"Comrade Stalin, the Slashdotters tell us that Pope Cringely has an idea called Snapster! We ought not to go up against him, because he thinks it's legal."
"The Pope! And how many divisions does he have?"
- Josef Stalin
> Assuming you're connecting to the internet (which is a safe assumption) Win9x base install:
1. Binds netbios to all interfaces > 2. Installs 'Personal webservices'
Oops. I knew about #1, because there's no way to turn it off at install time. It's the first thing I do after setting up networking.
I also knew about #2, but whenever I installed 9x for myself or others, I always did a full custom install and said "WTF does $USER need a web server on this box for?" and unclicked it. So no IIS hole built-in.
So I'll stand partially corrected on this one. But I think the original point -- which is that without a firewall, a consumer 9x box can still be hardened (albeit "hardened" in the sense of having gone from liquid to Jello) in ways that an XP box can't -- stands.
> ncacn_ip_tcp : TCP port 135 >ncadg_ip_udp : UDP port 135
>ncacn_np : \pipe\epmapper, normally accessible via SMB null session on TCP ports 139 and 445
Etc. Etc. Etc.
The ironic part is that a Win9x box doesn't run these services. Or any other services - to use a technical term, in comparison to XP and 2K, an out-of-the-box 9x install doesn't listen to jack shit. If you do the 30-second tweak to disable/unbind the NetBIOS crap, you can safely (!) run 9x without a firewall because such a box doesn't listen to 80, 135, 137, 139, 445 etc. Unpatched. (Well, as long as you don't use Outleak Excess or Internet Exploiter, but that's just plain sanity:)
XP? 2K? Nuh-uh. You can disable UPnP hole (SSDP/1900) from the Services panel, but I have yet to find a way (well, short of a firewall:) of stopping an XP box from listening to 135 and 445. After all, Joe Sixpack who owns just one computer obviously, always wants to be able to network it with NT 4.0 boxen over a LAN. But there's just no way of saying "Look, XP, I don't do that kind of kink. Ever. So stop listening to those ports".
Thanks, Bill. No, really. Thanks a bunch.
Other than a noble desire to take one for the team by jumping on the proverbial grenade, why the hell did HomeSec chose these twits as their vendor of choice?
> My bet: a complete lack of any standard ports for downloading pics, and a complete lack of any standard protocol for doing the downloading even if you can find a way to get to the ports, and maybe even an unusual format for that data on the internal flash media.
My bet: Standard ports, nonstandard pinouts. Standard protocol. Standard format for the data on the media.
Rationale: 1) Nonstandard ports = cost to develop a new controller from the ground up. 2) Nonstandard pinouts = no cost. 3) Nonstandard protocol that can't be trivially reverse-engineered: cost to code and test. 4) Nonstandard format for the data on the media: Cost to develop controllers and firmware.
Summary: "Oh, fuck it, use a two-pin connector and a standard USB controller. We'll supply +5 and GND at the photo lab. Nobody'll ever suspect it's USB with only two pins! Rot13 the bits as they go onto the chip. Nobody'll ever look for permutations of known plaintext like 'JFIF'. Everything else can be the reference design from the chipset's datasheet."
(Alternate: "Oh, fuck it, use a 3-pin headphone jack and RS-232 signals. Nobody'll ever guess. And Rot12 it, just in case anyone looks for ROT13.")
> Coming from an ex-Ritz camera employee, if you want to go through the work of engineering all of that, printing them out and all the rest of that work Ritz does, it will cost you more (in time and materials) then it will to have Ritz do it in 1 hour.
To which I say "Print them out? WTF d00d?"
Ritz' target market is "Less-technically-inclined people who want to print their pictures out and look at them in photo albums with their friends."
There is another market out there, however: the market for "Ten-dollar 2-megapixel digicams, and who the hell ever prints their photos to dead trees anyways when it's cheaper/faster/easier to just email the pics to your friends?"
The relative sizes of these two markets is what will determine whether Ritz' business plan succeeds or fails.
Netpliance of I-Opener fame made the same mistake - their target market was "people for whom AOL was too complicated and who didn't want to buy a $799 eek-its-scary e-machine computer thingy when they could have a $99 flat-screen appliance that'd give them the ability to do email and teh intarweb for $20/month."
