Rubbish. Speculators cannot hold a massively produced, massively consumed commodity at a high price over a long time. They might be able to profit from sudden price changes - up or down - by anticipating them, but over the long term they can have no effect. Nobody has the money to buy and stockpile a year's oil production.
The reason the price is rising is that much of the easy oil has been pumped, and we are now on to the harder, more expensive, oil. It is a fact of the market that the price of oil is the price of the last gallon pumped. Price will rise as long as demand exceeds supply. Rising prices bring in new producers, unviable at lower prices, but drive out consumers. When they match, the highest cost producer is just breaking even, and lower cost producers are making big profits.
So attempting to solve the problem by adding more, higher cost, producers pushes prices up, while small reductions in consumption can have disproportionate effects on the price as high-cost producers close down and leave the low cost ones. Saudi's marginal production cost is reckoned at about $10-20 a barrel: if we could reduce consumption to their production only, that is the price we would pay.
Not really, as long as oil is freely traded. If oil spikes from, say, $120 a barrel to $150 a barrel, do you seriously expect US-based producers to turn their back on $30 a barrel extra profit in order to please domestic consumers? They will either export their production or (more likely) expect domestic consumers to pay the market price. It is called the Free Market and the US is supposed to be keen on it. Oil is one of the most transportable, commoditized things around, and the market is world wide.
No, to stamp a patent on it they have to explain how it is done. Which, it appears, they have done in this case. I cannot patent the idea of a time machine, but if I can explain how how one can be built, I can sure as hell patent that, despite many hundreds of SF stories describing time travel.
I agree with you in principle, though I accept faster rates than you seem to for underlying "value adding" transfers. I think corporate treasurers need to be able to do currency exchanges on a timescale of minutes in order to balance debits and credits across multinational groups. Providing liquidity behind such reasonable transactions is a good thing, so an automated system that takes a large lump of money from one corporate action and lays it off in ten different ways, evening out risk and spreading the price signal, is good, But such a system needs to run only perhaps ten or twenty times as fast as the underlying transactions. If real traders have a timescale of minutes, then a timescale of a few seconds, as you suggest, is adequate to provide all the added value that the markets can generate.
What worries me about HFT is not the number of microtrades, but the fact that they are actively used to trade for profit. As long as it is pure risk sharing, the system is self damping. But when systems start actively trying to spot and anticipate trends, you put a positive feedback term into the system. And with HFT, such a positive feedback can spiral out of control before it can be stopped. Other posters have said that this doesn't matter: when it has started to happen on previous occasions, and automated stop and roll back has fixed the problem. I worry that thing that because it never has gone wrong, it never will go wrong has been the prelude to significant disasters in the past.
I went on a tour of JET, ITER's predecessor. Even they reckoned that, if they were given full go-ahead to go straight to a production power plant with all safe speed, it would be 28 years before it wen on-grid. That is prett close to the "fusion power is thirty years away. Alway has been, always will be."
Which is unjust to Kodak. They definitely saw it coming, and tried to adapt: they produced the first digital cameras, and for a very sort time were the leading producer of them. But, to pick up your metaphor, they were a dinosaur that couldn't dodge: they simply did not have the culture to innovate. Britannica, by contrast were not so much dinosaurs as moles - they couldn't see the flood coming.
Yup. I told everybody not to invest in that fly-by-night Google: dozens search engines would soon be all over the place. And Apple was a fad for a few arty types who were afraid of real computers.
Or the system presents the cashier with a picture of the numberplate it cannot read, and the cashier presses an override button when he recognises a foreign plate. Imposing a delay of maybe 15 seconds on foreigners.
Or have the filling station staff press an override button when they see what you are doing. Which is what happens when I cycle to the filling station for fuel for my generator (I live on a boat).
Firstly, most stations already have numberplate recognition fitted.
People it might affect are those such as garage mechanics and used car sales staff, who have personal insurance rather than vehicle insurance, allowing them to drive uninsured cars for road tests and to the filling station. However, they would almost certainly be going to their local filling station where they have an account and could bypass this check.
