True not all trade is oil, but the trade deficit of the US is such that, were it not for oil trade, the value of the dollar would be lower. If I sell you 2 dollars of stuff I have 2 dollars. If you can only provide me with 1 dollar worth of stuff in return I have piece of waste paper with "1 dollar" written on it unless I can exchange if for someone elses goods or sell it. If no one wants to buy it off me at what I thought it was worth when you gave it to me, and I know that, then next time I come to sell you something I'm going to demand enough dollars off you to make up the difference. The value of the dollar has shrunk. Now, luckily for you, some guy half way round the world wants to trade my useless bit of paper for useful oil so now that paper has value again.
The dollars value is seriously propped up by oil because there simply isn't enough value in the US exported goods to cover the amount of dollars spent on imported goods so the excess would be useless except for the fact we can buy oil with it. This has been going on for 20 years and now the majority of all dollars in circulation, both electronic and actual paper, are held by European, Japanese and Chinese banks.
well, even if you were going to spend the money on food and water, and its far more likely to be spent on bigger SUVs, that would probably be better spent on preventing global warming. When all the major coastal cities of the western economies are under water or struggling to buy enough food to feed our populations, or trying to cope with the people made homeless by the advancing deserts in the equatorial regions and glaciers in the north, a few hundred billion will look like small change.
The relationship between euros and oil is defined by factors other than the supply and demand for oil, for example the relative strengths of the two economies. In your example above, if the value of the dollar fell between now and feb 15 then I would lose money on the deal. Therefore I would have wanted have sold dollars not bought dollars. If many people also sold dollars then the value of the dollar would fall still. On the other hand because almost all oil transactions have to be performed in dollars if I wanted to buy oil I would have to buy some dollars to make that purchase, thus keeping the value of the dollar up. If OPEC decides that in the future it will do all its oil trading in Euros then the need for me to buy dollars vanishes. The one thing which forces people to buy dollars vanishes and the dollar hits the floor.
actually the really far out models, such as those which lead to cooling or 20 K+ warming were discarded because they predicted unrealistic physical processes. What we have left are the models worth seriously looking at to find flaws in their assumptions.
except that water vapour beyond a limit gives a negative feedback because it turns into clouds, which then increases the albedo of the earth returning more or the Sun's incident radiation back to space without it being turned into kinetic energy. One of the key factors is that evaporation rate is actually mostly due to the incident light, and not the ambient temperature, which is why the global dimming effect is so powerful in holding back climate change. Not only does it increase albedo, but it also reduces evaporation rate and thus the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere.
With so many positive and negative feedback mechanisms working out what is going to happen is very tricky, but I would tend towards predicting a 5-6 degree increase over 100 years. This is more than enough to render large parts of the Earth uninhabitable, and it would seem likely to plunge northern Europe into a new iceage. Of course that would mitigate some of the worst effects of flooding other parts of the world but it's not good for us old-worlders.
Well if you have a better way of predicting the behavior of chaotic system I'm sure there's a bunch of people at the met office who'd love to speak with you. Until then I'm going to use the best available science as a working hypothesis. In the mean time I wonder if this model can tell me where is going to be a nice place to live, that won't be flooded, frozen or scorched in the next 50 years or so.
No one is saying that the attacks were a hoax, just that the organisation behind those attacks was actually small and ad-hoc, rather than some huge and highly centralised evil empire. The name Al Qaeda was actually made up by the FBI in order to make the anti-mafia laws applicable to the radical islamist movement, but they have since taken the name as their own. It suits their goals to pretend to be bigger and more dangerous than they are, and it suits the goals of the western politicians to have an identifiable enemy on whom to wage an unwinable war, because that gives them an excuse to weild draconian powers and it unites the people behind a sense of a God given mission to fight evil.
read up on it here and download the torrents somewhere. I can't find them now because of my employers damn content filters but I strongly urge you to get them somewhere.
