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Comment Re:Good for them (Score 1, Insightful) 258

This is one possibility, but the "That way I wouldn't have to repurchase them again in the future" argument seems pretty weak, given that once most books have their day, circulation drops to zero for years (which is why it does make sense to purge books from smaller libraries). I think the more likely possibility is that it was a scheme to boost circulation numbers to protect their budget, as suggested in TFA.

Comment Re:Hot Housing Markets a Sign of Too Few Houses (Score 1) 84

I don't see how the situation will improve without more compact, denser housing either. Here in Portland, our formerly middle class neighborhood is being infilled with large, circa $1M homes, which are typically occupied by an average of 2.x people. We specifically bought our 1200 ft^2 home because we didn't want to have to take care of a big place full of stuff. I get concerned about the related social housing trends, too. For example, I bought our house in '11 from a retired firefighter's widow, whose (employed) son had kept the place buffed, but couldn't afford to take on the mortgage. So the social rarification process started with me 'swooping' in to buy the place when they had to put it on the market. And now the nice house across the street (next to the house where our neighborhood trash/recycling guy lives) has become a teardown to be replaced by a home that most people on our block couldn't afford.

Submission + - How Russia Recruited Elite Hackers for Its Cyberwar (nytimes.com)

Lasrick writes: 'For more than three years, rather than rely on military officers working out of isolated bunkers, Russian government recruiters have scouted a wide range of programmers, placing prominent ads on social media sites, offering jobs to college students and professional coders, and even speaking openly about looking in Russia’s criminal underworld for potential talent.' Important read.

Submission + - Chinese rocket fails to put two satellites into correct orbits (spaceflightnow.com)

schwit1 writes: Tracking data suggests that two Earth-observation satellites launched today by China’s Long March 2D rocket were placed in the wrong orbits.

The two SuperView 1, or Gaojing 1, satellites are flying in egg-shaped orbits ranging from 133 miles (214 kilometers) to 325 miles (524 kilometers) in altitude at an inclination of 97.6 degrees. The satellites would likely re-enter Earth’s atmosphere within months in such a low orbit, and it was unclear late Wednesday whether the craft had enough propellant to raise their altitudes.

The high-resolution Earth-observing platforms were supposed to go into a near-circular orbit around 300 miles (500 kilometers) above the planet to begin their eight-year missions collecting imagery for Siwei Star Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., a government-owned entity.


Submission + - Watership Down author Richard Adams died on Xmas Eve, aged 96 (theguardian.com)

haruchai writes: In addition to his much-beloved story about anthropomorphic rabbits, he penned 2 fantasy books set in the fictional Beklan Empire, first Shardik (1974) about a hunter pursuing a giant bear he believes to be imbued with divine power, and Maia (1984) , a peasant girl sold into slavery who becomes entangled in a war between neighboring countries

Submission + - Germany Considers Fining Facebook $522,000 Per Fake News Item (heatst.com)

schwit1 writes: The government of Germany is considering imposing a legal regime that would allow fining social networks such as Facebook up to 500,000 euros ($522,000) for each day the platform leaves a “fake news” story up without deleting it.

I would like the same enforced against US government officials.We would end up with a transparent government or no debt.

LBJ:None of our boys will die on foreign soil
Nixon:I am not a crook
GHW Bush: Read my lips – No New Taxes
WJ Clinton: I did not have sex with that woman Miss Lewinski
GW Bush: Iraq has weapons of mass destruction
I, Barrack Hussein Obama, pledge to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.

Submission + - Creepy Website IknowWhatYouDownload Makes Your Torrenting History Open To All (iknowwhatyoudownload.com) 2

dryriver writes: The highly invasive and possibly Russian owned and operated website http://iknowwhatyoudownload.co... immediately shows the bittorent download history for your IP address when you land on it. What's more, it also shows the torrenting history of any specific IP address you enter, and also of IP addresses similar to your's, so you can see what others near you — perhaps the nice neighbours in the house next door — have downloaded when they thought nobody was looking. Upon clicking on somebody else's IP link in my range, for example, I found that the person had downloaded a tremendous amount of Porn content of a certain rather embarrassing type in what they thought was the privacy of their own home. The website highlights XXX content in bright red on its download list, a feature that appears explicitly designed to embarrass people who torrent porn. There is also a nasty little "Track Downloads" feature that lets you send a "trick URL" to somebody else. When they click on the URL — thinking its something cool on Facebook, Twitter or the general internet — THEY see what they URL promised, but YOU get sent their entire torrenting history, including anything embarrassing or otherwise compromising content they may have downloaded in private. A website this malicious and invasive can only have been built by the big content producers to deter people from downloading piratedcontent methinks. The website appears to offer an API, customized download reports and more to interested parties in the hopes of generating big cash from making other people's torrenting activities public. I wonder how long it takes before some teenager commits suicide or similar because his school friends sent him a "trick URL" from this site that outed him/her as downloading gay porn or similar.

Submission + - The recent changes in Earth's magnetic field (spaceweather.com)

schwit1 writes: New data from Europe’s Swarm constellation of satellites detail the recent bigger-than-expected changes that have been occurring in the Earth’s magnetic field.

Data from Swarm, combined with observations from the CHAMP and Ørsted satellites, show clearly that the field has weakened by about 3.5% at high latitudes over North America, while it has strengthened about 2% over Asia. The region where the field is at its weakest – the South Atlantic Anomaly – has moved steadily westward and weakened further by about 2%. These changes have occured over the relatively brief period between 1999 and mid-2016.

It was already known that the field has weakened globally by about 10% since the 19th century. These changes appear to be part of that generally weakening. Some scientists have proposed that this is the beginning of an overall flip of the magnetic field’s polarity, something that happens on average about every 300,000 years and last occurred 780,000 years ago. At the moment, however, we have no idea if this theory is correct.

Comment Re:collateral damage (Score 1) 73

One wonders if this is true, but beyond the internal and external DPRK propaganda, it seems like there must be enough men and women of reason in their government and research facilities to make the case for and maintain these complex weapons/energy programs in a relatively protected environment, knowing that failures and quality improvement are necessary and inherent to the process.

That sentence was a lot longer than I planned, sorry.

Comment Re:Only 10,000 times lower? (Score 1) 134

Sometimes, but many times the drug is excreted unchanged (during the early penicillin era, drug scarcity drove urine collection from treated patients to recycle the still-active penicillin molecules). Many times, the metabolites are also biologically active, either as part of the intended physiological effect, or active in other related or unrelated ways.

Comment Loophole (Score 1) 819

At least in the 80's in the US, a friend from school and I decided to reload our own shotgun shells to save money and the hassle of finding an adult to buy us ammo. Even at the time, I was a little baffled by the fact that my friend and I could walk into a store and buy cans of powder, primers, and shot, but couldn't buy factory made ammo.

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