Just wait for Italy to switch nuclear. Just wait...
the present government in Italy is committed to allow construction of nuclear power plants in italy, probably on the framework of the finnish nuclear plant. The biggest italian utility has a stake in the french prototype of the EPR reactor. Italy, and especially Piedmont, the region I live in, is in the unique situation of having dismantled its own nuclear reactors, while being downwind from France and its nuclear plants, by which it imports about half of the 12% of the total electricity needs it imports from abroad. Italy is a kyoto treaty signatory, and strange as it may seem, nuclear is cheap if you signed that piece of paper, especially in respect to Solar and wind.
Here's the link, in italian, of the government's intentions towards nuclear investment.
Disclosure to a 3rd party is suicide as your atty-client confidentiality could be lost (what happens if the 3rd party gets subpoenas?). Losing data is suicide because it shows a lack of due diligence.
Use paper. It works. or burn to 2X archival CDR and THEN use paper. whatever floats your boat.
I think that might be resolved by encryption, like plausible deniability. Then again, if client/attorney relationship is a problem, and the client is paranoid, have him encrypt the documentation himself with his public key, send it to you encrypted further with your public key, and store it somewhere. This way, the only way to access those backups will be by asking both for the private keys, and no one can tamper with the actual content indipendently of the other.
I thought mission critical computers should not be reachable from the Internet. So the spies walked to those computers and planted the software there???
that happens in the military, where there's a defined physical space between mission critical rigs, unconnected to the internet, and non mission critical rigs, and you must use physical media, "launder" it on a standalone computer, then transfer the data to the mission critical computers.
I do think, tough, that in any event physical security built into the systems would block major damage; no sane engineer would avoid building that into the infrastructure. After all we do have circuit breakers at home, we do not rely on a computer chip.
It might also be that this is a colossal scam, in that some federal agency is "phishing" these guys, which to me could be a perfectly legitimate ruse-de-guerre.
Maybe it's just me, but it also seems that videogaming has been moving increasingly towards consoles. One less thing you need an increasingly powerful computer for.
...Running Vista or Windows 7 + office could be a good start.... [rant] I work/worked for 20 + years in a business environment, started out with an 8088, and when I bought a combination Athlon/win xp I've met a really new experience in my life....I quit pestering the higher ups for a bleeding edge rig. With the core duo generation of processors, the natural tendency in "power users" has been to yell to the IT guys "keep your hands off my rig! you can take it from my cold , dead hands!!!!!!"[/rant] On a more serious note, I work in Finance as a portfolio manager/advisor; the benchmark information system for people like me is the Bloomberg, and AFAIK their reference system for installation is a WIN XP sp3 machine with office 2003. No plans for Vista or Win7 has been circulated to the users, who for the most part are on a mix of win2000/win xp machines. Most if not all of these machines work well in their present state but would not work as well in Vista/win7. Moreover, when these rigs were bought, hardware was a bigger part of the cost of ownership than it's now. since some of these broke down, big offices know how much a rig adequate for win xp costs vis a vis one that must run Vista on a similar level of user experience....lots of things are moving in Xp's direction.....
I remember Arthur C Clarke saying that Sci Fi is something that could happen, while fantasy is something that could never happen.
Only if you use the word "could" to means "sometime in the future, but not with what we currently know." By that reasoning, fantasy could happen as well, assuming that we find some source of power that would grant people abilities indistinguishable from magic. Is that any crazier than assuming that at some point we'll be able to travel faster than the speed of light?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke Given his motto, I think Clarke would characterize that kind of "Fantasy" as "science Fiction".
I thought that adding some local view would add some colour, so here's my 2âc
There's been some back and forth on the national papers about this earthquake prediction, liberally mixed with rumors about stray dogs wailing, etc etc. I fully expect this to continue, since basic scientific method is not the order of the day here. As much as I think that further research by the guy in question will be valuable, the history of earthquake prediction has been rather dismal, insofar as many times over, after a quake, it's been relatively easy to find some scientist having predicted it, while the actual "before the fact " experience has materially changed in the ability to foresee what ( we do have seismic maps, etc.), but not the when.
To get an 'evolutionary' effect out of video gaming you'd have to look at self-selection, I think. In other words, a case where it's not that playing a game makes your eyesight better, but just that normally-sighted people drop out en masse and the only players left are super-sighted freaks.
What's happening here seems to be more interesting than just selection.
