No. by focusing the light you'll get more candelas and more lux but not more lumens. Lumen is a measure of total visible energy. The intensity on a spot is measured in lux (visible energy per area) or candela (visible energy per solid angle).
These are good tips. I would also suggest reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's post the Oxford based blog: http://www.overcomingbias.com/. Read them in chronological order. They'll makes more sense.
He writes criticism of the different AI approaches that is really worth reading. He'll tell you that you should read books by E.T. Jaynes and Judea Pearl. I highly recommend reading Jaynes before doing any probabilistic modeling. There is even a free draft of his book online.
So you think it would be okay for Intel to sell Linux, profit from the works of other developers for free, doing everything they can to circumvent copyright law, use their minuscule code contribution to make profit on the back of thousands of developers who did 99.9% of the work. These developers who asked as only compensation that any derived work's source be accessible to them and others for free? You think that is fair?
You're the one proposing violating billions of dollars worth of copyrights as if the code was simply public domain and I'm the commie?
The only fair way for Intel to sell Linux with closed drivers would be to go see each and every copyright holder and ask them how much they want for their code and _pay them_ before closing it up and selling it.
Given that an operating system consists mostly of a bunch of drivers attached together with a kernel, there are good reasons to prevent distribution of closed drivers mixed with GPL ones. I don't think it is legal, not without stretching the meaning of the GPL.
Consider the following scenario:
Intel develops new closed undocumented architecture with a 16 core cpu. Similarly to current network or video cards, you need a proprietary driver to enable the super accelerated multicoreness. In order to allow the use of the newer faster cpu's, Linux vendors do what they did with the other proprietary drivers, label these drivers as "not part of the kernel" put them in a wrapper and ship their version of Linux with the proprietary drivers which, for now, intel is giving away for free as a binary blob. For a while everybody is happy and content. The new 16 cores chips becomes the norm. There are even 32 core chips on the market and the 64 cores chips are soon to be released all of which rely on proprietary drivers.
Suddenly, we hear that a large company, Lintelsoft, started by ex MS executives, makes a deal with Intel, a very lucrative deal for Intel, to license the drivers. Intel then says they won't give away the drivers anymore but you are free to buy the brand new Lintel Linux distribution. This distribution, which sells for 699$ a piece is all GPL'd except for those drivers that have become so prevalent that you need them in order for computers to run at a reasonable speed.
Open source programmers scramble to write free replacement drivers that work on their Gnubian distribution but only manage to make drivers that can run the multi core cpu's at 1/20th the speed as Intel won't release documentation or specifications. Linux is rendered mostly useless except for the Lintel distro, (which is also available for free and with sourcecode as Lintelora, excluding the proprietary driver sources of course) You can always plug in the Gnubian drivers in the free Lintelora project and get a working computer but it will only run at 1/20th the speed of the commercial 699$ a pop version and isn't powerful enough to run the new Mozilaurus browser smoothly.
In this scenario, Lintelsoft would have effectively stolen Linux from the open source community, making profit with other people's source code and breaking all versions that are free.
How can we let anyone close up an obviously derived work based on some wrappers?
Notice that, even today I sometimes need to pay to get a fully working Linux from certain vendors, like Mandriva. (if i don't pay, 3d acceleration wont work.) I expect that kind of twisting of the law by commercial vendors. It surprises me that even Ubuntu is including proprietary video drivers nowadays.
What's worst is that legally in order to maintain copyrights you need to make reasonable efforts at protecting those rights. Legally if the open source community waits until the binary drivers become problematic before acting, proprietary vendors will be able to argue legitimately that closed source code has been allowed in the kernel by the open source community for a long time now: The law says that you are not legally allowed to suddenly change your mind about interpretations to suit current needs thus the open source community would be screwed.
what I'm trying to say is that a company with little or no potential to issue dividend is worth very little and should be shorted since the price would eventually go down anyways.
A company with potential for dividend, these are the ones that justifiably have a price above 0 because they are expected to be profitable at least in the long term, are dangerous to short as the short seller might end up with huge liabilities either because of the price going up, or else because he has to issue dividends. The people who buy at artificially low prices stand to make a lot of money off the back of these short sellers.
