There's a lot of pages that are created on wikipedia that should be deleted, go over the AfD page and give it a read. People that have very little idea what wikipedia wants on its pages, or that blatantly ignore it to promote their own music or sports team or as their personal myspace page, one line mentions in a publication, hoaxes and so on. Sadly I think it's much the same as if you try helping out newbies, with each newbie your patience wanes until it's just RTFM!!! Same if you try fighting the endless stream of trash pages, eventually everything that doesn't fit your strict reading gets a "Delete!". I remember back in the early days of wikipedia, I added a bit to it but it was mostly about just adding information that was factual in an encyclopedic style, since unsourced facts were better than no facts. Today I'm pretty sure they'd get deleted because that's not what they want anymore - perhaps they never did but there were a lot fewer who'd delete a reasonably sane article for lack of sources. In a way you're not looking for quality contributions, you're looking for people who knows how to quote someone else without adding anything of their own. Completely different model, really.
Even failing still sheds light on what is wrong with our theory (or reality if you're an economist:-).
Well the thing is there's probably one theory that is right for physics. The same is not true for economics, if people buy into the bubble there'll be a bubble and if people buy into the panic there'll be a panic so you have self-fulfilling predictions while an atom does what it does no matter what you predict. The actual trigger can be as distant as the assassination of an archduke starting a world war, and if that trigger didn't happen the whole economy could change.
Take a look at the stock market after the financial crisis, for every drop there was a group of people saying "Now is the time to invest!" but they weren't many enough and it dropped some more. Finally it hit some form of critical mass of people and it took a huge bounce back as people suddenly realized they missed the bottom and wanted to get back in. Does the timing of that have anything at all to do with the economy as such? Nah, it's all about timing in relation to everyone else. And when everyone is trying to predict what everyone else is doing, it gets really messy.
Unfortunately yes, because despite ANSI making SQL standards the actual common feature set is extremely minimal. It's not a strength nor a feature, of course if you want that last bit of performance you will optimize for a specific database. However, there are many applications between trivial and "pedal to the metal" that ought to be possible to write in a database-independent way, but that you can't because of syntactical sugar. Operations on date and time for example are a genuine pain in the butt and doesn't work the same at all. A lot of the basic operators aren't the same, like if you ever use "||" as concatenation as per the SQL standard your code is broken on MSSQL and MySQL. And even if you need the most trivial of triggers, good luck writing one that's valid T-SQL, pl/SQL, pg/SQL and whatever MySQL has, even if it's just basic SQL statements in a wrapper. Even for what I'd call a basic application - not a trivial one but one step up - you're likely to be tied to a specific database unless you use some sort of meta-SQL wrapper which has tons of issues on its own.
What I do have is a couple UNIX boxes that are completely capable (,,,)
And they don't run MS Office or Photoshop but they could, so it should be legal to install virtualbox with a pirated Windows VM and apps so that you can right? And every Windows game that could run on the same hardware, they're free to pirate and try to make work under WINE because they're not offering a linux port too? You're painting yourself in a corner and then complain you can't reach the door. What's next? Complain that they don't work under the BSDs, AmigaOS or BeOS? Buy a computer without DVD drive, then go pirate all the DVDs because the cornerstore only has DVDs but they could offer them on memory sticks or via wireless or hook up a network cable? Sometimes I do think copanies are unreasonable not to offer service, but you're unreasonable in the other direction. You're not willing to budge one inch to find a solution, you expect the world to revolve around you and your solution. Sucks for you that it doesn't.