Nature is a tightfisted lady. natural selection gives a set of potential abilities, but if you do not use them, they fall by the wayside. Think about how astronauts bodies lose mass and bone density in space.
the human race has been shaped by its tribal structure; the ability to discriminate visual info for hunting, while handy for everyone, kept honed probably only in the individuals who specialized in hunting. nature discarded the immediate availability in other members of the tribe.
Doesn't the tendency of an event recurring increase with the passage of time?
California hasn't had an earthquake recently, the chance is getting better ever day.
There are phenomena that follow that rule, like earthquakes, and others which don't,at least not toan appreciable extent, like big meteor hits on Earth.
In earthquakes, parts of the Earth surface push against one another, with some lateral friction vector added, so any year in which there's no release of tension (i.e. Earthquake) adds to the probability of an event occurring, and to the magnitude of that event; in case of meteor hits, there's no additive power to the intensity of the event (meteors do not grow in size/energy potential with time), and the cumulative probability of occurrence increases very slowly, if at all.
I can't remember which industrialist once said it, but your comments are very similar to his. He said:
If someone asks if you can do a job, you say "Yes sir!" and then go about figuring out how to do it.
alternative strategy: figure out a way to pass the buck if it goes sour. Many times, the tasks proposed by PHBs are unfeasible, not because because they are too ambitious, but because they are either meaningless or manifestly absurd. My usual advice in these cases can be distilled in two words: "Steering committee"
Before that, he was deputy chief of the Justice Department's Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property section, where he worked under Scott Charney, who is currently corporate vice president for trustworthy computing at Microsoft
Trust... worthy... computing at Microsoft... Isn't there a law that prohibits the words trustworthy and Microsoft in the same sentence?
I do not think it's forbidden, but it comes very close to the definition of Oxymoron, i.e. mutually contradictory terms.
I still think that Microsoft will have a very hard time prying customers away from the fiercer of its competitors: WIN XP.
In all the financial institutions I work with, or know, WIN XP is the validated standard, and as far as I know no one takes the XP "expiry date" seriously, so no plan B is in place.
This is still in Microsoft favour, since no one is actively pursuing things like ubuntu/open office or such, but it's anyone's guess how long this state of grace will go on; after all, many applications work in terminal emulation, which is an ancient technology by any standard; why use Vista of Windows 7 for that?
The thing is, this is one use of DRM that I think I might be able to live with: when you're renting content.
the problem with DRM is that it turns everything into rented content. Your music, your movies, your video games, and soon to be your applications and your OS. Everybody wants to switch over to a pay per use plan because that's how they figure they'd make the most money.
I wander what will happen when I ask for copy of a music CD I bought aagain..... and again....and again.
This is a really good idea. Not because this code is any good. In fact it is quite obvious that whatever code Wall Street used to price CDS did not quite work, as AIG (who I am sure used a Wall Street bank for advice) was not able to correctly price these. So this is a classic situation of someone opensourcing code that is known to be useless, in order to get some good will out of it.
But if the code is open sourced, at least people will be able to analyze it and know how worthless it is. So when somebody wants to buy shares in a bank or an insurance company, he/she can look at the code used to price that company's assets and liablities and will know how much to trust the company's books.
There was a story a couple of months ago that some people examined the computer code that rating agencies used to rate mortgage backed securities. They asked the rating agency to plug in the code a slight decrease in home prices to see what prediction the code makes. The rating agency said that that would be impossible because the code was written under the assumption that housing prices never fall!!!
Unsurprisingly all major rating agencies rated most mortgage backed securities AAA right before the market crashed, and thus fucked over shitloads of investors that were stupid enough to believe them.
Now if an investor had access to the code, they might know that the rating agencies are full of shit and not trust their ratings.
...of course, simple commons sense told that, irrespective of the quality of the software, pricing complex derivatives, often lasting years and years, or rating bonds or issuers,implied a knowledge of the future that defied its end; if I knew with a good enough approximation the future events, why should I sell such knowledge for a pittance? and remember "pittance " here is a huge amount of money anyway. perversely enough, seeing an hardcoded result in the source would warm my heart, because it would imply that the rating agencies themselves knew that such quest for ratings, this kneeling at the althar of false gods, was moronic, and so it was not worth the effort to write good code for a random variable. I must confess that I am waiting with glee the day when the financial authorities will come clean and say to their controlled entities and the general public: " Do you remember how much we insist on financial risk management? well, it's all a load of brown stuff, because there's no such thing. the very concept is a contradiction in terms."