For example let say a company trades at 10$ because in the long term the company is expected to earn and distribute about 1$ per share per year. That is a 10% return. If a short seller tries to manipulate the market by short selling a bunch of shares under market prices. Smart people will see that, hey, the shares are now 5$ per shares with a company which is expected to eventually distribute about 1$ per year that is a 20% return. Time to buy!
A few may panic, sell even a little lower and thus profit the short seller but there can't be a lot of those stupid investors that would give away an expected >20% return! And for the short seller to have brought the price down to catch those few stupid investors, he had to sell _a lot_ of shares at a very low price. Selling these shares is a contract to the buyers that says: "I have to pay you whatever dividend the company pays" and in the long term this dividend is expected to be about 1$ per share per year. Only stupid people would want to buy back the shares from the short seller at a low price and forgo their entitlement to the 1$ dividend. Short selling at low prices gets you in a very disadvantageous position.
If the company is not expected to issue a dividend for a long time, it is expected to instead grow in value (its money is reinvested so as to grow its long term potential for dividends even more!), which doesn't put short sellers in a better position. They will have to cover at a probably very high price.
I'm not saying a short seller can't get lucky and make a little money off manipulation if he happens to be perfectly timed and attract a large crownd of stupid investors. However it is much much more likely he will lose lots of money, and that others will make lots of money on his back. All in all, not a profitable practice.
Yes but who would buy your shares for 120 when the company has no potential to make any money? I don't think the stock market is that much disconnected from reality.
Short sellers are liable for dividends otherwise the concept of short selling would make little sense.
granted this is from wikipedia but:
"If the company distributes the dividend, the short seller is also "short the dividend". This is because he borrowed the stock shares and sold them to another investor. The investor he sold them to expects a dividend. The investor he borrowed the shares from expects a dividend also."
Okay, but he will be stuck with huge liabilities when he has to issue dividends or cover his shorts. The people who bought his short sales have no incentive to sell them back to him at a low price because they would lose the potential for dividends for too little money. I certainly wouldn't let go of my shares at a low price while I'm entitled to a nice cash flow of dividends from the short sellers.
Should we also make illegal buying and selling stocks at a low price like Pakistan?
The truth is if a company is generating profit the price will rebound and the short sellers can be liable for huge sums. A manipulated market is next to impossible to time, and because of their disadvantageous position (they sold at artificially low prices) manipulative short sellers are probabilistically much more likely to lose money than to gain.
That is not true. Even newbie investors know that stock prices have no inertia and that a sudden drop in price not accompanied by bad news is an opportunity to buy cheap. Panic happens when there is bad news and people are not too sure how to price this news. It is not caused by short selling.
Yeah, that's what bank regulations were supposed to be about. They were supposed to limit the amount of leverage or "margin ratio" as you call them. The government has clearly failed here.
In fact it is so good I'm going to post it right here:
"Here is the quote of the day:
"...we and other global firms have, for many years, urged the SEC to reform its net capital rule to allow for more efficient use of capital. This is the single most important factor in driving significant parts of our business offshore, so that our firms can remain competitive with our foreign competitors risk-based capital standards must become the norm. The SEC has made it clear that risk-based capital rules can be implemented only when the Commission is confident that firms employing value-at-risk models have robust credit and risk management policies in place."
Translated into English, this testimony from back in 2000 was from someone asking that major brokerage firms be permitted to increase leverage subject to oversight of their wondrous mathematical risk models. The request was agreed to four years later, in 2004, and it helped lead to the meltdown in independent brokers this year.
The speaker? Some guy named Henry Paulson, the then-CEO of Goldman Sachs. I wonder what happened to him."
If a company has no potential to issue dividend then it is worth nothing and should be shorted into oblivion.
Note that shorting small growing companies that don't issue dividends yet is equally dangerous because these are the companies which are more likely to grow fast (the market expects them to grow otherwise it wouldn't allow delaying dividends in favor of reinvesting profits). These are the type of companies that could suddenly be worth ten times their shorted value and the shorter would have lost ten times the money he invested.
If the company has no potential to generate dividends then it is worth nothing and should be shorted into oblivion.
