They might me in range, but it's pretty hard to hit anything smaller than a barn from a 20-ft boat bobbing on open ocean -- but it is a lot easier from a 1000ft boat...
Unfortunately, said 1000-foot boat is LARGER than a barn.
Fortunately, said 1000-foot boat has a one-inch thick steel hull and is nigh-impossible to sink via small arms fire. People on its deck are in an ideal fortified position. (Whether they have the weapons or the incentive to fight back is an economic/political question...)
conversely, your 1000ft boat is much larger than a barn.
Who cares if they hit your several-inch-thick ship hull? Not even RPG hits will sink a supertanker or suezmax. They need to hit people-sized targets, and that's pretty hard from a boat.
If they're in range of your small arms fire, your in range of theirs. Plus those guys have some RPG-7s.
They might me in range, but it's pretty hard to hit anything smaller than a barn from a 20-ft boat bobbing on open ocean -- but it is a lot easier from a 1000ft boat...
I realize this view is mighty unpopular, yet I am going to express it. While science is very important, so are social issues. I would like to see the NASA budget considerably shrunk but for only a short period of time, say 12 - 18 months. We have to get our country healthy again and space flight really only effects a small sector of the economy. It will create jobs but only at the most educated levels. A healthy country is a more efficient and productive one. Now, you may feel free to mod me but are you willing to join the censors?
I don't have an opinion one way or another, but I am quite sure that it is infeasible to cut NASA's budget in half for 18 months and then expect them to continue as if nothing happened...
What does a "shrunk budget" mean? Firing reseachers, firing engineers, cancelling projects with industry... And if you as an engineer got fired, you would presumably look for another job with more security and better pay in the private sector and not come back after 18 months into a shitty job where they will eliminate your position at a whim... In short, they can't just mothball manpower, because it won't come back.
I am hoping that current prices should come down a bit; they're currently priced as if they had some sort of "Enterprise Class Premium Edition" of an OS or something, but I feel like you're buying what essentially is the LCD part of a netbook, and an e-reader part of a distro.
The current ones *do have nice displays and elegant cases, but I feel I should be getting a Newton or something, at that price, or at least a beefed-up mp3 player built in.
I also think that the price is mostly due to the display itself -- every one of these eReaders is using the panels from E-Ink Corporation (patent-encumbered, proprietary, and thus sold for a high monopoly price). If it was the OS premium or the construction, the competition from cheap chinese eReaders would have driven prices down (and all of those also still cost $200+)... So competing display technologies from other companies are a necessity to get a price war started, I think.
Theres none good sides on it. Or why do you think US wont open their banking data back to EU?
It's just another case of USA forcing their laws, ideas and politics to other countries. Only taking, and not giving back. Fuck yeah!
You may want to look into who provides a lot of the equipment, personnel and funding for U.N. and NATO peacekeeping forces. I think the US/EU relationship is pretty symbiotic. While the banking data probably won't be given to the EU, 'not giving back' is untrue.
I've looked into it. From Wikipedia: "About 4.5% of the troops and civilian police deployed in UN peacekeeping missions come from the European Union and less than one percent from the United States (USA)." The ten biggest troop contributors by country are 8 developing countries, France and Italy. Regarding UN troop funding - the reluctance and tardiness of the US to pay its UN contributions is legendary, and they are currently $1.3bn in arrears.
As to NATO troop contributions -- the US is making a lot of noise that the Europeans are not supporting their War of Terror "peacekeeping" missions in Iraq and Afghanistan enough; but they knew that they didn't have most EU countries' support when they set up to invade Iraq in the first place...
No it's not. Car analogy: You are running at full speed, about to hit a tree; the two people in the front seat now start squabbling whether to turn the steering wheel left or right while still pumping the throttle...
Einstein was an Eastern European. As were most of the other scientists coming up with what Einstein brought together in Relativity. Soviet physicists were mostly Eastern European, and came up with quite a lot of advances in physics.
No he wasn't - Western Germany/Italy/Switzerland are hardly 'Eastern Europe'. Nor were the others: Poincaré (France), Planck (Germany), Bohr (Denmark), Lorenz (Netherlands), Schwarzschild (Germany), Lemaitre (Belgium)... (Not that Eastern Europeans weren't well represented in sciences, they just have very little to do with the early history of relativity.)
The decimal comma is an SI standard as much as the decimal point and its usage is preferred (according to Wikipedia) in Germany, France, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, French Canada, Romania, Sweden and much of the rest of Europe.
Have a look where the design team and the sponsors come from.
