Actually, they say his driver was able to to decelerate the vehicle by ~15mph in an unspecified but small time after the 50 mph measurement, WITHOUT CAUSING THE VEHICLE'S BRAKE LIGHTS TO COME ON.
I think that either the initial speed measurement was flawed, or that guy hires an amazing set of drivers who carefully use some as yet unrevealed deceleration technique at the precise fraction of a second required to fool the devices into issuing bogus tickets, and can do it on demand over and over again, producing more than 40 flawed citations.
Looking around a local charity isn't really an "experiment"; there's no control, and it's not reflective of charities in general, at least in revenue terms
You are correct, it's more observation than experiment. it would, however, be actual data rather than the OP's self serving baseless speculation, and you'll note that I specified "a handful" and not just one local charity. One data point is an anecdote.
(I'd guess most donations go through big multinational charities, not the local sort you'd look around).
That would be a guess, not data.;) And big multinationals often have local operations and welcome volunteers.
I suspect many charities do use the cheapest things available and pay as little as possible (which, while it may help them feel good, probably isn't the most efficient way to help people)
If it isn't the most efficient, most would welcome suggestions for improving efficiencies. However, the likeliest approximation of the truth is that they are working with severely constrained resources, and do the best they can figure out how with what they've got. Often the most efficient methods are simply beyond their means, and therefore are not an option.
- but I also know of people who are making a very comfortable living running charities.
In most cases the people making a "very comfortable living" in the non-profit sector are making a fraction of the living they'd make doing exactly the same sort of job for a profit-oriented entity. The higher in the organization, the smaller the fraction. As with all things, there are exceptions, and there are people who abuse their positions, but it's not the norm. Then again, a good capitalist might claim that the people are providing a valuable service to the organization and deserve to be compensated for it. The safeguard has to be transparency, so that the people funding the organization can understand how the money is allocated and why, and make good decisions about donation.
For an actual experiment, the thing to do would be to compare lives saved - what's the difference in death toll between disasters where there was a big donation-to-charity response, and disasters of a comparable scale but which attracted far fewer donations for whatever reason (reduced media coverage? Happened during bad economic circumstances?).
That would be a very interesting study indeed, and I'd agree that it could be highly useful for making future decisions. I think one might have a very difficult time making useful comparisons between different situations given the complexities involved, but perhaps with a large enough data set something could be made of it. On the other hand, mere survival is hardly the only factor worth measuring.
I'd be interested to see such a comparison, but from the fact that we don't see them made by the charities (where's the "your donations saved x000 lives in the tsunami" poster?), I have an inkling they're not that impressive.
It would be nearly impossible to derive any such figures for a single event, and any figure presented would be subject to such high levels of skepticism as to be counterproductive as a public relations effort. Your trust in your own inklings arouses my own skepticism, as well.;)
As for a more efficient way of accomplishing the mission, that's what capitalism will find for you. I wouldn't be at all surprised if buying Japanese (from ordinary, profit-making Japanese companies) will help the country get back on its feet faster than charitable donations.
Ah, there we go, the real point of your statements, I believe.
Capitalism, my friend, is good at one thing, and one thing only: maximizing profits for the people who already control the means of production. Any other positive effect is a happy coincidence, and not to be counted u
Cynicism, like optimism, is rarely completely correct. The reality almost always lies somewhere between the extremes.
There are certainly scammers, opportunists, and fraudsters in the world, and always will be. However, this is a minority in the 'emergency relief' field of endeavor, as well as most other forms of charitable organization. The people who create and operate the vast majority of these orgs are doing their imperfect best to help people under often very difficult and never simple circumstances.
It's also impossible to take donations and convert them into goods and services in the needed locations without any overhead. There are costs and delays involved in organizing, transporting, an distributing things, and that doesn't magically disappear when you are doing it for charitable causes.
If you still think that most charities are wasteful and are just scams, I'd invite you to experiment to validate that hypothesis. Find a handful of local charities, and go see what they do - or even better, donate a bit of your time and energy. In almost every case, you'll find that the organization is squeezing every bit of good that it can from every centavo donated, doing it with the cheapest possible equipment and facilities, paying as little as they can for the labor required, and always falling short of what they would like to accomplish. All while being jeered by the lazy, selfish cretins on the sidelines. If you know of a more efficient, lower cost way of accomplishing the mission, they'll be overjoyed to hear about it.
