IANAL, but I'm pretty sure France isn't bound by the United States Constitution.
Not within France, it isn't -- which is what the ruling basically says. However, if France tries to enforce its laws within the US, through the US Courts, then they do run up against that pesky old document.
I've heard from mathematical finance experts (such as Nassim Taleb) that Eliot cycles are quite unscientific. Adherents seem to believe that market moves are composed of these cycles -- but that the cycles can also lengthen, shorten, invert themselves etc. As you can probably imagine, anything can be described as cyclic if the "cycles" are allowed to go through these kinds of gymnastics! Searching for cycles using real mathematical tools (e.g. Fourier analysis) reportedly reveals that true cycles don't exist.
Unfortunately, this is pretty typical of "technical analysis", which is the voodoo of charting past patterns to predict future prices. I once spoke with a trader at a major Wall Street firm who believed that prices have "supports" and "restraints" -- i.e. natural floors and ceilings that they don't want to break through. When I asked her what happens if a price breaks through the floor, she responded with the hilariously tautological, "well, it just goes lower until it establishes a new floor!"
(Note: I have degrees in mathematics and finance.) Mandelbrot is not talking about making price predictions in the stock market, e.g. "if the price goes up on Monday, it will go up on Tuesday". As many./ers have already noticed, any such scheme would be self-defeating: if people began to anticipate a Tuesday price rise, they would buy on Monday, driving the price up a day early -- and erasing the pattern.
For this reason, most financial models assume that stocks follow a kind of stochastic (i.e. random) process called a "martingale", meaning that returns are uncorrelated over time, so you can never beat the market with a strategy like the one above. However, this leaves open the question of which probability distribution the returns follow.
The earliest models, such as the Black-Scholes model for option pricing, assume that stocks follow geometric Brownian motion -- this means that returns follow a normal probability distribution, i.e. the usual bell curve. However, real world markets do not follow a normal distribution: the tails of the distribution are much "fatter", meaning that the Black-Scholes model underestimates the risk of extreme market moves. Therefore, this is a bad risk model, and a company full of Nobel prize winning PhDs, called Long Term Capital Management, followed it off a cliff in the late 90's, nearly bringing down the US financial markets. (For a captivating account of LTCM's rise and fall, check out the book "When Genius Failed".)
This is what Mandelbrot means when he "encourage[s] the study and adoption of more-realistic risk models". We need a better model for the statistical dynamics of markets in order to properly understand (and price) risk -- i.e. to be able to compute accurately the probability that such-and-such price move will happen -- not to make simple-minded stock predictions.
If you're interested in Mandelbrot's own mathematical work on the subject, I'd recommend his book "Fractals and Scaling in Finance". For a great read about the inherent unpredictability of the markets, try the books "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" or "Fooled By Randomness".
"...can be completed in a little over 2 years, and it comes with IBM's WebSphere and Microsoft's MCSD certification."
I've said this before, and will again. A collection of certificates is not the same as a computer science degree.
Actually, if one of the certificates says "Bachelor of Science in Computer Science" (the part you "..."ed out), then it is precisely a computer science degree. I agree that too many people confuse IT with CS, and certificates with real degrees, but it looks like this is a real degree. How good the degree actually is -- well, that's up for debate.
But if 90% of everything is crap then aren't 90 of these top 100 papers crap as well?
Interesting... so if 90% of everything is crap, then of the remaining 10%, 90% of THAT is crap, too. So 99% of everything is crap. But then 90% of the remaining 1% is crap, so 99.9% is crap. Repeating this indefinitely, it follows that 100% of everything is crap.
First, they don't have to use the DMCA, it is a choice.
Possibly not. As a public company, Apple has a legal responsibility to its shareholders to protect the interests of their investment. While IANAL, I'm pretty sure that Apple could be sued by shareholders if they put the personal belief that "DMCA sux" ahead of their fiduciary responsibilities.
Once the UK goes REALLY metric, it will be a 226.7962 kg fine.
I just feel bad for the poor Brits on Slashdot who are still trying to figure out how many stone that is. At least they don't measure fuel economy in rods/hogshead...
Well, more accurately it should be "Calcuators RPN Future the of", but if I were to point that out I'd be basically admitting how much of a geek I am.
Hmm, I don't think that's right either. Here's what the stack looks like for evaluating calculators rpn future the of.
