Luckily their economy is starting to collapse. They'll be back to rice farming soon enough. Oh wait, what about that heavy metal contamination? Its actually worse than you think...
nah, they can transition to other things pretty easily. Cows, for example.
Anyone who's ever hung out with cows on da farm knows they're not exactly rocket scientists. Buffalo would repopulate the plains without humans in the way, but I'm not seeing a bright future for cows, corn, or chickens without people. Pigs, yeah pigs would probably do pretty well without us.
Eh. Standard/. car analogy: My daily driver could theoretically be a indy 500 pace car. indy500 cars are cool because they're high tech and high performance and all that. My daily driver is cool because it hauls me thru stop and go rush hour traffic with perfect reliability for 13 years now from 110 above to 20 below. I bet it would be fun as heck to drive my car as an indy 500 pace car. But I'm not impressed by mere numerology that there exists a spot on the speedometer below my redline and above their 1st gear idle RPM or that you can take a picture of my car in front of their car.... thats the part of the "eh" I'm talking about.
Thats a staged photo. Its not how it appears. Breitling uses L-39Cs, which are cool little planes. But, they're 40 feet long.
The aircraft is about 2.5 Rossy length units long. The L-39 is 40 feet long. So, if the aircraft and Rossy were equidistant from the camera, that would imply Rossy is 16 feet tall, which would imply he would make a hell of a lot more money playing pro basketball than flying his jet. Not that he couldn't do both. I'm just pointing out its staged. I would guess the photography plane is about 100 feet from the L39s and about 40 feet from Rossy? I would estimate the two planes are roughly "wingtip to wingtip" which is quite a bit closer to each other than they are to Rossy.
The other thing I don't get is the L-39C stalls right around 100 knots, from memory (you can fly it in x-plane flight simulator, but I haven't done so in probably 3 years). supposedly when Rossy floors it, he tops out around 180 knots. So... I'm unimpressed than a plane that mins out at 100 kts can formation fly with a "plane" that maxes out at 180.
You would think if any phone in the world had "Precedence dialing" ABCD buttons, it would be the govt phones, but they dont. Of course the govt types would rely on security thru obscurity and therefore all their passwords would be "A"
Doesn't the relative failure of LiveCode and SuperCard in the market show its a non-starter?
Also I have no interest in developing for a proprietary language. Having one company in control of the lang and its distribution is just obsolete. So bye bye.
Or I've missed something, apart from the fact that if groupon didnt exist I wouldn't have heard about the retailer in the first place...
you missed that americans are trained not to barter except in automobile and real estate transactions... where most of them are not good at bartering, can't blame them for lack of experience, I guess.
You've described the "Kohls department store" retail model. A quarter of the store is 75% off all the time. If you happen to be there and see something you could use and its on sale that week, how wonderful for you. If you needed socks today, and they're full price, sucks to be you, hope you enjoy paying $40 for a pack of socks. Its high risk shopping. I hate going there. You'd think I could argue with the cashier and management to just get 25% off everything all the time, in fact get rid of the whole concept of retail vs sale price, but that's just not done here.
groupon is just doing the bartering for you, online, as a "shoppers union" negotiated contract, essentially. Or at least thats what they're trying to do, as they slowly march themselves lemming like off the cliffs.
The *overall* average/aggregate stock prices for a particular economy may be affected quite a bit by government policies, but 1) the effect is not so large as you claimed, and
You must be looking at hyper-short term, like hour to hour, or even medium term like years.
You can't seriously claim that:
Going from a funds rate around 20% in the early 80s to 0% now does not have a large effect?
"Cash for clunkers" had no effect on sales/profit?
The repeal of Glass-Steagall had a not-so-large effect on the banking industry?
Where I live, groupon only offers services at a discount of marked up price. So, the going rate for a non-X rated short massage is $25 and we'll mark it up to $100 and offer it via groupon at half off only $50. ditto car detailing at half their normal $60/hour rates, landscape services where they pay the illegal $5 cash after mowing the lawn and charging you $80 but now only half price, etc. Does anyone get actual "stuff" from groupon deals, like walk away with a physical object?
A better analogy, would be if you buy shares in the groupon ipo, in a market where "ten bucks per trade" is a good starting point for a commission, instead of charging $100/trade we'll let you buy at 50% off only $50 per trade. Whata deal!
