You used to have have commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies, and each did something different under different rules. Then the rules that had been in place since the Great Depression were repealed by Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and suddenly the legal boundaries between these kinds of financial services was gone.
GLB is part of why the banking sector has imploded entirely: banks that are successful have been able to buy the failing banks.
Europe has integrated banking and it seems to work for 'em.
*AND* we should destroy anyone who was involved in shortselling any commodity related to loans, they should be prosecuted for making (and winning) the bet that tens of thousands of people would lose their livelihoods, their houses.
That doesn't make any sense at all. It's not their fault that anyone lost his home. If I bet that Mariah Carey will die within the next week and she does, it's not my fault. Likewise, if I shorted lumber three months ago it's not my fault that home construction has decreased.
For example, lots of people have a checking account, savings account, credit card, poersonal line of credit, HELOC, brokerage account, and more. I see absolutely no reason why a single account could not offer all those features.
Because they offer different features. A checking account has lots of activity and fluctuates in value considerably. Due to its need for liquidity, it carries a lower interest rate. A savings account has lower liquidity because money in it is meant to basically stay there. Because of its lower liquidity, the interest rate is higher. A credit card is a short-term monthly loan; if you want you can get a debit card which is basically a check card on a checking or savings account. A line of credit is basically a pre-approved credit limit, similar to a credit card but generally intended to be used differently, and thus has different interest rates. A personal LOC is unsecured; a HELOC is secured by one's home equity. Again, different rates apply because of the different circumstances. A brokerage account exists to manage investments, which are an entirely different animal.
All those different accounts can't be merged into one because they serve different needs. The closest merge you can make is between a brokerage and a checking account. My bank offers one of those and it's a real delight: the interest of a savings account with the convenience of checking. But of course it has its own tradeoffs.
Banks offer different accounts because customers have different requirements.
As for other financial instruments, they exist because there's a need for them as well. Let's take the case of futures contracts as an example. Commodities prices fluctuate constantly, even by the minute. This makes planning for both producers and consumers difficult. Steel mines have a lot of uncertainty about what price they'll be able to get, and railroads have a lot of uncertainty about what price they'll pay. This uncertainty is not good. So what they do is settle on a futures contract, in which the parties settle on a price today for delivery of a quantity in the future. This means the steel mine and the railroad alike know what their longer-term outlays will look like and can plan accordingly.
So yeah, it's a weird financial instrument--but it's a useful one.
Of course, someone else could buy that contract to sell steel at $20/pound if he thinks the price of steel will drop to $10/pound by the delivery date; he'll buy steel that very day, hand it over to the railroad and pocket $10/pound for his troubles...
We've watched evolution happen in controlled environments.
I don't believe we've ever observed speciation occur. Nor have we observed macroevolution. Both of which facts are expected since speciation and macroevolution are so very rare.
Either int will be a fixed size and longer ints will have another name, or you can explicitly state the size of int as a declaration. This has always been done and 'good coding' should include explicit declaration.
A third option is a language which permits integers of any size. This works out pretty well in practise, although of course there are efficiency issues with bignums. Still, as long as they transparently are represented with platform words where possible, who cares?
Did you realize that to kill a man in many states it takes not 50% of people + 1 vote, but just 12 people?
It takes 100% of the people 'voting' (the jurors); plus, I think the judge can be more lenient if he desires. Then higher courts must confirm the sentence and the governor must sign the death warrant.
I've often thought that it would be a good idea to give the electors more power and to remove popular voting for presidential candidates altogether: instead, have the electors each run campaigns in their states based on the issues they hold dear; then in December they each vote for the candidate they prefer best.
It's because we're proud of our flag and our country in a way that e.g. the English or French no longer are. The United States are some of the first popular democracies and we're proud of the fact that unlike other nations at the time of our founding our entire state edifice is built upon popular consent.
That's why the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima was such a big deal. That's why flag burning is such a big deal. That's why we fly flags in front of our homes, our schools and even our car dealerships. We're proud to be Americans, proud in a way that few other peoples are anymore.
