I have always found this a very American point of view. It always reads as if there is a big [PERIOD] behind it, meaning "to the exclusion of everything else". If that's true than it's just ridiculous. Corporations exist only to make money? If that would be true than we've gone seriously wrong somewhere in history. It should be all about *us*, people, living and breathing beings of flesh and blood. Corporations should exist for the benefit of society and society should exist for the benefit of the people that live in it. Our capitalist system might work best if corporations *focus* on making money, but definitely *not* to the exclusion of everything else. I think it's not too strange to demand that they do so within a certain moral and ethical framework, not passively following the boundries drwan by laws and regulations but actively seeking to be an asset to society and to its people.
I can almost hear you say "dream on", but I think it starts with chaning this way of thinking where nothing else is expected of a corporation than money, money and ever more money.
It's not a "way of thinking", it's a genuine structural problem with sharemarkets and corporate governance. Take Cadbury for example. The company did have motives other than profit -- it was founded with a particular emphasis on supporting its employees. Last year, Kraft wanted to buy Cadbury. The management wasn't keen on this, and fought it, until Kraft increased their offer very slightly. At this point, a problem with modern corporate governance kicked in. The chairman could not demonstrate that the share price would rise above Kraft's offer in the short term; that meant that strictly he could not recommend to shareholders that they should reject the offer -- he had to say that the offer was in shareholders' best interests. Many of the shareholders were pension funds. While some fund managers personally did not like Kraft taking Cadbury over much either, as managers in charge of other people's investments they didn't feel they could act against the recommendation of Cadbury's board, and so felt they had to accept the offer. So, even though nobody personally liked the deal, the requirements of everyone's role mean that they had to choose to approve the deal. This was compounded by a large number of funds that bought shares and immediately voted for the deal, because of their requirement to make money for their investors (in this case through the differential between the share price and the deal price).
I wouldn't put it as strongly as the grandparent post. But there is an old adage: if you ever actually need a brain surgeon, you will probably care much more that he has a steady hand than what his high school maths score was.
"Protecting children" is a spurious reason, at best.
First, if you want to protect your kids, do it! They are your kids. Not mine. If you want to protect your kids, great, go ahead, have fun, knock yourself out, but leave me out of it!
Nope, we're going to do all sorts of horrible things like make sure the lowered speed limits outside the school gates apply to you rather than only to drivers who happen to be parents, make sure those magazines you like are inconveniently on the top shelf (where you have to reach up even though you're not a parent), make sure the cigarettes are inconveniently behind the counter in the shop (even when you come in rather than a parent)... Aren't we a bunch of bastards protecting children rather than sacrificing them to your convenience. Maybe you could start your own political party, draw up some placards saying "stop protecting children!" and "let kids suffer for my convenience" and see if you get elected?
They don't need to, but why stop them? They're only trading amongst themselves. The customer gets a better price when he decides to come in.
Wrong on both counts. As the banks have fastest access, tiny transaction times (high liquidity) ensures the banks get first dibs on any better prices -- so in fact it ensures the customer gets a worse price because if there is a better one, the bank will take it and then offer the worse price to the customer. They are also not only trading amongst themselves -- they are using the implicit hedge that the taxpayer will insure their losses lest the bank go under.
Not a false experiment. The volatility is caused by illiquidity. No market makers, who always trade faster than farmers/factories, thus prices are wide and intransparent. Farmer comes in, loses a wider spread. Simple.
Of course it's a false experiment. In a discussion about whether there is any benefit to micro-liquidity in futures you blabber on about a product where futures do not exist. Guess what - a product not existing ain't much of an experiment in how quickly it should be traded! And your response when that's pointed out? Just to repeat your same rubbish from before but saying "Simple" at the end.
Whatever frequency of trading you're talking about, it's more expensive for the farmer/factory to sell/buy if the market is illiquid. Sure, most of the trading by far is too fast for Nestle to notice, but the guys they just bought a huge load of coffee from need to distribute the risk too.
And guess what, they also don't need to trade every 100ms. Heck, if you want to trace it all the way back, you can be pretty dang sure that the farmer doesn't make sales every 100ms either! The "liquidity" is several orders of magnitude faster than any business in the supply chain would notice; making the trades "high liquidity" (which also makes the tender times short) gives no advantage to the business customer but certainly does give the bank an advantage -- the bank does want higher liquidity so it can take advantage of the delay in the customer's behaviour.
Onions aren't futures traded by law, and they're more volatile.
False experiment. The question is not whether hedging should be banned but about whether increased frequency of trading on hedges gives any benefit.
Seriously people, how can this be modded insightful? No social benefit whatsoever? I don't have much sympathy for Wall Street traders, especially when they lose, but even I can acknowledge that professional traders, high frequency and otherwise, have an important role to play in the marketplace: they provide liquidity. I don't know about the rest of you, but I like being able to tender my shares on the exchanges and know that there will always be a buyer, no questions asked, whenever I am ready to sell. Liquidity is the oil which lubricates the engine of the marketplace and without liquidity there would be even wilder price swings, greater uncertainty and still higher unemployment. The Wall Street traders may not be saints, but credit should be given where credit is due (pun intended): liquidity is NOT worthless.
Boy have you been drinking the snake oil. Do you need eBay to close every individual auction within 100ms before you'll be confident anything will sell?
You and most of/. really have no clue how market making works, HF or not. Some people have reasons to buy derivatives (futures and options). A coffee roaster might want a call option on raw beans to protect themselves from price rises, and likewise, a coffee grower might want a put option to protect against falling prices.