Ok clear enough? However the problem is they fucked with the in-generation naming. Previously the 5870 was the highest end single GPU card, now the 6970 is. As such the situation you have is:
5750->6850 5770->6870 5850->6950 5870->6970
Stop pretending this is an accident, it's deceptive marketing quite simply. Check out this graph. The 5870 and 5850 outperform the 6870 and 6850 respectively, and I'm not cherry picking graphs either it's across the board. No matter what ABCD system you use people will assume A+1 with all else being equal as a better card. It's not, it's a worse card. The truth of the matter is that both AMD and nVidia is in a bit of a bend here, they didn't get the 32nm process from TMSC they expected so their last round of cards are quite lackluster. If you have a relatively recent card the incentives to get a card in this generation are few. Currently they're not so much fighting each other, they're fighting themselves with people asking "Um, why should I upgrade my card again?". Hence the version numbers on steroids to make you think you moved up one generation and one performance level.
It seems quite likely now, yes. They lost communication in late March, the winter solstice was in late May so you'd expect it back around late July the way I'm thinking. It's 5 months past that now with 4 months left to peak production. If it survived the winter at all you'd think that would be long enough to get back in touch, of course it did get stuck in a less than ideal position so it might have trouble recharging enough. Worth listening to, but I would be surprised if it recovers and if it does it'll probably be just to say hi before the next winter kills it. The money is pretty solidly on Opportunity lasting the longest now.
I doubt we have that, how difficult it is to detect a planet not only depends on the size but very much on the orbit. But you don't need to exclude anything, just to do better than random sweeps. Even if it turns out planetary systems are very common, we can pick the most earth-like planets in the most earth-like orbits around the most sun-like stars with jupiter-like asteroid cleaners and moon-like satellites and point our antennas there. If we can do things like spectral analysis, detect magnetic fields and so on let's throw that in the mix too. Of course life might be completely different, but until we've got something better to go on we should try searching for life that resembles that on earth. Just geting a partial list of candidates to rank would be a great step up from current efforts.
Another nice thought, but one that doesn't work in practice when one side is accusing the other of being agents of the chinese government, or admirers of Stalin and Hitler.
I can sort of understand, with the big two covering almost the whole political spectrum in the US then a far left Democrat and a far right Republican are miles apart on the political spectrum. Here in Norway we have 7 parties in our parliament, there are various left/right/center coalitions but they don't stretch longer than they have to in order to get a majority. You'd never see the Socialist Left Party (far left, duh) and the Progress Party (far right) sit down and cooperate, yet if you are looking for bipartisan support in Congress that's what you're doing. You just don't get 100% support in politics, it's just that in the US you have an ice front between Democrats and Republicans even though two centrists could be closer than the extremes inside each party.
Coupled with the fact that many remote regions of the world now get cellular coverage(eg MT. Everest), the number of people who need a sat phone will go down from probably 100,000 to 20,000, pushing up costs even further. I recokon, after around 5 years, maybe 1000-2000 people will need sat phone coverage.
World wide? Nah. There's a lot more people working in odd places than you think. Also, if you're the C?O of a big company, I expect you to have one for insurance because in a shitstorm you're expected to be available 24/7 from anywhere these days, just the fortune 500 would be more than that. The problem is that they'll get almost no call minutes. I've been outside cell coverage from time to time and first of all I couldn't justify the cost in the first place. But even if I did, it'd be reserved for dialing emergency services and sending/receiving similar "Caught by storm, found shelter we're all good kthxbye" or "Your brother has been in a car accident and is badly injured" messages. And forget data costs which is also a major income source these days.
Never mind that a lot of the time you're "out of coverage" could be covered if your phone supports hooking up to a large directional antenna, I did that once in a basement apartment (no, not my mom's) that had 0-1 bars of coverage, went to almost max just from inside the apartment. Of course I'd have to keep my phone hooked up to that but it could be an option to get coverage at your remote cabin, with an outdoor wall mount - or pole mount to get you above the foliage - you can connect at ranges your tiny little phone wouldn't stand a chance. It's most of the gain for much, much less cost for coverage at a fixed point. Basically, I think it's a market with no upside. Every time you get enough users gathered in one place to make a cash cow, one of the terrestrial network operators will put up a cell and take the market away. The sat phone market is constantly trying to profit on the leftovers.
