True - but we are talking about credit ratings. Given that there is no consensus on how to price any kind of exotic derivative (hence the existence of both local vol and stochastic vol models) then why the hell are the ratings agencies trying to rate what are exotic, highly leveraged derivatives - using a ratings system designed to explain one of the simpler forms of investment, corporate and government debt?
Seems like they have a bug in their business model.
Of course it isn't a legitimate play to improve MS/Yahoo. He recognises that MS is a piece of shit run by morons, but that it has a lot of cash. He wants to get rich by buying yahoo shares at $26 and selling them to MSFT at >$26.
He doesn't whether MS fuck up Yahoo or Yahoo fucks up Yahoo - it probably just makes him sick to his stomach to see Yang behaving as though he owns a company that he's already sold for a fat sum, and pissing away his shareholders money in the process.
Is the real reason people don't like the idea of ISPs filtering out bittorrent because they like to steal films, porn, games and music, or is there another reason? I can think of three legitimate reasons why people wouldn't like their internet access filtered:
1) you're breaking the internet - suddenly I can't send certain packets on certain ports. This increases the chances of other services being broken, and ISPs filtering the wrong ports. Legitimate bittorrent use might be affected.
2) It won't work anyway - people will just invent a different p2p protocol which isn't detectable
3) It seems to be restricting free speech
I don't think 3 is important at all - according to Article 17 of the UN declaration of human rights, everyone has the right to own property, and not to be arbitrarily deprived of it - as far as I am concerned that's the right of Madonna to sell her music and the right of EMI's shareholders to profit on the music it owns. If people claim "free speech" means you can plagiarise and steal, then they can stick it.
1 isn't a big deal for most users, I download my isos over http. 2 looks insurmountable - but I can't see why people are up in arms based on any of these reasons. If it's in a noble cause, like protecting people from theft, why not try filtering internet traffic - if it fails then try something else?
One of the most interesting comments I've ever read on Slashdot. Not sure if you need to be concerned though. The minimum wage you choose is higher in real dollars than at any time before or after - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:History_of_US_federal_minimum_wage_increases.svg/. High minimum wages are criticised for various reasons - it's argued that they have little effect except driving employees into the black market. Cars are getting better all the time, and cost practically the same as they did in 1957 in real dollars (or at least they do in the UK). Doctors bills are one of the few things which are not reduced by technology. Like theatre tickets, these will increase with time. However you get more for your money - life expectancy has increased about 10 years in the meantime.
Whether or not you choose to believe high minimum wages drive the black market - I don't believe low minimum wages do. If someone can make good money selling crack, they can usually make better money selling cars. All you need to do is lower the barriers preventing them from making the choice. The barriers that might be stopping them are high taxes, racism, lack of education, lack of money - but none of these are addressed by minimum wages if you aren't already in employment. Bored of typing now, be interested to see what you think?
even if it was a giant coincidence, most of the above can be learned anyway. Only problem is, if it was a coincidence, it misses the point of a proof of concept - proving that you can actually do it. They didn't hire freighters and run them with cables down, so they didn't find out if it's feasible for them to try it. If it was a proof of concept it had the unfortunate effect of alerting all of the affected parties to the existence of the threat, whatever that is supposed to be.
Spotted this when reading around the pirate bay takedown stuff - this article shows what kind of hoops the record industry is going through trying to maintain control of unreleased music, and it's own problems trying to combat the leaks from it's own employees. Reminds me of the war on drugs... Seems like music copyright is very dead, whether it's legal or not.
http://nymag.com/news/features/42391/
you think that the whole world lives under US law?
Where is it not illegal to help people to steal music films and software? I realise just asking this question might make me "the enemy" in Pirate Party speak - but it's a serious question. Where in the world is there a legal system that hasn't developed an idea of intellectual property rights? It seems obvious to me patents have been a vital part of the economy since the industrial revolution.
The extension to copyright and patenting software and artistic works seems obvious - a television show is the result of several man years of work, it has value, why should the creators not be able to protect their work from being taken from them and distributed by others?
