Yes that seems fair since the pound has declined by 29% against the Euro over the past year... except... that it's actually risen by 10%... but hey why let facts get in the way of some price gouging.
We should get a discount as they don't have to translate all the EULAs into foreign languages!
And to the idiots advocating Britain joining the Euro... do you live in a cave? There's a strong possibility that the Euro will disintegrate imminently.
The diamond market is controlled by a cartel comprising de Beers and the Russians. They carefully control the supply and manipulate the price and sell through closed organisations of dealerships. It's also a one-way market. You can only sell diamonds at a fraction of their supposed market rate and there is a public brainwashing campaign to persuade people (well women mainly) to keep diamonds for ever. It's all a con.
So what threatens this cosy state of affairs? Other African countries flooding the market with their equally good diamonds. Therefore they must be demonised. Since their diamonds cannot be criticised on quality the concept of "conflict diamonds" was invented. On the other hand dictators rich from oil-revenues are most welcome to spend their money on weaponry.
The difference is that they were signed off as AAA by the appropriate ratings agencies. Of course the banks were gaming the system and the agencies were clueless but they really were AAA bonds. Since the mugs who bought them were often bailed out (at par!) by the even more US clueless government you could argue that in a meta-sense they really were AAA quality.
I've read FIASCO and it's an amusing memoir. However I think it's too simplistic to characterise the banks' behaviour as fraud. Unfortunately many corporate treasurers and other financial decision-makers were extremely ill-equipped to make derivatives transactions. Of course the banks made money on the deals but the counterparties were unable to understand and mitigate the risks. The "there's blood in the water" mentality was more about mis-selling than fraud and nothing whatsoever to do with Black-Scholes.
The failure of Long-Term Capital Management was a huge failure of risk management and capital allocation as Scholes claims. Again it had nothing to with Black-Scholes. Their convergence trade wasn't even wrong but the extreme spread widenings triggered by the Russian default gobbled up all their money and meant they couldn't ride it out.
Finally the bailouts of banks in the US and Europe were caused by simple bad loans. The fact they were packaged up and sliced-and-diced into CDOs doesn't change the underlying reality. You could argue it was a failure of Li's Copual pricing method but even that is somewhat unfair. When banks are making loans to people who are unlikely to repay them disaster cannot be averted.
Their failure to patch this in a year - or even enter into any meaningful dialogue - is indicative of a company with no effective management. Is it wrong to hope some script kiddies now run riot and permanently damage the brand. Probably but meh.
Gee I bet they wish they'd thought of that before interfacing the reactor core control system with iTunes.
This malicious software is explicitly tailored to the target systems and uploaded deliberately.
The "robot" didn't exist. If they'd stuck to using astrology or reading tea-leaves they'd probably still be going strong but inventing a fictitious robot was just criminal.
Is any genuine science being done here? Running simulations to model, say, the weather or ocean currents makes sense. You can calibrate them to past data and use them predictively. How does a simulation of the "universe" tell you anything?
Yes I think they were inspirational. I remember wanting to write a screen scrolling type Defender game on my Spectrum and learning Z80 machine code in order to do it. I couldn't afford an assembler though so I had to write out the programs in pseudo-code and manually look up their codes. It didn't seem a big deal at the time but it was immensely satisfying to actually produce a working program from a series of 8-bit numbers.
I'm hoping the Raspberry Pi will do a similar job of stimulating young programming talent today.
For many years Penn and Teller have publicly revealed how tricks are done on their television shows. This is in defiance of organisations of professional magicians such as The Magic Circle (who they deride). In nearly all cases they were not the original devisors of the effect but by their actions they, in a small way, spoil it for everyone. OK, so be it, magic is not very important and they have successful showbiz careers. For them now to complain about someone revealing how one of their tricks is done, and try to use the law to copyright it, is just incredible hypocrisy.
Yes you're right. In fact if you just consider England, not Britain, then 1/3 of the population lives in London or the South-East. This isn't a good thing - it leads to ridiculous imbalances in employment and property prices - but it's the way it is. And population density aside, London has a much higher concentration of newsmaking entities (eg. Parliament, the City (financial district), many cultural/arts organisations).
I understand the frustration people living in, say, Manchester or Birmingham feel about the London-centric news but the fact is that very little happens in your cities which is of national significance.
No it isn't. It's the most intellectually lazy way of criticising Muslims imaginable. Americans predominantly espouse Christianity but it doesn't seem to stop them invading countries like Iraq and killing 100,000 people. Extremists responsible for this attack represent Muslims about as accurately as McVeigh represents Christians.
That article claims 42.5m is 120 feet - it's actually 140 feet. The wave was probably recorded as 120 feet and someone mangled the conversion rather than the other way round.
I live and work in London and there have been an increasingly apocalyptic series of warnings as to how congested London will be and how normal commuter transport will be close to unusable during the Games. This announcement has to be viewed within that framework.
My own perception is that this is like the Millennium Bug all over again. London is so enormous that apart from the immediate vicinity of the Olympic Stadium there will barely be a blip in transport users. Once this materialises the doomsayers will claim it was precisely because of their forecasts that sufficient numbers of people worked from home/went on holiday etc.