Also the fall of share prices doesn't affect the amount of capital the company has or the amount of money they make and thus it doesn't change its potential for dividends. It might change the amount of capital it is able to raise, but even then, a smart lender will look at the fundamentals of the company and its ability to make profits, not its share price.
Okay but FTD only occurs when the short seller goes bankrupt. I guess since there is borrowing in short selling it can contribute to over leveraging in institutions such as hedgefunds but it isn't worst than any other kind of borrowing.
For common investors, the broker doesn't allow short sales without them keeping the value of the shares in cash in the account. Trying to manipulate prices by short selling low will only lead to losses from having to buy back higher or pay dividends. Short selling at low prices is doing the opposite of the "buy low, sell high" rule of investing!
That's crap. The price of the shares has no bearing on the ability of the companies to generate profit. In these cases the short sellers were right, the companies were not worth anything, they were not in a position to generate profit and that is not the short sellers fault. The share prices would have gone down regardless.
If the companies were able to generate profit the short sellers would have lost a lot of money and would have been liable to pay dividend to the people they sold to until they covered their shorts. See my other comments in the thread.
You are completely right. And that's not all, the low prices would mean buyers would be getting disproportionately high dividends rates and short sellers would have to pay these high dividends to the people they sold to. There is no money to be made by short selling at under fair price. Short sellers will simply become liable to issue huge dividends!
"So they just don't bother to follow through because the cost will end up being, theoritically, infinite. When Broker B finds that Broker A hasn't delivered the stock, they can technically go out and buy on the market and have the bill sent to Broker A. But they rarely do this because what goes around comes around and they will eventually find themselves in the situation where one of their customers initiated the naked short. Whenever the shares aren't settled it's called a failure-to-deliver (FTD) and on any given day the value of the sales that aren't delivered is measured in the tens of billions of dollars."
That's BS. Brokers force short sellers to keep a positive balance by issuing margin calls and will not let them simply not pay to cover their shares. Unless the short sellers go bankrupt, they are liable.
"Due to the massive amount of sales being offered the price plummets, defrauding honest investors of value."
They are not really being defrauded unless they choose to sell at precisely the wrong time at an undervalued price. They do own shares that are under priced and thus more valuable held than sold because the dividend potential is greater than the bid price. However this should correct itself fairly quickly when people realize that the price is too low and they are getting a really good deal by buying even if bidding much higher than the current price (closer to the fair price that reflects the potential dividend payout).
Maybe not, but in order to cover their shorts and make money, they would need to find sellers who are willing to sell at an artificially low price. They would run out of stupid sellers pretty quickly. Only the stupidest sellers would want to sell at a price lower than the dividend potential or the company. The fair price of a stock is always proportional to its expected long term dividend potential.
There is money to be made on the back of short sellers who manipulate prices. It is pretty damn easy to buy their under priced securities and only sell them back at a fair price. There is not much incentive to sell when you are getting dividend potential worth more than the value of the stocks. And if short sellers can't find enough dumb sellers, they will only be able to cover at a loss or wait in hope of a price drop while issuing dividends until they are forced to cover by a margin call.
"Hmm, if that were the case, I could drive every stock down to zero then not worry about having to locate stock, because of the abundance available due to those getting margin calls"
Don't forget short sellers must issue dividends to the people that buy their shorts. So if you massively shorted a profitable company to manipulate its price you would have a huge liability when the company issued a dividend.
If you'd try it, I for one would buy all those shares at discount price, and live on the dividend you'd graciously issue to me every quarter until you accepted to cover your short at a fair price.
Actually what we need is a trust metric. Some process that propagates trust creating a kind of trustworthiness social network so that when you encounter something new, you can get an idea of, who trusts this information.
It should be able to answer questions like: Do the people you know trust this? How about the those you rated as trustworthy? Do certain specific groups and communities trust this? Maybe it hasn't been rated enough yet?
Slashdot Mirror
No. by focusing the light you'll get more candelas and more lux but not more lumens. Lumen is a measure of total visible energy. The intensity on a spot is measured in lux (visible energy per area) or candela (visible energy per solid angle).
