rademi

None of these patents were original at the time they were adopted -- they all have obvious prior art.

Someone should take away Level 3's patent card. And PersonalWeb really ought to be liable for abuse of process.

You can shard RDBMS relatively easily -- basically you wind up pushing a part of your database structure into your clients, so your clients can decide which shard to use.

The cost, though, is that you wind up having a difficult time doing some things that MongoDB can't do. (For example: Renormalizing your database... Does that even mean anything for MongoDB?)

There's something to be said, of course, for simplifying your design. But it's probably a good idea also to make sure your design reflects your requirements.

I'd venture to say that for a blind non-participant the difference isn't necessarily that large.

Meanwhile, aggression covers a lot of ground, which includes clubbing someone over the head, and generally being a jerk. But the fact that someone uses this word with two "g"s and two "s"s to describe some part of the process of building a happy family does not mean that other people are going to automatically know how to build a happy family after having read the paragraph that uses those words...

Once upon a time, computer programming was a job for women, and not for men. So, based on that period of history, we can equivalently suggest: Maybe we don't need more men in software?

(I do not believe either suggestion, not for a second. And I am disturbed that people are so ignorant of history. Both the women subject to stereotype threat and the men suggesting it's a non-issue are making this same kind of mistake. So, instead, I'd like to point out that women are awesomely smart. So deal with it. Please.)

To be fair, that was Larry Wall reacting to criticism in 1994 https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!msg/comp.lang.l...

Anyways, my experience is that all languages will get people criticizing them. And, in my experience, those kinds of criticisms should almost always be categorized as "does not want to talk about language FOO" and a proper response is probably something like "if you don't want to give that subject the respect it deserves, let's change the subject to something you find interesting".