Would that even be legally enforceable? A 1.6% stake in Facebook hardly gives them the right to control how Facebook sells off the remaining 98.4%.
As long as FaceBook signed the contract with that provision, it would be enforceable, even if Microsoft was buying a 0.0001% stake. The size of the stake doesn't matter. The terms of the contract do. And when there's $240 million on the table, making your company worth $15 billion, feeding your self-confidence and giving you delisions of invulnerability and infallibility... You would be surprised at the stupid shit you might agree to in such a state.
Yes, but how much do you want to bet that Microsoft has some sneaky stuff in the sale contract that prevents FaceBook from selling at a lower price without Microsoft's permission because said sale would diminish the value of Microsoft's investment?
This was more sneaky than some people think. They only had to spend $240 million to create such a stratospheric valuation that no one else would be stupid enough to buy at that price.
If people say "Facebook's the flavor of the month and it's never going to warrant a $15 billion value because the next flavor of the month will come along and steal its thunder," then Microsoft wins because Facebook can never find other investors at that valuation. That creates a cascade effect of investor avoidance, forcing Facebook's actual value down to where it's reasonable and Microsoft can snatch it up at a bargain.
If, on the other hand, people drink the Kool Aid and start pumping up the price of Facebook, Microsoft can sell out its interest at a profit.
I'm thinking the answer is the first possibility... they put Facebook's value at $15 billion to discourage others from investing in Facebook and make Facebook beholden to them.
The only thing that matters is 517 is a random sample. If it isn't sufficiently random then you can't conclude much but a random sample 517 is sufficient to draw some correlations, patterns, data, or even some conclusions depending on the data. Merely stating 517 / 21 million is not sufficient to dismiss it.
Really? Let's say you're looking at 7 characteristics of the crimes and each has 3 different possibilities. That gives you 2187 different variations. And at 2187 variations, given an even distribution among 21 million instances, you can have 9602 instances of *each* variation. Yet even if the distribution is even and the sample is sufficiently random so it produces no duplicates, prove to me that a sample of 517 events will give sufficient insight into all 2187 possibilities in a set of 21 million instances.
And saying "So you're one of those 'me hate science because I smartest' types?" or suggesting I don't understand because I haven't obtained a degree in statistics just reinforces my subject line, a partial quote of: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics."
"Since the population is constantly getting a new supply of unimprisoned young people, the crime rate has been dropping in that demographic in direct relation to the removal of lead from gasoline."
And it has nothing to do with the fact that a lot more pregnant women smoked and drank in 1973 than in 1983? It has nothing to do with advances in pre-natal care, early-childhood care, better pre-school programs, advances in anger management education, the growing Christian fundamentalism, a better economy than the 70s, and 15 other factors which could be cited as retarding influences on youth violence? No, it's lead.
How about we tie teen violence to our nation's committment to space? We can see sharp declines in both over that period. Could it be that keeping our astronauts grounded lets them spend more time going around and being a positive influence on young people, thus the lowered violent crime rate? Could the answer to be youth crime be more astronauts and less spaceships?
A fine product of the US education system I see. Stats was your major?
So, if you didn't major in Statistics, you're not allowed to distrust them? 517 was the number of cases the agency closed in a 7 year period. This was not a representative sample of all cases from all law enforcement agencies dealing with this problem. It was all cases handled by one specialized agency.
And furthermore, let's talk statistics. There are like 100 things I can do that will statistically reduce my "chance of death" by 10%. How the fuck can I reduce my chance of death? Statistically, based on ALL available data, my chance of death is 100%! All these statistics do is tell me that if I quit smoking now, my chances of dying in the next 10 years go down by 40%. Now that doesn't mean I go from a 100% chance of death to a 60% chance of death. As a man in his 30s, it means my chances of dying go down from about 15% to 9%. That 9 percent includes drunk drivers, gang bangers, suicide bombers, tainted meat, crimes of passion, poisonous snakes, chainsaw accidents, unexpected heart attacks, and 18 types of cancer that smoking doesn't much influence one way or another.
"Perhaps, but unless you can compare places with those legal features with places that don't and show there's a difference, you don't have a very impressive argument."
