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You can - buy T-Bills. You can even buy them directly from the US treasury at https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_tbills_gl...

This is pretty much exactly what the banks are doing, albeit at a larger scale. They buy T-Bills, or other equivalents such as Gilts (UK government backed bonds) as they're as secure as investments get - with reduced returns as the compensation for the increased security of the bonds being backed by one of the worlds major economies.

For more information - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_bond and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_(finance)

The article covered that about half way down - the short version is that the Swedish authorities tried to interview him in London but Ecuador wouldn't let him be interviewed by the Swedish authorities unless Sweden agreed on a pre-condition that they couldn't lawfully agree to.

> In March 2015, however, the SPA changed its position and requested to interview Assange in London. A spokesperson for Assange welcomed the development and said Assange wanted to be interviewed.

> This was followed in June 2015 by a formal request to the English and Ecuadorean authorities.

> But the SPA were not able to proceed as Ecuador did not give the requisite permissions. The trip to London by a Swedish prosecutor had to be abandoned.

> And gentlemen in England now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

It's from Shakespeare's Henry V and it's part of the speech given by the titular King to his troops just before the Battle of Agincourt - which fell on St. Crispin's day. The Battle of Agincourt became a major English victory against the French during the Hundred-Year War and led to Henry V being recognized as Heir Apparent to the French crown, and his son, Henry VI, claiming the title of King of France as well being King of England.

In simpler terms the quote is saying that the glory gained by fighting in the battle alongside their King will be so great that any man who could fight who was not there will be jealous and will think of themselves as lesser men when in the company of those who fought.

The whole speech is here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Crispin%27s_Day_Speech - and well worth reading.

I was under the impression that you can, though they might show up under Documents rather than Books - assuming you've side-loaded by sending the files to your kindle e-mail address. It's not something I try to do very often though, so I might be mistaken - they don't seem to appear in the Cloud Reader though.

In any case, since you can just open the files in the desktop version of Kindle, it doesn't seem like it would be such a big deal.

I'd recommend the recently released F# Deep Dives as well - it's less about learning the language, than about seeing how a variety of different real world problems can be solved in F#. A few hours reading that gave me more inspiration than all the blog posts solving toy problems I've read in the last year.

Table of contents and sample chapters here - http://manning.com/petricek2/

The site is part of the Wellcome Trust, a large UK charity that's focused on improving human and animal health. They're one of largest sources of funding for medical research in the world, second only to the Gates Foundation according to Wikipedia. They're also a bit supporter of open access science journals.

If you're in London, they also have the Wellcome Collection - a medical focused museum that describes itself as "The free destination for the incurably curious". Pretty much always fascinating and worth a visit!

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/ http://www.wellcomecollection.org/

I don't know about any programmes based in the US, but in the UK there's both the Open University ( http://www.open.ac.uk/ ) and the University of London International Programmes ( http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/ ) - both of which are legitimate and well known universities of good repute.

VASSAL is basically a virtual board - it wasn't really designed to do any form of rules enforcement, but rather handle the physical aspects of a board game. Given that translating game rules into software is often a daunting task, that's probably for the best!

If you want to see some lovely examples of this in Arabic, along with just a genuinely beautiful book, you might like to look at the graphic novel Habibi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habibi_%28graphic_novel%29

For what it's worth - there are some valid criticisms of the book and it's depictions of Arabic culture and history, but it's still lovely look at.

Part of the performance record might well be due to not everyone taking the pill remembering to always take it. If you miss the odd day, I'd imagine that the chance of accidental pregnancy goes up a fair bit.

In non-committed relationships, or in the early days of a relationship, surely it's sensible to use condoms anyway - as much for protection against STDs as for having to trust that your partner isn't lying when she says she's using a contraceptive.

I might be an outlier and I've also got the benefit of free health care and sexual health clinics being in the UK, but it seems like sensible practice to not stop using condoms until you've both had an STD screen - which takes all of ten minutes plus a week to get results - just to be safe. Especially since it's possible to have an STD while also being unaware of it.

A very interesting article, although I can't help but feel that it tars doctors with slightly too broad a brush.

