Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26111 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
If you are sending a single probe to Mars that took 10years to design and build and will be operated for years - that's true.
If you want a permanent base and need to lift 1000t of supplies to Mars in 100s of launches then the delivery charge starts to become significant.
The fine comes under operating expenses so mostly is just knocked off the next tax bill.
The demanded upgrades will be written off against R&D tax credits or infrastructure improvement grants - so if their accountants are on the ball they should make a profit out of this
> there is no point in the extra acceleration
Not for the driver - but there is for Tesla.
How much free advertising + how many extra sales does having the fastest accelerating road car get you?
There isn't much point to winning Le Mans every year for the average Audi A3 buyer - but Audi still pay to do it.
"There's no way that a Tesla (in the present day) could keep up with any normal vehicle over a 12 or 24 hour cross country race."
Then there is no way that your dead-dinosaur powered car could keep up with a Tesla in a 12/24month race. It stops by the side of the road, unfolds the solar panels and has a kip for a few days.
You start drilling a well, hoping that there is undiscovered oil under you, while looking up how to build an oil refinery out of washing up liquid bottles and sticky back plastic in your Blue Peter annual.
"Otherwise the police could search anyone's home based on a case that is occurring 50 miles away that has nothing to do with the person in question."
That was one of the concerns when the law was introduced = the "Lord Lucan" strategy.
Every officer could have a warrant for "anyone/anywhere" on the theory that since they didn't know who/where was involved in the Lord Lucan murder the warrant must apply everywhere and to everyone.
Remember this is a force that used suspect is a "black youth in London" as a justification that their stop and searches weren't random but were targeted on those fitting a description.
> And islands are notoriously hard to attack- as Nazi generals learnt the hard way.
Blockaded islands that you can fire bomb at will are also unnecessary to attack.
You can starve the entire population over a winter then leave the remainder to die in the summer once you have destroyed the water/sewage/power and medical services.
The purpose of QE is the hope that the banks will flood the high street with free money and people will shop the country out of a recession with cheap credit cards.
Austerity means stopping government infrastructure projects and cutting government jobs leading to higher unemployment, while at the same time scaring those who do have jobs into not spending anything because things must be bad, and going to get worse, if the government is closing schools and hospitals.
Of course - what did Keynes know ?
Can anyone explain why printing truckloads of money was the correct thing to do for UK and USA while restricting the money supply and austerity was the necessary for every other advanced country in europe?
Was it simply that all Germans believe that inflation (even 2.1% inflation) causes Nazis?
Was it a deliberate screw your neighour policy (like Germany claiming that the only way out of recession is for France/Italy to close their car industry) ?
Those building in the spying at the factory in are evil henchmen of a commie dictatorship aimed at political enemies of the state.
Those intercepting the servers in transit and "updating them" are the brave guardians of law and order in their constant battle against the commie terrorists in our midst.
I really can't see how people could get confused
>If someone has managed to bypass your entire office security, got into the server room and managed to reflash a machine
Or they simply did it at the UPS facility when the server was on it's way to you or at the motherboard factory - depending whether you are being spied on by the good guys or the bad guys.
So only those in the club get the profits, and there are rules about who can be in the club.
Meanwhile the great unwashed, buying shares on the public market, or with pensions invested in the public market don't see an of the profits.
I seem to remember that capitalism was good because it efficiently redistributed wealth between losers and winners, tis looks a lot more like feudalism
Isn't that two different things?
Most of the FTSE could be foreign owned, you would expect that in a major market the majority of the shares would be owned by international insurance, pension funds etc - rather than necessarily by share owning British citizens.
The majority of firms in the FTSE being foreign controlled is because the London market is a so much better place to list than Moscow or Singapore, or because they were all originally British firms that have now been taken over.
No exactly the opposite. If you think you are going to experience inflation then you are better off owning a global mix of companies in USD, GBP, Eu, Yen, Renminbi etc.
The only advantage of owning shares only in your local currency is if you think it is going to rise in value compared to the rest of the world - in which case all the companies in your home market that have to export are screwed
Nobody picks the stocks.
HFT is mostly either arbitrage (this stock in London is 0.1% cheaper in New York if the exchange rate from GBP->Euro->USD is slightly less than X.)
Or front running; people are buying stock X so if I am 0.1km closer to the exchange I can buy it 100us before them and resell it for 0.1% more.
Or market watching; a big pension fund has to hold 30% of a certain class of bonds. On the last payday of the month it will get a huge chunk of new money which it has to buy these bonds with, so just before this the price goes up.
HFT can be a good thing in that it makes the market more efficient, everybody gets to buy Apple for the same price, anybody attempting to sell apple for 0.1c more is going to get zero business. That's why some IPOs and those little "only certain customers can buy these stocks" deals that a bunch of (now bankrupt) merchant banks did - are so bad.
You to Netflix: I want to pay $8 a month but I want to be able to keep any movie for as long as I want and share it with all my friends - so no protection please.
Netflix to studio: We want to pay for the rights to show a certain movie in a certain market for a certain time. But we are going to let all our customers download and keep it and share it with everyone else on the net - that won't cost us any more will it ?
The 386 (and pentium that was based on it) were transformative but they were designed and the engineering led by John Crawford.
If she started in 1987, that was 2 years after the chip was first sold, and she would have had the job of sales and marketing for an almost monopoly (except for Sun) supplier of 32bit chips
Although surviving as a senior exec at intel for 25 years is pretty impressive for anybody
It is if anything even worse in european projects. Exactly the same pork barreling but you also have countries that spent the last 1000years at war with each other, and some countries who think that only they can build some things because certain other countries are a bunch of neanderthals who can barely bang rocks together. Then you have a bunch of small countries who decide that their post office/civil aviation authority/milk marketing board has to be in charge of approving the specs for a space project.
And then you have to translate everything into a dozen languages even though everybody working on the project is speaking English.
Mind you - you do get to go for some very nice lunches when the meetings aren't being held in the UK or Germany.
