Curious, I'm in about the same situation.
Though I point out that even the attny general (Holder) pointed out that the big banks, who bought laws that allow legal co-mingling of their derivative bets and depositors money are "too big to jail". And yeah - "Free Jon Corzine!"
I note that the FDIC is ridiculously underfunded. Can't get blood from a turnip. You could print more, but we know where that goes.
I note that while we have a defense department that seems at least to support a lot of large defense contractors, and theoretically my stuff, we also have civil asset forfeiture so bad that last year it exceeded all losses by theft and burglary - 4.7 vs 4.2 billion bucks. (!)
So yes, it's good to have non money assets and especially ones that are NOT liquid enough to be desireable for thieves in uniforms to steal.
This is probably not the right thread to discuss this, but I was reacting to the "OMG, no backup - what an idiot" for something a lot less meaningful to most than "my next meal/rent or my kid's next doctor appointment".
Seemed kinda silly in terms of getting priorities straight.
I'd bet just about zero percent on this thread have "backed up" their money - which is bits in some bank's computer - at most. Their "TOS" were recently changed to "bail-in" by lawmakers. Yet you all seem to be perfectly happy with money that's basically fake and which only exists as bits on a computer you don't own. Which can be taken from you -legally- if the bank makes bad bets (yes, they are allowed to co-mingle funds now too). Don't take my word for it, but don't be surprised if more than GIF's go missing at some point.
It's also moderately trivial to re-format comments in source using many available tools if one desires to do so. Some already-rolled ones, almost any language that supports regex, even, gawd, bash scripts with sed and awk etc can do this. If you don't like it that much, make a tool that fixes it.
It ain't rocket surgery, it's a job for an otherwise boring afternoon. I don't recall any compiler whatever having an issue figuring out which of the input was comments. Go to town, how hard can it be?
How much did Oracle pay to steal SQL itself? Or as another poster mentioned, nearly all of c++ syntax (without some of the freedom and power because programmers are too stupid to manage memory allocation so we steal real time abilities from you and do it ourselves, like, um, perl). And so on. If Oracle wins any of this - and I'd like to see API's not copyrightable at all, it's obviously not the intent of having them - we ALL lose, particularly those dumb enough to either work and live in the US or to sign one of those ignorant "not free trade" agreements that give corporations higher powers than governments over such things.
This is about diesel. Call us back when they have a throttle. Your post is about how it's done in gasoline spark-ignition engines where you can keep the mixture as you please. Diesel's won't fire unless there is enough pressure to compression-ignite the fuel so there is no throttle to close up, and the mixture is therefore "all over the place".
Oh, I did all that back when I had taxable income. I'm now retired and fairly well off. I just feel for those who aren't doing as well, and never will under the current regulatory regime. FWIW, I 5x'd my retirement account trading from March 2009 to 2014, then got out and am still out. I'd sold after about 20% loss off the previous peak to the protestations of my then broker (who now thinks I'm a genius). That game is now so rigged itself it's better to wait awhile for after the tide next goes out and the naked swimmers have to dump at pennies on the dollar. Being responsible puts one in a position of being able to wait for things like that, and just take the easy winnings. I'll do ok on the mountain (well, a buncha hills in Appalachia) I now own outright, and am off-grid mostly. I changed a buncha cash into things that are unpleasant or difficult to confiscate, but which benefit me just fine..gov doesn't want to be in the real estate business or try to make money selling my solar system, farm, and so on. They like to just cntrl-x cntrl-v cash (eg bits in the bank - fiat), so it's wise to not make it too easy for them to do that.
Oh, made the money in the first place as a systems engineer and coder. I still do that, but now it's only for fun.
Too bad I commented here or I'd use mod points to mod you up. There are a lot of tricks, and the one you mention is one of them (I believe Apple and others also use Ireland and the Netherlands among others, as havens). The point is, the normal taxpayer can't afford them - it's not gain at the margin for the taxes a little guy saves, but is for the big guys. In a rather long life, it seems nearly every law or regulation passed has favored the big over the small and perhaps disruptive. That's the real problem in my mind.
Tax the corps and they pass it through as price increases that are net regressive taxes on all customers. Affecting the poor more than the rich. It's not that simple, not that I believe they shouldn't pay.
