This reminds me of the London gold price fixing which seems irrelevant because gold is also electronicly traded, and probably HFT'd; but it looks like they still do it.
Many of use got used to the idea of offsite backups for our local hard drives.
When applications are in "the cloud", you need the opposite: a way to "backdown" in case the provider goes offline or changes the ToS in ways you don't like.
Some kind of sophisticated browser cache might be the best way to do this. I know I've seen some things like that. You'd probably still have to have the cache do slightly different things for different sites; but I think a browser-cache approach is probably a good starting point.
Obviously, there are some types of links that generate virtually infiinite content, so you have to watch out for that; OTOH, the stuff we really care about (pictures, comments about pictures, text) tends to be, in essence, static content. It shouldn't be that difficult to scrape it and archive it locally (famous last words).
What did they do before self-esteem was invented? Seriously. I've heard "low self esteem" described as a cause for everything from gang violence to sex addiction. AFAIK, self-esteem doesn't crop up very much before the 70s, right? What did they use before that, just good old-fashioned demons I guess.
Has anybody done a study to test if FaceBook increases your chance of being posessed?
People without common sense don't have $200k? I beg to differ.
Running a Ponzi scheme doesn't seem like something you'd do if you had common sense, does it? Sooner or later it'll catch up with you, right? Well...
OK, a less extreme example? Buying a McMansion with a NINJA loan. Total nonsense. Yet, there were probably some people who actually, through total dumb luck, got out at the right time. Same deal with dot-coms or any other bubble.
The lottery. Suckers game, and yet people win $200k all the time.
And, if that isn't enough to convince you; I actually saw a report on 419 scams where one of the victims was a doctor. A doctor!!!
And yes, my first thought was "I don't want him operating on me".
In short, a fool and his money are soon parted, and you'd be surprised how many rich fools there are, waiting to be parted from their money.
OK, not to cast this accomplishment in a bad light; but I wish rankings weren't used so often for this kind of thing.
The trouble with ranks is that everybody could be really close to the same number, and the rankings are just statistical noise.
Somebody else posted the percentage list upon which the rankings are based. That's better, but you still have to consider the number of hosts. A country with a small number of hosts could rank really low, and still have a large percentage of spambots.
China is a huge country, but I'm not sure how many hosts it has. The US may have more, but I doubt that's enough to justify our huge percentage of spams.
IMHO, the USA antispam people and the people that publish these rankings both have work to do.
It was a bit tricky but I found one. I recall that this study was discussed widely in the media in 2008, for obvious reasons.
Of course, that's a journalist's dumbed-down version. "Experimental Economics", "irrational" and "bubble" are obvious keywords to try. Good luck finding a source that isn't paywalled. That's as far as I care to go with it...
To argue we aren't rational is to contradict yourself(for why would you attempt to convince someone through discussion if they weren't capable of reason?).
I know plenty of people who can balance a checkbook, yet still they believe in astrology. The part of their head that balances the checkbook is rational and, IMHO, the part the believes in astrology isn't. Taken in whole they are not rational, since there is a part of them that isn't rational. Now, the actual balancing of the checkbook is rational, but their investment in International Baby Mulcher (because the stars were aligned) isn't.
To say that people aren't rational, and yet to work with those parts of their minds that are rational (via argument), does not seem contradictory to me.
I'm playing a tune to your ears, but I'm drawing a picture for your eyes.
This is just one small example of Greenspan's real mistake. Yes. His real mistake.
He stated that a belief that firms would act rationally was his mistake.
Rational actors are a funamental assumption of economic analysis, and all but the most blindered ivory-tower economists recognize that as a funametal flaw in the discipline. Recently, some experimental economics that pulls in the discipline of psychology has been done, so there's hope despite academia's tendancy to resist interdisciplinary study.
Anyway, I digress. Greenspan's real mistake was to buy into the fiction of corporate personhood.
Corporations don't act. They aren't persons. Employees and managers act, usually in their own self interest. Thus, the managers acting in their own self interest destroyed the firms and profited while doing so. As a collection of people all seeking their own self-interest, the firm serves the individuals that run it; but ultimately the firm itself becomes insolvent!
I see your point a bit here... less of a fallacy, and more like an answer to "if we don't inflate, then what do we do".
However, I have to maintain that compelling the government to tax as opposed to inflate (or any other financing method) won't stop wars. The Spanish-American war was financed by a telephone tax, which we kept paying until what, the 1990s? I forget exactly; but it was a ridiculously long time.
Now, I'm not necessarily accusing you of this; but I think a lot of people who put forth the "if the government couldn't inflate, we wouldn't have wars" argument, are just attacking the current system for their own political purposes. It seems to be an article of faith among the Ron Paul crowd, that they tell eachother to make themselves feel good. Like many of the Ron Paul partisan standpoints, when you go back and look at history, they start breaking down...
