IPOs are often intentionally undervalued because that is how the people who invested before the IPO (i.e. the people whose investment helped make the company successful in the first place) make money.
But it would have to be taken away with the consent of the electorate. I suspect a speech by the queen about why she refused to sign RIPA would have resulted in a lot of MPs looking for a new career...
I blamed the queen for signing the RIP Act. She is supposed to be a last-stop constitutional safeguard, who can reset the system if the government goes completely hatstand. She didn't.
The Stasi, like the Gestapo, relied on informers. They both worked in a situation where everyone was doing something illegal and an accusation was about all the evidence that was required. If they wanted to intimidate or eliminate someone, they just needed to pressure a neighbour or acquaintance into informing on them. This meant that they were intrinsically limited. Both were relatively small organisations and it would take several weeks of several agents' time to get one person. Their power came from the fear that they generated: everyone knew someone who knew someone who had been arrested on trumped-up charges and never seen again. It was unlikely to happen to you, but it could.
The problem with this kind of database and monitoring is that it means that any Stasi-like organisation can be run efficiently. Want to eliminate everyone in a certain category of political undesirables? There's an app for that...
The problem with not having career politicians is that you get people coming in, just getting to understand the system, and then leaving. Meanwhile, you have career civil servants just below them who understand the system very well and take advantage of the fact that their bosses don't.
Perhaps the solutions should be to slowly increase the threshold required to win each election. First time you stand, you just need to beat everyone else. If you win, next time you need a majority of 10% over the second-place candidate, then 20%, and so on. If a politician is really popular with his constituents, he can server 4-5 terms. If not, then he goes back to his old job or retires.
Actually, the problem is that you often don't get what you pay for. The most important think when considering outsourcing is to work out how you are going to evaluate their work. If you don't have a mechanism for rejecting bad work, you'll get bad work. If you're doing off-site code review with people several time zones away, you may find you're spending more time doing code review than it would take you to just rewrite it from scratch...
But just because they haven't "woken up" yet doesn't give you the right to violate copyright law.
I never said it did. I don't pirate, I simply avoid any interaction with companies that won't provide me with the products or services that I want. I am slap bang in the middle of the early-adopter demographic for this kind of thing, yet I haven't bought a BluRay player, nor have I signed up for any streaming services. Your employer can blame piracy for their lack of sales, but even though I was one of the first people I know to buy a DVD player (back when they were actually expensive), the first to sign up for DVD rentals through the post, and have a lot more disposable income than back then, I am not buying any of their DRM'd products. Until your industry wakes up, I'll continue to chuck the money that they don't want at low-budget independent productions and things like gog.com that provide me with entertainment in a form that I want.
The issue with most of these studies is selection bias. I have seen several things attempting to analyse the percentage piracy in BitTorrent, and they all work by examining the traffic on a particular tracker. To give an HTTP analogy, this would be like analysing all of the traffic on a warez site and concluding that all of the traffic sent over HTTP was piracy, or examining all of the traffic from news.bbc.co.uk and concluding that it was all non-infringing. Most legitimate bittorrent traffic comes from people running their own tracker to distribute their stuff, and finding all of these is difficult.
And it's only available for streaming. My main use case for this kind of thing is having something to keep me entertained on long train journeys or on flights. Even if I have 3G Internet on the train, I lose that when we go into a tunnel or through a deep cutting. On the plane it's stupidly expensive. I don't want to stream, I want to download. I want to pay a fixed monthly fee to be able to download whatever I want (maybe with a limit of downloads per month) in a DRM-free format so I can watch it on whichever device I choose. The closest I get is renting DVDs, but if I want to watch them on anything other than my laptop it's a pain to rip and transcode them.
And his prices are massively over the top. I moved house two years ago and bought a new fridge and freezer and I paid less than $500 for the pair. Second hand ones are half the price, and most rental places come with at least a fridge, usually a combination of the two. Similarly, I've never seen a flat rented without a cooker (although it may only be a two-hob thing). The $200 he spent on pans is about what I have spent on pans in total over ten years - most of mine are very cheap supermarket ones, and when I went to university I took a set of three (£20 from Sainsbury's, along with about £10 of cheap wood and plastic utensils. Most places I've rented - including the place I'm renting now - come with enough to cook with and a few plates and so on).
And don't forget that $10K of his $11,355 figure is a car. I don't own a car, nor have I felt the need for one. I pay £3 every week or two to have my supermarket shopping delivered to me - less than the cost of taking the bus to the supermarket and back - and I can pick up fresh things locally. If you live in a big city then you probably don't even need to do the supermarket shopping.
