I can define my units so that the speed of light in a vacuum is 1. I can also define my units so that 1 unit of mass is equal to 1 unit of energy.
In either case I will have a "c"; the c in E = m c^2 in the former, for example. *That* c is a dimensionless number-- hence interesting-- and that it is 1 is definitely interesting.
It's not just "a" constant. That the constant of proportionality between (inertial) mass and energy is the square of the speed of light in a vacuum is less than entirely obvious (it becomes slightly more so if you replace "speed of light in a vacuum" with "speed of massless particles", but that's another story).
To be honest, I've never used any of the Linux iPod solutions; I use Shuffler on Windows. It's definitely the case, though, that at least with my iPod Shuffle you can't just dump the files onto it; it has an internal DB which has to list the files in order for them to play. It seems, on the face of it, to be a silly design, but I'd guess there's a good reason somewhere.
I don't really understand how you can sound so reasonable and yet take a basic misunderstanding of economics and risk and turn it into some kind of personal vendetta. Did you lose big money on some bad stock trade? Lose your job at Enron? Yes, people do stupid things with derivatives. Yes, people speculate irresponsibly with them. But they are much more akin to cars than nuclear weapons. There are stupid, irresponsible ways to use them, but at the core they are highly useful things that people use to good ends on a daily basis.
As for businesses being "paranoid about their own solvency," unless you want to institute even more corporate welfare, you won't change the fact that businesses run risk. This is not because the bad men buy and sell things. This is because the universe is fundamentally unpredictable. Nobody can tell you what the weather will be like in Florida next year. No evil richniks are spending money to make it change. This doesn't mean that orange growers can't or shouldn't hedge their risk with weather derivatives! More broadly, nobody can tell you where the U.S. economy will be in ten years. This-- not men in suits behind the scenes-- is the fundamental reason interest rates are uncertain.
Honestly, if your main point is that you don't want to believe in supply and demand, I can't stop you. I don't think "most economists" would agree with you-- consult any basic (non-Marxist) text in economics-- but it's your perogative.
The fact remains that reasonable businesses have a legitimate demand for instruments like options and futures, primarily for the mitigation of risk. Even if you personally only buy soda and ipods, the companies that make these things for you have a real use for these products, and a natural desire for the best possible prices. Only with the advent of modern financial engineering, as practiced by quants, have banks been able to calculate reasonable prices for these instruments. In some sense it is an arms race, but no more so than those between Pepsi and Coca-Cola chemists or Apple and Creative engineers.
These people have made it possible to produce a set of products which many businesses demand and use successfully to manage their finances. These are products which don't pollute, aren't bad for your health, and consume no natural resources. Most likely many people you know, possibly including you, work for businesses which hedge their risks with derivatives. Is their continued solvency a wrong priority?
I think you're wrong on a lot of counts, but I'll highlight one with a question.
Scenario one. Your company will make a large profit if oil prices go down, but it will be in danger of bankruptcy if oil prices go up.
Scenario two. Your company's profits are essentially independent of oil prices.
In which scenario are you gambling on oil prices?
By buying derivatives, Southwest converted scenario one into scenario two. Without oil futures, they would have been forced to gamble on oil prices (or to waste money stockpiling actual fuel). There's nothing irrational about it.
Please call up Southwest Airlines and tell them that they're doing nothing but gambling. They avoided the current dismal fate of most U.S. airlines by eliminating their exposure to fuel prices via futures purchases, something they could not have done effectively without a liquid derivatives market. In fact I think many corporations which are "actually making and doing things" would be very unhappy to hear that their carefully calculated risk-mitigating derivatives trades are nothing more than gambling!
It really isn't rocket science. You know your company is okay if interest rates stay below 4%, but at 4.5% or higher you'll be in serious danger of not making your debt payments. You don't want to just bet that interest rates will stay below 4%, so you buy a cap (with 4% strike), which is a derivative that pays you money exactly when your company is taking a hit. Bingo, no more risk, and you can go back to making widgets for ignorant consumers who don't realize how important Wall Street analysts are to making what you just did possible.
Perhaps they're trying to work around the moderation system to give the grandparent karma? In which case insulting their intelligence is a bit rude, don't you think?
