No, the stock market exists so that you can buy and sell shares -- sort of like a supermarket.
Not much like a supermarket at all. Have you ever tried to sell your leftovers to Safeway? Me neither, but I'm guessing we wouldn't have much luck.
The stock market doesn't exist simply to indulge people's compulsion to shift around variously colored pieces of paper, it exists as a method for companies to raise capital in order to expand and continue their operations. (We'll stipulate that those operations benefit society.) Day traders and other investors who buy and sell based not on any reasoned analyses but simply by following a frenzied mob mentality are harmful to that end. Excessive volatility doesn't help a company at all; there's no use in finding yourself with an extra billion dollars of capital in the morning if it could be gone by afternoon. Neither companies nor society nor much of anyone besides commission-chasing brokers were well-served by the collapse of perfectly viable startups in the wake of shortsighted "investors'" panicked exodus from anything with a website.
[M]arkets don't only serve the needs of society by accident. They serve the needs of people.
They serve the desires of the people involved, which are not always rational and not always in the people's own best interests, and even more often not in the interests of the economy or society at large. A guy offering to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to passers-by is a "market" too, but after he leaves town I don't think there will be any vacuum, with thwarted hopeful bridge-buyers clamoring for someone to take his place.
No they're not. They're observations of fact. Seriously, though, "ad hominem" is not just fancy talk for "insult." An ad hominem is when you say something like "The flaw in Rush Limbaugh's argument against welfare is that he's a fat drug addict" instead of addressing the argument directly.
I've heard more venom against Bush then I ever heard against Clinton.
You must have been living in a cave through most of the 90s.
You have been misinformed. It's true that commercial speech is less protected than non-commercial speech, but that doesn't mean that copyright only applies to commercial speech. Quoting a relevant limited section of an article has generally been held to constitute fair use, as has making photocopies for class handouts in an academic setting, but you're not free to make copies of a book and hand them out on the street just as long as you don't charge money.
I don't know of any cases involving pasting the entirety of an available text on a messageboard for the sole and express purpose of violating the publisher's terms of use, but I don't think you'd get very far with a fair use defense.
Immoral? Maybe, but so is tracking people's reading habits
How is this "immoral," especially given that the people being tracked are anonymous? All they're doing is learning that, say, people who read a lot of articles about tennis also tend to follow British politics, or that hardly anyone makes it through to the last page of Joe Reporter's economics stories. It doesn't carry the slightest possibility of hurting anyone.
In some parts of Africa it is considered a part of becomming an adult to get the genitals cut. They have been doing it for thousands of years. It is their culture, and those who don't participate never feel like real members of their community. Should the USA go over to these tribes, deep in the wilderness, and tell these tribes they must stop their culture because it is violent and against womens rights?
Don't like the law? Write your lawmaker, but don't complain that the system isn't working right.
My influence over my lawmakers is less than negligible, not having a lot of money to throw at reelection campaigns. Remember that it was the duly elected representatives of New London CT that sought to steal their own constituents' property. I don't believe the system was originally intended to function that way. Therefore I will indeed complain that the system isn't working right, loudly and, I hope, convincingly.
P.S. Can we please have a moratorium on "Bzzzt, thanks for playing" and its variants? That shit is really irritating.
Have you looked at the price of oil lately? It's not only Iraqi oil that's $60/bbl. The cost of extracting oil from the Alaskan North Slope or the Gulf of Mexico has not increased as a result of the ongoing unpleasantness in the Mideast, but the oil companies get to sell it for those inflated prices regardless.
Of course it's not entirely so simple as "higher oil prices always lead to higher oil company profits," since at a certain point people will presumably curtail their consumption enough to offset the high margins with low volume. But that hasn't happened yet, at least not in the USA, and until they find out where that point is, expensiver is better.
The dictionary is descriptive, not prescriptive. Never refer to it to bolster your side of a debate, as what it is describing may be improper albeit common usage. Most dictionaries will let you know that this is the case by tagging the entry with a disclaimer, such as "colloquial," "Americanism," or..."informal."
I also remember all I read about nuclear fusion and now I see it made available (ok, in actual testing and producing actual electricity) in a breadbox sized box
Where is this available, or even in testing? Aren't fusion reactors still enormous experimental things that take more energy to run than they put out?
would turn the TV off in disgust if the next episode of "24" featured a nuclear bomb stolen by leprechauns
Are you kidding? That would be awesome!