Yes, but finding a causal relationship between lowered crime and more people spending more time in prison is easier than finding it between lowered crime and lowered lead.
The economy in the 90s was better than in the 70s. Remember how bad inflation was under Carter? You can tie lower crime rates to a better economy (more people with jobs, more people with hope, less idle hands for the devil's work).
I'm not saying any one thing led to it. I'm just saying that you can tie a drop in crime in the 90s to a lot of things. There are more compelling theories than lead, IMO.
From the AP article: "The Federal Trade Commission has said about 3 million Americans have their identities stolen annually." And this study covers 517 cases over 7 years (2000-2006). I'm sorry, but I can't see a study of 517 cases during a period of approx. 21 million crimes providing really useful data.
Yet despite a 56% reduction in violent crime, we increased our prison population faster than we increased the national population and have a record level of people in jail. How does unleaded gas explain that?
Perhaps it's that mandatory sentencing laws for drug crimes and 3 strikes laws took a lot of violent offenders and potential violent offenders off the street, rather than less lead.
Think of it this way... these OSes are so feature-rich that there are any number of axes on which to compare them. I recently wrote up a comparison between Ubuntu 7.10 and Windows XP, based on installing them into virtual machines on my Mac and then trying to get them to play a DVD.
If Comcast thinks an "overwhelming majority" of their 25 million customers are very satisfied with their service, they'got their heads in the sand. I'll bet you most of them have gripes enough to be dissatisfied, just not enough to switch to DirecTV or Dish Network.
For example, we've got a 30+ mile per hour windstorm going. My cable's still on. Don't know how a dish would be faring. But that doesn't mean I'm happy with Comcast.
Here in Washington, we had a program guide and DVR powered by Microsoft, a little nod from Comcast to the folks in Redmond. It wasn't in use anywhere else in the country. I found it to be very buggy and annoying. If I told the DVR to tape only new episodes of "Stargate SG-1" only on Sci-Fi, only at 8, besides putting the 8 p.m. Friday showing of new episodes in the "upcoming recordings" list, it would put in that plus every one of the 6 p.m. reruns all week long. On top of that, it loved to become unresponsive while fast forwarding. It would just fast forward along, well past the point where you wanted it to stop, buffering every key press sent by the remote, until it finally decided it was done and executed all those keypresses in quick succession.
When Comcast announced we'd be getting the program guide and DVR control software the rest of the country has, I literally jumped for joy, singing "ding dong, the witch is dead", because I thought ANYTHING had to be better than the Microsoft DVR software. I was soooo wrong. Comcast's is worse. Try to set a series recording for "Top Chef" on Bravo and you get every episode... sort of like the Microsoft DVR, but with one major difference. Microsoft put the recordings in the to do list well in advance so you could remove them. With the new Comcast DVR software, it doesn't add these things until the last minute, so the next time you look at your recorded programs list, there's a bunch of crap you didn't expect and don't want. And better than the fast forward that won't stop, the new software gives me fast forward that advances 10-20 seconds and pauses. If you hit the fast forward again, it jumps up to double-speed fast forward and you overshoot whatever mark you were trying to hit.
I contacted customer service and they just said they were sorry I didn't like it, but tough.
So my options... get a dish. Wait until Verizon rolls out FIOS TV in my neighborhood (they laid the cable this summer, but are dragging their feet on FIOS installs) and see if they're better. Shell out $800 + $12.95 a month for a dual tuner HD TiVO with Cable Card. I'm currently pinning my hopes on the second option. But when Verizon gets off their asses Comcast loses my $1800 a year for cable TV and cable internet.
The only reason Comcast can delude themselves that their customers are happy is because they've been spending millions to lobby the FCC to restrict Verizon's roll-out of TV via fiber and prevent their customers from having a second terrestrial alternative. As TV over fiber rolls out, if the telecoms don't cock it up (and that's a BIG if), you could see people leaving Comcast in *droves*.
Hooray for Mona Shaw. She took civil disobedience a little too far, but God bless her. We're all having a vicarious thrill from her exploit.
TFA states: "In the global economy, innovation, technological progress and the protection of intellectual property rights are keys to U.S. competitiveness. Keeping up with the demand for patents is critical to the nation's health."
