Ok, thanks for the clarification.

NoSQL scenarios being what they are, there are obviously cases when they make sense and have advantages in terms of performance, but it's not always a win, especially if you don't know what you're doing or why.

I don't know anyone who believes that SQL can do everything either, especially when dealing with extremely large datasets, but analytics and search on huge datasets are not the scenario that your typical dev who doesn't know whether or why to use LAMP or MEAN in the first place are going to be handling in their first outing. The advice being given for those noobs who don't know the relative strengths of each stack, especially in regards to databases.

Not to be rude, but what the hell are you talking about?

SQL engines are often slower than what? In what scenario? Operating on what hypothetical database schema with how many records spread across how many tables?

SQL engines have problems with massive parallelism? Why? Which ones?

How well do you *really* know SQL in general and the capabilities of different database engines in particular? I suspect you may know less than some people who know SQL *really* well (as opposed to *pretty* well).

I apologize for the tenor of this post, but that portion off the article was ridiculous, and thus far all of the comments in support of it have demonstrated a similar lack of familiarity with actual databases, their operation, or performance tuning.

...But to me, the fact that 42% (or even 30%) believe that Earth is 10,000 years old is already a major a catastrophe from an educational perspective, given that we're talking about a First World nation with mandatory education.

I'm not saying you're wrong to consider it a problem. That doesn't change the fact that it's a minority opinion, and that self-identified religious people are becoming rarer in the USA.

...Oh, they're bringing them all the time - just look at the regular bills related to abortion, for example...

Poor example, in my opinion. I think there's room there to see abortion at a certain gestational age as a human-rights issue, but I get what you're saying. The climate change issue is nonreligious.

Religious freedom laws (the right to refuse service to customers on the sole basis of their own personal beliefs) are something that's talked about, and that some more local governments have been trying to legislate, but without much success. It's also easy to see that such laws will face harsh criticism in federal court challenges to their constitutionality. Again, it's easy to point to the people doing outrageous things and scream about a problem, but don't mistake it for a country-wide one.

I'm sure you're aware of the many fine counter-arguments to the points you are attempting to make as to why the electoral college is bad. I'm not going to spend time listing them unless you really want me to, so I'll just say that there's plenty of disagreement there, and leave it at that. The populace is every bit as disinclined to vote as it ever has been (and the graph of voter participation is pretty flat across the past century), so we get who the most interested parties vote for, whether that's good or bad. That doesn't mean that legislators are running roughshod over the populace, it means that most of the populace can't be bothered to spend 10 minutes voting.

As for question 1, yes. I'm reasonably sure that 42% is a minority, and I'm skeptical of that number being accurate. The sample size was 1028 people in all 50 states and the stated margin of error is +/- 4%. I do admit that I'm shocked that the number has remained at 40-47% since the question was first asked in 1987, especially with news of fewer and fewer people identifying as religious.

As for question 2, there's a reason that we aren't seeing legislators bring forth new laws regarding religion (though I agree that there have been some very disturbing statements by some officials in key positions), and that is because they serve at the will of the People, a majority of whom would not stand for it. Despite punditry to the contrary, *we* (well, those of us who vote, call, email, and protest) are in charge. So, yes, again, I'm pretty sure.

...Those of you who give +Points to people like drakaan, I have to ask, why do you do it? Is it because your opinion agrees with his on evolution? I don't care about that. Just keep in mind that cheerleading the Federal Courts running roughshod over Christian ideas may seem cool right now. But if they were to succeed in totally suppressing religious thought and freedoms, you won't have any freedoms left either. At that point, they will also take away your marijuana rights and all those other things you think are important. At that point, it will be impossible to give + points to anyone not "approved".

I actually didn't give an opinion on evolution. I did make some comments about the USA not being populated by morons, and I pointed out that a previous law mandating that public schools teach Evolution was ruled unconstitutional by the federal courts, as it runs afoul of the First Amendment's establishment clause.

A subset of Christians expressing their beliefs in a Creator being responsible for designing life (as an alternative to the theory of evolution) by way of formal instruction in federally-funded schools is at odds with the protections the First Amendment reserves for the People.

If a private school (there are many of them...my neighbor's son goes to a pretty exclusive Catholic one with ties to Notre Dame) wants to teach ID to students, then there's no problem. The problem only exists when we're talking about public education.

The federal courts aren't running roughshod over Christian ideas, in this case. One could argue that there are instances, specifically with regards to displaying religious symbols in public spaces, where they have done so, but this is not one of those cases. You are not being prohibited from expressing your religious beliefs by our government, and if you were, I'd fight like hell to prevent it, just as I would if any of your other constitutional rights were being infringed upon.

You *are* being prevented from using a government institution to spread your ideas, which is as it should be for any religion.

Entertaining, but incorrect.

There is a vocal minority of people with faith-based beliefs that override reasoned thought. They are not in charge. There are a few elected politicians who are morons, and a larger swath of electorate who share those beliefs, but that's still a minority of the population. The USA has more than 50 states, territories, and outlying areas, each with their own local government structure.

In Louisiana, a similar issue has been dealt with in the courts previously and the federal judiciary seems to have been reasonable enough in deciding that the law is unconstitutional.

This newer law seems to have the same goal as the 1981 law, and will likely face similar challenges. The nation is not made up of morons. It actively recognizes and points them out, which sometimes makes it appear that way, though.

If only I had mod points. I write .net web apps all the time, and for businesses, and I test in IE *last* because first and foremost, I want it to work in the future, which means for mostly-standards-compliant browsers. Writing IE-specific code is an extremely bad plan. Not all browsers are running on windows desktops or laptops.

I'm not arguing that VB is good, but that's a pretty trivial example of what makes it bad. Here's a discussion of where DIM came from: http://stackoverflow.com/quest... You used to be able to just say "variablename = value" without a dim statement. That's improved in the current syntax for VB.Net. If you want an example or two of what makes VB bad look at some of the legacy VB6 and classic ASP code hanging around out there. PHP has some (most) of the same problems.

You get a compiler error from doing what? I wasn't giving a code example, I was noting that scalar variables occupy space in memory and have to be able to be referenced, hence they have a dimension.

What's your unmentioned better way of looking at it?

Actually, all variables have a dimension. Think of your "myObject" as having dimensions of [1].

Great. Now, since I didn't immediately recognize where it was from, I'm going to have to spend the next month or two re-reading all of my Heinlein books.