Four-year-old boys in different states were involved in two separate shooting incidents in the last four days, with tragic results.
On Saturday, a Tennessee boy discharged a pistol at a sheriff's deputy's wife, killing her instantly. On Monday, a New Jersey boy left a 6-year-old neighbor in serious condition after a rifle fired at his head.
The Tennessee incident occurred during a family cookout at the home of Josephine and Daniel Fanning. He's a sheriff's deputy in Wilson County.
Deputy Fanning, 51, was in his bedroom showing his collection of weapons to a relative around 7:00 p.m. Saturday, when Josephine, 48, and the 4-year-old came into the room. The young boy grabbed a loaded handgun sitting on the bed and fired it once, striking and killing the deputy?s wife, according to Tennessee Bureau of Investigations spokeswoman Kristin Helm. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
The incident appears to be an accident and no one has been charged, but the investigation is still open, according to Helm.
?It?s a sad, sad set of circumstances,? Sheriff Robert Bryan told NBC affiliate WSMV in Nashville.?"Nobody is immune to this. Nobody. It doesn't matter if you are a law enforcement officer. These things can happen in second."
The 4-year-old is a relative of the deputy and his late wife, WSMV reported. The weapon used by the 4-year-old boy was not Deputy Fanning?s service weapon.
Another tragic incident took place in New Jersey on Monday evening, when a 4-year-old boy accidentally shot a 6-year-old neighbor with a rifle he found in his parents? home.
Police said the two boys were playing with a .22-caliber rifle outside the 4-year-old?s home in Toms River, N.J., when around 7:00 p.m. the gun discharged and struck the 6-year-old in the head, NBCNewYork.com reported.
The 4-year-old's parents reportedly heard the shot and called 911.
According to NBCNewYork.com, the 6-year-old is in serious condition at Jersey Shore Medical Center. An investigation is ongoing.
Hapyrus has launched FlyData, technology that enables it to automatically upload and migrate data to Amazon Redshift, the data-warehouse service that can scale to petabyte size. Amazon has claimed that Redshift will increase the speed of query performance when analyzing any size data set, using the same SQL-based business intelligence tools analysts use today. Hapyrus Co-Founder Koichi Fujikawa says their service, a big data router, makes Redshift even more effective and an alternative to Hadoop and Hive, the most widely recognized combination used for processing and analyzing data. After setup, FlyData runs in the background, moving the data to Redshift. Fujikawa said Hapyrus sets up a virtual private cloud on AWS. Customers can integrate their own virtual private network to transfer the data. Hapyrus competes against the likes of Informatica and Talend. Its current focus is on integrating with AWS, but going forward it will integrate data from a variety of sources. Fujikawa said in an email that Informatica and Talend provide complex data-integration solutions for big enterprise customers — mainly for on-premise systems. “We provide our data-integration service for cloud components like Redshift for any size of companies, from startups to relatively big organizations,” he said. Fujikawa says Redshift can be 10 times faster than?Hadoop?and Hive. Customers he hears from say they are seeking alternatives for the everyday kind of work that needs to get done. They can get stymied by the time and the expense that a query takes when using Hadoop and Hive. But there are also complexities with using Redshift, as Airbnb discovered: First, in order to load your data into Redshift, it has to be in either S3 or Dynamo DB already. The default data loading is single threaded and could take a long time to load all your data. We found breaking data into slices and loading them in parallel helps a lot. On its nerd blog, Airbnb said Redshift lacks some of the features that come with Hadoop. But data analysts are liking it so much that they want to use it pretty much exclusively. The Airbnb nerd blog makes the point that, in the end, Redshift and Hadoop may be more compatible than anything else. “Redshift, as a data warehouse, should be compared to Vertica, Greenplum, AsterData, Impala, Hadapt, and CitusData,” said Drawn to Scale Co-Founder Bradford Stephens in a recent email interview. “They’re just different things.” The smallest of startups take
The planet Mars lost most of its original atmosphere long ago when huge amounts of gas escaped into space, leaving only a wispy remnant behind, scientists say.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has revealed that a light variant of the gas argon is relatively depleted in Martian air, bolstering a longstanding belief that the Red Planet's current atmosphere ? which is just 1 percent as thick as that of Earth ? is a meager shell of its former self.
"We found arguably the clearest and most robust signature of atmospheric loss on Mars," said Sushil Atreya, a SAM co-investigator at the University of Michigan, in a statement.
Curiosity used its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument to sniff a sample of Martian air and measured the ratio of two different argon isotopes, which are varieties of an element that have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei. The instrument found that the lighter argon-36 is about four times as common as the heavier argon-38. [Latest Mars Photos by the Curiosity Rover]
That ratio is significantly lower than the ratio for the solar system at its birth, as estimated from argon-isotope measurements of the sun and Jupiter, researchers said. The new measurement is consistent with the idea that gas escaped from the top of the Martian atmosphere in the distant past, with lighter stuff leaving more easily than heavier atoms and molecules.
The Curiosity rover team reported the new results today (April 8) at the 2013 European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, where scientists also provided other updates about the rover's recent discoveries.
For example, Curiosity's onboard weather station, known as REMS (for Rover Environmental Monitoring Station) has shown that humidity varies from place to place along the robot's route inside Mars' huge Gale Crater. REMS' observations are the first systematic measurements of humidity on the Martian surface, researchers said.
And Curiosity's laser-shooting Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, has given the rover team insights about the coating of dust that gives the Red Planet its distinctive color.
"We knew that Mars is red because of iron oxides in the dust," ChemCam deputy principal Investigator Sylvestre Maurice, of the Research Institute of Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France, said in a statement. "ChemCam reveals a complex chemical composition of the dust that includes hydrogen, which could be in the form of hydroxyl groups or water molecules."
Curiosity landed inside Gale Crater on the night of Aug. 5, kicking off a two-year surface mission to determine if the area could ever have supported microbial life.
Rover scientists have already achieved this goal, announcing last month that an area called Yellowknife Bay was a wet, habitable environment billions of years ago. The team came to this conclusion after studying analyses Curiosity performed of material drilled from deep within a Yellowknife Bay outcrop in early February.