Trust is not so important as being reproducible and verified by multiple methods. There's no explicit reason to distrust "doppler shifts, wobbles and loss of brightness due to osculation" but it's good science to say "Well, if what we're measuring is the result of a planet, we should be able to do X and see the planet directly. If we don't, there's something wrong. That it has been correct for near star systems give credibility to the other methods that they'll be correct for distant star systems. Sometimes you have to accept single-source results because it's the world's largest and most sensitive telescope or most powerful particle accelerator or things like that, but it's not ideal to leave it at that. Verifying results is a lot less glorious than making the discoveries in the first place, but it's an important part of science.
"To steal a kiss" is not ignorant of the legal definition of stealing, we just choose to use it to mean something else. "Broadband connection" now has a casual meaning different from the formal telecom/IT definition of broadband. Many words have left their etymological roots, you can choose to take the normative high ground and say "they shouldn't" but those of us that try to be more descriptive simply say "well, they have". For example, one of the things that make me want to tear my hair out is that "lol" is now a Norwegian word. As in, many people below 30 use it as a spoken word. "You want me to do that? lol" And they pronounce it like L-O-L. Language is changing, and it doesn't follow the rules.
I just checked the same numbers for Norway, and slightly less than half our "broadband" connections fall short of the 4 Mbit download mark, the mean being 4.1 Mbit (graph). There's no similar statistics for the upload speed, but I see Telenor (our biggest ISP) offer 5000/500 and 16000/800 kbps so many more will fail the 1 Mbit upload requirement. However these numbers are typically actual values, I'd be interested to know how much is claimed speed and how much is BS "up to", 5000/500 isn't so bad if you actually get it.
No, competition is a wonderful cure for most problems. The free market is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Also, competition is not a protection against fraudulent marketing nor abusive companies. Many companies operate under the policy that are happy to take your money once, then disappear and reappear under another name when complaints and bad reputation crop up. Or they know they're an effective oligarchy, each may have their dissatisfied customers but they only rotate a little. It's also important that the government steps in early and hard against methods used by a dominating actor to gain monopoly, otherwise you end up with the monopolist paying pennies in damages many years later but more than making up for it in monopoly profits.
Yahoo has got a fairly nice feature where you get up to 500 mail aliases. That way you know exactly what site is selling your address and as a bonus you can have it autosort to folders. On top of that, you have the best unsubscription method possible, you simply delete the alias and all their mail will bounce. It probably doesn't hurt to send a "fuck you too" email with the alias saying you know what they did either. I really wish I had discovered it sooner, because my personal address was already a bit spammy but I don't want to change it now. At least this way it's not getting any worse.
Been there, done that.... the good thing is that I use throwaway e-amail addresses provided by my webmail host, so I know what site is responsible for my 200 spam/day emails. I don't think the law will accomplish anything, but at least I can delete the temp email and have the mails bounce when I'm done with them. The wild, wild west got nothing on spam email, it's so lawless that only like the top 5 in the world has the chance of getting token caught.
Yes, that culture has indeed worked out for Europe. In fact, I think Ireland and Greece have definitely benefited the most by screwing over the short-term (haven't they screwed over the long term, as well?).
You can blame the financial companies for giving countries the rope to hang themselves with, but the Greek and Irish debt crisis are almost all about public debt. To please the voters by providing lots of services and generous benefits while keeping taxes low, they've completely ignored basic economics like making your income match your expenses and just let the budget deficit run wild. Eventually the lenders go "Whoa whoa whoa, you want to borrow even MORE?" First they do it for a risk premium then they finally say no more credit for you, then people blame the lenders for "putting the thumbscrews" on the country. Of course the US crisis that lowered their tax income and increased their interest rates didn't help, but it's what happens when you push yourself to the financial limits and operate with no safety net.
