I must respectfully disagree, at least with respect to authentic, historical, biblical Christianity (which admittedly differs from most of what has been called "Christianity" through the ages and including now).

Christian ethics are based on the two Great Commandments, as recorded in Mark 12:30-31 and several parallel passages (these in turn are quotes of Old Testament passages). The first is to love God with all our being; the second is to love our neighbor as ourselves.

In my view this constrains, or at least should constrain, all people - including those in government - from violating the rights of their neighbor. The Ten Commandments, and many other passages within the Bible, give specific examples of things that are gross violations of this ethic; for example, to testify falsely, to rob, or to murder another human being are all failure to respect the rights of our neighbors, and therefore to love our neighbor as ourselves. I understand that the Quran contains similar proscriptions and similar explanations for why they violate the will of Allah. Our faiths are similar at least on this point, although they diverge on others.

Governments that violate these laws, by, for example, murdering people throughout the Muslim world on the grounds that they are suspected "terrorists," thereby violate Christian law as well, and Christians are most unwise to support such actions or those who commit them.

I do not believe there is any legitimate reason for the hostility that exists today between Muslims and professing Christians. I think there would be less if more professing Christians actually understood and lived as the Bible and as Jesus taught. And even within the U.S., there are many who feel as I do, although not nearly enough to have much influence over the political system.

Yep. One for which the majority of humans seem spectacularly unsuited.

You mean to tell me you're critical of Bush *and* Obama? You sound like one of those eeeevil libertarians. Please report to the nearest FEMA camp for your "voluntary" re-education!!

That describes Aspies like me to a very large degree. I can effortlessly ace standardized tests, but have severe issues with short-term memory, interpersonal skills, and many things that others would consider basic common sense. People who know me only casually think I am very smart, but once they know me better they know I am also a dumbass.

I manage to live a semi-normal life now, but only because of 45 years of experience of understanding and managing my condition, and lots of help from my wife who's also an Aspie but to a much lesser degree than myself. Here are some things that help:

    * Recording all details, including some others would memorize, because I know otherwise I'd forget them. I use an ancient Palm for this.

    * A fair amount of self-imposed structure and order around my time, finances, and to-do lists

    * Doing work for which Aspies are generally well suited, namely software development

    * Learning to anticipate other people's reactions so I can predict what they are likely to be and interpret their nonverbal cues, which is more difficult for Aspies, a little more accurately

    * Acknowledging my limitations and hiring people to do things I can't do well

I'd think that pigs of the four-legged variety would be highly insulted by the comparison. GP is not referring to those who genuinely try their best to "protect and serve." He is referring to sadistic, murdering thugs who use their badge to let them commit horrific crimes with impunity.

Antagonistic? Damn right. Immature? You are free to think so if you wish, but I'll take "immature commenter" over "sadistic fucking murderer" any day.

Someday the people will rise up and take back their society, and they will take a dim view of the thuggery committed by pigs. They will want revenge, and they will get it. But I will be advocating for the very things that the pigs did not grant the courtesy of offering to their victims: a fair trial and, if warranted, a punishment that fits their crimes. I will not participate in, and in fact will vigorously oppose, any punishment that is any more sadistic or brutal than the crimes they are proven to have committed. I also will not participate in any action that could result in harm to any cop who is *not* proven to have committed serious crimes.

There are some decent ones; not as many as there should be, but to be a decent cop in a decaying, violent and lawless society, surrounded by thugs with and without badges, is a hard, brave and courageous thing, and we will need such people to rebuild a new society on top of the ashes of this one. In short, I'm with the good ones, but as for the "pigs" - again, with apologies to the four-legged kind - they had better straighten out. God is just, and His justice will not sleep forever.