The fraud artists and opportunists should be exposed and eliminated whenever possible. They are not only diverting resources away from the need, they are also causing a reduction in the willingness of the general public to fund legitimate organizations. Don't let anecdotal evidence persuade you that the exceptions are really the rule, though.
And last of all, don't use cynicism as a smokescreen for your own laziness and selfishness.
For most public AND private universities and colleges, tuition hikes are in general a last resort, and they happen because the school's other sources of funding have decreased. Most schools will cut programs and scrimp and save in many other ways before they give in and raise tuition. Driving away potential students is not what they want to do, and they avoid it whenever possible.
Operating a university is very, very expensive, and not because some fat cats are raking in the dough. Quite the contrary.
The most common reasons for tuition increases are reduced funding from government sources and reduced income from investment-related sources, both mostly resulting from economic downturns.
I really want to use GIMP. I really do. I keep trying to learn how to do the same things I already know how to do (and do quickly) in Photoshop.
I keep trying, but over and over I find myself booting windows and launching Photoshop because I get frustrated.
I keep telling myself that it's just because I haven't learned GIMP well enough yet.
Someday I'll learn it well enough, and those last couple of games will work under wine, and I'll purge that dratted windows partition. I hate having a whole OS taking up space just to run a couple of programs.
Now, as for Inkscape - I have little time invested in learning any vector graphics program. I was pretty happy with my one experience with Inkscape. Of course, I ended up doing finishing touches in Photoshop... dang it, when you can use a hammer really well, everything seems to be at least somewhat like a nail...
Without offering any opinion of my own, since my opinion is not fully formed on this as yet, I would remind that the cost of doing the proposed actions must be compared against the costs of the various alternatives, not viewed as additional costs. If this is the best option, why not do it? If not, do something else.
Politics is the art of the possible, not pixie dust and ponies [...].
Heh, I'll bet a politician told you that.
Politics is nothing *but* pixie dust and ponies, with the almost sole aim of gaining and/or retaining present personal power and future wealth for the politician. The job of the voter is to put those power and wealth carrots where we want the politicians to go, and then chase them in that direction with pointy sticks.
The much maligned bureaucrats are the ones attempting to convert the underfunded pixie dust into reality, with mixed results.
The primary problem with representative democracy is that often a majority of the people ultimately in charge (the voters) do not understand the issues at hand. Instead, they vote by 'gut feeling' which is easily manipulated by parties with sufficient resources.
Nonetheless, in the end the failures of a democracy are the fault of the people, and those failures seem to me to be somewhat less awful than the failures of autocratic systems.
Also, the success of propaganda lies not in managing to fool the perceptive, but in fooling everyone else sufficiently to make the cries of 'foul' disappear in the general noise. I suspect that the Chinese propagandists in this case were successful in that aim, but we shall see.
Nonsense! Trading doesn't have to be equitable for it to take place. Black marketplaces exist everywhere outside of any established regulation, but yet we still have a market place if exchange takes place. It's nice if obligations are enforced, but not necessary. All the homes in foreclosure show that aspect of it, yet it is still possible to get a house.
All of those items are desirable, but by no means are they necessary by any definition of a market. A market is simply when you have two entities trading.
You make a good point. I was referring to a healthy public market, as opposed to the horrendous inequities one finds in black markets, but I was not specific on that point.
Without the context I mentioned, I can simply trade you one used bullet for everything you own, and you also lose everything you might ever have owned in the future.
Of course, many people delude themselves that they would be the one with the bullets, but most of them are wrong.
Many people also subscribe to the idea that an unregulated market will regulate itself, due to factors like reputation and intelligent self interest. However, an examination of history suggests that this is as fallacious as the idea that people can all cooperate equitably in a commune.
'Free' implies no imposition of order or expectations, but 'Market' connotes an establishment of certain expectations, such as equitable trading, enforced obligations, peace, security, and probably a negotiable instrument as a means of exchange. 'Market' doesn't exist without agreed upon regulation and an external entity to enforce said regulation.
So, a market can only be free up to a certain point before it ceases to be a market and instead becomes looting and anarchy.
I believe we have walked up to and peered into that abyss, and didn't enjoy what we saw.
The idea that government spending creates "growth" is, at best, arguable.