There is nothing on the horizon for them that can pump up the price short of people (new suckers) thinking they'll get to flip it to someone else. This is very much like a ponzi scheme.
No, it is very much like an improperly identified, yet accurate, well summarized, well written, and fairly elegant one line description of the endgame of "greater fool theory".
If you have an editor account on wiki, you could probably cut and paste your one liner into that article as a description of conditions at the end stages of a GFT operation.
GFT is the most profitable investment strategy during a bubble. During the second great depression? Not so good. I guess we'll all see how it turns out.
They have admitted in their filings that they are using the float from both the income from new sales, as well as the hold-backs on the money they owe merchants (they can take 3 to 4 months to pay out) to support their business.
Dude that is every manufacturing plant that has operated in the last century, or at least post-first-great-depression, not a scam at all. See "net 30 account" etc. Also see restaurants, retail stores, some warehouse operations, darn near any business involving "move this here, in exchange for this money, eventually".
Now if you lie about it, and put that debt down as a cash asset on the balance sheet, or if you play games to avoid placing it on the cashflow statement, that is financial fraud. If you violate your contractual "net 30" account terms, there are all kinds of civil law violations. There are also ways to get in trouble with the IRS if you are obfuscating who's paying who how much interest (or imputed income from not paying whats actually owed, etc)
They don't have any profits once they pay their sales reps and the merchants they owe money to
Being stupid or a failure isn't a crime, or frankly even all that unusual.
they've also failed to put aside the money from unused groupons - most consumers don't know that in many states they can claim a refund from groupon up to 5 years later for unused tickets.
"manufacturers coupons" have been tired old case law since coupons became "cool" in the great depression. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on coupon law, and I'm guessing you aren't either. I can assure you that at least 20 years ago in the grocery business we did not keep 5 years of cash reserves equal in value to every coupon we printed for the previous 5 years. If you think about it, at a couple percent off for a fraction of the store per week, that coupon fund would end up being some multiple of the balance sheet of the entire corporation and most of the plants feeding us.
I do agree fully that they're running themselves into the ground and offer little value other than (quickly disappearing) hype. I disagree that a standard commercial "net 30" account, or offering manufacturers coupons is somehow a scandal or moral crisis or a corporate secret or a legal problem, or even something new or unusual.
no. it means you pay out the early suckers with new suckers money. that is the definition of a ponzi scheme. when you run out of new suckers the whole thing breaks down.
Yeah, but that's exactly what they're not doing. The way you run a ponzi in an IPO situation is you IPO, take the money, pay it out as dividends, stock price goes up, sell more stock at high price, pay the money out as more dividends, repeat repeat repeat until the last step is instead of paying out the stock sale as dividends, you run to Argentina or whatever is trendy now a days. Think Mr Madoff except his escape didn't quite work out, or obviously, historically, Mr Ponzi himself. That's not even remotely what is happening at groupon.
You can run the cashflow p/l and balance sheet of a company into the ground perfectly effectively without running a ponzi. Its not like a ponzi scheme is the only way to destroy a company, or to commit fraud.
Now would you agree with a whole bunch of published journalists, and myself, that in my/our opinion it appears they are either committing financial fraud or at very best are just barely on the legal side of being prosecuted? That I think we could agree on?
The situation is analogous to "begs the question". "begs the question" has a technical very specific philosophical meaning but in modern prose it almost exclusively means "Insert wordy semi-scholastic filler phrase here". Also see "price point" instead of "price", etc etc. Hell, see "etc" too.
In modern American speech, "ponzi scheme" is a semi-scholastic phrase meaning "it sucks" or "I don't like it" or "they're crooks". It does have a real technical meaning and describes a criminal activity which has nothing at all to do with your explanation in any form. Ironically (irony is another often re-imagined word) their sales/finance strategy is vaguely ponzi like, in the sense that all corporate sales/finance strategies are when they reinvest any profits in the company, but not really, not in a criminal sense anyway, and certainly not in the market explanation you provided.
I can't think of a way to run a ponzi in/over/with a market like you describe... maybe a boiler room operation cooperating with false price quotes could pull it off?
Note that I'm not defending them; they appear based on lots of journalist stories to have published fraudulent financial data. That would make them frauds, not ponzi operators. I'm just saying it does no one on either side, any good, to describe a bank robber as a kidnapper, or describe a horse thief as a murderer.
