If you've experienced Oracle's "24/7/365 top-notch support," as you phrase it, you know there are certain problems it will not help you with. For example, there are known bugs, some of which cause what in Oracle jargon are called "600 errors," which means, "you're screwed, and you've lost data irretrievably." These bugs have remained unfixed for years, and no matter what kind of support you buy from Oracle, they will not fix them. Their green-eyeshade people have decreed that the cost of fixing them is not worth it.

Better pro tip: always use your SQL engine's parameterization rather than rely on "sanitizing" such inputs. Your engine's parameterizer is extremely well tested, even if it's an engine with relatively sloppy coding practices. Your "sanitizing" script can never be tested quite as well.

She was like a little ball of sunshine.

As for statistics, does this really surprise anyone in a time when net polls are being reported as hard news?

Let's talk about some voice acting we liked.

My favorite example of voice acting is Bioshock. Withing that my favorite is Armin Shimerman.

I agree, games that have professional voice actors (or even professional actors) tend to produce good voice acting. It is a shame that this is the only good thing I can say about Bioshock, System Shocks retarded cousin.

"An unjust law is no law at all", said St Augustine, providing the foundation of civil disobedience movements across the globe. If a law is not really a law at all, it is argued, one has a right -- even a duty -- to break it. Martin Luther King articulated this view in his Letter from Birmingham Jail: "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws".

The problem is that while the law is a matter of public record, justice is an intensely personal matter. What one person regards as just may strike another as an unwarranted imposition. This is why we need law; if we all behaved according to our personal standards of morality, anarchy would rule. While we may have our own views about the justice of particular laws, we generally accept that some rules must apply universally. If we are to follow Martin Luther King's exhortation to resist unjust laws, then, there must be an unusual type or degree of injustice to justify that. What kind of injustice might do so?

The great American democrat Henry David Thoreau had an answer. In his classic essay Civil Disobedience, Thoreau observed that "a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice". An infantile deference to the will of the majority, however ill-informed, is still common today. It informs the thoughtless "majority rules!" which is frequently blurted out as if, on its own, it magically justifies anything (I always want to ask whether, if the majority jumped off a cliff, the speaker would too). In fact, "majority rules" is a solution of last resort. Ideally, people should act according to their consciences. If that is inappropriate, unanimity should be sought. Only if these two fail should the will of the majority be imposed on the rest. Thoreau called for this kind of government, "in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience... in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable".

http://xkcd.com/652/

LED flashlights are great. But for indoor lighting? Have any of you tried reading a book (you remember them, on dead trees) under them? I've used a commuter bus that's put in LEDs, and it's *dreadful*, bluish, eyestrain city.

And none of the compact fluorescents I've seen have the warm color of incandescent. *bleah* Time to stock up on bulbs....

                mark

I had video games as a kid, and was always reading at a much higher level than most of my peers.

Video Games had nothing to do with my poor grades, it was the fact that I didn't like to do the work.

You're mostly right, but only because the technology is young. LEDs have been around for nearly 50 years, but it's only been recently that we've been ramping up the power to general lighting requirements.

That said, here are the potential advantages over CFL:

1) Higher efficiency. Yes, CFLs and LEDs are roughly equivalent right now, but the potential for LEDs is much greater. As added incentive, heat is a limiting factor for LEDs, so there's more than one motivation to improve efficiency.

2) Longer life. This is related to the efficiency, as too much heat decreases life. Expect life to increase dramatically as time goes on.

3) Dimming control. Still in its infancy, but some LED bulbs can be dimmed in the same way as incandescents. I can't use CFLs in touch lamps for the same reason.

4) Color control. Currently sucks, but the technology allows for better control than CFLs, especially when it comes to dimming.

5) Manufacturing capability. This is a big unknown, but many are predicting that the price will drop dramatically, just like we've seen with other semiconductor products. Personally, I think this might take a while since we don't really know what it will take to make bright, color-corrected LED bulbs.

6) Form factor. LEDs can conform better to the incandescent form factor. This advantage is also slightly debatable because of heat controls: liquid cooling and heat sinks are being put on LED bulbs right now ... if that's continues to be the case then the shape of the bulb might be quite odd for some time. The nature of using a collection of individual lights also places strange limitations on the form factor, which is why flood lighting is one of the early form factors that works well.

7) Public image. CFLs have (mostly wrongfully) gotten a bad reputation for bad color quality, flickering, warm-up, and mercury. It remains to be seen how the public views LEDs, but many of these (except for color, for now) don't apply.

8) Rugged. I've saved this one for last. Incandescent and CFL light bulbs are much more fragile than LED bulbs, which makes shipping them from overseas (where manufacturing costs are lower) much more effective. It also increases the applications that can use LEDs.

Notice that most of these are still only theoretical. Stick with CFLs for now, or expect to pay a lot more for something with few advantages.

Maybe by the time your CFLs burn out the LED technology will have caught up.

How about 21 bytes?

C:\>debug
-a 0100
0D39:0100 MOV AH,09
0D39:0102 MOV DX,0108
0D39:0105 INT 21
0D39:0107 RET
0D39:0108
-e 0108 'Hello world!$'
-r cx
CX 0000 :15
-n hello21.com
-w
Writing 00015 bytes
-q

C:\>HELLO21.COM
Hello world!
C:\>dir hello.com
17/03/2010 10:48 22 HELLO21.COM

mad scientist? No-where near, lol.

What I have is something SO basic and simple it's ridiculous. Here's an analogy:

Imagine a world where people only knew about birds when they were flying overhead, and so, because of that, they defined birds not just for what they are, but also by the ACT of flying.

Imagine that this then caused problems when it came to fully understanding other animals and objects that can also fly.

Imagine then, that someone came along later - (800 years later!), and pointed out that within the language itself, (i.e. how it is used), a bird, (or any other object), and the act of flying are treated completely SEPARATELY from each other, and therefore defining a thing, (a noun), by it's application, is simply inconsistent with the rules of the language, and therefore wrong.

Because of this, that person then wondered if such a thing, a bird, could actually EXIST independently of such an act, and then, after some exploration, found that they DID. (He found them simply sitting there on the ground or in their nests, and even walking around - they were not flying, yet they still (obviously) exist).

Because of this, people then were fully able to recognise and understand how all the things that can fly, are now fully related to each other within the language, and so can now fully understand and define them for what they are.

And it was all because of the way they defined one thing in a manner that was inconsistent with its use within the language.

Such is the nature of the problems I've found, (and am trying to write a paper about).

>>>Maybe you should have tried a different brand then? I have CFLs in almost every fixture in the house.

Which brand?

In my experience ALL the brands (Philips, GE, Lights of America) have a warmup time, unless you buy one that don't have the instant on function. (Instead they sputter and flicker for 2-3 seconds.) I've tried to find the non-instant-on CFLs but they don't seem to be made anymore. Bottom Line: After ~15 years of CFL use I've reached the conclusion they simply are NOT an identical replacement for incandescents. There are too many flaws, like trying to use a netbook when what you really need is a full-sized laptop or desktop.

It's not just the "War on Terror." It's all the wars. We face no external threats, militarily speaking. It's time for us to discard our empire.

...for stalkers.

Time to ban!