If the source IS available under the GPL, one can correct it and provide a much more capable version, no?
Given my experience with past "open source exchange replacements" (e.g. OpenExchange, HP OpenMail) you need an MAPI driver as a plugin to Outlook to enable the advanced features, and that part usually is not open source.
The decent market data services all want thousands of dollars per month for their streams so that basically precludes anyone but the trading professionals working for financial services companies or high net worth individuals (HNWI), who have enough at stake to justify the $20,000 per month Bloomberg Terminal, from doing anything more than dabbling. The free services are delayed 20 minutes or more and/or have limits on queries per unit time (usually both and always the query limit) etc that make them unsuited for automated analysis (probably what the companies want, since they are trying to sell you up to their professional streaming services).
There are stages between these two extremes. E*trade (UK), for instance, provide streaming access to live data for their customers for £8/month. OK, so I suspect the data is slightly delayed and possibly not the same depth as you get on these bloomberg terminals (I've never come across them before, so I don't know what's provided there), but it is live market data on a per-sale basis for all UK & US publically traded equities, which seems like it ought to be adequate to me.
What we have had has not been proper regulation, but it has not been "laissez-faire" either because the politicians have been butting in and urging the big boys on Wall Street to make money available to people who couldn't afford their houses!
{{citation needed}}
AFAIK, the banks have been lending money on sub-prime mortgages because they thought they could make money on it, not because of any government intervention.
I mean, think about it. It's no coincidence that all of these huge firms which have lasted decades upon decades and have withstood countless trials, including the Great Depression, are now all failing at the same time right now. Under a "laissez-faire" market, that would be one big coincidence.
You seem to be under the illusion that the stock market is essentially random and that changes in the prices of a stock are independent of each other. That's fair enough; a lot of people spend a lot of their lives under this illusion. But it isn't true. Even (perhaps especially) in absence of any kind of government intervention, changes in the market are correlated, particularly falls. One company failing quite frequently effects the viability of others, particularly if they were (a) interdependent financially (which many banks are) or (b) dealing in essentially the same market and therefore associated in the minds of traders.
So, no, it clearly isn't coincidence that so many companies are in trouble at the same time. But that's not evidence of government intervention. It's evidence of the failure of a business model and the serious impact that has on all businesses who were either practicing that business model (the banks) or investing heavily in businesses who practiced it (AIG).
Why should the public be forced to take on the risk these same asshats assumed solely because the asshats screamed "free markets" to get the regulations that would have protected the public voided and the agencies charged with oversight gutted? You didn't see AIG investors protesting the profits they were getting when times where better so why protest when they go belly up? It is corporate welfare pure and simple.
Because, like it or not, the risk is a public one. If AIG goes bankrupt, sure, its shareholders lose. But, in many cases, its customers lose even more. And there are a _lot_ of those customers. I believe that they underwrite approximately 50% of insurance policies in the USA. This deal is in the interests of anyone who has such a policy.
Also, the state taking on this company is actually a good deal for the public. Listen: the government has loaned them $85,000 million, right? And in return it has acquired an 80% stake in the company. A company with assets worth $1,050,000 million. So that stake is (basically) worth nearly ten times as much as the loan (at extortionate interest) that it was given in exchange for.
Hell, I'd love the ability to make a deal like that. Stop complaining. Your government just made itself richer at the expense of one company, while making _everyone_ grateful that they did so. It really was a win-win deal.
It is bad but unfortunately quite common to see bills made up of a collection of unrelated compromises in order to get enough people to vote for it. What baffles me is that you say it doesn't happen in Europe (or at least not as much). Please, what is your secret to pulling that off?
I'm still not quite sure I understand why it happens over there and not here (I'm in the UK), because everything you've said applies equally to us, but...
