That's not how insurance works at all. Were that it did. Medical insurance instead costs money every day, sick or healthy.
Medical insurance cost you for every day, being sick or healthy, but they also pay you (and doctors of course) money when you are sick. Money spend by insurance company/government is a lot higher than what you have to pay in insurance during this time - so it comes similar to not paying for insurance when you are ill.
As for the 'pre-existing' trick, it really depends on the country/plan etc. I don't think that any of the government-based health insurances care about it. You may die waiting years for surgery, but you will not be 'dropped' from the insurance.
Losing job - again depending on the country. In some cases, it is illegal for the employer to fire you during extended illness and for some period afterwards.
There is a story about Chinese emperor getting ill and calling a doctor. After spending few weeks of not getting better and paying a doctor for constant care, emperor said "I will NOT pay you anything while I'm ill, but you will earn a gold piece for every day I'm healthy". In the story, emperor got better next day and doctor was NOT executed for cheating beforehand, but lived happily afterward, keeping emperor healthy.
We got the same concept today and it is called health insurance. You are paying constantly, but they are covering medical costs (and often they pay your salary in the period you cannot work). It is broken in most countries, but somehow insurance companies trying to keep hospital costs roughly sane for them.
Wouldn't something similar work for legal services? Or is it already there in form of state-given-lawyer and everyday taxes which are paying for him?
What is a difference between this technology and DLNA over wifi (except not having to buy 100$ converter) ? Even not over wifi, as putting extra cable to TV from router is probably not an issue in most setups (and laptop can be still over wifi). With DLNA, there is a promise of truly interconnected 'multimedia home' - mobile phones, printer for photos, smart controllers etc.
From what I understand, DLNA is for multimedia only (?) and Wi-Di for normal screen output (presentations etc) ? If this is the selling point, wouldn't it be easier to play with DLNA on software level to allow transmission of normal screen in addition to mpg?
I'm not sure, but it looks to me that in Italy, you need a case to retrieve this data and correlate it through few layers (update on web -> ip address -> who was sitting there in Internet Caffe at this very moment). From what I understand about Belarus, they want to skip most of intermediate steps, so you will be able to link person with online publication without sending police with prosecution order to internet caffee.
On top of that, you can do a lot of data mining- 'give me all people who posted on both "Free Belarus" board and "Home Chemist" interest group'. It is not that easy if you have bunch of random IPs and would have to get 'mapping' info from all access points constantly.
Yes, there is a privacy loss in both cases. Difference seems to be that in Italy, they have to start from publication (and with considerable effort they can trace the publications to people), in Belarus you can start from person (what is this guy doing on the internet) - and you get publication->person mapping for free.
Obviously, there are blocking technical/social difficulties to get it implemented in real world, but we are discussing about the idea here.
You can do it this way. Or alternatively, you can buy Player Handbook to get the rules and then Subscribe to D&D Insider for 1 month and download everything from there, including Character Builder and Adventure Tools. With that you get:
All the rules for all characters, explained in full. VERY nice tools to compute all the numbers, prerequisites etc for you. All monsters from all published books and adventures, with tool to modify them and print out whatever you need. 15+ issues of Dungeon, with 3 adventures in each (same bad, some quite good) 15+ issues of Dragon, for some flavor reading.
Basic trick is that if you get Character Builder once (you don't need long subscription, just grab it once per year or so), you don't need any of the splat books anymore. For Monster Manual, Adventure Tools give you all stats with possibility of modification, only pictures are missing - but guess what, pictures from all the books are available for download on Wizards site...
So, for cost of PH, DMG and 1 month subscription to Insider, you get amount of material which hardly can be matched with any other offering - with tools which are way better than anything done so far (with all due respect, PCGen is not coming even close to quality of CB, despite being developed for many years more).
I'm wondering when they will realize that having so good CB is reducing splat books sell numbers.
Real cost in 4e comes from miniatures (for maps, battle map is good and one-time expense). For that, look for ebay/etc - people are still selling some cheap commons from Wizards skrimish D&D (whatever was the name). You can get a lot of them at cost of 0.20-0.40$ per piece. For 100$ you can get few hundred 'mass' minis for your needs. After that, you can spend few bucks a month to get a nice monster to particular adventure you need and slowly build your minis library.
