I think you are trying to say that there should be no moral opprobrium incurred by just "doing your job." That is obviously not strictly true, but disregard that for the moment, and consider that this argument is double-edged: it is the job of each individual American to make money for himself. If there is nothing wrong with Mr. Gates advocating immigration to further his interests, then there is nothing wrong with a citizen opposing it in his own interest.
My personal view is that immigrants who can find jobs are good for America and Americans, but that is because I subscribe to orthodox economic theory. In the same way, I believe that trade always benefits both parties; it is not a win-lose proposition. There are simply no real economists who think otherwise (the sensational headlines you may have seen refer to debates over the degree of benefit.)
However, the average citizen does not subscribe to these views and has every right to vote accordingly. The challenge is to change public opinion; for this purpose, "he was just doing his job" is inadequate.
"The best defense is a good offense" is just a trite saying - it's not handed down from God or anything, you know. Of course there are many cases where aggression is the winning policy, but history also contains many contrary examples. Defense can be the best offense at the tactical, operational, or strategic level - wars have been won without winning a single battle.
On the other hand, professional military people are inherently biased toward offense, not merely because of their training, but because they tend to be aggressive people by nature (self-selection.) Sometimes this has caused them to serve there countries poorly. Two examples will suffice:
1) Convoy Britain learned by bitter experience during the 16th through 18th centuries that the surest way to reduce shipping loses due to enemy action was convoy. Convoy was effective even when there were no escorts! Yet by the advent of the first world war, this knowledge was somehow forgotten or neglected. Individual captains with fast ships did not want to participate in slow convoys which they believed would make them more vulnerable. The navy approved of this view because they preferred to spend their resources actively, in a futile scouring of the endless seas, rather than passively, in protecting what was really important. Merchantmen were allowed their freedom, and the result was nearly disasterous: the U-boat campaign of the first world war came much closer to starving Britain than did that of the second. The situation was only retrieved by implementing convoy.
2) Battlecruisers A famous example of "offense is the best defense" gone wrong. The idea of a battlecruiser was a ship with the armament of a battleship but the speed of a cruiser, maximizing the tactical qualities of movement and firepower. As this was achieved by reducing armour, the resulting ship was cheaper as well! It was a very popular idea with the naval theorists. But the battleship was a system, in which guns and armour functioned together. As Jutland demonstrated incontrovertibly, a battlecruiser could not survive in an environment with battleships, but it was not as useful for screening fleets as the several smaller cruisers it replaced.
Re:I hope the author of the book is more careful..
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
Many of the reviewer's comments seem to impute causality to certain structures of the brain, but it's often an open question whether the deviant structures are cause or effect or side-effect. The question is open because these are simply correlations...
From an epistemological point of view, the only way we know anything other than what we can directly sense is by "simple correlations", as David Hume noticed long ago. How do I know that the bread I eat today will nourish me and not poison me? Only because that is what happened yesterday and the day before, for as long as I have lived.
In the case of the brain, we know, for example, that Broca's area must have something important to do specifically with speech because damage to that area (say by a stroke) will cause a characteristic type of aphasia, but leave intact most other functions including cognition and motor control of the mouth and tongue. Note that a stroke is not the only way of acquiring brain damage. To say that it is all "simple correlation" leaves us with the choice of backward causality (loss of speech causes brain damage), which is a bizarre assertion, or some unidentified factor that causes all possible forms of damage specifically to Broca's area and independently causes aphasia - equally bizarre.
You've missed the point. The OP is saying that the book is overstating the scientific case, which would be good to know, if it's true. The reviewer you quote is claiming to disprove the possibility of scientific knowledge of the brain, using only philosophy and without recourse to any facts. That's not very interesting at all, except to people who already believe what he says and like to have their prejudices reinforced.
Re:When will these scientists learn
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
The mind is more than the brain.
Yes, but why? "These scientists" will learn when you can answer that question - and so will you.
Re:Man who mistook his wife for a hat
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Sounds similar to "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"
No, it's not. The "Hat" book is an ad hoc collection of interesting cases (but you're right: it is a good read!) The book under review is supposed to be a coherent potted summary of the current state of knowledge illustrated by cases.
When an engineer designs and builds a new bridge it is entirely possible that no bridge like it has ever been designed or built before. Sure, there are some base cases that just get churned out, but there are also big, new, creative designs that occur for bridges.
