Comment Re:Snowden's copies? (Score 1) 231
Are you just as histrionic over Lois Lerner's missing emails?
Comment Re:The Existence of a "United States of America" (Score 1) 231
That was awful. Pick up just about any Harry Turtledove book for a more thoughtful take on the subject.
Comment Re:Useless coins (Score 1) 753
You need one of those gay European man purses to carry around all your loose change. Then it makes sense, I suppose.
Scotland Could Become Home To Britain's First Spaceport 151
An anonymous reader writes Scotland could take a giant leap for mankind by becoming the home of Britain's first spaceport. UK Government ministers will announce on Tuesday eight potential sites for a base for sending rockets and tourists into orbit. RAF bases at Kinloss and Leuchars are believed to be among contenders for the spaceport, which would open in 2018 and be Britain's answer to Cape Canaveral. Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said: "I am delighted that the government is pushing forward with its ambitious plans to open a spaceport in the UK by 2018. Spaceports will be key to us opening up the final frontier of commercial space travel. Scotland has a proud association with space exploration. We celebrated Neil Armstrong's Scottish ancestry when he became the first man on the Moon and only last week an amazing Scottish company was responsible for building the UK Space Agency's first satellite. The UK space industry is one of our great success stories and I am sure there will be a role for Scotland to play in the future."
Walter Munk's Astonishing Wave-Tracking Experiment 55
An anonymous reader writes in with a look at a scientist's interesting wave-tracking experiment and the incredible journeys that waves make. His name is Walter Munk, now in his 90s and a professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. About 60 years ago, he was anchored off Guadalupe Island, on Mexico's west coast, watching swells come in, and using an equation that he and others had devised to plot a wave's trajectory backward in time, he plotted the probable origins of those swells. But the answer he got was so startling, so over-the-top improbable, that he thought, "No, there must be something wrong." His equations said that the swells hitting beaches In Mexico began some 9,000 miles away — somewhere in the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean, near Antarctica. "Could it be?" he wrote in an autobiographical sketch. Could a storm half way across the world produce a patch of moving water that traveled from near the South Pole, up past Australia, then past New Zealand, then across the vast expanse of the Pacific, arriving still intact – at a beach off Mexico? He decided to find out for himself. That is why, in 1957, Walter Munk designed a global, real life, wave-watching experiment.
Comment wrong (Score 1) 34
That Left vs. Right is only or mostly a distraction is a Leftie/Libertarian tactic. They are of course highly distinctly opposing philosophies, even if the extreme divide between the philosophies is not fully represented in Congress.
I don't know about the banks, but corporations are only trying to buy favor in regulations and subsidies, so that they can be more successful. This is tyranny in that it's anti-competitive and hurts the average citizen, but is nowhere near where the vast majority of the tyranny we're experiencing nowadays is coming from: The GOP's progressivism towards more and more perfect national security, and the Left's progressivism towards more and more perfect outcomes in almost everything in general.
TL;DR: That cartoon pushes the standard commie line that the institutions of capitalism are our biggest problem.
p.s. What it does get right is that, since neither major party cares one whit about libertarianism, in that sense it's meaningless which one you vote for, because neither will advance that cause. (But then that's hardly the only meaningful factor, whereupon there becomes a huge difference between the parties.)
Comment Re:a thought (Score 1) 11
Another thought is this: I've written my share of T-SQL in the same spirit as this. And that is, what I have come to philosophically consider to be doing too much on the database side. An RDBMS's strong suit is retrieving data, not string manipulations. And your requirements for the data to be built into a string and of a certain format is really a business rule, where even if you're not doing a tiered architecture physically, it isn't a best practice to mix business layer concerns into what is logically the data layer.
I'm to the point where I consider the T-SQL language's non-DML/non-DDL stuff to be only as a last resort, such as needing to send already formatted data into say SQL Server Reporting Services, where you might not have middle tier(s) and the luxury of processing the data via any other means before it gets presented. But for application work, I want to start using the database to do just enough calculating to identify what data I want retrieved, and then the rest of the crunching that needs to be performed being done in C# or whatever (which will typically be more expressive and efficient for this).
