This many comments and no one mentions the rest of the deal? He bought the papers for about $140M. He also loaned the company he bought them from $400M at 10% annual interest. And Warren doesn't make loans like that unless the terms protect him in the event that the borrower goes bankrupt. So if the papers he bought just break even, he's still making a decent return on the overall investment.
Clearly, I didn't make my point in the original post; my bad. The "pre-mounted in a plastic enclosure" is perhaps the most important feature. I know where to find naked displays; what I want to avoid is the homemade plastic box, with things cut/fastened ever so slightly off center, odd screws showing, etc. And while I appreciate the "just write an app" suggestions, in some cases the box will end up mounted on a wall, in at least one the controller will be driving relays to switch higher voltages, in another there will be some odd sensors, and so forth. Don't need processor boards, don't need an unmounted display. Need an LCD with touch panel mounted very neatly and solidly in a reasonable-looking box. Apologies for not being clearer.
Any time you mention "solder", remember the temps involved and that the plastic structure used in the construction has to withstand those temperatures. Standard FR4 printed circuit board material (fiberglass reinforced, non-reversible heatset resin) is remarkably tough stuff. Even the most heat-resistant thermoplastics the industrial 3D printing suppliers are making available are questionable for standard soldering temperatures. And it's not clear that the hobbyist printers can produce the temperatures necessary to work with those higher-melting-point thermoplastics.
Badly, almost certainly.
Think of it as a poor man's wire-wrap system and make comparisons to that.
The conductive thread has a lot more resistance than real wire-wrap wire
(I would have used wire-wrap wire with stripped ends instead of conductive thread for this reason alone).
You don't get the gas-tight connections that you get where wire-wrap wire is pulled over the corner of a square post,
so there's potential for long-term oxidation and increased resistance
(to the point of appearing to be an open circuit at low voltages).
Since the "wires" aren't insulated,
stretching or sagging from any loss of tension runs the risk of shorting two connections.
It's going to be even more prone to loosening from vibration and flexing than wire-wrap.
Why carry the weight of the genset, fuel tank, and fuel around when all you're doing is commuting to work, driving to the grocery, etc? Which make up 90%-plus of the "standard" usage, at least by hours. Let's face it -- in 25 years, most of us will be driving cars that are much smaller and much lighter most of the time; lugging around a genset will be a convenience we won't be able to afford.
Include an unfoldable solar panel in the car and a small pole to put a mini wind turbine on;)
Or,
for those rare occasions when you're going to be driving 500 miles in a day,
rent a small fifth-wheel add-on trailer with a fuel tank and generator set.
The amount of power needed to maintain highway speeds is rather small,
on the order of 10-15 horsepower.
Several gallons of alcohol or a modest tank of compressed biogas
can be refueled quickly during long trips.
For the large majority of driving, though,
you don't have to drag around the extra weight.
Renting makes sense for people whose need is infrequent;
if you're one of the people who have to make long-distance trips regularly,
you can buy your own.
Those features can certainly deal with the "display" part of the problem,
but they don't deal with the "floating" part.
Both Word and Writer insist that things be attached -- to the page, to a paragraph, to a character, somewhere.
They don't (and after this long, I'm inclined to say won't ever) address the underlying issue
that in some types of document,
strict ordering is relaxed for certain types of objects
when the material is laid out on finite pages.
And after decades, I'm still waiting for Word (or LibreOffice) to add the typographic notion of a floating display: a block of image/text/whatever that has to stay together, but can automatically float to the top of the next page if there's not room at the current point of the current page, with text continuing to fill so the current page doesn't have extra white space at the bottom. It's an important feature in books and most technical reports, and the automatic bit is critical in large "living" documents that are revised regularly. Troff could manage it more than 30 years ago; LaTeX for almost as long.
What was Dijkstra's quote? "APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection."
At one point, though, consider what IBM's implementation gave you
that simply wasn't available elsewhere (other than Lisp, of course):
stack traces,
interactive symbolic debugging,
self-modifying code,
etc.
I will never forget
the numerical analysis programming assignment that was supposed to take three weeks,
and writing it in one night using APL.
