> Ten years ago, people "invested" in their homes with leverage (debt) when everyone was saying that you'd be insane not to and that renters were throwing away their money. Now many of these people are upside down. You can be lucky for a long time, but that's not necessarily investing.
Buying a house with leverage was a great trade ten years ago, you'd still have a remarkable return in most areas of the world.
> Doing what the parent advocates, especially with leverage â" options, forwards & futures, buying on margin (borrowing money), or shorting (borrowing stock)â", could net you big money, but it could also wipe you out. very true. But of course the main reason to use options instead of futures is that you can limit your downside.
> You can work 10x harder, 10x faster, and 10x smarter than the guy next to you, but if you didn't finish high-school/college/university, you won't get the better job.
Of course if you're that good, why didn't you get a degree in the first place, or pick it up in nightschool?
> Yes! You know who else was part of that fine tradition? Stalin, Hitler, Mussolin All three renowned for being upstanding members of the house of Lords?
Absolutely. The original VW Beetle had - I think - about 34hp, and weighed about a ton. Of course it's not a high performance car, but my dad took his across the alps several times.
Horsepower inflation in the car industry is just ludicrous. Do sporty family saloons really need 500bhp?
You forget that the risk / reward ratio in investment banks is completely different than in telecoms. Time to market is often more valuable than complete reliability. So in sensible investment banks, you adjust the development and balance the development speed against the reliability. E.g. if you have a stock trading system that deals with a million transactions a day, you make sure it's rock solid, even if that means only quarterly releases. If you have an exotics system which needs daily changes, you do that and accept that every now and then it has problems.
> As someone who programmed in assembly for 5 yeas professionally, let me say: C is a crappy assembly language
No, it's a good and portable assembly language.
> It has a crappy macro language, Fair point. The preprocessor is pretty shit.
> and I'm often left guessing what the compiler will do with my C code, especially on an unfamiliar platform.
> Is an int 32 or 64 bits? I had better compile a test program and fire up a debugger to find out. OK, since there's no C standard type for "32 bit int", what works on this compiler? Maybe INT32 is defined somewhere?
Why would you expect to be able to program in portable assembly without knowing enough about the platform to know what the size of an int is?
And quite frankly, what C compilers do really isn't too hard to figure out...
Since it seems unlikely people on Facebook are going to confess to be being a major drug trafficker, or show video clips of their last home invasion rape and robbery, I can't really see the value to society of wasting law enforcement resources clogging up the criminal justice system with the parade of Facebook petty crimes.
In the UK we seem to have plenty of stupid criminals. A group of people beating someone up while filming it on their mobiles, and posting the evidence on social networking sites seems to be a common habit amongst our more detestable yoofs.
I don't know about the UK, but here in the states our criminal justice system is full. We have enough people in jail, more than enough people getting tagged with arrest records over fairly minor infractions. We need law enforcement to focus on the big problems and not be looking for reasons to dump some otherwise law-abiding person into the criminal justice meat grinder because they copped to some petty crime in Facebook.
And we need to de-criminalize a wide swath of drug possession crimes. We're spending billions keeping people in jail for a few oz's of pot. It's really quite insane.
Yeah and Amen, brother. Good luck getting anyone in power to listen to the evidence though.
I think the rank and file police are equally hacked off about the situation...I don't think many coppers took the job because they like paperwork. This http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wasting-Police-Time-Crazy-World/dp/0955285410/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208716095&sr=8-1 is an amusing read.
UN Declaration on human rights: Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks
I'm sure I've seen plenty of legal opinions on slashdot, where the average user is about as legally qualified as Gonzalez, stating that sharing your music collections is a basic human right.;)
C. We'll just keep you in detention for as long as we like. D. We can ship you to a random country that owes us favours, and you'll be lucky if you emerge alive in a year or two.
The joy of globalisation, even torture can be outsourced.
I haven't found a good way of outsourcing googling for references yet, so you'll have to do it yourself.
> Now, most of the food in Spain except for the ham, seafood and churros is bordering on objectively disgusting, but everyone I saw over there is very thin.
That'll be a different Spain from the one everyone else visits...
Slashdot Mirror
> no normal people got hurt in this mess, only bad, dumb people or greedy people
Bad, dumb and greedy sounds like a normal person to me.
> Ten years ago, people "invested" in their homes with leverage (debt) when everyone was saying that you'd be insane not to and that renters were throwing away their money. Now many of these people are upside down. You can be lucky for a long time, but that's not necessarily investing.
Buying a house with leverage was a great trade ten years ago, you'd still have a remarkable return in most areas of the world.
> Doing what the parent advocates, especially with leverage â" options, forwards & futures, buying on margin (borrowing money), or shorting (borrowing stock)â", could net you big money, but it could also wipe you out.
very true. But of course the main reason to use options instead of futures is that you can limit your downside.
It's a VW, just cheaper and with a different badge.
>f you ACTUALLY helped wire a few million out of an African country, you'd be a criminal.
No, you'd be a swiss banker.
> You can work 10x harder, 10x faster, and 10x smarter than the guy next to you, but if you didn't finish high-school/college/university, you won't get the better job.
