"Summitting is optional, descending is mandatory."
More than anything else, I think that this is the key. I've climbed a couple of 14,000 foot peaks and a number of 13,000 foot peaks. On the way up, if you know something is wrong, you can turn back. Some people get "summit fever" and ignore the impending problems. I've been guilty of this myself once or twice, and have gotten lucky. Others just don't recognize them because they don't have enough experience. However, intelligent and experienced climbers can often recognize many problems before they become critical, and take the appropriate action.
However, once you've reached the top, there is no "go back". If something goes wrong your only option is to continue on your course until you get back to shelter. And of course, as somebody said earlier, it's also partly simple statistics- The longer you have been up there, the more time there is for something to go wrong. It's bad enough when you are dealing with 14,000 foot peaks, but the starting point of an Everest ascent, if I remember correctly, is around 16,000 feet. And, generally speaking, the number one rule in First Aid when you are above 16,000 feet is "Get below 16,000 feet." That's a lot of time for something to go wrong, and not a whole lot you can do about it if it does.
I'd really like to see some support for Foxmarks or something similar that also supports Firefox. Between 3 different computers and a half dozen or so virtual machines, keeping my bookmarks synced between all of them becomes really important, otherwise I am constantly wondering "Which computer was I using the other day when I found that page about FOO?" If they are working on extension support, than I assume this is coming as well.
This must be some sort of company record for them getting a product out of BETA. They managed to do something in a few months that many higher profile projects have not been able to do in years.
Not if you're wife happens to be Dutch... or rather happens to have a somewhat rational outlook on the value of things. At least, my wife claims it comes from being Dutch and I don't know enough other Dutch people to argue with her.
I once found myself in a conversation with several of her college girlfriends and their husbands about designer purses. (sorry, "handbags") I think the extent of my contribution was a sarcastic "Loiue who?" when one of them was explaining how to identify a counterfeit Luis Vuitton. When one of them asked me why I had never bought one for my wife, I had to explain to them that they may not know my wife as well as they thought, because I would be sleeping on the couch if she ever found out that I spent that much "on a purse". They weren't amused. Instead, she's perfectly happy carrying around the $20 knockoff she bought at a party.
"An Inconvenient Truth" was a good movie, but fortunately for him, he is a politician and not a scientist, so he didn't have to worry about inconvenient facts getting in the way of his story. I give him credit for raising awareness (for which he won his Nobel Peace prize), but I think we're better off leaving him to his evangelizing. Let somebody with a firmer grasp of the actual facts behind the matter propose policy.
As a stock market investor, perhaps... In the stock market, growth is king, and Microsoft doesn't have much room to grow except expanding into new markets, something they have not done well at in recent years. Still, I would bet a fair amount of money that anyone and everyone who is important at Apple would absolutely love to be where Microsoft is now in the next ten years...
My wife can't understand why I do it. Why would anyone else? Unless they already understand the mentality behind it, that kind of explanation is not going to help.
I'm fairly certain that anyone who actually needs phishing detection probably won't even notice that it's gone, or won't know what it means. For example, people like my parents who only have Firefox because some well meaning geek installed it for them a year and a half ago...
Even if I were willing to grant that there are better tools available (doubtful - I would pick Firebug over any C or C++ debugger I've ever used), I would counter that the kinds of mistakes they are most helpful in catching are much harder to make in interpreted languages. Unfortunately, it does take a while to get used to the fact that in JavaScript, occasionally 1 + 1 == 11. (And I still maintain that overloading addition and concatenation in a dynamically typed language is the single worst design decision in the entire language.) But all in all, it's not a terribly hard error to catch, and it's about the only error that I can think of that you are more likely to make in a dynamic language. On the other hand, the errors that you are most likely to spend hours or days chasing down in C++, bad casts or memory errors, go away in a dynamic language. What's more, it can greatly simplify your overall program design by getting rid of a lot of superfluous inheritance structures. In a dynamic language, you can just use inheritance where it's helpful in reducing code duplication, rather than being forced into it because some API FooBar requires whatever you pass in to be an instance of FooPtr.
But Javascript or ECMAScript isn't a 'real' language, or at least not in practice, and that's the issue. Code written in it needs to run on multiple different implementations with no properly accepted standards. Contrast that to C, which yeah, has a number of various flavors, but it only matters that you have a compiler that understands that dialect. The stuff you distribute to users isn't going to explode because of your choice of C.
