I get faces fine, no luck with names till I've say, worked a week with you in close contact the whole time, and sometimes a month to remember last names (as when I write paychecks). Embarrassing as hell, but simple solution in my case -- my wife has no such problems and remembers names even if nothing else about someone.
For a little while I was semi-famous as a rock drummer. People in my small town would come up to me all the time, you know, some kid showing off he knows me to his little teeny girlfriend and so on -- made it a pain to go out for groceries or a bolt at the hardware store, frankly. Sure, I was always nice and talked to them -- after all, fans are what made that job worth doing (profitable). But! Never knew their names even once. People tend to forget that when you are on stage, the lights are on you -- you don't even see faces, and of course no names. Just because they obsessed on you doesn't mean it went the other way either. As soon as they were out of earshot and I could then carry on with whatever I was out in public to do, I'd just ask my wife who the heck that was, and she always knew. With a little training, I got her to converse with these people and always use their names right up front, to hide my ignorance (which of course made me look better -- 100% of good politicians and salesmen have this name recognition talent for a reason, it's flattering to people to at least seem to remember them).
You obviously don't get it or understand the markets.
A house flipper is an investor compared to a day trader, and if both are smart, takes substantially less risk. More often than not, a flipper will even do improvments on a house they want to flip. Seen any trader or most investors do that with Exxon, BP and so on?
Disclaimer -- I trade for a living, usually longer than 20 minutes, and yes, it's more often than not a gamble, though I predict well. Because it's human nature and nothing else that determines the "value" of a stock certificate. You can wipe your butt with one, that's the value unless someone else will pay for it when you want to sell it. Period.
Buying stock in a company doesn't help that company unless you bought it from them directly. Period, full stop. OK some companies own some of their own stock, so if you buy enough to make it go up, you help them a little bit....do you have a clue how much that takes to do?
Of course, any trader can beat the big guys, because they can't just buy X percent of their net worth in any equity (or other instrument) all at once without driving up the price of what they are buying or driving down the price of what they sell. This is one of the very few cases on this planet where the little guy actually has an advantage -- I can buy or sell my whole net worth in milliseconds and just barely see the effect on the markets -- they can't, and the quick can catch the middle of the moves they create.
Right -- and higher octane allows for higher compression. The LS3 in my 2010 Camaro SS has insane high compression, partly compensted at low rpm by big cam timing, and knock sensors and all that -- Basic thermal stuff says efficiency goes way up with compression, very quickly, which is why Diesels do so well (but stink in other senses).
But because people built cities in stupid places in CA where there's thermal inversion, the higher NOX output of high compression engines was basically mandated out of existance. Here in farm country, having nitrogenous fertilizer fall from the sky in the rain seems like a somewhat better idea than in LA, home of the **IAA and other "nice" outfits.
And the Camaro (422 hp they say, and I believe that may be an understatement) gets over 3 mpg *better* mileage than my 2007 6 cyl Honda Ridgeline....Which doesn't hold all that much more cargo, but at least has back seats larger then infant size.
These mileage numbers get even worse when long high speed trips are measured. The Camaro mileage goes way up on the highway, and the Honda gets even worse. 98% of my driving is on twisty mountain roads, though.
There is much science that amounts to abandonware, and even some low hanging fruit due to various politics and the desire to get into whatever seems either sexiest right now, or has the most funding right now (usually about the same things).
I did some EEG work while working on a prosthetic for deaf infants -- how to even tell if it was having any effect? No one had looked into that, it was wide open and easy to make real progress at.
I got a nice telescope and camera setup, and did do some stuff I thought was worthwhile in digital signal processing to get rid of some atmospherics. And it was fun.
Now I work on nuclear fusion full time. Since it's my time, my money, my lab, I can do things no governement or university can, the most important one of which is turn on a dime every time I learn something new. My results are at worst "competitive" with all comers in the particular area I'm working in too -- all that money hasn't bought them much progress as it hasn't been spent wisely.
If in today's science, a lab grunt brought a potential Fleming a contaminated petri dish, they'd get harsh words, a do over if not a reprimand, and we'd not find penicillin.
In today's science, if an apple hits you on the head, you build a roof or move away from the tree, you don't try and figure out why.
Yes, the chances of one person doing something really earth shaking are about like they've always been, but that means -- there's a chance. Einstein was mentioned, but there are many others going back and forward in time from that, quite a few actually, and most of them didn't have the gear I have or can get cheap surplus. What was "rocket science" in the 30's is now around on ebay for pennies.
Think of the greats who would have *killed* to get the scientific gear we can get today for cheap, and how much low hanging fruit there might be as science rushed on to the next sexy thing, leaving behind quite a lot for the button sorter types -- who wouldn't realize something new happening if it killed them.
And here on Slashdot, we can afford to remember that rocket science started in the middle kingdom some thousands of years ago, and I'd bet some of it was done by what we call drunken rednecks today.
It's a matter of perspective.
My site shows some of what I can do -- go ahead and bang on me, my ISP boasts they can take a Slashdotting, lets see if they can. You should be nice to
these guys, as that's a home-class server on a not very fat pipe funded by the guy who shares it with us, but it's a group of pretty smart guys who *are right now* doing things in advance of the big boys. If you are clever, you might not need billions and big buildings to find things out that are useful.
So, the word is, go for it.
I had to spend most of a lifetime getting ready -- you know, money, knowledge, experience, equipment, all that mundane crap. But it was worth it for me, and should be to you too.
Or so I interpret. Not a great leap forward or anything, and so _very_ damaging to Apple's rep of "innovation" -- which I personally can do entirely without given their actions of late -- not even including this clusterfsck. Looks like half the world is piling on them for "stealing" rather than innovating anyway, though I find the patent claims pretty bogus all the way around -- and the patent system thoroughly broken.
