In the case of Northern Rock, the creation of 24 billion quid is small potatoes compared to the amount of money already in the system -- and the bank itself will recover some percentage of the bad loans, I imagine, so the effect on the economy may actually be smaller than the headline figure.
What bads loans?
There's a tremendous amount of ignorance and disinformation going around about what actually happened to Northern Rock. It is not, and never was exposed to the US sub-prime risk. It's not a buyer of debt on the money markets, its a seller. The debt it holds is in the form of UK mortgage loans which are generally dependable ("sub-prime" never really got going here, thankfully.) The bank was/is not suffering from high defaults and is in no particular risk of going bankrupt.
What happened was a liquidity crisis, exacerbated by a media generated run on the bank. NR ran a business model where they sold the majority of their loans on, rather than offsetting them against deposits. When the debt market dried up, they found themselves unable to do this, and stuck for the hard cash they needed for their day-to-day operations. In the interests of a stable banking system, the Bank of England stepped in as lender of last resort. Then all their depositors panicked and tried to withdraw at once, resulting in the £24bn figure.
Whether you consider it "real money" or not, it's in no particular danger of being lost, it's guaranteed against reliable UK home loans. It just may take some time to repay, as these loans run up to 25 years. The BoE effectively bought in to NR's mortgage book. It did so at a punitive rate, so in theory they actually stands to make a profit from the deal.
Because then you'd need an engine on the bottom of the throwaway fuel tank. Having the shuttle on the side allows the reusable SSME to be used for takeoff thrust, so the only throwaway part is a simple tank.
Of course, we all know by now that a throwaway engine, indeed a whole throwaway vehicle, would be cheaper and safer. When "reusability" requires over-engineering things, burning huge amounts of fuel to put a massively overweight vehicle into orbit, and having to rebuild all the propulsive components between flights anyway, it's a futile exercise. We simply don't have the technology to design practical reusable space vehicles even 30 years later, but for some reason they were obsessed with the reusability concept at the time.
The super-safe way to do this on a Unix filesystem would be:
1. Create hard links for new locations. 2. Verify hard links were successfully created. 3. "Delete" files from the old locations, thus leaving the new hard links as the only pointers to the files.
Whether this approach is actually used much, I don't know.
In a similar vein, it is frustration with the out-dated UNIX system of spreading bits of applications around inconsistent places in/bin,/usr,/etc,/usr/local and who knows where else that has pushed me away from most Linux distros towards using BogoLinux, PC-BSD, and MacOS X.
As others have pointed out, with package management systems available, this makes no difference to usability.
More to the point, just because you don't understand the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, don't knock it. Contrary to your beliefs, it's not just some disorganised relic of past Unix. It is designed to allow system files with different characteristics to be separated from each other so they can be spread across different filesystems and mounted in different ways. This is very useful for things like network booting, backup plans and security models.
I was visiting an academic CS research group, which is doing some networking protocol work they want widely adopted (eg, in Windows would be a good start).
So they should have chosen BSD in the first place, or maybe even just placed it in the public domain. The GPL V2/V3 distinction makes absolutely no difference here, you can't use V2 code in proprietry software either.
This isn't GPL3 "hurting", it's clueless people choosing the wrong license for their aims.
That you Britain for setting up this powerkeg. (I believe that was intended to say thank you.)
Britain ruled Iraq for a grand total of 12 years between inheriting it from the Ottoman Empire and granting independance, and they didn't redraw any borders. I think your finger of blame is somewhat misplaced.
"The count encompasses non-combatants killed by military or paramilitary action and the breakdown in civil security following the invasion."
IOW it's mainly Muslims killing each other, so the GPs point about us "still killing them in mass" is bullshit. The main reason we're still there four years later is to try to stop Muslim deaths. (Of course, whether our continued presence is actually helping is very debatable.)
I also have to wonder what exactly the numerous Islamic terrorist atrocities commited before any western involvement in Iraq or Afganistan were "fighting back" against.
A person who--
* (a) dishonestly obtains an electronic communications service, and
* (b)does so with intent to avoid payment of a charge applicable to the provision of that service, is guilty of an offence.
Clause (b) makes this applicable only where there is a pay service that you are bypassing.
Computer Misuse Act 1990:
A person is guilty of an offence if--
* (a) he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;
* (b) the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and
* (c) he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.
The application of clauses (b) and (c) in the wifi scenario is very debatable. For clause (b), it can be argued that you were authorised, in that the technology itself contains authentication mechanisms that were configured to allow free access. If this argument is not accepted, then you can still fall back on clause (c), and say that given the open configuration, you had no reasonable way of knowing that the owner did not intend to grant free access.
You asked the machine for a $50 withdrawal.
The electronic systems in the machine logged a $50 withdrawal.
So what if when approached, you say that's what you got?
If they go to a court with the claim you recieved $100 due to a mechanical mix-up with the cassettes, how do they prove it?
In their own claim they are acknowledging that their systems are fallible, so how can they rely on them to make a case?
I wanted to know what was up with radiocarbon dating and all these dinosaur fossils we keep finding everywhere. Apparently, God put all those there, meticulously altering their Carbon-14 content in an elaborate ruse, trying to pull the proverbial wool over our eyes.
