So how many bankers are willing to donate a couple hundred million dollars to improve the education system, so that people understand that an adjustable-rate mortgage is not something that will work in their favor?
Huh? An ARM is not advantageous? Since when? I'm pretty sure I read about a study claiming that there has never been a good time to lock in, and that went all the way back to the Great Depression. But even on the face of it, there will never be a time in the future when my mortgage will be as high as it is today. And ARMs always have a lower rate than anything you can lock in at today. So, if I can start paying down a bit more principal a bit faster today, then by the time that the rate increases, I'll have less principal than I would have had if I were locked in. Rates would have to not merely increase, but increase by enough to overtake the old locked-in rate by a significant amount (at least 0.25%, sometimes much more depending on how late in your contract it happens) in order for my principal to not be lower after the five-year contract period on ARM than fixed-rate.
That's just the rough estimation method. The more cynical method is that band adjustors are not going to set their fixed rate contracts to lose money over the long term. Even though their marketing department promises that you'll be shielded from huge increases in rates, the reality is that they are fixed to rates that are not seen to be money-losers. I'm not educated enough in economics to bet against the bank, so it makes more sense to bet they're right and take the variable rate. According to that study I referred to earlier, this seems like the prudent path.
Where the problem comes up is if you can't afford the fixed-rate payments, even when you're on an adjustable-rate. That is, if the rates do rise, can you swallow that difference? If you can't, you can't afford any mortgage. Period. You do have to understand what "adjustable" means. And that rates can never get down to zero, so when they're already damned near zero, they can only go up. This means your payments can only go up. If you aren't planning on that, you're going to fail.
I can't imagine *AA coughing up sufficient funds to Comcast (and all the other ISPs that will surely follow suit) such that producing movies/music and complying with these subpoenas remains profitable for both.
Except that, unlike on the CSI shows (or even Law & Order sometimes), DNA testing is still expensive and takes a long time to run. Testing DNA at a crime scene is not automatic.
You're right. They're going to be using a weapon that was received in a less-than-legal manner in the first place, and either their fence will have fixed this for them (the fence is smarter - they're generally not in harm's way, which is a much smarter place to be) or, even if it's not removed, it will merely tie back to the original, legal owner, who likely had it stolen. Then you have to solve the theft, first, assuming the cops are smart enough to believe the victim instead of accusing them of the murder, and then figure out the fence, find him, and find out who he sold to (he probably isn't keeping meticulous records, though I'm sure some do).
So you're going to nab a) crimes of passion (not generally high on the repeat-offender list), and b) guys dumb enough to use their legally-purchased weapons in otherwise premeditated offenses. All low-hanging fruit, relatively speaking. While the group in (a) needs appropriate punishment for their actions, they're not generally a threat to the world at large. And those in (b) are likely going to be caught anyway even without this new law.
You don't really need to go too far up the intelligence tree to find guys using stolen weapons for their crime. At which point, this does very little. About the best it can do is improve the ability to link crimes together (you have to go MUCH further up the intelligence tree to find guys using a new weapon for each crime once fired).
Sure, sure. It's all bullshit. And, as another commenter remarked, Penn and Teller even have a show about it. But, do you know what is worse than "red white and blue all American BULLSHIT"? UN bullshit. Iranian bullshit. Russian bullshit. Peoples' Republic of China bullshit. Absolute-monarchy bullshit. Anarchist bullshit. Seriously, if you're going to be that cynical, you have to realise that the alternatives are all bullshit too.
Of course, if everything is bullshit, that really means it's just you that is full of bullshit. Sure, there's still bullshit out there, but when everything is scoring a 9 or higher on a ten point scale of bullshit, maybe, just maybe, it's your bullshit meter that is full of shit. You need to recalibrate that thing, relax, take a valium or something, and try again. And then you'll find things aren't nearly as bad as you thought. You still need to be on the lookout for true bona-fide bullshit, but you'll stop sweating the small stuff, and your paranoia will recede.
I think they broke it in 4.8. I distinctly recall this being a problem in 4.8.3, and I'm running 4.8.4 now. Most likely it was a problem in the rest of the 4.8 series, but I've run them all, usually within 48 hours of release, so I can't recall with specificity exactly where it stopped working. 4.8.4 was only released within the last week or so, so I can be pretty sure about 4.8.3 not working. But even then, it's still better than the click+click+click+click+... that was portrayed in GGP.
I've tied a key to the KDE menu. For my most-commonly-used apps, they're on the front page, so "My Favourites" (yeah, I have a MS keyboard) -> up/down arrow to get to the right place, enter. For others, MF+"ktor"+click. Admittedly, that last click is annoying. I've been meaning to open a bug report on it (I think it used to work with arrows/enter to select from the dynamic list). Either way, no, it's not click+click+click+click+... if you know what you're looking for, which presumably you do if Gnome's Ctrl+space+"fi"+enter is working for you.