Researchers want Curiosity to drill another hole in the area, to confirm and build on what the rover has already found. But that won't happen until next month, as the team is sending no new commands to Curiosity for about four weeks, when Mars is passing behind the sun from Earth's perspective.
Our star can disrupt and degrade interplanetary communications in such an alignment, which comes along every 26 months or so and is known as a Mars solar conjunction. Until May 1, Curiosity will do stationary science work with REMS and two other instruments, its Radiation Assessment Detector and the water-hunting Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons, using commands sent up in March, scientists said.
"After conjunction, Curiosity will be drilling into another rock where the rover is now, but that target has not yet been selected. The science team will discuss this over the conjunction period," Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter?@michaeldwall.?Follow us?@Spacedotcom,?Facebook?or?Google+. Originally published on?SPACE.com.
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Apr. 8, 2013 ? A new discovery about the malaria-related parasite Toxoplasma gondii -- which can threaten babies, AIDS patients, the elderly and others with weakened immune function -- may help solve the mystery of how this single-celled parasite establishes life-long infections in people.
The study, led by a University of South Florida research team, places the blame squarely on a family of proteins, known as AP2 factors, which evolved from the regulators of flowering in plants.
In findings published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers demonstrate AP2 factors are instrumental in flipping a developmental "switch" that transitions the parasite from a rapidly dividing form destructive to healthy tissue to a chronic stage invisible to the immune system. They identified one factor, AP2IX-9, that appears to restrict development of Toxoplasma cysts that settle quietly in various tissues, most commonly the host's brain.
A better understanding of how the switch mechanism works may eventually lead to ways to block chronic Toxoplasma infections, said study principal investigator Michael White, PhD, professor of global health and molecular medicine at USF Health and a member of the Center of Drug Discovery and Innovation, a Florida Center of Excellence at USF.
White and his colleagues are among the world's leading experts in T. gondii, combining approaches from biochemistry, genetics and structural biology to look for new ways to combat the parasitic disease toxoplasmosis.
No drugs or vaccines currently exist to treat or prevent the chronic stage of the disease. The T. gondii parasites may remain invisible to the immune system for years and then reactivate when immunity wanes, boosting the risk for recurrent disease.
"The evolutionary story of Toxoplasma is fascinating," White said. "We were blown away to find that the AP2 factors controlling how a flower develops and how plants respond to poor soil and water conditions have been adapted to work within an intracellular human parasite."
Ages ago the ancestors of malaria parasites genetically merged with an ancestor of plants, and the primitive plant donated its AP2 factors to the future malaria family.
"Our study showed that, like the AP2 factors help a plant survive a stressful environment, the AP2 factors of T. gondii help the parasite decide when the time is right to grow or when to form a tissue cyst that may lie dormant in people for many years," White said.
Toxoplasmosis, the infection caused T. gondii, is commonly associated with the medical advice that pregnant women should avoid contact with litter boxes. That's because infected cats play a big role in spreading the disease. The tiny organism thrives in the guts of cats, producing countless egg-like cells that are passed along in the feces and can live in warm moist soil or water for months.
People can acquire toxoplasmosis several ways, usually by exposure to the feces of cats or other infected animals, by eating undercooked meat of infected animals, or drinking water contaminated with T. gondii.
Up to 30 percent of the world's population is estimated to be infected with the T. gondii parasite. In some parts of the world, including places where sanitation is poor and eating raw or undercooked meat is customary, nearly 100 percent of people carry the parasite, White said.
Few experience flu-like symptoms because the immune system usually prevents the parasite from causing illness, but for those who are immune deficient the consequences can be severe.
The disease may be deadly in AIDS patients, organ transplant recipients, patients receiving certain types of chemotherapy, and infants born to mothers infected with the parasite during or shortly before pregnancy. Recently, toxoplasmosis has been linked to mental illness, such as schizophrenia and other diseases of dementia, and changes in behavior.
Because it is common, complex and not easily killed with standard disinfection measures, the toxoplasma parasite is a potential weapon for bioterrorists, White added.
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BANGKOK (AP) ? Asian stock markets mostly gained Wednesday on the heels of a record high on Wall Street as traders waited for the latest Federal Reserve meeting minutes for insight into the U.S. economy's prospects.
Japan's stock market continued to rise on a wave of enthusiasm for the Bank of Japan's aggressive new approach to shaking the world's third-largest economy out of its two decade slump. The Nikkei 225 index in Tokyo rose 0.8 percent to 13,292.86.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng added 0.2 percent to 21,910.15. South Korea's Kospi advanced 0.8 percent to 1,935.74. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 fell 0.1 percent to 4,971.90.
Investors are looking to the release later in the day of a transcript of last month's Federal Reserve policy meeting for insights into the Fed's latest views on the health of the U.S. economy.
"Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said this week that while the U.S. economy was significantly stronger than it was four years ago, it has yet to recover back to an acceptable state of health," said analysts at DBS Bank Ltd. in Singapore.
Mainland Chinese stocks fell after China released trade data for March. Some experts said the official figures didn't match up with information available in Hong Kong about goods going in and out of China. The export figure, in particular, raised skepticism.
The General Administration of Customs said export growth slowed to 10 percent from the previous two-month period's 23.6 percent. However, Francis Lun, chief economist of GE Oriental Financial Group in Hong Kong, said the actual figure was probably closer to 2 to 3 percent but was inflated by exporters seeking government rebates.
"Exports on the surface look good. But there are many people casting doubt on the accuracy of these figures," Lun said.
The Shanghai Composite Index was down 0.3 percent at 2,218.76.
Japanese heavy industrial shares posted strong gains. Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp. jumped 6.8 percent. Kobe Steel rose 6.8 percent. Cosmo Oil soared 14.7 percent.
Australian surf wear retailer Billabong International dived 26 percent amid disappointment at its moves toward a $287 million takeover deal that is half of what was offered last December.
Apart from the Fed minutes, U.S. corporate earnings will draw attention later in the week. Banks Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase are among the blue chips scheduled to issue reports.
Wall Street stocks ended higher Monday, as investors waited to see whether big U.S. companies would deliver on expectations of strong earnings in 2013. The Dow Jones industrial average hit another record Tuesday, rising 0.4 percent to close at 14,673.46. The Standard & Poor's 500 added 0.4 percent, to 1,568.61. The Nasdaq composite gained 0.5 percent to 3,237.86.