Idea is that you create Ultimate Computer which is best thing you can get with current laws of physic. Then, you start to create different universes (or 'inclusions' as named in the book) with 'better' laws of physics and build better computers there (and 'outsource' the computation). At some point you will reach Ultimate Inclusion (best combination of laws of physics for the best computer). Fortunately, around that point, you are supposed to evolve enough to not care anymore...
It seems that Android already got something from the next generation of AR applications (multi-topic, interactive). They hope to port it to iPhone soon. It looks to be considerably more advanced compared to what is given in original story.
Statistically speaking, are there a heck of a lot of black guys in Poland?
Probably 1 in 1000 in bigger cities. None at all in smaller ones. My mother-in-law (around 55 now probably) has seen black person on the street first time in her life 2 years ago when she came to visit us in Frankfurt. She is coming from small town (35k population), but it is not a complete backwater village.
From my observations (growing up in Poland), most of the visibly foreign people were met around the universities. You will have probably around 1:50 ratio there. I know that in other cities there are considerable populations of Asian people centered around trading sites - but generally, Asian looking people are a lot more common in Poland overall compared to the black people.
Said that, it is not preventing some of my collegues from being heavily racist in private talks.
From what I can understand from their manifest, they don't want full disclosure of exploits so 1) Other script kiddies cannot use them too easily 2) General public is not aware of the risks 3) Security companies cannot prepare protection against them
This is like... let's thing about proper, slashdot analogy... bunch of car thieves telling that they are against installing immobilizers in cars and warning they will steal cars of immobilizer producers and supporters till they stop distributing immobilizers. When they stop, thieves will come back to stealing random cars, with less effort.
1) current state-of-the-art [...] 50,000 atoms[...]scientists think they can shrink [..] to 15,000 atoms 2) group of German physicists [...] pair of cobalt atoms [...] hexagonal carbon ring
I don't know how many atoms are in second case, but with estimate of 10-50, you will get 3 orders of magnitude from point 1.
Now, the sizes. 8nm versus 0.5nm (diameter, so I cut in in half) 4*4*pi is around 50. 0.25*0.25*pi is around 0.2 Difference is 250 times. I think that we can count it as 3 orders of magnitude with a bit of good will.
A few have run off with all the money. Who was on the other side of those massively leveraged positions that the banks lost on?
It is possible that nobody was there.
Imagine me being a company. I buy 1k stocks of Foo for $10, paying $10k. Now, Foo has increased in worth to $100 - I have 'earned' $90k. Year has passed, so I'm showing it in finacial reports. I take a loan backed by those stocks to build a new shop. Moment later, Foo goes bankrupt.
Who has run out with my $100k ? $10k went to original stock holders (which in meantime of course felt like they have lost $90k). Rest is just virtual money.
Even better case than with stocks would be with Madoff's pyramid fund.
With derivative instruments, this is only moved through one or more levels of indirection.
I think that often it might be a fear of showing what kind of code they want customers to pay money for. Security by obscurity also comes into picture.
Really, Fermi's Paradox sounds like me saying that if I sit on a lonely beach for a week and don't find a bottle with a message in it in proper English, there are no other intelligent beings in the world.
I don't think that anybody says anything about the message in the bottle. We are looking for signs of galactic civilization - star engineering, radio signals, probes, whatever.
I would rather think about comparing it to sitting on the beach for one week and waiting for any bottle (even plastic PET) to appear... If you live in area similar to mine, you won't have to take sleeping bag with you for this search...
I've never seen a serious commercial product shipped independently of an application server.
It depends on definition of 'serious' of course, but I was working for a company producing software for airline operations (briefing/loading, no booking nor avionics/realtime). We had number of clients, including some really big names in Europe. Software was written in J2EE and it was used on 2 different application servers, on 2 different databases (3 combinations in total) - only because companies we were supporting were mostly standarized on Websphere, so there was no need to test it on more. There is NO way any of the big names out there would start supporting new application server just to install our ear, which was probably managing less than 10% of their web activities.
Yes, it was a pain to port it from Websphere to Orion, but it was done by one guy in period of few months and after that I'm quite sure that next port would be already a brief (as most of WAS-specific stuff was cut off/replaced). My proposal to cut it properly and port it to Tomcat, getting rid of EJB was unfortunately ignored...
In addition to using different release of jdk (which is probably a minor difference), I have a strong suspicion that they have used default configuration - which is to run client jvm on windows and server jvm on linux.