This is very misleading: a lie of the second kind. You are implying that most software systems should be highly reliable because most bridges are highly reliable. But bridges, as a category, only seem so reliable because almost all bridges we encounter are clones of time-tested designs. When someone actually builds a big, new, creative bridge is almost always over-time and over-budget, and often develops structural or material flaws that were not predicted.
So, we're supposed to get angry at all anti-piracy groups now because this one planted evidence?
What's your point? By "we", I suppose you mean that segment of Slashdot users, possibly a minority, that are opposed to the legal enforcement of copyright. Well, those people are already angry at anti-piracy groups. One reason is that they believe that anti-piracy groups are big evil corporations, devoid of ethics, who screw everyone they can while wrapping themselves in a banner of rightous indignation. So now that they've found an actual, real-life example of heinous anti-piracy behaviour, they're supposed to say "Oh well, I guess we were wrong"? Why, exactly?
If GPL authors can go after GPL violaters, copyright owners can go after infringers.
Again, what's your point? If GPL authors can't illegally entrap GPL violators, copyright owners can do whatever the hell they want?
B)You have forgotten that houses cost money to own
The difference between your purchase price and selling price is not pure profit. Aside from transaction costs, you must account for property taxes, maintenance and improvement, and the cost of money (mortgage or opportunity investment cost.)
C) Leverage is a two-edged sword
Most people take out a mortgage when they buy a house; a levered investment. As long as there is significant inflation, your are almost guaranteed to result in a nominal profit because nominal prices will rise even when real prices are falling. Leverage amplifies this nominal profit. However, nominal mortgage rates are currently low for a reason: inflation is also low. This means that inflation isn't eating away the real value of your debt the way it used to, and a real price decline can result in a levered nominal price decline.
Once you account for inflation, carrying costs, and leverage, housing practically never beats equity as an investment. That is not to say you should not buy a house. On the contrary, I own a house myself, and for very good reasons. The most important of these is non-financial: it improves my quality of life. But there are also financial reasons: I have a systemic requirement for housing and owning protects me from vagaries in the rental market. Owning my house is also an inflation hedge. However, it is not a financial investment.
... most users use their regular password plus a number, adding exactly nothing to the security.
I can one-up this. When I expressed my view that forced password changes were detrimental to security because they encouraged weak passwords, my MIS representive said "No problem! Just put a digit at the end of a strong password and increment it each time!"
What a clearly expressed and beautifully written post! The only thing I have to add is that the question about performance in this case betrays a fundamental confusion in the mind of the questioner. Lurking behind the question is the idea that the "compact" form is somehow cheating, taking advantage of a language loophole; missing is the realization that the two forms are formally identical, having not merely the same effect but also the same semantics. That is why I consider the "ptr == NULL" to be inferior style, and in fact the use of NULL in C generally to be undesirable. The fact is that zero means the null pointer and boolean false identically, by definition. You may not like this, but if you are going to program in C you must accept the fact.
That is why I always laugh when I see a construction like (expression!=0), made "for clarity." The point is to stamp boolean semantics onto the integer expression... but wait! The given expression evaluates to TRUE only because it is nonzero. So to make it even more clear, it should be ((expression != 0) != 0) etc.
One thing I've noticed though: creative, amusing or artful ads don't work on me.
That's what you think.
Honestly, how do we know we aren't being influenced?
Now you are on the right track. However, there is no spooky, subliminal hypnosis involved. It's just that we are far more susceptible to advertising than we think. Companies advertise for only one reason: it works. New products have uncertain demand, but in established industries it is fairly easy to predict how sales will respond to advertising. Yet nobody thinks they are influenced by ads. Likewise, it is easy to prove that physically attractive political candidates have a material advantage over uglier ones, but while we may be willing to to believe that other voters could be so superficial, we all know that we ourselves are wiser... don't we?
Mr Jeanneney's solution is a classical French top-down, command-economy approach.
The fragment you left out of your quotation seems to support your position better than what you included (my translation):
It is by advancing public monies that we can guarantee citizens and researchers - providing the necessary support as taxpayers rather than consumers - protection from the perverse effects of for-profit research hiding behind an appearance of disinterest.
Having said that, I think you are missing the point. By advocating a government role in society, M. Jeanneney is merely representing the opinion of the majority of French citizens, who expect their government to be the most prominent instrument of cultural expression. It is not necessary for government projects to "have an impact" on Continental culture when these very projects are an integral part of that culture.