Maybe now that it's backfiring on those who can buy congress with pocket change, things will change?
Nah, never happen -- it's still useful for them all to keep possible small competitors from ever getting out of the gate, so ALL the people who own congress still support it. That means of course, *not* the taxpayers they now even fail to pretend they represent.
Beans, Bullion, Bullets -- get ready, people.
(I'd add beef and rice, I can't stand beans all the time, and neither can those around me due to the greenhouse gasses emitted)
A pretty high percentage of people who get government aid here, and this is primarily a retirement community, are people who are fine, and very smart who game the system to get disability checks for not working. I think for a few years there I was one of the maybe 10% who actually worked for a living. Sure some were legit, but a good fat percent (near double digit) had simply learned how to throw various symptoms of mental problems, having read the books and so on to get a free ride.
This is not from some jerk talk show, this is observation in the flesh, with names attached. Reality. I'm sure it's different in other places and all that, but it was quite out of hand. Thing is, free money with no discipline has its own limits and these people tend to self destruct too. As far as I could see that was the only thing setting the equilibrium.
I trade for a living, and the last few have been, well, "living in exciting times" -- made and lost some money, no big deal either way I guess.
I make money either way when there's motion -- the trick is being on the right side of it! I'm tiny re the market, a mere millionaire (and I made my stake in the first place with honest hourly work). But I will tell you this -- sell only a million bucks of stock in one order, and it moves the market noticeably, you can even see it on google finance.
For this reason NO ONE deliberately does this, ever, except as a ploy to manipulate -- because buying in huge chunks drives up the price before you finish buying, and selling the same idea in reverse. In fact....
Here's how the big funds (some are many billions, perhaps a few are into trillions by now) manipulate things -- and this is just one example.
Let's say they decide that some stock ought to be about 1% of their holdings, a typical number. That's a heck of a lot of stock, and maybe even more than some companies have outstanding (so they can't do this with dinky companies). First thing they do is sell short in a single large order. Stock goes down, traders sell, goes down more, stops trip, goes down more.
Then they start buying in *small* amounts, never enough to drive the price back up much, usually using a network of brokers all buying little bits, to help them keep their moves secret (they are anal about that for good reasons).
Once they get about the amount they want, they post another large buy order, enough to drive the price up. Traders and Joe Sixpack/Shmo and all the pundits start noticing that the stock is going up and start buying or advising others to buy. This drives the price up nicely.....while the mutual fund is now selling it back out in small amounts. This also works in reverse for shorting, I'll spare another bunch of words for that one, you can figure it out.
You can almost always see this action, it's why one of the famous advisors (William O'Neil) mentions the classic cup with handle pattern that presages a runup. When you see that classic exponential rise at the top, it's time to get out, you've got most of the move. Then the cycle repeats, with the average trader and Joe being stuck with stock they bought high...
A savvy trader looks for this, and tries to catch the middle 80% or so of these manipulated moves. A surfer doesn't have to be a hydrologist, or even care where the waves come from to be a great rider -- I'd put a sub IQ surfer dude against any scientist I know for just surfing -- he learns to detect, almost feel the little ripples and wavelets that presage a great wave to ride.
Successful trading is just like that. Not magic, but not pure logic either.
Sometimes, computers can help, because they can be unemotional.
I think what actually happened here, and with my instant data and level II data, it didn't even last 10 minutes -- too fast for me to take advantage of it as TD Ameritrade bogged their servers, was that a bunch of sell orders were created by computers where no one had thought to put those "little bit at a time" limits on them, as that part of the state machine is only hit rarely if ever. When all the stops tripped, everyone (even the little guys) contributed to the flood of sell orders for which no buyers appeared until the prices got way low. Once a single transaction, no matter how tiny went down at the low price, all the computers saw it and sold in "preserve the firm" mode.
On many days, I can see the program/millisecond trading going on on BAC, F, C and a couple other stocks -- you can see prices oscillating 1 penny or less all day long, and a sustained move of more than a penny is rare, but sets the new baseline for the oscillation that continues.
If as said above, anybody really skilled at things like digital signal processing was involved in writing those programs, I'd be really surprised. As an expert in that field, it's easy to reverse engineer what they do, and it's d
IIRC, the error was that of gravity. In real use, the Hubble mirror of course is in zero G, but on earth, one G, and a mirror that size is affected. If you make it right for zero G, you have to make it wrong at one G. They made two -- using two different contractors. One got it right, but that wasn't the one that launched. Embarrassing yes, but tested -- they tested crap out of the things, but one of the testers forgot to include the effect of gravity on mirror "sag". The mirrors were both tested many many times during final figuring -- just not to the correct spec in the case of the one that got launched.
And no, it wasn't out an inch -- more like a millionth of that.
Yup, fear is what makes other beings dangerous in general -- look at things here on this planet for examples. And like the poster above the parent, I think that any beings with the stuff to get off a planet and go looking around probably evolved in similar ways to us, first dominating most of their other local species, and are quite likely to "understand" how humans work -- which should scare them or at least make them think hard about what threat we may pose them later, if not now.
Seems likely what we'd see first is the equivalent of scouts, who may look at us and feel, well, if those guys are this dangerous to themselves and others now, and we only come around every 100k years or so, the time to eliminate the possible threat to our species is now, while it's still easy to do.