Share price is a function of revenues. Cash flow and profitability determine stock price.
Companies that do little to generate cash and profits don't deserve a high share price. Did the dot com boom teach us nothing?
Stock price is a function of supply and demand by short term speculators. To some extent its centrally controlled; look at the "constant" demand by 401K retirement purchases for the past few decades, and when those purchases turn into sales due to retirement/death/perma-un(der)employment, look out below... There is some impact by corruption, mostly insider trading, but also industry wide a lot of front running.
Stock value is a mathematical function of net present value of future dividend income, and the worth of the corporate balance sheet divided by the number of shares with corrections for market friction both up and down. Both are obviously centrally controlled; an example is federal interest rates in comparative NPV calcs and federal control of inflation vs the ROI of historical corporate investments; but indirectly there are the effects of regulation purchased by the corporation from lawmakers, and effects from taxation, for example a dollar of dividend income is worth less than a dollar on the balance sheet to a 401K investor due to cap gains vs dividend income tax laws. Management has a slight impact on stock value, but the prevalence in group think and herd behavior means they all pretty much do the same thing, so they're not too important. Corruption has a huge impact on value, most corporate accounting numbers are on the edge of legality, the huge impact of government control of businesses is controlled by comparatively small bribes (both legal and illegal) to govt officials. Corruption is a much bigger problem for stock values than stock prices.
On average, if you buy at a price lower than the value, you come out ahead, and vice versa, just like price vs value of real estate or beanie babies or ham radio gear or anything else. However there is an old saying about the market having the ability to be insane longer than you have the ability to remain solvent, so look out... Also both price and value are almost completely centrally controlled with little impact from "market forces" so they are to some extent a proxy for how much the individual investor / speculator trusts corporate owned politicians.
Not a wiki cut and paste, all my own words except my attempt at recalling the "ability to remain solvent" quote.
By that logic do you even need anything radioactive in your dirty bomb? Just CLAIM it contained plutonium and you'll generate the necessary paranoia. Anyone trying to tell people that there was nothing there is just trying to cover it all up.
Too many journalists with beta/gamma geiger counters... need the clicky clicky.
An alpha emitter would probably kill more people (most of the worst of the bone seeker isotopes are alpha emitters) but without the clicky clicky, you get no reporters reporters, so...
Also if you're going to go fake, anyone with a cheap counter can blow the lid on a dirty bomb, but only a couple labs in the country can verify talcum foot powder is not actually anthrax. Thats why the "anthrax letter scare of 2002", or whatever it was, was the "anthrax letter scare of 2002", not the "Cobalt 60 scare of 2002".
damn good point. i wonder why this hasn't happened yet?
Because there isn't a "real" threat. Only false flag operations and the occasional mentally ill shoe bomber. The "threat" is the population not being scared into submission. The war on terror is the solution.
Right on man, but the problem with a switcher in a gadget like this, is they're pretty temp stable, being fed from a vaguely stable voltage, feeding a stable constant current... there is going to be a strong extremely stable and repetitive "switcher noise" component in your random noise output unless you're really careful.
Going to a far extreme, if the switcher "signal" to noise "noise" ratio is high enough, you may as well skip the input stage and just go pure software and run a hash.
I suppose you could do something tricky, like low-pass the heck out of the switcher, and make the output a high pass and/or make your sampler only look at very high freq noise levels. Or, fine, the switcher is noisy, so you sample at the same instant of the switcher cycle each time... The CMRR of an opamp or a linear reg is pretty good, so you could boost to 12 volts and then linear reg the noisy 12 down to a pristine 8 volts or so.
The analysis to prove what level of switcher noise is acceptable is not obviously apparent to me. Almost certainly a switcher is clean enough, but how do you know? The experiment to prove it out is going to be weird; easy to set up, just push in a clean external voltage, but analyzing the output to prove randomness level changes with power supply noise input is hard.
claims to be exploiting quantum effects in the P-N junctions to be a true RNG
Thats a wee bit of the wordy mumbo jumbo, like talking about the "maxwellian equation emitter controlled by polarization rotation human interface unit" I'm using to read this, instead of calling it a freaking monitor. Just call it a zener diode and be done with it. The Zener story is bizarre and this doesn't help. Clarence M. Zener came up with the theory for his diodes in the 30s, although they couldn't be built until the 50s when they thought it would be cool to name the diode after him, or maybe his physics equation, or both. Strange but true fact is that a "zener" diode operating below 5 volts uses the actual physics Zener effect and a "zener" diode operating above 5 volts uses the physics avalanche effect, which the Entropy Key claims to use.
