I'd like to hear someone justify the US having nuclear weapons, especially taking into account that they are the only country to have used them to attack another country...
Okay, I'll bite...
The reason the US has nuclear weapons is because the US developed them. The same is true with France, China, Russia, and the UK. Someone had to use the first, and that happened to be the US.
Since 5 countries had nuclear weapons when the NNPT was signed, it doesn't make much logical sense to have a treaty that purports to take away that capablility from a country. Just like you can't un-invent something and why would a country voluntarily give up something like that?
Seems to me this is sort of like the argument about the use of the various poison gasses after WWI. The french used it first (or was it the germans, I always forget that one), but after the war, there was a treaty that tried to ban poison gas, but of course none of the countries that knew how to make poison gas volunteered to destroy their stockpiles.
Ohhh, you mean justify why it is "fair" for the US to have nuclear weapons. It's a cruel world and life isn't fair sometimes. There's no "mommy" country to make the countries play fair after they've been bad (btw, the UN isn't a mommy, it's more like a blog where countries can go to diss on each other).
I don't know how good this 48 hour thing would really be at making good tasting beef.
Sounds like determining the "best" will be a guess based on less than 48 hours of time, however, the best tasting beef is dry aged from 10-28 days (even the wet aged, vacuum packed, beef is aged for about 7 days). This means this will basically be done by visual inspection grading, not actually tasting anything...
Then you get make this clone of something that might taste good (at least has good fat marbling since that is what they grade on mostly) which you will need to have eat and exercise the exact same way to get the same beef grade. Sounds like the odds are perhaps better than playing dna roulette, but it still seems like a crap shoot to me.
Besides cows have already been genetically sequenced. You can already test them for the "marbling gene" and the "tenderness genes", which means you can sort embryo already. There's no need to clone to get this result. It really just sounds like they are doing this just because they can.
Actually, people that develop ciphers go out of their way to make sure the scrambling algorithms they use are not groups, or fields or other simple to analyze mathematical abstract algebraic construct like matrices. If a cipher was a group or a matrix, then repeated operations wouldn't be very secure (e.g., 3des would be pretty must just des with an alternate set of keys) just like a sequence of matrix operations can be replaced by a composite matrix.
Of course a cipher being a mapping function that maps it's input set to an equivalently sized output set will generate a high-dimensional permutation group, but that's subtly (but significantly) different than being a group or matrix...
I'm not the first to say this but: This is a viral marketing ploy for something completely different from free energy. Stay tuned to the site and eventually things should become clearer.
not so fast, it could well be that it is already 100 AU from earth depending ont the geometry at the moment.
According to this document, at 8/8/2006, voyager 1 was 99.91 AU from the sun with heliographic intertial longitude of 172.8 degrees and 34.2 degrees latitude. On the same date, earth was 1.014 AU from the sun with heliographic intertial longitude of 239.3 degrees and latitude of 6.2 degrees longitude.
Confirmation of the fact that it's already passed 100.7AUs is of course is left as an exercise for the reader...;^)
> Only in the short term.. given a long enough timeframe, its odds of running into something eventually are 100%.
Depends on the nature of the universe.
If you believe in that the universe is uniformly expanding, then every point is at the center of the expansion. Since the velocity of voyager isn't that high (relativistically speaking), there is at least some chance that it could eventually get to a state where nothing even going at speed of light can run into it, ever.;^)
CPUs (okay they're still doing this one) FLASH (spun out that business to Spansion w/Fujitsu, did IPO a couple years ago) SRAM (they end-of-lifed all their discrete SRAM parts in 1999) PLDs (spun out that business to Vantis, sold to Lattice in 1999) Embededded Processors (sold Alchemy to Raza this year, Geode up for sale now) Microcontrollers (I think AM186 devices are "not recommended" for new designs) Ethernet Controllers and PHYs (although they still do sell these, mostly in niche markets)
I think you are remembering the "old" AMD, not the "new" niche-AMD we know now...
young-ins, it's too late. there was already X10.;^)
X10 was the first popular version of the X-window system releaased back in '86, shortly redesigned and replaced by the first version of X11 that we know today...
As I recall, some of the knocks against X10 was that it was slow, somewhat platform specific, kind of a resource hog and the protocol was not very backward compatible with previous versions... Hmm, that kindof reminds me of some other software;^)
> He's not giving all of his net worth to charity when he dies, but it's pretty > close. Which is why this story made me wonder if his death is impending...
Many folks are speculating that he's been thinking about this ever since his wife Susan died back in 2004 (they had been married since 1952, although separated since 1977, his wife set him up with his current live-in girlfriend Astrid).
Apparently Warren's original plan was to leave all his money to his wife Susan (who has been his closest advisor on all charitable matters) to figure out how to set up a foundation to distribute their wealth to charity. Most likely, plans probably changed when Susan got cancer and died. One can just wonder what an event like that can do to your thoughts about your own mortality and the possiblity that your live-in girlfriend could accidentally mess up your carefully planned life-time donation strategy and he probably just decided to take matters into his own hands to make sure it was done to his satisfaction.
Of course the original investors and the underwriters want to make piles of money;^)
However, to clear up a common misconception, most IPOs are actually "best-efforts" IPO, not a "firm-commitment" IPO. The main difference is that in a "firm-commitment" IPO, the underwriters (or a syndicate of underwriters) essentially buy the whole offering for a set price and resell them to their clients. In a "best-efforts" IPO, the underwriters are only required to transact the amount of shares to fulfil their client's demands. Of course the risk is lower for the underwriters to do a "best-efforts" IPO so it's usually cheaper for a company to do that (underwriters take a smaller cut). However for a hot IPO, underwriters may do a low-cost "firm-commitment" IPO.
As for how IPO investing is very risky and can lose money, here's how.
