Well, timed traffic light patterns along main roads work reasonably well if they don't have a lot of traffic turning onto them from cross streets. These people who turn on to the main drag will have to stop at a red light. Eventually, the main wave front catches up to the ever-growing packet, and the whole bunch will have to stop, sending a "hydraulic hammer" backwards through the traffic, until the two or 3 rows at the front of the pack notice that the light is indeed green, and has been for 45 seconds, and they proceed through the intersection just in time for the light to change to red. When every light along a 15-mile path does this, along with 1-2-1 lane intersections, well... (IL-120, IL-137 between Grayslake and Abbott Park, IL comes to mind...).
...the lights do this on purpose, but it's not personal.
All those inductance loops, and in some other locations, video cameras hooked up to image analysis apps, do it to help all sorts of things. The ones that do it at 4am are doing it to slow you down. Approach the light below the speed limit, and the light probably won't change.
What gets me are the areas with well-heeled residents that have one entrance onto a busy road, and they have a light. No matter how heavy the traffic on the main road, their light always turns green to let them out when they approach the light, with little or no delay. But a couple of miles away, the place iwth the low-income apartments, a school, etc., well...no lights, just weak 20mph school zone signs.
You also mean like hell being the parent of a kid who, while in college, found out he/she liked cocaine or heroin a little bit too much, and died because of it?
To me, Heaven and Hell are one and the same. It's all a matter of perspective. What is hell for Hitler? being surrounded by Jews, somehow with Born Again (tm) smiles on their faces, all saying, "we forgive you, Adolph. We love you! Won't you sing 'Kumbayah' with us?".
It's like your own personal Room 109.
But if there is a God, it's much bigger than anything mere humanity can attribute it to. The Bible (and Koran) are analogous to two people touching different parts of an elephant in the dark, proclaiming it to be a tusk, a big ear, dry rough skin, etc., but never being able to really see the thing as a whole or integrate all the pieces together.
Funny thing is, these people will always exist, no matter what. There is still crime in Cuba, for example.
What it really does is actually make it even easier for them to hide, because once they have whatever token of legitimacy they need, people will no longer question them until they step WAY outside of the box.
A stupid card counter keeps playing until asked to leave by the pit boss, and never come back. The harder ones to catch are the ones who have a feel for how far to push it, or are satisfied getting $50 today, $200 next weekend, and maybe even accepting losing here and there, so as to appear behaviorally that he's just another typical blackjack player, except that he's actually coming out well ahead of the house over time.
Isn't it odd, though, that the worst breaches in US security (and USSR security) have come from people on the inside, in trusted positions, who turn their backs on their native country and give priveleged information to the other side?
Isn't it odd that, while double-book bookkeeping helps prevent some forms of embezzelment, it still sometimes happens that a person is given check-writing authority *and* check authorization authority, or is in cahoots with the DBA who can help erase some of the bread crumbs?
Or, that corporate boards will still authorize loans, etc., of corporate money to corporate executives with no oversight by *anyone*?
The US has problems getting HUMINT out of homogenous societies that are not white-skinned. Hmm... I wonder why?
Inspite of all the stiffer laws, reporting and transparency requirements, etc. on all sorts of areas of corporate and governmental operation, the biggest threats to these entities are all within the organizations, not without.
Yet those on the outside are portrayed as the biggest threat since, well, since forever, thus justifying all sorts of great innovations in social control.
We know what we know, we know somewhat what we don't know. The biggest problem, always, is not knowing what we don't know, and just assuming it doesn't exist or is inconsequential.
How does one tell the difference between an imam extolling his worshippers to join in a jihad against the debauchery of the West and Jerry Falwell, who does it every sunday, inside America?
Well... what about all those people who get accidentally/inadvertently shot by the police due to a variety of factors?
Oh, wait. That's probably not what you meant.
As far as being ardently anti-death penalty, I'm sorry. There are sick fucks like Ted Bundy that have earned the right to die at the hands of the State.
I agree, though, that in practice, the death penalty probably is unevenly applied in the US, but so are most other criminal sentences. Rich? White? Professional Athelete? Not going to prison unless you have managed to burn a LOT of bridges along the way (Martha Stewart). Compare her with Kenneth Lay or Jeff Skilling.
Remember, it hasn't been that long that being drunk was a mitigating circumstance in most car accidents, and too many people still see it that way.
...and, do note that the Supreme Court does consider it in some of their case law. While not a legal document, it does provide some legal guidance for spirit and intent.