These are good tips. I would also suggest reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's post the Oxford based blog: http://www.overcomingbias.com/. Read them in chronological order. They'll makes more sense.
He writes criticism of the different AI approaches that is really worth reading. He'll tell you that you should read books by E.T. Jaynes and Judea Pearl. I highly recommend reading Jaynes before doing any probabilistic modeling. There is even a free draft of his book online.
So you think it would be okay for Intel to sell Linux, profit from the works of other developers for free, doing everything they can to circumvent copyright law, use their minuscule code contribution to make profit on the back of thousands of developers who did 99.9% of the work. These developers who asked as only compensation that any derived work's source be accessible to them and others for free? You think that is fair?
You're the one proposing violating billions of dollars worth of copyrights as if the code was simply public domain and I'm the commie?
The only fair way for Intel to sell Linux with closed drivers would be to go see each and every copyright holder and ask them how much they want for their code and _pay them_ before closing it up and selling it.
Given that an operating system consists mostly of a bunch of drivers attached together with a kernel, there are good reasons to prevent distribution of closed drivers mixed with GPL ones. I don't think it is legal, not without stretching the meaning of the GPL.
Consider the following scenario:
Intel develops new closed undocumented architecture with a 16 core cpu. Similarly to current network or video cards, you need a proprietary driver to enable the super accelerated multicoreness. In order to allow the use of the newer faster cpu's, Linux vendors do what they did with the other proprietary drivers, label these drivers as "not part of the kernel" put them in a wrapper and ship their version of Linux with the proprietary drivers which, for now, intel is giving away for free as a binary blob. For a while everybody is happy and content. The new 16 cores chips becomes the norm. There are even 32 core chips on the market and the 64 cores chips are soon to be released all of which rely on proprietary drivers.
Suddenly, we hear that a large company, Lintelsoft, started by ex MS executives, makes a deal with Intel, a very lucrative deal for Intel, to license the drivers. Intel then says they won't give away the drivers anymore but you are free to buy the brand new Lintel Linux distribution. This distribution, which sells for 699$ a piece is all GPL'd except for those drivers that have become so prevalent that you need them in order for computers to run at a reasonable speed.
Open source programmers scramble to write free replacement drivers that work on their Gnubian distribution but only manage to make drivers that can run the multi core cpu's at 1/20th the speed as Intel won't release documentation or specifications. Linux is rendered mostly useless except for the Lintel distro, (which is also available for free and with sourcecode as Lintelora, excluding the proprietary driver sources of course) You can always plug in the Gnubian drivers in the free Lintelora project and get a working computer but it will only run at 1/20th the speed of the commercial 699$ a pop version and isn't powerful enough to run the new Mozilaurus browser smoothly.
In this scenario, Lintelsoft would have effectively stolen Linux from the open source community, making profit with other people's source code and breaking all versions that are free.
How can we let anyone close up an obviously derived work based on some wrappers?
Notice that, even today I sometimes need to pay to get a fully working Linux from certain vendors, like Mandriva. (if i don't pay, 3d acceleration wont work.) I expect that kind of twisting of the law by commercial vendors. It surprises me that even Ubuntu is including proprietary video drivers nowadays.
What's worst is that legally in order to maintain copyrights you need to make reasonable efforts at protecting those rights. Legally if the open source community waits until the binary drivers become problematic before acting, proprietary vendors will be able to argue legitimately that closed source code has been allowed in the kernel by the open source community for a long time now: The law says that you are not legally allowed to suddenly change your mind about interpretations to suit current needs thus the open source community would be screwed.
what I'm trying to say is that a company with little or no potential to issue dividend is worth very little and should be shorted since the price would eventually go down anyways.
A company with potential for dividend, these are the ones that justifiably have a price above 0 because they are expected to be profitable at least in the long term, are dangerous to short as the short seller might end up with huge liabilities either because of the price going up, or else because he has to issue dividends. The people who buy at artificially low prices stand to make a lot of money off the back of these short sellers.
For example let say a company trades at 10$ because in the long term the company is expected to earn and distribute about 1$ per share per year. That is a 10% return. If a short seller tries to manipulate the market by short selling a bunch of shares under market prices. Smart people will see that, hey, the shares are now 5$ per shares with a company which is expected to eventually distribute about 1$ per year that is a 20% return. Time to buy!
