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It depends on which European country you're talking about.
The Norwegian economy has just been rated as the 11th most competitive economy in the world, up four places since last year.
What's even more interesting is that last weekend Norway won the gold medal in the double at the World Championships[^] - keeping the balance of the boat, just after racing 2000m, is nearly as impressive as winning the finals ...
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Espen Harlinn wrote: The Norwegian economy has just been rated as the 11th most competitive economy
in the world, up four places since last year
However should the alarmist predictions of the article come true, which isn't likely at all, it would be severely hurt.
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Obviously, we're going to get hurt.
Look at the chart: Dow Jones Industrial Average[^] - expand the range of the chart to cover the years from 1990 until now.
Things get bad every 5 to 7 years or so, usually when all the "experts" agree that the market is healthy with no symptoms of an imminent crash in sight ...
Predicting the market and stocks is harder than it used to be, but still: Stockcommander - Motley Fool CAPS[^].
I got there by creating a graph from historical data, connecting instruments that historically tended to move in the same direction, at roughly the same time. Then I used something like Brandes algorithm to pick likely candidates when something made a serious move.
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Espen Harlinn wrote: Things get bad every 5 to 7 years or so
The implicit threat in the article is that the European union would collapse and that of course would lead to the collapse of the Euro along with the economies of those that depend upon it.
Not just a depressed economy.
But that is the alarmist part of it.
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I'm reading a very topical book by Robert Peston called How do we fix this mess. The guy writes with authority about the mess we got in back in 2007. It wasn't just the bankers that did it; we all had a part to play in the problems. I can't recommend his book enough.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Last weekend I spent far too much at Home Depot, which is not at all unusual for me. But what was unusual, and a bit worrisome, is that at the checkout, after I ran my credit card through the scanner, it popped up a message asking if I'd like them to email me a receipt - then it displayed my correct email address! I've never used this card online, so what's up with that? 
These hoity toity software developers are starting to annoy me, building applications that share my information with other applications, without my knowledge! Be warned, I'm probably as well armed as John, and I will find you...
Will Rogers never met me.
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That's pretty bad. I also don't like ATMs wishing me a happy birthday.
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Quite a few years ago I used a PO Box for confidential postage (before pron was on line) and naturally did not mention it's existence to anyone (specifically the wife). While applying for some bank service they asked me which postal address I wanted to use, and there was the PO Box details. This was in the 90s so the bastards have been doing this sort of thing for a long time.
The real irony is that a couple of years later I was doing some work for the same bank and had the opportunity to vent my irritation at a rather senior level.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Roger Wright wrote: building applications that share my information with other applications, without my knowledge!
They probably got their data from the NSA. 
Marc
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Roger Wright wrote: These hoity toity software developers
You talking to ME, huh?
Seriously, you're probably using the wrong Facebook setting[^] 
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
-----
Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience
Greg King
-----
I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.
Lily Tomlin, Actress
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So the next time, as a developer, you think "Oh, that'd be a good idea!", think again.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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It was recently revealed in the UK that some councils are selling electoral register data for £5 a pop to marketing agencies and the like. You can of course opt out but it peeves me that they never assume that by default, like those very small tick boxes you see buried in the T&C of websites that always assume you want "in".
This bloke[^] got his own back on those firms.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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Roger Wright wrote: These hoity toity software developers are starting to annoy me...
Please, not us developers!
The clients who order such crap are the bad ones!
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An older gentleman was on the operating table awaiting surgery and he insisted that his son-in-law, a renowned surgeon, perform the operation.
As he was about to get the anaesthesia, he asked to speak to his son-in-law. "Yes, Dad, what is it?"
"Don't be nervous son; do your best and just remember, if it doesn't go well...... if something happens to me, your mother in law is going to come and live with you."
The surgery was a great success.
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 You know he wasn't going to let anything happen to the old man.
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Glad you liked it Mike 
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I put my current gaming computer together about 4 years ago, and I'm thinking of upgrading. So, CPU? Motherboard? Graphics card(s) and configuration? If you were building your dream machine from scratch, what would be your specs?
What I have now works reasonably well, but I want to upgrade it to 64-bit and add more memory. It has two 500MB drives in a RAID-0 array, which makes it a bit problematic to swap drives and copy the old data back over. So, I'm curious about what a new machine would look like.
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Gawd, I hate RAID0!
Double the chance of a HDD failure ruining everything...
Other than that, I have no idea - sorry!
This message is manufactured from fully recyclable noughts and ones. To recycle this message, please separate into two tidy piles, and take them to your nearest local recycling centre.
Please note that in some areas noughts are always replaced with zeros by law, and many facilities cannot recycle zeroes - in this case, please bury them in your back garden and water frequently.
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Yeah, I know  The idea was to maximize disk access speeds. Probably not necessary nowadays.
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One word: SSD.
Gregory.Gadow wrote: what would be your (dream) specs?
Costly. 4000€ give or take
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Given how cheap solid state drives have become, I will probably go that route this time.
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See that's a terrible question for me to answer, because I would design something entirely ridiculous (i.e. all sorts of stuff you don't need, but as long as you're dreaming you might as well...).
I can tell you my current specs though, it can run every game I've come across at max settings @ 2560x1440 fine:
AMD Phenom II x4 965 Black Edition (3.4 GHz quadcore)
16 GB 1333 DDR3 RAM
ASUS ROG 5870 Platinum (900 Mhz, 2 GB GDDR5)
I don't remember the motherboard off the top of my head, it's ASUS though. Overall, not too expensive either (the card was, but it was complete overkill at the time). Also I've noticed the newer AMD X870's (6870 and 7870) don't really compare to mine though, my room mate has 2 6870's in his (I think) and it's only a little better than my single 5870 in some benchmarks we ran (his system is pretty similar to mine, same CPU, same RAM speed). So if you only want to run one you might want to go for a higher one. (Or get a Nvidia card - I can't help you there though, no experience.)
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Depends if you have an interest in overclocking things? Have a look a www.reddit.com/r/buildapc[^] and http://pcpartpicker.com/[^]
I built a new PC last month but I'm not really interested in playing games. It's an i7, 16gb ram, 250gb ssd and 1tb hdd. With case, monitor, keyboard etc it was about $1400 AUD and it does things very, very quickly.
You can easily spend the same again on two graphics cards if that's your thing.
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What kind of gaming?
For gaming, disk speed is not that important. (YMMV) and in the last 20+ years, I've never had the use for RAID at home
The latest generation i5 (haswell?) are very good and very good quality for the price and good enough for most games.
Get the best motherboard you can get; if it also supports i7 the better, so you can upgrade CPU later on; the MB also needs to support SLI (or crossfire) to be able to get 2 graphic cards if you want to.
Graphic card : Most high end cards will play most games at high or better resolution, I have an old Radeon 6800 HD (something) that still runs skyrim and starcraft2 at ultra settings.
Memory:for games, no need more than 8gig.
Power supply : get a big enough PS to allow expansion, and if you build your own PC, get one that is modular (to reduce cable clutter) ( there are online power calculator).
This should get you started.
Good luck
I'd rather be phishing!
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