I admit, I still use a toy APL interpreter as a desktop calculator,
that uses a bizarre mapping of ASCII characters to APL symbols
so you can type things on a regular keyboard.
The source code for the interpreter -- in hideously old-school C -- traces back to Ken Thompson at Bell Labs,
with lots of bits added later at Berkeley, Yale, and especially Purdue.
Per the IEA's statistics for Jan 2012, Japan got about 89% of its electricity from combustible fuels, and about 7.6% from renewables (more than half of that conventional hydro). Their imports of thermal coal and liquefied natural gas were up almost 10% and 30% respectively relative to a year earlier. Overall power generation is only off 2.6% relative to a year earlier, but they're making up for the vast majority of the missing nuclear electricity by burning fossil fuels. Building out sufficient renewables is a decades-long project.
Years ago, when this kind of practice surfaced from time to time, the usual problem for the student doing the importing was that they neglected to pay a required duty/tariff on goods imported for resale. Which landed them in hot water with the federal government, who insisted on looking at their records and collecting -- or attempting to collect -- the amounts due. While that doesn't appear to be the issue in this case, I wonder if the tariffs are still in place and whether US Customers will be knocking on his door?
On the order of fifteen years ago -- perhaps longer -- people proposed ways to use a small number of multicasts, plus short duration unicasts to provide near video-on-demand service.
One of them went as follows
(note this only makes sense for reasonably popular content).
Multicast multiple copies of the content with an X minute offset between streams.
When the user connects, they connect to the stream which has started most recently and begin recording from the current point.
The user also begins receiving a unicast stream the delivers the first several minutes of the content
(at worst, X minutes, where X is the offset).
At the appropriate point,
the application switches from the unicast stream to the recorded multicast stream.
Yes, it was a kludge.
And got kludgier when you wanted to add things like long pauses
(longer than X minutes)
without recording the entire stream.
But it did reduce the total bandwidth needed to deliver popular on-demand content.
...but to extend the lifespan of B-52s beyond 2040 and still expect it to be used for military bombing raid --- this is lunacy to the max !!
For its original mission, probably.
OTOH, the B-52 will still be well-suited for its current active mission:
a big slow cheap reliable bomb truck standing off outside the range of the surface-to-air missiles insurgents have,
holding position for hours,
loaded with smart guided munitions,
providing air support for ground troops.
Observer on the ground sends request to hit point A,
B-52 crew loads coordinates into smart bomb and shove it out the door.
Current JDAM and JSOW accuracy seems to be within about six meters;
better if the ground troops can put a laser spot on the target and the munition is equipped to track it.
My parents and grandparents? They had the space race. First man in space. First space walk. First moon landing... People are more worried about potholes and "banning" gay sex than they are about furthering the progress of all mankind.
Your grandparents (my parents) also decided that they weren't going to watch your great-grandparents (my grandparents) die for lack of medical care because they couldn't buy insurance. Medicare and Medicaid have saved more lives and improved the quality of life for more people than the space program can ever hope to claim. The down side is that those programs, and federal tax policies, have also propped up the overpriced US medical system -- every other developed country in the world manages to get health outcomes as good or better than the US at a fraction of the price, about half on average.
It's all about the dollars. Want tax money to be available to fund more space exploration? Support single payer health insurance in the US.
In 2002, the Ohio State Board of Education ruled that teachers could introduce
materials such as ID into biology classes.
The Board reversed itself in 2006.
In 2004, the Dover, Pennsylvania school board required that biology teachers
read a statement prepared by the board
critical of evolution and suggesting Of Pandas and People as a reference.
The statement was found unconstitutional in court.
All eight of the board members who voted for the statement were defeated in the next election.
In 2005, the Kansas State Board of Education adopted curriculum standards
that allowed ID.
In the next election,
four of the six members who had voted for ID adoption were defeated and
the new board reversed the 2005 decision.
Also in 2005,
legislation was introduced in Montana that would have made ID a part of the biology curriculum.
So, yes, ID is an issue in a variety of states outside of the South and Texas.
Imagine The Lord of the Rings where all the Hobbits had Brooklyn accents.
Gandalf and Saruman with Deep South drawls.
Once upon a time, years ago while I was in graduate school,
I saw a national touring company's production of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors
set in the Deep South,
with Southern stereotypes for several of the characters,
and all of the slapstick parts played as slapstick.