Benchmark oil for May delivery was down 28 cents to $93.92 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract gained 84 cents to finish at $94.20 a barrel on the Nymex on Tuesday.
In currencies, the euro fell to $1.3088 from $1.3099 late Tuesday in New York. The dollar fell to 99.04 yen from 99.28 yen.
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Follow Pamela Sampson on Twitter at http://twitter.com/pamelasampson
FILE - In this Feb. 20, 1985 file photo, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher meets with her friend and political ally President Ronald Reagan during a visit to the White House in Washington. Thatcher, who led Britain for 11 years, died of a stroke Monday morning, April 8, 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, file)
FILE - In this Feb. 20, 1985 file photo, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher meets with her friend and political ally President Ronald Reagan during a visit to the White House in Washington. Thatcher, who led Britain for 11 years, died of a stroke Monday morning, April 8, 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, file)
FILE - In this July 18, 1987 file photo, President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz look on as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reads a statement outside the White House in Washington. Ex-spokesman Tim Bell says that Thatcher has died. She was 87. Bell said the woman known to friends and foes as "the Iron Lady" passed away Monday morning, April 8, 2013. (AP Photo/File)
FILE - In this June 23, 1982 file photo, President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher speak to reporters at the White House in Washington. Ex-spokesman Tim Bell says that Thatcher has died. She was 87. Bell said the woman known to friends and foes as "the Iron Lady" passed away Monday morning, April 8, 2013. (AP Photo/File)
FILE - In a June 10, 1984 file photo, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, second left, stands with, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, left, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, second right, and Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at London's Buckingham Palace, prior to a dinner for summit leaders. Thatchers former spokesman, Tim Bell, said that the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died Monday morning, April 8, 2013, of a stroke. She was 87. (AP Photo, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, two self-assured and firm-speaking conservatives, joined forces in the early 1980s and drastically changed the economic and political landscapes in both of their countries.
Their calls for more-austere government and lower taxes still resonate with conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. And their side-by-side standing up to Soviet communism is credited by those of all political stripes as hastening the end of the Cold War.
Thatcher died Monday in London of a stroke at 87.
The British prime minister and the American president had the kind of personal bond that is extremely rare at such high levels of power.
She was the first and last White House State Dinner guest during Reagan's eight-year presidency. And when he died in 2004, at 93 after suffering for years with Alzheimer's disease, a frail Thatcher attended his state funeral.
"They had similar backgrounds and in some ways could understand what the other was experiencing," said Heather Conley, director of Europe programs for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"And they had unique solidarity. They were tough, they were single-minded in many ways. Some have argued that that lack of complexity was their shortcoming. But in some ways, their focus was their strength," Conley said.
Reagan and Thatcher forged a special friendship "from the very beginning, the first time they met," former first lady Nancy Reagan said Monday.
"I loved it that she and Ronnie were as close as they were," she told Fox News.
Thatcher led Britain's Conservative Party to three election victories, governing from 1979 to 1990. Reagan was president from 1981 to 1989.
Both cut income taxes deeply and reined in national government spending. Both favored privatizing many government functions. Both stood up to organized labor. Both tackled inflation. Both were strong advocates of free markets and increased open international trade.
And both had a lasting ? and controversial ? impact on their own and opposing political parties in their respective nations.
Reagan's supply-side theories that lower taxes can stimulate growth ? like a rising tide that lifts all ships ? was derided as "Reaganomics" by critics and even once called "voodoo economics" by the Republican who went on to serve as his vice president and later as president himself, George H. W. Bush.
Even today, it is hard for American Republicans to support any increase in taxes ? a Reagan legacy that still makes it difficult for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground on tax legislation.
In Britain, Thatcher's policies were dubbed "Economic Thatcherism."
"Using deregulation and privatization, she restored Great Britain, once dismissed as the 'sick man of Europe,' to its position as a world power. Indeed, her policies led the way and inspired other nations ? including those in newly free Eastern Europe ? to adopt similar reforms to boost their economies," Ed Feulner, former president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote Monday in a tribute.
"An intrepid warrior for freedom and human dignity, Prime Minister Thatcher stood with her 'noble friend,' President Ronald Reagan, to confront the Soviet empire when it was at its peak," Feulner added.
Thatcher's efforts in advancing conservative causes and programs in Britain may have strengthened Reagan's hand in selling his conservative agenda at home, and vice versa.
Conservatives at the time viewed the political victories of the two allies as part of a worldwide trend moving in their direction ? a trend that has since run into a lot of bumps in the road.
Today's widely held warm and fuzzy image of the Reagan-Thatcher alliance of three decades ago may have been fortified and blurred somewhat by the passage of time.
"They were actually very similar, but very different from what many people today think they did," said Bruce Bartlett, an economic adviser to Reagan and Bush.
While Thatcher and Reagan were both economic conservatives at heart, "they were also much more pragmatic about what could be done" than many of today's conservatives, Bartlett said. "And they both accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state. They just tried to make it work better and reduce its cost."
While both are known for slashing taxes and cutting spending, Reagan also supported many later tax increases and backed raising the government's borrowing authority many times. Thatcher raised her nation's value-added tax.
The two had vastly different governing styles. Reagan projected radiant optimism and cheerful agreeability. Thatcher, who came to be known as the "Iron Lady," exhibited relentless determination.
And they sometimes disagreed. For instance, Thatcher didn't get the level of support she wanted from Reagan during the Falklands War crisis. And Thatcher was miffed and annoyed by Reagan's 1983 invasion of the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada.
Still, "she was a great partner with the United States," said former top State Department official Nicholas Burns, including being the one who persuaded Reagan that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was "someone we can do business with."
Apparently her warmth with Reagan didn't fully convey to Bush, Reagan's successor.
While she fully supported Bush on confronting Saddam Hussein after Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, she was a little concerned about his resolve. "So this was the reason I said, 'Look, George, this is no time to go wobbly," she later recalled.
The elder Bush issued a statement Monday declaring: "America has lost one of the staunchest allies we have ever known."
