Even just playing the NASDAQ composite over that time period would have netted them a solid 6% APY.
What? The total returns of the NASDAQ composite for the last 5 years was 12.75%. And not risky? During the most of the last 5 years the total returns over the previous 5 years was negative. This is not what a steady 6% annual return looks like.
"Is becoming" implies irrationality is growing and spreading. Is there some reason to think that? I don't know of any; actually I think it's the opposite. Now when we hear about these backwaters it is surprising simply because it's no longer normal.
In only the last 7 years the percent of Americans identifying as atheist increased from 1% to 5%. OK, so we've only finally reached parity with Saudi Arabia - but we were talking about trends.
He got pissed when he found out the VW cost $20,000 less than his Volt.
Huh? The Volt is $41K - $7500 tax rebate = ~$34K. A VW TDI Sportwagen is $27K. That's a $7K difference, not $20K.
Are you by chance directly comparing the price of a used car to a new one?
Now, I agree a diesel engine chugging steadily away is very hard to beat on the freeway. But for people who do mostly city driving, I think the Volt could be very competitive.
and gas prices have not even got off the ground yet. Wait for the $8.00 a gallon and $12.00 a gallon prices. $4.00 a gallon is dirt cheap compared to where it will go.
I'm very skeptical of that now because of the huge increase in natural gas production in the last few years. Gasoline and natural gas aren't fully interchangeable of course, but there is already a compressed natural gas Honda Civic, for example.
I have mixed feelings about natural gas. I'm sure it will delay the adoption of wind, solar, and electric cars. But it's so much better than coal, and mostly better than gasoline.
This is not like Hubble images where they're assigning colors to radio / infrared / ultraviolet / xray frequencies that your eyes can't even see. The difference between the two images in this case is similar to what you get every day by putting on or taking off sunglasses, or looking out your window at midday vs. near sunset. Colors are shifting all the time, for the most part you are insensitive to it. Most people taking pictures don't even bother to use a gray card to get correct(?) white balance.
Do you honestly think that is what this whole thing is really about? Please. How many other allegations of "sure I wanted to sleep with him, but I didn't want to go all the way" are actually pursued through Interpol and extradition treaties each year? This is an empirical question.
citizens (in theory, at least) control the government, and they should be able to stop them from trying this nonsense.
Where I live we had a referendum against red light cameras. It passed, and now the cameras are gone. Surely the same could be done with plate tracking.
Scramjets are only efficient to operate aver Mach 3 to 4.
Well, that's what I meant by using it as the final stage of another engine that gets the air up to mach 3.5 and then blows it over the scramjet which then spits it out the back at mach 7 or whatever. If the plane only needs to go mach 0.8, you wouldn't have to accelerate that much air to get the required thrust, if you were accelerating the air by so much.
Somebody in another forum told me the scramjet engine only has a 2x thrust to weight ratio (much less than any decent rocket engine) so the technology isn't promising. Do you know if there is any theoretical argument on why that could not be improved? Also could a scramjet be used as a more effective "afterburner" stage on some other type of engine for subsonic or merely supersonic (but not hypersonic) aircraft?
Just because Samsung claims these things are similar enough to be considered prior art doesn't make it so - just as Apple's claims that the similarities between their products and Samsung's are too strong doesn't make it so, either.
It is all a matter of degree. Basically this means capitalism is now a judged sport, where government decides who deserves how much credit for what advances. This is annoying, but I don't know how avoidable it is. Certainly I don't see high-tech companies clamoring to abolish intellectual property rights.
They're even planning a compiler switch that turns off the features that will be outlawed in the compiler source.
That is an interesting avenue. As languages like C++ and perl can attest, languages can evolve by adding features but it's almost impossible to take them back. Having a compiler flag to enforce a coding standard is a way to do that less coercively.
Maybe this will result in a popular new dialect of C/C++.
Real Programmers must spend their first year writing Pascal code to create hypothetical schedules for students at a university, followed by implementing every data type in a fat textbook from "Associative Array" to "Weight-Balanced Tree." Second year, the same thing - in Scheme. Final year, same thing - in assembler - and with runtime complexity proofs.
Congratulations, the both of you remaining are done.
What is this? Use of libraries? Graphics? User interaction? Heresy I say!