The underwriters usually make up the IPO price by just judging the demand from institutional investor clients and their promise to buy shares. Then they use a "subscription" model to allocate the shares. Once the IPO prices, but before they shares start trading they solicit subscriptions from potential fish (I mean investors). The investors look at the IPO price, and commit to buy up to a certain number of shares. The underwriters often give you a "red-herring" price range before the IPO prices so you can mull it over before they give you the real price and subscription.
In any case, once you subscribe, you may get the amount of shares you subscribe for, but often you may get less (in many cases an IPO is oversubscribed and the underwriters end up giving you less than what you subscribed for using some allocation scheme among all subscribers, usually favoring the big subscribers). To try to get more share, some clever people stretch themselves (assuming they will get less than their subscription). Of course this is somewhat risky since you are on the hook for payment up to your maximum subscription level as soon as you subscribe and the IPO price is known, but people do that all the time.
The next day after the IPO prices, you are informed how many shares you actually got and the shares usually start trading, but like most securities transactions, you don't get your actual shares delivered for about a week (in the best case usually no sooner than the 3 day customary setting time). If the IPO subscription was low (indicating low demand), you may find out that instead of being over-subscribed and getting less than you asked for you might have gotten all that you asked for. Unfortunatly, when this happens and you are waiting for your shares to be delivered, the shares will probably drop in value. Now you are stuck, you can't sell your shares since you don't have them yet, and if the shares are dropping in value you may find that you can't even "short" sell your shares (you need to borrow shares from your brokerage to sell to short and they often don't have any for you to borrow). Even if you managed to borrow some shares to short-sell, you have to short on an uptick (which isn't happening when the shares are going down). By the time you actually receive your IPO shares so you can sell them, they may be worth much less than you paid for them. Note that the institutional investors took exactly the same risk and are in the same boat. Perhaps they took a more informed risk and were less leveraged, but that's not their fault was it?
The underwriters on the other hand already gave the money to the company at the IPO price in exchange for the shares their clients subscribed for, they just want the money their clients promised them in exchange for shares (and of course they also had to pay for the shares they kept for themselves at the IPO price too and aren't giving themselves an out). Just like people shouldn't expect refunds on lottery tickets if they didn't win, why should people expect one here? Or if you borrowed money to buy lottery tickets and they didn't win, should the debt be forgiven? Of course people with winning lottery tickets don't ask for refunds, right;^)
Why shouldn't the filing fee of a patent include checking to determine uniqueness?
Of course the filing fee is supposed to help fund the patent examiner to research the uniqueness of your patent... However, not only is it totally insufficient to fund this activity in the best of situations (the fee is deliberatly set low as to not discriminate against small individual inventors), but remember you are also feeding a highly efficient streamlined government agency with that fee...:^)
P.S. In this context, the correct spelling of nerd is E-N-G-I-N-E-E-R;^)
So, would it be possible to make a 3-D chip? Where, instead of one line or branches that the electron follows but a crazy ass network for it to flow through?
In most respects, chips today are ALREADY 3d in that there are multiple layers of planar (flat layers) metal wiring (anywhere from 4 to 8) connected by vias (vertical interconnect) over a single layer transistors. The routing of signals on each layer is on purpose designed to be a crazy-ass network (to avoid electromagnetic signal coupling noise between adjacent wires).
However, in current technology, there's still only 1 layer of transistors, and the main limitation of adding more is that there's no good way to get rid of the heat of transistors. Even today, there isn't a good way to get rid of the heat of the transistors in the 1 layer of current chips, let alone a big pancake stack (or lasagna) of transistors. People are already starting to stack memory chips that don't get too hot together, and I'm sure they'll eventually start doing different kind of stacks too as they get better at figuring out the heat problem...
.. in 30 seconds (if I actually typed that slow), I could find this website on google...
A DST contains a secret, 40-bit cryptographic key which is field-programmable via RF command. In its interaction with a reader, a DST emits a factory-set (24-bit) identifier, and then authenticates itself by engaging in a challenge-response protocol. The reader initiates the protocol by transmitting a 40-bit challenge. The DST encrypts this challenge under its key and returns a 24-bit response. It is thus the secrecy of the key that ultimately protects the DST against cloning and simulation.
I'm pretty sure, as this article indicates, they probably use better stuff on modern cars these days...
TI has indicated to the authors that they have more secure RFID products available at present; in lieu of specifying these products, they refer to the site www.ti-rfid.com for information.
In fact, RFID chips with somewhat longer key-lengths are already available in the marketplace and used in a range of automobile immobilizers. Philips offers two cryptographically enabled RFID chips for immobilizers. The Philips HITAG 2, however, has a 48-bit secret key, and thus offers only marginally better resistance to a brute-force attack-- certainly not a comfortable level for long-term security. The Philips SECT, in contrast, has a 128-bit key. The HITAG 2 algorithm is proprietary, while Philips data sheets do not appear to offer information about the cryptographic algorithm underpinning their SECT device. It is difficult to say, therefore, whether these algorithms are well designed.
Why wouldnt the OEM's just sysprep in a custom ruleset at the time of assembly, whitelisting all their addons?
Maybe, but perhaps this is complicated by generic system-restore facilities and the fact that the OEMs probably don't really want a "white-list" that airs their dirty little shovel-ware secrets...
Also a factor (as another poster mentioned), they probably don't want that stuff in writing... Just imagine the following testimony during a class action suit...
EFF Attorney, "So tell me Mr. DellFlunky, was it you who authorized putting this Rainweatherbug malware on the whitelist for all computers shipped between 2007 and 2008 that caused the internet to crash?"
Mr. DellFlunky, "I was just following the orders of the VP of sales, he said they were going to pay us big bucks..."
EFF Attorney, "Did you test the software before putting it on the whitelist which allowed all your computers shipped between 2007 and 2008 to crash the internet?"
Mr. DellFlunky, "Test the software before we install it, why would we do that? Do you realize how much that would cost? Nobody even uses that stuff anyhow..."
