Don't be dumb and buy anything when it is near historically-high levels. You'll only be the "greater fool" that allows those people who bought near the lows and rode the price up to cash out just before the price collapses.
Certainly that's common sense advice, but if you'd bought gold at the historically high level of $1000/oz last year, you'd be doing quite well now.
Sometimes prices really aren't cyclical, and sometimes the cycles are quite long.
That said, I'm not buying gold. And I certainly see no reason for gold prices not to be cyclical, aside from a possible impending total crash of the world's economies. In which case gold will go up a lot more shortly before euros and dollars become worthless -- but shortly thereafter, you'll be wishing you bought food and ammo instead, and if your gold was on paper rather than holding up your mattress, you won't have it anymore anyway.
Yeah for fiscal responsibility at the expense of moral responsibility!!!
Do you really believe there's a moral responsibility to a mortgage-holding bank? They don't attach any moral value to it; they just treat the note as a bit of negotiable paper. If the penalty for default (including loss of creditworthiness) is less than the benefit, it makes perfect sense to do so.
If you got your mortgage from the local banker who never sells the notes, has been known to be forgiving when people get behind in payments for various reasons beyond their control, and is generally a good guy, then maybe there's a moral dimension. But that banker is, if not completely mythical, pretty close.
He said they nabbed one little old lady with over $500 in her pockets trying to stuff steaks in her coat.
I stole a bunch of steaks from WalMart once, in early spring. They'd just gotten a shipment of employee caps in, so I snagged one of those and put it on. I grabbed one of those aprons, too. Then I went out to the garden center where the grills were, and fired one up (nice of them to keep the charcoal and lighter fluid nearby). Then I told one of the employees that we were running a promotion and asked him to get me a bunch of steaks. I grilled them up, ate a bunch myself, and served the rest to other customers. Then I went home.
Particles are points, right? I.e. of zero size, and therefore infinite density. So why doesn't (e.g.) an electron immediately collapse to form a black hole?
An electron's classical radius isn't zero, but more to the point, you can't use just classical physics at that scale.
But as an example, one official said, an investigation into a drug cartel earlier this year was stymied because smugglers used peer-to-peer software, which is difficult to intercept because it is not routed through a central hub. Agents eventually installed surveillance equipment in a suspect's office, but that tactic was "risky," the official said, and the delay "prevented the interception of pertinent communications."
So it's risky. If law enforcement has to take some risks because the safe way is to take away everyone's freedom, so be it. The question, as usual, is who is to be the master. If the answer is "law enforcement", welcome to the police state.
There's a reason behind this issue and it's concerning law enforcement. Unless you guys believe we should allow all drugs to enter the United States freely.
All, rather than than the (very roughly) 60% entering freely now? It'd be no big deal.
I don't like the law any more than you, but c'mon, let's not resort to slippery slope arguments.
How many slippery slopes do we have to slide down before people will stop objecting to the argument? We've gone from metal detectors in airports to random bag searches on public transit. We've gone from border checkpoints to a 100-mile Fourth Amendment-free zone. We've gone from "reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions" to "free speech zones". We've gone from "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" to eternal copyright. And, of course, we've already gone from the FISA court providing for warrantless wiretaps for intelligence purposes to wholesale government wiretapping at the carrier level.
For them nothing has changed since 9/11. They're living "normally" as far as they're concerned. All they have to worry about is making payments on their McMansion, credit cards, luxury cars, online shopping sprees,....
Err, no. Many of them are likely in default on their credit cards, their McMansions are in foreclosure, the luxury car is either long since repossessed or is the SAME luxury car they had back then, etc. And that is why the Democrats are going to get pasted in November, not because Obama has proven to be a copy of George Bush in terms of civil liberties (financial policy too, but that WILL hurt them).
As another interesting aside, the biggest step change in income tax receipts from the rich in recent memory came when Lawson dropped the higher income tax rate significantly, which actually resulted in more income being generated/declared in the UK and therefore more UK tax paid on it.
Shh... sneering at the Laffer curve is de rigeur here.
If the police somehow obtains evidence illegaly (e.g. through burglary), that will be prosecuted separately.
