gngeal

Many, many people in jail were severely mentally ill. There was no support for them.

So UK is getting as bad as the US? Or has it never been good over there? Given how mental health conditions and incarcerations (for whatever reason) go hand in hand, I'd expect any sane society to tackle the former even more ferociously than the latter.

A reasonable summary of what they're trying to build here is "HyperCard for the internet", which is actually a pretty cool idea.

That sounds very much like what the VPRI people have been doing all along.

Your data is still digital at least. What about the E. coli evolution experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli_long-term_evol...) that has to store its data in analog form in a freezer? You can't send that to other people with interest in the results by e-mail or FTP.

an EE can't simply change the brightness of the sun to meet a requirement. We can.

Wow, you can change the brightness of the sun to meet a requirement?

BTW, there are quite a few limitations placed on you by nature: uncomputable numbers, NP-completness, ...

It's also freely available on https://archive.org/search.php?query=Five%20Hundred%20and%20... ;-)

What has the Berne Convention have to do with it? I've compared the Elsevier contract draft with my local legislation, and the wording of the contract is simply unenforceable.

That's ridiculous. It's not even funny.

It's also null and void in my country (.cz), and probably in many other European countries.

The flag is bleached and the other things are dusty, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood solar radiation.

I semi-understand that (intellectually), I just don't have the brain circuits for internalizing any of that. This is illogical and I simply have problems with illogical things. (That is probably probably why the medical committee deemed it a severe disability in my case.)

A lot of people wouldn't ask them back to their place right away. But that doesn't necessarily mean being upfront and to the point wouldn't work, it certainly does, all the time. Someone like yourself considers it a positive trait, as do I.

Actually, I don't consider "asking someone back to their place right away" as either positive or negative thing because I don't understand the motives. Sorry, this kind of interpersonal stuff simply goes beyond me. ;/ But I assume that if that is important to someone, I don't see a reason for that person not to be candid about it.

I don't think many investors appreciate it, but that doesn't mean a cold email won't work -- but it better be extraordinary.

It's more that I see no reason for why this should matter when many business people don't even consider the effects that their actions or decisions have on human communities, changing the lives of countless other people. So many of them don't give a shit about what difference it makes when they decide to do something, but when someone else deals with them, many of them dwell on superficial veneer rather than on substantial matters proposed? Sounds very much like hypocrisy to me.

I have a paper from my shrink that says that essentially, I have had a blind spot for these things since my childhood. Only in recent years have I started to understand what it means. My "if you have something to tell me, why do you dance around it?" brain simply does not compute these things.

Java has always been a good language if you ignored the ecosystem.

You mean "no unsigned types (even though the language is essentially machine-level when it comes to integers), no compact memory layouts for aggregate data, no useful function values without jumping through hoops etc." is an approach that leads to good languages?

I think its more of the realization that types are actually freaking useful for determining "provability" of a system. C++ perhaps takes it too far with Const, but it allows the compiler to prove that certain functions will not attempt to modify certain variables.

There is very little in terms of "provability" that either C++ or its types give you. Proving anything really interesting (for example, the absence of race conditions in concurrent code) still seems like pretty much an arduous process in languages not explicitly designed for such things.

Compared to Python or Ruby, you're pretty much relying entirely on culture and good habits to ensure the proper rules of encapsulation. Any code may modify the private members of your objects. (Granted, C++ has "mutable", Java has the whole "Reflection" loophole as well. But you can search for those edge cases rather easily).

That didn't seem very comprehensible to me, but if you're claiming that in Ruby, you can modify member variables of someone's objects, well, you can't, unless you use reflection as well (not only that, but the access to member variables is object-based, rather than class-based, so you can't access the member variables of an object from any other object, even if they are of the same class, unlike in C++ - so much for the "objects communicate by passing messages" in C++!). More to the point, in C++, you can always cast a pointer into something that makes the raw data accessible. There's enough stuff in C++ for you to blow your whole leg off instead of just shooting yourself into the foot.

You can't put me in an uncomfortable situation. Reading these things only confirms to me that I will never be able to understand all the other people.

Except that of all the things you've named, dynamically typed languages are hardly "a fad". It's surprising (?), though, that the lousy ones are the most popular ones.

And C# "fixes" the deficiencies by heaping features upon features. Already it looks like the MS version of Perl.

I'd go for Light Ordnance Rapid Deflection High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator. Much scarier that way.

Well, someone edit the title, then!

The domains table currently has 84 fields.

Are you sure you've read up on your C. J. Date? I've had that once before: someone complaining that "queries take too much time" with a paltry single-digit-GB database. When I asked about the specifics, the only repeating reply was "we can't tell you". You don't mention anything of value, but querying a few million records can't possibly take a few minutes on the aging desktop computer I've bought seven years ago, much less on a modern server.

Downing mortars? How can you "down" something firmly standing on the ground?

"Super simple interface, and it's even written in Erlang."

Meaning that you probably still can't read email in it, but it can already do conference calls. ;)

most people intuitively perceive the fact that "the majority of drivers consider themselves above average" as human stupidity

I intuitively perceive it as good drivers being clustered together near the top, with a few outstanding lousy drivers near the bottom.

If you are not convinced, consider Bill Gates walking into a room full of college students - suddenly, almost everybody becomes below-average wealthy (if average == mean).

That's true in my country even if Bill Gates doesn't walk in. Hell, perhaps it's true even in the US.

Europeans were almost wiped out by the plague

Uh, nope. What does "almost wiped out" mean to you? 30% of population dead is "almost wiped out"? It's horrible, of course, but there were still 70% who stayed alive. Well, I could say that I can jump almost three meters high with that logic. :-)

But the web site still works in other browsers, doesn't it?

You can have all these things. A combination of Plan 9 and VPRI's DynaBook jr. is probably what you desire. :-)

1. It reminds me to be civil and think before I post.

That sounds very much like "I don't kill people because I'd get caught". Why can't you be civil (whatever that means) and think just because?

So essentially, it's totally meaningless marketing bullshit? As much as I favor memory optimizations, I think that merely trying to linearize the access patterns is completely futile in the case of graph databases. On that level of brute-force approach to speeding things up, you'll most likely gain more performance by using lower-latency memory modules, or simply by using different data structures to accommodate for your specific cache line sizes and latencies, then by trying to linearize generic graphs.

Essentially, you're trying to do what the medical research isn't doing: to invalidate the existing papers. :-)

Could anyone explain to me what it means "native" versus "non-native" graph processing in that slide show? Ditto for "native" versus "non-native" graph storage. I simply have no idea what I'm supposed to picture when I see that.

Also, on the neo4j.org page, the claim that "graph data model['s] expressiveness supersedes the relational model" seems a little bit spurious, seeing as, as I understand it, the relational model and graph data are both anchored in first-order predicate logic, and therefore should be able to do the same things essentially (although Codd-style RDBMS with a little bit more fuss regarding the necessary schemas).

Jormundir is very much wrong on that. OOP was never supposed to "involve lots of mutation". Go ask Alan Kay. ;-)