Back when I was working w/ Oracle (10 i think) I remember trying out update-able views, but I found that the rules and restrictions were such that it seemed like only trivial views could be updated and I decided I was easier to just work w/ the underlying tables and/or write sprocs whenever I need to do more far-reaching updates.

That said, I never dug that deep into the subject. Do any slashdotters know of a situation where an update-able view would be handy/ideal?

I'm of two minds. On one hand I think it's "ok" to laugh about this because it is such a trivial thing. I'm guessing the person(s) responsible for doesn't mind terribly much — I mean it's not like s/he has to be worried about being fired.

But on the the other hand, I think reveling in schadenfreude and antagonizing 49% of voters is a good way for Dems to get screwed in the midterms (again)

I mean, heck, the Romney campaign is transitioning, right? The only problem is in the details, and Romney doesn't like to get into that sort of stuff until later.

Wow. "blindingly ignorant and inept" seems a bit strong for someone whose crime against humanity is not knowing what a hosts file does. Honestly this sort of statement typifies what's wrong with IT.

Astroturfing? Please explain how ryzvonusef is a google+ astroturf account, despite his slashdot registration predating google+ by a couple years.

Or maybe he thought this story was interesting and you are kinda being a dick?

...when even Facebook is saying "hey guys, this seems like you're crossing a line with people's privacy".

Well, perhaps we're latching onto different definitions. I consider a story fact-checked when it's airtight -- that the only assertions that you make are the ones that you can independently verify. And in this case "didn't fact check adequately" and "didn't fact check" is hard to distinguish when you consider that it would lead to the same conclusion: the TAL staff was duped, humiliated, and issued their first-ever retraction.

Actually, it's not explicitly untrue. You act as though "made an effort at fact-checking" is an acceptable counter to "didn't fact check". If you are unable to corroborate a claim with at least one other party you have not fact-checked. When TAL was not able to verify some of the more serious claims they should have not gone forward with the story. But don't take my word for it, even Ira Glass agrees (emphasis mine):

I can say now in retrospect that when Mike Daisey wouldn't give us contact information
for his interpreter we should've killed the story rather than run it. We never should've
broadcast this story without talking to that woman

So, they didn't fact check his story. They admit to not fact-checking his story. And it wasn't hard to find the interpreter. In fact the Marketplace correspondent, Rob Schmitz, claims that he found her on his very first Google search. I absolutely love This American Life, and so it saddens me to see them screw up like this. But they screwed up. Badly.

Keep in mind that some of the things they couldn't verify still have some truth to them...

I think you're referring to the workers who suffered nerve damage from exposure to n-hexane. Ironically, that's one of the things that Mike Daisy admits that he made up. Oh, that did happen to some workers at some other company over a thousand miles away. A long time before his visit. The thing is, Mike Daisy claimed that he witnessed it and that he interviewed several people who suffered such nerve damage. Which is a lie.

There were people that were wounded in Vietnam. I could claim that I'm one of them. Would that be partially true?

This is really cool, because I just finished reading how badly Washington Post screwed up with the "Inventor of Email" story. In fact, if you look at the comments you can see that former OSDN CEO Robin Miller (aka roblimo) suggested that they hire someone from the slashdot crowd to work on IT reporting. Maybe they took it to heart.

Beyond that I think they also own it it the literal sense. Wikipedia says they purchased it from the original inventor...

Oh to be sure Objective-C wouldn't be on the radar were it not for iOS. I'm sure that 95% of objective-c developers are working on iOS (the other 5% probably being MacOS). My only point is that there's a big difference between "uses" and "requires".

Well hell, so long as we're substituting words, I choose to replace the word "correct" with "high" in your previous statement ;-)

I'm not sure I understand how it matters why it's popular. The index isn't a listing of strictly general purpose programming language.

Actually that's not even remotely true. You always had option of using C and C++ in addition to Objective C, and ever since apple removed the language restriction you can use whatever language you wish so long as it compiles to native code, resides in the app bundle, and doesn't use undocumented API calls. In fact many games are written in C# using monotouch.

But even if your statement was correct, I'm not sure it's relevant. There are lots of environments that *require* Java development, so do we then apply some sort of negative weighting to it's rank on the TIOBE index? If it's popular it's popular.