I read a story a long time ago, I think in a short story collection.  The main idea was that a TV had been invented that could be set to any place and time in the past, and you could see what happened there and then.  Anybody know what it was?
While reading a question here whose answer was Stephen Baxter's &quot;Light of Other Days&quot; book, it reminded me of a short story I read with a similar idea. Probably read at least 30-40 years ago, in English. The fact that the Government has invented a device that can view the past is made public (by a whistleblower, I believe). Historians go nuts besieging the government to look at their favorite time periods to reveal the truth about various historical &quot;facts&quot; and or &quot;mysteries&quot; (Who shot JFK? Who was Jack the Ripper? Was Helen of Troy really that beautiful? Did Jesus exist? etc, etc.) And the government is stonewalls most of them and claims it's expensive to operate, hard to control to get exact time/location, etc. So someone (maybe the whistleblower?), knowing it's possible, does math/construction and builds his own version, and realizes it's easy to make, cheap to operate, and easy to use. So he makes plans to stick it to the government by releasing the info. Maybe he tries to force the government to release the info, or they realize he has made it, so they grab him and try to convince him to stop. But he is not convinced until they tell him, it can't see back very far (maybe just a few days/weeks, because it needs exponentially more power the further you look back.) Finally the agents tell him: &quot;Don't you see, you can use it to see what's happening just a few minutes ago, or even now. Your company can't make widgets? Zoom in on your competitors and see how they make them. Think your wife is fooling around on you? Zoom in on her and track her to see if she is. Your pretty neighbor is taking a bath now? Zoom in and watch her... These devices mean no one will have any privacy now.&quot; At which point he tells them it's already too late. They kept him there so long that the letters he mailed will already be delivered to various newspapers, scientists, historians, etc.
I have been trying to get a sense of the different problems in frequentist settings where MCMC is used. I am familiar that MCMC (or Monte Carlo) is used in fitting GLMMs and in maybe Monte Carlo EM algorithms. Are there more frequentist problems where MCMC is used? 4 fast cores or 6 slower ones? I have the option of 3.33 ghz 4 core processor, a 2.66ghz 6 core or a 2.93 ghz 6 core. I know that the middle one will be slower than the last, you don't have to tell me that. What I would like to know is what would work better? 4 fast cores or 6 slower ones? I know that if you do the math the last one is the best but how many cores can Blender use?  I would also like to know what would be the best for blender internal renderer and cycles (if there's any difference.) What should be done with questions that have been resolved as a comment instead of an answer? I'm trying to go through and provide answers to every unanswered question (search &quot;closed:0 answers:0&quot;), somewhat following the spirit that was blogged about at  .  However, I'm finding this much more difficult than it needs to be, as many of the questions have already been answered without the use of an &quot;answer&quot; - but instead, in the form of a comment by either the OP or another poster. I wouldn't mind reading through and skipping these, as long as there was some appropriate action I could take to at least assist with preventing these questions from being seen again from the same query - either by myself or another SO member.  Is there such an appropriate action?  Should we vote to close?  If so, using what reason? Even if I vote to close, what are the chances that 4 other users will also view the question and also vote to close?  (i.e., will my individual vote even do any good?  Is there any report to show recent close votes, so that others may also review and contribute supporting close votes?) Should we post some sort of an answer - even just something to the effect of &quot;this was already answered by the OP's own comment to his answer (above)&quot;? Would something like this be appropriate to flag for moderator attention, and let the moderators deal with it?  (Or would this be considered too trivial?) Should we rename the question title to something standard that can be used in a search exclusion?  (Maybe &quot;SOLVED:&quot;?)  Basically, how can I help to denote questions as &quot;This question is no longer in active search of an answer - though better answers may still be appreciated.&quot;? I've already reviewed , which was closed as a duplicate of  - but this requires effort on part of a user who may very likely no longer be active. Otherwise, is there something I should be doing to improve my search to filter out these types of questions? I've run across this many times, so I don't consider it to be a rare issue.  However, the last question like this I just ran across, prompting this question, was .  In this case, the question was self-answered by the OP in the form of a comment, this question is the OP's only question, the OP has no other visible activity on SO, and the OP hasn't been seen on SO since he registered and posted the question 5 months ago. Another one I just ran across is .  