It is not the tech, it is the social customs. Fill then pay has been customary in the UK since filling attendants disappeared, probably forty years ago. People expect to fill then pay, and will probably avoid a station that demanded prepay. And, since most filling stations double as convenience shops, I bet that they will get many more sales from people who have done the primary task of filling up before they pay rather than people who are focussed on filling up rather than buying papers or chocolates.
Since the figures are per 100,000 people, I see no reason not to compare them. Holland has a much greater population density giving greater opportunities for burglary. The two countries have very similar average incomes, though spread differently.I think the comparison is as reasonable as any country-to-country comparison.
As the price rises, margins rise. As margins rise, the sales people (pushers), who are 100% on commission, are more and more motivated to sell more. And, being already illegal, they are not controlled by truth in advertising, consumer protection or anything similar. And they provide a one-to-one sales pitch that car dealers would die for.
The illegal drugs marketing operation is, probably by an order of magnitude, the best funded marketing operation in the world. And marketing works - that is why businesses shell out for it.
So attacking supply increase prices which increases marketing which increases demand. Experience is that decriminalising drugs reduces demand.
I'll give you another example. the company I worked for in the very distant past had recently upgraded from tape-based systems to hard disk based systems. These were the top-loading washing machine style drives, with ten platters on a spindle, and the disk packs cost a fair sum. Stocking the data centre with forty or fifty of these things came to a fair amount - enough to go to the board for approval. Time passes, and our team gets a floppy-disk based microprocessor development system (8 in floppies). We want to buy a box of floppies so each team member can have his own floppy and even (shock, horror) take backups. But it was now written into the procedures that purchases of disks required board approval - despite the fact that this box of disks was only just over the manager's petty-cash limit. It took two weeks to get past this hump, during which a team of three were doing all their work in the two floppies we actually owned.
Its a joke. I think the fault makes the whole ethernet cable into, effectively, a dangling wire, and the only use of a dangling wire is as an aerial. Possibly connecting tx and rx makes it into a loop of sorts, and thus a loop antenna.
"USAn" is internet shorthand for "citizen of the USA". Are you saying: 1: there is no such thing as a citizen of the USA, or 2: you are posting on/. and yet are unaware of the Internet propensity for abbreviations?
They are already doing both, They have competitions for designs for ribbon material for a space elevator and machines to climb such ribbons, and conferences on colonisation. But both topics are still in the blue sky stage. A space elevator needs a material about four times stronger than anything yet manufactured, and it is a bit early to talk about colonisation when we have not yet reached Mars once, and have no plans for a moon lander. NASA is doing all it reasonably could be doing at this stage.
Japan will certainly not have a space elevator in 2012, nor for many years after. Actually, Japan's space program is not going particularly well. They have a lot of partial and complete failures.
There is a smooth transition between hiring someone whose skills and abilities you know and trust because you have worked with them before, and hiring less qualified friends. Recruiting is expensive, slow, and hard work. It is very difficult to judge someone's ability at interview, and I have seem some horrible mistakes made. Recruiting someone you have worked with in the past saves recruitment fees, can be done quickly, and you have effectively had months or years of "interview".
Realistically, teams of people who work together has been a regular pattern in all large organisations for centuries. LinkedIn just extends what was available to the few to the many,
Jobs are found by who you know - not which 200 links on linkedin you might have.
Which is how LinkedIn works for me. Everybody in my office is on LinkedIn, but it is not used much. Its main function is a contact point for ex-colleagues after you go your separate ways. I don't keep in email contact with them all, but I know that if I want to contact someone I have worked with in the past, I can do so via LinkedIn. Possibly not directly, but via another ex-colleague. The links will lie latent for years, and most will never be used. But the few that are will be very valuable.