Of the things he listed, about the only ones that you might actually need to buy if you are in rented accommodation are the spices, and you can cook quite competently with only a couple of herbs and spices. Pick them up from a local immigrant shop and you can probably get ten times as much for half the price of a supermarket.
Only if it's given away (or cheap) to everyone. Lots of competitions had iPads as prizes, but that didn't make anyone think iPads were cheap. GM could, for example, have picked 100 charities and given each of the a few cars to use as prizes in some fund raising things. Each of the charities would have advertised GM, got a load of money (probably more than the value of the car) and GM would have had its name associated with causes that people care about (the nice thing about this is that people who don't care about the cause in question will probably be unaware of the competition). Next time the people who didn't win the competition are thinking about getting a car, they'll remember that GM gave their favourite charity some cars to help raise funds. Oh, and they can probably write the donations off against tax, which they can't do with Facebook stunts.
I'm 30 next month, so I'm not sure if I still fall into the 'young' demographic, but I've been able to afford a car for about 10 years and a nice car for about 5. I have no car, nor any strong desire for one, although I do own a house (well, technically, the bank owns about 30% of it still). I am more likely to buy a light aircraft than a car. For short distances, especially here, a bike is more convenient and cheaper, and a taxi when I need one is cheaper than maintaining an albatross, sorry, a car.
A car has just never seemed like a good economic proposition for me. If I'm going on a longer trip and I have spare money, I'd much rather buy a first-class rail ticket and have a comfy chair and a table that I can fit a laptop on. I can get some work done, watch a movie, or just sleep, depending on how I feel - none of these are possible if I'm driving.
The problem with that is that people just post the link on some coupon aggregation site. If I want to order a pizza, I first decide what I want, then I search for a discount code. Usually I get 25-50% off. The company has gone to the expense of the advertising campaign with the coupons, but I don't even see it until after I've made the decision to order from them. And, as one company discovered, if they just lower their prices to a more reasonable level without all of these things then I buy from them a lot more often...
There is not a single shred of evidence to prove there is not a creator. Not one.
There is not one single shred of evidence to prove that there is not a teapot orbiting the sun in the same orbit as the Earth but on the other side, or that pixies don't live at the bottom of your garden. There is no evidence for the nonexistence of anything that does not interact with the rest of the world, because there can't be. There are an uncountably infinite set of things that lack evidence for their nonexistence, so should we believe in all of them?
So why do we teach evolution as the only answer?
Wow, there's a non-sequitur if ever one was. A creator and evolution are entirely orthogonal concepts. The alternative to evolution is unchanging species, which has been quite thoroughly debunked.
Really? I spent a bit of time in the USA, in a variety of states, and I didn't find anywhere where it would have been difficult to afford to live on food cooked from fresh ingredients spending only a few dollars a day. Cooking a meal for a family would cost a lot less than taking them all to McDonald's.
I don't know where this idea that fresh fruit and vegetables are expensive comes from. They're the cheapest way of getting food, as long as you have time to cook (and 10-20 minutes a day is enough for that if you don't do anything too complicated).
I believe the grandparent is most likely misinterpreting the observation that most men die with prostate cancer. In the vast majority of cases, something else kills them before the cancer. One of the interesting effects of increased screening in the USA is that, early on, a lot of people underwent treatments that turned out to be more dangerous than the cancer. Now, doctors are a lot more willing to recommend just ignoring it.
His comment most likely is true of rats. Pretty much all rats that don't starve, get caught in traps, or killed by predators die of cancer. For them, a very high mutation rate has been a good species survival trait, because it's meant that they quickly develop resistance to poisons (there's a good chance that one or two members will be immune to anything that the pack encounters) and the cost of a reduced lifespan is worth it, especially since a faster turn-over of generations helps with the rate of evolution.
I've found it interesting how this has been repeated and justified in so many ways over the years. The first time I heard this quote was the mid '80s, and it was '64KB ought to be enough for anyone', not 640KB. Back then, it was apparently related to a hard-coded limit in Microsoft BASIC, which limited it to 8-bit computers. The alleged context was that this was Bill Gates' facetious reply when asked about this limit with regards to the new 16-bit microcomputers. As I recall, early versions of Microsoft BASIC on the IBM PC only supported 64KB, even though the machine could address ten times as much.
Slashdot Mirror
IPOs are often intentionally undervalued because that is how the people who invested before the IPO (i.e. the people whose investment helped make the company successful in the first place) make money.
But it would have to be taken away with the consent of the electorate. I suspect a speech by the queen about why she refused to sign RIPA would have resulted in a lot of MPs looking for a new career...
I blamed the queen for signing the RIP Act. She is supposed to be a last-stop constitutional safeguard, who can reset the system if the government goes completely hatstand. She didn't.