I don't know so much about 'ethical' anymore. Their free service now expires monthly or so, with only a five-day warning. One of these months I'm going to be on vacation for a week and when I return will discover that my domain has expired:-(
And so what if it's chilly here in the winter? Put on a freakin' coat.
I didn't mention the weather--I live in Denver, where for a good part of the winter the ground's covered in snow. A few years back we had snow over the sidewalk for weeks:-)
Instead of India, why not move to the Northeast U.S. or Maritime Canada?
Because then one's in New England or Canada? New England is the land of atrocious accents, cranky people and the nanny state. Canada is the land of the nanny state (nice & polite people, though).
Granted, either's still more familiar than India. But blech. Give me the West any day.
Now, someone emails you with their name and address asking for a quote.
Good luck trying to figure out what this law
Ummm...reply back without the address?
Or get a lawyer--that's their job, after all, and you'd be a fool to run a business without one anyway. You may be able to reply back with simply the street, or only the street number.
Lincoln had every intention of making blacks equal to whites.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position." --Abraham Lincoln, 21 Aug. 1858
And: "Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this. We cannot, then, make them equals."
What it means is that these artists' parents never bothered to teach them discretion, taste or tact, and further that they seized on an opportunity for self-promotion. A week ago I had not heard either's name; today I have. Their stunt succeeded.
Like spree murderers, we shouldn't publish their names. We should ignore them.
It has been two thousand years since some girl claimed that she got knocked up by a burning bush rather then her boyfriend and millions of people worship her as a virgin.
And her prospective husband, rather than divorce her as he desired, ate a bad meal, saw a vision and decided to marry her anyway and raise the kid.
And a bunch of fishermen were persuaded by this kid, now-grown, to leave their steady jobs to wander around listening to him preach.
And after he was executed, they decided that rather than head back to fishing that they'd continue the job, annoying the local powers-that-were to the point that they themselves were executed.
Or...the girl was impregnated by God, her son was the Son of God, His miracles actually did convince a bunch of fishermen that He was on to something and so forth.
Which is more difficult to believe? That guys like Saul of Tarsus decided, 'hey, I'm tired of stoning these Christians; I'm gonna become one instead!' or that they he actually received a vision? That ignorant Judean fishermen thought it better to be tortured to death than to enjoy an old age surrounded by their grandchildren, or that they actually believed what they preached first-hand knowledge of?
Oh, and no mainstream Christians worship Mary. We venerate her, of course, since she is the Mother of God after all.
You're 100% correct. Most every language has regexp support these days, and rightly so: they can be very useful in their place. But Perl makes them very easy to use (which is a good feature) and more importantly has a culture which encourages their frequent use. You know how when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail? Well, when all you have is Perl every problem looks like it can be solved with regexps.
The terrible thing about regexps--and the reason why they should be avoided in code if possible--is that they tend to be write-only. It's very easy to take something you want to match and turn it into a regexp; that's why grep and emacs and vi and all sorts of end-user tools support them. But going in the opposite direction--reasoning from a regexp to figure out the class of strings it matches--is more difficult. In fact, a suitably-complex regexp matches an infinite number of strings (hint: most any use of * will do that...).
This write-only tendency of one of Perl's key language features ties in with the write-only tendency of Perl code in general. It's very easy to figure out what Perl you need to write in order to do X; it's rather more difficult to figure out from Perl code what X or Y or Z it is doing.
This is why so often the answer to Perl maintenance is to rewrite it.
This problem is not unique to Perl; in fact, I imagine that write-only code is possible in almost any language. But its probability is different in different languages; it seems less likely in Python than it is in Perl. In fact, no language in my experience lends itself to write-only code like Perl does.
I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard to maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in Perl.
That's simply being in a state of denial. Yes, it is possible to right relatively maintainable and legible code in Perl--but that's relative to other Perl code. And yes, the best Perl will be better than the worst PHP or Java (but that's mostly because PHP is like Perl, and Java is in many respects worse).
