I live in Sydney, close to the city's monorail. By coincidence, it runs right over our light rail system near my home.
The monorail is much noisier than the light rail. The monorail carries far fewer people than the light rail. The monorail costs more than the light rail. If the monorail fails for some reason, the only way out is to climb out the end of the car (assuming there isn't, say, a fire in the way), and walk along a narrow, elevated track, possibly in darkness, and possibly in the rain. On the other hand, if the light rail fails, all you have to do is get out through one of the many doors.
Only tourists use the Sydney monorail. As a form of public transport, it's fairly useless.
Maybe they mean "tiny" as in "insignificant". After all, the entire state has a population of less than 500,000, almost half of whom live in one city - Hobart. Most of the island is very, very empty.
Come to think of it, powerline internet delivery makes no sense at all for Hobart. The city is very small and compact, making it ideal for wireless.
Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion
However, that amendment meant exactly what it says - i.e., it reserved that right for the states. In other words, it was designed to limit what the new federal government could do, in order to protect the rights of state governments - not the rights of individuals.
The current interpreation is very different to this intention, of course.
A Sydney magistrate, Laurence Lawson, threw out the case because the Roads and Traffic Authority failed to find an expert to testify that its speed camera images were secure.
I.e., it wasn't thrown out because MD5 is suspect; it was thrown out because the government couldn't find an expert witness to be cross-examined, for some reason we don't know. In fact, I'd read that statement as meaning that the magistrate wanted to examine the entirety of speed camera security, not just MD5.
The motorist's defence lawyer, Denis Mirabilis, argued successfully that an algorithm known as MD5, which is used to store the time, date, place, numberplate and speed of cars caught on camera, was a discredited piece of technology.
That part of the story is just a lawyer's opinion, not a fact. "Successfully", in the context of the previous quote, just means that his argument was unopposed in court.
My understanding is that it is easy to generate multiple messages that have the same MD5 hash, but only if you get to choose both messages. It's still very hard (i.e., an infeasibly large number of CPU cycles for most of us) to generate data that yields the same MD5 hash as some other, arbitrary document.
It all sounds to me more like a case of blinding a magistrate with science, than some kind of victory for common sense. (Well, lawyers are involved, so commonsense isn't relevant, anyway.)
Re:Won't somebody please think of the ATM machines
on
IBM Officially Kills OS/2
·
· Score: 1, Informative
OS/2 may not show the BSOD, but it does crash from time to time. Even in ATMs. It's hard to find an O/S that never crashes.
That's not a big deal, though. A friend told me that he lost his ATM card late one stormy night, when the ATM crashed and rebooted mid-transaction. That was when he found it was a Unix box... because the boot messages came up on the monitor...
Trailing P/E doesn't. Forward P/E does, in theory. If the company's earnings forecast is right.
However, in practice, history shows that forecasting is essentially impossible. Google may claim that next year's earnings will be $X, and they are probably wrong. Likewise, you might glibly claim that you have to factor "growth rates" into a valuation, but your "growth rate" is only ever going to be an assumption. This was the trap that people fell into in the dot com bubble: they assumed very high growth rates. They didn't materialise, so the bubble burst.
All of which can be said of FCF, which, despite what the parent stated, is not a panacea for corporate book-cooking. FCF is slightly better than earnings, but it's just one more number in a bigger picture. (Sales is a better number still, but even that can be fiddled.)
In any case, to imply that GOOG is a good buy because someone expects earnings growth is, in my opinion, bad advice. Because of its high P/E, GOOG has a much higher level of risk associated with it than companies with more mundane P/E values.
As Warren Buffet says, buy shares like you buy groceries. GOOG isn't groceries - it's a lottery ticket. Caveat emptor.
I saw a Titan Arum flower at the Sydney Botanic Gardens last year. The stench isn't what I'd describe as overpowering - it's actually a quite faint odour. I thought I reminiscent of old, dried-out roadkill.
The plant is quite weird. Even when not in flower, it looks strange - kindof fleshy and too symmetrical.
Once the flower opens, it fades very quickly, so you have to be quick.
"If it enables parents to control TV and exercise in their children, then it will be useful."
A parent can turn off the TV. (A parent can even get rid of the TV.) A parent can make sure that their children eat well. A parent can make sure that their children get an adequate amount of exercise.
If these things aren't already happening, a stupid pair of shoes won't help. People need to take responsibility for themselves, not abrogate it to a microcontroller.
Being second won't be a major problem. The weapons will take time to develop and mature, so I doubt that the first generation will be perfect. That leaves a decent window for other nations to get going with their own 'death from above' systems.