However, here the &quot;answer&quot; comment was posted by a reputable and recently active SO member.  Should I leave a comment directed at him, asking him to re-post his comment as an answer, or should I post my own answer echoing his comment?  (Or something else?) Yet another is .  Interestingly, the OP actually self-edited the question to include the &quot;SOLVED:&quot; prefix on to the question, instead of posting his resolving comment as an answer (and ideally accepting it) as he was asked to do by another comment.  This brings up another good idea - is there a &quot;standard&quot; we should use to rename the titles on these &quot;resolved but unanswered&quot; posts that could be used as a search exclusion?  (Also added to the above list.) Install Ubuntu, you can not continue I have a Visual Studio 2008 solution with two projects (a Word-Template project and a VB.Net console application for testing).  Both projects reference a database project which opens a connection to an MS-Access 2007 database file and have references to System.Data.OleDb.  In the database project I have a function which retrieves a data table as follows   private class AdminDatabase    ' stores the connection string which is set in the New() method    dim strAdminConnection as string     public sub New()    ...    adminName = dlgopen.FileName    conAdminDB = New OleDbConnection    conAdminDB.ConnectionString = "Data Source='" + adminName + "';" + _        "Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0"     ' store the connection string in strAdminConnection    strAdminConnection = conAdminDB.ConnectionString.ToString()    My.Settings.SetUserOverride("AdminConnectionString", strAdminConnection)    ...    End Sub     ' retrieves data from the database    Public Function getDataTable(ByVal sqlStatement As String) As DataTable         Dim ds As New DataSet         Dim dt As New DataTable         Dim da As New OleDbDataAdapter         Dim localCon As New OleDbConnection           localCon.ConnectionString = strAdminConnection          Using localCon             Dim command As OleDbCommand = localCon.CreateCommand()             command.CommandText = sqlStatement             localCon.Open()             da.SelectCommand = command             da.Fill(dt)             getDataTable = dt         End Using      End Function End Class   When I call this function from my Word 2007 Template project everything works fine; no errors. But when I run it from the console application it throws the following exception     ex = {"The 'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0'   provider is not registered on the   local machine."}   Both projects have the same reference and the console application did work when I first wrote it (a while ago) but now it has stopped work.  I must be missing something but I don't know what.  Any ideas? I have a Macbook and an iMac, generally I work on my Macbook, but sometimes I need that information on my iMac. My OS is Mac OSX Snow Leopard. After my online research on the subject, I learnt that, biologically speaking, many scientists believe that there is no such thing as a race. Homo sapiens as a species is only 200,000 years old, which has not allowed for any significant genetic diversification yet, and our DNA is 99.99% similar. I've read statements that there can be more genetic variation inside a racial group than between different racial groups, meaning that, for example, two individuals from the same "race" can have less in common with each other than with an individual from another "race".  :     Scientists consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits     Q1: If Homo sapiens has no races (according to biologists), why are we so different morphologically? (hair/eyes/skin colour and even athletic performance seem to differ between human populations)  Q2: Is it common for other species too, when genetically close populations have very different morphological traits? Are there any other mammal or animal species that exhibit biological diversity comparable to human diversity, and how do taxonomists treat these species? (excluding intentionally bred domestic species to keep the comparison fair)    The question has been paraphrased to emphasize that it is the biological debate that is in question, not the sociopolitical. I.e., why is there no consensus in evidence and opinions of scientists? Display View counts of Questions in Mobile version I often use Stack Exchange sites from my smartphone. It works great, but I always have to switch to full version to see view counts of a question. Can you please add it? There's plenty of space on question page for it to place. I request community to suggest a location. How to get back Windows 10 [UEFI] after Legacy installation of Fedora 24? What and where are the stack and heap? How to let the user switch language in playframework 2 Can't disable windows 10 PIN complexity I recently linked my Microsoft Office account to my school to have access to Office for students. Right after linking my account, I couldn't login to my computer again with my 4-digit pin code and got the message: "your organization has set the following pin code requirements. Your pincode has to be at least 6 digits long."   I had to change my pincode but I want to change it back to my original 4-digit one. Some internet research has made me enable gpedit.msc, but when I try to find the PIN complexity setting in gpedit (Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\PIN Complexity) it just isnt't there.   