Would not the UBound and LBound functions not solved those issues?

Yes, though I didn't know they existed.

The existing code was written with 0 or 1 as required (except where there were bugs), and frankly I think it's was better anyway to use 0 everywhere rather than LBound(x).

They are not GDPR compliant anyway, they just try to fight it by making GDPR look bad. Look for alternatives for such pathetic sites.

Even Google of all places "respects" it now (after pressure). It becomes noticeably better every year.

These companies comply with GDPR as much as alcoholics comply with drinking driving laws by keeping a bottle on the trunk and stopping to take a swig once in a while

Big centralized sites want that.

Your beef is with the companies that do this, not with the GDPR.

A law which causes the whole web to be worse for no reason deserves criticism. Managing cookies belongs in the browser, a place auditable and adjustable by the user. Not on every website in the world.

GDPR may have had good outcomes too, and I am neutral on all other aspects, but whatever part of EU and California regulation led directly to cookie banners is a colossal failure which has benefitted no one (except possibly the dozens of snake oil cookie banner products which pretend to comply).

Mine's a B&W samsung laser. I print a decent amount but sporadically, No issues, fast and reliable and generic replacement toner cartridges are cheap on Amazon (which was where I bought the printer for about 50 quid).

We made and used quills in primary school, in a sort of arts and crafts/history crossover, I suppose. Didn't hold us back any, hopefully.

I think five shillings (20 shillings in a pound) was sometimes called a dollar because for a long time there were four US dollars to the pound.

A dollar is 10 shilling, or half a pound, and I believe the name goes back much further than the US dollar, to the time when various European precious metal coinages would have been recognized and converted.

The Australian dollar, and perhaps others, was set equal to half a British pound at the point when they obtained their own currency.

The South African rand was indeed also introduced as half a pound in 1961 (technically half a South African pound, but that had been equal to the pound sterling except 1931-1933)

I'm amazed at your pricing but it looks from your community forum activity that you have a market. Well done in an era where everyone expects stuff for free.

"The proposed Chat control EU law will"

If it's a proposed law then it should read

"The proposed Chat control EU law would"

Part of that sentence may have been elided. You could read it as "[If enacted] the proposed Chat control EU law will". That is not an uncommon construct.

Thanks for this comment. I would add restricting chat to 17+ people sounds utterly unfeasable considering how its use is widespread by teenagers of all ages.

At last, an optimistic comment.

Hopefully the Parliament and Council do their job and shoot it down, as they usually do with the average deranged Leyen proposal.

That's not really correct. The European Commission might not be directly elected by EU citizens, but the members of the European Parliament are elected by EU citizens, and the Council of the European Union is made up of one minister from each EU member state. A law doesn't get passed without support from the democratically elected parliament members and the national representatives in the council.

It's also worth noting that the President of the European Commission is elected by the European Council (not to be confused with the Council of the European Union). The European Council is made up of the heads of state of the EU member countries (who are themselves generally elected).

Could it be more democratic? Yeah, sure, maybe the President should be directly elected by constituents rather than by heads of states. But it's not undemocratic, and after a law is proposed by the European Commission, the democratic process decides whether it should pass or not.

EDIT: Thank you for your comment though! I'm not in an EU member state, so I haven't really known about this stuff before (I'm just affected by the laws without being a part of the EU demos). Your comment prompted me to research how this stuff actually works.

In my opinion, the EU to be really democratic, the Parliament, that we elect directly, should be able to have the same "right of initiative" (i.e. write laws, not just to approve them) as the Commission/Council.

> The European Commission isn't very democratic

The commissioners are appointed by the democratically elected government of each country, to push the agenda of the democratically elected government of each country.

Each layer of abstraction takes away choice in this model, and is indeed why Republics have Constitutions, among other reasons. The scope elected officials have is frankly too grand, resulting in positions where one wants to restrict your freedoms and lower taxes, and another wants to restrict your freedoms and raise taxes, and in many cases, the freedoms they want to restrict are the same freedoms -- and then when those freedoms of course are restricted, it's the "people" who voted for it!

And then to have elected officials that are elected by people who got in this way in the first place adds a whole layer of not having the interests of the public in mind.

Is it democratic, the way we normally think of the meaning of that word these days? Sure. Is it something we should take comfort in because of that fact? Personally, I lean toward "no."

