About 1 year ago I tried to get approval for an options trading account so I could sell SCO short (ie make money when their stock drops). Unfortunately I didn't have sufficient liquid assets to get options trading approval from my trading company.
You may not have asked for the right thing.
There are no options written for SCOX, and there never have been. See here for yourself. Had there been PUT options available, you could have bought those to make money when SCO's stock price crashed. The good thing about options: if you simply buy calls and puts, your loss is limited to your original investment.
Selling short does not involve option trading. It is effectively borrowing stock from holders of SCO at your brokerage and selling it, with the hope that you will be able to buy it back at a lower price to close out the position. If the stock price skyrockets, your potential loss is limited only by how high the price rises. There's a phenomena known as a "short squeeze", where short sellers try to close out their position by buying the stock, which only pushes the price higher.
In order to sell short, you must have a margin account. Depending on the brokerage and the specific stock, margin requirements are different. At mine (Fidelity), the margin requirement for SCOX is 60%, which means you would have to put up $6,000 in cash or marginable equities to short $10,000 of SCOX stock. They also have a minimum account balance.
50% is the initial Federal requirement (at the time of the short sell). Fidelity normally allows the margin requirement to drop to 35% (after the initial short) before issuing a margin call -- which requires you to deposit more cash or close out the position. The 60% margin requirement for SCOX indicates a significantly higher risks.
Part of your problem may have been your lack of knowledge about the terminology and being able to accurately articulate what you wanted to do. The SEC requires brokerages to assess whether clients understand the risks of option trading. I don't know if they are required to do the same for margin trading.
I had the original Pentium 60Mhz, and Intel replaced mine without any question. It even paid the shipping fees. (I was wishing Intel would send me a faster chip too, but I guess I was asking too much.)
As I remember, Intel initially refused to replace all Pentiums with the bug. They required some sort of pre-qualification to "prove that you needed the replacement".
The Attorney General of some state (I think it was Florida) went after Intel, for refusing to remedy a product known to be defective without any pre-qualification. Shortly thereafter, Intel announced they would replace the processor for anyone that asked, and took a substantial reserve against their profit for that quarter to fund the effort.
Not much chance of HIGHER frequency devices inteferring with LOWER frequency ones since generation of SUBharmonics is very limited.
Unless the cellphone's IF stage generates harmonics that land in the middle of the aircraft band (which ranges from ~100 MHz to ~250 MHz, with at least two band allocations.
I sometimes wonder if the real problem is the UHF signal from the cell phone confuses the VHF radio in the airplane, because it wasn't designed to account for higher frequency signals within the confines of the airframe. Our aircraft radio technology dates back to the 50's, and some of the stuff in service is pretty old.
Don't towers use some form of arbitration to figure out passing off a call from one tower to another?
Yes, they do. But the system capacity depends on being able to reuse the same frequency in non-adjacent cells, and a cell phone above them blocks all cells. The problem gets worse when you cross a system boundary, where the two systems don't coordinate with each other beyond the boundary (if at all).
There are areas where people can be above the cell towers, without flying -- think tall buildings and mountains. But, the system design takes that into account, detecting the overlap and switching the phones to non-intefering channels. And, it's only done in places where it is needed.
He had his ssid changed, wasn't broadcasting it, had MAC filtering on, and had WEP enabled. In three days his neighbors had hacked it and were running his connection full throttle.
Personally, I'd have a talk with the neighbors and tell them the next time they did it, I would be calling the police.
I'm using them for a personal domain. The "browser compatability" issue relates to which browsers are supported. The percentage is simply an estimate of the number of people using the supported browser.
Put into perspective, the FreeSSL (30-day trial) and StarterSSL ($39/year) are supported by:
Internet Explorer 5.01+
Netscape 7
Mozilla 1.0+
QuickSSL (starting at $179) adds the following browsers:
AOL 5+
Opera 7+
Safari (all versions)
Finally, a BusinessID certificate (starts at $299) adds PocketPC 2003.
I considered the browsers that I wanted to support, and chose StarterSSL.
A very long time ago, I heard that SETI@Home was running low on work-units because their client was so popular that they were just burning through them.
I'm not sure which event that you remember, but there are two that were related to your point:
When the project first went live (or perhaps during the beta immediately preceding it?), they didn't have enough workunits to give a unique one to every client. For a while, they were giving out the same workunits over and over, to the point that some users actually noticed the duplicates (due to the identifying info displayed during processing). However, that issue was resolved.