Another possible path in gpedit I found on the internet to do this was: Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Hello for Business > PIN Complexity, but that also didn't work as I don't have "Windows Hello for Business"   I also tried resetting my computer to the date before I joined my 'organization', but that didn't work either.   Does anyone have an idea how I can resolve this issue? "invalid EFI file path" while booting Windows I just got my new working notebook with Windows 8 pre-installed. After installing Ubuntu 12.10 the grub menu says that there is an "invalid EFI file path" and it won't boot Windows. Ubuntu works fine...  Is there anything I can do about this? Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages After upgrading from 10.04 to 12.04 I am trying to install different packages.  For instance ia32-libs and skype (4.0).  When trying to install these, I am getting the 'Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages' error message.   Output of commands:  sudo apt-get install -f Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree        Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.   After running this:  sudo dpkg --configure -a foo@foo:~$ sudo apt-get install -f Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree        Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Natural (human alpha-numeric) sort in Microsoft SQL 2005 We have a large database on which we have DB side pagination. This is quick, returning a page of 50 rows from millions of records in a small fraction of a second.  Users can define their own sort, basically choosing what column to sort by.  Columns are dynamic - some have numeric values, some dates and some text.  While most sort as expected text sorts in a dumb way. Well, I say dumb, it makes sense to computers, but frustrates users.  For instance, sorting by a string record id gives something like:  rec1 rec10 rec14 rec2 rec20 rec3 rec4   ...and so on.  I want this to take account of the number, so:  rec1 rec2 rec3 rec4 rec10 rec14 rec20   I can't control the input (otherwise I'd just format in leading 000s) and I can't rely on a single format - some are things like "{alpha code}-{dept code}-{rec id}".  I know a few ways to do this in C#, but can't pull down all the records to sort them, as that would be to slow.  Does anyone know a way to quickly apply a natural sort in Sql server?    We're using:  ROW_NUMBER() over (order by {field name} asc)   And then we're paging by that.  We can add triggers, although we wouldn't. All their input is parametrised and the like, but I can't change the format - if they put in "rec2" and "rec10" they expect them to be returned just like that, and in natural order.    We have valid user input that follows different formats for different clients.  One might go rec1, rec2, rec3, ... rec100, rec101  While another might go: grp1rec1, grp1rec2, ... grp20rec300, grp20rec301  When I say we can't control the input I mean that we can't force users to change these standards - they have a value like grp1rec1 and I can't reformat it as grp01rec001, as that would be changing something used for lookups and linking to external systems.  These formats vary a lot, but are often mixtures of letters and numbers.  Sorting these in C# is easy - just break it up into { "grp", 20, "rec", 301 } and then compare sequence values in turn.  However there may be millions of records and the data is paged, I need the sort to be done on the SQL server.  SQL server sorts by value, not comparison - in C# I can split the values out to compare, but in SQL I need some logic that (very quickly) gets a single value that consistently sorts.  @moebius - your answer might work, but it does feel like an ugly compromise to add a sort-key for all these text values. Solving multiple congruences by CRT = Chinese Remainder Theorem How do I get the solution given by CRT to match another solution, e.g. the least positive? For example say I have X = 1234. I choose mi as 5, 7, 11, 13. This satisfies the simple requirements of . More precisely given in my example k = n = 4, and the product of any k - 1 is smaller then X how come simply computing the remainder of each won't give equations that solve to X = 1234. In the case of the example, x = 4 mod 5 x = 2 mod 7 x = 2 mod 11 x = 12 mod 13  Which resolves to  (won't CRT produce the smallest?) Any hints?  Below is the solution linked to on &quot;Math Celebrity&quot; (cached to avoid link rot). Install GNOME Shell extensions from terminal Is there a way to install GNOME extensions from terminal, for example dash to dock? The way I do it now is to go into Ubuntu Software app store and install it. Chapterwise page range in the TOC Can you give me some advice for how to obtain the following format of the TOC?        Chapter’s heading 1-7   Chapter’s heading 9-10   Chapter’s heading 11-15 Reset CSS display property to default value Temporarily change language for terminal messages/warnings/errors Messages in my terminal are displayed using Russian language by default, which is my native one.  For just a moment I want them to be in English (eg. to paste in forums), then switch back to the default language.  How can I do the switch and switch back using bash?