Each of those configurations have it's benefits - client jvm is quite good for interactive applications, but for anything number-crunching, like the mentioned benchmarks are, server jvm is the must (think about difference between gcc with no opt and gcc -O3 and add some more on top).
Quick check on my vista box with jdk 1.6.0_11, gives 101 for monte carlo in client mode and 220 for monte carlo in server mode. It looks quite similar to their reports (with jvm version change/different cpu than mine maybe being responsible for rest of difference)
If it is really true, that I'm shocked to see to what length some people will go to prove their favorite OS is better.
Next, I'm expecting browser speed comparison with firefox on broadband pitted against IE 8 on 9.6k modem. After that, 3d performance of ubuntu on latest nvidia versus integrated graphics on Windows 3.11.
You can see the picture of the crashed trams here http://miasta.gazeta.pl/lodz/51,35134,4823174.html?i=0
At the moment, total 12 people were injured due to derail accidents caused by this boy, with first 'hack' happening somewhere back in December. At first, mechanical failure was suspected, but after the second accident police was informed.
In addition to infrared device, boy also had stolen access keys, which allowed him to enter both trams and the tram-company warehouse.
It turned out that he was actually on board of the trams he was derailing - in front of first cars, to be able to influence the switch with remote.
There are some protections against switching the rail while tram is on top of them, but they were implemented only in few areas of the city. Reason for not putting them everywhere is that neither city nor tram company is not feeling responsible - tracks are owned by city and only leased to tram company. City on the other hand says that company gets special discounts which should be spent for maintaining the tracks...
Currently the boy is in correction institute for young criminals and he will spend there 3 months. Depending on the further development of the case and his behavior during those 3 months, court will decide about his future. This boy already had some problems in the past and he had curator/warden(?) assigned to him. He was often missing school.
I don't think that putting 'original thoughts' and 'formal training' on opposite sides is very fair. While there CAN be cases in which too much education can stiffle the 'free mind', it is not a rule IMHO. If given person is brilliant, he/she will just not allow to be trampled under format education foot.
I think it is a lot easier to stay free under strict education rules than to be 'different' with all these post-Columbine enforcements I have heard about. Don't want to be a cheerleader ? You are surely a sociopath !!! And IMHO there is a lot more brainkilling pheromones in being forced to enjoy being cheerleeder and interacting with Britney-like subculture then in having to learn a lot of math.
Anyway, I agree that no country has a monopoly on good brains. But if you talk about race to Moon, government certainly made a difference here. Stalin has killed a LOT of best scientists and rest of them had to be taken back from Syberia to work on space program. Certainly, if they would spend 10 years at university instead of Syberia, chances for success would be better...
I agree that there is a bit too much formal education (at least in Poland), which is not really needed later in workplace. US universities are certainly better at preparing people for work. But question is, should university create a perfect cubicle worker ? Here, in Poland, there is a rule that university should teach you how to learn and give you a base for learning reasonably broad number of subjects in future - not to prepare you in 100% for given job. At least theory says so, in practice it is often a total mess, due to lack of funding, personal preferences of university headmaster, number of post-communist people at high positions etc, etc.
I'm not a native speaker of english language, but increasing simplicity sounds very strange to me - I would rather think in terms of decreasing complexity. I know that in theory it is the same, just sounds a bit like oxymoron to my untrained ear...
Anyway, as you might have noted, I have said nothing against foreach or enums. I have only said, that while
String str = (String)list.get(1);
is ugly, it is easier to understand than construct like
E[-] toArray(E[-] arr);
I'm absolutely pro the new changes - and variant-based generics promise to solve dark areas of previous java generics solution. I'm just worried about fact that adding quite a few new magic operators to language increases amount of knowledge you need to start understanding other people's code.
No, in your example, you do not expect Number[-], you expect 'T extends E[-]', which as far as I understand, means totally anything. E[-] could be Object[], so T extends Object[] can be any array (am I right?). So code behaves exactly as it should, you have just created bad collection interface.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at the GNU Coding Standard which is used for gcc, whatever 'best practices' and style guideline they come with will make a good fireplace material ...
Well, at least in my bank traders actually WERE typing T for thousand. I don't think we had an alias for K at all.
That's not how insurance works at all. Were that it did. Medical insurance instead costs money every day, sick or healthy.
