See the report from the person who was actually at the airport. It seems that actually in Russia's case it really was security theater since metal detectors were optional, not mandatory as we have here. So our security would have prevented this attack (in the terminal anyway).
The bomb blew up where people were waiting for arrivals. Those areas aren't secured in our airports either.
Volume 3 was first published in 1973. That is 38 years ago. Also, the first (incomplete) paperback edition of volume 4 was published in 2005. In 2011, volume 4 is still not complete. Wtf 28 years? Please don't post again until the whole series is complete.
The series will never be complete. Besides the fact that Knuth is getting on in years, there's the little problem that computer science continues advancing, which has required Knuth to revise the existing volumes in addition to working on writing the new ones.
None of which affects the value of the existing volumes in the slightest, of course.
I'm not an attorney, but all I can say is that sounds like utter nonsense to me.
What about companies that are specifically set up to do "green" business? Are you telling me that if they then choose environmentally-friendly manufacturing processes that are much more expensive and therefore barely provide a profit margin over non-green processes that would provide a much better shareholder return, that the shareholders can sue them for doing precisely what the company was established to do, and what the shareholders were made aware of before they bought shares?
Your argument is basically that the defined and documented goals of the corporation are meaningless. I don't buy it.
I think "We're acting in accordance with the goals outlined in our articles of incorporation, with which stockholders indicated their concurrence when they bought the stock" is pretty much an ironclad defense, unless said stockholders can prove that the corporation's actions are not in fact in accordance with the defined goals.
The fact that most corporations' articles of incorporation specify profit as their primary goal doesn't mean all of them have to, and Google's don't.
So anybody at all can be an engineer if they just decide so?
Yeah. Not really sure how to respond to that.
An engineer is someone who does engineering. It's about the mindset, the rigor and the goals, not the degrees and certifications. In some engineering fields, some engineering work legally requires degrees and certifications, but that doesn't mean that only those components of those fields are "true engineering".
What bugs me the most are searches on technical or medical topics, where Google give me a dozen "harvester" results -- e.g., I get sites that have stolen conversations from other message boards, and reported them along with tons of ads. Yuck! There must be dozens of hundreds of sites, all with broken answers to questions about JavaScript and/or medicines.
Google calls these "content farms", and TFA says they're taking steps to remove them from search results.
My favorite part is how searching for something that happens to appear in a Stackoverflow question returns dozens of sites that copy and paste the Stackoverflow content surrounded by ads.
The article mentions that Google recognizes this problem and is deploying some algorithm changes to reduce it.
Wikimedia has a stat that shows about 34% of Windows 7 users visiting the english wikipedia site have a working dualstack IPv6 connection (using tunneling, not native IPv6).
And no, you can't own a domain name either. If you don't pay the renewal fee, and anyone can register it after it lapses - so you're just licensing or leasing it.
And you can't own land or a house either. If you don't pay the property tax, the state will take it from you and sell it - so you're just licensing or leasing it.
I don't find that argument compelling for either domain names or real estate.
Lets just hope ISP's don't get lazy and start NAT'ing their customers.
They will, but it won't be from laziness because it'll be a lot of work and a lot of expense, and it won't last long because NAT doesn't scale that well.
It's also possible that injecting people with heroin helps them stay away from drugs.
Interestingly, the Swiss have discovered that injecting long-time heroin addicts with inexpensive prescription heroin is a pretty good way to get them off heroin, and to make their lives manageable until they get off heroin. The program has been so successful that several other countries have adopted it.
If sales go up but piracy does not go down, how does that not show that a pirated track isn't necessarily a lost sale? Did the demand suddenly and coincidentally rise?
This will have no statistically significant effect on piracy
You're right, of course. This will have no significant effect on piracy. It likely will, however, increase sales, once again demonstrating that piracy and sales are only vaguely related, and certainly not in the simple, direct way that people often assume.
The definition of speculation is participating in financial transactions with higher levels of risk in order to (hopefully) get greater returns.
