If MySQL did not exist, Postgresql might not be as good as it is.

Competition is good, it permits the market to try out new ideas.

Lots of us are using MySQL without problems because someone else has handled the details, and we don't care if it's stupid. If postgres were easier to use, maybe more people would use it.

This is something that has boggled my mind for nigh-on twenty years. Eighteen of them, I guess. Linux came with all the latest tools, but in order to get them for Solaris you'd have to download some old tools and use them to build some new tools. Ultimately I think it's really all about selling you the sunspro compilers, or whatever they're called now, two decades on. If it's too easy to just use gcc, nobody will ever buy sunspro, for which they want a massive stack of cash. It's the only compiler that generates very good SPARC code, and it costs a million billion dollars so many people didn't bother to buy it, and went GCC instead. And then they were throwing away performance. If you're going to run those tools, you might as well run them on x86-Linux. And in fact, that's been eroding Solaris steadily for all this time.

How revolutionary. If I do that on a single-core Linux box, the scheduler still lets me have resources for other tasks, including CPU.

Too bad it still doesn't work. Problems like not using VT even when it's clearly present and activated, or the D3D driver pretty much always crashing the VM completely. Stuff that works fine in vmware, which also has superior performance. I'd really like to like Virtualbox, but it doesn't work.

Also known as "Share your wealth with us, or we will share our poverty with you." America's wealthy would turn this land into another Dubai. And if you haven't been paying attention to what's going on with our aquifers, that's actually a lot more likely in toto than you might imagine.

If you're running an app that's ten years old, you must be on Windows. Or using Open Source.

Nah, you'd just drag some lines around to subdivide it, it could be handled by a compiz plugin within the current systems and it wouldn't be a big deal at all. Probably easier than cabling three monitors.

Or by road distance covered, 90% right-hand! I'd say that's something of a landslide victory. Driving on the left side is bananas. And come to think of it, they drive on the right side in the places where bananas come from...

Since we're talking about public schools here, the question has to be one of balance of benefit to society. Can those parents make a significant difference in a sea of indifference, or would everyone be better served if they at least made sure their children were well-educated instead of being dragged down by the public school system?

Er, I meant Britons. Sorry. Brain fart.

Oddly, the Germans created the car, I think they get to decide which side of the road cars drive on. And the Americans created their mass production, so we get to decide which side of the road most of them are driven on.

I don't think there's a clear argument for which side of the road people should drive on, but if there is, it is that everything else is done on the right, probably because the right hand is primary in the majority of people. You need more dexterity for shifting than for steering, for example, so it makes more sense to sit on the left side of the car and shift with the right. If you're sitting there, you need to be sitting on the right side. And by the same token, since the left arm was the shield arm, that was the side on which you took your opponent when jousting. I've read around a bit on the subject of driving vs. walking, and in NZ they drive on the left and walk on the right. In England it's said they walk on the left, but there's a strict convention of standing on the right side of escalators coming out of the underground, which would better fit a walk-on-the-right model. It makes more sense to walk on the right since that's the arm you want to protect, and you'll do that with your left arm.

Bottom line, if it matters, it makes slightly more sense to drive on the right side. The opposite of the way the brits do it.

The actual inspections by PG&E and fire departments were real, too. They were collecting real information about fire hazards. That wasn't their primary purpose, though, as proven by a lack of contact attempts and willfully crossing marked property boundaries without a warrant. It doesn't actually matter if the vaccinations were fake.

Finally we find a way in which NJ is superior to CA. Not enough to make me move, though :)

British motoring laws are shit. In civilized countries the temporary bright function is actually known as "flash to pass". In civilized states of civilized countries, it's illegal to clog the passing lane. My understanding is that the Bretons have no such law, though that's true of most countries, including the USA; only a few states have one, and I've never even heard of it being enforced, and regularly see cops pass people on the right instead of citing them. It must only be used for selective enforcement against youth and minorities.

Hmm, all motoring laws are shit. Except for a few cold countries mostly full of white people. Even some of them get it spectacularly wrong.

That is a staggeringly stupid thing to say. It's more like a government assassin was disguised as a meter reader, with the blessing of the meter readers office. You would be justified in being suspicious of every meter reader in the future, and of blowing their back out if they made a move towards you that looked like an attack. Indeed, you'd be an idiot not to stay on your guard around them at all times.

PG&E and local fire departments have both in the past been conned into spying on citizens' activity on their own land on behalf of law enforcement here in Northern California, you might be able to guess why. As a result, both were getting shot at. Both set strict no-spying policies, and the shooting stopped.

You do realize that religion, not just fundamentalist religion, is negatively correlated with both intelligence and education, right?