... I use Explorer because there are websites that don't render properly under anything else.
Yes, we've all had that experience. Somehow, that doesn't stop us from using better browsers for all the other sites.
How about this story. My company provides web access to our email. The website checks your browser and issues an ominous message about browser certification if the browser doesn't claim to be IE. The joke? The site renders under Mozilla, but not under (patched) IE!
To a Socialist in Europe, the main US parties are both conservative.
You mean that America does not have a left party (the spectrum of political opinion and thought in America is very broad.) That is true, but by European standards, America does not really have a right party either. The US parties are both "conservative" in the sense that their priority is to protect vested financial interests, but they are not right-wing in the sense that successful parties in Norway and Italy are, for example.
It also used to be true that the Democrats and Republicans were barely distinguishable; if the two parties were the basis of a linear space, any dispassionate observer from Mars would purse his lips and say that they were in desperate need of a Givens rotation to preserve numerical stability. Pity poor America, which is obliged to express the entire gamut of its hopes and aspirations via these inadequate instruments.
The situation has changed recently, because the current adminstration, while similar in policy to its opponents, is profoundly different in its philosophical basis. That is essentially because they are not conservative at all; they are neo-conservative, and neo-conservatives are the opposite of conservative: they are radical, wanting to change everything.
But if a "false sense" of security, as it were, is what it takes to make ordinary Americans travel by air, instead of cowering in their homes (as many did after 9/11), isn't it fulfilling its its goal?
Actually, another poster claims that although the majority of Americans think they are safer, the majority of those who fly do not:
Whatever the administration[1] does is wrong. If there is another attack, whatever they were doing wasn't enough. If there isn't another attack, whatever they were doing was too harsh.
Well that's as broad as it is long, isn't it? You could as easily say that whatever the administration does is right, because if there is another attack, then they need to do even more of whatever they were doing, however unpleasant, whereas if there isn't another attack, then whatever they were doing was obviously justified.
In my opinion, this kind of rationalization does not relieve an administration of the duty to pay attention to its citizens.
My point is, the idea that language affects how we think and what we perceive is not really all that novel.
It's not novel at all; nor is the idea actually referred to in the article: that language affects what we can perceive. What's new is that there might actually be evidence in support of the idea. Previous examples (words for snow, shades of green) have always turned out to be false (people without words for these things can still discrimminate between different examples.)
This latest example may also be false; this tribe has been studied for many years by different researchers who do not agree.
[...] language is far more complicated than you might imagine. Linguistics, psycholinguistics, and visual cognition are not trivial just because you don't understand them on a serious level [...]
Yes, but here you are just agreeing with the OP. The assertion was that ignorant opinions are as good as learned ones precisely because the field is so difficult that erudition gives little advantage; the fact that you have spent your life studying the field does not guarantee that you have made any progress. Life is not fair, and no law says that you won't waste your life chasing a dream.
Please note that I do not agree with the OP: I don't believe ignorance is ever an advantage. But you missed the rather obvious point - not a promising sign from someone working in a difficult field.
My point is that I was marginally inconvenienced, but it was not the end of the world.
Oh yes, quite! You have not been seriously inconvenienced, and your experience in not being inconvenienced obviously proves that nobody else has a problem either. Those lying elitists!
I am throwing Karma out the window on this one as my comments on this subject fall on deaf ears here
Actually, your karma is doing just fine... as was to be expected. Although MicroSoft apologists invariably portray themselves as isolated voices of reason, victims of simple-minded Slashdot bigotry, a count of pro and con comments shows that there is no lack of support for MicroSoft on Slashdot.
It may come as a surprise to you but more than 90% of the Internet users out there aren't aware or concerned with IE vulnerabilities
It may come as surprise to you, but that won't actually surprise anyone. It is exacty the problem.
Firefox is not the answer to MS' issues. Better preparation for security is.
Quite. And better preparation involves two easy steps:
fix broken websites
migrate users to Firefox (or other working browser)
I certainly agree with your general sentiment (more or less: markets are fairly efficient, and there is no magic investment strategy.)