You shouldn't need super-secret proprietary Ultra Code in order to price an issue, it just requires a market and the means to discover a price. Of course, that doesn't help if you're selling the cash-stream leg of the derivative to yourself, so you need a very sophisticated process to discover how much a 3rd person would pay if you weren't self-dealing, which you might not be doing as much of if your issue was an actual item of intrinsic value, and not little more than a side bet you invented to mollify CDO investors...
Am I getting anything wrong here?
I'd say probably, because "market and the mean to discover a price" means to me the price at which I would be able to resell the derivative back to the originator or some other entity, not the price someone would pay for buying it, which is the usual answer. Moreover, and I am getting finacially geeky here, if you buy a credit default swap from an entity you really should buy two of them:D
here's why:
let's say that I own 10 mn USD of a 5 year maturity bond issued by General Electric, which for some reason I do not want to part from; this bond yields 1,2% over a treasury bond of similar maturity. So, I happily go to a big financial institutions, and they say: "Sure, no problem, we'll sell you a 5 year credit default swap;you pay us X% up front, and if any event of default happens before maturity, you'll deliver the bond to us and we'll pay you 10 mn USD" (this is the standard contract).
Ok, now i go home with a warm fuzzy all over myself, until I recall that i considered two outcomes instead of three, namely:
So, as you can see, where I needed protection from one event now I need two of them!!! Now let's go on to the "unnamed" 4th item, which happily kept me away from getting involved in CDS when I worked in an insurance company:
4. I buy long term listed puts on GE stock, the company goes bust, I collect the puts premia (there's no originator risk because in listed options the exchange takes collateral money) and goodbye to the financial institution, which might as well go bust herself!!!!!
For the financially ubergeeky, this strategy is also valuable in case GE does a big capital increase, since in that case the stock price goes down, helping my put options position, while my bond stays current and probably increases in value relative to a similar tresury issue. I have no uncertain pricing, since the options are listed, there's two way market any day, there's little or no counterparty risk, I do not have to sign an ISDA master agreement, , etc. etc.
The banks aren't any more anti-communism than Microsoft is. IE: They oppose it when it benefits others or non-executives, and support it when it keeps them and the rest of the American Aristocracy in beach houses and private jets.
[...]
I work in Finance since 1988, and I am at least familiar with CDS and other things, so here's my 2c.
CDS, and other exotic derivatives, have practically nothing to do with banking; moreover, Banking is a "Communist" activity.
let's first define "proper banking": your employer credits your pay to your bank account; your bank keeps a ledger of how much money you have available on your account, but unless you invest it yourself, by buying a government bond or something similar, that money is just sitting idle. Therefore, the bank invests it, taking into account that you might withdraw the money the next day etc.; let's say that the bank deposits your money with the Central bank at the determined rate, which is the official lever through which any central bank governs how much "money" costs, and which is the same for all banks in a particular jurisdiction. IT goes without saying that the bank can lend the money to your employer, who, since is not as solid financially as a central bank, will have to pay an higher rate of interest. at this point you have: 1. A single authority (central bank) that decides how much money costs;
2.the same authority does (...) enforce standards by which the banks should be strictly regulated on how much risk they are taking on by investing, and how much of their own capital they have to set aside against possible losses, to ensure that a banking meltdown does not happen;
3. a varied assortment of banking establishments, which differentiate themselves from each other on their relative ability to choose how to use the depositors' money: leave it at the central bank, or take on additional risks within the strict confines of the laws and regulations in order to make more money for their shareholders.
We therefore have a system in which a single national authority provides the commodity (i.e. money) that you're trading on, sets the associated rules and regulations for using it, and has enforcement power when you do something different from what they want; in addition, they have powers of inspection that few other authorities have, in addition to the power and responsibility to close any bank that falters; you'll all agree with me that this is really a pretty deterministic ("communist") system.
ao, to go back to the original comment: bankers have NOT become communists; they first became BAD communists, and ow they will be led home by their distracted mother, the central bank ( I hope).
