Why is lending or gifting what is supposedly yours a bizarre new right?

I notice that you still left this right undefined, and continue to describe it in vague terms.

What about devices that can only download content because they are incapable of transmitting a signal?

What about NDA-covered material?

What about other agreements, like employment? Should you be able to lend your job to someone else?

Would you allow "book brokers" that dramatically over-provision books, and allow people to rent books with minute-level granularity?

Can you rent out individual pages?

What about a physical book? Is the binding itself in violation, because it prevents you from lending individual pages?

What about lending to someone with different media? Can someone with an e-book lend it to someone as a physical book? What constitutes the "same" media versus "different" media? What about different revisions of the same device?

What about software bugs, old/new display formats, or malfunctions?

The problem is no consumer group exists which can fight all the way to the Supreme Court, which is probably what it will take.

Where did that come from?

Sure, the e-book practices are bad. That's why I buy physical books.

Legislation is not the answer here -- let alone asking the Supreme Court to somehow bestow some bizarre new "right" upon you out of thin air.

Ignoring the inherent dangers of crowdsourcing - why are we supposed to believe that this site is more reliable, and has less bias than your average twitter channel?

Exactly. Even if sites like politifact are well-intentioned, it often turns into more of a counter-argument (e.g. presenting additional, possibly relevant facts from another perspective) than fact-checking (that is, something is actually false in the original claim).

Nothing really wrong with that, except that they present the site as though it is somehow above the fray. It's not.

And that leads back to the frustration that I feel. I am a software engineer with a strong science background. To be told that I have to accept folklore as a source of database knowledge - that is just so very very wrong.

Any better ideas?

Decisions are complex. Any big decision is guided by objective, quantifiable things; but often decided by very subjective considerations. If it were totally objective, the decision would essentially have already been made. All you can do is learn a lot about the system, weigh the considerations, and make a judgment call. Or you can trust some people along the way to help you make a decision.

OO problem

In the real world, there are real problems. There's no such thing as an OO problem unless it's a problem created by OO.

Easy: you throw a typical problem from each class and then test all the engines against all of the problems.

If it were a typical problem, hopefully you'd just be able to avoid the whole thing and pull a typical solution off the shelf (think grep).

A DBMS only matters for complex problems that come from complexities in the real world organization that the database represents. You could try to implement two solutions in two different systems, assuming that you're equally knowledgeable in both. But that's tricky, too, because you'd have to use them for long enough that you read the data, not just write it.

The biggest argument for using WHEN on a trigger is for per-tuple AFTER triggers, to avoid queuing up an event to fire later.

I'd love to see a full comparison between all of these, feature-for-feature, with no bias for or against any specific development model or database model, but rather an honest appraisal of how each database performs at specific tasks.

I intend this comment with sincerity: everyone would like that. But it's not very realistic, because there are so many variables in play. Even when you try to pick one aspect, like performance, it explodes into all different angles very quickly, and you can't really do an apples-to-apples comparison.

You can try to pick extremely simplistic measures, like how many simple INSERTs per second can be executed on a given machine, but that's really not representative of most real workloads.

The only thing you can really do is pick a few systems that appear to be of high quality, and understand them as best you can. Then, you will at least know what to expect in different situations.

However, version to version comparisons of the same system are a good idea -- still not easy, but it's more realistic to get apples-to-apples comparisons between versions. I think someone is working on it.

The way things should work is that a CS degree ought to be enough for a development position, period. And that no one earns such a degree if they can't develop.

You seem to have a university computer science degree confused with a training course.

That's also about the worst advice I've heard for hiring. You'll surely get the worst candidates that nobody else wants to hire. If you do hire someone that's any good, it will be purely by luck, and they will use the time to learn new things and then leave for a better company. Good developers don't want to spend their entire career around bad developers.

you deprive everyone else of the democratic right to choose the laws that they are governed by.

The thing about laws is that they apply to everyone. Some laws that are supported by a majority infringe on the freedoms of the minority (or perhaps even the majority).

I don't think that pure democracy, or anything close to it, is desirable. I'm unconvinced by any argument that just because something is more democratic, it is better.

The other degrees set you up in a field, the arts degree sets you up to think.

All academic majors at a good university set you up to think. Science is a clear example, because it applies to almost everything: start with an assumption, construct an experiment to isolate it, and try to disprove your own assumption. That will help you in life no matter what you're doing.

Business is arguably useful for a different reason: it's about organizing people in a useful way given certain assumptions (private property and protection from fraud and coercion). Wherever those assumptions hold, business education will be valuable.

These fix most if not all the problems you mentioned.

Thanks, I will consider it. I'll need to wait for reviews that talk about the long-term operation of these bulbs so that I know which one to buy.

Three things make me skeptical, however:

1. The political pressure and environmental guilt mean that a lot of people are pushing them regardless of how unpleasant they may be.

2. All CFLs seem to work great at first, and start introducing delays, buzzing, and flickering later on in a slow, painful, gradual death. Maybe higher quality bulbs delay these effects, or maybe they don't ever happen, I don't know. Do the long lifetimes of a CFL consider it "dead" the first time it takes more than 200ms to turn on, the first time it emits a detectable buzz, or the first time it flickers? Or do they only consider it "dead" after it won't turn on at all? My guess is the latter, meaning that (to see the cost savings) I would need to endure flickering, delays, and buzzing.

3. Engineers often like to take something simple and declare that it's wrong and something much more complex is required. Usually this involves eschewing usability and aesthetic concerns. On slashdot I have to take this into account.

Also, I'd like to point out that I never had to read reviews of a normal lightbulb. Maybe some went out faster than others, but I didn't really care because they are cheap; and it was either "good" or "bad" (never buzzing or flickering). That was a real benefit that CFL proponents don't seem to consider.

Costs are not always included in the prices. What about the quality of life regression? CFLs have the same startup time and flicker problems of other florescent lights, and output an annoying "buzz". And I don't happen to like the spectrum as much.

When I see that CFLs actually work as well as incandescent bulbs, then we can compare the prices. Until that time, they are only "better" on paper.

need to support two languages instead of one,

In PostgreSQL, you can write functions in a lot of languages, and if your favorite language doesn't happen to be supported, you can probably add support without even restarting.

So, none of your arguments apply to postgresql.

here in the US we've got the largest prison population in the world with no evidence that it's actually getting us anything

No evidence? Take a violent person. Put them in prison for 10 years. That's 10 years that they can't hurt non-prisoners. QED.

That's not even counting the deterrent effect. It's fashionable now to say that prisons do not deter, but I find it very hard to believe that if we just abolished prisons and offered no alternative punishment, that everyone would magically follow the laws.

You might argue that some alternative is more effective than prisons, but to say that prisons are not effective at all is extreme hyperbole.