I think we should dump months altogether and just have years and days. Today would be 2004-354. Think of the savings in head-scratching! (Quick, how many days between January 20, 2005 and April 8, 2005? What about 2005-20 and 2005-98? Is 11/8/2004 a date in November, or August?)
We can even make day of the week easy to work out. Assuming we keep the seven day week, if we reserve 365 as a special day (and 366 on leap years) every numerical date has the same weekday every year (take the number mod 7) since 364 = 52 * 7.
It would also make my job easier. I work in fixed income finance, and we get screwed by the calendar all the time. Suppose you have a $100 bond that pays 6% interest, monthly. How much should you receive for January? $0.50? $(31/365)*6? $(31/360)*6? Believe it or not, all three answers are used in the industry, depending on what kind of bond you're buying. Suppose you buy a bond, settled on November 30, to pay off three months after settlement. When do you get paid?
You can imagine how much fun it is to write software to handle that.
Re:What Google needs is Lexis-Nexis and Journal ta
on
Google Suggest
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You mean like scholar.google.com? Or something more where you could pay to get the full text? I definitely wish I could click on Google Scholar's results and get the full text right there with a uniform interface and without having to log in or pay other people.
While I agree with your post in principle, the federal government has managed to dictate things that are in theory state, local, or private matters in the past through mandates tied to federal funding. A particularly irritating example to me:
At my university the law school barred JAG (military law) offices from recruiting on campus due to its anti-discrimination policy being in conflict with military policy about gays. The government invoked a law which would have caused us to lose all federal grant funding-- for entirely unrelated purposes such as medical research-- if we didn't let the JAG recruiters in. (By the way, they weren't barring students from speaking to them, only asking that they not do so at official on-campus recruiting events.) Protests were made (and for all I know are still being made), but in the end the Law School was unwilling to cripple other departments over a dispute which wasn't theirs. I was glad my research group wasn't destroyed, but the whole thing obviously left a bad taste in my mouth.
Do you have any idea how the U.S. presidential election system works? I'd dismiss you as a troll but you're currently modded at 3, so I hope some actual facts will help here.
Electoral vote result in 2000: Bush 271, Gore 266, no vote 1 (one Gore elector withheld in protest)
Electoral votes from Florida in 2000: 25
Official Bush margin of victory in Florida: less than 0.1%
Nader votes in Florida: 1.6%
Likewise in New Hampshire: 4 EVs, Bush margin of victory 1.3%, Nader votes 3.9%.
Please consider researching your facts before making unfounded accusations!
Sigh, where's the "-1, doesn't understand basic physics" moderation when I need it? There's just not enough energy available from the sun to move a "regular" car at any reasonable speed. End of story.
Others have gone through the actual numbers so I won't bother reproducing them here. I just feel the need to defend these guys (who I didn't know personally, but who many on my former team have met) against someone who clearly doesn't understand in the least what their endeavor is about. This project was enough of a non-joke to these guys to risk their lives for it, and I'm going to guess that it will continue to be so. I hope they don't pay a lick of attention to what you think.
True white light (like what you get from the sun) consists of an equal spread of energy across all frequencies.
Actually, the Sun's spectrum is close to a blackbody spectrum, which is not "white" in the exact sense you mention. (Hence why you'll hear the Sun referred to as a "yellow star," and other stars referred to as "blue".) It also has a series of absorption lines in it.
Slashdot Mirror
I can define my units so that the speed of light in a vacuum is 1. I can also define my units so that 1 unit of mass is equal to 1 unit of energy.
In either case I will have a "c"; the c in E = m c^2 in the former, for example. *That* c is a dimensionless number-- hence interesting-- and that it is 1 is definitely interesting.
It's not just "a" constant. That the constant of proportionality between (inertial) mass and energy is the square of the speed of light in a vacuum is less than entirely obvious (it becomes slightly more so if you replace "speed of light in a vacuum" with "speed of massless particles", but that's another story).
Farked too. It's the perfect storm!
The acetaminophen, I believe, acts in synergy with the hydrocodone, so they don't have to put as much dope in the pill to make it work.