So far as I understand it, the very slight evidence available is the opposite. That sexually explicit rape-oriented games and videos allow those inclined to such things get their needs out of their systems and therefore be less likely to do them for real, not more. I.e that video game violence/prevents/ real world violence.
However, I would be the first to agree that the evidence is slight (two small studies of about 100 subjects, IIRC - and sorry, I didn't see the underlying data, only references to it). But I do feel that making legislation on the basis of "it is common sense", "it stands to reason" etc is crazy. And you should not be legislating until you have proof of actual harm, not personal distaste for other people's likings.
An awful lot of criminal legislation seems to be pushed by people wanting prevent people like themselves from doing things that they wouldn't do anyway. They don't get the point that people who do commit such crimes are not like them, and may not be deterred or otherwise affected by things that would deter them.
Hydroplaning and black ice I would expect them to be better than humans. We already have computers to handle this better than us - they are called ABS and traction control. Likewise, static obstacles like road debris and potholes I think they will be built to sense more reliably than humans: they can use radar and/or ultrasound as well as light. The difficulty is with moving objects, particularly those controlled by people (bad drivers, careless pedestrians, reckless cyclists), With less of a model of mind, they will either have to leave large safety margins (and hence go slower) or else take risks. Maybe they can get the risks down to where, given their superior senses and faster reactions, they will end up net safer than human drivers.
My current IT department use month of arrival as the default password for a new account. So someone starting today would get a password of "Feb12". So every time they type it in, you get reminded of how long they haven't changed it. Certainly better than 12345.
I am afraid that Google is a proof of the axiom that all power corrupts. While not seeing them as totally evil, the fact of being huge and rich has distorted their vision so that they cannot see the dark side of the things that they do, I think they still mean well, they think that they are "doing no evil". But their view is so distorted by the point that they are looking from that they have lost touch with what ordinary people think. They are so intent on open information that they cannot understand why people, quite honourably and innocently, want too keep some information private to themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
...to rickrolling - or call it terrortrolling. Just set up a few fake links for your gullible frenemies, and get them the dawn knock on the door.
Rubbish. Speculators cannot hold a massively produced, massively consumed commodity at a high price over a long time. They might be able to profit from sudden price changes - up or down - by anticipating them, but over the long term they can have no effect. Nobody has the money to buy and stockpile a year's oil production.
The reason the price is rising is that much of the easy oil has been pumped, and we are now on to the harder, more expensive, oil. It is a fact of the market that the price of oil is the price of the last gallon pumped. Price will rise as long as demand exceeds supply. Rising prices bring in new producers, unviable at lower prices, but drive out consumers. When they match, the highest cost producer is just breaking even, and lower cost producers are making big profits.
So attempting to solve the problem by adding more, higher cost, producers pushes prices up, while small reductions in consumption can have disproportionate effects on the price as high-cost producers close down and leave the low cost ones. Saudi's marginal production cost is reckoned at about $10-20 a barrel: if we could reduce consumption to their production only, that is the price we would pay.
Not really, as long as oil is freely traded. If oil spikes from, say, $120 a barrel to $150 a barrel, do you seriously expect US-based producers to turn their back on $30 a barrel extra profit in order to please domestic consumers? They will either export their production or (more likely) expect domestic consumers to pay the market price. It is called the Free Market and the US is supposed to be keen on it. Oil is one of the most transportable, commoditized things around, and the market is world wide.
No, to stamp a patent on it they have to explain how it is done. Which, it appears, they have done in this case. I cannot patent the idea of a time machine, but if I can explain how how one can be built, I can sure as hell patent that, despite many hundreds of SF stories describing time travel.
I agree with you in principle, though I accept faster rates than you seem to for underlying "value adding" transfers. I think corporate treasurers need to be able to do currency exchanges on a timescale of minutes in order to balance debits and credits across multinational groups. Providing liquidity behind such reasonable transactions is a good thing, so an automated system that takes a large lump of money from one corporate action and lays it off in ten different ways, evening out risk and spreading the price signal, is good, But such a system needs to run only perhaps ten or twenty times as fast as the underlying transactions. If real traders have a timescale of minutes, then a timescale of a few seconds, as you suggest, is adequate to provide all the added value that the markets can generate.