Maybe I didn't make myself clear - what I mean is: Falkvinge says that fascism can exist without "curtailment of civil liberties". This makes it clear Falkvinge doesn't know what fascism means - this is particularly telling given that he claims his opposition "have no intellectual capital". Did he make the "lexical definition" up? Can he be trusted to speak the truth?
fascism n. a merging of corporate and government interests, typically adjoined with a drastic curtailment of civil liberties.
Falkvinge's definition of fascism is an interesting one - it makes Hong Kong probably the most fascist state in history, far more than Nazi Germany.
Interesting as well that he believes it is possible to have a fascist state without a curtailment of civil liberties - perhaps he's referring to California Uber Alles?
Does anyone care to speculate which "lexicon" he got this definition from?
Interesting. I'm running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T41 I bought second hand for $400. What does apple sell in the $350-$450 range? I might be tempted to switch.
Am I the only one who read this summary as
while OS X saw continuous growth, increasing share by 74%, at the same time, Linux's percentage has risen by only 117%
Seems fairly likely that an OS with tiny market share will grow more slowly than an OS with more share. Linux and Apple should be able to sew up the OS market pretty tight between them - Apple for the rich and pretty, linux for the rest (like me).
I agree that companies need to behave ethically, and I generally disagree with regulation for enforcing this - but in this case, if it isn't illegal to bundle rootkits and packet sniffers it should be. However I don't think profit incentive encourages behaviour like this...
1) Sony and Sears are the two examples. Both hoped to generate profit through their ideas I assume - but both were stupidly ill thought out schemes. Both were unlikely to succeed even if they were undetected. Both were bound to be detected. The publicity from both schemes will damage the companies involved. Bottom line - these schemes were never likely to increase the profit of the business - management failed to stop these schemes before they started.
2) Sony and Sears are both facing falling incomes as their competitors carve up their former marketplaces. These companies are failures. They were already failures before their stupid and wrong spy schemes.
I believe the failure (2) and the stupid schemes (1) run from the same root cause - they are badly run. Maybe as you're saying they need some help and oversight - but I'm saying without oversight, these companies will stop their bad behaviour anyway because they are doomed. The same thing is true of Enron - they were lying and stealing, but they were only doing this to fund their inability to run a profitable energy business. Their actions were stopped not by oversight but by equity analysts suspicions about the accounts.
I thought it was interesting you mentioned the focus on short term bonuses in the original post - I think that's a damn important point. The current sub prime, insider trading and hedge fund problems in the financial industry are all caused by a focus on the end of year bonus at the cost of all else. But I think Buffett is a good example - he runs a strong moral firm. He invests long term in businesses that do things, and he doesn't rip people off because life's too short.
Companies are impersonal entities - so are websites like slashdot. And open source groups, and countries, and trade unions, and churches, and families. They don't care about people, they just care about their own objectives.
I've read this comment: "companies are wrong because they just care about profit" about 20 times on slashdot. It's often modded +5 by people who like to read the same thing every day. Like a mirror reflecting a mirror, no light is shed, no information is uncovered, the distorted reflection becomes darker and darker.
If you made this comment, or modded it up, here is some information for you:
Companies, like people, are good and bad. Companies are made of people. People who refuse to take responsibility for their actions, or their company's actions, are cowards. The reason why companies like sears are so bad is because they are populated by cowards, who make clever little excuses like "it's the corporation's fault", "it's the profit imperative that made me stop caring". The tech that installed this packet sniffer probably used these excuses. The suit that requested it doesn't know why it's wrong. The bureacracy caused by these incompetents is the real cause. Note that Apple and Google don't have problems like this - but they're pretty profitable for shareholders, no?
Ooh one other thing - the correlation coefficient these guys are using is Pearson's - that's a valid choice since it assumes a near-normal distribution of variable distributions. The percentage turnout is a Poisson distribution (each person has a probability of voting, individual decision to vote is not dependent on another's decision to vote) and the overall vote for Putin's lot is pretty similar to Poisson (prob of voting Putin, not dependent on another's decision to vote). Very large poisson samples can be accurately approximated by normal. Unfortunately these samples deviate from this by having 100% probabilities. These outliers cause a big increase in correlation - but in this case this is just stronger evidence that the vote was rigged (in a fair election, the probability of a 100% vote for one party is almost zero).
