So you do not feel that up to 200 unguided rockets a day for a couple of weeks into your county is reason enough for a retaliatory operation?
I think that the primary reason for this "retaliatory operation" is not to make the Palestinians stop shooting rockets (they won't) but chestbeating ("we can't stop you from violating our sovereignty but at least we can look tough while you do it") - and that with the situation on the border to Syria and the upcoming elections the IDF & Netanjahu both feel a profound need for that.
Turkey is openly providing safe harbor to Syrian rebels while at the same time telling Assad that if he doesn't stay well clear of their border, they have no problems whatsoever to call down the wrath of the entire NATO on his regime. Meanwhile Isreal is making excuses for Assad after his troops shot at Israeli territory (and Israeli soldiers!). Isreal probably has good reasons to act as they do (maybe they have better intelligence on the havoc Assad could wreak if he panics) but that doesn't change that they started to look weak - which is an impression they cannot afford given their situation.
And who would elect some who can't even keep his own people safe?
You notice that the rocket attacks on Israel increased as the chances of Assad winning in Syria decreased. Almost like someone wanted to get Syria off the front page.
You could argue just as well that after showing unusual lenience towards Syria (there have been several incidents on the Golan Heights during the past few weeks most of which Israel did uncharacteristically excuse - they obviously have no interest whatsoever in a border conflict with the Assad regime right now) the IDF feels the need to demonstrate strength and assertiveness in a less risky theater.
Already being in a heightened state of military awareness (having mobilized reservists etc,...) would probably also be of advantage if more fallout from the conflict in Syria should spill over into the border area.
While I don't necessarily disagree with your point rgd the behavior of the Palestinians I think that Isreal is going for a very deliberate over-reaction specifically with an eye towards Syria (and by extension Iran). In my opinion Israel is very uneasy about the option to start a war with Syria (which would undoubtedly act as a catalyst to the conflict between Assad regime and rebels and might lead to unpredictable developments and outcomes) but can't afford to sit idly by either. Contrast the behavior of Israel regarding Syrian border violations with the behavior of Turkey rgd the same issue and the probelm becomes imho quite obvious.
*OK, that one may be slightly contentious, but TBH, I've never (and I mean in since kernel 1.0) heard any convincing argument regarding why anyone should run SUSE over another distro. Counter-arguments happily invited.
The best reason to use SUSE (which is also the best reason not to use SUSE) is YaST. It's one of the best configuration tools for new users (iirc only Mandrake/Mandriva had something comparable) but it can lead to horrible breakage if you mix using YaST and manually editing configuration files.
SUSE also used to provide (imho) the best out of the box KDE desktop experience but with the switch to Gnome they let that strength fall by the side entirely...
SUSE also came with very decent manuals (a user guide and an administration guide which rivaled many Linux books in size & scope) but the sale of boxed sets has been scrapped with SUSE Linux 11 as far as I remember (at that point Novell decided to adopt the RH model and only to provide an enterprise distribution). In the German language area it also was the distribution for which 3rd party documentation was the most readily available (e.g. Michael Kofler's excellent "Linux" book used to be quite SUSE centric and even included SUSE Linux evaluation versions at times).
From my point of view SuSE peaked around version 7 where it provided massive advantages over contemporary distributions for non-experts. Today there is very little reason for a home user to use OpenSUSE and SUSE mostly competes with RHEL.
PETA doesn't believe in people period, hell they labeled fish as "sea kittens" to try to get people not to eat them, and I have even seen a PETA person arguing against FLU shots because the flu is "alive".
The Jains would likely agree. Beliefs in the 'sanctity of life', for lack of a better term, typically have a level of life they respect. For a lot of religions, its a fetus. For a lot of PETA followers its animal life. The problem is you usually end up having to defend where you decide to draw the line and there don't seem to be any scientific arguments for a particular view, it comes down to whatever your faith or your gut or your conditioning tells you. Unless you refuse to draw the line...and then you get a virus with a right to life. One way off of a slippery slope is to slide all the way to the bottom. On a toboggan. With bells on.
The problem with giving viruses a "right to life" is that they are not alive in the first place.
Sharp's position is entirely determined by the choices they make or have made. If they make bad decisions, their business will suffer and if they make good ones their business will prosper.