I would be shocked if future generations are not reprocessing our profligate waste as a concentrated source of natural resources within just a couple generations from now. In the meanwhile, the least we can do is keep it IN the landfill instead of seeping into the groundwater or outgassing into the air. But sorting the garbage on its way out is almost certainly more efficient.
In many cases, electronics that are supposed to be recycled really aren't. Instead, they are dumped in the Third World where they cause all kinds of environmental problems...
If the European Union wants this regulation to have a positive impact, they need to stipulate that the equipment be recycled locally under EU safety and environmental standards
I hate to spoil the article for you but...
The revised directive also includes a clampdown on illegal exports of waste electronic equipment. Equipment that is no longer under warranty can only be exported to non-OECD countries if it has been certified to be fully functional and sent properly.
But I would not attribute that primarily to bad web design. The entirety of what the web was at that time is a vanishing fraction of what it is now. We still tend to think of the Internet mainly as the web (HTML) but by bandwidth probably over 95% of it is video codecs such as H.264 (e.g. Netflix, Youtube, bittorrent). Video takes a lot of CPU power to decode (unless hardware acceleration is available - which on a P4-era video card it is not). This includes school-appropriate factual information; increasingly it is video rather than text.
1) Nobody makes money making sub-prime loans. It's trivial for any idiot to understand that loaning money to people who can't pay it back is a dumb idea.
False! Extending a loan (or owning a mortgage-backed security) to anybody is a great idea so long as I get my commission (or sell it at a markup) and no longer own it when it goes kaboom.
In your imagination, the only party willing to buy those bad loans was the government. In truth, most everybody bought them. Partially this is because the ratings agencies gave these mortgage-backed securities the highest ratings. But the notion this was a wholly government-created situation is just libertarian wishful thinking. Nations in which banks were deregulated the most did worst (see also Ireland), and those where time-tested regulations were preserved did best (see Canada - where average net worth is now higher than in the US).
Goldman (and JP Morgan?) don't owe the government anything because they were simply gifted enough money to stay afloat, free and clear. This was done by the government paying AIGs debts to Goldman, even though they were unregulated, non-FDIC arrangements. In other words, the banking industry set up a scapegoat (AIG) to receive bailouts for it and then die, which it did. So Goldman and the others get their cake ($$$ with 9 zeros) and eat it too (carping about how they never wanted and didn't need TARP).
The findings have parallels to cancer studies. Earlier this year, scientists showed that separate parts of the same tumour can evolve independently and build up distinct genetic mutations, meaning that single biopsies give only a narrow view of the tumour's diversity
However, it seems to me that cancer mutations are usually not germline, whereas these mutations in trees might well be... dare we use the term "Lamarckian"?
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds pretty clever, so long as they keep letting you repeatedly milk their intro offer.
What? The total returns of the NASDAQ composite for the last 5 years was 12.75%. And not risky? During the most of the last 5 years the total returns over the previous 5 years was negative. This is not what a steady 6% annual return looks like.
OK, go ahead and issue me a 5-year bond at 40% APY. You can keep the extra 7% you'll earn as a management fee. Do we have a deal?
.
The so-called time-value of money hasn't existed in practical terms for 10 years.
In only the last 7 years the percent of Americans identifying as atheist increased from 1% to 5%. OK, so we've only finally reached parity with Saudi Arabia - but we were talking about trends.
Huh? The Volt is $41K - $7500 tax rebate = ~$34K. A VW TDI Sportwagen is $27K. That's a $7K difference, not $20K.
Are you by chance directly comparing the price of a used car to a new one?
Now, I agree a diesel engine chugging steadily away is very hard to beat on the freeway. But for people who do mostly city driving, I think the Volt could be very competitive.
I'm very skeptical of that now because of the huge increase in natural gas production in the last few years. Gasoline and natural gas aren't fully interchangeable of course, but there is already a compressed natural gas Honda Civic, for example.
I have mixed feelings about natural gas. I'm sure it will delay the adoption of wind, solar, and electric cars. But it's so much better than coal, and mostly better than gasoline.
This is not like Hubble images where they're assigning colors to radio / infrared / ultraviolet / xray frequencies that your eyes can't even see. The difference between the two images in this case is similar to what you get every day by putting on or taking off sunglasses, or looking out your window at midday vs. near sunset. Colors are shifting all the time, for the most part you are insensitive to it. Most people taking pictures don't even bother to use a gray card to get correct(?) white balance.
