Software defined radio is by definition mathematics. You might be doing the maths in a clever way, but you're still doing maths, and being able to patent it would be like patenting the quadratic formula.
I'm not sure if I got your question exactly with IO busses, but if you're talking about bit-banging a bus then I don't see the patentability. I don't see how the bus can be patentable if it's in hardware, it's a combination of wiring and protocol: the wiring shouldn't be patentable and the protocol is basically an algorithm. Implementing the protocol in hardware may be patentable, but I think the 'not-obvious to someone skilled in the art' part of it would be a stumbling block - if you've got a protocol so ridiculously complex that a competent engineer can't work out how to drive it in hardware then you should probably be allowed to keep it...
The 'clever' hydraulics I think is similar: If it's done in hydraulics but it's obvious to someone that the behaviour being implemented could be implemented in that fashion then I don't see what's patentable. You could have a very complex piece of software to control essentially dumb hydraulics, but still all you are doing is providing a function to map the desired behaviour onto a mathematical model of the hydraulic system.
The problem with most of these debates is that they don't seem to ask anyone 'skilled in the art' whether they'd have come up with that design. Here's a crazy idea: Companies applying for patents pay a fee and that patent office makes the non-patented parts of the application public. Solve the problem in a reasonable amount of time in a manner that matches the patentable part of the application? Pocket the fee. Solve it differently? You both get patents for your respective solution (one of which is now very valuable to any competitors!). No-one solves it? Original company gets the patent, and possibly some of the fee back minus admin etc. Now there's a disincentive to put stupid patents out there, an incentive in the system to find alternative solutions to them etc. If you've truly come up with something that no-one else is able to solve in the same way then you get to own it - a bit like the system is supposed to work...
Predicting it accurately would be very hard... but I think that the several orders-of-magnitude difference between 6000 years and 4.5 billion years means that it 6000 years is unlikely. Here's another way of looking at it: 6000 years/4.5 billion years is 1.33x10^-6 or 0.0001333%.
Secondly I doubt the age of the earth is calculated by fossil record because the earth predates the fossils by some quite significant margin. Only in fairy tales (you know the ones) was the earth and everything on it created in a short space of time. It spent quite a bit of time as a glowing hot ball of molten material, I doubt there were many fossil-leaving creatures around then. The movement of tectonic plates forcing things into the still molten core of the earth puts a bit of an upper bound on the maximum age of fossils as well. If you've found some source dating the earth itself by fossil record then they're either idiots or they have some interest in pushing inaccurate and terrible science
Thirdly in things that are dated by fossil record: I'd wager (even if you wouldn't) that the likely age of the fossil is known through radiocarbon dating or another technique, giving a range of ages where that fossil is likely to be found (extinction not being a modern phenomena). That way when you find rocks with those fossils in you can make a reasonable guess at when the rock formed. In other cases the formation of the rock happens at a known, or discernible rate (e.g. sedimentary rocks where a layer of sediment is formed each year), and so it is practical to date the fossils based on their position in the rock.
The error is pretty large, but then so is the timescale involved, and the accuracy doesn't need to be huge - being accurate to within 6000 years as illustrated above is actually ridiculously tiny, 100's of millions of years is probably a safer error range. The reasoning isn't circular where one of the data sets is calibrated against some other measurable fact.
BTW. I'm no geologist/physicist or other expert on these matters... someone who knows a bit more can chime in if I've made any wild assumptions. What I will say though is that I think it is more than likely we can make a pretty good guess at the age of the earth, with a significant margin for error.
If it's 'hot' for millenia then it's not actually very 'hot' at all.
If it's 'hot' for decades it's not really a problem to store it.
It's only the stuff in the middle that's particularly nasty, and that can be controlled through good design of the reactor process
Reprocessing and breeder reactors will mean we can get rid of all the waste in it's entirety. Of course that would mean research, development and construction of new reactors. One of the biggest problems is that a lot of the people who complain about the by-products of nuclear power are also the people who are blocking any solution to it. It seems they would rather have big piles of waste comprising small quantities of very dangerous material mixed with large quantities of practically inert material (making large quantities of practically dangerous material) lying around so there is something to complain about than use existing technology to make the waste harmless because it would be nuclear technology and therefore everything it does would be evil.