However, I think that the OP was simply trying to say that at a given dollar delta, the dollar amount of upside and downside risks are asymmetric. Although equity markets generally have a pronounced negative skew, it is still true that returns look much more geometric than arithmetic. The dollar amount of a 95% likelihood up move will be larger than the dollar amount of the same likelihood down move.
In the case of your example, in order to target a return of 1M, you need to estimate an outcome: your estimate was $0.01 -> 0. However, the likelihood of a price rise to say $0.03 might be just as great; in that case you have risked 3M to make 1M.
Finally, there are special hazards to shorting, particularly for the retail investor. Generally you must put up more collateral than would be needed to go long the same position, and usually you are paid an inferior rate on that collateral. There is also the problem of getting there from here: even if you are ultimately right, a price rise from 0.01 to 0.02 might result in margin calls that oblige you to close your position.
From what I understand they changed the course to have less hills which are Lances strong point.
Just the opposite. They have helped out the climbing specialists by increasing the importance of the mountain stages. For instance, the first individual TT is practically just L'Alpe d'Huez.
Armstrong doesn't really have a strong point; or rather, he has no weakness, being extremely good at both climbing and TT. However, he is not small enough to be quite as good as the very best of the pure climbers.
Yes, there are many good book review periodicals in English (my wife is an unreformed LRBie), but none matches the TLS. The reviewers are usually experts in the subject, and the reviews themselves often contain excellent potted summaries of the same. The books reviewed are ecclectic; aside from fiction, you can expect to find science, history, art, philosophy, religion, etc.
The reviewer is talking about real numbers. Your intuition about randomness is derived from numbers such as one encounters in a computer or a physical instrument. However, these are not real numbers, they are truncations of real numbers. There are only countably many numbers you can represent on a computer, whereas there are uncountably many real numbers.
There's no such thing as a random number on a computer, because once you single a number out for attention, it isn't random anymore. But, in a technical sense revealed by RTFB, "almost all" real numbers can't be counted. They can't be named exactly, in a way that would allow you to generate them to arbitrary precision. This must be so, because such precise name is a computer program, and there are only countably many computer programs. These numbers are "random" in the sense that it is impossible to single one out for special attention. Although "almost all" real numbers are random, you can't specify a single example!
What did they study what they don't know how OSes work, and don't know any C?
The original post is a bit misleading. A student taking this course would know C, but UW does (did?) not teach it. The student would have taken courses in how OS's work, but not on the detailed internals of a kernel (that's what this course is for!) Nowadays, of course, many students may have had a look at OS kernels such as Linux.
The version of the course that I took (nearly 20 years ago) had two parts 1) write a multi-tasking pre-emptive kernel and 2) write a real-time application on top of the kernel. The application controlled model trains & track switches, so we just called the course "trains." You had two people and about 13 weeks to do the job; most teams followed the OS/App split with the people. (For obvious reasons, you weren't supposed to take this course concurrently with certain other courses, such as Graphics and Compilers.) If I recall rightly, a small fraction of the system was written in assembler and the balance in a boutique language called WSL (Waterloo Systems Language), so C was of no direct use anyway.
Are you sure these are computer science students?
In fact, the CS/EE cross listing in the original post indicates that some students are engineers, not CS. But in my day it was all CS.
Never mind your confused ideas about capitalism ("unions are the source of all evil") - it's your ideas about capital institutions (banks) that have me laughing.
Ever wonder why a bank needs about a million years and 2 million wankers to do anything? Why everyone spends more time in meetings talking about doing things than actually doing anything? It's so that if something goes wrong, everyone will be at fault. That's useful, because when it's everyone's fault, it's really nobody's.
If any heads roll, it will be because of political scores to be settled, not actual misdeeds. Oh, and you can forget about your silly daydream of "100% liable" - as a bank customer, you can't afford what it would cost to hold individual employees liable. What would you charge for a contract that had the following terms: be perfect, gain 100,000; make a mistake, lose 100,000,000? Only the institution can afford to cover liability, and that's because the risk is spread over many employees. It's the same principle as insurance.