Then in your case you wouldn't have the recursion going on in the database side to construct the string.
p.s. Over time the DBA's can alter the indexes on tables, and the SQL Server query analyzer can adopt different cached data access plans depending on the amount of and distributions within the data. So timings can change, so if you were already close to a limit...
How To Fix The Shortage of K-5 Scholastic Chess Facilitators 128
theodp writes The good news, writes Michael Thomas, is that wired kids are learning chess at an unprecedented rate. Young children learning chess from tablets can quickly become more knowledgeable than their parents. But the bad news, laments Thomas, is there is so much demand for scholastic chess that there are not enough experienced chess facilitators to go around. Could technology like RFID-tagged chess pieces or services like ChessStream.com be employed to referee second-grader chess matches, Thomas wonders, or are more well-meaning-but-not-necessarily-expert human facilitators — a la T-ball coaches — the answer?
Comment a thought (Score 1) 11
In SQL's order of operations, ORDER BY is done after SELECT, where in that 2nd query the string is built up, and then somehow some sorting is supposed to happen. It could be harmless or fouling things up, and it might not be what you want judging from the 1st query where the string is built in Sequence order.
Predicting a Future Free of Dollar Bills 753
An anonymous reader writes with this story about how a cashless society might work and how far-off in the future it is. "...We're not there yet, but a cashless society is not as fanciful as it seems. Recent research suggests that many believe we will stop using notes and coins altogether in the not-too-distant future. New payments technologies are rapidly transforming our lives. Today in the U.S., 66 percent of all point-of-sale transactions are done with plastic, while in the U.K. it's just under half. But while a truly cashless society is some time away yet, there is raft of groundbreaking technologies that will make cash a mere supporting act in the near future."
Scientists Have Developed a Material So Dark That You Can't See It 238
gbjbaanb writes A British company is developing a new material that's so black it absorbs all but 0.035 percent of the visual light, making it the darkest material ever created. Of course, apart from making album covers, it conducts heat 7 times better than copper and is 10 times stronger than steel. "The nanotube material, named Vantablack, has been grown on sheets of aluminium foil by the Newhaven-based company. While the sheets may be crumpled into miniature hills and valleys, this landscape disappears on areas covered by it. 'You expect to see the hills and all you can see it's like black, like a hole, like there's nothing there. It just looks so strange,' said Ben Jensen, the firm's chief technical officer.
Comment Re:Not France vs US (Score 1) 309
I think you lost context somewhere.
Yes, I doubt there exist 'small online shops for books' how would they operate, what would they sell?
Sure there are book stored, especially eBooks that are smaller than Apple or Amazon or B&N
Comment Re:Difference between SF and fantasy, or lack ther (Score 1) 309
Sorry, book sellers group it like this since, how long? Since Harry Potter?
Because they believe a Nerd who likes Fantasy also likes SF or a Geek who likes SF also likes fantasy.
Fact is, most people only read one of the genres
What compels an author to sell permanent exclusive rights, whether through assignment or exclusive license, to a publisher?
I don't know, I assume the 'free market' prevents him from getting a deal with any publisher at all, if he does not agree to slavery terms?
Second, I was clarifying that unavailable translations are not the fault of book sellers, be they Amazon or brick and mortar, but instead business decisions made by authors.
no one said it was the 'book sellers'. tNevertheless your conclusion is nonsense. The author is the last one having anything to say, first comes the publisher in the original country, the 'guy' who has the copyright. THEN comes the publisher in the destination country. And those often decide 'oh, we translated the first and the second of the books of Mr. Author' but his third one did not get a Nebula or a Hugo
Hence: read in the original language
Comment Image size and camera (Score 1) 129
I wonder how big images to be displayed on such a screen would be, or more important: what camera do you need to be able to support such resolutions?
Comment Re:Why the assumption.... (Score 1) 309
No it is not easy.
10 people voting with their wallet for the book shop around the corner are not enough for it to survive. And it is usually not so that the others vote 'against' it but they don't 'vote' at all
So: people who realize that don't even vote in the first place (with their wallet) but order directly online