Part of why Netpliance failed was that there was a small - but sufficiently large - market of people who thought "$99 flat-panel PCs that can be h4x0r3d to run Linux! Wow, I gotta get me some of that! The parts alone are worth $500!"
Moral of the story: Don't be nearsighted when it comes to your target market. Think ahead and make sure you're aware of any other markets, particularly non-target markets that break your business model.
> No, it is not totally legal in all cases. It is illegal to charge blacks higher rent because you think they'll trash the place, or charge the elderly more for auto insurance, even though they're a higher risk.
Interesting precedent you cite.
Is it legal to charge blacks more for basketball tickets than one charges whites? (Or to charge whites more than blacks at NASCAR events?)
If you're about to say "no", what about "Ladies' night" at your local watering hole - males pay a $5 cover charge, and females get in free?
And if you still say "no", how about "We don't even have skin color, name, or address in our database of loyalty-card purchases. But we found can charge higher prices for watermelon, chicken, and collard greens to consumers who also happen to be regular purchasers of Jheri Curl hair care products. Likewise, our data shows that we can charge a premium on Pabst Blue Ribbon, Budweiser, and 'wifebeater' undershirts to consumers who are regular purchasers of NASCAR memorabilia. Race has nothing to do with it."
Even if we assume the real-world data actually supports the stereotypes I (ab)used in my example, the freaky part is that race really doesn't enter into the equation. The goal is to maximize margins from everyone - a black guy who drinks cheap beer and loves NASCAR events gets gouged the same way as his white-trash neighbor:)
Insofar as accusations of racism go, your grocery store shouldn't care if your skin is pink or brown, so long as your money's green.
> Klingon, difficult you think? >Warriors and linguists, Klingons think they are. >Speaking well a warrior not be making. > Grammar lessons enlightening be, grammar enforcement threats darkness be leading to.
> What's the problem? When he gets back to the hotel at night, he wants to watch a movie. Big
deal.
I'll tell you what the big deal is! The big deal is that watching movies is STEALING!
If the hotel's TV offers a chance to pay $7.95 to see Dirty Harry, and you bring in your own DVD of Dirty Harry, and your own laptop, so that you can watch the movie without paying the hotel, you're STEALING MONEY RIGHT OUT OF THE INNKEEPER'S WALLET!
And don't even think about buying a six-pack of Coke at the corner store for $2.99 when you're supposed to be paying $4.50 for a 6-oz bottle out of the minibar! (To say nothing of having the unmitigated gall to chill your six-pack with hotel-supplied ice!)
> No wonder it "coalesced" into a movement. Before, it was just a few random, scattered geeks. Then, when they were running with the idea, they said to themselves "Hey . . . if I could get a bigger, stronger, artificial bicep, then what about my . .."
> >
And suddenly, it's a movement.
Walk into the shrink wherever you are, just walk in, say "Shrink -- you can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne Restaurant" -- and walk out.
You know, if one Slashdotter, just one Slashdotter does it, they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.
And if two Slashdotters do it -- in harmony -- they may think that they're both trollin' and they won't take either of them.
And if THREE Slashdotters do it! Can you imagine three Slashdotters walkin' in, singin' a bar of "Cyberdyne Restaurant" and walkin' out? They might think it's a HACKER CONSPIRACY.
And can you imagine FIFTY Slashdotters a day? I said FIFTY Slashdotters a day -- walkin' in, singin ' a bar of "Cyberdyne Restaruant" and walkin' out? Friends, they may think it's a movement, and that's what it is.
The Cyberdyne Systems T-800 Model 101 Trans-Humanist Movement!
And all you gotta do to join it is to mod me (+1, Funny) the next time the mod points come 'round on the thread view. With feelin'.
You can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne Restaurant (or be an Alice!)
You can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne Restaurant
Implants, fuel cells, and neural hacks,
Muscle over bones made outa railroad track,
Oh, you can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne restaurant...
> There is no more effecient entity for gathering information and predicting events than a free market where information provides the edge needed for personal profit.