I think you're correct, and are pointing out a common mis-conception. A government can't reasonably directly create economic growth, but it can provide an infrastructure and context that promotes private economic investment and growth, and doing so is not usually without cost. The government spending does not directly create growth, but without the necessary contextual factors growth will not happen.
Now, with that said, you are also correct that the proper amount of spending and on what services and infrastructure is indeed arguable, and in fact that's an ongoing grand experiment. Nonetheless, the only people who say that government should not provide such services (a.k.a. 'spending') are ideologue politicians who care only for gaining votes regardless of consequences, and the dupes who believe them.
It can be used to maybe prevent a further slide (ie: temporarily paying unemployment when there are mass layoff, so those people have money to eat on, so rent is paid, food is bought, etc.) Government spending is a patch, it isn't an investment plan.
Agreed, and I've not heard any reasonable public official claim otherwise, except as campaign BS.
Notable exceptions would be in infrastructure and other items that the people can't themselves provide, but even then, too much is too much and the payback time for infrastructure is typically measured in years if not decades.
Absolutely. There are some things private enterprise is not well suited to organize and administer. Transportation infrastructure is a common example, but I'd also point out that national defense, a legal system, public safety, and fair regulation of competition are further examples of services absolutely essential to economic health, but not readily provided by self-interested organizations. Some aspects may be farmed out on a contractual basis to private concerns, but the administration of such things could not normally be entrusted to bodies answerable primarily to profit-motivated shareholders or private owners.
So, the key issue is to determine what services are required, how much these services will cost, and how to finance them over the long term. Short term thinking is generally unsuccessful in the end, as it is human nature to kick problems down the road, knowing that they'll become worse but hoping that someone else will have to deal with them.
In the US, and in many other places, we are discovering how it feels to be that 'someone else'.
And guess what? The answer is that we will have to spend, though we need to be very careful about how we do that. The people telling you that 'not spending' is the answer are selling you a fantasy.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will ideologues of one stripe or another grab enough of the power they so hungrily desire to attempt to force reality into the shape of their fantasies, and run things to ruin in the long term, or will we swing in ever increasing pendulum lengths between diverging foolishnesses, but stay balanced somehow through opposing forces, or will rationality win out through long-suffering tenacity and set things back in some sort of tenable order? Only time will tell.
The day may come when people no longer want what we now call a 'PC', but that day is a ways off yet. Every tablet user I've ever met also uses at least one and frequently more than one 'full PC', be it stationary or portable in design.
I think the future may further trend toward individuals owning multiple devices with different sets of functionality, rather than just one machine to do everything except the things it can't do. Efforts toward getting all of one's computing devices to collaborate nicely are welcomed.
On a personal note, my primary stationary PC and both of my laptops contain neither Intel CPUs nor Microsoft operating systems. Do they count toward 'Wintel' or not? They certainly aren't ARMdroids.
Also, how does one form a portmanteau of AMD and GNU/Linux? Will I be able to pronounce it?
Although this seems true when viewed from some angles, I've found as I age that understanding why (or why not) is every bit as important as how. Philosophy, of course, is much larger than the eternal 'why', but that is one example.
The meaning of the word 'reality' is a good philosophical question, and any discussion of whether some arbitrary object is 'real' depends upon an agreement as to how to measure such a thing. Your engineering is utterly dependent on the prior work of philosophers - even if the philosophy was not so labeled.
I'd suggest that some branches of philosophy deal with far more 'real' problems than finding a Higgs. But on a deeper level, understanding the nature of the universe is inherently tied to philosophical underpinnings.
If all of this seems like silly navel gazing, feel free to dismiss it. You may learn better in time, or like most of the human race, you may leave such things unexamined.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you suggesting that judges should rule based on measurable facts rather than on evidence presented by the defense and prosecution?
That would wreak havoc on the trial lawyering racket. Not to mention ruining the unfair advantages held by the wealthy.
Actually, they say his driver was able to to decelerate the vehicle by ~15mph in an unspecified but small time after the 50 mph measurement, WITHOUT CAUSING THE VEHICLE'S BRAKE LIGHTS TO COME ON.
I think that either the initial speed measurement was flawed, or that guy hires an amazing set of drivers who carefully use some as yet unrevealed deceleration technique at the precise fraction of a second required to fool the devices into issuing bogus tickets, and can do it on demand over and over again, producing more than 40 flawed citations.