I think that's a moot point, anyway. All it takes is a well-aimed bucket of gravel in the right orbit to take out a space-based system. Launching buckets of gravel is pretty cheap, so unless the US system is 100% effective, this system will suffer from the same flaws as the anti-missile system - it's easy to overwhelm it with a lot of cheap countermeasures.
Yes, I agree, and I don't get it. The NY Times has its flaws, but compared to most news media, it's extremely good, and there's no denying its influence.
The NY Times is one of the most widely-read, influential newspapers in the world. Their print edition sells over a million copies every day.
So in answer to your question: damn near every politician, diplomat and corporate CEO in the developed world reads it. You may not agree with what they write, but that's more of a reason to read it than to not read it.
Every day, across the world, thousands of weather balloons are released at the same time. (Or so Trevor, the weather guy at Cobar weather station in outback NSW, told me.) The balloons carry a commercially-made telemetry package that doesn't weigh much, and drops to the ground when the ballooon bursts at around 100K feet. I haven't heard of anything bad happening as a result. The planet is a big place, and the chances of hitting someone on the head are extremely low. (And even lower than that in the Cobar district.)
If you're ever in Cobar, I recommend a visit to the weather station. The balloon goes up every day at 9:15 am. It's the closest thing to entertainment they have.
I assume you were talking to me.
Thanks for the flamebait. FYI, I run my own business. Have done since late 1999.
Which is why I know what's required to succeed at it.
The basic costs to start a business in today's market is very small.
I think this is where Graham gets it very wrong.
Granted, the cost of IT gear is pretty low, and if you administer it yourself, running costs won't be high.
However, finding paying customers is time-consuming and expensive. I've worked for a startup, and they went under because they had a product, but no customers. Marketing ought to be 80% of your starting budget. A few businesses might escape this requirement, if they have a ready-made market, but most won't. Expect to bleed cash for a year or two before turning a profit. (It'll cost a lot more than $10k.)
Coupled to that, if you're out marketing, who's looking after your servers and fixing the bugs in your app?
Would Microsoft shave 0.5% off their cost base? Hell yes! Not only would they, they're obliged to by law. Shareholders can sue companies that fail to do their utmost to increase shareholder value.
And actually, a cost saving of 0.5% translates into a profit gain of about 1%, which is not chickenfeed.
Microsoft is having a hard time finding skilled workers within the United States, and the lack of H-1B visas for skilled workers is only making the situation worse, Gates said in a panel discussion at the Library of Congress.
Translation: "the available labour wants more money than we want to pay."
"Fact: The biography was unauthorized, which is legal, but not really that morally okay, especially when the biography is about someone who's still alive."
Curious logic there... so a biography has to be authorised, huh? Like, say, a newspaper story about someone has to be authorised? Or an encyclopedia entry? Do you realise that you'll just end up with self-serving crap if you do that, don't you?
How about this for a correction:
Fact: Jobs is a public figure, and his decisions affect large numbers of people. He is also charismatic and famous. An unauthorised biography of Jobs is therefore is a fair and reasonable thing, provided the content of the biography is obtained legally and without deception.
Having recently finished a postgrad journalism course at a major university, here's what I found:
Most journalism grads end up in PR, because there aren't enough jobs for them in the media, and when you write a PR release, you're doing exactly what reporters do every day - you're writing stuff in a way that makes it appetising to the reader, and perfect from the sub's point of view. PR also pays better than mainstream reporting, and you don't have to work nearly as hard. So that's why PR looks so much like news; it's written by journalists.
Also, the news media are very sensitive to costs, which is why most of them will happily print PR releases, which arrive free of charge from their sources. A good sub can edit ten stories in an hour, which is far cheaper than paying a reporter for a whole day just to chase one story that might not pan out.
So Paul Graham is quite right when he says that most "news" is marketing PR. However, he's wrong to blame the journalists for this. It isn't their laziness, or indifference to their trade; it's the fact that business today is solely interested in the bottom line, and the readers don't care that they're being fed a disguised ad.
On that last point, there's been an increasing trend towards unthinking acceptance of this kind of marketing. Consumption has become a major recreational activity in people's lives, so maybe to a lot of people, an ad is news!
Empty ramblings. Assertion. No proof, no quotes, nothin'.
I know it's an opinion piece. It's still a waste of space.
Incidentally, the share price of MACR is now well above what it was before the takeover was announced, so his crap about the market "dropping" the stock is blatant nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Sydney, close to the city's monorail. By coincidence, it runs right over our light rail system near my home.
The monorail is much noisier than the light rail. The monorail carries far fewer people than the light rail. The monorail costs more than the light rail. If the monorail fails for some reason, the only way out is to climb out the end of the car (assuming there isn't, say, a fire in the way), and walk along a narrow, elevated track, possibly in darkness, and possibly in the rain. On the other hand, if the light rail fails, all you have to do is get out through one of the many doors.