Except that the US isn't really the wealthiest country on earth. When you're in debt 7 Trillion Dollars, mostly to european and japanese banks, and borrowing 500 billion dollars more each year you are not wealthy, just living beyond your means. The only reason counties and people want to hold dollars is that you can buy oil in dollars. America simply doesn't export enough stuff competatively to allow the world to spend their dollars back into the US economy. Many people are starting to suggest that oil trading should be converted to euros, and Russia already sells its oil for euros because most of its oil sales are to Europe. If that happens then the value of the dollar will go through the floor and the debt you already have will rise in dollar terms to match. Put simply the US government is on the verge of bankrupcy, and this at a time when Bush is cutting taxes like mad.
Re:Sounds like a piracy crackdown, not a ban.
on
China Bans 50 Games
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· Score: 3, Insightful
But unfortunately they don't really seem to care at the moment how their government treats them. Or at least they don't care enough about computer games to risk dying for.
Perhaps, but its a misguided and silly attempt if it is. Anyone who believes in heaven really ought to get their heads around there being no way in which God can be bribed into thinking you are good, and also that no matter how "good" you are compared to other people, that's not the standard your going to be judged on. Indeed the Bible tells us that no one can get to heaven by their own works, because you can't be better than good, and therefore there's no way to make up for what you've already done.
Sorry Bill. (By the way, that also applies to everyone else, including those accusing Bill of being evil)
The question is motive. What is Bill Gates' motive for making all his money? Well, given he's giving a lot of his money away, it would seem money is not his motive now, although it may have been in the past. Perhaps he has a vision of having his product, his baby, on every PC in the world. What software geek wouldn't want that? Perhaps he just has a duty to the shareholders? In fact he did, in law have the responsibility to make as much money for his shareholders as he possibly could. Thats just the nature of capitalism so what are you going to do? If Microsoft is evil, it is because it has been the perfect embodyment of a successful corporation. It has crushed it's competitors, sailed close to the wind legally, but never been seriously harmed by it's mistakes, and it makes a fortune. If anyone is to blame for Microsofts evilness it is the US goverment and the constitution.
Unless he's Robin Hood. OK ok, I'm not seriously comparing Bill Gates to Robin Hood, but it's not too far off the mark. Like it or not, you, me and the US government are all rich, and the people Bill G is giving his money to are genuinely poor. As I understand it, when Bill dies virtually all his money will go to charity. OK his children will never have to worry about cash, but neither will be loaded.
I'm not going to argue that he doesn't do bad stuff, but that's what capitalism is all about . Do whatever you can get away with(if you read Marx you see that's the kind of thing which he said would bring down capitalism eventually). If you don't like it, go move to Cuba.
As it happens I don't agree with you about Microsoft destryoying software engineering. I should make clear that I have my MSDN subscription paid for by my employer, but Microsoft really look after their 3rd party developers, because they know that they can make windows stronger by helping and encouraging software development. Some of the Microsoft visual tools are leaps and bounds ahead of their competitors, and their new technology is cool too. OK Avalon is clearly an attempt to lock out firefox, but what do you expect?
Read up on the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. You will see that Bill has given $27 Billion of his $50 Billion fortune for the charity to manage. IIRC they are having a really tough time giving it away because it earns more interest than it can donate in a co-ordinated fashion.
What ever you think of the guys software and business practices, it is hard to argue that he is an evil man in the face of his generosity.
You mean this comment is my own property for 95 years just because I wrote it...
Stay back fools and don't quote me. You'd better believe I'll protect my rights!
You don't frighten me, Anonymous pig dog! Go and boil your bottom, you son of a silly person! I blow my nose at your, so-called, "Copyright!" Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!
You do realise that your statement, that nothing is real except that which is physical, is as much a statement of faith as any statement of religious faith. You are stating that there cannot be a god on the basis of no evidence or reasoned argument. The only truly logical position when all information is not yet known is agnosticism.
I know where you're coming from here, and to some extent your right. I keep going through this cycle of thinking "I'm a terrible person because I keep doing bad things. If I really loved God and followed Jesus, how could I still be doing bad things?". The point being that we are saved by faith, but how can I know that my faith is real. In the end I decide that if I'm worried then my faith is probably real and then you get back to the joyous acceptence of God's love and Jesus's gift to us.
I'm really worried though by the rise of judgmental, Bible bashing "Christians" and their moral crusade. I always think they've got it the wrong way round, in that good morals come from being close to God, not that being close to God comes from having good morals. This is why it is pointless to attack sinners, because we are all equally sinful before God. The only difference is that Christians know that God has forgiven us. Therefore the job of Christians is not to make people be good, but to help people to know and love God, by seeing us living a life through which something of the nature of God is reflected.