(calculators) (rpn calculators) (rpn calculators) (future) (rpn calculators) (the future) (rpn calculators) (of the future) (rpn calculators of the future)
This gives "rpn calculators of the future". To get "the future of rpn calculators", we want future calculators rpn of the:
(future) (future) (calculators) (future) (rpn calculators) (future of rpn calculators) (the future of rpn calculators)
Ah, brings me back to the good-old sentencing-diagramming days of elementary school.
Basically it assigns random chars/numbers/symbols to each letter of the alphabet... Now I print this nice little table and use it for passwords all over the place. For example I could just remember "slash" which maps to the password Z?+JTLZ?4&
The table itself isn't a terrible idea, but where you really go wrong is printing it out. If anyone gets a look at your "alphabet," and you've used a simple dictionary password, then it's as simple as doing a dictionary attack -- just with your modified alphabet instead of the standard one.
This is why, as the article states, user-devised password schemes aren't very good (although yours is probably somewhat better than many), as they only give the illusion of security.
Glad you asked. Assuming that we have a 10^15 byte disk (which is how those decimal-loving hard disk manufacturers would define it), and your MP3s are encoded at 128kbps (where 1 kb = 1024 b = 128 B, as the binary folks would have it), then you could listen to MP3s nonstop for:
10^15B/(128kb/s * 128B/kb) = 61035156250 seconds... which works out to just about 1934 years without hearing the same song twice.
It shouldn't be a big deal which distro you're running, what cpu arch you have, or what libs you have installed. Software should be smart and just work. If you don't have the right shared libs, the app in question should get/provide them itself.
This sounds all well and good, but it ignores one simple fact -- software is dumb and doesn't do anything "by itself." If your software does anything, it pretty much does it with the help of the OS, and whatever package management system(s) it chooses to provide. If your software seems "smart," it's probably the result of some good design and well-defined standards on the OS end. This is why distributions are important.
Proprietary OSes have it easy, because they can define a single, uniform standard for installing software, and vendors have no choice but to meet this requirement, which is ultimately great for end users. Unfortunately for Linux users, the standards that are available on every system -- gcc, make, the standard file structure -- make for a comparatively difficult and slow (unless you're a Gentoo user) installation experience, and make it impossible to install binary-only software (if you're into that sort of thing).
Distributions exist, in large part, to provide a similar uniformity of standards (like apt-get, portage, rpm, etc.) that users of proprietary systems get. But since you can't force people to adhere to a single standard, as proprietary OSes can, we've split off into different factions depending on what we prefer as individuals. This is a feature, not a bug!
So, in essence, expecting software to "just work" on all distributions makes about as much sense as expecting Windows software to work on a Mac. The whole point of having distributions and package systems -- indeed, of having an OS at all -- is internal cohesiveness, not interoperability. If you want the latter, I refer you to the aforementioned gcc/make. But if you want the former, your choice of distribution is important.
Sorry, buddy -- I own the copyright on the sound of Britney Spears' latest single being sent through SSH. Sure, laugh if you want, but it sounds better than the original.
Oh man, I'm embarassed. I bought Quicksilver the day it came out, and I still haven't finished it, and now the sequel comes out. It's official: Neal Stephenson publishes faster than I read!
Doesn't seem to me to be specifically open sourcey (sp?) to be religious about technical issues. I mean just look at Microsoft, they are a frikkin' technical monopoly:.Net good, use.Net, write everything in C#, Java bad, GPL evil, etc.
Whew, at least IBM doesn't do that. That kind of non-On Demand attitude would make it more difficult for On Demand businesses to get On Demand solutions to their On Demand problems.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure France isn't bound by the United States Constitution.
Not within France, it isn't -- which is what the ruling basically says. However, if France tries to enforce its laws within the US, through the US Courts, then they do run up against that pesky old document.
Cheers,
IT
Are you familiar with Elliot cycles?
I've heard from mathematical finance experts (such as Nassim Taleb) that Eliot cycles are quite unscientific. Adherents seem to believe that market moves are composed of these cycles -- but that the cycles can also lengthen, shorten, invert themselves etc. As you can probably imagine, anything can be described as cyclic if the "cycles" are allowed to go through these kinds of gymnastics! Searching for cycles using real mathematical tools (e.g. Fourier analysis) reportedly reveals that true cycles don't exist.
Unfortunately, this is pretty typical of "technical analysis", which is the voodoo of charting past patterns to predict future prices. I once spoke with a trader at a major Wall Street firm who believed that prices have "supports" and "restraints" -- i.e. natural floors and ceilings that they don't want to break through. When I asked her what happens if a price breaks through the floor, she responded with the hilariously tautological, "well, it just goes lower until it establishes a new floor!"