Only tourists use the Sydney monorail. As a form of public transport, it's fairly useless.
Maybe they mean "tiny" as in "insignificant". After all, the entire state has a population of less than 500,000, almost half of whom live in one city - Hobart. Most of the island is very, very empty.
Come to think of it, powerline internet delivery makes no sense at all for Hobart. The city is very small and compact, making it ideal for wireless.
"And now Larry is sticking them in his cap like a feather.
More like Larry is waving their spinal column around like the Predator.
Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion
However, that amendment meant exactly what it says - i.e., it reserved that right for the states. In other words, it was designed to limit what the new federal government could do, in order to protect the rights of state governments - not the rights of individuals.
The current interpreation is very different to this intention, of course.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/motorist-wins
I.e., it wasn't thrown out because MD5 is suspect; it was thrown out because the government couldn't find an expert witness to be cross-examined, for some reason we don't know. In fact, I'd read that statement as meaning that the magistrate wanted to examine the entirety of speed camera security, not just MD5.
That part of the story is just a lawyer's opinion, not a fact. "Successfully", in the context of the previous quote, just means that his argument was unopposed in court.
My understanding is that it is easy to generate multiple messages that have the same MD5 hash, but only if you get to choose both messages. It's still very hard (i.e., an infeasibly large number of CPU cycles for most of us) to generate data that yields the same MD5 hash as some other, arbitrary document.
It all sounds to me more like a case of blinding a magistrate with science, than some kind of victory for common sense. (Well, lawyers are involved, so commonsense isn't relevant, anyway.)
OS/2 may not show the BSOD, but it does crash from time to time. Even in ATMs. It's hard to find an O/S that never crashes.
That's not a big deal, though. A friend told me that he lost his ATM card late one stormy night, when the ATM crashed and rebooted mid-transaction. That was when he found it was a Unix box... because the boot messages came up on the monitor...
...P/E ratios don't capture growth rates...
Trailing P/E doesn't. Forward P/E does, in theory. If the company's earnings forecast is right.
However, in practice, history shows that forecasting is essentially impossible. Google may claim that next year's earnings will be $X, and they are probably wrong. Likewise, you might glibly claim that you have to factor "growth rates" into a valuation, but your "growth rate" is only ever going to be an assumption. This was the trap that people fell into in the dot com bubble: they assumed very high growth rates. They didn't materialise, so the bubble burst.
All of which can be said of FCF, which, despite what the parent stated, is not a panacea for corporate book-cooking. FCF is slightly better than earnings, but it's just one more number in a bigger picture. (Sales is a better number still, but even that can be fiddled.)
In any case, to imply that GOOG is a good buy because someone expects earnings growth is, in my opinion, bad advice. Because of its high P/E, GOOG has a much higher level of risk associated with it than companies with more mundane P/E values.
As Warren Buffet says, buy shares like you buy groceries. GOOG isn't groceries - it's a lottery ticket. Caveat emptor.
I saw a Titan Arum flower at the Sydney Botanic Gardens last year. The stench isn't what I'd describe as overpowering - it's actually a quite faint odour. I thought I reminiscent of old, dried-out roadkill.
The plant is quite weird. Even when not in flower, it looks strange - kindof fleshy and too symmetrical.
Once the flower opens, it fades very quickly, so you have to be quick.
You clearly don't understand.
DTV isn't about HD; it's about getting the extra SD channels that come with each frequency. That way, they can deliver five times as many commercials.
HD is just the bait.
One more /.er who strikes me as being maybe 20 years old, telling me about parenthood.
You couldn't be more wrong.
"If it enables parents to control TV and exercise in their children, then it will be useful."
A parent can turn off the TV. (A parent can even get rid of the TV.) A parent can make sure that their children eat well. A parent can make sure that their children get an adequate amount of exercise.
If these things aren't already happening, a stupid pair of shoes won't help. People need to take responsibility for themselves, not abrogate it to a microcontroller.
Being second won't be a major problem. The weapons will take time to develop and mature, so I doubt that the first generation will be perfect. That leaves a decent window for other nations to get going with their own 'death from above' systems.
I think that's a moot point, anyway. All it takes is a well-aimed bucket of gravel in the right orbit to take out a space-based system. Launching buckets of gravel is pretty cheap, so unless the US system is 100% effective, this system will suffer from the same flaws as the anti-missile system - it's easy to overwhelm it with a lot of cheap countermeasures.
Yes, I agree, and I don't get it. The NY Times has its flaws, but compared to most news media, it's extremely good, and there's no denying its influence.
I call flamebait on that.
The NY Times is one of the most widely-read, influential newspapers in the world. Their print edition sells over a million copies every day.