Actually, WSJ is pretty good, but most of it is behind a paywall and isn't getting properly indexed anyway.
Speaking as someone who is working in the finance industry, it actually isn't very good. The financial news is OK, but you can get better coverage even on US businesses and finance news from the FT (without hassles or paywall); and the politics/economics section has gone downhill ever since they compromised their journalistic integrity to get in step with the Neoconservative party line. (It's worst in the editorials, but it tends to bleed over into the selection of economic commentators and the spin of news stories.)
Imagine how much more complete the picture would be if the children all cooperated and worked together on the database content, developed the communication protocols for that database together, and gave each other free license to use them. Then differentiated themselves from the competition with the interface, hardware (if applicable), price, etc.
As far as I understand, most of these gizmos use the geolocation data from Wikipedia for their services -- so people already cooperate on the content. (And give it to everyone for free, too!) The crappiness of these apps just demonstrate that each of them is bad at parsing the WP database in its own way (compare for instance Google Maps with the Wikipedia layer enabled - it is much better).
Huh? Why should you not be able to do a Service Pack or Maintenance Update for free? Most IT companies do it, and I haven't heard of them having to defer booking revenue under US-GAAP. Are you sure that what you heard about Apple's reason for withholding features is true?
Wireless-N wasn't a service pack or maintenance update; it was a new feature. I looked over the regulations and Apple's interpretation was at least plausible.
Quote from WinXP SP3 release notes: "This update also includes a small number of new functionalities..." and I could also find half a million other examples (almost every application does this). I don't believe that is the real reason. (Of course if the question is whether Apple PR goons are lying or whether they cannot afford competent CPAs, I know what I would assume.)
Huh? Why should you not be able to do a Service Pack or Maintenance Update for free? Most IT companies do it, and I haven't heard of them having to defer booking revenue under US-GAAP. Are you sure that what you heard about Apple's reason for withholding features is true?
Actually I think the people of Great Britain need new governance that doesn't think that Aldous Huxley had the right idea.
I just wish they would model it after Huxley! Then at least we'd have free recreational drugs for everyone, relaxed sexual mores and yobs that are actually conditioned to like doing menial jobs instead of being anti-social...
Instead we get a re-imagining of Orwell - Animal Farm or Nineteen-Eightyfour, take your pick.
Sorry, I fail to see the link - I read all three articles and I still don't see the link between this arrest (which was a Met job, i.e. London/national police) and the GCHQ Cyber-Security Operations Centre (who are spooks, not policemen)...
We see evolution taking away limbs but never adding new ones.
I think the elephant's prehensile trunk would qualify as a counterexample... (Though I won't think that the chances of a Dumbo-style evolution are significant...)
The thing with Goldman Sachs is completely different than Madoff. Madoff duped investors in thinking he was making trades when it really was a large Ponzi scheme. Someone had to generate the fictitious paperwork for the investors and these programmers were allegedly behind it.
Goldman Sachs made huge bets in the housing market. When the housing market fell, Goldman (who had placed a lot of money into this market) lost big.
Hate to break it to you, but Goldman never "lost big" -- that's what the outrage is about. They made big bets with AIG betting against the housing market, and bet against AIG in the CDS market to hedge the risk of AIG collapsing.
So (1) they won big when the subprime market fell, (2) they won big when AIG didn't fail as expected but was bailed out could repay $17bn worth of bet winnings, (3) they won big when all their competitors who actually believed in the housing market collapsed or suffered, and Goldman was one in maybe three kids left on the block.
That's why now they can pay bigger bonuses than ever, in a time where unemployment is worse than at anytime in the last 80 years...
And 5c/$ underestimates it quite a bit -- since DOD spending would also be vastly less without the GWoT, not to speak of DHS spending, big chunks of the Department of VA's costs, and the interest on the debt created by a half-trillion of GWoT-related costs in past budgets...
Sorry, your point does not stand. Let me reiterate point three in different words: Price of crude oil in the US (WTI crude, delivery to Cushing, OK in Dec 2009): $78.64/bbl. Price of crude oil in Europe (Brent crude, delivery to Sullom Voe in Dec 2009): $77.45/bbl. Again, there is no meaningful difference between "US market prices" and "EU market prices"; this is a global market. Since all local oil prices are reported in $/bbl for the sake of comparability, it is pretty impossible to find a historical source for local oil prices in EUR.
So, Wolfram would be useful if it could take the EUR/USD time series and multiply it with the oil time series (it doesn't matter which oil time series it uses). Since it does not do that, it is worse than useless: it is misleading.