A few may panic, sell even a little lower and thus profit the short seller but there can't be a lot of those stupid investors that would give away an expected >20% return! And for the short seller to have brought the price down to catch those few stupid investors, he had to sell _a lot_ of shares at a very low price. Selling these shares is a contract to the buyers that says: "I have to pay you whatever dividend the company pays" and in the long term this dividend is expected to be about 1$ per share per year. Only stupid people would want to buy back the shares from the short seller at a low price and forgo their entitlement to the 1$ dividend. Short selling at low prices gets you in a very disadvantageous position.
If the company is not expected to issue a dividend for a long time, it is expected to instead grow in value (its money is reinvested so as to grow its long term potential for dividends even more!), which doesn't put short sellers in a better position. They will have to cover at a probably very high price.
I'm not saying a short seller can't get lucky and make a little money off manipulation if he happens to be perfectly timed and attract a large crownd of stupid investors. However it is much much more likely he will lose lots of money, and that others will make lots of money on his back. All in all, not a profitable practice.
Yes but who would buy your shares for 120 when the company has no potential to make any money? I don't think the stock market is that much disconnected from reality.
not even. Why would you buy a company that has no potential to make you any money?
Warren Buffet, arguably one of the best investors there has ever been would disagree with you.
Short sellers are liable for dividends otherwise the concept of short selling would make little sense.
granted this is from wikipedia but:
"If the company distributes the dividend, the short seller is also "short the dividend". This is because he borrowed the stock shares and sold them to another investor. The investor he sold them to expects a dividend. The investor he borrowed the shares from expects a dividend also."
Okay, but he will be stuck with huge liabilities when he has to issue dividends or cover his shorts. The people who bought his short sales have no incentive to sell them back to him at a low price because they would lose the potential for dividends for too little money. I certainly wouldn't let go of my shares at a low price while I'm entitled to a nice cash flow of dividends from the short sellers.
Should we also make illegal buying and selling stocks at a low price like Pakistan?
The truth is if a company is generating profit the price will rebound and the short sellers can be liable for huge sums. A manipulated market is next to impossible to time, and because of their disadvantageous position (they sold at artificially low prices) manipulative short sellers are probabilistically much more likely to lose money than to gain.
How would the share price influence profitability and the potential for dividends may I ask you?
That is not true. Even newbie investors know that stock prices have no inertia and that a sudden drop in price not accompanied by bad news is an opportunity to buy cheap. Panic happens when there is bad news and people are not too sure how to price this news. It is not caused by short selling.
I dunno, brokers would have to be making major profits from a client to be willing to cover the cost of their bad trades.
That would be analogous to guaranteeing the price of their long positions! That can't be a profitable thing to do.
Yeah, that's what bank regulations were supposed to be about. They were supposed to limit the amount of leverage or "margin ratio" as you call them. The government has clearly failed here.
want to read something scary? read this:
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2008/10/03/quote_of_the_da_6.html
In fact it is so good I'm going to post it right here:
"Here is the quote of the day:
"...we and other global firms have, for many years, urged the SEC to reform its net capital rule to allow for more efficient use of capital. This is the single most important factor in driving significant parts of our business offshore, so that our firms can remain competitive with our foreign competitors risk-based capital standards must become the norm. The SEC has made it clear that risk-based capital rules can be implemented only when the Commission is confident that firms employing value-at-risk models have robust credit and risk management policies in place."
Translated into English, this testimony from back in 2000 was from someone asking that major brokerage firms be permitted to increase leverage subject to oversight of their wondrous mathematical risk models. The request was agreed to four years later, in 2004, and it helped lead to the meltdown in independent brokers this year.
The speaker? Some guy named Henry Paulson, the then-CEO of Goldman Sachs. I wonder what happened to him."
If a company has no potential to issue dividend then it is worth nothing and should be shorted into oblivion.
Note that shorting small growing companies that don't issue dividends yet is equally dangerous because these are the companies which are more likely to grow fast (the market expects them to grow otherwise it wouldn't allow delaying dividends in favor of reinvesting profits). These are the type of companies that could suddenly be worth ten times their shorted value and the shorter would have lost ten times the money he invested.