Cheers,
IT
(Note: I have degrees in mathematics and finance.) Mandelbrot is not talking about making price predictions in the stock market, e.g. "if the price goes up on Monday, it will go up on Tuesday". As many ./ers have already noticed, any such scheme would be self-defeating: if people began to anticipate a Tuesday price rise, they would buy on Monday, driving the price up a day early -- and erasing the pattern.
For this reason, most financial models assume that stocks follow a kind of stochastic (i.e. random) process called a "martingale", meaning that returns are uncorrelated over time, so you can never beat the market with a strategy like the one above. However, this leaves open the question of which probability distribution the returns follow.
The earliest models, such as the Black-Scholes model for option pricing, assume that stocks follow geometric Brownian motion -- this means that returns follow a normal probability distribution, i.e. the usual bell curve. However, real world markets do not follow a normal distribution: the tails of the distribution are much "fatter", meaning that the Black-Scholes model underestimates the risk of extreme market moves. Therefore, this is a bad risk model, and a company full of Nobel prize winning PhDs, called Long Term Capital Management, followed it off a cliff in the late 90's, nearly bringing down the US financial markets. (For a captivating account of LTCM's rise and fall, check out the book "When Genius Failed".)
This is what Mandelbrot means when he "encourage[s] the study and adoption of more-realistic risk models". We need a better model for the statistical dynamics of markets in order to properly understand (and price) risk -- i.e. to be able to compute accurately the probability that such-and-such price move will happen -- not to make simple-minded stock predictions.
If you're interested in Mandelbrot's own mathematical work on the subject, I'd recommend his book "Fractals and Scaling in Finance". For a great read about the inherent unpredictability of the markets, try the books "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" or "Fooled By Randomness".
Cheers,
IT
"...can be completed in a little over 2 years, and it comes with IBM's WebSphere and Microsoft's MCSD certification."
I've said this before, and will again. A collection of certificates is not the same as a computer science degree.
Actually, if one of the certificates says "Bachelor of Science in Computer Science" (the part you "..."ed out), then it is precisely a computer science degree. I agree that too many people confuse IT with CS, and certificates with real degrees, but it looks like this is a real degree. How good the degree actually is -- well, that's up for debate.
Cheers,
IT
But if 90% of everything is crap then aren't 90 of these top 100 papers crap as well?
... so if 90% of everything is crap, then of the remaining 10%, 90% of THAT is crap, too. So 99% of everything is crap. But then 90% of the remaining 1% is crap, so 99.9% is crap. Repeating this indefinitely, it follows that 100% of everything is crap.
Interesting
Crapfully yours,
IT
First, they don't have to use the DMCA, it is a choice.
Possibly not. As a public company, Apple has a legal responsibility to its shareholders to protect the interests of their investment. While IANAL, I'm pretty sure that Apple could be sued by shareholders if they put the personal belief that "DMCA sux" ahead of their fiduciary responsibilities.
Cheers,
IT
I am not familiar with this right. One has the right to commit a crime, as long as one writes an article about it later?
Crap, I wish I'd known about that defense before I "researched" my article on how easy it is to sell crack cocaine to 8-year-olds.
Cheers,
IT
Once the UK goes REALLY metric, it will be a 226.7962 kg fine.
I just feel bad for the poor Brits on Slashdot who are still trying to figure out how many stone that is. At least they don't measure fuel economy in rods/hogshead...
Cheers,
IT
Then it won't matter, because no-one else will use the technology and it'll just quietly fade away.
... cough, cough, BETA, cough.
Sony has made that mistake before
Cheers,
IT
Hmm, I don't think that's right either. Here's what the stack looks like for evaluating calculators rpn future the of.This gives "rpn calculators of the future". To get "the future of rpn calculators", we want future calculators rpn of the:Ah, brings me back to the good-old sentencing-diagramming days of elementary school.
Cheers,
IT
What are you going to do with your terabyte iPod?
Easy -- listen to the newly-released Duke Nukem Forever soundtrack.
Cheers,
IT
Basically it assigns random chars/numbers/symbols to each letter of the alphabet ... Now I print this nice little table and use it for passwords all over the place. For example I could just remember "slash" which maps to the password Z?+JTLZ?4&
The table itself isn't a terrible idea, but where you really go wrong is printing it out. If anyone gets a look at your "alphabet," and you've used a simple dictionary password, then it's as simple as doing a dictionary attack -- just with your modified alphabet instead of the standard one.
