Do you really think the prices were lower? The German Railways were subsidized by taxpayer money, and I'll bet the total cost of the system was far greater than it is today. I'm not saying that the way it's being run today is right, but when people compare the "price" of then vs. now, of course they're going to be ticked off that the price of a ticket is higher. Then it's going to be hard to convince people to ride and take in the revenues necessary to upkeep and improve the capital.
Even for a "business" user, you should be well enough organised that your employer can afford to be out of touch with you for a short period, without suffering catastrophic business failure (if not, they should fire you immediately as you are obviously a single point of failure and as such a total liability to the organisation).
What an asinine statement. If you're such a liability to your corporation that you being gone is catastrophic then the last thing they should do is fire you. File that away in Business 101.
If anyone deserves to be fired, it's that person's manager or the person in charge of personnel. They're the one's that have created the single point of failure, not the employee.
I can't believe drivel like this gets modded +5 "Insightful"
Oh and don't forget about the uptick rule [wikipedia.org] that the SEC removed that prevented short sellers from shorting on stocks on downward movement that had originally been in place for 70 years because of the 1929 market crash! And people have to ask why the market did what it did.
This had very little to do with the market's downturn. The market went down because people were taking their investment dollars out of the market. People who were long were going flat.
Just because the uptick rule went away doesn't mean it was a free for all to short every stock (or any particular stocks, like financials). There are still rules in place. You must have a locate (which means your broker has to be able to loan you actual (long) shares) before you can short. This places a real limit on the amount short selling can impact the market, and we would have hit that very quickly. In fact, for a very long time, it was hard/impossible to borrow many, many stocks.
The market definitely needs regulations, but it needs the right regulations. Right now it has a bunch of flipping stupid ones, and it's missing a bunch it ought to have. The uptick rule is not one of the regulations it needs.
How do you know that the measures you use are due to better health care? If I had to guess at a cause, I would say all of those measures suck in the US because we're fat, lazy slobs. We eat our way into the grave, and I don't think that health care is an issue there. You would have to normalize those metrics for the general level of health before you can make the claims you do. I would wager that our health care metrics beat the pants off any other country: the health care system is keeping us close to other countries even though it appears we're actively trying to kill ourselves...
The other retarded thing is that Happy Birthday is a derivative work that is in the public domain. Happy Birthday is the exact same melody as 'Good Morning To You', yet somehow switching the words a little bit privileges it enough to deserve copyright?!
Your suggestions are good ones. I think this could be a great way to defeat the RIAA. However, for even those that can sing, this might not work.
For instance, I can sing: I am a band leader, I sing solos, I direct choirs...
However, I don't really have one bit of creative talent to create new material. I have given it a try--I suck. I can read music just fine, and I'm good at reproducing what that music says to do, but I haven't the faintest idea how to write it.
It's not like when I program, and I know the desired outcome and can link together the logic necessary to get from start to finish. No, music doesn't have business requirements, use cases, and you certainly don't know what the finished product is (unless you have the gift, like Mozart) until it's finished.
I think there would be more of what you advocate, but I suspect that there would be general suckage throughout society. And I think that's why we turn to the labels--there is good stuff there--even if it's just 1% of the stuff. And I know that I (and probably most others that aren't a part of the industry) don't have the creativity or talent to create something that could touch the 99% of bad stuff in the music industry. And seriously, I can sing and play multiple instruments, but that doesn't change my creative musical ability.
This is the thing I do for a living--it's quite fun. We have our own proprietary systems at work, and a boatload of data to run through it.
I would recommend that you try Genius Trader. It's in Perl, and it's a little rough around the edges, but I think it will get you going where you want to go.
After you have back tested your trading idea, you'll have to open a brokerage account with someone with a nice API, if you want to trade elecronically. But my guess is that you don't have enough money to do that. Commissions will likely kill you, and there's a whole host of risk related to the technology (oh, you didn't want to trade 100000 shares?). But Genius Trader can give you the trades, and then you can hand trade them (I would highly recommend this route).
The thing that I would truly recommend to you though is just dump all the money you can in the market right now. Even if it goes a little lower from here, by the time you retire, the money you put in today is going to be worth a lot.
The iPod being a mass storage device is true for pre-iPhone iPods. The iPhone and iPod Touch use a proprietary driver. Some people think this is so that nobody can hack the iPhone, but I believe it's for another reason. One issue for the iPod as a mass storage device is that it would upload all of the files, then upload a refreshed database. If the iPod got disconnected during a sync, then you don't quite know what state the files/database are in. With the new iPhone driver, they manage the database actively so that if you disconnect during a sync, there will be no ambiguity of state.