All they do (well almost all) is legal. Should I want to hire someone at a PO box in some lax country to assign my income around - it'd be legal for me too. It's just that what isn't even pocket change for these guys is more than my total income (and I'm not poor).
Anatole France: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." .
It's hard to devise a system that doesn't favor entities with money - which is power, given human nature. Fix the latter and the former works itself out.
As we say here, GoodLuckWithThat.
I do hope this isn't a plan to snatch defeat from the jaw of victory...another approach they could use is that this is essentially an unlawful "taking" in a couple of senses (yet another amendment).
They used to have the right to sell services that could be considered secure (yes, I know). If it's totally public, and it is, that none of their services are the least bit secure (from the government...we already know about the rest) - then no sales to anyone who cares about their privacy. That's potentially a huge "taking" without recompense.
Ditto a taking from those with a reasonable expectation that just because they (foolishly IMO) use cloud, they are now extra exposed to.gov snooping (along with the rest).
Good to have another trick in your pocket if the first one fails, assuming you actually want to win.
I'm aware of that - I've written books on Digital Signal Processing, for example.
So, why in fact does everybody conflate pi with the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, without mentioning it's imaginary since there is no flat space in the known universe where that definition is actually true?
You just moved the problem without solving it. Read article, title and so on.
You're being too kind. Most of a decade ago 2 hours in ER cost me way over $4k - and that's after months of negotiation and paying some cash under the table.
Logged in just to point this out. Ninja'd. On Pi day it's always fun to remind people of this - but they always act like you're a troll. No, just correct. Pi is only Pi in a flat space with no energy/mass in it. In other words, it's never equal to the formulas that calculate it out to N digits anywhere in the known universe, and at some point, just you being there to measure it would make it not right (not sure how many decimal places out, but in theory, even a human body warps space a little).
Interesting thought, but no need to partner if I wanted to get into that. I've been an EE/comp-sci for all my rather long life (starting before PCs). I'm not a big fan of bitcoin, personally..I prefer shiny stuff you can drop on your toe and say "ouch", tools, skills, infrastructure. More lasting value and can't be removed via internet kill switch.
A killer-important question for my apps. I use a decent (currently around 5) number of pi's on my off-grid solar powered homestead, and they need to be on 24/7/365 to do things like control my power and water systems, collect weather data (internal and external) from buildings on my campus, do security, handle anticipatory HVAC controls, and in general make my life easier more quickly than I get weaker from old age. TDP is huge when there are times like right now - solar panels covered with snow and main batteries getting low.
Being able to segment and prioritize power use when it's a limit - yet utilize all that nature happens to be providing at the moment (be that water, heat, power) is critical to my life. Can't do that if the thing doing it is itself a big load, or too expensive to partition into lots of separate functional units that CAN be shut down selectively when power is low - though it's better to never have to shut data collection down.
.
While mips per watt is really important - plain old watts are too. A setup that can handle a decent peak computational loading had better be good at idle too.
Just like solar power - the need for computation is a famine or flood situation. Sometimes you need a lot - sometimes not. With solar, assuming a decently sized system - a system that can handle Feburary in "conserve" mode is dumping so much power on you the rest of the year you might as well be using for an electic car (which I do). A good systems design handles things like this that we can't really change, gracefully.
Yup - rather than mod up an already +5, thought I'd chime in myself. It's the community, and the existing popularity - the network effect, that makes the pi a win.
I tasked myself with designing a "LAN of things" for my off-grid homestead, intended to last, well, forever - as long as I'll live. LAN because security, and my life depends on Neuman's little helpers. Will I be able to get a replacement for an also-ran that will go off market the instant it's not a huge success, as has happened many times from this source already? I'm not going to count on it.
Tell me again what advantage there is in X86 if I'm not going to use assembler? Anything running a modern opsys - any of them - will have "issues" doing real time hard-deadline stuff, because the opsys will preempt your code now and then to do its thing - which is why I hang an Arduino Uno or a Teensy off most of the Pi's in my setup - the hardware support for little fiddly bit-bang stuff stinks on all these class of boards, but linux (well, it's all there is, but I'd have chosen it anyway) - and its apps - from NGINX to MySQL, to...you name it, absolutely rocks on a pi.
