Also, ContrailScience.com has really good examples of how and why contrails can look like missle launches at times. They have a backup page ( site is flooded ) running here:
That's true. But there's more to it than that. The reason they made these risky loans was that they didn't have any incentive to properly vet the applications and in fact they had an incentive to make as many loans as possible.
This was indeed a problem, the liability here was in the fly-by-night lending companies that pretty much did "dump and run" type operations. At this point in time, any surviving asset ( including personal asset of owners of these lending companies ) have pending lawsuits against them. In some states, they face criminal charges for knowingly ignoring fraudulent loan application data, and in some cases, changing the loan application to make the loan appear more valuable in a MBS.
This lag in the legal check to the system can't be overlooked. The future is inherently protected by the private lawsuits brought and action some state AG's have taken since the crisis. If my MBS software had accurate data for "Second Home" and "Full Doc" and other meta attributes of the loan, better ratings would have occurred.
For each loan they made, they could sell it into a MBS and also receive a piece of the monthly payments to administer the mortgage.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't blame the lenders (or some of the borrowers), but in general, I think you should expect that if someone can make money by doing X, they'll do X. People generally don't leave money lying on the table.
There's nothing wrong with incentives to make money through an action that mitigates risks, as long as the risks pool is properly represented. See my point above. This ties back into the argument some people have about arbitrage systems. that somehow it's "Free money" and therefore inherently bad. It's not. It's a futures trade and the buyer takes a risk and the seller hedges against a bad future. It's a valid instrument and has proven effective since the rice market opened in 1697.
What created these bad dynamics, was that there was a demand for mortgages due to the misvaluation of these MBSs. The top tranches were rated as AAA, which made them very appealing to various fund managers who were required to invest a percentage of their funds in AAA rated securities (which have lower return than other investments).
No argument here. Moodys, Fitch, S&P all got it wrong. But I still can trace that fault back to fraud. Borrowers lied. Some lenders knew they were lying, and passed on the lie without performing adequate due diligence. Those same actions could take down any number of others financial instruments. Auditing of the lending process should have been more strict. Or in some cases, should have existed at all. Wall street, should ( in hindsight ) not have believed the bank numbers.
They should have sampled a population of the loans, and validated the data. However, they were not allowed to pierce the ownership vale of these loans.
The reason these things got rated as AAA was the model used to value them was stupid. It essentially boils down to, there hasn't been a very high correlation of defaults in the past, therefore there will not be a high correlation of defaults in the future. That model then of course failed when it couldn't predict something that had not been observed, that there can be a failure mode where the correlation of defaults increases overnight.
Well, failure of the model occurred in a number of ways. You had the misrepresented loans, they were like submerged mines. Not only did they take down the pool they were in, eventually once those loans exploded, they caused nearby loans to lose value. After all, if you have two homes on your street go REO chances are your home price is going to suffer when someone picks them up off the auction block.
So the main two issues are that the people who could have prevented this had no incentive to and current financial theory thinks that it can value a bunch of securities using a
I didn't find many ( any? ) bugs with the game engine in New Vegas. Where I found tons of bugs was in the "user code" ( or plot/quest scripting code ). Yeah sure there were places where path-finding would freak out, but the real bugs was when you couldn't complete a quest or couldn't talk to someone because the game scripted events had painted you into a corner or just failed to register that you had completed some leg of the quest.
I never had a graphics bug, and the three times the game crashed on me each time the Steam Updates window was setting on my desktop with a new update to download... so my guess is that was some NVIDIA driver + steam overlay issue.
Games like Fallout 3 / New Vegas really can't be fully tested because of the number of permutations that exist in paths to play the game. It's a shame that they release to console first because of piracy rates on PC. If they could pre-release to PC a release candidate quality game, they'd get tens of thousands fanboi eyes going through every quest permutation imaginable. Then, two months later, they press and release the console discs.
Real simple. If I own a house that I rent out and have no intention of living in, that would be a commercial residential home.
That's still absolutely nothing like taking numbers of such properties, dividing them up into shares, and selling them as securities. Dig?
No, what would happen is the lender would sell off that loan into a CMBS ( Commerical Mortgage Back Security). That CMBS would still be tranched out based on the risks of the asset pool ( it's not divided into shares ). And those tranches would be bought by any number of clients.
