HP are complaining that they were defrauded of between 80 and 90% of what they paid for Autonomy. On a ten digit deal, surely they employed all the best accountants and lawyers around to check it out? I mean, $100 million on advisers is still only 1% of the deal. If they did, why are they not suing these advisers (possibly as well, but certainly first)? If they did not, they they really have only themselves to blame and all concerned (not just the top man) should be ejected without parachutes.
While I agree with your principle, I think it is also true that a lot of legislation is sloppily written and much bigger than it needs to be. Pascal apologised for writing a long letter because he didn't have enough time to write a short one, and I think the same applies in spades to legislation. I would like to give legislatures a fixed word budget per session, with a fifty percent trade-in on laws repealed. We need more laws for an increasingly complex world, but we need them to be well thought out and well drafted. If one legislators windy persiflage deprives others of their opportunities, they may stop it instead of nodding it through in return for having their own fatuities passed.
On the contrary, the barriers to entry for lawyers are too low. The US has one of the highes proportions of lawyers per capita, with about 300 lawyers per hundred thousand, compared with Japan's seven. Even Britain only has a third as many lawyers. Those lawyers need employment, preferably high paid, and will encourage litigation. They may well believe it is justified, but self-interest biases judgement.
I used to work for a manufacturer of video raid arrays. While I was writing software, not on hardware QA, I saw a lot of drives go past. I saw no sign of high early failures, bathtub style. It seemed to me essentially random. The only tip I would have would be to monitor your bad block count. Most drives only showed one or two "grown" as opposed to factory marked bad blocks. If the bad block list grows into the teens, swap that drive.
Yes, Marlborough still gone, replaced by Ogbourn St Andrew, a tiny village nearby, and Basingstoke has moved six miles west to the approximate location of Watership Down.Searching for Crawley takes you to the hamlet in Hampshire not the major town by Gatwick Airport, and searching for Crawley, Sussex finds some sort of health club in Burgess Hill, twenty miles away. They did manage quite quickly to remove Burghclere Station, closed in 1960 and now buried under the Newbury Bypass (after putting it very conveniently close to my home, instead of two miles, where it actually had been).
I would guess you are in the US, where it isn't that bad. Near me, in the well populated southern UK, it has lost one and displaced one of the significant towns in my immediate area - places I frequently visit. The latter is the place I nominally live - where I pay my local taxes. Obviously, because I know my own patch pretty well, I don't need to map these places. But it means my confidence in it mapping a place I don't know is essentially zero,
I agree. When I considered the Drake Equation, I always used to put a much lower value than most on the term expressing the probability of planets in a solar system. I was wrong: it looks as if planets are plentiful, and therefore habitable planets more plentiful than I had thought,
The best replacement I have to solve the Fermi paradox is the possibility that the step from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life is very hard, as some biologist suggest,
As others have pointed out, a hypothesis is just speculation that looks good enough to take seriously. My experience is that scientist speculate continuously and wildly. Of course, most such speculations get shot down before they get further than lunchtime gossip. It is when a speculation stands up to quite a lot of lunchtimes that scientists begin to take it seriously and start working on it as a hypothesis. But a speculation is just a baby hypothesis.
Untrue. His doctor occasionally put him on a vegetarian diet in an attempt to cure flatulence, but he was very find of German sausages. Goebbles pushed the vegetarian to make him look saintly.
Indeed. It is only the children of fools, and the friends of children of fools, who get killed. But it is still children from your community being punished for the mistakes of their parents. If you can stop fools harming themselves with drugs (even though some could use drugs responsibly), can you not stop fools harming their children with guns (even though some could use guns responsibly)?
From New Jersey you can easily drive to states where gun purchase is freer and easier, and drive back without passing any customs or checkpoints. Individual states cannot control guns within the contiguous states. The UK has an advantage as an island. Not to say that gun smuggling is impossible, but it requires a lot more effort than jumping into your car for a long drive.
Jaguar Land Rover, British but Indian owned, are exporting very well. Most cars made in Britain, of which there are quite a lot, are Japanese badged (Toyota, Nissan, Honda),
It is not so much that smuggling is difficult, it is that it is not very worth while. If you are caught with a gun except in very clearly licensed circumstances, you are guilty of a crime with significant penalties. So owning a gun, before you start doing anything good or bad with it. In the US, by and large, if you are standing outside a bank with a gun, you are a completely law abiding citizen. In the UK, if you have a gun in a public place and it is not inside a locked box, you have committed an offence even if your gun ownership is quite legal. Even air rifles have to be transported in a zip-up cover.