It's a total no-brainer if I might want to have a hot spare available well down the road. If not new - so many have been sold I'd bet there's even a thriving used market by the time I'd need one.
I don't sell anything, I give what I develop away - GPL or just copyleft, I have no reason to care. Interested people might want to check out my forums under software to see some of what I've managed so far along the LAN of things lines. I like to say that surviving off-grid is actually the oldest profession - you have to be alive to do that other one that claims to be the oldest, after all;~).
I have nothing against Intel - all my regular PC's are intel, and I like them - including the NUCs (I'm posting from a Haswell one with 2tb of spinner and 500gig of SSD right now). It's not the point, the point is - will they abandon this if it doesn't make money fast? Track record speaks for itself.
I could be somewhat silo-ed - I've been planning to work on that more, at any rate. Dunno. What I see is more dupes out there than even slashdot - which I quickly detect, so the amount of truly new content that isn't trivial is still going down from my POV. I'm no spring chicken on the inet - so perhaps my perception is different, due to having seen all this go by a lot more than most. I particularly laugh at all the "press release gimme a grant" science, having books from the '50's that describe much of the same stuff, but our new specialists don't know they've merely rediscovered something I have in an old book already. And you gotta love those headlines and abstracts that promise the world - and deliver nothing at all. I've learned to read those faster, or well, skim and reject, which might be part of it. "Oh, Piebald, you took nothing and made it into words!"
.
I don't count entertainment/social/sports, as from my old-fart POV, those things are unchanging human nature, and essentially trivial and boring. I don't care who is famous for being famous anymore, who is porking whom, who won the game (with credits for the script at the end!) and so forth one bit.
Ok, here's the link - and no, I'm not trying to self-promote (no need), just point out the >1600 comments and no moderation. This probably changed recently, but...my own experience was different. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Got quite a few views...and they'll be back - we made that breakthrough I predicted.
:
Not that I disagree with the other commenters. As I said - it's like the world just went dark. Even/. just doesn't have the story flow which has been not only slowing, but becoming more derivative of the other sites I read. It all seems to be copy-paste, little real journalism anymore. In fact, it seems to me that outfits like Vice at least *originate* things once in awhile, not just copy from the wires who themselves no longer put many in the field. And it's not just "news", but science reporting (my gig is science), tech (same old, little innovation), and most of everything else I can think of at the moment. As if the stuff on social media was ever of great concern to any but the most shallow. To actual humans, it seems pretty boring and almost totally meaningless, except as a warning to "don't go there with your life, get a real one instead".
I'm not so sure Vice is all-negative, after all, they did a pretty cool and positive feature on my fusion work. You can search youtube on my username for it if you care.
What does concern me is that it used to take me almost all day to read everything new that day on the 'net - and now it takes only an hour, if that, and I don't really read faster than I used to. .
While it seems even the tinfoil hat crowd aren't talking about explicit censorship, either the world is kind of going dead, or something like hidden chilling effects are happening. I really don't like that one bit - no matter which it is - the creeping lack of new worthwhile content doesn't bode well at all. Yes, I read more widely on more topics and specialties than most so maybe it's more obvious to me, but gee, it's a huge change over the last few years. Seems as though society is just giving up, whatever the reason.
I use perl daily, still. It's kinda fun, and while no one was looking, it got to be fast and pretty bug-free, along with well, CPAN. Perl 6 evidently tossed the language and runting optimized into one another for the JRI...and fixed what wasn't broke - it really didn't need any more syntactic sugar. I use perl 5.xx in my Lan of things as it's quick to program and is even fairly fast on small cpus - as in raspi and friends. 6 won't match that, and I don't have time to learn new quirks.
Not a fanboy of Apple or most (all?) of the big corps myself, but it seems people are too dim to realize there's no "their money" for governments to take (and waste).
It's our money. Corporations run at whatever profit, period - Apple being prime in the case of simply setting prices high enough to get the margins they desire, and people paying them whatever. .
"It doesn't work like that."