The worst Perl is worse than the worst of any other language with the possible exception of APL. That's fairly undeniable; anyone who has seen one of the four-line RSA engine.sigs knows what I mean. TMTOWTDI looks like a great idea until one realises that it often means that one man's idiomata are unrecognisable to another. The assumed values mean that data can be operated on without even being mentioned.
Middle-grade Perl is not bad, but it is simply not as clean and legible as, say, Python, Lisp, Ruby or in some cases perhaps Java (although modern Java is trying very hard to be uglier than Perl).
Perl was a great language when we were all used to awk and ksh. There's really no non-legacy (and I include the wonderful CPAN under that heading) reason to use it nowadays though.
I think Ruby has some of Perl's problems, but it seems to be in other ways pretty decent. Right now my favourite scripting/web language is Python and my favourite language in general is Lisp.
the US has been semi-totalitarian for almost 8 years now
Oh please--I really can't let this go. Semi-totalitarian for almost eight years--you don't really believe that America under Bush has been significantly different than under Clinton or anyone else in the last few decades, do you?
Yes, the TSA are a bunch of morons. But note that the whole showing-ID-to-fly bit came in under Clinton, not Bush.
Your freedom of speech has not changed from what it was eight years ago.
Your freedom of religion--or lack thereof--is arguably better than it was eight years ago.
Your right to bear arms is less infringed than what it was eight years ago.
Your freedom from soldier-quartering is unchanged.
Your freedom from unwarranted search and seizure is unchanged. Yeah, that's true: Clinton conducted warrantless wiretaps of conversations between overseas entities and the United States. That's always been permitted, since the communication crosses the border (same reason that laptop and paper searches have always been permitted when crossing the border). And as that parenthetical comment states, the ability to search your laptop is nothing new: it's always been the case that one's possessions are subject to search when crossing the border.
Your fifth amendment rights are arguably stronger, e.g. after this case--jurisprudence has long been that passwords are not protected; this is an excellent change.
Your sixth amendment rights have been unchanged. Yeah, illegal combatants don't have those rights, but they have never had those rights, not now, not under Roosevelt, not under Jefferson. Granted, under Clinton the Supreme Court weakened the Sixth when a defendant is accused by children--that was an incredibly piss-poor decision, but hardly Clinton's direct fault.
Your seventh amendment right to trial by jury is unchanged.
Your eighth amendment rights are unchanged. Indeed, the eighth is interpreted even more expansively than ever before (incorrectly IMHO): if you raped, murdered and ate forty people at the age of 17 years, 11 months and 20 days you are no longer subject to the death penalty; nor if you brutally tortured and raped a child. This was not the case eight years ago.
The ninth and tenth amendments are not interpreted any more loosely than they have been for a century. I disagree with this, but that's hardly changed in the last eight years.
This may or may not be a scam (my bet's on the former). But even if by some chance it is true, it's still a horrible idea. Think about it: it's taking agricultural waste and burning it up in car engines. It's one thing to burn petroleum--it's a nasty poisonous substance with few uses other than fuel, plastics and medicines.
But agricultural waste is chock-full of valuable organic substances. It should be composted and returned to the soil so that it can fertilise the next year's worth of food. Burning it up is not all that different from burning corn in the form of 'ethanol' (really, just whiskey): it's just another way to take the last remaining topsoil in the United States and use it to fuel our car addiction, not entirely different from a junky selling his blood every day to get his fix.
While the crate of photos and the journals might be cool for the next generation, nothing took the place of the website for today.
Nothing says that you can't simply scan the analog pictures and type up the paper notes for a website. This might even be preferable, since you can edit, give everything a narrative flow &c.
I have to say it is idiotic to just put everything in a paper journal, no matter what the practicality, fails to realize some of the benefits of being able to edit and make information available to others.
A paper journal is eminently editable: you cross out what you no longer like. You can make the information available to others by...wait for it...typing it up into a website or magazine article or book or whatever later on.
