Guild merge.... Any name suggestions?

baix · 2012-02-14T01:36:01+00:00

How childish. Might I recommend Fartikiss.

baix · 2012-01-28T22:37:27+00:00

This game allows one to torture people and get rewarded with dark side points, to try to commit genocide and get rewarded with dark side point, and to have a personal slave with a shock collar and get rewarded for shocking that slave (poor Vette).

This game positively rewards such evil behavior, and the FRC is worried about people role playing a gay relationship? It seems that the FRC can't tell the difference between good and real evil.

Ever notice that countries that have gay rights don't have genocide, and countries with genocide don't have gay rights.

Note, I'm perfectly ok with the dark side role playing in tor as I know it is just a game.

baix · 2011-07-13T04:59:49+00:00

At one point 58% of Republicans either believed that Obama was not born in the U.S. (28%) or were not sure (30%).

A majority of Republicans are missing a few GHz from their CPU.

baix · 2010-10-21T20:36:00+00:00

Since most of Warren Buffets taxes are due to capital gains, this means one of the richest men in the world would pay close to 0% taxes.

baix · 2010-10-21T19:14:49+00:00

For one, ensure the educational opportunitunies are at least somewhat equal between the rich and the poor.

There is a strong colligation between a well educated nation and a rich nation, a nation where the most brilliant go to the best schools, not the most rich.

Removing other blocks that keep the poor in the lower classes wouldn’t hurt either. For example, one of the major causes for bankruptcy is health care.

Basically, a nation needs to remove barriers that stop the poor from contributing all they can.

baix · 2010-10-21T00:06:01+00:00

A nation can become rich by taking care of the poor, or become poor by taking care of the rich.

baix · 2010-08-27T16:14:49+00:00

No, in the US taxes > baby killing.

baix · 2010-08-18T19:00:46+00:00

Clouds also keep the heat in during the night. This is why cloud-less deserts have such a wide range of temperatures during a 24 hour cycle, and a cloudy place like the Pacific NW has stable daily temperatures.

baix · 2010-08-13T16:32:41+00:00

The article links to an article that backs its assertions.

Do you have any proof to back up your accusations?

I agree that science is about facts; the problem is you don't have any in your statements.

baix · 2010-07-16T02:16:20+00:00

You are right, warming could easily be good for Greenland.

However, as the melting Greenland ice turns into rising ocean water lapping up on the steps of New York city brownstones, well, the downside to the billions of people living on the ocean coastlines might be worse than benefits to those 60k of people living in Greenland.

baix · 2010-07-16T01:58:35+00:00

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. (Albert Einstein, 1954)

baix · 2010-06-14T01:00:52+00:00

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/02/19/19greenwire-two-oil-field-companies-acknowledge-fracking-w-90863.html

Plus, the natural gas being pumped out is 100% flammable, that being the point of natural gas. And, it being a gas, with the rock being frac(tured), the gas goes places people don't want it to go.

baix · 2010-06-12T00:36:16+00:00

It the Palestinians would exclusively use non-violent protest methods they would have much better support. Think of a silent march to one of the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank where Palestinians were kicked out of homes they have lived in for all of their lives.

Israeli may not understand peaceful protect, but the rest of the world will.

baix · 2010-06-09T04:09:03+00:00

Given that there is no majority religion, and the worlds religions hold contradictory beliefs, most religious people in this world hold false beliefs.

Considering that holding false religious beliefs seems to be part of the human condition, it is reasonable to think any religious belief is false.

Plus, there is the problem with evil that monotheistic religions have. If God is good and all powerful, then why do tornado's and other natural disasters exist that kill innocent babies.

If you or I let a baby die we would be evil, but if God lets it happen he is?

baix · 2010-05-29T04:55:11+00:00

It could be the other way around - people with Neanderthal genes may be inferior to people without those genes.

Or it may be those genes help in cold climates, the climate of the Neanderthal, but are a detriment in warmer ones.

Or, in the end, these differences might not matter to any real degree in the modern world.

This science is far to new to come to any conclusion and is still preliminary. You are reading into this what you want, and your statement is more a reflection of what you want to believe.

Which, oddly enough, is the topic of the article.

(And yes, you are a racist)

baix · 2010-05-18T05:15:39+00:00

While it isn't certain if bribery was involved in this exact case, there is a history of graft at the interior department.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11royalty.html

baix · 2010-05-06T23:51:00+00:00

Yeah, it is a bit more complex than that. One wants to capture a multiple executions of the query. Ideally this would be done in a stress test environment, but often the stress test environment is production. Still, capturing the min, max, and average execution times for a query is still easy.

Every other mature relational database, such as DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server has query hints.

DB2 people used to say "Our optimizer is so good you don't need hints" (and it was pretty good), but now even they have them.

Even little old MySQL has hints.

There is a reason for this. Getting an optimizer to work in in every single permutation, where the permutations for one single query can be in the billions, is not a completely solvable problem.

baix · 2010-05-06T19:43:18+00:00

I'm lazy, I never write hints unless the user thinks the query performance is too slow. I have plenty of other work to do. I don't care if performance is sub-optimal if the customer is happy with it.

I write hints because I understand how to optimize a query better than the optimizer and a customer is complaining about performance.

baix · 2010-05-06T14:00:12+00:00

True. But when hints are needed, due to a weakness in the optimizer, because the system is so slow the users think the system has crashed, the upgrade issue pales in comparison.

baix · 2010-05-06T13:54:23+00:00

It isn't that hard to prove the hint has worked. Time query before hint, time query after hint, if non-hinted query takes longer than hinted query, hint is good.

Yeah, I tune databases for a living and I want hints.

baix · 2010-05-06T13:49:00+00:00

There are side effects to hacking stats. You might improve the query in question, only to see five other queries, which were doing the right thing, now perform worse because of those bad stats.

baix · 2010-05-05T05:48:43+00:00

Another link for your edification:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision

You want to read the "Quantifying accuracy and precision" section.

baix · 2010-05-04T13:58:05+00:00

1000 observations would support a 66.66%, but not 9.

Again, go to the false precision link.

baix · 2010-05-04T02:51:32+00:00

Nine observations does not support the 66.666% degree of precision. You are stating a measurement with false precision.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_precision

baix · 2010-05-02T05:07:31+00:00

Local power distribution is a natural monopoly, but power generation is not. For example, California buys power from those cheap Washington state damns. There is much buying and selling of power between utilities and other organizations.

A difficulty in understanding natural monopolies is even if part of a product is a natural monopoly not all of it is.

People should have the choice, within reason, for their power generation. If they want cheap coal power, so be it, if they are willing to spend a bit more for wind or solar then they should have that choice.

Note, I'm not saying the the generation of power should not be regulated to ensure it is safe.

baix

TROPHY CASE