Slashdot Mirror

Is this horrendously upscaled JPEG all we're going to get?

Don't forget Buckazoids.

And look at several well-known movies and their budget compared to what they did earn: http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfro...

But for every movie success there are several failures.

For those of you who enjoyed this, here's an image of an old gag that inspired part of it

Doom 3 in VR is easy!

This is how I want to work
https://d2gpw04v015qcw.cloudfr...
Armpit to asshole with your cow-orkers

Based on this image: http://d22r54gnmuhwmk.cloudfront.net/photos/8/fk/xq/BHfkxqsNQendYXM-556x313-noPad.jpg So, a 100GB plan is already $300, but it specifically says $5 per addition GIGABIT. Does this not mean that each additional Gigabyte is $40?!

I am ready to look into that, I have a nest (1st gen) and experience and tools in embedded development, looking at the mainboard (reverse side) for the nest there are plenty of touchpoints and even a set of contacts, how much you want to bet the JTAG interface for the Microprocessor is exposed letting someone (like me) install my own software?

Right now I'm looking around to see if anyone else has started this effort, no takers thus far but maybe that's just my search-fu being weak.

I am ready to look into that, I have a nest (1st gen) and experience and tools in embedded development, looking at the mainboard (reverse side) for the nest there are plenty of touchpoints and even a set of contacts, how much you want to bet the JTAG interface for the Microprocessor is exposed letting someone (like me) install my own software?

Right now I'm looking around to see if anyone else has started this effort, no takers thus far but maybe that's just my search-fu being weak.

relevent comic here:
http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/5713890_700b_v2.jpg

And Robocop runs DOS.

http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/4437682_700b.jpg

What's the problem with deficits, exactly?

The gold standard was regularly suspended in times of (regularly occurring) crisis. The private banking system evolved the clearinghouse to try to provide some needed elasticity. Quoting the Lecture 5 Notes from the Economics of Money and Banking, Part 1 MOOC:

Of particular interest is what happens in a financial crisis, when all member banks find themselves short of gold, because of outflows into circulation or abroad. Then there is no chance of solving the problem by arranging for weak banks to borrow temporarily from strong banks. Instead, weak banks borrow from the clearinghouse, which creates additional reserves from thin air simply expanding both sides of the balance sheet.

[Can't post the table because of slashdot's junk character and whitespace filters :(]

In effect, what happens is that intraday deficits and surpluses are not paid but rather put off to another day.

The advantage of a central bank off the gold standard is that much-needed elasticity in times of crises can be created, in a more equitable manner than when a private individual like J. P. Morgan controls the clearinghouse, and expands credit only to his friends.

There are other reasons why the gold standard is impractical, and banks themselves evolved away from it: it's impractical to transfer physical quantities of gold each day to meet intra-bank payments, for example. So banks started giving each other credit, and treating the gold as a virtual reserve anyway. Doing away with the gold standard altogether was a natural step.

A longer exposition of the natural need for elasticity, which the gold standard fails to satisfy, from the Lecture 3 Notes:

Already in 1873 the country experienced the first of a series of financial crises, all of which
followed a similar pattern.

In slack times the farm banks would find themselves with excess funds for which they
could find no local outlet. They might use them to buy a security (bond) but they had always to
keep in mind that they would need the funds come fall. So they tended to deposit the funds in
New York where they could earn interest. New York banks would therefore find themselves
with excess funds, which they also knew were only seasonal, so they wanted a short term
investment. They would buy liquid securities or make short term loans. Of particular interest is
the phenomenon of the call loan made to stock market speculators. Thus in slack periods (late
winter) we might find something like what Young shows (p. 302), where country banks have
excess reserves. He mentions the number 50 million as the withdrawal at harvest time, which
note is pretty close to the excess 2% reserves. At harvest time there is a cash drain from the
system, and that means a cash drain from New York, which New York seeks to remedy by
calling in loans and raising reserves from abroad.

