First, the regulations against bucket-shops* was repealed.
Then the SEC discovered it couldn't even ask for data from these operations, much less regulate them.
Then the people at the SEC, having nothing interesting to work on, discovered they could fill their time and use their vast network and computing resources in an interesting manner, while waiting for the party in charge of ripping off the consumer to be thrown out of power.
* - A bucket shop is a betting parlor in which the game of choice is stock prices. You don't buy and sell the stock, or options in the stock, you just make a wager against the house that the price of a certain stock will rise or fall by a certain amount by a certain time. When the law was repealed, it allowed the creation of "derivatives" that had no tie to the underlying equity whatsoever. The same change in the law allowed almost unlimited borrowing to make these bets; this is prohibited to equity buyers by the margin-open and margin-hold restrictions, but the new bucket shops being run in hedge funds sold this service like it was the gold mine it was until the credit-multiplier got so stretched there wasn't a real dollar left to lend. The same change in the law required no reporting of any of this activity to the government. That is how a market worth tens of trillions of dollars in transactions per day grew from nothing in just a few years without you or me or the SEC or our congressmen having a clue it was happening. In the end, when all the funny-money transactions were unwound, nearly a $Trillion in real money had disappeared into accounting cul de sacs, requiring the government to issue the TARP bailouts to provide solvency to banks that were unsure if they were still operational. This is why "financial regulation" is a hideously inadequate euphemism for the sort of hangings we should be scheduling on the gallows down the center of Wall St. right now. Failure to pass a major reform package demanding transparency and accountabiltiy will simply allow this stuff to occur again.
We need to know more before sending humans because if a colony of humans dies determining the hundred reasons that colonizing that spot is impossible then it's as though you were simply gambling lives for your own amusement.
Really, unless the exploring humans luck into somewhere they can take off their helmets and gloves and physically interact with the environment, they might as well be here watching it on TV.
Orbital mechanics is fiddly, I'll grant you that, but it's constant fiddly. Everything in the system moves predictably.
In other words, it's NP-easy. Toss the players into the computer and let it grind. Adjust dv here and there, and you can spline together 64 blue loops.
The trickiest thing here isn't the 64 loops. It's finding the 64 loops that get you the 200 scientific datasets you most want. Which isn't done in this case by a computer or a brain. It's done by a campaign of political refinement. The picture with the loops in it isn't therefore the interesting part. The description of how they posed that picture and what will come of each of those loops is.
So when you say I have no idea, I yawn at you, too, and imagine that you are likely in denial about the fact that your own job can likely be replaced by a piece of software I likely could conceive of without resorting to a whiteboard.
Now Queen's University researchers must compile the data for release because of the (UK) Freedom of Information Act.
Seems unreasonable. They should charge the requester for any effort needed to "compile" or transmit the data. No reason the public should foot the bill for any particular formatting or delivery.
But the Internet was built on a PDP-11, and he's never been a real player in it.
I've never really been impressed with Apple products. I liked my iPod mini, but I got it essentially for free; and then it fried itself because I charged it under a pile of papers one night. Still no desire to own another iWhatever. They have a minor superiority in blingness; general inferiority in featureness; and a massive inferiority in clueness.
Your seminar is based on a solid piece of stupid. Time to assimilate is not strongly correlated with violent reactions to criticism.
As a counterexample: Hawaiians had nearly zero time to "modernize," and they aren't preternatural terrorists (despite the nutjob secessionists).
But they also don't have a book like the Quran that tells them to kill unbelievers and blasphemers (and that not being a believer is being a blasphemer, leaving only one "logical" conclusion).
Further, the Mideast has had just as long to modernize as the West has. They've merely refused to, or rather, not been allowed to because of the tight grip their feudal lords keep on power (aided, again, by the Quran).
The problem is the illogic of the Quran and the number of people who accept it unquestioningly, not any pop-sociology.
No, they got their project picked out of the hundreds submitted for funding because they had a particular plan that met particular objectives.
They engineered the spacecraft with normal margins over and above the basic requirements to allow for the sort of uncertainties that enter into designing every part of a device this complicated and limited in mass and power. One of the simplest of these is to put in twice as much fuel as your nominal model tells you to, giving yourself 100% margin to deal with exigent circumstances.