"Wars should be finacned via taxation" was not the original argument. I'm not sure what this fallacy is called, but it's some kind of fallacy where you've basicly changed the argument.
The Soviet disasters are, as you say, all re-entry. The US disasters are an even split, although you can quibble about Columbia since it was damaged on launch.
Of course, the US disasters killed more people because the craft carried more people. The Wiki list also has ground fatalities, but it includes non-manned missions. They also include non-rocket accidents in the training list.
There are, as always, lots of ways to juggle the statistics to make it look like something is worse or better.
Many utilities actively encourage conservation. Their business is already highly regulated, and they don't want the hassle of building a new plant. In some cases, infrastructure is strained. I'm living in a zone affected by a recent gas disaster (San Bruno explosion). PG and E is encouraging gas conservation; and that's not all that unusual. Even when there is no disaster, the desire to avoid straining infrastructure, resulting in huge retrofit costs, is something they want to avoid. They'd probably prefer to stretch out the fossil fuel supply as long as possible too, simply to avoid the cost of alternatives. Yes, they're working on huge new solar plants, wind farms, etc; but that takes time and money. It may never fully replace what we have.
With the resource extraction companies you might have more of an argument. Extracting maximum resources in a minimal ammount of time might serve their economic interests.
The way I see it, the utilities are customers for the resource extractors. I don't think you should put them in the same boat.
If you pull in all spaceflight, including the Soviet program, I'm guessing blast-off is more dangerous. IIRC, the Soviets had a rocket blow up and kill not only all cosmonauts, but dozens of ground observers who were too close.
It's a close race though. Don't forget testing as an also-ran. There's the Apollo oxygen fire, and recently there have been deaths during the test phase of some private rockets, I want to say it was Armadillo Aerospace, but I don't recall off the top of my head...
Well, just look at one example--the US Civil war. The South printed. The north issued bonds.
So, let's take this one step further and say that the ability to issue bonds makes it easier to wage war.
So let's say the government can't inflate the currency or issue bonds. Let's say they can't tax either, because the same argument would be used.
Keep removing every ability the government has to finance the war, and you end up with "X makes it easier to wage war because wars can be paid through X".
Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that the government has no financing at all. What do you end up with? Wars of conquest to obtain the equivalent of financing, to finance more wars. The Roman empire grew like that. The Vikings were initially raiders, but in some cases ended up settling in conquered territories.
War, under some circumstances, is itself a profitable venture.
So sorry, no matter how you twist it, the idea that "sound money" is any kind of antidote to war is kinda silly. Indeed, Spain's reliance on gold as currency made the Native American lands particularly tasty targets.
Yes, and then when we're all starving you'll tell us to go where the food is. Guess what?
It just so happens that mountains and valleys near oceans are great places to grow food. Plenty of water, stable climate during the summer. Before Silicon Valley was a tech center, it was very productive agricultural land. The Central Valley still is, and although it's further from the faults it would still have problems in a "big one", not to mention that it has huge 100-year floods.
I don't expect to have a quake alarm in my house. However, if I'm riding a train I'd like to know that it will come to a stop when it gets an alarm, or that if I'm about to cross the Oakland Bridge, the metering lights will stay stuck on red. BTW, if that ever happens, DON'T RUN THE LIGHT. You might be really, really sorry.
I know the Japanese are already doing this with trains. A system like this ought to be a prerequisite before we even think of building high speed rail. I won't be surprised if they're way behind on the integration though...
1. Dual mandate of price stability and employment--came from Congress, and pulled the Fed out of areas where it's equipped to act.
2. A more regressive tax structure, started under Reagan.
3. Massive, unnecessary wars started by GWB.
4. Well meaning, but in retrospect ill advised government efforts to encourage home ownership. Also not something the Fed did.
If you're blaming the Fed, it's like blaming the tail for wagging the dog. Some people even go so far as to argue that the ability to print money causes wars. If you look at history, you see that the war comes first, then they turn to money printing. The gold standard does NOT keep people honest, honestly! As soon as government has a reason, they immediately trash the gold standard. As one author put it, "the gold standard is as good as the paper it's written on".
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of the London gold price fixing which seems irrelevant because gold is also electronicly traded, and probably HFT'd; but it looks like they still do it.
Many of use got used to the idea of offsite backups for our local hard drives.
When applications are in "the cloud", you need the opposite: a way to "backdown" in case the provider goes offline or changes the ToS in ways you don't like.
Some kind of sophisticated browser cache might be the best way to do this. I know I've seen some things like that. You'd probably still have to have the cache do slightly different things for different sites; but I think a browser-cache approach is probably a good starting point.