There are dividend stocks that also fall into the category of speculation. For example, there are a number of real estate investment companies who pay 15-20% annual dividends... or at least they do until they fail, at which point they don't pay any dividends and their stock becomes worthless.
Speculation vs investment is about the quality and prospects of the security, not whether it pays dividends.
Both are actual money. Any time you own any asset, there is a chance of that asset's value declining. That doesn't make the asset's value unreal. For that matter, cash declines in value, and there's a possibility that it may decline with great rapidity (the US dollar could well do that if some of the holders of our national debt ever decide to call and the government has to resort to massive inflation to cover the debts). Even theoretically "hard" assets like gold can take a dive if demand suddenly declines or supply suddenly increases.
There is no currency or asset that is guaranteed to have future value. That doesn't make them unreal.
Why is Apple's stock so prone to heavy fluctuation
Apple doesn't pay dividends, so its stock is owned by speculators, not investors. Its value is based solely on the belief that there will always be another sucker along in a minute who thinks its worth more than you paid. When you stop believing those suckers will appear, then it's time to bail.
Nonsense.
Whether or not a company pays dividends has nothing to do with whether it's an investment or speculation.
There are two ways for companies to return value to their shareholders, and both are equally valid. The more traditional one is to distribute quarterly profits as dividend payments. With that method, assuming constant profits which are entirely distributed to shareholders, the value of the company remains constant, and so does the share price. In fact, for such a company, the stock price is basically expected to be pretty much equivalent to the net present value of the future dividend stream.
Companies that don't pay dividends but still make healthy profits either plow those profits into growth or else simply invest them. Because the profits are retained, the book value of the company increases. The company is actually worth more, but the number of shares remains constant, so the value of a share necessarily increases. Figuring the "proper" price of a non-dividend stock is a little trickier than estimating a future dividend stream and computing NPV, but one very good measure that's often used is the P/E ratio, which is the market value of the company (the share price times the number of shares outstanding) divided by the last year's earnings. In theory, if earnings were to remain constant the value of the company (and the share prices) are expected to double in around P/E years. The average P/E for a US stock over the last century is 14. For tech stocks, which are expected to be growth stocks, P/E ratios of 30+ are not uncommon, but such a ratio means that either the company has very good growth prospects or it's overpriced.
In Apple's case, it's current P/E is 23. That's a very modest premium that indicates an expected growth rate of only about 7.5%. If you believe that Apple is likely to continue growing at a rate of 7.5% annually for the next few years, then it's a good investment. This is absolutely no different from buying a stock that has been paying a dividend of around 8%. The price of such a stock will be based on the assumption of that dividend stream continuing. In BOTH cases, if the growth/income doesn't happen, the investment was a bad one. In the case of Apple, the result will be a declining stock price. In the case of a dividend stock, the result will be a decrease in the quarterly dividends, and a decline in stock price as the market reprices the stock based on the lower expected dividend stream.
Of course, that data suggests that AAPL isn't overvalued compared to the rest of the S&P 500. There's always a possibility the entire market is
Given that Apple's P/E ratio is 23 and Apples (P-$)/E ratio is just over 15, I don't think so. Those are some very healthy numbers, indicating that Apple's market price is very justified on the basis of their earnings plus the assumption of very modest growth.
Also I like being modded +4 Informative while being directly contradicted by fact. Go Slashdot!
Well, it'll be necessary to prove that the employer actually and knowingly hired the undocumented worker, without performing due diligence. And if the employer was presented with evidence of legal right to work that a reasonable person would consider valid (e.g. e-verify said it's good), then of course the employer wouldn't be convicted and the alien wouldn't get a green card -- and might well be prosecuted for fraud, then deported as an undocumented person.
I think the fraud issue more or less takes care of itself, because by making the report the undocumented person puts himself under scrutiny by the system.
