There is also a difference between "spin" and "speculation"
The former is enhancing the truth, the latter trying to discern the truth.
16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
It was rumored that Saddam was buying PS/2 in order to [insert preferred Mwahahaha action here]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/12/19/iraq_buys_4000_playstation_2s/
There was as much truth to this as Iraqis throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators, Serbs ultrakilling Kosovars or the more recent Gaddafi handing out Viagra to enable Gang Rape Horror stories -- but at least it was funny.
...and copies of the same on cheap paper can be found in many cold, dead hands.
"a non-executable documentation is protected by the Federal Republic Of Germany Constitution"
It may be so in principle. Try to publish and be ready for in order of likelihood: a few "Abmahnbriefe", reduced employment prospects, a costly legal defense and jailtime.
If there is inherent value in the stock, long sellers will now have a field day. So why complain?
Of course, the accelerated "trading" and rumor-triggered stock market transactions. a.k.a. the self-described "financial industry" fed with cheap paper money like a pig bursting at the seams has no inherent value [it doesn't produce SSDs for example], but that's the way the circus rumbles.
"Naked short sellers aren't the lowest scum on earth, but they are vying for the title."
Only if they are bullshitting their clientele about what they are gonna do with the money they are receiving and/or go crying to governemnt upon cratering later.
Otherwise - hell, they can play casino all day for what I care.
"For it's the subsidies we paid a decade or more ago that have accelerated the industry to this point: yet the near term economic switching point is used as the clinching argument for why we should have whacking great subsidies for the next 20 years."
This is the main problem: Economic knowledge of most all is in La-La Land. Apparently "subsidies" can be had just "for free" and are often credited with "accelerating" a technology.
On the contrary - they mean some committe in the Ministry of Planned Economy has decided that they know better than anybody else and that want to direct scare resources into some politically preferred scheme of "investment" (and this goes for windmills, solar power at home or nukes), while actual solutions and reachable technological paths stay unexplored.
These resources must be pulled either from other taxpayer-funded projects like [favorite program here] or else taxes will be going up. Maybe the government goes a bit into debt with its central bank, and "finances" things through inflation. When the subsidies stop, or the technology tanks for various reasons [hey, Niobium is sooo expensive!], or the money-fuelled bubble pops, resources will have been squandered, pension schemes will have evaporated, companies will have crashed and the dole queue will be longer. Meanwhile, economically reasonable and feasible projects will never have seen the light of day.
But by then it will be nobody's fault in particular. the minister will wash his hands and the usual suspects will be calling for even more control economy, "money injections", "belt tightening", "price controls" to twart "gougers", banning of a recently "dangerous" technology or whatever.
And winters will be colder.
iPhans here seem seem to think that not being "copied" is Apple's God-given right.
They also seem to be under the illusion that the concept of "Intellectual Property" is meaningful in the first place. But that's another discussion.
They miss the irony that with hard-core IP protection, Apple would have been in a troublesome situation back during the Apple-Microsoft "look-and-feel" spat due to its "reuse" of a few Xerox Park ideas. Luckily, IP fascism coupled to an entitlement mentality had not yet become the powerful force that it is today, and the full outbreak of "software patent" retardation had not yet been achieved, so Xerox was sent packing, Apple didn't win its case, the GUI idea was set free and we are all the better off for it.
So Apple is being "copied"? So big deal. This means that its product is well-established and that the time of premium pricing is coming to end. This means that it's time for the pony's next trick. With several deca-billion in the bank and sales going strong [as iPhans are not loth to emphasize again and again], Apple should be able to handle this and innovate its way forward. Or maybe not. Patent law being what it is, who knows what will come up.
"We should've executed the top 11 executives of BP as well as taken over all BP operations and given it to the US government as payment."
Because oil flows better and more securely if the means of production have been nationalized and top executives are shot whenever sabotage/snafus/fishkill occurs?
Your political commissar coat, m'lord.
Release a song which might or might not be acceptable, and you are NEARLY LIKE HITLER?
Holy cow! Whatever next??
"Hitler's entry to the Eurovision song contest, singing about increasing Lebensraum, upping the Bruttosozialprodukt, übering the EURO and his love towards his dog. After this message..."
But we have come a long way from when the president was considered something of an arbiter of public affairs to today's Prussian-style unitary President complete with Military-Grade Führertransporter.
"We all adore Jefferson but we live in Hamilton's world"
Beer because we can Hail to that!
"Bean" is not a specific class type. It's just a class written to a convention so that another program can introspect it.
"Pojo" is an ordinary class in the context of persistence frameworks - as opposed to "J2EE Enterprise Java Beans" (bletch), which have nothing to do with the aforementioned Beans but are objects that, to be persisted, have to be of a class that is a subclass of some framework-provided class, which fracks up all the already pock-marked beauty of framework-managed persistence in the first place. Luckily we now have JPA and Hibernate, so that's all old history and you can persist your POJOs. Get it? More in the fat Hibernate Book.
0 on the test sheet.
Throwing up 15'000 previously unaccounted-for dead Afghans [Iraq war logs reveal 15,000 previously unlisted civilian deaths: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/true-civilian-body-count-iraq] _does_ count for something.
And all because a pipeline didn't get okayed and a frat boy and a poodle get instrumented in a jiffy. Nice.
"On Earth, Andrew Lear's habits would have been no more than a character trait. In a hurry, he might choose mismatched socks. He might put off using the dishwasher for a day or two if he were involved in something interesting. He would prefer a house that looked "lived in." God help the maid who tried to clean up his study. He'd never be able to find anything afterward.
He was a brilliant but one-sided man. Backpacking or skin diving might have changed his habits—in such pursuits you learn not to forget any least trivial thing— but they would never have tempted him. An expedition to Mars was something he simply could not turn down. A pity, because neatness is worth your life in space.
You don't leave your fly open in a pressure suit.
A month after the landing, Childrey caught Lear doing just that.
The "fly" on a pressure suit is a soft rubber tube over your male member. It leads to a bladder, and there's a spring clamp on it. You open the clamp to use it. Then you close the clamp and open an outside spigot to evacuate the bladder into vacuum.
Similar designs for women involve a catheter, which is hideously uncomfortable. I presume the designers will keep trying. It seems wrong to bar half the human race from our ultimate destiny.
Lear was addicted to long walks. He loved the Martian desert scene: the hard violet sky and the soft blur of whirling orange dust, the sharp close horizon, the endless emptiness. More: he needed the room. He was spending all his working time on the alien communicator, with the ceiling too close over his head and everything else too close to his bony elbows.
He was coming back from a walk, and he met Childrey coming out. Childrey noticed that the waste spigot on Lear's suit was open, the spring broken. Lear had been out for hours. If he'd had to go, he might have bled to death through flesh ruptured by vacuum.
We never learned all that Childrey said to him out there. But Lear came in very red about the ears, muttering under his breath. He wouldn't talk to anyone.
The NASA psychologists should not have put them both on that small a planet. Hindsight is wonderful, right? But Lear and Childrey were each the best choice for competence coupled to the kind of health they would need to survive the trip. There were astrophysicists as competent and as famous as Lear, but they were decades older. And Childrey had a thousand spaceflight hours to his credit. He had been one of the last men on the moon.
Individually, each of us was the best possible man. It was a damn shame."
I have people around me that have the ironclad belief that "hundreds have died" and "millions will die" and are convinced that the Pacific ocean is currently glowing in the dark with whales pumping out their last whalesong. They are actually refusing to go to Tokyo in the summer.
I needs fresh clarification material, although the earlier dose seems to not have helped.