Or you could be informed... and look at reality. Highest cost as percentage of GDP in the world, coverage of 2/3rd the population? Yay US! I've got private healthcare (it's often a job perk in the UK), but I also know that if I lost my job tomorrow, had some chronic illness or something that wasn't covered I'd still be fine. I get taxed for it, but I still feel more 'free' than I would were it necessary to be employed or maintain a private health insurance policy for coverage. Also we get much more holiday over here, no worries about random gun violence - our police are generally unarmed because they generally don't need to be armed, and you get all the rain you can complain about.
In addition, device drivers talk to real hardware. Sometimes a buggy driver will cause an irrecoverable situation in hardware regardless of software that may be able to 'kill' a driver process. Short of the kernel closing down devices and potentially buses (e.g. Linux disables non-handled interrupt sources) there will be nothing that can be done. If your buggy driver instructs the device to DMA data to incorrect memory locations then the fanciest kernel in the world can't help. Microkernels may have advantages, but I agree they are unlikely to provide the panacea of stable, high-performance device drivers. IMHO that can only be obtained by correctly written and well tested device drivers, which makes the monolithic/micro-kernel choice irrelevant.
Or let's see reality. You have 6 companies A-F, with corresponding CEOs A-F. Each company has a remuneration committee that votes on the compensation for the CEO.
The remuneration committee for company/CEO A consists of people who happen to be CEOs [B-F] The remuneration committee for company/CEO B consists of people who happen to be CEOs [A,C-F] The remuneration committee for company/CEO C consists of people who happen to be CEOs [A-B,D-F] etc. etc.
Market forces have nothing to do with it (otherwise why would companies that make losses still increase executive compensation? Why would executives who have failed still be getting higher and higher paid jobs?). It's all a big exercise in scratching each others' backs. Even if it's not by design, and even if your pay is decided by people a few steps removed, there's still a circular dependency where it's in no-one's interest to vote down remuneration.
Even without the direct link above, you still see examples of 'Other companies of size XXX pay YYY for this position so we are going to pay YYY+ZZZ to get the best person'. The people who make these decisions are also in the market for these jobs: It's not in their interest to push the pay down as it would indirectly push down or limit their own pay.
You're correct. We should also remove any testing and training requirements for operating heavy machinery because most people would probably be fine. And the guys that run critical infrastructure like power plants, or people who drive trains, or pilots who fly planes, they all have to go through a ridiculous amount of testing and training and have strict requirements that clearly do very little to preserve anyone's safety. We should just let them try it and if they don't kill anyone they can carry on because they clearly know what they're doing.
If you're that shitting scared on the road you shouldn't be driving, that fear is your brain telling you that you have no control over the situation. You could try being a better driver, observation, anticipation, defensive driving etc. will mean that you don't get as many nasty surprises and you are better prepared for the ones that do happen. If you want to drive like you own the road then you're going to come into conflict with an awful lot of other idiots who also think they own the road. Share the roads, expect people to drive like idiots and protect yourself from them by becoming a better driver yourself, and you'll find the whole experience a lot better. Driving is a skill, one that is complex and has many facets. Drivers should be continuously seeking to be better at it, not to get as close as possible to the minimum acceptable standard.
Same as all the parked up lorries (18-wheelers or whatever everyone else calls them) leaving their doors open when they're sleeping in a lay-by overnight. They still have to worry about then is someone stealing their diesel though...
Surely they should just have a physical separation between the busses - one for safety-critical features (Engine, Transmission, ABS, Lighting etc.) and one for entertainment and other 'utility'. If a controller needs to link between the two then it should only support a very limited range of commands, and there should be no direct method for passing a command or data from the 'utility' bus to the 'safety' bus. Ideally these critical controllers should be read-only on the 'utility' bus. These portions of the code need to be tested and verified, preferably openly and independently. Thus there would be no way to inject bad commands onto the safety critical bus except by physically connecting something to it.