I very well understand Germany and the other countries that have been relatively conservative in spending, it's like we've saved and you've wasted, but now you expect us to come save your ass? They've been at the brink of financial collapse, and the EU brought them back from the edge with a crisis packet but they don't seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation. The public debt is still increasing and now they start talking about doing a "haircut" of their debt. But that will force everyone else to take losses, and I don't think they will. The UK used anti-terror laws against Iceland after the Icelandic bank collapse, I'm sure they'd do they same against Greece. And if you want another round of nationalism in Europe, break Germany's back trying to save the euro.
Anyway, this got a bit off track but the point is that this is almost all a government-created crisis that was vastly accelerated by the financial crisis in the US. It's not so much an unregulated financial industry but more national leaders who act as if they got endless pockets and perhaps even in some form has counted on the EU to bail them out. And now it turns out that if everyone gets on the public debt carousel, there's nobody with money left to bail out tose that don't have money. The various European countries are now pinning each other up the way US investment banks did, which will either save them or cause an economic bust so huge the Great Depression becomes small fry. They're certainly putting more and more eggs in that basket.
To summarize the book, buys stocks based on what you think their value is, which actually requires doing a value analysis on the stock and buying when it is undervalued, and selling when it is overvalued, as to just getting sucked into the latest get rich quick stock or bond at the height of its balloon, only to have it pop.
The problem is that the market can be wrong longer than you can be right. That is to say it doesn't help if you sit on a stock that is constantly undervalued, you never get the "real" value unless you buy it out and go private which is not an option for 99.999% of us. The question is what brings markets to say "Hey, this stock is vastly underpriced, buy buy buy." or "Hey, this stock is vastly overpriced, sell sell sell." because unless you're doing it for the dividends you're sooner or later going to sell it back into the same market. And you should also be aware that you can still lose money if the market is falliing at the same time, even if the stock performed better than the index. It should even out over time but it adds volatility. It's not that simple to ignore what the market overall is doing.
That we involve victims in sentencing hearings is abominable, as is that we enforce arbitrary minimum sentencing regulations.
When they're not being abused, minimum sentences make sense. The jury has a range of sentencing, but the law still says no variety of the crime is worth less than X years in prison. Otherwise you could have something much worse than jury nullification, you could have juries finding the guy guilty of murder and sentence him to pay $1. The way the US looks at double jeopardy he couldn't be trialed again.
As for IT -- it's a function of the work involved that critical infrastructure is vulnerable to a rogue IT staff-member. Proper oversight is hard to do, especially since IT is an enigma to executive-level management most of the time. Proper system design, access management, etc, are harder to ensure for IT systems than they are for accounting processes.
TThe real issue is that for most other systems, it's the IT system enforcing the rules. The accountant simply doesn't have the rights to make payouts himself. However, with IT access you can often subvert the whole process by writing directly to files, changing the database, replacing executables and so on.You can't trust anything a person has root/admin access to to abide by any rules nor tell you the truth.
Everything was coming to this. It's normal to assume that what was done by governments before will one day be done by commercial companies.
If you can get some ROI on it, there's obviously a decent market for satellite launches. And making deliveries to ISS, but that's demand all generated by the government. Maybe you can get some space hotels in LEO, but for everything else like sending out probes, going back to the Moon or to Mars there's not really been many realistic business plans, even if you count on playboy billionaires.
There's lots of services I don't see the private industry ever overtaking from the public like courts, police, CPS and so on. You might subcontrat specific things like ISS resupply missions, but not the overall thing. That I think will be fairly true for space exploration still.
The reason that Bitorrent became popular was because it was a faster protocol
A lot of that wasn't really the protocol as such, it's that you actually got faster downloads for faster uploads so people turned off all their caps. Napster etc. didn't really reward uploads much, you got the files at pretty much the same speed no matter what. Proper incentives are everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Except one of those 14 packages is a meta-package with about 75 binary firmwares, including microcode for all Radeon cards for example.