"Help. Help. It's happening. The attack is on. O'Grady farm. Uh, send help. The leprechaun is attacking. Army, navy, guns, marines, and we're gunna need some medicine."
I haven't watched 24 since the beginning of the second season, but nuclear leprechauns would definitely bring me back.
That's rather narrow. Many religious people understand that their holy texts are fiction in a narrative sense but contain larger "truths" in that the lesson imparted by the fiction is truly a good guideline to live by. Jesus' parables are the most familiar example. (Aesop's Fables might be a closer parallel to Star Trek, since neither are linked to any specific religion.) It's the sad shouty fundamentalist robots who unfortunately propagate the notion that you must believe in the literal truth of every word in the Bible/Q'uran/whatever to be considered truly religious.
Further, there are plenty of religious people who are not "uniquivists" (for lack of a better word.) One can be a Unitarian Buddhist. A devout Jew can learn from the Tao Te Ching.
I certainly don't approve of cookies that note that (hypothetically), I've been looking at Toyota's web site, and stragely enough for the next week I get Honda propaganda banner ads.
The only way this could happen is if a third-party banner advertiser were advertising on Toyota's site who also had a contract to provide Honda ads on other sites. Toyota.com's own cookies aren't accessible to anyone but Toyota, and they're not about to offer that information to their competition.
Most browsers have an option to silently block third-party cookies; in my experience this, combined with banner/popup blockers or a custom hosts file, takes care of 99.5% of intrusive marketing BS.
This guy is in a long line of people who must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the new Star Wars movies are not as good as the original trilogy.
Reasonable doubt? We're not in court! What the hell is the matter with you? Stephenson articulated his opinion of the prequels and what he thinks was missing from them. He's not under any obligation to prove anything, least of all to a boring pedantic Comic Book Guy whose enjoyment of the movies is directly tied to his ability to exercise an encyclopaedic knowledge of their every trivial detail. Most people go to movies to be entertained and moved and even enlightened, not to compete in some dork contest.
"Kill" means "stream" or "channel" in Dutch. There are a lot of places named _____kill in the Northeast where the Dutch settled -- Beaverkill, Peekskill, the Catskills, etc. (A few years ago PETA tried to get the name changed to "Fishsave" and were roundly mocked for their idiotic effort.)
Companies can indeed be punished -- relative to their competitors. If you force punitive costs on Dell but not Gateway, Gateway gets an advantage at Dell's expense, thereby punishing Dell. What you can't really do is punish an entire industry across the board.
Recycling fees aren't about punishment, though. Having them incurred by the manufacturer allows for a system in which each product could be precisely assessed for toxin amounts and taxed accordingly. (You can't expect the guys at the local dump to measure the exact amount of lead in every monitor that comes their way.) A benefit of manufacturer-pays, then, is the incentive to reduce the toxic content of their products, as they'll be charged less in recycling fees.
Slashdot Mirror
Not much like a supermarket at all. Have you ever tried to sell your leftovers to Safeway? Me neither, but I'm guessing we wouldn't have much luck.
The stock market doesn't exist simply to indulge people's compulsion to shift around variously colored pieces of paper, it exists as a method for companies to raise capital in order to expand and continue their operations. (We'll stipulate that those operations benefit society.) Day traders and other investors who buy and sell based not on any reasoned analyses but simply by following a frenzied mob mentality are harmful to that end. Excessive volatility doesn't help a company at all; there's no use in finding yourself with an extra billion dollars of capital in the morning if it could be gone by afternoon. Neither companies nor society nor much of anyone besides commission-chasing brokers were well-served by the collapse of perfectly viable startups in the wake of shortsighted "investors'" panicked exodus from anything with a website.
[M]arkets don't only serve the needs of society by accident. They serve the needs of people.
They serve the desires of the people involved, which are not always rational and not always in the people's own best interests, and even more often not in the interests of the economy or society at large. A guy offering to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to passers-by is a "market" too, but after he leaves town I don't think there will be any vacuum, with thwarted hopeful bridge-buyers clamoring for someone to take his place.