Thus the cash drain spread into the stock market, causing selling by those who were using
call loans to finance their speculative positions. And it spread to the international money
market, pulling in gold from London. The consequence was a very definite seasonal pattern in
interest rates, as the harvest expansion of credit took place on a fixed reserve basis. The result
was not only a seasonal interest rate but also periodic financial crises, caused whenever banks
had to make cash payments but lacked the cash to do so. Young makes the correct point that the
problem was the inelasticity of reserves. If somehow reserves could be reduced in slack times
and expanded in tight times, the problem could be solved. How to make reserves elastic? The
answer was to make reserves a form of credit.

What's the problem with deficits, exactly?

The gold standard was regularly suspended in times of (regularly occurring) crisis. The private banking system evolved the clearinghouse to try to provide some needed elasticity. Quoting the Lecture 5 Notes from the Economics of Money and Banking, Part 1 MOOC:

Of particular interest is what happens in a financial crisis, when all member banks find themselves short of gold, because of outflows into circulation or abroad. Then there is no chance of solving the problem by arranging for weak banks to borrow temporarily from strong banks. Instead, weak banks borrow from the clearinghouse, which creates additional reserves from thin air simply expanding both sides of the balance sheet.

[Can't post the table because of slashdot's junk character and whitespace filters :(]

In effect, what happens is that intraday deficits and surpluses are not paid but rather put off to another day.

The advantage of a central bank off the gold standard is that much-needed elasticity in times of crises can be created, in a more equitable manner than when a private individual like J. P. Morgan controls the clearinghouse, and expands credit only to his friends.

There are other reasons why the gold standard is impractical, and banks themselves evolved away from it: it's impractical to transfer physical quantities of gold each day to meet intra-bank payments, for example. So banks started giving each other credit, and treating the gold as a virtual reserve anyway. Doing away with the gold standard altogether was a natural step.

A longer exposition of the natural need for elasticity, which the gold standard fails to satisfy, from the Lecture 3 Notes:

Already in 1873 the country experienced the first of a series of financial crises, all of which
followed a similar pattern.

In slack times the farm banks would find themselves with excess funds for which they
could find no local outlet. They might use them to buy a security (bond) but they had always to
keep in mind that they would need the funds come fall. So they tended to deposit the funds in
New York where they could earn interest. New York banks would therefore find themselves
with excess funds, which they also knew were only seasonal, so they wanted a short term
investment. They would buy liquid securities or make short term loans. Of particular interest is
the phenomenon of the call loan made to stock market speculators. Thus in slack periods (late
winter) we might find something like what Young shows (p. 302), where country banks have
excess reserves. He mentions the number 50 million as the withdrawal at harvest time, which
note is pretty close to the excess 2% reserves. At harvest time there is a cash drain from the
system, and that means a cash drain from New York, which New York seeks to remedy by
calling in loans and raising reserves from abroad.

Thus the cash drain spread into the stock market, causing selling by those who were using
call loans to finance their speculative positions. And it spread to the international money
market, pulling in gold from London. The consequence was a very definite seasonal pattern in
interest rates, as the harvest expansion of credit took place on a fixed reserve basis. The result
was not only a seasonal interest rate but also periodic financial crises, caused whenever banks
had to make cash payments but lacked the cash to do so. Young makes the correct point that the
problem was the inelasticity of reserves. If somehow reserves could be reduced in slack times
and expanded in tight times, the problem could be solved. How to make reserves elastic? The
answer was to make reserves a form of credit.

What's there left to discuss? If you want who is moon's owner, just check whose flag is planted on it.

Correct: the flag is pretty obvious.

One picture from the article illustrates why we need this in the UK. Its the large muzzy threat that we face.