[...] Branding of that scale is usually only best for companies that have an established foot print in the market place, and that have a customerbase who is already aware of their products.
Once you think about that for a bit, it is pretty obvious how foolish it was of the dotcoms to advertise during the Superbowl. [...]
You have seen the trees but not the forest. During the bubble, Nortel ran endless branding ads. Why? Individual consumers did not buy their products. No, but they did buy their stock.
Once you consider that the true product of snakeoil.com is not snake oil, but SnakeOil stock, the picture snaps into focus. Advertising during the superbowl may have been unethical, it may have been bad timing, and it may have been unlucky, but it was not necessarily foolish.
That would be why up to zero people have suggested that it is a first amendment issue. Except you, of course. Nice troll though.
Re:More technical introduction to Quant analysis?
on
My Life as a Quant
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The book recommended by the parent is an excellent practical discussion about exchange-traded options. It is not, however, "a good technical introduction to the techniques used for quantative analysis on Wall Street", being neither technical nor about derivative securities in general.
The standard recommendation is Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives by John Hull, and this is in fact a very good book and simultaneously a good introduction to many OTC derivatives. I like Paul Wilmott's book On Quantitative Finance. (This book comes in several versions, some longer and some shorter.)
The books mentioned above stress PDE-based analysis. If you would prefer an approach based on martingale theory, try Financial Calculus by Baxter and Rennie. An Introduction to the Mathematics of Financial Derivatives by Neftci is a more elementary version; think of it as "Stochastic Calculus for Dummies." Neither of these two books contains much information about traded contracts.
Daly was arguably the greatest marine of all time and the man behind the famous quote.
I have no argument with that, provided you mean the greatest US marine. The greatest marine of all time was the guy who licked the Carthaginians at Ecnomus.
The quote is famous but not original. I don't know when this exhortation was first made; no doubt the Romans were saying this in their day and for all I know the ancient Sumerians were too.
However, I do know how Frederick Hohenzollern ("The Great") addressed his men after the breakdown of his attack at Kolin: "You rogues! Would you live forever?" According to tradition, the reply called out from the ranks was "we thought for thirteen pennies a day we had done enough."
Sorry, but you've assumed the thing you're trying to prove.
You aren't sorry at all - you are wrong.
You've assumed that $600 of that is salaries.
Yes. To assume a figure for salaries is a logical necessity of the exercise. The example I gave has two parts, A) without options: assume $600 in salaries, and B) with options, assume $300 in salaries. The exact numbers aren't important; the point would remain if I had said A) $600 and B) $599.
Or are you trying to say that option grants have no influence whatsoever on salaries? That you would not accept $1 less in salary in exchange for options? In that case, why would a company ever grant you an option?
Simply using math doesn't allow you to commit fallacies.
My point exactly. The fallacy being that expensing options somehow "double-counts" them.
You are confused. Grants (or discounts) of stock are already treated as expenses (for the employer) and income (for the employee.) The news is that stock option grants (or discounts) must now be treated in the same sensible manner.
Say that salaries account for $600 of th $900 expenses, and that a 3-year call struck at $25 is worth $5. Now suppose that half of the salaries are paid in options. That works out to options on 60 shares.
Original earings per share: 100/100 = 1
Now, if we don't count the options as an expense, and merely dilute the shares, we reduce expenses to 600, and therefore increase earnings to 400:
Earnings per share without dilution: 400/100 = 4 Diluted (but still bogus) earnings per share: 400/160 = 2.5
However, if we counted the options as an expense, earnings would be unchanged, and thus earnings per share would remain at their true value, which is $1. The reason that simple dilution fails is that effectively dilutes earnings for only one year, whereas the true effect of share issuance is to dilute earnings in perpetuity.
A prison term is the only way to truly deter someone from spamming.
So execution wouldn't work then;-)
Prison on the other hand would make [Joe Trailerpark] really stop and think...
Why should it, if nothing else has? Joe's whole problem is that he has no frontal lobes - he does not clearly anticipate the consequences of his actions. That's why he's living in a trailer park.
... some people will do it anyway, just like some people sell drugs
Yes, well "some people" are all that is required. The whole country is knee-deep in drugs, even though only some people sell them.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time you double your speed, wind resistance quadruples. It goes with the square of the velocity.
Exactly. It is power that varies as the cube of velocity. That is because force (wind resistance) varies as the square.
It's his job to make money for Microsoft.
