If you disbelieve hard enough, you might go away, barring some external, real intervention. Disbelieve that food exists and that you need it to survive, and it will go away from your perspective because your perspective goes away when you die.
REVIEW: You don't even try to use vi? JOY: I'm used to having a 24-line terminal with no ability to scroll back. The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the screen.
Of course, that was a long time ago, when vi was only 10 years old. Here's the interview from Unix Review. In the interview, he likens vi to a piñata.
On a more serious note, he does — gasp — criticize vi and say that it needs features and is a little complicated. It's an interesting historical read.
Start your own blog with your own resources. Slashdot owes you nothing, least of all coverage on the front page. Part of Slashdot's value is in filtering stories for its voluntary audience — providing "news for nerds."
Even given this lack of obligation, Slashdot is fairly liberal (in the classical sense) in not censoring. Your journal is not censored. Your comments are not censored (barring that Scientology incident). Moderation is hardly censorship; it is another form of filtering that you voluntarily submit to by posting comments and reading Slashdot at a given threshold.
As for your rejected stories, consider writing your stories as journal entries and submitting them that way so that they are published regardless of whether an editor decides to put it on the front page.
There were serious problems with this bill, which I wrote on my blag to try to persuade my friends and family that it was a bad idea. I wrote my congresswoman and senators to try to convince them of the same.
After the house rejected a similar measure, the Senate introduced a new bill with even more crap in it. Appropriations bills have to begin in the House of Reps, so the Senate picked an old house resolution, 1424, and gutted it. They then added 450 pages. Is that really a bill that started in the House?
My congresswoman, Jean Schmidt, voted against the first bill, and then voted for the Senate version. I wrote a somewhat venomous letter to her after she did this, telling her that I would do everything in my power to get her fired. Hopefully I won't be getting any special visits from my closing line, which others have told me sounds a little harsh:
You're right that they are not more tax efficient for those who take the buyback, but the tax treatment is better for those who choose to increase their stakes by not participating, as there is zero tax effect for these people. There is a net tax benefit to doing buybacks versus simply paying the same amount in dividends.
All said, I'm not too optimistic either tax rate, given our mounting obligations as a country.
Parent post is at best hard to parse and at worst nonsense, and I don't like modding posts overrated. I have studied public finance extensively, and I also manage investments.
You improve your P/E ratio, ultimately meaning that your dividends get spread across a smaller pool of stocks...
PE is the ratio of Price (per share) to Earnings (per share). Any change in PE is incidental here, and is the result of the reduction in the denominator of EPS (Earnings Per Share). In fact, you might expect the PE ratio to stay the same, with the price moving commensurate to the reduction in shares and increase in EPS. When you say "stocks", you are referring to the stock of more than one company. You meant shares, which represent stock in a company. I'm not trying to be pedantic, but using the right terminology helps.
When a company has excess cash, one of the things it can do is to buy back shares from shareholders who wish to sell shares. Doing this reduces the shares outstanding and therefore increases the ownership stakes of those shareholders who decide not to sell. Some shareholders might also use it as a tax-efficient dividend (at the capital gains rate), by selling a small fraction of their shareholding.
makes the stocks more valuable as a blue chip commodity, raising their price. its a good strategy when you're taking a long view, and don't anticipate any future rapid growth.
Being a blue chip company has more to do with having stable earnings and a clean balance sheet. Blue chip companies are the companies of conservative investors, "widows and orphans", and this has little to do with buying back shares, except that it is a way to approximate a dividend.
The $40b is controlled by the board of directors, and ultimately belongs to the shareholders. its not a funny money fund. Ultimately the best use of the $ is to improve the shareholder's value.
Buybacks are more tax efficient. US shareholders would each be taxed at the dividend income rate for the dividend payment. By doing a buyback, shareholders who would have preferred a dividend can sell a portion of their shares, simulating a dividend, and then only paying the capital gains tax, which is typically lower than the tax for ordinary income or dividends.
I watched an interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, in which he said that the license for Android means that Yahoo could, for example, create their own version. (In the same interview, he said he would be happy if Microsoft built the next version of IE on Chrome).
Hopefully future vendors will drop the Google account requirement. There are rumors of a Sprint android phone, and AT&T has commented that they are considering it, for whatever that is worth.