You don't even need malicious software for things to go wrong... my Audi A4's radio uses the diagnostic bus to get speed information for volume control, it died and knocked out communications for everything in the car... for the sake of a couple of extra wires.
I don't know how it works in the US, but over here in Engerland expert witnesses are required by the court to be impartial. We had a lecture from a guy at Uni whose job was investigating electronic engineering failures and was often an expert witness in legal trials associated with these failures. He also told several clients to settle out of court because his testimony would lose them the case (e.g. his investigation had shown them to be at fault, and when examined he was legally obliged to say exactly that).
So it's not entirely unreasonable that Apple pay their guy an enormous consulting fee for researching the situation so he can provide reasoned and unbiased testimony. If his research led him to believe Apple were in the wrong then there's no obligation for them to ask him to take the stand.
Is he referring to using containers as part of the target application or as part of the compiler itself? The compiler internals might be much cleaner or there may be less redundant code for the compiler if it used STL rather than alternative or custom containers etc. Your target application would still only be using STL if you wrote code to use it...
And then all the other trading houses would have to accept their own mistakes, fat-fingered trades and so on, which is probably why the exchange allows trades to be reversed.
That was the point of the CDO though - to reduce the overall risk by joining smaller risks together. If you are a lender and you loan $1million, with a 10% risk of default then you have a 1 in 10% chance of losing everything and on average you get 90% back. If you make 10 loans of $100k at 10% risk then you've got a more complex risk but what you can avoid is the black-or-white nature of the single loan where you either get what you expected or get nothing. So by collateralizing a bunch of loans you are creating a risk curve. The odds of you losing everything are much lower, and the presuming your loan pays back some amount more than you lent your risk of making any loss is significantly reduced. It's the same as insurance. You expect occasional large payouts but overall you take in more than you pay out.
So having a product made of non-triple-A loans is fine, so long as the risks are correctly understood - a problem with a vast number of things in finance. Two things occur: First people don't take into account, or aren't aware of, the interconnected nature of the risks - they are not independent. In the real world someone might stop paying their mortgage due to events that are connected to them only, but as a group the loans may be affected by much larger scale events (e.g. economic downturn, war, environmental disaster). Second is that the responsibility for the risk was passed on: the person making the loan gets their money when they sell the CDO to the market so their need to ensure that they have correctly analyzed the risk is significantly reduced, hence all the selling of loans to people who were in no way able to repay them. The people buying the CDOs _should_ have been thoroughly investigating the products they were buying - at least some kind of independent audit sampling the quality of loans to ensure that the risk matched what was being presented - but while everyone was making money that doesn't happen, what could be wrong when everyone's getting richer?
The whole thing is not really any different to how most stock market investments are made. Diversify risk so that isolated drops in value can be absorbed and the overall investment turns a profit. If there is a major stock market shift then everyone loses - pension funds etc., the big, long-term investors that everyone wants to see lose a lot in these situations. Playing a long term game means they recover in time, but still they are affected by systemic problems and in some cases affected by poorly categorized or unknown risks (financial/accounting scandals spring to mind).
In fact the only thing to do is guarantee some of those products, to stem the panic and cut the losses. On the other end there need to be tighter regulations on lending, right at the end-user point. I don't know about the US but in the UK this is definitely the case - we already have pretty strong regulation around lending and especially mortgages and people I know who are mortgage assessors for lenders are now incredibly cautious and will follow requirements to the letter - partly as every application they approve will be checked and any discrepancies mean that everything they've done will be thoroughly investigated.
