Can you provide an example or two? Looking at bread, beer, wine & smoked salmon I don't see metric-only. I certainly understand that crazy laws may permit metric-only but I haven't seen any (in the United States). Thanks!
I'm surprised we haven't seen a push since food manufacturers are already repacking in smaller units to hide inflation. Remember when salami, chocolate, ice cream and coffee were purchased by the pound?
If we switch to metric the confusion would probably so great as to mask even smaller package sizes.
Violence in suffrage movement actually happened, so I don't understand your post.
This post argues there was no violence on the part of the movement, but they certainly endured violence.
However, over in England violence on the part of the movement was a tactic. "Meanwhile, and in striking contrast, the woman suffrage movement in Great Britain under such leaders as Emmaline Pankhurst, escalated its militant tactics. By 1910, it had moved from mass meetings, marches, and heckling of cabinet ministers, to arson, violence, and hunger strikes. The radical tactics enacted by British suffragists captured the media's attention and helped gain their victory."
Unfortunately Amazon does not. I recently got in an argument with someone who (IMO) gave out 4/5 star reviews. The reviewer countered that no, she had given out 1 star reviews. She had reviewed hundreds of items, and Amazon's lame interface displays 10 reviews at a time, with no ability to sort by number of stars (or other useful filters). I finally found her 1-star review of a self-published e-book, but by that time didn't have the energy to pursue it further.
A histogram of reviews by star would be extremely useful. Obviously Amazon doesn't care about the consumer's ability to rate the reviews, though, given how little thought they've put into it.
Elsewhere I posted about bogus five-star reviews. I suspect publishers simply hand out money to shills to create bogus Amazon accounts and post 5-star reviews of their books that suck. I'm not why so many here think that limiting reviews to purchasers would solve things. Also, I always read books at libraries before I buy them. So, you'd cut down on the number of negative reviews from people like me.
Another problem is Amazon's unwillingness to address "fraudulent" reviews that attempt to grant 5-star reviews to books. A good example is Jean Auel's disaster. Lots of reviews from "Amazon Verified Purchased" for which this was their first-ever (and only) review with zero mention of plot points or characters, just glowing short reviews.
Hmm, it appears Amazon finally cleaned that up - a couple of months that book had an astonishing number of 5-star reviews, given it may qualify as the worst book ever published. Initial reviews were all five-star, with quite clear evidence the reviewer had not read the book. Here's an example.
I suspect Amazon purged all comments & forum posts relating to a pretty good analyis of their rating system - it appeared that Amazon was weighting 4 & 5 star votes more than 1 & 2 star votes. I can't find reference to that now, though.
Quite relevant post for me, as I just had a Seagate 1.5T drive (which they sneakily had branded as Samsung) go bad after just 3000 hours - I purchased the drive in May and there are plenty of upset reviewers there complaining about Seagate trashing Samsung's name. I heard clicking, but interestingly SMART returned no errors. Luckily Seagate's SeaTools software detected the error:
Model: ST2000DL004 HD204UI
Firmware Revision: 1AQ10001
SMART - Pass 12/18/2012 10:45:55 AM
Short DST - Started 12/18/2012 10:46:11 AM
Short DST - FAIL 12/18/2012 10:48:14 AM
SeaTools Test Code: 6C9AC2A4
So, I set up the RMA. I think I'll go with a WD as a real replacement - they still have drives with 5 year warranties. Even there, though, on the newegg board are allegations they're either experiencing significant delays in getting a replacement, or the replacements are also bad.
But my real reason for posting was wondering about the integrity of a replacement drive? If I'm getting a "refurbished" drive, can I be guaranteed there's no virus/worm residing on the MBR? Is there a way to completely purge the drive that would clear any virus/worms?
I wiped my drive using HDDErase which worked without a hitch. I believe that would fix any infections, so maybe I'll start doing that before installing replacement drives. Thoughts?
Agreed. Can someone knowledgable chime in on what DX11 provides such that XP is locked out?
Looking here all it mentions is shader tracing & WDDM? I don't follow computer games all that much, but am curious about the technical reasons for the exclusion of XP.
When was the last time you upgraded a CPU and didn't get a new motherboard?