So... they have money to burn in rewriting existing software that is freely available, and probably has been developed by people with a passion for what they're doing and thus have spent more time gaining expertise in the area, and probably has been available for a number of years and thus has had many people test it, uncover bugs, and fix them? Not to mention money to burn in trying to replicate the amount of testing needed?
Seriously, they need a clue transplant. I thought the corporate lawyers at $my->work were sticklers, but they at least let us ship GPL software as long as we can certify that there's no cross pollination of licensing (i.e., our code doesn't become GPL, too). And sometimes even then we can ship the GPL code (if we can find a way to keep the GPL from affecting key propietary code). Though non-GPL is definitely easier. Thankfully most of what I do is in perl where most things (nearly everything) are dual-licensed GPL/Artistic, giving us the freedom to keep our proprietary code proprietary while still leaving us on the hook to ensure distribution of the code we get from the community.
Mod parent up to +10. There's NOTHING worse than hyperbole. If I had a nickel for every time I saw unnecessary hyperbole, I'd be a BILLIONAIRE by now. If I could jump as over the top as these headlines get, I could out-leap Superman over tall buildings! Excessive use of hyperbole is worse than SATAN rising from the DEPTHS OF HELL, spewing HELLFIRE on everyone!
Or, maybe, just maybe, you need to take a valium. Not sure.
There's this thing called "google" which can be helpful. I mean, you're already on the net in a browser, it's not hard. Heck, just going directly to wikipedia gets you the hit in one try.
How is "controlling a system and getting money in exchange for licenses" not literally owning?
Up to now, their figurative owning is an "effective" ownership, as in "there are effectively no competitors in this space." However, should you know what you're doing, you could get something else with little effort. With this change, they are actually getting paid for compettitors to be allowed into their space. That is de facto, or literal, ownership.
I bet that if there were no DCMA laws, YouTube would allow anyone to flag copyright violations. But, because RIAA/MPAA fought so hard for this law, YouTube needs to cover its arse by actually following the letter of the law.
I'm sure harce was merely attempting to get the same comment in the original thread and the inevitable dupe. The only problem here is that he didn't wait for the dupe to actually be posted. Probably should have waited a few more minutes.
That's about what I said, isn't it? Their "accent alone doesn't mean it's not Microsoft". You have to use that in combination with other factors, such as who called whom, what is being said, how it is being said, and knowledge of the domain (such as knowing that MS doesn't outsource their sales force - while it makes sense to me, outsourcing development doesn't make sense to me and they do that anyway, so "makes sense to me" doesn't seem to be sufficient for determining this).
So true. I never fully understood the vitriol aimed at illegal immigrants for precisely this reason. Europeans illegally emigrated to the Americas. legality =/= morality
Yes, European colonists treat the Americas like shit, but that should be debated within its own moral framework.
Where are the calls coming from? Probably India or some impoverished nation.
Yes, from India. I've had them on the line more than a few times, and even strung them along in a VirtualBox session once, too. Except that I stopped it when they asked for actual money and explained to them that everything they said was a lie, starting with their names. They hung up that time. Another time I simply asked them why they liked scamming people, and the guy yelled at me as if to be offended by this. That was entertaining - knowing that I knew more about what they were talking about than they did, he wasn't going to be able to browbeat me into agreeing he actually was with Microsoft.
Any way, the accent can't be missed. It has been thick every time. Of course, in this day and age, the accent alone doesn't mean it's not Microsoft:-(
The problem with any sort of GPS tracking is that it has an error range. If you can pin down that the phone is in my building, but the building has 120 units in it. Is it really worth search 120 units for a 500 dollar phone? Actually maybe it is, if in the long run you set the precedent that the police will hunt you down and arrest you if you steal a 500 dollar phone, but it might not be. Different people will have different tolerances for these things.
Is it really worth running roughshod over the privacy of 119 innocent units to discover 1 alleged perpetrator?
Heck, I read all about this YEARS ago in that trusty old reference, The Bathroom Reader. Not sure which edition - I have probably about ten of them.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
scant [...] women
Pics or it didn't happen!
Oh crap, I think I just proved the point. :-P
So how many bankers are willing to donate a couple hundred million dollars to improve the education system, so that people understand that an adjustable-rate mortgage is not something that will work in their favor?
