As for "conspiracy" I don't buy that nonsense, but it's pretty obvious the Housing Boom was caused by an inadvertent mistake by the Clinton administration, specifically the HUD. They passed a regulation that made it illegal to deny a mortgage application even if the citizen was too poor to pay it back. Hence a run-away boom.
So yes we can blame the Democrats, or at least the ones who were in the white house in 1997.
Hmm, I agree with most of the things you have to say... but there are plenty of other factors that filled the housing bubble. All the poor people alone wouldn't have had enough money to overinflate and overspeculate our economy to that extent:-P
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124578382 had a segment with some interesting numbers... about a third of the mortgaged properties (probably ones in "good" neighborhoods and grossly overvalued) were never even inhabited... they were simply purchased as investments, since the conventional wisdom back in the day was that real estate was always a solid investment / tax shelter.
With the artificially low interest rates thanks to the Fed Reserve, people with modest amounts of money were investing in real estate, or investing in these silly mortgage-backed securities to help rich people invest in real estate. There were even fraud rings where people would sell the same empty house to each other and pocketing the increasingly larger sums of borrowed money. The Planet Money people had at least one in their portfolio where a house that originally sold for $700K was eventually mortgaged out and foreclosed on for over $2M. And now there are all the silly strategic defaults, where lots of upper / middle class homeowners who can actually afford their mortgage want / need to sell for some reason, but of course can't find any buyers at the inflated price they bought it for, so really their best option is to go delinquent until the bank agrees to foreclose.
Anyway, if I had to pick a single thing to blame, I'd choose the Fed Reserve for artificially lowering the interest rates in a pathetic attempt to "keep the economy going", or an illusion thereof. If banks can't make money off of interest like they traditionally could, then of course they're going to have to get very creative. All low interest did was keep people speculating, because securing big loans was like free money:-P
IANAE, but I won't believe in any kind of true recovery until interest rates are back above inflation (assuming that too can hold steady at ~3% ). In the meantime, we're toying with some freaky financial system which I doubt anyone understands well enough not to get taken advantage of.
"It's an old racing adage that it's a lot easier to make a fast driver who crashes safe than to make a slow driver faster.
Is there any source for this old adage? Google only turns up this slashdot article:-P
Would have thought I'd at least have run into it in the course of Gran Turismo 4, or even a parody of it in GTA training:-P That, and I/always/ do much better in races by taking the latter approach... and that's when there's not even a penalty for risking dangerous crashes in the video games...
Has the innovator been out-innovated due to a sluggish product roadmap?
Counterpoint:
No.
Nintendo pretty much has a different market segment of casual gamers. Younger kids who are into the franchise (Pokemon, Mario, etc. and other exclusives are all over the elementary schools... never heard anyone there ever mention Halo or even Final Fantasy). Kids don't care about system specs... hell, they won't even watch TV if it's not a cartoon, so I surmise they actually expect the cartoony "8-bit look" as a sign that a game is actually "for them".
Finally, the hardcore gamers will have a Wii anyway just for the heck of it.
Nintendo can milk this cow, the Wii teat, for a while longer. Then once publishers actually start releasing interesting games for the PS3 and Kinect motion controls, they can come out with the next big thing out of cycle.
I surmise it would be some kind of augmented reality thing, so they can sell more cheap widgets with each game, that the kids will bring to school and lose and have to be replaced.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how exactly do they propose to "pull the plug" on WikiLeaks, or any foreign-hosted website? Unless they put in a government-operated Great Firewall (a la China) on all links coming into the USA, it's technically impossible to block foreign websites.
Well, the wording from TFA indicates that they would put a court order for all US ISPs to "redirect" traffic away from the affected sites. That's a lot of ISPs. Though after most ISPs get closed down for contempt of court for not filtering the internet, it won't be so many ISPs:-P
This is just the first step. I don't think the technology is that important to the lawmakers. They're simply making it legal for them to attempt to shut down websites, via any technological means necessary. Hence, no one is really complaining much, because there's nothing really specific to attack in the wording of the law.
The next logical step would be to make it illegal for citizens to circumvent whatever filter mechanism they use (via anonymizing international proxies, for example). Then the fun begins... it won't really matter if their pathetic technological means are ineffective.