This sort of margin is not just good for business, it's generally required by the funding authority (NASA and the government), because they got tired of being bitten on the ass by penurious aerospace craft design in the '00s. That's the 19'00s, not the 20'00s.
Then, as the mission goes along, their managers and technical staff made careful decisions that didn't waste their fuel margins. The result is that they have a free spacecraft on-orbit with which to do new science. Which again they have to propose to the funding authority, since ground systems and personnel still cost money. The funding authority sees the variable costs as incredibly cheap compared with developing and emplacing a whole new device, so they give it a green light.
A few months later, we get to see a pretty picture that blows the minds of the smaller-minded among us, and makes the bigger-brained among us yawn at the idea that anyone is impressed with 64 loops around a couple of rocks that aren't going anywhere fast...
Wait. Check that. The comparison operators for PDP-8 are all microcoded. I bet that if you combine two of them together it takes more cycles to get through the microcode. So a less-than-or-equal might take 2-3X as long as a less-than, while both occupy only one instruction in your object code.
Checked the PDP-8. It will do less-than-or-equal by literally combining the opcodes for less-than and equal in a way that or's them together.
So okay. I have no idea why Ritchie didn't know that, and chose to do things the way he did. Probably momentum from some other system he'd worked on before he came up with C.
Slashdot Mirror
Which CC companies do this, so we can avoid them and let them rot?
They knew what it was. There far too little blood and verbal abuse involved for it to be their normal work.
Whoever broke this story got it backward.
First, the regulations against bucket-shops* was repealed.
Then the SEC discovered it couldn't even ask for data from these operations, much less regulate them.
Then the people at the SEC, having nothing interesting to work on, discovered they could fill their time and use their vast network and computing resources in an interesting manner, while waiting for the party in charge of ripping off the consumer to be thrown out of power.
* - A bucket shop is a betting parlor in which the game of choice is stock prices. You don't buy and sell the stock, or options in the stock, you just make a wager against the house that the price of a certain stock will rise or fall by a certain amount by a certain time. When the law was repealed, it allowed the creation of "derivatives" that had no tie to the underlying equity whatsoever. The same change in the law allowed almost unlimited borrowing to make these bets; this is prohibited to equity buyers by the margin-open and margin-hold restrictions, but the new bucket shops being run in hedge funds sold this service like it was the gold mine it was until the credit-multiplier got so stretched there wasn't a real dollar left to lend. The same change in the law required no reporting of any of this activity to the government. That is how a market worth tens of trillions of dollars in transactions per day grew from nothing in just a few years without you or me or the SEC or our congressmen having a clue it was happening. In the end, when all the funny-money transactions were unwound, nearly a $Trillion in real money had disappeared into accounting cul de sacs, requiring the government to issue the TARP bailouts to provide solvency to banks that were unsure if they were still operational. This is why "financial regulation" is a hideously inadequate euphemism for the sort of hangings we should be scheduling on the gallows down the center of Wall St. right now. Failure to pass a major reform package demanding transparency and accountabiltiy will simply allow this stuff to occur again.
The codeine would mask the pain and induce death itself. A "trained biologist" would know that.
The Anthrax found in the letters was allowed to float around in the air in crowded places, too. How many people died?
This guy is giving second-hand and speculative "evidence", and it's not holding up to scrutiny.
and ducking re-entering spacecraft
We need to know more before sending humans because if a colony of humans dies determining the hundred reasons that colonizing that spot is impossible then it's as though you were simply gambling lives for your own amusement.
Really, unless the exploring humans luck into somewhere they can take off their helmets and gloves and physically interact with the environment, they might as well be here watching it on TV.
Is it ridiculous?
Think about this:
We worry most that China is an industrialized, technologically adept nation of 1.8 billion people who could overwhelm us in a shooting war.
Then think about this:
From where those 1.8 billion people sit, the Chinese Government is a much easier target, and a much bigger threat.
I have.
Orbital mechanics is fiddly, I'll grant you that, but it's constant fiddly. Everything in the system moves predictably.
In other words, it's NP-easy. Toss the players into the computer and let it grind. Adjust dv here and there, and you can spline together 64 blue loops.
