This has nothing to do with freedom, international content, or whatever. Has anyone here clicked on the link and read the press release?
The above poster (EnderWiggnz) was exactly right. There ARE existing laws. And the Executive Order says that these people are tasked with finding out if the Internet is making it any easier for people to break these existing laws. IN THE US. Not Sweden, not upper Uzbekistan, the US.
Here's a paraphrase of the EO:
a) There will be a group of people who will see if people are using the internet to break existing laws;
1) if so, can we use existing laws to prosecute them for these crimes, such as use of controlled substances, etc
2) Do the cops need any additional tools or laws passed to help them prosecute these crimes;
3) Can we give anything to parents or teachers to minimize the occurrance of these crimes;
b) Keep in mind that the "current administration's" policy is to do as little as possible,
Sec. 2) Report back to me in 4 months with what you've found.
Yes, the assumption that past returns are a prediction of future performance is in on its face wrong. And it certainly holds true for last year's performance on Amazon, etc. But it holds true for the bank returns as well. Bank returns during the great depression were certanly less than the 2-4% I quoted you!
It is also very easy to "buy the market". Invest in a S&P500 fund, or a Russell 2000 fund. These funds usually track market returns within a tenth of their actual rate. This is a very sensible way to invest.
As to your preferring 2-4% to 6-8% -- well, I can't comment on that. Why don't you plot out a graph of $10,000 invested over thirty years at the two rates, and tell me which YOU'D rather retire with!
(the answer is 2,310,000 at 4%, 10,020,000 at 8%, but keep in mind that inflation is taking back 1-3% a year, so in 30 years the 2.3 mil isn't going to be nearly as attractive as it sounds now!)
Obviously, if your tolerance for risk is so much less that you can only invest in a bank account, that is certainly what you should do. But realize that your returns will be substantially less.
There are so many things wrong with your first statement, I don't know where to begin. Yes, if you proceed under your assumptions, you may be right, but nowhere is it written that the stock market is a zero-sum game (for each winner there is a loser, etc).
Look: The plain reality is that for the last 100 years, the stock market has averaged 6-8% gain, including the crash of '87 and the great depression, and your bank account returns 2-4%. You do the math.
I won't dispute your point two, but might I suggest that HAVING financial security is undoubtedly better than NOT having it.
Might I suggest that if you are planning on holding your shares for 5+ years, that you just buy them in the aftermarket, like most mortals?
This isn't a wise-ass suggestion: Amazon.com went up tremendously on its first day, but if you had bought & held, even with the 30-40% drop it's taken recently you are still making well above-market returns. A quick look at the chart shows that you would have made about 1000% (yes, one thousand percent) if you bought the stock any time in July, 1997 and held it until now. Two years folks.
Another thing to keep in perspective. Don't shed a tear about missing Red Hat. There will be many, many other good investment opportunities along any minute, probably many of them Linux and/or open source related. The opportunities aren't going to dry up and stop coming. Some day, it may be YOUR company going public!
That is a hot idea. I would like to participate in BOTH efforts, but I'm not going to run two screensavers or whatever. I think a client that would take an arbitrary task and work on it for a while, then move to another, would be really neat. One time you'd be finding aliens, the other you'd be factoring.
I actually have a lot of sympathy for Seti@Home, and I feel that people should refrain from bashing them. Designing large distributed systems is HARD, and that it works reasonably well at all is testament to their efforts. Not to mention that these people are interested in the science, NOT the computer aspect of this project. Aside from the distributed.net effort, there's not a whole lot of experience out there in these internet-wide computational systems.
No, you can't invest in an **>IPO** because you're not qualified. You can certainly invest in the stock market. Go buy some shares in Disney.
Reality slap people: the stockmarket is a highly regulated entity. Las Vegas is not. (or, actually, LV is more so: Las Vegas is one of a small # of places in the country where gambling is totally legal, state lotteries notwithstanding).
Just for the record, in the early eighties, the ENTIRE STATE OF MASSACHUSETTS was prohibited from participating in one IPO of a small computer company because the state securities commission ruled that it was too speculative (IPOs have to be approved in each and every of the 50 states -- didn't know that, did'ja?). That small computer company? Apple.
Of course, one could make the argument that the Massachusetts SEC did them a favor:-) but you get the point here.
Unfortunately, you will not see that answer. As has been pointed out, they are legally obligated to ask those questions.
If anyone has a problem here, it should be with the government imposing parental-style regulations over the behaviour of private citizens. Perhaps the open-source/slashdot effect/whatever should target their political representatives to get this fixed if they have a complaint.
