his name was barry.. or was it linden? anyways. . . he was a top coder... there was this one time.. let me take a moment and see if i can remember the story.....
nope, no good. im afraid i cant recall it. ah well, you had to have been there.
encyclopedias from the early 1900s were blatantly racist and often stupid.
encyclopedias from the 1950s reflected the cold war biases of their authors.
wikipedia is a steaming pile of shit, but its better than anything that came before it, which is why people use it and why encyclopedias are dead as a medium unless someone can figure out a new business model where the authors get payed for their work.
(hint - wikipedia already has many articles where authors have been payed, its a dirty secret that nobody likes to discuss, but fundamental to understanding how the site works)
which saw several million casualties and refugess, including over a million people dead, with chemical warfare and massive tank battles, and then the 1991 gulf war where Saddam set his own oil fields on fire.... then of course the 1970s violent revolution in Iran, the rise of the Ba'ath Party in Syria and Iraq, the Suez crisis, the various wars against israel, etc.
compared to all that, the US invasion in 2003 of Iraq is not very big. it seems big, but it really does not explain the price craziness at all. things have been much more chaotic in the past in the middle east, but prices were much more stable.
the system can fail regardless of how 'genius' the person you stick on the job.
witness the financial crash of 2008 - hundreds of PHDs were involved in creating CDOs, Synthetic CDOs, RMBS, and giving AAA+ ratings to migrant farm laborers with $300,000 home loans. all those geniuses didn't help the system one single bit, not at all, not one iota.
has gone up dramatically since the 1990s, and the Consumer Price Index has essentially been 'gamed' to hide all of this.
gasoline in particular went haywire about the same time that the commodities exchanges switched from open pits to electronic trading (see the book Asylum by McGrath-Goodman for more information)
food is linked to gasoline of course, but it still doesn't explain why flour is fluctuating up and down by 100% every few months.
housing of course went through the roof thanks to the subprime mortgage securities and their deriviatives (CDOs, Synthetic CDOs, etc), and the foreclosure robo-signing scandal has backlogged the system so much that prices still havent come down properly.
Fannie and Freddie - still going strong. Executives still making millions.
JP Morgan - still dealing in Credit Default Swaps, with absolutely zero consequences
Morgan Stanley - still churning out shitty IPOs like Facebook that rip people for millions, with absolutely zero consequences
Goldman - still being Goldman
the hedge funds and investment banks can now give unlimited anonymous money to political campaigns. including banks that are essentially 'international' with no allegiance to the US or its constitution.
Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was linked to the Magnetar hedge fund that was near the center of the subprime bubble, and it faced absolutely zero consequenecs, its managers have faced essentially no inquiries whatsoever.
if you want to know how things have changed, id start with any of the recent crisis books - "The Big Short" by Lewis, "Fool's Gold" by Tett, "Colossal Failure of Common Sense", by McDonald, "On the Brink", Paulson, "In Fed We Trust", Wessel, etc etc etc.
The stories about Citigroup and it's incestuous relationship with the high offices of government are of particular interest.
The Federal Reserve is kind of a joke as far as regulation goes. It does a lot of mole whacking, but you have to understand, we gave 2 trillion dollars to shitty banks that in essence, could not process transactions. We didn't "shut them down", we didnt "take them over". We bailed them out and payed their executives Bonuses.
look, all of the 'disgruntled customers' like yourself may be upset, but are you upset to take your money out and go to a smaller institution? one that charges slightly higher fees and has less profitable interest rates, but that actually takes it's job seriously?
this is the situation in the US with people who 'hate big banks'. if they 'hate' them so much, there are literally tens of thousands of small banks and credit unions - and they are insured up to $250,000 if you are worried about losing your money.
the thing is, customers would rather go with a big shitty bank, and then complain about getting screwed, than a small bank that always works. its some kind of pathological addiction to drama or something.
that literally exists only because taxpayers funded it through government enforced bailouts.