Coffee roasters do not have differing needs every 100ms. In fact, the coffee roaster taking the hedge makes its major business decisions (which it needs to hedge for) less than once per day so in theory the customer would be quite happy with a trading frequency several orders of magnitude slower. If "liquidity" blew out from 100ms trades to hourly trades or worse, it is the banks and hedge funds that would blow up (taking the world with it), not Kenco and Nescafe. The upshot is that the "customers" of increased liquidity are not regular businesses but the banks themselves. You are a bureaucracy that is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.
If I was the judge, I would have awarded them the dollar, then charged them with all the legal fees for wasting the court's time on something so meaningless and trivial.
I'm not convinced this is meaningless or trivial. Trespass onto a private property in order to take unapproved photos of your home to plaster them all over the internet is well over that "creepy" line that Google supposedly doesn't want to cross. Let's use the extreme bad analogy: various actresses have appeared in movies in a state of undress; so would the same judge also decide it "does no harm" if Google sent staff to sneak onto their properties, photo them through their bathroom windows, and publish naked pictures of them on the Web then -- as they've shown they "don't value their privacy"?
A 100% death tax is essential for a fair and equal society.
Unfortunately not -- it would massively discriminate against the poor, as the rich are in a much better position to make themselves tax resident in Monaco or the Cayman Islands and avoid it completely, while those of modest means lose everything.
Plus who's to say it's something to worry about at all. They certainly didn't traumatize me.
Riiiiiight, because Slashdotters are famous for their healthy relationships with women and their unrivalled excellence at communicating with the opposite gender.
Except they do contribute - indirectly. By exporting goods to other countries, those companies bring money into their host country, where they pay it out as wages, spend it on locally-purchased supplies, etc. The host country then has ample opportunity to obtain tax revenue via personal income, payroll, or consumption taxes.
Not in the Irish case. Companies "in Ireland for tax reasons" don't necessarily employ many people there. They just have to allocate certain revenues to an Irish subsidiary for tax purposes, and then re-"export" these same on-paper revenues to tax havens like Bermuda. The so called "Double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich" (they use another holding company in Holland too) that meant Google paid only 2.4% tax rather less than Ireland's 12.5% to 25% rates. It doesn't depend on how many people you employ. Nor on actually making much in Ireland. Just on sharp practice to ensure that even the toilet cleaners at these countries pay higher rates of tax than the company does.
5-10 year olds are often very creative with "unremarkable bits of plastic". (Lego, for instance, consists entirely of unremarkable bits of plastic, while Meccano is unremarkable bits of metal and plastic.) A Rubik's cube on the other hand, while certainly interesting and stimulating, isn't actually very creative at all. Even cars, dolls, and trains are played with creatively and imaginitively, as children make up and play stories around them, and often lay out cities using nothing more than dirty clothes on the floor...
This filing doesn't mean that even Google think the defence will succeed.
It's my understanding that if you want to preserve your rights to assert a defense, you have to assert it up front. This prevents dramatic Perry Mason-style maneuvers where you pull a new defense out of the hat near the end of the trial.
But the predictable consequence of this rule is that lawyers will assert any and all possible defenses up front, so as to preserve their client's options.
Aw, stop spoiling our speculation party with facts.
I must have pointed out about 20 times here on Slashdot that Android is not Google's OS any more than Linux is a Red Hat OS. It is an OS produced by 78 different companies who are members of the Open Handset Alliance and also has numerous unaffiliated contributors.
I wouldn't be so sure about that until I'd seen OHA's articles of incorporation...
From OHA press release: "Android and Open Handset Alliance are trademarks of Google Inc.
From OHA Terms of Service:
10. License from Google
10.1 Google gives you a personal, worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and non-exclusive license to use the software provided to you by Google as part of the Services as provided to you by Google (referred to as the "Software" below). This license is for the sole purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the Services as provided by Google, in the manner permitted by the Terms.
If the software is in breach of copyright, then the big fat "provided by Google" "trademarks of Google" stickers all over everything might undermine a claim of "it wasn't us, guv, honest, it was those rascals over there in the Open Handset Alliance". Is the Open Handset Alliance even incorporated anywhere? If not, how is it even a legal entity?
On the other hand, maybe Jammie Thomas should be trying the defence of "it wasn't me, it was the Jamme-and-Daughter-Open-Source-Project wot did it"?
I wonder how Oracle will go suing Android integrators in Korea, Taiwan and China?
This filing doesn't mean that even Google think the defence will succeed.
From the article: Overall, Google's answer takes an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, including seemingly contradictory defenses, such as that Android developers are in fact "licensed to use the Patents-in-Suit and the copyrights in the works that are the subject of the Asserted Copyrights."
Sounds a little like "Uh oh! Quick! Everyone think up some kind of a defence for this! Maybe if we have enough, they'll negotiate and settle on one of them!". Surely Google would not normally like to put up a big neon sign saying "WARNING: Use Android and you may be sued!" by making public claims that their customers should be liable in a lawsuit.
Of-course its falsifiable - you would falsify it by finding a cause.
A pity you snipped the following sentence that pointed out the flaw: that quest is never-ending, so your experiment never returns a result. (Roughly speaking, it is the quest of science, and no it ain't ever going to end.)
But follow this though experiment: How would you show that an event has no cause? Well you could do it by showing the infinite amounts of it that have occurred at any given instant, under any given conditions, which is what one would logically expect from something that occurs without a cause, but not from one that occurs with one.
Nope, that would merely suggest a ubiquitous cause. To use a potentially muddy example, zero-point energy is not deemed "causeless" even though we have never yet found an absence of it. To use another, the Casimir effect, though spontaneous, has a cause: the quantisation of fields. The quantisation of fields is also ubiquitous but yup science would very much like to know why on that one too...