Yeah, but like so many things that are critical to the nation's health, it's not a hot button issue with the majority of voters, so it gets a little lip service, and wallows in mediocrity, getting enough funding and attention to avoid a near-term embarrassing implosion of the department, but not enough to solve its problems.
No matter. Another decade or two of bad patents being approved and we won't have to worry about the department imploding. Our economy will.
He wasn't paying $5000 for a 200-node supercomputer run. He was paying "as much as $5,000" for runs using "up to 500" processors. So, basically, he was paying ~$10 per processor, per run.
The 8-PS3 "supercomputer" is returning speeds equal to about a 200 node run. So his $3200 computer is costing the same as a $2,000 run. But the $3200 doesn't include the rack, the electricity, cooling, and other expenses to put the multi-PS3 unit together or to run it.
Still, with Amazon elastic cloud computing, you can get a 200 "computing unit" run for just short of a week 24/7 for $3200.
If he's smart... well not smart, but sensible... he's going to lay low for a little while and coast off the kudos and adrenaline this generated. Yet, if he were sensible, he wouldn't have done this, would he?
Thing about this is... Yes, it's reckless. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's endangering the lives of innocents. But the article remains a damn good read. What's done is done and it made a heck of a story.
I, for one, welcome our 40-year-old turtle overlords.
My introduction to programming was BASIC, back in 1980. By the time I encountered LOGO in a high school computer science class, it was a fun toy for about an hour, but then got old. Thinking back to that, I could conclude that LOGO is sort of lame, but for little kids who don't have the typing and language skills of middle school or high school students, I guess it's a better entry into programming than BASIC.
They're supposed to have LOGO on the OLPC XO laptop, and if I do that "buy one, donate one" thing, it will be interesting to see at which age my kid (who is now 2.5 years old) starts taking an interest in LOGO.
I don't have a car, no kids, I live alone (no neighborhood) in an abandoned gov. concrete bunker (no fire), have my own well and sewage system, so why do _I_ have to pay for your luxuries?
Schools are a public good. Educating the chldren of our nation benefits the nation as a whole in many different ways.
You're using the Internet. Taxes paid to help develop that.
You're probably depending on roads and other tax-supported infrastructure to bring you "luxuries" like toilet paper, spare parts for your computer, and just about any other good you're not manufacturing yourself.
You benefit more from taxes than you think.
As for those who cite how we funded things before income tax... The cost of public works somehow outpaces inflation like college tuition does. Based on the costs to build a simple mile of highway today, the interstate highway system we built in the 20th century would bankrupt the nation. Why is that?
In Judaism, you must bury the dead within three days.
With a rule like this, no Jew would be able to fly home in time for a funeral.
I'm sure posting this will generate rude responses from Anonymous Cowards. But it had to be said. A 72-hour hold on air travel would violate religious freedoms. OTOH, if they merely cut it down to 24 or 36 hours, it might clear that hurdle, but still cause all sorts of other problems.
Much earlier, actually. It happened when the US Congress allowed itself to collect Income Tax -- there was a pretense of ammending the Constitution, but the procedure was never properly followed.
And if you read through the page he linked, the argument that the amendment was not properly ratified has been rejected by the courts as have arguments that taxation equals slavery, that it's an unconstitutional violation of privacy, etc. No legal challenge to the federal government's right to impose an income tax upon its citizens has yet been successful, despite some pretty novel arguments.
Does that mean I like paying income tax... or sales tax... or gasoline tax... or property taxes??? No. But I do enjoy having relatively well-maintained roads and highways, a free public education for my kid, police patrolling my neighborhood, a fire department that saves many structures and lives, working water and sewer systems, a court system... and all the other things my taxes pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
Would that even be legally enforceable? A 1.6% stake in Facebook hardly gives them the right to control how Facebook sells off the remaining 98.4%.
As long as FaceBook signed the contract with that provision, it would be enforceable, even if Microsoft was buying a 0.0001% stake. The size of the stake doesn't matter. The terms of the contract do. And when there's $240 million on the table, making your company worth $15 billion, feeding your self-confidence and giving you delisions of invulnerability and infallibility... You would be surprised at the stupid shit you might agree to in such a state.