I have to say it is idiotic to store one's trip memories digitally. There's nothing like thumbing through an old journal from a decade or more in the past, knowing that this page was in a pub in London, that page was in an army camp from the Phillipines and so forth. Consider your descendants: they're much more likely to keep papers, letters and notebooks than digital data. Your great-grandchildren will feel a much deeper connexion to you reading your handwriting on a page you wrote in what used to be Germany than they would reading a blog entry about the exact same thing.
Rethink your needs! You want to take pictures and keep a journal. Well, you can save your pictures to memory cards and mail the cards back home just like mailing DVDs--only smaller and more portable. You can take notes in a real paper journal, with a pen or pencil. You can also draw pictures therein if you like. Decades from now when you come across your battered old travel journal, it will mean something to you. Moreover, the journal doesn't need batteries, isn't nearly as likely to be stolen and is much lighter-weight.
You might consider buying a new notebook every week wherever you happen to be and mailing the old one back home. Then you'll have a collection of foreign notebooks, each one filled with your thoughts on the trip. Trust me, when you read over them in the years to come they'll mean a lot more than a few computer files ever will. You'll see the handwriting of a younger you and it will take you back like no blog entry could.
And you can always type your notes up when you return home.
Slashdot Mirror
GLB is part of why the banking sector has imploded entirely: banks that are successful have been able to buy the failing banks.
Europe has integrated banking and it seems to work for 'em.
That doesn't make any sense at all. It's not their fault that anyone lost his home. If I bet that Mariah Carey will die within the next week and she does, it's not my fault. Likewise, if I shorted lumber three months ago it's not my fault that home construction has decreased.
Because they offer different features. A checking account has lots of activity and fluctuates in value considerably. Due to its need for liquidity, it carries a lower interest rate. A savings account has lower liquidity because money in it is meant to basically stay there. Because of its lower liquidity, the interest rate is higher. A credit card is a short-term monthly loan; if you want you can get a debit card which is basically a check card on a checking or savings account. A line of credit is basically a pre-approved credit limit, similar to a credit card but generally intended to be used differently, and thus has different interest rates. A personal LOC is unsecured; a HELOC is secured by one's home equity. Again, different rates apply because of the different circumstances. A brokerage account exists to manage investments, which are an entirely different animal.
All those different accounts can't be merged into one because they serve different needs. The closest merge you can make is between a brokerage and a checking account. My bank offers one of those and it's a real delight: the interest of a savings account with the convenience of checking. But of course it has its own tradeoffs.
Banks offer different accounts because customers have different requirements.
As for other financial instruments, they exist because there's a need for them as well. Let's take the case of futures contracts as an example. Commodities prices fluctuate constantly, even by the minute. This makes planning for both producers and consumers difficult. Steel mines have a lot of uncertainty about what price they'll be able to get, and railroads have a lot of uncertainty about what price they'll pay. This uncertainty is not good. So what they do is settle on a futures contract, in which the parties settle on a price today for delivery of a quantity in the future. This means the steel mine and the railroad alike know what their longer-term outlays will look like and can plan accordingly.
So yeah, it's a weird financial instrument--but it's a useful one.
Of course, someone else could buy that contract to sell steel at $20/pound if he thinks the price of steel will drop to $10/pound by the delivery date; he'll buy steel that very day, hand it over to the railroad and pocket $10/pound for his troubles...
I don't believe we've ever observed speciation occur. Nor have we observed macroevolution. Both of which facts are expected since speciation and macroevolution are so very rare.
A third option is a language which permits integers of any size. This works out pretty well in practise, although of course there are efficiency issues with bignums. Still, as long as they transparently are represented with platform words where possible, who cares?
It takes 100% of the people 'voting' (the jurors); plus, I think the judge can be more lenient if he desires. Then higher courts must confirm the sentence and the governor must sign the death warrant.
I've often thought that it would be a good idea to give the electors more power and to remove popular voting for presidential candidates altogether: instead, have the electors each run campaigns in their states based on the issues they hold dear; then in December they each vote for the candidate they prefer best.