If they could hide these effectively, I wouldn't care, but it is the size of these monstrosities in addition to the sneaky tactics that AT&T is trying to pull that really pisses me off. There are cities all over the country that are suing AT&T to stop them from being installed until they do it properly. AT&T is breaking the law in a lot a places with the size of these things. Not only that, but they're trying to sell TV services without getting a franchising license from the city (they're staying they don't have to because they're providing "data" services).
Nevertheless, I would say that's pretty darn close to a Volkswagon in size. And I have mod points, and I really wanted to -1 you, but Slashdot doesn't have the right mod (and I don't want to use overrated).
I would like to add to this thread. I am not a whacko-environmentalist. I'm not really an environmentalist at all. I believe there are still a bunch of unknowns in the global warming debate and it's not as settled as Al Gore would like you to believe. I also think that there aren't many fossil fuels left and that these things will sort themselves out economically. Of course, that being said, I find it hard to breath when in downtown Chicago and think that even for a local environment it would be good to clean up a bit.
That said, I think it is worth trying to go organic. The important point I want to make is that it doesn't have to be all or nothing. My wife and I have started to go down that road, and we're probably about 75% organic now. And we've discovered that it's not a whole lot more expensive that non-organic. With energy prices the way they are, transportation is becoming critical cost of food, not how it was grown. So you may not end up spending much (if any) more by buying organic.
We started eating organic when my wife started having health problems shortly after we got married. We were worried that it might be the hormones they put in meat and the pesticides they put in fruits and veggies. I already knew (through some self experimentation) that pesticides made me sick--I would throw up after eating an apple where the pesticides get stuck between the skin and the wax seal they put around apples (no amount of scrubbing helped, only peeling).
We want to raise our daughter without the side effects my wife and I have experience from this industrialized agriculture. We don't want her to hit puberty at 10 years old because she was pumped full of hormones like we were as kids.
One trick may be to find good places to buy organic. See if there are any local farmer's markets nearby (that doesn't guarantee that it's organic, but you have a good chance). We have the advantage of living in a farm state. Also, you might be jaded by the organic markup at the big chain grocery stores (Jewel, Dominicks', Albertson's, etc.). We have a little chain by us named Trader Joe's which has a ton of organic food for the same price as the non-organic in the big chain supermarkets. Seek out a similar store.
But like the parent post said, at least eat organic for your health, even if you don't care about the environmental impact.
I know that in the case of software, it's perfectly legal to download pirated versions providing you legitimately own it (ROMs in particular are a good example of this), but what about media?
IANAL either, but from the perspective of downloading media you own ("have a license to use"), you're probably okay. However, the person you're downloading from likely does not have the legal right to distribute the copyrighted content. My guess is that if you are downloading from an unauthorized distributor, you are probably committing contributory infringement, which is just as bad as actual infringement (in the law's eyes anyway). I'm just saying you should be careful before you assume something is legal.
The problem with not having the login page on SSL is that a phishing site that managed to poison DNS could get you to send them your login information.
With an SSL login page this would be much more difficult. If someone managed to hijack the domain name (either through compromising DNS servers or changing your hosts file because you were foolish enough to install that "free" screensaver), and you were forced to log in through SSL, your browser would yell at you because the site key would not match what the browser was expecting.
If you don't require SSL login, then even an experienced user could be fooled if they allowed someone else to use their computer, get it infected, change the hosts file and try to log in from an unsecured page (or think Worm that propagates across your corporate network). You can't be sure your info is going to the banks SSL server or some unsecured site in Russia (unless you checked the HTML & Javascript source...do you?).
This doesn't have to do with cell phones, but it does have to do with AT&T. About 2 or 3 years ago I got a landline phone plan with them that was unlimited local and long distance for $40 per month. It was more expensive than a place like Vonage, but I really wanted the physical land line. I got my first bill and it was $52, and there were no setup fees in there. They had managed to pack in $12, or 30%, of taxes, fees, surcharges, cost recovery (what the hell, isn't that the point of charging the first price to begin with), 911 fees, etc. So I immediately switched to VOIP. I have to say that these phone companies suck, and I cannot believe that they can't give you an all-in number.