So while it might be that on some strict level the above though experiment of what a event without a cause might look like would not be accepted as proven to be a non-caused event - it would be practically accepted as its based on numerous repeatable experiments under a wide variety of conditions.
Empirically false. There has never been accepted any event that is deemed "non-caused", even when we haven't found the cause for it. Again, science does not stop looking for causes at any point whatsoever, ever.
But "god" as in the first uncaused event is by definition repeatable, infinitely so. For it not to be repeatable it needs to be caused.
Logically false. "Repeatable" means caused more than once.
I don't get why you think this. If things have no cause then they have no "why". Its not a call to stop asking irritating questions, but a statement of fact.
It is our job as thinkers and scientists to continue asking questions including "why". And "it has no cause" is not a statement of fact but always an unfalsifiable (and hence unscientific) claim. How do you show that it has no cause except by embarking on a never-ending quest to find one (which is why science would never actually accept it had found it.) For instance, following your line of logic, physicists would have stopped dead when they came across the idea of the big bang -- but they haven't. You are welcome to take the personal philosophy of "it has no cause" if you like, but do not imagine it has any greater significance or weight than your own personal philosophical choice.
On the contrary, unless there really was god at the bottom, it would be the nail in the coffin of the notion that the universe had some greater meaning.
This claim is wrong in two ways. First, it wouldn't be a nail in the coffin of greater meaning scientifically (the question "why is that at the bottom" would be deeply meaningful -- see the various holy grail quests for a fundamental theory of everything). And it wouldn't be a nail in the coffin philosophically either -- remember again that there is no requirement for the scientific model of the universe to be "really what happened", only that it should fit observations. For instance, philosophically "so God it looks like defined the world that way" and "or God created it at a later date with a larger set of initial conditions" remain valid philosophical choices.
How can I make this clearer to you, as you seem to be married to some wrong assumptions about science? For instance you seem to think that science is a personal belief system, when it is a practice based around particular rules, unrelated to the practitioners' personal beliefs (science does not depend on the identity of the scientist). Perhaps a little thought experiment to highlight the difference. If God turned up tomorrow and performed a miracle for a roomful of scientists in such a way that it was blindingly obvious that God exists -- it still would not be scientific to talk about God (you still can't conduct an independent repeatable objective experiment in the future).
If there "really is God at the bottom", science could not prove it. God did it is not a repeatable process, so it is not a conclusion that science can make. Conclusions about God necessarily come from other branches of philosophy. But that doesn't mean they are wrong. Science is a human invention, not a natural invention. If it turns out that the universe "really" works differently to how science can ever describe, then quite clearly is science not the universe that would be "wrong". If there's a Wizard of Oz behind the curtains, he wouldn't disappear just because we can't describe him. (Even if he is stepped in front of the curtain, waved to us and wrote us notes, then we still couldn't describe him scientifically.)
I think you have misunderstood this - I was giving an example of a causeless start and how as a result it has no why, as well as why one might consider such a thing truly possible.
Bad example then, as it looks like something that wasn't causeless and we'd run lots of experiments and come up with lots of theories to try to work out why.
Science relies on the idea that the universe can (theoretically eventually) be completely described by mathematical formulae and laws
You need to justify this statement - I've already stated that I disagree with this as science only needs observations to function
Wrong. The mere observation that Joe's mum is tall, Joe's dad is tall, and that Joe is tall is not science. The hypothesis that there is are genes for tallness that are passed on hereditarily, teste
Wouldn't the why then be that it has no cause and hence its without a point?
I do believe you just said the equivalent of "It just is, stop asking irritating questions"... If an ultimate first cause were identified and proven as such, then I think that would be seen as loaded with meaning rather than meaningless, and the start of a lot of "why that" and "why not nothing" questions, not just a shrug and assumption that it should not be asked about. (Though in practice, science would never accept that it had found the ultimate first cause and would keep looking for a cause of that cause indefinitely.)
"without a point" is different -- that is asking about purpose, rather than necessity. ("Apples fall because of gravity" is different to "the point of gravity is to pull apples to the ground".)
However logically we wouldn't expect this to be the case - as if X pops into existance without a cause
... then the question would be "how does the rule 'X pops into existance without a cause' come about"? Why not no rule? Why not a rule 'Y pops into existance without cause' instead?...
And if the presence of X prevents further X's from appearing then the cause of X's appearance can be stated as the absence of X.
Unscientific as it cannot be falsified. Substitute almost anything for X and this becomes obvious. For fun substitute "the universe as it is now" for X, and you have the theory that the universe is brand new and sprang instantaneously into existance right now (including all our memories), caused by the absense of a universe. Perfectly self-consistent, but unscientific.
Doesn't the incompleteness theorem contradict the notion of mathematics as a fundamental part of the universe and suggest that it is indeed just a self-consistent system for categorising and understanding the world? (and I admit here that its pushing my understanding of the issues involved)
What notion of "mathematics as a fundamental part of the universe"? Science relies on the idea that the universe can (theoretically eventually) be completely described by mathematical formulae and laws, but again the philosophical question of whether the universe "really" uses maths is out of scope. If "really" a Wizard of Oz is hiding behind the curtain pulling the strings, that makes no difference to science. I'm not convinced that Godel is relevant in this case -- it just states that in any consistent logic, you can make a mathematical statement that happens to be true but can't be proven to be true. It does highlight that we cannot know everything, no matter how much we might want to, though. Which does put a dent in the hopes of ever finding a scientific theory of everything, or ultimate cause.