If it makes you feel better, the U.S. where I live is becoming more and more like an African country too, and I don't mean South Africa or even Egypt; I mean like a third-world tin-pot kleptocracy or military dictatorship. Our "president" claims the authority to kill anyone he wishes anywhere in the world, and routinely does so. We abandoned both free enterprise and rule of law long ago . . . mostly covertly until around 9/11, but increasingly overtly since that time. Less than half the people of this country produce anything at all, and more than half live at their expense. Every kind of corruption is accepted as normal at every level of business, government, and even private organizations such as churches. Many of our largest cities are (or have recently been) run by convicted felons. We imprison more people, and murder more people overseas, than the rest of the world combined. Only a great deal of inherited wealth has prevented our living standards from falling below those of the average sub-Saharan African, and we are moving in that direction far more rapidly than they are moving in this one. On many non-financial measures of well-being, such as maternal and infant mortality, literacy, and education, we are near (or below) the bottom of the developed world. I am sorry to see Argentina rapidly reverting back to collectivism, tyranny and lawlessness, and quite concerned about the things that probably will have to happen to pull it back from that abyss, but Argentinians have always been proud, resourceful people, and you will survive this. Americans once were as well, but it remains to be seen whether we will muster the collective courage and backbone to fight back against what is really happening here (which is much different, and much worse, than either Occupy or the Tea Party people are generally inclined to realize).

While not through medication, I've had a similar life experience. Earlier in life I was much more severely depressed, most of the time, but found bursts of creativity and insight, during which I wrote music, invented things, and anticipated technological developments that would not occur until years or decades later.

Over time, I learned to pretend to be more "normal." I can't relate to other people really, but I can pretend to, well enough to fool most of those outside my immediate family. As I did this, I became a little less isolated, and thus a little less depressed, but the creativity and intelligence pretty much disappeared. I can still develop software competently, drawing on learning that mostly happened during my very depressed times, but the passion and creativity are long gone, and I no longer even understand everything I once did as a teenager, much less could I possibly repeat it. I can play music, but can no longer write it.

All and all I would say I am much happier now as a near "normal". I can have family and friends, albeit at a distance, and that is a wonderful feeling. My needs are very few, so most of what I earn can go to providing a better future for my family. I have some health problems that I probably won't survive, but I'm OK with that (except for the @$!$ insomnia which I wish I could send to fucking hell a few years ahead of me). I had the good sense to invest in both life insurance and gold, so when I'm gone, my family will have a reasonable chance of being able to start over, with most of the wealth I was able to accumulate but free from the burdens and problems I caused.

The greatest blessing: my children seem to have inherited most of my intelligence and creativity (and their mom's as well . . . she is 100x smarter than I am, and about equally creative although she hasn't really developed it). They do *not* seem to have inherited my problems. My oldest son seemed like he might be moderately autistic, until about age 3, at which point he completely grew out of it, and my other two have never shown any sign of any kind of problem remotely like my own, but like my oldest, they are incredibly bright, creative, thoughtful and social. If I never achieve anything more in life than simply providing a spiritual, moral, and financial foundation on top of which they can build and grow, I am OK with that. I am just so glad they probably will never have to go through this kind of isolation and loneliness.

I call this the "onion architecture" and it is a mortal enemy of DRP (don't repeat yourself). It is generally sold as though it were an implementation of the SRP (Single Responsibility Principle). It isn't. The whole point of *both* principles is to help manage complexity, cohesion, and coupling. If they come into conflict, I choose the simpler. Most people in my experience don't though; they simply go to one extreme or the other - 10 classes to do the work of one, or one to do the work of 10.

The Muslims I know don't hate Jewish people; they hate the Israeli state, and not because it is nominally Jewish, but because it robs, enslaves, and murders Muslim people. They tend to hate the American state (but, generally, not the American people) for the exact same reason.

