You only get the advertised sale price if you use their "club card" which has your personal identifying information plus now your spending habits, etc.
Whenever I signed up for a club card, it was pretty clear to me that I was receiving a discount in payment for my spending profile. With Costco or other "membership-only" stores, this is built in; and the membership fee is a straightforward economic decision (do your marginal savings relative to a non-membership big box store outweigh the membership cost?) In either case, I am being compensated for the harvesting of my information, and there is no personal risk involved. What's being presented in the article—forced binding arbitration in lieu of actual legal recourse—is an entirely different situation, because it amounts to a risk transfer (company reduces legal costs, customers who are "wronged" lose the recourse to recover losses). It's very one-sided, and I find it unbelievable that the judicial system would go along with this idea.
Why aren't there more datacenters in Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, etc.?
There are datacenters in the Chicago area, particularly for futures. Between these facilities and New York, the latest latency race is microwave relay towers. Any new stock exchange which decides to pop up and locate themselves in the Midwest has to fight the network effect to become relevant. In the long run (assuming they become popular enough to attract liquidity), they would only end up creating an additional opportunity for latency arbitrage in a big triangle between Chicago and New York. Overall, there is a lot of risk and very little value in starting up a new exchange in a brand-new location.
OTOH, some of the existing exchanges do have off-site datacenters for disaster recovery. BATS's connectivity manual (PDF PDF DANGER WILL ROBINSON) lists three locations on p.14. With some digging you can probably find more for the other exchanges. Because the 2-day closure of the stock exchange appears to be a coordinated effort by the SEC, there was little incentive on Monday to actually use a disaster recover site. If a primary datacenter had serious problems during a normal trading day I bet any of the exchanges would fail over pretty quickly.
Similarly, Obama was chosen by the Democrat voters in that primary, who apparently are happy with him despite the drone strikes and other not-so-left things he's done, evidenced by the fact that there were other alternatives on the ballot but the Democrat voters had no interest in them and voted exclusively for Obama.
That is not true everywhere. I ended up voting in the Republican primary specifically because my Democratic ballot only had one option.
Look at large buildings where management outsources janitorial care. Guess where IT is going.
Toilets in a large building are fungible. If one bathroom is out because of a mega-deuce, I can just go to the next one. Computer networks are frequently unique snowflakes tightly bound to the business.
It was cheaper for me, going from Florida to NYC. Actually, it was cheaper for my whole family than it was for a single plane ticket. Admittedly it was 20 years ago or so, but I don't exactly travel that much, so I've never had a reason to look up tickets since.
I have taken a number of Amtrak trips more recently than you, but in a different region. Here's my story:
In-state travel in Illinois vs. airplane: Amtrak is substantially cheaper and door-to-door time is competitive due to ORD/MDW security.
In-state travel in Illinois vs. car: Amtrak is cheaper for one adult. Door-to-door time is 30-90 minutes worse, depending on rail congestion.
Regional travel (Wisconsin, Michigan, etc.) vs. plane: Amtrak is always cheaper. Door-to-door time is 2x or 3x worse, probably in part due to the Great Lakes.
Regional travel vs. car: Amtrak is always more expensive. Door-to-door time is up to 180 minutes worse because the train route goes several urban areas instead of taking a direct path.
National travel (midwest-to-coast) vs. plane: More expensive and substantially (maybe 6x) slower.
National travel vs. car: On par with driving because it travels overnight, but YMMV depending on driving buddies. Really this is more like a "land cruise", where you are paying for scenic transportation and room & board.
I'll only take train by myself in-state. Out-of-state it only makes sense if I can take advantage of my time on the train (vacation relaxing, or work with 3G/4G). Traveling cross-country is a vacation, not effective transport.
If it doesn't work somewhere, then don't build the tracks there. And then we have plenty of cities that are close to each other, and which would benefit from such a chain.
Yeah, placement is key. But as I learned from SimCity 2000: over-building a rail line is an added expense, but under-building is a complete waste.
The total US debt is much higher than 50K per person.
But this doesn't even include all the mortgage guarantees and all the student loan guarantees that the government makes! How about all the bank guarantees? FDIC? If everything is counted in, that's all sorts of money that the government promises to pay in case things go South, and that's all kinds of money that government does not have.
IANAAccountant, but it doesn't seem kosher to count things like FDIC insurance as straight-up debt. Yeah, it matters for risk analysis, but it's not money that is owed today nor is it accumulating interest while the banks hum along.
Inflation in the price of oil caused by the shear logistics of its extraction, processing, and consumption isn't due to monetary inflation. It's due to an increasing complexity and cost of doing business in the age of dwindling easy oil.