Try the tutorials section of investopedia.com for basic market operation etc.
You have to go a bit beyond the basic level to understand my post completely; you essentially need an introductory course on finance theory. But the jargon is easy to explain:
Consider the value of a security (e.g. our convertible bond) to be a function f(S,t) of time t and the underlying stock price S:
delta is the partial derivative of f w.r.t. S
gamma is the second partial derivative of f w.r.t. S
delta hedging is holding an amount of S that cancels the delta of f
A plain hedge in the stock has no higher-order sensitivities (like gamma) to the stock, but the option does. Therefore, the hedge is only exact at a particular value of S. When S changes, the delta of f changes and you have to buy or sell stock to adjust your hedge. When you have positive gamma, the value of your option increases faster than the value of your hedge decreases, and decreases slower than your hedge increases; that is why it is possible to make money even though your hedge is no longer exact.
In all of this I have not mentioned the effect of time (theta.) If you are really trading, you need to pay attention to this because it is working against your long option (that is why you can still lose money overall even if you are long gamma.)
You can also just short some stock without intending to continually adjust your position; that is "static" hedging. For vanilla options, it's not as good as dynamic hedging, but in some situations (e.g. barrier options near the barrier) it is the only reasonable course.
The parent is an excellent post, and deserves to be rated +5, informative. However, I would like to point out a technical error to those Slashdot readers who understand finance:
A convertible is really just a bond + a call option, and shorting against a call option is a common strategy.
No. Many, many tears have been shed over this fallacy. Most converts are like a bond + call, so long as the credit of the name remains good. The credit will be reflected in the underlying stock price, and in this region, the bond value acts as a floor, producing an option-like value profile with positive gamma. That means that since you are long the option, your delta hedge will be profitable even if you can't rebalance. However, when the name is close to default, the bond value itself will go to zero; this produces a region of negative gamma. A convert thus has both positive and negative gamma, quite unlike a vanilla option; it's definitely possible to lose your shirt even if you're delta hedged.
Anyway, in Canada the government can seize your property without any kind of warrant, or even notification. Next. look up the Notwithstanding Clause. Finally, Canada also recently psased "anti-terrorism" laws similar to what you're complaining about.
No, the government cannot seize your property without any kind of warrant, or even notification. The Notwithstanding Clause applies to rights of provinces, not individuals; it allows a province to pass laws that violate the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But before an individual suffers from this a province must first pass the legislation, and then enforce it. This involves warrants and notifications.
Canada has indeed passed "anti-terrorism" laws, but they are not very similar to those in the U.S., and in any case Canada is under considerable diplomatic pressure from America, which believes these laws are insufficiently enforced. (Canada is alleged to be the weak spot in America's defences.)
You've got plenty of liberties in both countries, and pretty incontestably more in the U.S.
"Pretty incontestable"? It would be nice to be so right that other people weren't even allowed to dispute with you; the current administration certainly thinks so. But it does you no credit to express this view in your argument.
Actually, before the 9/11 crisis, I would have agreed with you. It always seemed to me that the American character would never put up with the degree of government interfernce that occurs in Canada. Also, on paper, the constitutional safeguards in the U.S. seem stronger than those in Canada. However, a piece of paper is only as good as it's enforcement, and the agencies charged with this enforcement in America seem reluctant to do so. In Canada, by contrast, the government is treading lightly despite its apparently draconian powers. It turns out that there is no substitute for decency and common sense.
We know that over the last 100 years that the world-wide temp has gone up by roughly 1 degree. But before that time period, there is no climate data at all. So, how can we conclude that this is unnatural or not?