Half the audience left after the first act;
the rest of us were rolling in the aisles.
The technical argument against that -- separate from what the terms-of-service agreement might say -- is that to push data to your neighbor requires that you use upstream bandwidth. Your cable modem does not transmit on the frequencies that your neighbor's modem listens to. Each packet will be transmitted from your modem to the head end, queued up, then sent downstream on a different carrier frequency. For various valid reasons, upstream is a much scarcer resource than downstream.
Yes, and as the US is still heavily dependent on crude oil imports, the supply variable to look at is not global production, but global net exports -- because we can't import oil if no one is exporting. There is a long-term trend of the producing countries consuming more of their own production and exporting less. Global net exports peaked in 2005, and are down by more than 3 million barrels per day since then. The US, Europe, Japan, China and India are all oil importers, and are all bidding for a shrinking supply of the available exports.
Use more precise terms for clarity, please: we exported more finished petroleum products (diesel, gasoline, etc) than we imported. OTOH, of the finished products we consumed in the US, some 45% were still refined from imported crude oil. And some part of the finished products exported from our refineries were derived from imported crude. The US continues to be the largest crude oil importer in the world, and is heavily dependent on imported crude to provide for domestic consumption.
Tablets might find a niche for students taking notes, but I doubt it (it's easier to just use pen and paper especially for writing formulas).
For me, this is the killer app. For more than 30 years, I've organized my life in a little three-ring binder filled with 8.5 x 5.5" paper. Addresses, phone numbers, to-do lists, how-tos for things I do infrequently, key paragraphs for papers that struck me while I was sitting in the park waiting for a kid, and voluminous (in total) notes including formulas, sketches of graphs, line-and-box drawings. Notes from the doctors office. I'd really like to replace it with a tablet, since the tablet can also do other things. But I've got to have good digital paper, which implies really high-res touch (for my crabbed little handwriting) and a stylus.
The Microsoft Courier with its two displays had a lot of potential. I had visions of taking notes in the right-hand pane, and flipping pages by "pushing" the current page over to the more passive left-hand pane in order to get a fresh sheet of paper while still providing access to the previous page(s).
I'm getting old enough to begin to wonder if I'll ever be able to buy what I want.
You would never even see my resume because I am sixty-something.
Very true, at least in part. There are currently good reasons for HR to quietly dispose of the resumes from people over about the age of 55. One is that they are part of a protected group -- so in the event of a sizable layoff, there would be a bunch of extra hoops to jump through to demonstrate that there was no discrimination against older workers. Note that the case law on this is generally that there doesn't have to be intent to discriminate, you're guilty even if it just worked out that way. Second is if your firm has health insurance benefits. Through no fault of their own, 55 is about the dividing line where degenerative diseases -- heart disease, cancer, strokes -- quit being unusual. Particularly at small firms, group premiums will increase sharply as you add older workers.
For the second item, 33 of 34 OECD countries have figured out the answer -- single-payer health financing, or heavy regulation of the insurance companies so that the system functions as a virtual single-payer system. In that situation, hiring an older worker has the same effect on the firm's payments into the health care system as hiring a young worker. As a side effect -- US governments at all levels spend a bigger share of GDP on health care than almost all of the other OECD countries; but in the US that only pays for the elderly, the poor, and government employees (including the military and their dependents), while in the other 33 they manage to provide for the entire population.
And yet the candidate pool doesn't even appear to be that deep.
Bear in mind where you're talking about relocating to.
I've written about this before.
The big wind farms like these are going up on the Great Plains
which have been in a depopulating spiral for decades.
Groceries may be 25 miles from where you live.
The nearest health care may be 50 miles away,
and the nearest specialist in a particular field you need 100 miles.
The school systems and other public services are collapsing.
Or alternatively,
you live where there are still services and drive 50-60 miles each way to work.
For the large majority of the unemployed,
who haven't grown up there,
it looks like tossing most of your life away for $20/hour.
Ah, that's enough for Wikipedia. Fritz Leiber's The Big Time is the novel, with the opposing sides nicknamed the Snakes and the Spiders. The short story is Try to Change the Past. The novel is available from Project Gutenberg. Copies of the short story of more dubious legality are easy enough to find online.