OEM customers (e.g., Dell, HP, Gateway, etc) often ship their PCs with dozens of what I call "shovel-ware" (trial versions of useless software that OEMs pile on heaps on the desktop). Often this shovel-ware likes to call home occasionally to notify you of "new updates available for download" and other such nonsense.
I'm sure it's very embarrasing (and costly) to the OEMs when they get support calls from their own customers when the microsoft outbound firewall blocks the shovelware and flashes up a dialog box. So they probably just asked microsoft to ship the firewall so that the outbound firewall doesn't validate the application (which makes it too easy for end users to "accidentally" disable the shovelware and too easy for experienced users to get a list of all the shovelware polluting their machines from the "allowed" list and uninstall it). Of course microsoft doesn't want to have too many configs out there, so they just make this the default setting out of the box. </TINFOILHAT>
Sure microsoft is listening to their customers, it's just their OEM customers...
>I'm not really sure that MP3 is really more related to ASPEC (the Fraunhofer stuff) or related to Musicam (the Philips stuff)
I thought that what everyone refers to as MP3 is Layer 3, which in turn is based on ASPEC (while Layer 1/2 are based on MUSICAM).
Certainly MP3 is layer III, but since you seem to be insisting, I'll elaborate...
Instead of the "two-path" approach that you seem to be implying (e.g., layer I/II MUSICAM and layer III based on ASPEC), instead, the MPEG 1 audio standard was structured in a series complexity layers (layer I was the simplest and layer III the most complex), but they were based on the same basic 32 sub-band filterbank schema from MUSICAM. Layer III borrowed many ideas from ASPEC (most notably augmenting the sub-band filterbank with MDCT for better frequency resolution, and using huffman codes instead of fixed length codes), but really still uses the the sub-band filterbank schema rather than the ASPEC spectral transform scheme so in a sense, layer III really had many fathers. In fact it's pretty easy to see in layer III that the MDCT was really sort of grafted in over the sub-band scheme from layer I and layer II. It's a bit unfair to say that MP3 has nothing to do with MUSICAM, although like I said, FhG certainly deserves a lot of the credit and as a result has some of their IP in the standard...
Here's a press release from the Convenor that probably conveys what I was trying to say a little bit better.
Perhaps surprisingly to most people not familiar with the process, quite a bit of technical work from many companies are integrated into standards the MPEG committee produced. This is sort of collaboration is somewhat unusual for an international standards body (which often just rubber-stamps proposals from a single company). In the committee, people/companies that have good ideas (that bear out under analysis) and are willing to do the hard work to refine the ideas into practice, generally see their IP incorporated into the standard.
Of course, the view is that "FhG developed MP3" is just a sound-bite like the "US govt developed the iPod". All sound-bites have some fraction of truth and some fraction of spin. The fraction of truth is much higher in the former than the later, but like the orignal poster said, I think that gives short shrift to the many companies and individuals that contributed to making MP3 (and that's not just a political point of view about MP3, you can see it in the technical details).
However, this is/. so it's usually just easier to dumb-down into sound-bites for the fan-boys to argue about...;^)
FWIW, mp4/aac which is what I think I-tunes/iPod uses (rather than the older MP3-format) is more of a AT&T/Dolby thing than a Fraunhofer thing (although both engineers from Fraunhofer and Sony were certainly involved with AAC development and of course it inherited some of its characteristics from refining mp3).
In development, what eventually became the AAC/MP4 codec used to be called the NBC codec (for not-backward-compatible), because the charter was to make some better audio codec w/o necessarily inheriting anything from previous stuff...
As for MP3's, having attended some mpeg committee meetings, I think this wikipedia account is fairly accurate (from what I recall, I was mostly a video guy, but did attend some audio meetings)...
I'm not really sure that MP3 is really more related to ASPEC (the Fraunhofer stuff) or related to Musicam (the Philips stuff). In any event, MP3 ended up to be quite a merge of different ideas by the time it got out of the MPEG committee since there had to be some compatiblity between the formats for audio layer I/II and III modes although no doubt FhG engineers put much of the work into making the final standard and probalby deserve a lot of the credit for what became MP3.
However, to be accurate, I don't think that US government funding had much involvement in this area at all. Most of the DARPA funding in audio coding was going to speech coders using various forms of predictive coding and vocal track modelling. The sub-band coding ideas, although not unknown in the general digital signal processing and signal compression community, didn't really have as much funding as the speech stuff. As you might expect, music is better modeled by transform coding than vocal track modelling, so any association the US government funding had in developing a transform coder for audio compression for music was very slight at best (even though they pour 100's of millions of research dollars into transform coding of video for military applications, the audio stuff is mostly quite different algorithmically).
On the other hand, you can probably thank DARPA and AT&T research dollars for the digital audio compression of your voice on your cell phone. If military types communicated orders using harmonicas and trumpets instead of yelling into microphones, maybe DARPA would have taken more interest in compressing music...;^)
> I'd love to eat more healthy foods, but the fact is that I can only afford the stuff packed with sugar and fat.
Yikes, it looks like we really need more education about proper nutritional choices.
As an example, walk into any discount ethnic grocery store and look at the prices in the produce department and then compare it to the overprocessed food shelves from the big chain supermarkets. I don't think there is really much of a difference in price but only the overprocessed food-stuffs have the excessive sugar and fat.
I think what you might have wanted to say is "I love to eat stuff packed with sugar and fat and I can't seem to find the time to search for comparably priced healthy foods that I want to eat."
When you say it like that, I think you might see where the problem probably lies...
Google said that if their tax rate hadn't been running 41.8%, they would have outperformed the analysts projections
I think a good case could be made that if the person watching over the pot of money didn't seem to be doing a good job with the tax planning, that this would be a good reason for investors to question the potential future financial health of the company...
I don't care how smart the engineers are, if the executives are flushing money down the toilet, things aren't going perfectly and with their Price-Earnings multiple, investors can be expected to take some pause when things don't look perfect.