Medical insurance cost you for every day, being sick or healthy, but they also pay you (and doctors of course) money when you are sick. Money spend by insurance company/government is a lot higher than what you have to pay in insurance during this time - so it comes similar to not paying for insurance when you are ill.
As for the 'pre-existing' trick, it really depends on the country/plan etc. I don't think that any of the government-based health insurances care about it. You may die waiting years for surgery, but you will not be 'dropped' from the insurance.
Losing job - again depending on the country. In some cases, it is illegal for the employer to fire you during extended illness and for some period afterwards.
There is a story about Chinese emperor getting ill and calling a doctor. After spending few weeks of not getting better and paying a doctor for constant care, emperor said "I will NOT pay you anything while I'm ill, but you will earn a gold piece for every day I'm healthy". In the story, emperor got better next day and doctor was NOT executed for cheating beforehand, but lived happily afterward, keeping emperor healthy.
We got the same concept today and it is called health insurance. You are paying constantly, but they are covering medical costs (and often they pay your salary in the period you cannot work). It is broken in most countries, but somehow insurance companies trying to keep hospital costs roughly sane for them.
Wouldn't something similar work for legal services? Or is it already there in form of state-given-lawyer and everyday taxes which are paying for him?
What is a difference between this technology and DLNA over wifi (except not having to buy 100$ converter) ? Even not over wifi, as putting extra cable to TV from router is probably not an issue in most setups (and laptop can be still over wifi). With DLNA, there is a promise of truly interconnected 'multimedia home' - mobile phones, printer for photos, smart controllers etc.
From what I understand, DLNA is for multimedia only (?) and Wi-Di for normal screen output (presentations etc) ? If this is the selling point, wouldn't it be easier to play with DLNA on software level to allow transmission of normal screen in addition to mpg?
I'm not sure, but it looks to me that in Italy, you need a case to retrieve this data and correlate it through few layers (update on web -> ip address -> who was sitting there in Internet Caffe at this very moment). From what I understand about Belarus, they want to skip most of intermediate steps, so you will be able to link person with online publication without sending police with prosecution order to internet caffee.
On top of that, you can do a lot of data mining- 'give me all people who posted on both "Free Belarus" board and "Home Chemist" interest group'. It is not that easy if you have bunch of random IPs and would have to get 'mapping' info from all access points constantly.
Yes, there is a privacy loss in both cases. Difference seems to be that in Italy, they have to start from publication (and with considerable effort they can trace the publications to people), in Belarus you can start from person (what is this guy doing on the internet) - and you get publication->person mapping for free.
Obviously, there are blocking technical/social difficulties to get it implemented in real world, but we are discussing about the idea here.
You can do it this way. Or alternatively, you can buy Player Handbook to get the rules and then Subscribe to D&D Insider for 1 month and download everything from there, including Character Builder and Adventure Tools. With that you get:
All the rules for all characters, explained in full.
VERY nice tools to compute all the numbers, prerequisites etc for you.
All monsters from all published books and adventures, with tool to modify them and print out whatever you need.
15+ issues of Dungeon, with 3 adventures in each (same bad, some quite good)
15+ issues of Dragon, for some flavor reading.
Basic trick is that if you get Character Builder once (you don't need long subscription, just grab it once per year or so), you don't need any of the splat books anymore. For Monster Manual, Adventure Tools give you all stats with possibility of modification, only pictures are missing - but guess what, pictures from all the books are available for download on Wizards site...
So, for cost of PH, DMG and 1 month subscription to Insider, you get amount of material which hardly can be matched with any other offering - with tools which are way better than anything done so far (with all due respect, PCGen is not coming even close to quality of CB, despite being developed for many years more).
I'm wondering when they will realize that having so good CB is reducing splat books sell numbers.
Real cost in 4e comes from miniatures (for maps, battle map is good and one-time expense). For that, look for ebay/etc - people are still selling some cheap commons from Wizards skrimish D&D (whatever was the name). You can get a lot of them at cost of 0.20-0.40$ per piece. For 100$ you can get few hundred 'mass' minis for your needs. After that, you can spend few bucks a month to get a nice monster to particular adventure you need and slowly build your minis library.