Can't remember either the author or title, but that's one small bit in a larger novel.
Two sides battling up and down the time line.
Agents are recruited in some fashion just before they die.
IIRC, the bit that ends with the meteorite striking the person in the head
(duplicating a.38 caliber bullet wound)
is a demonstration of just how much reality resists being changed.
Slashdot Mirror
This many comments and no one mentions the rest of the deal? He bought the papers for about $140M. He also loaned the company he bought them from $400M at 10% annual interest. And Warren doesn't make loans like that unless the terms protect him in the event that the borrower goes bankrupt. So if the papers he bought just break even, he's still making a decent return on the overall investment.
Clearly, I didn't make my point in the original post; my bad. The "pre-mounted in a plastic enclosure" is perhaps the most important feature. I know where to find naked displays; what I want to avoid is the homemade plastic box, with things cut/fastened ever so slightly off center, odd screws showing, etc. And while I appreciate the "just write an app" suggestions, in some cases the box will end up mounted on a wall, in at least one the controller will be driving relays to switch higher voltages, in another there will be some odd sensors, and so forth. Don't need processor boards, don't need an unmounted display. Need an LCD with touch panel mounted very neatly and solidly in a reasonable-looking box. Apologies for not being clearer.
Any time you mention "solder", remember the temps involved and that the plastic structure used in the construction has to withstand those temperatures. Standard FR4 printed circuit board material (fiberglass reinforced, non-reversible heatset resin) is remarkably tough stuff. Even the most heat-resistant thermoplastics the industrial 3D printing suppliers are making available are questionable for standard soldering temperatures. And it's not clear that the hobbyist printers can produce the temperatures necessary to work with those higher-melting-point thermoplastics.
Badly, almost certainly. Think of it as a poor man's wire-wrap system and make comparisons to that.
The conductive thread has a lot more resistance than real wire-wrap wire (I would have used wire-wrap wire with stripped ends instead of conductive thread for this reason alone). You don't get the gas-tight connections that you get where wire-wrap wire is pulled over the corner of a square post, so there's potential for long-term oxidation and increased resistance (to the point of appearing to be an open circuit at low voltages). Since the "wires" aren't insulated, stretching or sagging from any loss of tension runs the risk of shorting two connections. It's going to be even more prone to loosening from vibration and flexing than wire-wrap.
Why carry the weight of the genset, fuel tank, and fuel around when all you're doing is commuting to work, driving to the grocery, etc? Which make up 90%-plus of the "standard" usage, at least by hours. Let's face it -- in 25 years, most of us will be driving cars that are much smaller and much lighter most of the time; lugging around a genset will be a convenience we won't be able to afford.
Or, for those rare occasions when you're going to be driving 500 miles in a day, rent a small fifth-wheel add-on trailer with a fuel tank and generator set. The amount of power needed to maintain highway speeds is rather small, on the order of 10-15 horsepower. Several gallons of alcohol or a modest tank of compressed biogas can be refueled quickly during long trips. For the large majority of driving, though, you don't have to drag around the extra weight. Renting makes sense for people whose need is infrequent; if you're one of the people who have to make long-distance trips regularly, you can buy your own.
Those features can certainly deal with the "display" part of the problem, but they don't deal with the "floating" part. Both Word and Writer insist that things be attached -- to the page, to a paragraph, to a character, somewhere. They don't (and after this long, I'm inclined to say won't ever) address the underlying issue that in some types of document, strict ordering is relaxed for certain types of objects when the material is laid out on finite pages.
And after decades, I'm still waiting for Word (or LibreOffice) to add the typographic notion of a floating display: a block of image/text/whatever that has to stay together, but can automatically float to the top of the next page if there's not room at the current point of the current page, with text continuing to fill so the current page doesn't have extra white space at the bottom. It's an important feature in books and most technical reports, and the automatic bit is critical in large "living" documents that are revised regularly. Troff could manage it more than 30 years ago; LaTeX for almost as long.