So close, and yet... So far.
ECMAScript is a 'real' defined language, and JavaScript code that is valid in IE will also be valid in virtually any other browser. Admittedly, the reverse is not quite true. Some browsers have been a bit quicker to add support for newer language features, or are more forgiving of minor syntax errors. You can see the same differences in C compilers from different vendors, too.
No the real weak point in JavaScript development is not the language itself, but rather the DOM, or the "standard library" if you will. This can be incredibly frustrating, of course, but again it is hardly unique to JavaScript. In the early days of the STL, you could find many of the same problems in C++. And even in C, you still run into the same problems today. Is the fact that not all browsers support addEventListener() somehow more problematic than the fact that not all C libraries implement strlcpy or asprintf? Is the slightly different semantics of instantiating an XmlHttpRequest object on different browsers somehow a graver crime than the fact that not every "struct tm" contains a tm_gmtoff?
The language problems that plague JavaScript are inherent in any multi-vendor language. If you can't learn how to deal with them, the solution is to either switch to a single vendor language, like Java and C#, or use an abstraction layer to smooth over the differences, like Qt or glib. Interestingly enough, we see both of these solutions at work on the web as well, where many developers have decided to switch to a single vendor solution like Flash or Silverlight, or started using abstraction layers like Prototype, MochiKit, JQuery, Dojo,...
The problems that we have in the U.S. with gun violence, particularly the widely publicized events, don't really have a lot to do with the amount of gun ownership in the United States - there is a much larger array of factors at work. There are countries with much higher levels of gun ownership than the U.S. with significantly lower amounts of violent crime, and there are also countries with lower levels of gun ownership with similar or higher levels of violent crime.
Most importantly, there is a big difference between the availability of guns, and how widespread that they are. Within the U.S., areas where guns are widespread often do tend to have lower levels of violent crime than areas where they are not. On the other hand, you also have a lot of places where gun ownership is discouraged or otherwise uncommon, but guns are still easy enough to obtain for those who do want them. It's easy to see how that can become a problem.
Societies where people own guns may not be peaceful, but societies without them aren't necessarily peaceful, either. It's worth noting that in many cases studies comparing crime rates between otherwise similar populations with differing availability of firearms have found that while firearm related violent crime does tend to drop in areas with more limited availability, overall violent crime does not. Often, a gun is merely a tool, and a violent individual who is denied it will find another tool in its place. Obviously, there are limits to that. Of course, the gunman at Virginia Tech probably wouldn't have gone on a similar rampage with a combat knife. However, such events are extremely rare, and are dwarfed by the instances of suicide or domestic violence. And even then guns are not the only option for a dedicated individual. Remember that the killers at Columbine intended to start their rampage with homemade explosives, which failed to detonate. Had they gone off, the number of students killed by gunfire would have paled in comparison.
It means very little, particularly in this situation. A companies "Market Cap" is roughly what it would cost for an individual to buy all of the outstanding stock in a company. Even doing that doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot. That's just the cost to assume control of the company. In doing so, you would take on all their assets and liabilities as well, so a rough estimate of how much it would actually cost someone to "buy" a company could roughly be imagined as the total of market cap plus current liabilities minus current assets. (Another famous example of this recently was the Bear Stearns takeover. The original plan would have had JPMorgan taking over Bear Stearns for about $250 million, which might seem like a steal, but the true cost to them will almost certainly be in the billions of dollars given Bear Stearns' shaky financial state at the time.)
In this case, the numbers you would really want are found on their balance sheet, namely their current assets (particularly cash on hand) and liabilities. This information should be readily available to you if you have any half way decent online brokerage account. Some make it available to the general public as well. According to ETrade, they ended Q3 2008 with $2.1 million cash. Their total assets and liabilities at that time were $9.5 million and $12.7 million respectively, although it's hard to tell what form those come in. (Most notably, over half of their total liabilities are lumped together under "Other Liabilities".) So they were well in the hole already even before this ruling...
And no, compiling from svn doesn't count, especially given the number of components / dependencies. I may have had time to dork with that when I was in college, but not now...
While obviously we need people in the community who actually release code every now and then, I think Raster has done more for the community than many people give him credit for. Over the years, he has been an incredible source of ideas that others have run with to do some amazing things. I'll admit that it's been years since I've used any software that he's written, and I'm frustrated to the point of no longer caring that the last stable release of Enlightenment was something like eight years ago. But when you stop and think about how many aspects of a modern linux box are derived directly or indirectly from work that he did so many years ago, it's pretty impressive. (That said, I can't think of many significant contributions he's made more recently.)
