Humans aren't necessarily logical, but they are ususally consistent (especially on the topic of themselves). If you ask a person the same question three times in slightly different ways (e.g., "what do you do for a living?", "what is your job?", etc.,), you'd usually expect roughly the same answer three times. If I answered "I work in IT", followed by "I'm not telling you", followed by "I'm a farmer", you might suspect something is up (suspect that I'm a chat bot if you're doing a Turing test, suspect that I'm crazy or am talking rubbish if we're face to face).
The aircraft and automobile manufacturers branded both Rolls-Royce and Volvo have long since been completely separate companies. Short of a few of the big Japanese mega-corps, there aren't many companies these days that operate in completely disparate markets like that.
There's an excellent opt-out option, available to all Facebook users- don't have a Facebook account. And you can even delete your profile if you've already signed up for one. An unusually high (I imagine) percentage of my social circle aren't users of Facebook or other social networking sites, and we cope- phone calls, text messages and emails all do the trick just fine.
If you're a police officer and your job (and posibly your life) depends on it, I'm sure you could cope without Farmville and poking for the duration.
So, what they're saying is that if discarding any supernova not of this specific type (type Ia), then there hasn't been any closer for a staggering 20 years?
Yeah, what's so exciting about a cosmic event being observed, better than any of it's type has been in 20 years?
Those astronomers, eh? Getting excited over every single flawless observation of once-in-a-generation events. Honestly, so very uncool.
I mean honestly, what do the editors of this site think- that the readership is nothing but a bunch of nerds or something?
There is really no major difference between the internet and every other form of media that's existed, at least as far as this discussion is concerned. Radical books, newspapers, pamphlets and pirate radio stations have all contributed to revolutions in their time; and all have been used for propaganda and other authoritarian purposes. The internet is yet another tool for the radical, the propogandist, and everybody else too- it's scope for mass participation makes it very different from all those that came before, but it isn't a game changer.
And any "analysts" who predict Samsung are suddenly going to abandon Android because of this deal are clearly living in a fantasy land. Samsung have invested far too heavily in Android (both phones and tablets) to simply toss it away, without at least some evidence of market unfairness from Google/Motorola first. It's not exactly the same as Nokia abandoning their single (never as popular as they'd wanted) MeeGo handset.
If you're planning on buying 100% of shares in a publicly traded company, you have to announce it eventually- shareholders usually get to vote on it, seeing as it's their shares you're talking about. Insider trading is usually taking advantage of exactly this crazy prize jump that happens when you announce it- you buy up shares at their regular price before the announcement, and then take advantage of the price hike after the announcement to sell at a big profit. If a company were able to purchase another company at a discount, this insider trading wouldn't make much sense, seeing as you'd be buying shares at more than you're going to be paid for them.
Seeing as shareholders get to vote on any share-selling deal, they will never approve a sale of a company at less than market price- why would they? If you own shares in a company worth $1million at any time you want to sell them, why would you agree to sell them for $0.9million?
This looks like a purely cosmetic change- taking the name "Firefox 5" off the website download page and whatnot, in favour of "new version of Firefox now available", maybe with a date. The release cycle wont change any more from what it already has, and the info is still there and easily accessible for anyone who wants it. This won't lead to addons being "continuously breakable at any time" (unless there's some seriously novel coding in some of those addons).
I don't think a minor marketing change is going to kill Firefox any time soon.
They'll also be able to cure cancer, and catch Bin Laden's clone, and fart rainbows.
The odds of Google bringing all of Motorola's manufacturing to the US after this merger are exactly the same as the odds of Motorola doing it before the merger- somewhere close to zero. Since when is the DOD budget officially used to bribe industries to move manufacturing plants around, anyhow? Isn't that kind of thing usually called "corruption"?
When you announce you're going to buy a a huge number of shares in a company, the price of those shares usually go up. Most mergers and acquisitions usually pay a fairly hefty premium over the market price.
There seems to be at least one fairly universal score-card that works for companies in all industries- profit. Alternatively, you could try gross revenue.