The painful truth is MS products are good enough in most people's eyes, and that's all that matters at the moment. The computer is a means to an end to most people. They have real, actual concerns to deal with that don't involve nerd drama.
right and wrong at the same time. Yes, to my wife the PC is just a tool, to browse the internet and download e-mail, but even if the computer runs XP pro, she does use Firefox and Thunderbird... so if i had to change the computer to Vista, or Windows seven, I could always set up an ubuntu rig, she'd probably not even notice.
Why did I do that? because with most new versions of old software by Microsoft, be it office, IE, or vista, the unskilled user has had a more troubling experience, a steeper learning curve, and in many cases a noticeable lack of performance. try installing Vista on a 20 month old hardware, and you'll get the question "can I go back to what I was using?", followed by "is there something else?"
So no, it's not the slashdot crowd that's whining at windows anymore, it's the MS customer crowd. Slashdotters only gloat.
[...] I don't know if Boomers have passive sonar as good as that of an attack submarine, but it's probably pretty close. All this incident proves is that the engineers did their jobs well and made the sub nearly undetectable by passive means.
Even if they had the same Sonar suite / processing power, the end result would be that, all else being equal, the Boomer (missile sub) would have a better detection range than the attack sub, simply because the reactor would be optimized for noise, not speed.
the attack sub has need for speed transients (peak speeds inthe 35+ knots range), the boomer has not. Since detection by Active Sonar suites (Surface combatants and such, active sonobuoys etc) is an issue, the attack sub is preferably as small as possible, which denies it installing bulky noise reduction equipment, like a larger reactor cooling system which avoids the need for pumps.
As for spreading the boomers out, as elsewhere in history, geography dictates to history: even if the range is in the 4.000 nautical miles range, the areas that cover for example Iran and most of russia at the same time is not infinite, so depending on the strategic contingency planning (north Korea anyone?), the ocean can get smaller than it looks from space.
In addition: as much as it's great to bring a cat home from the shelter so they can take in another one (especially now, with people abandoning cats when their houses get foreclosed... who would do that?!?), ask yourself why you're getting the cat.
Make sure that you're not just getting the cat to be a roving rattrap. You're going to be responsible for the care of a living being, remember -- regardless of whether the cat is actually a good mouser, it's your responsibility to give it a good home.
Also, just to warn you, Siamese cats are very loud and whiny. We just got one, and she's very needy, and talks your ear off if she wants something. Look at some Youtube videos of Siamese cats. I have no idea how a mix would be, but I just wanted to warn you...
I own two cats, and one of their principal characteristics is that they sleep most of the day, and they "hunt" at night..so unless you provide for access to the relevant areas at night, it will be a poor solution, unless you're very fond of cats for company's sake (I am).
Oddly enough, that pretty much covers it. This article has nothing specifically to do with blackberrys, its about any kind of cell phone using a public GSM or CDMA network.
that's why the most probable presidential commlink is a multipoint/ always on/ encrypted comm system..... it encrypts gibberish (or recorded calls with disinformation in it, which would be an elegant trick) most of the time, and phone calls when needed. Yes, it gives away the locations of all the transmitters, but so what? it does away with the Sigint risk,i.e. even if I do not know whose phone a particular signal is, the call patterns give away info....everyone seemed obsessed with his personal security risk, but the Signal analysis risk is in a way far worse, because If an opponent identifies the various blackberry users, it could glean info based on who calls whom: if after a big accident in Gaza Obama calls the defence secretary straight away, it's different for the "intentions" people than if he calls the diplomats first...
On a side note, I read in the comments to the article someone complaining that the media is analysing the risks connected to the presidents having his own blackberry. I find that this point of view is utterly ludicrous, given that an half assed gadget man like me is aware of those issue.
one of the things that galls me is that he's the boss and he's taking a security risk publicly. in my country there's an old saying, "The fish stinks from the head"..... everyone will be more lax on security issues from now on....
Slashdot Mirror
I'd discipline my son when he lies about homework, if only I could quit playing COD4.
I solved the daylight problem... I have a duplicate set of solar panel on the opposite side of Earth, wired into the house!
Just wait for Italy to switch nuclear. Just wait...
the present government in Italy is committed to allow construction of nuclear power plants in italy, probably on the framework of the finnish nuclear plant. The biggest italian utility has a stake in the french prototype of the EPR reactor.
Italy, and especially Piedmont, the region I live in, is in the unique situation of having dismantled its own nuclear reactors, while being downwind from France and its nuclear plants, by which it imports about half of the 12% of the total electricity needs it imports from abroad.