So while I would say that it's unlikely that I'll ever run Enlightenment again, I still think it's nice to hear about new developments on that front, as there's a good chance I'll be using something derived from it in a few years...
While I lack the Photoshop skills to pull this off, one could easily rotate that pink line counter clockwise just a couple of degrees, until the peak in 2000 just barely pokes out the top, similar to the way 1982 is currently poking out the bottom. If you do that, then instead of a six year bubble poking out the top between 1997 and 2003, you get a ~6 year dip dropping out of the bottom from the late 1970's to early 1980's, which I think many people alive at the time would agree is reflective of reality. If you look at it that way, 2000 was a bit above the high end of the normal range, before the market corrected and took us right back into the middle of the normal range.
Without seeing any numbers behind their chart (is that actually a statistical regression line? It sure doesn't look like it to me) who's to say which interpretation is right, and which is wrong?
It was United Airlines, and the story was much older then two years. But more importantly, the company DID NOT LOSE A SINGLE PENNY. Companies do not make or lose money when their stock price goes up or down. The only time the stock price ever affects how much money a company has is when the stock is first issued. After that, the only people making or losing money are the people buying and selling the shares. In fact the only people who lost anything at all in that event were shareholders that Freaked Out and sold their shares because the price was dropping. Within 5 trading days, the price had solidly returned to what it was before the drop. Most of that happened within the same day. In fact, if you look right now at a stock chart for UAL, you probably couldn't even tell what day that happened without looking at the associated news events. Most likely the same thing will happen here. If Apple's stock price doesn't recover fully in a few days, maybe it's because people will start to consider the wisdom of holding a lot of stock in a company whose stock price is so closely tied to the fortunes of one man who has known health problems...
So how do you keep these things from happening? Well, maybe you can't, but it's not so hard to keep them from affecting you. You have a couple of options really. 1) Stay out of the stock market entirely. Stick to T-Bills, CD's, real estate, etc. 2) Stick to funds, preferably unmanaged funds such as Index funds. If you are going to go with a managed fund, learn a bit about the fund managers and their trading history. 3) If you decide to buy your own stocks, don't micro manage them. Buy for long term performance, and let them sit.
And if you really feel the urge to (as someone else described it) "treat the stock market like a first person shooter", than you can even try to profit from mistakes like this. You hear a lot about the itchy trigger fingered shareholders who lost several billion dollars when UAL's price dropped from about $12 to $3, but nobody ever talks about the people who made billions when it promptly returned back to it's normal value.
Saying that every one who shorts stock has a short term view is only true if you believe that all companies will increase in value in the long run. Selling SCOX short in 2002 would have been a loss in the short term, but 6 years later, it would have paid off well, assuming you had the patience to stick it out. Of course, for some people, six years is still short term. But even people investing for the long term have to think in terms of months and years. Yes, short selling is commonly used by short term traders to make money off a failing company, but it can also be used by long(er) term investors to make money off companies or sectors that are stable but for whatever reason significantly overvalued. Google is certainly not going to die off any time soon, but a lot of investors thought they were significantly overvalued when their stock was pushing $750, whether they were short term investors or not.
It would royally piss people off to have a quick loading screen, log in and then see "Hold up, still starting up the network". (Just as frustrating as starting a Windows or Mac, getting to the desktop and still waiting while services and programs are loaded).
They wouldn't be the first, unfortunately. The Intel wireless driver on my Dell Inspiron laptop works that way. Somehow they've completely disabled all of Window's built in network configuration and replaced it with a tray app that starts as part of the normal boot / login process. Even when coming back from suspend, I have to wait about two seconds for it to connect back to the network again. When booting from scratch it's even worse. It's actually pretty common for me to have Thunderbird or Firefox (quickly being replaced by Chrome) up and running only to get a connection error because my wireless driver is still initializing.
You're completely right, though, it does royally piss me off...
Does it have any kind of "Smart Playlist" builder? That's the main thing keeping me on iTunes these days - it has about the only sane implementation of a smart playlist that I've found. foobar2k is alright, but I have to rebuild the playlists when I add new music which is a little irritating.