Last month, I just upgraded my system from Intel Core 2 Duo E6500 to E8500 because the original Intel CPU fan was getting so annoying I swapped it out for a Zalman. I figured if I'm in there already, might as well get the 2nd fastest version of the CPU. Prices have plummeted since that was a current processor!
But I grant in 20+ years of building my PCs, that was probably the first time I've ever swapped out a CPU. Sadly, I really didn't see much of a difference in speed, but the fan is significantly quieter.
I guess I'm a dinosaur, because I only upgraded to XP last year, and the only reason I did that was to install Visual Studio 2010, which was the first VS to not run under Windows 2000. About the only benefit of moving to XP was better security - I could finally create a non-admin user and still be able to use SQL & Visual Studio productively.
I see zero reason to upgrade to Windows 7, let alone 8.
Ditto. I consult for a health care company and use one of their laptops. Full disk encryption using PGP. It works quite well - integrated with Windows Active Directory. Yeah, it slows things down, but no HIPAA worries.
Awesome interview. I loved this part: "The other thing is making sure our customers understand that temporary systems are not good in situations like this. One of our major carriers, their backup system was to bring up a rollup generator. And from what I understand, they paid to have this generator there in four hours, and when they had this generator up, the police confiscated it for emergency use. So their backup generator wasn’t there any more."
Can anyone elaborate on what radio system he was talking about? I contributed to a DR plan several years ago, but my concerns about cell phone reliability were shot down.
I'm in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), so my two main sources of information are these two books by Steve Solomon and Carol Deppe. Depending on your climate Elliot Coleman has good advice. I don't know about other climates. I'm using organic practices, so my advice isn't useful for those going the conventional route.
In the PNW the ground doesn't freeze, so some microorganisms aren't killed off like they are elsewhere. This means after gardening about three years in the same spot the ground becomes far less productive. So... best practice is to let the ground lie fallow for a year to starve out the bad microorganisms, which increases your land requirements.
Replenishing the soil in terms of fertilizer can be challenging if one is going the self-sufficiency route.
Raising meat requires add'l land, and coming up with self-sufficient animal food requires even more land. I'm raising poultry and find that in my climate ducks are the most self-sufficient, followed by geese. Goats are able to forage a bit. I do pigs, too, and while they do forage and consume all our scraps, they require external feed.
We are simply not able to grow certain staples such as rice. We're gluten-free, so wheat is out for us, but anyone trying to be self-sufficient who consumes white flour is in for a hard time. If growing grain, do you count fuel in your self-sufficiency? If not, are you using oxen?
Given our family's needs, I think three-four acres would do it (taking rotation into account), but we're not aiming for total self-sufficiency. This assumes shipping in animal feed. That said, I think fruit trees can be a significant source of food without requiring a bunch of input.
Given the realities of property taxes I don't think self-sufficient farming is possible except in areas well away from population centers where land/taxes are dirt cheap. It also takes a lot of work. There's a big learning curve, too. If you're thinking about raising your own food, get started (even on a small scale). This isn't something you can pick up by reading a few books...
If the author is intending to have a comprehensive history of RPG (which is ambitious) I'd argue play-by-mail games should be included in the history.
Difficult to imagine, but there was a time (before BBSs) where players actually played fantasy/strategic/etc games through the mail. Steve Jackson is one example, and there are others.
I used to work in that business, and it sadly seems to have been completely ignored -- Wikipedia has no entries for the games I worked on.
But I'm not fond of the HSA - for one thing, I don't trust that the money will actually be there (just as I don't expect to see Social Security). Instead, I have a high-deductible that I treat as catastrophic insurance. I'm also irritated at the administrative fees most HSAs charge. I see HSA as just another scam to force your money into the stock market (or money market, etc.)
Currently insurance is regulated at the state level, so coverage options vary widely based on the state. If you *really* need coverage and are mobile you may find it worthwhile to research state variances. For instance, there are very few medical insurance choices in Washington state.
Elizabeth Warren showed most bankruptcies in the US are as a result of medical catastrophe. With caps on lifetime coverage (often $1MM, which arrives sooner than you would think), your insurance may not be as useful as you think it is.
Most of my observations are invalid come 2014 if Obamacare doesn't get altered/repealed.
Let's also recall in the 80's & 90's you could walk up to the airport counter, pay cash and fly right then.