Agreed on this and everything else you said in your post. I'm an active trader who saw the bizarre option behavior and damn near traded on it simply because the rest of the market was in lousy shape that week, so it was a cinch that it was a leaked earnings warning or impending downgrade. I decided not to make the trade because the implied volatility was pricing in what I figured was a damn near impossible move down. I mean, even if you know the stock's gonna fall, if you overpay for the puts, you still lose money. And there's just no way it's gonna fall that much... so I scratched my head, put the airlines on my radar screen as a sector to watch, and went back to watching the rest of the market. And then the shit hit the fan.
During the week in which trading was halted, I found myself periodically *screaming* at the television that someone, somewhere, had damn well better be spending this week looking at [things I thought of that I've SNIPPED], to say nothing of things I hadn't thought of.
For what little it's worth (now that the idea of integrating a market with intelligence data as an early-warning system been dropped due to a PR blowback), thanks for being part of it. You did good.
> As their senior DBA, I have 4 words for you. > >"I do not recall"
And if it comes to court and the attorney for the plaintiff gives you any hassle for that, there's always "...because DHS signed the contract with Microsoft that required the database be on MS Access. Of course it doesn't recall!":)
> Reminds me of the old joke about two efficient-market economists walking down the street. Economist one: "Look - there's a $50 bill on the sidewalk" Economist two: "Don't be stupid, if it was somebody would have picked it up already" I reckon that's about the predictive power of this initiative.
On the Street, the joke is usually told as "a trader and an economist" - not two economists. The point (and the lesson) of the joke -- markets aren't 100% efficient 100% of the time. Only economists believe they are.
Trader: "Look - there's a $50 bill on the sidewalk".
Economist: "Don't be stupid, if it was somebody would have picked it up already."
Trader: *picks up $50*.
Most jokes (really, more like Buddhist koans than jokes, which is what makes them so delightful) of this nature are that the aggressive trader wins, because everyone else is slow and/or backwards in their thinking. But there's one that's a nice twist on this:
"The difference between traders and investors"
Young bull: "I'm bored! Let's run up the hill and fuck one of them cows!"
Old bull: "Let's walk up the hill and fuck 'em all."
> Look at how unpredictably the stock markets behave already. When was the last time a major drop or surge in the NYSE or NASDAQ was accurately predicted by the majority of investors?
Indexes, probably never.
Individual stocks? Multiple times a day during earnings season, and about 10% of the time before any given takeover/merger announcement. Typically there's a surge (or drop) in price on massive volume compared to recent trading.
Rumors leak.
You can't trade on insider information, but you can trade on rumors, provided those rumors aren't coming from insiders. When I see changes in price and volume that cannot be rationally explained, and I see merger rumors in the business press, and the rumored merger makes business sense at a price higher than that at which the company's trading, sometimes I'll put on a trade. Sometimes I get lucky and the deal goes through at a substantial premium. Sometimes the deal goes through - but at the price that had already been leaked. Sometimes I get unlucky and the rumors turn out to be bullshit. To date, I've been more lucky than unlucky. I pays my money and I takes my chances.
But to answer the broader form of your initial question - when was the last time a free market system composed of millions of individual traders paying their money and taking their chances - predicted specific events within days of their happening? It happens every day.
For readers who have a philosophical or ideological problem with the notion that a "free market system" composed of "individual traders" is somehow able to "predict" events, shift gears for a bit.
If I told you a distributed computing network composed of millions of individual price-estimating nodes had the emergent property of being able to predict prices in advance, you probably wouldn't blink - yet that's all a market is.
> The people who knew about the hijackings in September would just shrug off money. Not everyone in the world thinks money is special.
I'm only going to say this once, but I'm going to say it loudly.
You sure as fuck weren't watching the implied volatility and put/call ratios on airlines the week before 9/11.
If you don't know what that sentence means, you need to do some research. A lot more research. The story has since been picked up by conspiracy theorists, and the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty much nil. Dig back to September and October 2001, and read the financial press instead. You can find a lot of good starting points in the comments of this Slashdot article.
For the record, I believe (on circumstancial evidence - namely the rapidity with which the story was buried, leaving only conspiracy theorists to increase the noise-to-signal ratio,) that the SEC did the Right Thing - turned their conclusions over to other organizations who could ensure that the Right Thing (namely, outside of SEC jurisdiction) would eventually get done.