There is not much direct temperature evidence before the 19th century, but there is plenty of inferential evidence. Isotope ratios in Arctic ice give a good record going back 10s of thousands of years. This might sound doubtful, but the earlier part of this evidence can be cross checked with more obvious sources, such as tree rings (more than a thousand years) and sediment layers in lakes (thousands of years.) There is a great deal of fossil evidence, of which the best comes from pollen and hard-shelled micro-organisms (e.g. diatoms.) These (when embedded in countable sediment layers) tell us when conditions allowed the organisms to live in a particular locale. Beetles are also very useful, with many temperature-sensitive species having conserved their morphology for quite a long time (a million years.) In general, the most useful species are small organisms with hard parts; these leave more remains and travel less than larger organisms (a rare fossil could easily be in an atypical location.) Geological evidence tells us about glaciations over quite long time scales (millions of years.)
All of these sources of evidence are beset with problems and complications, and therefore highly technical (i.e. beyond a/. post.) However, all of them are investigated by groups of very intelligent and trained people who know about the problems and do their best to compensate. Furthermore, you must remember that our picture of the past is a jigsaw puzzle and every piece must fit; for instance, it is not enough to observe that ancient beetles whose hard anatomy is the same as modern might have had different soft anatomy (and thus different temperature sensitivity.) You must also explain why the other evidence appears to match the beetles.
maybe the world gets a little hotter ever couple of 100,000 years too???
The world's climate does indeed vary on many different timescales and for many different reasons - it even gets a little hotter every 100,000 years or so! In fact it's in a hot period right now; that is why you haven't noticed that we are living in an ice age. The reason for the cycle is not magnetic fields, but rather the shape and timing of the earth's orbit around the sun (the amount of eccentricity, the amount of "wobble", and the timing of northern summer relative to the orbital position are not constants.) This is the "Milankovich cycle."
The people who think that human activity might make dramatic short-term changes in the earth's climate know all this and try to take it into account.
But that's excusable. The 386s[u]x deserves to be forgotten. However, as others have mentioned, the 186 was actually quite successful in embedded applications.
[...] I don't see much problem with a limited suspension of due process rights with a theft of this scale [...]
A basic principle of justice in our society is that due process becomes more important for more serious crimes. That is because the consequences of mistaken judicial process are more serious in these cases. A cop can give you a speeding ticket while you are in your living room watching TV, and there's not much you can do about it. But if you're accused of murder, we're supposed to acquit you if there is a reasonable possibility that you're innocent - even if we think the odds are you're guilty.
Imagine how the results would have been laughed at if the original penicillin strain had died, and they tried to reproduce the result with other moulds.
Well as I recall (google it for yourself, I'm too lazy), they did lose the original culture - or rather, they never had it. They had to appeal to the public for specimens in order to find the type that produced the results they had observed by accident. The heroine was "Moldy Mary", who brought in many samples.
The idea of your point, as I understand it, is that a phenomenon could be hard to demonstrate, but still true and important. Your first example doesn't really work because "cat's whiskers" were (relatively) easy to reproduce, indisputably worked, but had no theoretical basis. Cold fusion, on the other hand, was a theoretical edifice weakly supported by experiments that nobody could replicate.
Your second example doesn't really work either, because the reason penicillin was "hard to replicate" was that a physical ingredient which could reasonably be postulated to exist was known to be missing. I might add that the penicillin researchers didn't publish their conclusions before finding penicillin.
The bottom line is that true and important ideas that have never been demonstrated just aren't very interesting, because they can't be distinguished from the false and worthless ones.
You could easily cure your ignorance by learning to read. The 51% number was calculated from a theoretical model. The purpose of the mechanical coin flipper was to test the predictions of the model. The 10,000 number wasn't an experiment used to compute the bias: it was an offhand estimate of the number of coin flips that would be necessary to produce a statistically noticeable deviation with such a small predicted bias.
I don't know how this estimate was produced, but I can guess. A binomial distribution, such as coin toss, approaches a gaussian as N grows large. The drift of a gaussian grows like N, but the volatility grows like root N, so that the relative contribution of drift grows as N increases. 10,000 happens to be the crossing point in this case: 100 = sqrt(10,000) = 51% x 10,000 - 50% x 10,000.
Slashdot Mirror
... I use Explorer because there are websites that don't render properly under anything else.