___
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Maybe it's because everyone's sick of fighting over gay marriage. Maybe it's because our rightblogger friends' tactic of Adam-and-Steving the issue hasn't helped their increasingly hopeless cause, even within the Republican Party. In any case some of the brethren are working a new angle.
Well, not totally new. There has long been a body of conservative thought about how it's actually straight marriage that needs fixing, and in these dark days for the anti-gay cause, that kind of thinking is catching on with rightbloggers. The basic premise: Straights better marry fast and early, because something something values.
Conservatives have been concerned with declining marriage rates for ages -- usually on goddamn-hippies, too-much-sex grounds. Some of them have called for laws to be changed to redress the balance. They've denounced no-fault divorce, for example, on the grounds that marriages are a pure social good even when they're miserably unhappy. "No-fault divorce laws were a mistake that encouraged marital irresponsibility," wrote some guy who's President of one of the hundreds of rightwing organizations that have "Marriage" in the title. "No Fault Divorce Was the Bullet to the Brain of Marriage," cried Mark Shea.
At World magazine, Alisa Harris told the heartbreaking story of a couple that got divorced, thereby transferring misery from the wife to the husband, which Harris seemed to find unfair; "It's just too easy [to divorce]," the husband told Harris. "She could literally change her life overnight." We can see how conservatives would find this frustrating.
Conservatives have even been willing to let the evil federal government intervene to encourage marriage, at least when they're in charge, as with George W. Bush's $1.5 billion "promotion of marriage" program in 2004, an expenditure which, so far as we remember, none of the currently budget-conscious Republicans complained about at the time.
Some of the brethren have defended such programs on the grounds that they're cost-effective -- because marriage by itself makes people rich. In 2002 small-government conservative Rich Lowry of National Review criticized a welfare bill that would "pay -- and reward -- single moms for being single moms"; if we stopped paying them, Lowry reasoned, they might get married, and that would be super: "If [unwed fathers] were to marry the mothers of their children, 75 percent of the mothers would be lifted out of poverty," he claimed. "In roughly two-thirds of the cases, the mothers would be lifted out of poverty without even having to work themselves." Lifted out of poverty without working? They should bottle this "marriage" stuff!
This idea has persisted, even, we might say, metastasized; when Katie Roiphe postulated in 2012 on a future world without marriage, at National Review Heather Mac Donald snarled that "actually, we know already" what such a world would be like -- "It's called the ghetto." So, just as marriage can make everyone rich, lack of marriage can make everyone poor. It's that powerful!
In recent years, the idea that marriage makes you rich has become an important part of the marriage-mania schtick -- as has a pretense, calculated to draw in more soft-hearted auditors, of concern for the poor.
Take Charles Murray. He's the author of The Bell Curve, a book beloved of rightbloggers because it implies black people are intellectually inferior to white people. This may be why, when Murray considered the fate of America's under-married working class in his 2012 book Coming Apart, he said he had deliberately left black people out of his projections "as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the U.S. have become," he said. Yeah, we get it, buddy.
Murray noticed that wealthier Americans were still getting married before having kids, while poorer Americans were not. But unlike you and us, Murray dismissed the idea that this had anything to do with the drastically reduced economic opportunities for blue-collar workers these days; rather, he thought it was because poor people didn't know that marriage and hard work are good for you -- because richer Americans had stopped telling them so, out of a "condescending 'nonjudgmentalism.'"
Murray suggested "the new upper class must start preaching what it practices," i.e. wealthier Americans should go out among the poor and prosletyze for "marriage and the work ethic," i.e., nag them about it, which if effective would then make everybody rich, or at least the white people.
Murray seems to have been inspired by W. Bradford Wilcox, director of something called the National Marriage Project, who said in 2010 that "family breakdown inhibits the accumulation of assets" -- that is, unwed parenthood leads to poverty, not the other way around.
Wilcox at least had a more entertaining, if no more believable, reason for the downtick in marriage than Murray: he said the lower classes had fallen victim to a sentimental idea about marriage -- a "soul mate" model rather than a more rugged "'institutional' model" (why, it even sounds like something used in factories!). "More and more Americans think that marriage is about an intense and fulfilling couple-focused relationship," complained Wilcox, which is ridiculous -- it's about pooping out kids and working till you have a stroke. But the poor insist on a soul mate thing they can't afford, said Wilcox, and since the "emotional and sexual intensity of the couple relationship waxes and wanes," they naturally wind up unmarried with squalling brats in a trailer, unlike those who never expected to quote-unquote love their partners.
Like Murray, Wilcox believed in nagging -- "highly educated Americans," he said, "need to put their privilege in service of the public good by doing a better job of extending their marriage mindset to the rest of America." He didn't say how it would work, but we like to think he sent troupes of pro-marriage troubadours to wander the hinterlands, singing songs of conjugal wealth transference.
Flash forward to 2013: As they found themselves in a post-gay-marriage-acceptance landscape, some rightbloggers who don't normally go on about straight marriage have been taking up the subject -- and from their writings we get the distinct sense that they don't mind switching targets as long as they still get to hector somebody about their personal lives.
Reihan Salam, one of the young rightbloggers promoted by the praise of David Brooks and others, took a Wilcoxian view: Degenerate moderns, he complained, had abandoned a "conjugal view of marriage, in which procreation and lifelong marital fidelity are central," and adopted one whereby "children, once at the center of marriage, have now become negotiable, and what used to be negotiable -- love, companionship, sex -- has moved to the center."
So, said Salam, maybe conservatives should forget about gay marriage and get to work on straight marriage. His buddy David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute of Buzzword Buzzword -- who Salam said has "emerged as one of the leading critics of same-sex civil marriages," so you know he's hardcore -- had in a recent op-ed "called for a kind of truce. 'Instead of fighting gay marriage,' he wrote, 'I'd like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same.'" Gays and straights, scolding together! Unfortunately, Salam reported, "Many of Blankenhorn's erstwhile allies saw his op-ed as a capitulation, and as a result the Institute for American Values lost several members of its board." Maybe we should build him a statue.
