“Taxes in the largely agricultural economy of the Middle Ages were usually paid in the form of goods, and these payments were recorded with notches on wooden ‘tally’ sticks that were then split length-wise. One half remained with the tax payer serf, as proof of payment (an ingenious way to avoid counterfeiting). It didn’t take long for the King and his treasurer to realize that they could actually issue tally sticks in advance, in order to finance ‘emergency spending’. The half of the tally stick which originally remained with the treasury had a handle and was called the ‘stock’ - the term that has evolved to describe shares in publicly listed corporations today

“For any significant piece of code at Google, you can find almost a whole book about it internally, and a well-written one at that.

“Intel’s Core 2 processors are buggy as hell. Some of these bugs don’t just cause development/debugging problems, but will assuredly be exploitable from userland code. BIOS vendors will be very late providing workarounds/fixes. Some bugs are unfixable and cannot be worked around. Intel only provides detailed fixes to BIOS vendors and large operating system groups. Open Source operating systems are largely left in the cold.

Intel understates the impact of these errata very significantly. Almost all operating systems will run into these bugs. Basically the MMU simply does not operate as specified/implemented in previous generations of x86 hardware. Some of these bugs are along the lines of “buffer overflow”; where a write-protect or non-execute bit for a page table entry is ignored. Others are floating point instruction non-coherencies, or memory corruptions — outside of the range of permitted writing for the process — running common instruction sequences.

At this time, I cannot recommend purchase of any machines based on the Intel Core 2. Intel must become more transparent.

“If the ICC wants the game to be globalised there should be enough cricket to create equality. Because if you don’t have the games in the first place, how are you going to develop your players to compete with the best?

“There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I’d argue, is good procrastination.

“The procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

“Are crowds wise or dumb?

Groups of people are dumber than their constituent members when they exchange words, like in committees, boards, governments, meetings, etc.

Groups of people are smarter than their constituent members when they exchange actions. Markets are smarter than individuals because currency is a surrogate for action.

“The US Senate has issued a subpoena ordering the Bush administration to give up documents related to its surveillance of domestic terror suspects. The administration has refused a series of requests to release the documents in the past.

“Overall if the unemployment rate doesn’t increase and interest rates don’t increase then I don’t think it will have an effect on the rest of the economy.

“I’m willing to bet anyone in this room $1 million that the rates the nation’s wealthiest individuals pay in income tax are less than those their subordinates have to pay.