For the sake of context, I'm in the UK (so med school is a 5 or 6 year degree, not an undergrad and postgrad like the US), my fiancee is an Obstectric Surgeon (aka an Ob/Gyn) who's half way through specialist training (six years out of med school, three years training in her specialty), my father is an Oncologist (clinical, not surgical, though a lot of interaction with surgeons as would be expected) in his mid-sixties (so med school was forty odd years ago, consultant for over thirty years) - he is, however, both research focused and head of his department so is far more aware of current trends in the NHS than someone who's purely a clinician who wouldn't have much reason to keep up to date with the current literature or thinking in the NHS.

It's interesting to compare and contrast the mindsets and training they both have. A large number of the points raised in the article have been, from what I can tell, incorporated in the training that doctors receive these days - there have been changes to how surgical teams work to help break down barriers between the surgeon(s) and everyone else in the room. In the current NHS thinking the idea of surgeon-as-god is long gone, and even little measures like everyone in the operating theatre introducing themselves before the operation starts go along way to breaking down the formal barriers between the staff.

However, medicine is a very traditional discipline and it can be hard change the way people practice when you're trying to fundamentally change something they've been doing for the last twenty years. From the stories I hear from my father, there are more than a few surgeons of his era who do take the view that they can do no wrong and errors happen as a result. Thankfully, people of that mindset are mostly approaching retirement age and the generation of doctors below them seem to be more open to new ideas - something I suspect is an artefact of being trained during the eighties onwards when lots of fields of medicine became a lot more research focused and less interested in doing things because "that's how it's always been done". Quite likely also due to increased collaboration with colleagues around the globe suddenly being possible so new ideas spread faster.

It's also difficult to talk about the NHS as a whole. Every NHS trust (every geographical area in the UK falls under a particular trust that encompasses one or more hospitals) is slightly different, as there's a degree of autonomy within each trusts. Each deanery (the group of hospitals that a doctor does their specialist training in) is different - the quality of training you'd get in a deanery which is recognised as delivering world class training in your specialty is going to be entirely different than if you end up at a random deanery that has little connection to your specialty. Like any other area of academia, the best people tend to clump in certain places.

This means that, to the detriment of the NHS as a whole, just because some hospitals and trusts change the status quo and improve matters, it doesn't mean that it will spread immediately to everywhere else. It's sad, but perhaps not too surprising when you consider the size of an organisation like the NHS - were you to add them all together, it's an organisation with something in the order of 1.4 million employees, so it perhaps should be a surprise that chance is often slow. Doubly so when you consider that it's a profession that likes to see an idea proved before it's implemented.

On the upside, my fiancee will be spending the next year (from Sept) as an education and simulation fellow where she'll be designing and running simulations for junior doctors. Making sure that they can recognise when the blinders start to slip on and empowering them to speak up when they think that something is going wrong, even if it means telling someone several decades their senior to stop what they're doing, is surely one of the most useful things we can do to ensure that problems like the one in the article are kept to a minimum.

In Our Time is a fantastic source of interesting topics, especially since all it's past episodes are available for free on the BBC's website. With over 640 episodes it shouldn't be too hard to find something of interest!

For those not familiar with the show, the format is simple. A topic is picked for each week and it consists of the host, Melvyn Bragg, and three experts on that topic. The experts are then left to discuss the topic for 45 minutes with the host only interjecting to ask questions and steer the conversation. It's very much the pinnacle of listening to smart people talk about things that they're interested in.

Recent episodes have covered topics as diverse as The Talmud, Photosynthesis, States of Matter, Spartacus and Early Chinese History.

A list of episiodes can be found here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player - and there's links on the site to download all the episodes since 2011.

It sounded like that's a result of the upgrade on Android - presumably they've changed something recently about how they store the offline play lists.

It means that the person's output is not simply a multiple of the number of hours that they work, but that for each unit of time they work their output increases compared to the previous unit.

For example:

    Linear
    output = time * k

    Non-Linear
    output = time ^ k

In practice it means that for jobs that are linear, it doesn't matter how many hours any individual works as long as the total hours worked remains the same - assuming that they're all of the same skill level. Doctors, for example, are mostly shift workers so the output of one doctor working for 12hrs is pretty much the same as two doctors working six hours each.