Hey, it's no skin off their back. What people don't seem to realize here is that the questionairre is for THEIR protection, not yours. If you lie, and the stock you invest in falls through the floor, you have not one leg to stand on for a lawsuit (not that you do anyway -- when you sign up for ANY brokerage account you waive your right to sue and agree to binding arbitration).
In one of those "strange coincidence" things, Doonesbury is doing a series of strips on MP3s (or at least, it was 2 weeks ago, and it's now releasing the strips on the online site):
Wired news had an interesting blurb on this, pointing out that 80+% of MP3.COM's revenues come from on-site advertising, and they lost a few mil last year, but due to the current MP3 hype, and the fact that apparently a lot of people think they own the MP3 technology (!) the company got bid up into the billions.
There may not be an opt-out button, but there is a "remove me from the list" feature prominently featured at the bottom of the promotional email they send you.
I can't imagine a reputable business NOT including one of these these days!
Well, CMGI funded GeoCities, Raging Bull, PlanetAll, ThingWorld, Vicinity, etc etc etc. The thing I don't understand is why they would purchase Lycos -- they FUNDED Lycos to begin with. I doubt they owned it all, but still. Especially after the CEO of CMGI got in the spat with the CEO of Lycos about the merger with Barry Diller's company (Home shopping network, etc)
While I concede the points in your article, I really admire Lucas for getting to the point in his career where he can literally lay down the rules to the Hollywood machine.
From what I understand, Lucas financed TPM by himself; he has dictated what standards theatres must attain to show his movie; he has maintained tight control over his licensees. And through all this, he is beholden to no one other than himself, making exactly the movie HE wants with no other influence other than his desires.
In my mind, that's a pretty envious position to be in. *I* wish I had a job over which I had total, 100% control -- don't we all. Yes, he may be accused of playing the commercialization card to the hilt, but I'd rather have him do it than the Hollywood Menace.
Re:Only 10% of the IP addresses are used?
on
IP Address Shortage
·
· Score: 1
I think you'll find that a lot of ISPs still deal out addresses out of THEIR pool in blocks that still largely resemble these old blocks. And the point remains: Many organizations are allocated vastly more address space than they utilize. Each extra bit in your block, whether it's on an octet boundary or not, doubles your space.
Also, the orgs that have the large class As were given them waaaaayyy back before CIDR.....
Re:Only 10% of the IP addresses are used?
on
IP Address Shortage
·
· Score: 3
In fact, that is EXACTLY the problem. There are really only 3 levels of address allocation -- class C (2**8 addresses), class B (2**16 addresses) and class A (2**24 addresses) (or so).
Way back when, most companies would just grab a class B, thinking "gee, I'll probably have more than 256 machines, the class B will give me room to grow". Of course, they only have maybe 1024 machines, so most of their address space ends up empty.
This has GOT to be the case with Ford, Eli Lilly, Merck, Mercedes Benz, and Prudential. I say we revoke their class As!
Plan 9 is a research operating system. I doubt Thompson really thought AT&T was going to get back in as a major player in the OS biz. The guy is a *researcher*. If he had any plans otherwise, he would have gone off and founded a startup.
As for Linux being a "better Unix than Unix ever was", I'd say that has to be the silliest statement I've ever heard. And pointless, too. Linux hasn't won the war yet -- and the Unix wars have been going on for a very, very, very, VERY long time now....
And I doubt that Thompson has quite the chip on his shoulder you seem to think. Why should he? He's paid big bux by AT&T to sit around with 32k+ songs! Sheesh. He's a researcher. He's gone on to other things. The IP telephony stuff sounds pretty cool.
The comments in the article I did find interesting was the advice to his son to get into Biology, and that there wasn't much left to do in Computer Science. I find the latter statement quite debatable, but the former quite interesting! Hack the genome!
No, actually, HDs do NOT do variable speed. The amount of information on the inner sectors is the same as the outer sectors to combat this problem. Some floppies, and CD-Roms, however, are variable-speed.
I think the reason the industry has moved away from larger disks is many-fold. The power demands of larger disks are greater. The seek times are definitely greater, along with the latency. And there is a great advantage to the smaller size with a completely uniform form factor.
I think, however, that big IBM iron still may use special large disks.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone remember Dancing Demon for the TRS-80 model 1?
GPS rollover is tomorrow night (between Saturday and Sunday).
This has nothing to do with freedom, international content, or whatever. Has anyone here clicked on the link and read the press release?
The above poster (EnderWiggnz) was exactly right. There ARE existing laws. And the Executive Order says that these people are tasked with finding out if the Internet is making it any easier for people to break these existing laws. IN THE US. Not Sweden, not upper Uzbekistan, the US.