Taxing them more simply means higher prices for all the customers. That would be us, not them. If they keep prices the same, it means less investment by them in jobs, or higher prices for us, period. Further, while most people see reports of huge "cash in the bank" values for some of these outfits, they fail to look at the financials of same to discover that there are loans against most of the balance in most cases, often as not used to buyback shares to keep earnings/outstanding share up and thus share prices (and C-suite compensation) as well - most companies don't actually have a lot of that cash in hand (though some do). At any rate, a tax on them is simply a tax on the customers in the end, there's no free of that sort in this universe. I suppose one could make the argument that since I'm not a customer of theirs, I wouldn't care - and I'm not - but costing for example, Apple customers more would trickle down to me in the form of other raised prices I'd pay for things made by their customers in the end, anyway.
It's dangerous to live in a world of flat-broke spendthrift governments who use words like "fair" to mean "gimme more of your money to buy your votes with" - whether a company or an individual. Consumption taxes are effectively regressive... While profits have a poor record of trickling down, losses seem to always do so; is that rain, or are you p*ssing on my back? TANSTAFFL
Slashdot Mirror
Curious, I'm in about the same situation. Though I point out that even the attny general (Holder) pointed out that the big banks, who bought laws that allow legal co-mingling of their derivative bets and depositors money are "too big to jail". And yeah - "Free Jon Corzine!"
I note that the FDIC is ridiculously underfunded. Can't get blood from a turnip. You could print more, but we know where that goes.
I note that while we have a defense department that seems at least to support a lot of large defense contractors, and theoretically my stuff, we also have civil asset forfeiture so bad that last year it exceeded all losses by theft and burglary - 4.7 vs 4.2 billion bucks. (!)
So yes, it's good to have non money assets and especially ones that are NOT liquid enough to be desireable for thieves in uniforms to steal.
This is probably not the right thread to discuss this, but I was reacting to the "OMG, no backup - what an idiot" for something a lot less meaningful to most than "my next meal/rent or my kid's next doctor appointment".
Seemed kinda silly in terms of getting priorities straight.
I'd bet just about zero percent on this thread have "backed up" their money - which is bits in some bank's computer - at most. Their "TOS" were recently changed to "bail-in" by lawmakers. Yet you all seem to be perfectly happy with money that's basically fake and which only exists as bits on a computer you don't own. Which can be taken from you -legally- if the bank makes bad bets (yes, they are allowed to co-mingle funds now too). Don't take my word for it, but don't be surprised if more than GIF's go missing at some point.
It's also moderately trivial to re-format comments in source using many available tools if one desires to do so. Some already-rolled ones, almost any language that supports regex, even, gawd, bash scripts with sed and awk etc can do this. If you don't like it that much, make a tool that fixes it. It ain't rocket surgery, it's a job for an otherwise boring afternoon. I don't recall any compiler whatever having an issue figuring out which of the input was comments. Go to town, how hard can it be?
How much did Oracle pay to steal SQL itself? Or as another poster mentioned, nearly all of c++ syntax (without some of the freedom and power because programmers are too stupid to manage memory allocation so we steal real time abilities from you and do it ourselves, like, um, perl). And so on. If Oracle wins any of this - and I'd like to see API's not copyrightable at all, it's obviously not the intent of having them - we ALL lose, particularly those dumb enough to either work and live in the US or to sign one of those ignorant "not free trade" agreements that give corporations higher powers than governments over such things.
Title says it all. Bastards. PJ had to shut down one of the best sites on the net over this.
Samsung may not be willing to sell it to Apple.
Quick google, but examples abound: https://ipcloseup.wordpress.co...
This is about diesel. Call us back when they have a throttle. Your post is about how it's done in gasoline spark-ignition engines where you can keep the mixture as you please. Diesel's won't fire unless there is enough pressure to compression-ignite the fuel so there is no throttle to close up, and the mixture is therefore "all over the place".
Oh, I did all that back when I had taxable income. I'm now retired and fairly well off. I just feel for those who aren't doing as well, and never will under the current regulatory regime. FWIW, I 5x'd my retirement account trading from March 2009 to 2014, then got out and am still out. I'd sold after about 20% loss off the previous peak to the protestations of my then broker (who now thinks I'm a genius). That game is now so rigged itself it's better to wait awhile for after the tide next goes out and the naked swimmers have to dump at pennies on the dollar. Being responsible puts one in a position of being able to wait for things like that, and just take the easy winnings. I'll do ok on the mountain (well, a buncha hills in Appalachia) I now own outright, and am off-grid mostly. I changed a buncha cash into things that are unpleasant or difficult to confiscate, but which benefit me just fine. .gov doesn't want to be in the real estate business or try to make money selling my solar system, farm, and so on. They like to just cntrl-x cntrl-v cash (eg bits in the bank - fiat), so it's wise to not make it too easy for them to do that.