methinks your anger is misplaced. please find an arena where the people who run RBS, Goldman, Morgan, Deutsche, and all of the other 'too big to fail' banks were propped up by taxpayer funding, and tell them that they should be "put to the wall".
lest we forget, a huge number of the subprime mortgage securites (CDOs) had the "RBS" name on them. RBS only exists because the taxpayers kept it afloat. it was 'too big to fail'.
the fact that it would fail again in some catastrophic way is not surprising. it is like watching a hippopotamous shit all over the floor and then scratching your head and asking "why did the hippo shit all over the floor?". because thats what hippos do. they shit on the floor. if you want to stop having to wipe hippo shit out of the floor by the truckload, you might want to just get the hippo out of the room instead of trying to figure out how to get it to stop shitting.
anyone who has actually programmed for linux will understand the problem here. imagine the 'tax' imposed for the support time spent having to workaround the various quirks of redhat, fedora, debian, suse, etc etc. and if you are a zealot about to type in 'oh no its not that hard', kindly tell me which open source project you have actually worked on a release of.
Germany and Russia were major trading partners in the 19th and early 20th century.
In the late 1930s, Hitler and Stalin were allies, agreeing to carve up Poland, which they did in 1939.
In 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people. The Eastern Front of World War Two was one of the primary atrocities that the human species has perpetrated upon itself and upon the planet Earth.
Please tell me again how their 'integrated economy' prevented war.
When the facts of measurable reality (in our case, history) disagree with your theory, your theory must be thrown out and disregarded. In every science people to understand this, but in History they so often ignore it for some bizarre socio-bio-emotional reason. People appear to be fascinated by theories, and don't really care about the data.
i know it seems all cutesy wutesy, but if you have watched Prometheus 5 times in a row in the theatre like i have, you will know that we cannot trust these little buggers.
the 'green revolution' of pesticides and fertilizer did not end hunger. hunger is not caused by a lack of supply , but by the distribution methods. many countries that experience starvation are also experiencing brutal wars, dictatorships, lack of civil society, property rights, etc etc etc. afghanistan, for example, from 1979 to the present. they had to set aside things like crops and farming so that they could grow opium and fight a proxy war on behalf of the two the superpowers.
then there is the fact that most costs of food nowdays in places like the US go to marketing, and 'value added' stuff like freezing, dehydrating, processing, and otherwise repackaging basic wheat, corn, soy, etc, into pizza rolls, snack chips, etc etc.
the 'global financial crisis' was caused directly by massive fraud and profiteering. is there any incentive for cloud companies to create massive quantities of products that are completely worthless and sell them to sucker investors?
considering that most motherboards are made in china now, i find it laughable that so many people think their systems can be 'secured' because its running 'intel/amd and linux'.
where Bill Gates himself signed a deal with the government, claiming that all the linux computers they were using were being re-installed with windows, and then allowing Tunisia's dictator to modify the acceptable-cert-list in IE (and giving access to the source code of windows to the dictatorship).
the typical F/OSS line is that they practice 'non discrimination' in what 'field of endeavor' their licenses cover.
you can see it in the official open source defintitions, its one of their top rules.
the reality is that GPL and F/OSS software have always been closely linked to the high levels of the military industrial complex. the biggest funders of linux are big corporations with huge defense contracts. universities in the CS field are all closely linked to the military. For @#$ sake, Internet used to be DARPAnet - essentially it was a military program.
now there have been -some- licenses out there that discriminate against certain 'fields of endeavor', but they are very few and far between.
Slashdot Mirror
his name was barry.. or was it linden? anyways. . . he was a top coder... there was this one time.. let me take a moment and see if i can remember the story... ..
nope, no good. im afraid i cant recall it. ah well, you had to have been there.
twa. i mean , you are so racist you dont deserve the last t.
encyclopedias from the early 1900s were blatantly racist and often stupid.
encyclopedias from the 1950s reflected the cold war biases of their authors.
wikipedia is a steaming pile of shit, but its better than anything that came before it, which is why people use it and why encyclopedias are dead as a medium unless someone can figure out a new business model where the authors get payed for their work.