The government involvement is a trade-off between a true free-market where, yes, all the people who made out like thieves in the boom will be shirtless in the bust and having some kind of limits on the damage that can occur. Allowing an enormous crash like we would see without the bailouts will affect everyone. Pensions, investments, businesses, economies will all collapse and that will leave _everyone_ in a bad situation. Perhaps a few bad people will learn a lesson, but we will all definitely take an enormous punishment. It's not fair, but nothing is, and to take that as a basis for action is unfortunately naive. The best of a bunch of bad choices is more careful regulation. I'd like to see a much more proactive and independent approach to quantifying the risks being taken in some of these areas and a bit more backbone fro
Fuck me sideways. Can we sort this shit out. To free something is to loose it. To not win is to lose. If you were practising archery you'd be loosing arrows. If you were walking around with coins falling from your pocket you would be losing money. If you open all the cages at the zoo the animals have been loosed. If you drop your keys down the drain they are lost. A sibling's death might mean you lose a brother. A tragedy might occur to someone you are loosely related to. If something is not tight it is loose. To make it less tight would be to make it looser. Not knowing the difference between loose and lose makes you sound like a loser.
If English is not your first language then I apologise: in that case you are a far more capable speaker than many who would call English their native tongue, and I can certainly make no claims to proficiency in any other language, but I see this mistake so very often, from people who should genuinely know better that I cannot keep the inner pedant at bay any more.
It's quite hard (for large values of quite) to build nuclear reactors using approved existing designs (the ones that have been running for 40 years with no catastrophes). Trying to get a design approved that uses new technology, that will cost an awful lot more than an existing design due to unknowns in the engineering etc.? No commercial entity would take the risk, they'll just build what they know works and makes them plenty of money.
If there was an investment fund where I could put money towards the development of breeder reactors I would. Crowd-sourcing on an enormous scale. I'd do it because I think it the best and possibly only truly good solution to providing our energy needs for the future. I'd do it because no commercial operation would do it because of the financial risk involved - which is a perfectly legitimate business decision. I'd do it because no government in the world at the moment (except maybe China and Russia) has the foresight to invest in our future, to promote useful science, research and engineering simply because it could yield enormous benefits instead of pandering, appeasing and succumbing to lobbyists, 'special' interest groups, and Luddites.
Anyway, breeder reactors are being approached with the same 'mad rush' as every other proposed solution to energy problems (except the killing nearly everyone one - that one still has very little momentum...) Where are the people clamouring to build solar furnaces, without ridiculous subsidies would there be wind farms and solar panels? (in the UK the reduction in subsidies overnight halved the installation rate - could it be that people were only doing it for the government-guaranteed return and not the environment? Perish the though...). Why aren't we building damns everywhere, and growing all the switchgrass under the sun, and tapping into the earth's crust for geothermal? Is it because it won't make enough money? Or because the risk-return ratio isn't good enough? Is it because in times of austerity we (caused by people who would do anything for money) won't spend money on something that would make all of us richer in the long run?
You're right, driving is the driver's responsibility and that's who should be insured. One question though: If the car is not maintained in a roadworthy way, or has a dangerous fault known to the owner but not something the person renting the car would be able to detect then I would have thought the owner would be liable. I don't mean things that a reasonable inspection of the car would uncover (Like the BOLTSS bikers get told to do: Brakes, Oil, Lights, Tyres, Steering, Suspension), but things that are known to the owner and potentially dangerous to a renter. I presume most rental agencies keep up with maintenance partly for this reason, to not do so would surely be seen as negligent. So if you're renting out your own car it doesn't seem unreasonable that you would be held responsible for ensuring it was safe to drive.
'There also we be some other great keynotes...' doesn't make any sense either.
Did you put in 'There also will be some other great keynotes...' and then have 'are' suggested as a correction for 'be' or did you not notice your own typo - if so it speaks to the argument for not depending on the tools to tell you what you should already know: the message you are intending to convey.
290Million pound fine to the company, so effectively paid for by the shareholders, not by those who actually perpetrated the crime (and still demand their bonuses).
Slashdot Mirror
I'll take dying waiting over dying due to not being able to afford them thanks.
There's no rule against private healthcare over here by the way - you want something better then you can pay for it, no-one's going to stop you.
Software defined radio is by definition mathematics. You might be doing the maths in a clever way, but you're still doing maths, and being able to patent it would be like patenting the quadratic formula.