The problem with Bible thumping Christians is that they often try to force repentence as a condition for being saved. This leads to a kind of legalism which says that if you do A, B and C then you will be saved, and it leads to the outpouring of hate against gays, abortionists and even other Christians. What then happens is that this creates a barrier which has the effect of stopping people coming to know Jesus, and is therefore clearly sinful. I believe that repentence is a CONSEQUENCE of knowing Jesus and having the Holy Spirit, just as James says that good deeds and works are a sign that our faith is true faith. He's not saying that if we do good things THEN we will be right with God, but that IF we are right with God, THEN we will do good deeds because we want to. It like, if you love someone then you make them breakfast in bed, or buy them a gift. It would be pointless and wrong for a person to demand a gift as a pre-requisite for love.
Jesus reserved his most stinging attacks for the religious people of his day. The pharisees who wore their self-rightousness as a badge of social respectability. Those who deemed the sick, the sinners and the prostitutes to be untouchable. They obeyed mosaic law perfectly and added to it around the edges just to be on the safe side.
Mat 7:2, "For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. 3, "And why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4, "Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log is in your own eye? 5, "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
Mat 23:23, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. 24, "You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel! 25, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence. 26, "You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, so that the outside of it may become clean also. 27, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. 28, "Even so you too outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. 29, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous,
Actually the architect was Sir Norman Foster, the British architect behind the infamous swaying millennium bridge over the Thames by the Tate modern. The actual engineers were all French.
look up "albedo". If it is reflected back to space it will not increase atmospheric temperature.
Also an increase in temperature at the top of the atmosphere will not neccesarily result in an equal increase lower down in the bit where we live and weather happens.
I read an article which included an anecdote about optimisation problems in the 64 bit version of the MSVC compiler. The problem is that compilers use a vast number of pointers, and while the number of registers has increased, the amount of cache has not and so they can only fit half the number of pointers into cache on chip and are getting more soft page faults as a consequence. This almost exactly offsets the gain caused by the extra registers so the 32bit and 64 versions of the compiler run at just the same speed.
very few standard motherboards will support more than 32Gb of RAM. That doesn't stop you having several TB of virtual address space however. IIRC the EMT_64 has an address space of 40 bits while AMD64 supports up to 48 bits
Slashdot Mirror
you mean they added ANOTHER one!?!?
True not all trade is oil, but the trade deficit of the US is such that, were it not for oil trade, the value of the dollar would be lower. If I sell you 2 dollars of stuff I have 2 dollars. If you can only provide me with 1 dollar worth of stuff in return I have piece of waste paper with "1 dollar" written on it unless I can exchange if for someone elses goods or sell it. If no one wants to buy it off me at what I thought it was worth when you gave it to me, and I know that, then next time I come to sell you something I'm going to demand enough dollars off you to make up the difference. The value of the dollar has shrunk. Now, luckily for you, some guy half way round the world wants to trade my useless bit of paper for useful oil so now that paper has value again.
The dollars value is seriously propped up by oil because there simply isn't enough value in the US exported goods to cover the amount of dollars spent on imported goods so the excess would be useless except for the fact we can buy oil with it. This has been going on for 20 years and now the majority of all dollars in circulation, both electronic and actual paper, are held by European, Japanese and Chinese banks.
well, even if you were going to spend the money on food and water, and its far more likely to be spent on bigger SUVs, that would probably be better spent on preventing global warming. When all the major coastal cities of the western economies are under water or struggling to buy enough food to feed our populations, or trying to cope with the people made homeless by the advancing deserts in the equatorial regions and glaciers in the north, a few hundred billion will look like small change.