What does Occam suggest?
Looking around a local charity isn't really an "experiment"; there's no control, and it's not reflective of charities in general, at least in revenue terms
You are correct, it's more observation than experiment. it would, however, be actual data rather than the OP's self serving baseless speculation, and you'll note that I specified "a handful" and not just one local charity. One data point is an anecdote.
(I'd guess most donations go through big multinational charities, not the local sort you'd look around).
That would be a guess, not data. ;) And big multinationals often have local operations and welcome volunteers.
I suspect many charities do use the cheapest things available and pay as little as possible (which, while it may help them feel good, probably isn't the most efficient way to help people)
If it isn't the most efficient, most would welcome suggestions for improving efficiencies. However, the likeliest approximation of the truth is that they are working with severely constrained resources, and do the best they can figure out how with what they've got. Often the most efficient methods are simply beyond their means, and therefore are not an option.
- but I also know of people who are making a very comfortable living running charities.
In most cases the people making a "very comfortable living" in the non-profit sector are making a fraction of the living they'd make doing exactly the same sort of job for a profit-oriented entity. The higher in the organization, the smaller the fraction. As with all things, there are exceptions, and there are people who abuse their positions, but it's not the norm. Then again, a good capitalist might claim that the people are providing a valuable service to the organization and deserve to be compensated for it. The safeguard has to be transparency, so that the people funding the organization can understand how the money is allocated and why, and make good decisions about donation.
For an actual experiment, the thing to do would be to compare lives saved - what's the difference in death toll between disasters where there was a big donation-to-charity response, and disasters of a comparable scale but which attracted far fewer donations for whatever reason (reduced media coverage? Happened during bad economic circumstances?).
That would be a very interesting study indeed, and I'd agree that it could be highly useful for making future decisions. I think one might have a very difficult time making useful comparisons between different situations given the complexities involved, but perhaps with a large enough data set something could be made of it. On the other hand, mere survival is hardly the only factor worth measuring.
I'd be interested to see such a comparison, but from the fact that we don't see them made by the charities (where's the "your donations saved x000 lives in the tsunami" poster?), I have an inkling they're not that impressive.
It would be nearly impossible to derive any such figures for a single event, and any figure presented would be subject to such high levels of skepticism as to be counterproductive as a public relations effort. Your trust in your own inklings arouses my own skepticism, as well. ;)
As for a more efficient way of accomplishing the mission, that's what capitalism will find for you. I wouldn't be at all surprised if buying Japanese (from ordinary, profit-making Japanese companies) will help the country get back on its feet faster than charitable donations.
Ah, there we go, the real point of your statements, I believe.
Capitalism, my friend, is good at one thing, and one thing only: maximizing profits for the people who already control the means of production. Any other positive effect is a happy coincidence, and not to be counted u
Cynicism, like optimism, is rarely completely correct. The reality almost always lies somewhere between the extremes.
There are certainly scammers, opportunists, and fraudsters in the world, and always will be. However, this is a minority in the 'emergency relief' field of endeavor, as well as most other forms of charitable organization. The people who create and operate the vast majority of these orgs are doing their imperfect best to help people under often very difficult and never simple circumstances.
It's also impossible to take donations and convert them into goods and services in the needed locations without any overhead. There are costs and delays involved in organizing, transporting, an distributing things, and that doesn't magically disappear when you are doing it for charitable causes.
If you still think that most charities are wasteful and are just scams, I'd invite you to experiment to validate that hypothesis. Find a handful of local charities, and go see what they do - or even better, donate a bit of your time and energy. In almost every case, you'll find that the organization is squeezing every bit of good that it can from every centavo donated, doing it with the cheapest possible equipment and facilities, paying as little as they can for the labor required, and always falling short of what they would like to accomplish. All while being jeered by the lazy, selfish cretins on the sidelines. If you know of a more efficient, lower cost way of accomplishing the mission, they'll be overjoyed to hear about it.
The fraud artists and opportunists should be exposed and eliminated whenever possible. They are not only diverting resources away from the need, they are also causing a reduction in the willingness of the general public to fund legitimate organizations. Don't let anecdotal evidence persuade you that the exceptions are really the rule, though.
And last of all, don't use cynicism as a smokescreen for your own laziness and selfishness.
Oddly enough, I still laughed. Perhaps I am also outdated.