I'm not sure if I got your question exactly with IO busses, but if you're talking about bit-banging a bus then I don't see the patentability. I don't see how the bus can be patentable if it's in hardware, it's a combination of wiring and protocol: the wiring shouldn't be patentable and the protocol is basically an algorithm. Implementing the protocol in hardware may be patentable, but I think the 'not-obvious to someone skilled in the art' part of it would be a stumbling block - if you've got a protocol so ridiculously complex that a competent engineer can't work out how to drive it in hardware then you should probably be allowed to keep it...
The 'clever' hydraulics I think is similar: If it's done in hydraulics but it's obvious to someone that the behaviour being implemented could be implemented in that fashion then I don't see what's patentable. You could have a very complex piece of software to control essentially dumb hydraulics, but still all you are doing is providing a function to map the desired behaviour onto a mathematical model of the hydraulic system.
The problem with most of these debates is that they don't seem to ask anyone 'skilled in the art' whether they'd have come up with that design. Here's a crazy idea: Companies applying for patents pay a fee and that patent office makes the non-patented parts of the application public. Solve the problem in a reasonable amount of time in a manner that matches the patentable part of the application? Pocket the fee. Solve it differently? You both get patents for your respective solution (one of which is now very valuable to any competitors!). No-one solves it? Original company gets the patent, and possibly some of the fee back minus admin etc. Now there's a disincentive to put stupid patents out there, an incentive in the system to find alternative solutions to them etc. If you've truly come up with something that no-one else is able to solve in the same way then you get to own it - a bit like the system is supposed to work...
You can't just toss these things off, anyway
Indeed... you'd need very large hands...
Predicting it accurately would be very hard... but I think that the several orders-of-magnitude difference between 6000 years and 4.5 billion years means that it 6000 years is unlikely. Here's another way of looking at it: 6000 years/4.5 billion years is 1.33x10^-6 or 0.0001333%.
Secondly I doubt the age of the earth is calculated by fossil record because the earth predates the fossils by some quite significant margin. Only in fairy tales (you know the ones) was the earth and everything on it created in a short space of time. It spent quite a bit of time as a glowing hot ball of molten material, I doubt there were many fossil-leaving creatures around then. The movement of tectonic plates forcing things into the still molten core of the earth puts a bit of an upper bound on the maximum age of fossils as well. If you've found some source dating the earth itself by fossil record then they're either idiots or they have some interest in pushing inaccurate and terrible science
Thirdly in things that are dated by fossil record: I'd wager (even if you wouldn't) that the likely age of the fossil is known through radiocarbon dating or another technique, giving a range of ages where that fossil is likely to be found (extinction not being a modern phenomena). That way when you find rocks with those fossils in you can make a reasonable guess at when the rock formed. In other cases the formation of the rock happens at a known, or discernible rate (e.g. sedimentary rocks where a layer of sediment is formed each year), and so it is practical to date the fossils based on their position in the rock.
The error is pretty large, but then so is the timescale involved, and the accuracy doesn't need to be huge - being accurate to within 6000 years as illustrated above is actually ridiculously tiny, 100's of millions of years is probably a safer error range. The reasoning isn't circular where one of the data sets is calibrated against some other measurable fact.
BTW. I'm no geologist/physicist or other expert on these matters... someone who knows a bit more can chime in if I've made any wild assumptions. What I will say though is that I think it is more than likely we can make a pretty good guess at the age of the earth, with a significant margin for error.
Actually in broadcast 2k is 2048 - there's a good number of 2048x1080 standards. 1920x1080 (or 1050 or 1035) are generally referred to as HD.
There's one every time...
If it's 'hot' for millenia then it's not actually very 'hot' at all.
If it's 'hot' for decades it's not really a problem to store it.
It's only the stuff in the middle that's particularly nasty, and that can be controlled through good design of the reactor process
Reprocessing and breeder reactors will mean we can get rid of all the waste in it's entirety. Of course that would mean research, development and construction of new reactors. One of the biggest problems is that a lot of the people who complain about the by-products of nuclear power are also the people who are blocking any solution to it. It seems they would rather have big piles of waste comprising small quantities of very dangerous material mixed with large quantities of practically inert material (making large quantities of practically dangerous material) lying around so there is something to complain about than use existing technology to make the waste harmless because it would be nuclear technology and therefore everything it does would be evil.