The relationship between euros and oil is defined by factors other than the supply and demand for oil, for example the relative strengths of the two economies. In your example above, if the value of the dollar fell between now and feb 15 then I would lose money on the deal. Therefore I would have wanted have sold dollars not bought dollars. If many people also sold dollars then the value of the dollar would fall still. On the other hand because almost all oil transactions have to be performed in dollars if I wanted to buy oil I would have to buy some dollars to make that purchase, thus keeping the value of the dollar up. If OPEC decides that in the future it will do all its oil trading in Euros then the need for me to buy dollars vanishes. The one thing which forces people to buy dollars vanishes and the dollar hits the floor.
actually the really far out models, such as those which lead to cooling or 20 K+ warming were discarded because they predicted unrealistic physical processes. What we have left are the models worth seriously looking at to find flaws in their assumptions.
except that water vapour beyond a limit gives a negative feedback because it turns into clouds, which then increases the albedo of the earth returning more or the Sun's incident radiation back to space without it being turned into kinetic energy. One of the key factors is that evaporation rate is actually mostly due to the incident light, and not the ambient temperature, which is why the global dimming effect is so powerful in holding back climate change. Not only does it increase albedo, but it also reduces evaporation rate and thus the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere.
With so many positive and negative feedback mechanisms working out what is going to happen is very tricky, but I would tend towards predicting a 5-6 degree increase over 100 years. This is more than enough to render large parts of the Earth uninhabitable, and it would seem likely to plunge northern Europe into a new iceage. Of course that would mitigate some of the worst effects of flooding other parts of the world but it's not good for us old-worlders.
Well if you have a better way of predicting the behavior of chaotic system I'm sure there's a bunch of people at the met office who'd love to speak with you. Until then I'm going to use the best available science as a working hypothesis. In the mean time I wonder if this model can tell me where is going to be a nice place to live, that won't be flooded, frozen or scorched in the next 50 years or so.
No one is saying that the attacks were a hoax, just that the organisation behind those attacks was actually small and ad-hoc, rather than some huge and highly centralised evil empire. The name Al Qaeda was actually made up by the FBI in order to make the anti-mafia laws applicable to the radical islamist movement, but they have since taken the name as their own. It suits their goals to pretend to be bigger and more dangerous than they are, and it suits the goals of the western politicians to have an identifiable enemy on whom to wage an unwinable war, because that gives them an excuse to weild draconian powers and it unites the people behind a sense of a God given mission to fight evil.
read up on it here and download the torrents somewhere. I can't find them now because of my employers damn content filters but I strongly urge you to get them somewhere.
Except that the US isn't really the wealthiest country on earth. When you're in debt 7 Trillion Dollars, mostly to european and japanese banks, and borrowing 500 billion dollars more each year you are not wealthy, just living beyond your means. The only reason counties and people want to hold dollars is that you can buy oil in dollars. America simply doesn't export enough stuff competatively to allow the world to spend their dollars back into the US economy. Many people are starting to suggest that oil trading should be converted to euros, and Russia already sells its oil for euros because most of its oil sales are to Europe. If that happens then the value of the dollar will go through the floor and the debt you already have will rise in dollar terms to match. Put simply the US government is on the verge of bankrupcy, and this at a time when Bush is cutting taxes like mad.
But unfortunately they don't really seem to care at the moment how their government treats them.
Or at least they don't care enough about computer games to risk dying for.
Perhaps, but its a misguided and silly attempt if it is. Anyone who believes in heaven really ought to get their heads around there being no way in which God can be bribed into thinking you are good, and also that no matter how "good" you are compared to other people, that's not the standard your going to be judged on. Indeed the Bible tells us that no one can get to heaven by their own works, because you can't be better than good, and therefore there's no way to make up for what you've already done.
Sorry Bill. (By the way, that also applies to everyone else, including those accusing Bill of being evil)
The question is motive. What is Bill Gates' motive for making all his money? Well, given he's giving a lot of his money away, it would seem money is not his motive now, although it may have been in the past. Perhaps he has a vision of having his product, his baby, on every PC in the world. What software geek wouldn't want that?
Perhaps he just has a duty to the shareholders? In fact he did, in law have the responsibility to make as much money for his shareholders as he possibly could. Thats just the nature of capitalism so what are you going to do? If Microsoft is evil, it is because it has been the perfect embodyment of a successful corporation. It has crushed it's competitors, sailed close to the wind legally, but never been seriously harmed by it's mistakes, and it makes a fortune. If anyone is to blame for Microsofts evilness it is the US goverment and the constitution.