Obviously, there are some types of links that generate virtually infiinite content, so you have to watch out for that; OTOH, the stuff we really care about (pictures, comments about pictures, text) tends to be, in essence, static content. It shouldn't be that difficult to scrape it and archive it locally (famous last words).
What did they do before self-esteem was invented? Seriously. I've heard "low self esteem" described as a cause for everything from gang violence to sex addiction. AFAIK, self-esteem doesn't crop up very much before the 70s, right? What did they use before that, just good old-fashioned demons I guess.
Has anybody done a study to test if FaceBook increases your chance of being posessed?
Every self-promoting jackhole is going to create their own entry, then and the quality of each article itself will drop
So what you're saying, is that if you don't delete from Wikipedia then in the long run, Wikipedia becomes FaceBook.
/me ducks.
I'm really not interested in this until I can pull a Chicago attack on it. In other words, create lots of fake identities and get $reward*$fakes.
Of course, it'd be highly illegal unless I could find some kind of loophole. So, for all intents and purposes (heheh) I'm not interested.
83% of the Rules of Acquisition are made up on the spot.
IMHO, those who can resist will ultimately triumph.
Rule #3: Now, to really find out the secret of getting laid, send me $100.
Rule #4: What did I tell you???
People without common sense don't have $200k? I beg to differ.
Running a Ponzi scheme doesn't seem like something you'd do if you had common sense, does it? Sooner or later it'll catch up with you, right? Well...
OK, a less extreme example? Buying a McMansion with a NINJA loan. Total nonsense. Yet, there were probably some people who actually, through total dumb luck, got out at the right time. Same deal with dot-coms or any other bubble.
The lottery. Suckers game, and yet people win $200k all the time.
And, if that isn't enough to convince you; I actually saw a report on 419 scams where one of the victims was a doctor. A doctor!!!
And yes, my first thought was "I don't want him operating on me".
In short, a fool and his money are soon parted, and you'd be surprised how many rich fools there are, waiting to be parted from their money.
OK, not to cast this accomplishment in a bad light; but I wish rankings weren't used so often for this kind of thing.
The trouble with ranks is that everybody could be really close to the same number, and the rankings are just statistical noise.
Somebody else posted the percentage list upon which the rankings are based. That's better, but you still have to consider the number of hosts. A country with a small number of hosts could rank really low, and still have a large percentage of spambots.
China is a huge country, but I'm not sure how many hosts it has. The US may have more, but I doubt that's enough to justify our huge percentage of spams.
IMHO, the USA antispam people and the people that publish these rankings both have work to do.
It was a bit tricky but I found one. I recall that this study was discussed widely in the media in 2008, for obvious reasons.
Of course, that's a journalist's dumbed-down version. "Experimental Economics", "irrational" and "bubble" are obvious keywords to try. Good luck finding a source that isn't paywalled. That's as far as I care to go with it...
To argue we aren't rational is to contradict yourself(for why would you attempt to convince someone through discussion if they weren't capable of reason?).
I know plenty of people who can balance a checkbook, yet still they believe in astrology. The part of their head that balances the checkbook is rational and, IMHO, the part the believes in astrology isn't. Taken in whole they are not rational, since there is a part of them that isn't rational. Now, the actual balancing of the checkbook is rational, but their investment in International Baby Mulcher (because the stars were aligned) isn't.
To say that people aren't rational, and yet to work with those parts of their minds that are rational (via argument), does not seem contradictory to me.
I'm playing a tune to your ears, but I'm drawing a picture for your eyes.
This is just one small example of Greenspan's real mistake. Yes. His real mistake.
He stated that a belief that firms would act rationally was his mistake.
Rational actors are a funamental assumption of economic analysis, and all but the most blindered ivory-tower economists recognize that as a funametal flaw in the discipline. Recently, some experimental economics that pulls in the discipline of psychology has been done, so there's hope despite academia's tendancy to resist interdisciplinary study.
Anyway, I digress. Greenspan's real mistake was to buy into the fiction of corporate personhood.
Corporations don't act. They aren't persons. Employees and managers act, usually in their own self interest. Thus, the managers acting in their own self interest destroyed the firms and profited while doing so. As a collection of people all seeking their own self-interest, the firm serves the individuals that run it; but ultimately the firm itself becomes insolvent!
I am Tokien. No, I am Tokien... etc. Now we can get sued by the Tolkien estate, and whoever wrote Spartacus.
I see your point a bit here... less of a fallacy, and more like an answer to "if we don't inflate, then what do we do".
However, I have to maintain that compelling the government to tax as opposed to inflate (or any other financing method) won't stop wars. The Spanish-American war was financed by a telephone tax, which we kept paying until what, the 1990s? I forget exactly; but it was a ridiculously long time.