Or you could be informed... and look at reality. Highest cost as percentage of GDP in the world, coverage of 2/3rd the population? Yay US! I've got private healthcare (it's often a job perk in the UK), but I also know that if I lost my job tomorrow, had some chronic illness or something that wasn't covered I'd still be fine. I get taxed for it, but I still feel more 'free' than I would were it necessary to be employed or maintain a private health insurance policy for coverage. Also we get much more holiday over here, no worries about random gun violence - our police are generally unarmed because they generally don't need to be armed, and you get all the rain you can complain about.
In the time you spent typing that post you could have read the comment carefully...
See if you can spot it this time round...
Pedantic GP is pedantic. Over-eager-to-feel-superior AC should not feel superior
In addition, device drivers talk to real hardware. Sometimes a buggy driver will cause an irrecoverable situation in hardware regardless of software that may be able to 'kill' a driver process. Short of the kernel closing down devices and potentially buses (e.g. Linux disables non-handled interrupt sources) there will be nothing that can be done. If your buggy driver instructs the device to DMA data to incorrect memory locations then the fanciest kernel in the world can't help. Microkernels may have advantages, but I agree they are unlikely to provide the panacea of stable, high-performance device drivers. IMHO that can only be obtained by correctly written and well tested device drivers, which makes the monolithic/micro-kernel choice irrelevant.
Or let's see reality. You have 6 companies A-F, with corresponding CEOs A-F. Each company has a remuneration committee that votes on the compensation for the CEO.
The remuneration committee for company/CEO A consists of people who happen to be CEOs [B-F]
The remuneration committee for company/CEO B consists of people who happen to be CEOs [A,C-F]
The remuneration committee for company/CEO C consists of people who happen to be CEOs [A-B,D-F]
etc.
etc.
Market forces have nothing to do with it (otherwise why would companies that make losses still increase executive compensation? Why would executives who have failed still be getting higher and higher paid jobs?). It's all a big exercise in scratching each others' backs. Even if it's not by design, and even if your pay is decided by people a few steps removed, there's still a circular dependency where it's in no-one's interest to vote down remuneration.
Even without the direct link above, you still see examples of 'Other companies of size XXX pay YYY for this position so we are going to pay YYY+ZZZ to get the best person'. The people who make these decisions are also in the market for these jobs: It's not in their interest to push the pay down as it would indirectly push down or limit their own pay.
"... and if you don't want to pay your taxes, you're free to spend a weekend with the pain monster"
You're correct. We should also remove any testing and training requirements for operating heavy machinery because most people would probably be fine. And the guys that run critical infrastructure like power plants, or people who drive trains, or pilots who fly planes, they all have to go through a ridiculous amount of testing and training and have strict requirements that clearly do very little to preserve anyone's safety. We should just let them try it and if they don't kill anyone they can carry on because they clearly know what they're doing.
If you're that shitting scared on the road you shouldn't be driving, that fear is your brain telling you that you have no control over the situation. You could try being a better driver, observation, anticipation, defensive driving etc. will mean that you don't get as many nasty surprises and you are better prepared for the ones that do happen. If you want to drive like you own the road then you're going to come into conflict with an awful lot of other idiots who also think they own the road. Share the roads, expect people to drive like idiots and protect yourself from them by becoming a better driver yourself, and you'll find the whole experience a lot better. Driving is a skill, one that is complex and has many facets. Drivers should be continuously seeking to be better at it, not to get as close as possible to the minimum acceptable standard.
Pop the hood, lock the doors with the remote (presuming you have one) then actually open the hood, that usually sets the alarm off...
Same as all the parked up lorries (18-wheelers or whatever everyone else calls them) leaving their doors open when they're sleeping in a lay-by overnight. They still have to worry about then is someone stealing their diesel though...