It could be a procedural issue. I get the feeling that adding an amendment to a bill is fairly easy under the US system; over here each amendment proposed is first considered by the Speaker of the house in which it is proposed (who will ignore amendments he considers would be a waste of time) and then debated and voted on in both houses before it is incorporated into the bill. Because each bill only has a limited time to be debated, there is a fairly low limit on the number of amendments that can plausibly be incorporated; typically only a few (at most 20 or so) can be considered in each debate, and there are only three debates (and one committee stages, which can also make a small number of amendments) in each house before the bill is enacted. A UK bill typically receives a total of about 100 amendments, not all of which are incorporated; the impression I have is that under the US system the number of amendments is often substantially higher than that.
That's what we call a simplifying assumption. It's probably correct to within an order of magnitude, which translates to about 2-3 Kelvin in the final answer.
You can believe as much as you wish on a "steady state" cosmology, for instance, but anyone with a microwave antenna and a spectrum analyzer will prove you wrong.
Tell that to Fred Hoyle. He continued proposing modifications to steady state theory to make it fit the evidence gathered until the '90s.
And where do you intend to get the energy to split the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen?
Pull it from the alternator. There's an excess of energy in the system during deceleration that can be usefully extracted (somewhat like regenerative braking on an electric vehicle), and the efficiency of such a system is good enough that it's not a significant drain during acceleration.
Does a 2007 Ford Transit, UK spec count? How about an Audi A2? Period. Fullstop. Rationalize all you like, but they still stink and are still loud, even if they may be cleaner in the science lab.
Dunno. My 97 Citroen XM seems pretty good to me. No worse, really, than my 2002 Ford Ka (petrol, and making reasonable adjustments for the substantial difference in sizes between the two vehicles). Better than the 96 (petrol) Ford Scorpio it replaced. Certainly a lot better than my 94 (diesel) Transit was at the same age.
Not sure what the problem you're seeing is, but I don't think it's universal. Maybe you're just particularly sensitive to something that's in the emissions of diesel engines?
Everybody knows that speed zones (i.e. traps) are designed for revenue enhancement, not safety.
And if they don't know, here's the official UK government figures to convince them: speed cameras installed at road works on motorways increase the accident rate by (depending on the type of camera in use) up to 55%.
There is a huge difference in safety dropping from 75 to 55 mph. First of all there is the difference in kenetic energy ke = mv^2. So for a 1000 kg car traveling at 24.5872 meters / second (55 mph) it has 604,530.404 joules of Kenetic energy where at 33.52800 meters per second (75 mph) it has 1,124,126.78 joules.
And this is relevant because...?
Well, actually, no, I'll answer that for you... it isn't relevant. Unless you're talking about situations where a car is being driven directly into an immovable object, its kinetic energy is not the most important factor in determining the result of the collision.
Going 75 you have nearly twice the kenetic energy meaning it is twice as hard to stop if something goes wrong and do twice the damage if you hit something.
No, not really. The relevant factor in how hard it is to stop is actually momentum, not kinetic energy, as your brakes are actually able to pull more energy out of your vehicle when you are travelling faster (i.e., they produce a force that is roughly constant, not one that is smaller at high speeds as a constant-energy braking system would). See above regarding damage: the kinetic energy of the vehicle is only relevant if it is all released, which only happens in head-on collisions with large, heavy objects. In pedestrian-threatening situations (which is what we're concerned about here), the impulse applied to the pedestrian is what's relevant, which increases with velocity, not velocity squared. And the distinction is irrelevant, anyway: the pedestrian's dead at 55mph. He's not going to be deader at 75.
Once you loose control of a car traveling a hundred feet can happen in the blink of an eye (less than a second).
1. I don't generally spend anything like a second blinking, and I don't think most other people do either. 2. OK, so it's less than a second at 75mph. It's still less than 1.2 seconds at 55mph; is that really so much better?
Was that the case where the cops were told they were apprehending a suicide bomber?
They weren't _told_ anything. They came to the conclusion, all by themselves, that because (a) he had dark skin and (b) was wearing a bulky jacket on a warm day he clearly _must_ be a terrorist.