Note that normal SETI@home procedure is to hand out the same workunit to at least two (and sometimes more) clients, so that the results can be compared for verification. Some overclockers have been inadvertantly sending back bad results because their floating point unit acts up. But, in the beginning, many clients analyzed each workunit.
As the client got more popular, the SETI@home client was burning up all the bandwidth on their shared connection to the 'Net. They were exceeding their quota consistently, and needed to do something to slow the rate of requests for workunits. By adding more processing by the clients for each workunit, the sustained bandwidth usage was reduced.
So you spend time remapping keyboard keys while your computer is being hammered by a couple hundred viruses and worms? That's a bit dangerous if you ask me.
I don't connect a computer to the 'Net, except from behind a firewall. When I got my first DSL service before you could buy a consumer-class router/firewall, I built my own.
Since Microsoft issues patches to patches without rescinding the broken patch, there are plenty of opportunities to make this change during one of the repeated reboots.
It's the first thing I do when installing Windows on new systems. If a client gives me a computer for use during a project (even a short one), I make the same change and put it back before I leave on the last day.
However, I'm considering dropping the caps-lock key altogether and making both into control keys. When I swap them, most people have a lot of trouble using my keyboard -- which is either a problem or a feature, depending on your point of view.
Baystar had better dump that common stock right away.
That's going to be difficult.
Baystar got about 740,000 shares of common stock. The agreement prohibits them from selling more than about 29,000 shares per day (10% of the average daily volume for the past 5 days, and average daily volume over the past 3 months has been 290,000 shares).
That's 25 days -- and sustained selling at that level will push the market price down.
I've never understoood the appeal of standing in front of a video poker terminal*, feeding in cash and pushing the little buttons, when I know that the odds are against me. But I have spent many unproductive hours with handheld poker games, and was inspired to come up with a system to lose less often.
Or, you could go to one of the many places on the 'Net that have already done so:
Ok, now THAT was a great joke. Mod parent up as funny!
Yes, it was. But, it wasn't original. It's a variation on one from Back to the Future:
"I'm sure in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by."
Re:Salon: News writen by Sophomores...
on
Safe and Insecure?
·
· Score: 1
in fact, they ENCOURAGE it.
It should be noted that while Speakeasy does encourage sharing of your connection (by facilitating sharing of the cost via Netshare), you are still contractually responsible for the use of that connection:
You didn't make a comment about '1984'. You posted a political diatribe against the Bush administration.
If you don't get that joke, read 1984 and then get back to me and see if you think I'm still a "Troll".
I've read '1984'. And I think the moderator was right, although I think a better choice would have been "Flamebait".
(For the record, I agree with you in principle. But, I find the repetitive political attacks as tiresome as the "beowulf cluster" and "in the Soviet Union" jokes)
Baystar must think the same. Otherwise, why call selling stock at a loss a 'financial opportunity'?
Consider this:
Baystar loses their entire investment in SCO, including their most recent purchase from RBC -- but not until SCO has spread as much FUD about Linux as possible.
Microsoft voluntarily settles with Burst.com for an astronomical sum and Baystar gets a significant return on that investment.
By settling with Burst.com, Microsoft pays off Baystar for funding SCO's litigation. By buying up more of SCO's preferred stock, Baystar just increased their equity in the "arrangement".
If Microsoft is guaranteeing a certain percentage of return on Baystar's investment in SCO, then Baystar just locked in a bigger profit.
Most beepers send back a received signal to acknowledge the receipt of a page.
No, they don't. Most inexpensive pagers are one-way. The two-way pagers are significantly more expensive, at least for the equipment. Local or regional service is cheaper for one-way pagers, but two-way pagers are less expensive for national coverage. The reason: a two-way pager "checks in" with the local system, so the page is only broadcast in one location, vs. throughout the entire US.
I have a Motorola Talkabout with Skytel service. I probably won't carry it much longer, as US-wide SMS service is finally becoming reliable enough that I can depend on it for messages.
Re:Too many features,
on
Camera Phone Tips
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It may be a niche market around DC but I bet non-camera phones sell like hotcakes around here.
It's not a niche market. Most of the technology and financial companies for which I do consulting and training have prohibitions against cameras on the premises. I read somewhere that Samsung employees cannot carry many of the phones that Samsung manufactures on company premises due to a similar policy.
