That some Ponzi schemes make it to the stock market isn't news. After all, Madoff was a chairman of NASDAQ.
I heard that at one time he stopped to take a piss in a KFC in southern Alabama, so nobody will be surprised to learn that fast food chains are a Ponzi scheme. Also he was born in April, making him a Taurus, which clearly implies that Ford is a Ponzi scheme (this is why they did not need bailout money).
Seriously, this whole discussion and the bastardization of "Ponzi Scheme" reminds me of this episode in the Simpsons when Lisa goes to a girl school, and in the math class the teacher asks: "is the number 7 odd, or just different".
> The only thing that keeps them going is (1) the cash infusion from the IPO - otherwise they would have shut their doors by the end of the year, and (2) the money from current sales, which is used to pay off past sales - same as a Ponzi scheme.
The Groupon business model is lousy, their business have no intrinsic value, but all of this is clear to whoever wants to get a piece of the action. Buying Groupon stock might not be a sound investment, the IPO might be a mere financial tactic on their part to bring in money and cash out, but that does not make it a criminal activity.
Saying that the Groupon thing is a Ponzi scheme is like spitting in the face of Madoff's victims. Saying that teabaggers are fascists is making fun of the people who were tortured and killed in Mussolini's jails. Saying that my 55 years old neighbor who married a 19 year-old is a pedophile is disrespectful of those who had their 5 year-old abused by the bus driver. Saying that OWS is a revolution is an insult to the people who died to kick out dictators.
> I've looked at using encryption as a means of destroying data, in that if you encrypt a drive or a set of files with an appropriately long and complex key, and then destroy all copies of that key, that data effectively is destroyed
How do you destroy the key? You encrypt it and destroy the second key that you used to encrypt the first one? That's convenient, now you just have to repeat the process in a recursive manner and it should be completed in NaN years.
My first Linux was not for coding or server or e-penis, it was to keep the fucking music playing.
I guess you had one of those few soundcards that were actually working with alsa? In those days, getting sound to work was half the fun (the other half was guessing if clipboard would work when trying to copy stuff from one application to another in KDE).
No identity theft, no burglaries, no terrorism... what would Ahmed and Jamal do without Google? The shishtaouk deli and car-wash markets are getting crowded.
> without any gfx upgrades, titles will look better on a pc monitor and gfx card
The price tag that comes with this is too high. PS3 games look pretty good on my big screen tv, I don't really care about it being "true" 720p or any other specific format. We're not talking about Wii video quality here.
> consoles cater to the here today gone tomorrow attitude that publishers foster to increase their profits
I have played the GTA and Fallout series a lot on a console, still do. Good games are good games. Also I find it easier to play for a long time when I am seated in my big couch in front of my big tv, not on a desk chair with a "tiny" 24 inch monitor.
This being said, my best gaming experience was many, many years ago when a friend hooked up a VGA projector on his PC and we were playing Tie Fighter with the screen being an entire wall.
> As stupid as their government is, it has the advantage of moving in a monolithic manner. So once a decision if made, the nation marches in lockstep. Makes for a very impressive ability to turn the nation on a dime. The U.S. can't do that. We have other strengths, some huge, we just don't have the ability to act like that except maybe in the face of a national crisis.
Between Confucius and Mao not a lot of things happened in that huge country. That's a hell of a big dime they need to turn on.
Surprisingly things are moving much faster since westerners are involved in their business. Must be a coincidence.
Actually it's win-win-win: 1) Win for Google 2) Win for the owners 3) Win for the debit cards clone artists who will be able to find stores where the pinpads are easy to access without having to send Ahmed or Jamal all over town (too bad for Ahmed and Jamal, it was a cool gig and they had the chance to drive the BMW and listen to loud eurodance)
I gave up on upgrading the hardware all the time, especially since vendors make it difficult to upgrade a single component. Instead of replacing a 500$ videocard once in a while, now I get a console, so instead of checking systems requirements I only need to find the big bold signs that say "PS3" at Best Buy. Also a console gives me the chance to play on the same huge tv where I watch movies without having a PC in the room. I guess I'm not a serious gamer that needs to program macros on a 10-button futuristic mouse.
As for MP, unless it is with friends I also gave up on that. The cyberspace is full of people that spend a lot of time playing and it's no fun when you just die all the time without having the opportunity to actually play.
Yeah maybe you have a point. It's like the USSR where the investment in R&D was mostly related to finding ways to copy western technology. I don't know if this is a side-effect of Communism or if it's culture-related.
> The Soviet Union proved that state socialism does not work. If you want to redistribute your wealth, do so by your own choice. It's called "charity".
Charity does not work because it is not sustainable. There are many other ways to redistribute your wealth, such as funding schools or medical research, which are not charity and are more likely to have a long-term positive effect.
I used to think that about IE9, then I had to travel using a small laptop (borderline netbook), a Celeron with 2GB RAM. Chrome is fast, IE9 takes forever to start and after a few tabs it make the whole computer unusable.
And now that the single most important missing feature has been added to Chrome (being able to right-click to select context menu items) they will pry this browser from my cold, dead hands!