Regardless of the relative complexity of oil drilling and refining, inflation will have an impact on oil prices, just as it will on every other commodity. And regardless of your personal wealth situation, the impact of the Fed's various QEs has been to inject a large amount of money into the system and effectively devalue the currency. Your nice car, your house, and other non-USD assets don't lose value as a result of a currency deflation. Your bank account and wages, however, do lose value.
It's only persistent failure is the legacy growth of inconsistent api calls.
I can think of a few more which were still relevant around the introduction of PHP 5:
Prone to insecurity by design: things like "addslashes" by default (or at all—what a horrible idea), auto-registration user input variables mixed with implicit variable declarations, mysql_real_escape_string(), etc.
Weird decisions with language design as it evolved: Destructors were added, but they got called in the wrong order for RAII which implies that they didn't actually understand the purpose of destructors (this was fixed, thankfully). Namespaces were added long after everyone was already following the namespace_function convention of C, creating a schism between new code and old (and not actually providing any new functionality).
A very poor alternative to CPAN. DBI had existed for years when PHP's inferior community DB abstraction layer came onto the scene. Smarty was all the rage at one point in time, but turns out it's just as powerful as PHP and therefore not actually useful as a template engine.
Aside from a low barrier to entry, the real strengths that I see in PHP don't actually have much to do with the language itself:
Deployment takes advantage of the filesystem and existing filesystem-based web servers, which is intuitive. IMHO, it is much better to use Apache as a "front controller" (for script lookups and rewrites) than trying to shoehorn that abomination into a "web" framework the way I have seen done in Zend, Django, etc.
Language-level integration with HTTP GET/POST data, headers, server information, cookies mean nobody has to do boilerplate. OK, I guess this is an advantage of the PHP language, but conceivably someone could customize any language's interpreter to handle the HTTP "magic" before hitting a single script.
I'm going to assume that you are making assumptions based on other fantasy novels and games, but in the World of Warcraft, orcs are not inherently evil.
I was an avid Warcraft II player, and in that world orcs were definitely portrayed as the evil team. Most of the magic spells were centered around death and "human" sacrifice, distinct taboo subjects. The artistry, backstory in the manual (yeah, paper manual with flavor text!), and voice acting were all distinctly savage and violent. This "not inherently evil" attitude sounds suspiciously like a retcon established for the benefit of WoW's social acceptance.
Which is a problem because GET is supposed to be "idempotent" (not supposed to have any side effects no matter how many times you run it).
(1) you could just use POST and deny GET requests for URLs with side effects. You just end up encoding the "delete key" into the form's target URL instead of using a field, but for most applications that's fine. (2) "Idempotent" means that running once is identical to running many times. Deleting an account is usually idempotent so it's valid (albeit crazy/stupid) for GET. Now, HEAD OTOH... I have heard of some server-side scripting systems which execute HEAD by performing a GET and then discarding the output. That would be nasty for/delete/this/account.htm.
The shoes I'm wearing right now are made about 100 miles from where I live in central Chicago and they're as good as any Mephisto (and about as pricey).
it's primarily the Democrats the entertainment industry has in their pockets
These two statements are consistent. There are certainly some Democrat-driven initiatives (continuation/escalation of the War on Drugs, support of a surveillance society, etc.) which sound conservative. Not "Conservative" i.e. Republican, but "conservative" i.e. "favoring the status quo".
Why would you donate to PBS/NPR, anyway? They are supported by advertising. Including pretty egregious companies like Exxon, Siemens, and Monsanto.
If they get enough donations, they have bargaining power against the corporate sponsors/underwriters/whatever-they're-called. They become much more likely to broadcast material with paints a sponsor in a bad light if they predict that sustained (or increased) donations can overcome the loss of the sponsor. Your argument of "they have corporate sponsors, therefore they don't deserve public/popular financial support" is self-fulfilling.
I've also heard the Koch brothers listed as sponsors for some programs. But that certainly didn't stop them from running programs on the Koch "union-busting" shenanigans.
Take someone with no preconceptions, say a barbarian from a pre-modern society, and serve them two meals: one of a Big Mac and the other Thai-Burmese-Argentinian fusion or whatever is considered haute cuisine these days, and the barbie will pick the Big Mac every time.
To further emphasize the impact of marketing on our lives, my mind immediately jumped to the Capital One barbarians (vikings?) eating the Big Macs, and the Geico cavemen eating the fusion. Yeah, preconceptions indeed.
Julia Childs picked up cooking late in life with no previous interest or apparent pre-disposition. Programming is like cooking.
In the future when we have holo-decks, I want Julia Childs to school me on graph algorithms over the Internet's backbone routers. I want to see her mad about a prematurely-optimized Duff's Device. Yeah...