What was Dijkstra's quote? "APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection." At one point, though, consider what IBM's implementation gave you that simply wasn't available elsewhere (other than Lisp, of course): stack traces, interactive symbolic debugging, self-modifying code, etc. I will never forget the numerical analysis programming assignment that was supposed to take three weeks, and writing it in one night using APL.
I admit, I still use a toy APL interpreter as a desktop calculator, that uses a bizarre mapping of ASCII characters to APL symbols so you can type things on a regular keyboard. The source code for the interpreter -- in hideously old-school C -- traces back to Ken Thompson at Bell Labs, with lots of bits added later at Berkeley, Yale, and especially Purdue.
Per the IEA's statistics for Jan 2012, Japan got about 89% of its electricity from combustible fuels, and about 7.6% from renewables (more than half of that conventional hydro). Their imports of thermal coal and liquefied natural gas were up almost 10% and 30% respectively relative to a year earlier. Overall power generation is only off 2.6% relative to a year earlier, but they're making up for the vast majority of the missing nuclear electricity by burning fossil fuels. Building out sufficient renewables is a decades-long project.
Years ago, when this kind of practice surfaced from time to time, the usual problem for the student doing the importing was that they neglected to pay a required duty/tariff on goods imported for resale. Which landed them in hot water with the federal government, who insisted on looking at their records and collecting -- or attempting to collect -- the amounts due. While that doesn't appear to be the issue in this case, I wonder if the tariffs are still in place and whether US Customers will be knocking on his door?
On the order of fifteen years ago -- perhaps longer -- people proposed ways to use a small number of multicasts, plus short duration unicasts to provide near video-on-demand service. One of them went as follows (note this only makes sense for reasonably popular content). Multicast multiple copies of the content with an X minute offset between streams. When the user connects, they connect to the stream which has started most recently and begin recording from the current point. The user also begins receiving a unicast stream the delivers the first several minutes of the content (at worst, X minutes, where X is the offset). At the appropriate point, the application switches from the unicast stream to the recorded multicast stream.
Yes, it was a kludge. And got kludgier when you wanted to add things like long pauses (longer than X minutes) without recording the entire stream. But it did reduce the total bandwidth needed to deliver popular on-demand content.
For its original mission, probably. OTOH, the B-52 will still be well-suited for its current active mission: a big slow cheap reliable bomb truck standing off outside the range of the surface-to-air missiles insurgents have, holding position for hours, loaded with smart guided munitions, providing air support for ground troops. Observer on the ground sends request to hit point A, B-52 crew loads coordinates into smart bomb and shove it out the door. Current JDAM and JSOW accuracy seems to be within about six meters; better if the ground troops can put a laser spot on the target and the munition is equipped to track it.
Your grandparents (my parents) also decided that they weren't going to watch your great-grandparents (my grandparents) die for lack of medical care because they couldn't buy insurance. Medicare and Medicaid have saved more lives and improved the quality of life for more people than the space program can ever hope to claim. The down side is that those programs, and federal tax policies, have also propped up the overpriced US medical system -- every other developed country in the world manages to get health outcomes as good or better than the US at a fraction of the price, about half on average.
It's all about the dollars. Want tax money to be available to fund more space exploration? Support single payer health insurance in the US.
In 2002, the Ohio State Board of Education ruled that teachers could introduce materials such as ID into biology classes. The Board reversed itself in 2006.
In 2004, the Dover, Pennsylvania school board required that biology teachers read a statement prepared by the board critical of evolution and suggesting Of Pandas and People as a reference. The statement was found unconstitutional in court. All eight of the board members who voted for the statement were defeated in the next election.
In 2005, the Kansas State Board of Education adopted curriculum standards that allowed ID. In the next election, four of the six members who had voted for ID adoption were defeated and the new board reversed the 2005 decision.
Also in 2005, legislation was introduced in Montana that would have made ID a part of the biology curriculum.
So, yes, ID is an issue in a variety of states outside of the South and Texas.
Gandalf and Saruman with Deep South drawls.
Once upon a time, years ago while I was in graduate school, I saw a national touring company's production of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors set in the Deep South, with Southern stereotypes for several of the characters, and all of the slapstick parts played as slapstick. Half the audience left after the first act; the rest of us were rolling in the aisles.