There are external factors such as exchange rates that can hurt a business badly without it making any "wrong" choices.
What makes you think they're going to keep their word? You're not signing a contract here, these are criminals! All you're doing is showing you're a soft touch. They'll be back, and they'll demand more money. They'll probably tell their friends, too. Not to mention the moral aspect that by giving in to these people you are directly funding crime.
OP didn't solve the problem and judging by the summary he doesn't believe to have solved the problem by paying up - but hedid buy time to set up infrastructure so he can actually refuse payment on the next collection round. Even if the OP he does ultimately decide to go with the Rackspace solution his $400 investment has saved him $4500 in hosting fees.
How would you have reacted in his situation? And no, "I would have planned ddos protection when setting up the site several months/years ago" does not count.. The choice is between either paying the $400 in the hope that it will buy you enough time to fix the issue or not to pay and possibly lose out on several days worth of revenue (plus the damage to your reputation - customers don't like companies that provide no or only severely degraded service) while you scramble to find a solution to the on-going ddos.
The submitter might have made a mistake by responding to the demand in the first place - maybe the extortion attempt was not as targeted as he believed it to be and no reaction would not have resulted in a DOS... but that's speculation. Once the DDOS was under way that option was no longer available.
Maybe get off your moral high-ground (not wanting to support crime, never giving in to blackmail out of principle,...) and do a proper cost/benefit analysis...
This is a typically American problem - the notion that you can simply throw money at problems and they will go away. The war on poverty has met the same fate. We have essentially the same proportion of people below the poverty line today as we did in LBJ's time despite spending massive amounts of money on it.
Keep in mind that poverty is first and foremost a measure of inequality not a measure of well-being - the definition usually used for industrialized countries sets the poverty line at 60% of the median household income (absolute definitions of poverty are only used for the poorest countries).
The only way to get less poverty is by reducing inequality in incomes - if you want to achieve this via redistribution you have to increase the amount given to the poor faster than median household income increases to see any effect. If the money you spend on fighting poverty just keeps track with GDP/median household income/... you can't expect to see any change in poverty.
Why would you say something like that and why the fuck did you get modded up for that?
Why does slashdot even exist if its entire purpose seems to be to disseminate blatantly false and incorrect information?...maybe that is the reason it exists. I'm sorry to say this, but if this site only exists to serve as a tool to be used to spread lies, I can't rationalize visiting it anymore.
Seeing how GP is just expressing his personal opinion without making any claims that could be objectively falsified it is pretty bold of you to accuse him of lying.
Can you see into his head?
The general idea implied in his post - "let's make up for the loss of revenue from DNT (and incentivize the user to turn it off again) by just showing more non-targeted ads" - seems plausible to me (although I can't recall reading about such a scheme having been implemented in practice - but then GP doesn't claim that, he just says "If I were facing this choice I would do X")
I don't really buy the idea that our education system is any better than what people had in the past anyway. Better classroom discipline and a greater incentive to study probably meant that schools were actually better in the past.
it's not just schools - you also have to consider to consider the effects of other factors such as improved nurtition and healthcare.
It may sound exotic to you but based on what we can actually observe in very poor countries you do owe some of your intelligence to your protein-heavy diet, the lack of parasites,...
In Economic history there also is the (controversial) theory that the high rate of reproduction among members of the upper society (or rather the relatively high rate of surviving children) along with very high downwards mobility (especially in countries with "first son gets all"-style inheritance) lead to a very rapid spread of desirable attributes through the general population (during the few hundred years prior to industrialization).
Wha?? Someone failed basic statistics. If the rate is lower over a population (where "rate" = incidents/population), how is the concentration (eh, also incidents/population) striking? In fact, it's only striking because of the *anecdotes* sensationalized by stories like this...
Foxconn workers are not a representative sample of the total population of China.
The suicide rate at Foxconn may very well be above average for people of the age-group, gender balance and socio-economic status Foxconn workers fall into while still being below the nation-wide average.
According to a paper cited in the relevant wikipedia article "rural suicides outnumber urban suicides by a 3:1 ratio" so we would strongly expect the suicide rate at (urban) Foxconn to be low compared to the nation-wide average even if working conditions are abysmal.