All of which means that the only time UK criminals want guns is for a carefully planned big-time heist, or for turf wars with another gang. Most crime is, to some extent, opportunistic. And when opportunistic crime occurs, there are not guns in reach. The relatively small number of professional criminals who run organised crime know that having guns around every day is bad business. They may well have stored guns, but the stay stored against a special need.
The UK Police estimate that the total number of illegal guns in the UK is about 30-40,000.
I don't know about criminal homicides, but the pro-rata level of deaths of children and teenagers through gun accidents (i.e. excluding crime and adult accidents) in the US is the same as total gun deaths from all causes in the UK. (Figures NRA, Home Office). The NRA disregards this level of deaths as unimportant.
And how is an outsider to distinguish between a Christian and someone just calling themselves one? Remember that the Crusaders, the Inquisition and Fred Phelps call themselves Christian. I am not concerned about the inward doctrine - many intolerant people claim the legal protection and public recognition of being Christian.
I an an atheist, but I honour the teachings of the Gospels (but not the rest of the Bible) as admirable and compassionate. But, in my opinion, nearly all southern republican politicians who claim to be Christian are in deep breach of that loving doctrine. I cannot recognise the teachings of Jesus in anyone, for example, who supports the death penalty. Nor in those who support lifetime benefit caps. But if I insult them, they will wrap their claimed Christianity around them and spit venom at me.
At some level, organisations have to have the ability to discuss things privately. People have to have the chance to float novel ideas without fear that they might be pilloried for what was just a tentative discussion point. Was this purely a discussion, or did actions arise out of it? If it was purely a discussion, then "Chatham House Rules", which means that you do not reveal the discussions. On the other hand, if the meeting was forming actual policy and had outcomes other than just informing the participants, it is reasonable for the names of those who contributes to that policy formation to be known.
You need room to toss ideas around, to free associate, to think outside the box, without fear that your career will be destroyed when you are discovered outside the box. But when you take actual actions, or contribute to them, you need to be accountable.
If you think this is a way forward, you should think again. Open a couple of history books, look for countries that tried it and look how and why it failed.
Do you actually think before giving these advices?
Sweden, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands... None of these seem disaster areas to me,
I entirely agree. I want a serious left/right choice that people in the middle - the majority, unless America has a statistically improbably population - to have two credible candidates. When driving you want to steer a little to the left or a little to the right, not left lock to right lock. Politics should be the same: the lead candidats should be centre left and centre right, to allow the country to make moderate course adjustments, not hard left not hard right.
It would certainly help if the tale I was spun about my slow broadband was true. According to the droid I spoke to. there was no point in installing more equipment into my local exchange because they were bandwidth limited on the link from that relatively local exchange to the main backbone, and it would mean laying new fibre, which would take a long time and be very expensive. If they can suddenly speed up that link by 10x, let alone 2000x, then the cluster of villages served by that exchange will, in an internet sense, breathe a lot more easily.
But that is politics today: Jean Claude Junker, PM of Luxembourg and longest serving Head of Government in a democracy: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”
Apple's share price is based on a continuing sequence of spectaculars. In a sense, you are right : they, or their share buyers, have redefined success to be to repeat every year what they have done for the past three or four. Now it looks, unsurprisingly, as if they cannot keep the sprint up, and the will fall back to merely good instead of spectacular. As they do so, their share price will reflect this changed view.
I think there are differences. I think Apple designs its own hardware, down to a pretty low level. Including, for example, getting custom components manufactured for them. No, they don't own the assembly line that fits them together. That, in my opinion, is not something to be too worried about. While assembly has its skills, I think it could be recreated if needed, unlike the design skills that make Apple devices different.
On the other hand, many of the PC manufacturers are just badging stuff designed as well as built in the Far East. They are just becoming middlemen. providing a local-looking face to assemblies of overseas designed and built components.
Slashdot Mirror
HP are complaining that they were defrauded of between 80 and 90% of what they paid for Autonomy. On a ten digit deal, surely they employed all the best accountants and lawyers around to check it out? I mean, $100 million on advisers is still only 1% of the deal. If they did, why are they not suing these advisers (possibly as well, but certainly first)? If they did not, they they really have only themselves to blame and all concerned (not just the top man) should be ejected without parachutes.
