About six years ago, UK interest rates hit the historic low of 0.5%. In keeping with all the finiancial advice at the time that this was a once in a lifetime circumstance I rushed out and got a fixed rate mortgage. For ten years. The interest rates have not increased at all that whole time, and I've lost money every single month.   The terms of this mortgage are very strict. There is a substantial penalty  (£1,000 per year remaining) to get out of it. I can only overpay up to double the monthly amount of the mortgage. If I do it makes zero difference to the actual amount I will pay overall - the only result will be to end the mortgage early.  I could afford to overpay each month if I wanted to. However, to my mind this is the least logical thing to do in this situation. As I said, I've lost money on this every month. The only chance I have to make up what I've lost is if interest rates rise during the remaining term of the mortgage. It seems likely this is going to happen within the next 12 months, and it's possible there may be further rises in the remaining 3 years.  When friends and family quiz me about this, they seem amazed that I'm not overpaying. And when I explain the above, they seem unable to understand why I think overpaying is the last thing I should be doing. It's happened so many times now that I'm starting to doubt the wisdom of my decision. So - am I right not to overpay?
My mortgage came up for renewal right at the time in 2009 when UK interest rates hit rock bottom. This was unprecidented, and most financial advice was to take out a fixed-rate mortgage. So I perhaps went overboard and got one for ten years.  Five years on, interest rates haven't moved and I'm losing money on it to the tune of £100 a month. Obviously, this is ongoing: so that decision has cost me about £5000 in real terms so far. It'll come to a lot more by the end of the mortgage, unless interest rates rise.  Being fixed rate, it's been designed so you can't get out early. If I decide to end the mortage, it'll cost me £1,000 per year of the mortgage remaining - which is roughly what I'm losing anyway, so that seems a bad idea.   I can overpay by up to £500 per month. However, doing this doesn't help pay down the mortgage at all: the total is just added up and will cause the mortgage to end early, by a period dependent on the overpayment total.   This seems to me to be a very bad idea because hoping interest rates rise over the next five years is the only hope I have of making good on some of the losses that I've made.   Is this sensible thinking? If so, is there anything at all I can do to try and ameliorate the financial pain this product is causing me?
What visa does my wife need to travel to the UK with me, if I'm going there on a business visa? I am resident of India and just got UK Business visa ( 6 months, multiple entry) .. I am going for a week on business trip. I want to take my wife along with me and at the end of trip.. I want to extend my trip for 3 days and we want to spend some time on leisure.   What visa I should apply for my wife.. visitor visa? should she mention in the visa form that she is going along with me and staying with me while I am on work and later we are spending time on leisure.   While filling my business visa form, there was a field asking if anyone else is going with me.. I selected no.. as there were no plans.  Also is it ok to spend time on leisure on UK Business visa Shape gets distorted when adding stroke in Illustrator CS6 I very recently started learning how to use Adobe Illustrator (CS6), and just now I noticed something strange. When I add a 1pt stroke to my shape, it gets slightly distorted. This distortion does not disappear if I remove the stroke. (But only if I remove the stroke by setting its weight to 0. Using CTRL+Z does return the shape to its former state.)  After adding and removing the stroke a few times, the difference becomes quite noticable:   Am I doing something wrong? Is it a bug? I can't imagine this being the expected behaviour.  EDIT: I think I figured it out. Appearantly, turning 'Align to pixel grid' off doesn't affect previous shapes. If I turn it off and then recreate my shape from scratch, the problem is fixed.   However, I was wondering if their is a way to disable the effect for existing shapes. In other words, can I 'fix' the shapes I created while 'Align to pixel grid' was still on? How to install the latest Arduino IDE? I have an Arduino UNO, which I need to get working with Ubuntu.  Can somebody explain to me the steps required to install the IDE on Ubuntu? Invalid variance: The type parameter 'T' must be contravariantly valid on 'UserQuery.IItem.ItemList'. 'T' is covariant Understanding shape and calculation of confidence bands in linear regression Active versus passive transformations Make flash drive bootable with MULTIPLE Windows Installers I have seen many ways to make a USB an installer for about any Windows OS. But how can I (using grub or something like that) make it bootable to all editions on Windows XP and 7?   I have tried Googling it and researching, I've even tried to do it, But I dont understand much about GRUB or linux at all.  Please keep in mind that I am not very good with linux, so please use as many details as possible. I am writing an application that if the user hits back, it may resend the same information and mess up the flow and integrity of data. How do I disable it for users who are with and without javascript on? Why align and equation environment do not tolerate empty lines? Repeating something with (1/n)th chance of success n times Is there anything that can be said about how many attempts it will take to correctly guess a random number out of 1000 numbers? If the number wouldn't change the probability would just increase every guess, giving in the end a probability of 1.  