Well if you do edit that article you will become a poster child for the weaknesses of Wikipedia, because you don't know what you are talking about. I see no evidence that you have read either link you provide, as neither of them supports your bizarre assertions and the Forbes article goes some way toward contradicting them. It says:
In naked short-selling, the trader sells the shares without properly borrowing the stock. When the stock isn't properly borrowed, the buyer at the other end of that short-sale doesn't get delivery of the shares within the mandated three-day window. The buyer also loses out on voting rights and tax-advantages until the short-seller closes out the position.
You see? The problem is that the buyer of the shorted stock can't vote the stock if the trade fails. That is because the stock doesn't exist, and it doesn't exist because nobody but the board of the company in question can create more stock. You can't create "fake" stock just by shorting it. That is why it is possible to sell more than a company's float via naked shorting.
I would go on to describe what a naked short is, but the Wikipedia article is perfectly accurate, in marked contrast to your own post. Suffice to say that the difference between a naked short and an ordinary short if the trade fails is that in the former case, it is the stock buyer that has a problem whereas in the latter it is the stock lender (in addition to the stock shorter, of course, who always has a problem.)
The most important aspect of this story is hidden in the following brief quotation:
Foreign companies, although faced with ownership restrictions, could also bid on the spectrum in partnership with a Canadian company.
It is the government's insistence on subsidizing their friends by blocking foreign competition that is the root cause of high cellular service prices in Canada. Foreign companies were allowed to bid last time around too, and some did. But once they realized that without a controlling position they would never be able to compete effectively against the entrenched locals, they sold their interests.
With effective competition limited to local interests, the likely outcome is that either the undercapitalized new entrants will be bought out by existing interests (at a handsome profit) for a return to the status quo, or they will join the oligopoly for return to the status quo but with a few more players. All that has happened is that the Liberal government has been replaced by a Conservative one; friends of the Liberals will now be joined by friends of the Conservatives in getting rich at Canadian's expense.
I've been following the south beach diet for a couple of months now, and I have already lost a significant amount of weight.
"I've been using Cold FX for a couple of months now, and I haven't had a single cold. I've been investing in winter wheat futures for a couple of months now, and I've made a fortune. I've been watching red-haired people for a couple of months now, and a lot of them seem to be left-handed." Anecdotes like these aren't worthless, but they aren't very conclusive either.
it's basically cutting out all highly processed foods from your diet and to stick to whole grains and whole unprocessed (ie not from a box) food.
Your main problem will be to find someone to dispute this advice. You just need to add lower taxes, increased services, and motherhood to your platform and you can run for congress.
It doesn't matter. Even if the guy is a lying thief, the situation is still 100% Best Buy's fault. If the problem almost never comes up, then they should automatically replace his hard drive as he asks - it's the cost of doing business. If there is a suspiciously high volume of these requests, then it is up to Best Buy to make it possible for a customer to verify that he's getting what he paid for.
It is worth mentioning, as others have done, that it is unlikely a fraudster would ask a for a replacement; a refund would be much more valuable. This seems likely to be a simple ripoff by Best Buy.
Shakespeare and Chaucer are good examples that prove the grandparents point, because they are in fact very hard to read. That is why modern editions of their works are heavily edited, and not simply slavish copies of the manuscripts.
great attitude to take towards solid progressive thinking that will help women out
What exactly is so solid and progressive about this thinking? By using "testimonials from attractive young career women", the author is trying to associate something that girls already value (physical attractiveness) with something they do not (math.) How can this strategy ever result in girls valuing math above the stereotypical feminine virtues? It is like sprinkling broccoli with sugar to make it more palatable; it might get your kid to eat it, but it won't get him to prefer it over ice cream.
Of course the physical gifts of a pro athlete don't make him genetically superior to an average person. If being able to run faster, jump higher, throw harder etc were genetically advantageous for humans, we would all be able to do those things better than we now can. That certainly includes pro athletes: a 120 pound chimp grandmother is far, far stronger than say a 320 pound NFL lineman.