Anyhow, they seem to be a fine company, just not a perfect company...
Okay, I didn't RTFA, but I thought I'd mention that it is indeed possible for an anonymous third party to challenge a patent. Anyone can put such a challenge into a patent file, although nobody really looks at it and nothing really happens (except the current patent holder gets notified), unless the patent is actually challenged or re-examined (this is my understanding, but IANAL). I believe this is the case that since patents are presumed valid, nobody will look at this new evidence unless there is an actual trial to invalidate the patent where the patent holder can defend aganist the evidence...
Here is the relavant part of the United States Code you can interpret yourself...
35 U.S.C. 301. Citation of prior art. Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing prior art consisting of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent. If the person explains in writing the pertinency and manner of applying such prior art to at least one claim of the patent, the citation of such prior art and the explanation thereof will become a part of the official file of the patent. At the written request of the person citing the prior art, his or her identity will be excluded from the patent file and kept confidential.
The uspto has a publication on this subject, but it's mostly legalese. With most government actions, often fee is involved. However, and I quote the publication...
Prior art in the form of patents or printed publications may be cited to the Office for placement into the patent files. Such citations may be made without payment of a fee.
As far as I know we here in Canada don't sell records, Atleast the cell phone company that I work for doesn't. Plus with the new privatcy act this isn't going to happen.
Like it or not, usually what is inflicted on the citizens of the U.S. of A. by business folks also happens to canadaians. I never understood why some canadians thought it would be any different than that.... Business is pretty much multinational now and the governments of the world are becoming more more under the influence of the big multinationals...
Basically all these folks at macleans did was call a US company that got the records directly from Bell Canada, Telus Mobility, and Fido/Rodgers...
So which cell phone company in canada do you work for again?
In the United States, generally dental school is considered a graduate/professional education (since you need a BS or BA for entrance)...
Which do you think is going to cause more damage to the University's reputation: the student's insulting comments, or the University's totalitarian overreaction?
Not that it matters, but it seems to me that both the student's action and the university administrator's overreaction aren't going to be remembered 15 minutes from now.
From my perspective, he's done nothing wrong and he's bravely protesting an unjust punishment! He's not cowardly or whiny; he's brave and righteous!
Okay, then let's just let him be brave and righteous, certainly if the administration does nothing, you are robbing him of this opportunity for indignation. However, isn't he just a victim of everyday circumstance (everyday people overreact, right)?
I know that I personally will think less of anyone who was complicit enough with the university's policies to tolerate graduating from there.!
Okay, you made your judgement, later other folks will make theirs, in time things will just sort themselves out, no?
This student shouldn't be punished for his mistake because he didn't make a mistake! He's done nothing wrong!
So what if he didn't do anything wrong... When my car got hit by someone who didn't have enough insurance, I was screwed. This was just because I was correctly driving and following all the traffic laws and just happened to be in front of someone who wasn't paying attention... No insurance company wanted to pay my deductable and it was too small to sue for (other than for righteousness reasons)... Just because you don't do anything wrong doesn't mean you don't have to suffer consequences. Life is unfair. People have to learn to live with it.
Dental school (as the case with many graduate/professional programs) is essentially a trade school, they train you the magic arts of dentistry so that you can practice it. There is little critical thinking involved outside of technical problem analysis (the misconception that a school's mission must be to teach social thinking skills is a very "liberal-arts/holistic" view of education, some aspect of schooling is just job training/certification and most graduate/professional programs fall into this later category).
As for a breach of contract, well most contracts come with non-performance/liquidated damage clauses. I'm pretty much guessing the "school-tuition" contract limits damages to the refund of tuition for non-performance (e.g., failure of the school to allow the person to graduate). Very few contractual agreements come with what is called "specific-performance" clauses because they are often difficult to enforce. For example, say if the school is burried in a freak blizzard for ten years (sometimes I think wisconsin isn't too far away from this eventuality) or suppose they decided to close down their dental school, how are they supposed to let you go to school and graduate, regardless of what they promised?
I'm not saying that taking action against the person is a smart thing for the school to do, but there are many things that are in the grey area when it comes to restricting speach by private organizations. As a stupid example, what if there was someone going around on campus students blogging about how fellow students/faculty are tall and ugly and unfit for reproduction (tall and ugly are categories of people that are not protected under federal anti-discrimination and civil rights statutes). Well, you might argue that stopping that person is censorship, but since it isn't technically a violation of any legal statutes (except some sort of verbal harassment akin to swearing), but it might be in the school's best interest to stop this person (to keep the remainder of the student/faculty from leaving for other schools). There's a lot of grey in this whole blogging issue.
Often it seems to me that often people today want to be protected from the consequences of their actions as if that is some divine right to be act with impunity and protection of others (e.g., the government, a lawyer, etc). The people who really make a statement are those who suffer some consequence. Those people that hide behind protection are merely whiners. Sure sometimes it takes a lot of sacrifices to make a statement, but in a world seemingly filled with whiners who don't want to take the consequences for their actions (note the abundance of lawyers in the world and the lawsuits that they file), it seems like seeing if someone gave up something to make a statement, it is only then an appropriate filter to use to see who we should focus our limited attention-span on. Note that if the school DIDN'T impose this punishment, I seriously doubt anyone would be discussing this, but does that make the complaint less valid?
Note that by the blogger's own admission, the comments were made when he was at least in a bad mood and possibly a binge drinking/drunken state. "Gee, your honor, I'm sorry I ran over that baby and pregnant mother, when I was having a bad day, I had a fight with my girlfriend, and just had a couple beers at the pub..." Yeah, that was a good excuse, as if that somehow minimizes the impact. Doesn't (rightly or wrongly) what was said and the student's behavior shed a bad light on the school and/or dentists (or at least possibly impacts the careers dental students from Marquette who have yet to graduate eventually to out to get their first job having come from a school of this repuation). Maybe the school deserves the criticism, maybe not, time will tell right? Shouldn't we trust the judgement of time on both Marquette and the blogger/student?