Also for the record, as I don't have a need to know, I can only hope that my speculation outlined above is correct. I do look forward to finding out when it's all declassified some decades hence. Gonna make for some damn interesting reading.
> When I was working at a software store we got one of the Barney's in. We used to cover up the eyes of Barney for a few mintues at a time just to hear the complaints that he would start saying.
Yeah, that Barney... we had one at the office for a few weeks. Near-universal reaction was "this thing is evil".
Did anyone ever succeed in h4x0r1ng one? We were thinking that if we reverse-engineered some of the protocols, we could get a bunch of them to talk to each other and do evil Skynettish things, but our "project" never got past the "that'd be cool in a sick sort of way" stage.
> Wait a second. You are claiming that someone making $40,000 a year is also spending half of it
on fast food and gadgets? This may be true if they live with their parents and have no dependants, but it sure isn't true for most people.
I dunno, how about a family of four, for whom the "food" portion is likely a higher proportion of their expenses than for the single-no-dependents guy?
Fast food is expensive stuff. Even if you're starving to death and need to maximize calories-per-dollar, you're better off buying a stick of butter, a pound of sugar, and a small bag of flour to stick it all together.
Or burgers - Lean ground beef: $3.00/lb ($0.75 for 1/4lb). Egg - $0.10 each. Onion - $0.25. Buns - $0.25 each. Spices, condiments, electricity/gas, $0.25 tops. That's a $6-8 ($8 in Silicon Valley;) restaurant burger, dripping with juices and sticking out the side of the bun, for a little over the cost of a Whopper.
If you gotta drive to the Burger King as opposed to picking it up at work, doing it at home is even cheaper:) If it's time you're worried about, put in one hour on the weekend to make 2-3 pounds' worth, then freeze the patties. On Burger Night, thaw in fridge starting the morning of Burger Night. Total prep time from thawed patty to kickass burger = 15-20 min, tops.
I can whip up a batch of cookies in under an hour. Same calories as store-bought, no artificial ingredients, comparable quality, and about a quarter of the price.
I've got no sprog, but believe that food preferences are learned behavior. If you raise your sprog on homebrew good food, and they probably won't even like the fast food as much.
> The surgeon said he couldn't drink that night because he had surgery the next day. He joked how you wouldn't be able to do that in the US, ie schedule your transplant surgeries in advance.
Hence the obligatory Tienanmen joke:
"Remember that dude in Tienanmen square who stood in front of the tank? Damn, he had balls! Wish I had balls like that!"
"Well, as the next best thing, my Grandpa's got his liver!":-)
> Another way to look at it is that an already rich guy only got 10% more rich, and now has to deal with the daily hassles of taking public transit in CA (yes, I've done it and it sucks), not being able to go with coworkers to restaraunts at lunch, not being able to go with friends to the movies, etc.
> > And, probably the worst part is that he is now sitting on that money instead of redistributing it to the mall workers/mechanics in the area, which hurts the economy.
Still a third way to look at it is that at the 39% marginal tax rate (CA State + US Fed + SS + SDI) that a $40,000/year worker is paying, damn near anyone can get themselves the same $20,000 a year raise by doing the same things.
And when a guy making $40,000/year does it, he's given himself a 50% raise. Good thing there's people like you around encouraging people to live beyond their means. Can't have the "already rich" $40,000 a year types "get more rich", can we?:-)
> Heh. Reminds me of the cows they have at the University of Idaho that have "windows" installed
to see their stomachs (article here or google for more info)
> I make close to $200K. I parked the Navigator and Viper and started taking Caltrain. I save $200 a month on gasoline, and I get work done on the train instead of sitting on hwys 17-85-101 on my way to work. Instead of the $10 I spent on two lattes per day, I now brew my own coffee in the morning and carry a thermos. Thats another $250 per month. Movies every weekend? Fuck that; NETFLIX rocks, and I can make a dozen hotdogs for what one costs at the Mountain view cinema. $50 per month. > >Going to Nola's or Baha Fresh everyday for lunch? Not anymore dude. thats $300+ a month reduced to $100 by bringing my lunch from home. Now that I ride the train, I dont stop at Fry's twice a week to "just look around" like I used to tell my wife. An easy $150 a month saved just by staying out of the book/CD/game aisles. If I need something now, Ebay has it. Drinks after work with my team? Once a week instead of 3-4 times. Thats another $100 saved.
