• Niko (unregistered) in reply to Phlip

    It's not a business rule; it's company policy. Customers shall NEVER be fulfilled.

  • (cs) in reply to Quirkafleeg
    Quirkafleeg:
    consequat:
    Alargule:
    What's a tautology?
    The first chicken was hatched from the first chicken egg that was laid by the first chicken.
    Why did the chicken c̶r̶o̶s̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶o̶a̶d̶ travel in time?
    How should I know? Do I look like a chicken?
  • (cs) in reply to Adam
    Adam:
    Since many of us work with logic professionally, we're probably familiar with the definition of a tautology: a statement which by its very structure must be true. For example:

    a == a

    In some cases you don't even have to evaluate the variables and consider what they refer to -- it can be determined that the statement is true without even doing that much work.

    Here's one in a language unique to nondeterministic processors, AKA humans:

    That which is more fit to survive is more likely to survive.

    You don't even have to dereference "that which is more fit to survive" to see that the statement has to be true. But link this tautology to a more widely recognized label -- evolution -- and suddenly a huge flock of nondeterministic processors get their panties in a bunch.

    The universe contains a lot more stable atoms than unstable ones simply because the unstable ones don't tend to hang around that long. And so on right up to galaxies, and everything in between. We're here, quite simply, because the alternative is less probable.

    There now, you owe your life to a tautology. Lesson concluded. You may now return to merriment and chaos.

    Your answer actually highlights one of the problems with applying "survival of the fittest" to macro-evolution. Most persons who use this reasoning actually assume two things: that the probability difference for survival between more-fit/less-fit is significant, followed by the misrepresentation of your statement as "that which is more fit to survive, has survived" This usually devolves into "evolution is true because evolution is true, no proof needed, QED". However, the actual scientific proof of them has proven to be fiendishly difficult. As a result, proponents of evolution are as militantly "religious" about their own views of origins as are anyone else.

    As anyone who has studied elementary probability can tell you, just because a perfectly-balanced coin has two sides, there is nothing that prevents you from flipping "tails" millions of times in a row. Sure, it's highly improbable, but it could happen. Furthermore, "survival of the fittest" attempts to explain these issues from the wrong end, by attempting to describe what came before in terms of what came after.

    So yes, a == a and that which is more fit to survive is more likely to survive. But neither statement tells you much that is actually useful.

  • maxh (unregistered)

    Erm, "true fact" isn't superfluous. A fact is anything that can be proven true or false, so "true fact" eliminates the possibility that it is false.

  • Josephus (unregistered) in reply to brian j. parker
    brian j. parker:
    I'm not defending it, I'd do it differently, but at least you're only wasting a bit of space (literally!) per order. Too often I see something like this as a 'Y'/'N' character field, using a whole byte or two per order.

    Wasting a whole byte? that is crazy business! if a company has one hundred million orders, that would equate to 95mb. Where is a company which has one hundred million orders going to find the kind of money to buy 95mb of disk space?

  • the beholder (unregistered) in reply to da Doctah
    da Doctah:
    Quirkafleeg:
    consequat:
    Alargule:
    What's a tautology?
    The first chicken was hatched from the first chicken egg that was laid by the first chicken.
    Why did the chicken c̶r̶o̶s̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶o̶a̶d̶ travel in time?
    How should I know? Do I look like a chicken?
    Well, if you really want to know...

    http://www.savagechickens.com/2006/07/time-after-time.html and http://www.savagechickens.com/2006/01/time-travel.html

    p.s.: Akismet sucks

  • the beholder (unregistered) in reply to the beholder
    the beholder:
    p.s.: Akismet sucks
    ... but strangely enough, it didn't forbid my posting of two links at once!!

    It still sucks, though.

  • (cs) in reply to GalacticCowboy
    GalacticCowboy:
    So yes, a == a and that which is more fit to survive is more likely to survive. But neither statement tells you much that is actually useful.

    I would argue that our interpretation of the word "fit" may be skewed in this context. We may go back in time and see the sickest, most lame of a species end up surviving. In analyzing the situation, we may find there was a predator that ended up killing off the "stronger" of the species for whatever reason you can think of -- the weaker of the species hid well; the predator instinctively avoided the weaker (more sickly??) ones, perhaps due to instinctive fear of disease; etc. We would presume that what we interpreted to be the "stronger" of the species lived on, when in fact that may not be. But the "weaker" survived because they had a particular survival skill we wouldn't consider to be fit (or even perhaps consider to be a skill), but whatever that may be allowed them to survive.

    So it may be that the "fittest" did survive, but our definition of "fittest" doesn't always match with what Mother Nature would be doing.at the time.

  • Arnold (unregistered) in reply to fnord
    fnord:
    The first rule of the tautology club is the first rule of the tautology club

    The second rule of tautology club is the first rule after the first rule of tautology club

    By the way, the third rule is to never talk about it because it's pointless.

  • (cs) in reply to nonpartisan
    nonpartisan:
    GalacticCowboy:
    So yes, a == a and that which is more fit to survive is more likely to survive. But neither statement tells you much that is actually useful.

    I would argue that our interpretation of the word "fit" may be skewed in this context. We may go back in time and see the sickest, most lame of a species end up surviving. In analyzing the situation, we may find there was a predator that ended up killing off the "stronger" of the species for whatever reason you can think of -- the weaker of the species hid well; the predator instinctively avoided the weaker (more sickly??) ones, perhaps due to instinctive fear of disease; etc. We would presume that what we interpreted to be the "stronger" of the species lived on, when in fact that may not be. But the "weaker" survived because they had a particular survival skill we wouldn't consider to be fit (or even perhaps consider to be a skill), but whatever that may be allowed them to survive.

