I don't know about that. My philosophy is that there should be two ways to do everything - one way that's obvious and handles the "easy" cases, and a more "advanced" method that handles edge conditions that come won't come up in the commonly intended uses.
That way one makes the easy things easy while not making the hard things nearly impossible.
Arguably, the North Korean regime is propped up by China simply to ensure that South Korea (which is a US ally) does not gain a direct land border with the Chinese homeland. That, and the fact that any collapse of the North Korean state would send a flood of refugees into the Chinese countryside, causing even more displacement and unrest.
Going one step further, who are we to say that this was a "failure" at all? Sure, North Korea stated that this was a launch to deliver a satellite to orbit, but we have no idea what the real intention of the launch was. For all we know, the second stage could just have been a dummy and the real purpose of the test would have been to test the first stage of a ballistic missile still in development.
Gloating over N. Korea's apparent "failure" in this test smacks of hubris to me.
Just another example of why I prefer a non-State world. We don't need laws to protect ourselves.
Really? I'd rather have laws that protected my basic rights. I'd really rather not live by the "law of the jungle", and be subject to the wishes of whoever can muster the most armed force in my particular area.
I recognize that your preferences may differ. In that case, you are free to move to some of the more lawless portions of this world. Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo come to mind. I'm sure the residents of those locales feel that they're living in paradise just because they're not subject to the rule of law.
The issue is that newspapers (by contributing to a better informed citizenry) produce a positive externality that isn't being captured on their profit/loss statements. Making newspapers tax-exempt would help them capture some of the benefits of this externality without costing the rest of us too much money. After all, its not like a newspaper would be paying a whole lot of taxes once its bankrupt, either.
The press won't have to censor itself any more than other nonprofits who deal with government issues. Its not like this is completely uncharted legal water - precedent does exist regarding what sorts of statements a nonprofit can make without those statements constituting an explicit endorsement of a candidate.
To be fair, though, the one major example I have of donation supported media (National Public Radio) is remarkably balanced, especially in it its coverage of the ongoing economic troubles. At the very least they've not been more unbalanced in any direction than privately funded media.
From the story, which is admittedly light on details, it seems like Valve is embedding its executables with some kind of digital watermark. So, you will still be able to install and play the games, but, if they end up on peer to peer networks, they know who to call.
My question is, "What prevents you and me from doing a diff between our copies of the game to find out which bits are the watermark?"
But, if you reduce the data that you send to the end console, you start relying on that console to do some of the computation for you. In your example, the end console would still be responsible for doing all of the rendering calculations to display the polygons on the screen. Now, what happens when a new game comes along and wants to stream more polygons, or wants to use some other graphics element that is easier to send, but harder to draw?
Basically, it seems that you've come up with the concept of a dedicated Wow (or CounterStrike, or Starcraft, etc.) box that can be sold using a business model whereby the monthly plan makes up for the fact that you sell the box itself at a loss. While that'd be interesting to see from a business perspective, its not a huge innovation in terms of technology.
The type of disasters that could cause people to make claims on their fire hazard insurance cannot possibly affect the percentage of the policy holders as the type of disasters that could befall the CDS counterparties. With CDS, it's almost all or nothing, as far as people making claims, since house prices more or less move together.
That's the key assumption that CDS issuers were missing. Their mathematical models (based on historical data), showed that the chance of house prices declining simultaneously in all major markets in the country was infinitesimal. Of course, with hindsight, we know that those very models ignored the potential risks caused by the "financial innovation" that spread large numbers of loans to subprime borrowers, creating such a risk where none existed.
The key here is that these banks should've known that there was no way AIG could cover all these CDS. They should've known that if housing prices decline, there would be lots of defaults.
Of course the banks knew that there was no way that AIG could cover all its CDS contracts simultaneously. One of the basic principles of insurance is that the company doesn't hold enough reserves to cover all the outstanding policies - it holds enough in reserve to cover the likely number of payouts, with a generous safety margin. Obviously, the safety margin here wasn't generous enough.
As for there being lots of defaults if house prices declined, that was again an oversight that was shared by both the banks and AIG. Both sides used the same housing data that showed that the chances of simultaneous price declines in all major markets of the country was very small. So, of course the conclusion was that AIG had enough funds to cover its contracts.