Yes, they live in Las Vegas. They get flown in and out of Area 51 by non-descript, unmarked 737's from McCarran Intl. At least, that's the version for the public.
At least wxunderground.com will let you see the fleshed-out NWS scientist commentaries on the weather forecasts, along the lines of "two of the models predict X, but Model A predicts not X, and it seems to be more accurate this time of year, so I'm going with the Model A.", etc.
The NWS/Accu-Trak/TWC reports are what the weather puppets on TV/Radio read anyways. Not too many actually bother trying to interpret things on their own anymore. Tom Skilling @ WGN comes to mind.
If you remember wx.purdue.edu in the old days, this was probably the most awesome weather information site available (also had wx.washington.edu, etc.). Well, the atmospheric sciences people I think got tired of hosting these public wx sites ($$$), and they went non-public in the DotCom days, but now it's in a commercial form of wxunderground.com.
All it will take is someone from TWC or some of the other commercial repackagers of NWS information who happens to have been a good RNC/TeamW contributor to put a whisper in Karl Rove's ear that NOAA is out of line here, that those commie freeniks should have to pay for the information, and it will then fall under some blanket of the US PATRIOT Act, National Security, DMCA, etc., so that their handle on the data from NOAA/NWS is impenetrable for the untermenschen (ie., the rest of us).
Mmm... he mentioned 747SP. For the longest time, the longest unrefueled flight in Guinness BoR was for a 747SP flight. they loaded it with chilled JP4. It flew some insane route, and IIRC, it landed in Johannesburg, ZA.
The 747SP is a "chopped" 747-200. It's fuselage is a good amount shorter than a regular 747, but the wing size etc. is the same. It was ordered for some of the longer flights (i.e., NY-Johannesburg, LA-Sydney, etc).
We had a sick sheep that was bleeding profusely from the nose at the slightest disturbance. She also appeared to have some sort of nasal infection. We took her up to the vet. As the vet was using his little probe light to look inside it, of course her nose started bleeding. It flowed profusely down her lip, and he managed to tickle her nose enough to make her sneeze. He got blasted right in the face...
On the other hand, we were at an alpaca farm, our youngest daughter was enjoying an alpaca that was letting her scratch its chest. It bent its head down to smell near her face, and decided to chuff out a bit of rumen contents in my daughter's direction. It didn't appear to be a hostile act (camelids usually look and act more than a little pissed off before they do this).
Oh the joys of parenthood. You have to comfort your child and calm her down, keeping a straight face, while internally you're rolling on the floor laughing your ass off.
She still likes alpacas, but if she ever sees the one that did that to her again, I bet she'll eventually hock a loogee at it...
1) "I read about it on the Internet [so it must be true]"
2) "It's true. Really."
What was interesting today, I was reading an article in "Software Development" from this month, where the story's author was talking about "workplace mobbing", basically the workplace version of the part of human nature that likes to pile on when various barriers to negative behavior, judgement, etc. seem to vanish quickly for a large number of people in the group.
We just have seen a big version of this in the US to some extent, in our presidential election. That whole ill-defined "moral values" issue.
We had a pretty major issue where instead of being an intensely personal battle against one person for some people (i.e., Bill Clinton), the energy was instead refocused on nebulous issues, seemingly repeated endlessly (there are 5 lights) until the point where they attained a level of truthfulness, whether it be one candidate serving in-country in vietnam somehow having his military service being perceived to be fraudulent vs the other's sham service being seen as a non-issue, to all sorts of interesting rumors and allegations about one of the candidate's wife and her inheritance, etc.
Where am I going with this?
Maybe the Choctaw language (and the Choctaws...) came to the realization and acceptance of a part of human nature that seems to deny truth even when being hit over the head with it, and figured out how to call a spade a spade while calling everything else a bad hand, but still being able to know what their partner was going to throw down in their contract bridge hand.
In other words, how does the Choctaw language (and mindset) smokeout bullshitters?
What would a game of poker being played by Choctaws be like, or a Choctaw fishermen's convention? Now look at something like Colin Powell testifying before the UN that Iraq had all these bugaboo WMDs. How would the Choctaws handled that? What if one Choctaw was an absolute bullshit artist (maybe Karl Rove is really a Choctaw...) who could use the "truth tense" untruthfully, but well enough so that others took it to be true?
But proving the hybrid system on a more conventional platform means that it might enable a more expanded electrical part of that picture, which leads to various kinds of electromagnetic weapons (lasers, EMP, rail guns, etc.) that can use some of the required electrical generation to help move the vehicle when it's not doing its primary task.
