I've had the misfortune to access the schema of an accounting system we had to use, and *every* FK was a string. Even if it was an integer. In a DB with 600+ tables, all connected. This ran on Oracle, and when I looked at the query analysis it was quite plain why it ran dog-slow even with a modest userbase. It used most of the IO and CPU on figuring out joins (I don't know the proper term, but I suspect this would not have been a problem if the FKs were ints). The table scans that ran (lots of them as well) required less resources than a single join. Changing it needs a redesign of the schema, but it can be done with minimal downtime.

When I confronted the vendor with this they blamed the oracle consultants, when I told the higher-ups in my own company that this was an abominable design they told me to shut up, and that the design must be perfect, as it was done by Oracle people. That's one of the reasons why I have no trust in what DB consultants do (I should probably become one myself, I'm pretty sure I could do a better job off the bat).

Which is why I still sign in to Steam with a long-dead username @ a no-longer-existing domain. I was dumbfounded when it struck me why they couldn't change it. Of course it's possible and highly desirable for everyone involved to change that, and I still wonder why Valve, which employs some arguably extremely brilliant people, isn't able to do the change with a minimum of downtime. It probably plays hell on their db to use strings as keys as well? Can anyone enlighten me on this one?

I think most scientifically-minded atheists would say that there is no way to prove ("know") there isn't a God (not even to prove that the traditional, bearded, old-wise-male in the sky (if you're Christian) does not exist). I don't, and I still consider myself an atheist. It's just extremely unlikely that he exist, and it's not logically consistent that a traditional Christian God can have all the attributes christians claim. From another perspective, the human incentive to believe in higher powers is well understood. From there it's easy to draw the conclusion that actual existence of deities does not follow from human belief in deities. Most religions contradict other religions, thus most of them must be wrong. Saying with certainty that there is no higher power whatsoever is, however, pretty much attributing omniscience to yourself.

Moving the goalposts, are we? I'm not going to argue this further, but for your own sake you might want to tackle all the "Observed instances" in this other Wiki article, have at it. For instance, domestic sheep can no longer produce offspring with their wild counterpart because of human-induced speciation. By some interpretations that means that humans have been trespassing on the domains of God for millenia. Good luck, you'll need it.

Here you go. Not all Gutenberg books are flawless, but most are pretty damn good, and a high-profile work like this has surely been perused by enough eyeballs that it's likely to be the most correct version available in any form. Also, its ID is 2600 :)

No, it does not. Assuming you're from the U.S (that would explain some things), your pound as a unit of mass is defined in terms of the kg:

You imply that it's clear what it means, which is obviously ridiculous as you're severely muddled on the issue. Of course, the grown-ups use SI-units to avoid this confusion. On a side note it would be amusing to request a quote for an otherwise serious request to SpaceX for lift to LEO with mass expressed in lbs :)

Zero gravity != free falling (you were originally talking about free falling, or micro gravity, as smarter people than both of us call it). And no, he didn't reach too far too "prove a point", you're just plain wrong. There is no point in the observable universe where forces from gravity are zero. Even if curvature is flat because forces even out, gravity is not absent.

Wikipedia lists the series as "ongoing". Is the story arc in the omnibus finished? It seems interesting, and the price ($9.19 for me) is nice, but I'd rather hold out for the conclusion of any cliffhangers before even starting to read. Furthermore, where does Wool 6 - First shift fit in? :)

The fact that a director deemed it ready for a movie adaptation seems to imply that it's concluded, but I'd rather hear the opinion of someone with first-hand experience.

Yes, that's a very nice summary, and our experience as well. It seems that each new upgrade aims to add bullet points to their feature list, once a bullet is on there, Adobe doesn't give a flying fuck whether it actually works well or not. If it doesn't work well expect to have to upgrade in order to see improvements (or not). To your examples I'll add epub export, which has been a "feature" since CS3, and as of CS5.5 it's still *horrible*. Image handling has actually degraded from CS4 (no "Keep original" anymore), and a blindingly obvious flaw like support for manual page breaks is still not part of it. Since our source documents are indd we still use it to export epubs, but I have to do an embarrassing amount of manual postprocessing to make them usable. Luckily *good* tools like Calibre and Sigil make that process bearable, but there should be no reason to replace font files manually because Adobe performs a ridiculous XOR mangling of fonts when embedding them in an epub.

New versions will bring new features while leaving all the old ones flawed, maybe with minor improvements, and of course bugs in the previous version is perceived as upgrade drivers (we were promised by support that the regex replace bug with \n and styles would be fixed with CS5.5, and... it's not. Same with the shitty support for hyperlinks and "invalid" destinations from Word, which will make Indesign crash instantly and optionally corrupt your document). Add to this that they make it impossible to plan for upgrades since every new version is a surprise release, and that Adobe actually sells "upgrade insurance", and it comes across as a goddamn racket.

You're the epitome of the glass-half-empty person. I wish you luck in rectifying your attitude problems, the glass is actually half full :)