I for one doubt that the problems are of technical nature. What they did well was to get a lot of people excited and start a well-sized fellowship of power users interested in hosting a dispora server.
The problem is that it is a student project that intended to start from zero and kept largely to itself.
The problem may also have to do with the fact that the driving force behind diaspora development (Ilya Zhitomirskiy) killed himself in 2011 and that the rest of the group did rather pursue their own project (Makr.io) than work on diaspora after his death.
What you want is single-digit inflation that keeps pace with economic growth. This is actually healthy for an economy. The problem is that when bitcoin true believers like you talk about inflation, you're comparing all inflation to the 1930s German hyper-inflation, which isn't the same thing.
The math spells it out and if even math is not going to convince you, then I guess there is no talking.
I'm glad you brought that up. As it happens, I'm a math major and I can be easily convinced by arguments that are based on math.
Let's start with the basics: What is the "best" value for single-digit inflation? I assume that 1% is too low and 9% is too high - what's the optimum value to use? Is 7% too much?
While we're on the subject, what's the math formula for calculating the optimal value? If the answer is "it depends", then what does it depend on? Is the function relatively flat (any value within a range is good) or peaked (one specific value is best, and near values are bad)?
Actually, how does one even calculate the current inflation rate? Are gas prices included? Luxuries? How do I tell which purchases contribute to inflation and which don't? Is there a rule I can look up?
Don't appeal to math unless you know what math is. Economics is not math.
Economics major here (switched majors from maths to econ after 2 years so I guess I can see your POV).
First of all - economics mostly uses maths as a tool but is not math. However, there are branches of economics that take maths very seriously - especially traditional microeconomics (as opposed to the likes of behavioral micro) has been stringently derived from a small set of axioms. Get yourself a graduate-level micro textbook (Mas-Colell is great) and you will find the familiar "definition - proposition - lemma - proof - corollary" structure pervading every topic discussed by this book. The proofs are usually not super complex and mostly use convexity arguments (due to indifference curves being everywhere), the (hyperplane) seperation theorem,...
Whereas microeconomics uses very math-y mathematics (centered on analytical proofs), macroeconomics uses mathematics in a more physics-like way (to calculate equilibrium conditions - lots of integral calculus, series, differential equations,...).
The post you replied to is rubbish - price inflation corresponding to GDP growth is generally not considered desirable (and "inflation" is usually meant to mean price inflation). What the poster was probably referring to is probably just an increase of the quantity of money.
Now, price inflation in the 1-2% range is usually seen as desirable - less because (this fully anticipated) inflation is particularly beneficial but because deflation tends to cause real problems and measurement errors mean that only in the 1-2% range you can actually be certain that you prices are stable rather than falling.
Why is deflation bad? there are two main reasons - (a) it encourages the hoarding of currency over investments into the actual economy and (b) while wages adapt to inflation very well (with 0-2 years lag depending on whether next year's inflation was anticipated and already considered in this year's wage negotiations or not) it is nearly impossible to lower wages based on the argument that the general price-level in the economy has fallen.
Products sell for lower prices but the wage-level stays constant - the natural consequence is rising unemployment, falling demand due to the unemployed having less to spend,... and so on.
Inflation is hard to measure as you have to (a) define a sensible basket of goods and (b) have to find a way to deal with increases in the quality of goods (the computer you can buy today may be more expensive than the computer you could buy 10 years ago but it is also much more powerful and as such hardly comparable. what do?)
Well, Steam + TF2 already works in wine, with a few quirks. I'd expect them to start from there and slowly spread to other major distributions starting with Ubuntu, there's only so much you'd want to support this early in the game.
Although I'd wish Value would go Linux-native (I'm not sure if they have confirmed this), it would indeed take much more time to port each non-Source third-party game and having Valve actively supporting wine would mean more improvements for wine in general. It would be a big step-up from the Cedega/Transgaming attempts from the last decade.
on Mac the Valve games are native but most other games offered through Steam use Cider (a Wine derivative), DosBox,...
from the description of his scenario (he expects a problem when changing back to high resolution) it sounds very much as if the screen settings window on his Ubutu version is not optimized for 640x480 and does probably not display correctly (maybe the buttons to confirm your choice are hidden, maybe the dropdown listing various screen resolutions does not fit fully onto the screen,...).
