Indeed, that's why I referred to those who do this sort of thing as arbitrageurs.
FWIW, there's another variety of arbitrage which is a little bit more gambling-based (middling), though with a positive profit expectation. In additon, most pro scalpers (and you basically have to be a pro to do this consistently... in the modern era, to scalp, you basically have to sit in front of a computer screen for several (10+) hours a day and invest enough cash into it at different books) do gamble on where a scalp opportunity will come up. For instance, a scalper might expect the Marlins to be +130 or so before the first pitch tonight and lock in the Cubs price right now; if the Marlins never get to +130, the scalper ends up gambling.
Scalpers aren't well-liked by most of the books, especially since they can be very indistinguishable from the beards used by the syndicates.
The exception to this is sports betting... there is a class of bettors (arbitrageurs) who make a small guaranteed profit on every game they bet on. This is "scalping", and hapens most often in betting on baseball (for a variety of reasons).
For instance, at this instant, Olympic Sportsbook offers the Cubs at -122 and the Marlins at +102 (meaning that a $122 bet on the Cubs would profit $100 and a $100 bet on the Marlins profits $102). If you could find a book that offered +122 for the Marlins, you then work out the bet amounts such that, whether the Cubs or Marlins win, the profit on the winning bet exceeds the loss on the losing bet.
In addition, since sports betting is almost entirely about skill in handicapping, a skilled bettor/handicapper can rape the book.
Re: my sig, I'm much better at picking NFL games than EPL games...
There's quite a few chains of them around New England, fwiw. Most of them are buying shopping mall theatres from the early 80's theatre-building boom that have been deemed inadequate by the likes of Viacom or Cinemark (ie they only have 6 or 8 screens).
There's been some speculation that, with DirecTV's smart card system, they could offer a plan where you pay $15 a month up front to cover the depreciation on the satellites and billing and so forth and then get the rest of the service a la carte.
Yes, but TiVo and no product placement is going to reduce the broadcast channels to only doing programming wherein neither of those is a problem. The prominent example is sports programming. How many TiVo owners will be willing to be several minutes behind every other viewer of the Pats/Jets game? Similar to sports are other event type shows (the Oscars come to mind) where a large audience that's going to watch live is assured.
It could eventually lead to political support or lobbying efforts that are disguised as the nightly news.
Puh-leeze. Why do we have this problem with opinionated journalism?
In the UK, you always know that the Telegraph is going to be a raging conservative take and that the Grauniad is going to be the left-wing take, with the Independent and Times being somewhere in between. Anybody who only reads one of those publications is an idiot and is getting a Pravda-ified view of the world. Yet, you consistently see British journalism (especially at the quality paper level) being deified.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a problem to have media sources pretending to be impartial and selling themselves as such, when such is impossible. Much as I despise Fox News for a variety of reasons (and I probably politically agree with their slant more often than not), I give them undying love and respect for the "Fair & Balanced" slogan; not because I believe it, but because I believe that by co-opting the slogan and showing how meaningless it is, that they are helping to get to a world wherein people see "impartiality" for what it is: partiality trying to hide itself.
The same is true of virtually any publication that does reviews. The publication might not be paid for the reviews, but they do get benefits from simply having the reviews (especially if it's something hotly anticipated).
Note the correlation between ad pages bought over the previous 12 months and the reviews the car mags give. I guarantee that a lot of the vitriol directed at BMW for making the 5-series look like a Pontiac Grand Prix (especially now that the Grand Prix has lost a lot of the idiotic cladding) is because BMW scaled back their print ad budget last year.
And before someone mentions Consumer Reports, they're even more subtly biased (specifically against Saturn). CR gets a lot of their profit from sale of haggling guides. Saturn has long trumpeted their no-haggle policies. If Saturn sells vehicles, other manufacturers might follow suit with similar sales approaches. If enough manufacturers go to no-haggle, there goes CR's haggling guides and the sales they represent.
