No, he was talking about total number of votes. One point four million more people voted for Democrats in House races than voted for Republicans.

It doesn't make the current legislature any more or less legitimate than other legislatures. The system is imperfect, sometimes it sucks, whatever.

However is a completely meaningful and valid point when it's being used to refute the notion of the Republican-House-Majority reflecting or measuring the popular will of the people.

The prior poster was suggesting that a majority of the people voted for Republicans in the House and that Obama won the presidency because some percentage of them split their vote in order to vote against Romney. And that's just plain wrong. A majority voted Democrat for president, and a majority voted Democrat for the House. There was no "split" in popular vote there.

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For the House, Democrats got a MILLION more votes in than Republicans. The Republican majority was elected by gerrymandering. I accept that the system is imperfect and sometimes sucks, I'm not denying the legislative authority of the duly elected legislature. However it does completely invalidate your attempt to associate that house majority with a completely fictional popular-public mandate.

Considering Obama made it a central issue of his presidency, and a central issue of his campaign, it makes a hell of a lot more sense than trying to claim an anti-ACA mandate based on the negative one million votes by which the Republicans won the house.

Firstly, polls show a majority against Obamacare only when you include the percentage who "oppose Obamacare" only because it didn't go far enough and establishing a Single-Payer system.
Secondly, a comical percentage poll in favor of "The Affordable Care Act" and opposed to "Obamacare". A substantial percentage of opposition have no clue that ACA=Obamacare, and that a substantial percentage of oppositions is nothing more than clueless echoing of hollow "Obamacare is somehow bad" soundbites.

It's interesting how you conveniently forget that one of the checks is that the House can't legislate anything, including budge decisions, without approval of the Senate. And they can't do so without Presidential approval, unless they can get a 2/3 mandate from both the House and Senate.

It also doesn't much help your case when the "will" of a majority of the House members is to drop the current shutdown bullshit and pass a clean budget, and it's John Boehner blocking blocking that easily passed bipartisan budget from coming to a vote. For internal party-politics reasons Boehner is allowing the radical minority TeaParty wing to burn down the house if they don't get what they want.

Okey dokey... how about the Senate refuses to pass any budget.... zero dollars for border control.... zero dollars for the military... unless it's attached to some issue... lets say radical gun control. Here's a list of what sorts of guns are illegal, and it's a felony prison sentence if you don't turn in or destroy any illegal guns. There ya go. Using the budget as a nuclear weapon.

This is exactly why the TeaParty idiots are unfit to govern, and why the Republican party as a whole has become unfit to govern for letting the TeaParty wingnuts run the show. Because BurnTheHouseDown ideological extremism is DESTRUCTIVE. It's hurting the economy, it's hurting people, it's hurting the Nation. In a Democracy we're supposed accept that sometimes we just don't have the votes to get what we want, and we don't fucking threaten to blow up the goddamn country with nuclear weapons like a bunch of terrorists if laws aren't passed/changed/repealed to our liking.

It's not even like they are fighting over the budget, and saying they don't want to provide funding for ACA. They are demanding a change in law be passed, completely unrelated to the budget, and using the budget as a nuclear weapon to fucking blow up the country if their unrelated law doesn't get passed. No different than the Senate using the budget as a nuclear weapon to get a budget-unrelated gun control law passed.... when they know they just plain don't have the votes to pass that completely unrelated law.

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Um.... wait....
Who in this scenario are you suggesting represents the police force???

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An almost endless series of scientific studies have thoroughly refuted the null hypothesis. The proportion of homophobes who are homosexual is strongly different from the proportion of homosexuality the general population. Homophobes are several times more likely than the general public to have an erectile response to gay porn, to spend more time looking at gay porn images when given a variety of images, and to have a faster reaction time for homosexual terms when when the test primed them for self-identification.

For example in this study two thirds of non-homophobic men showed no erectile response to a gay porn video, while 80% of homophobic men did have an erectile response.

Homophobes being active or repressed gay is a cliche because it's typically true, especially among the loudest most driven anti-gay crusaders. There is a reason they're driven.

Other research has found that such individuals are also highly likely to have been raised in very authoritarian and repressive homes. In such a home it would be emotionally dangerous or even physically dangerous for a child to express any homosexual inclination. In such a situation it becomes a survival mechanism for a child to develop an intense hostile internal repression of homosexual inclinations. This internal hostile repression is then directed outward at anyone and anything that threatens to evoke their internal repression.