If a government contractor is doing work that requires a secured area, carrying a camera phone into it can land you in jail.
I was thinking about this as well, and thought of two scenarios where a Microsoft anti-virus would be useful:
Recognize and block "social engineering" worms/virii, which doesn't necessarily exploit a vulnerability in the OS, but instead induces the novice user to do something like opening an attachment or downloading a file.
Block exploits of a vulnerability in the OS after the exploit is "in the wild", but before a patch is available. But, Microsoft would inevitably use it to guard against a vulnerability they don't want to fix, because too many (semi-)legitimate features depend on it.
(It's a link to the story about Microsoft including antivirus software in Windows XP Service Pack 2.)
Read the article again. There's a footnote at the bottom:
Corrects earlier version which incorrectly stated SP2 would include a built-in virus scanner. The offering actually includes a pop-up monitor that checks the settings of third-party anti-virus and firewall applications, and allows users to modify them if necessary.
Free money -- a prize, income that doesn't come from capital gains or a job -- gets taxed at a really high rate.
No, it gets taxed at the same rate as ordinary income. It may put you into a higher tax bracket (and a higher marginal rate), but it's no different than if you had collected the cash value as salary or as a short-term capital gain.
Being in the prize-winning business is basically self employment for the purposes of taxation, so you get dinged for all those taxes.
No, lottery winnings are considered to be gambling income and a W-2G is issued. The distributor of any prize must issue a 1099-MISC to the recipient. Both end up on line 21 of the Form 1040 as "Other Income", and is not subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes.
Disclaimer: IANACPA, but my girlfriend is. However, one can confirm all of the above by simply reading the on-line help included in TurboTax and creating a sample 1099-MISC and/or W-2G to see the effect.
For most people who make >$30K a year, the amount starts to approach 45%.
The payroll tax (for SS and Medicare) is 7.65% * 2 for the self-employed. In 2004, the marginal rate for single taxpayers with a taxable income over $29,050 is 25%, for a total of 40.3%. For taxable income over $70,350, the combined rate is 43.3%, and for taxable income over $146,750, the combined rate is 48.3%.
What Ronnie did wrong was increase spending greater than the increase in revenue (thus the increase in the debt).
No, what Ronnie did wrong was accept the promise of Congress to make unspecified cuts in spending at a later date. They didn't. Coupled with the subsequent increases in spending (for both military and domestic programs), the deficit exploded.
The interesting part is that the deficit finally became a politically viable issue. Perot's support showed that people were willing to vote for someone that was serious about reducing the deficit. Both major parties realized those voters represented a significant margin and got serious about controlling spending.
Combined with the bubble economy of the late 90's (which boosted tax revenues, temporarily), we actually came close to balancing the budget for a few years -- but actually never did so: the Social Security surplus made things look better than they really were. However, the subsequent burst in the bubble reduced tax revenues, followed by the fallout from 9/11, which caused both a reduction in revenues and an increase in spending that has exploded the deficit again.
Of course, Bush hasn't helped the situation by spending money like a liberal Democrat.
Slashdot Mirror
You may not have asked for the right thing.
There are no options written for SCOX, and there never have been. See here for yourself. Had there been PUT options available, you could have bought those to make money when SCO's stock price crashed. The good thing about options: if you simply buy calls and puts, your loss is limited to your original investment.
Selling short does not involve option trading. It is effectively borrowing stock from holders of SCO at your brokerage and selling it, with the hope that you will be able to buy it back at a lower price to close out the position. If the stock price skyrockets, your potential loss is limited only by how high the price rises. There's a phenomena known as a "short squeeze", where short sellers try to close out their position by buying the stock, which only pushes the price higher.
In order to sell short, you must have a margin account. Depending on the brokerage and the specific stock, margin requirements are different. At mine (Fidelity), the margin requirement for SCOX is 60%, which means you would have to put up $6,000 in cash or marginable equities to short $10,000 of SCOX stock. They also have a minimum account balance.
50% is the initial Federal requirement (at the time of the short sell). Fidelity normally allows the margin requirement to drop to 35% (after the initial short) before issuing a margin call -- which requires you to deposit more cash or close out the position. The 60% margin requirement for SCOX indicates a significantly higher risks.
Part of your problem may have been your lack of knowledge about the terminology and being able to accurately articulate what you wanted to do. The SEC requires brokerages to assess whether clients understand the risks of option trading. I don't know if they are required to do the same for margin trading.