Now dig this. With combined California + Federal taxes on $200K at around 43%, that after-tax savings is equivalent to a pre-tax salary raise of $20000 - about 10%.
> If you can give up some of the ego stuff, you can live just fine in the Valley.
Preach on, brother. You just got yourself a 10% raise, with zero change in your standard of living. (Well, apart from no longer "just looking around" at Fry's, but hey, we all gotta make sacrifices. I'd spend less time "just looking around" at Fry's too, if someone was giving me a $20000 raise for it:-)
> If everyone took jobs for $28k, who is going to pay for universal healthcare?
If everyone got rid of universal healthcare, universal education, universal pyramid scheme retirement plans, universal basket-weaving classes, maybe more of us would be able to live on jobs that only paid $28K:)
Government is really good at only one
thing, and that is to break your leg, then hand you a crutch and say, 'Look, if it weren't
for the government you wouldn't be able to walk,'
- Harry Browne, Bigtime Libertarian Nutbar, but a Bigtime Libertarian Nutbar Who Had A Pretty Damn Good Point
> You can't buy a baby in the United States," said Caplan. "... But you can buy the sperm, you can buy the egg and you can rent the uterus."
...at $5000/year in a call center in Bangalore, but spend all the money and hassle doing that, when it's cheaper, and all of us horny nerds are happy to download our pr0n and, uh... telecommute?:)
Slashdot Mirror
"The Pope! And how many divisions does he have?"
- Josef Stalin
> 2. Installs 'Personal webservices'
Oops. I knew about #1, because there's no way to turn it off at install time. It's the first thing I do after setting up networking.
I also knew about #2, but whenever I installed 9x for myself or others, I always did a full custom install and said "WTF does $USER need a web server on this box for?" and unclicked it. So no IIS hole built-in.
So I'll stand partially corrected on this one. But I think the original point -- which is that without a firewall, a consumer 9x box can still be hardened (albeit "hardened" in the sense of having gone from liquid to Jello) in ways that an XP box can't -- stands.
>ncadg_ip_udp : UDP port 135
>ncacn_np : \pipe\epmapper, normally accessible via SMB null session on TCP ports 139 and 445
Etc. Etc. Etc.
The ironic part is that a Win9x box doesn't run these services. Or any other services - to use a technical term, in comparison to XP and 2K, an out-of-the-box 9x install doesn't listen to jack shit. If you do the 30-second tweak to disable/unbind the NetBIOS crap, you can safely (!) run 9x without a firewall because such a box doesn't listen to 80, 135, 137, 139, 445 etc. Unpatched. (Well, as long as you don't use Outleak Excess or Internet Exploiter, but that's just plain sanity :)
XP? 2K? Nuh-uh. You can disable UPnP hole (SSDP/1900) from the Services panel, but I have yet to find a way (well, short of a firewall :) of stopping an XP box from listening to 135 and 445. After all, Joe Sixpack who owns just one computer obviously, always wants to be able to network it with NT 4.0 boxen over a LAN. But there's just no way of saying "Look, XP, I don't do that kind of kink. Ever. So stop listening to those ports".
Thanks, Bill. No, really. Thanks a bunch. Other than a noble desire to take one for the team by jumping on the proverbial grenade, why the hell did HomeSec chose these twits as their vendor of choice?
My bet: Standard ports, nonstandard pinouts. Standard protocol. Standard format for the data on the media.
Rationale:
1) Nonstandard ports = cost to develop a new controller from the ground up.
2) Nonstandard pinouts = no cost.
3) Nonstandard protocol that can't be trivially reverse-engineered: cost to code and test.
4) Nonstandard format for the data on the media: Cost to develop controllers and firmware.
Summary: "Oh, fuck it, use a two-pin connector and a standard USB controller. We'll supply +5 and GND at the photo lab. Nobody'll ever suspect it's USB with only two pins! Rot13 the bits as they go onto the chip. Nobody'll ever look for permutations of known plaintext like 'JFIF'. Everything else can be the reference design from the chipset's datasheet."