Today, if you make more than minimum wage in a job that does not absolutely require good English skills, you are overpaid. You can be replaced by someone willing to work for 10x what they were getting in Mexico, which is about $1.25 a hour. Yes, our minimum wage is like 50x what they can get in Mexico which means they will die to try to get here. And plenty of them do exactly that.
Which means the solution isn't to build fences or put the Army on the border to point guns at people. The solution is to fine (stiffly) and jail the Americans who employ undocumented workers. When no US citizens will hire them, the Mexicans will have no reason to come here.
No, but it doesn't have to be. To evade something like this would take more money and effort than a minimum wage job picking produce or mowing lawns is worth.
More money and effort than one (less than) minimum wage job is worth... but what about a chunk of each of several hundred such jobs? Coyotes make their money on volume, just like pretty much any other smuggler.
Also, the drug traffickers move a lot of stuff over the border, and they are highly motivated to find a way to get it across. And they're heavily armed, and well-equipped.
Against either threat you don't want to have guards all by themselves, 1/4 mile from the nearest buddy. Against both, it'd just be a good way to get your border patrol agents killed. Given the number of people in Mexico who want to get into the US, and given how badly they want to do it, you need something more like what I described.
The US Mexico border is 1,969 miles. Stationing on average 4 guards per mile gives us 7,876 guards. 4 shifts to give us 24x7x365 coverage gives us 31,504 guards.
31,504 guards would give us 4 guards per mile of US Mexico border, 24x7x365.
Assume generously that each guard costs us $150,000 / yr for pay, benefits, equipment, logistics, training, and administration.
BOTTOM LINE: For a price of 4.75 billion USD per year we can have 1 well paid, well equipped guard stationed on average every 1/4 mile along the entire 1,969 miles of the US Mexico border.
You're on the right track, but your numbers are a little low. One guard per 1/4 mile is too far apart for any kind of mutual support, and in many places too far apart to prevent people from easily slipping through the gaps.
To make it work, you need to add fences with sensors. Your 31,000 guards would be sufficient to walk the fences and check for gaps, check alarms, etc., and then you'd need another force of guards, probably another 16,000, set up as alert response teams (ARTs), mounted in trucks.
If I were given the job of designing this, based on what I learned about physical security while manning similar perimeters in the military, I'd put up guard towers every 1/2 mile, with sensor-monitoring stations and spotlights. The guard in the tower would generally use his eyeballs. He'd have a roving buddy, probably mounted on an ATV, to check sensor alerts and get a ground view of "their" half-mile of fence.
The ARTs would be eight-man teams, posted one team per four-mile stretch. They should move from time to time so the intruders can't predict their location. In the event of detection of a crossing in force, too large for a single ART to handle, ARTs from nearby sectors could be called in and there should also be a helicopter-based quick response force, possibly with heavy weapons if the coyotes take all this as a challenge.
All of the above is kind of an average. In areas where the terrain is flat, wildlife is sparse (wildlife causes a lot of false alarms on the fence sensors) and crossing intensity is low, the resources can be spaced a little more widely. In other areas more resources will have to be applied.
Also, you'd need a few teams with ground-penetrating radar equipment who periodically cover the whole length checking for tunnels.
My guess is that all of this would cost around $4B to build, plus an ongoing cost of about $6B per year for people, maintenance and equipment.
Oh, and it still wouldn't be anywhere close to 100% effective.
And, you know, actually give out jail time, instead of just the occasional fine they'll deduct from their profits. So those jobs for illegals dry up, and they stop trying to come in.
And to make sure that the employers get caught, offer green cards to illegals who turn in their bosses. Make receiving the green card contingent upon successful prosecution of the boss, so the worker is motivated to provide all of the evidence required so that prosecution is trivial. If you can turn the workers against the employers and make the employers afraid of the workers, employers will become extremely careful about verifying the immigration status of people they hire.
Slashdot Mirror
See the report from the person who was actually at the airport. It seems that actually in Russia's case it really was security theater since metal detectors were optional, not mandatory as we have here. So our security would have prevented this attack (in the terminal anyway).