Then it's not homeopathy which works - it's the placebo effect which works. And for that we don't need overpriced sugar which has danced around the table twelve times at midnight or somesuch nonsense.
The placebo needs to be credible in order to work - if the patient can easily distinguish it from "real" medicine (by name or by price) it won't work as well,
There are a lot of real and imaginary diseases where a placebo is really all the patient needs - while use of homeopathy to "treat" severe diseases should of course be prohibited indiscriminately destroying its public credibility does probably a lot more damage than good. If there is one thing that "school medicine" has learned from all the "alternative" medicine concepts then that "There is nothing wrong with you, go home and stop clogging up my practics hours" is never the right answer. People want their imaginary diseases to be taken 100% seriously and prescribing something homeopathic (which is basically guaranteed to have no side effects) is a lot better than prescribing some unwarranted "real" medicine or losing them to esoteric healing (once you lost them they won't come back when they are seriously ill and will instead try to treat their cancer with herb teas).
I am not sure what protection the stock market gives. The people who invested in facebook during the IPO has lost half their money. The people who capitalized facebook has made money. You could have invested in Microsoft back in 2008 and have lost money due to the stock decline or inflation. People invested in Enron, Worldcom, all under the so-called stock protection, and lost everything.
if you are not a commercial investor and invested into any stock directly you are just setting yourself up for failure and anyone with basic finance knowledge will tell you so.
Buy an index certificate, be prepared to hold it at least 15 years and have another 5 years during which you cash out (into bonds, bank deposits,...) as the opportunity arises (and even then you can end up in a Japan-like situations and take home losses). But never buy single stocks and never invest into stocks when you may be forced to cash out on a tight deadline.
Every time there's a BitCoin story, people loudly claim it's a Ponzi scheme. Maybe they're right.
Or maybe they're just spewing buzzwords without understanding what they mean. Bitcoin itself is not a ponzi scheme and that's obvious to anyone with a dictionary. A ponzi scheme is a scheme where "investors" are paid from deposits from new investors. Obviously such a scheme must always grow in order to make payments and that means it is guaranteed to eventually collapse. As nobody sane would invest in something that explicitly advertised itself as a ponzi, such schemes always involve secrecy and obfuscation.
Bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme but it behaves similar to one - the increasing mining difficulty and limited overall amount of coins heavily rewards early adopters (who hoard their bitcoins) if and if only these early adopters can convince the latecomers that bitcoins actually have value (otherwise cashing out becomes hard).
Your ability to sell the bitcoins you mined at a low difficulty for ridiculous amounts of dollars later on is entirely dependent on the growth of the overall bitcoin scheme - and as bitcoins do currently have very limited value as use for transactions (few stores accept them, usually cheaper to pay in dollars than btcs if the stores accept them, high volatility makes accepting them difficult for business, people would be stupid to spend them giving their deflationary nature) the main motivation to get some bitcoins is to profit off the demand that will be created by those that want to get into bitcoin after you.
You could have found out about the train ride from reading an article in a publication or a post in a forum. [...] The publication is rewarded for its work either by you buying it, or by getting an affiliate payment from the train ride for the help it gave to someone who ended up being a customer.
Guess what? She has no difficulty whatever in understanding what GMOs are, and how they are distinct from organisms which arise through breeding. No problem at all.
Any 3 year old child can tell you that birds are not dinosaurs - but an ornithologist can't.
Slashdot Mirror
So you do not feel that up to 200 unguided rockets a day for a couple of weeks into your county is reason enough for a retaliatory operation?
I think that the primary reason for this "retaliatory operation" is not to make the Palestinians stop shooting rockets (they won't) but chestbeating ("we can't stop you from violating our sovereignty but at least we can look tough while you do it") - and that with the situation on the border to Syria and the upcoming elections the IDF & Netanjahu both feel a profound need for that.
Turkey is openly providing safe harbor to Syrian rebels while at the same time telling Assad that if he doesn't stay well clear of their border, they have no problems whatsoever to call down the wrath of the entire NATO on his regime. Meanwhile Isreal is making excuses for Assad after his troops shot at Israeli territory (and Israeli soldiers!).
