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An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization
This article investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To effectively organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation, minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit. Pirates devised two institutions for this purpose. First, I analyze the system of piratical checks and balances crews used to constrain captain predation. Second, I examine how pirates used democratic constitutions to minimize conflict and create piratical law and order. Pirate governance created sufficient order and cooperation to make pirates one of the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.
I initially found him to be an interesting character but I was turned off by his support for Iran's nuclear weapons program and stopped paying attention. This is a strange turn of events.
He apparently stated:
“I would love to have the opportunity to be able to go back to Iran again after I have been to Israel, and make this contact between Iranian and Israelis, which is my project, bypassing the governments and making this contact between the two peoples.”
Vesela Lecheva, Chairman of the State Agency for Youth and Sports, supported the bid of the Bulgarian Chess Federation to organize the semifinal match for the world championship title between Veselin Topalov and Gata Kamsky, Radio Gong reported. Having in mind the importance of the competition and its complex preparation, and in order to provide optimal conditions for the players and the media, Bulgaria suggested this match to take place from 3rd to 15th February 2009. Possible hosts are Sofia, Plovdiv, Veliko Turnovo and Bansko.
In a letter sent to FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, Ms. Lecheva stressed that all necessary financial guarantees are ready. Meanwhile, Bulgaria is surprised with the change of financial parameters for the match, which expanded to 300 thousand U.S. dollars, without clear argumentation.
YouTube - Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote
Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen.
New Hope for Financial Economics: Interview with Bill Janeway | The Big Picture
This is an insightful interview that takes a hard line on the financial crisis and also manages to actually use the word bankster.
When people ask us who we’d like to see in positions of financial responsibility such as Treasury Secretary in the Obama Administration, we have three simple tests:
First, the ideal candidates should not have been involved in formulating the financial rescues and bailouts of the past 18 months.
Second, ideal candidates may never have worked for Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS).
And third, the ideal candidates should not be economists or at least among that tendency of economist who believe that markets are efficient and complete, that people are rational and that supporting concepts like OTC derivatives and fair value accounting are good and practical public policies.
Obama asks Bush to provide help for automakers - International Herald Tribune
SAY NO! to a bailout of the automakers.
They've been making 40+ mpg cars for years, in their european market. They are responsible for our "SUV" nation, they've been in bed with big oil for years, and now they want us to pay them MORE?
Please.
I filled my tank for $1.75/gal today, and I really don't see how the automakers can fly into DC on private jets, and ask for alms.
The S&P 500 is headed for its biggest annual decline since the Great Depression, when it fell 47 percent in 1931.
``The final low will be much lower than this,'' and may not occur before the fourth quarter of next year, de Graaf said.
At a minimum, stocks are likely to revisit their lowest levels of 2002 and 2003, when a 51 percent slide from the March 2000 peak sent the S&P 500 as low as 768.63, said Mary Ann Bartels, chief market analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. in New York.
The S&P 500 is likely to fall to around 680, 20 percent lower than yesterday's close, probably by the end of the year, said John Roque, senior technical analyst for New York-based brokerage Natixis Bleichroeder Inc.
You Might Want To Think About Stopping Your Mortgage Payments and Reducing Your Income
Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, predicts that many homeowners who have little or no equity will stop paying their mortgage and then reduce their income to get the biggest payment cut possible. They could stop working overtime or, if two spouses work, one could quit. After the modification, they could try to boost their income again.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Schiff says. "People are going to feel like complete morons if they don't participate. The people getting punished are the ones who never made an irresponsible decision to buy a house they couldn't afford."
Web spam is a widely-recognized threat to the quality and security of the Web. Web spam pages pollute search engine indexes, burden Web crawlers and Web mining services, and expose users to dangerous Web-borne malware. To defend against Web spam, most previous research analyzes the contents of Web pages and the link structure of the Web graph. Unfortunately, these heavyweight approaches require full downloads of both legitimate and spam pages to be effective, making real-time deployment of these techniques infeasible for Web browsers, high-performance Web crawlers, and real-time Web applications. In this paper, we present a lightweight, predictive approach to Web spam classification that relies exclusively on HTTP session information (i.e., hosting IP addresses and HTTP session headers). Concretely, we built an HTTP session classifier based on our predictive technique, and by incorporating this classifier into HTTP retrieval operations, we are able to detect Web spam pages before the actual content transfer. As a result, our approach protects Web users from Webpropagated malware, and it generates significant bandwidth and storage savings. By applying our predictive technique to a corpus of almost 350,000 Web spam instances and almost 400,000 legitimate instances, we were able to successfully detect 88.2% of the Web spam pages with a false positive rate of only 0.4%. These classification results are superior to previous evaluation results obtained with traditional linkbased and content-based techniques. Additionally, our experiments show that our approach saves an average of 15.4 KB of bandwidth and storage resources for every successfully identified Web spam page, while only adding an average of 101 microseconds to each HTTP retrieval operation. Therefore, our predictive technique can be successfully deployed in applications that demand real-time spam detection.
Rory Stewart, the author of the best seller The Places In Between about Afghanistan and soon-to-be director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School, rejects both the troop increases and the idea that the success of counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq can be duplicated in Afghanistan. Stewart, a former British infantry officer, would limit US involvement to carefully targeted economic development aid, and dismisses a counterinsurgency strategy as unrealistic and overly ambitious. He recommends that the US pursue a containment strategy and a narrowly counterterrorist military campaign.