There are 250 work days in a year. 50 * 250 = 12,500. Multiply that out by 5 and you get 62,500. I'll bet there are a good number of 5 year old cars with 60,000+ miles on them. Maybe you'll be surprised at how many people go more than 50 miles a day.
I do remember when XP came out and I clutched to Win2k like people are doing with XP now. If it were up to me, I would still be using Windows 2000.
The reason I was eventually forced to switch was that nobody was writing drivers for Win2k any more, and WinXP drivers weren't always backward compatible (they often were, but not always).
It got to be that enough equipment failed to work with Win2k that I was forced to switch to WinXP. I've done all I can to make it look and behave like Win2k (windows classic theme, turn off all customizations/animations, etc.).
I fear the day when the same thing is going to happen with Vista. I have Vista on my laptop, and I have to occasionally use it, and I loathe it. I typically prefer to boot into Ubuntu to do my work. That desktop is not quite ready (though I need to upgrade to the latest version), but it gets in my way less than Vista. I also bought an iMac and love it (wish I could use one at work).
That said, the cycle of computing life will continue, and Microsoft will find some way to force us all to use Vista. It sucks, and I'm going to do my part to help make sure Vista doesn't pick up any more traction than necessary.
If these algorithms actually worked, why would you need to be working for somebody else?
That's very easy. I work in this field, and I have trading models that have made millions for my company. So I should use the info that I've learned and trade my own money right? I should make those millions for myself, right?
There are two (really three) reasons I can't do this for myself. The first is that you already need millions to successfully trade this way. You can't take $50k and turn it into $1M because of many reasons, the biggest being that commissions charges would eat away at your $50k faster than you could make anything. You can however, take $2M and turn it into $4M, because once you have that much money to start with, it only costs you a fraction of a penny to trade a share, and brokers are willing to give you good leverage, like 10 to 1. The second reason I can't do this on my own is the IT infrastructure. We have millions (per year!) invested in having the fastest servers, the fastest connections, the most recent market data. You need a lot of expensive information and infrastructure to do this trading.
The third reason is that I have a non-compete, so I can't just go and do it on my own now. I'd have to wait a couple of years. That's definitely not worth it when you can work a deal to get a percentage of the profits for the year. It might be fun to run my own fund someday, but there are a lot of good reasons to work for someone else, making money trading models that you say don't work.
If he gets a fine this large and jail time for infecting 0.25 million computers, where's the appropriate sentence for Sony for knowingly infecting millions of computers with the rootkit on their CDs?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think the prices were lower? The German Railways were subsidized by taxpayer money, and I'll bet the total cost of the system was far greater than it is today. I'm not saying that the way it's being run today is right, but when people compare the "price" of then vs. now, of course they're going to be ticked off that the price of a ticket is higher. Then it's going to be hard to convince people to ride and take in the revenues necessary to upkeep and improve the capital.
What an asinine statement. If you're such a liability to your corporation that you being gone is catastrophic then the last thing they should do is fire you. File that away in Business 101.
If anyone deserves to be fired, it's that person's manager or the person in charge of personnel. They're the one's that have created the single point of failure, not the employee.
I can't believe drivel like this gets modded +5 "Insightful"
This had very little to do with the market's downturn. The market went down because people were taking their investment dollars out of the market. People who were long were going flat.
Just because the uptick rule went away doesn't mean it was a free for all to short every stock (or any particular stocks, like financials). There are still rules in place. You must have a locate (which means your broker has to be able to loan you actual (long) shares) before you can short. This places a real limit on the amount short selling can impact the market, and we would have hit that very quickly. In fact, for a very long time, it was hard/impossible to borrow many, many stocks.
The market definitely needs regulations, but it needs the right regulations. Right now it has a bunch of flipping stupid ones, and it's missing a bunch it ought to have. The uptick rule is not one of the regulations it needs.
How do you know that the measures you use are due to better health care? If I had to guess at a cause, I would say all of those measures suck in the US because we're fat, lazy slobs. We eat our way into the grave, and I don't think that health care is an issue there. You would have to normalize those metrics for the general level of health before you can make the claims you do. I would wager that our health care metrics beat the pants off any other country: the health care system is keeping us close to other countries even though it appears we're actively trying to kill ourselves...
I think you may have just contradicted yourself.
1990-2000: 33MHz x 1 core to 1GHz x 1 core = 30x improvement
2000-2010: 1GHz x 1 core to 4GHz x 8 cores = 32x improvement
For linear tasks the new decade only brings 4x improvement, but for multitasking and multimedia, we are seeing 32x improvement.