I find it completely awesome that the parent has been voted offtopic by the wise and fair crowd of Slashdotters. After all, what we all want here is to read again and again the same Google/Apple/Linux worshipping and not have actual discussions.
Reading about Linux's disappointingly lame MD system gave me new respect for Synology's devices, especially for the SOHO environments for which they're suited.
For a larger / business application, ZFS totally rocks, but Oracle has decimated Solaris' visibility, so one is left with no good options.
I have yet to see a typical scenario where the bottleneck is at the back-end (ie: md). The sluggish part is always at the frontend; the higher you get on the OSI layers, the more you need a robust interface. And at this level, Linux is terrific. Having a custom storage machine allows you to put more power where you need it, something that is not possible with a COTS device.
Just look at the huge IBM SAN, the DS8000 or V7000 - basically it's a cluster of AIX servers with lots of disks, and the RAID implementation is never really important because nobody is ever writing to the actual storage immediately, the IO is always hitting the cache first and the destaging process is done in background. What makes those SAN incredibly powerful is the robust front-end, not the RAID driver.
I did have a NAS a while ago, but I got rid of it in favour of building up a linux server. I found that NAS performance is slow at best, abysmal at worst
I would agree with that. However the best scenario I've tried with a Linux machine is using a software raid (or LVM) on a bunch of disks and then setup a iSCSI target, especially convenient in a virtualized environment. Network cards are cheap so it's easy to add custom multipath.
I'm not well-versed in soft science but I would tend to agree. This is particularly true with soccer in Italy where the "only way" to lose (for both sides) is to have a bad ref.
> Hating the ref is not part of the game and it's that idiot mentality that ruins the game
I don't know what game is ruined. As far as I can tell, the only thing that is ruined is discussion when someone see peopsle with a different opinion as having an "idiot mentality".
In many spectator sports, hating the ref is a big part of the fun; baseball in the USA, ice hockey in Canada, soccer in Europe (especially Italy).
Having a flawless robot instead of a ref would be like an episode of 24 where Jack Bauer is not slowed down by people of the FBI trying to arrest him while he is trying to find a nuclear bomb hidden by terrorists in downtown LA. The "enemy" would still be there but the spectator would feel cheated.
Slashdot Mirror
That some Ponzi schemes make it to the stock market isn't news. After all, Madoff was a chairman of NASDAQ.
I heard that at one time he stopped to take a piss in a KFC in southern Alabama, so nobody will be surprised to learn that fast food chains are a Ponzi scheme. Also he was born in April, making him a Taurus, which clearly implies that Ford is a Ponzi scheme (this is why they did not need bailout money).
Seriously, this whole discussion and the bastardization of "Ponzi Scheme" reminds me of this episode in the Simpsons when Lisa goes to a girl school, and in the math class the teacher asks: "is the number 7 odd, or just different".
> The only thing that keeps them going is (1) the cash infusion from the IPO - otherwise they would have shut their doors by the end of the year, and (2) the money from current sales, which is used to pay off past sales - same as a Ponzi scheme.
The Groupon business model is lousy, their business have no intrinsic value, but all of this is clear to whoever wants to get a piece of the action. Buying Groupon stock might not be a sound investment, the IPO might be a mere financial tactic on their part to bring in money and cash out, but that does not make it a criminal activity.
Saying that the Groupon thing is a Ponzi scheme is like spitting in the face of Madoff's victims. Saying that teabaggers are fascists is making fun of the people who were tortured and killed in Mussolini's jails. Saying that my 55 years old neighbor who married a 19 year-old is a pedophile is disrespectful of those who had their 5 year-old abused by the bus driver. Saying that OWS is a revolution is an insult to the people who died to kick out dictators.
Words are important.
> I've looked at using encryption as a means of destroying data, in that if you encrypt a drive or a set of files with an appropriately long and complex key, and then destroy all copies of that key, that data effectively is destroyed
How do you destroy the key? You encrypt it and destroy the second key that you used to encrypt the first one? That's convenient, now you just have to repeat the process in a recursive manner and it should be completed in NaN years.
My first Linux was not for coding or server or e-penis, it was to keep the fucking music playing .
I guess you had one of those few soundcards that were actually working with alsa? In those days, getting sound to work was half the fun (the other half was guessing if clipboard would work when trying to copy stuff from one application to another in KDE).
No identity theft, no burglaries, no terrorism... what would Ahmed and Jamal do without Google? The shishtaouk deli and car-wash markets are getting crowded.
> without any gfx upgrades, titles will look better on a pc monitor and gfx card
The price tag that comes with this is too high. PS3 games look pretty good on my big screen tv, I don't really care about it being "true" 720p or any other specific format. We're not talking about Wii video quality here.
> consoles cater to the here today gone tomorrow attitude that publishers foster to increase their profits
I have played the GTA and Fallout series a lot on a console, still do. Good games are good games. Also I find it easier to play for a long time when I am seated in my big couch in front of my big tv, not on a desk chair with a "tiny" 24 inch monitor.
This being said, my best gaming experience was many, many years ago when a friend hooked up a VGA projector on his PC and we were playing Tie Fighter with the screen being an entire wall.