I think you are trying to say that there should be no moral opprobrium incurred by just "doing your job." That is obviously not strictly true, but disregard that for the moment, and consider that this argument is double-edged: it is the job of each individual American to make money for himself. If there is nothing wrong with Mr. Gates advocating immigration to further his interests, then there is nothing wrong with a citizen opposing it in his own interest.
My personal view is that immigrants who can find jobs are good for America and Americans, but that is because I subscribe to orthodox economic theory. In the same way, I believe that trade always benefits both parties; it is not a win-lose proposition. There are simply no real economists who think otherwise (the sensational headlines you may have seen refer to debates over the degree of benefit.)
However, the average citizen does not subscribe to these views and has every right to vote accordingly. The challenge is to change public opinion; for this purpose, "he was just doing his job" is inadequate.
"The best defense is a good offense" is just a trite saying - it's not handed down from God or anything, you know. Of course there are many cases where aggression is the winning policy, but history also contains many contrary examples. Defense can be the best offense at the tactical, operational, or strategic level - wars have been won without winning a single battle.
On the other hand, professional military people are inherently biased toward offense, not merely because of their training, but because they tend to be aggressive people by nature (self-selection.) Sometimes this has caused them to serve there countries poorly. Two examples will suffice:
1) Convoy
Britain learned by bitter experience during the 16th through 18th centuries that the surest way to reduce shipping loses due to enemy action was convoy. Convoy was effective even when there were no escorts! Yet by the advent of the first world war, this knowledge was somehow forgotten or neglected. Individual captains with fast ships did not want to participate in slow convoys which they believed would make them more vulnerable. The navy approved of this view because they preferred to spend their resources actively, in a futile scouring of the endless seas, rather than passively, in protecting what was really important. Merchantmen were allowed their freedom, and the result was nearly disasterous: the U-boat campaign of the first world war came much closer to starving Britain than did that of the second. The situation was only retrieved by implementing convoy.
2) Battlecruisers
A famous example of "offense is the best defense" gone wrong. The idea of a battlecruiser was a ship with the armament of a battleship but the speed of a cruiser, maximizing the tactical qualities of movement and firepower. As this was achieved by reducing armour, the resulting ship was cheaper as well! It was a very popular idea with the naval theorists. But the battleship was a system, in which guns and armour functioned together. As Jutland demonstrated incontrovertibly, a battlecruiser could not survive in an environment with battleships, but it was not as useful for screening fleets as the several smaller cruisers it replaced.
Many of the reviewer's comments seem to impute causality to certain structures of the brain, but it's often an open question whether the deviant structures are cause or effect or side-effect. The question is open because these are simply correlations...
From an epistemological point of view, the only way we know anything other than what we can directly sense is by "simple correlations", as David Hume noticed long ago. How do I know that the bread I eat today will nourish me and not poison me? Only because that is what happened yesterday and the day before, for as long as I have lived.
In the case of the brain, we know, for example, that Broca's area must have something important to do specifically with speech because damage to that area (say by a stroke) will cause a characteristic type of aphasia, but leave intact most other functions including cognition and motor control of the mouth and tongue. Note that a stroke is not the only way of acquiring brain damage. To say that it is all "simple correlation" leaves us with the choice of backward causality (loss of speech causes brain damage), which is a bizarre assertion, or some unidentified factor that causes all possible forms of damage specifically to Broca's area and independently causes aphasia - equally bizarre.
You've missed the point. The OP is saying that the book is overstating the scientific case, which would be good to know, if it's true. The reviewer you quote is claiming to disprove the possibility of scientific knowledge of the brain, using only philosophy and without recourse to any facts. That's not very interesting at all, except to people who already believe what he says and like to have their prejudices reinforced.
The mind is more than the brain.
Yes, but why? "These scientists" will learn when you can answer that question - and so will you.
Sounds similar to "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"
No, it's not. The "Hat" book is an ad hoc collection of interesting cases (but you're right: it is a good read!) The book under review is supposed to be a coherent potted summary of the current state of knowledge illustrated by cases.
When an engineer designs and builds a new bridge it is entirely possible that no bridge like it has ever been designed or built before. Sure, there are some base cases that just get churned out, but there are also big, new, creative designs that occur for bridges.
This is very misleading: a lie of the second kind. You are implying that most software systems should be highly reliable because most bridges are highly reliable. But bridges, as a category, only seem so reliable because almost all bridges we encounter are clones of time-tested designs. When someone actually builds a big, new, creative bridge is almost always over-time and over-budget, and often develops structural or material flaws that were not predicted.