A 90% correlation with this many points is a very strong sign that there is a dependence between the variables. The question is - are the variables relevant? You may be thinking of spurious correlation - for example the number of votes cast for the winning party is likely to be correlated with voter turnout (because if more people vote then more people will vote for each party). Another example is where you have stationarity in time series analysis - 2D random walks show highly significant correlation coefficients despite the x and y movements being uncorrelated. Stationarity is not a problem here as this is not time series data.
Assuming that how people vote is not dependent on voter turnout (which seems valid for a fair election) then the only other dependence could be that turnout is dependent on how people intend to vote - people choose not to vote because they think the turnout in their region is going to be high. It's difficult to come up with arguments to explain this - except for the obvious one, that busloads full of stooges were going from station to station voting every time. This was witnessed by BBC news among others.
Sorry didn't mean to piss you off... having a big market share doesn't make apple evil - it's just a reflection of the fact they've got no decent competition. The reason MS get bashed is because they used underhand tactics to try to exclude competition. Apple don't do that. My comparison was unfair.
Read the context. GP was explaining that the article was wrong, and that apple holds positions 1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9,10 in the list of best selling music players. Zune came in at #24.
Tell me why your "safe" Gold currency shot up to 2000 dollars an ounce (today's dollars) and then down again over a three year period at the start of the 80s? Why should I be stupid enough to tie my country's fortunes to something which trades in such a tiny market - 80 billion dollars worth are produced a year? To give you an idea of why the Swiss Franc is infinitely preferable to Gold - the volatility of the swiss franc against the euro is currently about 4%, and ranges between about 3-8%. Gold's volatility against any real currency is between 15-40%. No country in the world uses a gold standard - it would be insane to try.
The macro reason for this is that we now live in an information society where people's time is far more valuable than any commodity. This explains why over the last 100 years the increase in value of gold has been a million-fold outstripped by shares and several times outstripped by US treasuries and even deposit accounts. By the way the Euro has increased 25%, to an all time high, against the dollar over the last year - the boogymen and messiahs (I assume you mean the Saudis and the Chinese) that you speak of are moving their money out of US dollars and into the Euro.
I don't get that - how can the 80gb ipod be higher on the mp3 player list (#3) but the zune be higher on the hard drive based mp3 player list (#1)? It would be nice if the 80gb ipod is flash only.
Anyone else find it amusing that the consensus on Slashdot seems to be that a Microsoft monopoly of OSes is evil but an Apple monopoly of mp3 players needs to be defended? I do think MS are pretty awful, as Jobs says, they have no taste (just look at Halo 3...), and Jobs and apple come pretty close to walking on water, but competition is never a bad thing.
Of course democracy has been usurped by capitalism. I just hadn't really thought about it in terms of foreign policy before.
Not a bad thing either. Democracy is just tyranny by the masses - it's pretty shitty if you're in a minority - and it seems to produce sub-optimal results even for the majority (c.f. America). Capitalism is truly meritocratic, and it works. Look at how China has developed and Russia has stagnated over the last 20 years. The rise of communication technology (i.e. internet, mobile phones) means people will be able to organise themselves without a big brother government to look after them. It's easy for "liberal" (read: socially liberal, economically restrictive) Americans to talk down capitalism. Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians etc. are embracing it with both arms - I think that is why the dollar is currently sitting at.67 euro, American wages aren't rising, and most major banks are now making more investment in the developing world than in America and Europe together.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like they have a bug in their business model.
This comment rocks. Britain had the same problems in 2001 - amusingly satirised in the Brass Eye Paedo special: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_Eye#2001_paedophilia_special
He doesn't whether MS fuck up Yahoo or Yahoo fucks up Yahoo - it probably just makes him sick to his stomach to see Yang behaving as though he owns a company that he's already sold for a fat sum, and pissing away his shareholders money in the process.
Why was above comment modded flamebait? Here's a graph of the value of the dollar in euros. Looks like it's dropping to me. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=USDEUR=X&t=5y.