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I will tell you, it is three nominees. Snowden, Malala, and the - what's the third one there? Let's see. OK. Snowden, Malala , and...
The third nominee, Snowden, Malala, and, let's see. I can't. The third one, I can't. Sorry.
Oops.

But whoever it is ain't winning, because whatever they did was like totally lame compared to Snowden exposing U.S. government spying and Malala getting shot in the head for wanting girls for go to school.

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Muahahahaha.

Those are MY jellyfish. With with frikin laser beams attached to their heads.
Except the lasers fell off.... because have you ever tried attaching something to a jellyfish?

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This method is mÃfÆ'à © complÃfÆ'à throughly cromulent! I always use Google Translate to exÃfÆ'à © cuter all my messages through Slashdot franÃfÆ'à Ãf  ais Ãf then English. You can not tell me mÃfÆ'à  at all.

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True, but calling a dictionary a vector space doesn't make it so. For example how "close" are the definitions of "happiness" and "joy"? In a dictionary, the only concept of "closeness" is the lexical ordering of the word itself, and in that sense "happiness" and "joy" are quite far apart (as far apart as words beginning h-a are from words beginning with j-o are in the dictionary). But in some kind of adjacency matrix which show how often these words appear in some relation to other words, they might be quite close in vector-space; "guilt" and "shame" might likewise be closer to each other than either is from "happiness", and each of the four words ("happiness", "joy", "guilt", "shame") would be closer to any other of those words than they would be to "crankshaft"; probably close to "crankshaft" (a noun) than they'd be to "chewy" (an adjective).

Anyhow, if you'd read the paper, at least as far as the abstract, you'd see that this is about *generating* likely dictionary entries for unknown words using analysis of some corpus of texts.

Someone please tell me this is an Onion story.

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Funny how being caught does that to people.

That means there will come a day when it's every person, and then two years later...
Whoa! Duuuude! That's like totally Trippy!

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Well, this is somewhat different. Small businesses usually don't have lucrative cash cow businesses that they can use to underwrite strategic efforts.

Microsoft used cashcow funding to crush Palm out of existence, only to be crushed in turn by Apple. Apple beat MS by breaking the cardinal rule of pre-iPhone smartphone market -- focus on making carriers like Sprint happy, rather than users. Apple didn't get into a futile war of attrition with Microsoft across the board, they picked one of the weaker carriers (AT&T) and gave them an exclusive deal in which they brought Apple's fanbase to the table in exchange for control over the platform and secondary markets (iTunes store).

Using a cash cow to underwrite a strategic business isn't necessarily an exercise in futility. It makes sense if you see some strategic vulnerabilty. Palm was vulnerable; because of Moore's law, the price of a standalone PDA was dropping into the throwaway commodity range. In order to maintain their market position, Palm had to convince its users to transition to more complex and therefore more expensive devices. This was an opening and Microsoft established a beachhead with its deep pockets. Then Palm was forced into yet another repositioning by convergence of PDAs and phones, and that's where MS drove a stake through their heart.

Apple and Android on tablets today are a different story. Or at least they may be. They're entrenched competitors. It makes sense to go up against them if you see some disruptive development on the horizon. Offhand, I don't see what that might be, but possibly someone at MS does. "We did it before and we can do it again," in contrast, isn't a strategy.

And that would be ... the economic system where they ignore the long term environmental consequences of your actions in order to maximize short term gains?

Er... a fish?

What do you mean "out of sync"? You mean it generates the same number twice? Or do you mean it can generate a number that has been assigned by some other mechanism to a primary key field?

If the latter, that's true of database sequences in general, including Oracle RDBMS. Some platforms, such as SQL Server, give you both sequences and autoincrement fields. The reason to have both is that while autoincrement is simpler to use, sequences are more flexible (e.g. you can obtain the key value for a row before the transaction is committed).

In any case, it is bad practice to rely on an auto increment or identity field's magnitude for anything other than identifying a record. For example, developers sometimes use such numbers to order records by when they were created, but auto increment numbers aren't reliable for that purpose. Sequences work just fine for generating numeric primary keys, even though they can pretty much intrinsically get "out of sync" with the keys in a table. "Syncing" is not a feature offered by sequences, period.