Every "advantage" has a cost; if it isn't worth its cost, it is adversely selected. That is the essence of evolution.
Nitrogen has no effect on any of this, except as a gas to fill up the non-oxygen part of the mix, and, for divers a gas that will be absorbed under high pressures and released from tissues as pressures decrease.
Oops. You forgot a big one: nitrogen narcosis. Like oxygen, nitrogen has toxic effects at high partial pressures. Those divers you mentioned who use reduced oxygen concentrations also use helium as the inert filler.
There is obviously a correlation between acceleration and exercise - it is hyperbole to say that accelerometers have nothing to do with the number of calories you burn.
However, I agree that in the absence of contrary evidence, that correlation may be very weak in this study. According to the accelerometer, for instance, the kids who rode the bus home got more exercise than those who rode their bikes. Some of the colourful quotations in the news article contradict the summary of the research: if singer Chloe is really getting just as much exercise as runner Stephanie, then why has she no exercise adaptations? (She loses her breath and her legs hurt whenever she is imprudent enough to use them.)
My own experience as a child athlete was that my exercise program raised my daily caloric requirment over 5,000. I am skeptical that I was merely "moving around" exercise to which I was already genetically committed.
Yes - I am familiar with the physical principles and applications of accelerometers.
However, they are normally used in studies comparing similar activities. For example, one can be reasonably confident that in comparing two joggers of the same weight, a higher accelerometer output corresponds to a higher energy expenditure. The point is this: in comparing dissimilar activities, such as jogging and swimming say, one must devise an independent benchmark of energy expenditure, because a given accelerometer measurement can correspond to different power outputs. One can then weight accelerometer readings to compare two dissimilar athletes.
This can be difficult even given two well-defined activities such as running and swimming. It seems to be impossible in principle when the nature of the activities is unknown and unmeasured. But I have read only the BBC article, and not the original research; perhaps the authors devised an ingenious method that I have not thought of?
Actually, what the study found was that children who did sports had the same effect on an acceleromter as those who did not.
I am curious about how good a proxy acceleration is for total power dissipation. After all, you don't accelerate much on a bike (except when turning, which requires little power.) If you attached an accelerometer to Lance Armstrong working at threshold, it would register next to nil as he poured 500W into his cranks and dissipated another 1500W or so as heat.
What this sounds like is a bunch of legally clueless management types got mad
Legally clueless is understandable, but these managers seem to be managerially clueless as well. Many posters have prosed on about the importance of "not burning your bridges." That is good advice to employees but it applies just as well to companies.
What exactly are the potential benefits of this action to the employer? By threatening a lawsuit, rather than a pay raise and a promotion, they abandon all hope of retaining the employee. Some might argue that they will benefit by intimidating their remaining employees, but the contrary effect of alienation seems more likely. Certainly, the effect on potential new hires will be unfortunate.
I had the same reaction - according to the claimed facts, the employer sounds too stupid to be true. So it can't be true, can it?
But then I rememebered a case we had here a few years ago, in which the local branch of an international investment bank (which I won't name, protecting the guilty) sued a junior mining company for maliciously declaring a profit. What had happened was that the investment bank had overhedged a long convertible bond position by a huge naked short position in the stock - more than the float, apparently. When the company declared a profit and paid a dividend, the bank got killed. They claimed that the profit was declared maliciously, to punish them for their short position (which was depressing the share price.)
The thing is, their suit never had a chance of success. Apart from the difficulty of proving malice, it would not even have been sufficient, as the fiduciary duty of the company executives was to people who own the company, not to those who anti-own it. But if you have money and want to sue someone, you can always find a lawyer.
The US Dollar isn't based on anything other than trust now - fiat money. What makes second life, or any other currency, any different?
What are you talking about? Neither the article nor the post you replied to said anything about the value of the US dollar. The point is that if there were really a market for exchanging SSL and USD, as claimed, then there would be some price that represents the relative value of these two commodities that is "simply accepted", in your parlance. It doesn't matter what these values are "based on."