The reason I assume scouts is plain old physics. Were there significant sub-C travel (commerce for example) going on this side of the galaxy, it'd be real detectable to us, and we don't see it. We don't have a clue what FTL travel would be like (if possible) or what footprint it would leave (energy signature) but it seems reasonable that it would certainly disrupt the spacetime at the source and destination ends, which again, we'd see and be trying to explain.
Because during re-entry you can't communicate to a craft surrounded by ionized atmosphere and bits of burned off heat shield. Something similar happens during boost as well. Almost the entire instrumentation recorder/time shift industry was created as a result,so data from launch and re-entry could be gathered and studied.
I've had the same experience though I wound up not actually losing the money after the bank did their investigation thing, and it's darn lucky that the guy who did it to me didn't realize that the debit card in question was for a payroll account and had a ton of money in it. Just some junkie who knew how to make up card numbers the first time (the algorithm is published including the checksum info!), and the second time a dumpster diver getting info from a legit company I deal with who got sloppy.
I now just have several check accounts for various uses that have the attached plastic, and only put money in them when needed -- any attempt to rip them off won't get much if anything. And it works fine -- no more problems after that move. You can't just use cash -- my wife will pickpocket it (!), and the internet doesn't allow it for online ordering.
I'd simply want to put the "read mostly" parts of say a linux distro on one, to improve boot and app startup times, and leave the rest on good old spinning disks, even though I'm severely power limited here and SSD's would help with that. Fairly easy to do in Linux with mounting points and so on, not so easy with other opsys. Of course, the more bloatier apps still churn a bunch of writing on startup due to config files being updated and the like....
But this way you don't write the SSD much, it should live long and not get real fragmented. Also, you don't need that big size to pull it off. To save power (but not annoyance) you then set the spinning disks to power down real quick when not in use...
Seems like a good plan for my home main server which has a ton of read-mostly data on it -- now that could use up some SSD capacity indeed. But nearly all of that read mostly data could do as well on a normal hard drive -- music, data sheets, scientific papers and such like don't need blazing fast reads to work well. I can't see putting my MySQL databases on SSD anytime soon though.
Is all these ditched Russion subs -- the reactors alone have quite a lot of already enriched fuel in them, and who knows what else they carried. 248 meters they say is hard. Hah -- if you were a state or sub-state actor and knew where one was, you'd be after that thing foot horse and marines -- and get it. I bet you can even see the thermal bloom on some of them via satellite.
I actually own and drive a car that does 200mph plus, stable -- but even the best interstate highway or local track isn't really up to that (even with some helpful cops clearing a path). I give out before the car does. One thing you gotta give these driver/pilots is they have large brass ones. Altitude is a pilot's friend!
FYI, the car is a modded 2010 Camaro SS -- and it ain't you're daddies Camaro.
I would think that the lost sub reactors are the real threat. Since they make heat, they can be more easily found by the heat bloom on the surface (IR satellite pictures) and tracking back (the ocean current).
That might be within the means of a non state actor or a small state that wants nukes. Sub reactors tend to use very enriched fuel too.
I think before that happens, some government (perhaps USA) should find and recover them. Having one would make it all too easy for someone to build a couple bombs (at least).
Manuals are getting to be fairly rare, yes, though my nice new 2010 Camaro has one.
I had to re-learn how to drive a manual, especially on something that powerful.
(Wow, is it ever a fun car to drive, like strapping on a jet fighter)
What I find interesting in all this is that for one thing, that shouldn't matter -- why not take the automatic to neutral? The engine might blow if full throttle unloaded but if it's that or your life.....well, people aren't all that smart I guess, or we wouldn't see in the movies how people are asked to dig their own graves -- and they do it!
Over half the cars I've recently owned won't let you turn them off unless in park...with the wheel locked. So I guess we can't expect people to do that, but if there was ever a stupider safety feature, I don't know what it is. This originally was a CYA move by the car manufacturers to avoid suits caused by people starting cars in gear and having wrecks (so they claimed).
I have yet to own a car (and I've owned cars since the '60s) that you couldn't stop with the brakes....even at full throttle so little or no vacuum boost, but of course since I understand how power brakes work, I'd never wimpishly tap the pedal and use up the vacuum in the reservoir before trying that in an emergency! But again, people aren't that smart about the things they put their lives on the line with.
Gosh, I mean if you're really in a life ending situation, you can't muster a little extra foot pedal pressure?
As someone who spent decades writing code and designing high reliability systems (6 9's or more), I can say from here without even checking that it's a software problem. We were constantly trying to hire more people with the skills and mindset to be able to do this, and there just aren't many pickings who can do it without (or even with) ridiculous things like triple redundancy, "safe languages" and all the expensive other approaches that try to substitute method for skill and due dilligence (and which all fail anyway). It's not like we weren't offering top of the line money, far more than enough to buy a code jock from a car maker...there just wasn't the talent pool.
So I don't have to write all kinds of drivers for each new thing. At a whole house level, this isn't that useful. But I'm on solar power here and knowing when remote loads (like the freezer in the outbuilding) is running is good, and knowing when somehow my "vampire loads" have ramped up at night -- what's causing that battery drain, is very good and extremely useful. As it is, my Xantrex stuff tells me some things on a proprietary layer over a CAN bus. Pain in the....you know and that's only whole house stuff.
Would be a lot nicer to use a cheap MicroChip part all over and by circuit, sometimes even by device, and only have to write one set of code to talk to all of it.
The standard is a big benefit to me going forward. I don't care about sending data to Google one way or the other -- I want to know myself as part of my job as "the power company" on my campus.
I use microchip's PIC controllers all the time and like them a lot, so I'm glad they got with someone who has a clue (which can be interpreted from either side just as well).