Note that USB does not provide more than 5 volts and a reasonable current limiter means its gonna be operating well into zener-land.
So, A dude named Zener, invented Zener physics, leading to the theory of zener diodes, then someone else built one 20 years later and named it after him, and the key markets itself as using the closely related avalanche effect, but because only 5 volts is available without some sort of voltage multiplier or boost switching regulator, its probably actually using the low voltage Zener effect, regardless of the effect, devices using avalanche or zener effect are always marketed as zener diodes commercially, so I'm sure there is a Zener on the board. Which doesn't matter in the end, because zener noise is just as good as avalanche noise for crypto, as far as I know. In fact zener is probably better, less temperature dependence. Talk about abuse of proper nouns and trademarks... kinda like my Xerox machine at home was manufactured by Brother.
This stuff is all from memory, I hope I didn't swap Zener and Avalanche effects, although either way its still a heck of a story.
'Sussman's Ottawa lab uses a pulse of laser light that lasts a few trillionths of a second. His team shines it at a diamond. The light goes in and comes out again, but along the way, it changes.... It is changed because it has interacted with quantum vacuum fluctuations, the microscopic flickering of the amount of energy in a point in space.... What happens to the light is unknown — and unknowable.
Sounds very much like xray crystallography which discovers all kinds of interesting things about the crystalline matrix.
Would be hilarious if they discover via non-random results there is, after all, some inherent crystaline like order to the quantum vacuum. Or even funnier if they knew it all along, and some TLA agency paid them to try and pass it off as random, cloaked in a lot of new age zero point energy stuff.
Well, somebody is selling those things, so I guess it could be much worse. I suppose if it happened at a church hackerspace, if such a thing exists...
Worse would be getting the machine owner in big trouble, like making plastic automatic knives aka switchblades, or rifle receivers or single use short barreled plastic 12 gauge shortguns or any number of things the BATFE demands licensing and fees. Even just endless streams of pirated trademarked copyrighted mickey mouse gear would be a problem.
WTF? I'm not invisible when I'm on call at 2am. Doesn't even make sense. By that logic when I'm on call I should just shut off the ringer and get a good nights sleep, after all, supposedly that's invisible.
You say chain them together, like 1 ms after backing up, you start wiping. I say, how long can you wait with the images and hardware in storage before wiping?
At least back them all up, then wipe them all in two separate processes? Whatever you do, don't manually start one process after the other because at least 1% of the time (several machines, in your case) you'll accidentally start wipe before backup. At least that'll compress pretty well if you're wiping with zeros.
Wiping is faster and "what if" the images are somehow bad or corrupt or otherwise need access to the hardware (like, whoops, we tossed out the software license hardware dongle, best find it).
I agree the OP had a workable solution under ideal conditions. Good engineering is figuring out the failure modes in non-ideal conditions. That's the big missing part in the OPs post. This is one of those situations much like safety engineering, where by far the easiest part is handling the "everything's working perfect" scenario and the hard part is figuring out the failure modes exist, and how to handle them.
Unless you have a Lot Of Time to Test this BEFORE HAND, you could easily end up with an automated screw-up-the-back-up and nuke-everything system
This might be the best (only?) justification for buying non-free beer non-free freedom software I've ever seen, because you can intentionally buy the cheapest cruddiest non-working commercial software out there, then when all the data is lost, you don't have to maintain, backup, search, restore and otherwise admin the images for eternity minus a day, and you can blame the commercial software provider instead of yourself... Everyone, especially in management, knows commercial software just doesn't work sometimes and its no ones fault. Heck you could just skip actually imaging and wiping the drives, blame the software, and spend the new spare time playing skyrim.... Hmmm.... I think we're on to something here.
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Luckily their economy is starting to collapse. They'll be back to rice farming soon enough. Oh wait, what about that heavy metal contamination? Its actually worse than you think...
nah, they can transition to other things pretty easily. Cows, for example.