The principle of estoppel would seem to apply here however:
Microsoft has promised not to sue, and stated so publicly, in writing. The Mono developers (and users) have proceeded under the assumption that commitment was made in good faith; Even if Microsoft reverses their decision, they cannot then sue for infringement of the *patents they already agreed not to sue* over. Estoppel would kick in, protecting the devs & users.
There is a bigger problem: Oracle again! We know that Microsoft, for.NET, licenses certain patents from Oracle (and that Oracle earn quite a bit of money from it). Does Mono have a licence to those Oracle patents? If not, regardless of what Microsoft say, what is to stop Oracle from suing the pants off Mono (or companies that use it) for patent infringement as well?
If it isn't agency then indeed I haven't. Perhaps you could explain it.
That post, as I mentioned, was an aside illustrating a very old and well known argument. (Though rather stupidly I typed the wrong name in -- it's the cosmological argument not the teleological argument.) We were discussing how an empty set could become non-empty, and you said (paraphrased) "of course you can apply operations on the empty set". To illustrate this old argument, I pointed out that in that sentence you've used nouns that aren't in the set: in this sentence the two nouns "you" and "operations". Leaving aside agency (another debate), it's an illustration that even in the way you speak about the problem, there is still an ultimate cause for the set becoming non-empty, just sometimes you place it outside the set. The cosmological argument is that if you keep back-tracing causes, and the chain is not infinite, then eventually you reach something that has no cause -- in which case you can't answer "why" on it. Either it's turtles all the way down, or there's some initial uncaused condition. (Traditionally, in the cosmological argument, you then label the initial uncaused condition "god" but that brings up a separate debate about agency -- whether that "ultimate cause" had deliberate intent.)
No we have observations which we sometimes choose to quantify / theories that we use maths to power(for instance the theory of evolution is typically expressed without mathematics)... we also do qualitative measurement too... not to mention that should there be a more fitting way of observing and recording the universe then we would use that.
I understand what you're tying to say, but I think you are wrong. Science really is about proposing and testing theory, rather than just observation for its own sake. Observations are a contribution to science because they give us more data to propose and test theories on. Similarly, mathematics is rather wider than you suggest -- qualitative measurements are still mathematical, even if not written down in a formal notation. Although the theory of evolution is usually described in words rather than mathematical notation, it still relies on underlying mathematical premises, and would be considered unscientific if it were mathematically proven false. For example, consider natural selection (that in a sufficiently large population over a sufficient length of time, the population of a gene will almost certainly increase if its presence improves the probability of the individual it resides within reproducing). That might be expressed in words, but fundamentally it is a claim on probability and statistics. If the laws of probability proved it false (they don't!) then it would have been thrown out.
These are massive assumptions that you make here - I dont think you can really justify them. Why should "you" (by which I take you mean agency given your later conversion to god) be required for anything.
Read it again. What do I mean by "you"? It was your word "you". I am illustrating a point you just don't seem to grasp by showing it in your very own sentences and argument. (Relabelling your own "you" as god was a bit of rhetorical ramming the problem home to you.)
As for mathematical operations - we use them as a self-consistent way of observing/describing the world. The universe is no more using mathematical operations then you are using addition when you put two apples together.
The mathematical operations are part of the mathematical description of the universe. Whether the universe "really" is "using" them is neither here nor there -- as scientists we only have mathematical descriptions of observations to work with and the philosophical question of whether it's "really" using those operations is out of scope -- we only care that the maths fits the observations. The mathematical description is the scientific universe (whether or not it is the "real" universe). Which brings us back to the point that the mathematical description provably cannot describe a universe that self-boots from the empty set of "no data and no operations", which is a bit of a pain if we wish to assert (as you did) that we can eventually describe all the "whys" of the universe using science (and hence mathematical descriptions) alone, with no initial conditions (to ask an unanswerable why about) and no external operations (that would be mysticism).
Your explanation using logic only serves to confuse the issue. In that example if X is the universe then !X is not "no universe" - but all possible universes except that configuration.
No, "if X is a universe". The opposite of "I am" is "I am not", not "I am very slightly different than I happen to be".
My assertion was that discovering the causation of the event (i.e. how it occurs) - the "scientific" part gives us the why - the "philosophical/metaphysical" part.
See the other post -- there is a theoretical limit to back-tracing causality. Hence why it answers small why "why do I have two arms and legs" but not big why "why does anything exist at all".
An aside -- I can use your post to illustrate the teleological argument, which a lot of theists allude to:
What is this even supposed to mean? That you cannot perform any mathematical operations on an empty set? Nonsense.
So, in your post we have three pertinent nouns: the empty set {}, "you", and mathematical operations. Let's pose this question: are the "you" and "mathematical operations" nouns within the universe?
If so, your starting point for your prototypical universe is not { }, but at least
{ you, mathematical operations }
and you have not found ultimate cause -- the universe has something in it already that we cannot just back-trace through cause and effect -- some minimal set of operations is required to have already been there to bootstrap the process.
If not, and your hypothesis is
{ } , you, mathematical operations
then you have just subscribed to mysticism and we might as well write
Sorry to hear you are confused. I'm disappointed though that you take the false logic of "if I am confused it must be wrong or does not belong in this discussion". I'll try rephrasing it for you one last time.
If your question is "why X" then you are implying "why X rather than !X". Now remember, we are creating a more precise version of the original question, not answering it yet. The question we're looking at, often asked by many people, was "why a universe exists" -- implying "why a universe rather than no universe". ie, "why a universe, rather than {}".