The rioters are animals. They aren't going to respond well to repeated taunting, any more than a feral cat responds well to being poked with a stick.
The rioters are people, not feral cats. They may not be as "enlightened" as you wish (mobs rarely are), but if you degrade them to animals then what do you expect?
CS typically covers algorithms and high level languages, things useful in entry level programming and application development
A good CS school will hit much more of the topics that you listed under ECE. Mine had the following:
More languages: during my program the core classes used Java, C++, C (both desktop and embedded), MIPS, OCaml; non-core added Perl, PHP, Python, and probably a few others. ECE guys were required to learn x86 asm (they too the tougher Computer Architecture course; I wasn't interested).
More emphasis on software given the basis of a turing machine. Algorithms and operating systems, in particular.
Less emphasis on the hardware/software interface. So not very much asm, and only one entry-level course with chip design.
Similar emphasis on the basics of discrete math, calculus, and physics.
Given the choice of the programs, any individual student would come out as a more efficient general-purpose programmer and a far better software designer from the CS side. ECE was more for people who wanted to "go deep" on the hardware/software interface: pure embedded programming, hardware design, or signal analysis. All of the other advanced topics you listed were equally available on either side of the fence.
Not if you do it through the public market data but before the other order makes it through.
With the exception of the short-lived "flash orders", once you see an order displayed on public market data you cannot front-run it. It's already at the exchange. You can join it, or trade against it, or post your order at a more aggressive price, but there's no way to trade before it on the exchange without making a price sacrifice.
Seriously. I've talked to quite a few people who have been caught up in an "event" where they had to sell (for tax reasons, for financial reasons, etc.) and they just happened to pick the wrong moment of time to trade. And there have been thousands of such "bad times" so far this year.
Use marketable limit orders (i.e. sell order with price set a reasonable range below the current bid, so expecting immediate execution unless something goes crazy) or stop-limit orders for an orderly sale. Don't use market orders. Don't use stop-market orders. You'll only trade at a bad price if you send an order that permits trading at a bad price.
The shares you sell are always the ones you've held the longest.
Yeah, I always thought that (LIFO/queue order) was a ridiculous approach to book-keeping. It's not like shares "go bad" like produce or commodities. Effectively it means large funds and rich individuals can day-trade stocks while paying long-term capital gains (~15%) because they can limit annual turnover/volume to a fraction of their holdings... but everyone else gets the short-term capital gains (=marginal income tax, something like 33%). If profits/losses were booked FIFO (stack order) then taxes due to trading would be independent of the capitalization of the trader... a.k.a. in favor of the little guy.
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Whenever I signed up for a club card, it was pretty clear to me that I was receiving a discount in payment for my spending profile. With Costco or other "membership-only" stores, this is built in; and the membership fee is a straightforward economic decision (do your marginal savings relative to a non-membership big box store outweigh the membership cost?) In either case, I am being compensated for the harvesting of my information, and there is no personal risk involved. What's being presented in the article—forced binding arbitration in lieu of actual legal recourse—is an entirely different situation, because it amounts to a risk transfer (company reduces legal costs, customers who are "wronged" lose the recourse to recover losses). It's very one-sided, and I find it unbelievable that the judicial system would go along with this idea.
There are datacenters in the Chicago area, particularly for futures. Between these facilities and New York, the latest latency race is microwave relay towers. Any new stock exchange which decides to pop up and locate themselves in the Midwest has to fight the network effect to become relevant. In the long run (assuming they become popular enough to attract liquidity), they would only end up creating an additional opportunity for latency arbitrage in a big triangle between Chicago and New York. Overall, there is a lot of risk and very little value in starting up a new exchange in a brand-new location.
OTOH, some of the existing exchanges do have off-site datacenters for disaster recovery. BATS's connectivity manual (PDF PDF DANGER WILL ROBINSON) lists three locations on p.14. With some digging you can probably find more for the other exchanges. Because the 2-day closure of the stock exchange appears to be a coordinated effort by the SEC, there was little incentive on Monday to actually use a disaster recover site. If a primary datacenter had serious problems during a normal trading day I bet any of the exchanges would fail over pretty quickly.
That is not true everywhere. I ended up voting in the Republican primary specifically because my Democratic ballot only had one option.
Toilets in a large building are fungible. If one bathroom is out because of a mega-deuce, I can just go to the next one. Computer networks are frequently unique snowflakes tightly bound to the business.
Here, have
some
of mine.
I have taken a number of Amtrak trips more recently than you, but in a different region. Here's my story:
I'll only take train by myself in-state. Out-of-state it only makes sense if I can take advantage of my time on the train (vacation relaxing, or work with 3G/4G). Traveling cross-country is a vacation, not effective transport.