The trickiest thing here isn't the 64 loops. It's finding the 64 loops that get you the 200 scientific datasets you most want. Which isn't done in this case by a computer or a brain. It's done by a campaign of political refinement. The picture with the loops in it isn't therefore the interesting part. The description of how they posed that picture and what will come of each of those loops is.
So when you say I have no idea, I yawn at you, too, and imagine that you are likely in denial about the fact that your own job can likely be replaced by a piece of software I likely could conceive of without resorting to a whiteboard.
Cox had a news server?
I've been paying them for broadband forever, and I never knew that.
Which is why I've also been paying Easynews for NNTP forever...
Fuck Cox.
Now Queen's University researchers must compile the data for release because of the (UK) Freedom of Information Act.
Seems unreasonable. They should charge the requester for any effort needed to "compile" or transmit the data. No reason the public should foot the bill for any particular formatting or delivery.
But the Internet was built on a PDP-11, and he's never been a real player in it.
I've never really been impressed with Apple products. I liked my iPod mini, but I got it essentially for free; and then it fried itself because I charged it under a pile of papers one night. Still no desire to own another iWhatever. They have a minor superiority in blingness; general inferiority in featureness; and a massive inferiority in clueness.
Depends. How deep are you into turtleneck sweaters?
Ah, so what?
I get that when I bag on Glenn Beck.
We already have about 3,000 gods on the list, and the monotheists all think they're the only ones who got it right.
They'll never believe in anything involving overwhelming odds.
Your seminar is based on a solid piece of stupid. Time to assimilate is not strongly correlated with violent reactions to criticism.
As a counterexample: Hawaiians had nearly zero time to "modernize," and they aren't preternatural terrorists (despite the nutjob secessionists).
But they also don't have a book like the Quran that tells them to kill unbelievers and blasphemers (and that not being a believer is being a blasphemer, leaving only one "logical" conclusion).
Further, the Mideast has had just as long to modernize as the West has. They've merely refused to, or rather, not been allowed to because of the tight grip their feudal lords keep on power (aided, again, by the Quran).
The problem is the illogic of the Quran and the number of people who accept it unquestioningly, not any pop-sociology.
Being judged by twelve random people is as close to 'objective' as possible.
No, it's as close to random as possible, and as far from biased as possible, but it's purely and utterly subjective.
One day, possibly not long from now, we're going to see China freed from the dictatorial, self-serving government Mao imposed on it.
That's going to be a pretty good day.
s/automoton/automaton/g
We had a self-replicating automoton a long time ago. It's called cc.
That's the thing about robots. You can make them play with themselves and they can't figure out how to win.
No, they got their project picked out of the hundreds submitted for funding because they had a particular plan that met particular objectives.
They engineered the spacecraft with normal margins over and above the basic requirements to allow for the sort of uncertainties that enter into designing every part of a device this complicated and limited in mass and power. One of the simplest of these is to put in twice as much fuel as your nominal model tells you to, giving yourself 100% margin to deal with exigent circumstances.
This sort of margin is not just good for business, it's generally required by the funding authority (NASA and the government), because they got tired of being bitten on the ass by penurious aerospace craft design in the '00s. That's the 19'00s, not the 20'00s.
Then, as the mission goes along, their managers and technical staff made careful decisions that didn't waste their fuel margins. The result is that they have a free spacecraft on-orbit with which to do new science. Which again they have to propose to the funding authority, since ground systems and personnel still cost money. The funding authority sees the variable costs as incredibly cheap compared with developing and emplacing a whole new device, so they give it a green light.
A few months later, we get to see a pretty picture that blows the minds of the smaller-minded among us, and makes the bigger-brained among us yawn at the idea that anyone is impressed with 64 loops around a couple of rocks that aren't going anywhere fast...
It was. Now he's a bowler.
Wait. Check that. The comparison operators for PDP-8 are all microcoded. I bet that if you combine two of them together it takes more cycles to get through the microcode. So a less-than-or-equal might take 2-3X as long as a less-than, while both occupy only one instruction in your object code.
Checked the PDP-8. It will do less-than-or-equal by literally combining the opcodes for less-than and equal in a way that or's them together.
So okay. I have no idea why Ritchie didn't know that, and chose to do things the way he did. Probably momentum from some other system he'd worked on before he came up with C.