Yes, but how much do you want to bet that Microsoft has some sneaky stuff in the sale contract that prevents FaceBook from selling at a lower price without Microsoft's permission because said sale would diminish the value of Microsoft's investment?
Yeah, the guys who registered facewiki, facecatalog, facepedia, and bacefook are all sittin' pretty now!
This was more sneaky than some people think. They only had to spend $240 million to create such a stratospheric valuation that no one else would be stupid enough to buy at that price.
If people say "Facebook's the flavor of the month and it's never going to warrant a $15 billion value because the next flavor of the month will come along and steal its thunder," then Microsoft wins because Facebook can never find other investors at that valuation. That creates a cascade effect of investor avoidance, forcing Facebook's actual value down to where it's reasonable and Microsoft can snatch it up at a bargain.
If, on the other hand, people drink the Kool Aid and start pumping up the price of Facebook, Microsoft can sell out its interest at a profit.
I'm thinking the answer is the first possibility... they put Facebook's value at $15 billion to discourage others from investing in Facebook and make Facebook beholden to them.
The only thing that matters is 517 is a random sample. If it isn't sufficiently random then you can't conclude much but a random sample 517 is sufficient to draw some correlations, patterns, data, or even some conclusions depending on the data. Merely stating 517 / 21 million is not sufficient to dismiss it.
Really? Let's say you're looking at 7 characteristics of the crimes and each has 3 different possibilities. That gives you 2187 different variations. And at 2187 variations, given an even distribution among 21 million instances, you can have 9602 instances of *each* variation. Yet even if the distribution is even and the sample is sufficiently random so it produces no duplicates, prove to me that a sample of 517 events will give sufficient insight into all 2187 possibilities in a set of 21 million instances.
And saying "So you're one of those 'me hate science because I smartest' types?" or suggesting I don't understand because I haven't obtained a degree in statistics just reinforces my subject line, a partial quote of: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics."
"Since the population is constantly getting a new supply of unimprisoned young people, the crime rate has been dropping in that demographic in direct relation to the removal of lead from gasoline."
And it has nothing to do with the fact that a lot more pregnant women smoked and drank in 1973 than in 1983? It has nothing to do with advances in pre-natal care, early-childhood care, better pre-school programs, advances in anger management education, the growing Christian fundamentalism, a better economy than the 70s, and 15 other factors which could be cited as retarding influences on youth violence? No, it's lead.
How about we tie teen violence to our nation's committment to space? We can see sharp declines in both over that period. Could it be that keeping our astronauts grounded lets them spend more time going around and being a positive influence on young people, thus the lowered violent crime rate? Could the answer to be youth crime be more astronauts and less spaceships?
Sheesh.
A fine product of the US education system I see. Stats was your major?
So, if you didn't major in Statistics, you're not allowed to distrust them? 517 was the number of cases the agency closed in a 7 year period. This was not a representative sample of all cases from all law enforcement agencies dealing with this problem. It was all cases handled by one specialized agency.
And furthermore, let's talk statistics. There are like 100 things I can do that will statistically reduce my "chance of death" by 10%. How the fuck can I reduce my chance of death? Statistically, based on ALL available data, my chance of death is 100%! All these statistics do is tell me that if I quit smoking now, my chances of dying in the next 10 years go down by 40%. Now that doesn't mean I go from a 100% chance of death to a 60% chance of death. As a man in his 30s, it means my chances of dying go down from about 15% to 9%. That 9 percent includes drunk drivers, gang bangers, suicide bombers, tainted meat, crimes of passion, poisonous snakes, chainsaw accidents, unexpected heart attacks, and 18 types of cancer that smoking doesn't much influence one way or another.
"Perhaps, but unless you can compare places with those legal features with places that don't and show there's a difference, you don't have a very impressive argument."
Yes, but finding a causal relationship between lowered crime and more people spending more time in prison is easier than finding it between lowered crime and lowered lead.
The economy in the 90s was better than in the 70s. Remember how bad inflation was under Carter? You can tie lower crime rates to a better economy (more people with jobs, more people with hope, less idle hands for the devil's work).
I'm not saying any one thing led to it. I'm just saying that you can tie a drop in crime in the 90s to a lot of things. There are more compelling theories than lead, IMO.