Just saying "yeah, but why {}" is not an answer to the question, but merely a claim that you shouldn't ask that question. But your assertion was that the question could be answered, not just that you can rationalise not asking it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have always found this a very American point of view. It always reads as if there is a big [PERIOD] behind it, meaning "to the exclusion of everything else". If that's true than it's just ridiculous. Corporations exist only to make money? If that would be true than we've gone seriously wrong somewhere in history. It should be all about *us*, people, living and breathing beings of flesh and blood. Corporations should exist for the benefit of society and society should exist for the benefit of the people that live in it. Our capitalist system might work best if corporations *focus* on making money, but definitely *not* to the exclusion of everything else. I think it's not too strange to demand that they do so within a certain moral and ethical framework, not passively following the boundries drwan by laws and regulations but actively seeking to be an asset to society and to its people.
I can almost hear you say "dream on", but I think it starts with chaning this way of thinking where nothing else is expected of a corporation than money, money and ever more money.
It's not a "way of thinking", it's a genuine structural problem with sharemarkets and corporate governance. Take Cadbury for example. The company did have motives other than profit -- it was founded with a particular emphasis on supporting its employees. Last year, Kraft wanted to buy Cadbury. The management wasn't keen on this, and fought it, until Kraft increased their offer very slightly. At this point, a problem with modern corporate governance kicked in. The chairman could not demonstrate that the share price would rise above Kraft's offer in the short term; that meant that strictly he could not recommend to shareholders that they should reject the offer -- he had to say that the offer was in shareholders' best interests. Many of the shareholders were pension funds. While some fund managers personally did not like Kraft taking Cadbury over much either, as managers in charge of other people's investments they didn't feel they could act against the recommendation of Cadbury's board, and so felt they had to accept the offer. So, even though nobody personally liked the deal, the requirements of everyone's role mean that they had to choose to approve the deal. This was compounded by a large number of funds that bought shares and immediately voted for the deal, because of their requirement to make money for their investors (in this case through the differential between the share price and the deal price).
A doctor is like a mechanic?
I wouldn't put it as strongly as the grandparent post. But there is an old adage: if you ever actually need a brain surgeon, you will probably care much more that he has a steady hand than what his high school maths score was.
"Protecting children" is a spurious reason, at best.
First, if you want to protect your kids, do it! They are your kids. Not mine. If you want to protect your kids, great, go ahead, have fun, knock yourself out, but leave me out of it!
Nope, we're going to do all sorts of horrible things like make sure the lowered speed limits outside the school gates apply to you rather than only to drivers who happen to be parents, make sure those magazines you like are inconveniently on the top shelf (where you have to reach up even though you're not a parent), make sure the cigarettes are inconveniently behind the counter in the shop (even when you come in rather than a parent)... Aren't we a bunch of bastards protecting children rather than sacrificing them to your convenience. Maybe you could start your own political party, draw up some placards saying "stop protecting children!" and "let kids suffer for my convenience" and see if you get elected?
They don't need to, but why stop them? They're only trading amongst themselves. The customer gets a better price when he decides to come in.
Wrong on both counts. As the banks have fastest access, tiny transaction times (high liquidity) ensures the banks get first dibs on any better prices -- so in fact it ensures the customer gets a worse price because if there is a better one, the bank will take it and then offer the worse price to the customer. They are also not only trading amongst themselves -- they are using the implicit hedge that the taxpayer will insure their losses lest the bank go under.
Not a false experiment. The volatility is caused by illiquidity. No market makers, who always trade faster than farmers/factories, thus prices are wide and intransparent. Farmer comes in, loses a wider spread. Simple.
Of course it's a false experiment. In a discussion about whether there is any benefit to micro-liquidity in futures you blabber on about a product where futures do not exist. Guess what - a product not existing ain't much of an experiment in how quickly it should be traded! And your response when that's pointed out? Just to repeat your same rubbish from before but saying "Simple" at the end.
Whatever frequency of trading you're talking about, it's more expensive for the farmer/factory to sell/buy if the market is illiquid. Sure, most of the trading by far is too fast for Nestle to notice, but the guys they just bought a huge load of coffee from need to distribute the risk too.
And guess what, they also don't need to trade every 100ms. Heck, if you want to trace it all the way back, you can be pretty dang sure that the farmer doesn't make sales every 100ms either! The "liquidity" is several orders of magnitude faster than any business in the supply chain would notice; making the trades "high liquidity" (which also makes the tender times short) gives no advantage to the business customer but certainly does give the bank an advantage -- the bank does want higher liquidity so it can take advantage of the delay in the customer's behaviour.
Onions aren't futures traded by law, and they're more volatile.
False experiment. The question is not whether hedging should be banned but about whether increased frequency of trading on hedges gives any benefit.
High frequency trading has no social benefit.
Seriously people, how can this be modded insightful? No social benefit whatsoever? I don't have much sympathy for Wall Street traders, especially when they lose, but even I can acknowledge that professional traders, high frequency and otherwise, have an important role to play in the marketplace: they provide liquidity. I don't know about the rest of you, but I like being able to tender my shares on the exchanges and know that there will always be a buyer, no questions asked, whenever I am ready to sell. Liquidity is the oil which lubricates the engine of the marketplace and without liquidity there would be even wilder price swings, greater uncertainty and still higher unemployment. The Wall Street traders may not be saints, but credit should be given where credit is due (pun intended): liquidity is NOT worthless.
Boy have you been drinking the snake oil. Do you need eBay to close every individual auction within 100ms before you'll be confident anything will sell?
You and most of /. really have no clue how market making works, HF or not. Some people have reasons to buy derivatives (futures and options). A coffee roaster might want a call option on raw beans to protect themselves from price rises, and likewise, a coffee grower might want a put option to protect against falling prices.