Dunno about losing market share, they had about 33% of China (with Bidu having most of the rest). But even that, which is a huge number of eyeballs, only accounted for a couple of percent of their total gross income. Whether they actually made net profit on China is hard to determine without doing some serious forensic accounting, but it couldn't have been much, in the rounding error range.
The potential is there to be sure -- but it's not now. Evidently they just weren't pulling in the advertising revenue for China well at all.
So, in reality, this doesn't cost them much, and it certainly makes a point worldwide.
Many Chinese friends of mine really like and use Google as for some things (scientific research) they are pretty hard to beat. But I guess those types don't click through on ads much. However, that group can be effectively noisy, and done right this really makes the Chinese repression stand out not only to the world, but to their own people.
So, for now, it's good. If they can without losing face, they may capitulate, but that won't be while the issue is front and center.
Disclaimer -- I trade stocks for a living and sometimes have positions in Google, Bidu, and a bunch of other issues -- and I look these numbers up all the time in order to make my own business decisions. No positions in search just now however, I'm waiting for a better defined trend in those rather than a headline caused blip -- those can really bite one on the butt.
So it will be there, just like a bunch of other stuff people whined was undocumented by Microsoft.
You just won't be able to find what you want.
Bureaucrats rejoice! You're still safe.
Yeah, the way it *is* done at middle volume (mere millions) embedded shops. I wrote code for things like PA systems, embedded PBXs and voice over IP (lan at the time) for many years.
Myself and the people working for me made *very* good money for writing efficient code. We are all retired, and still young.
This came about because of the value to this type of customer. If you can write better code (which includes system and hardware design at the limit), then they save bucks per unit on everything from CPU, ram and so on, to square inches of PCB and in millions, that adds up quick for the customer of the code, in this case a hardware manufacturer.
I recall being told that the CEO of a company we worked for once went down the hall chortling that investing in my outfit for coding and systems design was the best move he'd ever made. For a mere few hundred K$ (which we earned in an astonishingly short time, like a month or a little more), we did him a product that made many millions in one year, much of that in pure hardware savings over the older design.
So, it happens. It's not as likely in mass market product like cel phones, as we were able to do this partly by locking down most of the feature set -- if someone became aware that our hardware even had software in it -- we'd messed up. Things like phone exchanges don't have reset buttons or power switches, they're just supposed to work, period. For one customer, the need of a reset was considered a failure requiring a service call. So the emphasis was on the 9's first, then hardware cost -- good code addresses both!
It does really help that we wrote our own opsys for all this, purpose-designed for realtime multitasking for a limited number of apps. Having had to use a bloated commercial system (for which developers and tools were more common) would have easily wiped out all those gains. We were doing in a 10 mhz PIC microprocessor what others needed a full boat board running windows CE had trouble doing. That's where the money/value to our customers came in.
This is just a high tech sniper that uses larger bullets. The military has a love-hate relationship with snipers. They are very effective, but it's the not very subtle difference between killing (most likely thought of as self defense in a battle) and murder.
That commandment in the Bible, correctly translated says "do no murder" and doesn't mention killing -- else half or more of the old testament would be in self-conflict.
The thing is, guys who can look through a scope, see a face and then decide to "play god" and murder the target are considered kind of creepy to most normal folk. It's not like there is a shortage of them, one problem is finding one who is able, but not too gung ho and therefore completely dangerous to all.
In either case, you have a targeted murder, rather than a killing in the heat of battle, and I think that's the real issue. This is only a matter of scale -- the drone operator is in even less danger than a ground based sniper, but is a lot more "wholesale" if you get my drift -- those larger bullets do a lot more damage...and are a lot less accurate.
I have heard of cases where guys assigned the job of flying drones, who can even go home to the wife at lunchtime, cracking up (in the bad way) due to the realization that they are murdering people for a living from an air conditioned office in complete safety themselves (kind of like what some investment bankers do with far less remorse).
Because there is value in a paper trail, any competent programmer should know all these proposals are open to easy fraud.
Further, where I live, in the boonies of SW VA, USA, checks are "in" bigtime.
Yes, we are sort of living in the past here. People still trust one another -- is that bad?
My checking account pays interest, and zero fees for the checks other then printing them. Here if you forget your checkbook at the general store, you can just ask them to pay later -- interest free loan on your asking.
You city folk who sadly, are the majority think this and that are the best way, and perhaps in a trust-free society such as you've managed to create for yourselves, those ways are best -- for you. But lets not forget that not all of us have gone down that road and see "catching up to you" as a very stupid move indeed. That must be why they tax us to fix your roads, and you try to export all your pipelines and power plant pollution to us -- many of whom are off the grid and on solar power....Is your way really better for all, or just you?
Where everyone knows everyone else, things are a lot different. The cops know who did what without having to invade the privacy of the rest of us, and many other significant benefits accrue. If we don't like what the county government does, we can go do something about it -- we outnumber them and aren't sheeple here. Our cops are well known to all and if they become abusive, we fire them. Can you do that? We do with some regularity.
Remember this country is as strong as it is because of diversity. Making one size fits all, \centralization of power which sadly isn't something that can be fixed by partison politics, as both parties do it, is the WRONG move. Let's at least not break the parts that work trying to shore up the broken parts.
That's the tale of equality by slamming down all things that stick up - rather than bringing up the low, we simply chop off the high. Sounds all "fair' but is that truly good? I doubt it.
I have to agree.
Two more good words.
"FALSE POSITIVE".
Go fight that charge with your own money sometime and then get back to me, willya, you naive idiot?
Oh, you aren't rich? Slammer.