Of course if you're that good, why didn't you get a degree in the first place, or pick it up in nightschool?
Sheesh... noobs ;)
> Yes! You know who else was part of that fine tradition? Stalin, Hitler, Mussolin
All three renowned for being upstanding members of the house of Lords?
Absolutely. The original VW Beetle had - I think - about 34hp, and weighed about a ton. Of course it's not a high performance car, but my dad took his across the alps several times.
Horsepower inflation in the car industry is just ludicrous. Do sporty family saloons really need 500bhp?
You forget that the risk / reward ratio in investment banks is completely different than in telecoms. Time to market is often more valuable than complete reliability. So in sensible investment banks, you adjust the development and balance the development speed against the reliability. E.g. if you have a stock trading system that deals with a million transactions a day, you make sure it's rock solid, even if that means only quarterly releases. If you have an exotics system which needs daily changes, you do that and accept that every now and then it has problems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Niklaus_Wirth%2C_UrGU.jpg
Full beard, no real success for Pascal. Or Modula-2, or Oberon.
The exception that proves the rule.
> As someone who programmed in assembly for 5 yeas professionally, let me say: C is a crappy assembly language
No, it's a good and portable assembly language.
> It has a crappy macro language,
Fair point. The preprocessor is pretty shit.
> and I'm often left guessing what the compiler will do with my C code, especially on an unfamiliar platform.
> Is an int 32 or 64 bits? I had better compile a test program and fire up a debugger to find out. OK, since there's no C standard type for "32 bit int", what works on this compiler? Maybe INT32 is defined somewhere?
Why would you expect to be able to program in portable assembly without knowing enough about the platform to know what the size of an int is?
And quite frankly, what C compilers do really isn't too hard to figure out...
Since it seems unlikely people on Facebook are going to confess to be being a major drug trafficker, or show video clips of their last home invasion rape and robbery, I can't really see the value to society of wasting law enforcement resources clogging up the criminal justice system with the parade of Facebook petty crimes.
I don't know about the UK, but here in the states our criminal justice system is full. We have enough people in jail, more than enough people getting tagged with arrest records over fairly minor infractions. We need law enforcement to focus on the big problems and not be looking for reasons to dump some otherwise law-abiding person into the criminal justice meat grinder because they copped to some petty crime in Facebook.In the UK we seem to have plenty of stupid criminals. A group of people beating someone up while filming it on their mobiles, and posting the evidence on social networking sites seems to be a common habit amongst our more detestable yoofs.
And we need to de-criminalize a wide swath of drug possession crimes. We're spending billions keeping people in jail for a few oz's of pot. It's really quite insane.
Yeah and Amen, brother. Good luck getting anyone in power to listen to the evidence though.I think the rank and file police are equally hacked off about the situation...I don't think many coppers took the job because they like paperwork. This http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wasting-Police-Time-Crazy-World/dp/0955285410/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208716095&sr=8-1 is an amusing read.
Blame our New Labour overlords, not the coppers
> Or, as Alan Kay, the guy who invented object oriented programming....
;)
I'm fairly sure Simula predates SmallTalk by a few years, so Mr Kay doesn't quite deserve that honour.
I'm also fairly sure that the guy who invented the wheel didn't have modern cars in mind, either
Finally someone who sees sense:
Voting machines make a very simple, nicely parallelisable problem unnecessarily complicated.
Sealed ballot boxes and observers from all parties, as well as fairly neutral officials present at the count works fine in Europe.
And if you have more voters, you'll likely have more volunteers, too.
Voting machines are a bad solution in search of a problem.
Sadly just bought, not paid for. :(
no point blocking them, that just disconnects you from your users. Just sue them.
UN Declaration on human rights: Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks
Hasn't been repealed yet.
That's around the same price and distance as my commute to London (if you buy a daily ticket).
Is there a PT alternative in Washington?
"The Mythical Man Month" by Fred Brooks was first published in 1975, and republished in 2000 as a 25th anniversary edition.
;)
And it's still one of the most insightful books about commercial software development out there.
The Pragmatic chaps aren't bad either, but I'm not convinced they'll get republished in 2024
I'm sure I've seen plenty of legal opinions on slashdot, where the average user is about as legally qualified as Gonzalez, stating that sharing your music collections is a basic human right. ;)
C. We'll just keep you in detention for as long as we like.
D. We can ship you to a random country that owes us favours, and you'll be lucky if you emerge alive in a year or two.
The joy of globalisation, even torture can be outsourced.
I haven't found a good way of outsourcing googling for references yet, so you'll have to do it yourself.
My system at work is currently running on 650 blades (a mixture of AMD/Intel, all dual processor, dual and quadcore).
:)
216 Processors no longer qualifies as a supercomputer. This is 2007, not 1997
> Now, most of the food in Spain except for the ham, seafood and churros is bordering on objectively disgusting, but everyone I saw over there is very thin.
That'll be a different Spain from the one everyone else visits...
You can't blame python for the fact that you slept through the floating point classes in your computer science degree, can you?