Better would be to see something like OpenAndroid spring up to succeed where OpenMoko has so far failed.
For those wondering what the parent post is about, the title of the article was originally in the form of "Google unveil", which is popular in British English.
Only recently have we started to see this use of collective nouns with plural-form verbs in America. I especially see it in music web sites when referring to bands as collective nouns instead of single entities.
It hinges on whether you see companies as "they" or "it". I think it makes more sense to refer to discrete entities in the singular, as the title does now.
In fact, most economists consider ~5% unemployment normal. This level is called natural unemployment. A major contributor is frictional unemployment, which describes people who are searching for a new job or between seasonal jobs, e.g. going from life-guarding in the summer to cooking in the winter.
Cosmovox owes some of its inspiration to the Theremin, an early 20th century electronic music instrument which is played by moving your hands near an antenna. Cosmovox can convincingly imitate the sound of the Theremin, and other similar electronic instruments which haunt pulp sci-fi movies, yet Cosmovox uses the computing power of your iPhone to do far more.
Buying a house with leverage was a great trade ten years ago, you'd still have a remarkable return in most areas of the world.
True, but people were still buying with this rationale two years ago. A better example would be buying into a stock market bubble like the one in the Japanese stock market in the 1980s. 14 years after it burst stocks still hadn't recovered to its peak level. We have had similar situations in our stock market.
That splash page is a usability nightmare. The image, which is primarily text, should include alt and longdesc attributes so that blind people and other people using text-only clients can decipher the message.
Even better, they could format that page using text for the text part and images with alt text for the decorative part.
Better than that would be dropping the splash page altogether, as it seems to convey nothing of value for most visitors.
Caveat Investor. Parent is likely a lucky and/or foolish speculator rather than an investor.
Practically no one earns 30% annually with consistency, especially not people for whom it is a hobby. Many people remember the good bets and forget the bad ones. The only way you should be tracking returns is by measuring the net value of the account/s from period to period.
Ten years ago, people "invested" in their homes with leverage (debt) when everyone was saying that you'd be insane not to and that renters were throwing away their money. Now many of these people are upside down. You can be lucky for a long time, but that's not necessarily investing.
Sometimes markets aren't efficient, and a smart, even-tempered investor can beat them. This combination is rare, and on average, the average investor has average returns. For your reference, the average annual compounding return for the S&P 500, a fairly representative index of 500 American stocks, was 5.3% from 1 Jan. 2002 to 31 Dec. 2007. It's fallen since then.
Doing what the parent advocates, especially with leverage — options, forwards & futures, buying on margin (borrowing money), or shorting (borrowing stock)—, could net you big money, but it could also wipe you out.
That is a valid complaint. Not only do you need a Mac, you need the most recent OS.
I have a Powerbook G4 and a Macbook, both running OS X 10.4. Developing on the Powerbook is out because it has a risc processor, and I need OS 10.5 to develop on my (x86) Macbook.
Last night I downloaded Google's android SDK and emulator, and today I have a working Hello World and sample Lunar Lander.
Although Google has promised Android Market there are no android phones out there right yet, so the revenue potential is much less than for the iPhone at the moment.
Looks like someone missed both the link and the winking emoticon.
At a depth of about 60 feet, which is quite comfortable given life support, I was a little startled when that very submarine snuck up on me scuba diving near Sunset House.
They likely mean "corresponding to a real person" by unique visitor, not being unique to the period. If we assume 200 million unique visitors in a year, 120 million of those people could be visiting every month, thus 120 million unique visitors a month. The other 80 million visitors from that year are the sensible ones.
Multiple browsers can skew the figure. If a myspace user has a work computer, a home computer, and an iPhone, he will appear as 3 unique visitors unless he is logged in.
Slashdot Mirror
If you disbelieve hard enough, you might go away, barring some external, real intervention. Disbelieve that food exists and that you need it to survive, and it will go away from your perspective because your perspective goes away when you die.
Last I heard, Bill prefers ed to his own vi.
REVIEW: You don't even try to use vi?
JOY: I'm used to having a 24-line terminal with no ability to scroll back. The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the screen.
Of course, that was a long time ago, when vi was only 10 years old. Here's the interview from Unix Review. In the interview, he likens vi to a piñata.