As I remember, Intel initially refused to replace all Pentiums with the bug. They required some sort of pre-qualification to "prove that you needed the replacement".
The Attorney General of some state (I think it was Florida) went after Intel, for refusing to remedy a product known to be defective without any pre-qualification. Shortly thereafter, Intel announced they would replace the processor for anyone that asked, and took a substantial reserve against their profit for that quarter to fund the effort.
Unless the cellphone's IF stage generates harmonics that land in the middle of the aircraft band (which ranges from ~100 MHz to ~250 MHz, with at least two band allocations.
I sometimes wonder if the real problem is the UHF signal from the cell phone confuses the VHF radio in the airplane, because it wasn't designed to account for higher frequency signals within the confines of the airframe. Our aircraft radio technology dates back to the 50's, and some of the stuff in service is pretty old.
Yes, they do. But the system capacity depends on being able to reuse the same frequency in non-adjacent cells, and a cell phone above them blocks all cells. The problem gets worse when you cross a system boundary, where the two systems don't coordinate with each other beyond the boundary (if at all).
There are areas where people can be above the cell towers, without flying -- think tall buildings and mountains. But, the system design takes that into account, detecting the overlap and switching the phones to non-intefering channels. And, it's only done in places where it is needed.
Personally, I'd have a talk with the neighbors and tell them the next time they did it, I would be calling the police.
That rule was instituted after a number of W callsigns were issued to stations west of the Mississippi.
The stations already holding W callsigns were allowed to keep them. Dallas has at least two:
WFAA
WRR
https://products.freessl.com/ssl/starterssl.do?ref =freessl
I'm using them for a personal domain. The "browser compatability" issue relates to which browsers are supported. The percentage is simply an estimate of the number of people using the supported browser.
Put into perspective, the FreeSSL (30-day trial) and StarterSSL ($39/year) are supported by:
QuickSSL (starting at $179) adds the following browsers:
Finally, a BusinessID certificate (starts at $299) adds PocketPC 2003.
I considered the browsers that I wanted to support, and chose StarterSSL.
I'm not sure which event that you remember, but there are two that were related to your point:
Note that normal SETI@home procedure is to hand out the same workunit to at least two (and sometimes more) clients, so that the results can be compared for verification. Some overclockers have been inadvertantly sending back bad results because their floating point unit acts up. But, in the beginning, many clients analyzed each workunit.
The registry editor labels the value as type REG_BINARY, and the dialog box to enter edit it is labeled "Edit Binary Value".
If you want to argue about semantics, take it up with Microsoft.
I don't connect a computer to the 'Net, except from behind a firewall. When I got my first DSL service before you could buy a consumer-class router/firewall, I built my own.
Since Microsoft issues patches to patches without rescinding the broken patch, there are plenty of opportunities to make this change during one of the repeated reboots.
If you still want a caps-lock for some reason, you can swap them with this binary value:
It's the first thing I do when installing Windows on new systems. If a client gives me a computer for use during a project (even a short one), I make the same change and put it back before I leave on the last day.
However, I'm considering dropping the caps-lock key altogether and making both into control keys. When I swap them, most people have a lot of trouble using my keyboard -- which is either a problem or a feature, depending on your point of view.
It is. It just isn't turned on by default.
You can do it with a flag when starting CMD, or you can change the registry to make it permanent:
http://www.jsiinc.com/SUBF/Tip2500/rh2542.htm
Just set the flag to 0x09 to enable TAB as the completion character.
Doh! I read the wrong number from the press release. Baystart actually got 2,105,263 shares of common stock in the exchange.
That's 72 trading days (or 14 calendar weeks) to sell the entire amount, at the current average volume.
That's going to be difficult.
Baystar got about 740,000 shares of common stock. The agreement prohibits them from selling more than about 29,000 shares per day (10% of the average daily volume for the past 5 days, and average daily volume over the past 3 months has been 290,000 shares).
That's 25 days -- and sustained selling at that level will push the market price down.
Or, you could go to one of the many places on the 'Net that have already done so:
http://wizardofodds.com/games/videopoker/
Find the right game with the right payouts, and the long-term return exceeds 100%.
Yes, it was. But, it wasn't original. It's a variation on one from Back to the Future:
"I'm sure in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by."
It should be noted that while Speakeasy does encourage sharing of your connection (by facilitating sharing of the cost via Netshare), you are still contractually responsible for the use of that connection:
Am I responsible for the NetShare customer usage?