As I said above, everything is clear in hindsight, but I'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thought that things could get this bad ahead of time.
"Hey, they only way we'll need this insurance is if there is a catastrophic collapse. But if that happens, Companies C, D, E,..., Z are all going to be asking to be reimbursed along with us! And why should we think Company A has anywhere near enough capital to insure all of those companies in case of default?" Company B should be asking Company A, "Hey, do you even able to insure this?"
When you buy insurance on your house, do you ask the insurance company what would happen if every house on your block was burned down? Of course not. Its not your job to calculate those probabilites and manage that risk, its the insurance company's. In the same way, it was not the buyers' responsibility to calculate the odds of catastrophic collapse. That function was (supposed to be) served by AIG. After all, why was AIG even offering these contracts if they didn't have enough capital to cover them?
And the answer would be a resounding "No" (or a bald-faced lie that would be easy to uncover).
Not necessarily. Do you know which insurance company is responsible for your neighbor's house? How about the apartment building down the street? Even if the company knew who else was insured by AIG, how could it know that its internal risk model was more accurate? After all, AIG was supposed to the expert when it came to these sorts of things. If it had been otherwise, no one would have bought insurance from them.
Its really easy to argue from hindsight and say, "These companies should have known better." But, at the time, buying credit default swap insurance from AIG probably seemed like a prudent hedging measure - just like buying insurance on your car or your house.
Insuring them may present no tangible benefits to you, but letting them fail is certainly going to present tangible harm. Example: When Lehman Brothers failed unexpectedly, many money market funds were adversely affected. These funds then sold their other assets into the corporate bond market, flooding it and essentially shutting it down. Because the market was shut down, many large corporations were faced with the probability of not being able to make payroll, as they were unable to get cash from their primary source of short term loans. Such an event would have undoubtably affected thousands (perhaps millions) if the Federal Reserve had not stepped in and purchased mass quantities of commercial bonds to restore order.
I agree that it would be best if the present situation had not arisen, and if regulators had put in more stringent controls ahead of time. However, as the grandparent poster points out, letting the current system of banks and financial institutions fail rapidly and messily would cause more harm than good. We need to insure these banks on a temporary basis while we wind down their obligations and ensure that other parties will not be unduly harmed by their failures. Then we let them fail, when their failure can cause no harm to the rest of us.
But thankfully, those who possess such missiles have no reason to shot down our airshipâ"or at least since we won't (and shouldn't) be using the ship against them, one hopes they would consider such act of war rather carefully.
Not necessarily. The U-2 was shot down by a SA-2 system, which the Soviet Union sold to a number of countries. The North Vietnamese used it against American planes during the Vietnam war. Egypt used it against Israel during the 6 Day War. We know for sure that the Iranians and North Koreans have the system. So, one cannot say that the only countries with the means to shoot down such an airship are friendly ones.
There are missiles that are capable of bringing down the U-2, which flies at 70,000 feet. I don't think a fat, non-moving target sitting at 65,000 feet will be a problem.
Even if the MiG can't shoot it down with guns, its easy enough to strap a few pods of dumb-fire rockets to the wings. Given that the blimp is a big, static target, even relatively inaccurate rockets would have a fair chance of bringing it down.
Any aircraft that started heading towards the blimp would most likely be intercepted before it got anywhere near it.
Aircraft, perhaps, but what about missiles? Unlike a UAV, this blimp is tethered and can't be maneuvered out of the way of incoming fire. What does the military plan to do if an enemy launches a large number of "dumb" ballistic missiles set to go off when they reach the blimp's altitude? The defenders would have to shoot down all of the incoming rockets, whereas the attacker would only have to get one shot in.
Observation doesn't necessarily require being directly over enemy territory. Such airships would be excellent for covering borders and providing 25/7 situational awareness over areas of Iraq and Afghanistan.
While these sorts of blimps would be great against a foe armed with small arms and other handheld/light weaponry (e.g. those we're fighting in Iraq/Afghanistan), they'd be just about useless against any enemy with even moderate technical capability.