If the company has no potential to generate dividends then it is worth nothing and should be shorted into oblivion.
Also the fall of share prices doesn't affect the amount of capital the company has or the amount of money they make and thus it doesn't change its potential for dividends. It might change the amount of capital it is able to raise, but even then, a smart lender will look at the fundamentals of the company and its ability to make profits, not its share price.
Okay but FTD only occurs when the short seller goes bankrupt. I guess since there is borrowing in short selling it can contribute to over leveraging in institutions such as hedgefunds but it isn't worst than any other kind of borrowing.
For common investors, the broker doesn't allow short sales without them keeping the value of the shares in cash in the account. Trying to manipulate prices by short selling low will only lead to losses from having to buy back higher or pay dividends. Short selling at low prices is doing the opposite of the "buy low, sell high" rule of investing!
That's crap. The price of the shares has no bearing on the ability of the companies to generate profit. In these cases the short sellers were right, the companies were not worth anything, they were not in a position to generate profit and that is not the short sellers fault. The share prices would have gone down regardless.
If the companies were able to generate profit the short sellers would have lost a lot of money and would have been liable to pay dividend to the people they sold to until they covered their shorts. See my other comments in the thread.
You are completely right. I think the parents name says it all...
You are completely right. And that's not all, the low prices would mean buyers would be getting disproportionately high dividends rates and short sellers would have to pay these high dividends to the people they sold to. There is no money to be made by short selling at under fair price. Short sellers will simply become liable to issue huge dividends!
"So they just don't bother to follow through because the cost will end up being, theoritically, infinite. When Broker B finds that Broker A hasn't delivered the stock, they can technically go out and buy on the market and have the bill sent to Broker A. But they rarely do this because what goes around comes around and they will eventually find themselves in the situation where one of their customers initiated the naked short. Whenever the shares aren't settled it's called a failure-to-deliver (FTD) and on any given day the value of the sales that aren't delivered is measured in the tens of billions of dollars."
That's BS. Brokers force short sellers to keep a positive balance by issuing margin calls and will not let them simply not pay to cover their shares. Unless the short sellers go bankrupt, they are liable.
"Due to the massive amount of sales being offered the price plummets, defrauding honest investors of value."
They are not really being defrauded unless they choose to sell at precisely the wrong time at an undervalued price. They do own shares that are under priced and thus more valuable held than sold because the dividend potential is greater than the bid price. However this should correct itself fairly quickly when people realize that the price is too low and they are getting a really good deal by buying even if bidding much higher than the current price (closer to the fair price that reflects the potential dividend payout).
Maybe not, but in order to cover their shorts and make money, they would need to find sellers who are willing to sell at an artificially low price. They would run out of stupid sellers pretty quickly. Only the stupidest sellers would want to sell at a price lower than the dividend potential or the company. The fair price of a stock is always proportional to its expected long term dividend potential.
There is money to be made on the back of short sellers who manipulate prices. It is pretty damn easy to buy their under priced securities and only sell them back at a fair price. There is not much incentive to sell when you are getting dividend potential worth more than the value of the stocks. And if short sellers can't find enough dumb sellers, they will only be able to cover at a loss or wait in hope of a price drop while issuing dividends until they are forced to cover by a margin call.
"Hmm, if that were the case, I could drive every stock down to zero then not worry about having to locate stock, because of the abundance available due to those getting margin calls"
Don't forget short sellers must issue dividends to the people that buy their shorts. So if you massively shorted a profitable company to manipulate its price you would have a huge liability when the company issued a dividend.
If you'd try it, I for one would buy all those shares at discount price, and live on the dividend you'd graciously issue to me every quarter until you accepted to cover your short at a fair price.
The joke would be on you.
Actually what we need is a trust metric. Some process that propagates trust creating a kind of trustworthiness social network so that when you encounter something new, you can get an idea of, who trusts this information.
It should be able to answer questions like: Do the people you know trust this? How about the those you rated as trustworthy? Do certain specific groups and communities trust this? Maybe it hasn't been rated enough yet?