Huge telco embezzlement scheme

Eric Lichtblau's article in the New York Times, Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool, tells us that telecoms are charging the police fees to search their computerized records. There are several problems with this.

1. This is embezzlement. Businesses are charging the state for "services" that are their public duty to perform. Your taxes are going straight to someone's pocket.
2. The expectation of a profit establishes an incentive against cooperating with the state in crime investigations.
3. This arrangement is an agreement between business and state. It can be assumed that the state is not following the legal process of getting warrants for these searches, which would force the business to release the information.
4. It can also be assumed that the state is collecting information that it could not obtain a warrant for and has no right to see.

Is "One Language To Rule Them All" a possibility?

Imagine a highly-abstract, highly-verbose, machine-readable superlanguage that supports a superset of the features available in the common general-purpose object-oriented languages like C++, Java, Python, Perl, Javascript, and PHP.

Instead of programming code being interpreted or compiled down to a base machine language, it is instead decompiled upward to the more abstract language. This more abstract language is later compiled down to JVM or machine code, and can also be compiled downward to any of the supported input languages.
( Read more... )

Thoughts on databases, to no effect

The other day I had a wild idea about database design.

Indexes should be on constraints rather than on columns.

It just so happens that equality (select where x=y) is the most commonly needed constraint, so conventional indexes work for most needs.

What new features could be added to a database engine with this concept in mind? ( Read more... )