What you were talking about before (U.S. Crude Price converted to another currency) is not what you are talking about now (European Union Crude Price in Euros) What you were talking about before is nearly useless data. Do you not agree?
First: You were not quoting me, but SleepingWaterBear.
Second: Nobody mentioned "U.S Crude Price" before you in the thread. The OP was talking about the "price of oil in non-US dollars"; I didn't mention oil at all.
Third: Crude oil is a pretty uniform commodity trading on a global market, and has a global price. Different flavors or delivery destinations (e.g. West Texas Intermediate or North Sea Brent) have minimal price differences of at most 5%; thus the concept of "THE price of oil" is not nearly useless, but a very useful and commonly used simplification. However, a wrong currency conversion of either of these price series from USD to other currencies like the EUR will distort historical prices by as much as 50% percent or more, rendering the tool useless. QED.
Fourth: Even if you would be right and oil prices in the US were meaningfully different from oil prices in Europe, displaying the US oil price in EUR is not "nearly useless data". Any company which trades in the US oil market and keeps its books in EUR will need that data. (Ever heard of Shell Oil, or Arco/BP, or Total?)
Fifth: "irregardless" is not a word. You are looking for "irrespective" or "regardless".
Why do you want to know the historic "value" of oil in non-fixed units, and how often is that more desirable than the historic value of oil in fixed (typically todays) units?
The historic value of oil in Euro is relevant for somebody who -- let's go out on a limb here -- lives in Europe, for instance. To clarify: every other currency is just as much of a "fixed unit" as the USD, it's just that the relationship between those currencies and the USD is not constant. A financial or economic tool that can only display values of GDP, stock prices, etc in USD is useless for 95% of the world.
Well, I'm not surprised there is such school. My impression is, that economists in general don't have a good grasp of math, specifically, they don't seem to understand the exponential function, otherwise they would not speak of "growth" all the time.
I'm not saying one should not take human behavior into account, but at least they should get the boundary conditions right, and one of those is that our resources are limited.
Your impression is wrong. Every economist knows about Thomas Robert Malthus and Malthusian economics -- for the pre-industrial era his model best explains demographics and the limits of growth. It only so happened that just after he published his thoughts, the industrial revolution happened and technological progress pushed the boundaries of growth further and further - in an exponential manner.
Would you dare to make an exact forecast where the limits of growth lie? Limited by fossil fuels? Or a single planet's worth of solar energy? Maybe a Dyson sphere's worth of solar energy? Technological progress moves the goalposts rapidly enough that you have to assume exponential growth punctuated by occasional catastrophes - at least for the next 50 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, said 1000-foot boat is LARGER than a barn.
Fortunately, said 1000-foot boat has a one-inch thick steel hull and is nigh-impossible to sink via small arms fire. People on its deck are in an ideal fortified position. (Whether they have the weapons or the incentive to fight back is an economic/political question...)
conversely, your 1000ft boat is much larger than a barn.
Who cares if they hit your several-inch-thick ship hull? Not even RPG hits will sink a supertanker or suezmax. They need to hit people-sized targets, and that's pretty hard from a boat.
If they're in range of your small arms fire, your in range of theirs. Plus those guys have some RPG-7s.
They might me in range, but it's pretty hard to hit anything smaller than a barn from a 20-ft boat bobbing on open ocean -- but it is a lot easier from a 1000ft boat...
I realize this view is mighty unpopular, yet I am going to express it. While science is very important, so are social issues. I would like to see the NASA budget considerably shrunk but for only a short period of time, say 12 - 18 months. We have to get our country healthy again and space flight really only effects a small sector of the economy. It will create jobs but only at the most educated levels. A healthy country is a more efficient and productive one. Now, you may feel free to mod me but are you willing to join the censors?
I don't have an opinion one way or another, but I am quite sure that it is infeasible to cut NASA's budget in half for 18 months and then expect them to continue as if nothing happened...
What does a "shrunk budget" mean? Firing reseachers, firing engineers, cancelling projects with industry... And if you as an engineer got fired, you would presumably look for another job with more security and better pay in the private sector and not come back after 18 months into a shitty job where they will eliminate your position at a whim... In short, they can't just mothball manpower, because it won't come back.
I am hoping that current prices should come down a bit; they're currently priced as if they had some sort of "Enterprise Class Premium Edition" of an OS or something, but I feel like you're buying what essentially is the LCD part of a netbook, and an e-reader part of a distro.
The current ones *do have nice displays and elegant cases, but I feel I should be getting a Newton or something, at that price, or at least a beefed-up mp3 player built in.