I'll see your Intelligent Design and raise you an appendix and a tail bone.
Nobody calling themselves 'frugal' should go anywhere near one of those expensive schools without a significant package of grants and scholarships.
It might seem that way, but actually... no.
For most public AND private universities and colleges, tuition hikes are in general a last resort, and they happen because the school's other sources of funding have decreased. Most schools will cut programs and scrimp and save in many other ways before they give in and raise tuition. Driving away potential students is not what they want to do, and they avoid it whenever possible.
Operating a university is very, very expensive, and not because some fat cats are raking in the dough. Quite the contrary.
The most common reasons for tuition increases are reduced funding from government sources and reduced income from investment-related sources, both mostly resulting from economic downturns.
I really want to use GIMP. I really do. I keep trying to learn how to do the same things I already know how to do (and do quickly) in Photoshop.
I keep trying, but over and over I find myself booting windows and launching Photoshop because I get frustrated.
I keep telling myself that it's just because I haven't learned GIMP well enough yet.
Someday I'll learn it well enough, and those last couple of games will work under wine, and I'll purge that dratted windows partition. I hate having a whole OS taking up space just to run a couple of programs.
Now, as for Inkscape - I have little time invested in learning any vector graphics program. I was pretty happy with my one experience with Inkscape. Of course, I ended up doing finishing touches in Photoshop... dang it, when you can use a hammer really well, everything seems to be at least somewhat like a nail...
Without offering any opinion of my own, since my opinion is not fully formed on this as yet, I would remind that the cost of doing the proposed actions must be compared against the costs of the various alternatives, not viewed as additional costs. If this is the best option, why not do it? If not, do something else.
Politics is the art of the possible, not pixie dust and ponies [...].
Heh, I'll bet a politician told you that.
Politics is nothing *but* pixie dust and ponies, with the almost sole aim of gaining and/or retaining present personal power and future wealth for the politician. The job of the voter is to put those power and wealth carrots where we want the politicians to go, and then chase them in that direction with pointy sticks.
The much maligned bureaucrats are the ones attempting to convert the underfunded pixie dust into reality, with mixed results.
Sarcasm alert.
An iPad is also lighter and cheaper than a laptop.
Maybe a tablet is overkill for some applications, but it's not for the ones I use it.
The last four laptops I bought for myself and family members each cost less and does more than an iPad, save only the touchscreen and low weight.
When tablets cost what netbooks cost now, I'll be interested.
The primary problem with representative democracy is that often a majority of the people ultimately in charge (the voters) do not understand the issues at hand. Instead, they vote by 'gut feeling' which is easily manipulated by parties with sufficient resources.
Nonetheless, in the end the failures of a democracy are the fault of the people, and those failures seem to me to be somewhat less awful than the failures of autocratic systems.
Also, the success of propaganda lies not in managing to fool the perceptive, but in fooling everyone else sufficiently to make the cries of 'foul' disappear in the general noise. I suspect that the Chinese propagandists in this case were successful in that aim, but we shall see.
Rossi has specifically stated that 'cold fusion' is not what is going on.
There's a lot of misinformation in the comments here, and in the slashdot post title. Go figure.
Go read this
Kudos to another poster for that link.
Nonsense! Trading doesn't have to be equitable for it to take place. Black marketplaces exist everywhere outside of any established regulation, but yet we still have a market place if exchange takes place. It's nice if obligations are enforced, but not necessary. All the homes in foreclosure show that aspect of it, yet it is still possible to get a house.
All of those items are desirable, but by no means are they necessary by any definition of a market. A market is simply when you have two entities trading.
You make a good point. I was referring to a healthy public market, as opposed to the horrendous inequities one finds in black markets, but I was not specific on that point.
Without the context I mentioned, I can simply trade you one used bullet for everything you own, and you also lose everything you might ever have owned in the future.
Of course, many people delude themselves that they would be the one with the bullets, but most of them are wrong.
Many people also subscribe to the idea that an unregulated market will regulate itself, due to factors like reputation and intelligent self interest. However, an examination of history suggests that this is as fallacious as the idea that people can all cooperate equitably in a commune.
Free market - this is an interesting term.
'Free' implies no imposition of order or expectations, but 'Market' connotes an establishment of certain expectations, such as equitable trading, enforced obligations, peace, security, and probably a negotiable instrument as a means of exchange. 'Market' doesn't exist without agreed upon regulation and an external entity to enforce said regulation.