This is why, as the article states, user-devised password schemes aren't very good (although yours is probably somewhat better than many), as they only give the illusion of security.
Cheers,
IT
Are these robots going to be powered by fish flatulence, by chance?
No way! Everyone knows that robots beat up old people and use their medicine for fuel. Hope you have enough robot insurance.
Cheers,
IT
Even in a real-life fight, I bet the losing gang was still whining about the lag.
Cheers,
IT
How many 128kbps MP3s can you store on it.
... which works out to just about 1934 years without hearing the same song twice.
Glad you asked. Assuming that we have a 10^15 byte disk (which is how those decimal-loving hard disk manufacturers would define it), and your MP3s are encoded at 128kbps (where 1 kb = 1024 b = 128 B, as the binary folks would have it), then you could listen to MP3s nonstop for:
10^15B/(128kb/s * 128B/kb) = 61035156250 seconds
Cheers,
IT
It shouldn't be a big deal which distro you're running, what cpu arch you have, or what libs you have installed. Software should be smart and just work. If you don't have the right shared libs, the app in question should get/provide them itself.
This sounds all well and good, but it ignores one simple fact -- software is dumb and doesn't do anything "by itself." If your software does anything, it pretty much does it with the help of the OS, and whatever package management system(s) it chooses to provide. If your software seems "smart," it's probably the result of some good design and well-defined standards on the OS end. This is why distributions are important.
Proprietary OSes have it easy, because they can define a single, uniform standard for installing software, and vendors have no choice but to meet this requirement, which is ultimately great for end users. Unfortunately for Linux users, the standards that are available on every system -- gcc, make, the standard file structure -- make for a comparatively difficult and slow (unless you're a Gentoo user) installation experience, and make it impossible to install binary-only software (if you're into that sort of thing).
Distributions exist, in large part, to provide a similar uniformity of standards (like apt-get, portage, rpm, etc.) that users of proprietary systems get. But since you can't force people to adhere to a single standard, as proprietary OSes can, we've split off into different factions depending on what we prefer as individuals. This is a feature, not a bug!
So, in essence, expecting software to "just work" on all distributions makes about as much sense as expecting Windows software to work on a Mac. The whole point of having distributions and package systems -- indeed, of having an OS at all -- is internal cohesiveness, not interoperability. If you want the latter, I refer you to the aforementioned gcc/make. But if you want the former, your choice of distribution is important.
Cheers,
IT
Wow, that guy must have done a LOT of acid.
Cheers,
IT
Sorry, buddy -- I own the copyright on the sound of Britney Spears' latest single being sent through SSH. Sure, laugh if you want, but it sounds better than the original.
Cheers,
IT
And there goes the last DJ
And there goes the last DJ
Damn, if only I knew the title of that song...
Cheers,
IT
Oh man, I'm embarassed. I bought Quicksilver the day it came out, and I still haven't finished it, and now the sequel comes out. It's official: Neal Stephenson publishes faster than I read!
Cheers,
IT
Doesn't seem to me to be specifically open sourcey (sp?) to be religious about technical issues. I mean just look at Microsoft, they are a frikkin' technical monopoly: .Net good, use .Net, write everything in C#, Java bad, GPL evil, etc.
Whew, at least IBM doesn't do that. That kind of non-On Demand attitude would make it more difficult for On Demand businesses to get On Demand solutions to their On Demand problems.
Cheers,
IT
Star Wars: Episode III: A Big Pile of Sith
...
At least that's what dyslexic people will call it
Cheers,
IT
Do nonsense numbers have to double every 18 months for the sake of being a Moore's Law compliant statistic?
Of course! Linux distributions have been doing this for years. That's why my "Linux 10.0" can mop the floor with your paltry Linux 2.6.
Cheers,
IT
Yeah, how come the Terminator/Matrix/Inspector Gadget never had to worry about magnets?
:)
Remember how they used EMP in the Matrix movies to disable the sentinels? Guess what the "M" in "EMP" stands for, Einstein.
Cheers,
IT
Simply hit Ctrl-Meta-Shift-X-U-G, then Meta-Shift-Q-Shift-P-77, then type gvaomp-txt
... since everyone knows that's what emacs stands for anyway.
Don't worry, it becomes quite natural after a while.
I find it much more intuitive to remap it to Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift
Cheers,
IT