Let's also recall during that same period you could use someone else's ticket (they couldn't make the trip, so sold it to you). That's the real reason the airlines were so happy to go along w/ the security theater - people can no longer sell their airplane tickets on the open market.
Think about it - why that critical need to verify your identity 30 minutes before you board the airplane?
I disagree. I found it a pedantic book with nothing insightful. The protagonist raids grocery stores post apocalypse, nothing more. Or is the complete lack of action supposed to be the insight? Color me unimpressed.
"The point is to submit a large number of false trades that you have no intention of making until other traders start to notice them, then take advantage of their reaction. It works, because too many other actors in the market do not have enough time or information to recognize the pattern of bids and counterattack. More simply, it works by making markets less efficient to introduce an arbitrage opportunity.
Right now only a handful of specialized firms are seriously trying to exploit this, but as more money is made, I expect a lot more players to buy in. Eventually, there will be enough high speed action to make it a less effective strategy, but in the interim I’m expecting a lot more meltdowns."
I'm kind of impressed - you're the first person I've seen on slashdot standing up for HFT with a non-AC account.
That said, it is clear at this point that HFT does nothing but act as a drag on the market. High frequency traders are parasites, injecting themselves into a transaction between an honest buyer and seller. HFTs try to extract money at every level, without adding any value.
HFT proponents will bleat (yes, like sheep) that they add liquidity. But at the same time they exit the market just when liquidity is most needed (assuming they haven't gone rogue like KCG) :
"Case in point, computers regularly withdraw liquidity just before news releases. Oil is a great example. The other day, there was a status report scheduled at 10:30, and around 10:28-10:29, the buy orders on USO (United States Oil Fund, an ETF that aims to track oil) dried up. That doesn’t happen with human traders."
Slashdot Mirror
Cross contamination & subsequent loss of organic certification isn't an issue then?
How about Monsanto dragging innocent farmers into court?
Can you provide an example or two? Looking at bread, beer, wine & smoked salmon I don't see metric-only. I certainly understand that crazy laws may permit metric-only but I haven't seen any (in the United States). Thanks!
I'm surprised we haven't seen a push since food manufacturers are already repacking in smaller units to hide inflation. Remember when salami, chocolate, ice cream and coffee were purchased by the pound?
If we switch to metric the confusion would probably so great as to mask even smaller package sizes.
Violence in suffrage movement actually happened, so I don't understand your post.
This post argues there was no violence on the part of the movement, but they certainly endured violence.
However, over in England violence on the part of the movement was a tactic. "Meanwhile, and in striking contrast, the woman suffrage movement in Great Britain under such leaders as Emmaline Pankhurst, escalated its militant tactics. By 1910, it had moved from mass meetings, marches, and heckling of cabinet ministers, to arson, violence, and hunger strikes. The radical tactics enacted by British suffragists captured the media's attention and helped gain their victory."
Unfortunately Amazon does not. I recently got in an argument with someone who (IMO) gave out 4/5 star reviews. The reviewer countered that no, she had given out 1 star reviews. She had reviewed hundreds of items, and Amazon's lame interface displays 10 reviews at a time, with no ability to sort by number of stars (or other useful filters). I finally found her 1-star review of a self-published e-book, but by that time didn't have the energy to pursue it further.
A histogram of reviews by star would be extremely useful. Obviously Amazon doesn't care about the consumer's ability to rate the reviews, though, given how little thought they've put into it.
Elsewhere I posted about bogus five-star reviews. I suspect publishers simply hand out money to shills to create bogus Amazon accounts and post 5-star reviews of their books that suck. I'm not why so many here think that limiting reviews to purchasers would solve things. Also, I always read books at libraries before I buy them. So, you'd cut down on the number of negative reviews from people like me.
Another problem is Amazon's unwillingness to address "fraudulent" reviews that attempt to grant 5-star reviews to books. A good example is Jean Auel's disaster. Lots of reviews from "Amazon Verified Purchased" for which this was their first-ever (and only) review with zero mention of plot points or characters, just glowing short reviews.
Hmm, it appears Amazon finally cleaned that up - a couple of months that book had an astonishing number of 5-star reviews, given it may qualify as the worst book ever published. Initial reviews were all five-star, with quite clear evidence the reviewer had not read the book. Here's an example.
