Liquidity isn't about time, it's about spread. Stock markets are double-auction systems, where you are free to bid and offer at any price you want. Trades only occur when someone offers a stock for less than someone else's bid price. The stock has a 'price,' and to buy stock you have to bid a little higher, and to sell you have to bid a little lower. The difference between the bid and offer price is the spread, and the spread represents an inherent transaction cost to most investors.
Now liquidity is just how easy it is to convert your stock into cash. There is always some liquidity, as long as you're willing to accept a bad deal. You offer to sell your stock cheaply enough, or buy high enough, and somebody will buy or sell. Of course, on blue chip stocks, the spread has always been pretty small, so it has never cost a lot to trade in those stocks. But in medium-cap and small-cap stocks, where HFTs have had the biggest impact, they've reduced spreads enormously.
Twenty years ago before the rise of HFT traders, you might had paid a market maker $0.50 / stock on the spread for a trade in a medium-cap stock. If you want to rebalance your investment portfolio annually, those kinds of transaction costs could wipe out your gains. It effectively priced individual investors out of the market, and if you wanted to save money you were forced into the hands of large institutional investors, who will happily charge you a 2% management fee for the pleasure of handling your money.
Today we take it for granted that most stocks have very small spreads, and you can make regular trades without seeing all your gains lost to transaction costs. HFTs have put the Serious Men in Suits market makers out of business, and have pushed the cost of trading down to the point where the individual can manage their own savings, without having to fork over most of their profit to other Serious Men in Suits.
So yeah, you may not like high frequency traders, but they're better than the old-boy networks of "specialists" and stockjobbers that they replaced.
Which frankly, is as it should be. If the Chinese can mine and produce rare earth metals at prices that can put all the competition out of business, that's good for them. But that doesn't mean they should. The world is hungry enough for these metals that they can sell at the same price as Mountain Pass without running out of customers... and at those prices their mines will be incredibly profitable.
Yup. Most rare earth minerals came from the Mountain Pass mine in southern California, until the Chinese priced them almost out of the market in the 1990s.
Probably? Of all people and organizations in the world, I suspect the NSA is the least likely to be relying on GPL'd third party code for their encryption needs.
The key is not in there. It's generated dynamically, based on information pulled from local computer's configuration. The key generating algorithm isn't obfuscated, but it will only generate the correct key on the target computer (or one very similar).
The only way this will be cracked will be by finding a computer with a sufficiently similar configuration (unlikely), or by a herculean feat of cryptanalysis (incredibly unlikely).
Never overlook the obvious. Want to piss off a small security team? Put a small sample of/dev/urandom into a binary blob and release it. They'll spend all their time trying to decrypt that white noise source and never notice the Really Interesting thing nearby it.
That doesn't even make sense. You're suggesting that the author, instead of actually encrypting the payload, is only pretending to, to distract attention from a different unencrypted portion elsewhere? That makes about as much sense as a 'the moon landing was a hoax' conspiracy theory.
The program doesn't have the key, the target computer does! When it runs, it collects various information about the computer's configuration and uses that to generate a possible key. It tries to decrypt its payload with that, and if the decryption works, the payload runs. If the decryption doesn't, then the key was wrong, and it's not the target computer, and the payload doesn't run.
It's a very clever approach, and depending on how specific the target configuration is, we may never see the decrypted payload in the public world.
No, it follows from the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, and it is linear. The amount of fuel required is exponential in the delta-V required, but linear in the payload mass. m_1 = m_0 e^{- \Delta v / v_e}
A nice story, too bad it's all made up. Knight is being held to the actions of their trading software, and they've had to sell 75% of the company to pay for it.
What lessons? They're fiction. History can teach lessons, but fiction, especially science fiction, is speculation. I suppose Atlas Shrugged teaches important lessons about philosophy, and KSR's Mars Trilogy proffers valuable insight into economics?
The idea that fiction can teach important "lessons" is one of the worst popular ideas I know of. Usually when people say stuff like that, they really mean only the lessons they agree with.
Why wouldn't it? Code quality is something driven by the uncoordinated decisions of millions of individuals around the world. Such things are usually normally distributed.
The fact that your employer was big enough to ever be part of the S&P 500 is prima facie evidence that it's not the sort of small-cap stock that the parent is talking about.
One of my former employers is a small cap, and I haven't seen more than $100 a day in trades in the four years since I've left.
L band radar. Stealth designs aren't optimized for observability in the L band, because the L band isn't that important. It's good enough for air traffic control where you don't need high precision, but it's not precise enough for weapon guidance. The limitations of the technology are well understood by the engineers that use it.