You cannot hit the bid in signficant quantities, but you can lift the ask in any volume you like - showing that this "market" is a scam.
... your statement of "grossest imaginable violation of the constitution's language" is hyperbole in the extreme, and, more to the point, absolute bollocks.
Great post! But I think you might have gone farther in illustrating the depth of Jewish scholarly tradition in analysing and debating scripture. Much of what Christians think of as "the bible" is drawn from this tradition; the bible is like an onion, containing commentary on the earliest parts, commentary on the commentary, etc. A fascinating and very readable survey of this tradition (in English) is James Kugel's The Bible As It Was.
A common thread in this sort of commentary is drawn from the perfection of God and his works; there can be nothing wrong or accidental in the bible, which therefore repays the most careful study. In extreme form this idea can lead people to look for coded messages, but generally it amounts to inference from close reading. An example from the very begining of the bible has to do with light and darkness. God created light and separated it from darkness on the first day of creation, but he didn't get around to creating the sun, moon and stars until the fourth day. So there must have been some other light involved. What was the nature of this light? Is it still around, or was it dispensed with after the fourth day? In this simple fragment there is food for endless thought and debate.
You can begin to see that fundamentalist Christians who claim to be reading the bible literally do no such thing - they are heavily editing the bible to pick and choose the "literal" bits that suit them. For example, a literal reading of Genesis states that the world has a roof - the vault of heaven that separates the waters above from the waters below. This view has gone out of fashion but it was commonplace in medieval Christendom. The medieval cathedral wasn't just a big church - it was a model of the cosmos, with the high roof of the building representing the high roof of the world, the lights fixed in the roof like the stars fixed in the world's roof. All this made perfect sense to the medieval mind. It explained why the sky is blue; where rain came from (leaky roof); and how God flooded the world when he decided to start over (really big leak.)
So along with the dinosaurs, this Creationist museum really ought to have a display showing an Apollo rocket bonking its nose cone on the roof of the world.
... the real issue being discussed is the problem of (on the internet) people berating, criticizing and/or demanding of government (officials) without offering any solutions or compromises.
Why is this a problem? Why does Mr. Taylor think that people saying stupid things on the internet is worse than people saying stupid things in pubs, say? Perhaps he means that people can demand the impossible, and elect someone who promises the impossible, but they can't have the impossible. Well and good, but arguably this is a fair description of his own party's campaign strategy; his remarks seem rather hypocritical. And in any case, there were demagogues long before there was an internet.
... in the real world, if you want to make those gripes, you have to write in to your local paper...
Convenient that you should mention that. Politicians who are outraged by citizen participation on the internet are following a long tradition of politicians who were outraged by citizens participating in politics by any means whatsoever - such as by newspaper, for example. The advent of the cheap broadsheet newspaper was thought in its time to be the harbinger of civilization's end by Britain's ruling class for reasons very similar to those you site. This attitude was reflected in newspaper taxes and censorship laws well into the 19th century.
According to Bloomberg, today's dated Brent spot was $57.95 and WTI spot was 58.76. On the other hand, The Dec 2008 Nymex light sweet crude future is at 68.20. So in fact, oil prices have to rise substantially for you to break even on your long futures position.
But let's say that you firmly believe that by Dec 2008 oil will be trading around $80. If you are right, does that mean you will make a big profit by going long the Dec 2008 future?
No. The reason is that futures contracts have daily settlement to mitigate default risk. It is not good enough for the price of oil to end up where you want it on Dec 2008; it must also not decline on the way there. If it goes down to say $40 on the way, you will have to close out your position at a loss or else face bankruptcy (assuming that your position is large enough to have significant gains in relation to your wealth.)
This is not just a theoretical risk: a famous example is Metalgesllschaft. In their case, they didn't have to guess what the future price of oil would be because they had already sold it! They wanted to lock in their profits by hedging in the futures market, but they miscalculated the forward/futures basis when applying their hedge. The result was that they were killed by margin calls - even though their overall position was above water.
Am I wrong to assume that CS education is much more maths based in the EU than in the USA?
