schteph

In my first year of high school I had Latin, which I hated with a passion. Before, I thought that it would boil down to learning some common words and sayings and proverbs, but no. It was learning latin as a foreign language. I don't think I was taught anything remotely as useless as that. And I really don't like the teacher and she didn't like me and it was truly awful and I hated every second of it. It was so awful that I had nightmares about it, even years after high school.

A couple (two I think) of years after that latin studies I saw the Life of Brian for the first time. I didn't know what I was going to see, so when the "romanus eunt domus" scene came. It wasn't just hilariously funny it was also cathartic.

So I'd say that. I remember that sketch almost by heart since the first time I saw it.

I didn't read it like that. What I take from it is that he's implying that the government uses something much stupider than sql, like Lotus1-2-3 or plain txt files or excel. I really wouldn't be surprised that there's some government department that had their IT done during the first Bush administration and didn't really upgrade from it since.

There are also probably some departments that don't get much funding, so they organise part of their work into some shared excel files.l

Nothing really wrong with that. Unless he's implying that the entire federal government works like that, which is preposterously stupid.

This is true, but there are many instances where denormalization makes sense and is frequently used.

A common example is a table that is frequently read. Instead of going to the "central" table the data is denormalized for faster access. This is completely standard practice for every large system.

There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but it can be easily misused. With SSN, I'd think the most stupid thing to do is to use it as the primary key. The second one would be to ignore the security risks that are ingrained in an SSN. The federal government, being large as it is, I'm sure has instances of both, however since Musky is using his possy of young, arrogant brogrammers, I'm positively certain they're completely ignoring the security aspect.

For those wondering, that's apparently called a masonry stove, specifically a tiled stove. These were pretty common where I'm at and people still sometimes keep them for decorative purposes.

But sales tax still works for that, since if you want to buy a Ferrari we're keeping 20% automatically at the point of sale.

Unfortunately, that is very easy to circumvent. Rich people usually own companies which made them rich in the first place. They can easily buy cars in the company name and write not just the VAT off, but income taxes as well.

They didn't give her a ten percent raise, but a hundredth of ten percent raise, for some reason (I would say for fraudulent reasons, but it could just be a mistake)

In relational databases (sql) tables are actually table representations of relations, where a relation is defined as any subset of a Cartesian product.

In the first sql example we have a "person" relation, which is a subset of namesXgenders cartesian product. Because of this an element of the person relation ("Jimothy", null) cannot have "no gender" (as it wouldn't be a member of the cartesian product namesXgenders).

All of this leads to the following: null in sql doesn't mean "said element doesn't have that property", it means that said property is unknown.

With that in mind, the first example returns expected, if on the surface counterintuitive result: you don't know what Jimothy 's gender is, so when queried with NOT M NOT F, that row shouldn't be returned, because you can't just assume Jinothy's gender. The query should be, for those cases: not m, not f or unknown (ie is null).

Similarly for the second case. Email is not nonexistent, it's unknown, so it makes sense that the db allows you to insert more than one person with unknown email addresses.

I wouldn't say that either of these is an sql wtf, I would just call both of those tables badly designed.

As much as I understand us military, they are required to follow all orders (like any military, really) except orders that are illegal.

So, if Trump ordered an invasion of Greenland, the military should refuse that order, unless that order also comes with an act of congress declaring war on Greenland. However, Nixon bombed Cambodia without a declaration of war, so I don't know.

If they have any balls left, they'd just release it anyway and have Biden pardon them.

I don't think they'll do it, but they should.

I'm obviously out of the loop. What happened?

True, however there's this photo of Tom as Picard, so he did at least pose as Picard.