On the other hand, does anyone know of a good way to sync library information between multiple copies of iTunes? The biggest thing that has kept me looking for an iTunes replacement is that I have my music on 3 different computers, and since iTunes stores things like song rating in its binary database rather than in the file's ID3 tag, there's no good way of coping my files from one computer to another and having it keep that information intact, short of designating one computer as the master and periodically dumping the iTunes libraries on the slave and reloading them from the Master's xml file.
It's not, really. The XML file is (from iTunes' perspective) a write only export of the library. The actual library is a binary blob. If you try to make any changes to the XML file, you will find that iTunes promptly overwrites them. The only time iTunes ever actually reads this XML file is if the main database file is lost or corrupted. It will then rebuild the binary database from the XML file, a process that is inordinately long, and doesn't actually preserve all of the data. This is a useful trick if you want to move your library to a new location on disk for example, but the XML file is not very useful for most of the kind of things you might normally want to use it for, such as, say, syncing your song ratings between instances of iTunes on two separate computers.
In many states a recount is automatically done if the difference in popular vote is within a certain percentage (although with the appearance of electronic voting systems in the last few elections, sometimes that recount has just been to have the computer show the numbers again - hence the push for electronic systems that leave a paper trail.) Still, that was one of my biggest thoughts back when everybody (on both sides) was bitching about the recount craziness in 2000. The difference in popular vote for the entire country in 2000 was only 0.5%. I know in some major urban areas as many as 5% of the ballots were not counted because they either failed to show a clear vote for one candidate, or had more than one. Really, when it came down to it, we might as well have had the Supreme Court Chief Justice flip a coin, because that would have been as likely to get us "the will of the people" (whatever that is) as anything else.
Any way that you vote for one elected official from a pool of n+1 candidates will result in the possibility that one candidate will win by a small margin of votes. In fact, if the candidates are closely matched, it is almost guaranteed. The only way to avoid that possibility would be to not have an election at all. It's kind of the whole point of voting on something. It's not like you can pick out 269 people and say "These are the people who made Bush president", as if they could have decided the election no matter what anybody else in the country did. (It's also worth pointing out that the difference in popular vote between the two candidates was also well under 1%.)
I'll agree that the electoral college isn't perfect, but it's also not as broken as a lot of people like to think. Of course, I also can't help but wonder sometimes if we shouldn't go back to the way it originally worked, where the state representatives chose who the electors would vote for. I know it would be a large step backwards in many ways, but it would get people more interested in their local politics, and it would perhaps put some respect back into the election cycle, rather than the media circus/popularity contest which it has become.
I think this has been known for some time. For all the talk you hear about swing voters, the undecided voters rarely decide an election. For many voters, which candidate they will vote for is already a foregone conclusion, and most of the rest make up their minds fairly early on in the process. While there will always be some people who change their minds, the debates and the campaigning aren't really intended to win over voters so much as they are to encourage enough people already on their side that it's worth it to get out and actually vote. In addition to the candidates themselves, there are often a number of other tricks that the parties will use to get more of their voters into the polling places. During the last presidential election, for example, there was a lot of talk about how the gay marriage bills up for vote in a large number of swing states may have affected the outcome of the election.
This election ought to be particularly interesting because both candidates alienated a lot of their parties most faithful voters during the primary season, and there's certain to be some desperate maneuvering (such as McCain's VP pick) to convince people that they still need to get out and vote for their candidate.
The housing bubble, which is undoubtedly the cause of the economic downturn, came about because...
The housing bubble came about because of sheer greed on the part of the people doing the lending. I think Warren Buffet summed it up well in his most recent shareholder letter:
Some major financial institutions have, however, experienced staggering problems because they engaged in the "weakened lending practices" I described in last year's letter. John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, aptly dissected the recent behavior of many lenders: "It is interesting that the industry has invented new ways to lose money when the old ways seemed to work just fine."
I worked in the financial industry at the time, and I don't really think that either party can claim credit or blame, just as neither party can really claim credit or blame for the tech bubble and burst of 1998 - 2001. The fact is, a lot of people had convinced themselves, and others, that property values would never go down, despite that fact that it had happened in the not too distant past, and so a lot of people got themselves into a position that they couldn't afford, at the encouragement of their lenders. I remember shopping for a house in 2004, and I remember our lender trying to convince us that we could afford a house that was almost 50% more than what we ended up buying, despite the fact that making the regular payments on the house we are in now barely leaves us with any in the way of free income. This is simple greed, and doesn't require intervention or blame of either party. Not that I believe either party is above blame in general, but I think that most of the time that you see somebody saying that "The current success/problem with the economy is because of some policy X implemented by party Y, they are fitting data to their preconceived ideas, and not the other way around. I've heard both Bill Clinton and George Bush assigned either credit or blame for the tech bubble, and burst, and so far I haven't heard a single bit of convincing evidence on either side. I think the same is true now...
