It's not that "we can't". It's that "it's a REALLY hard computation to run". Like cracking some modern cyphers or computing the folding of proteins.
It's doable but hard for both for the Casimir force and for the forces in the model - because it's the same math.
So do you want to buy a LOT of supercomputer time and wait months (or whatever) for each answer? Or do you want to build a cheap apparatus and take some measurements?
"Hmm... renter in good standing making monthly payments, owner in bad standing not making monthly payments. Maybe we should offer them the house in exchange for them continuing to pay. The worst that could happen is they say no and move out."
This might work for a single-occupant building. For a multi-unit building it's not practical.
Selling to another landlord with tenants in place might improve the value - or it might drop it. After all, with the current tenants at their current rent and payment rates the previous landlord couldn't keep the payments up. So the bank might have to clear out the existing tenants to give the building a chance to become a profitable income property.
Wouldn't it have been cheaper to cut the original owners the deal, instead of repossessing and reselling at the lower monthly rates?
Unintended consequence of such a policy: Essentially EVERY borrower immediately defaults to get the same deal.
So the banks won't offer the deal to the existing owners.
(I don't like it either: I'm an existing owner of an owner-occupied property who has kept up payments. I wanted to refinance at the crash-related lower rates. But it looks like I may have to refi with another lender to get it to happen just because of such a policy - assuming I haven't missed the window. Fortunately, keeping up the payments, having a house that's still above water, and having both a job and assets combine to give me a dandy credit rating.)
Note that mainframes have been partitioned into multiple virtual machines for a LONG time (and can repartition to add/remove/adjust-size-of resources while the OS in the partition is running - like a virtual hotplug situation).
If the Windows image in a particular partition BSoDs or otherwise crashes it will not even be visible in the other partitions. (Unless they share a resource - like maybe sharing a CPU, where they might get a bit more of it {if Windows halts} or a bit less of it {if windows goes mumble-mode and uses its full allocation of CPU time}).
In a tough economy, even the high price of a mainframe might be attractive if it means eliminating a large number of rack mounts and personnel devoted to keeping Exchange online (as well as all the other servers typically found in large corporations).
Also: If you already HAVE a mainframe and it's underutilized (which they ALWAYS are unless they're too small - and then you scale them up for a fee), moving your Microsoft server apps onto a partition of it lets you discard the racks of PC-style servers and their attendant hardware maintenance issues (and personnel) - while porting your software maintenance crew directly over to the new platform.
This could be quite a cost saving in trying times.
Apparently Microsoft didn't learn anything from that little SCO fiasco.
Sure they did!
They learned that a patent suit against even the strongest of their enemies by an expendable cannon-fodder company can tie up their enemies for years and cost them lots of time and money that can be replaced from the sucked-dry husk of their sock-puppet.
A big difference between American- and eastern-heritage students is family support of education.
Typical US-heritage students are expected to, in addition to studying, be working to earn part of their university costs (and to have done so during the high school years leading up to it). They're also expected to have considerable extra-curricular activity.
Typical Asian-heritage students have exactly ONE responsibility until they have graduated and become employed professionally: LEARN. The family fully supports the child completely (though perhaps not in royal style), leaving him much more time for studying.
Result: Asian-heritage students can put a LOT more concentration into learning than American-heritage students. This snowballs over time. And it really shows, especially in those subjects where performance can be measured objectively.
Attacks like this, namely single vector and single target, point to a single person or small number of persons who have found some way of using the data to profit themselves. We're probably looking at [description of nerd deleted]
ORLY?
Sounds more to me like a "Spear Phishing" operation - in this case espionage against financial institutions.
Spear-phishing has been used by detective agencies for corporate espionage before. But the tie-in to an existing piece of malware, the highly-developed stealth and anti-competition code, and the targeting of financial information, sounds to me more like the multi-billion-dollar organized crime malware operations than a single operator.
These groups also have the resources to make use of the sort of information gathered by this tool to suck billions into their own pockets by market manipulation, in addition to the outright theft you'd expect from a single, unconnected, nerd.
The first OS I encountered was tape-based. And it prefilled user memory with a "core constant".
This was a subroutine jump to an abort routine which printed the return location - which in turn told you where you had improperly jumped to and dumped all your registers, followed by the memory itself if that was authorized. (That was all the info that was left by the time the OS got control.)