Yes, we've all had that experience. Somehow, that doesn't stop us from using better browsers for all the other sites.
How about this story. My company provides web access to our email. The website checks your browser and issues an ominous message about browser certification if the browser doesn't claim to be IE. The joke? The site renders under Mozilla, but not under (patched) IE!
To a Socialist in Europe, the main US parties are both conservative.
You mean that America does not have a left party (the spectrum of political opinion and thought in America is very broad.) That is true, but by European standards, America does not really have a right party either. The US parties are both "conservative" in the sense that their priority is to protect vested financial interests, but they are not right-wing in the sense that successful parties in Norway and Italy are, for example.
It also used to be true that the Democrats and Republicans were barely distinguishable; if the two parties were the basis of a linear space, any dispassionate observer from Mars would purse his lips and say that they were in desperate need of a Givens rotation to preserve numerical stability. Pity poor America, which is obliged to express the entire gamut of its hopes and aspirations via these inadequate instruments.
The situation has changed recently, because the current adminstration, while similar in policy to its opponents, is profoundly different in its philosophical basis. That is essentially because they are not conservative at all; they are neo-conservative, and neo-conservatives are the opposite of conservative: they are radical, wanting to change everything.
But if a "false sense" of security, as it were, is what it takes to make ordinary Americans travel by air, instead of cowering in their homes (as many did after 9/11), isn't it fulfilling its its goal?
0 40725/
Actually, another poster claims that although the majority of Americans think they are safer, the majority of those who fly do not:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118924&cid=10
Whatever the administration[1] does is wrong. If there is another attack, whatever they were doing wasn't enough. If there isn't another attack, whatever they were doing was too harsh.
Well that's as broad as it is long, isn't it? You could as easily say that whatever the administration does is right, because if there is another attack, then they need to do even more of whatever they were doing, however unpleasant, whereas if there isn't another attack, then whatever they were doing was obviously justified.
In my opinion, this kind of rationalization does not relieve an administration of the duty to pay attention to its citizens.
My point is, the idea that language affects how we think and what we perceive is not really all that novel.
It's not novel at all; nor is the idea actually referred to in the article: that language affects what we can perceive. What's new is that there might actually be evidence in support of the idea. Previous examples (words for snow, shades of green) have always turned out to be false (people without words for these things can still discrimminate between different examples.)
This latest example may also be false; this tribe has been studied for many years by different researchers who do not agree.
[...] language is far more complicated than you might imagine. Linguistics, psycholinguistics, and visual cognition are not trivial just because you don't understand them on a serious level [...]
Yes, but here you are just agreeing with the OP. The assertion was that ignorant opinions are as good as learned ones precisely because the field is so difficult that erudition gives little advantage; the fact that you have spent your life studying the field does not guarantee that you have made any progress. Life is not fair, and no law says that you won't waste your life chasing a dream.
Please note that I do not agree with the OP: I don't believe ignorance is ever an advantage. But you missed the rather obvious point - not a promising sign from someone working in a difficult field.
My point is that I was marginally inconvenienced, but it was not the end of the world.
Oh yes, quite! You have not been seriously inconvenienced, and your experience in not being inconvenienced obviously proves that nobody else has a problem either. Those lying elitists!
Actually, your karma is doing just fine
It may come as a surprise to you but more than 90% of the Internet users out there aren't aware or concerned with IE vulnerabilities
It may come as surprise to you, but that won't actually surprise anyone. It is exacty the problem.
Firefox is not the answer to MS' issues. Better preparation for security is.
Quite. And better preparation involves two easy steps:
fix broken websites
migrate users to Firefox (or other working browser)
I certainly agree with your general sentiment (more or less: markets are fairly efficient, and there is no magic investment strategy.)
However, I think that the OP was simply trying to say that at a given dollar delta, the dollar amount of upside and downside risks are asymmetric. Although equity markets generally have a pronounced negative skew, it is still true that returns look much more geometric than arithmetic. The dollar amount of a 95% likelihood up move will be larger than the dollar amount of the same likelihood down move.