Yes you are, because both the US and the EU are far more diverse than can be reconciled with your simple assumption. You can safely assume, for instance, that graduates of MIT or Caltech are taught quite a lot of math. On the other hand, the more prestigious French schools take a much more abstract and mathematical approach than their counterparts in the UK - or anywhere else, really.
For students who want to actually do research in computer science: They're in the wrong department. The best preparation for graduate work in computer science is an undergraduate degree in mathematics.
That is a false dichotomy. At my alma mater (the University of Waterloo), a degree in computer science is a degree in mathematics - Computer Science is a department of the faculty of Mathematics. All of the courses you list were required and more besides (depending on what material you think belongs under which heading.)
Slashdot Mirror
You see? The problem is that the buyer of the shorted stock can't vote the stock if the trade fails. That is because the stock doesn't exist, and it doesn't exist because nobody but the board of the company in question can create more stock. You can't create "fake" stock just by shorting it. That is why it is possible to sell more than a company's float via naked shorting.
I would go on to describe what a naked short is, but the Wikipedia article is perfectly accurate, in marked contrast to your own post. Suffice to say that the difference between a naked short and an ordinary short if the trade fails is that in the former case, it is the stock buyer that has a problem whereas in the latter it is the stock lender (in addition to the stock shorter, of course, who always has a problem.)
It is the government's insistence on subsidizing their friends by blocking foreign competition that is the root cause of high cellular service prices in Canada. Foreign companies were allowed to bid last time around too, and some did. But once they realized that without a controlling position they would never be able to compete effectively against the entrenched locals, they sold their interests.
With effective competition limited to local interests, the likely outcome is that either the undercapitalized new entrants will be bought out by existing interests (at a handsome profit) for a return to the status quo, or they will join the oligopoly for return to the status quo but with a few more players. All that has happened is that the Liberal government has been replaced by a Conservative one; friends of the Liberals will now be joined by friends of the Conservatives in getting rich at Canadian's expense.
I've been following the south beach diet for a couple of months now, and I have already lost a significant amount of weight.
"I've been using Cold FX for a couple of months now, and I haven't had a single cold. I've been investing in winter wheat futures for a couple of months now, and I've made a fortune. I've been watching red-haired people for a couple of months now, and a lot of them seem to be left-handed." Anecdotes like these aren't worthless, but they aren't very conclusive either.
it's basically cutting out all highly processed foods from your diet and to stick to whole grains and whole unprocessed (ie not from a box) food.
Your main problem will be to find someone to dispute this advice. You just need to add lower taxes, increased services, and motherhood to your platform and you can run for congress.
It doesn't matter. Even if the guy is a lying thief, the situation is still 100% Best Buy's fault. If the problem almost never comes up, then they should automatically replace his hard drive as he asks - it's the cost of doing business. If there is a suspiciously high volume of these requests, then it is up to Best Buy to make it possible for a customer to verify that he's getting what he paid for.
It is worth mentioning, as others have done, that it is unlikely a fraudster would ask a for a replacement; a refund would be much more valuable. This seems likely to be a simple ripoff by Best Buy.
Shakespeare and Chaucer are good examples that prove the grandparents point, because they are in fact very hard to read. That is why modern editions of their works are heavily edited, and not simply slavish copies of the manuscripts.
What exactly is so solid and progressive about this thinking? By using "testimonials from attractive young career women", the author is trying to associate something that girls already value (physical attractiveness) with something they do not (math.) How can this strategy ever result in girls valuing math above the stereotypical feminine virtues? It is like sprinkling broccoli with sugar to make it more palatable; it might get your kid to eat it, but it won't get him to prefer it over ice cream.
So would you consider teenagers drawing chalk pictures on the sidewalk a glamourous, high-profile crime, then?
Of course the physical gifts of a pro athlete don't make him genetically superior to an average person. If being able to run faster, jump higher, throw harder etc were genetically advantageous for humans, we would all be able to do those things better than we now can. That certainly includes pro athletes: a 120 pound chimp grandmother is far, far stronger than say a 320 pound NFL lineman.