> As stupid as their government is, it has the advantage of moving in a monolithic manner. So once a decision if made, the nation marches in lockstep. Makes for a very impressive ability to turn the nation on a dime. The U.S. can't do that. We have other strengths, some huge, we just don't have the ability to act like that except maybe in the face of a national crisis.
Between Confucius and Mao not a lot of things happened in that huge country. That's a hell of a big dime they need to turn on.
Surprisingly things are moving much faster since westerners are involved in their business. Must be a coincidence.
> Win-win
Actually it's win-win-win:
1) Win for Google
2) Win for the owners
3) Win for the debit cards clone artists who will be able to find stores where the pinpads are easy to access without having to send Ahmed or Jamal all over town (too bad for Ahmed and Jamal, it was a cool gig and they had the chance to drive the BMW and listen to loud eurodance)
If you were a real pro, you'd say "case the joint", not "scope out the place". Gotcha!
I gave up on upgrading the hardware all the time, especially since vendors make it difficult to upgrade a single component. Instead of replacing a 500$ videocard once in a while, now I get a console, so instead of checking systems requirements I only need to find the big bold signs that say "PS3" at Best Buy. Also a console gives me the chance to play on the same huge tv where I watch movies without having a PC in the room. I guess I'm not a serious gamer that needs to program macros on a 10-button futuristic mouse.
As for MP, unless it is with friends I also gave up on that. The cyberspace is full of people that spend a lot of time playing and it's no fun when you just die all the time without having the opportunity to actually play.
Yeah maybe you have a point. It's like the USSR where the investment in R&D was mostly related to finding ways to copy western technology. I don't know if this is a side-effect of Communism or if it's culture-related.
> Except that even in China Chinese goods have a reputation for being crap
So were the Japanese cars in the 90s, and then Korean cars. It's a learning process.
> there's no more guarantee of accuracy than, say, your stupid no-fly list.
The no-fly list is very accurate because the people on that list are indeed unable to fly!
> The Soviet Union proved that state socialism does not work. If you want to redistribute your wealth, do so by your own choice. It's called "charity".
Charity does not work because it is not sustainable. There are many other ways to redistribute your wealth, such as funding schools or medical research, which are not charity and are more likely to have a long-term positive effect.
I used to think that about IE9, then I had to travel using a small laptop (borderline netbook), a Celeron with 2GB RAM. Chrome is fast, IE9 takes forever to start and after a few tabs it make the whole computer unusable.
And now that the single most important missing feature has been added to Chrome (being able to right-click to select context menu items) they will pry this browser from my cold, dead hands!
But yeah, IE9 looks cool.
Duh, a conspiracy and a sin are not the same thing.
I find it completely awesome that the parent has been voted offtopic by the wise and fair crowd of Slashdotters. After all, what we all want here is to read again and again the same Google/Apple/Linux worshipping and not have actual discussions.
Reading about Linux's disappointingly lame MD system gave me new respect for Synology's devices, especially for the SOHO environments for which they're suited.
For a larger / business application, ZFS totally rocks, but Oracle has decimated Solaris' visibility, so one is left with no good options.
I have yet to see a typical scenario where the bottleneck is at the back-end (ie: md). The sluggish part is always at the frontend; the higher you get on the OSI layers, the more you need a robust interface. And at this level, Linux is terrific. Having a custom storage machine allows you to put more power where you need it, something that is not possible with a COTS device.
Just look at the huge IBM SAN, the DS8000 or V7000 - basically it's a cluster of AIX servers with lots of disks, and the RAID implementation is never really important because nobody is ever writing to the actual storage immediately, the IO is always hitting the cache first and the destaging process is done in background. What makes those SAN incredibly powerful is the robust front-end, not the RAID driver.
I did have a NAS a while ago, but I got rid of it in favour of building up a linux server. I found that NAS performance is slow at best, abysmal at worst
I would agree with that. However the best scenario I've tried with a Linux machine is using a software raid (or LVM) on a bunch of disks and then setup a iSCSI target, especially convenient in a virtualized environment. Network cards are cheap so it's easy to add custom multipath.
No, the real question is: Can we look with this through the blonde bomb shells clothes...
That would be convenient to spot girls with a tramp stamp before it's too late (one way or the other).
Does this system run on "Windows"?
maybe you should take the stand in the Apple vs Samsung trial
I'm not well-versed in soft science but I would tend to agree. This is particularly true with soccer in Italy where the "only way" to lose (for both sides) is to have a bad ref.
> Hating the ref is not part of the game and it's that idiot mentality that ruins the game
I don't know what game is ruined. As far as I can tell, the only thing that is ruined is discussion when someone see peopsle with a different opinion as having an "idiot mentality".
In many spectator sports, hating the ref is a big part of the fun; baseball in the USA, ice hockey in Canada, soccer in Europe (especially Italy).
Having a flawless robot instead of a ref would be like an episode of 24 where Jack Bauer is not slowed down by people of the FBI trying to arrest him while he is trying to find a nuclear bomb hidden by terrorists in downtown LA. The "enemy" would still be there but the spectator would feel cheated.