I also think that the price is mostly due to the display itself -- every one of these eReaders is using the panels from E-Ink Corporation (patent-encumbered, proprietary, and thus sold for a high monopoly price). If it was the OS premium or the construction, the competition from cheap chinese eReaders would have driven prices down (and all of those also still cost $200+)... So competing display technologies from other companies are a necessity to get a price war started, I think.
Theres none good sides on it. Or why do you think US wont open their banking data back to EU?
It's just another case of USA forcing their laws, ideas and politics to other countries. Only taking, and not giving back. Fuck yeah!
You may want to look into who provides a lot of the equipment, personnel and funding for U.N. and NATO peacekeeping forces. I think the US/EU relationship is pretty symbiotic. While the banking data probably won't be given to the EU, 'not giving back' is untrue.
I've looked into it. From Wikipedia: "About 4.5% of the troops and civilian police deployed in UN peacekeeping missions come from the European Union and less than one percent from the United States (USA)." The ten biggest troop contributors by country are 8 developing countries, France and Italy. Regarding UN troop funding - the reluctance and tardiness of the US to pay its UN contributions is legendary, and they are currently $1.3bn in arrears.
As to NATO troop contributions -- the US is making a lot of noise that the Europeans are not supporting their War of Terror "peacekeeping" missions in Iraq and Afghanistan enough; but they knew that they didn't have most EU countries' support when they set up to invade Iraq in the first place...
given what they want to do, that's a good thing.
No it's not. Car analogy: You are running at full speed, about to hit a tree; the two people in the front seat now start squabbling whether to turn the steering wheel left or right while still pumping the throttle...
Einstein was an Eastern European. As were most of the other scientists coming up with what Einstein brought together in Relativity. Soviet physicists were mostly Eastern European, and came up with quite a lot of advances in physics.
No he wasn't - Western Germany/Italy/Switzerland are hardly 'Eastern Europe'. Nor were the others: Poincaré (France), Planck (Germany), Bohr (Denmark), Lorenz (Netherlands), Schwarzschild (Germany), Lemaitre (Belgium)... (Not that Eastern Europeans weren't well represented in sciences, they just have very little to do with the early history of relativity.)
Have a look where the design team and the sponsors come from.
Actually, WSJ is pretty good, but most of it is behind a paywall and isn't getting properly indexed anyway.
Speaking as someone who is working in the finance industry, it actually isn't very good. The financial news is OK, but you can get better coverage even on US businesses and finance news from the FT (without hassles or paywall); and the politics/economics section has gone downhill ever since they compromised their journalistic integrity to get in step with the Neoconservative party line. (It's worst in the editorials, but it tends to bleed over into the selection of economic commentators and the spin of news stories.)
Imagine how much more complete the picture would be if the children all cooperated and worked together on the database content, developed the communication protocols for that database together, and gave each other free license to use them. Then differentiated themselves from the competition with the interface, hardware (if applicable), price, etc.
As far as I understand, most of these gizmos use the geolocation data from Wikipedia for their services -- so people already cooperate on the content. (And give it to everyone for free, too!) The crappiness of these apps just demonstrate that each of them is bad at parsing the WP database in its own way (compare for instance Google Maps with the Wikipedia layer enabled - it is much better).
Wireless-N wasn't a service pack or maintenance update; it was a new feature. I looked over the regulations and Apple's interpretation was at least plausible.
Quote from WinXP SP3 release notes: "This update also includes a small number of new functionalities..." and I could also find half a million other examples (almost every application does this). I don't believe that is the real reason. (Of course if the question is whether Apple PR goons are lying or whether they cannot afford competent CPAs, I know what I would assume.)
Huh? Why should you not be able to do a Service Pack or Maintenance Update for free? Most IT companies do it, and I haven't heard of them having to defer booking revenue under US-GAAP. Are you sure that what you heard about Apple's reason for withholding features is true?
Actually I think the people of Great Britain need new governance that doesn't think that Aldous Huxley had the right idea.
I just wish they would model it after Huxley! Then at least we'd have free recreational drugs for everyone, relaxed sexual mores and yobs that are actually conditioned to like doing menial jobs instead of being anti-social...
Instead we get a re-imagining of Orwell - Animal Farm or Nineteen-Eightyfour, take your pick.
Sorry, I fail to see the link - I read all three articles and I still don't see the link between this arrest (which was a Met job, i.e. London/national police) and the GCHQ Cyber-Security Operations Centre (who are spooks, not policemen)...
We see evolution taking away limbs but never adding new ones.
I think the elephant's prehensile trunk would qualify as a counterexample... (Though I won't think that the chances of a Dumbo-style evolution are significant...)