I quote again from Mehrling's Lecture 10 Notes:

Suppose that fundamental value is the price that dealers would quote if their inventories were exactly zero, so they are not exposed to any price risk. The Treynor model then shows how market making by dealers pushes price away from fundamental value, on one side or another, by more or less depending on the size of the outside spread and the dealer’s maximum long and short position limits. Standard asset price theory abstracts from this effect, in effect treating the outside spread as collapsed around fundamental value, so there is no need for dealers. Some markets are close approximations to this, but others are not; some times are close approximations to this, but others are not.

Quoting from Lecture 10 Notes:

The modern theory of finance is built on the assumption of perfect liquidity, so that prices can be
fully efficient. It is supposed to be arbitrage that creates perfect liquidity by entering to take
advantage of even the smallest deviation. To say that liquidity is perfect is to say that liquidity is
a free good.

But in a fully efficient market, arbitrage would not be profitable since all bets would be
fair bets. So position takers would not make money. And if position takers do not make money,
they will not compete so much for the market-making business.

So let's make liquidity a free good. Then you don't even have to regulate dealers. They'll just wither away...

Quoting from Mehring's Notes for Lecture 10, in Economics of Money and Banking, Part One:

In financial theory, it is common practice to assume perfect arbitrage, and hence also
complete liquidity. Assets are assumed to trade at their fundamental value since any other price
would create an arbitrage profit opportunity. In effect, the world that the finance theorists
imagine is a world in which the VBT outside spread is very very narrow, so there is no room and
no need for dealers. In the real world, the outside spread is quite wide, dealers offer prices inside
that spread but the prices can deviate very far from fundamental value. That is the world Fischer
Black was talking about in his infamous presidential address to the American Finance
Association when he said that he thought markets were efficient, meaning price was usually
within a factor of two of true value.

We can understand what Black is saying by referring back to the Treynor model.
Suppose that fundamental value is the price that dealers would quote if their inventories were
exactly zero, so they are not exposed to any price risk. The Treynor model then shows how
market making by dealers pushes price away from fundamental value, on one side or another, by
more or less depending on the size of the outside spread and the dealer’s maximum long and
short position limits. Standard asset price theory abstracts from this effect, in effect treating the
outside spread as collapsed around fundamental value, so there is no need for dealers. Some
markets are close approximations to this, but others are not; some times are close approximations
to this, but others are not.

If efficiency is completely arbitrary, then the prices that high-frequency traders even out, which the post I was responding to hailed as the legitimate foundation of capitalism, are based on what? They're just pushing prices around to make a profit. Why is that "legitimate"?

Dealers profit from the general lack of liquidity. Wouldn't it be better if a "public option" existed, which provided liquidity without a profit motive? You wouldn't have to regulate dealers; just provide another option which worked in the public interest, pushing prices lower than dealers alone will.

Market-making dealers push prices away from their efficient levels, as even Fischer Black noted. From Perry Mehrling's Lecture 22 Notes, in his Economics of Money and Banking, Part Two MOOC:

On Monday, December 30, 1985, Fischer gave the presidential address to the American Finance Association which was meeting in New York, and stunned his audience with the following words:

“We might define an efficient market as one in which price is within a factor of 2 of value; i.e. the price is more than half of value and less than twice value. By this definition, I think almost all markets are efficient almost all of the time. ‘Almost all’ means at least 90 percent.”

Here we can detect, I think, the influence of Fischer Black’s friend, Jack Treynor, who had originally introduced him to his own version of the capital asset pricing model but gone on to a life in the markets rather than academia, and in that life had produced the dealer model that we have been using in previous lectures. Think about what the dealer model says. It says, just as Fischer relates, that the price of a security fluctuates within bounds set by the value based trader, bounds that can be rather far from true value. At any moment in time, the price of the security will lie somewhere within those bounds, exactly where depends on the inventory of the dealer.

Dealers profit by exploiting market inefficiencies, and pushing prices away from their efficient levels, within a factor of 2. So if the efficient level of a barrel of oil is $100, the dealers can push the price down to $50 or up to $200. That's a pretty wide margin of error.