The walls of the computing center contained posters giving this value as it would appear if printed as various types of values (integer, floating point, complex,...).
Another machine I dealt with back then was a typesetting device using a Data General Nova and the company's homebrew OS (designed by Mark Weiser of Xerox Parc fame, based on work by Djikstra and Riddle). It had a debugger entry that could be reached by a one-word instruction which we would insert as breakpoints and also use to fill unused memory. The hex form of this was "0c0f". When the machine hit a breakpoint we said it had "coughed".
When I saw the title I thought "How the HELL can you have 'open source pharmaceuticals' in a legal regime where new drug compounds are illegal by default?"
Then I read TFA.
This has NOTHING to do with making "open source pharmaceuticals". This is about sharing data among drug companies and doctors to try to get a better handle on things like:
- understanding the gene-regulation changes that occur in major diseases
- designing better drugs using this data
- customizing drug therapies by selecting drugs that are a good match for a patient's genetics and disease, picking those that will be safe and effective for him in particular while avoiding those that would cause dangerous side-effects due to his particular genetics.
It looks like it will run afoul of HIPPA unless it's very carefully designed.
What would be better is to release the source to the client and the server so atleast it could live on in the community.
Unfortunately the bankruptcy officials may consider it part of the company's assets, to potentially be sold to pay off creditors.
If the stockholders had put something like that in the company charter BEFORE THEY TOOK ON DEBT it would be another story. Ditto if the creditors could be persuaded to release claims on the source for this purpose.
Also: Some players might form a consortium and make a bid on the source. (They could probably make a rather SMALL bid and still get it.) Once they own it they can do what they want with it - including releasing it under any license terms that don't violate those of any licensed IP it contains.
At least that's how I understand it. (Insert obligatory IANAL disclaimer here.)
... a bank has a lot of assets but also a lot of libabilities. If the banks assets don't outweigh thier libabilities then buying them would be a very stupid move.
Good point.
OK, modification: If the bank's actual assets (including its customer base and the removal of its competition against the purchaser), plus the tax benefit of their current losses offsetting the buying bank's gains, is greater than the purchase cost plus the cost of the merger and turning around the purchased bank's operating procedures to render them profitable, it's a good deal for the buyer and doesn't consume bailout money to execute it.
If this ISN'T the case, then (because the bailout money is apparently structured as a loan, which must be repaid if the buying bank is to remain solvent) it makes no sense to make the buy with bailout money.
... the government handed them $350 billion with no strings attached (which they promptly spent on... buying distressed companies).
It's not clear that the "buying distressed companies" part is being done with bailout money.
As part of the same legislation, the government changed the tax rules. Now if a successful bank buys a failing bank it can use all of the losses of the failing bank to offset its profits for computing taxes. (IMHO that always should have been the case and the previous regulations to the contrary were an arbitrary distortion of the market.)
The failing banks' stock prices were so depressed that non-failing banks could buy them outright for less than the tax reduction of the merged company versus the original successful bank. So there was no issue with trying to evaluate the quality of the bank's assets (especially the mortgages). Any value at all was added profit. If the tax savings plus the residual asset value is greater than the cost of the merger there's no bailout money spent (though it might have been borrowed from other uses until tax settlement time).
Your environment is land sonny boy; you don't have gills, you don't have fins, no tail, can't hold your breath more than a few minutes.
Whales, seals, and otters don't have gills either.
Unlike other apes our hair is aligned with the flow of water over our bodies - when swimming, not just when being rained on. And we have much better developed anti-drowning reflexes - both in the breathing system and the circulatory system.
Drop a chimp in a lake and he drowns. Pull him out before he dies and he'll likely get pneumonia anyhow. Drop a baby in water and he swims.
We've been in water enough for surviving and prospering there to have been very evolutionarily important.
So just because we're REALLY good at loping across the plains and running down antelope doesn't mean hanging out in water isn't part of our niche.
Nope. Territory for each species is a separate mapping and all the maps overlap.
The tree in your backyard is no less yours for "belonging to" a pair of birds who are nesting in it or nearby.