Does this ever actually happen? In the US, there have been serious arguments against the exclusionary rule, on the grounds that the police should and will be punished separately for their acts. In practice, they never are, and those advocating against the rule on those grounds are either extremely naive or are simply being disingenuous.
Right. Taxes are worse, because the money taken from you will be used to fund such things as the local corrupt police department, the transportation security agency, the war in Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan, or something else you don't like. At best, the funds are pocketed by some corrupt official along the way. In the mean time, all the good things they say they are using the taxes for -- roads, schools, fire stations, hospitals, air traffic control, etc -- are allowed to deteriorate so they have an excuse to raise taxes some more.
The skills "reprogram industrial PLCs" and "find four new zero days in Windows" don't overlap a whole lot. Given what this virus does, it's very hard to believe it's the work of one or two guys.
If it weren't for the stolen private keys, two guys would not be unlikely (one Windows, one industrial control) and one guy would be possible, IMO. But given the stolen private keys, some sort of larger espionage operation seems likely. Even if an unethical individual managed to get those private keys, they'd be pretty high value... what individual would have the motive to use not one but both just to attack some industrial control system?
I understand that this may well not be the norm - but I have seen many separate studies that indicate both of the following statements to be true:
a) University is a waste of money for most people who go b) Not going to university will seriously limit your earning potential
Sadly, they aren't contradictory. It could be the case that while the actual earnings are much greater for those who get a degree, the difference isn't enough to make up for the cost of education.
This may indicate the employers are willing to pay for a more educated workforce, even if the education has little to do with the job. My hypothesis is a college degree indicates an ability to problem solve and work without supervision.
I think it's more likely to indicate that many employers aren't willing to hire those without degrees at ANY price. The B.S. is the new high school diploma. For employers, it's just an often-arbitrary way of reducing the number of applicants to review. Some employers are demanding a bachelor's degree for help desk positions; that's arbitrary.
It was mostly European scientists who won WWII for the Americans, thanks to their development of nuclear technology.
Nice try. But V-E day had nothing to do with nuclear technology.
The Cold War was initially thought to be an American "win", but it was more due to problems within the USSR, rather than anything America did.
Well, yes, that's what the anti-communists -- most particularly including Reagan -- had been saying for a very long time. Certainly it was an American win, even if by attrition.
Worst of all, Reagan's policies from that period have clearly been very destructive to America, and are primarily responsible for the current poor state of the economy.
Sorry, that blame goes mostly to Shrub.
The First Gulf War can barely be considered a war, given that their enemy was almost non-existent, and had itself been subject to a decade of devastating war just before.
Which is to say it was a success, and you don't want to countit.
The Second Gulf War was a complete failure.
Except in as much as Saddam has been deposed, his party destroyed, and a new at least nominally US-friendly government set up. (what were the goals again?)
The War in Afghanistan has been nothing but a disaster, as well.
Except in as much as the Taleban, along with Al Queda, no longer controls the country.
6. People maintained lists. They kept records. According to the complaint: "Pixar instructed human resources personnel to adhere to the agreement and maintain a paper trail in the event Apple accused Pixar of violating the agreement." Dumb.
8. Did they really not think this would come to light? Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
These are only dumb if the companies involved thought they were doing something illegal.
While sure the employees are still probably losing something here it's clear they're not losing much at all, I can see now that every Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Intuit and Pixar employee is going to be making $200k+ because they're going to just keep stealing each other's employees instead of finding talent from the rest of the world so really this hurts everyone looking for a job right now and the only people that win are those already working for Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Intuit and Pixar.
Not a problem. Just mention on your LinkedIn/Facebook/whatever profile that you work for one of those companies. Doesn't have to be true, just has to come up in a keyword search. Once they're talking to you, you can "clarify" the error.
This study provides strong evidence against solar neutrino flux being the reason for observed variations in radioactive decay. However, it does not provide evidence against those variations -- nor was it designed to. The measurements still need to be explained; there have been reports of changes in radioactive decay during solar flares, and also seasonal variations; most likely IMO they're some sort of systemic measurement error, but maybe not.