Every "advantage" has a cost; if it isn't worth its cost, it is adversely selected. That is the essence of evolution.
Oops. You forgot a big one: nitrogen narcosis. Like oxygen, nitrogen has toxic effects at high partial pressures. Those divers you mentioned who use reduced oxygen concentrations also use helium as the inert filler.
There is obviously a correlation between acceleration and exercise - it is hyperbole to say that accelerometers have nothing to do with the number of calories you burn.
However, I agree that in the absence of contrary evidence, that correlation may be very weak in this study. According to the accelerometer, for instance, the kids who rode the bus home got more exercise than those who rode their bikes. Some of the colourful quotations in the news article contradict the summary of the research: if singer Chloe is really getting just as much exercise as runner Stephanie, then why has she no exercise adaptations? (She loses her breath and her legs hurt whenever she is imprudent enough to use them.)
My own experience as a child athlete was that my exercise program raised my daily caloric requirment over 5,000. I am skeptical that I was merely "moving around" exercise to which I was already genetically committed.
Yes - I am familiar with the physical principles and applications of accelerometers.
However, they are normally used in studies comparing similar activities. For example, one can be reasonably confident that in comparing two joggers of the same weight, a higher accelerometer output corresponds to a higher energy expenditure. The point is this: in comparing dissimilar activities, such as jogging and swimming say, one must devise an independent benchmark of energy expenditure, because a given accelerometer measurement can correspond to different power outputs. One can then weight accelerometer readings to compare two dissimilar athletes.
This can be difficult even given two well-defined activities such as running and swimming. It seems to be impossible in principle when the nature of the activities is unknown and unmeasured. But I have read only the BBC article, and not the original research; perhaps the authors devised an ingenious method that I have not thought of?
Actually, what the study found was that children who did sports had the same effect on an acceleromter as those who did not.
I am curious about how good a proxy acceleration is for total power dissipation. After all, you don't accelerate much on a bike (except when turning, which requires little power.) If you attached an accelerometer to Lance Armstrong working at threshold, it would register next to nil as he poured 500W into his cranks and dissipated another 1500W or so as heat.
What exactly are the potential benefits of this action to the employer? By threatening a lawsuit, rather than a pay raise and a promotion, they abandon all hope of retaining the employee. Some might argue that they will benefit by intimidating their remaining employees, but the contrary effect of alienation seems more likely. Certainly, the effect on potential new hires will be unfortunate.
I had the same reaction - according to the claimed facts, the employer sounds too stupid to be true. So it can't be true, can it?
But then I rememebered a case we had here a few years ago, in which the local branch of an international investment bank (which I won't name, protecting the guilty) sued a junior mining company for maliciously declaring a profit. What had happened was that the investment bank had overhedged a long convertible bond position by a huge naked short position in the stock - more than the float, apparently. When the company declared a profit and paid a dividend, the bank got killed. They claimed that the profit was declared maliciously, to punish them for their short position (which was depressing the share price.)
The thing is, their suit never had a chance of success. Apart from the difficulty of proving malice, it would not even have been sufficient, as the fiduciary duty of the company executives was to people who own the company, not to those who anti-own it. But if you have money and want to sue someone, you can always find a lawyer.
What are you talking about? Neither the article nor the post you replied to said anything about the value of the US dollar. The point is that if there were really a market for exchanging SSL and USD, as claimed, then there would be some price that represents the relative value of these two commodities that is "simply accepted", in your parlance. It doesn't matter what these values are "based on."
You cannot hit the bid in signficant quantities, but you can lift the ask in any volume you like - showing that this "market" is a scam.
No, you're just older. Soon you'll notice that there are more kids on your lawn, too.
In other words, 3GB of memory ought to be enough for anyone
So how is this implemented without storing the actual password, rather than the salted hash?
Pot, meet kettle.