What gets interesting is when different species interact. Many of them, especially predators, will drive away or kill competitors or threats. (Examples: Bobcats will drive away or kill off (and maybe eat) any other predators in their territory that they can. Goodbye housecats and stray dogs. And you really don't want to get near a buck deer in rut unless you're hunting it and well armed.)
We're made of meat. Predators generally recognize this and will eat us when they can. Like many other animals (even insects) we react by driving off or killing any individual predator that goes after us (especially our infants) our symbionts, and our food supplies.
We just happen to be VERY good at it. SO good that we have to decide whether it's a long-term benefit for us to ease off a little.
so your theory is that because the government tried to help the banking industry not collapse, all the farmers in the country are going to stop growing food?
Nope.
A lot of people aren't going to be able to BUY it. Some of them are nice people and I don't want them to starve. Others may be not-so-nice but I'd rather have them eating stuff they grew than stealing stuff others did.
And I certainly don't want the government doing the stealing FOR them, either.
By the way: The US was once the "breadbasket of the world", growing far more food than we consume and exporting far more than we import. That's no longer the case - by a long shot. We import most of our food now and don't grow/raise enough to feed our own population.
If the govenment hadn't tried to bail things out this would have been largely confined to the portion of the financial sector that gave out the bad housing loans or used the bum risk assessment methodology, along with people who lied on their loan applications or overbought houses. (And a little temporary depression of commodity prices while those who wrote insurance policies on the high-end mortgage-basket investment paper held a fire sale to raise money to pay off the damage claims - which means bargain prices for some manufacturers and consumers.) It would all have sorted out in a couple years.
Instead the government has sucked the blood out of the rest of the economy to pay off the guys who made or took the bad loans. They get rewarded while everybody who did everything right (except maybe vote for these idiots) gets ripped off and maybe kicked out of work.
This is how the Great Depression happened.
Except this time it's a lot worse. Expect the economy to be tanked and bread lines for a decade or two - maybe until the boomers are all dead. Or maybe a political upheaval on the scale of the Communist Revolution (though not necessarily as wrong-headed) or the fall of the Soviet Union.
If you have land available plant a garden right now. You may need it by harvest time - and certainly by harvest time in a year or two (when you've gotten over the first couple crop failures as you figure out how to farm).
This sudden publicity about Skype, which already apparently allows "lawful intercept", makes me wonder:
What if the security agencies and/or law enforcement just developed an effective tool to break and eavesdrop on Skype conversations? Its existence would eventually leak. So there's a window of opportunity - between the time the easy crack becomes available and the time it becomes known.
During that time a flurry of publicity about "how hard it is to tap Skype calls", "the terrorists may be avoiding the security agencies", yadda yadda, might encourage crooks, terrorists, and other undesirables to move to the compromised service and expose themselves.
If the legal situation makes it hard (or impossible) to use in court, a change to the law to permit and admit Skype taps would be desired by investigators. But a push for the law change would make more sense if there is some recently developed technological underpinning for tapping Skype than if it is an attempt to force Skype to knuckle under. (Meanwhile, illegal taps are still useful: They can be "laundered" into "anonymous tips" by the tapper calling the investigator at the next desk...)
They already did create their own news syndication operation. It's the AP. "The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staffers."
The "they" in MY posting, whom I suggested might form their own news syndication operation, is not the newspapers etc. It's the website operators.
They already have better news sources than those that feed AP and one of the big selling points of the internet for news is that it covers things that AP and the like don't and gets things right that they get wrong. (Also worse ones. But "many eyes find problems" seems to work better than "you're all brainless dweebs so we'll sort it out for you and tell you what we think you should know". Or at least it works better for the "news consumers".)
My point: If the AP makes itself even harder to deal with, websites that "do news" may decide to also "do syndication" and create their own replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that "we can't". It's that "it's a REALLY hard computation to run". Like cracking some modern cyphers or computing the folding of proteins.
It's doable but hard for both for the Casimir force and for the forces in the model - because it's the same math.
So do you want to buy a LOT of supercomputer time and wait months (or whatever) for each answer? Or do you want to build a cheap apparatus and take some measurements?
Yep.
Just like more typical "analog computers" where a voltage or current represents a value in the computation.