If you found Carbon-14 in a dinosaur fossil, that truly is a miracle.
It's not really stupidity.
Indeed. True stupidity would be applying a dating technique that only goes back about 60,000 years to fossils from 65,000,000 years ago.
The reason they licensed it under the MPL is so that it could be used in proprietary software. It is OK to call it "open source", but it is not "free software"
The FSF recognize the MPL as a free software license.
I don't quite understand how AMD are falling so far behind in the performance race.
They have what, on paper, should be a superior architecture. Core is excellent, but it's still an evolution of a 32-bit design and handicapped by the FSB. With a clean-sheet 64-bit design, Hypertransport and an on-die memory controller, AMD should easily be able to put out something competitive with Intel's offerings. As soon as their 65nm process was up and running they should have followed Intel's Lead and put 2 dies in one package to create a 4-core chip. The architecture is already designed to scale to at least 8-way (Opteron), and they have the advantage that they can link the cores internally via hypertransport. This would need very little R&D - it would just be a new configuration of proven technology.
I hear that in pure 64-bit operation things are much closer anyway, and that's obviously the way of the future.
As for your catch-all address, you can use some of the techniques that others have mentioned in previous comments. I usually tell my customers to just wait it out. The spammers will stop using your domain after a day or two. give it another couple of days for the mail queue's to empty out, and you'll stop getting bounces.
That's a bit optimistic. I'm in the exact same position and I've been getting roughly 1000-2000 bounces a day for over a month.
The Amiga was a great success. Back-to-front as it may seem, it was the failure of the company that sank the computer. If a suitable buyer had snapped it up in a timely manner, the Amiga could have lived on.
Unfortunately, as things turned out it just got sold on and on between companies that lacked the wherewithall to keep it going. After a few years of nothing but vaporware announcements, the IBM-compatible platform had caught up on tech and come down in price, making the Amiga irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Einstein didn't disprove the aether, he just described its properties and called it space-time.
Nope. KDE3 developer support will expire before three years, so neither version is LTS this time.
In the case of the BBC, there would be no other ISP involved. They peer directly with the major UK ISPs.
Yep, because introducing parallel processing to graphics hardware would be truly revolutionary.
Don't active galactic nuclei fire out their "death rays" along the axis of rotation, ie perpedicular to the galactic disc, where we are.
IIRC, we observe comic rays using huge tanks of water at ground level.
but right now people are just starting to get used to the idea of tabs much less use 12 of them.
Speak for yourself. I've been running 100-200 tabs on a regular basis for at least the last year.
In the case of Northern Rock, the creation of 24 billion quid is small potatoes compared to the amount of money already in the system -- and the bank itself will recover some percentage of the bad loans, I imagine, so the effect on the economy may actually be smaller than the headline figure.
What bads loans?
There's a tremendous amount of ignorance and disinformation going around about what actually happened to Northern Rock. It is not, and never was exposed to the US sub-prime risk. It's not a buyer of debt on the money markets, its a seller. The debt it holds is in the form of UK mortgage loans which are generally dependable ("sub-prime" never really got going here, thankfully.) The bank was/is not suffering from high defaults and is in no particular risk of going bankrupt.
What happened was a liquidity crisis, exacerbated by a media generated run on the bank. NR ran a business model where they sold the majority of their loans on, rather than offsetting them against deposits. When the debt market dried up, they found themselves unable to do this, and stuck for the hard cash they needed for their day-to-day operations. In the interests of a stable banking system, the Bank of England stepped in as lender of last resort. Then all their depositors panicked and tried to withdraw at once, resulting in the £24bn figure.
Whether you consider it "real money" or not, it's in no particular danger of being lost, it's guaranteed against reliable UK home loans. It just may take some time to repay, as these loans run up to 25 years. The BoE effectively bought in to NR's mortgage book. It did so at a punitive rate, so in theory they actually stands to make a profit from the deal.
But when you look at the type of expectations they have to live up to just to be equal,
What like, by definition, the same expectations as anyone else? That's superficially emotive horseshit.
Because then you'd need an engine on the bottom of the throwaway fuel tank. Having the shuttle on the side allows the reusable SSME to be used for takeoff thrust, so the only throwaway part is a simple tank.
Of course, we all know by now that a throwaway engine, indeed a whole throwaway vehicle, would be cheaper and safer. When "reusability" requires over-engineering things, burning huge amounts of fuel to put a massively overweight vehicle into orbit, and having to rebuild all the propulsive components between flights anyway, it's a futile exercise. We simply don't have the technology to design practical reusable space vehicles even 30 years later, but for some reason they were obsessed with the reusability concept at the time.
The super-safe way to do this on a Unix filesystem would be:
1. Create hard links for new locations.
2. Verify hard links were successfully created.
3. "Delete" files from the old locations, thus leaving the new hard links as the only pointers to the files.
Whether this approach is actually used much, I don't know.
Commercial or not, the restrictions in the GPL only affect those who distribute to third parties.