Messed up that URL. Here it is again:
The Bible as it Was
Great post! But I think you might have gone farther in illustrating the depth of Jewish scholarly tradition in analysing and debating scripture. Much of what Christians think of as "the bible" is drawn from this tradition; the bible is like an onion, containing commentary on the earliest parts, commentary on the commentary, etc. A fascinating and very readable survey of this tradition (in English) is James Kugel's The Bible As It Was.
A common thread in this sort of commentary is drawn from the perfection of God and his works; there can be nothing wrong or accidental in the bible, which therefore repays the most careful study. In extreme form this idea can lead people to look for coded messages, but generally it amounts to inference from close reading. An example from the very begining of the bible has to do with light and darkness. God created light and separated it from darkness on the first day of creation, but he didn't get around to creating the sun, moon and stars until the fourth day. So there must have been some other light involved. What was the nature of this light? Is it still around, or was it dispensed with after the fourth day? In this simple fragment there is food for endless thought and debate.
You can begin to see that fundamentalist Christians who claim to be reading the bible literally do no such thing - they are heavily editing the bible to pick and choose the "literal" bits that suit them. For example, a literal reading of Genesis states that the world has a roof - the vault of heaven that separates the waters above from the waters below. This view has gone out of fashion but it was commonplace in medieval Christendom. The medieval cathedral wasn't just a big church - it was a model of the cosmos, with the high roof of the building representing the high roof of the world, the lights fixed in the roof like the stars fixed in the world's roof. All this made perfect sense to the medieval mind. It explained why the sky is blue; where rain came from (leaky roof); and how God flooded the world when he decided to start over (really big leak.)
So along with the dinosaurs, this Creationist museum really ought to have a display showing an Apollo rocket bonking its nose cone on the roof of the world.
Why is this a problem? Why does Mr. Taylor think that people saying stupid things on the internet is worse than people saying stupid things in pubs, say? Perhaps he means that people can demand the impossible, and elect someone who promises the impossible, but they can't have the impossible. Well and good, but arguably this is a fair description of his own party's campaign strategy; his remarks seem rather hypocritical. And in any case, there were demagogues long before there was an internet.
Convenient that you should mention that. Politicians who are outraged by citizen participation on the internet are following a long tradition of politicians who were outraged by citizens participating in politics by any means whatsoever - such as by newspaper, for example. The advent of the cheap broadsheet newspaper was thought in its time to be the harbinger of civilization's end by Britain's ruling class for reasons very similar to those you site. This attitude was reflected in newspaper taxes and censorship laws well into the 19th century.
According to Bloomberg, today's dated Brent spot was $57.95 and WTI spot was 58.76. On the other hand, The Dec 2008 Nymex light sweet crude future is at 68.20. So in fact, oil prices have to rise substantially for you to break even on your long futures position.
But let's say that you firmly believe that by Dec 2008 oil will be trading around $80. If you are right, does that mean you will make a big profit by going long the Dec 2008 future?
No. The reason is that futures contracts have daily settlement to mitigate default risk. It is not good enough for the price of oil to end up where you want it on Dec 2008; it must also not decline on the way there. If it goes down to say $40 on the way, you will have to close out your position at a loss or else face bankruptcy (assuming that your position is large enough to have significant gains in relation to your wealth.)
This is not just a theoretical risk: a famous example is Metalgesllschaft. In their case, they didn't have to guess what the future price of oil would be because they had already sold it! They wanted to lock in their profits by hedging in the futures market, but they miscalculated the forward/futures basis when applying their hedge. The result was that they were killed by margin calls - even though their overall position was above water.
Yes you are, because both the US and the EU are far more diverse than can be reconciled with your simple assumption. You can safely assume, for instance, that graduates of MIT or Caltech are taught quite a lot of math. On the other hand, the more prestigious French schools take a much more abstract and mathematical approach than their counterparts in the UK - or anywhere else, really.
That is a false dichotomy. At my alma mater (the University of Waterloo), a degree in computer science is a degree in mathematics - Computer Science is a department of the faculty of Mathematics. All of the courses you list were required and more besides (depending on what material you think belongs under which heading.)