What happens when a company buys back all its stock?
A company can't do that. A share of stock entitles you to 1/n of the assets, and 1/n of all the future profits that company, where n is the number of shares outstanding. A company's 'market cap' is the total number of shares outstanding * the price per share. It typically stays constant when a company buys or sells shares to the public.
If a company starts buying the shares up, then n becomes smaller, and the value of the still-outstanding shares goes up. However, if the company is a 'going concern', i.e. has a potential for future profits, then the value of the shares outstanding will *always* be higher than the value of the cash the company has on hand with which it might buy those shares.
Or to put it more simply: IBM's current market cap is around $122B. If IBM bought every share but the last ten, each share would cost around $12 billion.
On the other hand, you *do* sometimes see a company 'go private', where a single investor buys the whole company in one fell swoop. Usually, that investor will make an offer substantially above the current market price (10-30% might be typical), and if the board and shareholders agree, all existing share become the property of that one investor, and the shareholders get cash.
Manufacturers- if you're going to put out a press release, just call it a #@$!ing press release- and stop insulting our intelligence.
Hmm. Slashdot picked it up and put it on the front page. I think you meant, "Manufacturers- if you're going to put out a press release, just call it a #@$!ing press release- and stop accurately assessing our intelligence."
Does that count companies like mine, that once bounced email back to me because I described a process as "sucking up all the CPU time", only to be told that 'suck' or 'sucking' is not allowed in our email?
With a fall in degree production looming, it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers without raising women's participation at the undergraduate level.
Well, they could raise men's participation at the undergraduate level.
Or black people's.
Or people whose last name begins with 'R'.
There are lots of ways to raise participation at the undergraduate level that don't involve identity politics.
"My favorite example of simple was the Viet Cong with their dung covered stakes vs the greatest power in the history of the world. We all know how that one turned out."
Yeah, they "won" the war, and today their children work in Nike factories for pennies per hour making shoes for Americans. Imagine how much it would have sucked for Vietnam if they'd lost the war.
It's been mentioned before that silent vehicles could be a safety issue because pedestrians / bicyclists might not hear them coming.
Ther's a solution that might well take care of it, and the reality of that possible solution will make the most ardent environmentalist happy to stop all research into alternative fuels forever:
In Germany, you pay approximately the same price for gasoline that we do in the USA. However, that transaction is *taxed* at a much higher rate.
Also, FWIW, standard gasoline in the USA is 87 octane. I was in Germany this past summer, and the lowest Octane I saw was 91 (though this was just while walking past a couple of gas stations -- I didn't have a car.) 91 Octane usually costs around $0.20 more per gallon here. (That's around 7 Eurocents per liter more.) So while the pump price is still different between USA and Germany, it's not *quite* as bad as it might seem.
How much it would cost to blanket a town in Wi-Fi? I honestly have no idea. However, I'm willing to bet that this would be something like handing out free fishing lures to anyone who asks for them. The vast majority of people who have fishing as a hobby have (obviously) *some* disposable income, and I'd be willing to guess that most of them have quite a bit. On the other hand, only a tiny fraction of the population would take advantage of free fishing lures.
"Technology that they would otherwise not have a prayer of seeing?" You mean Internet access?
Show me a 'poor' person / family who:
1) Has a computer 2) Is interested in Internet access 3) Can't afford $20 / month dial-up 4) Doesn't smoke 5) Doesn't drink 6) Doesn't use other recreational drugs 7) Doesn't have cable or satellite TV 8) Owns a car with the stock stereo system in it 9) Spends not more than I do on shoes (around $20 every 3 months) 10) Doesn't buy lottery tickets
And I'll grant that there are poor people who would benefit from this. However, I suspect that the vast majority of people who would use 'free' Wi-Fi are fully capable of paying for it, but are trying to get the rest of the city (Ironically enough, probably poorer than them!) to pay for it instead.
Keep in mind, that unless the city employees who administer the network do so for free, Linksys, Cisco, or whoever provides the hardware does so for free, and the upstream provider doesn't charge for bandwidth, this isn't "free" Wi-Fi, but instead subsidized, socialized Wi-Fi.
According to http://www.wifimaps.com/, there is only one wireless network within half a mile of my house, despite the fact that hundreds of people live in that area.
Why should the vast majority of the population subsidize the small percentage of people who are interested in this stuff? It's not like Internet connectivity is *that* expensive.
Besides, do you really want to get your Internet connectivity from your local government?
I propose that FARK, SomethingAwful, and all of the other places that do "Photoshop Contests" ask their users to put a big red THIS IS FAKE watermark across their entries. It's the only way to be sure.