As a NetShare Admin, you are responsible for all traffic taking place on your circuit, whether generated by yourself or your NetShare Customers. This covers abuse, reasonable use, etc.
Speakeasy's TOS also addresses the issue:
Speakeasy believes that shared wireless networks are in keeping with our core values of disseminating knowledge, access to information and fostering community, provided this usage does not have an adverse impact on the services of other customers, does not involve any illegal activity and is not otherwise in violation of any aspect of our existing Terms Of Service. Please remember that the Speakeasy account-holder is responsible for all activity originating from their DSL line, even if it is the result of other users on a shared wireless connection.
You didn't make a comment about '1984'. You posted a political diatribe against the Bush administration.
If you don't get that joke, read 1984 and then get back to me and see if you think I'm still a "Troll".
I've read '1984'. And I think the moderator was right, although I think a better choice would have been "Flamebait".
(For the record, I agree with you in principle. But, I find the repetitive political attacks as tiresome as the "beowulf cluster" and "in the Soviet Union" jokes)
Consider this:
By settling with Burst.com, Microsoft pays off Baystar for funding SCO's litigation. By buying up more of SCO's preferred stock, Baystar just increased their equity in the "arrangement".
If Microsoft is guaranteeing a certain percentage of return on Baystar's investment in SCO, then Baystar just locked in a bigger profit.
No, they don't. Most inexpensive pagers are one-way. The two-way pagers are significantly more expensive, at least for the equipment. Local or regional service is cheaper for one-way pagers, but two-way pagers are less expensive for national coverage. The reason: a two-way pager "checks in" with the local system, so the page is only broadcast in one location, vs. throughout the entire US.
I have a Motorola Talkabout with Skytel service. I probably won't carry it much longer, as US-wide SMS service is finally becoming reliable enough that I can depend on it for messages.
It's not a niche market. Most of the technology and financial companies for which I do consulting and training have prohibitions against cameras on the premises. I read somewhere that Samsung employees cannot carry many of the phones that Samsung manufactures on company premises due to a similar policy.
If a government contractor is doing work that requires a secured area, carrying a camera phone into it can land you in jail.
Read the article again. There's a footnote at the bottom:
Corrects earlier version which incorrectly stated SP2 would include a built-in virus scanner. The offering actually includes a pop-up monitor that checks the settings of third-party anti-virus and firewall applications, and allows users to modify them if necessary.
No, it gets taxed at the same rate as ordinary income. It may put you into a higher tax bracket (and a higher marginal rate), but it's no different than if you had collected the cash value as salary or as a short-term capital gain.
Being in the prize-winning business is basically self employment for the purposes of taxation, so you get dinged for all those taxes.
No, lottery winnings are considered to be gambling income and a W-2G is issued. The distributor of any prize must issue a 1099-MISC to the recipient. Both end up on line 21 of the Form 1040 as "Other Income", and is not subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes.
Disclaimer: IANACPA, but my girlfriend is. However, one can confirm all of the above by simply reading the on-line help included in TurboTax and creating a sample 1099-MISC and/or W-2G to see the effect.
For most people who make >$30K a year, the amount starts to approach 45%.
The payroll tax (for SS and Medicare) is 7.65% * 2 for the self-employed. In 2004, the marginal rate for single taxpayers with a taxable income over $29,050 is 25%, for a total of 40.3%. For taxable income over $70,350, the combined rate is 43.3%, and for taxable income over $146,750, the combined rate is 48.3%.
No, what Ronnie did wrong was accept the promise of Congress to make unspecified cuts in spending at a later date. They didn't. Coupled with the subsequent increases in spending (for both military and domestic programs), the deficit exploded.
The interesting part is that the deficit finally became a politically viable issue. Perot's support showed that people were willing to vote for someone that was serious about reducing the deficit. Both major parties realized those voters represented a significant margin and got serious about controlling spending.
Combined with the bubble economy of the late 90's (which boosted tax revenues, temporarily), we actually came close to balancing the budget for a few years -- but actually never did so: the Social Security surplus made things look better than they really were. However, the subsequent burst in the bubble reduced tax revenues, followed by the fallout from 9/11, which caused both a reduction in revenues and an increase in spending that has exploded the deficit again.
Of course, Bush hasn't helped the situation by spending money like a liberal Democrat.