another2another

You can actually get quite some way by adding constraints to columns. NOT NULL, default values and a CHECK constraints on a column can limit random invariance bleeding into the db.

So for example, if I ever see a CHAR(1) column that looks like it's meant to hold a boolean of some sort, the best thing is to immediately lock it down to a strict subset (preferably not NULL) of 2 states like ['Y'|'N'].

I still have nightmares about a db schema that grew a fungus of boolean representations, and massive amounts of code checking for y,n,Y,N,0,1,T,F,t,f all of which were used by different teams at different times. Constraints would have stopped all that.

Here's the docs for Postgres: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-constraints.html

First time I heard it, it was about XML. So, quite a while ago.

I thought the tiles on my bathroom floor were perfectly flat and even on the ground, until I switched off the light and used that damn laser on the Dyson vacuum cleaner.

What greeted me was an uneven landscape of tiles that the naked eye just didn't see.

>What makes concurrency so hard?

AanTythinANgY canTI happeME!n

I think it was specifically just minarets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Swiss_minaret_referendum

Now, you might find even that a bit overbearing, but I believe the right of a community to influence the architecture of their local town shouldn't be seen as a bad thing. The feeling was that the few minarets that already existed were incongruent enough, that they didn't want a carte-blanche on more sprouting up, which I think planning permission had already been applied for.

>I think the divisions are of domestic origin and this argument is more or less FUD.

I agree, many divisions are definitely of domestic origin. However we definitely know that foreign interference has been at play to identify and amplify those divisions.

>If so, which message, what topic and who was targeted?

5G - weird one I know, but agitators gonna agitate.

Climate - Russia was a massive oil exporter, de-carbonizing efforts threatened that.

Atomic power in Germany - Russia definitely didn't want Germany achieving independence from their gas imports.

BRICS - China would love to de-dollarize the world.

>And no, you will hardly ever get rid of surveillance powers once established without serious political shifts.

And this is the advantage of democracies, big shifts can happen. With Dictatorships however it usually takes violence. A lot of violence.

Creating a culture war is often the first reaction of the right to things they don't like in order to blunt their effect.

"loonie lentil eating lefties", "greenies", "mad Greta" (I'm making these up, but I'm sure I'm sure there's plenty of similar examples). People used to be comforted by these ad-hominems, and it allowed them to continue buying aspirational 4x4 off-road vehicles and 3 flights abroad a year without touching their conscious. They could laugh, share memes, ignore news stories about forest fires in Canada in December or massive loss of ice shelves in Antarctica and carry on as usual.

But as the pot starts to boil harder I get the feeling people are looking away from these distractions and beginning to look more critically at the information they're getting, and beginning to wonder if it's not such a funny joke after all.

Your answer seems a bit vague to me, so I can't follow what your objection is.

But just to be clear, my surprise at their abilities stems from the fact that their country is so insular, tightly controlled and technologically backward* (look at a night picture of N. Korea, for instance, 80% dark, with no basic streetlighting), that it surprises me that they can allow a portion of their society to roam and participate in the internet freely without infecting the rest of their country.

The Doublethink needed to pull that off must be staggering (thank you Orwell for giving us a vocabulary to express the concepts and experience of living under totalitarianism).

*I know they have ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, also I'm pretty sure their internal surveillance tech is also top notch.

This is certainly an issue, but apart from environmental legislation (e.g. please may I pump raw shit and tonnes of pesticide into public waterways) their main interest is at least in preserving public stability, general wealth and happiness.

Dictatorships though have a more macroscopically sinister agenda against successful democratic rivals.

I agree with you that things are currently quite bad, and need to get better. From my UK centric viewpoint, over the last decade Brexit, climate change and the pandemic have proven fertile ground for diverting peoples' attention away from societal issues that have not been addressed, or have even exacerbated by wilful neglect of basic services by Government.

But I have the feeling that that well of constant culture wars has run dry, and people are becoming more wary of being drawn into endless fruitless debates about these things. And after looking up form their smartphones they've finally seen all of the signs for Food Banks, noticed that the weather has gone insane and that the price of biscuits is inhumane and asked themselves 'how did we get here?' 'how do we get back to a better place?' and will hopefully agitate again for a better society.

Swings and roundabouts.

>A <$insert hyper emotional disparagement>. Dictatorships need hardly interfere with the "stability" of a society which <$insert random example some democratic failure>.

