Energy futures trading is like selling an insurance policy. It's really no more risky than investing in say, Allstate or Geiko. Both involve trading instruments in future risk.
I agree you shouldn't invest in something you don't understand. But I don't think there's an inherent flaw in investing in a company involved in futures trading.
This is one of the few times it is relevant. Godwin's law only applies if you call the opposing part "nazis" anyway, not any mention of WWII for fuck's sake.
I don't agree with that oft taught CS line of reasoning, not when programming in high level languages, or in lower level ones with lots of
Programs aren't some little snippet with a fixed and enumerated input and output anymore, written in a low level or semi-low level language like C. Saying that every program falls into the same category as grep is silly!
Sure, it's important to understand algorithmic complexity. All programmers should understand it. But it's not like they taught you in college. There are going to be thousands of little routines with subtle interactions and different implementations. Most of them you didn't even write.
So yeah, focus on language. The language is often doing a lot of the work for you now. If you use PHP with associative arrays, it doesn't matter how whiz-bang a coder you are if PHP used N^2 algorithms (I'm sure it doesn't) for resolving an associative array index to a value.
Floors on food prices are real, as are subsidies to farmers.
Yeah, I thought of that when I was posting it, but it's fundamentally not what the original post was talking about. If anything, price floors cause more people to go hungry, than the crazy socialist fantasy the original post implied.
Dude, that's a circular argument if I ever saw one. Let me condense it.
It's not circular. One cost is sunk and the other is variable. If they sell more copies they can more easily amortize the sunk cost and actually, you know, make real long term profit.
Sure, but to take your analogy further, the food laws only regulate the quality and labelling of the food.
It would be like them passing a law that says electricity has to be within 99.99% of 60hz over a 5 minute period with total harmonics less than 30Db etc. It would also be analogous to them saying that 100 amp service can't be marketed as 200 amp service.
Those kind of laws, while probably unnecessary, would be fine. But that isn't what's being suggested here.
What makes you think it's a shared resource? Electricity is created and destroyed like any other commodity, it is not a shared resource by any stretch. The only unique property it has is that it can't be easily stored, in every other way it is just a normal commodity.
If the supply of electricity is insufficient to meet demand, the price should rise to the point where people start to care.
Ironically liberal anti-capitalist price control policies on energy companies prevent this from happening.
So you want everyone to care? Let the market in electricity be a real free market.
Re:Couldn't be worse than some that I've had...
on
The Robot Professor
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· Score: 1
Nice.:P
Re:Couldn't be worse than some that I've had...
on
The Robot Professor
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· Score: 1
What the fuck is the point of that?
Why sit in a class and listen to a recording while staring at some Chuck E Cheese prop when you could sit at home and read the material 10 times faster?
Are we so hung up on this obselete and ancient system of "lecture" that we would stoop to such levels?
Get it through your head everyone! Sitting in a lecture is the antithesis of learning! College is a highly inefficient way to learn as a result of this.
It's not gimping the browser, it's making it do what it's supposed to do. If I type in a bad hostname, it should tell me, not try to guess what I might have meant.
Is that like "if you have nothing to hide, you won't object to surveillance"? Seriously, poor government!
Absolutely.
The government is supposed to be "surveilled" by the public. It is our responsibility to watch the government as closely as we can. It's not hypocritical to object to cameras on street corners but to lobby for cameras in police cars. They work for us, not the other way around.
The fact is that MS released a program to generate web pages only their browser could read, after they already had a large marketshare that it would benefit them to protect.
It would be much more trivial to fix Frontpage than to hack up IE to render FP spew. MS making their products only work with other products that they make, and making no effort for it to work with anyone else is their normal MO.
It wasn't embrace and extend as much as dominate and leverage. They leveraged their IE marketshare to break competitors. ActiveX and VBScripting on the web was a similar ploy. MS wanted a web that would only work with MS products, by any means necessary.
Microsoft deliberately created many of those terrible pages, specifically to break their competition.
Don't you remember Frontpage spew with missing things like... BODY tags, DOCTYPES, and other very imporant parts! How can you render a document if you don't even know what the type of the document is intended to be?
And how exactly would I take control of that X app running as root from an unprivledged window?
Linux has a few SUID applications, some in X even. If anyone can exploit them for privledge escalation it's considered a bug, and fixed in less than a day.
No one says "well, just don't run those and you'll be ok" like you Windows weenies are saying.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens when such an electric field intersects a conductor?
Energy futures trading is like selling an insurance policy. It's really no more risky than investing in say, Allstate or Geiko. Both involve trading instruments in future risk.
I agree you shouldn't invest in something you don't understand. But I don't think there's an inherent flaw in investing in a company involved in futures trading.
Irrelevant??
This is one of the few times it is relevant. Godwin's law only applies if you call the opposing part "nazis" anyway, not any mention of WWII for fuck's sake.
Which SQL Server? There are literally hundreds of servers that do SQL.. I just don't get it.