These things are completely equitable in all industries (a $10bn a year revenue for an oil company is exactly the same as a $10bn a year revenue for a phone maker, as for a travelling circus operator), and they give a good indication as to how important a company is (its tax potential, its ability to pay for advertising and media mindspace, its clout in buying and killing other companies and ventures, its influence over politicians and policy makers).
By these measures, you get an interpratation of companies more in keeping with what we all observe in reality- ExxonMobil (revenue $383bn, profit $30.5bn), Apple (revenue $65bn, profit $18bn).
Saying SSDs are too expensive is asinine now. The cost is tiny compared to the cost of having someone sit on their arse waiting for a slow pc...
Obviously I'm sure it depends what you're using your computers for. If you're storing 100's of GB of data (such as any home user with a big movie collection, or all sorts of professional uses), a multi-TB spinning disk HDD is still going to be hard to beat with SSDs without breaking the bank. Not a problem, I'm guessing, for 70's-era industrial control systems.
SSDs are expensive when you're buying by the thousands and consider that, aside from boot times, they don't impact PC performance enough to justify the cost for MOST PCs.
Maybe time to revist the Acorn approach- stick the OS on a small ROM, leave the bulk data to its own slow spinning disk. Of course with modern SSDs/RAM disks it's not like you need to venture into ROM territory just for the speed benefit- hence TFA.
Frankly I'm a little baffled that it's an approach none of the mainstream computer makers have experimented with that approach. SSDs have been affordable in the low capacities for years now, and multiple hard disks isn't exactly a challenge for modern OSs. Presumably it'd be more expensive than I imagine- or there must be technical challenges I'm not appreciating; I refuse to believe it's simply an industry-wide collective lack of imagination.
Relative compared to what? Which text-based portable communications system is newer? BBM is newer than emails and SMS. I suppose Twitter is newer, but that's just a variation on the web-based message board, which isn't.
Relative compared to what? Which text-based portable communications system is newer? BBM is newer than emails and SMS. I suppose Twitter is newer, but that's just a variation on the web-based message board, which isn't.
It's probably important as to how they're actually going about this. If the police have some suspects, have applied for a court order, and BB are now releasing BBM data for these suspects, that seems fairly reasonable. If the police just want to start going on fishing expeditions- looking at the BBM data for half the youths in Tottenham in the hope that they're saying incriminating things about rioting- then that's different.
My guess is there's a strong element of the latter- if the police already knew who was rioting, they wouldn't really need their BBM data; they could just roll on over and arrest them.
So the government plans to spend $1trn (or whatever) on the military this year. The government wants to save money, so they reduce staff numbers, mothball some equipment, switch to non-brand baked beans in the ration packs and whatnot, and thusly manage to spend $100 billion less than was projected. Wouldn't that be a good thing? Isn't that a "$100 billion saving from the military budget"? What's the other approach to saving money except for spending less?
So the result isn't instantaneous- you haven't saved as much as if you had scrapped the entire military all in one go. But quick fixes are usually not as quick as they seem, you know; who has suggestions for what to do with an extra 1.5 million unemployed veterans, and all those pesky collapsed multi-national mega-corps?
Democrats want the government to spend more. The TEA Party wants the government to spend less.
You appear to have misunderstood, as that is not correct.
The Democrats want to cut the deficit by spending somewhat less, and increasing government revenues through taxation. The Republicans want to cut the deficit by spending considerably less, but not increasing government revenues through taxation.
It's not that the Republicans (the party I'm assuming you support) are necessarily wrong; it's hardly an obvious decision, as both approaches have all sorts of complicated repercussion. Unless you have a PHD in economics, frankly I don't trust your opinion on it any more than I trust my own.
But that's still not all. Why aren't the other rating agencies condemning this? Perhaps they aren't really competing with one another?
Ratings agencies are supposed to be non-partisan, non-political, non-opinionated, etc. (which is why the subject matter in TFA is important at all). That means they don't go around issuing random condemnations; they just do the maths and publish their results.