So, we're supposed to get angry at all anti-piracy groups now because this one planted evidence?
What's your point? By "we", I suppose you mean that segment of Slashdot users, possibly a minority, that are opposed to the legal enforcement of copyright. Well, those people are already angry at anti-piracy groups. One reason is that they believe that anti-piracy groups are big evil corporations, devoid of ethics, who screw everyone they can while wrapping themselves in a banner of rightous indignation. So now that they've found an actual, real-life example of heinous anti-piracy behaviour, they're supposed to say "Oh well, I guess we were wrong"? Why, exactly?
If GPL authors can go after GPL violaters, copyright owners can go after infringers.
Again, what's your point? If GPL authors can't illegally entrap GPL violators, copyright owners can do whatever the hell they want?
I moved to Silicon Valley in 1983 ... Save for a minor dip in the 90's housing prices have never fallen in 22 years.
i ng_markets_and_rising_interest_rates.pdf is an interesting analysis of US house prices made last year. Let me draw your attention to the graph of real house prices since 1970.
A) You have forgotten to deflate nominal prices to real prices
The era you observed began with a period of high inflation. Here http://www.phn.com/pdfs/featured_articles/us_hous
B)You have forgotten that houses cost money to own
The difference between your purchase price and selling price is not pure profit. Aside from transaction costs, you must account for property taxes, maintenance and improvement, and the cost of money (mortgage or opportunity investment cost.)
C) Leverage is a two-edged sword
Most people take out a mortgage when they buy a house; a levered investment. As long as there is significant inflation, your are almost guaranteed to result in a nominal profit because nominal prices will rise even when real prices are falling. Leverage amplifies this nominal profit. However, nominal mortgage rates are currently low for a reason: inflation is also low. This means that inflation isn't eating away the real value of your debt the way it used to, and a real price decline can result in a levered nominal price decline.
Once you account for inflation, carrying costs, and leverage, housing practically never beats equity as an investment. That is not to say you should not buy a house. On the contrary, I own a house myself, and for very good reasons. The most important of these is non-financial: it improves my quality of life. But there are also financial reasons: I have a systemic requirement for housing and owning protects me from vagaries in the rental market. Owning my house is also an inflation hedge. However, it is not a financial investment.
... most users use their regular password plus a number, adding exactly nothing to the security.
I can one-up this. When I expressed my view that forced password changes were detrimental to security because they encouraged weak passwords, my MIS representive said "No problem! Just put a digit at the end of a strong password and increment it each time!"
What a clearly expressed and beautifully written post! The only thing I have to add is that the question about performance in this case betrays a fundamental confusion in the mind of the questioner. Lurking behind the question is the idea that the "compact" form is somehow cheating, taking advantage of a language loophole; missing is the realization that the two forms are formally identical, having not merely the same effect but also the same semantics. That is why I consider the "ptr == NULL" to be inferior style, and in fact the use of NULL in C generally to be undesirable. The fact is that zero means the null pointer and boolean false identically, by definition. You may not like this, but if you are going to program in C you must accept the fact.
... but wait! The given expression evaluates to TRUE only because it is nonzero. So to make it even more clear, it should be ((expression != 0) != 0) etc.
That is why I always laugh when I see a construction like (expression!=0), made "for clarity." The point is to stamp boolean semantics onto the integer expression
One thing I've noticed though: creative, amusing or artful ads don't work on me.
... don't we?
That's what you think.
Honestly, how do we know we aren't being influenced?
Now you are on the right track. However, there is no spooky, subliminal hypnosis involved. It's just that we are far more susceptible to advertising than we think. Companies advertise for only one reason: it works. New products have uncertain demand, but in established industries it is fairly easy to predict how sales will respond to advertising. Yet nobody thinks they are influenced by ads. Likewise, it is easy to prove that physically attractive political candidates have a material advantage over uglier ones, but while we may be willing to to believe that other voters could be so superficial, we all know that we ourselves are wiser
Mr Jeanneney's solution is a classical French top-down, command-economy approach.
The fragment you left out of your quotation seems to support your position better than what you included (my translation):
It is by advancing public monies that we can guarantee citizens and researchers - providing the necessary support as taxpayers rather than consumers - protection from the perverse effects of for-profit research hiding behind an appearance of disinterest.