"Having designed a system to translate letters into dots that could be put on a screen, he discovered a company called RCA already had a patent on it."
That says it all. Doubtless Woz's method was more elegant and completely original and yet the patent applies in the most general terms to any solution to a problem. They are essentially patenting the problem. By the 19th century patents had evolved to protect innovators as they brought products to market and give them a competitive advantage to reward the time spent on research and development. The whole concept of a "patent chest" of unused and unimplemented general outlines for solving a problem is a travesty. America seems particularly focused on patents (probably due to the influence of Edison in popular culture) and this is eventually going to drive innovation to countries where it's not so easy to get sued.
Pretty much. But people forget today that Keynes was specifically addressing the problems of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The world is so different now that it's by no means certain that Keynes himself would advocate the same solution for the current recession. I therefore tend to tune out anyone condemning a policy on the basis it's "Keynesian".
The situation is far less clearcut than you imply. If you look at an open source project and gain insights into how to do something similar yourself have you really plagiarised it? The decision was more about the internecine politics of chess computers than any wrongdoing.
Down's syndrome, as you are doubtless aware, is a chromosomal disorder for which there can never be a cure. To equate your son's autism with that seems ridiculous.
"he'll sing the same three words of a song for an hour straight while hitting the floor over and over again in specific patterns"
So stop him doing it. Make him do something else. Sing over his words. Make him hit different patterns. Force him to do it for two hours instead. Anything to break these vicious circles of feedback which develop in autistic brains and stop them developing. To just throw up your hands and say Oh it's autism there's no cure like Down's just seems to be giving up.
... be apportioned when there are 44 authors for a single paper?
That's not a criticism of this paper or what is hopefully an important discovery but just the whole scientific peer-reviewed system seems in danger of breaking down if this is the norm.
Wow you've completely mis-characterised what happened in the UK. Most of it is not germane to copyright discussions in any case but in the late 70s and 80s the Conservatives shifted state-owned industries to the private sector (often breaking them up and losing jobs in the process). These weren't industries "in trouble and going to the Government for help". They were already state-owned and haemorraging money. The music/entertainment industry has mainly not been state-owned (although the BBC is) so your analogy is misleading. Furthermore although showbiz is able to get its message heard more easily I wouldn't say the UK government has been particularly accommodating (so far) to their absurd demands.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes that seems fair since the pound has declined by 29% against the Euro over the past year ... except ... that it's actually risen by 10% ... but hey why let facts get in the way of some price gouging.
We should get a discount as they don't have to translate all the EULAs into foreign languages!
And to the idiots advocating Britain joining the Euro ... do you live in a cave? There's a strong possibility that the Euro will disintegrate imminently.
The diamond market is controlled by a cartel comprising de Beers and the Russians. They carefully control the supply and manipulate the price and sell through closed organisations of dealerships. It's also a one-way market. You can only sell diamonds at a fraction of their supposed market rate and there is a public brainwashing campaign to persuade people (well women mainly) to keep diamonds for ever. It's all a con. So what threatens this cosy state of affairs? Other African countries flooding the market with their equally good diamonds. Therefore they must be demonised. Since their diamonds cannot be criticised on quality the concept of "conflict diamonds" was invented. On the other hand dictators rich from oil-revenues are most welcome to spend their money on weaponry.
The difference is that they were signed off as AAA by the appropriate ratings agencies. Of course the banks were gaming the system and the agencies were clueless but they really were AAA bonds. Since the mugs who bought them were often bailed out (at par!) by the even more US clueless government you could argue that in a meta-sense they really were AAA quality.
I've read FIASCO and it's an amusing memoir. However I think it's too simplistic to characterise the banks' behaviour as fraud. Unfortunately many corporate treasurers and other financial decision-makers were extremely ill-equipped to make derivatives transactions. Of course the banks made money on the deals but the counterparties were unable to understand and mitigate the risks. The "there's blood in the water" mentality was more about mis-selling than fraud and nothing whatsoever to do with Black-Scholes. The failure of Long-Term Capital Management was a huge failure of risk management and capital allocation as Scholes claims. Again it had nothing to with Black-Scholes. Their convergence trade wasn't even wrong but the extreme spread widenings triggered by the Russian default gobbled up all their money and meant they couldn't ride it out. Finally the bailouts of banks in the US and Europe were caused by simple bad loans. The fact they were packaged up and sliced-and-diced into CDOs doesn't change the underlying reality. You could argue it was a failure of Li's Copual pricing method but even that is somewhat unfair. When banks are making loans to people who are unlikely to repay them disaster cannot be averted.
He can't be that evil, he has a most impressive white beard.
Oh my bad. I've never heard that term before. Hohum.
Really? You're very naive then. Any whistle-blower who embarrasses the leadership of any organisation is invariably kicked out.
Their failure to patch this in a year - or even enter into any meaningful dialogue - is indicative of a company with no effective management. Is it wrong to hope some script kiddies now run riot and permanently damage the brand. Probably but meh.
Gee I bet they wish they'd thought of that before interfacing the reactor core control system with iTunes. This malicious software is explicitly tailored to the target systems and uploaded deliberately.