And yet they do interfere. We've seen plenty of evidence, from Russia, Iran, China and (I still can't believe how they got competent at this, but there you go) North Korea.

And in some cases they've been successful at destabilizing formerly fairly sane and stable democratic countries. The social divisions that the UK And US currently find themselves in could be attributed in part to this steady drip of caustic interference.

However, as a "short term pessimist, but long term optimist" (Hitchens), I'm optimistic that we will start to introspect a bit more as societies and begin to be less easily manipulated. It will take a while, but I believe even now the tide is turning.

Well, there was the Great Slashdot Influx of 2010, where not reading TFA before commenting was a badge of honour.

If there was a smallish vehicle (thing? I'm thinking johnny #5) that could:

hold and carry things you give it (without spilling), and carry then set them down where you ask.

or pick things up from the ground for you.

Then that would probably be a great help for lots of older people.

I'm not that old myself, but I've seen lots of older people who are otherwise self-sufficient struggle with some of these things as mobility starts to suffer.

If it could also talk to you and give sass back, then that would also be a bonus.

To really make string_view sane and safe, you'd have to make std::string reference counted (with each string view holding a ref), but I can't see that being popular.

I'd watch it twice if Tom Hanks played detective Mallory.

Always interesting to see the amount of work going into LibreSSL, but I'm not sure how much use it gets outside of OpenBSD which seems a bit of a shame.

If the caller has nbytes = 4

and sizeof(hwrpb) is now 16 bytes, then you will be copying 12 bytes of data too many from the caller, potentially reading into memory it doesn't own. I would say that should be avoided.

The better solution I believe would be to only copy the minimum amount of bytes supported by caller & callee. So:

nbytes = MIN(nbytes, sizeof(hwrpb));

Which should ensure backwards and forwards compatibility, assuming the version info of hwrpb->size is respected then the fact that part of the hwrpb struct isn't initialized shouldn't matter.

Taiwan's better option would be to build submarines with Nukes, and position them all over the Pacific.

Capturing the mainland won't help you at all in that case, and there's no way you would get them all. It would be a MAD situation, and that's all TW needs.

There are Transaction Coordinators that will allow you to span transactions across multiple systems - databases, OR MQ Brokers.

This means you can begin a DB transaction, enlist the MQ GET operation, and then commit or rollback the whole lot. It obviously slows things down a tad, but ensures consistency across all actors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Distributed_Transact...

Yeh, they should've Bing'd the local laws before doing it.

Have a public enquiry, with lots of tea.

Oh to be thus conflicted, even for a few years.

There's still the 'offers over xxx,000' blind auction, but gazumping which is allowed in England (still I believe) is not in Scotland, and a good thing too.

I totally agree with you that YT has enabled a lot of really talented people to be successful and creative in a whole new way, and has opened up opportunities for many people all around the world to live profitable lives, where before TV channels were the gatekeepers of that creativity.

But the ad supported model seems to have slipped past the fair-to-viewers into the completely obnoxious and unbearable to nearly all viewers, so something has to give. Additionally it seems like content producers are getting a smaller amount than they used to get so it's less of an attractive platform, probably more so since the competitors showed up.

I have no problems with AdBlock plus on FF currently, but using private browsing on Utube since they started detecting ad-blockers. I also generally use Utube less as well, so not so bothered.

Indeed sqlite's original mission was "to be a replacement for fopen()", but as more features are being added it looks like that initial simplicity can't be maintained.

>Microsoft has been innovating way more than Apple,

What has Microsoft been innovating recently?

>taking tested and consolidated tech from others and rebranding it as its own.

Didn't Microsoft just recently build out a whole public cloud infrastructure by copying AWS and "rebranding it as its own"?

That's not innovating, that's direct competition, red in tooth and claw - something MS relishes.

>Fair enough, but Microsoft would be equally dead without Office and Azure revenue.

They were already on a bit of a shaky nail for a while when they relied only on Office and Windows, but their shift to the cloud (and resultant cuddly Embrace of Linux) has paid off well for them, so overall a smart move on their part.

>probably wouldn't be around if Microsoft hadn't given them $150M to save them from bankruptcy in 1997

I'm _pretty_ sure Apple could have gotten the money from elsewhere if they really had to. It's history now, so we'll never know for sure, but I'd bet that they could have found other investors if they really had to. People seem to think it's a black and white scenario - money from MS or death! But I don't think it ever was.

Windows 7 was also pretty decent, and managed to somewhat redeem the horror that was Vista.