We made a ton -- fair and square. My outfit did consulting, software, product development for both large established firms, and startups. This made it easy to predict when the bubble was going to pop, actually. We had customers coming out of our ears with no business plan, no market research, no skills of their own, and just some Vulture capital and an insistence that if we could just make their vision, they'd all be rich and make us rich too. The looks in their eyes when we asked for plain old cash instead of options told it all. We rejected many of those losers, not wanting the karma associated with the obvious epic fail that was going to happen to them.
And as a result of the observation, wound up advising some customers we consulted for to get the heck out of the markets -- too good to be true is, well, too good to be true. As a result a few very rich people think they owe me favors.
I now trade the markets for a living, having not much better to do for dough, and I turned out to be good at it. I am now stealing our bailout money back from Goldman and others for fun and profit. Feels pretty good, actually. One failure shouldn't make you give up -- it should make you learn the game. Did you really expect to make one decision once, and profit without further effort from it forever?
Why are you so special? No one else gets that deal. You have to earn it -- or you should earn it, because else the results don't make you happy anyway.
And the poster below is right: Once everyone is into a trip in the markets, it's time to get out, the big guys are and sticking Joe Dumbguy with overpriced stuff they are ditching. Think of it this way - if everyone is in the market fully, and all are bullish, who is left to buy more stocks and keep the prices rising? No one, so the first guy who wants to sell blows the whole show.
Slashdot Mirror
For a little while I was semi-famous as a rock drummer. People in my small town would come up to me all the time, you know, some kid showing off he knows me to his little teeny girlfriend and so on -- made it a pain to go out for groceries or a bolt at the hardware store, frankly. Sure, I was always nice and talked to them -- after all, fans are what made that job worth doing (profitable). But! Never knew their names even once. People tend to forget that when you are on stage, the lights are on you -- you don't even see faces, and of course no names. Just because they obsessed on you doesn't mean it went the other way either. As soon as they were out of earshot and I could then carry on with whatever I was out in public to do, I'd just ask my wife who the heck that was, and she always knew. With a little training, I got her to converse with these people and always use their names right up front, to hide my ignorance (which of course made me look better -- 100% of good politicians and salesmen have this name recognition talent for a reason, it's flattering to people to at least seem to remember them).
You obviously don't get it or understand the markets. A house flipper is an investor compared to a day trader, and if both are smart, takes substantially less risk. More often than not, a flipper will even do improvments on a house they want to flip. Seen any trader or most investors do that with Exxon, BP and so on? Disclaimer -- I trade for a living, usually longer than 20 minutes, and yes, it's more often than not a gamble, though I predict well. Because it's human nature and nothing else that determines the "value" of a stock certificate. You can wipe your butt with one, that's the value unless someone else will pay for it when you want to sell it. Period. Buying stock in a company doesn't help that company unless you bought it from them directly. Period, full stop. OK some companies own some of their own stock, so if you buy enough to make it go up, you help them a little bit....do you have a clue how much that takes to do? Of course, any trader can beat the big guys, because they can't just buy X percent of their net worth in any equity (or other instrument) all at once without driving up the price of what they are buying or driving down the price of what they sell. This is one of the very few cases on this planet where the little guy actually has an advantage -- I can buy or sell my whole net worth in milliseconds and just barely see the effect on the markets -- they can't, and the quick can catch the middle of the moves they create.
Right -- and higher octane allows for higher compression. The LS3 in my 2010 Camaro SS has insane high compression, partly compensted at low rpm by big cam timing, and knock sensors and all that -- Basic thermal stuff says efficiency goes way up with compression, very quickly, which is why Diesels do so well (but stink in other senses). But because people built cities in stupid places in CA where there's thermal inversion, the higher NOX output of high compression engines was basically mandated out of existance. Here in farm country, having nitrogenous fertilizer fall from the sky in the rain seems like a somewhat better idea than in LA, home of the **IAA and other "nice" outfits. And the Camaro (422 hp they say, and I believe that may be an understatement) gets over 3 mpg *better* mileage than my 2007 6 cyl Honda Ridgeline....Which doesn't hold all that much more cargo, but at least has back seats larger then infant size. These mileage numbers get even worse when long high speed trips are measured. The Camaro mileage goes way up on the highway, and the Honda gets even worse. 98% of my driving is on twisty mountain roads, though.
I did some EEG work while working on a prosthetic for deaf infants -- how to even tell if it was having any effect? No one had looked into that, it was wide open and easy to make real progress at.
I got a nice telescope and camera setup, and did do some stuff I thought was worthwhile in digital signal processing to get rid of some atmospherics. And it was fun.
Now I work on nuclear fusion full time. Since it's my time, my money, my lab, I can do things no governement or university can, the most important one of which is turn on a dime every time I learn something new. My results are at worst "competitive" with all comers in the particular area I'm working in too -- all that money hasn't bought them much progress as it hasn't been spent wisely.
If in today's science, a lab grunt brought a potential Fleming a contaminated petri dish, they'd get harsh words, a do over if not a reprimand, and we'd not find penicillin.
In today's science, if an apple hits you on the head, you build a roof or move away from the tree, you don't try and figure out why.
Yes, the chances of one person doing something really earth shaking are about like they've always been, but that means -- there's a chance. Einstein was mentioned, but there are many others going back and forward in time from that, quite a few actually, and most of them didn't have the gear I have or can get cheap surplus. What was "rocket science" in the 30's is now around on ebay for pennies.
Think of the greats who would have *killed* to get the scientific gear we can get today for cheap, and how much low hanging fruit there might be as science rushed on to the next sexy thing, leaving behind quite a lot for the button sorter types -- who wouldn't realize something new happening if it killed them.