At The Umlaut, Eli Dourado offered a Murrayesque explanation for why the poor weren't getting married: "A marriage is like a job -- financially lucrative, but inconvenient at times," he said, "so it could make sense that those who are especially averse to inconvenience would forgo both jobs and marriages and end up poor." Those marriage-shirking poors! Maybe this calls for a government marriage-training program? Doubtful -- in Dourado's view, government intervention has only made the situation worse: "Welfare policy has reduced the opportunity cost of childbearing out of wedlock for the poor," he wrote; "consequently, it makes sense that the poor are doing more of it." Maybe if we made them sing hymns first...
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, who normally focuses on how everything is Obama's fault, also caught marriage fever, telling readers of USA Today that "marriage inequality is one of the biggest things making people less equal, accounting for as much as 40% of the difference in incomes." (Lest you question his sincerity, Reynolds added, "I've been supporting gay marriage for a long time --? much, much longer than Barack Obama." Ah, good for him, he got it in there!)
ALMATY (Reuters) - World powers and Iran failed again to end the deadlock in a decade-old dispute over Tehran's nuclear program in talks that ended in Kazakhstan on Saturday, prolonging a standoff that could yet spiral into a new Middle East war.
No new talks were scheduled but big power negotiators, who earlier this year were insisting that time was running out, were at pains to say the diplomatic process would continue.
Iran's critics accuse it of covertly seeking the means to produce nuclear bombs. Israel, widely believed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, sees Iran's nuclear program as a potential threat to its existence.
With a presidential election due in Iran in June, scope for a breakthrough at the two-day meeting in Almaty was slim.
European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, the powers' chief negotiator, said long discussions had not bridged the differences between the two sides.
"It became clear that our positions remain far apart," Ashton, who represents the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany in talks with Iran, told a news conference.
In the meeting, the powers were asking Iran to suspend its most sensitive uranium-enrichment work in return for modest relief from international sanctions, an offer Iran did not accept.
"The Iranians indicated readiness to take some steps but they were small," one Western diplomat said.
Iran says its nuclear work is entirely peaceful and that it is Israel's assumed atomic arsenal that threatens peace.
"NO BREAKDOWN"
A senior U.S. official said there had been no breakdown in the negotiations and suggested that a willingness by Iranian negotiators to engage in detailed dialogue about the six nations' proposal was the most useful sign in years.
"There may not have been a breakthrough but there also was not a breakdown," the official, who requested anonymity, said. "Our intention is to proceed," the official added, referring to the powers' commitment to further diplomatic efforts.
Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili acknowledged a gap in positions between the two sides.
"We proposed our plan of action and the other party was not ready and they asked for some time to study the idea," he told a separate news conference, referring to Tehran's own proposals.
Iran says it is only refining uranium to power a planned network of nuclear energy plants and for medical purposes.
Some diplomats and experts have said Iran's June presidential election fuels uncertainty in the West over the Islamic Republic's strategy for nuclear diplomacy.
The U.S. official did not rule out that new talks could take place before the vote. But first the six powers would have to decide what steps, if any, to take to energize diplomacy.
OPTIONS
Strengthening economic sanctions, which now target Iran's vital oil industry and its banking sector, is one likely option.
"We need to absorb and digest what we heard," the official said. "And decide what makes best sense on the way forward."
Israel's Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz warned in a statement that Iran was trying to use the negotiations to gain time to advance its uranium enrichment programme.
"The Iranians are using this round of talks to pave the way to a nuclear bomb," Steinitz said, urging a more aggressive stance to make it "unequivocally clear to the Iranians that the negotiation games are finished."
Shashank Joshi, a senior fellow and Middle East specialist at the Royal United Services Institute, said: "I do not think the risk of war has substantially increased.
"The priority for both sides is to keep the diplomatic track alive until after the Iranian presidential elections."
Ashton said that for the first time there had been a "real back and forth between us when were able to discuss details ... To that extent, that has been a very important element"
But, she added: "What matters in the end is substance."
The six powers tried to persuade Iran to abandon its higher-grade uranium enrichment, as a first step to a broader deal. Refined uranium can be used to power atomic reactors, Iran's stated aim, or provide material for weapons if processed more.
Iran, which denies seeking nuclear weapons, wants major economic sanctions - including on its oil exports and banks - lifted and its right to enrich uranium publicly recognized.
Diplomats said one area where Iranian negotiators appeared willing to cede some ground was the demand that Tehran ship out some of its stockpile of 20 percent uranium, the sensitive product that powers worry represents an important step on route to making weapons-grade material.
One way to address the stocks could be for Iran to speed up conversion of the higher-grade uranium into reactor fuel. But that alone would not allay international concerns.
Jalili said it was Iran's "inalienable" right to refine uranium but that the activity could still be a subject for confidence-building cooperation. He did not elaborate.
The talks were held against a backdrop of flaring tension between big powers and North Korea, which like Iran is defying international demands to curb its nuclear program.
(Additional reporting by Zahra Hosseinian in Zurich, Dmitry Solovyov in Almaty,; Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem and Fredrik Dahl in Vienna; Editing by Stephen Powell)
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ALMATY, Kazakhstan (AP) ? Iran and six world powers are meeting for a second day in attempts to find common ground over concerns that Tehran's nuclear program might be used to make weapons.
Chances of progress at Saturday's session are unclear, however, after a first round ended with the two sides unable to reduce substantial differences.
The six insist Iran cut back on its highest grade uranium enrichment production and stockpile, fearing Tehran will divert it from making nuclear fuel to form the material used in the core of nuclear warhead.
Iran insists it has a right to enrich but says it has no interest to use the technology to make weapons. It wants more sanctions relief than the six are offering for any concessions on its part.
Sales at Charlotte-based department store company Belk rose 7?percent in 2012 compared with the previous year, the company said Thursday.
Belk executives attributed much of the increase to booming online sales and an extra week in the 2012 fiscal year. Total sales at the company rose to $3.96 billion, up from $3.7 billion in 2011. Profits increased more slowly, rising just under 3 percent to $188?million.
The company has invested $600 million in improving its information technology and e-commerce, and last year opened a 515,000-square-foot order distribution center in Jonesville, S.C. Belk trailed its competitors in establishing a strong online business, but said the company?s efforts are now paying off.