In the case of your example, in order to target a return of 1M, you need to estimate an outcome: your estimate was $0.01 -> 0. However, the likelihood of a price rise to say $0.03 might be just as great; in that case you have risked 3M to make 1M.
Finally, there are special hazards to shorting, particularly for the retail investor. Generally you must put up more collateral than would be needed to go long the same position, and usually you are paid an inferior rate on that collateral. There is also the problem of getting there from here: even if you are ultimately right, a price rise from 0.01 to 0.02 might result in margin calls that oblige you to close your position.
From what I understand they changed the course to have less hills which are Lances strong point.
Just the opposite. They have helped out the climbing specialists by increasing the importance of the mountain stages. For instance, the first individual TT is practically just L'Alpe d'Huez.
Armstrong doesn't really have a strong point; or rather, he has no weakness, being extremely good at both climbing and TT. However, he is not small enough to be quite as good as the very best of the pure climbers.
Yes, there are many good book review periodicals in English (my wife is an unreformed LRBie), but none matches the TLS. The reviewers are usually experts in the subject, and the reviews themselves often contain excellent potted summaries of the same. The books reviewed are ecclectic; aside from fiction, you can expect to find science, history, art, philosophy, religion, etc.
Oh, and "JC" is usually rather funny.
Balloons is for kiddie-winkies. Now I'll have to throw you overboard. Soon you will be made into a list.
The reviewer is talking about real numbers. Your intuition about randomness is derived from numbers such as one encounters in a computer or a physical instrument. However, these are not real numbers, they are truncations of real numbers. There are only countably many numbers you can represent on a computer, whereas there are uncountably many real numbers.
There's no such thing as a random number on a computer, because once you single a number out for attention, it isn't random anymore. But, in a technical sense revealed by RTFB, "almost all" real numbers can't be counted. They can't be named exactly, in a way that would allow you to generate them to arbitrary precision. This must be so, because such precise name is a computer program, and there are only countably many computer programs. These numbers are "random" in the sense that it is impossible to single one out for special attention. Although "almost all" real numbers are random, you can't specify a single example!
What did they study what they don't know how OSes work, and don't know any C?
The original post is a bit misleading. A student taking this course would know C, but UW does (did?) not teach it. The student would have taken courses in how OS's work, but not on the detailed internals of a kernel (that's what this course is for!) Nowadays, of course, many students may have had a look at OS kernels such as Linux.
The version of the course that I took (nearly 20 years ago) had two parts 1) write a multi-tasking pre-emptive kernel and 2) write a real-time application on top of the kernel. The application controlled model trains & track switches, so we just called the course "trains." You had two people and about 13 weeks to do the job; most teams followed the OS/App split with the people. (For obvious reasons, you weren't supposed to take this course concurrently with certain other courses, such as Graphics and Compilers.) If I recall rightly, a small fraction of the system was written in assembler and the balance in a boutique language called WSL (Waterloo Systems Language), so C was of no direct use anyway.
Are you sure these are computer science students?
In fact, the CS/EE cross listing in the original post indicates that some students are engineers, not CS. But in my day it was all CS.
LOL
Never mind your confused ideas about capitalism ("unions are the source of all evil") - it's your ideas about capital institutions (banks) that have me laughing.
Ever wonder why a bank needs about a million years and 2 million wankers to do anything? Why everyone spends more time in meetings talking about doing things than actually doing anything? It's so that if something goes wrong, everyone will be at fault. That's useful, because when it's everyone's fault, it's really nobody's.
If any heads roll, it will be because of political scores to be settled, not actual misdeeds. Oh, and you can forget about your silly daydream of "100% liable" - as a bank customer, you can't afford what it would cost to hold individual employees liable. What would you charge for a contract that had the following terms: be perfect, gain 100,000; make a mistake, lose 100,000,000? Only the institution can afford to cover liability, and that's because the risk is spread over many employees. It's the same principle as insurance.