And here on Slashdot, we can afford to remember that rocket science started in the middle kingdom some thousands of years ago, and I'd bet some of it was done by what we call drunken rednecks today.
It's a matter of perspective.
My site shows some of what I can do -- go ahead and bang on me, my ISP boasts they can take a Slashdotting, lets see if they can. You should be nice to
these guys, as that's a home-class server on a not very fat pipe funded by the guy who shares it with us, but it's a group of pretty smart guys who *are right now* doing things in advance of the big boys. If you are clever, you might not need billions and big buildings to find things out that are useful. So, the word is, go for it.
I had to spend most of a lifetime getting ready -- you know, money, knowledge, experience, equipment, all that mundane crap. But it was worth it for me, and should be to you too.
Nah, never happen -- it's still useful for them all to keep possible small competitors from ever getting out of the gate, so ALL the people who own congress still support it. That means of course, *not* the taxpayers they now even fail to pretend they represent. Beans, Bullion, Bullets -- get ready, people. (I'd add beef and rice, I can't stand beans all the time, and neither can those around me due to the greenhouse gasses emitted)
A pretty high percentage of people who get government aid here, and this is primarily a retirement community, are people who are fine, and very smart who game the system to get disability checks for not working. I think for a few years there I was one of the maybe 10% who actually worked for a living. Sure some were legit, but a good fat percent (near double digit) had simply learned how to throw various symptoms of mental problems, having read the books and so on to get a free ride. This is not from some jerk talk show, this is observation in the flesh, with names attached. Reality. I'm sure it's different in other places and all that, but it was quite out of hand. Thing is, free money with no discipline has its own limits and these people tend to self destruct too. As far as I could see that was the only thing setting the equilibrium.
I make money either way when there's motion -- the trick is being on the right side of it! I'm tiny re the market, a mere millionaire (and I made my stake in the first place with honest hourly work). But I will tell you this -- sell only a million bucks of stock in one order, and it moves the market noticeably, you can even see it on google finance.
For this reason NO ONE deliberately does this, ever, except as a ploy to manipulate -- because buying in huge chunks drives up the price before you finish buying, and selling the same idea in reverse. In fact....
Here's how the big funds (some are many billions, perhaps a few are into trillions by now) manipulate things -- and this is just one example.
Let's say they decide that some stock ought to be about 1% of their holdings, a typical number. That's a heck of a lot of stock, and maybe even more than some companies have outstanding (so they can't do this with dinky companies). First thing they do is sell short in a single large order. Stock goes down, traders sell, goes down more, stops trip, goes down more.
Then they start buying in *small* amounts, never enough to drive the price back up much, usually using a network of brokers all buying little bits, to help them keep their moves secret (they are anal about that for good reasons).
Once they get about the amount they want, they post another large buy order, enough to drive the price up. Traders and Joe Sixpack/Shmo and all the pundits start noticing that the stock is going up and start buying or advising others to buy. This drives the price up nicely.....while the mutual fund is now selling it back out in small amounts. This also works in reverse for shorting, I'll spare another bunch of words for that one, you can figure it out.
You can almost always see this action, it's why one of the famous advisors (William O'Neil) mentions the classic cup with handle pattern that presages a runup. When you see that classic exponential rise at the top, it's time to get out, you've got most of the move. Then the cycle repeats, with the average trader and Joe being stuck with stock they bought high...
A savvy trader looks for this, and tries to catch the middle 80% or so of these manipulated moves. A surfer doesn't have to be a hydrologist, or even care where the waves come from to be a great rider -- I'd put a sub IQ surfer dude against any scientist I know for just surfing -- he learns to detect, almost feel the little ripples and wavelets that presage a great wave to ride.
Successful trading is just like that. Not magic, but not pure logic either. Sometimes, computers can help, because they can be unemotional.
I think what actually happened here, and with my instant data and level II data, it didn't even last 10 minutes -- too fast for me to take advantage of it as TD Ameritrade bogged their servers, was that a bunch of sell orders were created by computers where no one had thought to put those "little bit at a time" limits on them, as that part of the state machine is only hit rarely if ever. When all the stops tripped, everyone (even the little guys) contributed to the flood of sell orders for which no buyers appeared until the prices got way low. Once a single transaction, no matter how tiny went down at the low price, all the computers saw it and sold in "preserve the firm" mode.
On many days, I can see the program/millisecond trading going on on BAC, F, C and a couple other stocks -- you can see prices oscillating 1 penny or less all day long, and a sustained move of more than a penny is rare, but sets the new baseline for the oscillation that continues.
If as said above, anybody really skilled at things like digital signal processing was involved in writing those programs, I'd be really surprised. As an expert in that field, it's easy to reverse engineer what they do, and it's d
IIRC, the error was that of gravity. In real use, the Hubble mirror of course is in zero G, but on earth, one G, and a mirror that size is affected. If you make it right for zero G, you have to make it wrong at one G. They made two -- using two different contractors. One got it right, but that wasn't the one that launched. Embarrassing yes, but tested -- they tested crap out of the things, but one of the testers forgot to include the effect of gravity on mirror "sag". The mirrors were both tested many many times during final figuring -- just not to the correct spec in the case of the one that got launched. And no, it wasn't out an inch -- more like a millionth of that.