For a job that has non-linear output, two people of the same skill who each work six hours, will be less productive than one person of the that skill working twelve hours. Easy enough to see:

    12 ^ 1.5 = 41.6
    2 * 6 ^ 1.5 = 29.4

In that case, splitting the job between two people results in an output that's 70% of the output of that job being done by one person.

Basically, it's saying that many workers are not fungible assets, no matter that they share the same level of skill.

Not much need to make internal transfers - London and Hong Kong are two of world's largest financial centres so there's plently of local work to do and it's not exactly hard to collaborate with colleages in NYC from London when there's a good 4/5 hours a day of overlap when both offices are active.

Looking at salaries is misleading anyway - companies like Jane Street do most of their compensation as bonuses rather than salaries. Having worked in the proprietry trading world, salaries are generally on the low side, but your bonus can be anything from 50%-100% of your salary upwards. It differs a fair bit depending on what you do - a traders' bonus will be more volatile and pegged to their performance that year, a back office dev will propably have a more stable bonus year to year, but not as large.

Given the date today I'd be tempted to not take the accouncement too seriously - it is April Fools Day after all.

The range at which Radars can detect planes is a lot shorter than most people seem to believe. Ground based Radars have an effective range of something in the region of 200miles due to the earth's curvature. To get around that you either have to have air based Radars (such as the E2-Hawkeye used by US carrier groups), or more exotic/experimental types of radars which bounce off the ionosphere.

The limitations of radar are part of the reason why Aircraft have transponders - you can pick up an actively broadcasting radio from far greater range, and you're not relying on getting a clean bounce back from the aircraft. They're also the reason why carriers carry multiple E2s - a radar on the top of a mast on a ship simply can't see far enough.

Not at all.

However if you're going to enter a market that already has multiple players and can be assumed to be competitive then surely it's important to understand why your competitors aren't doing whatever your idea is as it's likely to suggest if your idea might not be feasible, or profitable, or if there's another issue that might get in the way that you don't know about yet. Of course on the other hand it might tell you why it's not a good idea for them, but is a good idea for you - they might be burdened with legacy systems that would need to be rewritten to deal with deliveries after 5pm. They might have employee contracts which are hard to renegotiate. They might have hubs that are too far away from their delivery sites to make a shorter delivery run profitable after employee time and fuel costs are taken into account. But unless you're willing to ask the question, you're not going to know are you.

The website is nice, but I'm not sure that the business model is sound.

This is for two different reasons -

1) If there was a solid business case for making deliveries between 6pm and 10pm (reasonable after-work hours), why aren't delivery companies already doing so? If there was a case for it, I'm sure they'd happily do it and charge extra for it - just like many of them charge extra to guarantee delivery before a certain time in the morning.

1.1) Is missed deliveries really that big of a problem? Anecdotally, I order a lot of things online for delivery - to the extent that I managed to make over 190 orders on Amazon alone in one year. In the past two years or so, I've had less than a dozen parcels that couldn't be delivered on the first or second try. I live in a building with six other apartments - it's rare that someone isn't around to sign for a package.

2) There's an increasing number of shops that offer a locker service like Amazon Locker Service. Since this doesn't cost me anything extra, other than the time taken to pick up the parcel, what's the incentive to use a service like yours?

Oh, absolutely. In my arena, finance, there's no way you'd use your own staff - it would go straight to external auditors who'd conduct the investigation or contract specialist firms to investigate. Of course, not always going to be the case for smaller companies and more minimal impact cases.

Because fixing the problem isn't just a matter of changing the headline back to what it was supposed to read.

Someone entering your system, which is supposed to be secure, and changing the headline on your front page mean that you'll (if you're sensible) then go and contract an external firm to perform a security audit and find out how the intruders got into your system, what needs to be done to fix it, and why your system had that particular vulnerability to begin with. All of which costs money.

Alternatively, you'll use your own staff to do the same - which isn't free either, since they're now not doing their normal jobs for the duration. If I'm paying you $120,000 to be my sysadmin and then need to pull you off your normal duties to investigate someone entering my systems for a month then that investigation has cost me $10,000. That I was going to be paying you that money anyway isn't really relevant - that was the cost of your time that was used on that investigation.