Sexual crimes seems to be a big thing in Sweden recently, since they're at the core of some popular Stieg Larsson books / movies that have grown in the public eye there and internationally over the past few years:
But instead of a nickel or a quarter per alert, it'll just come as another mandatory "911" fee on your monthly statement, for your convenience. You'll end up wishing they only charged you a quarter per alert;-P But the government will negotiate the rate for you, so you will be guaranteed that it will be fair.
Replace the RAM with a 2GB module if you like. I didn't bother and it still runs fine.
I prefer running eeebuntu on it. Still waiting for the next generation Aurora to be released. But eeebuntu does a nice job with a compositing desktop. Though to get Google Earth running well, I had to delete some of the shared libraries included with Google Earth and symlink the equivalent system libraries.
If you don't mind something a bit bigger, I'd recommend going for anything with a dual-core atom and an nVidia ION chipset (not the ION2, since Intel castrated the video bandwidth with the new pine trail chips, but if there's not alternative it's not that much worse than the original ION). Dual core makes a big difference with responsiveness, are often 64-bit, and the ION GPU is much nicer than the Intel graphics.
I'm in favor of this Facebook email thing. gmail / buzz always had more interesting users, and this will keep a lot of the chaff away from the wheat:-P
Also, true story: my grandmother calls me at a random airport to notify me that I might be on the same flight as my father's cousin. Haven't had a social networking thingie deliver that kind of notification yet.
Ha, at least it wasn't as bad as Mac OS 9... where *everything* paused to give the user good interactive performance navigating a *menu bar*. Sheesh. Cooperative multitasking fail.
I got so paranoid trying to learn and use all of the few shortcut keys available (along with their idiosyncrasies) and run through any remaining menus really fast so my computations could keep processing and not grind to a halt for too long.
BWI, and probably Dulles International has them now. But Reagan National, the one actually used by congresscritters? Of course not! That'd be demeaning!
Reagan National gets all the other cool upgrades pretty early on, such as RNP. But that's just because it helps incoming planes stick to the tight and winding Potomac approach, so a congresscritter doesn't get inadvertently shot down by the SAM battery stationed in Bethesda, protecting them from a rogue hijacked flight that strays off the path.
But don't worry! Your best interests are foremost in their... oh nevermind:-P
Yeah, security theater, and heck, all government bureaucracy dealings make a lot more sense if you look at it as CYA (cover yer arse).
If (when) the next terrorist action occurs, you have to be able to say you did all you could (no matter how ridiculous) to prevent it. But who could have foreseen the $(shoe | underwear | pregnant) bomber? Now that we know, we shall immediately take action to more rigorously screen $(shoes | underwear | fetuses).
And anyone who backs off on one of those ridiculous reactionary measures will get hit will full responsibility for the next attack. And not our failures in $(foreign relations | winning hearts and minds | education | outreach) that perpetuate the inequalities that make people desperate enough to get indoctrinated for guerrilla suicide operations in the first place.
Yeah, the UK is getting just as bad as the Saudis, eh?
Still, then we'll just start more widespread use of stenography, and wireless mesh nets, and the technology will keep developing and improving to stay one step ahead of the politics.
I believe that technology can do more to set us free than to enslave us. The true power will remain in the hands of the technologists, and not the politicians who try to temporarily wrest power through legal documents and riding tides military strength and/or public opinion, then do their best to delay the next disruptive technology from unsettling them.
For now, I suppose its nice that privacy laws can be used to sometimes punish those that snoop on our cleartext dealings, should someone be compelled to enforce them. But I don't want to rely on that.
It doesn't scale well past 16 cores, which is why Linus doesn't want to include it in the main kernel. But it's included in custom kernels for mobile devices, such as CyanogenMOD for my Android phone.
Given that they might be flooded with used phones and probably first-gen smartphones soon, perhaps something that can charge USB phones would be in order...
Would love to play with some of that stuff, but those currently cost more than my cheap-ass bike:-P Should be neat if they could develop some cheap dynamos to distribute where they would need it, though. They also have bikes with full kickstands that elevate the rear wheel so you can pedal while stationary... could generate a couple hundred Watts that way...
Hmm, well, you could also make the argument that $LARGE_DEFENSE_CONTRACTOR spends more on ethics training than any other @GOVERNMENT_CONTRACTOR, but how does that correlate with the number and impact of misconduct from procurement scandals they've been implicated in? Is integrity measured by $($scandals+$fines)/$(training hours) ?