To be honest, I've never used any of the Linux iPod solutions; I use Shuffler on Windows. It's definitely the case, though, that at least with my iPod Shuffle you can't just dump the files onto it; it has an internal DB which has to list the files in order for them to play. It seems, on the face of it, to be a silly design, but I'd guess there's a good reason somewhere.
If your wife doesn't use iTMS, there are Linux sync solutions, e.g. gtkPod. Have you tried them?
Not to mention he has no excuse for not knowing how to STFW if he's posting in this thread. :-)
How about searching for <blah blah -site:engadget.com ? Or is it more fun to get annoyed...
...a National Science Foundation grant was successfully completed in January 2005...
Maybe the translation of this is "we lost our grant money and now our only hope is to pump our stock prices by hyping stuff that doesn't really work"?
I don't really understand how you can sound so reasonable and yet take a basic misunderstanding of economics and risk and turn it into some kind of personal vendetta. Did you lose big money on some bad stock trade? Lose your job at Enron? Yes, people do stupid things with derivatives. Yes, people speculate irresponsibly with them. But they are much more akin to cars than nuclear weapons. There are stupid, irresponsible ways to use them, but at the core they are highly useful things that people use to good ends on a daily basis.
As for businesses being "paranoid about their own solvency," unless you want to institute even more corporate welfare, you won't change the fact that businesses run risk. This is not because the bad men buy and sell things. This is because the universe is fundamentally unpredictable. Nobody can tell you what the weather will be like in Florida next year. No evil richniks are spending money to make it change. This doesn't mean that orange growers can't or shouldn't hedge their risk with weather derivatives! More broadly, nobody can tell you where the U.S. economy will be in ten years. This-- not men in suits behind the scenes-- is the fundamental reason interest rates are uncertain.
Honestly, if your main point is that you don't want to believe in supply and demand, I can't stop you. I don't think "most economists" would agree with you-- consult any basic (non-Marxist) text in economics-- but it's your perogative.
The fact remains that reasonable businesses have a legitimate demand for instruments like options and futures, primarily for the mitigation of risk. Even if you personally only buy soda and ipods, the companies that make these things for you have a real use for these products, and a natural desire for the best possible prices. Only with the advent of modern financial engineering, as practiced by quants, have banks been able to calculate reasonable prices for these instruments. In some sense it is an arms race, but no more so than those between Pepsi and Coca-Cola chemists or Apple and Creative engineers.
These people have made it possible to produce a set of products which many businesses demand and use successfully to manage their finances. These are products which don't pollute, aren't bad for your health, and consume no natural resources. Most likely many people you know, possibly including you, work for businesses which hedge their risks with derivatives. Is their continued solvency a wrong priority?
I think you're wrong on a lot of counts, but I'll highlight one with a question.
Scenario one. Your company will make a large profit if oil prices go down, but it will be in danger of bankruptcy if oil prices go up.
Scenario two. Your company's profits are essentially independent of oil prices.
In which scenario are you gambling on oil prices?
By buying derivatives, Southwest converted scenario one into scenario two. Without oil futures, they would have been forced to gamble on oil prices (or to waste money stockpiling actual fuel). There's nothing irrational about it.
Please call up Southwest Airlines and tell them that they're doing nothing but gambling. They avoided the current dismal fate of most U.S. airlines by eliminating their exposure to fuel prices via futures purchases, something they could not have done effectively without a liquid derivatives market. In fact I think many corporations which are "actually making and doing things" would be very unhappy to hear that their carefully calculated risk-mitigating derivatives trades are nothing more than gambling!
It really isn't rocket science. You know your company is okay if interest rates stay below 4%, but at 4.5% or higher you'll be in serious danger of not making your debt payments. You don't want to just bet that interest rates will stay below 4%, so you buy a cap (with 4% strike), which is a derivative that pays you money exactly when your company is taking a hit. Bingo, no more risk, and you can go back to making widgets for ignorant consumers who don't realize how important Wall Street analysts are to making what you just did possible.
Perhaps they're trying to work around the moderation system to give the grandparent karma? In which case insulting their intelligence is a bit rude, don't you think?