Coffee roasters do not have differing needs every 100ms. In fact, the coffee roaster taking the hedge makes its major business decisions (which it needs to hedge for) less than once per day so in theory the customer would be quite happy with a trading frequency several orders of magnitude slower. If "liquidity" blew out from 100ms trades to hourly trades or worse, it is the banks and hedge funds that would blow up (taking the world with it), not Kenco and Nescafe. The upshot is that the "customers" of increased liquidity are not regular businesses but the banks themselves. You are a bureaucracy that is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.
If I was the judge, I would have awarded them the dollar, then charged them with all the legal fees for wasting the court's time on something so meaningless and trivial.
I'm not convinced this is meaningless or trivial. Trespass onto a private property in order to take unapproved photos of your home to plaster them all over the internet is well over that "creepy" line that Google supposedly doesn't want to cross. Let's use the extreme bad analogy: various actresses have appeared in movies in a state of undress; so would the same judge also decide it "does no harm" if Google sent staff to sneak onto their properties, photo them through their bathroom windows, and publish naked pictures of them on the Web then -- as they've shown they "don't value their privacy"?
A 100% death tax is essential for a fair and equal society.
Unfortunately not -- it would massively discriminate against the poor, as the rich are in a much better position to make themselves tax resident in Monaco or the Cayman Islands and avoid it completely, while those of modest means lose everything.
Plus who's to say it's something to worry about at all. They certainly didn't traumatize me.
Riiiiiight, because Slashdotters are famous for their healthy relationships with women and their unrivalled excellence at communicating with the opposite gender.
Except they do contribute - indirectly. By exporting goods to other countries, those companies bring money into their host country, where they pay it out as wages, spend it on locally-purchased supplies, etc. The host country then has ample opportunity to obtain tax revenue via personal income, payroll, or consumption taxes.
Not in the Irish case. Companies "in Ireland for tax reasons" don't necessarily employ many people there. They just have to allocate certain revenues to an Irish subsidiary for tax purposes, and then re-"export" these same on-paper revenues to tax havens like Bermuda. The so called "Double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich" (they use another holding company in Holland too) that meant Google paid only 2.4% tax rather less than Ireland's 12.5% to 25% rates. It doesn't depend on how many people you employ. Nor on actually making much in Ireland. Just on sharp practice to ensure that even the toilet cleaners at these countries pay higher rates of tax than the company does.
5-10 year olds are often very creative with "unremarkable bits of plastic". (Lego, for instance, consists entirely of unremarkable bits of plastic, while Meccano is unremarkable bits of metal and plastic.) A Rubik's cube on the other hand, while certainly interesting and stimulating, isn't actually very creative at all. Even cars, dolls, and trains are played with creatively and imaginitively, as children make up and play stories around them, and often lay out cities using nothing more than dirty clothes on the floor...
It's my understanding that if you want to preserve your rights to assert a defense, you have to assert it up front. This prevents dramatic Perry Mason-style maneuvers where you pull a new defense out of the hat near the end of the trial.
But the predictable consequence of this rule is that lawyers will assert any and all possible defenses up front, so as to preserve their client's options.
Aw, stop spoiling our speculation party with facts.
I must have pointed out about 20 times here on Slashdot that Android is not Google's OS any more than Linux is a Red Hat OS. It is an OS produced by 78 different companies who are members of the Open Handset Alliance and also has numerous unaffiliated contributors.
I wouldn't be so sure about that until I'd seen OHA's articles of incorporation...
From OHA press release: "Android and Open Handset Alliance are trademarks of Google Inc.
From OHA Terms of Service:
10. License from Google 10.1 Google gives you a personal, worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and non-exclusive license to use the software provided to you by Google as part of the Services as provided to you by Google (referred to as the "Software" below). This license is for the sole purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the Services as provided by Google, in the manner permitted by the Terms.
If the software is in breach of copyright, then the big fat "provided by Google" "trademarks of Google" stickers all over everything might undermine a claim of "it wasn't us, guv, honest, it was those rascals over there in the Open Handset Alliance". Is the Open Handset Alliance even incorporated anywhere? If not, how is it even a legal entity?
On the other hand, maybe Jammie Thomas should be trying the defence of "it wasn't me, it was the Jamme-and-Daughter-Open-Source-Project wot did it"?
I wonder how Oracle will go suing Android integrators in Korea, Taiwan and China?
This filing doesn't mean that even Google think the defence will succeed.
From the article:
Overall, Google's answer takes an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, including seemingly contradictory defenses, such as that Android developers are in fact "licensed to use the Patents-in-Suit and the copyrights in the works that are the subject of the Asserted Copyrights."
Sounds a little like "Uh oh! Quick! Everyone think up some kind of a defence for this! Maybe if we have enough, they'll negotiate and settle on one of them!". Surely Google would not normally like to put up a big neon sign saying "WARNING: Use Android and you may be sued!" by making public claims that their customers should be liable in a lawsuit.
Of-course its falsifiable - you would falsify it by finding a cause.
A pity you snipped the following sentence that pointed out the flaw: that quest is never-ending, so your experiment never returns a result. (Roughly speaking, it is the quest of science, and no it ain't ever going to end.)
But follow this though experiment: How would you show that an event has no cause? Well you could do it by showing the infinite amounts of it that have occurred at any given instant, under any given conditions, which is what one would logically expect from something that occurs without a cause, but not from one that occurs with one.
Nope, that would merely suggest a ubiquitous cause. To use a potentially muddy example, zero-point energy is not deemed "causeless" even though we have never yet found an absence of it. To use another, the Casimir effect, though spontaneous, has a cause: the quantisation of fields. The quantisation of fields is also ubiquitous but yup science would very much like to know why on that one too...