In any event, why shouldn't he suffer the consequences of the comments he made? Just because life doesn't go smoothly right now, he's eventuall
You missed one of the biggest factors, many mutual funds and institutions (e.g., retirement/pension investors) generally have rules which prohibit them from investing in OTC stocks with low market cap (share price * shares). This is why a reverse split doesn't help, it may increase the share price, but of course reduce the number of shares.
Mutual funds and institutional investors are highly desired as they tend to be stable stock holders which can reduce the volatility of a stock (once they decide to invest they hold large chunks of companies and hold them for a while to increase tax efficiency). Once you get into the open market, you get hedge funds, insiders, and day-traders manipulating your stock price which can cause other investors to flee for the woods.
They also haven't had any analysts covering them since the beginning of this year (nobody likes to cover OTC or penny stocks).
Moving to an OTC (over the counter) market means that there are only a couple brokers making a market in the stock and price reporting is really up to them to perform on a timely basis. This means your broker (unless they are the ones making the market in the stock) really has to try to find a buyer for any stock to you want to sell or will have to pay the market maker a fee and/or be subject to the price they report. In a "listed" stock there generally are several big brokerages that match buyers with sellers and with a big exchange like NYSE enough shares are traded on the floor to create a more continuous range of prices and fast execution of any retail sized trader order. As the price continues to fall, the OTC market maker gives up and demote the stock to the "pink sheets" where sales are reported on paper reports as trades occur. Then the stock isn't very liquid at all and the daily or weekly price report is fairly worthless as an indicator of the worth of the stock.
The long and the short of it is that this means giving stock options to the employees or the executives is really not very meaningful anymore (anytime they sell, they don't have a good idea of the price they will get and more likely they will "heisenberg" the stock because if they sell the price is likely to go down) meaning it's hard to motivate employees and executives with either their existing or any new stock options or grants. Companies like SGI are all about employees, the assets are basically worthless to the investors w/o the employees. Unable to motivate them with stock/ownership, they have to pay them more (e.g. bonuses), or likely suffer attrition.
It's a downward death spiral that almost no company can get out of. For example, SGI has already had to pledge assets (e.g., patents, trademarks, etc.) to get their latest operating loan. In bankrupcy this puts these new lenders in a primary position and the normal equity/stock holders and current bond holders in an inferior position making it less likely for people to invest in the stock (equity holders are the last to get paid back in a bankrupcy). This is what makes it hard to raise any captial, except by heavily mortgaging thier assets even further to the lenders.
Once one of the lenders decides that the company assets are worth more than the company itself it often just rips the company apart for a fire sale to an army of lawyers who snap up patents at fire sales in order to shake down large companies for a few quick bucks. It's a sad, sad day when that happens.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason the US has nuclear weapons is because the US developed them. The same is true with France, China, Russia, and the UK. Someone had to use the first, and that happened to be the US.
Since 5 countries had nuclear weapons when the NNPT was signed, it doesn't make much logical sense to have a treaty that purports to take away that capablility from a country. Just like you can't un-invent something and why would a country voluntarily give up something like that?
Seems to me this is sort of like the argument about the use of the various poison gasses after WWI. The french used it first (or was it the germans, I always forget that one), but after the war, there was a treaty that tried to ban poison gas, but of course none of the countries that knew how to make poison gas volunteered to destroy their stockpiles.
Ohhh, you mean justify why it is "fair" for the US to have nuclear weapons. It's a cruel world and life isn't fair sometimes. There's no "mommy" country to make the countries play fair after they've been bad (btw, the UN isn't a mommy, it's more like a blog where countries can go to diss on each other).
Sounds like determining the "best" will be a guess based on less than 48 hours of time, however, the best tasting beef is dry aged from 10-28 days (even the wet aged, vacuum packed, beef is aged for about 7 days). This means this will basically be done by visual inspection grading, not actually tasting anything...
Then you get make this clone of something that might taste good (at least has good fat marbling since that is what they grade on mostly) which you will need to have eat and exercise the exact same way to get the same beef grade. Sounds like the odds are perhaps better than playing dna roulette, but it still seems like a crap shoot to me.
Besides cows have already been genetically sequenced. You can already test them for the "marbling gene" and the "tenderness genes", which means you can sort embryo already. There's no need to clone to get this result. It really just sounds like they are doing this just because they can.
Actually, people that develop ciphers go out of their way to make sure the scrambling algorithms they use are not groups, or fields or other simple to analyze mathematical abstract algebraic construct like matrices. If a cipher was a group or a matrix, then repeated operations wouldn't be very secure (e.g., 3des would be pretty must just des with an alternate set of keys) just like a sequence of matrix operations can be replaced by a composite matrix.
Of course a cipher being a mapping function that maps it's input set to an equivalently sized output set will generate a high-dimensional permutation group, but that's subtly (but significantly) different than being a group or matrix...
degrees != radians, it's only 98.9AUs...
shuda known 172.8 and 239.3 are pretty close...
Confirmation of the fact that it's already passed 100.7AUs is of course is left as an exercise for the reader... ;^)
> Only in the short term.. given a long enough timeframe, its odds of running into something eventually are 100%.
;^)
Depends on the nature of the universe.
If you believe in that the universe is uniformly expanding, then every point is at the center of the expansion. Since the velocity of voyager isn't that high (relativistically speaking), there is at least some chance that it could eventually get to a state where nothing even going at speed of light can run into it, ever.
Okay, here's what I know about the current AMD...
CPUs (okay they're still doing this one)
FLASH (spun out that business to Spansion w/Fujitsu, did IPO a couple years ago)
SRAM (they end-of-lifed all their discrete SRAM parts in 1999)
PLDs (spun out that business to Vantis, sold to Lattice in 1999)
Embededded Processors (sold Alchemy to Raza this year, Geode up for sale now)
Microcontrollers (I think AM186 devices are "not recommended" for new designs)
Ethernet Controllers and PHYs (although they still do sell these, mostly in niche markets)
I think you are remembering the "old" AMD, not the "new" niche-AMD we know now...
young-ins, it's too late. there was already X10. ;^)
;^)
X10 was the first popular version of the X-window system releaased back in '86, shortly redesigned and replaced by the first version of X11 that we know today...