I'm actually working on something like that now in my lab. I just want to finish my perpetual motion machine first, as it is a necessary component of my time-travel device.
Hmm. Yes. I think a time-travel device would actually make unbreakable DRM possible. It would only require exchange of information with the future -- essentially, the key to decode the DRM would be kept in the future, but the future would refuse to send a copy back if it detected that the copy it was about to send back had leaked at any point in the time between when it is going to send it and the time in which the key is hosted.
Is anyone else concerned about the 18% of healthcare IT respondents who DON'T think that medical records are at risk? I mean seriously - that's nearly a fifth of the people questioned in charge of IT for the healthcare industry who think that their systems are actually invulnerable to attack. So far as I'm concerned, that kind of attitude is the biggest threat to IT security there is.
Based on my experience with medical institutions, it wouldn't surprise me to find that 18% of them were so conservative that they hadn't yet started keeping medical records on networked computer systems...
Slashdot Mirror
Xandros with Scalix also works as a drop in
Except to get full features on Outlook, you need their MAPI Connector, which requires you to pay for "premium user" licenses.
If the source IS available under the GPL, one can correct it and provide a much more capable version, no?
Given my experience with past "open source exchange replacements" (e.g. OpenExchange, HP OpenMail) you need an MAPI driver as a plugin to Outlook to enable the advanced features, and that part usually is not open source.
Where is your intergrity, Slashdot?
Didn't you know? They traded it for cats.
Go for it. So far it hasn't appeared outside of this page. I'm going to do everything I can to spread this wonderful phrase.
A cat is no trade for integrity
No, but it's probably more fun.
Plus, my UID is a good bit lower, so my opinion is inherently more valuable. Checkmate.
No UID under 2^18 is low.
Sorry.
Come on; if Google were going to get into the business of absorbing things, surely we'd be seeing Google Shamwow! or something along those lines.
Google Black Hole (Beta), obviously. Bet you didn't know they'd been pouring money into the LHC.
The decent market data services all want thousands of dollars per month for their streams so that basically precludes anyone but the trading professionals working for financial services companies or high net worth individuals (HNWI), who have enough at stake to justify the $20,000 per month Bloomberg Terminal, from doing anything more than dabbling. The free services are delayed 20 minutes or more and/or have limits on queries per unit time (usually both and always the query limit) etc that make them unsuited for automated analysis (probably what the companies want, since they are trying to sell you up to their professional streaming services).
There are stages between these two extremes. E*trade (UK), for instance, provide streaming access to live data for their customers for £8/month. OK, so I suspect the data is slightly delayed and possibly not the same depth as you get on these bloomberg terminals (I've never come across them before, so I don't know what's provided there), but it is live market data on a per-sale basis for all UK & US publically traded equities, which seems like it ought to be adequate to me.
market data is expensive
Or at least it is for the first minute or two. After that it starts getting cheap quite quickly...
What we have had has not been proper regulation, but it has not been "laissez-faire" either because the politicians have been butting in and urging the big boys on Wall Street to make money available to people who couldn't afford their houses!
{{citation needed}}
AFAIK, the banks have been lending money on sub-prime mortgages because they thought they could make money on it, not because of any government intervention.
I mean, think about it. It's no coincidence that all of these huge firms which have lasted decades upon decades and have withstood countless trials, including the Great Depression, are now all failing at the same time right now. Under a "laissez-faire" market, that would be one big coincidence.
You seem to be under the illusion that the stock market is essentially random and that changes in the prices of a stock are independent of each other. That's fair enough; a lot of people spend a lot of their lives under this illusion. But it isn't true. Even (perhaps especially) in absence of any kind of government intervention, changes in the market are correlated, particularly falls. One company failing quite frequently effects the viability of others, particularly if they were (a) interdependent financially (which many banks are) or (b) dealing in essentially the same market and therefore associated in the minds of traders.