For example, the article states, "And its range would be such that the spy craft could operate at the distant edges of any military theater, probably out of the range of surface-to-air missiles as well." Yet, that statement completely ignores the fact that SAM ranges are based on their ability to catch up to and hit an aircraft (usually moving at high speed and maneuvering). A SAM would have significantly higher range if it was just fired at a static target.
Or, heck, why use a SAM at all? I mean, if you're shooting at a static, tethered blimp, you don't need any of the sophisticated guidance systems that a SAM provides; all you need is the location of the blimp or its associated ground anchor. A modified Scud could take out this blimp, so long as the enemy set it to explode at the same altitude as the blimp, rather than at ground level.
Fundamentally, a sitting duck is a sitting duck, no matter how well you think you've protected it.
Well met. But, to paraphrase another reply to this thread, judging Japanese anime by Evangelion is like trying to judge all movies based on American Beauty. Not everything is as screwed up as that.
To be fair, it's not easier if you have a DVR. Which a lot of people do, and the networks know that. There's not as much loathing of moving things around on the schedule anymore because the execs know that DVR's will find these shows automatically, so they're not as concerned about the con of potential audience loss anymore. The potential benefits outweigh the risks now.
I'm still not sure how the studio executives can justify that, given that most DVR users fast forward through advertising. I mean, wouldn't those executives see DVRs as a bad thing, given that they allow people to skip past what they're really selling (namely, the advertising)?
I'm not sure there's as much money in producing a dvd to be netflixed as producing a 1 hour tv show that is paid for by commercials (and ALSO netflix).
That's true, but, on the other hand, it's not as if the TV companies have a right to make as much money as they currently do.
On the other hand, I'd rather have a story/situation that doesn't have a clear ending than have a series that's stretched beyond its "ending" because the producers wanted to milk it for more money. Case in point: Naruto, Bleach, and, of course, DragonBall Z.
It is easier to dodge something coming at you from the front than from behind.
On the other hand, if someone hits you from behind, its usually their fault for not dodging out of the way. The way I see it, if you hit me from behind, I might thank you, since you probably paid for the repairs to my car as well as your own.
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I don't know about that. My philosophy is that there should be two ways to do everything - one way that's obvious and handles the "easy" cases, and a more "advanced" method that handles edge conditions that come won't come up in the commonly intended uses.
That way one makes the easy things easy while not making the hard things nearly impossible.
Arguably, the North Korean regime is propped up by China simply to ensure that South Korea (which is a US ally) does not gain a direct land border with the Chinese homeland. That, and the fact that any collapse of the North Korean state would send a flood of refugees into the Chinese countryside, causing even more displacement and unrest.
Going one step further, who are we to say that this was a "failure" at all? Sure, North Korea stated that this was a launch to deliver a satellite to orbit, but we have no idea what the real intention of the launch was. For all we know, the second stage could just have been a dummy and the real purpose of the test would have been to test the first stage of a ballistic missile still in development.
Gloating over N. Korea's apparent "failure" in this test smacks of hubris to me.
Just another example of why I prefer a non-State world. We don't need laws to protect ourselves.
Really? I'd rather have laws that protected my basic rights. I'd really rather not live by the "law of the jungle", and be subject to the wishes of whoever can muster the most armed force in my particular area.
I recognize that your preferences may differ. In that case, you are free to move to some of the more lawless portions of this world. Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo come to mind. I'm sure the residents of those locales feel that they're living in paradise just because they're not subject to the rule of law.
The issue is that newspapers (by contributing to a better informed citizenry) produce a positive externality that isn't being captured on their profit/loss statements. Making newspapers tax-exempt would help them capture some of the benefits of this externality without costing the rest of us too much money. After all, its not like a newspaper would be paying a whole lot of taxes once its bankrupt, either.
The press won't have to censor itself any more than other nonprofits who deal with government issues. Its not like this is completely uncharted legal water - precedent does exist regarding what sorts of statements a nonprofit can make without those statements constituting an explicit endorsement of a candidate.
To be fair, though, the one major example I have of donation supported media (National Public Radio) is remarkably balanced, especially in it its coverage of the ongoing economic troubles. At the very least they've not been more unbalanced in any direction than privately funded media.
Well, that doesn't really address the fact that the machine is exposed to malware and sucking down electricity all night.