Has it occured to you that maybe it's already happened? After all, oil prices rose to substantial new highs last year, about twice what they were only a few years ago. Welcome to the post-oil world, where oil costs twice what it did back in the long-long ago.
Not quite as dramatic as you thought it would be, is it?
Not only that, but the energy flux at a gas pump is huge. A gallon (3.8 liters) of gasoline contains about 120 MJ, so at 3 gallons per minute, that comes out to about six megawatts of power flowing into your car. That's the electricity usage of a small town.
...[T]he patriot act has a chilling effect on the freedom to read by state enquiry into reading...
Yawn. If you don't want the government to know what books you're reading, don't walk into government-owned buildings and borrow them from government employees.
Basically, specific impulse (Written Isp) answers the question:
If I ran this engine with the throttle set so that it was generating one pound of thrust, how long would one pound of fuel last?
It only works in the USA, because the metric system doesn't use the same units for force and mass. GO USA!
Interestingly, Isp is always equal to (exhaust velocity) / (force of gravity). So, if the SSME gets a specific impulse of 450 seconds, then the exhaust velocity is (450sec * 32 f/s^2), or around 14,400 feet per second. For the rest of the world, that's (450sec * 9.8 m/s^2), or around 4400 m/s.
Because of conservation of momentum, the faster you shoot stuff out the back, the less stuff you have to shoot out in order to generate the same thrust, so the Isp gets higher. However, the faster you want to shoot each kilogram you shoot out, the more energy per kilogram you need. The most energetic chemical reactions top out with enough energy to get themselves moving at around 5500 m/s, but that involves nasty stuff like Lithium or Flourine. You can also get really exotic by using things like monatomic Hydrogen, which when it combines with other H atoms gives off enough energy to result in a theoretical Isp of around 1600s (!). The problem of keeping individual Hydrogen atoms from combining until they reach the combustion chamber is left as an exercise for the reader.
I didn't realize it was a two-stage rocket. I should have R'd TFA more carefully.
While your passengers might be able to handle 5g+ for a couple of minutes, there would still be engineering problems. A single stage to orbit (SSTO) rocket runing LOX/Kerosene needs to be at least 12:1 fuel:(everything else). That means that at burnout, the acceleration will be as much as 13x what it was at launch, because the same engine is now pushing 1/13 as much weight. Most rocket engines are not very deeply throttleable; Minimum stable thrust is typically 50% or more of maximum thrust. Because of that, a single-engine rocket will be exerting easily 5x as much force on the passengers at burnout as it was at launch.
Of course, you can get around that by using multiple engines and shutting some of them off as you get lighter. However, that means you're hauling dead weight for part of the trip, never a good idea on an SSTO.
To get into orbit, you need at least 9000 m/s of deltaV, or about 15 g-minutes.
To do that in 160 seconds (2.67 minutes), you need an *average* acceleration of over 5.5g. You're also not going to get that at launch without a ridiculously overpowered engine that will crush your passengers at the end, when the ship has burned out all of its fuel and weighs a lot less. Most rocket engines aren't all that throttleable, with min thrust usually >.5 x max thrust.
For comparison, a Space Shuttle launch goes something like this:
(launch)~2g
(just before booster burnout)~3g
(just after booster burnout)less than 1g
(just before main engine burnout)~3g
The average acceleration is about 2g, meaning that the Shuttle takes around 8 minutes to go from ground to orbit.
Yes, that's medians and not averages, but the BLS doesn't give averages, and it's probably within a few percent of the same thing. That's $25 billion of the $127.5 billion in wholesaler purchase price going back to the engineers in those three fields.
...do it. Don't buy Monsanto seed, grow whatever you were growing last year.
What? You find the extra value associated with growing Monsanto-brand corn to outweigh the extra cost associated with buying it, making it a better deal for you? Fine. Monsanto must have made something pretty special there. In return for making that special thing, they get a temporary right to control how you and everyone else use it.
Don't want to have them controlling your crop? Fine. Wait until 20 years after the initial invention, and the patent will pass into the public domain. Then you can use it without fear of being sued.
Slashdot Mirror
A company can't do that. A share of stock entitles you to 1/n of the assets, and 1/n of all the future profits that company, where n is the number of shares outstanding. A company's 'market cap' is the total number of shares outstanding * the price per share. It typically stays constant when a company buys or sells shares to the public.