The Stasi, like the Gestapo, relied on informers. They both worked in a situation where everyone was doing something illegal and an accusation was about all the evidence that was required. If they wanted to intimidate or eliminate someone, they just needed to pressure a neighbour or acquaintance into informing on them. This meant that they were intrinsically limited. Both were relatively small organisations and it would take several weeks of several agents' time to get one person. Their power came from the fear that they generated: everyone knew someone who knew someone who had been arrested on trumped-up charges and never seen again. It was unlikely to happen to you, but it could.
The problem with this kind of database and monitoring is that it means that any Stasi-like organisation can be run efficiently. Want to eliminate everyone in a certain category of political undesirables? There's an app for that...
The problem with not having career politicians is that you get people coming in, just getting to understand the system, and then leaving. Meanwhile, you have career civil servants just below them who understand the system very well and take advantage of the fact that their bosses don't.
Perhaps the solutions should be to slowly increase the threshold required to win each election. First time you stand, you just need to beat everyone else. If you win, next time you need a majority of 10% over the second-place candidate, then 20%, and so on. If a politician is really popular with his constituents, he can server 4-5 terms. If not, then he goes back to his old job or retires.
Actually, the problem is that you often don't get what you pay for. The most important think when considering outsourcing is to work out how you are going to evaluate their work. If you don't have a mechanism for rejecting bad work, you'll get bad work. If you're doing off-site code review with people several time zones away, you may find you're spending more time doing code review than it would take you to just rewrite it from scratch...
But just because they haven't "woken up" yet doesn't give you the right to violate copyright law.
I never said it did. I don't pirate, I simply avoid any interaction with companies that won't provide me with the products or services that I want. I am slap bang in the middle of the early-adopter demographic for this kind of thing, yet I haven't bought a BluRay player, nor have I signed up for any streaming services. Your employer can blame piracy for their lack of sales, but even though I was one of the first people I know to buy a DVD player (back when they were actually expensive), the first to sign up for DVD rentals through the post, and have a lot more disposable income than back then, I am not buying any of their DRM'd products. Until your industry wakes up, I'll continue to chuck the money that they don't want at low-budget independent productions and things like gog.com that provide me with entertainment in a form that I want.
To be fair, McDonalds 'salads' are so laden with oil and sugar that it's difficult to class them as healthy choices...
The issue with most of these studies is selection bias. I have seen several things attempting to analyse the percentage piracy in BitTorrent, and they all work by examining the traffic on a particular tracker. To give an HTTP analogy, this would be like analysing all of the traffic on a warez site and concluding that all of the traffic sent over HTTP was piracy, or examining all of the traffic from news.bbc.co.uk and concluding that it was all non-infringing. Most legitimate bittorrent traffic comes from people running their own tracker to distribute their stuff, and finding all of these is difficult.
I believe the politically correct term is 'executives' not 'robbers' these days.
And it's only available for streaming. My main use case for this kind of thing is having something to keep me entertained on long train journeys or on flights. Even if I have 3G Internet on the train, I lose that when we go into a tunnel or through a deep cutting. On the plane it's stupidly expensive. I don't want to stream, I want to download. I want to pay a fixed monthly fee to be able to download whatever I want (maybe with a limit of downloads per month) in a DRM-free format so I can watch it on whichever device I choose. The closest I get is renting DVDs, but if I want to watch them on anything other than my laptop it's a pain to rip and transcode them.
And his prices are massively over the top. I moved house two years ago and bought a new fridge and freezer and I paid less than $500 for the pair. Second hand ones are half the price, and most rental places come with at least a fridge, usually a combination of the two. Similarly, I've never seen a flat rented without a cooker (although it may only be a two-hob thing). The $200 he spent on pans is about what I have spent on pans in total over ten years - most of mine are very cheap supermarket ones, and when I went to university I took a set of three (£20 from Sainsbury's, along with about £10 of cheap wood and plastic utensils. Most places I've rented - including the place I'm renting now - come with enough to cook with and a few plates and so on).
And don't forget that $10K of his $11,355 figure is a car. I don't own a car, nor have I felt the need for one. I pay £3 every week or two to have my supermarket shopping delivered to me - less than the cost of taking the bus to the supermarket and back - and I can pick up fresh things locally. If you live in a big city then you probably don't even need to do the supermarket shopping.
Of the things he listed, about the only ones that you might actually need to buy if you are in rented accommodation are the spices, and you can cook quite competently with only a couple of herbs and spices. Pick them up from a local immigrant shop and you can probably get ten times as much for half the price of a supermarket.
people between the age of 18 and 25 are insecure and narcissistic?