There's a lot of pages that are created on wikipedia that should be deleted, go over the AfD page and give it a read. People that have very little idea what wikipedia wants on its pages, or that blatantly ignore it to promote their own music or sports team or as their personal myspace page, one line mentions in a publication, hoaxes and so on. Sadly I think it's much the same as if you try helping out newbies, with each newbie your patience wanes until it's just RTFM!!! Same if you try fighting the endless stream of trash pages, eventually everything that doesn't fit your strict reading gets a "Delete!". I remember back in the early days of wikipedia, I added a bit to it but it was mostly about just adding information that was factual in an encyclopedic style, since unsourced facts were better than no facts. Today I'm pretty sure they'd get deleted because that's not what they want anymore - perhaps they never did but there were a lot fewer who'd delete a reasonably sane article for lack of sources. In a way you're not looking for quality contributions, you're looking for people who knows how to quote someone else without adding anything of their own. Completely different model, really.
Even failing still sheds light on what is wrong with our theory (or reality if you're an economist :-).
Well the thing is there's probably one theory that is right for physics. The same is not true for economics, if people buy into the bubble there'll be a bubble and if people buy into the panic there'll be a panic so you have self-fulfilling predictions while an atom does what it does no matter what you predict. The actual trigger can be as distant as the assassination of an archduke starting a world war, and if that trigger didn't happen the whole economy could change.
Take a look at the stock market after the financial crisis, for every drop there was a group of people saying "Now is the time to invest!" but they weren't many enough and it dropped some more. Finally it hit some form of critical mass of people and it took a huge bounce back as people suddenly realized they missed the bottom and wanted to get back in. Does the timing of that have anything at all to do with the economy as such? Nah, it's all about timing in relation to everyone else. And when everyone is trying to predict what everyone else is doing, it gets really messy.
Unfortunately yes, because despite ANSI making SQL standards the actual common feature set is extremely minimal. It's not a strength nor a feature, of course if you want that last bit of performance you will optimize for a specific database. However, there are many applications between trivial and "pedal to the metal" that ought to be possible to write in a database-independent way, but that you can't because of syntactical sugar. Operations on date and time for example are a genuine pain in the butt and doesn't work the same at all. A lot of the basic operators aren't the same, like if you ever use "||" as concatenation as per the SQL standard your code is broken on MSSQL and MySQL. And even if you need the most trivial of triggers, good luck writing one that's valid T-SQL, pl/SQL, pg/SQL and whatever MySQL has, even if it's just basic SQL statements in a wrapper. Even for what I'd call a basic application - not a trivial one but one step up - you're likely to be tied to a specific database unless you use some sort of meta-SQL wrapper which has tons of issues on its own.
What I do have is a couple UNIX boxes that are completely capable (,,,)
And they don't run MS Office or Photoshop but they could, so it should be legal to install virtualbox with a pirated Windows VM and apps so that you can right? And every Windows game that could run on the same hardware, they're free to pirate and try to make work under WINE because they're not offering a linux port too? You're painting yourself in a corner and then complain you can't reach the door. What's next? Complain that they don't work under the BSDs, AmigaOS or BeOS? Buy a computer without DVD drive, then go pirate all the DVDs because the cornerstore only has DVDs but they could offer them on memory sticks or via wireless or hook up a network cable? Sometimes I do think copanies are unreasonable not to offer service, but you're unreasonable in the other direction. You're not willing to budge one inch to find a solution, you expect the world to revolve around you and your solution. Sucks for you that it doesn't.
Ok clear enough? However the problem is they fucked with the in-generation naming. Previously the 5870 was the highest end single GPU card, now the 6970 is. As such the situation you have is:
5750->6850
5770->6870
5850->6950
5870->6970
Stop pretending this is an accident, it's deceptive marketing quite simply. Check out this graph. The 5870 and 5850 outperform the 6870 and 6850 respectively, and I'm not cherry picking graphs either it's across the board. No matter what ABCD system you use people will assume A+1 with all else being equal as a better card. It's not, it's a worse card. The truth of the matter is that both AMD and nVidia is in a bit of a bend here, they didn't get the 32nm process from TMSC they expected so their last round of cards are quite lackluster. If you have a relatively recent card the incentives to get a card in this generation are few. Currently they're not so much fighting each other, they're fighting themselves with people asking "Um, why should I upgrade my card again?". Hence the version numbers on steroids to make you think you moved up one generation and one performance level.