It's not bizarre. Apple may be incredibly profitable, but the stock is also incredibly expensive. Around $573 per share right now. And Apple is an incredibly undiversified company; all it takes is a bad fumble with the next iPhone, or somebody cooler showing up, and Apple can lose a lot of value overnight. You talk about long-term prospects? For the same price, I can buy stock in Exxon, or a dozen other natural resource companies. I think it's vastly more likely that the world will be obsessed with oil in ten years, than it will be in the iPhone 10.
And despite the strict gun laws being in place, shootings are still happening with the restricted weapons. And while only two were killed in the Danzig shooting, dozens were shot. I don't know how one can attribute the lower death rate in one mass-shooting vs. another to the presence of gun control laws.
Toronto's gun violence problem grows despite the city's ever increasing crackdown on firearms. As the police here have been pointing out, the difference between violent crime in the US vs.Canada is one of culture. The increase in this very public violence in Canadian streets is due to the cultural shift in Canada, and how the Canadian street gangs are starting to view the use of public violence in the same way as American street gangs have been for decades.
They're cliches, but they're still true: correlation doesn't equal causation, and guns don't kill people, people kill people. Gun control doesn't stop violence, it is simply more popular in communities which are less disposed to violence. Gun violence is ultimately a social and cultural problem, and should be treated as such.
Well, you're right that an engine is most efficient when coupled with a continuously variable transmission. An electrical transmission with appropriate power electronics can operate as a CVT, but you're mistaken in assuming that electric is the only solution. There are a number of commercially successful mechanical CVT designs that are more efficient at delivering power to the wheels (and cheaper!) than electrical buses.
That's a silly rant. Parallel importers make good business doing exactly what you seem to think is illegal. The only thing that prevents consumers from doing the same are convenience and legalized trade barriers (tarrifs and import duties), which are usually justified on the basis of protecting local jobs. If you want to buy dirt cheap products direct from the factory with no duties, convince your government to sign a free trade agreement with China. The Chinese would be thrilled.
But this is talking about digital goods, which are covered by the Berne Convention, circa. 1886. Effectively all international trade of digital goods is illegal under the Berne convention. If Steam can't sell you something in your country, then they probably don't have the legal right to. To establish free trade in digital goods, you'd have to overhaul the entire international copyright system, not a simple undertaking.
And to be honest, free trade in digital goods would be a terrible thing. Digital goods have incredibly low unit costs, but incredibly high non-recurring expenses. You can sell any individual unit for almost nothing and make an operating profit, but in order for your business to remain solvent, the average unit price needs to be much higher. If you can't enforce price discrimination based on local purchasing power, the only way to economically produce digital goods is to sell them at exorbitant prices in the developing world.
This is the situation with pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry is one where parallel importers do a lot of business, because the economics are very similar to digital goods, except generally there's no laws preventing international trade. If you go to the developing world and sell your life-saving drugs at prices the locals can afford, you make a little bit of profit, but then the parallel importers buy up most of the local product, reimport it to richer regions, and resell it at great profit. But you can't sell it to everybody for those prices, because at the prices you can charge in Africa you'll never make enough money to even cover the cost of the approvals process in North America. So pharmaceutical companies sell to nobody for those prices, and people living in the developing world suffer the consequences.
If you establish free trade in digital goods, you aren't suddenly going to get your games, movies and music for cheap. You're going to see the legal, inexpensive options for people living in the developing world disappear.
Indeed. If you can't get digital goods in one country, it's almost always because a local entity owns the copyright there and the Berne convention makes it illegal for US organizations like Amazon and Hulu to export to you. To Amazon, this is a lost sale, but it's better for them in the long run to institute these Geo-IP blocks than deal with the legal fallout from breaking copyright law.
It's your local rights holders who are the problem, not the overseas distributors.
The only place where "small scale tribal communities" provide better lives than modern democratic capitalist societies is your imagination. The noble savage is a myth.
And if they do, it's still good for the buyers, and the sellers aren't likely to make the same mistake twice.
With algorithmic pricing, the Amazon marketplace is just operating as an automated dutch auction. It's how markets should behave: raw supply and demand, with no collusion or other market distortions propping up prices.
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How's that? Knight screwed up badly, and the mistake has cost them $400 million dollars. Sounds pretty merit-based to me.