The bomb blew up where people were waiting for arrivals. Those areas aren't secured in our airports either.
Volume 3 was first published in 1973. That is 38 years ago. Also, the first (incomplete) paperback edition of volume 4 was published in 2005. In 2011, volume 4 is still not complete. Wtf 28 years? Please don't post again until the whole series is complete.
The series will never be complete. Besides the fact that Knuth is getting on in years, there's the little problem that computer science continues advancing, which has required Knuth to revise the existing volumes in addition to working on writing the new ones.
None of which affects the value of the existing volumes in the slightest, of course.
LOL. I suppose it's totally different where you live because a few hundred years ago some guys in wigs signed a piece of paper?
It certainly should be. But the "living Constitution" theory has largely gutted the reality.
I'm not an attorney, but all I can say is that sounds like utter nonsense to me.
What about companies that are specifically set up to do "green" business? Are you telling me that if they then choose environmentally-friendly manufacturing processes that are much more expensive and therefore barely provide a profit margin over non-green processes that would provide a much better shareholder return, that the shareholders can sue them for doing precisely what the company was established to do, and what the shareholders were made aware of before they bought shares?
Your argument is basically that the defined and documented goals of the corporation are meaningless. I don't buy it.
I think "We're acting in accordance with the goals outlined in our articles of incorporation, with which stockholders indicated their concurrence when they bought the stock" is pretty much an ironclad defense, unless said stockholders can prove that the corporation's actions are not in fact in accordance with the defined goals.
The fact that most corporations' articles of incorporation specify profit as their primary goal doesn't mean all of them have to, and Google's don't.
Well put.
So anybody at all can be an engineer if they just decide so?
Yeah. Not really sure how to respond to that.
An engineer is someone who does engineering. It's about the mindset, the rigor and the goals, not the degrees and certifications. In some engineering fields, some engineering work legally requires degrees and certifications, but that doesn't mean that only those components of those fields are "true engineering".
What bugs me the most are searches on technical or medical topics, where Google give me a dozen "harvester" results -- e.g., I get sites that have stolen conversations from other message boards, and reported them along with tons of ads. Yuck! There must be dozens of hundreds of sites, all with broken answers to questions about JavaScript and/or medicines.
Google calls these "content farms", and TFA says they're taking steps to remove them from search results.
My favorite part is how searching for something that happens to appear in a Stackoverflow question returns dozens of sites that copy and paste the Stackoverflow content surrounded by ads.
The article mentions that Google recognizes this problem and is deploying some algorithm changes to reduce it.
Wikimedia has a stat that shows about 34% of Windows 7 users visiting the english wikipedia site have a working dualstack IPv6 connection (using tunneling, not native IPv6).
Cite?
And no, you can't own a domain name either. If you don't pay the renewal fee, and anyone can register it after it lapses - so you're just licensing or leasing it.
And you can't own land or a house either. If you don't pay the property tax, the state will take it from you and sell it - so you're just licensing or leasing it.
I don't find that argument compelling for either domain names or real estate.
Lets just hope ISP's don't get lazy and start NAT'ing their customers.
They will, but it won't be from laziness because it'll be a lot of work and a lot of expense, and it won't last long because NAT doesn't scale that well.
It's also possible that injecting people with heroin helps them stay away from drugs.
Interestingly, the Swiss have discovered that injecting long-time heroin addicts with inexpensive prescription heroin is a pretty good way to get them off heroin, and to make their lives manageable until they get off heroin. The program has been so successful that several other countries have adopted it.
If sales go up but piracy does not go down, how does that not show that a pirated track isn't necessarily a lost sale? Did the demand suddenly and coincidentally rise?
This will have no statistically significant effect on piracy
You're right, of course. This will have no significant effect on piracy. It likely will, however, increase sales, once again demonstrating that piracy and sales are only vaguely related, and certainly not in the simple, direct way that people often assume.
We can have the benefits of the placebo effect without rip-offs and mumbo-jumbo.