How is that different from the type of advertising that the Wall Street Journal makes millions off of? It's advertising that's targeted to reach people who can act on the advertising and purchase the products. In the case of F-22's, there aren't many people around who are in a position to decide to purchase an F-22. A comparatively large number of people with a role in deciding whether or not to buy an F-22 listen to WTOP (and watch CNN and watch the Sunday morning shows).
Same for the WSJ. While a majority of the readers are not in any position to purchase the accounting services, enterprise IT products, and so forth that are advertised within its pages, a large number of those who do make such decisions read the WSJ.
Coupling's more of a knock-off of Friends, Sex & The City, and Seinfeld than anything else. In it's British incarnation, I'd say it's better than all three. I'm willing to give the American version some time before I write it off...
Of course knock-offs aren't a bad thing per se, anyway. When you get down to it, there's a very few archetypes that every other story is merely a retelling/combination of.
Right but with each broadcast contract the NFL signs, they increase the number of times that ads can be put in ("TV timeouts").
Of course, sports is about the only area on TV that's not going to be hurt by TiVo ad skipping because there's a benefit to watching it live as it's broadcast.
Massachusetts has the second highest per-capita income in the US @ $37,710 (only CT is higher, at $41k, and NJ is a few hundred bucks behind; NY rounds out the top 5), which does distort the taxes per income.
One thing to remember are that Massachusetts has, IMHO, the most intelligent tax code in the country (flat income tax and a limited sales tax at basically the same rate).
Another factor is that Massachusetts is the only wealthy state with a near-Californian devotion to direct democracy (and the fact that we can actually govern ourselves in turn says something, I think, about the relative intelligence of California and Massachusetts, but that's neither here nor there). The main effect of this, with regard to taxation has been the 2.5% law which limits the rate of growth in property taxes to 2.5% per annum while providing a means for that to be overridden if necessary (an annual referendum or town meeting is required to sustain an increase). Recent referenda to reduce the state income tax to 5% from 5.95% (successful) and abolish the state income tax (got 47% of the vote) have and continue to keep the General Court and the Governor of the Commonwealth on their toes.
In Boston, the VC market is back to what it was just before the late-90s insanity. I guess the Valley has been slower to get out of the funk than Boston has...
Just curious, but why would you use Texstar's packages? AFAIK, there's not a single package that Texstar provides that's not available in Mandrake contribs (which are essentially maintained as part of the distribution) or in PLF (which is largely maintained by the same contributors to the distribution from outside Mandrakesoft). If you just use main, contribs, and PLF, you're virtually guaranteed to be able to get bugs and conflicts fixed; as Texstar does not in any way participate in the development of MandrakeLinux, he is always going to be a few steps behind and there are various cases of conflict between his packages.
I don't see how this is possible given current CD player technology. If the CD player can read the stream of bits off the CD, and turn it seamlessly into music, then my computer (which is much more sophisticated than my CD player) should also be able to do so.
IINM, by "encrypted", they mean, with bogus error-checking code; CD-ROM drives tend to go apeshit when given bad error-checking code; CD players (except for certain car players, I suppose) generally don't. In essence, this is exploiting the sophistication of a CD-ROM drive.
Of course, a drive firmware hack could get around this...
One of the dominant industries in Oklahoma is telemarketing (because there's no shortage of poor blacks and white trash who will work minimum wage while taking the abuse from those they call). Oklahoma politicians don't want the industry shut down, as the last thing they need is more people out of work.
I use c. 80kbps ABR Ogg Vorbis (quality 1) and have no quibbles with it. I cannot tell the difference between 80kbps Ogg and 320 kbps MP3, given the music I listen to (a nice mix of metal, jazz, classical, film scores, classic rock, and techno).
Why not add a new DNS record type, the GUA record (for "GUess A"), which would return a speculative A record. ISPs that wanted to provide this service could then fallover to GUA records if A returns NXDOMAIN and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, that's why I referred to those who do this sort of thing as arbitrageurs.