Slashdot Mirror
More than anything else, I think that this is the key. I've climbed a couple of 14,000 foot peaks and a number of 13,000 foot peaks. On the way up, if you know something is wrong, you can turn back. Some people get "summit fever" and ignore the impending problems. I've been guilty of this myself once or twice, and have gotten lucky. Others just don't recognize them because they don't have enough experience. However, intelligent and experienced climbers can often recognize many problems before they become critical, and take the appropriate action.
However, once you've reached the top, there is no "go back". If something goes wrong your only option is to continue on your course until you get back to shelter. And of course, as somebody said earlier, it's also partly simple statistics- The longer you have been up there, the more time there is for something to go wrong. It's bad enough when you are dealing with 14,000 foot peaks, but the starting point of an Everest ascent, if I remember correctly, is around 16,000 feet. And, generally speaking, the number one rule in First Aid when you are above 16,000 feet is "Get below 16,000 feet." That's a lot of time for something to go wrong, and not a whole lot you can do about it if it does.
I'd really like to see some support for Foxmarks or something similar that also supports Firefox. Between 3 different computers and a half dozen or so virtual machines, keeping my bookmarks synced between all of them becomes really important, otherwise I am constantly wondering "Which computer was I using the other day when I found that page about FOO?" If they are working on extension support, than I assume this is coming as well.
This must be some sort of company record for them getting a product out of BETA. They managed to do something in a few months that many higher profile projects have not been able to do in years.
Not if you're wife happens to be Dutch... or rather happens to have a somewhat rational outlook on the value of things. At least, my wife claims it comes from being Dutch and I don't know enough other Dutch people to argue with her.
I once found myself in a conversation with several of her college girlfriends and their husbands about designer purses. (sorry, "handbags") I think the extent of my contribution was a sarcastic "Loiue who?" when one of them was explaining how to identify a counterfeit Luis Vuitton. When one of them asked me why I had never bought one for my wife, I had to explain to them that they may not know my wife as well as they thought, because I would be sleeping on the couch if she ever found out that I spent that much "on a purse". They weren't amused. Instead, she's perfectly happy carrying around the $20 knockoff she bought at a party.
"An Inconvenient Truth" was a good movie, but fortunately for him, he is a politician and not a scientist, so he didn't have to worry about inconvenient facts getting in the way of his story. I give him credit for raising awareness (for which he won his Nobel Peace prize), but I think we're better off leaving him to his evangelizing. Let somebody with a firmer grasp of the actual facts behind the matter propose policy.
*twitch*... wouldn't have! wouldn't have!
Sorry, not sure what just came over me there...
As a stock market investor, perhaps... In the stock market, growth is king, and Microsoft doesn't have much room to grow except expanding into new markets, something they have not done well at in recent years. Still, I would bet a fair amount of money that anyone and everyone who is important at Apple would absolutely love to be where Microsoft is now in the next ten years...
My wife can't understand why I do it. Why would anyone else? Unless they already understand the mentality behind it, that kind of explanation is not going to help.
I'm fairly certain that anyone who actually needs phishing detection probably won't even notice that it's gone, or won't know what it means. For example, people like my parents who only have Firefox because some well meaning geek installed it for them a year and a half ago...
Even if I were willing to grant that there are better tools available (doubtful - I would pick Firebug over any C or C++ debugger I've ever used), I would counter that the kinds of mistakes they are most helpful in catching are much harder to make in interpreted languages. Unfortunately, it does take a while to get used to the fact that in JavaScript, occasionally 1 + 1 == 11. (And I still maintain that overloading addition and concatenation in a dynamically typed language is the single worst design decision in the entire language.) But all in all, it's not a terribly hard error to catch, and it's about the only error that I can think of that you are more likely to make in a dynamic language. On the other hand, the errors that you are most likely to spend hours or days chasing down in C++, bad casts or memory errors, go away in a dynamic language. What's more, it can greatly simplify your overall program design by getting rid of a lot of superfluous inheritance structures. In a dynamic language, you can just use inheritance where it's helpful in reducing code duplication, rather than being forced into it because some API FooBar requires whatever you pass in to be an instance of FooPtr.