Unless he's Robin Hood. OK ok, I'm not seriously comparing Bill Gates to Robin Hood, but it's not too far off the mark. Like it or not, you, me and the US government are all rich, and the people Bill G is giving his money to are genuinely poor. As I understand it, when Bill dies virtually all his money will go to charity. OK his children will never have to worry about cash, but neither will be loaded.
I'm not going to argue that he doesn't do bad stuff, but that's what capitalism is all about . Do whatever you can get away with(if you read Marx you see that's the kind of thing which he said would bring down capitalism eventually). If you don't like it, go move to Cuba.
As it happens I don't agree with you about Microsoft destryoying software engineering. I should make clear that I have my MSDN subscription paid for by my employer, but Microsoft really look after their 3rd party developers, because they know that they can make windows stronger by helping and encouraging software development. Some of the Microsoft visual tools are leaps and bounds ahead of their competitors, and their new technology is cool too. OK Avalon is clearly an attempt to lock out firefox, but what do you expect?
but the value of his charity is $27 Billion. Not so long ago Bill was worth nearly $75B, but he lost some and gave away around half.
I'll take your wager.
Read up on the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. You will see that Bill has given $27 Billion of his $50 Billion fortune for the charity to manage. IIRC they are having a really tough time giving it away because it earns more interest than it can donate in a co-ordinated fashion.
What ever you think of the guys software and business practices, it is hard to argue that he is an evil man in the face of his generosity.
You do realise that your statement, that nothing is real except that which is physical, is as much a statement of faith as any statement of religious faith. You are stating that there cannot be a god on the basis of no evidence or reasoned argument. The only truly logical position when all information is not yet known is agnosticism.
I'm really worried though by the rise of judgmental, Bible bashing "Christians" and their moral crusade. I always think they've got it the wrong way round, in that good morals come from being close to God, not that being close to God comes from having good morals. This is why it is pointless to attack sinners, because we are all equally sinful before God. The only difference is that Christians know that God has forgiven us. Therefore the job of Christians is not to make people be good, but to help people to know and love God, by seeing us living a life through which something of the nature of God is reflected.
The problem with Bible thumping Christians is that they often try to force repentence as a condition for being saved. This leads to a kind of legalism which says that if you do A, B and C then you will be saved, and it leads to the outpouring of hate against gays, abortionists and even other Christians. What then happens is that this creates a barrier which has the effect of stopping people coming to know Jesus, and is therefore clearly sinful. I believe that repentence is a CONSEQUENCE of knowing Jesus and having the Holy Spirit, just as James says that good deeds and works are a sign that our faith is true faith. He's not saying that if we do good things THEN we will be right with God, but that IF we are right with God, THEN we will do good deeds because we want to. It like, if you love someone then you make them breakfast in bed, or buy them a gift. It would be pointless and wrong for a person to demand a gift as a pre-requisite for love.
Jesus reserved his most stinging attacks for the religious people of his day. The pharisees who wore their self-rightousness as a badge of social respectability. Those who deemed the sick, the sinners and the prostitutes to be untouchable. They obeyed mosaic law perfectly and added to it around the edges just to be on the safe side.
It seems to me as if this is the camp
got proof you even exist? no I thought not.
"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
-- George Patton
Well I guess that's one way to stop you playing counterstrike at work.
Actually the architect was Sir Norman Foster, the British architect behind the infamous swaying millennium bridge over the Thames by the Tate modern. The actual engineers were all French.
look up "albedo". If it is reflected back to space it will not increase atmospheric temperature.
Also an increase in temperature at the top of the atmosphere will not neccesarily result in an equal increase lower down in the bit where we live and weather happens.
I read an article which included an anecdote about optimisation problems in the 64 bit version of the MSVC compiler. The problem is that compilers use a vast number of pointers, and while the number of registers has increased, the amount of cache has not and so they can only fit half the number of pointers into cache on chip and are getting more soft page faults as a consequence. This almost exactly offsets the gain caused by the extra registers so the 32bit and 64 versions of the compiler run at just the same speed.
very few standard motherboards will support more than 32Gb of RAM. That doesn't stop you having several TB of virtual address space however. IIRC the EMT_64 has an address space of 40 bits while AMD64 supports up to 48 bits