Unless the rip-offs and mumbo-jumbo are what convince the person that the placebo will work.
You need to check a few more dictionaries.
The definition of speculation is participating in financial transactions with higher levels of risk in order to (hopefully) get greater returns.
There are dividend stocks that also fall into the category of speculation. For example, there are a number of real estate investment companies who pay 15-20% annual dividends... or at least they do until they fail, at which point they don't pay any dividends and their stock becomes worthless.
Speculation vs investment is about the quality and prospects of the security, not whether it pays dividends.
Both are actual money. Any time you own any asset, there is a chance of that asset's value declining. That doesn't make the asset's value unreal. For that matter, cash declines in value, and there's a possibility that it may decline with great rapidity (the US dollar could well do that if some of the holders of our national debt ever decide to call and the government has to resort to massive inflation to cover the debts). Even theoretically "hard" assets like gold can take a dive if demand suddenly declines or supply suddenly increases.
There is no currency or asset that is guaranteed to have future value. That doesn't make them unreal.
Apple doesn't pay dividends, so its stock is owned by speculators, not investors. Its value is based solely on the belief that there will always be another sucker along in a minute who thinks its worth more than you paid. When you stop believing those suckers will appear, then it's time to bail.
Nonsense.
Whether or not a company pays dividends has nothing to do with whether it's an investment or speculation.
There are two ways for companies to return value to their shareholders, and both are equally valid. The more traditional one is to distribute quarterly profits as dividend payments. With that method, assuming constant profits which are entirely distributed to shareholders, the value of the company remains constant, and so does the share price. In fact, for such a company, the stock price is basically expected to be pretty much equivalent to the net present value of the future dividend stream.
Companies that don't pay dividends but still make healthy profits either plow those profits into growth or else simply invest them. Because the profits are retained, the book value of the company increases. The company is actually worth more, but the number of shares remains constant, so the value of a share necessarily increases. Figuring the "proper" price of a non-dividend stock is a little trickier than estimating a future dividend stream and computing NPV, but one very good measure that's often used is the P/E ratio, which is the market value of the company (the share price times the number of shares outstanding) divided by the last year's earnings. In theory, if earnings were to remain constant the value of the company (and the share prices) are expected to double in around P/E years. The average P/E for a US stock over the last century is 14. For tech stocks, which are expected to be growth stocks, P/E ratios of 30+ are not uncommon, but such a ratio means that either the company has very good growth prospects or it's overpriced.
In Apple's case, it's current P/E is 23. That's a very modest premium that indicates an expected growth rate of only about 7.5%. If you believe that Apple is likely to continue growing at a rate of 7.5% annually for the next few years, then it's a good investment. This is absolutely no different from buying a stock that has been paying a dividend of around 8%. The price of such a stock will be based on the assumption of that dividend stream continuing. In BOTH cases, if the growth/income doesn't happen, the investment was a bad one. In the case of Apple, the result will be a declining stock price. In the case of a dividend stock, the result will be a decrease in the quarterly dividends, and a decline in stock price as the market reprices the stock based on the lower expected dividend stream.
Of course, that data suggests that AAPL isn't overvalued compared to the rest of the S&P 500. There's always a possibility the entire market is
Given that Apple's P/E ratio is 23 and Apples (P-$)/E ratio is just over 15, I don't think so. Those are some very healthy numbers, indicating that Apple's market price is very justified on the basis of their earnings plus the assumption of very modest growth.
Also I like being modded +4 Informative while being directly contradicted by fact. Go Slashdot!
LOL. No doubt.
Well, it'll be necessary to prove that the employer actually and knowingly hired the undocumented worker, without performing due diligence. And if the employer was presented with evidence of legal right to work that a reasonable person would consider valid (e.g. e-verify said it's good), then of course the employer wouldn't be convicted and the alien wouldn't get a green card -- and might well be prosecuted for fraud, then deported as an undocumented person.
