Nortel screwed up because it went for growth at all costs while getting rid of projects that were bringing in lots of profit but bringing down the almighty overall growth.

It became a victim of our current (last couple of decades) problems with the stock market where everything is upside down. New companies that don't produce products and have never made a profit can be "worth" more than old, stable companies that produce billions of dollars with of goods and been profitable for decades. We keep seeing mega-mergers happening because major investors and advisors are demanding steady rates of return that are impossible for these massive companies to achieve without buying other companies. CxO's are rewarded in stock options that make them focus completely on the short term and give them incentives to make decisions that are bad for the long term survival of companies and the environment. Advisors are able to change the fortunes of a company with just a rumour adding or removing billions from the "value" of a company in a day even though nothing about the company has changed, showing that the stock price is no longer correlated to reality. The economy is doing worse than anytime than anyone alive has seen it yet the markets are hitting records. How can that be if stock prices are based on reality?

The stock market is just gambling now. There's no such thing as value investing or being able to look at the balance sheet of a company to determine how well the stock should perform. It's become a place for the rich to put their money into and allow the robots increase their investments at the expense of those less fortunate not able to afford the latest trading technology.

They're comparing apples to clementines.

Why not both? It really depends on how you are going to use the information in the programs. The concept of a property group may allow one to easily check to see if a player is allowed to buy hotels on properties instead of iterating through all of their properties and seeing if they have the set of properties that make up the group that they are on.The property group would know the properties that belong to it and the properties would know who own them. If all of them are owned by the same player then hotels may be purchased. As an optimization every time a property is purchased the property group could have a flag updated.

It's (almost?) always a trade-off between data structure complexity and code complexity. As you make your data structures more complex, your code becomes simpler. In the above example, adding the property group data structure, object, or class reduced the iterations through lists of properties to find out which other ones were part of the same group. Adding a flag to indicate that hotels could be placed on the properties added a check when a purchase was done but reduced the code running every time it was a players turn to determine if the option to purchase hotels should be enabled to checking the value of a flag.

Yes, he's black. /s (Unfortunately it is a sad state of affairs in parts of the world in which skin colour is often enough to get you special privileges or harassment.)

But why is she running around without her phone?

Except the police withheld the evidence that proved his evidence.

In this case the officers hid evidence (video at a convenience store, the persons' phone GPS data, and his car dash cam video) that the person was not at the site of the murders when they happened as he stated all along. Because of that he spent 15 months in jail. Once the prosecutors found out about the hidden evidence their investigators quickly found a new suspect by looking at the Google data. He has every right to sue because the police officers intentionally hid the evidence of his innocence.

If you are going to do anything series with floating point calculations then you are probably going to want to off load it to the graphics card anyways.

Companies such as IBM have been doing a similar thing for a longer time with their larger systems. (The ones with the PowerN chips, running AIX, and taking up the equivalent of a couple racks.) Everything would be maxed out (CPU's, memory, storage, etc) and you would buy a license to access a new piece of hardware if you needed the upgrade in capacity.

So according to your theory then because IBM, or the other company, had delivered the hardware already the customers didn't need to pay for all of the extra stuff. All they had to do is buy the basic system and hack the license system in order to use everything else. It's the same as what these people are doing with their cars.

This is completely backwards for /. I should be making a car analogy to explain computers. Not making a computer analogy to explain cars!

I came here to post the same idea. Automating the truck is the wrong idea as is converting the trucks to electric. Medium to long distances should be handled by trains as they are much more efficient than trucks. Use the trucks to deliver the local and short haul stuff.

Not only would this be better for the environment but it would be safer for other drivers with the reduced number of trucks on the road. The reduced truck traffic would also keep major highways, especially those going in and out of major cities, in better shape for longer. Cities and states/provinces would not have to resurface or replace highways as often because it's the trucks that do the most damage to the road surfaces.

While some drivers would lose their jobs, some would see their job transition from a long haul driver to a short haul/local driver.

It may require some railroad lines being rebuilt or built in new area but it would be better for the environment, better for drivers, and better for government as it wouldn't have to repair or replace infrastructure as often.

Try recycling a nuclear power plant. All of that steel, concrete, and other material that would be great to use for other projects after the reactor has been shut down but everything near the reactor has been made slightly radioactive. It's now low level waste which means that it can't be recycled.

Plus there's nowhere to safely put the high level radioactive waste because society hasn't come up with a way to deal with something that's dangerous for 10,000s of years. Perhaps we should find a spot on the Earth that's being pushed back towards the molten core (I think it's a subduction zone). Then if we can just put the toxic payload safely in the ground that's about to go back to the core. Everything will become liquid, dilute, and some will eventually come back to the surface as lava. However it will take a long time to happen. It will take a long time for the items to even reach the molten core as plates move on the order of centimetres (inches) a year. And since it has to be placed on an oceanic plate for subduction to take place, and usually in quite deep water, there's not many groups that could get access to any material placed there. At least it's better than trying to shoot it up to the sun.

The British Ministry of Defence (MoD) dumped just about everything that was dangerous, including chemical weapons, into a couple of spots between Scotland and Northern Ireland shortly after World War 2. It came up recently after Boris Johnson suggested building a bridge between the two countries and this was mentioned as one of the hurdles.

From a New Scientist article about what MoD dumped: "the material dumped in the Atlantic includes 17,000 tons of captured German bombs filled with the nerve gas tabun. The scientists at the Marine Laboratory in Aberdeen say that another nerve gas, sarin, together with phosgene, tear gas and mustard gas, have also been dumped."

Have you heard of a fusion reactor melting down or spewing toxic, radioactive waste across half a continent? I thought not! /s

Congratulations for pointing out the same flaw as with the original design. What's the difference if I say to put the dice in the box after rolling them or to dump them into the box after shaking them in a bag as per the summary?

The whole thing is a gimmick to sell merchandise at best. At worst it's to sell merchandise and to gain access to people's accounts. It has a number of flaws such as the one you pointed out and as others have suggested, depending on a web site to be around in years time.

You're not going to have that many million bits of entropy just because pixels next to one another are so likely to be close in value, if not the same, to one another. For example, a black area on a photo would mostly contain 0's. Though if you are taking picture of writing on a piece of paper then most of the bits would be 1 for the white of the paper.

It could take an image given to it by the user, examine regions for contrast and/or colour changes to get a sample of however many pixels you desire, and then get the bits from that. Grabbing a couple of thousand pixels from a photo of even an older camera containing 5MP would give plenty of variation. A thousand pixels would be 3,000 RGB values and 24,000 bits.