If a company starts buying the shares up, then n becomes smaller, and the value of the still-outstanding shares goes up. However, if the company is a 'going concern', i.e. has a potential for future profits, then the value of the shares outstanding will *always* be higher than the value of the cash the company has on hand with which it might buy those shares.
Or to put it more simply: IBM's current market cap is around $122B. If IBM bought every share but the last ten, each share would cost around $12 billion.
On the other hand, you *do* sometimes see a company 'go private', where a single investor buys the whole company in one fell swoop. Usually, that investor will make an offer substantially above the current market price (10-30% might be typical), and if the board and shareholders agree, all existing share become the property of that one investor, and the shareholders get cash.
Hmm. Slashdot picked it up and put it on the front page. I think you meant, "Manufacturers- if you're going to put out a press release, just call it a #@$!ing press release- and stop accurately assessing our intelligence."
...I hate it when large corporations refuse to get involved in politics.
Does that count companies like mine, that once bounced email back to me because I described a process as "sucking up all the CPU time", only to be told that 'suck' or 'sucking' is not allowed in our email?
Well, they could raise men's participation at the undergraduate level.
Or black people's.
Or people whose last name begins with 'R'.
There are lots of ways to raise participation at the undergraduate level that don't involve identity politics.
Or $1.05 as mentioned in the same movie.
Yeah, they "won" the war, and today their children work in Nike factories for pennies per hour making shoes for Americans. Imagine how much it would have sucked for Vietnam if they'd lost the war.
It's been mentioned before that silent vehicles could be a safety issue because pedestrians / bicyclists might not hear them coming.
Ther's a solution that might well take care of it, and the reality of that possible solution will make the most ardent environmentalist happy to stop all research into alternative fuels forever:
Ring tones for your car
Something to consider:
In Germany, you pay approximately the same price for gasoline that we do in the USA. However, that transaction is *taxed* at a much higher rate.
Also, FWIW, standard gasoline in the USA is 87 octane. I was in Germany this past summer, and the lowest Octane I saw was 91 (though this was just while walking past a couple of gas stations -- I didn't have a car.) 91 Octane usually costs around $0.20 more per gallon here. (That's around 7 Eurocents per liter more.) So while the pump price is still different between USA and Germany, it's not *quite* as bad as it might seem.
How much it would cost to blanket a town in Wi-Fi? I honestly have no idea. However, I'm willing to bet that this would be something like handing out free fishing lures to anyone who asks for them. The vast majority of people who have fishing as a hobby have (obviously) *some* disposable income, and I'd be willing to guess that most of them have quite a bit. On the other hand, only a tiny fraction of the population would take advantage of free fishing lures.
I wasn't describing *all* poor people -- I was describing the ones that this would benefit.
Poor people who spend their money on shoes, liquor, or whatever, *could* afford Wi-Fi, or for that matter regular dial-up, but choose not to.
As I said in another post, 'free' Wi-Fi would primarily benefit people who could easily afford it.
FWIW, in my younger days, I spent two years supporting myself by working at McDonald's, thankyouverymuch. I was able to afford cable TV at the time.
"Technology that they would otherwise not have a prayer of seeing?" You mean Internet access?
Show me a 'poor' person / family who:
1) Has a computer
2) Is interested in Internet access
3) Can't afford $20 / month dial-up
4) Doesn't smoke
5) Doesn't drink
6) Doesn't use other recreational drugs
7) Doesn't have cable or satellite TV
8) Owns a car with the stock stereo system in it
9) Spends not more than I do on shoes (around $20 every 3 months)
10) Doesn't buy lottery tickets
And I'll grant that there are poor people who would benefit from this. However, I suspect that the vast majority of people who would use 'free' Wi-Fi are fully capable of paying for it, but are trying to get the rest of the city (Ironically enough, probably poorer than them!) to pay for it instead.
Keep in mind, that unless the city employees who administer the network do so for free, Linksys, Cisco, or whoever provides the hardware does so for free, and the upstream provider doesn't charge for bandwidth, this isn't "free" Wi-Fi, but instead subsidized, socialized Wi-Fi.
According to http://www.wifimaps.com/, there is only one wireless network within half a mile of my house, despite the fact that hundreds of people live in that area.
Why should the vast majority of the population subsidize the small percentage of people who are interested in this stuff? It's not like Internet connectivity is *that* expensive.
Besides, do you really want to get your Internet connectivity from your local government?
The last two Super Bowls have featured HDTV movie trailers. Any chance this trailer will be in HD?
Is OC broadcast in HD?
This isn't the first time that lots of people have taken a humorous Photoshop and thought it was real.
