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So the traditional measures of database scalability have to do with query speed. Does your database run queries quickly enough? Do you have contention issues when one thread is trying to insert data and another is trying to run some kind of crazy five table join. One problem I’ve run into with large MySQL [...]

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After yesterday’s gloomy post about how we have failed to defend ourselves from nefarious elected officials, I read this story praising the bureaucracy for imposing some accountability on the government. Christopher Hayes writes:

But a funny thing has happened over the past six years. At a time when the press failed to check a [...]

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The big political story of the week is that starting in 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney’s office declared that it was not bound by the laws that govern the executive branch, on the basis of … well it doesn’t really matter. They just made something up to justify not complying with the rules they don’t [...]

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Jason Levine offers a counterpoint to John Gruber’s iPhone post from the other day, explaining the enterprise features offered for the BlackBerry that the iPhone won’t match. They’re both right, of course. The iPhone isn’t going to try to compete in the space where BlackBerry excels. At the same time, there are going to [...]

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The Audobon Society reports a precipitous decline in many bird species in the United States. Why are the birds disappearing? The proximate cause is habitat loss, but of course the root cause is indifference:

The Audubon Society portrait of common bird species in decline is really a report on who humans are. Let [...]

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Timothy Noah is kicking of a new series for Slate on what Presidential candidates are promising in terms of health care reform with a look at Barack Obama’s health care plan. Here’s what he says about the state of health care in America:

Health care has lately ranked second, third, or fourth in polls [...]

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Go read John Gruber’s blog post on the bizarre Wall Street Journal article today letting the world know that the iPhone won’t connect to proprietary mail services. I would assume that anybody who’s seriously considering buying an iPhone already knows that.

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A federal court has ruled that stored email is afforded the same constitutional protections as telephone conversations and email being transmitted over the wire. Law enforcement agencies will need to obtain a search warrant to access it. I expect that the government will appeal the ruling, but it makes sense technologically speaking. There’s no reason [...]

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Ed Felten describes the odd nature of gold farming in World of Warcraft:

This relationship is an amazing tangle of play and work. The gold farmer works playing a game, so he can earn money which he spends playing the same game. The customer finds part of the game too much like work, so [...]

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Lots of people think that golf is the most boring televised sport there is, but I think it’s because they don’t really understand everything that goes into it. I’d say it’s sedate, but not boring. In today’s final round of the US Open, which is already exciting just because it’s the toughest tournament in professional [...]

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