On a more serious note, he does — gasp — criticize vi and say that it needs features and is a little complicated. It's an interesting historical read.
Whoosh.
There are at least two contexts in which that is funny.
Dubya, is that you?
Start your own blog with your own resources. Slashdot owes you nothing, least of all coverage on the front page. Part of Slashdot's value is in filtering stories for its voluntary audience — providing "news for nerds."
Even given this lack of obligation, Slashdot is fairly liberal (in the classical sense) in not censoring. Your journal is not censored. Your comments are not censored (barring that Scientology incident). Moderation is hardly censorship; it is another form of filtering that you voluntarily submit to by posting comments and reading Slashdot at a given threshold.
As for your rejected stories, consider writing your stories as journal entries and submitting them that way so that they are published regardless of whether an editor decides to put it on the front page.
OMG WAU!!! U CAN HAS javascript implementashun!!
JAVASCRIPT VERZHUN moer liek:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR IZ 0
IM IN YR LOOP
UPZ VAR!!1
IZ VAR BIGR THAN 10?
GTFO.
KTHX
VISIBLE VAR
KTHX
KTHXBYE
Javascript Lolcode Inturpretur.
KTHXBYE, WTFBBQ!
*ducks*
There were serious problems with this bill, which I wrote on my blag to try to persuade my friends and family that it was a bad idea. I wrote my congresswoman and senators to try to convince them of the same.
After the house rejected a similar measure, the Senate introduced a new bill with even more crap in it. Appropriations bills have to begin in the House of Reps, so the Senate picked an old house resolution, 1424, and gutted it. They then added 450 pages. Is that really a bill that started in the House?
My congresswoman, Jean Schmidt, voted against the first bill, and then voted for the Senate version. I wrote a somewhat venomous letter to her after she did this, telling her that I would do everything in my power to get her fired. Hopefully I won't be getting any special visits from my closing line, which others have told me sounds a little harsh:
I noticed from the roll call that you voted for this boondoggle, H.R. 1424. You have no spine, and I will use every ounce of my energy to have you removed from office. You do not represent us.
Sadly insightful.
but this is what will take people to the streets!
(who am I kidding, everyone has cable anyway)
You're right that they are not more tax efficient for those who take the buyback, but the tax treatment is better for those who choose to increase their stakes by not participating, as there is zero tax effect for these people. There is a net tax benefit to doing buybacks versus simply paying the same amount in dividends.
All said, I'm not too optimistic either tax rate, given our mounting obligations as a country.
Parent post is at best hard to parse and at worst nonsense, and I don't like modding posts overrated. I have studied public finance extensively, and I also manage investments.
You improve your P/E ratio, ultimately meaning that your dividends get spread across a smaller pool of stocks...
PE is the ratio of Price (per share) to Earnings (per share). Any change in PE is incidental here, and is the result of the reduction in the denominator of EPS (Earnings Per Share). In fact, you might expect the PE ratio to stay the same, with the price moving commensurate to the reduction in shares and increase in EPS. When you say "stocks", you are referring to the stock of more than one company. You meant shares, which represent stock in a company. I'm not trying to be pedantic, but using the right terminology helps.
When a company has excess cash, one of the things it can do is to buy back shares from shareholders who wish to sell shares. Doing this reduces the shares outstanding and therefore increases the ownership stakes of those shareholders who decide not to sell. Some shareholders might also use it as a tax-efficient dividend (at the capital gains rate), by selling a small fraction of their shareholding.
makes the stocks more valuable as a blue chip commodity, raising their price. its a good strategy when you're taking a long view, and don't anticipate any future rapid growth.
Being a blue chip company has more to do with having stable earnings and a clean balance sheet. Blue chip companies are the companies of conservative investors, "widows and orphans", and this has little to do with buying back shares, except that it is a way to approximate a dividend.
The $40b is controlled by the board of directors, and ultimately belongs to the shareholders. its not a funny money fund. Ultimately the best use of the $ is to improve the shareholder's value.
Parse error.
Buybacks are more tax efficient. US shareholders would each be taxed at the dividend income rate for the dividend payment. By doing a buyback, shareholders who would have preferred a dividend can sell a portion of their shares, simulating a dividend, and then only paying the capital gains tax, which is typically lower than the tax for ordinary income or dividends.