So, no, it clearly isn't coincidence that so many companies are in trouble at the same time. But that's not evidence of government intervention. It's evidence of the failure of a business model and the serious impact that has on all businesses who were either practicing that business model (the banks) or investing heavily in businesses who practiced it (AIG).
Why should the public be forced to take on the risk these same asshats assumed solely because the asshats screamed "free markets" to get the regulations that would have protected the public voided and the agencies charged with oversight gutted? You didn't see AIG investors protesting the profits they were getting when times where better so why protest when they go belly up? It is corporate welfare pure and simple.
Because, like it or not, the risk is a public one. If AIG goes bankrupt, sure, its shareholders lose. But, in many cases, its customers lose even more. And there are a _lot_ of those customers. I believe that they underwrite approximately 50% of insurance policies in the USA. This deal is in the interests of anyone who has such a policy.
Also, the state taking on this company is actually a good deal for the public. Listen: the government has loaned them $85,000 million, right? And in return it has acquired an 80% stake in the company. A company with assets worth $1,050,000 million. So that stake is (basically) worth nearly ten times as much as the loan (at extortionate interest) that it was given in exchange for.
Hell, I'd love the ability to make a deal like that. Stop complaining. Your government just made itself richer at the expense of one company, while making _everyone_ grateful that they did so. It really was a win-win deal.
It is bad but unfortunately quite common to see bills made up of a collection of unrelated compromises in order to get enough people to vote for it. What baffles me is that you say it doesn't happen in Europe (or at least not as much). Please, what is your secret to pulling that off?
I'm still not quite sure I understand why it happens over there and not here (I'm in the UK), because everything you've said applies equally to us, but...
It could be a procedural issue. I get the feeling that adding an amendment to a bill is fairly easy under the US system; over here each amendment proposed is first considered by the Speaker of the house in which it is proposed (who will ignore amendments he considers would be a waste of time) and then debated and voted on in both houses before it is incorporated into the bill. Because each bill only has a limited time to be debated, there is a fairly low limit on the number of amendments that can plausibly be incorporated; typically only a few (at most 20 or so) can be considered in each debate, and there are only three debates (and one committee stages, which can also make a small number of amendments) in each house before the bill is enacted. A UK bill typically receives a total of about 100 amendments, not all of which are incorporated; the impression I have is that under the US system the number of amendments is often substantially higher than that.
That's what we call a simplifying assumption. It's probably correct to within an order of magnitude, which translates to about 2-3 Kelvin in the final answer.
Now, if you were to ask what the surface area of a VW-Beetle-equivalent of graphene is ...
About half the size of Delaware.
You can believe as much as you wish on a "steady state" cosmology, for instance, but anyone with a microwave antenna and a spectrum analyzer will prove you wrong.
Tell that to Fred Hoyle. He continued proposing modifications to steady state theory to make it fit the evidence gathered until the '90s.
And where do you intend to get the energy to split the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen?
Pull it from the alternator. There's an excess of energy in the system during deceleration that can be usefully extracted (somewhat like regenerative braking on an electric vehicle), and the efficiency of such a system is good enough that it's not a significant drain during acceleration.
Does a 2007 Ford Transit, UK spec count? How about an Audi A2? Period. Fullstop. Rationalize all you like, but they still stink and are still loud, even if they may be cleaner in the science lab.
Dunno. My 97 Citroen XM seems pretty good to me. No worse, really, than my 2002 Ford Ka (petrol, and making reasonable adjustments for the substantial difference in sizes between the two vehicles). Better than the 96 (petrol) Ford Scorpio it replaced. Certainly a lot better than my 94 (diesel) Transit was at the same age.
Not sure what the problem you're seeing is, but I don't think it's universal. Maybe you're just particularly sensitive to something that's in the emissions of diesel engines?
I drive a diesel Renault Scenic. Not the most powerful beast on the planet but on long runs I can exceed 70mpg.