Anyone who's ever hung out with cows on da farm knows they're not exactly rocket scientists. Buffalo would repopulate the plains without humans in the way, but I'm not seeing a bright future for cows, corn, or chickens without people. Pigs, yeah pigs would probably do pretty well without us.
Eh. Standard /. car analogy: My daily driver could theoretically be a indy 500 pace car. indy500 cars are cool because they're high tech and high performance and all that. My daily driver is cool because it hauls me thru stop and go rush hour traffic with perfect reliability for 13 years now from 110 above to 20 below. I bet it would be fun as heck to drive my car as an indy 500 pace car. But I'm not impressed by mere numerology that there exists a spot on the speedometer below my redline and above their 1st gear idle RPM or that you can take a picture of my car in front of their car .... thats the part of the "eh" I'm talking about.
Thats a staged photo. Its not how it appears. Breitling uses L-39Cs, which are cool little planes. But, they're 40 feet long.
The aircraft is about 2.5 Rossy length units long. The L-39 is 40 feet long. So, if the aircraft and Rossy were equidistant from the camera, that would imply Rossy is 16 feet tall, which would imply he would make a hell of a lot more money playing pro basketball than flying his jet. Not that he couldn't do both. I'm just pointing out its staged. I would guess the photography plane is about 100 feet from the L39s and about 40 feet from Rossy? I would estimate the two planes are roughly "wingtip to wingtip" which is quite a bit closer to each other than they are to Rossy.
The other thing I don't get is the L-39C stalls right around 100 knots, from memory (you can fly it in x-plane flight simulator, but I haven't done so in probably 3 years). supposedly when Rossy floors it, he tops out around 180 knots. So ... I'm unimpressed than a plane that mins out at 100 kts can formation fly with a "plane" that maxes out at 180.
You would think if any phone in the world had "Precedence dialing" ABCD buttons, it would be the govt phones, but they dont. Of course the govt types would rely on security thru obscurity and therefore all their passwords would be "A"
Doesn't the relative failure of LiveCode and SuperCard in the market show its a non-starter?
Also I have no interest in developing for a proprietary language. Having one company in control of the lang and its distribution is just obsolete. So bye bye.
Or I've missed something, apart from the fact that if groupon didnt exist I wouldn't have heard about the retailer in the first place...
you missed that americans are trained not to barter except in automobile and real estate transactions... where most of them are not good at bartering, can't blame them for lack of experience, I guess.
You've described the "Kohls department store" retail model. A quarter of the store is 75% off all the time. If you happen to be there and see something you could use and its on sale that week, how wonderful for you. If you needed socks today, and they're full price, sucks to be you, hope you enjoy paying $40 for a pack of socks. Its high risk shopping. I hate going there. You'd think I could argue with the cashier and management to just get 25% off everything all the time, in fact get rid of the whole concept of retail vs sale price, but that's just not done here.
groupon is just doing the bartering for you, online, as a "shoppers union" negotiated contract, essentially. Or at least thats what they're trying to do, as they slowly march themselves lemming like off the cliffs.
The *overall* average/aggregate stock prices for a particular economy may be affected quite a bit by government policies, but
1) the effect is not so large as you claimed, and
You must be looking at hyper-short term, like hour to hour, or even medium term like years.
You can't seriously claim that:
Going from a funds rate around 20% in the early 80s to 0% now does not have a large effect?
"Cash for clunkers" had no effect on sales/profit?
The repeal of Glass-Steagall had a not-so-large effect on the banking industry?
OSHA/EPA had no effect on plant profitability?
LOL....
Where I live, groupon only offers services at a discount of marked up price. So, the going rate for a non-X rated short massage is $25 and we'll mark it up to $100 and offer it via groupon at half off only $50. ditto car detailing at half their normal $60/hour rates, landscape services where they pay the illegal $5 cash after mowing the lawn and charging you $80 but now only half price, etc. Does anyone get actual "stuff" from groupon deals, like walk away with a physical object?
A better analogy, would be if you buy shares in the groupon ipo, in a market where "ten bucks per trade" is a good starting point for a commission, instead of charging $100/trade we'll let you buy at 50% off only $50 per trade. Whata deal!