Isreal probably has good reasons to act as they do (maybe they have better intelligence on the havoc Assad could wreak if he panics) but that doesn't change that they started to look weak - which is an impression they cannot afford given their situation.
And who would elect some who can't even keep his own people safe?
You notice that the rocket attacks on Israel increased as the chances of Assad winning in Syria decreased. Almost like someone wanted to get Syria off the front page.
You could argue just as well that after showing unusual lenience towards Syria (there have been several incidents on the Golan Heights during the past few weeks most of which Israel did uncharacteristically excuse - they obviously have no interest whatsoever in a border conflict with the Assad regime right now) the IDF feels the need to demonstrate strength and assertiveness in a less risky theater.
...) would probably also be of advantage if more fallout from the conflict in Syria should spill over into the border area.
Already being in a heightened state of military awareness (having mobilized reservists etc,
While I don't necessarily disagree with your point rgd the behavior of the Palestinians I think that Isreal is going for a very deliberate over-reaction specifically with an eye towards Syria (and by extension Iran).
In my opinion Israel is very uneasy about the option to start a war with Syria (which would undoubtedly act as a catalyst to the conflict between Assad regime and rebels and might lead to unpredictable developments and outcomes) but can't afford to sit idly by either.
Contrast the behavior of Israel regarding Syrian border violations with the behavior of Turkey rgd the same issue and the probelm becomes imho quite obvious.
*OK, that one may be slightly contentious, but TBH, I've never (and I mean in since kernel 1.0) heard any convincing argument regarding why anyone should run SUSE over another distro. Counter-arguments happily invited.
The best reason to use SUSE (which is also the best reason not to use SUSE) is YaST. It's one of the best configuration tools for new users (iirc only Mandrake/Mandriva had something comparable) but it can lead to horrible breakage if you mix using YaST and manually editing configuration files.
SUSE also used to provide (imho) the best out of the box KDE desktop experience but with the switch to Gnome they let that strength fall by the side entirely...
SUSE also came with very decent manuals (a user guide and an administration guide which rivaled many Linux books in size & scope) but the sale of boxed sets has been scrapped with SUSE Linux 11 as far as I remember (at that point Novell decided to adopt the RH model and only to provide an enterprise distribution). In the German language area it also was the distribution for which 3rd party documentation was the most readily available (e.g. Michael Kofler's excellent "Linux" book used to be quite SUSE centric and even included SUSE Linux evaluation versions at times).
From my point of view SuSE peaked around version 7 where it provided massive advantages over contemporary distributions for non-experts. Today there is very little reason for a home user to use OpenSUSE and SUSE mostly competes with RHEL.
PETA doesn't believe in people period, hell they labeled fish as "sea kittens" to try to get people not to eat them, and I have even seen a PETA person arguing against FLU shots because the flu is "alive".
The Jains would likely agree. Beliefs in the 'sanctity of life', for lack of a better term, typically have a level of life they respect. For a lot of religions, its a fetus. For a lot of PETA followers its animal life. The problem is you usually end up having to defend where you decide to draw the line and there don't seem to be any scientific arguments for a particular view, it comes down to whatever your faith or your gut or your conditioning tells you. Unless you refuse to draw the line...and then you get a virus with a right to life. One way off of a slippery slope is to slide all the way to the bottom. On a toboggan. With bells on.
The problem with giving viruses a "right to life" is that they are not alive in the first place.
Sharp's position is entirely determined by the choices they make or have made. If they make bad decisions, their business will suffer and if they make good ones their business will prosper.
There are external factors such as exchange rates that can hurt a business badly without it making any "wrong" choices.
What makes you think they're going to keep their word? You're not signing a contract here, these are criminals! All you're doing is showing you're a soft touch. They'll be back, and they'll demand more money. They'll probably tell their friends, too. Not to mention the moral aspect that by giving in to these people you are directly funding crime.
OP didn't solve the problem and judging by the summary he doesn't believe to have solved the problem by paying up - but hedid buy time to set up infrastructure so he can actually refuse payment on the next collection round. Even if the OP he does ultimately decide to go with the Rackspace solution his $400 investment has saved him $4500 in hosting fees.