The other ratings agencies are sticking to their guns- they haven't followed suit in reducing their ratings. That's as much condemnation as you need; they're basically saying that they disagree with S&P's findings. It's for this reason that the markets have kept reasonably level-headed, despite S&P's shenanigans.
My advice is to wait for the dust to settle before panicking. S&P might have to retreat with their tail between their legs, or the other agencies might come up with similar findings. Then it'll be time to re-open this flamefest.
1) Plan on buying something for $100. 2) Haggle the price down to $75. 3) Congratulations, you've saved $25.
1) Terrorist threatens to kill two orphans. 2) Superman kicks his ass, but he still manages to shoot one of the orphans. 3) Congratulations Superman, you've managed to save one orphan.
I've only ever made one proper edit, and many spelling corrections. As far as I know, most of the spelling corrections stayed made- the only reversions seem to be where my edit has gotten caught in the crossfire of some other edit/revert war.
My only real edit was made on a very large, major article, and survives to this day. Looking at it now (many years later) it is really an appalling bit of writing, but it's inoffensive, it adds value, and it's still there. So no complaints from me.
My only bad experience was once trying to make a correction on an article about sci-fi. There was one individual in particular who was running amok, and there were already serious flamewars on the talk page before I started. Suffice it to say, I took a deep breath and walked away.
One man's clutter is another man's really useful buttons and info boxes. Whenever I install a new Firefox these days, I have to spend 5 minutes trying to turn on all my favourite toolbars and info boxes that have gone mysteriously missing by default. It's a pain, but at least the options to do so are still there. If they ever start making it so these features are simply gone (which is more or less the Ubuntu approach) it'll be time to abandon ship.
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Humans aren't necessarily logical, but they are ususally consistent (especially on the topic of themselves). If you ask a person the same question three times in slightly different ways (e.g., "what do you do for a living?", "what is your job?", etc.,), you'd usually expect roughly the same answer three times. If I answered "I work in IT", followed by "I'm not telling you", followed by "I'm a farmer", you might suspect something is up (suspect that I'm a chat bot if you're doing a Turing test, suspect that I'm crazy or am talking rubbish if we're face to face).
The aircraft and automobile manufacturers branded both Rolls-Royce and Volvo have long since been completely separate companies. Short of a few of the big Japanese mega-corps, there aren't many companies these days that operate in completely disparate markets like that.
There's an excellent opt-out option, available to all Facebook users- don't have a Facebook account. And you can even delete your profile if you've already signed up for one. An unusually high (I imagine) percentage of my social circle aren't users of Facebook or other social networking sites, and we cope- phone calls, text messages and emails all do the trick just fine.
If you're a police officer and your job (and posibly your life) depends on it, I'm sure you could cope without Farmville and poking for the duration.
So, what they're saying is that if discarding any supernova not of this specific type (type Ia), then there hasn't been any closer for a staggering 20 years?
Yeah, what's so exciting about a cosmic event being observed, better than any of it's type has been in 20 years?
Those astronomers, eh? Getting excited over every single flawless observation of once-in-a-generation events. Honestly, so very uncool.
I mean honestly, what do the editors of this site think- that the readership is nothing but a bunch of nerds or something?
There is really no major difference between the internet and every other form of media that's existed, at least as far as this discussion is concerned. Radical books, newspapers, pamphlets and pirate radio stations have all contributed to revolutions in their time; and all have been used for propaganda and other authoritarian purposes. The internet is yet another tool for the radical, the propogandist, and everybody else too- it's scope for mass participation makes it very different from all those that came before, but it isn't a game changer.
And any "analysts" who predict Samsung are suddenly going to abandon Android because of this deal are clearly living in a fantasy land. Samsung have invested far too heavily in Android (both phones and tablets) to simply toss it away, without at least some evidence of market unfairness from Google/Motorola first. It's not exactly the same as Nokia abandoning their single (never as popular as they'd wanted) MeeGo handset.