There is a sf book which explores this concept in more detail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfekcyjna_niedoskona%C5%82o%C5%9B%C4%87
Idea is that you create Ultimate Computer which is best thing you can get with current laws of physic. Then, you start to create different universes (or 'inclusions' as named in the book) with 'better' laws of physics and build better computers there (and 'outsource' the computation). At some point you will reach Ultimate Inclusion (best combination of laws of physics for the best computer). Fortunately, around that point, you are supposed to evolve enough to not care anymore...
http://layar.com/press-release-layar-reality-browser-announces-global-launch-and-new-features-in-the-latest-release/
It seems that Android already got something from the next generation of AR applications (multi-topic, interactive). They hope to port it to iPhone soon. It looks to be considerably more advanced compared to what is given in original story.
Statistically speaking, are there a heck of a lot of black guys in Poland?
Probably 1 in 1000 in bigger cities. None at all in smaller ones. My mother-in-law (around 55 now probably) has seen black person on the street first time in her life 2 years ago when she came to visit us in Frankfurt. She is coming from small town (35k population), but it is not a complete backwater village.
From my observations (growing up in Poland), most of the visibly foreign people were met around the universities. You will have probably around 1:50 ratio there. I know that in other cities there are considerable populations of Asian people centered around trading sites - but generally, Asian looking people are a lot more common in Poland overall compared to the black people.
Said that, it is not preventing some of my collegues from being heavily racist in private talks.
decimal expansion is infinite in all bases
Can you have decimal expansion in base different than 10 ?
From what I can understand from their manifest, they don't want full disclosure of exploits so
1) Other script kiddies cannot use them too easily
2) General public is not aware of the risks
3) Security companies cannot prepare protection against them
This is like... let's thing about proper, slashdot analogy... bunch of car thieves telling that they are against installing immobilizers in cars and warning they will steal cars of immobilizer producers and supporters till they stop distributing immobilizers. When they stop, thieves will come back to stealing random cars, with less effort.
As you wish. "You are stupid".
Now when we got it done, let's read the article.
1) current state-of-the-art [...] 50,000 atoms[...]scientists think they can shrink [..] to 15,000 atoms
2) group of German physicists [...] pair of cobalt atoms [...] hexagonal carbon ring
I don't know how many atoms are in second case, but with estimate of 10-50, you will get 3 orders of magnitude from point 1.
Now, the sizes. 8nm versus 0.5nm (diameter, so I cut in in half)
4*4*pi is around 50.
0.25*0.25*pi is around 0.2
Difference is 250 times. I think that we can count it as 3 orders of magnitude with a bit of good will.
What was your question ?
A few have run off with all the money. Who was on the other side of those massively leveraged positions that the banks lost on?
It is possible that nobody was there.
Imagine me being a company. I buy 1k stocks of Foo for $10, paying $10k. Now, Foo has increased in worth to $100 - I have 'earned' $90k. Year has passed, so I'm showing it in finacial reports. I take a loan backed by those stocks to build a new shop. Moment later, Foo goes bankrupt.
Who has run out with my $100k ? $10k went to original stock holders (which in meantime of course felt like they have lost $90k). Rest is just virtual money.
Even better case than with stocks would be with Madoff's pyramid fund.
With derivative instruments, this is only moved through one or more levels of indirection.
I think that often it might be a fear of showing what kind of code they want customers to pay money for. Security by obscurity also comes into picture.
>it all ends up with gorillas freezing to death in the winter
Could be tricky. Aren't we kind of gorillas which refused to freeze to death in winter?
Really, Fermi's Paradox sounds like me saying that if I sit on a lonely beach for a week and don't find a bottle with a message in it in proper English, there are no other intelligent beings in the world.
I don't think that anybody says anything about the message in the bottle. We are looking for signs of galactic civilization - star engineering, radio signals, probes, whatever.
I would rather think about comparing it to sitting on the beach for one week and waiting for any bottle (even plastic PET) to appear... If you live in area similar to mine, you won't have to take sleeping bag with you for this search...
I've never seen a serious commercial product shipped independently of an application server.
It depends on definition of 'serious' of course, but I was working for a company producing software for airline operations (briefing/loading, no booking nor avionics/realtime). We had number of clients, including some really big names in Europe. Software was written in J2EE and it was used on 2 different application servers, on 2 different databases (3 combinations in total) - only because companies we were supporting were mostly standarized on Websphere, so there was no need to test it on more. There is NO way any of the big names out there would start supporting new application server just to install our ear, which was probably managing less than 10% of their web activities.