How would you have reacted in his situation? And no, "I would have planned ddos protection when setting up the site several months/years ago" does not count. .
The choice is between either paying the $400 in the hope that it will buy you enough time to fix the issue or not to pay and possibly lose out on several days worth of revenue (plus the damage to your reputation - customers don't like companies that provide no or only severely degraded service) while you scramble to find a solution to the on-going ddos.
The submitter might have made a mistake by responding to the demand in the first place - maybe the extortion attempt was not as targeted as he believed it to be and no reaction would not have resulted in a DOS... but that's speculation. Once the DDOS was under way that option was no longer available.
Maybe get off your moral high-ground (not wanting to support crime, never giving in to blackmail out of principle, ...) and do a proper cost/benefit analysis...
This is a typically American problem - the notion that you can simply throw money at problems and they will go away. The war on poverty has met the same fate. We have essentially the same proportion of people below the poverty line today as we did in LBJ's time despite spending massive amounts of money on it.
Keep in mind that poverty is first and foremost a measure of inequality not a measure of well-being - the definition usually used for industrialized countries sets the poverty line at 60% of the median household income (absolute definitions of poverty are only used for the poorest countries).
The only way to get less poverty is by reducing inequality in incomes - if you want to achieve this via redistribution you have to increase the amount given to the poor faster than median household income increases to see any effect. If the money you spend on fighting poverty just keeps track with GDP/median household income/... you can't expect to see any change in poverty.
Why would you say something like that and why the fuck did you get modded up for that?
Why does slashdot even exist if its entire purpose seems to be to disseminate blatantly false and incorrect information? ...maybe that is the reason it exists. I'm sorry to say this, but if this site only exists to serve as a tool to be used to spread lies, I can't rationalize visiting it anymore.
Seeing how GP is just expressing his personal opinion without making any claims that could be objectively falsified it is pretty bold of you to accuse him of lying.
Can you see into his head?
The general idea implied in his post - "let's make up for the loss of revenue from DNT (and incentivize the user to turn it off again) by just showing more non-targeted ads" - seems plausible to me (although I can't recall reading about such a scheme having been implemented in practice - but then GP doesn't claim that, he just says "If I were facing this choice I would do X")
I don't really buy the idea that our education system is any better than what people had in the past anyway. Better classroom discipline and a greater incentive to study probably meant that schools were actually better in the past.
it's not just schools - you also have to consider to consider the effects of other factors such as improved nurtition and healthcare.
...
It may sound exotic to you but based on what we can actually observe in very poor countries you do owe some of your intelligence to your protein-heavy diet, the lack of parasites,
In Economic history there also is the (controversial) theory that the high rate of reproduction among members of the upper society (or rather the relatively high rate of surviving children) along with very high downwards mobility (especially in countries with "first son gets all"-style inheritance) lead to a very rapid spread of desirable attributes through the general population (during the few hundred years prior to industrialization).
Wha?? Someone failed basic statistics. If the rate is lower over a population (where "rate" = incidents/population), how is the concentration (eh, also incidents/population) striking? In fact, it's only striking because of the *anecdotes* sensationalized by stories like this...
Foxconn workers are not a representative sample of the total population of China.
The suicide rate at Foxconn may very well be above average for people of the age-group, gender balance and socio-economic status Foxconn workers fall into while still being below the nation-wide average.
According to a paper cited in the relevant wikipedia article "rural suicides outnumber urban suicides by a 3:1 ratio" so we would strongly expect the suicide rate at (urban) Foxconn to be low compared to the nation-wide average even if working conditions are abysmal.
I for one doubt that the problems are of technical nature. What they did well was to get a lot of people excited and start a well-sized fellowship of power users interested in hosting a dispora server.
The problem is that it is a student project that intended to start from zero and kept largely to itself.
The problem may also have to do with the fact that the driving force behind diaspora development (Ilya Zhitomirskiy) killed himself in 2011 and that the rest of the group did rather pursue their own project (Makr.io) than work on diaspora after his death.
Who buys larger ram / HDDs from the computer manufacturer? Why would you do that to yourself?