Also note that the idea that decay rates might be affected by particle flux or shape isn't all that farfetched. Fission rates in certain isotopes are, for instance.
Verizon (and other cell companies) should not only no longer place cell sites in Hempstead. They should disconnect all the sectors of out of town antennas which point into Hempstead, and make the whole thing a dead zone. Then there's a few things that could happen.
1) Much of Hempstead's population will get sick of being in a dead zone and will tell the tinfoil hatter's to STFU and repeal the law. 2) Hempstead will become a destination for tinfoil hatters and cranky old cellphone haters, and everyone's happy. 3) (most likely) Much of Hempstead's population will want their cell phone reception, but they'll fail to see any connection between lack of reception and anti-tower laws. They'll then complain that they're somehow being mistreated and/or discriminated against by the carriers. Maybe they'll even try a lawsuit. The rest of us will all have a good laugh at their expense.
They've reached the point in both the US and UK where rehabilitation is being ignored in the desperate attempt to just cram everyone into the limited space somehow.
Rehabilitation never worked in the first place, so that's no great loss. Prison is debilitating.
Computer Engineers and Electrical Engineers. For a time, when software was first being written, it was engineers doing the work, rather than computer science majors.
Computer Science was not accepted until the 1990s. The field was quite well-established by then. They're still very restrictive on which CS programs they accept, requiring an accreditation that has only very recently become common, whereas they are not so restrictive with other technical degrees.
But it's also finer grained than that - it's not one USPTO art group for "software"... Instead, there's more than a hundred, subdivided into areas of specialty, including AI, cryptography, network acceleration, UI design, etc:
There's no evidence, IMO, that any of the patent examiners in any of those hundred subfields are skilled in those subfields.
Asserts have one valid use: to wrap something you know you haven't completed and that you know (or are hoping) will break. And if you're releasing stuff you know will break I don't want to pay you.
An assertion failure means something went wrong that, in the normal operation of the system, could not go wrong. The most likely reason for this is of course a programming error, but there are others: some memory got corrupted, your CPU is malfunctioning, some peripheral is malfunctioning, or some other similar sort of thing. This makes handling assertion failures tricky because you can't assume the state of the system is sane. When I did embedded stuff, assert failures would act similarly to watchdog failures -- the system would disable all interrupts, try to write the assertion code to non-volatile RAM, then reboot. For our application it made sense to do this. For other applications something different might need to be done. But the point is that an assert failure is different than an ordinary error. You can't simply handle the error condition; the whole system state could be bad. You might want to shut the system down completely (e.g. if there's a backup which will take over). You might want to attempt to completely reset your state. Or you might just want to report the condition (somehow) and continue as if nothing happened until someone intervenes. But in any case, assertions have their place.
You can call it incompetence within their field, but don't claim that Patent Examiners are examining applications outside of the field they have training in. That's demonstrably false.
For a time, while software patents were being granted, a computer science degree was not allowed as a prerequisite for becoming either a patent examiner or a patent lawyer. So just who was examining those early software patents?
At the very least arguable. The "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA (absent which, an ISP is per se liable for copyright infringement, at least under pre-DMCA precedent, see, e.g., Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Frena, 839 F.Supp. 1552, 1559 (M.D. Fla., 1993))
The more recent, but also pre-DMCA Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Servs., Inc., 907 F. Supp. 1361 (N.D. Cal. 1995).
argues otherwise
If the Pirate Party actually want to achieve something, then they need to start being constructive. A few suggestions:
* Change the name. Pirate Party makes them sound like a bunch of teenagers.
* Propose a sensible alternative to copyright, or propose a reasonable term for copyright. Their current proposals, if implemented, would cause significant damage to the economies of most western countries.
* Focus more on the privacy and security policies - people are more sympathetic to people who want to be left alone than to freeloaders.
As soon as they do that, they're no longer "the Pirate Party". They're just another easily ignored ho-hum political group with no constituency.
Of course, there's no way they can achieve anything through the political process the way they are; the RIAA (et al) are ascendant and will remain ascendant no matter what anyone does, short of force of arms (Pirate navy?). But trying to be "sensible" will just extinguish the Pirate Party.
