>Why source a story sourced from NASA to some wanker's blog in Network World"?Presuambly this asshole just submitted it himself to get more pageviews.

Yes, coondoggie is Michael Cooney, a news editor at Network World. He spends hours every day spamming his articles to Slashdot, Hacker News, etc. Why Slashdot editors continue to reward this sort of bad behavior is beyond me: his "articles" are rarely more than a quick, semi-accurate summary of someone else's article on another site.

> NASA says an asteroid about half the size of a football field will blow past Earth on Feb 15...

That's no asteroid: Chuck Norris roundhouse-kicked half the football field from Falcons Stadium into heliocentric orbit, after they beat the Seahawks in the playoffs.

Yes, we'll get that, as well as the tried-and-true "praising with faint damn" approach:
"Yes, perhaps it's not a perfect bill, but those who are rejecting it are arguing that we should do nothing."

No, it's not perfect, because it's a bag of shit. Throw it out.

Again, sounds like you were using the old MyISAM engine: I've never seen that happen under InnoDB.

It's possible you haven't used it in a while: the InnoDB engine has provided ACID and foreign keys, and has been part of MySQL since 2001. I agree that stored procedure and triggers are not particularly well supported in MySQL, but I prefer keeping app logic in the app or middle tier over stored procedures anyway, so that's never been a problem for me. I can't find that bug where backup were corrupt for 100-column tables: can you point me at a link for that?

A large multinational company I worked for until a year ago made a massive switch from SQL Server to MySQL, with support from a multinational DB support firm. We saved millions of dollars per year from year one in license and support fees, even after the (direct and indirect) costs of migration and cross-training the DBAs to MySQL. Performance improved significantly in three cases, improved slightly in a few others, and stayed the same in the rest. Nowhere did we see performance decreases or downtime increases. We kept one instance of SQL Server for the data warehouse, because the users preferred Microsoft's ETL and reporting tools.

The company I'm currently working for has a mix of Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server and Informix. They've decided to standardized on SQL Server, for which they're shelling millions in license fees and migration costs, and so far there's been no performance or uptime gain. A critical multi-terabyte DB has been left for later in the migration project: everyone (apart from the consultants and a few managers) is worried it's not going to work, and wishes we could simply leave these perfectly good, working database servers alone.

MySQL used to be thought of as a low-end RDBMS, but has evolved into a good choice for many applications, though of course no single RDBMS is the right choice for all types of DBs. For the point-of-sale application asked about here, if the .NET code is written to be DB-neutral, and if there are no stored procedures server-side, then MySQL may be a good choice: ask your app vendor, jdray. It offers several options for high availability, according to the application's requirements, including Windows Server Failover Clustering, Oracle's MySQL Cluster, Codership's Galera Cluster for MySQL, simple master-master replication, and a few others.

According to their list of included translations, ETEN's "YouVersion" reader provides 27 English translations so far. This includes the King James that you mentioned, and two Roman Catholic translations (CPDV and Douay-Rheims) which include several Apocrypha not included in the Protestant translations. I'm not sure what you mean by the "Eastern Orthodox Bible": there is a new translation to English by that name, with the New Testament just released and the full release due later this year, so that obviously hasn't been included yet. There is no Coptic translation included yet, but there are three Coptic Church groups so far listed on the YouVersion groups pages, so that's clearly not a problem for them. Hebrew and Syriac are also not available yet. There is no charge for any of the included translations, and they are working to add more translations to the list: according to their "vision" page they're working with other Bible groups to pull in more translations.

There was no reason to file this article under "censorship", with the little icon of the guy with his mouth taped shut. One large US retail chain has decided that they won't stock the fourth book in the series. That's not censorship.

If Sam's Club were lobbying Congress to pass legislation banning the book from being printed or sold, or getting an agreement from all of the other major retailers not to stock the book, then that would be censorship.

I can't find anything on the author's Brick Testament Facebook page calling this "censorship", and the author notes on that page that "The Brick Bible remains available at many other major retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, and at many independent bookstores as well." The free PR that this is generating will probably boost sales of the book overall.

Yes sorry, didn't mean to imply that it was intentional flamebait. Just noting that it's a topic that raises hackles much too easily. :-) And I completely agree about Westminster and the Welsh Assembly. Just the fact that Peter Hain and Cheryl Gillan have been handed in turn the role of Welsh Secretary shows how clueless Westminster is about Wales.

>The Welsh and Scottish nationalists are fairly pro-Europe because neither country is really viable as a totally independent entity...

Mmmm... yummy crunchy flamebait! Scrunch scrunch scrunch... :-)

But back here on earth, yes, agreed, and from the polls I've seen most people in Wales and Scotland favour autonomy within the UK, rather than full independence. Catalonia is the best argument I can think of for this: they can run all the stuff they want to run themselves, but don't have to pay for a separate military, passports, foreign service, embassies, etc. Seems like a pretty sweet deal, and with Franco dead they no longer have to fear for their lives for proposing such a thing. I'm hearing pro-autonomy noises from Labour, and even from a few Tories lately. For minor politicians in the existing Westminster parties, it would mean they'd get a shot at being bigger fish in the smaller ponds of Holyrood and Cardiff Bay.

Not all nationalists see the EU this way: just those who support the larger, longer-established national governments. Smaller nationalist movements like the SNP in Scotland, etc often see the EU as a potential alternative to their existing "parent" nation-state, which in Scotland's case is the UK.

Of course, this makes the EU all the more irritating to Euro-sceptics in the UK...

Well I like the Chrome address bar too, but again, whether we like it or not is not the point. The original poster (Toonol) was simply pointing out that you can't turn the awesome bar off in FF if you don't want it. You can't turn it off in Chrome either, as far as I can tell.

I like the "awesome bar" too, but that's not the point. As the GP says, eliminating the option to disable it reduces the power of the user.

Yes, users can choose another browser. Is that really all the choice that the FF developers wish to extend to their users? This "take it or leave it" attitude was one of the reasons that I quit using Gnome. The next feature that Firefox forces on you might be one that you don't like.

An "oust side" consultant: what an excellent egg corn! :-)

Wyden has also publicly criticized what he calls the US government's secret interpretation of the "Patriot Act".