Italy is a kyoto treaty signatory, and strange as it may seem, nuclear is cheap if you signed that piece of paper, especially in respect to Solar and wind. Here's the link, in italian, of the government's intentions towards nuclear investment.
Disclosure to a 3rd party is suicide as your atty-client confidentiality could be lost (what happens if the 3rd party gets subpoenas?). Losing data is suicide because it shows a lack of due diligence. Use paper. It works. or burn to 2X archival CDR and THEN use paper. whatever floats your boat.
I think that might be resolved by encryption, like plausible deniability.
Then again, if client/attorney relationship is a problem, and the client is paranoid, have him encrypt the documentation himself with his public key, send it to you encrypted further with your public key, and store it somewhere. This way, the only way to access those backups will be by asking both for the private keys, and no one can tamper with the actual content indipendently of the other.
Why not just go nuclear? We could eliminate CO2 and increase the speed by 2x over diesel.
...what part of the phrase "Piracy in Somalia" is unfamiliar to you?
I thought mission critical computers should not be reachable from the Internet. So the spies walked to those computers and planted the software there???
that happens in the military, where there's a defined physical space between mission critical rigs, unconnected to the internet, and non mission critical rigs, and you must use physical media, "launder" it on a standalone computer, then transfer the data to the mission critical computers.
I do think, tough, that in any event physical security built into the systems would block major damage; no sane engineer would avoid building that into the infrastructure. After all we do have circuit breakers at home, we do not rely on a computer chip.
It might also be that this is a colossal scam, in that some federal agency is "phishing" these guys, which to me could be a perfectly legitimate ruse-de-guerre.
If you've got even an ounce of willpower, you can quit too.
I was once addicted to willpower. Then I went cold turkey and caved in to every craving, and now I feel much better.
Lucky you. I was addicted to cold turkey, and since my loved one has started roasting it for dinner my life took a turn for the worse.
Maybe it's just me, but it also seems that videogaming has been moving increasingly towards consoles. One less thing you need an increasingly powerful computer for.
...Running Vista or Windows 7 + office could be a good start.... [rant] I work/worked for 20 + years in a business environment, started out with an 8088, and when I bought a combination Athlon/win xp I've met a really new experience in my life....I quit pestering the higher ups for a bleeding edge rig. With the core duo generation of processors, the natural tendency in "power users" has been to yell to the IT guys "keep your hands off my rig! you can take it from my cold , dead hands!!!!!!"[/rant]
On a more serious note, I work in Finance as a portfolio manager/advisor; the benchmark information system for people like me is the Bloomberg, and AFAIK their reference system for installation is a WIN XP sp3 machine with office 2003. No plans for Vista or Win7 has been circulated to the users, who for the most part are on a mix of win2000/win xp machines. Most if not all of these machines work well in their present state but would not work as well in Vista/win7. Moreover, when these rigs were bought, hardware was a bigger part of the cost of ownership than it's now. since some of these broke down, big offices know how much a rig adequate for win xp costs vis a vis one that must run Vista on a similar level of user experience....lots of things are moving in Xp's direction.....
I remember Arthur C Clarke saying that Sci Fi is something that could happen, while fantasy is something that could never happen.
Only if you use the word "could" to means "sometime in the future, but not with what we currently know." By that reasoning, fantasy could happen as well, assuming that we find some source of power that would grant people abilities indistinguishable from magic. Is that any crazier than assuming that at some point we'll be able to travel faster than the speed of light?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke
Given his motto, I think Clarke would characterize that kind of "Fantasy" as "science Fiction".
I thought that adding some local view would add some colour, so here's my 2âc
There's been some back and forth on the national papers about this earthquake prediction, liberally mixed with rumors about stray dogs wailing, etc etc. I fully expect this to continue, since basic scientific method is not the order of the day here.
As much as I think that further research by the guy in question will be valuable, the history of earthquake prediction has been rather dismal, insofar as many times over, after a quake, it's been relatively easy to find some scientist having predicted it, while the actual "before the fact " experience has materially changed in the ability to foresee what ( we do have seismic maps, etc.), but not the when.
"See better or die. Simple."
[...]
To get an 'evolutionary' effect out of video gaming you'd have to look at self-selection, I think. In other words, a case where it's not that playing a game makes your eyesight better, but just that normally-sighted people drop out en masse and the only players left are super-sighted freaks.
What's happening here seems to be more interesting than just selection.