So while it might be that on some strict level the above though experiment of what a event without a cause might look like would not be accepted as proven to be a non-caused event - it would be practically accepted as its based on numerous repeatable experiments under a wide variety of conditions.
Empirically false. There has never been accepted any event that is deemed "non-caused", even when we haven't found the cause for it. Again, science does not stop looking for causes at any point whatsoever, ever.
But "god" as in the first uncaused event is by definition repeatable, infinitely so. For it not to be repeatable it needs to be caused.
Logically false. "Repeatable" means caused more than once.
(Many apologies that a poorly formatted tag in the above has mixed up what is a quotation and what is a reply)
I don't get why you think this. If things have no cause then they have no "why". Its not a call to stop asking irritating questions, but a statement of fact.
It is our job as thinkers and scientists to continue asking questions including "why". And "it has no cause" is not a statement of fact but always an unfalsifiable (and hence unscientific) claim. How do you show that it has no cause except by embarking on a never-ending quest to find one (which is why science would never actually accept it had found it.) For instance, following your line of logic, physicists would have stopped dead when they came across the idea of the big bang -- but they haven't. You are welcome to take the personal philosophy of "it has no cause" if you like, but do not imagine it has any greater significance or weight than your own personal philosophical choice.
On the contrary, unless there really was god at the bottom, it would be the nail in the coffin of the notion that the universe had some greater meaning.
This claim is wrong in two ways. First, it wouldn't be a nail in the coffin of greater meaning scientifically (the question "why is that at the bottom" would be deeply meaningful -- see the various holy grail quests for a fundamental theory of everything). And it wouldn't be a nail in the coffin philosophically either -- remember again that there is no requirement for the scientific model of the universe to be "really what happened", only that it should fit observations. For instance, philosophically "so God it looks like defined the world that way" and "or God created it at a later date with a larger set of initial conditions" remain valid philosophical choices. How can I make this clearer to you, as you seem to be married to some wrong assumptions about science? For instance you seem to think that science is a personal belief system, when it is a practice based around particular rules, unrelated to the practitioners' personal beliefs (science does not depend on the identity of the scientist). Perhaps a little thought experiment to highlight the difference. If God turned up tomorrow and performed a miracle for a roomful of scientists in such a way that it was blindingly obvious that God exists -- it still would not be scientific to talk about God (you still can't conduct an independent repeatable objective experiment in the future). If there "really is God at the bottom", science could not prove it. God did it is not a repeatable process, so it is not a conclusion that science can make. Conclusions about God necessarily come from other branches of philosophy. But that doesn't mean they are wrong. Science is a human invention, not a natural invention. If it turns out that the universe "really" works differently to how science can ever describe, then quite clearly is science not the universe that would be "wrong". If there's a Wizard of Oz behind the curtains, he wouldn't disappear just because we can't describe him. (Even if he is stepped in front of the curtain, waved to us and wrote us notes, then we still couldn't describe him scientifically.)
I think you have misunderstood this - I was giving an example of a causeless start and how as a result it has no why, as well as why one might consider such a thing truly possible.
Bad example then, as it looks like something that wasn't causeless and we'd run lots of experiments and come up with lots of theories to try to work out why.
Science relies on the idea that the universe can (theoretically eventually) be completely described by mathematical formulae and laws
You need to justify this statement - I've already stated that I disagree with this as science only needs observations to function
Wrong. The mere observation that Joe's mum is tall, Joe's dad is tall, and that Joe is tall is not science. The hypothesis that there is are genes for tallness that are passed on hereditarily, teste
Wouldn't the why then be that it has no cause and hence its without a point?
I do believe you just said the equivalent of "It just is, stop asking irritating questions"... If an ultimate first cause were identified and proven as such, then I think that would be seen as loaded with meaning rather than meaningless, and the start of a lot of "why that" and "why not nothing" questions, not just a shrug and assumption that it should not be asked about. (Though in practice, science would never accept that it had found the ultimate first cause and would keep looking for a cause of that cause indefinitely.)
"without a point" is different -- that is asking about purpose, rather than necessity. ("Apples fall because of gravity" is different to "the point of gravity is to pull apples to the ground".)
However logically we wouldn't expect this to be the case - as if X pops into existance without a cause
... then the question would be "how does the rule 'X pops into existance without a cause' come about"? Why not no rule? Why not a rule 'Y pops into existance without cause' instead? ...
And if the presence of X prevents further X's from appearing then the cause of X's appearance can be stated as the absence of X.
Unscientific as it cannot be falsified. Substitute almost anything for X and this becomes obvious. For fun substitute "the universe as it is now" for X, and you have the theory that the universe is brand new and sprang instantaneously into existance right now (including all our memories), caused by the absense of a universe. Perfectly self-consistent, but unscientific.
Doesn't the incompleteness theorem contradict the notion of mathematics as a fundamental part of the universe and suggest that it is indeed just a self-consistent system for categorising and understanding the world? (and I admit here that its pushing my understanding of the issues involved)
What notion of "mathematics as a fundamental part of the universe"? Science relies on the idea that the universe can (theoretically eventually) be completely described by mathematical formulae and laws, but again the philosophical question of whether the universe "really" uses maths is out of scope. If "really" a Wizard of Oz is hiding behind the curtain pulling the strings, that makes no difference to science. I'm not convinced that Godel is relevant in this case -- it just states that in any consistent logic, you can make a mathematical statement that happens to be true but can't be proven to be true. It does highlight that we cannot know everything, no matter how much we might want to, though. Which does put a dent in the hopes of ever finding a scientific theory of everything, or ultimate cause.