It seems quite likely now, yes. They lost communication in late March, the winter solstice was in late May so you'd expect it back around late July the way I'm thinking. It's 5 months past that now with 4 months left to peak production. If it survived the winter at all you'd think that would be long enough to get back in touch, of course it did get stuck in a less than ideal position so it might have trouble recharging enough. Worth listening to, but I would be surprised if it recovers and if it does it'll probably be just to say hi before the next winter kills it. The money is pretty solidly on Opportunity lasting the longest now.
Nah, just short-lived. Three decades is nothing.
I doubt we have that, how difficult it is to detect a planet not only depends on the size but very much on the orbit. But you don't need to exclude anything, just to do better than random sweeps. Even if it turns out planetary systems are very common, we can pick the most earth-like planets in the most earth-like orbits around the most sun-like stars with jupiter-like asteroid cleaners and moon-like satellites and point our antennas there. If we can do things like spectral analysis, detect magnetic fields and so on let's throw that in the mix too. Of course life might be completely different, but until we've got something better to go on we should try searching for life that resembles that on earth. Just geting a partial list of candidates to rank would be a great step up from current efforts.
Another nice thought, but one that doesn't work in practice when one side is accusing the other of being agents of the chinese government, or admirers of Stalin and Hitler.
I can sort of understand, with the big two covering almost the whole political spectrum in the US then a far left Democrat and a far right Republican are miles apart on the political spectrum. Here in Norway we have 7 parties in our parliament, there are various left/right/center coalitions but they don't stretch longer than they have to in order to get a majority. You'd never see the Socialist Left Party (far left, duh) and the Progress Party (far right) sit down and cooperate, yet if you are looking for bipartisan support in Congress that's what you're doing. You just don't get 100% support in politics, it's just that in the US you have an ice front between Democrats and Republicans even though two centrists could be closer than the extremes inside each party.
Coupled with the fact that many remote regions of the world now get cellular coverage(eg MT. Everest), the number of people who need a sat phone will go down from probably 100,000 to 20,000, pushing up costs even further. I recokon, after around 5 years, maybe 1000-2000 people will need sat phone coverage.
World wide? Nah. There's a lot more people working in odd places than you think. Also, if you're the C?O of a big company, I expect you to have one for insurance because in a shitstorm you're expected to be available 24/7 from anywhere these days, just the fortune 500 would be more than that. The problem is that they'll get almost no call minutes. I've been outside cell coverage from time to time and first of all I couldn't justify the cost in the first place. But even if I did, it'd be reserved for dialing emergency services and sending/receiving similar "Caught by storm, found shelter we're all good kthxbye" or "Your brother has been in a car accident and is badly injured" messages. And forget data costs which is also a major income source these days.
Never mind that a lot of the time you're "out of coverage" could be covered if your phone supports hooking up to a large directional antenna, I did that once in a basement apartment (no, not my mom's) that had 0-1 bars of coverage, went to almost max just from inside the apartment. Of course I'd have to keep my phone hooked up to that but it could be an option to get coverage at your remote cabin, with an outdoor wall mount - or pole mount to get you above the foliage - you can connect at ranges your tiny little phone wouldn't stand a chance. It's most of the gain for much, much less cost for coverage at a fixed point. Basically, I think it's a market with no upside. Every time you get enough users gathered in one place to make a cash cow, one of the terrestrial network operators will put up a cell and take the market away. The sat phone market is constantly trying to profit on the leftovers.