Well of course I had all the common ones memorised after a few hours of hand assembly but had to check those JR NC or LDDR from time to time.
The "robot" didn't exist. If they'd stuck to using astrology or reading tea-leaves they'd probably still be going strong but inventing a fictitious robot was just criminal.
Is any genuine science being done here? Running simulations to model, say, the weather or ocean currents makes sense. You can calibrate them to past data and use them predictively. How does a simulation of the "universe" tell you anything?
Yes I think they were inspirational. I remember wanting to write a screen scrolling type Defender game on my Spectrum and learning Z80 machine code in order to do it. I couldn't afford an assembler though so I had to write out the programs in pseudo-code and manually look up their codes. It didn't seem a big deal at the time but it was immensely satisfying to actually produce a working program from a series of 8-bit numbers. I'm hoping the Raspberry Pi will do a similar job of stimulating young programming talent today.
For many years Penn and Teller have publicly revealed how tricks are done on their television shows. This is in defiance of organisations of professional magicians such as The Magic Circle (who they deride). In nearly all cases they were not the original devisors of the effect but by their actions they, in a small way, spoil it for everyone. OK, so be it, magic is not very important and they have successful showbiz careers. For them now to complain about someone revealing how one of their tricks is done, and try to use the law to copyright it, is just incredible hypocrisy.
Yes you're right. In fact if you just consider England, not Britain, then 1/3 of the population lives in London or the South-East. This isn't a good thing - it leads to ridiculous imbalances in employment and property prices - but it's the way it is. And population density aside, London has a much higher concentration of newsmaking entities (eg. Parliament, the City (financial district), many cultural/arts organisations). I understand the frustration people living in, say, Manchester or Birmingham feel about the London-centric news but the fact is that very little happens in your cities which is of national significance.
No it isn't. It's the most intellectually lazy way of criticising Muslims imaginable. Americans predominantly espouse Christianity but it doesn't seem to stop them invading countries like Iraq and killing 100,000 people. Extremists responsible for this attack represent Muslims about as accurately as McVeigh represents Christians.
That article claims 42.5m is 120 feet - it's actually 140 feet. The wave was probably recorded as 120 feet and someone mangled the conversion rather than the other way round.
I live and work in London and there have been an increasingly apocalyptic series of warnings as to how congested London will be and how normal commuter transport will be close to unusable during the Games. This announcement has to be viewed within that framework. My own perception is that this is like the Millennium Bug all over again. London is so enormous that apart from the immediate vicinity of the Olympic Stadium there will barely be a blip in transport users. Once this materialises the doomsayers will claim it was precisely because of their forecasts that sufficient numbers of people worked from home/went on holiday etc.
"Having designed a system to translate letters into dots that could be put on a screen, he discovered a company called RCA already had a patent on it." That says it all. Doubtless Woz's method was more elegant and completely original and yet the patent applies in the most general terms to any solution to a problem. They are essentially patenting the problem. By the 19th century patents had evolved to protect innovators as they brought products to market and give them a competitive advantage to reward the time spent on research and development. The whole concept of a "patent chest" of unused and unimplemented general outlines for solving a problem is a travesty. America seems particularly focused on patents (probably due to the influence of Edison in popular culture) and this is eventually going to drive innovation to countries where it's not so easy to get sued.
Pretty much. But people forget today that Keynes was specifically addressing the problems of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The world is so different now that it's by no means certain that Keynes himself would advocate the same solution for the current recession. I therefore tend to tune out anyone condemning a policy on the basis it's "Keynesian".
The situation is far less clearcut than you imply. If you look at an open source project and gain insights into how to do something similar yourself have you really plagiarised it? The decision was more about the internecine politics of chess computers than any wrongdoing.
Down's syndrome, as you are doubtless aware, is a chromosomal disorder for which there can never be a cure. To equate your son's autism with that seems ridiculous. "he'll sing the same three words of a song for an hour straight while hitting the floor over and over again in specific patterns" So stop him doing it. Make him do something else. Sing over his words. Make him hit different patterns. Force him to do it for two hours instead. Anything to break these vicious circles of feedback which develop in autistic brains and stop them developing. To just throw up your hands and say Oh it's autism there's no cure like Down's just seems to be giving up.
Please don't hate on the UK because some of our politicians are assclowns. This has zero chance of becoming UK law.
... be apportioned when there are 44 authors for a single paper? That's not a criticism of this paper or what is hopefully an important discovery but just the whole scientific peer-reviewed system seems in danger of breaking down if this is the norm.
Wow you've completely mis-characterised what happened in the UK. Most of it is not germane to copyright discussions in any case but in the late 70s and 80s the Conservatives shifted state-owned industries to the private sector (often breaking them up and losing jobs in the process). These weren't industries "in trouble and going to the Government for help". They were already state-owned and haemorraging money. The music/entertainment industry has mainly not been state-owned (although the BBC is) so your analogy is misleading. Furthermore although showbiz is able to get its message heard more easily I wouldn't say the UK government has been particularly accommodating (so far) to their absurd demands.