From the AP article: "The Federal Trade Commission has said about 3 million Americans have their identities stolen annually." And this study covers 517 cases over 7 years (2000-2006). I'm sorry, but I can't see a study of 517 cases during a period of approx. 21 million crimes providing really useful data.
Vista won't play DVD's (decode MPEG2) out of the box. Actually, two versions of Vista (Home Premium and Ultimate) bundle DVD decoders.
But Ubuntu wont play DVDs out of the box either. The task was to see how quickly and easily Ubuntu and XP could each be made DVD capable.
Yet despite a 56% reduction in violent crime, we increased our prison population faster than we increased the national population and have a record level of people in jail. How does unleaded gas explain that?
Perhaps it's that mandatory sentencing laws for drug crimes and 3 strikes laws took a lot of violent offenders and potential violent offenders off the street, rather than less lead.
Think of it this way... these OSes are so feature-rich that there are any number of axes on which to compare them. I recently wrote up a comparison between Ubuntu 7.10 and Windows XP, based on installing them into virtual machines on my Mac and then trying to get them to play a DVD.
If Comcast thinks an "overwhelming majority" of their 25 million customers are very satisfied with their service, they'got their heads in the sand. I'll bet you most of them have gripes enough to be dissatisfied, just not enough to switch to DirecTV or Dish Network.
For example, we've got a 30+ mile per hour windstorm going. My cable's still on. Don't know how a dish would be faring. But that doesn't mean I'm happy with Comcast.
Here in Washington, we had a program guide and DVR powered by Microsoft, a little nod from Comcast to the folks in Redmond. It wasn't in use anywhere else in the country. I found it to be very buggy and annoying. If I told the DVR to tape only new episodes of "Stargate SG-1" only on Sci-Fi, only at 8, besides putting the 8 p.m. Friday showing of new episodes in the "upcoming recordings" list, it would put in that plus every one of the 6 p.m. reruns all week long. On top of that, it loved to become unresponsive while fast forwarding. It would just fast forward along, well past the point where you wanted it to stop, buffering every key press sent by the remote, until it finally decided it was done and executed all those keypresses in quick succession.
When Comcast announced we'd be getting the program guide and DVR control software the rest of the country has, I literally jumped for joy, singing "ding dong, the witch is dead", because I thought ANYTHING had to be better than the Microsoft DVR software. I was soooo wrong. Comcast's is worse. Try to set a series recording for "Top Chef" on Bravo and you get every episode... sort of like the Microsoft DVR, but with one major difference. Microsoft put the recordings in the to do list well in advance so you could remove them. With the new Comcast DVR software, it doesn't add these things until the last minute, so the next time you look at your recorded programs list, there's a bunch of crap you didn't expect and don't want. And better than the fast forward that won't stop, the new software gives me fast forward that advances 10-20 seconds and pauses. If you hit the fast forward again, it jumps up to double-speed fast forward and you overshoot whatever mark you were trying to hit.
I contacted customer service and they just said they were sorry I didn't like it, but tough.
So my options... get a dish. Wait until Verizon rolls out FIOS TV in my neighborhood (they laid the cable this summer, but are dragging their feet on FIOS installs) and see if they're better. Shell out $800 + $12.95 a month for a dual tuner HD TiVO with Cable Card. I'm currently pinning my hopes on the second option. But when Verizon gets off their asses Comcast loses my $1800 a year for cable TV and cable internet.
The only reason Comcast can delude themselves that their customers are happy is because they've been spending millions to lobby the FCC to restrict Verizon's roll-out of TV via fiber and prevent their customers from having a second terrestrial alternative. As TV over fiber rolls out, if the telecoms don't cock it up (and that's a BIG if), you could see people leaving Comcast in *droves*.
Hooray for Mona Shaw. She took civil disobedience a little too far, but God bless her. We're all having a vicarious thrill from her exploit.
TFA states: "In the global economy, innovation, technological progress and the protection of intellectual property rights are keys to U.S. competitiveness. Keeping up with the demand for patents is critical to the nation's health."
Yeah, but like so many things that are critical to the nation's health, it's not a hot button issue with the majority of voters, so it gets a little lip service, and wallows in mediocrity, getting enough funding and attention to avoid a near-term embarrassing implosion of the department, but not enough to solve its problems.