Some people would still insist on a separate table. I probably would not (even though Deaths probably should be). In most contexts, we can adopt the convention here that a birth date of NULL should be interpreted as "unknown." Again, I'm breaking the relational model - very slightly - but in a way I'm fairly confident, from experience, should not cause too many problems. BTW, there are contexts in which this model might *not* make sense. How about a maternity unit in a hospital? We might want to start recording information about a baby who has not yet been born. He or she most certainly exists, and may have various attributes that we can know and wish to make use of, yet birth date may not be one of them, because it hasn't happened yet and we don't know for sure when it will (or even if it will). There are good relational ways to model all of these attributes, and a nullable BirthDate column may or may not be an acceptable compromise. In my opinion (which is not shared by relational purists), it depends largely on whether there is a single, unambiguous meaning for that NULL.

From a purely pragmatic point of view, it may not seem unreasonable to model it that way. But you should be aware that you are trading one form of complexity for another, probably bigger one. For instance, now, if you want to know who was alive on some specific date, you have to write something like "WHERE DateOfDeath IS NULL OR DateOfDeath > @date." You also will not know for certain whether a NULL means "person is still alive" versus "person is dead but we do not know his or her date of death." When you try to compare different people's death dates any comparison to NULL will yield NULL and you will need special case logic in every such comparison. You will need tristate logic throughout any part of your application that does logical tests based on the date of death. Nullable values will sometimes require special treatment in your code, depending on the language (e.g., whether date/time values are considered to be nullable in that language). I could go on. I also could build you both tables, an updateable view, and a set of SPs to do your basic CRUD stuff on both tables plus "show me living people" and "show me dead people", in a LOT less time than it would take to handle all the code problems that would result from breaking 1NF. I am not an extremist on this subject, but I wear both DBA and developer hats, and when I'm acting as a DBA or in any other situation where I have control over the DB, I do try to get into 3NF, and then denormalize only if there are demonstrated reasons to do so. As a developer, I will sometimes take shortcuts if it's genuinely necessary, but, more often than not, I end up regretting them.

GP is correct, and your understanding of the relational model appears to be - no offense - a bit lacking. To address your first example: people and deaths are different, though related, concepts. Ideally, they should have separate tables, plus a view. If someone died, he or she has a row in a Deaths table, which joins to the People table; otherwise, not; no NULLS necessary. When interacting with the data from outside the database, you use a view, which can be engineered to appear to contain NULLs, duplicate rows, and so forth. The views can be updateable, using triggers and whatnot, so you can treat them as if they were tables wherever it is convenient to do so, and they will behave the way you appear to believe they should (or the way your ORM tool believes they should); but, behind the scenes, the data will be stored in 3NF and therefore will be far less subject to insert, update and delete anomalies than they might be otherwise. Now, no one is holding a gun to your head and saying you *must* use the relational model. But I do advise you to understand it, and its benefits, and to use it where it makes sense, and, if you don't use it, to understand the tradeoffs you are making.

The libertarian agenda is very different from corporatism, and almost all libertarians recognize that businesses should not have greater rights than individuals. I along with many (though not all) libertarians oppose the existence of limited-liability corporations in the first place. Limited liability is the mechanism by which companies can keep profits for themselves while "socializing" the costs of externalities such as harm to workers or to the environment. I also oppose most forms of "intellectual property," another somewhat controversial but far from unusual opinion among libertarians.

Socialists and libertarians both oppose corporatism, which is the system we have now. We certainly differ over what we would replace it with, but one substantial and practical point of agreement is that most socialists and libertarians would advocate the repeal of "laws" that constitute special privileges for big corporations. (We libertarians would go much further though, because most of us understand the phenomenon of "regulatory capture," by which megacorps get laws passed ostensibly to protect workers, or the environment, or whatever, but which are so expensive to comply with, that they have the effect of rewarding the megacorp by punishing or even shutting down all of its smaller competitors.)

Good call bro. LEDs contain gallium, arsenic, indium, aluminum, and, in some rare cases, *gasp* CARBON. If pulverized, crushed, combined with oxygen and released into the environment, in mass quantities, they could cause global warming. No responsible parent would ever allow that!