There is nothing on the horizon for them that can pump up the price short of people (new suckers) thinking they'll get to flip it to someone else. This is very much like a ponzi scheme.
No, it is very much like an improperly identified, yet accurate, well summarized, well written, and fairly elegant one line description of the endgame of "greater fool theory".
The wikipedia article isn't that great, but:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
If you have an editor account on wiki, you could probably cut and paste your one liner into that article as a description of conditions at the end stages of a GFT operation.
GFT is the most profitable investment strategy during a bubble. During the second great depression? Not so good. I guess we'll all see how it turns out.
They have admitted in their filings that they are using the float from both the income from new sales, as well as the hold-backs on the money they owe merchants (they can take 3 to 4 months to pay out) to support their business.
Dude that is every manufacturing plant that has operated in the last century, or at least post-first-great-depression, not a scam at all. See "net 30 account" etc. Also see restaurants, retail stores, some warehouse operations, darn near any business involving "move this here, in exchange for this money, eventually".
Now if you lie about it, and put that debt down as a cash asset on the balance sheet, or if you play games to avoid placing it on the cashflow statement, that is financial fraud.
If you violate your contractual "net 30" account terms, there are all kinds of civil law violations.
There are also ways to get in trouble with the IRS if you are obfuscating who's paying who how much interest (or imputed income from not paying whats actually owed, etc)
They don't have any profits once they pay their sales reps and the merchants they owe money to
Being stupid or a failure isn't a crime, or frankly even all that unusual.
they've also failed to put aside the money from unused groupons - most consumers don't know that in many states they can claim a refund from groupon up to 5 years later for unused tickets.
"manufacturers coupons" have been tired old case law since coupons became "cool" in the great depression. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on coupon law, and I'm guessing you aren't either. I can assure you that at least 20 years ago in the grocery business we did not keep 5 years of cash reserves equal in value to every coupon we printed for the previous 5 years. If you think about it, at a couple percent off for a fraction of the store per week, that coupon fund would end up being some multiple of the balance sheet of the entire corporation and most of the plants feeding us.
I do agree fully that they're running themselves into the ground and offer little value other than (quickly disappearing) hype. I disagree that a standard commercial "net 30" account, or offering manufacturers coupons is somehow a scandal or moral crisis or a corporate secret or a legal problem, or even something new or unusual.
no. it means you pay out the early suckers with new suckers money. that is the definition of a ponzi scheme. when you run out of new suckers the whole thing breaks down.
Yeah, but that's exactly what they're not doing. The way you run a ponzi in an IPO situation is you IPO, take the money, pay it out as dividends, stock price goes up, sell more stock at high price, pay the money out as more dividends, repeat repeat repeat until the last step is instead of paying out the stock sale as dividends, you run to Argentina or whatever is trendy now a days. Think Mr Madoff except his escape didn't quite work out, or obviously, historically, Mr Ponzi himself. That's not even remotely what is happening at groupon.
You can run the cashflow p/l and balance sheet of a company into the ground perfectly effectively without running a ponzi. Its not like a ponzi scheme is the only way to destroy a company, or to commit fraud.
Now would you agree with a whole bunch of published journalists, and myself, that in my/our opinion it appears they are either committing financial fraud or at very best are just barely on the legal side of being prosecuted? That I think we could agree on?
it's basically a ponzi scheme.
Nope, not even close.
The situation is analogous to "begs the question". "begs the question" has a technical very specific philosophical meaning but in modern prose it almost exclusively means "Insert wordy semi-scholastic filler phrase here". Also see "price point" instead of "price", etc etc. Hell, see "etc" too.
In modern American speech, "ponzi scheme" is a semi-scholastic phrase meaning "it sucks" or "I don't like it" or "they're crooks". It does have a real technical meaning and describes a criminal activity which has nothing at all to do with your explanation in any form. Ironically (irony is another often re-imagined word) their sales/finance strategy is vaguely ponzi like, in the sense that all corporate sales/finance strategies are when they reinvest any profits in the company, but not really, not in a criminal sense anyway, and certainly not in the market explanation you provided.
I can't think of a way to run a ponzi in/over/with a market like you describe... maybe a boiler room operation cooperating with false price quotes could pull it off?
Note that I'm not defending them; they appear based on lots of journalist stories to have published fraudulent financial data. That would make them frauds, not ponzi operators. I'm just saying it does no one on either side, any good, to describe a bank robber as a kidnapper, or describe a horse thief as a murderer.