Online sales increased 87 percent compared to 2011. They remained a small portion of the company?s overall revenue, however, making up about 3.4?percent of sales.
Belk said that increasing online sales are also driving more in-person customer visits to its stores. Sales at Belk stores open for a year or more, considered a key measure of a retailer?s health, rose 6.3 percent.
Belk operates more than 300 department stores, and is the largest privately held department store in the nation. Much of the company?s stock is still held by the Belk family.
The board of directors also has authorized a $100-million stock buyback.
14-year-old Santiago Gonzalez is?profiled in a recent episode of PRODIGIES. Here?s more from THNKR:
Fourteen-year-old programmer and software developer Santiago Gonzalez might just be the next Steve Jobs. He already has 15 iOS apps to his name and dreams of designing for Apple. At age 12, Santiago became a full-time college student and is on track to earn his bachelor?s degree in computer science and electrical engineering by age 16. By 17, when most teenagers are excited to just have their driver?s license, Santiago will have his masters degree.
A self-professed computer nerd, Santiago is fluent in a dozen different programming languages and thousands of people have downloaded his apps for the Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Learn how Santiago?s parents overcame a rigid school system that left their son intellectually stifled and depressed and instead followed an unconventional pathway to nurture his incredible gifts. Santiago?s story is truly inspiring and his family?s experience provides a powerful model for parents of exceptionally gifted children.
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Alright, so I got the coin change problem working just fine, but I can't seem to keep track of the used coins. I get incorrect values since I went about it in a recursive manner, so when values are stored in the array, it's not the correct index.
I get the following output from the entire program: Minimum number of coins needed to make change for $12.00: 2 --[ The table for the minimum number of coins at each denomination ]-- 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 1 7 2 8 3 9 4 10 1 11 2 12 2 0 : {0, 0, 0, 0, 0} 1 : {1, 0, 0, 0, 0} 2 : {10, 1, 6, 6, 1} 3 : {1, 1, 1, 1, 10} 4 : {6, 1, 10, 6, 1} 5 : {6, 1, 6, 1, 6} 6 : {1, 0, 0, 0, 0} 7 : {0, 0, 0, 0, 0} 8 : {0, 0, 0, 0, 0} 9 : {0, 0, 0, 0, 0} 10 : {0, 0, 0, 0, 0} 11 : {0, 0, 0, 0, 0} 12 : {0, 0, 0, 0, 0}
And here is my code:
#include <iostream> #include <iomanip> #include <string> using namespace std; #define INF 10000 // A large value that denotes infinity /* Globals, Shouldn't be used, but makes my life easier for the mean time */ int denominations[3]; int change(int); void vals(); int c[13][5] = {{0}, {0}}; int v[13] = {0}; int j = 2, k = 0; int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { int coin = 12; int i = 0; denominations[0] = 1; denominations[1] = 6; denominations[2] = 10; for(i = 0; i < 13; i++) v[i] = INF; v[0] = 0; c[1][0] = v[1] = 1; cout << "Minimum number of coins needed to make change for $12.00: " << change(coin) << endl; cout << "--[ The table for the minimum number of coins at each denomination ]--" << endl; for(i = 0; i < 13; i++) cout << i << "\t" << v[i] << endl; vals(); cin.get(); }
int change(int init_val) { int test = INF, min = INF, remaining = 0, i = 0; if(init_val > 1) { for(i = 2; i >= 0; i--) { if(init_val >= denominations[i]) { remaining = init_val - denominations[i]; c[j][k] = denominations[i]; k++; if(v[remaining] != INF) { test = 1 + v[remaining]; } else if(v[remaining] == INF) { test = 1 + change(remaining); } if(test <= min) { min = test; } } } v[init_val] = min; return v[init_val]; } if(init_val == 1) { min = v[1]; test = 1; j++; return v[1]; } if(init_val == 0) { min = v[0]; test = 0; k = 0; j++; return v[0]; } }
Any help or pushes in the correct direction would be greatly appreciated.
This post has been edited by IngeniousHax: Today, 06:23 PM
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Replies To: Modify coin change to keep track of used coins?
#2 andrewsw ?
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Re: Modify coin change to keep track of used coins?
Posted Today, 06:31 PM
What "coin change problem" ??
#3 IngeniousHax ?
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Re: Modify coin change to keep track of used coins?
Posted Today, 06:41 PM
It's a dynamic programming approach to making change for some value using the least amount of denominations possible, given that you have an infinite supply of each denomination.
This post has been edited by IngeniousHax: Today, 06:41 PM
Remote controlled lawnmowers are far from a new idea. People have been cutting grass from the comfort of a lawn chair for years now. But what if you needed to clear the side of a steep hill, or obliterate some nasty weeds without ever getting up? That's when you'll need the intimidating half-tank half-mower called the TREX. More »
(Reuters) - Hundreds of fast-food restaurant workers in New York City turned out for protests on Thursday in what organizers said would be their largest rally yet for better pay.
Employees from familiar chains such as McDonald's Corp, Burger King and Yum Inc's KFC are seeking to roughly double their hourly wage to $15. They also say they want the right to form a union without interference.
Winning such concessions will be an uphill battle. Low-wage, low-skill workers lack political clout and face significantly higher unemployment than college graduates.
"It's a long fight. We have to stick together if we're going to have a chance," said Joseph Barrera, 22, who has worked at a Brooklyn KFC restaurant for the past 10 months.
Organizers estimated that there are 50,000 fast-food workers in New York City who earn $10,000 to $18,000 per year
Events kicked off at a McDonald's in midtown Manhattan, where roughly 100 people - including supporters bused in from Washington, DC - rallied. Roughly the same number of protesters clogged the entrance of a Wendy's restaurant near Penn Station at noon.
As many as 400 workers from more than five dozen restaurants around New York City have committed to turn out for protests planned at various locations throughout the day, said Jonathan Westin, director of Fast Food Forward, which organized Thursday's actions and is backed by labor, community and religious groups.
That turnout would be twice as large as in November, when the city's fast-food workers also walked off the job, Westin said.
"It's going to be difficult for these businesses to operate this time," said Westin.
That claim was in dispute, though. Protesters said their walk-out prevented a Burger King restaurant in Brooklyn from opening, but the company said it was only delayed 15 minutes.
