Your knee is jerking. It's making you look dumb. These people are not treating the market as a casino. They are not making short term investments. They are making market. If you don't understand what that means, you're not competent to comment.
Your paranoia is showing. They aren't making money at everyone else's expense. They are making money at *each other's* expense. Everyone else benefits because competition over the bid/ask spread between market makers means they get better prices for their sales and purchases, and pay less to the market makers. The MMs are basically cutting each other's throats to get a slice of an ever-smaller pie.
Oh it will happen. Just like Japan in the 80s. They had the opposite of a baby boom after WW2 because they were starving to death and dying of cancer, malnutrition, diarrhea, but the point is the relationship between the number of workers and the number of retirees. Their demographic spread curve anticipates ours by about 1 generation.
There are so many misconceptions packed into that brief post that I don't know where to begin.
"Stable" profit is chimerical, for one thing. The volatility of return on investment depends on many factors, and varies widely between business sectors. It depends on economic conditions, sometimes weather, sometimes disasters, sometimes inventions and skill of execution. Taking risk does not intrinsically increase growth rates, nor do growth rates inherently depend on risk. Moreover, it is not necessary to get "bigger and bigger" to increase stock share value. Additionally, "stable profit" does not mean "0 gain for shareholders" -- for example, shares which return stable dividends provide stable gains, and also when a company is stable, it becomes an attractive takeover target, which increases its value.
The stock market is essentially perfect communism: The people own the means of production. To the degree that this fails, it is corrupt. In practice, it fails because boards of directors are composed largely of evil and/or incompetent people, and shareholders are shockingly apathetic about this.
You are claiming that the bailout avoided a worse downturn. I am claiming that the bailout (1) was too late to do any good and (2) sells your children and grandchildren into slavery. When they let Lehman go bankrupt, the cat was out of the bag: Interbank lending stopped. That is what broke the world economy. Bailing out AIG did nothing to improve matters.
Only two things the government did were constructive: (1) They started buying commercial paper (which they should have done in 2007), and (2) they made markets for CDOs/CMOs (which they should have done in June of 2008).
If they had done those things earlier, there would have been no major bankruptcies, hence no credit lockup, and hence downturn.
In fact, the government created the whole crisis by "reforming" bankruptcy law in 2006, and deregulating mortgage and credit derivatives before that.
Apply grey superscript paragraph numbers, and use those to refer to the text, instead of page numbers. This resolves the problem of varying output devices which is the absolute show-stopper for incorporating pagination into html.
That 34 million is, of course, street value of the goods--after they've been "cut" with powdered sugar and strychnine, to a purity less than 10% of the original.
Knee-jerk reactionary. I hate Microsoft software because it stinks on ice. It is not productive. It is the opposite of productive. Counterproductive. I have wasted more time on closed microsoft software than I would ever have dreamed possible. You can't fix it when it is broken. It is always broken. There is no useful documentation for the most important features -- and this is by DESIGN. The software intentionally shoots you in the kneecaps, because it is part of the microsoft business plan to sell you a wheelchair. This is no more a religious issue than hating someone who rapes my child.
I can't imagine wasting money on a PC with less that 12GB these days. I use it to do SVDs on semantic networks, or edit video. If you aren't making use of your RAM, it just means you haven't run into an application that you regularly rely upon which benefits from large RAM. Lots of other people have.
Windows stopped being generally unstable in 2002. Then it resumed being generally unstable in 2003. I keep re-installing w2k pro + sp5 when I need something to run windows, because nothing since has matched its performance and stability.
There is no major OS that makes anything remotely like an appropriate use of persistent RAM. SSD is one application of persistent RAM, but it's a terrible one, which ignores most of the benefits of persistent RAM. I want to treat flash as heirarchical memory, not as disk. I want the OS to support me not with inconsequential filesystem optimizations, but by implementing cache-on-write with an asynchronous write-back queue for mapped flash memory. I want to map allocated regions of a terabyte flash array into my 64-bit address spaces. It's not as easy as it should be to do these things: You mostly have to roll your own, and integrating with VM basically requires deep kernel magic. The situation stinks on ice.
Bonuses should not be taken into account, because they are speculative -- marginally higher probability of a significantly smaller payoff than start-up stock options.
Take the amount of time lost, per internet discussion thread, and per Zune owner, and multiply by the number of threads and number of Zune owner's respectively, add the two values, and divide by the average human life expectancy.
This thread alone consumed 6000 hours of human life, and there are enough threads like to for a multiplier of 10x, which makes the internet discussion equal to roughly 0.14 murders. Compare this to the roughly 50,000 lives lost due to Vista, and you will see why the Zune incident is more comic than tragic.
Slashdot Mirror
Your knee is jerking. It's making you look dumb. These people are not treating the market as a casino. They are not making short term investments. They are making market. If you don't understand what that means, you're not competent to comment.
Your paranoia is showing. They aren't making money at everyone else's expense. They are making money at *each other's* expense. Everyone else benefits because competition over the bid/ask spread between market makers means they get better prices for their sales and purchases, and pay less to the market makers. The MMs are basically cutting each other's throats to get a slice of an ever-smaller pie.
Free as in freedom, not free as in beer. You pay to get to the head of the line. Anyone is free to do so.