Here's a paraphrase of the EO:
a) There will be a group of people who will see if people are using the internet to break existing laws;
1) if so, can we use existing laws to prosecute them for these crimes, such as use of controlled substances, etc
2) Do the cops need any additional tools or laws passed to help them prosecute these crimes;
3) Can we give anything to parents or teachers to minimize the occurrance of these crimes;
b) Keep in mind that the "current administration's" policy is to do as little as possible,
Sec. 2) Report back to me in 4 months with what you've found.
You can't be serious about the Esther Dyson thing. She's got one impossible task to wrestle with already, give her a break.
The people on the list are there because they are people Clinton can boss around, in the same sense that your boss can give you tasks to do.
Yup, whoops, shame on me :-) I got all caught up in the joy of replying and didn't check my math.
But your post caught the crux of the matter anyway.
Trust me, it is a zero-sum game.
Yes, the assumption that past returns are a prediction of future performance is in on its face wrong. And it certainly holds true for last year's performance on Amazon, etc. But it holds true for the bank returns as well. Bank returns during the great depression were certanly less than the 2-4% I quoted you!
It is also very easy to "buy the market". Invest in a S&P500 fund, or a Russell 2000 fund. These funds usually track market returns within a tenth of their actual rate. This is a very sensible way to invest.
As to your preferring 2-4% to 6-8% -- well, I can't comment on that. Why don't you plot out a graph of $10,000 invested over thirty years at the two rates, and tell me which YOU'D rather retire with!
(the answer is 2,310,000 at 4%, 10,020,000 at 8%, but keep in mind that inflation is taking back 1-3% a year, so in 30 years the 2.3 mil isn't going to be nearly as attractive as it sounds now!)
Obviously, if your tolerance for risk is so much less that you can only invest in a bank account, that is certainly what you should do. But realize that your returns will be substantially less.
There are so many things wrong with your first statement, I don't know where to begin. Yes, if you proceed under your assumptions, you may be right, but nowhere is it written that the stock market is a zero-sum game (for each winner there is a loser, etc).
Look: The plain reality is that for the last 100 years, the stock market has averaged 6-8% gain, including the crash of '87 and the great depression, and your bank account returns 2-4%. You do the math.
I won't dispute your point two, but might I suggest that HAVING financial security is undoubtedly better than NOT having it.
None of this is relevant to RHAT, of course!
Might I suggest that if you are planning on holding your shares for 5+ years, that you just buy them in the aftermarket, like most mortals?
This isn't a wise-ass suggestion: Amazon.com went up tremendously on its first day, but if you had bought & held, even with the 30-40% drop it's taken recently you are still making well above-market returns. A quick look at the chart shows that you would have made about 1000% (yes, one thousand percent) if you bought the stock any time in July, 1997 and held it until now. Two years folks.
Another thing to keep in perspective. Don't shed a tear about missing Red Hat. There will be many, many other good investment opportunities along any minute, probably many of them Linux and/or open source related. The opportunities aren't going to dry up and stop coming. Some day, it may be YOUR company going public!
That is a hot idea. I would like to participate in BOTH efforts, but I'm not going to run two screensavers or whatever. I think a client that would take an arbitrary task and work on it for a while, then move to another, would be really neat. One time you'd be finding aliens, the other you'd be factoring.
I actually have a lot of sympathy for Seti@Home, and I feel that people should refrain from bashing them. Designing large distributed systems is HARD, and that it works reasonably well at all is testament to their efforts. Not to mention that these people are interested in the science, NOT the computer aspect of this project. Aside from the distributed.net effort, there's not a whole lot of experience out there in these internet-wide computational systems.
No, you can't invest in an **>IPO** because you're not qualified. You can certainly invest in the stock market. Go buy some shares in Disney.
:-) but you get the point here.
Reality slap people: the stockmarket is a highly regulated entity. Las Vegas is not. (or, actually, LV is more so: Las Vegas is one of a small # of places in the country where gambling is totally legal, state lotteries notwithstanding).
Just for the record, in the early eighties, the ENTIRE STATE OF MASSACHUSETTS was prohibited from participating in one IPO of a small computer company because the state securities commission ruled that it was too speculative (IPOs have to be approved in each and every of the 50 states -- didn't know that, did'ja?). That small computer company? Apple.
Of course, one could make the argument that the Massachusetts SEC did them a favor
Unfortunately, you will not see that answer. As has been pointed out, they are legally obligated to ask those questions.
If anyone has a problem here, it should be with the government imposing parental-style regulations over the behaviour of private citizens. Perhaps the open-source/slashdot effect/whatever should target their political representatives to get this fixed if they have a complaint.