What worries me about HFT is not the number of microtrades, but the fact that they are actively used to trade for profit. As long as it is pure risk sharing, the system is self damping. But when systems start actively trying to spot and anticipate trends, you put a positive feedback term into the system. And with HFT, such a positive feedback can spiral out of control before it can be stopped. Other posters have said that this doesn't matter: when it has started to happen on previous occasions, and automated stop and roll back has fixed the problem. I worry that thing that because it never has gone wrong, it never will go wrong has been the prelude to significant disasters in the past.
I went on a tour of JET, ITER's predecessor. Even they reckoned that, if they were given full go-ahead to go straight to a production power plant with all safe speed, it would be 28 years before it wen on-grid. That is prett close to the "fusion power is thirty years away. Alway has been, always will be."
Which is unjust to Kodak. They definitely saw it coming, and tried to adapt: they produced the first digital cameras, and for a very sort time were the leading producer of them. But, to pick up your metaphor, they were a dinosaur that couldn't dodge: they simply did not have the culture to innovate. Britannica, by contrast were not so much dinosaurs as moles - they couldn't see the flood coming.
Yup. I told everybody not to invest in that fly-by-night Google: dozens search engines would soon be all over the place. And Apple was a fad for a few arty types who were afraid of real computers.
Or the system presents the cashier with a picture of the numberplate it cannot read, and the cashier presses an override button when he recognises a foreign plate. Imposing a delay of maybe 15 seconds on foreigners.
Or have the filling station staff press an override button when they see what you are doing. Which is what happens when I cycle to the filling station for fuel for my generator (I live on a boat).
Firstly, most stations already have numberplate recognition fitted.
People it might affect are those such as garage mechanics and used car sales staff, who have personal insurance rather than vehicle insurance, allowing them to drive uninsured cars for road tests and to the filling station. However, they would almost certainly be going to their local filling station where they have an account and could bypass this check.
It is not the tech, it is the social customs. Fill then pay has been customary in the UK since filling attendants disappeared, probably forty years ago. People expect to fill then pay, and will probably avoid a station that demanded prepay. And, since most filling stations double as convenience shops, I bet that they will get many more sales from people who have done the primary task of filling up before they pay rather than people who are focussed on filling up rather than buying papers or chocolates.
Since the figures are per 100,000 people, I see no reason not to compare them. Holland has a much greater population density giving greater opportunities for burglary. The two countries have very similar average incomes, though spread differently.I think the comparison is as reasonable as any country-to-country comparison.
As the price rises, margins rise. As margins rise, the sales people (pushers), who are 100% on commission, are more and more motivated to sell more. And, being already illegal, they are not controlled by truth in advertising, consumer protection or anything similar. And they provide a one-to-one sales pitch that car dealers would die for.
The illegal drugs marketing operation is, probably by an order of magnitude, the best funded marketing operation in the world. And marketing works - that is why businesses shell out for it.
So attacking supply increase prices which increases marketing which increases demand. Experience is that decriminalising drugs reduces demand.
I'll give you another example. the company I worked for in the very distant past had recently upgraded from tape-based systems to hard disk based systems. These were the top-loading washing machine style drives, with ten platters on a spindle, and the disk packs cost a fair sum. Stocking the data centre with forty or fifty of these things came to a fair amount - enough to go to the board for approval. Time passes, and our team gets a floppy-disk based microprocessor development system (8 in floppies). We want to buy a box of floppies so each team member can have his own floppy and even (shock, horror) take backups. But it was now written into the procedures that purchases of disks required board approval - despite the fact that this box of disks was only just over the manager's petty-cash limit. It took two weeks to get past this hump, during which a team of three were doing all their work in the two floppies we actually owned.