Good cheese, like fine wine, smells like $hi+. But we eat that $hi+ up all the same! I don't know where I'm going with this.
Meh, SimEarth wasn't really sophisticated enough to give more than a handful of options to do what really needed to be done... though it was quite a bit more detailed than the Spore terraforming mechanic
That seems to indicate that the goal was mostly to increase the atmospheric pressure, not necessarily the composition... then the other fun stuff could start happening.
Remember SimEarth, where you had to make Mars habitable by sending over CO2 generators to create enough greenhouse gases to warm up the atmosphere enough to support liquid water and eventually life? Let's do that! Nevermind that it took a couple hundred years...
Well, maybe if we could do it in a bunch of greenhouses, we'd get there a bit faster. Except, aw hell, we have enough trouble just trying to do that here on Earth.
OK, maybe it's more fun to just hurl ice comets at it. Lets commandeer some!
Slashdot Mirror
As for "conspiracy" I don't buy that nonsense, but it's pretty obvious the Housing Boom was caused by an inadvertent mistake by the Clinton administration, specifically the HUD. They passed a regulation that made it illegal to deny a mortgage application even if the citizen was too poor to pay it back. Hence a run-away boom.
So yes we can blame the Democrats, or at least the ones who were in the white house in 1997.
Hmm, I agree with most of the things you have to say... but there are plenty of other factors that filled the housing bubble. All the poor people alone wouldn't have had enough money to overinflate and overspeculate our economy to that extent :-P
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124578382 had a segment with some interesting numbers... about a third of the mortgaged properties (probably ones in "good" neighborhoods and grossly overvalued) were never even inhabited... they were simply purchased as investments, since the conventional wisdom back in the day was that real estate was always a solid investment / tax shelter.
With the artificially low interest rates thanks to the Fed Reserve, people with modest amounts of money were investing in real estate, or investing in these silly mortgage-backed securities to help rich people invest in real estate. There were even fraud rings where people would sell the same empty house to each other and pocketing the increasingly larger sums of borrowed money. The Planet Money people had at least one in their portfolio where a house that originally sold for $700K was eventually mortgaged out and foreclosed on for over $2M. And now there are all the silly strategic defaults, where lots of upper / middle class homeowners who can actually afford their mortgage want / need to sell for some reason, but of course can't find any buyers at the inflated price they bought it for, so really their best option is to go delinquent until the bank agrees to foreclose.
Anyway, if I had to pick a single thing to blame, I'd choose the Fed Reserve for artificially lowering the interest rates in a pathetic attempt to "keep the economy going", or an illusion thereof. If banks can't make money off of interest like they traditionally could, then of course they're going to have to get very creative. All low interest did was keep people speculating, because securing big loans was like free money :-P
IANAE, but I won't believe in any kind of true recovery until interest rates are back above inflation (assuming that too can hold steady at ~3% ). In the meantime, we're toying with some freaky financial system which I doubt anyone understands well enough not to get taken advantage of.
You think that's embarrassing? My kids typically get better shots with their little VGA fisher-price camera than I do with mine.
Probably has something to do with seeing the world with a child's eye and making very simple compositions.
Hmm, I'm actually curious now about how insurance premiums might differ based on what browser you're using...
http://hothardware.com/News/At-Capital-One-Different-Browsers--Different-Interest-Rates/
What does your browser's user-agent string say about who you are as a person?
Mozilla : you like to run aftermarket addons. INCREASE PREMIUMS!
Chrome : you like things to be fast. INCREASE PREMIUMS!
IE6 : ah, old and stuck, and you're probably under the thumb of some corporate IT department. With money. INCREASE PREMIUMS!
IE8 : lazy bum. INCREASE PREMIUMS!
Opera : Huh? What's this? Oh well, no one really seems to use this, so whatever.
Heh, hope the same thing doesn't happen just because they see GT5 in my public Amazon wishlist :P
You'd think they could actually make good use simulators to evaluate how well / safely their customers could handle a vehicle.
On the other hand, haven't seen many driving sims that actually have realistic street traffic... maybe Grand Theft Auto gets the closest :-P
"It's an old racing adage that it's a lot easier to make a fast driver who crashes safe than to make a slow driver faster.
Is there any source for this old adage? Google only turns up this slashdot article :-P
Would have thought I'd at least have run into it in the course of Gran Turismo 4, or even a parody of it in GTA training :-P /always/ do much better in races by taking the latter approach... and that's when there's not even a penalty for risking dangerous crashes in the video games...
