The question isn't, "do masks work?", rather, "do mask policies work?". It's not clear that mask mandates had any real impact on mortality. Policies implementing social restrictions were incredibly divisive, and it's good to look around see how things played out and the data may suggest that voluntary mask rules, while limited in effect, put the choice to the wearer.

MD5 is still secure for preimage attacks. It's obviously insecure for collision attacks.

maybe they can convert back to postgres now

Scientists develop new super engine. It accelerates by 36mph!

In my experience, SQL is faster to write and has better execution speed than equivalent code written in popular imperative languages (java, .net etc). Not just by a little bit. This is why its use is proliferating and the many, many attempts to displace it have failed. While I would live to see a more algebraic syntax and (possibly) stricter adherence to relational models, there is no arguing the amount of investment and optimization into the language and its supporting implementations. postgres in particular is just amazing.

...most likely by local rich folks who want the power plant gone. Lake temperature is stable (at 39deg F). Trout fishing is booming, and the lake is one of the largest in the country by volume.

The attack was fairly sophisticated and perhaps the "fear of getting fired" story was simply that, a cover story. It seems like the real target was the source code.

This is an age old debate. It comes down to this: monolithic kernels tend to be faster so they are in common use.

Ackerman can only be coded recursively...heh

> Sure but the gold standard did not prevent economic crashes, eg in the 30s, and coming off the standard at that time helped

The US did not come off the gold standard in the 30's FDR seized all privately held gold stores and no longer allowed redemptions. These actions greatly increased and lengthened the depression; a huge part of the banking crash was due to panic redemptions based on rumors that the gold seizures were going to happen (that later turned out to be true).

Don't get me wrong: the gold standard is impractical for all kinds of reasons. However, US government management of the great depression was a disaster.

That's how to do it. It has to be managed in a loop transaction side or in the application. This loop is remarkably difficult to get right by most programmers. For example, if a trigger is added to the inserted table after the fact causing an error in some other table, most loop based upsert code I've seen will fail into an infinite loop.

Postgres HS/SR *is* the master slave replication feature. It's better than anything mysql offers as long as that you are ok with the main caveat: it replicates the entire database cluster and the slaves must be the same version. The only separate tooling you'd need would be to do things like manage failover if the built in tools to manage that aren't working for you. Logical replication handles all other cases. BDR (http://bdr-project.org/docs/stable/index.html) lays on top of that to provide clustering. It's not quite there yet; most but not all of the necessary foundation have been moved to the core product which can make installation and setup a bear. But the underlying infrastructure is really well designed and will ultimately compete with commercial solutions both in terms of power and ease of use.

I was curious and did some research on this. I know Linus and some of the other guys can be a lot to take. However, after reading a lot of the posts Sarah made complaining about people and things, I started to get the feeling she's attention seeking and disruptive. She constantly brings up gender in irrelevant ways and appears to be the self styled 'girl kernel developer'. She also punches below the belt. For example:

"*Snort*. Perhaps we haven't interacted very often, but I have never seen you be nice in person at KS. Well, there was that one time you came to me and very quietly explained you had a problem with your USB 3.0 ports, but you came off as "scared to talk to a girl kernel developer" more than "I'm trying to be polite"."

Linus tends to be very direct, as are a lot of important open source communities. The critical people are very busy and get frustrated when people display various kinds of incompetence. In fact, it appears to me that they were treating Sarah very gently precisely *because* she was a girl. Or maybe it was the intel.com email adress -- who knows.

Linus was right (I didn't agree with him when he wrote that but I do now). Jeff doesn't answer any of the major issues with c++: Lack of standard ABI (preventing interop with other languages), insanely complex grammar, years of paradigm shift, action at a difference, lack of abstraction away from computers, etc. Java/C# have completely displaced it in the business world and C still dominates system programming. C++ would be already obsolete except that it caught a big with the gaming industry...real-time games can't tolerate GC languages and C is considered too baroque to many developers.

That's silly. Anyone who does anything on their computer besides browsing the net and email will quickly observe that the move from slow to fast storage is the single greatest performance improvement in the history of the computer. It's very simple: if you are writing any non trivial amount of data or you are reading from datasets that exceed unreserved ram (a very typical thing to do that is gaming) then the hard drive is the primary performance bottleneck in the computer.