It really brings home an appreciation for the human race. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about environmental damage we really are the only chance for earth based biodiversity to survive.
Almost anything can be done if you don't care what it costs. What I don't see here (or in the similar Apple and Google announcements) is any indication of what their cost target is. Does anyone have any idea what their electricity costs need to be (or what the average datacenter revenue per megaWatt is)?
They are underwriters, They are paid to do this. Most of this money will come from Facebook, either upfront in commissions, or now, in fees.
And, of course, they will soon sell those shares, and recoup something, My back of the envelope guess is that their actual losses are likely to be $ 1 billion, not $ 11 billion.
As I posted above, I bet that there are underwriterrs meetings going on right now, to figure out how to best ding Facebook for the debacle.
I can't really understand why you're saying that share price going down on IPO is a troubling signal. During normal operation, sure, but on IPO? It just means that the company didn't undervalue themselves and sell their shares at too low prices.
If I were a shareholder before the IPO and the per share price would had doubled, that would mean half of my potential profit and ownership lost.
Say what ? If you were a shareholder before the IPO, you make your money by selling your shares. For a busy stock IPO, unless you are a big institutional investor or a principal, it will take time for you to do so, maybe a day or so. If the post-IPO bounce is positive, that delay means you make more money. If the bounce is negative, you make less money. If the share price doubled the first day, and you sold on the second, then you just doubled your return, and are likely to consider that a good thing. With the Facebook IPO, not so much.
Now, factor in people with options to buy at $ 38. My understanding is that that is a common reward companies give out just before an IPO. (You exercise the option at $ 38, and if the price is, say, $48, sell immediately and take your $10 / share.) Assuming Facebook did this, those people are likely to have been unable to exercise their options, and now are underwater holding basically worthless paper. They are unlikely to be pleased by this turn of events.
The underwriters spent all of Friday shoveling out money to prop up the share price, keeping it from falling below $38 / share. I don't think that they did this just for PR, but to make sure that Facebook made some minimum return (and/or maybe to protect the Venture investors or the founders). I bet Morgan Stanley is having meetings this very day to discuss how much of that half a billion dollars or so they shoveled into the IPO can be recouped from Facebook.
In military planning, intentions count for nothing. The Russians would never trust our statements about our intentions and, heck, neither would we if these were Russian installations. We don't even trust the British.
If you are the Park Service, and your budget gets cut, one ploy is to close the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument, not some campground in South Dakota, hoping to get a reaction and thus get the money back.
Sounds like the University of Florida did the same thing.
Space travel has a long history of "extremely rare if not practically impossible" issues coming up to bite you. Missions have been lost because of a single missing comma in the code. So, there is reason for this caution, and neither you nor Elon Musk is going to be able to change it.
Well, I am no a lawyer, but this is not automatic. Suppose the law is passed, and it does violate the Constitution. Then you have to have standing (i.e., show that you are harmed in some way, which can be hard to do in these cases where you don't know what it being done to you behind the scenes), and then sue, and then take it to some high court (i.e., multiple rounds of appeals). Some years (and quite a few dollars) later, if you are lucky, you have overturned the law. If not, you've made things worse.
It's much better to stop it at the beginning than to wait to see what the judicial sausage machinery comes up with.
You know, there were fireballs during the cold war. The universe didn't stop just because of our geopolitical situation. I can remember hearing of one blast (a meteor over the ocean near South Africa) that caused discussion as being a possible test of a very small nuke. And, famously, the astrophysical gamma ray bursts were first detected by satellites sent up to detect gamma ray bursts from nuclear explosions. Somehow, we survived all these false alarms.
There have got to be pieces on the ground from this, probably in the desert East of the blast. If you live in the area, I would start by looking on your roof, parking lot, any flat area with no natural rocks.
- there is no completely satisfactory theory of the Bullet Cluster and friends (such as A520 and DLSCL J0916.2+2951, although I am sure there will be a lot more to come) using any model, so I think it is premature to say they are conclusive and
- The vector field in TeVeS may be able to explain the gravitational lensing of these clusters.