Huh? An ARM is not advantageous? Since when? I'm pretty sure I read about a study claiming that there has never been a good time to lock in, and that went all the way back to the Great Depression. But even on the face of it, there will never be a time in the future when my mortgage will be as high as it is today. And ARMs always have a lower rate than anything you can lock in at today. So, if I can start paying down a bit more principal a bit faster today, then by the time that the rate increases, I'll have less principal than I would have had if I were locked in. Rates would have to not merely increase, but increase by enough to overtake the old locked-in rate by a significant amount (at least 0.25%, sometimes much more depending on how late in your contract it happens) in order for my principal to not be lower after the five-year contract period on ARM than fixed-rate.
That's just the rough estimation method. The more cynical method is that band adjustors are not going to set their fixed rate contracts to lose money over the long term. Even though their marketing department promises that you'll be shielded from huge increases in rates, the reality is that they are fixed to rates that are not seen to be money-losers. I'm not educated enough in economics to bet against the bank, so it makes more sense to bet they're right and take the variable rate. According to that study I referred to earlier, this seems like the prudent path.
Where the problem comes up is if you can't afford the fixed-rate payments, even when you're on an adjustable-rate. That is, if the rates do rise, can you swallow that difference? If you can't, you can't afford any mortgage. Period. You do have to understand what "adjustable" means. And that rates can never get down to zero, so when they're already damned near zero, they can only go up. This means your payments can only go up. If you aren't planning on that, you're going to fail.
I can't imagine *AA coughing up sufficient funds to Comcast (and all the other ISPs that will surely follow suit) such that producing movies/music and complying with these subpoenas remains profitable for both.
Except that, unlike on the CSI shows (or even Law & Order sometimes), DNA testing is still expensive and takes a long time to run. Testing DNA at a crime scene is not automatic.
You're right. They're going to be using a weapon that was received in a less-than-legal manner in the first place, and either their fence will have fixed this for them (the fence is smarter - they're generally not in harm's way, which is a much smarter place to be) or, even if it's not removed, it will merely tie back to the original, legal owner, who likely had it stolen. Then you have to solve the theft, first, assuming the cops are smart enough to believe the victim instead of accusing them of the murder, and then figure out the fence, find him, and find out who he sold to (he probably isn't keeping meticulous records, though I'm sure some do).
So you're going to nab a) crimes of passion (not generally high on the repeat-offender list), and b) guys dumb enough to use their legally-purchased weapons in otherwise premeditated offenses. All low-hanging fruit, relatively speaking. While the group in (a) needs appropriate punishment for their actions, they're not generally a threat to the world at large. And those in (b) are likely going to be caught anyway even without this new law.
You don't really need to go too far up the intelligence tree to find guys using stolen weapons for their crime. At which point, this does very little. About the best it can do is improve the ability to link crimes together (you have to go MUCH further up the intelligence tree to find guys using a new weapon for each crime once fired).
Sure, sure. It's all bullshit. And, as another commenter remarked, Penn and Teller even have a show about it. But, do you know what is worse than "red white and blue all American BULLSHIT"? UN bullshit. Iranian bullshit. Russian bullshit. Peoples' Republic of China bullshit. Absolute-monarchy bullshit. Anarchist bullshit. Seriously, if you're going to be that cynical, you have to realise that the alternatives are all bullshit too.
Of course, if everything is bullshit, that really means it's just you that is full of bullshit. Sure, there's still bullshit out there, but when everything is scoring a 9 or higher on a ten point scale of bullshit, maybe, just maybe, it's your bullshit meter that is full of shit. You need to recalibrate that thing, relax, take a valium or something, and try again. And then you'll find things aren't nearly as bad as you thought. You still need to be on the lookout for true bona-fide bullshit, but you'll stop sweating the small stuff, and your paranoia will recede.
That's okay. That's what /. has editors for.
Btw, would this video card work for you?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=14-102-980&SortField=3&SummaryType=0&Pagesize=10&PurchaseMark=&SelectedRating=-1&VideoOnlyMark=False&VendorMark=&IsFeedbackTab=true&Keywords=(keywords)#scrollFullInfo
Just don't install Linux on it, you won't be able to return it if it's defective.
I think they broke it in 4.8. I distinctly recall this being a problem in 4.8.3, and I'm running 4.8.4 now. Most likely it was a problem in the rest of the 4.8 series, but I've run them all, usually within 48 hours of release, so I can't recall with specificity exactly where it stopped working. 4.8.4 was only released within the last week or so, so I can be pretty sure about 4.8.3 not working. But even then, it's still better than the click+click+click+click+... that was portrayed in GGP.
I've tied a key to the KDE menu. For my most-commonly-used apps, they're on the front page, so "My Favourites" (yeah, I have a MS keyboard) -> up/down arrow to get to the right place, enter. For others, MF+"ktor"+click. Admittedly, that last click is annoying. I've been meaning to open a bug report on it (I think it used to work with arrows/enter to select from the dynamic list). Either way, no, it's not click+click+click+click+... if you know what you're looking for, which presumably you do if Gnome's Ctrl+space+"fi"+enter is working for you.
