slightly offtopic: The user id - coconuts2314 - looks like a bot. Look at all the submissions and only one lame comment. Shouldn't the HN spam algorithms detect this?
Does Postgres have an equivalent Connect By feature? Last I checked it didn't. If you don't need to scale your hierarchical data much, its pretty handy. I'd prefer to go to Postgres too.
PostgreSQL 8.4+ has recursive common table expressions. I don't know if they do everything that CONNECT BY does, but I know that they do everything that I've ever used CONNECT BY for.
Bezos is pretty good at business strategy, and from the outside it looks like upper management is good at forcing a workable product to be delivered come hell or high water.
I subscribe to the Economist and listen to it during my commute. Many of their articles are verbose, but it's still better, IMO, than many alternatives.
People who love C love it, in part, because they are often solving interesting problems with it. Many problems that require C are interesting: embedded software, automated robots, new databases etc. Most problems that C is not good at - Web development - are not that interesting to many people that love C.
C is not good at web development? Most of the "web" stack is written in C: OS/NGINX/apache/php/java/perl.
If you do write the top of the stack in C, it will run faster than anything else and be smaller. This means lower turnaround time which is VERY IMPORTANT in web apps. C, in many cases, is the best Web language.
Perhaps there's a misunderstanding in the term "turnaround". I meant it in this sense t = x + y + z.
where t = total time, x = send time , y = processing time, z = send back to user time. If you can decrease y, you decrease "t". Responsiveness is important to users. With the advent of large and extremely fast memory cache, small program size will dramatically increase program execution speed by have small code and small data already in cache. Smaller program executable will enable many more instances on a real physical node. Size matters. Speed matters.
I wrote a CGI in C around 2005. The C code produced only a small about of XML. All the presentation layers were done using client-side XSLT, CSS, and a bit of javascript. The result was very portable and efficient: we had to support serving from z/OS mainframes that used EBCDIC, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows.
Your comment may have gone over better if you included specific examples. For one, here's a story about Lisping at the Jet Propulsion Lab: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
It's my understanding Monsanto isn't a company that relies on free markets. They use lawyers heavily. If their seeds blow from a customer's farm to a non customer's farm and the non customer doesn't actively try to remove the Monsanto seeds, they sue. They are like the seed mafia.
"The Runyons say they signed no agreements, and if they were contaminated with the genetically modified seed, it blew over from a neighboring farm.
"Pollination occurs, wind drift occurs. There's just no way to keep their products from landing in our fields," David said.
"What Monsanto is doing across the country is often, and according to farmers, trespassing even, on their land, examining their crops and trying to find some of their patented crops," said Andrew Kimbrell, with the Center For Food Safety. "And if they do, they sue those farmers for their entire crop." "
In that case, Schmeiser's field was contaminated by his neighbour's field which was planted with Roundup resistant Canola seed.
"... on the balance of probabilities, the defendants infringed a number of the claims under the plaintiffs’ Canadian patent number 1,313,830 by planting, in 1998, without leave or licence by the plaintiffs, canola fields with seed saved from the 1997 crop which seed was known, or ought to have been known by the defendants to be Roundup tolerant and when tested was found to contain the gene and cells claimed under the plaintiffs’ patent. By selling the seed harvested in 1998 the defendants further infringed the plaintiffs’ patent."
Right, so it's not that they'll sue you if their seeds blow onto your property, it's that they'll sue you if their seeds blow onto your property, you harvest, separate and and save the seeds from the plants that grow, then you plant 'em.
I'm still not sure that counts as infringement, but hey, who am I to disagree with a Canadian court's interpretation of Canadian law?
Just enter "monsanto sues farmer" into your favourite search engine. The wealth of results, mostly partisan in nature however, would suggest that this is a significant issue.
Who needs a source (or nuanced facts, for that matter) when you've got such an impossibly sticky narrative? True or not, Monsanto will always be known as the people who sued over their seeds.
Which is a shame, because there are plenty of perfectly good reasons to hate Monsanto without delving into half-truths.
One thing, that Huffington Post article doesn't quite contradict the claim. It says:
"The court ruling said there was no likelihood that Monsanto would pursue patent-infringement cases against the organic farmers, who have no interest in using the company's patented seed products."
So long as the organic farmers didn't replant the contaminated seed or sell it, they are safe from lawsuits. If a farmer does replant the seed and benefit from the use of weedkiller resistance, they can expect to be sued.
So what are they supposed to do? Sort through the seeds one-by-one? The problem isn't that Monsanto is necessarily asking for anything that is obviously crazy, it's the implementation that causes problems.
It's a lot like software patents in some sense. You can't actually insulate yourself from infringement.
Not sure, certainly they shouldn't be won as a rule. Maybe there are exceptions, but it shouldn't be just a case of whoever hires the most expensive lawyers wins.
"Monsanto won its case against Parr, but the company, which won't comment on specific cases, has stopped its legal action <edit>for PR reasons</edit>against the Runyons."
Go ahead HN Lisp lovers, kill my karma!