Absolutely agree. Agilent is the heir to the HP I knew, respected and valued.
Mind you, their prices are just as high. Which, in a twisted way, is good. They have not descended to the lowest, unlike their erstwhile colleagues.
Thanks for this. Remarkably frank and outspoken remarks for a corporate presentation. If I had mod points, you would have them.
While I agree with your principle, I think it is also true that a lot of legislation is sloppily written and much bigger than it needs to be. Pascal apologised for writing a long letter because he didn't have enough time to write a short one, and I think the same applies in spades to legislation. I would like to give legislatures a fixed word budget per session, with a fifty percent trade-in on laws repealed. We need more laws for an increasingly complex world, but we need them to be well thought out and well drafted. If one legislators windy persiflage deprives others of their opportunities, they may stop it instead of nodding it through in return for having their own fatuities passed.
On the contrary, the barriers to entry for lawyers are too low. The US has one of the highes proportions of lawyers per capita, with about 300 lawyers per hundred thousand, compared with Japan's seven. Even Britain only has a third as many lawyers. Those lawyers need employment, preferably high paid, and will encourage litigation. They may well believe it is justified, but self-interest biases judgement.
I used to work for a manufacturer of video raid arrays. While I was writing software, not on hardware QA, I saw a lot of drives go past. I saw no sign of high early failures, bathtub style. It seemed to me essentially random. The only tip I would have would be to monitor your bad block count. Most drives only showed one or two "grown" as opposed to factory marked bad blocks. If the bad block list grows into the teens, swap that drive.
Yes, Marlborough still gone, replaced by Ogbourn St Andrew, a tiny village nearby, and Basingstoke has moved six miles west to the approximate location of Watership Down.Searching for Crawley takes you to the hamlet in Hampshire not the major town by Gatwick Airport, and searching for Crawley, Sussex finds some sort of health club in Burgess Hill, twenty miles away. They did manage quite quickly to remove Burghclere Station, closed in 1960 and now buried under the Newbury Bypass (after putting it very conveniently close to my home, instead of two miles, where it actually had been).
I would guess you are in the US, where it isn't that bad. Near me, in the well populated southern UK, it has lost one and displaced one of the significant towns in my immediate area - places I frequently visit. The latter is the place I nominally live - where I pay my local taxes. Obviously, because I know my own patch pretty well, I don't need to map these places. But it means my confidence in it mapping a place I don't know is essentially zero,
I agree. When I considered the Drake Equation, I always used to put a much lower value than most on the term expressing the probability of planets in a solar system. I was wrong: it looks as if planets are plentiful, and therefore habitable planets more plentiful than I had thought,
The best replacement I have to solve the Fermi paradox is the possibility that the step from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life is very hard, as some biologist suggest,
As others have pointed out, a hypothesis is just speculation that looks good enough to take seriously. My experience is that scientist speculate continuously and wildly. Of course, most such speculations get shot down before they get further than lunchtime gossip. It is when a speculation stands up to quite a lot of lunchtimes that scientists begin to take it seriously and start working on it as a hypothesis. But a speculation is just a baby hypothesis.
Hitler - so-so painter.
...and vegetarian.
Untrue. His doctor occasionally put him on a vegetarian diet in an attempt to cure flatulence, but he was very find of German sausages. Goebbles pushed the vegetarian to make him look saintly.
Indeed. It is only the children of fools, and the friends of children of fools, who get killed. But it is still children from your community being punished for the mistakes of their parents. If you can stop fools harming themselves with drugs (even though some could use drugs responsibly), can you not stop fools harming their children with guns (even though some could use guns responsibly)?
I care for all children, not just my own.
From New Jersey you can easily drive to states where gun purchase is freer and easier, and drive back without passing any customs or checkpoints. Individual states cannot control guns within the contiguous states. The UK has an advantage as an island. Not to say that gun smuggling is impossible, but it requires a lot more effort than jumping into your car for a long drive.
Jaguar Land Rover, British but Indian owned, are exporting very well.