FWIW, there's another variety of arbitrage which is a little bit more gambling-based (middling), though with a positive profit expectation. In additon, most pro scalpers (and you basically have to be a pro to do this consistently... in the modern era, to scalp, you basically have to sit in front of a computer screen for several (10+) hours a day and invest enough cash into it at different books) do gamble on where a scalp opportunity will come up. For instance, a scalper might expect the Marlins to be +130 or so before the first pitch tonight and lock in the Cubs price right now; if the Marlins never get to +130, the scalper ends up gambling.
Scalpers aren't well-liked by most of the books, especially since they can be very indistinguishable from the beards used by the syndicates.
The exception to this is sports betting... there is a class of bettors (arbitrageurs) who make a small guaranteed profit on every game they bet on. This is "scalping", and hapens most often in betting on baseball (for a variety of reasons).
For instance, at this instant, Olympic Sportsbook offers the Cubs at -122 and the Marlins at +102 (meaning that a $122 bet on the Cubs would profit $100 and a $100 bet on the Marlins profits $102). If you could find a book that offered +122 for the Marlins, you then work out the bet amounts such that, whether the Cubs or Marlins win, the profit on the winning bet exceeds the loss on the losing bet.
In addition, since sports betting is almost entirely about skill in handicapping, a skilled bettor/handicapper can rape the book.
Re: my sig, I'm much better at picking NFL games than EPL games...
Do you know how many Veeps a typical company has?
Between all the Executive Vice Presidents and Vice President in charge of...'s, there's probably an average of several per company...
Re: your .sig:
Are you planning to go to one of the cinematic showings of the Live in Rio DVD?
Have you been reading the thread?
The poster you're replying uses his own init system which doesn't link against glibc.
How many towns have movie theatres period?
There's quite a few chains of them around New England, fwiw. Most of them are buying shopping mall theatres from the early 80's theatre-building boom that have been deemed inadequate by the likes of Viacom or Cinemark (ie they only have 6 or 8 screens).
There's been some speculation that, with DirecTV's smart card system, they could offer a plan where you pay $15 a month up front to cover the depreciation on the satellites and billing and so forth and then get the rest of the service a la carte.
Yes, but TiVo and no product placement is going to reduce the broadcast channels to only doing programming wherein neither of those is a problem. The prominent example is sports programming. How many TiVo owners will be willing to be several minutes behind every other viewer of the Pats/Jets game? Similar to sports are other event type shows (the Oscars come to mind) where a large audience that's going to watch live is assured.
Puh-leeze. Why do we have this problem with opinionated journalism?
In the UK, you always know that the Telegraph is going to be a raging conservative take and that the Grauniad is going to be the left-wing take, with the Independent and Times being somewhere in between. Anybody who only reads one of those publications is an idiot and is getting a Pravda-ified view of the world. Yet, you consistently see British journalism (especially at the quality paper level) being deified.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a problem to have media sources pretending to be impartial and selling themselves as such, when such is impossible. Much as I despise Fox News for a variety of reasons (and I probably politically agree with their slant more often than not), I give them undying love and respect for the "Fair & Balanced" slogan; not because I believe it, but because I believe that by co-opting the slogan and showing how meaningless it is, that they are helping to get to a world wherein people see "impartiality" for what it is: partiality trying to hide itself.
The same is true of virtually any publication that does reviews. The publication might not be paid for the reviews, but they do get benefits from simply having the reviews (especially if it's something hotly anticipated).
Note the correlation between ad pages bought over the previous 12 months and the reviews the car mags give. I guarantee that a lot of the vitriol directed at BMW for making the 5-series look like a Pontiac Grand Prix (especially now that the Grand Prix has lost a lot of the idiotic cladding) is because BMW scaled back their print ad budget last year.
And before someone mentions Consumer Reports, they're even more subtly biased (specifically against Saturn). CR gets a lot of their profit from sale of haggling guides. Saturn has long trumpeted their no-haggle policies. If Saturn sells vehicles, other manufacturers might follow suit with similar sales approaches. If enough manufacturers go to no-haggle, there goes CR's haggling guides and the sales they represent.