So close, and yet... So far.
ECMAScript is a 'real' defined language, and JavaScript code that is valid in IE will also be valid in virtually any other browser. Admittedly, the reverse is not quite true. Some browsers have been a bit quicker to add support for newer language features, or are more forgiving of minor syntax errors. You can see the same differences in C compilers from different vendors, too.
No the real weak point in JavaScript development is not the language itself, but rather the DOM, or the "standard library" if you will. This can be incredibly frustrating, of course, but again it is hardly unique to JavaScript. In the early days of the STL, you could find many of the same problems in C++. And even in C, you still run into the same problems today. Is the fact that not all browsers support addEventListener() somehow more problematic than the fact that not all C libraries implement strlcpy or asprintf? Is the slightly different semantics of instantiating an XmlHttpRequest object on different browsers somehow a graver crime than the fact that not every "struct tm" contains a tm_gmtoff?
The language problems that plague JavaScript are inherent in any multi-vendor language. If you can't learn how to deal with them, the solution is to either switch to a single vendor language, like Java and C#, or use an abstraction layer to smooth over the differences, like Qt or glib. Interestingly enough, we see both of these solutions at work on the web as well, where many developers have decided to switch to a single vendor solution like Flash or Silverlight, or started using abstraction layers like Prototype, MochiKit, JQuery, Dojo, ...
The problems that we have in the U.S. with gun violence, particularly the widely publicized events, don't really have a lot to do with the amount of gun ownership in the United States - there is a much larger array of factors at work. There are countries with much higher levels of gun ownership than the U.S. with significantly lower amounts of violent crime, and there are also countries with lower levels of gun ownership with similar or higher levels of violent crime.
Most importantly, there is a big difference between the availability of guns, and how widespread that they are. Within the U.S., areas where guns are widespread often do tend to have lower levels of violent crime than areas where they are not. On the other hand, you also have a lot of places where gun ownership is discouraged or otherwise uncommon, but guns are still easy enough to obtain for those who do want them. It's easy to see how that can become a problem.
Societies where people own guns may not be peaceful, but societies without them aren't necessarily peaceful, either. It's worth noting that in many cases studies comparing crime rates between otherwise similar populations with differing availability of firearms have found that while firearm related violent crime does tend to drop in areas with more limited availability, overall violent crime does not. Often, a gun is merely a tool, and a violent individual who is denied it will find another tool in its place. Obviously, there are limits to that. Of course, the gunman at Virginia Tech probably wouldn't have gone on a similar rampage with a combat knife. However, such events are extremely rare, and are dwarfed by the instances of suicide or domestic violence. And even then guns are not the only option for a dedicated individual. Remember that the killers at Columbine intended to start their rampage with homemade explosives, which failed to detonate. Had they gone off, the number of students killed by gunfire would have paled in comparison.
It means very little, particularly in this situation. A companies "Market Cap" is roughly what it would cost for an individual to buy all of the outstanding stock in a company. Even doing that doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot. That's just the cost to assume control of the company. In doing so, you would take on all their assets and liabilities as well, so a rough estimate of how much it would actually cost someone to "buy" a company could roughly be imagined as the total of market cap plus current liabilities minus current assets. (Another famous example of this recently was the Bear Stearns takeover. The original plan would have had JPMorgan taking over Bear Stearns for about $250 million, which might seem like a steal, but the true cost to them will almost certainly be in the billions of dollars given Bear Stearns' shaky financial state at the time.)
In this case, the numbers you would really want are found on their balance sheet, namely their current assets (particularly cash on hand) and liabilities. This information should be readily available to you if you have any half way decent online brokerage account. Some make it available to the general public as well. According to ETrade, they ended Q3 2008 with $2.1 million cash. Their total assets and liabilities at that time were $9.5 million and $12.7 million respectively, although it's hard to tell what form those come in. (Most notably, over half of their total liabilities are lumped together under "Other Liabilities".) So they were well in the hole already even before this ruling...
Now when can I run it on my desktop?
And no, compiling from svn doesn't count, especially given the number of components / dependencies. I may have had time to dork with that when I was in college, but not now...