As I recall, some of the knocks against X10 was that it was slow, somewhat platform specific, kind of a resource hog and the protocol was not very backward compatible with previous versions... Hmm, that kindof reminds me of some other software
> He's not giving all of his net worth to charity when he dies, but it's pretty
> close. Which is why this story made me wonder if his death is impending...
Many folks are speculating that he's been thinking about this ever since his wife Susan died back in 2004 (they had been married since 1952, although separated since 1977, his wife set him up with his current live-in girlfriend Astrid).
Apparently Warren's original plan was to leave all his money to his wife Susan (who has been his closest advisor on all charitable matters) to figure out how to set up a foundation to distribute their wealth to charity. Most likely, plans probably changed when Susan got cancer and died. One can just wonder what an event like that can do to your thoughts about your own mortality and the possiblity that your live-in girlfriend could accidentally mess up your carefully planned life-time donation strategy and he probably just decided to take matters into his own hands to make sure it was done to his satisfaction.
Just a thought...
Of course the original investors and the underwriters want to make piles of money ;^)
;^)
However, to clear up a common misconception, most IPOs are actually "best-efforts" IPO, not a "firm-commitment" IPO. The main difference is that in a "firm-commitment" IPO, the underwriters (or a syndicate of underwriters) essentially buy the whole offering for a set price and resell them to their clients. In a "best-efforts" IPO, the underwriters are only required to transact the amount of shares to fulfil their client's demands. Of course the risk is lower for the underwriters to do a "best-efforts" IPO so it's usually cheaper for a company to do that (underwriters take a smaller cut). However for a hot IPO, underwriters may do a low-cost "firm-commitment" IPO.
As for how IPO investing is very risky and can lose money, here's how.
The underwriters usually make up the IPO price by just judging the demand from institutional investor clients and their promise to buy shares. Then they use a "subscription" model to allocate the shares. Once the IPO prices, but before they shares start trading they solicit subscriptions from potential fish (I mean investors). The investors look at the IPO price, and commit to buy up to a certain number of shares. The underwriters often give you a "red-herring" price range before the IPO prices so you can mull it over before they give you the real price and subscription.
In any case, once you subscribe, you may get the amount of shares you subscribe for, but often you may get less (in many cases an IPO is oversubscribed and the underwriters end up giving you less than what you subscribed for using some allocation scheme among all subscribers, usually favoring the big subscribers). To try to get more share, some clever people stretch themselves (assuming they will get less than their subscription). Of course this is somewhat risky since you are on the hook for payment up to your maximum subscription level as soon as you subscribe and the IPO price is known, but people do that all the time.
The next day after the IPO prices, you are informed how many shares you actually got and the shares usually start trading, but like most securities transactions, you don't get your actual shares delivered for about a week (in the best case usually no sooner than the 3 day customary setting time). If the IPO subscription was low (indicating low demand), you may find out that instead of being over-subscribed and getting less than you asked for you might have gotten all that you asked for. Unfortunatly, when this happens and you are waiting for your shares to be delivered, the shares will probably drop in value. Now you are stuck, you can't sell your shares since you don't have them yet, and if the shares are dropping in value you may find that you can't even "short" sell your shares (you need to borrow shares from your brokerage to sell to short and they often don't have any for you to borrow). Even if you managed to borrow some shares to short-sell, you have to short on an uptick (which isn't happening when the shares are going down). By the time you actually receive your IPO shares so you can sell them, they may be worth much less than you paid for them. Note that the institutional investors took exactly the same risk and are in the same boat. Perhaps they took a more informed risk and were less leveraged, but that's not their fault was it?
The underwriters on the other hand already gave the money to the company at the IPO price in exchange for the shares their clients subscribed for, they just want the money their clients promised them in exchange for shares (and of course they also had to pay for the shares they kept for themselves at the IPO price too and aren't giving themselves an out). Just like people shouldn't expect refunds on lottery tickets if they didn't win, why should people expect one here? Or if you borrowed money to buy lottery tickets and they didn't win, should the debt be forgiven? Of course people with winning lottery tickets don't ask for refunds, right
Of course the filing fee is supposed to help fund the patent examiner to research the uniqueness of your patent... However, not only is it totally insufficient to fund this activity in the best of situations (the fee is deliberatly set low as to not discriminate against small individual inventors), but remember you are also feeding a highly efficient streamlined government agency with that fee...
P.S. In this context, the correct spelling of nerd is E-N-G-I-N-E-E-R ;^)
In most respects, chips today are ALREADY 3d in that there are multiple layers of planar (flat layers) metal wiring (anywhere from 4 to 8) connected by vias (vertical interconnect) over a single layer transistors. The routing of signals on each layer is on purpose designed to be a crazy-ass network (to avoid electromagnetic signal coupling noise between adjacent wires).
However, in current technology, there's still only 1 layer of transistors, and the main limitation of adding more is that there's no good way to get rid of the heat of transistors. Even today, there isn't a good way to get rid of the heat of the transistors in the 1 layer of current chips, let alone a big pancake stack (or lasagna) of transistors. People are already starting to stack memory chips that don't get too hot together, and I'm sure they'll eventually start doing different kind of stacks too as they get better at figuring out the heat problem...
Maybe, but perhaps this is complicated by generic system-restore facilities and the fact that the OEMs probably don't really want a "white-list" that airs their dirty little shovel-ware secrets...
Also a factor (as another poster mentioned), they probably don't want that stuff in writing... Just imagine the following testimony during a class action suit...