Now, I'm not necessarily accusing you of this; but I think a lot of people who put forth the "if the government couldn't inflate, we wouldn't have wars" argument, are just attacking the current system for their own political purposes. It seems to be an article of faith among the Ron Paul crowd, that they tell eachother to make themselves feel good. Like many of the Ron Paul partisan standpoints, when you go back and look at history, they start breaking down...
"Wars should be finacned via taxation" was not the original argument. I'm not sure what this fallacy is called, but it's some kind of fallacy where you've basicly changed the argument.
List of Space disasters
The Soviet disasters are, as you say, all re-entry. The US disasters are an even split, although you can quibble about Columbia since it was damaged on launch.
Of course, the US disasters killed more people because the craft carried more people. The Wiki list also has ground fatalities, but it includes non-manned missions. They also include non-rocket accidents in the training list.
There are, as always, lots of ways to juggle the statistics to make it look like something is worse or better.
Many utilities actively encourage conservation. Their business is already highly regulated, and they don't want the hassle of building a new plant. In some cases, infrastructure is strained. I'm living in a zone affected by a recent gas disaster (San Bruno explosion). PG and E is encouraging gas conservation; and that's not all that unusual. Even when there is no disaster, the desire to avoid straining infrastructure, resulting in huge retrofit costs, is something they want to avoid. They'd probably prefer to stretch out the fossil fuel supply as long as possible too, simply to avoid the cost of alternatives. Yes, they're working on huge new solar plants, wind farms, etc; but that takes time and money. It may never fully replace what we have.
With the resource extraction companies you might have more of an argument. Extracting maximum resources in a minimal ammount of time might serve their economic interests.
The way I see it, the utilities are customers for the resource extractors. I don't think you should put them in the same boat.
If you pull in all spaceflight, including the Soviet program, I'm guessing blast-off is more dangerous. IIRC, the Soviets had a rocket blow up and kill not only all cosmonauts, but dozens of ground observers who were too close.
It's a close race though. Don't forget testing as an also-ran. There's the Apollo oxygen fire, and recently there have been deaths during the test phase of some private rockets, I want to say it was Armadillo Aerospace, but I don't recall off the top of my head...
Well, just look at one example--the US Civil war. The South printed. The north issued bonds.
So, let's take this one step further and say that the ability to issue bonds makes it easier to wage war.
So let's say the government can't inflate the currency or issue bonds. Let's say they can't tax either, because the same argument would be used.
Keep removing every ability the government has to finance the war, and you end up with "X makes it easier to wage war because wars can be paid through X".
Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that the government has no financing at all. What do you end up with? Wars of conquest to obtain the equivalent of financing, to finance more wars. The Roman empire grew like that. The Vikings were initially raiders, but in some cases ended up settling in conquered territories.
War, under some circumstances, is itself a profitable venture.
So sorry, no matter how you twist it, the idea that "sound money" is any kind of antidote to war is kinda silly. Indeed, Spain's reliance on gold as currency made the Native American lands particularly tasty targets.
I meant to kill the karma bonus, and hit anon by mistake.
Yes, and then when we're all starving you'll tell us to go where the food is. Guess what?
It just so happens that mountains and valleys near oceans are great places to grow food. Plenty of water, stable climate during the summer. Before Silicon Valley was a tech center, it was very productive agricultural land. The Central Valley still is, and although it's further from the faults it would still have problems in a "big one", not to mention that it has huge 100-year floods.
In other words, there is no safe place.
Japan has been doing this for a while.
I don't expect to have a quake alarm in my house. However, if I'm riding a train I'd like to know that it will come to a stop when it gets an alarm, or that if I'm about to cross the Oakland Bridge, the metering lights will stay stuck on red. BTW, if that ever happens, DON'T RUN THE LIGHT. You might be really, really sorry.
I know the Japanese are already doing this with trains. A system like this ought to be a prerequisite before we even think of building high speed rail. I won't be surprised if they're way behind on the integration though...
The Fed shares only a small part of the blame.
1. Dual mandate of price stability and employment--came from Congress, and pulled the Fed out of areas where it's equipped to act.
2. A more regressive tax structure, started under Reagan.
3. Massive, unnecessary wars started by GWB.
4. Well meaning, but in retrospect ill advised government efforts to encourage home ownership. Also not something the Fed did.
If you're blaming the Fed, it's like blaming the tail for wagging the dog. Some people even go so far as to argue that the ability to print money causes wars. If you look at history, you see that the war comes first, then they turn to money printing. The gold standard does NOT keep people honest, honestly! As soon as government has a reason, they immediately trash the gold standard. As one author put it, "the gold standard is as good as the paper it's written on".
A weeks worth of data on a pen-tip? How many Libraries of Congress per Volkswagon is that?