Yup, fear is what makes other beings dangerous in general -- look at things here on this planet for examples. And like the poster above the parent, I think that any beings with the stuff to get off a planet and go looking around probably evolved in similar ways to us, first dominating most of their other local species, and are quite likely to "understand" how humans work -- which should scare them or at least make them think hard about what threat we may pose them later, if not now. Seems likely what we'd see first is the equivalent of scouts, who may look at us and feel, well, if those guys are this dangerous to themselves and others now, and we only come around every 100k years or so, the time to eliminate the possible threat to our species is now, while it's still easy to do. The reason I assume scouts is plain old physics. Were there significant sub-C travel (commerce for example) going on this side of the galaxy, it'd be real detectable to us, and we don't see it. We don't have a clue what FTL travel would be like (if possible) or what footprint it would leave (energy signature) but it seems reasonable that it would certainly disrupt the spacetime at the source and destination ends, which again, we'd see and be trying to explain.
Because during re-entry you can't communicate to a craft surrounded by ionized atmosphere and bits of burned off heat shield. Something similar happens during boost as well. Almost the entire instrumentation recorder/time shift industry was created as a result ,so data from launch and re-entry could be gathered and studied.
I've had the same experience though I wound up not actually losing the money after the bank did their investigation thing, and it's darn lucky that the guy who did it to me didn't realize that the debit card in question was for a payroll account and had a ton of money in it. Just some junkie who knew how to make up card numbers the first time (the algorithm is published including the checksum info!), and the second time a dumpster diver getting info from a legit company I deal with who got sloppy. I now just have several check accounts for various uses that have the attached plastic, and only put money in them when needed -- any attempt to rip them off won't get much if anything. And it works fine -- no more problems after that move. You can't just use cash -- my wife will pickpocket it (!), and the internet doesn't allow it for online ordering.
But this way you don't write the SSD much, it should live long and not get real fragmented. Also, you don't need that big size to pull it off. To save power (but not annoyance) you then set the spinning disks to power down real quick when not in use...
Seems like a good plan for my home main server which has a ton of read-mostly data on it -- now that could use up some SSD capacity indeed. But nearly all of that read mostly data could do as well on a normal hard drive -- music, data sheets, scientific papers and such like don't need blazing fast reads to work well. I can't see putting my MySQL databases on SSD anytime soon though.
Is all these ditched Russion subs -- the reactors alone have quite a lot of already enriched fuel in them, and who knows what else they carried. 248 meters they say is hard. Hah -- if you were a state or sub-state actor and knew where one was, you'd be after that thing foot horse and marines -- and get it. I bet you can even see the thermal bloom on some of them via satellite.
I actually own and drive a car that does 200mph plus, stable -- but even the best interstate highway or local track isn't really up to that (even with some helpful cops clearing a path). I give out before the car does. One thing you gotta give these driver/pilots is they have large brass ones. Altitude is a pilot's friend! FYI, the car is a modded 2010 Camaro SS -- and it ain't you're daddies Camaro.
I would think that the lost sub reactors are the real threat. Since they make heat, they can be more easily found by the heat bloom on the surface (IR satellite pictures) and tracking back (the ocean current). That might be within the means of a non state actor or a small state that wants nukes. Sub reactors tend to use very enriched fuel too. I think before that happens, some government (perhaps USA) should find and recover them. Having one would make it all too easy for someone to build a couple bombs (at least).
I had to re-learn how to drive a manual, especially on something that powerful. (Wow, is it ever a fun car to drive, like strapping on a jet fighter)
What I find interesting in all this is that for one thing, that shouldn't matter -- why not take the automatic to neutral? The engine might blow if full throttle unloaded but if it's that or your life.....well, people aren't all that smart I guess, or we wouldn't see in the movies how people are asked to dig their own graves -- and they do it!
Over half the cars I've recently owned won't let you turn them off unless in park...with the wheel locked. So I guess we can't expect people to do that, but if there was ever a stupider safety feature, I don't know what it is. This originally was a CYA move by the car manufacturers to avoid suits caused by people starting cars in gear and having wrecks (so they claimed).
I have yet to own a car (and I've owned cars since the '60s) that you couldn't stop with the brakes....even at full throttle so little or no vacuum boost, but of course since I understand how power brakes work, I'd never wimpishly tap the pedal and use up the vacuum in the reservoir before trying that in an emergency! But again, people aren't that smart about the things they put their lives on the line with.
Gosh, I mean if you're really in a life ending situation, you can't muster a little extra foot pedal pressure?
As someone who spent decades writing code and designing high reliability systems (6 9's or more), I can say from here without even checking that it's a software problem. We were constantly trying to hire more people with the skills and mindset to be able to do this, and there just aren't many pickings who can do it without (or even with) ridiculous things like triple redundancy, "safe languages" and all the expensive other approaches that try to substitute method for skill and due dilligence (and which all fail anyway). It's not like we weren't offering top of the line money, far more than enough to buy a code jock from a car maker...there just wasn't the talent pool.
What more need I say?
So I don't have to write all kinds of drivers for each new thing. At a whole house level, this isn't that useful. But I'm on solar power here and knowing when remote loads (like the freezer in the outbuilding) is running is good, and knowing when somehow my "vampire loads" have ramped up at night -- what's causing that battery drain, is very good and extremely useful. As it is, my Xantrex stuff tells me some things on a proprietary layer over a CAN bus. Pain in the....you know and that's only whole house stuff. Would be a lot nicer to use a cheap MicroChip part all over and by circuit, sometimes even by device, and only have to write one set of code to talk to all of it. The standard is a big benefit to me going forward. I don't care about sending data to Google one way or the other -- I want to know myself as part of my job as "the power company" on my campus. I use microchip's PIC controllers all the time and like them a lot, so I'm glad they got with someone who has a clue (which can be interpreted from either side just as well).
The potential is there to be sure -- but it's not now. Evidently they just weren't pulling in the advertising revenue for China well at all.