Surely they should just have a physical separation between the busses - one for safety-critical features (Engine, Transmission, ABS, Lighting etc.) and one for entertainment and other 'utility'. If a controller needs to link between the two then it should only support a very limited range of commands, and there should be no direct method for passing a command or data from the 'utility' bus to the 'safety' bus. Ideally these critical controllers should be read-only on the 'utility' bus. These portions of the code need to be tested and verified, preferably openly and independently. Thus there would be no way to inject bad commands onto the safety critical bus except by physically connecting something to it.
You don't even need malicious software for things to go wrong... my Audi A4's radio uses the diagnostic bus to get speed information for volume control, it died and knocked out communications for everything in the car... for the sake of a couple of extra wires.
I don't know how it works in the US, but over here in Engerland expert witnesses are required by the court to be impartial. We had a lecture from a guy at Uni whose job was investigating electronic engineering failures and was often an expert witness in legal trials associated with these failures. He also told several clients to settle out of court because his testimony would lose them the case (e.g. his investigation had shown them to be at fault, and when examined he was legally obliged to say exactly that).
So it's not entirely unreasonable that Apple pay their guy an enormous consulting fee for researching the situation so he can provide reasoned and unbiased testimony. If his research led him to believe Apple were in the wrong then there's no obligation for them to ask him to take the stand.
Is he referring to using containers as part of the target application or as part of the compiler itself? The compiler internals might be much cleaner or there may be less redundant code for the compiler if it used STL rather than alternative or custom containers etc. Your target application would still only be using STL if you wrote code to use it...
And then all the other trading houses would have to accept their own mistakes, fat-fingered trades and so on, which is probably why the exchange allows trades to be reversed.
That was the point of the CDO though - to reduce the overall risk by joining smaller risks together. If you are a lender and you loan $1million, with a 10% risk of default then you have a 1 in 10% chance of losing everything and on average you get 90% back. If you make 10 loans of $100k at 10% risk then you've got a more complex risk but what you can avoid is the black-or-white nature of the single loan where you either get what you expected or get nothing. So by collateralizing a bunch of loans you are creating a risk curve. The odds of you losing everything are much lower, and the presuming your loan pays back some amount more than you lent your risk of making any loss is significantly reduced. It's the same as insurance. You expect occasional large payouts but overall you take in more than you pay out.
So having a product made of non-triple-A loans is fine, so long as the risks are correctly understood - a problem with a vast number of things in finance. Two things occur: First people don't take into account, or aren't aware of, the interconnected nature of the risks - they are not independent. In the real world someone might stop paying their mortgage due to events that are connected to them only, but as a group the loans may be affected by much larger scale events (e.g. economic downturn, war, environmental disaster). Second is that the responsibility for the risk was passed on: the person making the loan gets their money when they sell the CDO to the market so their need to ensure that they have correctly analyzed the risk is significantly reduced, hence all the selling of loans to people who were in no way able to repay them. The people buying the CDOs _should_ have been thoroughly investigating the products they were buying - at least some kind of independent audit sampling the quality of loans to ensure that the risk matched what was being presented - but while everyone was making money that doesn't happen, what could be wrong when everyone's getting richer?
The whole thing is not really any different to how most stock market investments are made. Diversify risk so that isolated drops in value can be absorbed and the overall investment turns a profit. If there is a major stock market shift then everyone loses - pension funds etc., the big, long-term investors that everyone wants to see lose a lot in these situations. Playing a long term game means they recover in time, but still they are affected by systemic problems and in some cases affected by poorly categorized or unknown risks (financial/accounting scandals spring to mind).
In fact the only thing to do is guarantee some of those products, to stem the panic and cut the losses. On the other end there need to be tighter regulations on lending, right at the end-user point. I don't know about the US but in the UK this is definitely the case - we already have pretty strong regulation around lending and especially mortgages and people I know who are mortgage assessors for lenders are now incredibly cautious and will follow requirements to the letter - partly as every application they approve will be checked and any discrepancies mean that everything they've done will be thoroughly investigated.