1) you're breaking the internet - suddenly I can't send certain packets on certain ports. This increases the chances of other services being broken, and ISPs filtering the wrong ports. Legitimate bittorrent use might be affected.
2) It won't work anyway - people will just invent a different p2p protocol which isn't detectable
3) It seems to be restricting free speech
I don't think 3 is important at all - according to Article 17 of the UN declaration of human rights, everyone has the right to own property, and not to be arbitrarily deprived of it - as far as I am concerned that's the right of Madonna to sell her music and the right of EMI's shareholders to profit on the music it owns. If people claim "free speech" means you can plagiarise and steal, then they can stick it.
1 isn't a big deal for most users, I download my isos over http. 2 looks insurmountable - but I can't see why people are up in arms based on any of these reasons. If it's in a noble cause, like protecting people from theft, why not try filtering internet traffic - if it fails then try something else?
Whether or not you choose to believe high minimum wages drive the black market - I don't believe low minimum wages do. If someone can make good money selling crack, they can usually make better money selling cars. All you need to do is lower the barriers preventing them from making the choice. The barriers that might be stopping them are high taxes, racism, lack of education, lack of money - but none of these are addressed by minimum wages if you aren't already in employment. Bored of typing now, be interested to see what you think?
I doubt windows sends a bug report when opening IE takes 4 minutes, but I still count that as a bug.
Spotted this when reading around the pirate bay takedown stuff - this article shows what kind of hoops the record industry is going through trying to maintain control of unreleased music, and it's own problems trying to combat the leaks from it's own employees. Reminds me of the war on drugs... Seems like music copyright is very dead, whether it's legal or not. http://nymag.com/news/features/42391/
Where is it not illegal to help people to steal music films and software? I realise just asking this question might make me "the enemy" in Pirate Party speak - but it's a serious question. Where in the world is there a legal system that hasn't developed an idea of intellectual property rights? It seems obvious to me patents have been a vital part of the economy since the industrial revolution.
The extension to copyright and patenting software and artistic works seems obvious - a television show is the result of several man years of work, it has value, why should the creators not be able to protect their work from being taken from them and distributed by others?
Maybe I didn't make myself clear - what I mean is: Falkvinge says that fascism can exist without "curtailment of civil liberties". This makes it clear Falkvinge doesn't know what fascism means - this is particularly telling given that he claims his opposition "have no intellectual capital". Did he make the "lexical definition" up? Can he be trusted to speak the truth?
Falkvinge's definition of fascism is an interesting one - it makes Hong Kong probably the most fascist state in history, far more than Nazi Germany.
Interesting as well that he believes it is possible to have a fascist state without a curtailment of civil liberties - perhaps he's referring to California Uber Alles?
Does anyone care to speculate which "lexicon" he got this definition from?
Cheers for the tips :) Will stick with Ubuntu until I make my fortune, or the lack of iTunes support threatens my sanity...
My trolling aside, seems like you can get a second hand G3 running Jaguar for about the same price. Is this a good piece of kit? Does Jaguar kick ass?
Interesting. I'm running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T41 I bought second hand for $400. What does apple sell in the $350-$450 range? I might be tempted to switch.
Seems fairly likely that an OS with tiny market share will grow more slowly than an OS with more share. Linux and Apple should be able to sew up the OS market pretty tight between them - Apple for the rich and pretty, linux for the rest (like me).
1) Sony and Sears are the two examples. Both hoped to generate profit through their ideas I assume - but both were stupidly ill thought out schemes. Both were unlikely to succeed even if they were undetected. Both were bound to be detected. The publicity from both schemes will damage the companies involved. Bottom line - these schemes were never likely to increase the profit of the business - management failed to stop these schemes before they started.
2) Sony and Sears are both facing falling incomes as their competitors carve up their former marketplaces. These companies are failures. They were already failures before their stupid and wrong spy schemes.
I believe the failure (2) and the stupid schemes (1) run from the same root cause - they are badly run. Maybe as you're saying they need some help and oversight - but I'm saying without oversight, these companies will stop their bad behaviour anyway because they are doomed. The same thing is true of Enron - they were lying and stealing, but they were only doing this to fund their inability to run a profitable energy business. Their actions were stopped not by oversight but by equity analysts suspicions about the accounts.