You seem to think the concept of Asset Backed Securities lead to the housing collapse. What lead to the housing collapse was simply banks giving loans they shouldn't have. Requiring 40% cash down on housing loans would have been another easy way to avoid all the problems.
Let's not forget that DDOS attacks are not known for their precision.
What other sites were possibly taken down because they were on the same server? Or perhaps shared a poorly balanced upstream router?
This kid is lucky the hosting company didn't have a contract with some local county Fire/Emergency/911 information website, because then they would have crucified him.
That thought gives me an idea. I think I'll offer free web hosting on my servers to teen suicide help lines so if some assholes DDOS one of my main sites, I can use the collateral damage as a rally cry, "SOMEONE SHOULD THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN".... Kinda like chaining civilian to power substations and bridges before a war....
They (we? i kinda want to be neutral on Slashdot) are going to have longer than that. See all those governorships they picked up? Most of them are in states in which redistricting will occur in the next two years. This will compound the Dem's loss, and probably turn most of those seats pure-red until another redistricting.
No, failure of the whole liver all at once would be exceptionally rare. Cirrhosis for example takes years to die from. Parts of the liver end up becoming 'scar' tissue, and cease to perform liver functions. At some point in time, if the disease isn't stopped and you fall below some threshold of healthy liver cells, you'll end up dead.
I'm with this viewpoint. I tried, but I found myself wanting to fast-forward past the dialogue. I didn't like any of the characters and rather looked forward to all of Caprica getting nuked. Not a good premise for a show. I find the whole 'prequel' concept a non-starter. Unless you go back and start a new timeline or a new plot that won't end with the original series start point.
Next show I expect to see canceled is Stargate Universe. I find myself fast-forwarding through about 50% of that show. It's predictable and has too many 'flash-back' and 'flash-to-dream'. Not to mention, at this point, Deus Ex Machania. The ship will be able to do _anything_ and it will end up doing _everything_ they need, just in time.
Your missing the micro-sat market. You and 500 other groups buy a small payload on a larger system going into space. It'll deploy your payload. Booking the right type of orbit and not blowing up in the first 10 minutes is the trick.
Also, with as many private companies now testing different space access systems, the dream of 100lbs for 1million to GEO orbit is quickly approaching.....
First, let's assume you can only put up one satellite. Let's also assume it's placed in geosynchronous orbit. We'll talk about bandwidth/latency later. Consider that, this one satellite could be visible to nearly all of Europe. Or a large portion of the US, or half of Africa. These are very broad regions. You now have the ability to completely decentralize the torrent seed hubs. Multiple enthusiasts with the proper antenna + radio cards could become down-link's for the pirate satellite. They in turn could then contribute to the distributed DB with the torrent metadata.
Uploading to the satellite would need to be managed just like public trackers manage now. However, the final upload route would be somewhat random and go via an 'enthusiasts' hi-gain pointed at the sat. Until the act of communicating with the satellite becomes illegal the 'buck' has been passed to hardware floating in orbit. And while it's conceivable a top-tier country could get their act together and outlaw the satcom based on Copyright or FCC or some violation of the law, and actively track down those acting as down-link/up-link stations, there will always be someone on the fringe. Some person in a country that can still see the satellite, and their government is more concerned about feeding their population then illegal pirate satellites.
The key here is to make the satellite accessible to the broadest range of second and third tier countries.
As for bandwidth/latency.... not so important for a big-ass-hash-table-in-the-sky in which the elements can have TTLs of days, months, years even longer for some really old torrents. Per-second raw tracking of # of seeds and leechers is not what this satellite would be for. This simply needs to hold the hash and other basic torrent metadata. Everything else is through DHT/DDB or some other lower level decentralization.
Lucky for them space lacks enough of the required 'air' for either of those weapon platforms to effectively work.
Surface-To-Space, Air-To-Space, Space-To-Space..... now we're talking. Those ASAT and other devices have systems for trajectory control without the need of fins or aerodynamic tricks.
A much better use for this technology would enable you to Tip the server host and the authors of any current mods running on the system. Sure, right now you can pretty much do it through paypal, but it's time consuming.