The navy is moving to do this with ships as well. Instead of having two systems, you can reduce it to one big electrical generation system, with some of the power going to the propulsion system, and the rest for the AEGIS radar and all of the NT4 workstations on the computer.
...or, that sometimes, there just isn't anything to be done with the waste. You can only reprocess wood pulp, for example. At some point, the fibers become too short to do anything with.
What do you do with excess arsenic, cesium, etc. that may be byproducts of various recycling streams? You bury them as toxic waste.
Of course, the article was wrong. The H2 is really a Chevy Tahoe that was "monster garaged" to sort of look like it was derived from the "real Hummer", the H1, which is a civilianized HMMWV, or Humvee.
As such, instead of 18 mpg like the Tahoe gets (which, for better or worse, is better than what a Ford Pinto got in the 70's...), because they added about 2000 lbs of...???... to it, it now gets 11mpg.
The upcoming "H3", which will be a "hummerized" Chevy Colorado (whatever that platform is generically called), will also have significantly reduced fuel economy compared to its "normal" brethren, but better than the H2.
Oh well.
What can you realistically do with an H2 (or H1) that you can't do better with a more normal SUV or pickup truck, except get off on thinking that you're really intimidating the hell out of all those Prius and Insight drivers with their Al Gore...er, John Kerry stickers?
Yes, I know that the H2/H1 have some decent off-road capabilities, but that doesn't fall into the "realistic" category, not to mention "practical" category.
If you need to buy an H1/H2 just so your kids impress their peers at school...
When I pointed out to a friend that part of the cost of replacing older, less "enviromentally friendly" cars with new cars was the pollution inherent in dispossing of the old car prematurely and manufacturing the new one (not to mention the pollution inherent in earning the money to buy the new car, and the pollution inherent in. ..) he was stunned. He'd simply never thought of that issue. All he'd ever heard about were emmisions, so that's all he ever thought about.
It's almost always more 'friendly' in the long run to use existing systems until they naturally expire than it is to replace them with new systems before that time. After all, isn't that why many of us spend so much time maintaining existing code base?
Well, a living, breathing example of a counter argument to this is Cuba. They've essentially been forced to operate as if it's 1953 (or whenever Castro took over). How do you figure? Well, everyone has managed to keep their 1953 refrigerators going. They've managed to keep their 1953 cars going. Etc etc etc.
A 1953 refrigerator uses probably about 2-3x the electricity that a more modern refrigerator uses. If you factor that over 50 years, Cuba has wasted a LOT of electricity. So they're trying to make a more efficient modern refrigerator (more modern insulation, more efficient compressers, etc), but they still need to figure out a way to not have it sell for $1100/unit, which is probably equivalent to about 1 billion pesos.
Cuba has to import all of its energy products. Without its sugah-daddy anymore, they have to do something.
Your point makes sense in the whole lifetime of lots of different incremental upgrades that is western advancement.
I could just about care less about the energy savings of Compact Fluorescent lights, for example. In my house, we seem to go through a lot of incancescent bulbs. And some of them are just in pretty inconvenient places to have to change what seems to be monthly. Putting in a CFD that will last 5-10 years is a savings in and of itself that justifies not having to drag the ladder in and out of the house.
It is not unfair to assume that if I had to do things like this at my job instead of what I'm being billed out at $60.00/hr to do (think: programmers doing lots of data entry...), if my manager didn't find some cheaper labor to do it, he's gonna get in trouble...
not a problem, though, if your datasource is a pre-stored OLAP cube, you're hitting a SQL Server with the OLAP tools (SS2K calls it Analysis Toolkit, or somethign like that), some other OLAP system that will work with MS-Query, or you're using MS-Query to run your queries...
you meant to put in "GROUP BY" instead of "ORDER BY"...
Most SQL processors will barf heavily on that SQL.
Oracle has ways to calculate the subtotal and overall total as well (without using WITH ROLLUP, COMPUTE or WITH CUBE)...
SQL Server only has WITH ROLLUP, COMPUTE and WITH CUBE. Of course, you could make a stored proc to do the same thing, and use it equivalently as a query, with Sql Server.