That, and I
Has the innovator been out-innovated due to a sluggish product roadmap?
Counterpoint:
No.
Nintendo pretty much has a different market segment of casual gamers. Younger kids who are into the franchise (Pokemon, Mario, etc. and other exclusives are all over the elementary schools... never heard anyone there ever mention Halo or even Final Fantasy). Kids don't care about system specs... hell, they won't even watch TV if it's not a cartoon, so I surmise they actually expect the cartoony "8-bit look" as a sign that a game is actually "for them".
Finally, the hardcore gamers will have a Wii anyway just for the heck of it.
Nintendo can milk this cow, the Wii teat, for a while longer. Then once publishers actually start releasing interesting games for the PS3 and Kinect motion controls, they can come out with the next big thing out of cycle.
I surmise it would be some kind of augmented reality thing, so they can sell more cheap widgets with each game, that the kids will bring to school and lose and have to be replaced.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how exactly do they propose to "pull the plug" on WikiLeaks, or any foreign-hosted website? Unless they put in a government-operated Great Firewall (a la China) on all links coming into the USA, it's technically impossible to block foreign websites.
Well, the wording from TFA indicates that they would put a court order for all US ISPs to "redirect" traffic away from the affected sites. That's a lot of ISPs. Though after most ISPs get closed down for contempt of court for not filtering the internet, it won't be so many ISPs :-P
This is just the first step. I don't think the technology is that important to the lawmakers. They're simply making it legal for them to attempt to shut down websites, via any technological means necessary. Hence, no one is really complaining much, because there's nothing really specific to attack in the wording of the law.
The next logical step would be to make it illegal for citizens to circumvent whatever filter mechanism they use (via anonymizing international proxies, for example). Then the fun begins... it won't really matter if their pathetic technological means are ineffective.
Sexual crimes seems to be a big thing in Sweden recently, since they're at the core of some popular Stieg Larsson books / movies that have grown in the public eye there and internationally over the past few years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Trilogy
We saw the first two movies at indy theaters / Netflix lately. Whee vengeance!
..ly generous to the carriers. :P
Oh, don't worry, you will pay for it.
But instead of a nickel or a quarter per alert, it'll just come as another mandatory "911" fee on your monthly statement, for your convenience. You'll end up wishing they only charged you a quarter per alert ;-P But the government will negotiate the rate for you, so you will be guaranteed that it will be fair.
I'd still recommend my eeePC 901 as the smallest netbook you could get
http://www.google.com/search?q=eeepc+901&hl=en&tbs=shop%3A1&aq=f
Replace the RAM with a 2GB module if you like. I didn't bother and it still runs fine.
I prefer running eeebuntu on it. Still waiting for the next generation Aurora to be released. But eeebuntu does a nice job with a compositing desktop. Though to get Google Earth running well, I had to delete some of the shared libraries included with Google Earth and symlink the equivalent system libraries.
If you don't mind something a bit bigger, I'd recommend going for anything with a dual-core atom and an nVidia ION chipset (not the ION2, since Intel castrated the video bandwidth with the new pine trail chips, but if there's not alternative it's not that much worse than the original ION). Dual core makes a big difference with responsiveness, are often 64-bit, and the ION GPU is much nicer than the Intel graphics.
Maybe this? http://www.buntfu.com/auction_details.php?auction_id=5198
irc on our own private server with ircstats.
I'm in favor of this Facebook email thing. gmail / buzz always had more interesting users, and this will keep a lot of the chaff away from the wheat :-P
Also, true story: my grandmother calls me at a random airport to notify me that I might be on the same flight as my father's cousin. Haven't had a social networking thingie deliver that kind of notification yet.
... so is a riding roughly proportional to the patrol area of a mountie on horseback?
Or is it some sort of leotard, and you are calling him a hoser because he has runs in it?
Blah wikipedia and their calling out of "common misconceptions" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riding_(country_subdivision)
Ha, at least it wasn't as bad as Mac OS 9... where *everything* paused to give the user good interactive performance navigating a *menu bar*. Sheesh. Cooperative multitasking fail.
I got so paranoid trying to learn and use all of the few shortcut keys available (along with their idiosyncrasies) and run through any remaining menus really fast so my computations could keep processing and not grind to a halt for too long.