Oh it will happen. Just like Japan in the 80s. They had the opposite of a baby boom after WW2 because they were starving to death and dying of cancer, malnutrition, diarrhea, but the point is the relationship between the number of workers and the number of retirees. Their demographic spread curve anticipates ours by about 1 generation.
I could wipe the floor with Goldman Sachs in algo trading, with nanosecond turnarounds.
There are so many misconceptions packed into that brief post that I don't know where to begin.
"Stable" profit is chimerical, for one thing. The volatility of return on investment depends on many factors, and varies widely between business sectors. It depends on economic conditions, sometimes weather, sometimes disasters, sometimes inventions and skill of execution. Taking risk does not intrinsically increase growth rates, nor do growth rates inherently depend on risk. Moreover, it is not necessary to get "bigger and bigger" to increase stock share value. Additionally, "stable profit" does not mean "0 gain for shareholders" -- for example, shares which return stable dividends provide stable gains, and also when a company is stable, it becomes an attractive takeover target, which increases its value.
The stock market is essentially perfect communism: The people own the means of production.
To the degree that this fails, it is corrupt. In practice, it fails because boards of directors are composed largely of evil and/or incompetent people, and shareholders are shockingly apathetic about this.
You are claiming that the bailout avoided a worse downturn. I am claiming that the bailout (1) was too late to do any good and (2) sells your children and grandchildren into slavery. When they let Lehman go bankrupt, the cat was out of the bag: Interbank lending stopped. That is what broke the world economy. Bailing out AIG did nothing to improve matters.
Only two things the government did were constructive: (1) They started buying commercial paper (which they should have done in 2007), and (2) they made markets for CDOs/CMOs (which they should have done in June of 2008).
If they had done those things earlier, there would have been no major bankruptcies, hence no credit lockup, and hence downturn.
In fact, the government created the whole crisis by "reforming" bankruptcy law in 2006, and deregulating mortgage and credit derivatives before that.
Why do you make this legal claim? Can you cite a law?
Apply grey superscript paragraph numbers, and use those to refer to the text, instead of page numbers. This resolves the problem of varying output devices which is the absolute show-stopper for incorporating pagination into html.
What have you got against poor people getting medical care?
That 34 million is, of course, street value of the goods--after they've been "cut" with powdered sugar and strychnine, to a purity less than 10% of the original.
So slashdot is now echoing anonymous rumors of blatant lies in its headlines. This is pretty shoddy work, ScuttleMonkey.
55 bucks for 12 minutes of long distance? Not unless you're using an Iridium sat phone! It's typical LEO bullcrap propaganda.
And don't get me started on "financing terrorism". It's the pot calling the snowman "darkie", is what that is.
Hairshirts don't help anyone.
That said, asking me to give up usability and productivity in order to make bill gates richer isn't going to get any traction.
Knee-jerk reactionary. I hate Microsoft software because it stinks on ice. It is not productive. It is the opposite of productive. Counterproductive. I have wasted more time on closed microsoft software than I would ever have dreamed possible. You can't fix it when it is broken. It is always broken. There is no useful documentation for the most important features -- and this is by DESIGN. The software intentionally shoots you in the kneecaps, because it is part of the microsoft business plan to sell you a wheelchair. This is no more a religious issue than hating someone who rapes my child.
Stalinism works better than autoconf.
Exotic dancers get bigger tips, and don't have to take shop classes with drooling delinquents.
What is the alternative to "financial math"? Loosing money? Try a "non-mathematical approach" to balancing your checkbook. Tell me how it works out.
Education is for the incompetent. The real players make money on the basis of competence, not credentials.
I can't imagine wasting money on a PC with less that 12GB these days. I use it to do SVDs on semantic networks, or edit video. If you aren't making use of your RAM, it just means you haven't run into an application that you regularly rely upon which benefits from large RAM. Lots of other people have.
Windows stopped being generally unstable in 2002. Then it resumed being generally unstable in 2003. I keep re-installing w2k pro + sp5 when I need something to run windows, because nothing since has matched its performance and stability.
The most judicious, experienced, diligent engineers are the ones with no kids at home and no retirement savings.
Same reason it doesn't reasonably support heirarchical persistent RAM: Everybody who wants to do it is too busy with other work.
There is no major OS that makes anything remotely like an appropriate use of persistent RAM. SSD is one application of persistent RAM, but it's a terrible one, which ignores most of the benefits of persistent RAM. I want to treat flash as heirarchical memory, not as disk. I want the OS to support me not with inconsequential filesystem optimizations, but by implementing cache-on-write with an asynchronous write-back queue for mapped flash memory. I want to map allocated regions of a terabyte flash array into my 64-bit address spaces. It's not as easy as it should be to do these things: You mostly have to roll your own, and integrating with VM basically requires deep kernel magic. The situation stinks on ice.
Bonuses should not be taken into account, because they are speculative -- marginally higher probability of a significantly smaller payoff than start-up stock options.
Take the amount of time lost, per internet discussion thread, and per Zune owner, and multiply by the number of threads and number of Zune owner's respectively, add the two values, and divide by the average human life expectancy.
This thread alone consumed 6000 hours of human life, and there are enough threads like to for a multiplier of 10x, which makes the internet discussion equal to roughly 0.14 murders. Compare this to the roughly 50,000 lives lost due to Vista, and you will see why the Zune incident is more comic than tragic.