Its a joke. I think the fault makes the whole ethernet cable into, effectively, a dangling wire, and the only use of a dangling wire is as an aerial. Possibly connecting tx and rx makes it into a loop of sorts, and thus a loop antenna.
"USAn" is internet shorthand for "citizen of the USA". /. and yet are unaware of the Internet propensity for abbreviations?
Are you saying: 1: there is no such thing as a citizen of the USA, or 2: you are posting on
They are already doing both, They have competitions for designs for ribbon material for a space elevator and machines to climb such ribbons, and conferences on colonisation. But both topics are still in the blue sky stage. A space elevator needs a material about four times stronger than anything yet manufactured, and it is a bit early to talk about colonisation when we have not yet reached Mars once, and have no plans for a moon lander. NASA is doing all it reasonably could be doing at this stage.
Japan will certainly not have a space elevator in 2012, nor for many years after. Actually, Japan's space program is not going particularly well. They have a lot of partial and complete failures.
There is a smooth transition between hiring someone whose skills and abilities you know and trust because you have worked with them before, and hiring less qualified friends. Recruiting is expensive, slow, and hard work. It is very difficult to judge someone's ability at interview, and I have seem some horrible mistakes made. Recruiting someone you have worked with in the past saves recruitment fees, can be done quickly, and you have effectively had months or years of "interview".
Realistically, teams of people who work together has been a regular pattern in all large organisations for centuries. LinkedIn just extends what was available to the few to the many,
Jobs are found by who you know - not which 200 links on linkedin you might have.
Which is how LinkedIn works for me. Everybody in my office is on LinkedIn, but it is not used much. Its main function is a contact point for ex-colleagues after you go your separate ways. I don't keep in email contact with them all, but I know that if I want to contact someone I have worked with in the past, I can do so via LinkedIn. Possibly not directly, but via another ex-colleague. The links will lie latent for years, and most will never be used. But the few that are will be very valuable.
So far as I understand it, the very slight evidence available is the opposite. That sexually explicit rape-oriented games and videos allow those inclined to such things get their needs out of their systems and therefore be less likely to do them for real, not more. I.e that video game violence /prevents/ real world violence.
However, I would be the first to agree that the evidence is slight (two small studies of about 100 subjects, IIRC - and sorry, I didn't see the underlying data, only references to it). But I do feel that making legislation on the basis of "it is common sense", "it stands to reason" etc is crazy. And you should not be legislating until you have proof of actual harm, not personal distaste for other people's likings.
An awful lot of criminal legislation seems to be pushed by people wanting prevent people like themselves from doing things that they wouldn't do anyway. They don't get the point that people who do commit such crimes are not like them, and may not be deterred or otherwise affected by things that would deter them.
Hydroplaning and black ice I would expect them to be better than humans. We already have computers to handle this better than us - they are called ABS and traction control. Likewise, static obstacles like road debris and potholes I think they will be built to sense more reliably than humans: they can use radar and/or ultrasound as well as light. The difficulty is with moving objects, particularly those controlled by people (bad drivers, careless pedestrians, reckless cyclists), With less of a model of mind, they will either have to leave large safety margins (and hence go slower) or else take risks. Maybe they can get the risks down to where, given their superior senses and faster reactions, they will end up net safer than human drivers.
Bashar Assad is a trained ophthalmologist. So he can count as far as glasses strengths go.
My current IT department use month of arrival as the default password for a new account. So someone starting today would get a password of "Feb12". So every time they type it in, you get reminded of how long they haven't changed it. Certainly better than 12345.
Before Google, I used Altavista.
I am afraid that Google is a proof of the axiom that all power corrupts. While not seeing them as totally evil, the fact of being huge and rich has distorted their vision so that they cannot see the dark side of the things that they do, I think they still mean well, they think that they are "doing no evil". But their view is so distorted by the point that they are looking from that they have lost touch with what ordinary people think. They are so intent on open information that they cannot understand why people, quite honourably and innocently, want too keep some information private to themselves.