That's why the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima was such a big deal. That's why flag burning is such a big deal. That's why we fly flags in front of our homes, our schools and even our car dealerships. We're proud to be Americans, proud in a way that few other peoples are anymore.
I don't know so much about 'ethical' anymore. Their free service now expires monthly or so, with only a five-day warning. One of these months I'm going to be on vacation for a week and when I return will discover that my domain has expired:-(
I didn't mention the weather--I live in Denver, where for a good part of the winter the ground's covered in snow. A few years back we had snow over the sidewalk for weeks:-)
Because then one's in New England or Canada? New England is the land of atrocious accents, cranky people and the nanny state. Canada is the land of the nanny state (nice & polite people, though).
Granted, either's still more familiar than India. But blech. Give me the West any day.
Ummm...reply back without the address?
Or get a lawyer--that's their job, after all, and you'd be a fool to run a business without one anyway. You may be able to reply back with simply the street, or only the street number.
You could even--gasp--encrypt the email.
Yup. There's comp.lang.lisp, comp.emacs among others.
Usenet is much better than web forums like Slashdot. It's open, it's free and it's text-only.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position." --Abraham Lincoln, 21 Aug. 1858
And: "Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this. We cannot, then, make them equals."
Federal laws for federal elections might be unconstitutional, since it's the states' right to determine how they select their electors.
Well, look who the alternative was!
Like spree murderers, we shouldn't publish their names. We should ignore them.
And her prospective husband, rather than divorce her as he desired, ate a bad meal, saw a vision and decided to marry her anyway and raise the kid.
And a bunch of fishermen were persuaded by this kid, now-grown, to leave their steady jobs to wander around listening to him preach.
And after he was executed, they decided that rather than head back to fishing that they'd continue the job, annoying the local powers-that-were to the point that they themselves were executed.
Or...the girl was impregnated by God, her son was the Son of God, His miracles actually did convince a bunch of fishermen that He was on to something and so forth.
Which is more difficult to believe? That guys like Saul of Tarsus decided, 'hey, I'm tired of stoning these Christians; I'm gonna become one instead!' or that they he actually received a vision? That ignorant Judean fishermen thought it better to be tortured to death than to enjoy an old age surrounded by their grandchildren, or that they actually believed what they preached first-hand knowledge of?
Oh, and no mainstream Christians worship Mary. We venerate her, of course, since she is the Mother of God after all.
You're 100% correct. Most every language has regexp support these days, and rightly so: they can be very useful in their place. But Perl makes them very easy to use (which is a good feature) and more importantly has a culture which encourages their frequent use. You know how when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail? Well, when all you have is Perl every problem looks like it can be solved with regexps.
The terrible thing about regexps--and the reason why they should be avoided in code if possible--is that they tend to be write-only. It's very easy to take something you want to match and turn it into a regexp; that's why grep and emacs and vi and all sorts of end-user tools support them. But going in the opposite direction--reasoning from a regexp to figure out the class of strings it matches--is more difficult. In fact, a suitably-complex regexp matches an infinite number of strings (hint: most any use of * will do that...).
This write-only tendency of one of Perl's key language features ties in with the write-only tendency of Perl code in general. It's very easy to figure out what Perl you need to write in order to do X; it's rather more difficult to figure out from Perl code what X or Y or Z it is doing.
This is why so often the answer to Perl maintenance is to rewrite it.
This problem is not unique to Perl; in fact, I imagine that write-only code is possible in almost any language. But its probability is different in different languages; it seems less likely in Python than it is in Perl. In fact, no language in my experience lends itself to write-only code like Perl does.
That's simply being in a state of denial. Yes, it is possible to right relatively maintainable and legible code in Perl--but that's relative to other Perl code. And yes, the best Perl will be better than the worst PHP or Java (but that's mostly because PHP is like Perl, and Java is in many respects worse).
The worst Perl is worse than the worst of any other language with the possible exception of APL. That's fairly undeniable; anyone who has seen one of the four-line RSA engine .sigs knows what I mean. TMTOWTDI looks like a great idea until one realises that it often means that one man's idiomata are unrecognisable to another. The assumed values mean that data can be operated on without even being mentioned.