Many different vendors make DBMS services that speak SQL.... What product is this talking about?
or in lower level ones with lots of
Doh, "lots of libraries".
I don't agree with that oft taught CS line of reasoning, not when programming in high level languages, or in lower level ones with lots of
Programs aren't some little snippet with a fixed and enumerated input and output anymore, written in a low level or semi-low level language like C. Saying that every program falls into the same category as grep is silly!
Sure, it's important to understand algorithmic complexity. All programmers should understand it. But it's not like they taught you in college. There are going to be thousands of little routines with subtle interactions and different implementations. Most of them you didn't even write.
So yeah, focus on language. The language is often doing a lot of the work for you now. If you use PHP with associative arrays, it doesn't matter how whiz-bang a coder you are if PHP used N^2 algorithms (I'm sure it doesn't) for resolving an associative array index to a value.
Floors on food prices are real, as are subsidies to farmers.
Yeah, I thought of that when I was posting it, but it's fundamentally not what the original post was talking about. If anything, price floors cause more people to go hungry, than the crazy socialist fantasy the original post implied.
Dude, that's a circular argument if I ever saw one. Let me condense it.
It's not circular. One cost is sunk and the other is variable. If they sell more copies they can more easily amortize the sunk cost and actually, you know, make real long term profit.
Sure, but to take your analogy further, the food laws only regulate the quality and labelling of the food.
It would be like them passing a law that says electricity has to be within 99.99% of 60hz over a 5 minute period with total harmonics less than 30Db etc. It would also be analogous to them saying that 100 amp service can't be marketed as 200 amp service.
Those kind of laws, while probably unnecessary, would be fine. But that isn't what's being suggested here.
What makes you think it's a shared resource? Electricity is created and destroyed like any other commodity, it is not a shared resource by any stretch. The only unique property it has is that it can't be easily stored, in every other way it is just a normal commodity.
You miss the point of capitalism.
If the supply of electricity is insufficient to meet demand, the price should rise to the point where people start to care.
Ironically liberal anti-capitalist price control policies on energy companies prevent this from happening.
So you want everyone to care? Let the market in electricity be a real free market.
Nice. :P
What the fuck is the point of that?
Why sit in a class and listen to a recording while staring at some Chuck E Cheese prop when you could sit at home and read the material 10 times faster?
Are we so hung up on this obselete and ancient system of "lecture" that we would stoop to such levels?
Get it through your head everyone! Sitting in a lecture is the antithesis of learning! College is a highly inefficient way to learn as a result of this.
It's not gimping the browser, it's making it do what it's supposed to do. If I type in a bad hostname, it should tell me, not try to guess what I might have meant.
Is that like "if you have nothing to hide, you won't object to surveillance"? Seriously, poor government!
Absolutely.
The government is supposed to be "surveilled" by the public. It is our responsibility to watch the government as closely as we can. It's not hypocritical to object to cameras on street corners but to lobby for cameras in police cars. They work for us, not the other way around.
What does a browser that a fraction of 1% of the population uses have to do with anything? Mozilla was obselete the day Firefox 1.0 came out.
The only reason it's still around is because of an extremely tiny and vocal minority that can't deal with change.
It's not all that silly.
If some crazy looking bird like you'd never seen before swooped down on you, you'd probably freak out and be at an evolutionary disadvantage.
So yeah, as long as looking "cool" means looking unique and surprising.
If I type a hostname into an FTP client I think it should assume ftp protocol.
If I type hostname into a web browser, the web runs on http, so of course it should assume http.
What damning evidence do you have
The fact is that MS released a program to generate web pages only their browser could read, after they already had a large marketshare that it would benefit them to protect.
It would be much more trivial to fix Frontpage than to hack up IE to render FP spew. MS making their products only work with other products that they make, and making no effort for it to work with anyone else is their normal MO.
It wasn't embrace and extend as much as dominate and leverage. They leveraged their IE marketshare to break competitors. ActiveX and VBScripting on the web was a similar ploy. MS wanted a web that would only work with MS products, by any means necessary.
Well they all work for this "Open" company.
It's just like that "Ars" company that ran that Digita site and that Technica site.
Microsoft deliberately created many of those terrible pages, specifically to break their competition.
Don't you remember Frontpage spew with missing things like... BODY tags, DOCTYPES, and other very imporant parts! How can you render a document if you don't even know what the type of the document is intended to be?
What do you possibly gain by having a separate search box? I just don't get it.
Indeed, you don't.
If I have a host named "porn" on my network, and I type "porn" into the address bar, I better damn well get the host I want and not some search.
We have a host named "pegasus" and I can't tell you how many times I've been to the pegasus mail web site and didn't want to be.
I invoke Malda's law.
And how exactly would I take control of that X app running as root from an unprivledged window?
Linux has a few SUID applications, some in X even. If anyone can exploit them for privledge escalation it's considered a bug, and fixed in less than a day.
No one says "well, just don't run those and you'll be ok" like you Windows weenies are saying.