Most cars made in Britain, of which there are quite a lot, are Japanese badged (Toyota, Nissan, Honda),
It is not so much that smuggling is difficult, it is that it is not very worth while. If you are caught with a gun except in very clearly licensed circumstances, you are guilty of a crime with significant penalties. So owning a gun, before you start doing anything good or bad with it. In the US, by and large, if you are standing outside a bank with a gun, you are a completely law abiding citizen. In the UK, if you have a gun in a public place and it is not inside a locked box, you have committed an offence even if your gun ownership is quite legal. Even air rifles have to be transported in a zip-up cover.
All of which means that the only time UK criminals want guns is for a carefully planned big-time heist, or for turf wars with another gang. Most crime is, to some extent, opportunistic. And when opportunistic crime occurs, there are not guns in reach. The relatively small number of professional criminals who run organised crime know that having guns around every day is bad business. They may well have stored guns, but the stay stored against a special need.
The UK Police estimate that the total number of illegal guns in the UK is about 30-40,000.
I don't know about criminal homicides, but the pro-rata level of deaths of children and teenagers through gun accidents (i.e. excluding crime and adult accidents) in the US is the same as total gun deaths from all causes in the UK. (Figures NRA, Home Office). The NRA disregards this level of deaths as unimportant.
I went to explicitly Christian schools for ten years. My mother was a believing Christian until her death. I did my share of Bible study.
And how is an outsider to distinguish between a Christian and someone just calling themselves one? Remember that the Crusaders, the Inquisition and Fred Phelps call themselves Christian. I am not concerned about the inward doctrine - many intolerant people claim the legal protection and public recognition of being Christian.
I an an atheist, but I honour the teachings of the Gospels (but not the rest of the Bible) as admirable and compassionate. But, in my opinion, nearly all southern republican politicians who claim to be Christian are in deep breach of that loving doctrine. I cannot recognise the teachings of Jesus in anyone, for example, who supports the death penalty. Nor in those who support lifetime benefit caps. But if I insult them, they will wrap their claimed Christianity around them and spit venom at me.
At some level, organisations have to have the ability to discuss things privately. People have to have the chance to float novel ideas without fear that they might be pilloried for what was just a tentative discussion point. Was this purely a discussion, or did actions arise out of it? If it was purely a discussion, then "Chatham House Rules", which means that you do not reveal the discussions. On the other hand, if the meeting was forming actual policy and had outcomes other than just informing the participants, it is reasonable for the names of those who contributes to that policy formation to be known.
You need room to toss ideas around, to free associate, to think outside the box, without fear that your career will be destroyed when you are discovered outside the box. But when you take actual actions, or contribute to them, you need to be accountable.
Proportional representation in Congress.
If you think this is a way forward, you should think again. Open a couple of history books, look for countries that tried it and look how and why it failed.
Do you actually think before giving these advices?
Sweden, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands... None of these seem disaster areas to me,
I entirely agree. I want a serious left/right choice that people in the middle - the majority, unless America has a statistically improbably population - to have two credible candidates. When driving you want to steer a little to the left or a little to the right, not left lock to right lock. Politics should be the same: the lead candidats should be centre left and centre right, to allow the country to make moderate course adjustments, not hard left not hard right.
It would certainly help if the tale I was spun about my slow broadband was true. According to the droid I spoke to. there was no point in installing more equipment into my local exchange because they were bandwidth limited on the link from that relatively local exchange to the main backbone, and it would mean laying new fibre, which would take a long time and be very expensive. If they can suddenly speed up that link by 10x, let alone 2000x, then the cluster of villages served by that exchange will, in an internet sense, breathe a lot more easily.
But that is politics today: Jean Claude Junker, PM of Luxembourg and longest serving Head of Government in a democracy: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”
Apple's share price is based on a continuing sequence of spectaculars. In a sense, you are right : they, or their share buyers, have redefined success to be to repeat every year what they have done for the past three or four. Now it looks, unsurprisingly, as if they cannot keep the sprint up, and the will fall back to merely good instead of spectacular. As they do so, their share price will reflect this changed view.
I think there are differences. I think Apple designs its own hardware, down to a pretty low level. Including, for example, getting custom components manufactured for them. No, they don't own the assembly line that fits them together. That, in my opinion, is not something to be too worried about. While assembly has its skills, I think it could be recreated if needed, unlike the design skills that make Apple devices different.
On the other hand, many of the PC manufacturers are just badging stuff designed as well as built in the Far East. They are just becoming middlemen. providing a local-looking face to assemblies of overseas designed and built components.