(Alternate: "Oh, fuck it, use a 3-pin headphone jack and RS-232 signals. Nobody'll ever guess. And Rot12 it, just in case anyone looks for ROT13.")
To which I say "Print them out? WTF d00d?"
Ritz' target market is "Less-technically-inclined people who want to print their pictures out and look at them in photo albums with their friends."
There is another market out there, however: the market for "Ten-dollar 2-megapixel digicams, and who the hell ever prints their photos to dead trees anyways when it's cheaper/faster/easier to just email the pics to your friends?"
The relative sizes of these two markets is what will determine whether Ritz' business plan succeeds or fails.
Netpliance of I-Opener fame made the same mistake - their target market was "people for whom AOL was too complicated and who didn't want to buy a $799 eek-its-scary e-machine computer thingy when they could have a $99 flat-screen appliance that'd give them the ability to do email and teh intarweb for $20/month."
Part of why Netpliance failed was that there was a small - but sufficiently large - market of people who thought "$99 flat-panel PCs that can be h4x0r3d to run Linux! Wow, I gotta get me some of that! The parts alone are worth $500!"
Moral of the story: Don't be nearsighted when it comes to your target market. Think ahead and make sure you're aware of any other markets, particularly non-target markets that break your business model.
Interesting precedent you cite.
Is it legal to charge blacks more for basketball tickets than one charges whites? (Or to charge whites more than blacks at NASCAR events?)
If you're about to say "no", what about "Ladies' night" at your local watering hole - males pay a $5 cover charge, and females get in free?
And if you still say "no", how about "We don't even have skin color, name, or address in our database of loyalty-card purchases. But we found can charge higher prices for watermelon, chicken, and collard greens to consumers who also happen to be regular purchasers of Jheri Curl hair care products. Likewise, our data shows that we can charge a premium on Pabst Blue Ribbon, Budweiser, and 'wifebeater' undershirts to consumers who are regular purchasers of NASCAR memorabilia. Race has nothing to do with it."
Even if we assume the real-world data actually supports the stereotypes I (ab)used in my example, the freaky part is that race really doesn't enter into the equation. The goal is to maximize margins from everyone - a black guy who drinks cheap beer and loves NASCAR events gets gouged the same way as his white-trash neighbor :)
Insofar as accusations of racism go, your grocery store shouldn't care if your skin is pink or brown, so long as your money's green.
>Warriors and linguists, Klingons think they are.
>Speaking well a warrior not be making.
> Grammar lessons enlightening be, grammar enforcement threats darkness be leading to.
Klingons, like overgrown Yoda they sound!
I'll tell you what the big deal is! The big deal is that watching movies is STEALING!
If the hotel's TV offers a chance to pay $7.95 to see Dirty Harry, and you bring in your own DVD of Dirty Harry, and your own laptop, so that you can watch the movie without paying the hotel, you're STEALING MONEY RIGHT OUT OF THE INNKEEPER'S WALLET!
And don't even think about buying a six-pack of Coke at the corner store for $2.99 when you're supposed to be paying $4.50 for a 6-oz bottle out of the minibar! (To say nothing of having the unmitigated gall to chill your six-pack with hotel-supplied ice!)
>
> And suddenly, it's a movement.
Walk into the shrink wherever you are, just walk in, say "Shrink -- you can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne Restaurant" -- and walk out.
You know, if one Slashdotter, just one Slashdotter does it, they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.
And if two Slashdotters do it -- in harmony -- they may think that they're both trollin' and they won't take either of them.
And if THREE Slashdotters do it! Can you imagine three Slashdotters walkin' in, singin' a bar of "Cyberdyne Restaurant" and walkin' out? They might think it's a HACKER CONSPIRACY.
And can you imagine FIFTY Slashdotters a day? I said FIFTY Slashdotters a day -- walkin' in, singin ' a bar of "Cyberdyne Restaruant" and walkin' out? Friends, they may think it's a movement, and that's what it is.
The Cyberdyne Systems T-800 Model 101 Trans-Humanist Movement!