Simple - a few thousand (if it is that many) people out of several million people having a problem is not always evidence of a real problem but rather proof that with a large enough install base some people will always have problems and it might well be for no reason at all beyond shear chance.

If there are 10 million installations of Mavericks (and I've got no idea how many there really are) and 5,000 people reporting a particular problem, that's only .05% of users - which is well within the expected proportion of users you'd expect to have problems with any upgrades. Note, for comparison the recent PS4 release problems and Sony's statement about the 0.4% of users experiencing problems - "This is within our expectations for a new product introduction"

Your second point is also a good way to deal with late payment penalties - something which it can be hard to add to a contract (as in, $x if you pay within 30 days $x + 10% if you're late).

Selling it as a discount for paying early is generally going to be easier to get a client to agree to - who doesn't like a discount? So it's $y normally, but $y - 10% if you pay within 30 days.

It's no effect on your bottom line, but it does make for happier clients!

In Summary - The Author, due to having recently switched from being a full-time to a freelance worker, cannot prove that he has the ability to pay the mortgage he's applying for and thus his application was denied.

The rest of the article being about how he owns several properties outright (that he rents out) and apparently has money in the bank is somewhat immaterial since the part that a lender cares about most is "can you continue to pay your debt from your sustainable income stream" - not your rental business which can be volatile and unpredictable income wise.

That lending rules have been tightened is surely a good thing even if it does mean the some people will find it harder to own property. Borrowing money to own a home is nobodies right, but something you should have to prove you're able to do - as the swathe of sub-prime mortgages that subsequently went underwater only a few years ago shows.

They're almost certainly not expected to work to anything near the level of precision that these sorts of high-end CNC machines do - judging by the comments in this thread, you're talking about micrometer level precision. They are to 'machine-tools' what your home server is to google's data centres.

Druce,

Congratulations on the re-launch, the site looks good and definitely one I'll be keeping an eye on, especially since I likely fall into being part of the target market being in the Capital Markets space.

My one main bit of feedback would be that you might want to broaden your sources to include more in-depth financial sources - right now it feels more like "business news" than it does "finance/financial markets news". To pick an example, I'd be more interested in stories like "Former HSBC Banker to Start Hedge Fund Investing Globally" than I am "Secret Handshakes Greet Frat Brothers on Wall Street" to pick two stories on Bloomberg at the moment. I want to hear the stories about what various hedge funds are up to, what's going on at Goldman's Structured Products desk, etc.

My two eurocents anyway!

The Knight Capital incident isn't unique to HFT firms - any firm that does automated trading can fall foul of similar problems.

Manipulate is a weasel word.

Every trade will affect the price of a share but that's not manipulation, that's a functioning market. Unless you can explain why a trade made by HFT is somehow more devious or underhanded than a trade made by another actor in the market.

In my experience HFT is a boogeyman. It's not well understood, and it's easy to blame for ills real and imagined - in part because you only tend to hear about it when something goes wrong and a Knight Capital type event happens, although that can apply to any firm that does any form of automated trading such as Market Makers and Algo traders and is definitely not the sole preserve of HFT shops. Based on what I know and see, I believe that the existence of HFT is generally an aid to price discovery (due to the narrower spreads), and liquidity (more actors means a better chance that someone will take the other side of a trade). In that respect, they're not too dissimilar to Market Makers, although a true market maker has additional responsibilities in terms of being willing to trade in illiquid products.

If you're not a professional trader then the topic of the article really isn't a big deal. If your trading style is such that it's significantly material whether you trade at 510 or 511, or whether your trade executes in the next minute or the next thirty minutes, then you're always going to be at a huge disadvantage compared to people who can get the best price and most immediate execution. A trading firm who are willing to pay to connect directly to an exchange will always get a better price than you can.

It's not horribly different to why the restaurant down the block from you gets better prices for produce than you do - their business affords them better access to the produce market.

Edit - For what it's worth, the bulk of my career has been in finance, mostly as a Quant-Developer at a mix of buy-side and sell-side firms and more recently as technology consultant who specializes in Capital Markets.