Oh, made the money in the first place as a systems engineer and coder. I still do that, but now it's only for fun.
Too bad I commented here or I'd use mod points to mod you up. There are a lot of tricks, and the one you mention is one of them (I believe Apple and others also use Ireland and the Netherlands among others, as havens). The point is, the normal taxpayer can't afford them - it's not gain at the margin for the taxes a little guy saves, but is for the big guys. In a rather long life, it seems nearly every law or regulation passed has favored the big over the small and perhaps disruptive. That's the real problem in my mind.
All they do (well almost all) is legal. Should I want to hire someone at a PO box in some lax country to assign my income around - it'd be legal for me too. It's just that what isn't even pocket change for these guys is more than my total income (and I'm not poor).
Anatole France: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."
.
It's hard to devise a system that doesn't favor entities with money - which is power, given human nature. Fix the latter and the former works itself out.
As we say here, GoodLuckWithThat.
I do hope this isn't a plan to snatch defeat from the jaw of victory...another approach they could use is that this is essentially an unlawful "taking" in a couple of senses (yet another amendment). They used to have the right to sell services that could be considered secure (yes, I know). If it's totally public, and it is, that none of their services are the least bit secure (from the government...we already know about the rest) - then no sales to anyone who cares about their privacy. That's potentially a huge "taking" without recompense. Ditto a taking from those with a reasonable expectation that just because they (foolishly IMO) use cloud, they are now extra exposed to .gov snooping (along with the rest).
Good to have another trick in your pocket if the first one fails, assuming you actually want to win.
I'm aware of that - I've written books on Digital Signal Processing, for example. So, why in fact does everybody conflate pi with the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, without mentioning it's imaginary since there is no flat space in the known universe where that definition is actually true?
You just moved the problem without solving it. Read article, title and so on.
You're being too kind. Most of a decade ago 2 hours in ER cost me way over $4k - and that's after months of negotiation and paying some cash under the table.
You're doing it wrong anyway.
Logged in just to point this out. Ninja'd. On Pi day it's always fun to remind people of this - but they always act like you're a troll. No, just correct. Pi is only Pi in a flat space with no energy/mass in it. In other words, it's never equal to the formulas that calculate it out to N digits anywhere in the known universe, and at some point, just you being there to measure it would make it not right (not sure how many decimal places out, but in theory, even a human body warps space a little).
Interesting thought, but no need to partner if I wanted to get into that. I've been an EE/comp-sci for all my rather long life (starting before PCs). I'm not a big fan of bitcoin, personally..I prefer shiny stuff you can drop on your toe and say "ouch", tools, skills, infrastructure. More lasting value and can't be removed via internet kill switch.
Being able to segment and prioritize power use when it's a limit - yet utilize all that nature happens to be providing at the moment (be that water, heat, power) is critical to my life. Can't do that if the thing doing it is itself a big load, or too expensive to partition into lots of separate functional units that CAN be shut down selectively when power is low - though it's better to never have to shut data collection down.
.
While mips per watt is really important - plain old watts are too. A setup that can handle a decent peak computational loading had better be good at idle too. Just like solar power - the need for computation is a famine or flood situation. Sometimes you need a lot - sometimes not. With solar, assuming a decently sized system - a system that can handle Feburary in "conserve" mode is dumping so much power on you the rest of the year you might as well be using for an electic car (which I do). A good systems design handles things like this that we can't really change, gracefully.
Yup - rather than mod up an already +5, thought I'd chime in myself. It's the community, and the existing popularity - the network effect, that makes the pi a win. I tasked myself with designing a "LAN of things" for my off-grid homestead, intended to last, well, forever - as long as I'll live. LAN because security, and my life depends on Neuman's little helpers. Will I be able to get a replacement for an also-ran that will go off market the instant it's not a huge success, as has happened many times from this source already? I'm not going to count on it. ;~).