Now see, this proves there must be a Designer! ;-)
Show me the designer label and I'll believe you
GCAT
There are some of us who have actually thought through the issue who believe that IVF isn't good either.
However, in both cases of aborting a pregnancy and "aborting" an non-implanted embryo, the result of the action is the same: death of an unborn child.
The reason you can nitpick about copyright infringement is that when you copy without permission, somebody doesn't lose property.
When you take away the viability of an embryo, implanted or not, a life ends.
Yes, because all quantum algorithms are hugely practical these days...
The other retarded thing is that Happy Birthday is a derivative work that is in the public domain. Happy Birthday is the exact same melody as 'Good Morning To You', yet somehow switching the words a little bit privileges it enough to deserve copyright?!
For instance, I can sing: I am a band leader, I sing solos, I direct choirs...
However, I don't really have one bit of creative talent to create new material. I have given it a try--I suck. I can read music just fine, and I'm good at reproducing what that music says to do, but I haven't the faintest idea how to write it.
It's not like when I program, and I know the desired outcome and can link together the logic necessary to get from start to finish. No, music doesn't have business requirements, use cases, and you certainly don't know what the finished product is (unless you have the gift, like Mozart) until it's finished.
I think there would be more of what you advocate, but I suspect that there would be general suckage throughout society. And I think that's why we turn to the labels--there is good stuff there--even if it's just 1% of the stuff. And I know that I (and probably most others that aren't a part of the industry) don't have the creativity or talent to create something that could touch the 99% of bad stuff in the music industry. And seriously, I can sing and play multiple instruments, but that doesn't change my creative musical ability.
:set nohl
I would recommend that you try Genius Trader. It's in Perl, and it's a little rough around the edges, but I think it will get you going where you want to go.
After you have back tested your trading idea, you'll have to open a brokerage account with someone with a nice API, if you want to trade elecronically. But my guess is that you don't have enough money to do that. Commissions will likely kill you, and there's a whole host of risk related to the technology (oh, you didn't want to trade 100000 shares?). But Genius Trader can give you the trades, and then you can hand trade them (I would highly recommend this route).
The thing that I would truly recommend to you though is just dump all the money you can in the market right now. Even if it goes a little lower from here, by the time you retire, the money you put in today is going to be worth a lot.
The iPod being a mass storage device is true for pre-iPhone iPods. The iPhone and iPod Touch use a proprietary driver. Some people think this is so that nobody can hack the iPhone, but I believe it's for another reason. One issue for the iPod as a mass storage device is that it would upload all of the files, then upload a refreshed database. If the iPod got disconnected during a sync, then you don't quite know what state the files/database are in. With the new iPhone driver, they manage the database actively so that if you disconnect during a sync, there will be no ambiguity of state.
Here's a Picture of one.
If they could hide these effectively, I wouldn't care, but it is the size of these monstrosities in addition to the sneaky tactics that AT&T is trying to pull that really pisses me off. There are cities all over the country that are suing AT&T to stop them from being installed until they do it properly. AT&T is breaking the law in a lot a places with the size of these things. Not only that, but they're trying to sell TV services without getting a franchising license from the city (they're staying they don't have to because they're providing "data" services).
Nevertheless, I would say that's pretty darn close to a Volkswagon in size. And I have mod points, and I really wanted to -1 you, but Slashdot doesn't have the right mod (and I don't want to use overrated).
<obligatory>http://www.xkcd.com/435/</obligatory>
That said, I think it is worth trying to go organic. The important point I want to make is that it doesn't have to be all or nothing. My wife and I have started to go down that road, and we're probably about 75% organic now. And we've discovered that it's not a whole lot more expensive that non-organic. With energy prices the way they are, transportation is becoming critical cost of food, not how it was grown. So you may not end up spending much (if any) more by buying organic.
We started eating organic when my wife started having health problems shortly after we got married. We were worried that it might be the hormones they put in meat and the pesticides they put in fruits and veggies. I already knew (through some self experimentation) that pesticides made me sick--I would throw up after eating an apple where the pesticides get stuck between the skin and the wax seal they put around apples (no amount of scrubbing helped, only peeling).
We want to raise our daughter without the side effects my wife and I have experience from this industrialized agriculture. We don't want her to hit puberty at 10 years old because she was pumped full of hormones like we were as kids.