While obviously we need people in the community who actually release code every now and then, I think Raster has done more for the community than many people give him credit for. Over the years, he has been an incredible source of ideas that others have run with to do some amazing things. I'll admit that it's been years since I've used any software that he's written, and I'm frustrated to the point of no longer caring that the last stable release of Enlightenment was something like eight years ago. But when you stop and think about how many aspects of a modern linux box are derived directly or indirectly from work that he did so many years ago, it's pretty impressive. (That said, I can't think of many significant contributions he's made more recently.)
So while I would say that it's unlikely that I'll ever run Enlightenment again, I still think it's nice to hear about new developments on that front, as there's a good chance I'll be using something derived from it in a few years...
While I lack the Photoshop skills to pull this off, one could easily rotate that pink line counter clockwise just a couple of degrees, until the peak in 2000 just barely pokes out the top, similar to the way 1982 is currently poking out the bottom. If you do that, then instead of a six year bubble poking out the top between 1997 and 2003, you get a ~6 year dip dropping out of the bottom from the late 1970's to early 1980's, which I think many people alive at the time would agree is reflective of reality. If you look at it that way, 2000 was a bit above the high end of the normal range, before the market corrected and took us right back into the middle of the normal range.
Without seeing any numbers behind their chart (is that actually a statistical regression line? It sure doesn't look like it to me) who's to say which interpretation is right, and which is wrong?
It was United Airlines, and the story was much older then two years. But more importantly, the company DID NOT LOSE A SINGLE PENNY. Companies do not make or lose money when their stock price goes up or down. The only time the stock price ever affects how much money a company has is when the stock is first issued. After that, the only people making or losing money are the people buying and selling the shares.
In fact the only people who lost anything at all in that event were shareholders that Freaked Out and sold their shares because the price was dropping. Within 5 trading days, the price had solidly returned to what it was before the drop. Most of that happened within the same day. In fact, if you look right now at a stock chart for UAL, you probably couldn't even tell what day that happened without looking at the associated news events. Most likely the same thing will happen here. If Apple's stock price doesn't recover fully in a few days, maybe it's because people will start to consider the wisdom of holding a lot of stock in a company whose stock price is so closely tied to the fortunes of one man who has known health problems...
So how do you keep these things from happening? Well, maybe you can't, but it's not so hard to keep them from affecting you. You have a couple of options really.
1) Stay out of the stock market entirely. Stick to T-Bills, CD's, real estate, etc.
2) Stick to funds, preferably unmanaged funds such as Index funds. If you are going to go with a managed fund, learn a bit about the fund managers and their trading history.
3) If you decide to buy your own stocks, don't micro manage them. Buy for long term performance, and let them sit.
And if you really feel the urge to (as someone else described it) "treat the stock market like a first person shooter", than you can even try to profit from mistakes like this. You hear a lot about the itchy trigger fingered shareholders who lost several billion dollars when UAL's price dropped from about $12 to $3, but nobody ever talks about the people who made billions when it promptly returned back to it's normal value.
It seems to me that one would have to in order to take that job.
Saying that every one who shorts stock has a short term view is only true if you believe that all companies will increase in value in the long run. Selling SCOX short in 2002 would have been a loss in the short term, but 6 years later, it would have paid off well, assuming you had the patience to stick it out. Of course, for some people, six years is still short term. But even people investing for the long term have to think in terms of months and years. Yes, short selling is commonly used by short term traders to make money off a failing company, but it can also be used by long(er) term investors to make money off companies or sectors that are stable but for whatever reason significantly overvalued. Google is certainly not going to die off any time soon, but a lot of investors thought they were significantly overvalued when their stock was pushing $750, whether they were short term investors or not.
They wouldn't be the first, unfortunately. The Intel wireless driver on my Dell Inspiron laptop works that way. Somehow they've completely disabled all of Window's built in network configuration and replaced it with a tray app that starts as part of the normal boot / login process. Even when coming back from suspend, I have to wait about two seconds for it to connect back to the network again. When booting from scratch it's even worse. It's actually pretty common for me to have Thunderbird or Firefox (quickly being replaced by Chrome) up and running only to get a connection error because my wireless driver is still initializing.
You're completely right, though, it does royally piss me off...
Does it have any kind of "Smart Playlist" builder? That's the main thing keeping me on iTunes these days - it has about the only sane implementation of a smart playlist that I've found. foobar2k is alright, but I have to rebuild the playlists when I add new music which is a little irritating.