Trust is not so important as being reproducible and verified by multiple methods. There's no explicit reason to distrust "doppler shifts, wobbles and loss of brightness due to osculation" but it's good science to say "Well, if what we're measuring is the result of a planet, we should be able to do X and see the planet directly. If we don't, there's something wrong. That it has been correct for near star systems give credibility to the other methods that they'll be correct for distant star systems. Sometimes you have to accept single-source results because it's the world's largest and most sensitive telescope or most powerful particle accelerator or things like that, but it's not ideal to leave it at that. Verifying results is a lot less glorious than making the discoveries in the first place, but it's an important part of science.
"To steal a kiss" is not ignorant of the legal definition of stealing, we just choose to use it to mean something else. "Broadband connection" now has a casual meaning different from the formal telecom/IT definition of broadband. Many words have left their etymological roots, you can choose to take the normative high ground and say "they shouldn't" but those of us that try to be more descriptive simply say "well, they have". For example, one of the things that make me want to tear my hair out is that "lol" is now a Norwegian word. As in, many people below 30 use it as a spoken word. "You want me to do that? lol" And they pronounce it like L-O-L. Language is changing, and it doesn't follow the rules.
I just checked the same numbers for Norway, and slightly less than half our "broadband" connections fall short of the 4 Mbit download mark, the mean being 4.1 Mbit (graph). There's no similar statistics for the upload speed, but I see Telenor (our biggest ISP) offer 5000/500 and 16000/800 kbps so many more will fail the 1 Mbit upload requirement. However these numbers are typically actual values, I'd be interested to know how much is claimed speed and how much is BS "up to", 5000/500 isn't so bad if you actually get it.
No, competition is a wonderful cure for most problems. The free market is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Also, competition is not a protection against fraudulent marketing nor abusive companies. Many companies operate under the policy that are happy to take your money once, then disappear and reappear under another name when complaints and bad reputation crop up. Or they know they're an effective oligarchy, each may have their dissatisfied customers but they only rotate a little. It's also important that the government steps in early and hard against methods used by a dominating actor to gain monopoly, otherwise you end up with the monopolist paying pennies in damages many years later but more than making up for it in monopoly profits.
Nope. Both Voyager probes are well over a light-day away from earth. Voyager 1 being over 31 light-hours away. So it's more like .0035 ly
Check your sources. It's about 116 AU or 16 light hours away.
Yahoo has got a fairly nice feature where you get up to 500 mail aliases. That way you know exactly what site is selling your address and as a bonus you can have it autosort to folders. On top of that, you have the best unsubscription method possible, you simply delete the alias and all their mail will bounce. It probably doesn't hurt to send a "fuck you too" email with the alias saying you know what they did either. I really wish I had discovered it sooner, because my personal address was already a bit spammy but I don't want to change it now. At least this way it's not getting any worse.
Meanwhile in a /. a few lightyears away: "Weird solar sail with "NASA" written on it found"
Well, if they did manage to get it a few lightyears away that'd make this mission NASAs biggest success ever. So far the record is about 0.002 ly.
Been there, done that.... the good thing is that I use throwaway e-amail addresses provided by my webmail host, so I know what site is responsible for my 200 spam/day emails. I don't think the law will accomplish anything, but at least I can delete the temp email and have the mails bounce when I'm done with them. The wild, wild west got nothing on spam email, it's so lawless that only like the top 5 in the world has the chance of getting token caught.
Yes, that culture has indeed worked out for Europe. In fact, I think Ireland and Greece have definitely benefited the most by screwing over the short-term (haven't they screwed over the long term, as well?).
You can blame the financial companies for giving countries the rope to hang themselves with, but the Greek and Irish debt crisis are almost all about public debt. To please the voters by providing lots of services and generous benefits while keeping taxes low, they've completely ignored basic economics like making your income match your expenses and just let the budget deficit run wild. Eventually the lenders go "Whoa whoa whoa, you want to borrow even MORE?" First they do it for a risk premium then they finally say no more credit for you, then people blame the lenders for "putting the thumbscrews" on the country. Of course the US crisis that lowered their tax income and increased their interest rates didn't help, but it's what happens when you push yourself to the financial limits and operate with no safety net.