Or wait, maybe it's rude anyway.
I think we should dump months altogether and just have years and days. Today would be 2004-354. Think of the savings in head-scratching! (Quick, how many days between January 20, 2005 and April 8, 2005? What about 2005-20 and 2005-98? Is 11/8/2004 a date in November, or August?)
We can even make day of the week easy to work out. Assuming we keep the seven day week, if we reserve 365 as a special day (and 366 on leap years) every numerical date has the same weekday every year (take the number mod 7) since 364 = 52 * 7.
It would also make my job easier. I work in fixed income finance, and we get screwed by the calendar all the time. Suppose you have a $100 bond that pays 6% interest, monthly. How much should you receive for January? $0.50? $(31/365)*6? $(31/360)*6? Believe it or not, all three answers are used in the industry, depending on what kind of bond you're buying. Suppose you buy a bond, settled on November 30, to pay off three months after settlement. When do you get paid?
You can imagine how much fun it is to write software to handle that.
You mean like scholar.google.com? Or something more where you could pay to get the full text? I definitely wish I could click on Google Scholar's results and get the full text right there with a uniform interface and without having to log in or pay other people.
...groan. As I was saying.
depend on federal grants for their livelihoods, the government doesn't have to make you do stuff to, you know, make you do stuff.
While I agree with your post in principle, the federal government has managed to dictate things that are in theory state, local, or private matters in the past through mandates tied to federal funding. A particularly irritating example to me:
At my university the law school barred JAG (military law) offices from recruiting on campus due to its anti-discrimination policy being in conflict with military policy about gays. The government invoked a law which would have caused us to lose all federal grant funding-- for entirely unrelated purposes such as medical research-- if we didn't let the JAG recruiters in. (By the way, they weren't barring students from speaking to them, only asking that they not do so at official on-campus recruiting events.) Protests were made (and for all I know are still being made), but in the end the Law School was unwilling to cripple other departments over a dispute which wasn't theirs. I was glad my research group wasn't destroyed, but the whole thing obviously left a bad taste in my mouth.
In a world where many people depend on federal
Do you have any idea how the U.S. presidential election system works? I'd dismiss you as a troll but you're currently modded at 3, so I hope some actual facts will help here.
Electoral vote result in 2000: Bush 271, Gore 266, no vote 1 (one Gore elector withheld in protest)
Electoral votes from Florida in 2000: 25
Official Bush margin of victory in Florida: less than 0.1%
Nader votes in Florida: 1.6%
Likewise in New Hampshire: 4 EVs, Bush margin of victory 1.3%, Nader votes 3.9%.
Please consider researching your facts before making unfounded accusations!
There's a new workaround for this here (no direct link allowed, sorry, you're stuck with copy paste):
6 79
/* Make the Search box flex wider */
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=258
The summary: put this in your userChrome.css.
#search-container {
-moz-box-flex: 200 !important;
}
#searchbar {
-moz-box-flex: 200 !important;
}
Hope this works for you!
Sigh, where's the "-1, doesn't understand basic physics" moderation when I need it? There's just not enough energy available from the sun to move a "regular" car at any reasonable speed. End of story.
Others have gone through the actual numbers so I won't bother reproducing them here. I just feel the need to defend these guys (who I didn't know personally, but who many on my former team have met) against someone who clearly doesn't understand in the least what their endeavor is about. This project was enough of a non-joke to these guys to risk their lives for it, and I'm going to guess that it will continue to be so. I hope they don't pay a lick of attention to what you think.
And behold [the very, very beginning of] a functioning market. Ain't competition grand?
Goodness gracious, folks, it's a joke. An old one at that. You must be one of the three in five Slashdotters who don't get jokes.
99.84 percent of all incoming mail is spam
Is that one of the 86.55% of all statistics which are made up on the spot?
True white light (like what you get from the sun) consists of an equal spread of energy across all frequencies.
Actually, the Sun's spectrum is close to a blackbody spectrum, which is not "white" in the exact sense you mention. (Hence why you'll hear the Sun referred to as a "yellow star," and other stars referred to as "blue".) It also has a series of absorption lines in it.