There is no way a Jet Li disc could accomplish this.

Dirk made shallow trivial playboy flier work in the first 5 seconds if screen time. Katee was going for tough marine, and it NEVER worked. Her character was unpleasant from the first scene to the last one I watched. I think I watched all of season one. But I disliked the show right away and it only got worse. I personally stayed watching because of Grace Park (for the obvious reasons) and Mary McDonnell, because she was really the only character who did well.

They couldn't keep me watching past season one.

And they, together, own a corporation which owns the presidential debates.

Hilarious, yet true.

This is a routine part of their normal strategy. AT&T is very inefficient by design so that it employs many people. They call them "voters" and use the threat of layoffs to get local politicos to do everything they want. They've done this again and again.

This is just the same sort of threatening on the national level.

Because Google doesn't really want to be in the business. They do it to push the telco/cable ISPs. Or so they say.

If they really wanted to succeed on this, they'd provide free consulting/lawyers and other help to the Next Century Cities group (http://nextcenturycities.org/). This would get a BUNCH of fast Internet going really quickly and would terrify the monopolies. It would also very quickly multiply the number of cities in NCC.

Yeah, but repeating the same second word makes it a crappy one. I'd go with "Smootch Tag", or (getting further from the rhyme, but closer to the meaning) "Mootch Flag", or "Tush shag".

I'm not sure you should attribute to malice/planning what could very well be complete, blithering, lazy, cowardly incompetence.

We'll find out in the next decade what people within the president's circle attribute it to.

I suspect H. Clinton will be more competent and you'll be able to safely claim malice when she does all the same crap as Obama.

No you're thinking of Eastasia. We've only been at war with Iran since about 1938.

I think this is a great idea. They should set up a site with every single second of footage on it, with all faces and letter/numbers fuzzed and all the audio turned into mwaw-mwaw-mwaw sound ala Peanuts-adult-speech. That's just not technically all that hard anymore. It doesn't require any human work. Then the cops'll know that if they use force or anyone or pass cash, bored seniors will see it and request the clear footage where a human would make sure that it would be acceptable (manual censorship). Don't like th emanual censorship in the clip you got? Fight that.

You get an honest police force and very little actual labor, as compared to people making blanket requests becasue they don't know what's there and they're looking for something good to show.

Yes, you can request the footage now of when that cop hit your kid, but you can't find out about someone getting a bribe unless you do the blanket requests described in the story.

Yes, it is.

You're right on the replication. I think that's Postgres's obvious weak point. It's what you'd find that you didn't like. I assume that's why you ignored Red Shift. The rest of your arguments simply prove my point.

I recommend against MSSQL not because it's not a good DB (it is -- it was originaly Sybase) but because it's cumbersome to work with outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. You mainly interface with it using ODBC and that's a pain outside of Windows. You're stuck with windows boxes on the back end AND on the front end. You can add ODBC systems to the mid-layer/server boxes you'd rather have (Linux, usually) but now you're paying money to add a kludge. Furthermore, because it absolutely needs to run on Windows on the back end, you have to pay employees who are generally of the sort who are going to want more Microsoft tools, so you'll be creeping more and more away from free stuff which is easy to maintain to a bunch of licenses and a complex setup. (Had to get a bunch of Windows boxes set up with precisely this sort of issue just a few weeks ago -- man! was it painful.)

You could start your project with Postgres and find out why you're unhappy with it and plan for a migration to something which is better for you post-hoc: Don't write SQL procs, and don't weave your SQL through a whole lot of code. Though frankly, the suggestions for Red Shift seem right on the money. They use Postgres drivers, JDBC, and ODBC, so you're set on any platform you want to work on without any added cost. They have a two-month free trial. You could try that out first and figure out what you're unhappy with there as a first step. Same rules apply -- keep things simple.

DBs are not for chewing data -- they're for giving you just the data you need so you can chew on it. You use the right tool for the chewing job once you have the data. (Some DB pre-chew is fine in situations where it's efficient and easy -- group by's, mostly.) So it doesn't matter that much how long the feature set of your DB is. What matters is that it's fast and you can get data in and out of it just about anywhere you want to. I've seen shops where they do all their data chewing in SQL server. They write reams of ugly, ugly code. They do this because they know how, and don't realize that a little work learning other things would make them vastly more efficient. The thing to always remember is that you don't buy a hammer and assume everything is a nail. Buy something which works with lots of other tools and pick the right ones for your job.

I don't get it. Why are you denormalizing your tables?

If you're talking about denormalizing, you're talking about a relatively complicated data set, else there would be nothing to denormalize. Almost nothing you'll do in SAS on any resonably complex data requires all the fields. So any DB on the back end (postgres, mysql) should be able to join up what you need from a well-normalized dataset quickly.

Or do you mean you're just making a big text file (or SAS data blob) and using that in SAS? If that's the case, I'm still left with more confusion. SAS is a terible programming language -- truely ghastly. So adding even an SQL layer can be useful in fixing up data for SAS churning.

What's your general technique?

In your first statement, you make a false dichotomy. I'll take getting handed 2.5 million bucks in twenty-four Scooby-Doo lunch boxes over Germany invading Russia any day.

Your first statement is about "free market capitalism", then your second one is about something with a "democratic form" -- these two things are not related.

In your third statement, you're confusing Socialism with Communism.

No. You're right that if you end up in jail, you did it wrong. But if you end up bankrupt, well, that's normal and shows you're good at taking risks. Lots of entrepreneurs wind up going through several bankruptcies. When they do the bankruptcy right, they still come out rich, and have something else already lined up. I know this sounds insane, but it's really quite normal. Fiscal responsibility, the kind we normal wage earners have to maintain, is a sign of not taking risks. It's a negative attribute, as far as the VCs are concerned. (Until it's their money being lost.)

I use them, as do my friends.