Above that age, we become less insecure.
What the fuck do you think Slashdot is?
Antisocial media.
Seriously, what 'social media' site allows you to identify people as friends but does not provide a mechanism for sending them messages?
Only if it's given away (or cheap) to everyone. Lots of competitions had iPads as prizes, but that didn't make anyone think iPads were cheap. GM could, for example, have picked 100 charities and given each of the a few cars to use as prizes in some fund raising things. Each of the charities would have advertised GM, got a load of money (probably more than the value of the car) and GM would have had its name associated with causes that people care about (the nice thing about this is that people who don't care about the cause in question will probably be unaware of the competition). Next time the people who didn't win the competition are thinking about getting a car, they'll remember that GM gave their favourite charity some cars to help raise funds. Oh, and they can probably write the donations off against tax, which they can't do with Facebook stunts.
I'm 30 next month, so I'm not sure if I still fall into the 'young' demographic, but I've been able to afford a car for about 10 years and a nice car for about 5. I have no car, nor any strong desire for one, although I do own a house (well, technically, the bank owns about 30% of it still). I am more likely to buy a light aircraft than a car. For short distances, especially here, a bike is more convenient and cheaper, and a taxi when I need one is cheaper than maintaining an albatross, sorry, a car.
A car has just never seemed like a good economic proposition for me. If I'm going on a longer trip and I have spare money, I'd much rather buy a first-class rail ticket and have a comfy chair and a table that I can fit a laptop on. I can get some work done, watch a movie, or just sleep, depending on how I feel - none of these are possible if I'm driving.
The problem with that is that people just post the link on some coupon aggregation site. If I want to order a pizza, I first decide what I want, then I search for a discount code. Usually I get 25-50% off. The company has gone to the expense of the advertising campaign with the coupons, but I don't even see it until after I've made the decision to order from them. And, as one company discovered, if they just lower their prices to a more reasonable level without all of these things then I buy from them a lot more often...
I think the news is that MIPS is not dead, it's just pining for the fjords.
Really? The only hard drive failures I've ever seen have resulted in a completely unreadable drive.
There is not a single shred of evidence to prove there is not a creator. Not one.
There is not one single shred of evidence to prove that there is not a teapot orbiting the sun in the same orbit as the Earth but on the other side, or that pixies don't live at the bottom of your garden. There is no evidence for the nonexistence of anything that does not interact with the rest of the world, because there can't be. There are an uncountably infinite set of things that lack evidence for their nonexistence, so should we believe in all of them?
So why do we teach evolution as the only answer?
Wow, there's a non-sequitur if ever one was. A creator and evolution are entirely orthogonal concepts. The alternative to evolution is unchanging species, which has been quite thoroughly debunked.
Really? I spent a bit of time in the USA, in a variety of states, and I didn't find anywhere where it would have been difficult to afford to live on food cooked from fresh ingredients spending only a few dollars a day. Cooking a meal for a family would cost a lot less than taking them all to McDonald's.
I don't know where this idea that fresh fruit and vegetables are expensive comes from. They're the cheapest way of getting food, as long as you have time to cook (and 10-20 minutes a day is enough for that if you don't do anything too complicated).
I believe the grandparent is most likely misinterpreting the observation that most men die with prostate cancer. In the vast majority of cases, something else kills them before the cancer. One of the interesting effects of increased screening in the USA is that, early on, a lot of people underwent treatments that turned out to be more dangerous than the cancer. Now, doctors are a lot more willing to recommend just ignoring it.
His comment most likely is true of rats. Pretty much all rats that don't starve, get caught in traps, or killed by predators die of cancer. For them, a very high mutation rate has been a good species survival trait, because it's meant that they quickly develop resistance to poisons (there's a good chance that one or two members will be immune to anything that the pack encounters) and the cost of a reduced lifespan is worth it, especially since a faster turn-over of generations helps with the rate of evolution.
I've found it interesting how this has been repeated and justified in so many ways over the years. The first time I heard this quote was the mid '80s, and it was '64KB ought to be enough for anyone', not 640KB. Back then, it was apparently related to a hard-coded limit in Microsoft BASIC, which limited it to 8-bit computers. The alleged context was that this was Bill Gates' facetious reply when asked about this limit with regards to the new 16-bit microcomputers. As I recall, early versions of Microsoft BASIC on the IBM PC only supported 64KB, even though the machine could address ten times as much.
Reliability is the reason I havent gone SSD yet. Every time I'm about to upgrade I read the reviews on newegg of some guy losing all his data
If 'some guy losing all of his data' is your reason for not buying an SSD, does it also stop you from buying a hard disk?
DERA had working low-cost EMP devices back when they were still DERA...