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Certainly that's common sense advice, but if you'd bought gold at the historically high level of $1000/oz last year, you'd be doing quite well now.
Sometimes prices really aren't cyclical, and sometimes the cycles are quite long.
That said, I'm not buying gold. And I certainly see no reason for gold prices not to be cyclical, aside from a possible impending total crash of the world's economies. In which case gold will go up a lot more shortly before euros and dollars become worthless -- but shortly thereafter, you'll be wishing you bought food and ammo instead, and if your gold was on paper rather than holding up your mattress, you won't have it anymore anyway.
Do you really believe there's a moral responsibility to a mortgage-holding bank? They don't attach any moral value to it; they just treat the note as a bit of negotiable paper. If the penalty for default (including loss of creditworthiness) is less than the benefit, it makes perfect sense to do so.
If you got your mortgage from the local banker who never sells the notes, has been known to be forgiving when people get behind in payments for various reasons beyond their control, and is generally a good guy, then maybe there's a moral dimension. But that banker is, if not completely mythical, pretty close.
I stole a bunch of steaks from WalMart once, in early spring. They'd just gotten a shipment of employee caps in, so I snagged one of those and put it on. I grabbed one of those aprons, too. Then I went out to the garden center where the grills were, and fired one up (nice of them to keep the charcoal and lighter fluid nearby). Then I told one of the employees that we were running a promotion and asked him to get me a bunch of steaks. I grilled them up, ate a bunch myself, and served the rest to other customers. Then I went home.
(believe it...or not)
Taking the offending police officer or prosecutor out the back of the courtroom and executing him isn't going to happen, though.
An electron's classical radius isn't zero, but more to the point, you can't use just classical physics at that scale.
So it's risky. If law enforcement has to take some risks because the safe way is to take away everyone's freedom, so be it. The question, as usual, is who is to be the master. If the answer is "law enforcement", welcome to the police state.
All, rather than than the (very roughly) 60% entering freely now? It'd be no big deal.
How many slippery slopes do we have to slide down before people will stop objecting to the argument? We've gone from metal detectors in airports to random bag searches on public transit. We've gone from border checkpoints to a 100-mile Fourth Amendment-free zone. We've gone from "reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions" to "free speech zones". We've gone from "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" to eternal copyright. And, of course, we've already gone from the FISA court providing for warrantless wiretaps for intelligence purposes to wholesale government wiretapping at the carrier level.
Err, no. Many of them are likely in default on their credit cards, their McMansions are in foreclosure, the luxury car is either long since repossessed or is the SAME luxury car they had back then, etc. And that is why the Democrats are going to get pasted in November, not because Obama has proven to be a copy of George Bush in terms of civil liberties (financial policy too, but that WILL hurt them).
Shh... sneering at the Laffer curve is de rigeur here.
Does this ever actually happen? In the US, there have been serious arguments against the exclusionary rule, on the grounds that the police should and will be punished separately for their acts. In practice, they never are, and those advocating against the rule on those grounds are either extremely naive or are simply being disingenuous.
Right. Taxes are worse, because the money taken from you will be used to fund such things as the local corrupt police department, the transportation security agency, the war in Iraq/Iran/Afghanistan, or something else you don't like. At best, the funds are pocketed by some corrupt official along the way. In the mean time, all the good things they say they are using the taxes for -- roads, schools, fire stations, hospitals, air traffic control, etc -- are allowed to deteriorate so they have an excuse to raise taxes some more.
If it weren't for the stolen private keys, two guys would not be unlikely (one Windows, one industrial control) and one guy would be possible, IMO. But given the stolen private keys, some sort of larger espionage operation seems likely. Even if an unethical individual managed to get those private keys, they'd be pretty high value... what individual would have the motive to use not one but both just to attack some industrial control system?
Sadly, they aren't contradictory. It could be the case that while the actual earnings are much greater for those who get a degree, the difference isn't enough to make up for the cost of education.