I propose that FARK, SomethingAwful, and all of the other places that do "Photoshop Contests" ask their users to put a big red THIS IS FAKE watermark across their entries. It's the only way to be sure.
Has it occured to you that maybe it's already happened? After all, oil prices rose to substantial new highs last year, about twice what they were only a few years ago. Welcome to the post-oil world, where oil costs twice what it did back in the long-long ago.
Not quite as dramatic as you thought it would be, is it?
Not only that, but the energy flux at a gas pump is huge. A gallon (3.8 liters) of gasoline contains about 120 MJ, so at 3 gallons per minute, that comes out to about six megawatts of power flowing into your car. That's the electricity usage of a small town.
What, exactly, does this have to do with my rights online?
Yawn. If you don't want the government to know what books you're reading, don't walk into government-owned buildings and borrow them from government employees.
Basically, specific impulse (Written Isp) answers the question:
If I ran this engine with the throttle set so that it was generating one pound of thrust, how long would one pound of fuel last?
It only works in the USA, because the metric system doesn't use the same units for force and mass. GO USA!
Interestingly, Isp is always equal to (exhaust velocity) / (force of gravity). So, if the SSME gets a specific impulse of 450 seconds, then the exhaust velocity is (450sec * 32 f/s^2), or around 14,400 feet per second. For the rest of the world, that's (450sec * 9.8 m/s^2), or around 4400 m/s.
Because of conservation of momentum, the faster you shoot stuff out the back, the less stuff you have to shoot out in order to generate the same thrust, so the Isp gets higher. However, the faster you want to shoot each kilogram you shoot out, the more energy per kilogram you need. The most energetic chemical reactions top out with enough energy to get themselves moving at around 5500 m/s, but that involves nasty stuff like Lithium or Flourine. You can also get really exotic by using things like monatomic Hydrogen, which when it combines with other H atoms gives off enough energy to result in a theoretical Isp of around 1600s (!). The problem of keeping individual Hydrogen atoms from combining until they reach the combustion chamber is left as an exercise for the reader.
Original poster here...
I didn't realize it was a two-stage rocket. I should have R'd TFA more carefully.
While your passengers might be able to handle 5g+ for a couple of minutes, there would still be engineering problems. A single stage to orbit (SSTO) rocket runing LOX/Kerosene needs to be at least 12:1 fuel:(everything else). That means that at burnout, the acceleration will be as much as 13x what it was at launch, because the same engine is now pushing 1/13 as much weight. Most rocket engines are not very deeply throttleable; Minimum stable thrust is typically 50% or more of maximum thrust. Because of that, a single-engine rocket will be exerting easily 5x as much force on the passengers at burnout as it was at launch.
Of course, you can get around that by using multiple engines and shutting some of them off as you get lighter. However, that means you're hauling dead weight for part of the trip, never a good idea on an SSTO.
Anyway, I stand corrected on my initial point.
To do that in 160 seconds (2.67 minutes), you need an *average* acceleration of over 5.5g. You're also not going to get that at launch without a ridiculously overpowered engine that will crush your passengers at the end, when the ship has burned out all of its fuel and weighs a lot less. Most rocket engines aren't all that throttleable, with min thrust usually >.5 x max thrust.
For comparison, a Space Shuttle launch goes something like this:
(launch)~2g
(just before booster burnout)~3g
(just after booster burnout)less than 1g
(just before main engine burnout)~3g
The average acceleration is about 2g, meaning that the Shuttle takes around 8 minutes to go from ground to orbit.
5.5g? Average? I doubt it.
Without a credit report, how do they know whether or not a buyer is solvent?
150,000 electrical engineers earning a median of $71k / year for a total of around $10 billion.
130,000 "electronics engineers, except computer" earning a median of $73k / year for another $9.5 billion or so.
70,000 computer hardware engineers earning a median of $79k / year for a total of $5.5 billion.
Yes, that's medians and not averages, but the BLS doesn't give averages, and it's probably within a few percent of the same thing. That's $25 billion of the $127.5 billion in wholesaler purchase price going back to the engineers in those three fields.
...do it. Don't buy Monsanto seed, grow whatever you were growing last year.
What? You find the extra value associated with growing Monsanto-brand corn to outweigh the extra cost associated with buying it, making it a better deal for you? Fine. Monsanto must have made something pretty special there. In return for making that special thing, they get a temporary right to control how you and everyone else use it.
Don't want to have them controlling your crop? Fine. Wait until 20 years after the initial invention, and the patent will pass into the public domain. Then you can use it without fear of being sued.