I think the fraud issue more or less takes care of itself, because by making the report the undocumented person puts himself under scrutiny by the system.
Today, if you make more than minimum wage in a job that does not absolutely require good English skills, you are overpaid. You can be replaced by someone willing to work for 10x what they were getting in Mexico, which is about $1.25 a hour. Yes, our minimum wage is like 50x what they can get in Mexico which means they will die to try to get here. And plenty of them do exactly that.
Which means the solution isn't to build fences or put the Army on the border to point guns at people. The solution is to fine (stiffly) and jail the Americans who employ undocumented workers. When no US citizens will hire them, the Mexicans will have no reason to come here.
No, but it doesn't have to be. To evade something like this would take more money and effort than a minimum wage job picking produce or mowing lawns is worth.
More money and effort than one (less than) minimum wage job is worth... but what about a chunk of each of several hundred such jobs? Coyotes make their money on volume, just like pretty much any other smuggler.
Also, the drug traffickers move a lot of stuff over the border, and they are highly motivated to find a way to get it across. And they're heavily armed, and well-equipped.
Against either threat you don't want to have guards all by themselves, 1/4 mile from the nearest buddy. Against both, it'd just be a good way to get your border patrol agents killed. Given the number of people in Mexico who want to get into the US, and given how badly they want to do it, you need something more like what I described.
Let's do the math.
The US Mexico border is 1,969 miles. Stationing on average 4 guards per mile gives us 7,876 guards. 4 shifts to give us 24x7x365 coverage gives us 31,504 guards.
31,504 guards would give us 4 guards per mile of US Mexico border, 24x7x365.
Assume generously that each guard costs us $150,000 / yr for pay, benefits, equipment, logistics, training, and administration.
BOTTOM LINE: For a price of 4.75 billion USD per year we can have 1 well paid, well equipped guard stationed on average every 1/4 mile along the entire 1,969 miles of the US Mexico border.
You're on the right track, but your numbers are a little low. One guard per 1/4 mile is too far apart for any kind of mutual support, and in many places too far apart to prevent people from easily slipping through the gaps.
To make it work, you need to add fences with sensors. Your 31,000 guards would be sufficient to walk the fences and check for gaps, check alarms, etc., and then you'd need another force of guards, probably another 16,000, set up as alert response teams (ARTs), mounted in trucks.
If I were given the job of designing this, based on what I learned about physical security while manning similar perimeters in the military, I'd put up guard towers every 1/2 mile, with sensor-monitoring stations and spotlights. The guard in the tower would generally use his eyeballs. He'd have a roving buddy, probably mounted on an ATV, to check sensor alerts and get a ground view of "their" half-mile of fence.
The ARTs would be eight-man teams, posted one team per four-mile stretch. They should move from time to time so the intruders can't predict their location. In the event of detection of a crossing in force, too large for a single ART to handle, ARTs from nearby sectors could be called in and there should also be a helicopter-based quick response force, possibly with heavy weapons if the coyotes take all this as a challenge.
All of the above is kind of an average. In areas where the terrain is flat, wildlife is sparse (wildlife causes a lot of false alarms on the fence sensors) and crossing intensity is low, the resources can be spaced a little more widely. In other areas more resources will have to be applied.
Also, you'd need a few teams with ground-penetrating radar equipment who periodically cover the whole length checking for tunnels.
My guess is that all of this would cost around $4B to build, plus an ongoing cost of about $6B per year for people, maintenance and equipment.
Oh, and it still wouldn't be anywhere close to 100% effective.
And, you know, actually give out jail time, instead of just the occasional fine they'll deduct from their profits. So those jobs for illegals dry up, and they stop trying to come in.
And to make sure that the employers get caught, offer green cards to illegals who turn in their bosses. Make receiving the green card contingent upon successful prosecution of the boss, so the worker is motivated to provide all of the evidence required so that prosecution is trivial. If you can turn the workers against the employers and make the employers afraid of the workers, employers will become extremely careful about verifying the immigration status of people they hire.