And all you gotta do to join it is to mod me (+1, Funny) the next time the mod points come 'round on the thread view. With feelin'.
You can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne Restaurant (or be an Alice!)
You can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne Restaurant
Implants, fuel cells, and neural hacks,
Muscle over bones made outa railroad track,
Oh, you can mod any parts you want at Cyberdyne restaurant...
Agreed on this and everything else you said in your post. I'm an active trader who saw the bizarre option behavior and damn near traded on it simply because the rest of the market was in lousy shape that week, so it was a cinch that it was a leaked earnings warning or impending downgrade. I decided not to make the trade because the implied volatility was pricing in what I figured was a damn near impossible move down. I mean, even if you know the stock's gonna fall, if you overpay for the puts, you still lose money. And there's just no way it's gonna fall that much... so I scratched my head, put the airlines on my radar screen as a sector to watch, and went back to watching the rest of the market. And then the shit hit the fan.
During the week in which trading was halted, I found myself periodically *screaming* at the television that someone, somewhere, had damn well better be spending this week looking at [things I thought of that I've SNIPPED], to say nothing of things I hadn't thought of.
For what little it's worth (now that the idea of integrating a market with intelligence data as an early-warning system been dropped due to a PR blowback), thanks for being part of it. You did good.
I meant it literally when I said that my head figuratively exploded upon reading your comment!
>
>"I do not recall"
And if it comes to court and the attorney for the plaintiff gives you any hassle for that, there's always "...because DHS signed the contract with Microsoft that required the database be on MS Access. Of course it doesn't recall!" :)
On the Street, the joke is usually told as "a trader and an economist" - not two economists. The point (and the lesson) of the joke -- markets aren't 100% efficient 100% of the time. Only economists believe they are.
Trader: "Look - there's a $50 bill on the sidewalk".
Economist: "Don't be stupid, if it was somebody would have picked it up already."
Trader: *picks up $50*.
Most jokes (really, more like Buddhist koans than jokes, which is what makes them so delightful) of this nature are that the aggressive trader wins, because everyone else is slow and/or backwards in their thinking. But there's one that's a nice twist on this:
"The difference between traders and investors"
Young bull: "I'm bored! Let's run up the hill and fuck one of them cows!"
Old bull: "Let's walk up the hill and fuck 'em all."
Indexes, probably never.
Individual stocks? Multiple times a day during earnings season, and about 10% of the time before any given takeover/merger announcement. Typically there's a surge (or drop) in price on massive volume compared to recent trading.
Rumors leak.
You can't trade on insider information, but you can trade on rumors, provided those rumors aren't coming from insiders. When I see changes in price and volume that cannot be rationally explained, and I see merger rumors in the business press, and the rumored merger makes business sense at a price higher than that at which the company's trading, sometimes I'll put on a trade. Sometimes I get lucky and the deal goes through at a substantial premium. Sometimes the deal goes through - but at the price that had already been leaked. Sometimes I get unlucky and the rumors turn out to be bullshit. To date, I've been more lucky than unlucky. I pays my money and I takes my chances.
But to answer the broader form of your initial question - when was the last time a free market system composed of millions of individual traders paying their money and taking their chances - predicted specific events within days of their happening? It happens every day.
For readers who have a philosophical or ideological problem with the notion that a "free market system" composed of "individual traders" is somehow able to "predict" events, shift gears for a bit.
If I told you a distributed computing network composed of millions of individual price-estimating nodes had the emergent property of being able to predict prices in advance, you probably wouldn't blink - yet that's all a market is.
I'm only going to say this once, but I'm going to say it loudly.
You sure as fuck weren't watching the implied volatility and put/call ratios on airlines the week before 9/11.
If you don't know what that sentence means, you need to do some research. A lot more research. The story has since been picked up by conspiracy theorists, and the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty much nil. Dig back to September and October 2001, and read the financial press instead. You can find a lot of good starting points in the comments of this Slashdot article.
For the record, I believe (on circumstancial evidence - namely the rapidity with which the story was buried, leaving only conspiracy theorists to increase the noise-to-signal ratio,) that the SEC did the Right Thing - turned their conclusions over to other organizations who could ensure that the Right Thing (namely, outside of SEC jurisdiction) would eventually get done.