If the number changes every guess tough, you just have a 1/1000th chance everytime. Can it be calculated how many attempts it would probably take, on average?  (I'm sorry, i'm not very skilled in probability maths) What did my neural network just learn? What features does it care about and why? How do I drag and drop files into an application? I don't have administrator account on my mac On my mac I have 2 accounts and the both are normal account. So in this moment I don't have a Administrator account, only one that was in the past a administrator, but now is not.  How I can have again a Administrator account? Why does a minimal prime ideal consist of zerodivisors? Let $A$ be a commutative ring. Suppose $P \subset A$ is a minimal prime ideal. Then it is a theorem that $P$ consists of zero-divisors.  This can be proved using localization, when $A$ is noetherian: $A_P$ is local artinian, so every element of $PA_P$ is nilpotent.  Hence every element of $P$ is a zero-divisor. (As Matt E has observed, when $A$ is nonnoetherian, one can still use a similar argument: $PA_P$ is the only prime in $A_P$, hence is the radical of $A_P$ by elementary commutative algebra.)  Can this be proved without using localization? Where did the ~/Library folder go in Lion? Bad Character code (256)/ \select@language{greek} Java ReentrantReadWriteLocks - how to safely acquire write lock? I am using in my code at the moment a  to synchronize access over a tree-like structure.  This structure is large, and read by many threads at once with occasional modifications to small parts of it - so it seems to fit the read-write idiom well.  I understand that with this particular class, one cannot elevate a read lock to a write lock, so as per the Javadocs one must release the read lock before obtaining the write lock.  I've used this pattern successfully in non-reentrant contexts before.  What I'm finding however is that I cannot reliably acquire the write lock without blocking forever.  Since the read lock is reentrant and I am actually using it as such, the simple code  lock.getReadLock().unlock(); lock.getWriteLock().lock()  can block if I have acquired the readlock reentrantly.  Each call to unlock just reduces the hold count, and the lock is only actually released when the hold count hits zero.    EDIT to clarify this, as I don't think I explained it too well initially - I am aware that there is no built-in lock escalation in this class, and that I have to simply release the read lock and obtain the write lock.  My problem is/was that regardless of what other threads are doing, calling getReadLock().unlock() may not actually release this thread's hold on the lock if it acquired it reentrantly, in which case the call to getWriteLock().lock() will block forever as this thread still has a hold on the read lock and thus blocks itself.  For example, this code snippet will never reach the println statement, even when run singlethreaded with no other threads accessing the lock:  final ReadWriteLock lock = new ReentrantReadWriteLock(); lock.getReadLock().lock();  // In real code we would go call other methods that end up calling back and // thus locking again lock.getReadLock().lock();  // Now we do some stuff and realise we need to write so try to escalate the // lock as per the Javadocs and the above description lock.getReadLock().unlock(); // Does not actually release the lock lock.getWriteLock().lock();  // Blocks as some thread (this one!) holds read lock  System.out.println("Will never get here");   So I ask, is there a nice idiom to handle this situation?  Specifically, when a thread that holds a read lock (possibly reentrantly) discovers that it needs to do some writing, and thus wants to "suspend" its own read lock in order to pick up the write lock (blocking as required on other threads to release their holds on the read lock), and then "pick up" its hold on the read lock in the same state afterwards?  Since this ReadWriteLock implementation was specifically designed to be reentrant, surely there is some sensible way to elevate a read lock to a write lock when the locks may be acquired reentrantly?  This is the critical part that means the naive approach does not work. How did the house elves start serving wizards? How/Why/When did the house elves start serving wizards? I tried on my own to find the answer but I couldn't find anything relevant to my subject but I am bad at searching. Here's :        At the moment, the latest entry there is October 13, which would be mistaken to mean October last year (2012), but it actually is October 2010. This applies to all the filters in the activity tab. Is there any software or hardware which lets you stop, slow down, speed up or even reverse time? Obviously I'm talking about time in terms of the PC clock rather than real time.  We were testing an application we've developed at work by setting the clock forward and back to simulate different scenarios and I started thinking how useful it would be if you could adjust the rate(?) of the system clock with finer control. So you could make a minute pass in a second or a day pass in 30 seconds and watch how the program you're developing copes with changes in date and time.  Is there any such software available?   I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows of any software or hardware which can let you do some or all of the above.