You have to go a bit beyond the basic level to understand my post completely; you essentially need an introductory course on finance theory. But the jargon is easy to explain:
Consider the value of a security (e.g. our convertible bond) to be a function f(S,t) of time t and the underlying stock price S:
delta is the partial derivative of f w.r.t. S
gamma is the second partial derivative of f w.r.t. S
delta hedging is holding an amount of S that cancels the delta of f
A plain hedge in the stock has no higher-order sensitivities (like gamma) to the stock, but the option does. Therefore, the hedge is only exact at a particular value of S. When S changes, the delta of f changes and you have to buy or sell stock to adjust your hedge. When you have positive gamma, the value of your option increases faster than the value of your hedge decreases, and decreases slower than your hedge increases; that is why it is possible to make money even though your hedge is no longer exact.
In all of this I have not mentioned the effect of time (theta.) If you are really trading, you need to pay attention to this because it is working against your long option (that is why you can still lose money overall even if you are long gamma.)
You can also just short some stock without intending to continually adjust your position; that is "static" hedging. For vanilla options, it's not as good as dynamic hedging, but in some situations (e.g. barrier options near the barrier) it is the only reasonable course.
The parent is an excellent post, and deserves to be rated +5, informative. However, I would like to point out a technical error to those Slashdot readers who understand finance:
A convertible is really just a bond + a call option, and shorting against a call option is a common strategy.
No. Many, many tears have been shed over this fallacy. Most converts are like a bond + call, so long as the credit of the name remains good. The credit will be reflected in the underlying stock price, and in this region, the bond value acts as a floor, producing an option-like value profile with positive gamma. That means that since you are long the option, your delta hedge will be profitable even if you can't rebalance. However, when the name is close to default, the bond value itself will go to zero; this produces a region of negative gamma. A convert thus has both positive and negative gamma, quite unlike a vanilla option; it's definitely possible to lose your shirt even if you're delta hedged.
Anyway, in Canada the government can seize your property without any kind of warrant, or even notification. Next. look up the Notwithstanding Clause. Finally, Canada also recently psased "anti-terrorism" laws similar to what you're complaining about.
No, the government cannot seize your property without any kind of warrant, or even notification. The Notwithstanding Clause applies to rights of provinces, not individuals; it allows a province to pass laws that violate the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But before an individual suffers from this a province must first pass the legislation, and then enforce it. This involves warrants and notifications.
Canada has indeed passed "anti-terrorism" laws, but they are not very similar to those in the U.S., and in any case Canada is under considerable diplomatic pressure from America, which believes these laws are insufficiently enforced. (Canada is alleged to be the weak spot in America's defences.)
You've got plenty of liberties in both countries, and pretty incontestably more in the U.S.
"Pretty incontestable"? It would be nice to be so right that other people weren't even allowed to dispute with you; the current administration certainly thinks so. But it does you no credit to express this view in your argument.
Actually, before the 9/11 crisis, I would have agreed with you. It always seemed to me that the American character would never put up with the degree of government interfernce that occurs in Canada. Also, on paper, the constitutional safeguards in the U.S. seem stronger than those in Canada. However, a piece of paper is only as good as it's enforcement, and the agencies charged with this enforcement in America seem reluctant to do so. In Canada, by contrast, the government is treading lightly despite its apparently draconian powers. It turns out that there is no substitute for decency and common sense.
By "symmetrical", I think the OP meant homogenous. Nobody is suggesting that for every star there is an equal and opposite one.
We know that over the last 100 years that the world-wide temp has gone up by roughly 1 degree. But before that time period, there is no climate data at all. So, how can we conclude that this is unnatural or not?
/. post.) However, all of them are investigated by groups of very intelligent and trained people who know about the problems and do their best to compensate. Furthermore, you must remember that our picture of the past is a jigsaw puzzle and every piece must fit; for instance, it is not enough to observe that ancient beetles whose hard anatomy is the same as modern might have had different soft anatomy (and thus different temperature sensitivity.) You must also explain why the other evidence appears to match the beetles.