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Well, timed traffic light patterns along main roads work reasonably well if they don't have a lot of traffic turning onto them from cross streets. These people who turn on to the main drag will have to stop at a red light. Eventually, the main wave front catches up to the ever-growing packet, and the whole bunch will have to stop, sending a "hydraulic hammer" backwards through the traffic, until the two or 3 rows at the front of the pack notice that the light is indeed green, and has been for 45 seconds, and they proceed through the intersection just in time for the light to change to red. When every light along a 15-mile path does this, along with 1-2-1 lane intersections, well... (IL-120, IL-137 between Grayslake and Abbott Park, IL comes to mind...).
...the lights do this on purpose, but it's not personal.
All those inductance loops, and in some other locations, video cameras hooked up to image analysis apps, do it to help all sorts of things. The ones that do it at 4am are doing it to slow you down. Approach the light below the speed limit, and the light probably won't change.
What gets me are the areas with well-heeled residents that have one entrance onto a busy road, and they have a light. No matter how heavy the traffic on the main road, their light always turns green to let them out when they approach the light, with little or no delay. But a couple of miles away, the place iwth the low-income apartments, a school, etc., well...no lights, just weak 20mph school zone signs.
You also mean like hell being the parent of a kid who, while in college, found out he/she liked cocaine or heroin a little bit too much, and died because of it?
To me, Heaven and Hell are one and the same. It's all a matter of perspective. What is hell for Hitler? being surrounded by Jews, somehow with Born Again (tm) smiles on their faces, all saying, "we forgive you, Adolph. We love you! Won't you sing 'Kumbayah' with us?".
It's like your own personal Room 109.
But if there is a God, it's much bigger than anything mere humanity can attribute it to. The Bible (and Koran) are analogous to two people touching different parts of an elephant in the dark, proclaiming it to be a tusk, a big ear, dry rough skin, etc., but never being able to really see the thing as a whole or integrate all the pieces together.
God made the System. Don't hate the Playah, hate the Game.
Funny thing is, these people will always exist, no matter what. There is still crime in Cuba, for example.
What it really does is actually make it even easier for them to hide, because once they have whatever token of legitimacy they need, people will no longer question them until they step WAY outside of the box.
A stupid card counter keeps playing until asked to leave by the pit boss, and never come back. The harder ones to catch are the ones who have a feel for how far to push it, or are satisfied getting $50 today, $200 next weekend, and maybe even accepting losing here and there, so as to appear behaviorally that he's just another typical blackjack player, except that he's actually coming out well ahead of the house over time.
Isn't it odd, though, that the worst breaches in US security (and USSR security) have come from people on the inside, in trusted positions, who turn their backs on their native country and give priveleged information to the other side?
Isn't it odd that, while double-book bookkeeping helps prevent some forms of embezzelment, it still sometimes happens that a person is given check-writing authority *and* check authorization authority, or is in cahoots with the DBA who can help erase some of the bread crumbs?
Or, that corporate boards will still authorize loans, etc., of corporate money to corporate executives with no oversight by *anyone*?
The US has problems getting HUMINT out of homogenous societies that are not white-skinned. Hmm... I wonder why?
Inspite of all the stiffer laws, reporting and transparency requirements, etc. on all sorts of areas of corporate and governmental operation, the biggest threats to these entities are all within the organizations, not without.
Yet those on the outside are portrayed as the biggest threat since, well, since forever, thus justifying all sorts of great innovations in social control.
We know what we know, we know somewhat what we don't know. The biggest problem, always, is not knowing what we don't know, and just assuming it doesn't exist or is inconsequential.
Not +5 Funny, +5 Dead Right-on.
How does one tell the difference between an imam extolling his worshippers to join in a jihad against the debauchery of the West and Jerry Falwell, who does it every sunday, inside America?
Well... what about all those people who get accidentally/inadvertently shot by the police due to a variety of factors?
Oh, wait. That's probably not what you meant.
As far as being ardently anti-death penalty, I'm sorry. There are sick fucks like Ted Bundy that have earned the right to die at the hands of the State.
I agree, though, that in practice, the death penalty probably is unevenly applied in the US, but so are most other criminal sentences. Rich? White? Professional Athelete? Not going to prison unless you have managed to burn a LOT of bridges along the way (Martha Stewart). Compare her with Kenneth Lay or Jeff Skilling.
Remember, it hasn't been that long that being drunk was a mitigating circumstance in most car accidents, and too many people still see it that way.
...and, do note that the Supreme Court does consider it in some of their case law. While not a legal document, it does provide some legal guidance for spirit and intent.
Any one know where Area51 workers live?
Yes, they live in Las Vegas. They get flown in and out of Area 51 by non-descript, unmarked 737's from McCarran Intl. At least, that's the version for the public.