"a pricing mechanism to judge whether various stages of production are efficient or not."

Even Fischer Black realized that prices are set by dealers in modern economies, and are pushed away from efficient levels by those dealers. From Perry Mehrling's Lecture 22 Notes for his Economics of Money and Banking, Part 2 MOOC:

On Monday, December 30, 1985, Fischer gave the presidential address to the
American Finance Association which was meeting in New York, and stunned
his audience with the following words:

“We might define an efficient market as one in which price is within a factor of 2 of
value; i.e. the price is more than half of value and less than twice value. By this
definition, I think almost all markets are efficient almost all of the time. ‘Almost all’
means at least 90 percent.”

A factor of 2 means, for example, that if the "real value" of oil is $100/barrel, the price set by dealers could be in the range $50/barrel to $200/barrel. That's a wide margin of error. Dealers profit from pushing the price away from the efficient level.

If you skim through the iFixit photos quickly (like I did), then this one kind-of-sort-of looks like someone lifting the lid on a record player.
(In case the link doesn't work, it's the picture for Step 8 on the iFixit website)

Quite. About 1/3 of US citizens live within it: https://d320ze5h7gg57a.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/webroot/privacy/spying/cfz_map/Image-Map.gif

The idea is nice, but the actual images are completely wrong. WiFi is just electromagnetic waves and those in turn are nothing other then light at another wavelength, i.e. a different color if you will, see this infrared image. This means being able to see WiFi signals would look fundamentally no different then just seeing ordinary light. You wouldn't see waves shooting out of your router, as you can't see waves unless they actually hit your detector, so the thing would simply glow like a light source. The thing where it gets interesting is in how different materials react to the WiFi, materials that are obaque to regular light would be transparent for WiFi signals, while others that are transparent for light would be opaque to WiFi. How much or how little WiFi gets reflected would also change. Being able to see how directional the signal of different antenna could also be interesting. There might also be issues with image resolution, as the wavelength determines how good you can resolve an image (not sure if that's just a practical limit of detector size or actually a physical limit).

Anyway, some simple photoshopping won't cut it, it would probably need a raytracer to simulate the wave propagation properly.

Here's another map of what the fans of the police state in Washington, DC want to be the constitution free zone.

Such data is gathered by the YouGov surveys, which happen very regularly. Here's the latest report. Unsurprisingly given the sort of policies associated with the coalition government, the approval rating of Parliament splits strongly down party lines. Overall the government is unpopular with a 25% approval rating, 61% disapproval and 14% don't know. However this average disguises the fact that amongst conservative voters approval is 75% and amongst Labour voters approval is only 5%.

These sorts of figures are what you might expect from the UK. The situation is not comparable to the USA where the approval rating of Congress reflects a more deep rooted feeling that corruption is rampant and all the parties are fundamentally the same. This can be seen in the fact that disapproval of Congress is almost identical regardless of voting intention. The problems in the UK reflect a strong north/south division every bit as strong as the city/rural division in the USA, where the richer and more conservative south tends to approval of austerity due to a less systematic dependence on welfare and public sector jobs. The post-industrial north is dominated by Labour voters who never made the transition to the service/knowledge economy and where quality of life is highly dependent on government spending.

I don't have time to find more precise stats, but I suspect if you examined UK voters beliefs more closely, people would not feel that democracy itself was particularly broken. Especially not over something as trivial as piracy - only in places like Slashdot and amongst the people who read it does piracy become some kind of moral imperative. Everyone else I know treats it as a naughty pleasure. They know they're breaking the law and won't get caught, but they don't have any desire to make a big moral campaign of it.

I still don't really understand the rationale behind the new connector. It seems the whole motivation for it was to make the iPhone thinner... which, I don't see as a real selling point at this point, especially given all the frustration with having to replace accessories or buy a new set of $30 adapters, and the fact that the iPhone 4s is really thin enough. As for simplicity, it really goes against the Apple aesthetic. One picture from the event made that evident.