For the Americans reading this, 70mpg UK == about 60mpg US. It's easy to forget that we mean something different by 'gallon'.
Everybody knows that speed zones (i.e. traps) are designed for revenue enhancement, not safety.
And if they don't know, here's the official UK government figures to convince them: speed cameras installed at road works on motorways increase the accident rate by (depending on the type of camera in use) up to 55%.
Brilliant way of improving safety, that.
There is a huge difference in safety dropping from 75 to 55 mph. First of all there is the difference in kenetic energy ke = mv^2. So for a 1000 kg car traveling at 24.5872 meters / second (55 mph) it has 604,530.404 joules of Kenetic energy where at 33.52800 meters per second (75 mph) it has 1,124,126.78 joules.
And this is relevant because...?
Well, actually, no, I'll answer that for you... it isn't relevant. Unless you're talking about situations where a car is being driven directly into an immovable object, its kinetic energy is not the most important factor in determining the result of the collision.
Going 75 you have nearly twice the kenetic energy meaning it is twice as hard to stop if something goes wrong and do twice the damage if you hit something.
No, not really. The relevant factor in how hard it is to stop is actually momentum, not kinetic energy, as your brakes are actually able to pull more energy out of your vehicle when you are travelling faster (i.e., they produce a force that is roughly constant, not one that is smaller at high speeds as a constant-energy braking system would). See above regarding damage: the kinetic energy of the vehicle is only relevant if it is all released, which only happens in head-on collisions with large, heavy objects. In pedestrian-threatening situations (which is what we're concerned about here), the impulse applied to the pedestrian is what's relevant, which increases with velocity, not velocity squared. And the distinction is irrelevant, anyway: the pedestrian's dead at 55mph. He's not going to be deader at 75.
Once you loose control of a car traveling a hundred feet can happen in the blink of an eye (less than a second).
1. I don't generally spend anything like a second blinking, and I don't think most other people do either.
2. OK, so it's less than a second at 75mph. It's still less than 1.2 seconds at 55mph; is that really so much better?
I'm detecting a serious lack of gravitas in this thread.
If we poured enough energy into Jupiter (say, terrawatt lasers),
I don't suspect terawatts would achieve an awful lot. Hold on:
Surface area: 6e10 km^2 = 6e16 m^2
Applying Stefan-Boltzmann law:
P / 6e16 = 6e-8 T^4
(where T is the temperature difference that will cause that much additional power to be radiated by a black body of Jupiter's size)
rearranging for T:
T = (P / 3.6e8) ^ 1/4
So, say we can put in 100TW (=1e14 W), we'll see a rise in temperature on Jupiter's surface of about 13 Kelvin.
I doubt that'd achieve an awful lot. :)
Was that the case where the cops were told they were apprehending a suicide bomber?
They weren't _told_ anything. They came to the conclusion, all by themselves, that because (a) he had dark skin and (b) was wearing a bulky jacket on a warm day he clearly _must_ be a terrorist.
unless a DRM that can't be broken is invented
I'm actually working on something like that now in my lab. I just want to finish my perpetual motion machine first, as it is a necessary component of my time-travel device.
Hmm. Yes. I think a time-travel device would actually make unbreakable DRM possible. It would only require exchange of information with the future -- essentially, the key to decode the DRM would be kept in the future, but the future would refuse to send a copy back if it detected that the copy it was about to send back had leaked at any point in the time between when it is going to send it and the time in which the key is hosted.
Yikes. :)
Is anyone else concerned about the 18% of healthcare IT respondents who DON'T think that medical records are at risk? I mean seriously - that's nearly a fifth of the people questioned in charge of IT for the healthcare industry who think that their systems are actually invulnerable to attack. So far as I'm concerned, that kind of attitude is the biggest threat to IT security there is.
Based on my experience with medical institutions, it wouldn't surprise me to find that 18% of them were so conservative that they hadn't yet started keeping medical records on networked computer systems...