Before "clarifying" something, make sure you understand it. "Shorting" is not a financial instrument. It simply means selling shares that you do not own. A financial instrument is something one can trade.
Options are a financial instrument because once you buy the right to buy or sell a share at a specific price (i.e an option) you can trade that right depending on how the share price fluctuates.
I'm not sure which operation is more "dangerous" (short selling a stock or buying put options). Options provide a bigger leverage but have no value past the strike time; the loss is however limited to whatever premium was paid to buy the option is one chooses not to exercise it. The risk in short selling is that you may end up having to buy the stock at a price that is much higher than you anticipated, so the worst case scenario is that you may have to keep that stock for a long time hoping that the price will go up again, or sell at a loss. In either case you need to have a good bankroll because most trading companies will require additional funds (or credit) to secure the position when the price of the underlying asset fluctuates wildly in a direction that does not favor you (otherwise they will liquidate).
What about people from the future time-traveling to give us exciting new patent-free technology? Is that more likely than aliens landing on Earth and handing over the keys to their spacecraft?
If it was possible to bet on THAT I would be interested. Who cares about drones.
You should post a screencast of you typing your comment in WordPerfect, with a small Rhodes electric piano music playing in the background. This would be a big hit with people who miss the series "Doogie Howser, MD".
You can short the loser side and get an immensely bigger payout if you are right. Options are pennies on the dollar compared to a bet or actual shares.
And in any event, unless you buy in at the IPO, you don't "help" a company or technology by buying their stock since the said stock is owned by some other dude and the sale does not bring a single more dollar to the company; if anything there is administrative overhead for them. The only marginal impact you may have is that by buying or selling you have a tiny influence over the stock price, which may please or displease other shareholders, who can reward or punish executives accordingly.
The dude says: "A stranger approaches a company like Microsoft holding two envelopes, one containing $1,000 cash, and the other containing an IE security vulnerability which hasn't yet been discovered in the wild, and asks Microsoft to pick one envelope. It would sound short-sighted and irresponsible for Microsoft to pick the envelope containing the cash — but when Microsoft declines to offer a $1,000 cash prize for vulnerabilities, it's exactly like choosing the envelope with the $1,000".
That's wrong. To have access to $1,000, Microsoft has to earn maybe $1,350 on account of the federal, state and local taxes. But that's not enough because they also need to pay their staff (and their office space), plus the lawyers and accountants who process quarterly for the earnings reports, plus banking fees, and lots of other stuff.
So paying a $1,000 bounty requires them to forfeit a $1,500 income, while getting a $1,000 cash payment means a $750 profit. Even if the bug is a big one (which rarely happens), what is going to happen? People flocking to OSX and Linux? If you ask the shareholders, taking the cash is a no-brainer.
This being said, I still don't understand why Microsoft bothers with IE. What do they have to gain? They should take a small chunk of their IE budget and fund Firefox.
Microsoft will do this for a while then try to exert pressure in various ways to get their way. Due to the structure of ASF, it's probably hard for them to get anywhere because there are so many different projects lead by so many different people. They will most certainly try however.
Also the amount, 12 millions, is retail price. With the large number of computers they have, the IRS probably gets the Public Sector Discount, which means at least 3x the retail price (plus mysterious fees), and to make things easier they probably rounded up the number to an even 200,000 licenses.
At the moment the GAO can't even give a ballpark figure for the money wasted by the IRS. Therefore, the amount of money wasted on XP does not matter, at least it goes back to an American company so they can stash it in Ireland or Benelux.
Yeah confidential data is never compromised in the private sector because companies are careful not to use XP, except Target. That includes Experian. Or Adobe. Or Sony. Or Apple. (etc.)
People who want to store their own projects on their own servers instead of having Crapware bundled with their downloads on SourceForge or who don't like the tedious process of publishing on Github can use this thing and SEO or twitter their way to the mainstream search engines - or maybe they just want to use it internally and don't care about people knowing about their stuff.
As for a federated register, if we look at the existing models (Wikipedia, Apple App Store, Google Play Store) then THAT is the end of OSS. When a small clique decides what is acceptable and what is not then the outcome looks good but that's just because the people or projects that are crushed are lost in the background noise.
Those links are posted by the Praetorians and hide a secret portal leading to a mysterious backdoor. Thanks to CyberBob, I know how it works: hold the left shift key on your keyboard then click directly in the middle of the top loop of the "8". If you do it correctly, you will get to the backdoor and it will be wide open.