(hint - wikipedia already has many articles where authors have been payed, its a dirty secret that nobody likes to discuss, but fundamental to understanding how the site works)
which saw several million casualties and refugess, including over a million people dead, with chemical warfare and massive tank battles, and then the 1991 gulf war where Saddam set his own oil fields on fire.... then of course the 1970s violent revolution in Iran, the rise of the Ba'ath Party in Syria and Iraq, the Suez crisis, the various wars against israel, etc.
compared to all that, the US invasion in 2003 of Iraq is not very big. it seems big, but it really does not explain the price craziness at all. things have been much more chaotic in the past in the middle east, but prices were much more stable.
the system can fail regardless of how 'genius' the person you stick on the job.
witness the financial crash of 2008 - hundreds of PHDs were involved in creating CDOs, Synthetic CDOs, RMBS, and giving AAA+ ratings to migrant farm laborers with $300,000 home loans. all those geniuses didn't help the system one single bit, not at all, not one iota.
has gone up dramatically since the 1990s, and the Consumer Price Index has essentially been 'gamed' to hide all of this.
gasoline in particular went haywire about the same time that the commodities exchanges switched from open pits to electronic trading (see the book Asylum by McGrath-Goodman for more information)
food is linked to gasoline of course, but it still doesn't explain why flour is fluctuating up and down by 100% every few months.
housing of course went through the roof thanks to the subprime mortgage securities and their deriviatives (CDOs, Synthetic CDOs, etc), and the foreclosure robo-signing scandal has backlogged the system so much that prices still havent come down properly.
in other words, yes, things have changed.
have you ever actually been a cashier?
have you ever actually been a file clerk?
have you ever actually been a mail clerk?
have you ever actually been a salesman?
if not, then i suggest you go try it. you will learn a lot.
Fannie and Freddie - still going strong. Executives still making millions.
JP Morgan - still dealing in Credit Default Swaps, with absolutely zero consequences
Morgan Stanley - still churning out shitty IPOs like Facebook that rip people for millions, with absolutely zero consequences
Goldman - still being Goldman
the hedge funds and investment banks can now give unlimited anonymous money to political campaigns. including banks that are essentially 'international' with no allegiance to the US or its constitution.
Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was linked to the Magnetar hedge fund that was near the center of the subprime bubble, and it faced absolutely zero consequenecs, its managers have faced essentially no inquiries whatsoever.
" I worked in banking IT in the late 80s"
if you want to know how things have changed, id start with any of the recent crisis books - "The Big Short" by Lewis, "Fool's Gold" by Tett, "Colossal Failure of Common Sense", by McDonald, "On the Brink", Paulson, "In Fed We Trust", Wessel, etc etc etc.
The stories about Citigroup and it's incestuous relationship with the high offices of government are of particular interest.
The Federal Reserve is kind of a joke as far as regulation goes. It does a lot of mole whacking, but you have to understand, we gave 2 trillion dollars to shitty banks that in essence, could not process transactions. We didn't "shut them down", we didnt "take them over". We bailed them out and payed their executives Bonuses.
look, all of the 'disgruntled customers' like yourself may be upset, but are you upset to take your money out and go to a smaller institution? one that charges slightly higher fees and has less profitable interest rates, but that actually takes it's job seriously?
this is the situation in the US with people who 'hate big banks'. if they 'hate' them so much, there are literally tens of thousands of small banks and credit unions - and they are insured up to $250,000 if you are worried about losing your money.
the thing is, customers would rather go with a big shitty bank, and then complain about getting screwed, than a small bank that always works. its some kind of pathological addiction to drama or something.
that literally exists only because taxpayers funded it through government enforced bailouts.