If the game gave me a way to 'tip' my current server, and that tip was appropriately split between the server host and the mods he runs based on back end points ( like shares in a film ), we'd end up with a new economic model for mod/map/hosting development.
It could reach a whole new level if you could 'tip' your medic... I suppose with the trade system you can always gift them something.
I agree with many of the other comments that the 'micro' size of these transactions are too large.
Not sure, I mean, I recently read "I Share Wear Midnight", and I felt that while writing the conclusion of the book, he forgot how he started out.
I notice a lot of writers get this way the older they get, so it may not be the disease. He may simply be so well versed in his world he takes for granted what is put on the page, versus what is in his mind.
The surveillance station. At a wall in the game you see twelve screens that each show a different location of the level. This can be used by the player to get a tactical gaming advantage. Have you ever seen something similiar in a current game? Again - probably not
Someone doesn't play many games. Many 3D engines, for well over 10 years, have had some means of rendering to a texture and throwing it up on a poly in the game world. I'm going to say that hardware accelerated means of doing this have been common for at-least 6 years.
Sure they could have paid interns to help them redact out civilian informants name/information to prevent any retribution when they leak classified military documents, but DID YOU SEE THAT FOUNTAIN!?! IT HAZ COLOR!
Windows Error Reporting only sends mini-dumps. You won't see code or contents of notepad/word etc. You get the callstack for all running threads, exception information that caused the fault, list of all loaded modules and processor context for all threads.
I read someplace, back when this station first stopped transmitting, how it had been tracked down within Russia to be a scientific installation. It's broadcast were used to measure some some sort of distortion or atmospheric change on radio waves, possibly coinciding with something to do with the sun. The frequency is broadcast on was even found registered in some book and referenced in some scientific papers published in the 70s/80s.
I just spent about 15mins looking for the articles I read about this and I can't find them. The Google searches are filled with paranoia crap that didn't exist a few months ago when it first went silent.
A single 'coin' can be divided to 8 decimal places. You probably only ever need a few thousand to survive to provide enough currency to the market. Read the FAQ, it's not an easy concept to grasp from the shitty kdawson summary.
I second this. This is really annoying. IOS has been Cisco's moniker of choice for their operating system since 1987, when they bought it from Bill Yeager. This is such typical Apple hubris, and only helps cement the dividing line between IT/Developers and Apple. Good luck getting any of us to help your users without a smirk or comment on their fannypack.....
Cubum autem in duos cubos, aut quadratoquadratum in duos quadratoquadratos, et generaliter nullam in infinitum ultra quadratum potestatem in duos eiusdem nominis fas est dividere cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc BRACCHIUMis exiguitas non caperet.
The reason is, the Google Map app is NOT http://maps.google.com./ It's far more complicated. It's essentially a full car navigation system. It will respond to voice commands, dial numbers for you, keep the phone from sleeping ( so you can keep looking down at it while driving without having to unlock your phone ), cache's a large amount of data especially if sat view is on and traffic is on, and wiki layers, and last search layers...etc...etc.
Look, this is very much a One Button Mouse vs n-Button Mouse debate. On the Apple products, you don't trust the user or developer.... ever (unless the developer is Apple). On the Android platform, each party is liable. While the developer is held in a sandbox based on specific rights, it's not impossible for a seemingly legitimate app to wake-up in the middle of the night and dial 1-900 numbers. This trade-off in security is deemed a worthy risk because of the payoff in productivity and usefulness in increased application integration.
Google maps is a great example of the uber app on the Android. And all the functionality of Google maps could be replaced with by some other application. Anyone can compete with it. In the Apple world, the Google Map App would pretty much need to be part of the base phone operating system, or at least produced by Apple and not run in the sandbox.
In the case that a developer of an app uses it maliciously, it falls back to Google and Google marketplace to police this app.
Google map app has built in voice search that I don't think is at the OS level. For example, if you click the mic button while in map mode and say "navigate to gas station" it goes into nav mode to the nearest gas station.
Don't think of it like the web based google mas, think of it instead as a hand-free car's navigation system. It will also dial numbers for you, including knowing to dial where your driving to ( "Dial Destination or some such magical phrase).