What is less clear is whether this can be done without some dark matter or some field that acts like additional Dark Matter (on extra-galactic scales). One of the attractions of MOND is that explains many galactic rotation curves with one free parameter (not one per galaxy, one). Requiring more parameters (or an additional role for some sort of actual dark matter) would be disappointing, but it will not by itself disprove the theory.
It is disappointing that the original paper doesn't not appear to consider MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) or TeVeS (a Tensor-Vector-Scalar theory of gravity, the relativistic version of MOND).
The way to think about Dark Matter is it represents a problem with physics, namely excess force in the dynamics of galactic sized and larger objects. We don't know if the problem is with quantum field theories or with general relativity. The first possibility leads to theories such as Cold Dark Matter (CDM) or Weakly Interactive Massive Particles (WIMPs); the second to something like MOND / TeVeS. As literally pretty much all we know about Dark Matter is that there is excess force, neither approach can be ruled out at present.
So, it's disappointing that they didn't consider the gravitational alternative. It's not clear from the paper whether or not MOND would survive this test. Unlike CDM or WIMP, MOND effects should be present at all places in the disk, so the real question is, are they compatible with these observations?
Slashdot Mirror
A half billion years here, a half billion years there, pretty soon you've added up to some real time.
It really brings home an appreciation for the human race. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about environmental damage we really are the only chance for earth based biodiversity to survive.
Don't be so sure.
Can this concept work at scale?"
Almost anything can be done if you don't care what it costs. What I don't see here (or in the similar Apple and Google announcements) is any indication of what their cost target is. Does anyone have any idea what their electricity costs need to be (or what the average datacenter revenue per megaWatt is)?
Four servers is a nerd's basement.
I have more than that in my basement. Think I'll get some solar cells and put out a press release.
You get Kangaroo Courts where the laws are made up to fit the ends of the Court.
Which is exactly what we have now.
Ah, the legal wisdom of Antonin Scalia. The man isn't fit to judge traffic court.
They are underwriters, They are paid to do this. Most of this money will come from Facebook, either upfront in commissions, or now, in fees.
And, of course, they will soon sell those shares, and recoup something, My back of the envelope guess is that their actual losses are likely to be $ 1 billion, not $ 11 billion.
As I posted above, I bet that there are underwriterrs meetings going on right now, to figure out how to best ding Facebook for the debacle.
I don't think you understand how IPO's work.
I can't really understand why you're saying that share price going down on IPO is a troubling signal. During normal operation, sure, but on IPO? It just means that the company didn't undervalue themselves and sell their shares at too low prices.
If I were a shareholder before the IPO and the per share price would had doubled, that would mean half of my potential profit and ownership lost.
Say what ? If you were a shareholder before the IPO, you make your money by selling your shares. For a busy stock IPO, unless you are a big institutional investor or a principal, it will take time for you to do so, maybe a day or so. If the post-IPO bounce is positive, that delay means you make more money. If the bounce is negative, you make less money. If the share price doubled the first day, and you sold on the second, then you just doubled your return, and are likely to consider that a good thing. With the Facebook IPO, not so much.
Now, factor in people with options to buy at $ 38. My understanding is that that is a common reward companies give out just before an IPO. (You exercise the
option at $ 38, and if the price is, say, $48, sell immediately and take your $10 / share.) Assuming Facebook did this, those people are likely to have been unable to exercise their options, and now are underwater holding basically worthless paper. They are unlikely to be pleased by this turn of events.
The underwriters spent all of Friday shoveling out money to prop up the share price, keeping it from falling below $38 / share. I don't think that they did this just for PR, but to make sure that Facebook made some minimum return (and/or maybe to protect the Venture investors or the founders). I bet Morgan Stanley is having meetings this very day to discuss how much of that half a billion dollars or so they shoveled into the IPO can be recouped from Facebook.
It's not a ghost town if it has never been occupied. This would be a sham city, like the sham Paris of World War I.
There is a long, long history in cryptography of systems that were provably secure in principle proving not to be so in practice.
I'll believe any quantum crypto system is secure after attackers have been pounding on it for a decade or so.
"It's not a hologram, it's just Pepper's Ghost."
I am beginning to feel like I should put that on my tombstone.
This is kind of like the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.
Not entirely. The Cuban missile crisis also involved US missiles in Turkey aimed at you know who.