So... they have money to burn in rewriting existing software that is freely available, and probably has been developed by people with a passion for what they're doing and thus have spent more time gaining expertise in the area, and probably has been available for a number of years and thus has had many people test it, uncover bugs, and fix them? Not to mention money to burn in trying to replicate the amount of testing needed?
Seriously, they need a clue transplant. I thought the corporate lawyers at $my->work were sticklers, but they at least let us ship GPL software as long as we can certify that there's no cross pollination of licensing (i.e., our code doesn't become GPL, too). And sometimes even then we can ship the GPL code (if we can find a way to keep the GPL from affecting key propietary code). Though non-GPL is definitely easier. Thankfully most of what I do is in perl where most things (nearly everything) are dual-licensed GPL/Artistic, giving us the freedom to keep our proprietary code proprietary while still leaving us on the hook to ensure distribution of the code we get from the community.
Slashdot isn't some game where you try to score the most karma points.
What? Shit, why have I been wasting all this time here if I can't win?
Mod parent up to +10. There's NOTHING worse than hyperbole. If I had a nickel for every time I saw unnecessary hyperbole, I'd be a BILLIONAIRE by now. If I could jump as over the top as these headlines get, I could out-leap Superman over tall buildings! Excessive use of hyperbole is worse than SATAN rising from the DEPTHS OF HELL, spewing HELLFIRE on everyone!
Or, maybe, just maybe, you need to take a valium. Not sure.
Or "You may actually be stupid."
Um, that's probably not helping. Nevermind.
There's this thing called "google" which can be helpful. I mean, you're already on the net in a browser, it's not hard. Heck, just going directly to wikipedia gets you the hit in one try.
Please excuse jgtg32a, he didn't get into MENSA, either.
:-)
There's only one person in this world you can control, and that's you.
Having high standards are for yourself. Having high standards doesn't require you to also have high expectations.
Yes.
How is "controlling a system and getting money in exchange for licenses" not literally owning?
Up to now, their figurative owning is an "effective" ownership, as in "there are effectively no competitors in this space." However, should you know what you're doing, you could get something else with little effort. With this change, they are actually getting paid for compettitors to be allowed into their space. That is de facto, or literal, ownership.
I bet that if there were no DCMA laws, YouTube would allow anyone to flag copyright violations. But, because RIAA/MPAA fought so hard for this law, YouTube needs to cover its arse by actually following the letter of the law.
I'm sure harce was merely attempting to get the same comment in the original thread and the inevitable dupe. The only problem here is that he didn't wait for the dupe to actually be posted. Probably should have waited a few more minutes.
That's about what I said, isn't it? Their "accent alone doesn't mean it's not Microsoft". You have to use that in combination with other factors, such as who called whom, what is being said, how it is being said, and knowledge of the domain (such as knowing that MS doesn't outsource their sales force - while it makes sense to me, outsourcing development doesn't make sense to me and they do that anyway, so "makes sense to me" doesn't seem to be sufficient for determining this).
So true. I never fully understood the vitriol aimed at illegal immigrants for precisely this reason. Europeans illegally emigrated to the Americas. legality =/= morality Yes, European colonists treat the Americas like shit, but that should be debated within its own moral framework.
Legality, like history, is defined by the victor.
Where are the calls coming from? Probably India or some impoverished nation.
Yes, from India. I've had them on the line more than a few times, and even strung them along in a VirtualBox session once, too. Except that I stopped it when they asked for actual money and explained to them that everything they said was a lie, starting with their names. They hung up that time. Another time I simply asked them why they liked scamming people, and the guy yelled at me as if to be offended by this. That was entertaining - knowing that I knew more about what they were talking about than they did, he wasn't going to be able to browbeat me into agreeing he actually was with Microsoft.
Any way, the accent can't be missed. It has been thick every time. Of course, in this day and age, the accent alone doesn't mean it's not Microsoft :-(
The problem with any sort of GPS tracking is that it has an error range. If you can pin down that the phone is in my building, but the building has 120 units in it. Is it really worth search 120 units for a 500 dollar phone? Actually maybe it is, if in the long run you set the precedent that the police will hunt you down and arrest you if you steal a 500 dollar phone, but it might not be. Different people will have different tolerances for these things.
Is it really worth running roughshod over the privacy of 119 innocent units to discover 1 alleged perpetrator?
Damn, I think I just encouraged them.
Heck, I read all about this YEARS ago in that trusty old reference, The Bathroom Reader. Not sure which edition - I have probably about ten of them. :-)