Hey, it's no skin off their back. What people don't seem to realize here is that the questionairre is for THEIR protection, not yours. If you lie, and the stock you invest in falls through the floor, you have not one leg to stand on for a lawsuit (not that you do anyway -- when you sign up for ANY brokerage account you waive your right to sue and agree to binding arbitration).
In one of those "strange coincidence" things, Doonesbury is doing a series of strips on MP3s (or at least, it was 2 weeks ago, and it's now releasing the strips on the online site):
http://www.doonesbury.com/dailydose/
Wired news had an interesting blurb on this, pointing out that 80+% of MP3.COM's revenues come from on-site advertising, and they lost a few mil last year, but due to the current MP3 hype, and the fact that apparently a lot of people think they own the MP3 technology (!) the company got bid up into the billions.
Greater fool theory, indeed!
There may not be an opt-out button, but there is a "remove me from the list" feature prominently featured at the bottom of the promotional email they send you.
I can't imagine a reputable business NOT including one of these these days!
If you've never been there, X10.com *always* has "expires at midnight tonite" deals. Maybe not for the firecracker stuff, but some sort of sale.
Remember those ginsu knives from the 70s? "Offer expires at midnight tonight" but the ad ran for months?
Well, CMGI funded GeoCities, Raging Bull, PlanetAll, ThingWorld, Vicinity, etc etc etc. The thing I don't understand is why they would purchase Lycos -- they FUNDED Lycos to begin with. I doubt they owned it all, but still. Especially after the CEO of CMGI got in the spat with the CEO of Lycos about the merger with Barry Diller's company (Home shopping network, etc)
Or a (well stocked) news stand? Or maybe a friend who is a member?
IEEE is a non-profit professional organization. The costs they charge just cover the services they give.
While I concede the points in your article, I really admire Lucas for getting to the point in his career where he can literally lay down the rules to the Hollywood machine.
From what I understand, Lucas financed TPM by himself; he has dictated what standards theatres must attain to show his movie; he has maintained tight control over his licensees. And through all this, he is beholden to no one other than himself, making exactly the movie HE wants with no other influence other than his desires.
In my mind, that's a pretty envious position to be in. *I* wish I had a job over which I had total, 100% control -- don't we all. Yes, he may be accused of playing the commercialization card to the hilt, but I'd rather have him do it than the Hollywood Menace.
I think you'll find that a lot of ISPs still deal out addresses out of THEIR pool in blocks that still largely resemble these old blocks. And the point remains: Many organizations are allocated vastly more address space than they utilize. Each extra bit in your block, whether it's on an octet boundary or not, doubles your space.
Also, the orgs that have the large class As were given them waaaaayyy back before CIDR.....
In fact, that is EXACTLY the problem. There are really only 3 levels of address allocation -- class C (2**8 addresses), class B (2**16 addresses) and class A (2**24 addresses) (or so).
Way back when, most companies would just grab a class B, thinking "gee, I'll probably have more than 256 machines, the class B will give me room to grow". Of course, they only have maybe 1024 machines, so most of their address space ends up empty.
This has GOT to be the case with Ford, Eli Lilly, Merck, Mercedes Benz, and Prudential. I say we revoke their class As!
How about the network-wide denial-of-service attack perpetrated by 6.02E23 people attempting to download the demo at once???
:-)
"Unix was a dying thing before Linus came along."
NOT! Not even remotely. Not even by any yardstick I can think of.
Is this a troll? Seriously?
Plan 9 is a research operating system. I doubt Thompson really thought AT&T was going to get back in as a major player in the OS biz. The guy is a *researcher*. If he had any plans otherwise, he would have gone off and founded a startup.
As for Linux being a "better Unix than Unix ever was", I'd say that has to be the silliest statement I've ever heard. And pointless, too. Linux hasn't won the war yet -- and the Unix wars have been going on for a very, very, very, VERY long time now....
And I doubt that Thompson has quite the chip on his shoulder you seem to think. Why should he? He's paid big bux by AT&T to sit around with 32k+ songs! Sheesh. He's a researcher. He's gone on to other things. The IP telephony stuff sounds pretty cool.
The comments in the article I did find interesting was the advice to his son to get into Biology, and that there wasn't much left to do in Computer Science. I find the latter statement quite debatable, but the former quite interesting! Hack the genome!
No, actually, HDs do NOT do variable speed. The amount of information on the inner sectors is the same as the outer sectors to combat this problem. Some floppies, and CD-Roms, however, are variable-speed.
I think the reason the industry has moved away from larger disks is many-fold. The power demands of larger disks are greater. The seek times are definitely greater, along with the latency. And there is a great advantage to the smaller size with a completely uniform form factor.
I think, however, that big IBM iron still may use special large disks.