Yeah, placement is key. But as I learned from SimCity 2000: over-building a rail line is an added expense, but under-building is a complete waste.
Corporate bonds. Take in loans from investors and pay them back interest while retaining ownership.
IANAAccountant, but it doesn't seem kosher to count things like FDIC insurance as straight-up debt. Yeah, it matters for risk analysis, but it's not money that is owed today nor is it accumulating interest while the banks hum along.
Regardless of the relative complexity of oil drilling and refining, inflation will have an impact on oil prices, just as it will on every other commodity. And regardless of your personal wealth situation, the impact of the Fed's various QEs has been to inject a large amount of money into the system and effectively devalue the currency. Your nice car, your house, and other non-USD assets don't lose value as a result of a currency deflation. Your bank account and wages, however, do lose value.
I can think of a few more which were still relevant around the introduction of PHP 5:
Aside from a low barrier to entry, the real strengths that I see in PHP don't actually have much to do with the language itself:
I was an avid Warcraft II player, and in that world orcs were definitely portrayed as the evil team. Most of the magic spells were centered around death and "human" sacrifice, distinct taboo subjects. The artistry, backstory in the manual (yeah, paper manual with flavor text!), and voice acting were all distinctly savage and violent. This "not inherently evil" attitude sounds suspiciously like a retcon established for the benefit of WoW's social acceptance.
(1) you could just use POST and deny GET requests for URLs with side effects. You just end up encoding the "delete key" into the form's target URL instead of using a field, but for most applications that's fine. (2) "Idempotent" means that running once is identical to running many times. Deleting an account is usually idempotent so it's valid (albeit crazy/stupid) for GET. Now, HEAD OTOH... I have heard of some server-side scripting systems which execute HEAD by performing a GET and then discarding the output. That would be nasty for /delete/this/account.htm.
Where do you get your shoes?
These two statements are consistent. There are certainly some Democrat-driven initiatives (continuation/escalation of the War on Drugs, support of a surveillance society, etc.) which sound conservative. Not "Conservative" i.e. Republican, but "conservative" i.e. "favoring the status quo".
If they get enough donations, they have bargaining power against the corporate sponsors/underwriters/whatever-they're-called. They become much more likely to broadcast material with paints a sponsor in a bad light if they predict that sustained (or increased) donations can overcome the loss of the sponsor. Your argument of "they have corporate sponsors, therefore they don't deserve public/popular financial support" is self-fulfilling.
I've also heard the Koch brothers listed as sponsors for some programs. But that certainly didn't stop them from running programs on the Koch "union-busting" shenanigans.
To further emphasize the impact of marketing on our lives, my mind immediately jumped to the Capital One barbarians (vikings?) eating the Big Macs, and the Geico cavemen eating the fusion. Yeah, preconceptions indeed.
I was effected by my mother and father.
You're not a number, you're a free man!
In the future when we have holo-decks, I want Julia Childs to school me on graph algorithms over the Internet's backbone routers. I want to see her mad about a prematurely-optimized Duff's Device. Yeah...
The rioters are people, not feral cats. They may not be as "enlightened" as you wish (mobs rarely are), but if you degrade them to animals then what do you expect?
In fairness to javascript, most other languages aren't designed for delopment either.
A good CS school will hit much more of the topics that you listed under ECE. Mine had the following:
Given the choice of the programs, any individual student would come out as a more efficient general-purpose programmer and a far better software designer from the CS side. ECE was more for people who wanted to "go deep" on the hardware/software interface: pure embedded programming, hardware design, or signal analysis. All of the other advanced topics you listed were equally available on either side of the fence.
With the exception of the short-lived "flash orders", once you see an order displayed on public market data you cannot front-run it. It's already at the exchange. You can join it, or trade against it, or post your order at a more aggressive price, but there's no way to trade before it on the exchange without making a price sacrifice.
Use marketable limit orders (i.e. sell order with price set a reasonable range below the current bid, so expecting immediate execution unless something goes crazy) or stop-limit orders for an orderly sale. Don't use market orders. Don't use stop-market orders. You'll only trade at a bad price if you send an order that permits trading at a bad price.
Yeah, I always thought that (LIFO/queue order) was a ridiculous approach to book-keeping. It's not like shares "go bad" like produce or commodities. Effectively it means large funds and rich individuals can day-trade stocks while paying long-term capital gains (~15%) because they can limit annual turnover/volume to a fraction of their holdings... but everyone else gets the short-term capital gains (=marginal income tax, something like 33%). If profits/losses were booked FIFO (stack order) then taxes due to trading would be independent of the capitalization of the trader... a.k.a. in favor of the little guy.