At least wxunderground.com will let you see the fleshed-out NWS scientist commentaries on the weather forecasts, along the lines of "two of the models predict X, but Model A predicts not X, and it seems to be more accurate this time of year, so I'm going with the Model A.", etc.
The NWS/Accu-Trak/TWC reports are what the weather puppets on TV/Radio read anyways. Not too many actually bother trying to interpret things on their own anymore. Tom Skilling @ WGN comes to mind.
If you remember wx.purdue.edu in the old days, this was probably the most awesome weather information site available (also had wx.washington.edu, etc.). Well, the atmospheric sciences people I think got tired of hosting these public wx sites ($$$), and they went non-public in the DotCom days, but now it's in a commercial form of wxunderground.com.
Weather.com's stuff just sucks.
this lasts.
All it will take is someone from TWC or some of the other commercial repackagers of NWS information who happens to have been a good RNC/TeamW contributor to put a whisper in Karl Rove's ear that NOAA is out of line here, that those commie freeniks should have to pay for the information, and it will then fall under some blanket of the US PATRIOT Act, National Security, DMCA, etc., so that their handle on the data from NOAA/NWS is impenetrable for the untermenschen (ie., the rest of us).
or, good eye focus relaxation technique (to look at stereograms w/o a viewer).
Mmm... he mentioned 747SP. For the longest time, the longest unrefueled flight in Guinness BoR was for a 747SP flight. they loaded it with chilled JP4. It flew some insane route, and IIRC, it landed in Johannesburg, ZA.
The 747SP is a "chopped" 747-200. It's fuselage is a good amount shorter than a regular 747, but the wing size etc. is the same. It was ordered for some of the longer flights (i.e., NY-Johannesburg, LA-Sydney, etc).
Dick Rutan was the pilot of Voyager, not Burt.
We had a sick sheep that was bleeding profusely from the nose at the slightest disturbance. She also appeared to have some sort of nasal infection. We took her up to the vet. As the vet was using his little probe light to look inside it, of course her nose started bleeding. It flowed profusely down her lip, and he managed to tickle her nose enough to make her sneeze. He got blasted right in the face...
On the other hand, we were at an alpaca farm, our youngest daughter was enjoying an alpaca that was letting her scratch its chest. It bent its head down to smell near her face, and decided to chuff out a bit of rumen contents in my daughter's direction. It didn't appear to be a hostile act (camelids usually look and act more than a little pissed off before they do this).
Oh the joys of parenthood. You have to comfort your child and calm her down, keeping a straight face, while internally you're rolling on the floor laughing your ass off.
She still likes alpacas, but if she ever sees the one that did that to her again, I bet she'll eventually hock a loogee at it...
Yes, but where it's humid enough, a 747 taking off can make quite the huge cloud of vapor over the wings...
English already does have this:
1) "I read about it on the Internet [so it must be true]"
2) "It's true. Really."
What was interesting today, I was reading an article in "Software Development" from this month, where the story's author was talking about "workplace mobbing", basically the workplace version of the part of human nature that likes to pile on when various barriers to negative behavior, judgement, etc. seem to vanish quickly for a large number of people in the group.
We just have seen a big version of this in the US to some extent, in our presidential election. That whole ill-defined "moral values" issue.
We had a pretty major issue where instead of being an intensely personal battle against one person for some people (i.e., Bill Clinton), the energy was instead refocused on nebulous issues, seemingly repeated endlessly (there are 5 lights) until the point where they attained a level of truthfulness, whether it be one candidate serving in-country in vietnam somehow having his military service being perceived to be fraudulent vs the other's sham service being seen as a non-issue, to all sorts of interesting rumors and allegations about one of the candidate's wife and her inheritance, etc.
Where am I going with this?
Maybe the Choctaw language (and the Choctaws...) came to the realization and acceptance of a part of human nature that seems to deny truth even when being hit over the head with it, and figured out how to call a spade a spade while calling everything else a bad hand, but still being able to know what their partner was going to throw down in their contract bridge hand.
In other words, how does the Choctaw language (and mindset) smokeout bullshitters?
What would a game of poker being played by Choctaws be like, or a Choctaw fishermen's convention?
Now look at something like Colin Powell testifying before the UN that Iraq had all these bugaboo WMDs. How would the Choctaws handled that? What if one Choctaw was an absolute bullshit artist (maybe Karl Rove is really a Choctaw...) who could use the "truth tense" untruthfully, but well enough so that others took it to be true?