Tell me again what advantage there is in X86 if I'm not going to use assembler? Anything running a modern opsys - any of them - will have "issues" doing real time hard-deadline stuff, because the opsys will preempt your code now and then to do its thing - which is why I hang an Arduino Uno or a Teensy off most of the Pi's in my setup - the hardware support for little fiddly bit-bang stuff stinks on all these class of boards, but linux (well, it's all there is, but I'd have chosen it anyway) - and its apps - from NGINX to MySQL, to...you name it, absolutely rocks on a pi.
It's a total no-brainer if I might want to have a hot spare available well down the road. If not new - so many have been sold I'd bet there's even a thriving used market by the time I'd need one.
I don't sell anything, I give what I develop away - GPL or just copyleft, I have no reason to care. Interested people might want to check out my forums under software to see some of what I've managed so far along the LAN of things lines. I like to say that surviving off-grid is actually the oldest profession - you have to be alive to do that other one that claims to be the oldest, after all
I have nothing against Intel - all my regular PC's are intel, and I like them - including the NUCs (I'm posting from a Haswell one with 2tb of spinner and 500gig of SSD right now). It's not the point, the point is - will they abandon this if it doesn't make money fast? Track record speaks for itself.
Or better, how can I upgrade my pi's to this?
.
I don't count entertainment/social/sports, as from my old-fart POV, those things are unchanging human nature, and essentially trivial and boring. I don't care who is famous for being famous anymore, who is porking whom, who won the game (with credits for the script at the end!) and so forth one bit.
Not that I disagree with the other commenters. As I said - it's like the world just went dark. Even /. just doesn't have the story flow which has been not only slowing, but becoming more derivative of the other sites I read. It all seems to be copy-paste, little real journalism anymore. In fact, it seems to me that outfits like Vice at least *originate* things once in awhile, not just copy from the wires who themselves no longer put many in the field. And it's not just "news", but science reporting (my gig is science), tech (same old, little innovation), and most of everything else I can think of at the moment. As if the stuff on social media was ever of great concern to any but the most shallow. To actual humans, it seems pretty boring and almost totally meaningless, except as a warning to "don't go there with your life, get a real one instead".
I'm not so sure Vice is all-negative, after all, they did a pretty cool and positive feature on my fusion work. You can search youtube on my username for it if you care.
What does concern me is that it used to take me almost all day to read everything new that day on the 'net - and now it takes only an hour, if that, and I don't really read faster than I used to.
.
While it seems even the tinfoil hat crowd aren't talking about explicit censorship, either the world is kind of going dead, or something like hidden chilling effects are happening. I really don't like that one bit - no matter which it is - the creeping lack of new worthwhile content doesn't bode well at all. Yes, I read more widely on more topics and specialties than most so maybe it's more obvious to me, but gee, it's a huge change over the last few years. Seems as though society is just giving up, whatever the reason.
It always worked on the first try for most!
I use perl daily, still. It's kinda fun, and while no one was looking, it got to be fast and pretty bug-free, along with well, CPAN. Perl 6 evidently tossed the language and runting optimized into one another for the JRI...and fixed what wasn't broke - it really didn't need any more syntactic sugar. I use perl 5.xx in my Lan of things as it's quick to program and is even fairly fast on small cpus - as in raspi and friends. 6 won't match that, and I don't have time to learn new quirks.
.
"It doesn't work like that."
Taxing them more simply means higher prices for all the customers. That would be us, not them. If they keep prices the same, it means less investment by them in jobs, or higher prices for us, period. Further, while most people see reports of huge "cash in the bank" values for some of these outfits, they fail to look at the financials of same to discover that there are loans against most of the balance in most cases, often as not used to buyback shares to keep earnings/outstanding share up and thus share prices (and C-suite compensation) as well - most companies don't actually have a lot of that cash in hand (though some do). At any rate, a tax on them is simply a tax on the customers in the end, there's no free of that sort in this universe. I suppose one could make the argument that since I'm not a customer of theirs, I wouldn't care - and I'm not - but costing for example, Apple customers more would trickle down to me in the form of other raised prices I'd pay for things made by their customers in the end, anyway.
It's dangerous to live in a world of flat-broke spendthrift governments who use words like "fair" to mean "gimme more of your money to buy your votes with" - whether a company or an individual. Consumption taxes are effectively regressive... While profits have a poor record of trickling down, losses seem to always do so; is that rain, or are you p*ssing on my back? TANSTAFFL