So, in reality, this doesn't cost them much, and it certainly makes a point worldwide. Many Chinese friends of mine really like and use Google as for some things (scientific research) they are pretty hard to beat. But I guess those types don't click through on ads much. However, that group can be effectively noisy, and done right this really makes the Chinese repression stand out not only to the world, but to their own people.
So, for now, it's good. If they can without losing face, they may capitulate, but that won't be while the issue is front and center.
Disclaimer -- I trade stocks for a living and sometimes have positions in Google, Bidu, and a bunch of other issues -- and I look these numbers up all the time in order to make my own business decisions. No positions in search just now however, I'm waiting for a better defined trend in those rather than a headline caused blip -- those can really bite one on the butt.
So it will be there, just like a bunch of other stuff people whined was undocumented by Microsoft. You just won't be able to find what you want. Bureaucrats rejoice! You're still safe.
Yeah, the way it *is* done at middle volume (mere millions) embedded shops. I wrote code for things like PA systems, embedded PBXs and voice over IP (lan at the time) for many years. Myself and the people working for me made *very* good money for writing efficient code. We are all retired, and still young. This came about because of the value to this type of customer. If you can write better code (which includes system and hardware design at the limit), then they save bucks per unit on everything from CPU, ram and so on, to square inches of PCB and in millions, that adds up quick for the customer of the code, in this case a hardware manufacturer. I recall being told that the CEO of a company we worked for once went down the hall chortling that investing in my outfit for coding and systems design was the best move he'd ever made. For a mere few hundred K$ (which we earned in an astonishingly short time, like a month or a little more), we did him a product that made many millions in one year, much of that in pure hardware savings over the older design. So, it happens. It's not as likely in mass market product like cel phones, as we were able to do this partly by locking down most of the feature set -- if someone became aware that our hardware even had software in it -- we'd messed up. Things like phone exchanges don't have reset buttons or power switches, they're just supposed to work, period. For one customer, the need of a reset was considered a failure requiring a service call. So the emphasis was on the 9's first, then hardware cost -- good code addresses both! It does really help that we wrote our own opsys for all this, purpose-designed for realtime multitasking for a limited number of apps. Having had to use a bloated commercial system (for which developers and tools were more common) would have easily wiped out all those gains. We were doing in a 10 mhz PIC microprocessor what others needed a full boat board running windows CE had trouble doing. That's where the money/value to our customers came in.
That commandment in the Bible, correctly translated says "do no murder" and doesn't mention killing -- else half or more of the old testament would be in self-conflict.
The thing is, guys who can look through a scope, see a face and then decide to "play god" and murder the target are considered kind of creepy to most normal folk. It's not like there is a shortage of them, one problem is finding one who is able, but not too gung ho and therefore completely dangerous to all.
In either case, you have a targeted murder, rather than a killing in the heat of battle, and I think that's the real issue. This is only a matter of scale -- the drone operator is in even less danger than a ground based sniper, but is a lot more "wholesale" if you get my drift -- those larger bullets do a lot more damage...and are a lot less accurate.
I have heard of cases where guys assigned the job of flying drones, who can even go home to the wife at lunchtime, cracking up (in the bad way) due to the realization that they are murdering people for a living from an air conditioned office in complete safety themselves (kind of like what some investment bankers do with far less remorse).
Further, where I live, in the boonies of SW VA, USA, checks are "in" bigtime. Yes, we are sort of living in the past here. People still trust one another -- is that bad?
My checking account pays interest, and zero fees for the checks other then printing them. Here if you forget your checkbook at the general store, you can just ask them to pay later -- interest free loan on your asking.
You city folk who sadly, are the majority think this and that are the best way, and perhaps in a trust-free society such as you've managed to create for yourselves, those ways are best -- for you. But lets not forget that not all of us have gone down that road and see "catching up to you" as a very stupid move indeed. That must be why they tax us to fix your roads, and you try to export all your pipelines and power plant pollution to us -- many of whom are off the grid and on solar power....Is your way really better for all, or just you?
Where everyone knows everyone else, things are a lot different. The cops know who did what without having to invade the privacy of the rest of us, and many other significant benefits accrue. If we don't like what the county government does, we can go do something about it -- we outnumber them and aren't sheeple here. Our cops are well known to all and if they become abusive, we fire them. Can you do that? We do with some regularity. Remember this country is as strong as it is because of diversity. Making one size fits all, \centralization of power which sadly isn't something that can be fixed by partison politics, as both parties do it, is the WRONG move. Let's at least not break the parts that work trying to shore up the broken parts.
That's the tale of equality by slamming down all things that stick up - rather than bringing up the low, we simply chop off the high. Sounds all "fair' but is that truly good? I doubt it.
I have to agree. Two more good words. "FALSE POSITIVE". Go fight that charge with your own money sometime and then get back to me, willya, you naive idiot? Oh, you aren't rich? Slammer.
And as a result of the observation, wound up advising some customers we consulted for to get the heck out of the markets -- too good to be true is, well, too good to be true. As a result a few very rich people think they owe me favors.
I now trade the markets for a living, having not much better to do for dough, and I turned out to be good at it. I am now stealing our bailout money back from Goldman and others for fun and profit. Feels pretty good, actually. One failure shouldn't make you give up -- it should make you learn the game. Did you really expect to make one decision once, and profit without further effort from it forever? Why are you so special? No one else gets that deal. You have to earn it -- or you should earn it, because else the results don't make you happy anyway.
And the poster below is right: Once everyone is into a trip in the markets, it's time to get out, the big guys are and sticking Joe Dumbguy with overpriced stuff they are ditching. Think of it this way - if everyone is in the market fully, and all are bullish, who is left to buy more stocks and keep the prices rising? No one, so the first guy who wants to sell blows the whole show.