...so has anyone thought to do this with poker players?
But proving the hybrid system on a more conventional platform means that it might enable a more expanded electrical part of that picture, which leads to various kinds of electromagnetic weapons (lasers, EMP, rail guns, etc.) that can use some of the required electrical generation to help move the vehicle when it's not doing its primary task.
The navy is moving to do this with ships as well.
Instead of having two systems, you can reduce it to one big electrical generation system, with some of the power going to the propulsion system, and the rest for the AEGIS radar and all of the NT4 workstations on the computer.
...or, that sometimes, there just isn't anything to be done with the waste. You can only reprocess wood pulp, for example. At some point, the fibers become too short to do anything with.
What do you do with excess arsenic, cesium, etc. that may be byproducts of various recycling streams? You bury them as toxic waste.
Of course, the article was wrong. The H2 is really a Chevy Tahoe that was "monster garaged" to sort of look like it was derived from the "real Hummer", the H1, which is a civilianized HMMWV, or Humvee.
As such, instead of 18 mpg like the Tahoe gets (which, for better or worse, is better than what a Ford Pinto got in the 70's...), because they added about 2000 lbs of...???... to it, it now gets 11mpg.
The upcoming "H3", which will be a "hummerized" Chevy Colorado (whatever that platform is generically called), will also have significantly reduced fuel economy compared to its "normal" brethren, but better than the H2.
Oh well.
What can you realistically do with an H2 (or H1) that you can't do better with a more normal SUV or pickup truck, except get off on thinking that you're really intimidating the hell out of all those Prius and Insight drivers with their Al Gore...er, John Kerry stickers?
Yes, I know that the H2/H1 have some decent off-road capabilities, but that doesn't fall into the "realistic" category, not to mention "practical" category.
If you need to buy an H1/H2 just so your kids impress their peers at school...
When I pointed out to a friend that part of the cost of replacing older, less "enviromentally friendly" cars with new cars was the pollution inherent in dispossing of the old car prematurely and manufacturing the new one (not to mention the pollution inherent in earning the money to buy the new car, and the pollution inherent in. . .) he was stunned. He'd simply never thought of that issue. All he'd ever heard about were emmisions, so that's all he ever thought about.
It's almost always more 'friendly' in the long run to use existing systems until they naturally expire than it is to replace them with new systems before that time. After all, isn't that why many of us spend so much time maintaining existing code base?
Well, a living, breathing example of a counter argument to this is Cuba. They've essentially been forced to operate as if it's 1953 (or whenever Castro took over). How do you figure? Well, everyone has managed to keep their 1953 refrigerators going. They've managed to keep their 1953 cars going. Etc etc etc.
A 1953 refrigerator uses probably about 2-3x the electricity that a more modern refrigerator uses. If you factor that over 50 years, Cuba has wasted a LOT of electricity. So they're trying to make a more efficient modern refrigerator (more modern insulation, more efficient compressers, etc), but they still need to figure out a way to not have it sell for $1100/unit, which is probably equivalent to about 1 billion pesos.
Cuba has to import all of its energy products. Without its sugah-daddy anymore, they have to do something.
Your point makes sense in the whole lifetime of lots of different incremental upgrades that is western advancement.
I could just about care less about the energy savings of Compact Fluorescent lights, for example. In my house, we seem to go through a lot of incancescent bulbs. And some of them are just in pretty inconvenient places to have to change what seems to be monthly. Putting in a CFD that will last 5-10 years is a savings in and of itself that justifies not having to drag the ladder in and out of the house.
It is not unfair to assume that if I had to do things like this at my job instead of what I'm being billed out at $60.00/hr to do (think: programmers doing lots of data entry...), if my manager didn't find some cheaper labor to do it, he's gonna get in trouble...
not a problem, though, if your datasource is a pre-stored OLAP cube, you're hitting a SQL Server with the OLAP tools (SS2K calls it Analysis Toolkit, or somethign like that), some other OLAP system that will work with MS-Query, or you're using MS-Query to run your queries...
you meant to put in "GROUP BY" instead of "ORDER BY"...
Most SQL processors will barf heavily on that SQL.
Oracle has ways to calculate the subtotal and overall total as well (without using WITH ROLLUP, COMPUTE or WITH CUBE)...
SQL Server only has WITH ROLLUP, COMPUTE and WITH CUBE. Of course, you could make a stored proc to do the same thing, and use it equivalently as a query, with Sql Server.