Yes, it was a pain to port it from Websphere to Orion, but it was done by one guy in period of few months and after that I'm quite sure that next port would be already a brief (as most of WAS-specific stuff was cut off/replaced). My proposal to cut it properly and port it to Tomcat, getting rid of EJB was unfortunately ignored...
Ice-9 melts at 45.8 C. If everybody increases their output of methane gases considerably to help global warming, we would solve the problem of ice-9.
In addition to using different release of jdk (which is probably a minor difference), I have a strong suspicion that they have used default configuration - which is to run client jvm on windows and server jvm on linux.
Each of those configurations have it's benefits - client jvm is quite good for interactive applications, but for anything number-crunching, like the mentioned benchmarks are, server jvm is the must (think about difference between gcc with no opt and gcc -O3 and add some more on top).
Quick check on my vista box with jdk 1.6.0_11, gives 101 for monte carlo in client mode and 220 for monte carlo in server mode. It looks quite similar to their reports (with jvm version change/different cpu than mine maybe being responsible for rest of difference)
If it is really true, that I'm shocked to see to what length some people will go to prove their favorite OS is better.
Next, I'm expecting browser speed comparison with firefox on broadband pitted against IE 8 on 9.6k modem. After that, 3d performance of ubuntu on latest nvidia versus integrated graphics on Windows 3.11.
You got me scared. I glimpsed the title and thought that Fallout 3 will be delayed because of the strike.
You can see the picture of the crashed trams here http://miasta.gazeta.pl/lodz/51,35134,4823174.html?i=0 At the moment, total 12 people were injured due to derail accidents caused by this boy, with first 'hack' happening somewhere back in December. At first, mechanical failure was suspected, but after the second accident police was informed. In addition to infrared device, boy also had stolen access keys, which allowed him to enter both trams and the tram-company warehouse. It turned out that he was actually on board of the trams he was derailing - in front of first cars, to be able to influence the switch with remote.
There are some protections against switching the rail while tram is on top of them, but they were implemented only in few areas of the city. Reason for not putting them everywhere is that neither city nor tram company is not feeling responsible - tracks are owned by city and only leased to tram company. City on the other hand says that company gets special discounts which should be spent for maintaining the tracks...
Currently the boy is in correction institute for young criminals and he will spend there 3 months. Depending on the further development of the case and his behavior during those 3 months, court will decide about his future. This boy already had some problems in the past and he had curator/warden(?) assigned to him. He was often missing school.
I don't think that putting 'original thoughts' and 'formal training' on opposite sides is very fair. While there CAN be cases in which too much education can stiffle the 'free mind', it is not a rule IMHO. If given person is brilliant, he/she will just not allow to be trampled under format education foot.
I think it is a lot easier to stay free under strict education rules than to be 'different' with all these post-Columbine enforcements I have heard about. Don't want to be a cheerleader ? You are surely a sociopath !!! And IMHO there is a lot more brainkilling pheromones in being forced to enjoy being cheerleeder and interacting with Britney-like subculture then in having to learn a lot of math.
Anyway, I agree that no country has a monopoly on good brains. But if you talk about race to Moon, government certainly made a difference here. Stalin has killed a LOT of best scientists and rest of them had to be taken back from Syberia to work on space program. Certainly, if they would spend 10 years at university instead of Syberia, chances for success would be better...
I agree that there is a bit too much formal education (at least in Poland), which is not really needed later in workplace. US universities are certainly better at preparing people for work. But question is, should university create a perfect cubicle worker ? Here, in Poland, there is a rule that university should teach you how to learn and give you a base for learning reasonably broad number of subjects in future - not to prepare you in 100% for given job. At least theory says so, in practice it is often a total mess, due to lack of funding, personal preferences of university headmaster, number of post-communist people at high positions etc, etc.
String str = (String)list.get(1);
is ugly, it is easier to understand than construct like
E[-] toArray(E[-] arr);
I'm absolutely pro the new changes - and variant-based generics promise to solve dark areas of previous java generics solution. I'm just worried about fact that adding quite a few new magic operators to language increases amount of knowledge you need to start understanding other people's code.
No, in your example, you do not expect Number[-], you expect 'T extends E[-]', which as far as I understand, means totally anything. E[-] could be Object[], so T extends Object[] can be any array (am I right?). So code behaves exactly as it should, you have just created bad collection interface.