The technical argument against that -- separate from what the terms-of-service agreement might say -- is that to push data to your neighbor requires that you use upstream bandwidth. Your cable modem does not transmit on the frequencies that your neighbor's modem listens to. Each packet will be transmitted from your modem to the head end, queued up, then sent downstream on a different carrier frequency. For various valid reasons, upstream is a much scarcer resource than downstream.
Yes, and as the US is still heavily dependent on crude oil imports, the supply variable to look at is not global production, but global net exports -- because we can't import oil if no one is exporting. There is a long-term trend of the producing countries consuming more of their own production and exporting less. Global net exports peaked in 2005, and are down by more than 3 million barrels per day since then. The US, Europe, Japan, China and India are all oil importers, and are all bidding for a shrinking supply of the available exports.
Use more precise terms for clarity, please: we exported more finished petroleum products (diesel, gasoline, etc) than we imported. OTOH, of the finished products we consumed in the US, some 45% were still refined from imported crude oil. And some part of the finished products exported from our refineries were derived from imported crude. The US continues to be the largest crude oil importer in the world, and is heavily dependent on imported crude to provide for domestic consumption.
For me, this is the killer app. For more than 30 years, I've organized my life in a little three-ring binder filled with 8.5 x 5.5" paper. Addresses, phone numbers, to-do lists, how-tos for things I do infrequently, key paragraphs for papers that struck me while I was sitting in the park waiting for a kid, and voluminous (in total) notes including formulas, sketches of graphs, line-and-box drawings. Notes from the doctors office. I'd really like to replace it with a tablet, since the tablet can also do other things. But I've got to have good digital paper, which implies really high-res touch (for my crabbed little handwriting) and a stylus.
The Microsoft Courier with its two displays had a lot of potential. I had visions of taking notes in the right-hand pane, and flipping pages by "pushing" the current page over to the more passive left-hand pane in order to get a fresh sheet of paper while still providing access to the previous page(s).
I'm getting old enough to begin to wonder if I'll ever be able to buy what I want.
Very true, at least in part. There are currently good reasons for HR to quietly dispose of the resumes from people over about the age of 55. One is that they are part of a protected group -- so in the event of a sizable layoff, there would be a bunch of extra hoops to jump through to demonstrate that there was no discrimination against older workers. Note that the case law on this is generally that there doesn't have to be intent to discriminate, you're guilty even if it just worked out that way. Second is if your firm has health insurance benefits. Through no fault of their own, 55 is about the dividing line where degenerative diseases -- heart disease, cancer, strokes -- quit being unusual. Particularly at small firms, group premiums will increase sharply as you add older workers.
For the second item, 33 of 34 OECD countries have figured out the answer -- single-payer health financing, or heavy regulation of the insurance companies so that the system functions as a virtual single-payer system. In that situation, hiring an older worker has the same effect on the firm's payments into the health care system as hiring a young worker. As a side effect -- US governments at all levels spend a bigger share of GDP on health care than almost all of the other OECD countries; but in the US that only pays for the elderly, the poor, and government employees (including the military and their dependents), while in the other 33 they manage to provide for the entire population.
Bear in mind where you're talking about relocating to. I've written about this before. The big wind farms like these are going up on the Great Plains which have been in a depopulating spiral for decades. Groceries may be 25 miles from where you live. The nearest health care may be 50 miles away, and the nearest specialist in a particular field you need 100 miles. The school systems and other public services are collapsing. Or alternatively, you live where there are still services and drive 50-60 miles each way to work.
For the large majority of the unemployed, who haven't grown up there, it looks like tossing most of your life away for $20/hour.
Ah, that's enough for Wikipedia. Fritz Leiber's The Big Time is the novel, with the opposing sides nicknamed the Snakes and the Spiders. The short story is Try to Change the Past. The novel is available from Project Gutenberg. Copies of the short story of more dubious legality are easy enough to find online.
For more light-hearted fantasy, Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. Also The Broken Sword, which is much darker.
Can't remember either the author or title, but that's one small bit in a larger novel. Two sides battling up and down the time line. Agents are recruited in some fashion just before they die. IIRC, the bit that ends with the meteorite striking the person in the head (duplicating a .38 caliber bullet wound)
is a demonstration of just how much reality resists being changed.