Having said that, I think you are missing the point. By advocating a government role in society, M. Jeanneney is merely representing the opinion of the majority of French citizens, who expect their government to be the most prominent instrument of cultural expression. It is not necessary for government projects to "have an impact" on Continental culture when these very projects are an integral part of that culture.
No, just a baseball umpire.
Once you consider that the true product of snakeoil.com is not snake oil, but SnakeOil stock, the picture snaps into focus. Advertising during the superbowl may have been unethical, it may have been bad timing, and it may have been unlucky, but it was not necessarily foolish.
That would be why up to zero people have suggested that it is a first amendment issue. Except you, of course. Nice troll though.
The book recommended by the parent is an excellent practical discussion about exchange-traded options. It is not, however, "a good technical introduction to the techniques used for quantative analysis on Wall Street", being neither technical nor about derivative securities in general.
The standard recommendation is Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives by John Hull, and this is in fact a very good book and simultaneously a good introduction to many OTC derivatives. I like Paul Wilmott's book On Quantitative Finance. (This book comes in several versions, some longer and some shorter.)
The books mentioned above stress PDE-based analysis. If you would prefer an approach based on martingale theory, try Financial Calculus by Baxter and Rennie. An Introduction to the Mathematics of Financial Derivatives by Neftci is a more elementary version; think of it as "Stochastic Calculus for Dummies." Neither of these two books contains much information about traded contracts.
Daly was arguably the greatest marine of all time and the man behind the famous quote.
I have no argument with that, provided you mean the greatest US marine. The greatest marine of all time was the guy who licked the Carthaginians at Ecnomus.
The quote is famous but not original. I don't know when this exhortation was first made; no doubt the Romans were saying this in their day and for all I know the ancient Sumerians were too.
However, I do know how Frederick Hohenzollern ("The Great") addressed his men after the breakdown of his attack at Kolin: "You rogues! Would you live forever?" According to tradition, the reply called out from the ranks was "we thought for thirteen pennies a day we had done enough."
Sorry, but you've assumed the thing you're trying to prove.
You aren't sorry at all - you are wrong.
You've assumed that $600 of that is salaries.
Yes. To assume a figure for salaries is a logical necessity of the exercise. The example I gave has two parts, A) without options: assume $600 in salaries, and B) with options, assume $300 in salaries. The exact numbers aren't important; the point would remain if I had said A) $600 and B) $599.
Or are you trying to say that option grants have no influence whatsoever on salaries? That you would not accept $1 less in salary in exchange for options? In that case, why would a company ever grant you an option?
Simply using math doesn't allow you to commit fallacies.
My point exactly. The fallacy being that expensing options somehow "double-counts" them.
You are confused. Grants (or discounts) of stock are already treated as expenses (for the employer) and income (for the employee.) The news is that stock option grants (or discounts) must now be treated in the same sensible manner.
No they aren't. You can easily prove this with a bit of arithmetic. Take this example:
Shares outstanding: 100
Revenue: 1,000
Expenses: 900
Earnings: 1,000-900 = 100
Share price: 20
Say that salaries account for $600 of th $900 expenses, and that a 3-year call struck at $25 is worth $5. Now suppose that half of the salaries are paid in options. That works out to options on 60 shares.
Original earings per share: 100/100 = 1
Now, if we don't count the options as an expense, and merely dilute the shares, we reduce expenses to 600, and therefore increase earnings to 400:
Earnings per share without dilution: 400/100 = 4
Diluted (but still bogus) earnings per share: 400/160 = 2.5
However, if we counted the options as an expense, earnings would be unchanged, and thus earnings per share would remain at their true value, which is $1. The reason that simple dilution fails is that effectively dilutes earnings for only one year, whereas the true effect of share issuance is to dilute earnings in perpetuity.
There's no such thing as an option that's worth nothing. If you don't agree, then please write me some options for free.
No, no, you misread! It's 15 year olds, i.e. 15 one-year old kids. The survey included 15/40 = .375 kids from each country!
A prison term is the only way to truly deter someone from spamming.
;-)
...
... some people will do it anyway, just like some people sell drugs
So execution wouldn't work then
Prison on the other hand would make [Joe Trailerpark] really stop and think
Why should it, if nothing else has? Joe's whole problem is that he has no frontal lobes - he does not clearly anticipate the consequences of his actions. That's why he's living in a trailer park.
Yes, well "some people" are all that is required. The whole country is knee-deep in drugs, even though only some people sell them.