Takes 15 minutes with a screwdriver to perform the upgrade yourself, arguably with better hardware, while saving yourself a mint.
Good luck upgrading the RAM on your MacBook Air...
(it's soldered onto the mainboard, so you better have steady hands and good soldering equipment...)
I'm glad you brought that up. As it happens, I'm a math major and I can be easily convinced by arguments that are based on math.
Let's start with the basics: What is the "best" value for single-digit inflation? I assume that 1% is too low and 9% is too high - what's the optimum value to use? Is 7% too much?
While we're on the subject, what's the math formula for calculating the optimal value? If the answer is "it depends", then what does it depend on? Is the function relatively flat (any value within a range is good) or peaked (one specific value is best, and near values are bad)?
Actually, how does one even calculate the current inflation rate? Are gas prices included? Luxuries? How do I tell which purchases contribute to inflation and which don't? Is there a rule I can look up?
Don't appeal to math unless you know what math is. Economics is not math.
Economics major here (switched majors from maths to econ after 2 years so I guess I can see your POV).
First of all - economics mostly uses maths as a tool but is not math. However, there are branches of economics that take maths very seriously - especially traditional microeconomics (as opposed to the likes of behavioral micro) has been stringently derived from a small set of axioms. Get yourself a graduate-level micro textbook (Mas-Colell is great) and you will find the familiar "definition - proposition - lemma - proof - corollary" structure pervading every topic discussed by this book. The proofs are usually not super complex and mostly use convexity arguments (due to indifference curves being everywhere), the (hyperplane) seperation theorem, ... ...).
Whereas microeconomics uses very math-y mathematics (centered on analytical proofs), macroeconomics uses mathematics in a more physics-like way (to calculate equilibrium conditions - lots of integral calculus, series, differential equations,
The post you replied to is rubbish - price inflation corresponding to GDP growth is generally not considered desirable (and "inflation" is usually meant to mean price inflation). What the poster was probably referring to is probably just an increase of the quantity of money.
Now, price inflation in the 1-2% range is usually seen as desirable - less because (this fully anticipated) inflation is particularly beneficial but because deflation tends to cause real problems and measurement errors mean that only in the 1-2% range you can actually be certain that you prices are stable rather than falling. ... and so on.
Why is deflation bad? there are two main reasons - (a) it encourages the hoarding of currency over investments into the actual economy and (b) while wages adapt to inflation very well (with 0-2 years lag depending on whether next year's inflation was anticipated and already considered in this year's wage negotiations or not) it is nearly impossible to lower wages based on the argument that the general price-level in the economy has fallen.
Products sell for lower prices but the wage-level stays constant - the natural consequence is rising unemployment, falling demand due to the unemployed having less to spend,
Inflation is hard to measure as you have to (a) define a sensible basket of goods and (b) have to find a way to deal with increases in the quality of goods (the computer you can buy today may be more expensive than the computer you could buy 10 years ago but it is also much more powerful and as such hardly comparable. what do?)
There is no definite measure of inflation a
Well, Steam + TF2 already works in wine, with a few quirks. I'd expect them to start from there and slowly spread to other major distributions starting with Ubuntu, there's only so much you'd want to support this early in the game.
Although I'd wish Value would go Linux-native (I'm not sure if they have confirmed this), it would indeed take much more time to port each non-Source third-party game and having Valve actively supporting wine would mean more improvements for wine in general. It would be a big step-up from the Cedega/Transgaming attempts from the last decade.
on Mac the Valve games are native but most other games offered through Steam use Cider (a Wine derivative), DosBox, ...
Maybe if we apologize to them more, they'll like us.
Fuck that! Find Iranian governments' world of Warcraft accounts and retaliatorily delete them!
You already did that last month :/
Now you have to retaliate against their retaliation... maybe target their FarmVille crops?
How many people do you know that have tried heroin and not gotten addicted?
Because why trust statistics when we can share anecdotes instead?
According to the NIDA it is estimated that "about 23 percent of individuals who use heroin become dependent on it".
According to the 2011 Monitoring the Future" report about 1.4% of 12th graders have tried heroin at some point within their lifetime (which is a lower level than the late 90s but has been stable since 2003).
