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Firstly, you come out with this stuff whenever an even tangentially related topic comes up on HN. So you are not making an observation about political science, you are engaging in advocacy. You are saying "Hooray for throwing out the rule book! That keeps us safe and stops the towelhead terrorists!". Like you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4474143

Secondly, you are engaging in the no true scotsman fallacy whenever I give a counterexample. Breivik wasn't true terrorism because he was just one guy. Well that's irrelevant. The size and scale of any terrorist attack ever made up to now has been insignificant next to the damage to civil liberties from "security" or even to the death toll from road accidents. The difference is whether the population get hysterical, as you are advocating, or maintain their sense of proportion, as I am advocating. Marinus Van Der Lubbe was also just one guy, but we got Hitler and the Nazis being given emergency powers as a result of the Reichstag fire, because the Germans in the 30s ran around screaming about how the scary, scary legions of communist barbarians (well funded by their Russian backers) were a serious threat to all of civilization, just like you keep screaming about how the scary, scary legions of islamist barbarians (well funded by their oil-sheikh backers) are a serious threat to all of civilization.

Well we don't have to treat this crap as natural. Any sane society, like the Norwegians today and unlike the Germans in the 30s, can just refuse to be scared, and put checks and balances in place to curb the politicians, like the European courts curbed the British government.

Politicians taking away liberties under the excuse of "security" is the oldest fraud in the book, as anyone can see from Julius Caesar's comments on Sulla. Nobody who grew up in a country with functioning schools and books has any excuse for not knowing better.

During the "War on Terror" an old man and anti-Nazi RAF veteran was arrested under "anti-terror" laws for holding an anti-Blair placard at a demonstration. During the IRA years, well ... Find me an example of "security" that egregious during the period I mentioned, I double dog dare you.

Stuff was blowing up all the time but the people simply did not get all paranoid. Business as usual.

By the way, your wiki link refers to laws that were put in place in the 70s. If I recall correctly, Britain tried full scale internment in the 70s and got bitch slapped in court by Ireland, and then stopped. That may be the reason Britain was acting in a saner way in the 80s, but I wasn't debating the history of it.

I was simply saying that 80s Britain was an existence proof of a society not responding to terrorism by turning into a police state. The IRA terrorism hadn't stopped in the 70s, by the way - it continued into the 90s making it far longer-lasting than Afghanistan.

And finally, the topic was Guantanamo Bay, where people have been held without trial for more than a decade. You are trying to compare that to British emergency powers that held people for one week?

You can post that wikipedia page a fifth and sixth time, it still won't change anything. It will just make you look stupider and more of a liar.

And civil liberties in the mainland were nowhere near as bad as this stupid war on terror.

The UK had internment without trial in the 1970s. The hunger strike episode was in the 1980s, and was started by people who had been tried and convicted. Not people being "rendered" illegally from other countries and certainly not random people handed in for bounty who never received trial.

Finally, the internment episode, which shows the UK in the worst light, is documented in this link in Wikipedia:

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

The timeline is from 1971-1977. "Gitmo" has been going for twice that long already.

The IRA were bombing Britain all the time. There are still no trash cans in the London subway system today; they were taken out because the IRA might leave bombs in them.

The IRA even hit Downing Street and one of Thathcer's political conferences.

There might have been stepped up security in Northern Ireland itself, but security in London during that period was far less than during this stupid "War on Terror", and there weren't all these stupid "anti-terror" laws. The regular police didn't even carry guns back then.

Thatcher tried to use a regulation banning the voices of Sinn Fein from being put on air because they were advocating terror. The BBC just played the footage and used voice-over artists to say their words.

And this was how 80's Britain responded to the IRA, which was a large and well funded organization.

So I have an existence proof that you don't have to turn into a police state as a response to terrorism, because I grew up in a country that chose another option.

Al Qaeda is a common name used by lots of different little local terrorist groups to make themselves seem menacing. eg if the Al Shabab boys in Somalia want to make themselves seem badass, they call themselves "Al Qaeda in Somalia"

But facts don't matter to you because you are a complete fraud.

So we'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and pretend that you are talking sense. We'll pretend that you were referring to Osama Bin Laden's organization in 2001. His actual organization, not the one in your fever dreams.

That organization had hardly any people outside of Afghanistan. And didn't use much money. Their entire budget for the attack was 19 air tickets and some box cutters.

The facts about the attack are also that it was small. Large for a terrorist attack, but small in the grand scale of things. 2 or 3 buildings knocked down, and about 3000 people killed.

We'll throw in the US embassy bombings and the attack on the USS Cole as well.

And you are saying this grand total justifies extraordinary rendition, suspension of habeas corpus and the Geneva conventions, the Patriot act etc etc etc. while the Korean war didn't?

Mao's China and Kim Il Sung's Korea put together, with their legions of commandos (and now their nukes) were a threat.

Are you trying to say a few thousand suicide bombers are a bigger threat? Such a bigger threat that we have to give up civil liberties for them that we did NOT have to give up when at war with China?

Are you really that stupid?

There is a (A) regular prisoner, that the normal legal rules apply to, including for terrorists.

Then there is (B) prisoner-of-war, which is for if there is a state of war and said person is a soldier in an enemy state.

Anybody who does not fit into category (B) by default fits into category (A).

"Enemy combatant" is something the Bush Administration pulled out of their ass because they wanted to torture prisoners.