"Hmm... renter in good standing making monthly payments, owner in bad standing not making monthly payments. Maybe we should offer them the house in exchange for them continuing to pay. The worst that could happen is they say no and move out."
This might work for a single-occupant building. For a multi-unit building it's not practical.
Selling to another landlord with tenants in place might improve the value - or it might drop it. After all, with the current tenants at their current rent and payment rates the previous landlord couldn't keep the payments up. So the bank might have to clear out the existing tenants to give the building a chance to become a profitable income property.
Wouldn't it have been cheaper to cut the original owners the deal, instead of repossessing and reselling at the lower monthly rates?
Unintended consequence of such a policy: Essentially EVERY borrower immediately defaults to get the same deal.
So the banks won't offer the deal to the existing owners.
(I don't like it either: I'm an existing owner of an owner-occupied property who has kept up payments. I wanted to refinance at the crash-related lower rates. But it looks like I may have to refi with another lender to get it to happen just because of such a policy - assuming I haven't missed the window. Fortunately, keeping up the payments, having a house that's still above water, and having both a job and assets combine to give me a dandy credit rating.)
Also the big-iron Blue Screen of Death! [etc.]
Note that mainframes have been partitioned into multiple virtual machines for a LONG time (and can repartition to add/remove/adjust-size-of resources while the OS in the partition is running - like a virtual hotplug situation).
If the Windows image in a particular partition BSoDs or otherwise crashes it will not even be visible in the other partitions. (Unless they share a resource - like maybe sharing a CPU, where they might get a bit more of it {if Windows halts} or a bit less of it {if windows goes mumble-mode and uses its full allocation of CPU time}).
(Why bother imagining a Beowulf cluster...)
In a tough economy, even the high price of a mainframe might be attractive if it means eliminating a large number of rack mounts and personnel devoted to keeping Exchange online (as well as all the other servers typically found in large corporations).
Also: If you already HAVE a mainframe and it's underutilized (which they ALWAYS are unless they're too small - and then you scale them up for a fee), moving your Microsoft server apps onto a partition of it lets you discard the racks of PC-style servers and their attendant hardware maintenance issues (and personnel) - while porting your software maintenance crew directly over to the new platform.
This could be quite a cost saving in trying times.
Apparently Microsoft didn't learn anything from that little SCO fiasco.
Sure they did!
They learned that a patent suit against even the strongest of their enemies by an expendable cannon-fodder company can tie up their enemies for years and cost them lots of time and money that can be replaced from the sucked-dry husk of their sock-puppet.
A big difference between American- and eastern-heritage students is family support of education.
Typical US-heritage students are expected to, in addition to studying, be working to earn part of their university costs (and to have done so during the high school years leading up to it). They're also expected to have considerable extra-curricular activity.
Typical Asian-heritage students have exactly ONE responsibility until they have graduated and become employed professionally: LEARN. The family fully supports the child completely (though perhaps not in royal style), leaving him much more time for studying.
Result: Asian-heritage students can put a LOT more concentration into learning than American-heritage students. This snowballs over time. And it really shows, especially in those subjects where performance can be measured objectively.
Attacks like this, namely single vector and single target, point to a single person or small number of persons who have found some way of using the data to profit themselves. We're probably looking at [description of nerd deleted]
ORLY?
Sounds more to me like a "Spear Phishing" operation - in this case espionage against financial institutions.
Spear-phishing has been used by detective agencies for corporate espionage before. But the tie-in to an existing piece of malware, the highly-developed stealth and anti-competition code, and the targeting of financial information, sounds to me more like the multi-billion-dollar organized crime malware operations than a single operator.
These groups also have the resources to make use of the sort of information gathered by this tool to suck billions into their own pockets by market manipulation, in addition to the outright theft you'd expect from a single, unconnected, nerd.
The first OS I encountered was tape-based. And it prefilled user memory with a "core constant".
This was a subroutine jump to an abort routine which printed the return location - which in turn told you where you had improperly jumped to and dumped all your registers, followed by the memory itself if that was authorized. (That was all the info that was left by the time the OS got control.)
The walls of the computing center contained posters giving this value as it would appear if printed as various types of values (integer, floating point, complex, ...).