Why is this modded down?
maybe because the only activity Kim Yong Il excels at is spinning in his grave?
I don't use the CLI to change screen resolution.
from the description of his scenario (he expects a problem when changing back to high resolution) it sounds very much as if the screen settings window on his Ubutu version is not optimized for 640x480 and does probably not display correctly (maybe the buttons to confirm your choice are hidden, maybe the dropdown listing various screen resolutions does not fit fully onto the screen, ...).
Where has that ingenuity that we've heard so much about gone?
Designed in California
Assembled in China
Then it's not homeopathy which works - it's the placebo effect which works. And for that we don't need overpriced sugar which has danced around the table twelve times at midnight or somesuch nonsense.
The placebo needs to be credible in order to work - if the patient can easily distinguish it from "real" medicine (by name or by price) it won't work as well,
There are a lot of real and imaginary diseases where a placebo is really all the patient needs - while use of homeopathy to "treat" severe diseases should of course be prohibited indiscriminately destroying its public credibility does probably a lot more damage than good.
If there is one thing that "school medicine" has learned from all the "alternative" medicine concepts then that "There is nothing wrong with you, go home and stop clogging up my practics hours" is never the right answer. People want their imaginary diseases to be taken 100% seriously and prescribing something homeopathic (which is basically guaranteed to have no side effects) is a lot better than prescribing some unwarranted "real" medicine or losing them to esoteric healing (once you lost them they won't come back when they are seriously ill and will instead try to treat their cancer with herb teas).
I am not sure what protection the stock market gives. The people who invested in facebook during the IPO has lost half their money. The people who capitalized facebook has made money. You could have invested in Microsoft back in 2008 and have lost money due to the stock decline or inflation. People invested in Enron, Worldcom, all under the so-called stock protection, and lost everything.
if you are not a commercial investor and invested into any stock directly you are just setting yourself up for failure and anyone with basic finance knowledge will tell you so.
...) as the opportunity arises (and even then you can end up in a Japan-like situations and take home losses). But never buy single stocks and never invest into stocks when you may be forced to cash out on a tight deadline.
Buy an index certificate, be prepared to hold it at least 15 years and have another 5 years during which you cash out (into bonds, bank deposits,
Or maybe they're just spewing buzzwords without understanding what they mean. Bitcoin itself is not a ponzi scheme and that's obvious to anyone with a dictionary. A ponzi scheme is a scheme where "investors" are paid from deposits from new investors. Obviously such a scheme must always grow in order to make payments and that means it is guaranteed to eventually collapse. As nobody sane would invest in something that explicitly advertised itself as a ponzi, such schemes always involve secrecy and obfuscation.
Bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme but it behaves similar to one - the increasing mining difficulty and limited overall amount of coins heavily rewards early adopters (who hoard their bitcoins) if and if only these early adopters can convince the latecomers that bitcoins actually have value (otherwise cashing out becomes hard).
Your ability to sell the bitcoins you mined at a low difficulty for ridiculous amounts of dollars later on is entirely dependent on the growth of the overall bitcoin scheme - and as bitcoins do currently have very limited value as use for transactions (few stores accept them, usually cheaper to pay in dollars than btcs if the stores accept them, high volatility makes accepting them difficult for business, people would be stupid to spend them giving their deflationary nature) the main motivation to get some bitcoins is to profit off the demand that will be created by those that want to get into bitcoin after you.
Wow, oh wow! Whoa! A square rainbow! WHAT DOES IT MEAN!?!? T_T
The video linked in the Technet announcement is interesting:
blue: Windows
red: Office
green: XBOX
yellow: ???
Maybe Microsoft is planning a new product line ... (if yellow was Server or dev tools there would be no reason not to include it in the video)
You could have found out about the train ride from reading an article in a publication or a post in a forum. [...] The publication is rewarded for its work either by you buying it, or by getting an affiliate payment from the train ride for the help it gave to someone who ended up being a customer.
how is this not advertising?
Guess what? She has no difficulty whatever in understanding what GMOs are, and how they are distinct from organisms which arise through breeding. No problem at all.
Any 3 year old child can tell you that birds are not dinosaurs - but an ornithologist can't.