So in answer to your question: damn near every politician, diplomat and corporate CEO in the developed world reads it. You may not agree with what they write, but that's more of a reason to read it than to not read it.
Every day, across the world, thousands of weather balloons are released at the same time. (Or so Trevor, the weather guy at Cobar weather station in outback NSW, told me.) The balloons carry a commercially-made telemetry package that doesn't weigh much, and drops to the ground when the ballooon bursts at around 100K feet. I haven't heard of anything bad happening as a result. The planet is a big place, and the chances of hitting someone on the head are extremely low. (And even lower than that in the Cobar district.)
t m
If you're ever in Cobar, I recommend a visit to the weather station. The balloon goes up every day at 9:15 am. It's the closest thing to entertainment they have.
http://www.cobar.nsw.gov.au/tourism/attractions.h
The ONLY address you can get if you live in the town of Audubon MN. is a P.O. Box.
Let's see now... according to whitepages.com, there's this person with a randonly-chosen surname:
Jones, Patrick J
18900 175th St
Audubon, MN
Then there's this one:
Smith, Alan & Jennie
17012 S Big Cormorant Rd
Audubon, MN
And these good folks:
Miller, Jesse & Bridget
15212 Hillview Ln
Audubon, MN
They all look like street addresses in Audubon to me!
I assume you were talking to me. Thanks for the flamebait. FYI, I run my own business. Have done since late 1999. Which is why I know what's required to succeed at it.
The basic costs to start a business in today's market is very small.
I think this is where Graham gets it very wrong.
Granted, the cost of IT gear is pretty low, and if you administer it yourself, running costs won't be high.
However, finding paying customers is time-consuming and expensive. I've worked for a startup, and they went under because they had a product, but no customers. Marketing ought to be 80% of your starting budget. A few businesses might escape this requirement, if they have a ready-made market, but most won't. Expect to bleed cash for a year or two before turning a profit. (It'll cost a lot more than $10k.)
Coupled to that, if you're out marketing, who's looking after your servers and fixing the bugs in your app?
What I'm saying is that MS would like to reduce its salary bill for developers.
And what you're saying is that MS's salary bill for its entry-level programmers is very high.
Thanks!
Would Microsoft shave 0.5% off their cost base? Hell yes! Not only would they, they're obliged to by law. Shareholders can sue companies that fail to do their utmost to increase shareholder value.
And actually, a cost saving of 0.5% translates into a profit gain of about 1%, which is not chickenfeed.
Microsoft is having a hard time finding skilled workers within the United States, and the lack of H-1B visas for skilled workers is only making the situation worse, Gates said in a panel discussion at the Library of Congress.
Translation: "the available labour wants more money than we want to pay."
"Fact: The biography was unauthorized, which is legal, but not really that morally okay, especially when the biography is about someone who's still alive."
Curious logic there... so a biography has to be authorised, huh? Like, say, a newspaper story about someone has to be authorised? Or an encyclopedia entry? Do you realise that you'll just end up with self-serving crap if you do that, don't you?
How about this for a correction:
Fact: Jobs is a public figure, and his decisions affect large numbers of people. He is also charismatic and famous. An unauthorised biography of Jobs is therefore is a fair and reasonable thing, provided the content of the biography is obtained legally and without deception.
Having recently finished a postgrad journalism course at a major university, here's what I found:
Most journalism grads end up in PR, because there aren't enough jobs for them in the media, and when you write a PR release, you're doing exactly what reporters do every day - you're writing stuff in a way that makes it appetising to the reader, and perfect from the sub's point of view. PR also pays better than mainstream reporting, and you don't have to work nearly as hard. So that's why PR looks so much like news; it's written by journalists.
Also, the news media are very sensitive to costs, which is why most of them will happily print PR releases, which arrive free of charge from their sources. A good sub can edit ten stories in an hour, which is far cheaper than paying a reporter for a whole day just to chase one story that might not pan out.
So Paul Graham is quite right when he says that most "news" is marketing PR. However, he's wrong to blame the journalists for this. It isn't their laziness, or indifference to their trade; it's the fact that business today is solely interested in the bottom line, and the readers don't care that they're being fed a disguised ad.
On that last point, there's been an increasing trend towards unthinking acceptance of this kind of marketing. Consumption has become a major recreational activity in people's lives, so maybe to a lot of people, an ad is news!
So I read TFA, and what did I see?
Empty ramblings. Assertion. No proof, no quotes, nothin'.
I know it's an opinion piece. It's still a waste of space.
Incidentally, the share price of MACR is now well above what it was before the takeover was announced, so his crap about the market "dropping" the stock is blatant nonsense.
Yeah, but who seriosuly thinks that particle physics deals with "why" and "how"? All it comes up with are mathematical descriptions, not explanations.