The principle of estoppel would seem to apply here however:
Microsoft has promised not to sue, and stated so publicly, in writing. The Mono developers (and users) have proceeded under the assumption that commitment was made in good faith; Even if Microsoft reverses their decision, they cannot then sue for infringement of the *patents they already agreed not to sue* over. Estoppel would kick in, protecting the devs & users.
There is a bigger problem: Oracle again! We know that Microsoft, for .NET, licenses certain patents from Oracle (and that Oracle earn quite a bit of money from it). Does Mono have a licence to those Oracle patents? If not, regardless of what Microsoft say, what is to stop Oracle from suing the pants off Mono (or companies that use it) for patent infringement as well?
If it isn't agency then indeed I haven't. Perhaps you could explain it.
That post, as I mentioned, was an aside illustrating a very old and well known argument. (Though rather stupidly I typed the wrong name in -- it's the cosmological argument not the teleological argument.) We were discussing how an empty set could become non-empty, and you said (paraphrased) "of course you can apply operations on the empty set". To illustrate this old argument, I pointed out that in that sentence you've used nouns that aren't in the set: in this sentence the two nouns "you" and "operations". Leaving aside agency (another debate), it's an illustration that even in the way you speak about the problem, there is still an ultimate cause for the set becoming non-empty, just sometimes you place it outside the set. The cosmological argument is that if you keep back-tracing causes, and the chain is not infinite, then eventually you reach something that has no cause -- in which case you can't answer "why" on it. Either it's turtles all the way down, or there's some initial uncaused condition. (Traditionally, in the cosmological argument, you then label the initial uncaused condition "god" but that brings up a separate debate about agency -- whether that "ultimate cause" had deliberate intent.)
No we have observations which we sometimes choose to quantify / theories that we use maths to power(for instance the theory of evolution is typically expressed without mathematics)... we also do qualitative measurement too... not to mention that should there be a more fitting way of observing and recording the universe then we would use that.
I understand what you're tying to say, but I think you are wrong. Science really is about proposing and testing theory, rather than just observation for its own sake. Observations are a contribution to science because they give us more data to propose and test theories on. Similarly, mathematics is rather wider than you suggest -- qualitative measurements are still mathematical, even if not written down in a formal notation. Although the theory of evolution is usually described in words rather than mathematical notation, it still relies on underlying mathematical premises, and would be considered unscientific if it were mathematically proven false. For example, consider natural selection (that in a sufficiently large population over a sufficient length of time, the population of a gene will almost certainly increase if its presence improves the probability of the individual it resides within reproducing). That might be expressed in words, but fundamentally it is a claim on probability and statistics. If the laws of probability proved it false (they don't!) then it would have been thrown out.
These are massive assumptions that you make here - I dont think you can really justify them. Why should "you" (by which I take you mean agency given your later conversion to god) be required for anything.
Read it again. What do I mean by "you"? It was your word "you". I am illustrating a point you just don't seem to grasp by showing it in your very own sentences and argument. (Relabelling your own "you" as god was a bit of rhetorical ramming the problem home to you.)
As for mathematical operations - we use them as a self-consistent way of observing/describing the world. The universe is no more using mathematical operations then you are using addition when you put two apples together.
The mathematical operations are part of the mathematical description of the universe. Whether the universe "really" is "using" them is neither here nor there -- as scientists we only have mathematical descriptions of observations to work with and the philosophical question of whether it's "really" using those operations is out of scope -- we only care that the maths fits the observations. The mathematical description is the scientific universe (whether or not it is the "real" universe). Which brings us back to the point that the mathematical description provably cannot describe a universe that self-boots from the empty set of "no data and no operations", which is a bit of a pain if we wish to assert (as you did) that we can eventually describe all the "whys" of the universe using science (and hence mathematical descriptions) alone, with no initial conditions (to ask an unanswerable why about) and no external operations (that would be mysticism).
Your explanation using logic only serves to confuse the issue. In that example if X is the universe then !X is not "no universe" - but all possible universes except that configuration.
No, "if X is a universe". The opposite of "I am" is "I am not", not "I am very slightly different than I happen to be".
My assertion was that discovering the causation of the event (i.e. how it occurs) - the "scientific" part gives us the why - the "philosophical/metaphysical" part.
See the other post -- there is a theoretical limit to back-tracing causality. Hence why it answers small why "why do I have two arms and legs" but not big why "why does anything exist at all".
What is this even supposed to mean? That you cannot perform any mathematical operations on an empty set? Nonsense.
So, in your post we have three pertinent nouns: the empty set {}, "you", and mathematical operations. Let's pose this question: are the "you" and "mathematical operations" nouns within the universe? If so, your starting point for your prototypical universe is not { }, but at least
{ you, mathematical operations }
and you have not found ultimate cause -- the universe has something in it already that we cannot just back-trace through cause and effect -- some minimal set of operations is required to have already been there to bootstrap the process. If not, and your hypothesis is
{ } , you, mathematical operations
then you have just subscribed to mysticism and we might as well write
{ }, God, divine creation
Sorry to hear you are confused. I'm disappointed though that you take the false logic of "if I am confused it must be wrong or does not belong in this discussion". I'll try rephrasing it for you one last time.
If your question is "why X" then you are implying "why X rather than !X". Now remember, we are creating a more precise version of the original question, not answering it yet. The question we're looking at, often asked by many people, was "why a universe exists" -- implying "why a universe rather than no universe". ie, "why a universe, rather than {}".
Just saying "yeah, but why {}" is not an answer to the question, but merely a claim that you shouldn't ask that question. But your assertion was that the question could be answered, not just that you can rationalise not asking it.