No they're not. They're observations of fact. Seriously, though, "ad hominem" is not just fancy talk for "insult." An ad hominem is when you say something like "The flaw in Rush Limbaugh's argument against welfare is that he's a fat drug addict" instead of addressing the argument directly.
I've heard more venom against Bush then I ever heard against Clinton.
You must have been living in a cave through most of the 90s.
Oblate spheroids are round.
Silkwood? Mask? Moonstruck? I didn't care for the latter, but it didn't suck.
Do you really think popularity and quality are interchangeable metrics?
Equilateral triangle.
How exactly does this cut costs? If anything, the 33k should be more expensive since it takes an extra step in the production process.
I don't know of any cases involving pasting the entirety of an available text on a messageboard for the sole and express purpose of violating the publisher's terms of use, but I don't think you'd get very far with a fair use defense.
How is this "immoral," especially given that the people being tracked are anonymous? All they're doing is learning that, say, people who read a lot of articles about tennis also tend to follow British politics, or that hardly anyone makes it through to the last page of Joe Reporter's economics stories. It doesn't carry the slightest possibility of hurting anyone.
Yes.
My influence over my lawmakers is less than negligible, not having a lot of money to throw at reelection campaigns. Remember that it was the duly elected representatives of New London CT that sought to steal their own constituents' property. I don't believe the system was originally intended to function that way. Therefore I will indeed complain that the system isn't working right, loudly and, I hope, convincingly.
P.S. Can we please have a moratorium on "Bzzzt, thanks for playing" and its variants? That shit is really irritating.
Of course it's not entirely so simple as "higher oil prices always lead to higher oil company profits," since at a certain point people will presumably curtail their consumption enough to offset the high margins with low volume. But that hasn't happened yet, at least not in the USA, and until they find out where that point is, expensiver is better.
The dictionary is descriptive, not prescriptive. Never refer to it to bolster your side of a debate, as what it is describing may be improper albeit common usage. Most dictionaries will let you know that this is the case by tagging the entry with a disclaimer, such as "colloquial," "Americanism," or..."informal."
Then they'll have to figure out how to make gelatin silver prints from digital. It's not all about the negative.
"suggests" != "proves"
Where is this available, or even in testing? Aren't fusion reactors still enormous experimental things that take more energy to run than they put out?
Are you kidding? That would be awesome!
"Help. Help. It's happening. The attack is on. O'Grady farm. Uh, send help. The leprechaun is attacking. Army, navy, guns, marines, and we're gunna need some medicine."
I haven't watched 24 since the beginning of the second season, but nuclear leprechauns would definitely bring me back.
Further, there are plenty of religious people who are not "uniquivists" (for lack of a better word.) One can be a Unitarian Buddhist. A devout Jew can learn from the Tao Te Ching.
The only way this could happen is if a third-party banner advertiser were advertising on Toyota's site who also had a contract to provide Honda ads on other sites. Toyota.com's own cookies aren't accessible to anyone but Toyota, and they're not about to offer that information to their competition.
Most browsers have an option to silently block third-party cookies; in my experience this, combined with banner/popup blockers or a custom hosts file, takes care of 99.5% of intrusive marketing BS.
Reasonable doubt? We're not in court! What the hell is the matter with you? Stephenson articulated his opinion of the prequels and what he thinks was missing from them. He's not under any obligation to prove anything, least of all to a boring pedantic Comic Book Guy whose enjoyment of the movies is directly tied to his ability to exercise an encyclopaedic knowledge of their every trivial detail. Most people go to movies to be entertained and moved and even enlightened, not to compete in some dork contest.
It's a Libertarian paradise!
About 420. (Not a pot reference, just 14 players * 30 teams.)
"Kill" means "stream" or "channel" in Dutch. There are a lot of places named _____kill in the Northeast where the Dutch settled -- Beaverkill, Peekskill, the Catskills, etc. (A few years ago PETA tried to get the name changed to "Fishsave" and were roundly mocked for their idiotic effort.)
Recycling fees aren't about punishment, though. Having them incurred by the manufacturer allows for a system in which each product could be precisely assessed for toxin amounts and taxed accordingly. (You can't expect the guys at the local dump to measure the exact amount of lead in every monitor that comes their way.) A benefit of manufacturer-pays, then, is the incentive to reduce the toxic content of their products, as they'll be charged less in recycling fees.
What was it you were saying about fact-checking?