Nature is a tightfisted lady. natural selection gives a set of potential abilities, but if you do not use them, they fall by the wayside. Think about how astronauts bodies lose mass and bone density in space.
the human race has been shaped by its tribal structure; the ability to discriminate visual info for hunting, while handy for everyone, kept honed probably only in the individuals who specialized in hunting. nature discarded the immediate availability in other members of the tribe.
Doesn't the tendency of an event recurring increase with the passage of time?
California hasn't had an earthquake recently, the chance is getting better ever day.
There are phenomena that follow that rule, like earthquakes, and others which don't,at least not toan appreciable extent, like big meteor hits on Earth.
In earthquakes, parts of the Earth surface push against one another, with some lateral friction vector added, so any year in which there's no release of tension (i.e. Earthquake) adds to the probability of an event occurring, and to the magnitude of that event; in case of meteor hits, there's no additive power to the intensity of the event (meteors do not grow in size/energy potential with time), and the cumulative probability of occurrence increases very slowly, if at all.
I can't remember which industrialist once said it, but your comments are very similar to his. He said:
If someone asks if you can do a job, you say "Yes sir!" and then go about figuring out how to do it.
alternative strategy: figure out a way to pass the buck if it goes sour. Many times, the tasks proposed by PHBs are unfeasible, not because because they are too ambitious, but because they are either meaningless or manifestly absurd. My usual advice in these cases can be distilled in two words: "Steering committee"
Before that, he was deputy chief of the Justice Department's Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property section, where he worked under Scott Charney, who is currently corporate vice president for trustworthy computing at Microsoft Trust... worthy... computing at Microsoft... Isn't there a law that prohibits the words trustworthy and Microsoft in the same sentence?
I do not think it's forbidden, but it comes very close to the definition of Oxymoron, i.e. mutually contradictory terms.
I still think that Microsoft will have a very hard time prying customers away from the fiercer of its competitors: WIN XP.
In all the financial institutions I work with, or know, WIN XP is the validated standard, and as far as I know no one takes the XP "expiry date" seriously, so no plan B is in place.
This is still in Microsoft favour, since no one is actively pursuing things like ubuntu/open office or such, but it's anyone's guess how long this state of grace will go on; after all, many applications work in terminal emulation, which is an ancient technology by any standard; why use Vista of Windows 7 for that?
the problem with DRM is that it turns everything into rented content. Your music, your movies, your video games, and soon to be your applications and your OS. Everybody wants to switch over to a pay per use plan because that's how they figure they'd make the most money.
I wander what will happen when I ask for copy of a music CD I bought aagain ..... and again....and again.
This is a really good idea. Not because this code is any good. In fact it is quite obvious that whatever code Wall Street used to price CDS did not quite work, as AIG (who I am sure used a Wall Street bank for advice) was not able to correctly price these. So this is a classic situation of someone opensourcing code that is known to be useless, in order to get some good will out of it.
But if the code is open sourced, at least people will be able to analyze it and know how worthless it is. So when somebody wants to buy shares in a bank or an insurance company, he/she can look at the code used to price that company's assets and liablities and will know how much to trust the company's books.
There was a story a couple of months ago that some people examined the computer code that rating agencies used to rate mortgage backed securities. They asked the rating agency to plug in the code a slight decrease in home prices to see what prediction the code makes. The rating agency said that that would be impossible because the code was written under the assumption that housing prices never fall!!!
Unsurprisingly all major rating agencies rated most mortgage backed securities AAA right before the market crashed, and thus fucked over shitloads of investors that were stupid enough to believe them.
Now if an investor had access to the code, they might know that the rating agencies are full of shit and not trust their ratings.
...of course, simple commons sense told that, irrespective of the quality of the software, pricing complex derivatives, often lasting years and years, or rating bonds or issuers,implied a knowledge of the future that defied its end; if I knew with a good enough approximation the future events, why should I sell such knowledge for a pittance? and remember "pittance " here is a huge amount of money anyway.
perversely enough, seeing an hardcoded result in the source would warm my heart, because it would imply that the rating agencies themselves knew that such quest for ratings, this kneeling at the althar of false gods, was moronic, and so it was not worth the effort to write good code for a random variable.
I must confess that I am waiting with glee the day when the financial authorities will come clean and say to their controlled entities and the general public:
" Do you remember how much we insist on financial risk management? well, it's all a load of brown stuff, because there's no such thing. the very concept is a contradiction in terms."