    So it may be that the "fittest" did survive, but our definition of "fittest" doesn't always match with what Mother Nature would be doing.at the time.

    Precisely. Since we cannot go back millions of years and actually observe the process, all we can do is look at the result. However, evolution does not answer these "bigger-picture" questions - it describes what, not why.

    In terms of logic, the typical fallacy in this field is "arguing from the consequent". In other words:

    if A then B B therefore A

    The problem is, conclusions reached from faulty logic cannot be trusted. While evolution does certainly answer many questions of origins, it clearly does not answer all, and is not the "best" answer for others. (Particularly in the fields of probability and complexity - the mere existence of life is colossally improbable because of the sheer complexity of even the simplest form of "life" as we understand it.)

  • Eske Tavssen (unregistered)

    It's a pleonasm when you do that thing with "true fact" etc/.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Kef Schecter

    Is the inverse of a Contradiction. !T = C Logical Mathematics is the most basic course that everybody going for anything computer related as to do all the way back in college...

  • Lego (unregistered) in reply to RDP
    RDP:
    The first chicken hatched from an egg that was a mutant laid by a near-chicken. Evolution DOES answer the question of which came first, and it was the chicken-egg, not the chicken.

    Unless, of course, you subscribe to "intelligent design", which also answers the question. The chickens were created and placed here to "go forth, multiply, and replenish the earth", presumably with eggs.

  • opp (unregistered) in reply to nasch
    nasch:
    Barely adequate means barely good enough to be adequate. They're still either adequate, or not. You would not (or at least I would not) describe a developer as extremely adequate, or compare two developers and consider which is more adequate than the other. I would still consider adequacy an absolute.
    There is a spectrum of adequacy in general. The preception of adequacy depends on viewpoint and specifics (purpose, etc.) and even then the line is fuzzy. Therefore it is not absolute.

    While a magnet is adequate for writing bits on a hard drive, it really isn't adequate for writing bits on a hard drive.

  • duis (unregistered) in reply to Lego
    Lego:
    RDP:
    The first chicken hatched from an egg that was a mutant laid by a near-chicken. Evolution DOES answer the question of which came first, and it was the chicken-egg, not the chicken.

    Unless, of course, you subscribe to "intelligent design", which also answers the question. The chickens were created and placed here to "go forth, multiply, and replenish the earth", presumably with eggs.

    Evolution was created by man to eliminate the need for an "intelligent designer." No wonder Evolution gets the chicken-egg answer backwards.

  • TB (unregistered) in reply to Alargule
    Alargule:
    What's a tautology?
    It's when you pull on both ends of an ology.
  • Phlop (unregistered) in reply to Phlip

    That's a joke, right? I just assume that it is.

    If not: I think the column is unnecessary. Whatever check you want to do in advance, such checks can be done without the need of a BIT column that only allows one state. This snippet is a very good example: The check constraint enforces the value to be zero, otherwise the entity won't be accepted. But somewhere in the application's code the value had to be set by evaluating something else or it's just a plain flag which can be set by the user. In both cases the application could check it before inserting into or updating the database. This would keep things simple and prevent a waste of at least one byte per entity.

  • BBT (unregistered) in reply to GalacticCowboy
    GalacticCowboy:
    Precisely. Since we cannot go back millions of years and actually observe the process, all we can do is look at the result. However, evolution does not answer these "bigger-picture" questions - it describes what, not why.

    Actually, it's both.

    Evolution is what happened- we know by looking at data from the fossil record (and elsewhere) that organisms have slowly evolved over time from common ancestor(s). Evolution happened, that's the observed fact. The "why" is the theory side of the equation- mutation + natural selection. Evolution is an observed fact, and the theory on why it happened and continues to happen has been refined pretty thoroughly since Darwin first developed his theory of natural selection.

    Evolution is both a fact and a theory, a what and a why.

  • Marvin the Martian (unregistered) in reply to Eske Tavssen
    Eske Tavssen:
    It's a pleonasm when you do that thing with "true fact" etc/.
    Indeed, it's a pleonasm and not a tautology --- for a tautology either should be redundant, for a pleonasm only one. Pleonasm: "it's a true fact!" (delete "fact" and it's grammatically wrong); tautology: "it's done and settled!" (delete either and it's fine).
  • augue (unregistered) in reply to BBT
    BBT:
    Evolution is what happened- we know by looking at data from the fossil record (and elsewhere) that organisms have slowly evolved over time from common ancestor(s). Evolution happened, that's the observed fact. The "why" is the theory side of the equation- mutation + natural selection. Evolution is an observed fact, and the theory on why it happened and continues to happen has been refined pretty thoroughly since Darwin first developed his theory of natural selection.

    Evolution is both a fact and a theory, a what and a why.

    Evolution is only a theory. The fossil record is a fact.

    Looking at the fossil record, it is obvious that millions of creatures were buried in massive amounts of sediment that could only have been caused by an almost unimaginably large flood. The fossil record clearly shows that the creatures were buried in the sediment in the order of their lack of ability to avoid being buried. The DNA that has been recovered from the fossil record disputes the "common ancestor" theory.

  • oheso (unregistered)

    Lead it to wtf commenters to start with a quick, obviously ridiculous line of code and descend into a bunch of horseshit about evolution and creation.

  • finnw (unregistered)

    Reminds me of a trick I used to use in MSSQL2K when I wanted to enforce that there could only be one row (e.g. if that table contained global configuration options.) I would define a column ALWAYS_0 TINYINT NOT NULL DEFAULT (0), with a UNIQUE constraint plus a CHECK constraint (ALWAYS_0 = 0).

    Maybe I missed a cleaner way to do it, but I couldn't find anything in the MSDN documentation at the time.

  • azeez (unregistered) in reply to Phlip

    type of tautology

  • HillOdony (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.

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