Do you honestly think that is what this whole thing is really about? Please. How many other allegations of "sure I wanted to sleep with him, but I didn't want to go all the way" are actually pursued through Interpol and extradition treaties each year? This is an empirical question.
Where I live we had a referendum against red light cameras. It passed, and now the cameras are gone. Surely the same could be done with plate tracking.
Thanks, that is a good explanation.
Well, that's what I meant by using it as the final stage of another engine that gets the air up to mach 3.5 and then blows it over the scramjet which then spits it out the back at mach 7 or whatever. If the plane only needs to go mach 0.8, you wouldn't have to accelerate that much air to get the required thrust, if you were accelerating the air by so much.
Somebody in another forum told me the scramjet engine only has a 2x thrust to weight ratio (much less than any decent rocket engine) so the technology isn't promising. Do you know if there is any theoretical argument on why that could not be improved? Also could a scramjet be used as a more effective "afterburner" stage on some other type of engine for subsonic or merely supersonic (but not hypersonic) aircraft?
It is all a matter of degree. Basically this means capitalism is now a judged sport, where government decides who deserves how much credit for what advances. This is annoying, but I don't know how avoidable it is. Certainly I don't see high-tech companies clamoring to abolish intellectual property rights.
That is an interesting avenue. As languages like C++ and perl can attest, languages can evolve by adding features but it's almost impossible to take them back. Having a compiler flag to enforce a coding standard is a way to do that less coercively.
Maybe this will result in a popular new dialect of C/C++.
.
Real Programmers must spend their first year writing Pascal code to create hypothetical schedules for students at a university, followed by implementing every data type in a fat textbook from "Associative Array" to "Weight-Balanced Tree." Second year, the same thing - in Scheme. Final year, same thing - in assembler - and with runtime complexity proofs.
Congratulations, the both of you remaining are done.
What is this? Use of libraries? Graphics? User interaction? Heresy I say!
try USER=ahmadinejad
I would be shocked if future generations are not reprocessing our profligate waste as a concentrated source of natural resources within just a couple generations from now. In the meanwhile, the least we can do is keep it IN the landfill instead of seeping into the groundwater or outgassing into the air. But sorting the garbage on its way out is almost certainly more efficient.
I hate to spoil the article for you but...
My kids use OpenOffice (I guess it's Libre Office now) at home and MS Office at school and don't seem to mind.
But I would not attribute that primarily to bad web design. The entirety of what the web was at that time is a vanishing fraction of what it is now. We still tend to think of the Internet mainly as the web (HTML) but by bandwidth probably over 95% of it is video codecs such as H.264 (e.g. Netflix, Youtube, bittorrent). Video takes a lot of CPU power to decode (unless hardware acceleration is available - which on a P4-era video card it is not). This includes school-appropriate factual information; increasingly it is video rather than text.
No, that's exactly the point, Microsoft still patches each new vulnerability discovered in Windows XP today.
For all the bad things about Microsoft, they do pretty well in supporting old APIs and old products, which is enormously valuable in practice.
False! Extending a loan (or owning a mortgage-backed security) to anybody is a great idea so long as I get my commission (or sell it at a markup) and no longer own it when it goes kaboom.
In your imagination, the only party willing to buy those bad loans was the government. In truth, most everybody bought them. Partially this is because the ratings agencies gave these mortgage-backed securities the highest ratings. But the notion this was a wholly government-created situation is just libertarian wishful thinking. Nations in which banks were deregulated the most did worst (see also Ireland), and those where time-tested regulations were preserved did best (see Canada - where average net worth is now higher than in the US).
Goldman (and JP Morgan?) don't owe the government anything because they were simply gifted enough money to stay afloat, free and clear. This was done by the government paying AIGs debts to Goldman, even though they were unregulated, non-FDIC arrangements. In other words, the banking industry set up a scapegoat (AIG) to receive bailouts for it and then die, which it did. So Goldman and the others get their cake ($$$ with 9 zeros) and eat it too (carping about how they never wanted and didn't need TARP).
However, it seems to me that cancer mutations are usually not germline, whereas these mutations in trees might well be... dare we use the term "Lamarckian"?