Slashdot Mirror
Also, ContrailScience.com has really good examples of how and why contrails can look like missle launches at times. They have a backup page ( site is flooded ) running here:
http://uncinus.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/4/
Better video link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GCgDKNEwyY
Actual explanation of the event:
http://www.examiner.com/weather-in-los-angeles/missile-launch-over-southern-california-explained
TL;DR: Was a jet airliner's contrail and the perfect upper-atmospheric moisture level + winds.
I'm sure what follows everything south of this post involves China, Iran, and Dr. Evil.....
That's true. But there's more to it than that. The reason they made these risky loans was that they didn't have any incentive to properly vet the applications and in fact they had an incentive to make as many loans as possible.
This was indeed a problem, the liability here was in the fly-by-night lending companies that pretty much did "dump and run" type operations. At this point in time, any surviving asset ( including personal asset of owners of these lending companies ) have pending lawsuits against them. In some states, they face criminal charges for knowingly ignoring fraudulent loan application data, and in some cases, changing the loan application to make the loan appear more valuable in a MBS.
This lag in the legal check to the system can't be overlooked. The future is inherently protected by the private lawsuits brought and action some state AG's have taken since the crisis. If my MBS software had accurate data for "Second Home" and "Full Doc" and other meta attributes of the loan, better ratings would have occurred.
For each loan they made, they could sell it into a MBS and also receive a piece of the monthly payments to administer the mortgage.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't blame the lenders (or some of the borrowers), but in general, I think you should expect that if someone can make money by doing X, they'll do X. People generally don't leave money lying on the table.
There's nothing wrong with incentives to make money through an action that mitigates risks, as long as the risks pool is properly represented. See my point above. This ties back into the argument some people have about arbitrage systems. that somehow it's "Free money" and therefore inherently bad. It's not. It's a futures trade and the buyer takes a risk and the seller hedges against a bad future. It's a valid instrument and has proven effective since the rice market opened in 1697.
What created these bad dynamics, was that there was a demand for mortgages due to the misvaluation of these MBSs. The top tranches were rated as AAA, which made them very appealing to various fund managers who were required to invest a percentage of their funds in AAA rated securities (which have lower return than other investments).
No argument here. Moodys, Fitch, S&P all got it wrong. But I still can trace that fault back to fraud. Borrowers lied. Some lenders knew they were lying, and passed on the lie without performing adequate due diligence. Those same actions could take down any number of others financial instruments. Auditing of the lending process should have been more strict. Or in some cases, should have existed at all. Wall street, should ( in hindsight ) not have believed the bank numbers.
They should have sampled a population of the loans, and validated the data. However, they were not allowed to pierce the ownership vale of these loans.
The reason these things got rated as AAA was the model used to value them was stupid. It essentially boils down to, there hasn't been a very high correlation of defaults in the past, therefore there will not be a high correlation of defaults in the future. That model then of course failed when it couldn't predict something that had not been observed, that there can be a failure mode where the correlation of defaults increases overnight.
Well, failure of the model occurred in a number of ways. You had the misrepresented loans, they were like submerged mines. Not only did they take down the pool they were in, eventually once those loans exploded, they caused nearby loans to lose value. After all, if you have two homes on your street go REO chances are your home price is going to suffer when someone picks them up off the auction block.
So the main two issues are that the people who could have prevented this had no incentive to and current financial theory thinks that it can value a bunch of securities using a
I didn't find many ( any? ) bugs with the game engine in New Vegas. Where I found tons of bugs was in the "user code" ( or plot/quest scripting code ). Yeah sure there were places where path-finding would freak out, but the real bugs was when you couldn't complete a quest or couldn't talk to someone because the game scripted events had painted you into a corner or just failed to register that you had completed some leg of the quest.
I never had a graphics bug, and the three times the game crashed on me each time the Steam Updates window was setting on my desktop with a new update to download... so my guess is that was some NVIDIA driver + steam overlay issue.
Games like Fallout 3 / New Vegas really can't be fully tested because of the number of permutations that exist in paths to play the game. It's a shame that they release to console first because of piracy rates on PC. If they could pre-release to PC a release candidate quality game, they'd get tens of thousands fanboi eyes going through every quest permutation imaginable. Then, two months later, they press and release the console discs.