On the other hand, does anyone know of a good way to sync library information between multiple copies of iTunes? The biggest thing that has kept me looking for an iTunes replacement is that I have my music on 3 different computers, and since iTunes stores things like song rating in its binary database rather than in the file's ID3 tag, there's no good way of coping my files from one computer to another and having it keep that information intact, short of designating one computer as the master and periodically dumping the iTunes libraries on the slave and reloading them from the Master's xml file.
It's not, really. The XML file is (from iTunes' perspective) a write only export of the library. The actual library is a binary blob. If you try to make any changes to the XML file, you will find that iTunes promptly overwrites them. The only time iTunes ever actually reads this XML file is if the main database file is lost or corrupted. It will then rebuild the binary database from the XML file, a process that is inordinately long, and doesn't actually preserve all of the data. This is a useful trick if you want to move your library to a new location on disk for example, but the XML file is not very useful for most of the kind of things you might normally want to use it for, such as, say, syncing your song ratings between instances of iTunes on two separate computers.
In many states a recount is automatically done if the difference in popular vote is within a certain percentage (although with the appearance of electronic voting systems in the last few elections, sometimes that recount has just been to have the computer show the numbers again - hence the push for electronic systems that leave a paper trail.) Still, that was one of my biggest thoughts back when everybody (on both sides) was bitching about the recount craziness in 2000. The difference in popular vote for the entire country in 2000 was only 0.5%. I know in some major urban areas as many as 5% of the ballots were not counted because they either failed to show a clear vote for one candidate, or had more than one. Really, when it came down to it, we might as well have had the Supreme Court Chief Justice flip a coin, because that would have been as likely to get us "the will of the people" (whatever that is) as anything else.
Any way that you vote for one elected official from a pool of n+1 candidates will result in the possibility that one candidate will win by a small margin of votes. In fact, if the candidates are closely matched, it is almost guaranteed. The only way to avoid that possibility would be to not have an election at all. It's kind of the whole point of voting on something. It's not like you can pick out 269 people and say "These are the people who made Bush president", as if they could have decided the election no matter what anybody else in the country did. (It's also worth pointing out that the difference in popular vote between the two candidates was also well under 1%.)
I'll agree that the electoral college isn't perfect, but it's also not as broken as a lot of people like to think. Of course, I also can't help but wonder sometimes if we shouldn't go back to the way it originally worked, where the state representatives chose who the electors would vote for. I know it would be a large step backwards in many ways, but it would get people more interested in their local politics, and it would perhaps put some respect back into the election cycle, rather than the media circus/popularity contest which it has become.
I think this has been known for some time. For all the talk you hear about swing voters, the undecided voters rarely decide an election. For many voters, which candidate they will vote for is already a foregone conclusion, and most of the rest make up their minds fairly early on in the process. While there will always be some people who change their minds, the debates and the campaigning aren't really intended to win over voters so much as they are to encourage enough people already on their side that it's worth it to get out and actually vote. In addition to the candidates themselves, there are often a number of other tricks that the parties will use to get more of their voters into the polling places. During the last presidential election, for example, there was a lot of talk about how the gay marriage bills up for vote in a large number of swing states may have affected the outcome of the election.
This election ought to be particularly interesting because both candidates alienated a lot of their parties most faithful voters during the primary season, and there's certain to be some desperate maneuvering (such as McCain's VP pick) to convince people that they still need to get out and vote for their candidate.
The housing bubble came about because of sheer greed on the part of the people doing the lending. I think Warren Buffet summed it up well in his most recent shareholder letter:
I worked in the financial industry at the time, and I don't really think that either party can claim credit or blame, just as neither party can really claim credit or blame for the tech bubble and burst of 1998 - 2001. The fact is, a lot of people had convinced themselves, and others, that property values would never go down, despite that fact that it had happened in the not too distant past, and so a lot of people got themselves into a position that they couldn't afford, at the encouragement of their lenders. I remember shopping for a house in 2004, and I remember our lender trying to convince us that we could afford a house that was almost 50% more than what we ended up buying, despite the fact that making the regular payments on the house we are in now barely leaves us with any in the way of free income. This is simple greed, and doesn't require intervention or blame of either party. Not that I believe either party is above blame in general, but I think that most of the time that you see somebody saying that "The current success/problem with the economy is because of some policy X implemented by party Y, they are fitting data to their preconceived ideas, and not the other way around. I've heard both Bill Clinton and George Bush assigned either credit or blame for the tech bubble, and burst, and so far I haven't heard a single bit of convincing evidence on either side. I think the same is true now...