How would the USA feel about Russian missiles stationed in Mexico close to the border?
Well, we have experience of how the US felt about Russian missiles stationed in Cuba. DIdn't go over well.
In military planning, intentions count for nothing. The Russians would never trust our statements about our intentions and, heck, neither would we if these were Russian installations. We don't even trust the British.
If you are the Park Service, and your budget gets cut, one ploy is to close the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument, not some campground in South Dakota, hoping to get a reaction and thus get the money back.
Sounds like the University of Florida did the same thing.
I knew about Steve Jobs "last dime" (which, sadly, I guess he has indeed spent by now), and so when I read
Tim Cook Prefers Settling To Suing and Has a Huge Quarter
I figured that must be some obscure reference to the size of either his warchest (for suing) or his pockets (for settling).
Well, it did get me to read the summary, so I guess it worked as a title.
Space travel has a long history of "extremely rare if not practically impossible" issues coming up to bite you. Missions have been lost because of a single missing comma in the code. So, there is reason for this caution, and neither you nor Elon Musk is going to be able to change it.
Well, I am no a lawyer, but this is not automatic. Suppose the law is passed, and it does violate the Constitution. Then you have to have standing (i.e., show that you are harmed in some way, which can be hard to do in these cases where you don't know what it being done to you behind the scenes), and then sue, and then take it to some high court (i.e., multiple rounds of appeals). Some years (and quite a few dollars) later, if you are lucky, you have overturned the law. If not, you've made things worse.
It's much better to stop it at the beginning than to wait to see what the judicial sausage machinery comes up with.
You obviously have no experience with (or chose to ignore) politics in the former Confederate states.
You know, there were fireballs during the cold war. The universe didn't stop just because of our geopolitical situation. I can remember hearing of one blast (a meteor over the ocean near South Africa) that caused discussion as being a possible test of a very small nuke. And, famously, the astrophysical gamma ray bursts were first detected by satellites sent up to detect gamma ray bursts from nuclear explosions. Somehow, we survived all these false alarms.
There have got to be pieces on the ground from this, probably in the desert East of the blast. If you live in the area, I would start by looking on your roof, parking lot, any flat area with no natural rocks.
My understanding is that
- there is no completely satisfactory theory of the Bullet Cluster and friends (such as A520 and DLSCL J0916.2+2951, although I am sure there will be a lot more to come) using any model, so I think it is premature to say they are conclusive and
- The vector field in TeVeS may be able to explain the gravitational lensing of these clusters.
What is less clear is whether this can be done without some dark matter or some field that acts like additional Dark Matter (on extra-galactic scales). One of the attractions of MOND is that explains many galactic rotation curves with one free parameter (not one per galaxy, one). Requiring more parameters (or an additional role for some sort of actual dark matter) would be disappointing, but it will not by itself disprove the theory.
See Can Mond take a Bullet and Gravitational Lenses in Generalized Einstein-Aether theory: the Bullet Cluster for more. (That first title is a classic, BTW.)
It is disappointing that the original paper doesn't not appear to consider MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) or TeVeS (a Tensor-Vector-Scalar theory of gravity, the relativistic version of MOND).
The way to think about Dark Matter is it represents a problem with physics, namely excess force in the dynamics of galactic sized and larger objects. We don't know if the problem is with quantum field theories or with general relativity. The first possibility leads to theories such as Cold Dark Matter (CDM) or Weakly Interactive Massive Particles (WIMPs); the second to something like MOND / TeVeS. As literally pretty much all we know about Dark Matter is that there is excess force, neither approach can be ruled out at present.
So, it's disappointing that they didn't consider the gravitational alternative. It's not clear from the paper whether or not MOND would survive this test. Unlike CDM or WIMP, MOND effects should be present at all places in the disk, so the real question is, are they compatible with these observations?
I am certainly not a paleontologist, but it seems to me that there is evidence of a filter :
Birds (air-mobile) - mostly survived. My understanding is that there wasn't even that big a restriction in the number of species.
Dinosaurs (not air-mobile) - entirely wiped out.
This, to me, indicates that there was some sort of premium on air mobility. Maybe there were enormous tsunami's, and you had to be aloft to survive.
And, neither one is a narcotic at all, at least from a medical standpoint.