially 'unpack' the object into a relational model, and then reconstitute the objects on demand. this post explains the kinds of problems better than most.

NoSchema is about storing data closer to the format we process it in today. Key-Value pairs. XML. Sets and Lists. Object-Oriented data structures. This is about abstractions that make developers more productive. It is a tool in a toolbox, and useful in some circumstance and not in others.

SQL databases do not have to be the 'one persistence data mechanism to rules them all'. We don't need one; we need many that solve differing classes of problems well.

Read my blog about it here:

http://blog.codesherpas.com/on_the_path/2010/08/securing-memcache-in-2-minutes.html

This isn't a security problem - this is operating by design. If you are a memcache user and this is news to you, you need to read more about the tools you are using. I bet you have security problems beyond this one.

I realize saying AT&T made the headline more sensational, but really - RTFA and you'll see this is AT&T's data breach, NOT Apple's. If AT&T had lax security on some other database, would this have been classified a data breach by RIM or Motorola?

No, because that wouldn't have been very interesting.

Does the summary mean they are using nib form because 3400 years ago it would have been in nib form to get to that region of the New World, or are they saying they are compromising the original slightly based on the geographic location of the brewer reproducing it today? Surely there is a way to get them to Delaware this day in age...

For more good ideas like this, watch this screencast from pragmatic TV.

http://bit.ly/Pk3z3

Jim Weirich expains how git (the version control tool) works from the ground up, and in doing so, builds a hypothetical system that sounds like what you are trying to do.

Interesting problem. Several things come to mind:

1) The Pragmatic tip "Keep knowledge in Plain Text" (fro the Pragmatic Programmer book, that also brought us DRY). You can argue whether XML, JSON, etc are considered 'plain text', but the spirit is simple - data is open when it is usable.

2) tools like diff and patch. If you make a change, you need to be able to extract that change from the whole and give it to other people.

3) Version control tools to manage the complexity of forking, branching, merging, and otherwise dealing with all the many little 'diffs' people will create. Git is an awesoe decentralized tool for this.

4) Open databases. Not just SQL databases like Postgres and MySQL, but other database types for other data structures like CouchDB, Mulgara, etc.

All of these things come with the poer to help address this problem, but come with a barrier to entry in that their use requires skill not just in the tool, but in the problem space of 'data management'.

The problem of data management, as well as the job to point to one set as 'canonical' should be in the hands of someone capable of doing the work. PErhaps there is a skillset worth defining here - some offshoot of library sciences?

I hink someone forgot what the 'U' in USB is supposed to stand for...