FLIPPING AND FRYING
The nearly $200 billion U.S. fast-food industry long has been known as an employer of teenagers and students.
But the 18-month "Great Recession" that began in December 2007 forced more adults to seek part-time, largely minimum wage work flipping burgers and manning fryers.
Burger King and McDonald's said in statements to Reuters that most restaurants in their chains are independently owned and operated, and offer compensation consistent with industry standards.
U.S. President Barack Obama proposed raising the federal minimum wage in his State of the Union address as a way to help lift some workers out of poverty. Critics, including the restaurant industry, say such a move would kill jobs by burdening small businesses with higher costs.
The state of New York recently passed a budget that includes plans to raise the state minimum wage to $9 an hour by the end of 2015.
But even with that hike, New York's minimum wage would remain below the roughly $11 hourly pay needed to lift a family of four above the poverty line.
"Anywhere where the cost of living is very, very high, $9 is not enough. Everyone should be able to make a living wage," said Barrera, who is paid the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
(Additional reporting by Lucas Jackson and Phil Wahba in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Leslie Gevirtz)
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) ? A murder suspect being interviewed at the Jackson, Miss., police headquarters shot a detective Thursday and those who came to investigate the gunfire found both men dead, authorities said.
The suspect was being questioned on the third floor of the building when the shooting happened, said Police Chief Rebecca Coleman. Police did not release any details on the sequence of what happened.
The officer was identified as Det. Eric Smith, 40, who was assigned to the Robbery-Homicide Division and had been with the department since 1995.
Late Thursday, police identified the murder suspect as Jeremy Powell, 23. Both the detective and the suspect had been shot multiple times.
Police said Powell was in the process of being arrested in the killing Monday of Christopher Alexander. News outlets reported that the 20-year-old Alexander's body was found Monday near a Jackson street and he had been stabbed in the neck.
City police spokesman Chris Mims described Smith as "a decorated detective and well-respected law-enforcement person throughout the state of Mississippi."
"He was in the processing of questioning that suspect," Mims said of the detective. "Other officers in the police department heard gunshots ring out and when they went to the interview room, discovered that both the suspect and the detective were deceased."
The police headquarters was on lockdown Thursday night, Mims said.
Jackson City Councilman Chokwe Lumumba was in police headquarters with the mayor afterward and said Smith was shot by the suspect. He did not know how the suspect ended up dead.
"I understand there may have been more than one police officer in the room," Lumumba said outside the police building.
The headquarters was blocked off and surrounded by crime tape. Law enforcement and Jackson city officials rushed to the scene.
Mims said the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation has taken over the investigation, which is standard procedure.
"This is a very tragic situation," he said. "The entire city of Jackson and the Jackson Police Department family are all hurting. We are asking for the public's patience while we find out why this tragic incident happened and how it happened."
At least 30 Jackson Police and Hines County Sheriff's office vehicles were haphazardly parked across multiple, major downtown Jackson streets. Officers were visibly shaken, wiping their eyes, and Assistant Chief Lee Vance could be seen comforting Chief Rebecca Coleman at one point, putting his arm around her shoulder outside the building. A 2008 photo on the department's website shows a smiling, fit Smith, in a shirt and tie, accepting a certificate of commendation on behalf of a detective, with Coleman and Vance on each side of him.
Lumumba, who is a lawyer, said Smith was fairly new to being a homicide detective and that he first met Smith in the late 1990s. The then-officer had testified on some of Lumumba's cases.
"I had great respect for his work and his integrity," Lumumba said. He added that Smith's stepson had played basketball on an Amateur Athletic Union team that Lumumba worked with.
"Eric helped take young men all over the country," the councilman said. "He's a real man in every sense of the word."
Mayor Harvey Johnson, Jr. also addressed the officer's death.
"Detective Smith was an excellent officer in all respects," the mayor said. "I want everyone to keep the Smith family in their prayers and in their thoughts."
Lumumba said that Smith was married and had another son.
A monument outside police headquarters lists 14 officers killed in the line of duty ? before today.
____
Mohr reported from Brandon, Miss. AP writer Jackie Quinn reported from Washington.
Hillary Clinton speaks in Washington on Tuesday. (Cliff Owen/AP)
It?s been just two months since Hillary Clinton left her post as President Barack Obama?s secretary of state. But as she re-emerges this week to deliver a pair of speeches honoring women's contributions to public life, it's as if the political world hadn?t seen her in ages.
Clinton's appearance on Friday morning at media maven Tina Brown's Women of the World summit in New York?coming just three days after an appearance at a gala honoring women in leadership in Washington?looks to only further intensify the unofficial parlor game of political junkies and the media just under 43 months until Election Day 2016: Will she run for president again?
Clinton has repeatedly said she has no plans for another White House run, but hasn?t quite ruled it out. And as a result, every move she makes has been viewed through the prism of a potential candidacy.
Her decision to open what aides described as a ?transition? office in Washington after leaving the Obama administration prompted questions about her political future. As did a video released last month by the Human Rights Campaign, in which the former first lady and New York senator publicly backed same-sex marriage.
On Thursday, it was announced that she's writing a book about her time as secretary of state set to be published in 2014?just ahead of the frenzy of the next presidential campaign. Add to that the scrutiny over her decision to give one of her first paid appearances on the speaking circuit later this month in Dallas?the same day former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a potential 2016 rival, is set to appear nearby on a book tour.
Meanwhile, virtually every aspect of her Tuesday appearance at a Kennedy Center gala in Washington was scrutinized for potential political clues. Commentators on the cable news networks noted that her blond hair was several inches shorter. The black hipster glasses she wore in the final weeks of her tenure at the State Department when she was recovering from a concussion were gone.
And, as CNN reported, she looked ?refreshed??perhaps a given after a whirlwind four years as Obama?s chief overseas envoy that took her around the world and back again literally every month.
People in Hillaryland?as her orbit has been repeatedly referred to?haven?t encouraged the frenzy over questions about her political future, insisting people are getting ahead of themselves in considering Clinton a 2016 candidate. But they haven?t exactly discouraged it either?as aides and those closest to Clinton have offered little to no information about how she has spent her time out of the public eye or even what her public speeches will be about.