I think it's more likely to indicate that many employers aren't willing to hire those without degrees at ANY price. The B.S. is the new high school diploma. For employers, it's just an often-arbitrary way of reducing the number of applicants to review. Some employers are demanding a bachelor's degree for help desk positions; that's arbitrary.
Nice try. But V-E day had nothing to do with nuclear technology.
Well, yes, that's what the anti-communists -- most particularly including Reagan -- had been saying for a very long time. Certainly it was an American win, even if by attrition.
Sorry, that blame goes mostly to Shrub.
Which is to say it was a success, and you don't want to countit.
Except in as much as Saddam has been deposed, his party destroyed, and a new at least nominally US-friendly government set up. (what were the goals again?)
Except in as much as the Taleban, along with Al Queda, no longer controls the country.
These are only dumb if the companies involved thought they were doing something illegal.
Not a problem. Just mention on your LinkedIn/Facebook/whatever profile that you work for one of those companies. Doesn't have to be true, just has to come up in a keyword search. Once they're talking to you, you can "clarify" the error.
This study provides strong evidence against solar neutrino flux being the reason for observed variations in radioactive decay. However, it does not provide evidence against those variations -- nor was it designed to. The measurements still need to be explained; there have been reports of changes in radioactive decay during solar flares, and also seasonal variations; most likely IMO they're some sort of systemic measurement error, but maybe not.
Also note that the idea that decay rates might be affected by particle flux or shape isn't all that farfetched. Fission rates in certain isotopes are, for instance.
Verizon (and other cell companies) should not only no longer place cell sites in Hempstead. They should disconnect all the sectors of out of town antennas which point into Hempstead, and make the whole thing a dead zone. Then there's a few things that could happen.
1) Much of Hempstead's population will get sick of being in a dead zone and will tell the tinfoil hatter's to STFU and repeal the law.
2) Hempstead will become a destination for tinfoil hatters and cranky old cellphone haters, and everyone's happy.
3) (most likely) Much of Hempstead's population will want their cell phone reception, but they'll fail to see any connection between lack of reception and anti-tower laws. They'll then complain that they're somehow being mistreated and/or discriminated against by the carriers. Maybe they'll even try a lawsuit. The rest of us will all have a good laugh at their expense.
Rehabilitation never worked in the first place, so that's no great loss. Prison is debilitating.
Computer Science was not accepted until the 1990s. The field was quite well-established by then. They're still very restrictive on which CS programs they accept, requiring an accreditation that has only very recently become common, whereas they are not so restrictive with other technical degrees.
There's no evidence, IMO, that any of the patent examiners in any of those hundred subfields are skilled in those subfields.
An assertion failure means something went wrong that, in the normal operation of the system, could not go wrong. The most likely reason for this is of course a programming error, but there are others: some memory got corrupted, your CPU is malfunctioning, some peripheral is malfunctioning, or some other similar sort of thing. This makes handling assertion failures tricky because you can't assume the state of the system is sane. When I did embedded stuff, assert failures would act similarly to watchdog failures -- the system would disable all interrupts, try to write the assertion code to non-volatile RAM, then reboot. For our application it made sense to do this. For other applications something different might need to be done. But the point is that an assert failure is different than an ordinary error. You can't simply handle the error condition; the whole system state could be bad. You might want to shut the system down completely (e.g. if there's a backup which will take over). You might want to attempt to completely reset your state. Or you might just want to report the condition (somehow) and continue as if nothing happened until someone intervenes. But in any case, assertions have their place.
For a time, while software patents were being granted, a computer science degree was not allowed as a prerequisite for becoming either a patent examiner or a patent lawyer. So just who was examining those early software patents?
The more recent, but also pre-DMCA Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Servs., Inc., 907 F. Supp. 1361 (N.D. Cal. 1995).
argues otherwise
As soon as they do that, they're no longer "the Pirate Party". They're just another easily ignored ho-hum political group with no constituency.
Of course, there's no way they can achieve anything through the political process the way they are; the RIAA (et al) are ascendant and will remain ascendant no matter what anyone does, short of force of arms (Pirate navy?). But trying to be "sensible" will just extinguish the Pirate Party.