Meanwhile, the rest of the industry seems to be moving away from wires and toward wireless. Wireless payments, wireless charging, wireless audio, etc. with NFC and other related technologies. Apple is for some strange reason the last to adopt these innovations, and it will be a whole year before they come up with an answer. In the mean time, they're piling on connectors and dongles galore. It's very strange.

Paramount for ripping off their flashlight?

Prior Art.. by real artists!

The Canine speech decoder already exists:
http://d1syadvoyajtpr.cloudfront.net/534fa0b9aacaf866a8eb6c6f51fa1388_500.jpg

Why are you doing this to me slashdot? I don't even have a dog.
Don't Do This To Me

"which was doing that". Feel free to quote and point out how.

My objection is to anyone driving claiming that "they're not dangerous". That's just not true. Bad drivers are much more dangerous, sure, but the chance of human error is always there, and that car you're driving can do a lot of damage. Not 20 minutes ago, I had a guy in broad daylight run a red light at an intersection I was almost in. If I was going faster, I would have been less able to stop, and if we had collided (a distinct possibility, perhaps avoided only by lucky timing) the faster I go, the more energetic the accident. My car adds danger, even if driven legally, and the faster I drive it, the less time I have to see and react to other people's mistakes.

99% safe is typically not regarded as very safe -- stats I just found googling around put the risk of giving birth or the risk of skydiving once at about one death per 100,000 (in Sweden). So skydiving once is 99.999% safe. Cave diving has an estimated risk of 138 deaths per 100,000 dives (1957-1979 figures) which earned it a reputation as an incredibly dangerous sport -- it's 99.862% safe, or 138 times riskier than sky-diving, depending on how you want to look at it.

You committed a simple and common error. The richest make $0 on that chart. All they make is interest, dividends, and capital gains, with no salary (incidentally, that is lower in tax rate than those who actually work for a living). I had thought I was top 10% wage earners, but a glance on there, and I realized I'm in the top 5% of wage earners. But the 1% don't even show up there. Why should they post a number to define the 1%? That 1% is unmeasurable, and the moment you label it, people will be able to include/exclude themselves in it, regardless of whether they would be considered by others as part of the 1%. The real issue isn't income, but wealth. And I think the OWS has hinted at, but not directly pointed to the hidden and hoarded wealth used to buy influence as the 1%, not wage earners (which I don't think anyone would consider that the 1%, though it's often used as a number, as it's the easiest to identify. But it's silly to pick villains based on the ease with which you can identify them, as opposed to the evil they do. Wealth is the more important number, but not nearly as well tracked. http://dkl3fnj1o5loa.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/top-1-percent-of-wealth-united-states.png Looks like you need $20,000,000 in assets above debts to be in the top 1%. I'm not in that and likely never will. If you have $106,000 or more, you are in the top half. I'm easily there, I'm about top 10% in wealth, but that depends on the valuation of some real estate I'm trying to dump in the bubble at the moment (there's still lots of real estate investment money out there and with the housing market weak, farms have been shooting up).

The USA is destroying itself in order to extend the buggy whip corporations. I'm expecting the USA will totally collapse within 20 years (another reason to sell my Indiana farm and get the money into investments in foreign countries). The only question I have is what the US and world will look like when there's a crisis that the US can't debt itself out of (because at some point, the bonds won't be bought anymore).

FISMA AWS enables U.S. government agency customers to achieve and sustain compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). AWS has been certified and accredited to operate at the FISMA-Low level. AWS has also completed the control implementation and successfully passed the independent security testing and evaluation required to operate at the FISMA-Moderate level. AWS is currently pursuing a certification and accreditation to operate at the FISMA-Moderate level from government agencies.

--Amazon Web Services: Risk and Compliance

You're right! Here's a photo of one of Allen's charities:

http://d2omthbq56rzfx.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Megayacht-Octopus-plus-Paul-Allen.jpg