Share price is a function of revenues. Cash flow and profitability determine stock price.
Companies that do little to generate cash and profits don't deserve a high share price. Did the dot com boom teach us nothing?
Stock price is a function of supply and demand by short term speculators. To some extent its centrally controlled; look at the "constant" demand by 401K retirement purchases for the past few decades, and when those purchases turn into sales due to retirement/death/perma-un(der)employment, look out below... There is some impact by corruption, mostly insider trading, but also industry wide a lot of front running.
Stock value is a mathematical function of net present value of future dividend income, and the worth of the corporate balance sheet divided by the number of shares with corrections for market friction both up and down. Both are obviously centrally controlled; an example is federal interest rates in comparative NPV calcs and federal control of inflation vs the ROI of historical corporate investments; but indirectly there are the effects of regulation purchased by the corporation from lawmakers, and effects from taxation, for example a dollar of dividend income is worth less than a dollar on the balance sheet to a 401K investor due to cap gains vs dividend income tax laws. Management has a slight impact on stock value, but the prevalence in group think and herd behavior means they all pretty much do the same thing, so they're not too important. Corruption has a huge impact on value, most corporate accounting numbers are on the edge of legality, the huge impact of government control of businesses is controlled by comparatively small bribes (both legal and illegal) to govt officials. Corruption is a much bigger problem for stock values than stock prices.
On average, if you buy at a price lower than the value, you come out ahead, and vice versa, just like price vs value of real estate or beanie babies or ham radio gear or anything else. However there is an old saying about the market having the ability to be insane longer than you have the ability to remain solvent, so look out... Also both price and value are almost completely centrally controlled with little impact from "market forces" so they are to some extent a proxy for how much the individual investor / speculator trusts corporate owned politicians.
Not a wiki cut and paste, all my own words except my attempt at recalling the "ability to remain solvent" quote.
By that logic do you even need anything radioactive in your dirty bomb? Just CLAIM it contained plutonium and you'll generate the necessary paranoia. Anyone trying to tell people that there was nothing there is just trying to cover it all up.
Too many journalists with beta/gamma geiger counters... need the clicky clicky.
An alpha emitter would probably kill more people (most of the worst of the bone seeker isotopes are alpha emitters) but without the clicky clicky, you get no reporters reporters, so...
Also if you're going to go fake, anyone with a cheap counter can blow the lid on a dirty bomb, but only a couple labs in the country can verify talcum foot powder is not actually anthrax. Thats why the "anthrax letter scare of 2002", or whatever it was, was the "anthrax letter scare of 2002", not the "Cobalt 60 scare of 2002".
damn good point. i wonder why this hasn't happened yet?
Because there isn't a "real" threat. Only false flag operations and the occasional mentally ill shoe bomber. The "threat" is the population not being scared into submission. The war on terror is the solution.
Right on man, but the problem with a switcher in a gadget like this, is they're pretty temp stable, being fed from a vaguely stable voltage, feeding a stable constant current... there is going to be a strong extremely stable and repetitive "switcher noise" component in your random noise output unless you're really careful.
Going to a far extreme, if the switcher "signal" to noise "noise" ratio is high enough, you may as well skip the input stage and just go pure software and run a hash.
I suppose you could do something tricky, like low-pass the heck out of the switcher, and make the output a high pass and/or make your sampler only look at very high freq noise levels. Or, fine, the switcher is noisy, so you sample at the same instant of the switcher cycle each time... The CMRR of an opamp or a linear reg is pretty good, so you could boost to 12 volts and then linear reg the noisy 12 down to a pristine 8 volts or so.
The analysis to prove what level of switcher noise is acceptable is not obviously apparent to me. Almost certainly a switcher is clean enough, but how do you know? The experiment to prove it out is going to be weird; easy to set up, just push in a clean external voltage, but analyzing the output to prove randomness level changes with power supply noise input is hard.
What we need is small, independent, companies competing directly in the same way Linux distros compete with each other.