How is that different from the type of advertising that the Wall Street Journal makes millions off of? It's advertising that's targeted to reach people who can act on the advertising and purchase the products. In the case of F-22's, there aren't many people around who are in a position to decide to purchase an F-22. A comparatively large number of people with a role in deciding whether or not to buy an F-22 listen to WTOP (and watch CNN and watch the Sunday morning shows).
Same for the WSJ. While a majority of the readers are not in any position to purchase the accounting services, enterprise IT products, and so forth that are advertised within its pages, a large number of those who do make such decisions read the WSJ.
Coupling's more of a knock-off of Friends, Sex & The City, and Seinfeld than anything else. In it's British incarnation, I'd say it's better than all three. I'm willing to give the American version some time before I write it off...
Of course knock-offs aren't a bad thing per se, anyway. When you get down to it, there's a very few archetypes that every other story is merely a retelling/combination of.
Right but with each broadcast contract the NFL signs, they increase the number of times that ads can be put in ("TV timeouts").
Of course, sports is about the only area on TV that's not going to be hurt by TiVo ad skipping because there's a benefit to watching it live as it's broadcast.
Massachusetts has the second highest per-capita income in the US @ $37,710 (only CT is higher, at $41k, and NJ is a few hundred bucks behind; NY rounds out the top 5), which does distort the taxes per income.
One thing to remember are that Massachusetts has, IMHO, the most intelligent tax code in the country (flat income tax and a limited sales tax at basically the same rate).
Another factor is that Massachusetts is the only wealthy state with a near-Californian devotion to direct democracy (and the fact that we can actually govern ourselves in turn says something, I think, about the relative intelligence of California and Massachusetts, but that's neither here nor there). The main effect of this, with regard to taxation has been the 2.5% law which limits the rate of growth in property taxes to 2.5% per annum while providing a means for that to be overridden if necessary (an annual referendum or town meeting is required to sustain an increase). Recent referenda to reduce the state income tax to 5% from 5.95% (successful) and abolish the state income tax (got 47% of the vote) have and continue to keep the General Court and the Governor of the Commonwealth on their toes.
That's because the old school Linux geeks/hippies switched to FreeBSD when too many newbies made it look less 1337.
What? You do realize that both Car & Driver and Road & Track, along with many other magazines are French-owned (Hachette-Filippachi)?
In Boston, the VC market is back to what it was just before the late-90s insanity. I guess the Valley has been slower to get out of the funk than Boston has...
Just curious, but why would you use Texstar's packages? AFAIK, there's not a single package that Texstar provides that's not available in Mandrake contribs (which are essentially maintained as part of the distribution) or in PLF (which is largely maintained by the same contributors to the distribution from outside Mandrakesoft). If you just use main, contribs, and PLF, you're virtually guaranteed to be able to get bugs and conflicts fixed; as Texstar does not in any way participate in the development of MandrakeLinux, he is always going to be a few steps behind and there are various cases of conflict between his packages.
IINM, by "encrypted", they mean, with bogus error-checking code; CD-ROM drives tend to go apeshit when given bad error-checking code; CD players (except for certain car players, I suppose) generally don't. In essence, this is exploiting the sophistication of a CD-ROM drive.
Of course, a drive firmware hack could get around this...
Bought and paid for...
Not necessarily.
One of the dominant industries in Oklahoma is telemarketing (because there's no shortage of poor blacks and white trash who will work minimum wage while taking the abuse from those they call). Oklahoma politicians don't want the industry shut down, as the last thing they need is more people out of work.
I use c. 80kbps ABR Ogg Vorbis (quality 1) and have no quibbles with it. I cannot tell the difference between 80kbps Ogg and 320 kbps MP3, given the music I listen to (a nice mix of metal, jazz, classical, film scores, classic rock, and techno).
Why not add a new DNS record type, the GUA record (for "GUess A"), which would return a speculative A record. ISPs that wanted to provide this service could then fallover to GUA records if A returns NXDOMAIN and so forth.
As has been noted, the RFC specifies that the A record is to be used if no MX is available.
I wonder how many port 25 connections Verisign is getting, thanks to all the spam armored domain names (e.g. slashdotNOSPAM.org)...