BWI, and probably Dulles International has them now. But Reagan National, the one actually used by congresscritters? Of course not! That'd be demeaning!
Reagan National gets all the other cool upgrades pretty early on, such as RNP. But that's just because it helps incoming planes stick to the tight and winding Potomac approach, so a congresscritter doesn't get inadvertently shot down by the SAM battery stationed in Bethesda, protecting them from a rogue hijacked flight that strays off the path.
But don't worry! Your best interests are foremost in their... oh nevermind :-P
Yeah, security theater, and heck, all government bureaucracy dealings make a lot more sense if you look at it as CYA (cover yer arse).
If (when) the next terrorist action occurs, you have to be able to say you did all you could (no matter how ridiculous) to prevent it. But who could have foreseen the $(shoe | underwear | pregnant) bomber? Now that we know, we shall immediately take action to more rigorously screen $(shoes | underwear | fetuses).
And anyone who backs off on one of those ridiculous reactionary measures will get hit will full responsibility for the next attack. And not our failures in $(foreign relations | winning hearts and minds | education | outreach) that perpetuate the inequalities that make people desperate enough to get indoctrinated for guerrilla suicide operations in the first place.
Yeah, the UK is getting just as bad as the Saudis, eh?
Still, then we'll just start more widespread use of stenography, and wireless mesh nets, and the technology will keep developing and improving to stay one step ahead of the politics.
I believe that technology can do more to set us free than to enslave us. The true power will remain in the hands of the technologists, and not the politicians who try to temporarily wrest power through legal documents and riding tides military strength and/or public opinion, then do their best to delay the next disruptive technology from unsettling them.
For now, I suppose its nice that privacy laws can be used to sometimes punish those that snoop on our cleartext dealings, should someone be compelled to enforce them. But I don't want to rely on that.
runs in my riding this year.
Was that English? Or does that have some kind of association with "mountie" that I'm unfamiliar with?
--
Please help a poor, intellectually destitute US American by donating to a knowledge bank this year.
Oh, I think this is actually kind of a good thing...
Next up: Canada leads in public adaptation of strong encryption while engaging in all online activities.
They mention the "Con Kolvias" scheduler in TFA, but they don't seem to want to refer to it by its real name:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Fuck_Scheduler
It doesn't scale well past 16 cores, which is why Linus doesn't want to include it in the main kernel. But it's included in custom kernels for mobile devices, such as CyanogenMOD for my Android phone.
Given that they might be flooded with used phones and probably first-gen smartphones soon, perhaps something that can charge USB phones would be in order...
http://www.google.com/search?q=bicycle+USB+dynamo&hl=en&tbs=shop%3A1&aq=f
Would love to play with some of that stuff, but those currently cost more than my cheap-ass bike :-P Should be neat if they could develop some cheap dynamos to distribute where they would need it, though. They also have bikes with full kickstands that elevate the rear wheel so you can pedal while stationary... could generate a couple hundred Watts that way...
http://www.brandsworld.us/en/products/ec.php
I've had it, it's not... well... it is what it is.
Better than the Bird's Nest Soup, at least.
Hmm, well, you could also make the argument that $LARGE_DEFENSE_CONTRACTOR spends more on ethics training than any other @GOVERNMENT_CONTRACTOR, but how does that correlate with the number and impact of misconduct from procurement scandals they've been implicated in? Is integrity measured by $($scandals+$fines)/$(training hours) ?
Good cheese, like fine wine, smells like $hi+. But we eat that $hi+ up all the same! I don't know where I'm going with this.
Meh, SimEarth wasn't really sophisticated enough to give more than a handful of options to do what really needed to be done... though it was quite a bit more detailed than the Spore terraforming mechanic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Carbon_dioxide_sublimation
That seems to indicate that the goal was mostly to increase the atmospheric pressure, not necessarily the composition... then the other fun stuff could start happening.
Remember SimEarth, where you had to make Mars habitable by sending over CO2 generators to create enough greenhouse gases to warm up the atmosphere enough to support liquid water and eventually life? Let's do that! Nevermind that it took a couple hundred years...
Well, maybe if we could do it in a bunch of greenhouses, we'd get there a bit faster. Except, aw hell, we have enough trouble just trying to do that here on Earth.
OK, maybe it's more fun to just hurl ice comets at it. Lets commandeer some!
All right, no more Spore for me :/