The government involvement is a trade-off between a true free-market where, yes, all the people who made out like thieves in the boom will be shirtless in the bust and having some kind of limits on the damage that can occur. Allowing an enormous crash like we would see without the bailouts will affect everyone. Pensions, investments, businesses, economies will all collapse and that will leave _everyone_ in a bad situation. Perhaps a few bad people will learn a lesson, but we will all definitely take an enormous punishment. It's not fair, but nothing is, and to take that as a basis for action is unfortunately naive. The best of a bunch of bad choices is more careful regulation. I'd like to see a much more proactive and independent approach to quantifying the risks being taken in some of these areas and a bit more backbone fro
Fuck me sideways. Can we sort this shit out. To free something is to loose it. To not win is to lose. If you were practising archery you'd be loosing arrows. If you were walking around with coins falling from your pocket you would be losing money. If you open all the cages at the zoo the animals have been loosed. If you drop your keys down the drain they are lost. A sibling's death might mean you lose a brother. A tragedy might occur to someone you are loosely related to. If something is not tight it is loose. To make it less tight would be to make it looser. Not knowing the difference between loose and lose makes you sound like a loser.
If English is not your first language then I apologise: in that case you are a far more capable speaker than many who would call English their native tongue, and I can certainly make no claims to proficiency in any other language, but I see this mistake so very often, from people who should genuinely know better that I cannot keep the inner pedant at bay any more.
It's quite hard (for large values of quite) to build nuclear reactors using approved existing designs (the ones that have been running for 40 years with no catastrophes). Trying to get a design approved that uses new technology, that will cost an awful lot more than an existing design due to unknowns in the engineering etc.? No commercial entity would take the risk, they'll just build what they know works and makes them plenty of money.
If there was an investment fund where I could put money towards the development of breeder reactors I would. Crowd-sourcing on an enormous scale. I'd do it because I think it the best and possibly only truly good solution to providing our energy needs for the future. I'd do it because no commercial operation would do it because of the financial risk involved - which is a perfectly legitimate business decision. I'd do it because no government in the world at the moment (except maybe China and Russia) has the foresight to invest in our future, to promote useful science, research and engineering simply because it could yield enormous benefits instead of pandering, appeasing and succumbing to lobbyists, 'special' interest groups, and Luddites.
Anyway, breeder reactors are being approached with the same 'mad rush' as every other proposed solution to energy problems (except the killing nearly everyone one - that one still has very little momentum...) Where are the people clamouring to build solar furnaces, without ridiculous subsidies would there be wind farms and solar panels? (in the UK the reduction in subsidies overnight halved the installation rate - could it be that people were only doing it for the government-guaranteed return and not the environment? Perish the though...). Why aren't we building damns everywhere, and growing all the switchgrass under the sun, and tapping into the earth's crust for geothermal? Is it because it won't make enough money? Or because the risk-return ratio isn't good enough? Is it because in times of austerity we (caused by people who would do anything for money) won't spend money on something that would make all of us richer in the long run?
You're right, driving is the driver's responsibility and that's who should be insured. One question though: If the car is not maintained in a roadworthy way, or has a dangerous fault known to the owner but not something the person renting the car would be able to detect then I would have thought the owner would be liable. I don't mean things that a reasonable inspection of the car would uncover (Like the BOLTSS bikers get told to do: Brakes, Oil, Lights, Tyres, Steering, Suspension), but things that are known to the owner and potentially dangerous to a renter. I presume most rental agencies keep up with maintenance partly for this reason, to not do so would surely be seen as negligent. So if you're renting out your own car it doesn't seem unreasonable that you would be held responsible for ensuring it was safe to drive.
'There also we be some other great keynotes...' doesn't make any sense either.
Did you put in 'There also will be some other great keynotes...' and then have 'are' suggested as a correction for 'be' or did you not notice your own typo - if so it speaks to the argument for not depending on the tools to tell you what you should already know: the message you are intending to convey.
290Million pound fine to the company, so effectively paid for by the shareholders, not by those who actually perpetrated the crime (and still demand their bonuses).
Oh the irony. Meant to be 'greatest country in the world'. Meant to be...