No matter. Another decade or two of bad patents being approved and we won't have to worry about the department imploding. Our economy will.
- Greg
He wasn't paying $5000 for a 200-node supercomputer run. He was paying "as much as $5,000" for runs using "up to 500" processors. So, basically, he was paying ~$10 per processor, per run.
The 8-PS3 "supercomputer" is returning speeds equal to about a 200 node run. So his $3200 computer is costing the same as a $2,000 run. But the $3200 doesn't include the rack, the electricity, cooling, and other expenses to put the multi-PS3 unit together or to run it.
Still, with Amazon elastic cloud computing, you can get a 200 "computing unit" run for just short of a week 24/7 for $3200.
If he's smart... well not smart, but sensible... he's going to lay low for a little while and coast off the kudos and adrenaline this generated. Yet, if he were sensible, he wouldn't have done this, would he?
Thing about this is... Yes, it's reckless. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's endangering the lives of innocents. But the article remains a damn good read. What's done is done and it made a heck of a story.
- G
Isn't it a little odd that if you strip off the first and last digits of the number "16,400", it's 640, as in 'no one needs more than 640k"?
He only did the surface optimization. Missed keywords and description in the headers, didn't bold enough stuff, and didn't use H1 and H2 enough. :-)
I, for one, welcome our 40-year-old turtle overlords.
My introduction to programming was BASIC, back in 1980. By the time I encountered LOGO in a high school computer science class, it was a fun toy for about an hour, but then got old. Thinking back to that, I could conclude that LOGO is sort of lame, but for little kids who don't have the typing and language skills of middle school or high school students, I guess it's a better entry into programming than BASIC.
They're supposed to have LOGO on the OLPC XO laptop, and if I do that "buy one, donate one" thing, it will be interesting to see at which age my kid (who is now 2.5 years old) starts taking an interest in LOGO.
I don't have a car, no kids, I live alone (no neighborhood) in an abandoned gov. concrete bunker (no fire), have my own well and sewage system, so why do _I_ have to pay for your luxuries?
Schools are a public good. Educating the chldren of our nation benefits the nation as a whole in many different ways.
You're using the Internet. Taxes paid to help develop that.
You're probably depending on roads and other tax-supported infrastructure to bring you "luxuries" like toilet paper, spare parts for your computer, and just about any other good you're not manufacturing yourself.
You benefit more from taxes than you think.
As for those who cite how we funded things before income tax... The cost of public works somehow outpaces inflation like college tuition does. Based on the costs to build a simple mile of highway today, the interstate highway system we built in the 20th century would bankrupt the nation. Why is that?
In Judaism, you must bury the dead within three days.
With a rule like this, no Jew would be able to fly home in time for a funeral.
I'm sure posting this will generate rude responses from Anonymous Cowards. But it had to be said. A 72-hour hold on air travel would violate religious freedoms. OTOH, if they merely cut it down to 24 or 36 hours, it might clear that hurdle, but still cause all sorts of other problems.
Much earlier, actually. It happened when the US Congress allowed itself to collect Income Tax -- there was a pretense of ammending the Constitution, but the procedure was never properly followed.
And if you read through the page he linked, the argument that the amendment was not properly ratified has been rejected by the courts as have arguments that taxation equals slavery, that it's an unconstitutional violation of privacy, etc. No legal challenge to the federal government's right to impose an income tax upon its citizens has yet been successful, despite some pretty novel arguments.
Does that mean I like paying income tax... or sales tax... or gasoline tax... or property taxes??? No. But I do enjoy having relatively well-maintained roads and highways, a free public education for my kid, police patrolling my neighborhood, a fire department that saves many structures and lives, working water and sewer systems, a court system... and all the other things my taxes pay for.
They also both intersect 5th avenue--the very same road as the Scifi Museum!!
And the Paramount Theater is on Pine street... while the Star Trek movies are made by Paramount Studios.
This is getting spooky.
- Greg
Two streets that run parallel to each other in downtown Seattle. Coincidence???
Don't a handful of the Toho rubber-suit-monster movies start with a Japanese space launch getting the attention of unfriendly aliens?