If you're planning on buying 100% of shares in a publicly traded company, you have to announce it eventually- shareholders usually get to vote on it, seeing as it's their shares you're talking about. Insider trading is usually taking advantage of exactly this crazy prize jump that happens when you announce it- you buy up shares at their regular price before the announcement, and then take advantage of the price hike after the announcement to sell at a big profit. If a company were able to purchase another company at a discount, this insider trading wouldn't make much sense, seeing as you'd be buying shares at more than you're going to be paid for them.
Seeing as shareholders get to vote on any share-selling deal, they will never approve a sale of a company at less than market price- why would they? If you own shares in a company worth $1million at any time you want to sell them, why would you agree to sell them for $0.9million?
This looks like a purely cosmetic change- taking the name "Firefox 5" off the website download page and whatnot, in favour of "new version of Firefox now available", maybe with a date. The release cycle wont change any more from what it already has, and the info is still there and easily accessible for anyone who wants it. This won't lead to addons being "continuously breakable at any time" (unless there's some seriously novel coding in some of those addons).
I don't think a minor marketing change is going to kill Firefox any time soon.
They'll also be able to cure cancer, and catch Bin Laden's clone, and fart rainbows.
The odds of Google bringing all of Motorola's manufacturing to the US after this merger are exactly the same as the odds of Motorola doing it before the merger- somewhere close to zero. Since when is the DOD budget officially used to bribe industries to move manufacturing plants around, anyhow? Isn't that kind of thing usually called "corruption"?
When you announce you're going to buy a a huge number of shares in a company, the price of those shares usually go up. Most mergers and acquisitions usually pay a fairly hefty premium over the market price.
For example, have a look at this chart of BSkyb's share prices. Try to guess at what point News Corp announced they wanted to buy the remaining stake in the company, and guess at which point they announced they were abandoning that plan.
http://graphs.lse.co.uk/GetGraph.asp?gcode=BSY&mode=ShareCharts&r=0.8588145571342161&p=9&ma=9&t=2&comp=
Its open in that you can download the source and use it in your own devlopments, in accordance with the license.
Nobody has ever said that being able to contribute code is the definition of open.
I'll grant you that they do take the piss when it comes to source release timing, though.
There seems to be at least one fairly universal score-card that works for companies in all industries- profit. Alternatively, you could try gross revenue.
These things are completely equitable in all industries (a $10bn a year revenue for an oil company is exactly the same as a $10bn a year revenue for a phone maker, as for a travelling circus operator), and they give a good indication as to how important a company is (its tax potential, its ability to pay for advertising and media mindspace, its clout in buying and killing other companies and ventures, its influence over politicians and policy makers).
By these measures, you get an interpratation of companies more in keeping with what we all observe in reality- ExxonMobil (revenue $383bn, profit $30.5bn), Apple (revenue $65bn, profit $18bn).
Saying SSDs are too expensive is asinine now. The cost is tiny compared to the cost of having someone sit on their arse waiting for a slow pc...
Obviously I'm sure it depends what you're using your computers for. If you're storing 100's of GB of data (such as any home user with a big movie collection, or all sorts of professional uses), a multi-TB spinning disk HDD is still going to be hard to beat with SSDs without breaking the bank. Not a problem, I'm guessing, for 70's-era industrial control systems.
SSDs are expensive when you're buying by the thousands and consider that, aside from boot times, they don't impact PC performance enough to justify the cost for MOST PCs.
Maybe time to revist the Acorn approach- stick the OS on a small ROM, leave the bulk data to its own slow spinning disk. Of course with modern SSDs/RAM disks it's not like you need to venture into ROM territory just for the speed benefit- hence TFA.
Frankly I'm a little baffled that it's an approach none of the mainstream computer makers have experimented with that approach. SSDs have been affordable in the low capacities for years now, and multiple hard disks isn't exactly a challenge for modern OSs. Presumably it'd be more expensive than I imagine- or there must be technical challenges I'm not appreciating; I refuse to believe it's simply an industry-wide collective lack of imagination.
They say that every century...