OEM customers (e.g., Dell, HP, Gateway, etc) often ship their PCs with dozens of what I call "shovel-ware" (trial versions of useless software that OEMs pile on heaps on the desktop). Often this shovel-ware likes to call home occasionally to notify you of "new updates available for download" and other such nonsense.
I'm sure it's very embarrasing (and costly) to the OEMs when they get support calls from their own customers when the microsoft outbound firewall blocks the shovelware and flashes up a dialog box. So they probably just asked microsoft to ship the firewall so that the outbound firewall doesn't validate the application (which makes it too easy for end users to "accidentally" disable the shovelware and too easy for experienced users to get a list of all the shovelware polluting their machines from the "allowed" list and uninstall it). Of course microsoft doesn't want to have too many configs out there, so they just make this the default setting out of the box.
</TINFOILHAT>
Sure microsoft is listening to their customers, it's just their OEM customers...
I thought that what everyone refers to as MP3 is Layer 3, which in turn is based on ASPEC (while Layer 1/2 are based on MUSICAM).
Certainly MP3 is layer III, but since you seem to be insisting, I'll elaborate...
Instead of the "two-path" approach that you seem to be implying (e.g., layer I/II MUSICAM and layer III based on ASPEC), instead, the MPEG 1 audio standard was structured in a series complexity layers (layer I was the simplest and layer III the most complex), but they were based on the same basic 32 sub-band filterbank schema from MUSICAM. Layer III borrowed many ideas from ASPEC (most notably augmenting the sub-band filterbank with MDCT for better frequency resolution, and using huffman codes instead of fixed length codes), but really still uses the the sub-band filterbank schema rather than the ASPEC spectral transform scheme so in a sense, layer III really had many fathers. In fact it's pretty easy to see in layer III that the MDCT was really sort of grafted in over the sub-band scheme from layer I and layer II. It's a bit unfair to say that MP3 has nothing to do with MUSICAM, although like I said, FhG certainly deserves a lot of the credit and as a result has some of their IP in the standard...
Here's a press release from the Convenor that probably conveys what I was trying to say a little bit better.
Perhaps surprisingly to most people not familiar with the process, quite a bit of technical work from many companies are integrated into standards the MPEG committee produced. This is sort of collaboration is somewhat unusual for an international standards body (which often just rubber-stamps proposals from a single company). In the committee, people/companies that have good ideas (that bear out under analysis) and are willing to do the hard work to refine the ideas into practice, generally see their IP incorporated into the standard.
Of course, the view is that "FhG developed MP3" is just a sound-bite like the "US govt developed the iPod". All sound-bites have some fraction of truth and some fraction of spin. The fraction of truth is much higher in the former than the later, but like the orignal poster said, I think that gives short shrift to the many companies and individuals that contributed to making MP3 (and that's not just a political point of view about MP3, you can see it in the technical details).
However, this is /. so it's usually just easier to dumb-down into sound-bites for the fan-boys to argue about... ;^)
FWIW, mp4/aac which is what I think I-tunes/iPod uses (rather than the older MP3-format) is more of a AT&T/Dolby thing than a Fraunhofer thing (although both engineers from Fraunhofer and Sony were certainly involved with AAC development and of course it inherited some of its characteristics from refining mp3).
g
;^)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_audio_codin
In development, what eventually became the AAC/MP4 codec used to be called the NBC codec (for not-backward-compatible), because the charter was to make some better audio codec w/o necessarily inheriting anything from previous stuff...
As for MP3's, having attended some mpeg committee meetings, I think this wikipedia account is fairly accurate (from what I recall, I was mostly a video guy, but did attend some audio meetings)...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3
I'm not really sure that MP3 is really more related to ASPEC (the Fraunhofer stuff) or related to Musicam (the Philips stuff). In any event, MP3 ended up to be quite a merge of different ideas by the time it got out of the MPEG committee since there had to be some compatiblity between the formats for audio layer I/II and III modes although no doubt FhG engineers put much of the work into making the final standard and probalby deserve a lot of the credit for what became MP3.
However, to be accurate, I don't think that US government funding had much involvement in this area at all. Most of the DARPA funding in audio coding was going to speech coders using various forms of predictive coding and vocal track modelling. The sub-band coding ideas, although not unknown in the general digital signal processing and signal compression community, didn't really have as much funding as the speech stuff. As you might expect, music is better modeled by transform coding than vocal track modelling, so any association the US government funding had in developing a transform coder for audio compression for music was very slight at best (even though they pour 100's of millions of research dollars into transform coding of video for military applications, the audio stuff is mostly quite different algorithmically).
On the other hand, you can probably thank DARPA and AT&T research dollars for the digital audio compression of your voice on your cell phone. If military types communicated orders using harmonicas and trumpets instead of yelling into microphones, maybe DARPA would have taken more interest in compressing music...
> I'd love to eat more healthy foods, but the fact is that I can only afford the stuff packed with sugar and fat.
Yikes, it looks like we really need more education about proper nutritional choices.
As an example, walk into any discount ethnic grocery store and look at the prices in the produce department and then compare it to the overprocessed food shelves from the big chain supermarkets. I don't think there is really much of a difference in price but only the overprocessed food-stuffs have the excessive sugar and fat.
I think what you might have wanted to say is "I love to eat stuff packed with sugar and fat and I can't seem to find the time to search for comparably priced healthy foods that I want to eat."
When you say it like that, I think you might see where the problem probably lies...
I don't care how smart the engineers are, if the executives are flushing money down the toilet, things aren't going perfectly and with their Price-Earnings multiple, investors can be expected to take some pause when things don't look perfect.
Anyhow, they seem to be a fine company, just not a perfect company...
Here is the relavant part of the United States Code you can interpret yourself...
The uspto has a publication on this subject, but it's mostly legalese. With most government actions, often fee is involved. However, and I quote the publication...Try this one on for size...