Ironically, US coins are widely accepted in Canada.
Whats ironic about it?
That Canadian legal tender is refused by cashiers (i.e. the 50-cent coin), yet foreign coins are accepted.
from the can-you-spell-hypocricy dept
Well, someone here obviously cannot...
Posted by kdawson on 23:04 15th November, 2009
That explains it, I guess.
The thing with Goldman Sachs is completely different than Madoff. Madoff duped investors in thinking he was making trades when it really was a large Ponzi scheme. Someone had to generate the fictitious paperwork for the investors and these programmers were allegedly behind it.
Goldman Sachs made huge bets in the housing market. When the housing market fell, Goldman (who had placed a lot of money into this market) lost big.
Hate to break it to you, but Goldman never "lost big" -- that's what the outrage is about. They made big bets with AIG betting against the housing market, and bet against AIG in the CDS market to hedge the risk of AIG collapsing.
So (1) they won big when the subprime market fell, (2) they won big when AIG didn't fail as expected but was bailed out could repay $17bn worth of bet winnings, (3) they won big when all their competitors who actually believed in the housing market collapsed or suffered, and Goldman was one in maybe three kids left on the block. That's why now they can pay bigger bonuses than ever, in a time where unemployment is worse than at anytime in the last 80 years...
You should have "lost" that card or "accidentally" damaged it with a magnet... Presto, new card.
Less than half a penny out of every tax dollar goes to NASA. 5 cents goes to the 'global war on Terror.' [see: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ef/Fy2008spendingbycategory.png
And 5c/$ underestimates it quite a bit -- since DOD spending would also be vastly less without the GWoT, not to speak of DHS spending, big chunks of the Department of VA's costs, and the interest on the debt created by a half-trillion of GWoT-related costs in past budgets...
So, Wolfram would be useful if it could take the EUR/USD time series and multiply it with the oil time series (it doesn't matter which oil time series it uses). Since it does not do that, it is worse than useless: it is misleading.
What you were talking about before (U.S. Crude Price converted to another currency) is not what you are talking about now (European Union Crude Price in Euros) What you were talking about before is nearly useless data. Do you not agree?
First: You were not quoting me, but SleepingWaterBear.
Second: Nobody mentioned "U.S Crude Price" before you in the thread. The OP was talking about the "price of oil in non-US dollars"; I didn't mention oil at all.
Third: Crude oil is a pretty uniform commodity trading on a global market, and has a global price. Different flavors or delivery destinations (e.g. West Texas Intermediate or North Sea Brent) have minimal price differences of at most 5%; thus the concept of "THE price of oil" is not nearly useless, but a very useful and commonly used simplification. However, a wrong currency conversion of either of these price series from USD to other currencies like the EUR will distort historical prices by as much as 50% percent or more, rendering the tool useless. QED.
Fourth: Even if you would be right and oil prices in the US were meaningfully different from oil prices in Europe, displaying the US oil price in EUR is not "nearly useless data". Any company which trades in the US oil market and keeps its books in EUR will need that data. (Ever heard of Shell Oil, or Arco/BP, or Total?)
Fifth: "irregardless" is not a word. You are looking for "irrespective" or "regardless".
Why do you want to know the historic "value" of oil in non-fixed units, and how often is that more desirable than the historic value of oil in fixed (typically todays) units?
The historic value of oil in Euro is relevant for somebody who -- let's go out on a limb here -- lives in Europe, for instance. To clarify: every other currency is just as much of a "fixed unit" as the USD, it's just that the relationship between those currencies and the USD is not constant. A financial or economic tool that can only display values of GDP, stock prices, etc in USD is useless for 95% of the world.
Well, I'm not surprised there is such school. My impression is, that economists in general don't have a good grasp of math, specifically, they don't seem to understand the exponential function, otherwise they would not speak of "growth" all the time. I'm not saying one should not take human behavior into account, but at least they should get the boundary conditions right, and one of those is that our resources are limited.
Your impression is wrong. Every economist knows about Thomas Robert Malthus and Malthusian economics -- for the pre-industrial era his model best explains demographics and the limits of growth. It only so happened that just after he published his thoughts, the industrial revolution happened and technological progress pushed the boundaries of growth further and further - in an exponential manner.
Would you dare to make an exact forecast where the limits of growth lie? Limited by fossil fuels? Or a single planet's worth of solar energy? Maybe a Dyson sphere's worth of solar energy? Technological progress moves the goalposts rapidly enough that you have to assume exponential growth punctuated by occasional catastrophes - at least for the next 50 years.