So, a market can only be free up to a certain point before it ceases to be a market and instead becomes looting and anarchy.
I believe we have walked up to and peered into that abyss, and didn't enjoy what we saw.
The idea that government spending creates "growth" is, at best, arguable.
I think you're correct, and are pointing out a common mis-conception. A government can't reasonably directly create economic growth, but it can provide an infrastructure and context that promotes private economic investment and growth, and doing so is not usually without cost. The government spending does not directly create growth, but without the necessary contextual factors growth will not happen.
Now, with that said, you are also correct that the proper amount of spending and on what services and infrastructure is indeed arguable, and in fact that's an ongoing grand experiment. Nonetheless, the only people who say that government should not provide such services (a.k.a. 'spending') are ideologue politicians who care only for gaining votes regardless of consequences, and the dupes who believe them.
It can be used to maybe prevent a further slide (ie: temporarily paying unemployment when there are mass layoff, so those people have money to eat on, so rent is paid, food is bought, etc.) Government spending is a patch, it isn't an investment plan.
Agreed, and I've not heard any reasonable public official claim otherwise, except as campaign BS.
Notable exceptions would be in infrastructure and other items that the people can't themselves provide, but even then, too much is too much and the payback time for infrastructure is typically measured in years if not decades.
Absolutely. There are some things private enterprise is not well suited to organize and administer. Transportation infrastructure is a common example, but I'd also point out that national defense, a legal system, public safety, and fair regulation of competition are further examples of services absolutely essential to economic health, but not readily provided by self-interested organizations. Some aspects may be farmed out on a contractual basis to private concerns, but the administration of such things could not normally be entrusted to bodies answerable primarily to profit-motivated shareholders or private owners.
So, the key issue is to determine what services are required, how much these services will cost, and how to finance them over the long term. Short term thinking is generally unsuccessful in the end, as it is human nature to kick problems down the road, knowing that they'll become worse but hoping that someone else will have to deal with them.
In the US, and in many other places, we are discovering how it feels to be that 'someone else'.
And guess what? The answer is that we will have to spend, though we need to be very careful about how we do that. The people telling you that 'not spending' is the answer are selling you a fantasy.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will ideologues of one stripe or another grab enough of the power they so hungrily desire to attempt to force reality into the shape of their fantasies, and run things to ruin in the long term, or will we swing in ever increasing pendulum lengths between diverging foolishnesses, but stay balanced somehow through opposing forces, or will rationality win out through long-suffering tenacity and set things back in some sort of tenable order? Only time will tell.
I feel old.
The day may come when people no longer want what we now call a 'PC', but that day is a ways off yet. Every tablet user I've ever met also uses at least one and frequently more than one 'full PC', be it stationary or portable in design.
I think the future may further trend toward individuals owning multiple devices with different sets of functionality, rather than just one machine to do everything except the things it can't do. Efforts toward getting all of one's computing devices to collaborate nicely are welcomed.
On a personal note, my primary stationary PC and both of my laptops contain neither Intel CPUs nor Microsoft operating systems. Do they count toward 'Wintel' or not? They certainly aren't ARMdroids.
Also, how does one form a portmanteau of AMD and GNU/Linux? Will I be able to pronounce it?
Darn you, Anonymous Coward, you've wrecked my smug sense of superiority and given away the goods.
Although this seems true when viewed from some angles, I've found as I age that understanding why (or why not) is every bit as important as how. Philosophy, of course, is much larger than the eternal 'why', but that is one example.
The meaning of the word 'reality' is a good philosophical question, and any discussion of whether some arbitrary object is 'real' depends upon an agreement as to how to measure such a thing. Your engineering is utterly dependent on the prior work of philosophers - even if the philosophy was not so labeled.
I'd suggest that some branches of philosophy deal with far more 'real' problems than finding a Higgs. But on a deeper level, understanding the nature of the universe is inherently tied to philosophical underpinnings.
If all of this seems like silly navel gazing, feel free to dismiss it. You may learn better in time, or like most of the human race, you may leave such things unexamined.
That's not a bug, it's an easter egg.
...it's like Synaptic, only it eats my bank account. Yay.
This is why front porches need shotguns.
Stock trading is a scam!
d'oh! Why did I not realize this years ago?!?!
</sarcasm>