Another machine I dealt with back then was a typesetting device using a Data General Nova and the company's homebrew OS (designed by Mark Weiser of Xerox Parc fame, based on work by Djikstra and Riddle). It had a debugger entry that could be reached by a one-word instruction which we would insert as breakpoints and also use to fill unused memory. The hex form of this was "0c0f". When the machine hit a breakpoint we said it had "coughed".
Better make it only in small batches. B-(
When I saw the title I thought "How the HELL can you have 'open source pharmaceuticals' in a legal regime where new drug compounds are illegal by default?"
Then I read TFA.
This has NOTHING to do with making "open source pharmaceuticals". This is about sharing data among drug companies and doctors to try to get a better handle on things like:
- understanding the gene-regulation changes that occur in major diseases
- designing better drugs using this data
- customizing drug therapies by selecting drugs that are a good match for a patient's genetics and disease, picking those that will be safe and effective for him in particular while avoiding those that would cause dangerous side-effects due to his particular genetics.
It looks like it will run afoul of HIPPA unless it's very carefully designed.
BAD article title. No donut.
What would be better is to release the source to the client and the server so atleast it could live on in the community.
Unfortunately the bankruptcy officials may consider it part of the company's assets, to potentially be sold to pay off creditors.
If the stockholders had put something like that in the company charter BEFORE THEY TOOK ON DEBT it would be another story. Ditto if the creditors could be persuaded to release claims on the source for this purpose.
Also: Some players might form a consortium and make a bid on the source. (They could probably make a rather SMALL bid and still get it.) Once they own it they can do what they want with it - including releasing it under any license terms that don't violate those of any licensed IP it contains.
At least that's how I understand it. (Insert obligatory IANAL disclaimer here.)
... a bank has a lot of assets but also a lot of libabilities. If the banks assets don't outweigh thier libabilities then buying them would be a very stupid move.
Good point.
OK, modification: If the bank's actual assets (including its customer base and the removal of its competition against the purchaser), plus the tax benefit of their current losses offsetting the buying bank's gains, is greater than the purchase cost plus the cost of the merger and turning around the purchased bank's operating procedures to render them profitable, it's a good deal for the buyer and doesn't consume bailout money to execute it.
If this ISN'T the case, then (because the bailout money is apparently structured as a loan, which must be repaid if the buying bank is to remain solvent) it makes no sense to make the buy with bailout money.
... the government handed them $350 billion with no strings attached (which they promptly spent on ... buying distressed companies).
It's not clear that the "buying distressed companies" part is being done with bailout money.
As part of the same legislation, the government changed the tax rules. Now if a successful bank buys a failing bank it can use all of the losses of the failing bank to offset its profits for computing taxes. (IMHO that always should have been the case and the previous regulations to the contrary were an arbitrary distortion of the market.)
The failing banks' stock prices were so depressed that non-failing banks could buy them outright for less than the tax reduction of the merged company versus the original successful bank. So there was no issue with trying to evaluate the quality of the bank's assets (especially the mortgages). Any value at all was added profit. If the tax savings plus the residual asset value is greater than the cost of the merger there's no bailout money spent (though it might have been borrowed from other uses until tax settlement time).
Your environment is land sonny boy; you don't have gills, you don't have fins, no tail, can't hold your breath more than a few minutes.
Whales, seals, and otters don't have gills either.
Unlike other apes our hair is aligned with the flow of water over our bodies - when swimming, not just when being rained on. And we have much better developed anti-drowning reflexes - both in the breathing system and the circulatory system.
Drop a chimp in a lake and he drowns. Pull him out before he dies and he'll likely get pneumonia anyhow. Drop a baby in water and he swims.
We've been in water enough for surviving and prospering there to have been very evolutionarily important.
So just because we're REALLY good at loping across the plains and running down antelope doesn't mean hanging out in water isn't part of our niche.
Technically it was the crocodile's beach first.
Nope. Territory for each species is a separate mapping and all the maps overlap.
The tree in your backyard is no less yours for "belonging to" a pair of birds who are nesting in it or nearby.
What gets interesting is when different species interact. Many of them, especially predators, will drive away or kill competitors or threats. (Examples: Bobcats will drive away or kill off (and maybe eat) any other predators in their territory that they can. Goodbye housecats and stray dogs. And you really don't want to get near a buck deer in rut unless you're hunting it and well armed.)