Liquidity isn't about time, it's about spread. Stock markets are double-auction systems, where you are free to bid and offer at any price you want. Trades only occur when someone offers a stock for less than someone else's bid price. The stock has a 'price,' and to buy stock you have to bid a little higher, and to sell you have to bid a little lower. The difference between the bid and offer price is the spread, and the spread represents an inherent transaction cost to most investors.
Now liquidity is just how easy it is to convert your stock into cash. There is always some liquidity, as long as you're willing to accept a bad deal. You offer to sell your stock cheaply enough, or buy high enough, and somebody will buy or sell. Of course, on blue chip stocks, the spread has always been pretty small, so it has never cost a lot to trade in those stocks. But in medium-cap and small-cap stocks, where HFTs have had the biggest impact, they've reduced spreads enormously.
Twenty years ago before the rise of HFT traders, you might had paid a market maker $0.50 / stock on the spread for a trade in a medium-cap stock. If you want to rebalance your investment portfolio annually, those kinds of transaction costs could wipe out your gains. It effectively priced individual investors out of the market, and if you wanted to save money you were forced into the hands of large institutional investors, who will happily charge you a 2% management fee for the pleasure of handling your money.
Today we take it for granted that most stocks have very small spreads, and you can make regular trades without seeing all your gains lost to transaction costs. HFTs have put the Serious Men in Suits market makers out of business, and have pushed the cost of trading down to the point where the individual can manage their own savings, without having to fork over most of their profit to other Serious Men in Suits.
So yeah, you may not like high frequency traders, but they're better than the old-boy networks of "specialists" and stockjobbers that they replaced.
Which frankly, is as it should be. If the Chinese can mine and produce rare earth metals at prices that can put all the competition out of business, that's good for them. But that doesn't mean they should. The world is hungry enough for these metals that they can sell at the same price as Mountain Pass without running out of customers... and at those prices their mines will be incredibly profitable.
Yup. Most rare earth minerals came from the Mountain Pass mine in southern California, until the Chinese priced them almost out of the market in the 1990s.
Probably? Of all people and organizations in the world, I suspect the NSA is the least likely to be relying on GPL'd third party code for their encryption needs.
The key is not in there. It's generated dynamically, based on information pulled from local computer's configuration. The key generating algorithm isn't obfuscated, but it will only generate the correct key on the target computer (or one very similar).
The only way this will be cracked will be by finding a computer with a sufficiently similar configuration (unlikely), or by a herculean feat of cryptanalysis (incredibly unlikely).
Never overlook the obvious. Want to piss off a small security team? Put a small sample of /dev/urandom into a binary blob and release it. They'll spend all their time trying to decrypt that white noise source and never notice the Really Interesting thing nearby it.
That doesn't even make sense. You're suggesting that the author, instead of actually encrypting the payload, is only pretending to, to distract attention from a different unencrypted portion elsewhere? That makes about as much sense as a 'the moon landing was a hoax' conspiracy theory.
The program doesn't have the key, the target computer does! When it runs, it collects various information about the computer's configuration and uses that to generate a possible key. It tries to decrypt its payload with that, and if the decryption works, the payload runs. If the decryption doesn't, then the key was wrong, and it's not the target computer, and the payload doesn't run.
It's a very clever approach, and depending on how specific the target configuration is, we may never see the decrypted payload in the public world.
No, it follows from the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, and it is linear. The amount of fuel required is exponential in the delta-V required, but linear in the payload mass. m_1 = m_0 e^{- \Delta v / v_e}
A nice story, too bad it's all made up. Knight is being held to the actions of their trading software, and they've had to sell 75% of the company to pay for it.
What lessons? They're fiction. History can teach lessons, but fiction, especially science fiction, is speculation. I suppose Atlas Shrugged teaches important lessons about philosophy, and KSR's Mars Trilogy proffers valuable insight into economics?
The idea that fiction can teach important "lessons" is one of the worst popular ideas I know of. Usually when people say stuff like that, they really mean only the lessons they agree with.
Why wouldn't it? Code quality is something driven by the uncoordinated decisions of millions of individuals around the world. Such things are usually normally distributed.
The fact that your employer was big enough to ever be part of the S&P 500 is prima facie evidence that it's not the sort of small-cap stock that the parent is talking about.
One of my former employers is a small cap, and I haven't seen more than $100 a day in trades in the four years since I've left.
In Canada, where these protests occurred, the military's budget was one of the hardest cut.
L band radar. Stealth designs aren't optimized for observability in the L band, because the L band isn't that important. It's good enough for air traffic control where you don't need high precision, but it's not precise enough for weapon guidance. The limitations of the technology are well understood by the engineers that use it.