No, what would happen is the lender would sell off that loan into a CMBS ( Commerical Mortgage Back Security). That CMBS would still be tranched out based on the risks of the asset pool ( it's not divided into shares ). And those tranches would be bought by any number of clients.
You seem to think the concept of Asset Backed Securities lead to the housing collapse. What lead to the housing collapse was simply banks giving loans they shouldn't have. Requiring 40% cash down on housing loans would have been another easy way to avoid all the problems.
Let's not forget that DDOS attacks are not known for their precision.
What other sites were possibly taken down because they were on the same server? Or perhaps shared a poorly balanced upstream router?
This kid is lucky the hosting company didn't have a contract with some local county Fire/Emergency/911 information website, because then they would have crucified him.
That thought gives me an idea. I think I'll offer free web hosting on my servers to teen suicide help lines so if some assholes DDOS one of my main sites, I can use the collateral damage as a rally cry, "SOMEONE SHOULD THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN".... Kinda like chaining civilian to power substations and bridges before a war....
They (we? i kinda want to be neutral on Slashdot) are going to have longer than that. See all those governorships they picked up? Most of them are in states in which redistricting will occur in the next two years. This will compound the Dem's loss, and probably turn most of those seats pure-red until another redistricting.
:
Someone should make a poster like the "Everything I needed to know in life I learned in kidergarten" but change it to Counter-Strike.
No, failure of the whole liver all at once would be exceptionally rare. Cirrhosis for example takes years to die from. Parts of the liver end up becoming 'scar' tissue, and cease to perform liver functions. At some point in time, if the disease isn't stopped and you fall below some threshold of healthy liver cells, you'll end up dead.
I'm with this viewpoint. I tried, but I found myself wanting to fast-forward past the dialogue. I didn't like any of the characters and rather looked forward to all of Caprica getting nuked. Not a good premise for a show. I find the whole 'prequel' concept a non-starter. Unless you go back and start a new timeline or a new plot that won't end with the original series start point.
Next show I expect to see canceled is Stargate Universe. I find myself fast-forwarding through about 50% of that show. It's predictable and has too many 'flash-back' and 'flash-to-dream'. Not to mention, at this point, Deus Ex Machania. The ship will be able to do _anything_ and it will end up doing _everything_ they need, just in time.
Your missing the micro-sat market. You and 500 other groups buy a small payload on a larger system going into space. It'll deploy your payload. Booking the right type of orbit and not blowing up in the first 10 minutes is the trick.
Also, with as many private companies now testing different space access systems, the dream of 100lbs for 1million to GEO orbit is quickly approaching.....
I could picture this working a couple of ways.
First, let's assume you can only put up one satellite. Let's also assume it's placed in geosynchronous orbit. We'll talk about bandwidth/latency later. Consider that, this one satellite could be visible to nearly all of Europe. Or a large portion of the US, or half of Africa. These are very broad regions. You now have the ability to completely decentralize the torrent seed hubs. Multiple enthusiasts with the proper antenna + radio cards could become down-link's for the pirate satellite. They in turn could then contribute to the distributed DB with the torrent metadata.
Uploading to the satellite would need to be managed just like public trackers manage now. However, the final upload route would be somewhat random and go via an 'enthusiasts' hi-gain pointed at the sat. Until the act of communicating with the satellite becomes illegal the 'buck' has been passed to hardware floating in orbit. And while it's conceivable a top-tier country could get their act together and outlaw the satcom based on Copyright or FCC or some violation of the law, and actively track down those acting as down-link/up-link stations, there will always be someone on the fringe. Some person in a country that can still see the satellite, and their government is more concerned about feeding their population then illegal pirate satellites.
The key here is to make the satellite accessible to the broadest range of second and third tier countries.
As for bandwidth/latency.... not so important for a big-ass-hash-table-in-the-sky in which the elements can have TTLs of days, months, years even longer for some really old torrents. Per-second raw tracking of # of seeds and leechers is not what this satellite would be for. This simply needs to hold the hash and other basic torrent metadata. Everything else is through DHT/DDB or some other lower level decentralization.
Lucky for them space lacks enough of the required 'air' for either of those weapon platforms to effectively work.
Surface-To-Space, Air-To-Space, Space-To-Space..... now we're talking. Those ASAT and other devices have systems for trajectory control without the need of fins or aerodynamic tricks.