We're made of meat. Predators generally recognize this and will eat us when they can. Like many other animals (even insects) we react by driving off or killing any individual predator that goes after us (especially our infants) our symbionts, and our food supplies.
We just happen to be VERY good at it. SO good that we have to decide whether it's a long-term benefit for us to ease off a little.
so your theory is that because the government tried to help the banking industry not collapse, all the farmers in the country are going to stop growing food?
Nope.
A lot of people aren't going to be able to BUY it. Some of them are nice people and I don't want them to starve. Others may be not-so-nice but I'd rather have them eating stuff they grew than stealing stuff others did.
And I certainly don't want the government doing the stealing FOR them, either.
By the way: The US was once the "breadbasket of the world", growing far more food than we consume and exporting far more than we import. That's no longer the case - by a long shot. We import most of our food now and don't grow/raise enough to feed our own population.
... which violates the second law of thermodynamics, last time I heard.
By the way: What the HELL is "two perpendicular electric fields"? Electric fields applied by two sets of electrodes combine to form their vector sum.
I'd like to see a MUCH better description of the design. Including especially any VARIATION in the fields.
If the govenment hadn't tried to bail things out this would have been largely confined to the portion of the financial sector that gave out the bad housing loans or used the bum risk assessment methodology, along with people who lied on their loan applications or overbought houses. (And a little temporary depression of commodity prices while those who wrote insurance policies on the high-end mortgage-basket investment paper held a fire sale to raise money to pay off the damage claims - which means bargain prices for some manufacturers and consumers.) It would all have sorted out in a couple years.
Instead the government has sucked the blood out of the rest of the economy to pay off the guys who made or took the bad loans. They get rewarded while everybody who did everything right (except maybe vote for these idiots) gets ripped off and maybe kicked out of work.
This is how the Great Depression happened.
Except this time it's a lot worse. Expect the economy to be tanked and bread lines for a decade or two - maybe until the boomers are all dead. Or maybe a political upheaval on the scale of the Communist Revolution (though not necessarily as wrong-headed) or the fall of the Soviet Union.
If you have land available plant a garden right now. You may need it by harvest time - and certainly by harvest time in a year or two (when you've gotten over the first couple crop failures as you figure out how to farm).
A bit of ergonomic work on the consoles is indicated.
"Idiopathic", meaning "you're an idiot for still letting your daughter play video games after she develops sores on her sweaty little hands."
Actually, "idopathic" means "the doctor doesn't know what caused it (but it wasn't the usual suspects)".
I.e. it's the medical establishment being ignorant and nothing to do with idiocy.
As somebody else pointed out: You can just plug in a USB stick WiFi adapter.
This sudden publicity about Skype, which already apparently allows "lawful intercept", makes me wonder:
What if the security agencies and/or law enforcement just developed an effective tool to break and eavesdrop on Skype conversations? Its existence would eventually leak. So there's a window of opportunity - between the time the easy crack becomes available and the time it becomes known.
During that time a flurry of publicity about "how hard it is to tap Skype calls", "the terrorists may be avoiding the security agencies", yadda yadda, might encourage crooks, terrorists, and other undesirables to move to the compromised service and expose themselves.
If the legal situation makes it hard (or impossible) to use in court, a change to the law to permit and admit Skype taps would be desired by investigators. But a push for the law change would make more sense if there is some recently developed technological underpinning for tapping Skype than if it is an attempt to force Skype to knuckle under. (Meanwhile, illegal taps are still useful: They can be "laundered" into "anonymous tips" by the tapper calling the investigator at the next desk ...)
So I wonder if Skype's security just got broken.
They already did create their own news syndication operation. It's the AP. "The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staffers."
The "they" in MY posting, whom I suggested might form their own news syndication operation, is not the newspapers etc. It's the website operators.
They already have better news sources than those that feed AP and one of the big selling points of the internet for news is that it covers things that AP and the like don't and gets things right that they get wrong. (Also worse ones. But "many eyes find problems" seems to work better than "you're all brainless dweebs so we'll sort it out for you and tell you what we think you should know". Or at least it works better for the "news consumers".)
My point: If the AP makes itself even harder to deal with, websites that "do news" may decide to also "do syndication" and create their own replacement.