I very well understand Germany and the other countries that have been relatively conservative in spending, it's like we've saved and you've wasted, but now you expect us to come save your ass? They've been at the brink of financial collapse, and the EU brought them back from the edge with a crisis packet but they don't seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation. The public debt is still increasing and now they start talking about doing a "haircut" of their debt. But that will force everyone else to take losses, and I don't think they will. The UK used anti-terror laws against Iceland after the Icelandic bank collapse, I'm sure they'd do they same against Greece. And if you want another round of nationalism in Europe, break Germany's back trying to save the euro.
Anyway, this got a bit off track but the point is that this is almost all a government-created crisis that was vastly accelerated by the financial crisis in the US. It's not so much an unregulated financial industry but more national leaders who act as if they got endless pockets and perhaps even in some form has counted on the EU to bail them out. And now it turns out that if everyone gets on the public debt carousel, there's nobody with money left to bail out tose that don't have money. The various European countries are now pinning each other up the way US investment banks did, which will either save them or cause an economic bust so huge the Great Depression becomes small fry. They're certainly putting more and more eggs in that basket.
To summarize the book, buys stocks based on what you think their value is, which actually requires doing a value analysis on the stock and buying when it is undervalued, and selling when it is overvalued, as to just getting sucked into the latest get rich quick stock or bond at the height of its balloon, only to have it pop.
The problem is that the market can be wrong longer than you can be right. That is to say it doesn't help if you sit on a stock that is constantly undervalued, you never get the "real" value unless you buy it out and go private which is not an option for 99.999% of us. The question is what brings markets to say "Hey, this stock is vastly underpriced, buy buy buy." or "Hey, this stock is vastly overpriced, sell sell sell." because unless you're doing it for the dividends you're sooner or later going to sell it back into the same market. And you should also be aware that you can still lose money if the market is falliing at the same time, even if the stock performed better than the index. It should even out over time but it adds volatility. It's not that simple to ignore what the market overall is doing.
That we involve victims in sentencing hearings is abominable, as is that we enforce arbitrary minimum sentencing regulations.
When they're not being abused, minimum sentences make sense. The jury has a range of sentencing, but the law still says no variety of the crime is worth less than X years in prison. Otherwise you could have something much worse than jury nullification, you could have juries finding the guy guilty of murder and sentence him to pay $1. The way the US looks at double jeopardy he couldn't be trialed again.
As for IT -- it's a function of the work involved that critical infrastructure is vulnerable to a rogue IT staff-member. Proper oversight is hard to do, especially since IT is an enigma to executive-level management most of the time. Proper system design, access management, etc, are harder to ensure for IT systems than they are for accounting processes.
TThe real issue is that for most other systems, it's the IT system enforcing the rules. The accountant simply doesn't have the rights to make payouts himself. However, with IT access you can often subvert the whole process by writing directly to files, changing the database, replacing executables and so on.You can't trust anything a person has root/admin access to to abide by any rules nor tell you the truth.
Everything was coming to this. It's normal to assume that what was done by governments before will one day be done by commercial companies.
If you can get some ROI on it, there's obviously a decent market for satellite launches. And making deliveries to ISS, but that's demand all generated by the government. Maybe you can get some space hotels in LEO, but for everything else like sending out probes, going back to the Moon or to Mars there's not really been many realistic business plans, even if you count on playboy billionaires.
There's lots of services I don't see the private industry ever overtaking from the public like courts, police, CPS and so on. You might subcontrat specific things like ISS resupply missions, but not the overall thing. That I think will be fairly true for space exploration still.
The reason that Bitorrent became popular was because it was a faster protocol
A lot of that wasn't really the protocol as such, it's that you actually got faster downloads for faster uploads so people turned off all their caps. Napster etc. didn't really reward uploads much, you got the files at pretty much the same speed no matter what. Proper incentives are everything.