I watched an interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, in which he said that the license for Android means that Yahoo could, for example, create their own version. (In the same interview, he said he would be happy if Microsoft built the next version of IE on Chrome).
Hopefully future vendors will drop the Google account requirement. There are rumors of a Sprint android phone, and AT&T has commented that they are considering it, for whatever that is worth.
Better would be to see something like OpenAndroid spring up to succeed where OpenMoko has so far failed.
For those wondering what the parent post is about, the title of the article was originally in the form of "Google unveil", which is popular in British English.
Only recently have we started to see this use of collective nouns with plural-form verbs in America. I especially see it in music web sites when referring to bands as collective nouns instead of single entities.
It hinges on whether you see companies as "they" or "it". I think it makes more sense to refer to discrete entities in the singular, as the title does now.
In fact, most economists consider ~5% unemployment normal. This level is called natural unemployment. A major contributor is frictional unemployment, which describes people who are searching for a new job or between seasonal jobs, e.g. going from life-guarding in the summer to cooking in the winter.
Cosmovox owes some of its inspiration to the Theremin, an early 20th century electronic music instrument which is played by moving your hands near an antenna. Cosmovox can convincingly imitate the sound of the Theremin, and other similar electronic instruments which haunt pulp sci-fi movies, yet Cosmovox uses the computing power of your iPhone to do far more.
From the app developer's web site: About Cosmovox.
Buying a house with leverage was a great trade ten years ago, you'd still have a remarkable return in most areas of the world.
True, but people were still buying with this rationale two years ago. A better example would be buying into a stock market bubble like the one in the Japanese stock market in the 1980s. 14 years after it burst stocks still hadn't recovered to its peak level. We have had similar situations in our stock market.
That splash page is a usability nightmare. The image, which is primarily text, should include alt and longdesc attributes so that blind people and other people using text-only clients can decipher the message.
Even better, they could format that page using text for the text part and images with alt text for the decorative part.
Better than that would be dropping the splash page altogether, as it seems to convey nothing of value for most visitors.
Caveat Investor. Parent is likely a lucky and/or foolish speculator rather than an investor.
Practically no one earns 30% annually with consistency, especially not people for whom it is a hobby. Many people remember the good bets and forget the bad ones. The only way you should be tracking returns is by measuring the net value of the account/s from period to period.
Ten years ago, people "invested" in their homes with leverage (debt) when everyone was saying that you'd be insane not to and that renters were throwing away their money. Now many of these people are upside down. You can be lucky for a long time, but that's not necessarily investing.
Sometimes markets aren't efficient, and a smart, even-tempered investor can beat them. This combination is rare, and on average, the average investor has average returns. For your reference, the average annual compounding return for the S&P 500, a fairly representative index of 500 American stocks, was 5.3% from 1 Jan. 2002 to 31 Dec. 2007. It's fallen since then.
Doing what the parent advocates, especially with leverage — options, forwards & futures, buying on margin (borrowing money), or shorting (borrowing stock)—, could net you big money, but it could also wipe you out.
That is a valid complaint. Not only do you need a Mac, you need the most recent OS.
I have a Powerbook G4 and a Macbook, both running OS X 10.4. Developing on the Powerbook is out because it has a risc processor, and I need OS 10.5 to develop on my (x86) Macbook.
Last night I downloaded Google's android SDK and emulator, and today I have a working Hello World and sample Lunar Lander.
Although Google has promised Android Market there are no android phones out there right yet, so the revenue potential is much less than for the iPhone at the moment.
A source to back you up via a Google News Search
Of course!
Looks like someone missed both the link and the winking emoticon.
At a depth of about 60 feet, which is quite comfortable given life support, I was a little startled when that very submarine snuck up on me scuba diving near Sunset House.
Maybe he meant multicast.
They likely mean "corresponding to a real person" by unique visitor, not being unique to the period. If we assume 200 million unique visitors in a year, 120 million of those people could be visiting every month, thus 120 million unique visitors a month. The other 80 million visitors from that year are the sensible ones.
Multiple browsers can skew the figure. If a myspace user has a work computer, a home computer, and an iPhone, he will appear as 3 unique visitors unless he is logged in.