You shouldn't need super-secret proprietary Ultra Code in order to price an issue, it just requires a market and the means to discover a price. Of course, that doesn't help if you're selling the cash-stream leg of the derivative to yourself, so you need a very sophisticated process to discover how much a 3rd person would pay if you weren't self-dealing, which you might not be doing as much of if your issue was an actual item of intrinsic value, and not little more than a side bet you invented to mollify CDO investors...
Am I getting anything wrong here?
I'd say probably, because "market and the mean to discover a price" means to me the price at which I would be able to resell the derivative back to the originator or some other entity, not the price someone would pay for buying it, which is the usual answer. :D
Moreover, and I am getting finacially geeky here, if you buy a credit default swap from an entity you really should buy two of them
here's why:
let's say that I own 10 mn USD of a 5 year maturity bond issued by General Electric, which for some reason I do not want to part from; this bond yields 1,2% over a treasury bond of similar maturity.
So, I happily go to a big financial institutions, and they say: "Sure, no problem, we'll sell you a 5 year credit default swap;you pay us X% up front, and if any event of default happens before maturity, you'll deliver the bond to us and we'll pay you 10 mn USD" (this is the standard contract).
Ok, now i go home with a warm fuzzy all over myself, until I recall that i considered two outcomes instead of three, namely:
1.the bond I own does not default, and I spent X% on insurance (ticks off list)
2.the bond I own defaults, I collect the insurance payment, and go home content (ticks off list, again);
3.the bond I own defaults, but the financial institution I bought the CDS from defaults sooner(HOLY %$&Ã@#é, why didn't I think of that?!?!?!?!?! and where can I buy the CDS on the big financial institution? how much does it costs?)
So, as you can see, where I needed protection from one event now I need two of them!!!
Now let's go on to the "unnamed" 4th item, which happily kept me away from getting involved in CDS when I worked in an insurance company:
4. I buy long term listed puts on GE stock, the company goes bust, I collect the puts premia (there's no originator risk because in listed options the exchange takes collateral money) and goodbye to the financial institution, which might as well go bust herself!!!!!
For the financially ubergeeky, this strategy is also valuable in case GE does a big capital increase, since in that case the stock price goes down, helping my put options position, while my bond stays current and probably increases in value relative to a similar tresury issue.
I have no uncertain pricing, since the options are listed, there's two way market any day, there's little or no counterparty risk, I do not have to sign an ISDA master agreement, , etc. etc.
The banks aren't any more anti-communism than Microsoft is. IE: They oppose it when it benefits others or non-executives, and support it when it keeps them and the rest of the American Aristocracy in beach houses and private jets.
[...]
I work in Finance since 1988, and I am at least familiar with CDS and other things, so here's my 2c.
CDS, and other exotic derivatives, have practically nothing to do with banking; moreover, Banking is a "Communist" activity.
let's first define "proper banking": your employer credits your pay to your bank account; your bank keeps a ledger of how much money you have available on your account, but unless you invest it yourself, by buying a government bond or something similar, that money is just sitting idle.
Therefore, the bank invests it, taking into account that you might withdraw the money the next day etc.; let's say that the bank deposits your money with the Central bank at the determined rate, which is the official lever through which any central bank governs how much "money" costs, and which is the same for all banks in a particular jurisdiction. IT goes without saying that the bank can lend the money to your employer, who, since is not as solid financially as a central bank, will have to pay an higher rate of interest.
at this point you have:
1. A single authority (central bank) that decides how much money costs;
2.the same authority does (...) enforce standards by which the banks should be strictly regulated on how much risk they are taking on by investing, and how much of their own capital they have to set aside against possible losses, to ensure that a banking meltdown does not happen;
3. a varied assortment of banking establishments, which differentiate themselves from each other on their relative ability to choose how to use the depositors' money: leave it at the central bank, or take on additional risks within the strict confines of the laws and regulations in order to make more money for their shareholders.
We therefore have a system in which a single national authority provides the commodity (i.e. money) that you're trading on, sets the associated rules and regulations for using it, and has enforcement power when you do something different from what they want; in addition, they have powers of inspection that few other authorities have, in addition to the power and responsibility to close any bank that falters; you'll all agree with me that this is really a pretty deterministic ("communist") system.