I suspect Amazon purged all comments & forum posts relating to a pretty good analyis of their rating system - it appeared that Amazon was weighting 4 & 5 star votes more than 1 & 2 star votes. I can't find reference to that now, though.
Quite relevant post for me, as I just had a Seagate 1.5T drive (which they sneakily had branded as Samsung) go bad after just 3000 hours - I purchased the drive in May and there are plenty of upset reviewers there complaining about Seagate trashing Samsung's name. I heard clicking, but interestingly SMART returned no errors. Luckily Seagate's SeaTools software detected the error:
Model: ST2000DL004 HD204UI
Firmware Revision: 1AQ10001
SMART - Pass 12/18/2012 10:45:55 AM
Short DST - Started 12/18/2012 10:46:11 AM
Short DST - FAIL 12/18/2012 10:48:14 AM
SeaTools Test Code: 6C9AC2A4
So, I set up the RMA. I think I'll go with a WD as a real replacement - they still have drives with 5 year warranties. Even there, though, on the newegg board are allegations they're either experiencing significant delays in getting a replacement, or the replacements are also bad.
But my real reason for posting was wondering about the integrity of a replacement drive? If I'm getting a "refurbished" drive, can I be guaranteed there's no virus/worm residing on the MBR? Is there a way to completely purge the drive that would clear any virus/worms?
I wiped my drive using HDDErase which worked without a hitch. I believe that would fix any infections, so maybe I'll start doing that before installing replacement drives. Thoughts?
Ah, you're right. Thanks!
Agreed. Can someone knowledgable chime in on what DX11 provides such that XP is locked out?
Looking here all it mentions is shader tracing & WDDM? I don't follow computer games all that much, but am curious about the technical reasons for the exclusion of XP.
When was the last time you upgraded a CPU and didn't get a new motherboard?
Last month, I just upgraded my system from Intel Core 2 Duo E6500 to E8500 because the original Intel CPU fan was getting so annoying I swapped it out for a Zalman. I figured if I'm in there already, might as well get the 2nd fastest version of the CPU. Prices have plummeted since that was a current processor!
But I grant in 20+ years of building my PCs, that was probably the first time I've ever swapped out a CPU. Sadly, I really didn't see much of a difference in speed, but the fan is significantly quieter.
I guess I'm a dinosaur, because I only upgraded to XP last year, and the only reason I did that was to install Visual Studio 2010, which was the first VS to not run under Windows 2000. About the only benefit of moving to XP was better security - I could finally create a non-admin user and still be able to use SQL & Visual Studio productively.
I see zero reason to upgrade to Windows 7, let alone 8.
Ditto. I consult for a health care company and use one of their laptops. Full disk encryption using PGP. It works quite well - integrated with Windows Active Directory. Yeah, it slows things down, but no HIPAA worries.
Apparently this was done last year, too. A £50 fine:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/07/muslim-extremist-fined-for-poppy-burning
Awesome interview. I loved this part: "The other thing is making sure our customers understand that temporary systems are not good in situations like this. One of our major carriers, their backup system was to bring up a rollup generator. And from what I understand, they paid to have this generator there in four hours, and when they had this generator up, the police confiscated it for emergency use. So their backup generator wasn’t there any more."
Can anyone elaborate on what radio system he was talking about? I contributed to a DR plan several years ago, but my concerns about cell phone reliability were shot down.
I'm in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), so my two main sources of information are these two books by Steve Solomon and Carol Deppe. Depending on your climate Elliot Coleman has good advice. I don't know about other climates. I'm using organic practices, so my advice isn't useful for those going the conventional route.
In the PNW the ground doesn't freeze, so some microorganisms aren't killed off like they are elsewhere. This means after gardening about three years in the same spot the ground becomes far less productive. So... best practice is to let the ground lie fallow for a year to starve out the bad microorganisms, which increases your land requirements.
Replenishing the soil in terms of fertilizer can be challenging if one is going the self-sufficiency route.
Raising meat requires add'l land, and coming up with self-sufficient animal food requires even more land. I'm raising poultry and find that in my climate ducks are the most self-sufficient, followed by geese. Goats are able to forage a bit. I do pigs, too, and while they do forage and consume all our scraps, they require external feed.