From the story, which is admittedly light on details, it seems like Valve is embedding its executables with some kind of digital watermark. So, you will still be able to install and play the games, but, if they end up on peer to peer networks, they know who to call.
My question is, "What prevents you and me from doing a diff between our copies of the game to find out which bits are the watermark?"
But, if you reduce the data that you send to the end console, you start relying on that console to do some of the computation for you. In your example, the end console would still be responsible for doing all of the rendering calculations to display the polygons on the screen. Now, what happens when a new game comes along and wants to stream more polygons, or wants to use some other graphics element that is easier to send, but harder to draw?
Basically, it seems that you've come up with the concept of a dedicated Wow (or CounterStrike, or Starcraft, etc.) box that can be sold using a business model whereby the monthly plan makes up for the fact that you sell the box itself at a loss. While that'd be interesting to see from a business perspective, its not a huge innovation in terms of technology.
I don't know about that. I looked at my Monopoly board the other day and it said, "Made in China."
The type of disasters that could cause people to make claims on their fire hazard insurance cannot possibly affect the percentage of the policy holders as the type of disasters that could befall the CDS counterparties. With CDS, it's almost all or nothing, as far as people making claims, since house prices more or less move together.
That's the key assumption that CDS issuers were missing. Their mathematical models (based on historical data), showed that the chance of house prices declining simultaneously in all major markets in the country was infinitesimal. Of course, with hindsight, we know that those very models ignored the potential risks caused by the "financial innovation" that spread large numbers of loans to subprime borrowers, creating such a risk where none existed.
The key here is that these banks should've known that there was no way AIG could cover all these CDS. They should've known that if housing prices decline, there would be lots of defaults.
Of course the banks knew that there was no way that AIG could cover all its CDS contracts simultaneously. One of the basic principles of insurance is that the company doesn't hold enough reserves to cover all the outstanding policies - it holds enough in reserve to cover the likely number of payouts, with a generous safety margin. Obviously, the safety margin here wasn't generous enough.
As for there being lots of defaults if house prices declined, that was again an oversight that was shared by both the banks and AIG. Both sides used the same housing data that showed that the chances of simultaneous price declines in all major markets of the country was very small. So, of course the conclusion was that AIG had enough funds to cover its contracts.
As I said above, everything is clear in hindsight, but I'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thought that things could get this bad ahead of time.
"Hey, they only way we'll need this insurance is if there is a catastrophic collapse. But if that happens, Companies C, D, E, ..., Z are all going to be asking to be reimbursed along with us! And why should we think Company A has anywhere near enough capital to insure all of those companies in case of default?" Company B should be asking Company A, "Hey, do you even able to insure this?"
When you buy insurance on your house, do you ask the insurance company what would happen if every house on your block was burned down? Of course not. Its not your job to calculate those probabilites and manage that risk, its the insurance company's. In the same way, it was not the buyers' responsibility to calculate the odds of catastrophic collapse. That function was (supposed to be) served by AIG. After all, why was AIG even offering these contracts if they didn't have enough capital to cover them?
And the answer would be a resounding "No" (or a bald-faced lie that would be easy to uncover).
Not necessarily. Do you know which insurance company is responsible for your neighbor's house? How about the apartment building down the street? Even if the company knew who else was insured by AIG, how could it know that its internal risk model was more accurate? After all, AIG was supposed to the expert when it came to these sorts of things. If it had been otherwise, no one would have bought insurance from them.
Its really easy to argue from hindsight and say, "These companies should have known better." But, at the time, buying credit default swap insurance from AIG probably seemed like a prudent hedging measure - just like buying insurance on your car or your house.
Insuring them may present no tangible benefits to you, but letting them fail is certainly going to present tangible harm. Example: When Lehman Brothers failed unexpectedly, many money market funds were adversely affected. These funds then sold their other assets into the corporate bond market, flooding it and essentially shutting it down. Because the market was shut down, many large corporations were faced with the probability of not being able to make payroll, as they were unable to get cash from their primary source of short term loans. Such an event would have undoubtably affected thousands (perhaps millions) if the Federal Reserve had not stepped in and purchased mass quantities of commercial bonds to restore order.