Aggressive flamewars on slashdot and mailing lists? I'm not seeing that work.
claims to be exploiting quantum effects in the P-N junctions to be a true RNG
Thats a wee bit of the wordy mumbo jumbo, like talking about the "maxwellian equation emitter controlled by polarization rotation human interface unit" I'm using to read this, instead of calling it a freaking monitor. Just call it a zener diode and be done with it. The Zener story is bizarre and this doesn't help. Clarence M. Zener came up with the theory for his diodes in the 30s, although they couldn't be built until the 50s when they thought it would be cool to name the diode after him, or maybe his physics equation, or both. Strange but true fact is that a "zener" diode operating below 5 volts uses the actual physics Zener effect and a "zener" diode operating above 5 volts uses the physics avalanche effect, which the Entropy Key claims to use.
Note that USB does not provide more than 5 volts and a reasonable current limiter means its gonna be operating well into zener-land.
So, A dude named Zener, invented Zener physics, leading to the theory of zener diodes, then someone else built one 20 years later and named it after him, and the key markets itself as using the closely related avalanche effect, but because only 5 volts is available without some sort of voltage multiplier or boost switching regulator, its probably actually using the low voltage Zener effect, regardless of the effect, devices using avalanche or zener effect are always marketed as zener diodes commercially, so I'm sure there is a Zener on the board. Which doesn't matter in the end, because zener noise is just as good as avalanche noise for crypto, as far as I know. In fact zener is probably better, less temperature dependence. Talk about abuse of proper nouns and trademarks... kinda like my Xerox machine at home was manufactured by Brother.
This stuff is all from memory, I hope I didn't swap Zener and Avalanche effects, although either way its still a heck of a story.
'Sussman's Ottawa lab uses a pulse of laser light that lasts a few trillionths of a second. His team shines it at a diamond. The light goes in and comes out again, but along the way, it changes. ... It is changed because it has interacted with quantum vacuum fluctuations, the microscopic flickering of the amount of energy in a point in space. ... What happens to the light is unknown — and unknowable.
Sounds very much like xray crystallography which discovers all kinds of interesting things about the crystalline matrix.
Would be hilarious if they discover via non-random results there is, after all, some inherent crystaline like order to the quantum vacuum. Or even funnier if they knew it all along, and some TLA agency paid them to try and pass it off as random, cloaked in a lot of new age zero point energy stuff.
Well, somebody is selling those things, so I guess it could be much worse. I suppose if it happened at a church hackerspace, if such a thing exists...
Worse would be getting the machine owner in big trouble, like making plastic automatic knives aka switchblades, or rifle receivers or single use short barreled plastic 12 gauge shortguns or any number of things the BATFE demands licensing and fees. Even just endless streams of pirated trademarked copyrighted mickey mouse gear would be a problem.
WTF? I'm not invisible when I'm on call at 2am. Doesn't even make sense. By that logic when I'm on call I should just shut off the ringer and get a good nights sleep, after all, supposedly that's invisible.
You say chain them together, like 1 ms after backing up, you start wiping. I say, how long can you wait with the images and hardware in storage before wiping?
At least back them all up, then wipe them all in two separate processes? Whatever you do, don't manually start one process after the other because at least 1% of the time (several machines, in your case) you'll accidentally start wipe before backup. At least that'll compress pretty well if you're wiping with zeros.
Wiping is faster and "what if" the images are somehow bad or corrupt or otherwise need access to the hardware (like, whoops, we tossed out the software license hardware dongle, best find it).
I agree the OP had a workable solution under ideal conditions. Good engineering is figuring out the failure modes in non-ideal conditions. That's the big missing part in the OPs post. This is one of those situations much like safety engineering, where by far the easiest part is handling the "everything's working perfect" scenario and the hard part is figuring out the failure modes exist, and how to handle them.
Unless you have a Lot Of Time to Test this BEFORE HAND, you could easily end up with an automated screw-up-the-back-up and nuke-everything system
This might be the best (only?) justification for buying non-free beer non-free freedom software I've ever seen, because you can intentionally buy the cheapest cruddiest non-working commercial software out there, then when all the data is lost, you don't have to maintain, backup, search, restore and otherwise admin the images for eternity minus a day, and you can blame the commercial software provider instead of yourself... Everyone, especially in management, knows commercial software just doesn't work sometimes and its no ones fault. Heck you could just skip actually imaging and wiping the drives, blame the software, and spend the new spare time playing skyrim.... Hmmm.... I think we're on to something here.