Illusion of choice does a lot to pacify a population against tyranny, and the authoritarians are well aware of that fact after the last century or so.

Thanks, I was editing my comment as you wrote yours to add that detail. It's an important point.

Those two layers of abstraction make all the difference. Directly elected officials are particularly bad, imagine that.

Let me say it again: EU citizens elect members of the European Parliament, there is no extra layer of abstraction. And it's precisely the European Parliament which can do something about it if the Commission is proposing a bad law.

The main problem is that the European Parliament can't write new laws. There's no way to directly elect members that write laws. In every democratic country, you do.

I agree. It would have been better if a directly elected body could propose laws. Whether you consider the EU "not very democratic" is kinda subjective, but there are certainly strong arguments that it's not as democratic as it should be.

But "if [the not directly elected parts of the EU] want to do something they will and there’s nothing that can be done about it" remains incorrect.

How many democratic governments are there if "if they want to do something they will and there’s nothing that can be done about it" can be used as a filter for not democratic?

Not that there is anything good about this proposed law, mind you :(

Yes, I didn't know what it was so I had looked it up before I saw yours. The definition I got is below:

A common table expression, or CTE, is a temporary named result set created from a simple SQL statement that can be used in subsequent SELECT, DELETE, INSERT, or UPDATE statements.

> (...) in subsequent SELECT, DELETE, INSERT, or UPDATE statements

The annoying part is that certain RDMBS engines (MySQL for instance) require you to write the INSERT keyword before any CTEs.

So, your T-SQL or PGSQL query:

`with cte1 as (...) insert into ... select ... from cte1;`

becomes:

`insert into ... with cte1 as (...) select ... from cte1;`

I know the difference is minor but when you deal with many different DB engines, it is simply annoying.

I knew about WITH clauses, just didn't know the name.

After 10 years should farmers have to give away their land for free too?

Farmers have to put in constant work to generate revenue. "IP" revenue too often entails create-once-earn-forever. However, "IP" often has a higher upfront investment attached to it, and often is not (as) "scalable", unlike farming.

What I am trying to say is that both things are very different in details where it matters, so I think this is a rather flawed analogy.

Maybe a closer analogy would be landowners who rent out land. Should a person who bought land 10 years ago be able to generate revenue from renting it to a farmer?

Farmers pay property tax and use the land productively. Property tax is an incentive to use the land productively.

If land could be replicated with a click of a button with close to zero cost, then sure.

If you're implying that the farmer would still have an income then it's not a valid analogy. If I open sourced my software that I've been continuously developing for more than 20 years my income would drop to almost zero, immediately.

Your changes made in the last ten years would still be your exclusive monopoly so your revenue would probably not change much if you really have been continously developing it.

But even if this would destroy your business model, that doesn't mean it would not be a good idea for society as a whole. Business models become obsolete all the time. If there is enough demand for your software, you will be able to fund the development of it even without might-as-well-be-perpetual exclusive control.

Farmers will keep generate revenue with their lands 10, 20 years later. But Microsoft won't generate revenue with Office 2003.. This is whole different.

If it is imaginary land that they have thought up, yes.

Meaning you don't value the time that someone puts into building software as highly as the time a farmer puts into paying his mortgage.

Ten years is an eternity when it comes to software. But yes, software developers (and other people creating things covered under copyright) are overvalued compared to those creating physical things. And that valuation is created entirely due to IP law. How is that fair?

>And that valuation is created entirely due to IP law.

In that case, the value of land is created entirely by property law.

A farmer has the exclusive right to land from the existing fixed supply that the entire world has available to it. He didn't create it and no one else can use it. Whereas a software developer makes something new. Nobody else was deprived of anything pre-existing. Less justification for taking code from a developer than land from a farmer.

K A Stroud Engineering Mathematics is probably the book that helped me most. 31 chapters each composed of about 60 problems. The problems are progressive and contain explanations of the new concepts that they contain. All the answers are at the back.

I used this book and the sister book “advanced engineering mathematics” for my bachelors and masters degree in mechanical engineering.

It is probably the best pair of books ever written for what I like to call “plug and chug” maths. Strouds books cover the whole of engineering mathematics.

I turned to them for calculus in first year, and for Fourier and Laplace in my final year and masters.

But it will not teach you how to solve and develop proofs.