One trick may be to find good places to buy organic. See if there are any local farmer's markets nearby (that doesn't guarantee that it's organic, but you have a good chance). We have the advantage of living in a farm state. Also, you might be jaded by the organic markup at the big chain grocery stores (Jewel, Dominicks', Albertson's, etc.). We have a little chain by us named Trader Joe's which has a ton of organic food for the same price as the non-organic in the big chain supermarkets. Seek out a similar store.
But like the parent post said, at least eat organic for your health, even if you don't care about the environmental impact.
IANAL either, but from the perspective of downloading media you own ("have a license to use"), you're probably okay. However, the person you're downloading from likely does not have the legal right to distribute the copyrighted content. My guess is that if you are downloading from an unauthorized distributor, you are probably committing contributory infringement, which is just as bad as actual infringement (in the law's eyes anyway). I'm just saying you should be careful before you assume something is legal.
With an SSL login page this would be much more difficult. If someone managed to hijack the domain name (either through compromising DNS servers or changing your hosts file because you were foolish enough to install that "free" screensaver), and you were forced to log in through SSL, your browser would yell at you because the site key would not match what the browser was expecting.
If you don't require SSL login, then even an experienced user could be fooled if they allowed someone else to use their computer, get it infected, change the hosts file and try to log in from an unsecured page (or think Worm that propagates across your corporate network). You can't be sure your info is going to the banks SSL server or some unsecured site in Russia (unless you checked the HTML & Javascript source...do you?).
This doesn't have to do with cell phones, but it does have to do with AT&T. About 2 or 3 years ago I got a landline phone plan with them that was unlimited local and long distance for $40 per month. It was more expensive than a place like Vonage, but I really wanted the physical land line. I got my first bill and it was $52, and there were no setup fees in there. They had managed to pack in $12, or 30%, of taxes, fees, surcharges, cost recovery (what the hell, isn't that the point of charging the first price to begin with), 911 fees, etc. So I immediately switched to VOIP. I have to say that these phone companies suck, and I cannot believe that they can't give you an all-in number.
If we have to put up with this kind of government, then maybe we can slap a few magnets on the founding fathers and take care of our energy crisis...
There are 250 work days in a year. 50 * 250 = 12,500. Multiply that out by 5 and you get 62,500. I'll bet there are a good number of 5 year old cars with 60,000+ miles on them. Maybe you'll be surprised at how many people go more than 50 miles a day.
The reason I was eventually forced to switch was that nobody was writing drivers for Win2k any more, and WinXP drivers weren't always backward compatible (they often were, but not always).
It got to be that enough equipment failed to work with Win2k that I was forced to switch to WinXP. I've done all I can to make it look and behave like Win2k (windows classic theme, turn off all customizations/animations, etc.).
I fear the day when the same thing is going to happen with Vista. I have Vista on my laptop, and I have to occasionally use it, and I loathe it. I typically prefer to boot into Ubuntu to do my work. That desktop is not quite ready (though I need to upgrade to the latest version), but it gets in my way less than Vista. I also bought an iMac and love it (wish I could use one at work).
That said, the cycle of computing life will continue, and Microsoft will find some way to force us all to use Vista. It sucks, and I'm going to do my part to help make sure Vista doesn't pick up any more traction than necessary.
That's very easy. I work in this field, and I have trading models that have made millions for my company. So I should use the info that I've learned and trade my own money right? I should make those millions for myself, right?
There are two (really three) reasons I can't do this for myself. The first is that you already need millions to successfully trade this way. You can't take $50k and turn it into $1M because of many reasons, the biggest being that commissions charges would eat away at your $50k faster than you could make anything. You can however, take $2M and turn it into $4M, because once you have that much money to start with, it only costs you a fraction of a penny to trade a share, and brokers are willing to give you good leverage, like 10 to 1. The second reason I can't do this on my own is the IT infrastructure. We have millions (per year!) invested in having the fastest servers, the fastest connections, the most recent market data. You need a lot of expensive information and infrastructure to do this trading.
The third reason is that I have a non-compete, so I can't just go and do it on my own now. I'd have to wait a couple of years. That's definitely not worth it when you can work a deal to get a percentage of the profits for the year. It might be fun to run my own fund someday, but there are a lot of good reasons to work for someone else, making money trading models that you say don't work.
If he gets a fine this large and jail time for infecting 0.25 million computers, where's the appropriate sentence for Sony for knowingly infecting millions of computers with the rootkit on their CDs?