We are simply not able to grow certain staples such as rice. We're gluten-free, so wheat is out for us, but anyone trying to be self-sufficient who consumes white flour is in for a hard time. If growing grain, do you count fuel in your self-sufficiency? If not, are you using oxen?
Given our family's needs, I think three-four acres would do it (taking rotation into account), but we're not aiming for total self-sufficiency. This assumes shipping in animal feed. That said, I think fruit trees can be a significant source of food without requiring a bunch of input.
Given the realities of property taxes I don't think self-sufficient farming is possible except in areas well away from population centers where land/taxes are dirt cheap. It also takes a lot of work. There's a big learning curve, too. If you're thinking about raising your own food, get started (even on a small scale). This isn't something you can pick up by reading a few books...
If the author is intending to have a comprehensive history of RPG (which is ambitious) I'd argue play-by-mail games should be included in the history.
Difficult to imagine, but there was a time (before BBSs) where players actually played fantasy/strategic/etc games through the mail. Steve Jackson is one example, and there are others.
I used to work in that business, and it sadly seems to have been completely ignored -- Wikipedia has no entries for the games I worked on.
Thanks, this was one of the best things I've read in years.
Good advice. I'm in the same boat but C-corp.
But I'm not fond of the HSA - for one thing, I don't trust that the money will actually be there (just as I don't expect to see Social Security). Instead, I have a high-deductible that I treat as catastrophic insurance. I'm also irritated at the administrative fees most HSAs charge. I see HSA as just another scam to force your money into the stock market (or money market, etc.)
Currently insurance is regulated at the state level, so coverage options vary widely based on the state. If you *really* need coverage and are mobile you may find it worthwhile to research state variances. For instance, there are very few medical insurance choices in Washington state.
Elizabeth Warren showed most bankruptcies in the US are as a result of medical catastrophe. With caps on lifetime coverage (often $1MM, which arrives sooner than you would think), your insurance may not be as useful as you think it is.
Most of my observations are invalid come 2014 if Obamacare doesn't get altered/repealed.
And all the bozos who upgraded w/ their frequent flier points.
Remind me again how many "too big to fail" banks/finance firms/etc. have been broken up since 2007?
Let's also recall in the 80's & 90's you could walk up to the airport counter, pay cash and fly right then.
Let's also recall during that same period you could use someone else's ticket (they couldn't make the trip, so sold it to you). That's the real reason the airlines were so happy to go along w/ the security theater - people can no longer sell their airplane tickets on the open market.
Think about it - why that critical need to verify your identity 30 minutes before you board the airplane?
I disagree. I found it a pedantic book with nothing insightful. The protagonist raids grocery stores post apocalypse, nothing more. Or is the complete lack of action supposed to be the insight? Color me unimpressed.
Wow, I'm having a hard time either a) explaining the issue or b) getting people to take my reports seriously.
The issue (for me) is that orders are getting placed with no expectation of them getting filled. Is this so hard to understand?
From a comment at http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/08/nanex-knightmare/:
"The point is to submit a large number of false trades that you have no intention of making until other traders start to notice them, then take advantage of their reaction. It works, because too many other actors in the market do not have enough time or information to recognize the pattern of bids and counterattack. More simply, it works by making markets less efficient to introduce an arbitrage opportunity.
Right now only a handful of specialized firms are seriously trying to exploit this, but as more money is made, I expect a lot more players to buy in. Eventually, there will be enough high speed action to make it a less effective strategy, but in the interim I’m expecting a lot more meltdowns."
If you quibble, please read http://www.nanex.net/aqck/2977.html and refute their argument.
I'm kind of impressed - you're the first person I've seen on slashdot standing up for HFT with a non-AC account.
That said, it is clear at this point that HFT does nothing but act as a drag on the market. High frequency traders are parasites, injecting themselves into a transaction between an honest buyer and seller. HFTs try to extract money at every level, without adding any value.
HFT proponents will bleat (yes, like sheep) that they add liquidity. But at the same time they exit the market just when liquidity is most needed (assuming they haven't gone rogue like KCG) : "Case in point, computers regularly withdraw liquidity just before news releases. Oil is a great example. The other day, there was a status report scheduled at 10:30, and around 10:28-10:29, the buy orders on USO (United States Oil Fund, an ETF that aims to track oil) dried up. That doesn’t happen with human traders."
Excellent observation. The island is the "out"- amazing how few people got that.