I thought it was interesting you mentioned the focus on short term bonuses in the original post - I think that's a damn important point. The current sub prime, insider trading and hedge fund problems in the financial industry are all caused by a focus on the end of year bonus at the cost of all else. But I think Buffett is a good example - he runs a strong moral firm. He invests long term in businesses that do things, and he doesn't rip people off because life's too short.
I've read this comment: "companies are wrong because they just care about profit" about 20 times on slashdot. It's often modded +5 by people who like to read the same thing every day. Like a mirror reflecting a mirror, no light is shed, no information is uncovered, the distorted reflection becomes darker and darker.
If you made this comment, or modded it up, here is some information for you:
Companies, like people, are good and bad. Companies are made of people. People who refuse to take responsibility for their actions, or their company's actions, are cowards. The reason why companies like sears are so bad is because they are populated by cowards, who make clever little excuses like "it's the corporation's fault", "it's the profit imperative that made me stop caring". The tech that installed this packet sniffer probably used these excuses. The suit that requested it doesn't know why it's wrong. The bureacracy caused by these incompetents is the real cause. Note that Apple and Google don't have problems like this - but they're pretty profitable for shareholders, no?
Ooh one other thing - the correlation coefficient these guys are using is Pearson's - that's a valid choice since it assumes a near-normal distribution of variable distributions. The percentage turnout is a Poisson distribution (each person has a probability of voting, individual decision to vote is not dependent on another's decision to vote) and the overall vote for Putin's lot is pretty similar to Poisson (prob of voting Putin, not dependent on another's decision to vote). Very large poisson samples can be accurately approximated by normal. Unfortunately these samples deviate from this by having 100% probabilities. These outliers cause a big increase in correlation - but in this case this is just stronger evidence that the vote was rigged (in a fair election, the probability of a 100% vote for one party is almost zero).
Assuming that how people vote is not dependent on voter turnout (which seems valid for a fair election) then the only other dependence could be that turnout is dependent on how people intend to vote - people choose not to vote because they think the turnout in their region is going to be high. It's difficult to come up with arguments to explain this - except for the obvious one, that busloads full of stooges were going from station to station voting every time. This was witnessed by BBC news among others.
Sorry didn't mean to piss you off... having a big market share doesn't make apple evil - it's just a reflection of the fact they've got no decent competition. The reason MS get bashed is because they used underhand tactics to try to exclude competition. Apple don't do that. My comparison was unfair.
Read the context. GP was explaining that the article was wrong, and that apple holds positions 1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9,10 in the list of best selling music players. Zune came in at #24.
The macro reason for this is that we now live in an information society where people's time is far more valuable than any commodity. This explains why over the last 100 years the increase in value of gold has been a million-fold outstripped by shares and several times outstripped by US treasuries and even deposit accounts. By the way the Euro has increased 25%, to an all time high, against the dollar over the last year - the boogymen and messiahs (I assume you mean the Saudis and the Chinese) that you speak of are moving their money out of US dollars and into the Euro.
Anyone else find it amusing that the consensus on Slashdot seems to be that a Microsoft monopoly of OSes is evil but an Apple monopoly of mp3 players needs to be defended? I do think MS are pretty awful, as Jobs says, they have no taste (just look at Halo 3...), and Jobs and apple come pretty close to walking on water, but competition is never a bad thing.
Not a bad thing either. Democracy is just tyranny by the masses - it's pretty shitty if you're in a minority - and it seems to produce sub-optimal results even for the majority (c.f. America). Capitalism is truly meritocratic, and it works. Look at how China has developed and Russia has stagnated over the last 20 years. The rise of communication technology (i.e. internet, mobile phones) means people will be able to organise themselves without a big brother government to look after them. It's easy for "liberal" (read: socially liberal, economically restrictive) Americans to talk down capitalism. Chinese, Vietnamese, Indians etc. are embracing it with both arms - I think that is why the dollar is currently sitting at