There is not much direct temperature evidence before the 19th century, but there is plenty of inferential evidence. Isotope ratios in Arctic ice give a good record going back 10s of thousands of years. This might sound doubtful, but the earlier part of this evidence can be cross checked with more obvious sources, such as tree rings (more than a thousand years) and sediment layers in lakes (thousands of years.) There is a great deal of fossil evidence, of which the best comes from pollen and hard-shelled micro-organisms (e.g. diatoms.) These (when embedded in countable sediment layers) tell us when conditions allowed the organisms to live in a particular locale. Beetles are also very useful, with many temperature-sensitive species having conserved their morphology for quite a long time (a million years.) In general, the most useful species are small organisms with hard parts; these leave more remains and travel less than larger organisms (a rare fossil could easily be in an atypical location.) Geological evidence tells us about glaciations over quite long time scales (millions of years.)
All of these sources of evidence are beset with problems and complications, and therefore highly technical (i.e. beyond a
maybe the world gets a little hotter ever couple of 100,000 years too???
The world's climate does indeed vary on many different timescales and for many different reasons - it even gets a little hotter every 100,000 years or so! In fact it's in a hot period right now; that is why you haven't noticed that we are living in an ice age. The reason for the cycle is not magnetic fields, but rather the shape and timing of the earth's orbit around the sun (the amount of eccentricity, the amount of "wobble", and the timing of northern summer relative to the orbital position are not constants.) This is the "Milankovich cycle."
The people who think that human activity might make dramatic short-term changes in the earth's climate know all this and try to take it into account.
The article covered this, and states that US specialty coffee contains more caffeine than European, contrary to popular opinion
You can't moderate well without reading the article.
But that's excusable. The 386s[u]x deserves to be forgotten. However, as others have mentioned, the 186 was actually quite successful in embedded applications.
[...] I don't see much problem with a limited suspension of due process rights with a theft of this scale [...]
A basic principle of justice in our society is that due process becomes more important for more serious crimes. That is because the consequences of mistaken judicial process are more serious in these cases. A cop can give you a speeding ticket while you are in your living room watching TV, and there's not much you can do about it. But if you're accused of murder, we're supposed to acquit you if there is a reasonable possibility that you're innocent - even if we think the odds are you're guilty.
Imagine how the results would have been laughed at if the original penicillin strain had died, and they tried to reproduce the result with other moulds.
Well as I recall (google it for yourself, I'm too lazy), they did lose the original culture - or rather, they never had it. They had to appeal to the public for specimens in order to find the type that produced the results they had observed by accident. The heroine was "Moldy Mary", who brought in many samples.
The idea of your point, as I understand it, is that a phenomenon could be hard to demonstrate, but still true and important. Your first example doesn't really work because "cat's whiskers" were (relatively) easy to reproduce, indisputably worked, but had no theoretical basis. Cold fusion, on the other hand, was a theoretical edifice weakly supported by experiments that nobody could replicate.
Your second example doesn't really work either, because the reason penicillin was "hard to replicate" was that a physical ingredient which could reasonably be postulated to exist was known to be missing. I might add that the penicillin researchers didn't publish their conclusions before finding penicillin.
The bottom line is that true and important ideas that have never been demonstrated just aren't very interesting, because they can't be distinguished from the false and worthless ones.
You could easily cure your ignorance by learning to read. The 51% number was calculated from a theoretical model. The purpose of the mechanical coin flipper was to test the predictions of the model. The 10,000 number wasn't an experiment used to compute the bias: it was an offhand estimate of the number of coin flips that would be necessary to produce a statistically noticeable deviation with such a small predicted bias.
I don't know how this estimate was produced, but I can guess. A binomial distribution, such as coin toss, approaches a gaussian as N grows large. The drift of a gaussian grows like N, but the volatility grows like root N, so that the relative contribution of drift grows as N increases. 10,000 happens to be the crossing point in this case: 100 = sqrt(10,000) = 51% x 10,000 - 50% x 10,000.