I agree that it would be best if the present situation had not arisen, and if regulators had put in more stringent controls ahead of time. However, as the grandparent poster points out, letting the current system of banks and financial institutions fail rapidly and messily would cause more harm than good. We need to insure these banks on a temporary basis while we wind down their obligations and ensure that other parties will not be unduly harmed by their failures. Then we let them fail, when their failure can cause no harm to the rest of us.
Best of all, Good Old Games sells their games completely DRM unencumbered, so its easy to play them with Wine on Linux.
But thankfully, those who possess such missiles have no reason to shot down our airshipâ"or at least since we won't (and shouldn't) be using the ship against them, one hopes they would consider such act of war rather carefully.
Not necessarily. The U-2 was shot down by a SA-2 system, which the Soviet Union sold to a number of countries. The North Vietnamese used it against American planes during the Vietnam war. Egypt used it against Israel during the 6 Day War. We know for sure that the Iranians and North Koreans have the system. So, one cannot say that the only countries with the means to shoot down such an airship are friendly ones.
There are missiles that are capable of bringing down the U-2, which flies at 70,000 feet. I don't think a fat, non-moving target sitting at 65,000 feet will be a problem.
Even if the MiG can't shoot it down with guns, its easy enough to strap a few pods of dumb-fire rockets to the wings. Given that the blimp is a big, static target, even relatively inaccurate rockets would have a fair chance of bringing it down.
Any aircraft that started heading towards the blimp would most likely be intercepted before it got anywhere near it.
Aircraft, perhaps, but what about missiles? Unlike a UAV, this blimp is tethered and can't be maneuvered out of the way of incoming fire. What does the military plan to do if an enemy launches a large number of "dumb" ballistic missiles set to go off when they reach the blimp's altitude? The defenders would have to shoot down all of the incoming rockets, whereas the attacker would only have to get one shot in.
Observation doesn't necessarily require being directly over enemy territory. Such airships would be excellent for covering borders and providing 25/7 situational awareness over areas of Iraq and Afghanistan.
While these sorts of blimps would be great against a foe armed with small arms and other handheld/light weaponry (e.g. those we're fighting in Iraq/Afghanistan), they'd be just about useless against any enemy with even moderate technical capability.
For example, the article states, "And its range would be such that the spy craft could operate at the distant edges of any military theater, probably out of the range of surface-to-air missiles as well." Yet, that statement completely ignores the fact that SAM ranges are based on their ability to catch up to and hit an aircraft (usually moving at high speed and maneuvering). A SAM would have significantly higher range if it was just fired at a static target.
Or, heck, why use a SAM at all? I mean, if you're shooting at a static, tethered blimp, you don't need any of the sophisticated guidance systems that a SAM provides; all you need is the location of the blimp or its associated ground anchor. A modified Scud could take out this blimp, so long as the enemy set it to explode at the same altitude as the blimp, rather than at ground level.
Fundamentally, a sitting duck is a sitting duck, no matter how well you think you've protected it.
Well met. But, to paraphrase another reply to this thread, judging Japanese anime by Evangelion is like trying to judge all movies based on American Beauty. Not everything is as screwed up as that.
To be fair, it's not easier if you have a DVR. Which a lot of people do, and the networks know that. There's not as much loathing of moving things around on the schedule anymore because the execs know that DVR's will find these shows automatically, so they're not as concerned about the con of potential audience loss anymore. The potential benefits outweigh the risks now.
I'm still not sure how the studio executives can justify that, given that most DVR users fast forward through advertising. I mean, wouldn't those executives see DVRs as a bad thing, given that they allow people to skip past what they're really selling (namely, the advertising)?
I'm not sure there's as much money in producing a dvd to be netflixed as producing a 1 hour tv show that is paid for by commercials (and ALSO netflix).
That's true, but, on the other hand, it's not as if the TV companies have a right to make as much money as they currently do.
On the other hand, I'd rather have a story/situation that doesn't have a clear ending than have a series that's stretched beyond its "ending" because the producers wanted to milk it for more money. Case in point: Naruto, Bleach, and, of course, DragonBall Z.
It is easier to dodge something coming at you from the front than from behind.
On the other hand, if someone hits you from behind, its usually their fault for not dodging out of the way. The way I see it, if you hit me from behind, I might thank you, since you probably paid for the repairs to my car as well as your own.