Like it or not, usually what is inflicted on the citizens of the U.S. of A. by business folks also happens to canadaians. I never understood why some canadians thought it would be any different than that.... Business is pretty much multinational now and the governments of the world are becoming more more under the influence of the big multinationals...
Basically all these folks at macleans did was call a US company that got the records directly from Bell Canada, Telus Mobility, and Fido/Rodgers...
So which cell phone company in canada do you work for again?
Dental school (as the case with many graduate/professional programs) is essentially a trade school, they train you the magic arts of dentistry so that you can practice it. There is little critical thinking involved outside of technical problem analysis (the misconception that a school's mission must be to teach social thinking skills is a very "liberal-arts/holistic" view of education, some aspect of schooling is just job training/certification and most graduate/professional programs fall into this later category).
As for a breach of contract, well most contracts come with non-performance/liquidated damage clauses. I'm pretty much guessing the "school-tuition" contract limits damages to the refund of tuition for non-performance (e.g., failure of the school to allow the person to graduate). Very few contractual agreements come with what is called "specific-performance" clauses because they are often difficult to enforce. For example, say if the school is burried in a freak blizzard for ten years (sometimes I think wisconsin isn't too far away from this eventuality) or suppose they decided to close down their dental school, how are they supposed to let you go to school and graduate, regardless of what they promised?
I'm not saying that taking action against the person is a smart thing for the school to do, but there are many things that are in the grey area when it comes to restricting speach by private organizations. As a stupid example, what if there was someone going around on campus students blogging about how fellow students/faculty are tall and ugly and unfit for reproduction (tall and ugly are categories of people that are not protected under federal anti-discrimination and civil rights statutes). Well, you might argue that stopping that person is censorship, but since it isn't technically a violation of any legal statutes (except some sort of verbal harassment akin to swearing), but it might be in the school's best interest to stop this person (to keep the remainder of the student/faculty from leaving for other schools). There's a lot of grey in this whole blogging issue.
Often it seems to me that often people today want to be protected from the consequences of their actions as if that is some divine right to be act with impunity and protection of others (e.g., the government, a lawyer, etc). The people who really make a statement are those who suffer some consequence. Those people that hide behind protection are merely whiners. Sure sometimes it takes a lot of sacrifices to make a statement, but in a world seemingly filled with whiners who don't want to take the consequences for their actions (note the abundance of lawyers in the world and the lawsuits that they file), it seems like seeing if someone gave up something to make a statement, it is only then an appropriate filter to use to see who we should focus our limited attention-span on. Note that if the school DIDN'T impose this punishment, I seriously doubt anyone would be discussing this, but does that make the complaint less valid?
Note that by the blogger's own admission, the comments were made when he was at least in a bad mood and possibly a binge drinking/drunken state. "Gee, your honor, I'm sorry I ran over that baby and pregnant mother, when I was having a bad day, I had a fight with my girlfriend, and just had a couple beers at the pub..." Yeah, that was a good excuse, as if that somehow minimizes the impact. Doesn't (rightly or wrongly) what was said and the student's behavior shed a bad light on the school and/or dentists (or at least possibly impacts the careers dental students from Marquette who have yet to graduate eventually to out to get their first job having come from a school of this repuation). Maybe the school deserves the criticism, maybe not, time will tell right? Shouldn't we trust the judgement of time on both Marquette and the blogger/student?
In any event, why shouldn't he suffer the consequences of the comments he made? Just because life doesn't go smoothly right now, he's eventuall
You missed one of the biggest factors, many mutual funds and institutions (e.g., retirement/pension investors) generally have rules which prohibit them from investing in OTC stocks with low market cap (share price * shares). This is why a reverse split doesn't help, it may increase the share price, but of course reduce the number of shares.
Mutual funds and institutional investors are highly desired as they tend to be stable stock holders which can reduce the volatility of a stock (once they decide to invest they hold large chunks of companies and hold them for a while to increase tax efficiency). Once you get into the open market, you get hedge funds, insiders, and day-traders manipulating your stock price which can cause other investors to flee for the woods.
They also haven't had any analysts covering them since the beginning of this year (nobody likes to cover OTC or penny stocks).
Moving to an OTC (over the counter) market means that there are only a couple brokers making a market in the stock and price reporting is really up to them to perform on a timely basis. This means your broker (unless they are the ones making the market in the stock) really has to try to find a buyer for any stock to you want to sell or will have to pay the market maker a fee and/or be subject to the price they report. In a "listed" stock there generally are several big brokerages that match buyers with sellers and with a big exchange like NYSE enough shares are traded on the floor to create a more continuous range of prices and fast execution of any retail sized trader order. As the price continues to fall, the OTC market maker gives up and demote the stock to the "pink sheets" where sales are reported on paper reports as trades occur. Then the stock isn't very liquid at all and the daily or weekly price report is fairly worthless as an indicator of the worth of the stock.
The long and the short of it is that this means giving stock options to the employees or the executives is really not very meaningful anymore (anytime they sell, they don't have a good idea of the price they will get and more likely they will "heisenberg" the stock because if they sell the price is likely to go down) meaning it's hard to motivate employees and executives with either their existing or any new stock options or grants. Companies like SGI are all about employees, the assets are basically worthless to the investors w/o the employees. Unable to motivate them with stock/ownership, they have to pay them more (e.g. bonuses), or likely suffer attrition.
It's a downward death spiral that almost no company can get out of. For example, SGI has already had to pledge assets (e.g., patents, trademarks, etc.) to get their latest operating loan. In bankrupcy this puts these new lenders in a primary position and the normal equity/stock holders and current bond holders in an inferior position making it less likely for people to invest in the stock (equity holders are the last to get paid back in a bankrupcy). This is what makes it hard to raise any captial, except by heavily mortgaging thier assets even further to the lenders.
Once one of the lenders decides that the company assets are worth more than the company itself it often just rips the company apart for a fire sale to an army of lawyers who snap up patents at fire sales in order to shake down large companies for a few quick bucks. It's a sad, sad day when that happens.