methinks your anger is misplaced. please find an arena where the people who run RBS, Goldman, Morgan, Deutsche, and all of the other 'too big to fail' banks were propped up by taxpayer funding, and tell them that they should be "put to the wall".
lest we forget, a huge number of the subprime mortgage securites (CDOs) had the "RBS" name on them. RBS only exists because the taxpayers kept it afloat. it was 'too big to fail'.
the fact that it would fail again in some catastrophic way is not surprising. it is like watching a hippopotamous shit all over the floor and then scratching your head and asking "why did the hippo shit all over the floor?". because thats what hippos do. they shit on the floor. if you want to stop having to wipe hippo shit out of the floor by the truckload, you might want to just get the hippo out of the room instead of trying to figure out how to get it to stop shitting.
as a cashier, salesman, delivery boy, etc.
just pause for a moment and consider the possibilities.
idiocy and pseudoscience, then i have to wonder if the slashdot system itself has some kind of inherent internal flaw.
anyone who has actually programmed for linux will understand the problem here. imagine the 'tax' imposed for the support time spent having to workaround the various quirks of redhat, fedora, debian, suse, etc etc. and if you are a zealot about to type in 'oh no its not that hard', kindly tell me which open source project you have actually worked on a release of.
Germany and Russia were major trading partners in the 19th and early 20th century.
In the late 1930s, Hitler and Stalin were allies, agreeing to carve up Poland, which they did in 1939.
In 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people. The Eastern Front of World War Two was one of the primary atrocities that the human species has perpetrated upon itself and upon the planet Earth.
Please tell me again how their 'integrated economy' prevented war.
When the facts of measurable reality (in our case, history) disagree with your theory, your theory must be thrown out and disregarded. In every science people to understand this, but in History they so often ignore it for some bizarre socio-bio-emotional reason. People appear to be fascinated by theories, and don't really care about the data.
i know it seems all cutesy wutesy, but if you have watched Prometheus 5 times in a row in the theatre like i have, you will know that we cannot trust these little buggers.
for speaking their mind about issues of the day, the use of their land + water, etc etc etc.
the 'green revolution' of pesticides and fertilizer did not end hunger. hunger is not caused by a lack of supply , but by the distribution methods. many countries that experience starvation are also experiencing brutal wars, dictatorships, lack of civil society, property rights, etc etc etc. afghanistan, for example, from 1979 to the present. they had to set aside things like crops and farming so that they could grow opium and fight a proxy war on behalf of the two the superpowers.
then there is the fact that most costs of food nowdays in places like the US go to marketing, and 'value added' stuff like freezing, dehydrating, processing, and otherwise repackaging basic wheat, corn, soy, etc, into pizza rolls, snack chips, etc etc.
we would be better off as a society pouring the money into parks and bike trails instead of video game controllers and fake worlds that dont exist.
it is a sad day for the species when SCA can be compared favorably to something by calling the other thing "too much make believe".
the 'global financial crisis' was caused directly by massive fraud and profiteering. is there any incentive for cloud companies to create massive quantities of products that are completely worthless and sell them to sucker investors?
considering that most motherboards are made in china now, i find it laughable that so many people think their systems can be 'secured' because its running 'intel/amd and linux'.
where Bill Gates himself signed a deal with the government, claiming that all the linux computers they were using were being re-installed with windows, and then allowing Tunisia's dictator to modify the acceptable-cert-list in IE (and giving access to the source code of windows to the dictatorship).
the typical F/OSS line is that they practice 'non discrimination' in what 'field of endeavor' their licenses cover.
you can see it in the official open source defintitions, its one of their top rules.
the reality is that GPL and F/OSS software have always been closely linked to the high levels of the military industrial complex. the biggest funders of linux are big corporations with huge defense contracts. universities in the CS field are all closely linked to the military. For @#$ sake, Internet used to be DARPAnet - essentially it was a military program.
now there have been -some- licenses out there that discriminate against certain 'fields of endeavor', but they are very few and far between.