The principle is the same regardless of the interest rate.
Who cares about principles when money is involved?
When the numbers are put into a more convenient form, the relevant equation is
Output = Input * exp( rate * time )
If you halve the rate, you have to double the time to get an equivalent return.
So if young jimmy at high school is expecting it to take 15 years to accumulate a certain amount from his initial stake, then he had better hope the interest rate doesn't change. But interest rates do change. And you have to subtract inflation from them. And you are taxed on them.
I'm not somebody who knows about these things, but I assume inflation has been around 4% over the last 20 years, so the true interest rate (in terms of what you can actually buy with the money) is r-I = 7-4 = 3. If this is the case then he will have to wait more than twice as long as he expected.
In summary, while it's nice that the value of your investment varies exponentially with time, it also varies exponentially with interest rates. So when you are making these little back-of-an-envelope calculations you do have to make very sure you don't mess up the value of the interest rate.
I was wondering about the possibility of having a desktop where the coordinates of the windows are unbounded, but the window coordinates are mapped (smoothly but) nonlinearly to screen coordinates in such a way that the central part of the screen looks undistorted and yet you can still 'see infinity' round the edges. Kind of like some of escher's drawings.
This would sort of give you unlimited desktop space.
No, it is most useful as an internal evaluation tool. A company with limited resources (ie all companies) may not want to research every new technology to see if they could lower their TCO by implementing it. They might want some kind of reason to believe it is cheaper before they commit to spending on an internal evaluation. This doesn't mean that an external TCO evaluation is the only one they will have.
...and less and less real art and science coming out of this country
So why do about half the nobel prizes in science go to american universities? As a european physicist/mathematician I have to say that the world leading institute for a particular field of research is usually from the US.
Really i'm shocked that this groundless rant is modded +5. Even on/.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares about principles when money is involved?
When the numbers are put into a more convenient form, the relevant equation is
Output = Input * exp( rate * time )
If you halve the rate, you have to double the time to get an equivalent return.
So if young jimmy at high school is expecting it to take 15 years to accumulate a certain amount from his initial stake, then he had better hope the interest rate doesn't change. But interest rates do change. And you have to subtract inflation from them. And you are taxed on them.
I'm not somebody who knows about these things, but I assume inflation has been around 4% over the last 20 years, so the true interest rate (in terms of what you can actually buy with the money) is r-I = 7-4 = 3. If this is the case then he will have to wait more than twice as long as he expected. In summary, while it's nice that the value of your investment varies exponentially with time, it also varies exponentially with interest rates. So when you are making these little back-of-an-envelope calculations you do have to make very sure you don't mess up the value of the interest rate.
If two people have their hands in each others pockets, then they can't hit each other.
So presumably they could ban it by searching around for and buying the patent that somebody inevitably has.
A particular example of the maths is here.
No, it is most useful as an internal evaluation tool. A company with limited resources (ie all companies) may not want to research every new technology to see if they could lower their TCO by implementing it. They might want some kind of reason to believe it is cheaper before they commit to spending on an internal evaluation. This doesn't mean that an external TCO evaluation is the only one they will have.
Presumably mental retardation is a result of the slashdot generation.
Idiot.
So why do about half the nobel prizes in science go to american universities? As a european physicist/mathematician I have to say that the world leading institute for a particular field of research is usually from the US.
Really i'm shocked that this groundless rant is modded +5. Even on /.