In a similar vein, it is frustration with the out-dated UNIX system of spreading bits of applications around inconsistent places in /bin, /usr, /etc, /usr/local and who knows where else that has pushed me away from most Linux distros towards using BogoLinux, PC-BSD, and MacOS X.
As others have pointed out, with package management systems available, this makes no difference to usability.
More to the point, just because you don't understand the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, don't knock it. Contrary to your beliefs, it's not just some disorganised relic of past Unix. It is designed to allow system files with different characteristics to be separated from each other so they can be spread across different filesystems and mounted in different ways. This is very useful for things like network booting, backup plans and security models.
I was visiting an academic CS research group, which is doing some networking protocol work they want widely adopted (eg, in Windows would be a good start).
So they should have chosen BSD in the first place, or maybe even just placed it in the public domain. The GPL V2/V3 distinction makes absolutely no difference here, you can't use V2 code in proprietry software either.
This isn't GPL3 "hurting", it's clueless people choosing the wrong license for their aims.
That you Britain for setting up this powerkeg. (I believe that was intended to say thank you.)
Britain ruled Iraq for a grand total of 12 years between inheriting it from the Ottoman Empire and granting independance, and they didn't redraw any borders. I think your finger of blame is somewhat misplaced.
"The count encompasses non-combatants killed by military or paramilitary action and the breakdown in civil security following the invasion."
IOW it's mainly Muslims killing each other, so the GPs point about us "still killing them in mass" is bullshit. The main reason we're still there four years later is to try to stop Muslim deaths. (Of course, whether our continued presence is actually helping is very debatable.)
I also have to wonder what exactly the numerous Islamic terrorist atrocities commited before any western involvement in Iraq or Afganistan were "fighting back" against.
Communications Act 2003:
A person who--
* (a) dishonestly obtains an electronic communications service, and
* (b)does so with intent to avoid payment of a charge applicable to the provision of that service,
is guilty of an offence.
Clause (b) makes this applicable only where there is a pay service that you are bypassing.
Computer Misuse Act 1990:
A person is guilty of an offence if--
* (a) he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;
* (b) the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and
* (c) he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.
The application of clauses (b) and (c) in the wifi scenario is very debatable. For clause (b), it can be argued that you were authorised, in that the technology itself contains authentication mechanisms that were configured to allow free access. If this argument is not accepted, then you can still fall back on clause (c), and say that given the open configuration, you had no reasonable way of knowing that the owner did not intend to grant free access.
You asked the machine for a $50 withdrawal.
The electronic systems in the machine logged a $50 withdrawal.
So what if when approached, you say that's what you got?
If they go to a court with the claim you recieved $100 due to a mechanical mix-up with the cassettes, how do they prove it?
In their own claim they are acknowledging that their systems are fallible, so how can they rely on them to make a case?
It's more like the "getting infected" function if you sleep with the sort of girl who is impressed by that crap.
Since the routers would have continued to do fine if they had been used within their design specifications, surely it should actually be:
Failure to Invest to Blame for Japan Net Outage
Or, more to the point:
Management Idiocy To Blame for Japan Net Outage
Evidently, Japan has it's share of PHBs too.
I wanted to know what was up with radiocarbon dating and all these dinosaur fossils we keep finding everywhere. Apparently, God put all those there, meticulously altering their Carbon-14 content in an elaborate ruse, trying to pull the proverbial wool over our eyes.
If you found Carbon-14 in a dinosaur fossil, that truly is a miracle.
It's not really stupidity.
Indeed. True stupidity would be applying a dating technique that only goes back about 60,000 years to fossils from 65,000,000 years ago.
The reason they licensed it under the MPL is so that it could be used in proprietary software. It is OK to call it "open source", but it is not "free software"
The FSF recognize the MPL as a free software license.
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html
I don't quite understand how AMD are falling so far behind in the performance race.
They have what, on paper, should be a superior architecture. Core is excellent, but it's still an evolution of a 32-bit design and handicapped by the FSB. With a clean-sheet 64-bit design, Hypertransport and an on-die memory controller, AMD should easily be able to put out something competitive with Intel's offerings. As soon as their 65nm process was up and running they should have followed Intel's Lead and put 2 dies in one package to create a 4-core chip. The architecture is already designed to scale to at least 8-way (Opteron), and they have the advantage that they can link the cores internally via hypertransport. This would need very little R&D - it would just be a new configuration of proven technology.
I hear that in pure 64-bit operation things are much closer anyway, and that's obviously the way of the future.
As for your catch-all address, you can use some of the techniques that others have mentioned in previous comments. I usually tell my customers to just wait it out. The spammers will stop using your domain after a day or two. give it another couple of days for the mail queue's to empty out, and you'll stop getting bounces.
That's a bit optimistic. I'm in the exact same position and I've been getting roughly 1000-2000 bounces a day for over a month.
The Amiga was a great success. Back-to-front as it may seem, it was the failure of the company that sank the computer. If a suitable buyer had snapped it up in a timely manner, the Amiga could have lived on. Unfortunately, as things turned out it just got sold on and on between companies that lacked the wherewithall to keep it going. After a few years of nothing but vaporware announcements, the IBM-compatible platform had caught up on tech and come down in price, making the Amiga irrelevant.