Relative compared to what? Which text-based portable communications system is newer? BBM is newer than emails and SMS. I suppose Twitter is newer, but that's just a variation on the web-based message board, which isn't.
(Reposting as accidentally posted in wrong place)
Damn, posted in response to the wrong post. Ignore please.
Relative compared to what? Which text-based portable communications system is newer? BBM is newer than emails and SMS. I suppose Twitter is newer, but that's just a variation on the web-based message board, which isn't.
It's probably important as to how they're actually going about this. If the police have some suspects, have applied for a court order, and BB are now releasing BBM data for these suspects, that seems fairly reasonable. If the police just want to start going on fishing expeditions- looking at the BBM data for half the youths in Tottenham in the hope that they're saying incriminating things about rioting- then that's different.
My guess is there's a strong element of the latter- if the police already knew who was rioting, they wouldn't really need their BBM data; they could just roll on over and arrest them.
So the government plans to spend $1trn (or whatever) on the military this year. The government wants to save money, so they reduce staff numbers, mothball some equipment, switch to non-brand baked beans in the ration packs and whatnot, and thusly manage to spend $100 billion less than was projected. Wouldn't that be a good thing? Isn't that a "$100 billion saving from the military budget"? What's the other approach to saving money except for spending less?
So the result isn't instantaneous- you haven't saved as much as if you had scrapped the entire military all in one go. But quick fixes are usually not as quick as they seem, you know; who has suggestions for what to do with an extra 1.5 million unemployed veterans, and all those pesky collapsed multi-national mega-corps?
Democrats want the government to spend more. The TEA Party wants the government to spend less.
You appear to have misunderstood, as that is not correct.
The Democrats want to cut the deficit by spending somewhat less, and increasing government revenues through taxation. The Republicans want to cut the deficit by spending considerably less, but not increasing government revenues through taxation.
It's not that the Republicans (the party I'm assuming you support) are necessarily wrong; it's hardly an obvious decision, as both approaches have all sorts of complicated repercussion. Unless you have a PHD in economics, frankly I don't trust your opinion on it any more than I trust my own.
But that's still not all. Why aren't the other rating agencies condemning this? Perhaps they aren't really competing with one another?
Ratings agencies are supposed to be non-partisan, non-political, non-opinionated, etc. (which is why the subject matter in TFA is important at all). That means they don't go around issuing random condemnations; they just do the maths and publish their results.
The other ratings agencies are sticking to their guns- they haven't followed suit in reducing their ratings. That's as much condemnation as you need; they're basically saying that they disagree with S&P's findings. It's for this reason that the markets have kept reasonably level-headed, despite S&P's shenanigans.
My advice is to wait for the dust to settle before panicking. S&P might have to retreat with their tail between their legs, or the other agencies might come up with similar findings. Then it'll be time to re-open this flamefest.
1) Plan on buying something for $100.
2) Haggle the price down to $75.
3) Congratulations, you've saved $25.
1) Terrorist threatens to kill two orphans.
2) Superman kicks his ass, but he still manages to shoot one of the orphans.
3) Congratulations Superman, you've managed to save one orphan.
What's your point?
I've only ever made one proper edit, and many spelling corrections. As far as I know, most of the spelling corrections stayed made- the only reversions seem to be where my edit has gotten caught in the crossfire of some other edit/revert war.
My only real edit was made on a very large, major article, and survives to this day. Looking at it now (many years later) it is really an appalling bit of writing, but it's inoffensive, it adds value, and it's still there. So no complaints from me.
My only bad experience was once trying to make a correction on an article about sci-fi. There was one individual in particular who was running amok, and there were already serious flamewars on the talk page before I started. Suffice it to say, I took a deep breath and walked away.
One man's clutter is another man's really useful buttons and info boxes. Whenever I install a new Firefox these days, I have to spend 5 minutes trying to turn on all my favourite toolbars and info boxes that have gone mysteriously missing by default. It's a pain, but at least the options to do so are still there. If they ever start making it so these features are simply gone (which is more or less the Ubuntu approach) it'll be time to abandon ship.