Lo and behold, all banking systems work this way since 1930 , one year after the 1929 crash.
in the US, that way of doing things was distorted during the Clinton administration, with the active connivance of then Fed president Alan Greenspan.
ao, to go back to the original comment: bankers have NOT become communists; they first became BAD communists, and ow they will be led home by their distracted mother, the central bank ( I hope).
The painful truth is MS products are good enough in most people's eyes, and that's all that matters at the moment. The computer is a means to an end to most people. They have real, actual concerns to deal with that don't involve nerd drama.
right and wrong at the same time. Yes, to my wife the PC is just a tool, to browse the internet and download e-mail, but even if the computer runs XP pro, she does use Firefox and Thunderbird... so if i had to change the computer to Vista, or Windows seven, I could always set up an ubuntu rig, she'd probably not even notice.
Why did I do that? because with most new versions of old software by Microsoft, be it office, IE, or vista, the unskilled user has had a more troubling experience, a steeper learning curve, and in many cases a noticeable lack of performance. try installing Vista on a 20 month old hardware, and you'll get the question "can I go back to what I was using?", followed by "is there something else?"
So no, it's not the slashdot crowd that's whining at windows anymore, it's the MS customer crowd. Slashdotters only gloat.
[...] I don't know if Boomers have passive sonar as good as that of an attack submarine, but it's probably pretty close. All this incident proves is that the engineers did their jobs well and made the sub nearly undetectable by passive means.
Even if they had the same Sonar suite / processing power, the end result would be that, all else being equal, the Boomer (missile sub) would have a better detection range than the attack sub, simply because the reactor would be optimized for noise, not speed.
the attack sub has need for speed transients (peak speeds inthe 35+ knots range), the boomer has not. Since detection by Active Sonar suites (Surface combatants and such, active sonobuoys etc) is an issue, the attack sub is preferably as small as possible, which denies it installing bulky noise reduction equipment, like a larger reactor cooling system which avoids the need for pumps.
As for spreading the boomers out, as elsewhere in history, geography dictates to history: even if the range is in the 4.000 nautical miles range, the areas that cover for example Iran and most of russia at the same time is not infinite, so depending on the strategic contingency planning (north Korea anyone?), the ocean can get smaller than it looks from space.
They say (I don't know who they are) that any hole/gap that you can fit a pencil through a mouse can get through as well.
oooohhhhhhh, Kinky!!!!!! ;)
In addition: as much as it's great to bring a cat home from the shelter so they can take in another one (especially now, with people abandoning cats when their houses get foreclosed... who would do that?!?), ask yourself why you're getting the cat.
Make sure that you're not just getting the cat to be a roving rattrap. You're going to be responsible for the care of a living being, remember -- regardless of whether the cat is actually a good mouser, it's your responsibility to give it a good home.
Also, just to warn you, Siamese cats are very loud and whiny. We just got one, and she's very needy, and talks your ear off if she wants something. Look at some Youtube videos of Siamese cats. I have no idea how a mix would be, but I just wanted to warn you...
I own two cats, and one of their principal characteristics is that they sleep most of the day, and they "hunt" at night..so unless you provide for access to the relevant areas at night, it will be a poor solution, unless you're very fond of cats for company's sake (I am).
Oddly enough, that pretty much covers it. This article has nothing specifically to do with blackberrys, its about any kind of cell phone using a public GSM or CDMA network.
that's why the most probable presidential commlink is a multipoint/ always on/ encrypted comm system..... it encrypts gibberish (or recorded calls with disinformation in it, which would be an elegant trick) most of the time, and phone calls when needed. Yes, it gives away the locations of all the transmitters, but so what? it does away with the Sigint risk,i.e. even if I do not know whose phone a particular signal is, the call patterns give away info....everyone seemed obsessed with his personal security risk, but the Signal analysis risk is in a way far worse, because If an opponent identifies the various blackberry users, it could glean info based on who calls whom: if after a big accident in Gaza Obama calls the defence secretary straight away, it's different for the "intentions" people than if he calls the diplomats first...
On a side note, I read in the comments to the article someone complaining that the media is analysing the risks connected to the presidents having his own blackberry. I find that this point of view is utterly ludicrous, given that an half assed gadget man like me is aware of those issue.
one of the things that galls me is that he's the boss and he's taking a security risk publicly. in my country there's an old saying, "The fish stinks from the head"..... everyone will be more lax on security issues from now on....