A much better use for this technology would enable you to Tip the server host and the authors of any current mods running on the system. Sure, right now you can pretty much do it through paypal, but it's time consuming.
If the game gave me a way to 'tip' my current server, and that tip was appropriately split between the server host and the mods he runs based on back end points ( like shares in a film ), we'd end up with a new economic model for mod/map/hosting development.
It could reach a whole new level if you could 'tip' your medic... I suppose with the trade system you can always gift them something.
I agree with many of the other comments that the 'micro' size of these transactions are too large.
Not sure, I mean, I recently read "I Share Wear Midnight", and I felt that while writing the conclusion of the book, he forgot how he started out.
I notice a lot of writers get this way the older they get, so it may not be the disease. He may simply be so well versed in his world he takes for granted what is put on the page, versus what is in his mind.
That or evil editing deadlines.
Someone doesn't play many games. Many 3D engines, for well over 10 years, have had some means of rendering to a texture and throwing it up on a poly in the game world. I'm going to say that hardware accelerated means of doing this have been common for at-least 6 years.
Sure they could have paid interns to help them redact out civilian informants name/information to prevent any retribution when they leak classified military documents, but DID YOU SEE THAT FOUNTAIN!?! IT HAZ COLOR!
Windows Error Reporting only sends mini-dumps. You won't see code or contents of notepad/word etc. You get the callstack for all running threads, exception information that caused the fault, list of all loaded modules and processor context for all threads.
I read someplace, back when this station first stopped transmitting, how it had been tracked down within Russia to be a scientific installation. It's broadcast were used to measure some some sort of distortion or atmospheric change on radio waves, possibly coinciding with something to do with the sun. The frequency is broadcast on was even found registered in some book and referenced in some scientific papers published in the 70s/80s.
I just spent about 15mins looking for the articles I read about this and I can't find them. The Google searches are filled with paranoia crap that didn't exist a few months ago when it first went silent.
A single 'coin' can be divided to 8 decimal places. You probably only ever need a few thousand to survive to provide enough currency to the market. Read the FAQ, it's not an easy concept to grasp from the shitty kdawson summary.
Talk about a precog:
The Noob Comic
I second this. This is really annoying. IOS has been Cisco's moniker of choice for their operating system since 1987, when they bought it from Bill Yeager. This is such typical Apple hubris, and only helps cement the dividing line between IT/Developers and Apple. Good luck getting any of us to help your users without a smirk or comment on their fannypack.....
Cubum autem in duos cubos, aut quadratoquadratum in duos quadratoquadratos, et generaliter nullam in infinitum ultra quadratum potestatem in duos eiusdem nominis fas est dividere cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc BRACCHIUMis exiguitas non caperet.
with one small change...
The reason is, the Google Map app is NOT http://maps.google.com./ It's far more complicated. It's essentially a full car navigation system. It will respond to voice commands, dial numbers for you, keep the phone from sleeping ( so you can keep looking down at it while driving without having to unlock your phone ), cache's a large amount of data especially if sat view is on and traffic is on, and wiki layers, and last search layers...etc...etc.
Look, this is very much a One Button Mouse vs n-Button Mouse debate. On the Apple products, you don't trust the user or developer.... ever (unless the developer is Apple). On the Android platform, each party is liable. While the developer is held in a sandbox based on specific rights, it's not impossible for a seemingly legitimate app to wake-up in the middle of the night and dial 1-900 numbers. This trade-off in security is deemed a worthy risk because of the payoff in productivity and usefulness in increased application integration.
Google maps is a great example of the uber app on the Android. And all the functionality of Google maps could be replaced with by some other application. Anyone can compete with it. In the Apple world, the Google Map App would pretty much need to be part of the base phone operating system, or at least produced by Apple and not run in the sandbox.
In the case that a developer of an app uses it maliciously, it falls back to Google and Google marketplace to police this app.
Google map app has built in voice search that I don't think is at the OS level. For example, if you click the mic button while in map mode and say "navigate to gas station" it goes into nav mode to the nearest gas station.
Don't think of it like the web based google mas, think of it instead as a hand-free car's navigation system. It will also dial numbers for you, including knowing to dial where your driving to ( "Dial Destination or some such magical phrase).