If they were following the rules instead of making up criminal shit like that, they'd have had to treat the AlQaeda suspects ("suspects" including innocent civilians turned in for bounties) as category (A) civilian prisoners and not torture them. That wouldn't have fit the Bushies' plan.

The plan was to torture the prisoners by water boarding and make them "confess" that Saddam Hussein was behind 911 - to manufacture a "reason" for the Bushies to attack Iraq. And the plan worked.

You also ignore that in terms of the domestic terror threat, according to the FBI organized jewish loons are a larger threat than yemeni moslem loons - and that jewish loons aren't being locked up indefinitely

http://forums.anandtech.com/archive/index.php/t-2135229.html

You also ignore that when the US was in a similar situation, during the McVeigh episode, the US did not respond towards the militiamen by locking them up without trial. They used normal law enforcement procedures. And McVeigh was not a lone wolf. That lot are organized and well funded

But if you didn't ignore these parallels, you'd be forced to see that there is an alternative called "the rule of law". And you wouldn't like that. You prefer the policy "lock up the towelheads and throw away the key".

And you call me a hatemonger.

That facility is in use in order to circumvent the law in treatment of prisoners period. It was located in Cuba in order to not be on US soil, because the Bush administration thought that offshore abuse would be easier to get away with.

If you have been awake at all during the past 12 years you will have heard the news stories about prisoners being tortured/executed there.

Furthermore, you will have heard the news stories of many inmates there turning out to be completely innocent.

Finally, you will have heard of the "people sweeps" in Afghanistan and Pakistan in which local warlords sold off people arbitrarily as "terrorists" to US forces, who didn't know better (and didn't care).

These people have been bunged up in Guantanamo without a fair trail. A fair trial is the only way to determine if they actually are who you and the lying US military claim they are.

If the prisoners are "guilty" of being enemy soldiers, then yes they can rot in jail until the US withdraws from Afghanistan.

If they are innocent, they should be freed immediately and compensated.

If you can't fathom that the word of the US military (or any part of any government really) should not just be taken on trust, you should take a time-machine to Nazi Germany. You'll love it there.

Whether or not US Forces say he's guilty does not make him guilty in reality. They could be lying; they have lied many times in the past

Similarly, Tim McVeigh was a militia nut job, there are many others like him out there, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_Republican_Army

However, these are white people, so when they blow something up they are just "one lone crazy person".

When 19 brown people bring down a couple of trade towers, suddenly it becomes "totally different"?

To be consistent with your logic, the Clinton administration should have carpet bombed Elohim City and suspended human rights in Oklahoma, including keeping innocent people locked up without trial, until they got every last Klan nut/ Church nut/Gun nut out there.

If you have reliable evidence then put him on trial or else shut up.

Even under "war rules" these prisoners should be dealt with in a better way.

And "Guilty until proven innocent?" Really? Idiot.

Refugee status was invented for such people.

If a country is aping the Israelis, it's failed as a democracy.

In my experience most lectures are closer to 1 hour than 3. For BS, MS, even PhD.

Do I understand you correctly that MBA classes are particularly freakishly timetabled?

I think that's Microsoft's advantage in the database market: their system has all the tools out-of-the-box.

And the licensing's really not that expensive - especially compared to the heart-attack inducing prices coming out of Oracle, IBM, SAS, Teradata, Kx etc etc etc

Well no, sometimes they have the resources but don't want to spend them, then they end up spending more overall because they botch the replacement.

You can periodically build a read-only cube that has pre-computed answers to any number that any pivot-table could read from that star schema.

Then, when the multinational supermarket CEO queries for his company's total profit by product line over the past five years, he gets an instant answer.

The other way, the CEO must wait for weeks to get that answer from the RDBMS - or the cube must be replicated the cube inside the RDBMS somehow using tons of materialized views.

Am I mistaken?

Ideally, you want to calculate all the changes, and then write to disk. In practice, you don't know when the changes 'end', so you want to write periodically to disk.

If you are using the RDBMS, you are relying on the optimizer to correctly guess what you are doing. When it gets it wrong, it will write continuously to disk.

The difference in speed is orders of magnitude, so this one change can easily make your server logic go 10 times slower for no good reason.

The problem is worse than this because the RDBMS is not just paging to disk, it's also doing locking/synchronization, thread pooling, tree building and call backs in the background.

In every case, it's trying to guess what features are just overhead, and what you really need ... and whenever it gets this wrong, it could be making a pointless system call, which gives you all the overhead of a context switch for nothing.

Whereas the gamedev doing this at a low level does not need to guess his own intentions, and uses (and pays cycles for) only those features he needs.

You might get away with a database-centric design if your gamedev is really good with databases (dubious) and if you have an appropriate database platform (nigh impossible).

But if you have the average gamedev (talented but schlubby and theory-averse) running on the average database (garbage MySQL, ugh!) your performance will DIE.

The deal is often overpriced based on "synergy" between the companies that does not exist.

But the deal happens because of perverse incentives for the management of the buying company.

The buying company often loses money and would have been better off not buying.

Your peacock with the giant butt-feathers from the other post is not meritorious but lucky that the butt-feather-eating predator hasn't shown up yet.

And your peahen that chooses to mate with the peacock with the giant butt-feathers, rather than the one that can fight off predators, is stupid.

Take a look around and you'll see the universe is not ruled by meritocracy but by (often self-perpetuating) stupidity.

Yeah, 'cause every beggar or migrant worker (that make up most of the population) in the petro-sheikhdoms, is secretly a millionaire.