No, they'll just buy their way into power again by offering free electricity to more voters. It's the Indian Democracy way.
It's not bizarre. Apple may be incredibly profitable, but the stock is also incredibly expensive. Around $573 per share right now. And Apple is an incredibly undiversified company; all it takes is a bad fumble with the next iPhone, or somebody cooler showing up, and Apple can lose a lot of value overnight. You talk about long-term prospects? For the same price, I can buy stock in Exxon, or a dozen other natural resource companies. I think it's vastly more likely that the world will be obsessed with oil in ten years, than it will be in the iPhone 10.
If it were simple, then why isn't everybody else doing it?
It's a sad day when I have to explain that 'engineering is hard' on slashdot of all places.
And despite the strict gun laws being in place, shootings are still happening with the restricted weapons. And while only two were killed in the Danzig shooting, dozens were shot. I don't know how one can attribute the lower death rate in one mass-shooting vs. another to the presence of gun control laws.
Toronto's gun violence problem grows despite the city's ever increasing crackdown on firearms. As the police here have been pointing out, the difference between violent crime in the US vs.Canada is one of culture. The increase in this very public violence in Canadian streets is due to the cultural shift in Canada, and how the Canadian street gangs are starting to view the use of public violence in the same way as American street gangs have been for decades.
They're cliches, but they're still true: correlation doesn't equal causation, and guns don't kill people, people kill people. Gun control doesn't stop violence, it is simply more popular in communities which are less disposed to violence. Gun violence is ultimately a social and cultural problem, and should be treated as such.
Well, you're right that an engine is most efficient when coupled with a continuously variable transmission. An electrical transmission with appropriate power electronics can operate as a CVT, but you're mistaken in assuming that electric is the only solution. There are a number of commercially successful mechanical CVT designs that are more efficient at delivering power to the wheels (and cheaper!) than electrical buses.
That's a silly rant. Parallel importers make good business doing exactly what you seem to think is illegal. The only thing that prevents consumers from doing the same are convenience and legalized trade barriers (tarrifs and import duties), which are usually justified on the basis of protecting local jobs. If you want to buy dirt cheap products direct from the factory with no duties, convince your government to sign a free trade agreement with China. The Chinese would be thrilled.
But this is talking about digital goods, which are covered by the Berne Convention, circa. 1886. Effectively all international trade of digital goods is illegal under the Berne convention. If Steam can't sell you something in your country, then they probably don't have the legal right to. To establish free trade in digital goods, you'd have to overhaul the entire international copyright system, not a simple undertaking.
And to be honest, free trade in digital goods would be a terrible thing. Digital goods have incredibly low unit costs, but incredibly high non-recurring expenses. You can sell any individual unit for almost nothing and make an operating profit, but in order for your business to remain solvent, the average unit price needs to be much higher. If you can't enforce price discrimination based on local purchasing power, the only way to economically produce digital goods is to sell them at exorbitant prices in the developing world.
This is the situation with pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceutical industry is one where parallel importers do a lot of business, because the economics are very similar to digital goods, except generally there's no laws preventing international trade. If you go to the developing world and sell your life-saving drugs at prices the locals can afford, you make a little bit of profit, but then the parallel importers buy up most of the local product, reimport it to richer regions, and resell it at great profit. But you can't sell it to everybody for those prices, because at the prices you can charge in Africa you'll never make enough money to even cover the cost of the approvals process in North America. So pharmaceutical companies sell to nobody for those prices, and people living in the developing world suffer the consequences.
If you establish free trade in digital goods, you aren't suddenly going to get your games, movies and music for cheap. You're going to see the legal, inexpensive options for people living in the developing world disappear.
It's not a case of Hulu refusing to serve you, if you're not in the US the Berne convention makes it illegal for them to do so.
Indeed. If you can't get digital goods in one country, it's almost always because a local entity owns the copyright there and the Berne convention makes it illegal for US organizations like Amazon and Hulu to export to you. To Amazon, this is a lost sale, but it's better for them in the long run to institute these Geo-IP blocks than deal with the legal fallout from breaking copyright law.
It's your local rights holders who are the problem, not the overseas distributors.
The only place where "small scale tribal communities" provide better lives than modern democratic capitalist societies is your imagination. The noble savage is a myth.
And if they do, it's still good for the buyers, and the sellers aren't likely to make the same mistake twice.
With algorithmic pricing, the Amazon marketplace is just operating as an automated dutch auction. It's how markets should behave: raw supply and demand, with no collusion or other market distortions propping up prices.