Middle-grade Perl is not bad, but it is simply not as clean and legible as, say, Python, Lisp, Ruby or in some cases perhaps Java (although modern Java is trying very hard to be uglier than Perl).
Perl was a great language when we were all used to awk and ksh. There's really no non-legacy (and I include the wonderful CPAN under that heading) reason to use it nowadays though.
I think Ruby has some of Perl's problems, but it seems to be in other ways pretty decent. Right now my favourite scripting/web language is Python and my favourite language in general is Lisp.
Oh please--I really can't let this go. Semi-totalitarian for almost eight years--you don't really believe that America under Bush has been significantly different than under Clinton or anyone else in the last few decades, do you?
Yes, the TSA are a bunch of morons. But note that the whole showing-ID-to-fly bit came in under Clinton, not Bush.
Your freedom of speech has not changed from what it was eight years ago.
Your freedom of religion--or lack thereof--is arguably better than it was eight years ago.
Your right to bear arms is less infringed than what it was eight years ago.
Your freedom from soldier-quartering is unchanged.
Your freedom from unwarranted search and seizure is unchanged. Yeah, that's true: Clinton conducted warrantless wiretaps of conversations between overseas entities and the United States. That's always been permitted, since the communication crosses the border (same reason that laptop and paper searches have always been permitted when crossing the border). And as that parenthetical comment states, the ability to search your laptop is nothing new: it's always been the case that one's possessions are subject to search when crossing the border.
Your fifth amendment rights are arguably stronger, e.g. after this case--jurisprudence has long been that passwords are not protected; this is an excellent change.
Your sixth amendment rights have been unchanged. Yeah, illegal combatants don't have those rights, but they have never had those rights, not now, not under Roosevelt, not under Jefferson. Granted, under Clinton the Supreme Court weakened the Sixth when a defendant is accused by children--that was an incredibly piss-poor decision, but hardly Clinton's direct fault.
Your seventh amendment right to trial by jury is unchanged.
Your eighth amendment rights are unchanged. Indeed, the eighth is interpreted even more expansively than ever before (incorrectly IMHO): if you raped, murdered and ate forty people at the age of 17 years, 11 months and 20 days you are no longer subject to the death penalty; nor if you brutally tortured and raped a child. This was not the case eight years ago.
The ninth and tenth amendments are not interpreted any more loosely than they have been for a century. I disagree with this, but that's hardly changed in the last eight years.
In other words, you're a twit.
Which is the better company?
But agricultural waste is chock-full of valuable organic substances. It should be composted and returned to the soil so that it can fertilise the next year's worth of food. Burning it up is not all that different from burning corn in the form of 'ethanol' (really, just whiskey): it's just another way to take the last remaining topsoil in the United States and use it to fuel our car addiction, not entirely different from a junky selling his blood every day to get his fix.
Nothing says that you can't simply scan the analog pictures and type up the paper notes for a website. This might even be preferable, since you can edit, give everything a narrative flow &c.
A paper journal is eminently editable: you cross out what you no longer like. You can make the information available to others by...wait for it...typing it up into a website or magazine article or book or whatever later on.
I have to say it is idiotic to store one's trip memories digitally. There's nothing like thumbing through an old journal from a decade or more in the past, knowing that this page was in a pub in London, that page was in an army camp from the Phillipines and so forth. Consider your descendants: they're much more likely to keep papers, letters and notebooks than digital data. Your great-grandchildren will feel a much deeper connexion to you reading your handwriting on a page you wrote in what used to be Germany than they would reading a blog entry about the exact same thing.
You might consider buying a new notebook every week wherever you happen to be and mailing the old one back home. Then you'll have a collection of foreign notebooks, each one filled with your thoughts on the trip. Trust me, when you read over them in the years to come they'll mean a lot more than a few computer files ever will. You'll see the handwriting of a younger you and it will take you back like no blog entry could.
And you can always type your notes up when you return home.