Asked about her speech in New York and her upcoming gig in Dallas, Philippe Reines, Clinton?s longtime spokesman, replied in an email, ?There?s not a whole lot to tell.?
It's not surprising that Clinton is wary of showing her cards too soon. When she launched her campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination in early 2007, Clinton entered the race with an aura of inevitability. But that collapsed when Obama began his competing bid, leading to a long and divisive primary battle that some Clinton insiders are still bitter about.
Clinton is said to be cautious about putting herself in that position again. And while her camp won't put a timeline on her decision, Democratic operatives have privately said they expect she will delay her 2016 decision as long as possible?not unlike Mitt Romney, who lost a bid for the GOP nomination in 2008 but began unofficially running for the party's 2012 nod long before formally entering the race.
But it's unclear how long Clinton can actually delay. Already, her indecision is said to be having an impact on other Democrats eying the race?including Vice President Joe Biden, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, all of whom are looking to court party donors in advance of what will be an expensive race.
Clinton?s ambiguity about her future hasn?t discouraged her most fervent supporters from laying the groundwork for her potential White House run. At least three political committees have launched in recent months to raise funds and organize grass-roots activity around a Clinton 2016 campaign?including Ready for Hillary, which held a 50-person rally outside Clinton?s Washington speech and is planning to hold a similar gathering on Friday in New York.
The group, which filed as a super PAC with the Federal Election Commission in January and launched its official website this week, is being run by several former Clinton aides?including Matt Felan, who was deputy national finance director for Clinton?s 2008 presidential campaign.
Seth Bringman, a former Clinton spokesman who is the group?s communications director, says Ready for Hillary has already seen strong financial support from a network of longtime Clinton donors?though he declined to say how much the group has raised or plans to raise. He said the money will be spent, in part, to ?defend her from attacks? while Clinton determines her political future.
?This is really about organizing support and having that in place for when or if she decides to run,? Bringman said. ?We?ll be ready.?
He was careful to note that the group was complying with election laws that prohibit coordination between potential candidates and their campaigns and independent committees spending money on their behalf. But asked if the group would exist if Clinton had suggested publicly or through intermediaries that she didn?t want people rallying around a potential 2016 bid, Bringman laughed.
?Her supporters would still be very vocal,? Bringman replied. ?Regardless of what she might say about her interest in running for president, I think her supporters would still be out there encouraging her to change her mind.?
A father and son from Austin say they've just sold their 2007 Porsche Cayman S for approximately 300 Bitcoins.
That's $39,000 (not including a 0.99 percent processing fee).
Blane, an IT specialist and software engineer, and his father say they sold the car last night to an anonymous buyer who cashed out his Bitcoins using the site Bitpay. (They asked us not to use their last name.)
We stumbled upon their claim in a Bitcoin discussion forum, and were able to reach out to them directly via email.
Blane emailed us two screenshots he says prove the transaction took place:
Blane
And the page they'd set up showing the car, as well as a Harley, on offer:
Blane
According to Blane,?his father created a Cragslist ad for the car a couple of months ago, and there was immediate interest:
...we received a few offers on the way up, one for 1000 bitcoins when they were $26 a piece, and interest really spiked once we started nearing $100 a coin. In the end, we had four potential buyers ready to pick up the car at around 400 BTC, the first user to make their way to Austin got the car.
Reached by phone, Blane's?father said the buyer, who wishes to remain anonymous, is a "young businessman" not from Texas who "does a number of things, from construction to running services in the food and beverage industry."?
He sent a surrogate to complete the transaction. From Blane:?
...all four of us were on the phone, me, father, buyer and surrogate while he sent the coins. We watched the transaction make its way through the network over a span of about 30 minutes , then he signed a bill of sale and passed on the title. ?
Blane and his father described the deal as a watershed moment both for themselves and Bitcoin in general. They say?they're now considering opening an online business devoted to selling cars for bitcoins. ?
Hapyrus has launched FlyData, technology that enables it to automatically upload and migrate data to Amazon Redshift, the data-warehouse service that can scale to petabyte size. Amazon has claimed that Redshift will increase the speed of query performance when analyzing any size data set, using the same SQL-based business intelligence tools analysts use today. Hapyrus Co-Founder Koichi Fujikawa says their service, a big data router, makes Redshift even more effective and an alternative to Hadoop and Hive, the most widely recognized combination used for processing and analyzing data. After setup, FlyData runs in the background, moving the data to Redshift. Fujikawa said Hapyrus sets up a virtual private cloud on AWS. Customers can integrate their own virtual private network to transfer the data. Hapyrus competes against the likes of Informatica and Talend. Its current focus is on integrating with AWS, but going forward it will integrate data from a variety of sources. Fujikawa said in an email that Informatica and Talend provide complex data-integration solutions for big enterprise customers — mainly for on-premise systems. “We provide our data-integration service for cloud components like Redshift for any size of companies, from startups to relatively big organizations,” he said. Fujikawa says Redshift can be 10 times faster than?Hadoop?and Hive. Customers he hears from say they are seeking alternatives for the everyday kind of work that needs to get done. They can get stymied by the time and the expense that a query takes when using Hadoop and Hive. But there are also complexities with using Redshift, as Airbnb discovered: First, in order to load your data into Redshift, it has to be in either S3 or Dynamo DB already. The default data loading is single threaded and could take a long time to load all your data. We found breaking data into slices and loading them in parallel helps a lot. On its nerd blog, Airbnb said Redshift lacks some of the features that come with Hadoop. But data analysts are liking it so much that they want to use it pretty much exclusively. The Airbnb nerd blog makes the point that, in the end, Redshift and Hadoop may be more compatible than anything else. “Redshift, as a data warehouse, should be compared to Vertica, Greenplum, AsterData, Impala, Hadapt, and CitusData,” said Drawn to Scale Co-Founder Bradford Stephens in a recent email interview. “They’re just different things.” The smallest of startups take
Maybe it's because everyone's sick of fighting over gay marriage. Maybe it's because our rightblogger friends' tactic of Adam-and-Steving the issue hasn't helped their increasingly hopeless cause, even within the Republican Party. In any case some of the brethren are working a new angle. 