Also for the record, as I don't have a need to know, I can only hope that my speculation outlined above is correct. I do look forward to finding out when it's all declassified some decades hence. Gonna make for some damn interesting reading.
Yeah, that Barney... we had one at the office for a few weeks. Near-universal reaction was "this thing is evil".
Did anyone ever succeed in h4x0r1ng one? We were thinking that if we reverse-engineered some of the protocols, we could get a bunch of them to talk to each other and do evil Skynettish things, but our "project" never got past the "that'd be cool in a sick sort of way" stage.
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> Don't worry, it is programmed to avoid shade so it won't go where the Sun doesn't shine.
"And how does this help me?"
- The Goatse Guy.
I dunno, how about a family of four, for whom the "food" portion is likely a higher proportion of their expenses than for the single-no-dependents guy?
Fast food is expensive stuff. Even if you're starving to death and need to maximize calories-per-dollar, you're better off buying a stick of butter, a pound of sugar, and a small bag of flour to stick it all together.
Or burgers - Lean ground beef: $3.00/lb ($0.75 for 1/4lb). Egg - $0.10 each. Onion - $0.25. Buns - $0.25 each. Spices, condiments, electricity/gas, $0.25 tops. That's a $6-8 ($8 in Silicon Valley ;) restaurant burger, dripping with juices and sticking out the side of the bun, for a little over the cost of a Whopper.
If you gotta drive to the Burger King as opposed to picking it up at work, doing it at home is even cheaper :) If it's time you're worried about, put in one hour on the weekend to make 2-3 pounds' worth, then freeze the patties. On Burger Night, thaw in fridge starting the morning of Burger Night. Total prep time from thawed patty to kickass burger = 15-20 min, tops.
I can whip up a batch of cookies in under an hour. Same calories as store-bought, no artificial ingredients, comparable quality, and about a quarter of the price.
I've got no sprog, but believe that food preferences are learned behavior. If you raise your sprog on homebrew good food, and they probably won't even like the fast food as much.
Hence the obligatory Tienanmen joke:
"Remember that dude in Tienanmen square who stood in front of the tank? Damn, he had balls! Wish I had balls like that!"
"Well, as the next best thing, my Grandpa's got his liver!" :-)
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> And, probably the worst part is that he is now sitting on that money instead of redistributing it to the mall workers/mechanics in the area, which hurts the economy.
Still a third way to look at it is that at the 39% marginal tax rate (CA State + US Fed + SS + SDI) that a $40,000/year worker is paying, damn near anyone can get themselves the same $20,000 a year raise by doing the same things.
And when a guy making $40,000/year does it, he's given himself a 50% raise. Good thing there's people like you around encouraging people to live beyond their means. Can't have the "already rich" $40,000 a year types "get more rich", can we? :-)
Wow, talk about case-modding a Gateway PC!
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>Going to Nola's or Baha Fresh everyday for lunch? Not anymore dude. thats $300+ a month reduced to $100 by bringing my lunch from home. Now that I ride the train, I dont stop at Fry's twice a week to "just look around" like I used to tell my wife. An easy $150 a month saved just by staying out of the book/CD/game aisles. If I need something now, Ebay has it. Drinks after work with my team? Once a week instead of 3-4 times. Thats another $100 saved.
After-tax, he's saving $200+250+50+200+150+100 = $950/month.
Now dig this. With combined California + Federal taxes on $200K at around 43%, that after-tax savings is equivalent to a pre-tax salary raise of $20000 - about 10%.
> If you can give up some of the ego stuff, you can live just fine in the Valley.
Preach on, brother. You just got yourself a 10% raise, with zero change in your standard of living. (Well, apart from no longer "just looking around" at Fry's, but hey, we all gotta make sacrifices. I'd spend less time "just looking around" at Fry's too, if someone was giving me a $20000 raise for it :-)
Suggested summer read: The Millionaire Next Door: Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy.
If everyone got rid of universal healthcare, universal education, universal pyramid scheme retirement plans, universal basket-weaving classes, maybe more of us would be able to live on jobs that only paid $28K :)
Hey, Slashdot editors, it's another dupe!