I wish I could take back that google search I just did and live in the blissful oblivion of not knowing from what movie that quote came from. Now I'm tainted.
What is the problem with VMs? I use one all the time when I browse some areas of the internet that I don't want to appear in the history of my main browser.
You can also get a free tattoo in prison, but the available designs are limited to a specific subset based on the color of your skin and/or the number of your street.
I believe that the only Windows involved in The Lattice is Windows XP, which happens to be the operating system used by the underlying SAN (an EMC Clariion) where all the data of the "known universe" (ours) is stored.
Yes people: your dearest memories could in fact stored on a device running Windows XP. One would need to be both a systems engineer and a neuroscientist to confirm this, but I suspect that the root cause of what we call Alzheimer is the WUAUCLT.EXE agent kicking into high gears and putting pressure on the SAN CPUs, preventing some bits of human memory to be properly serialized and stored.
This sucks but thanks to Windows XP at least we know that if the universe ends up crashing it won't be because the underlying storage infrastructure controller ran out of inodes while there is still plenty of disk space.
Since black is not a color, the meaning of your comment could qualify as a zen riddle. Thank you, this will give me something to ponder next time I'm in line at Starbucks*.
Maybe the problem is that they hired an actress that was 24 years old to play a high school student in the original series. Back then she was young and fresh but since women age faster than men, of course at her 10 years reunion she looks like someone who could have kids in high school herself.
My point is: try installing VMware workstation in a VM created with VMware workstation. It does not work. Ergo, since I can install VMware workstation in the "real world" it means that the "real world" is not a VM running on VMware workstation.
The Lattice HAS to run on ESX or Hyper-V, unless Root has access to a better technology. Maybe Sun LDOMs?
In any event I hope it's not an organic/slimy technology like those pods in Existenz.
Thank you for posting that link. This is fascinating but they left out the most important question: does the Lattice run on ESX or Hyper-V? We already know it can't be VMware workstation because the product won't let one install an hypervisor inside a VM (I tried).
Kristen Bell is not the young beautiful nymph she was when the series came out. After seeing her playing a corporate whore vomiting during drunken sex with a Wesley Snipes wannabe in House of Lies it's difficult to picture her as Veronica Mars, fresh and bubbly college girl. She does not look the part anymore.
When the Batman movie came out nobody was surprised that Adam West was not playing the hero. Even for the remake of Get Carter they took a younger guy (but at least gave a role to the old one). Why the double standard with women?
The movie is not about Kristen Bell. She's just an actress, and years did not do her any favor. I'm sure she can star in many movies where they need an older woman and she will do a great job, but there are plenty of talented younger girls available for playing younger girls characters.
Example; if someone said a watermelon is blue on the inside, but turns red when you cut it open, how could you prove them wrong? How could they prove they're right?
You couldn't and they can't. There is no method available to confirm or disprove what was said about the watermelon.
WHY does it turn red when you cut it open? Because it's exposed to oxygen in the air? Then cut one open in a vacuum. Or in an oxygen-free atmosphere. or maybe it turns red because of an interaction with the steel of the knife. So use a plastic knife. And so on. These are all testable.
Same with evolution. Point out a fossil that doesn't fit, and win a prize. except you can't, so you don't.
You can spend a lifetime making up WHYs and figuring out ways to prove or disprove them. That does not even come close to answering the fundamental question about the color of the watermelon.
The only solution to this problem is to have faith and live your life according to what the inside color of the watermelon means to you. You can even believe that there is no watermelon - that's a type of faith as well.
Now can we go back to being insulted that big companies found a way to minize risk in their commercial ventures by using a bait & switch approach so fans are the ones taking the risk?
Slashdot Mirror
Before "clarifying" something, make sure you understand it. "Shorting" is not a financial instrument. It simply means selling shares that you do not own. A financial instrument is something one can trade.
Options are a financial instrument because once you buy the right to buy or sell a share at a specific price (i.e an option) you can trade that right depending on how the share price fluctuates.
I'm not sure which operation is more "dangerous" (short selling a stock or buying put options). Options provide a bigger leverage but have no value past the strike time; the loss is however limited to whatever premium was paid to buy the option is one chooses not to exercise it. The risk in short selling is that you may end up having to buy the stock at a price that is much higher than you anticipated, so the worst case scenario is that you may have to keep that stock for a long time hoping that the price will go up again, or sell at a loss. In either case you need to have a good bankroll because most trading companies will require additional funds (or credit) to secure the position when the price of the underlying asset fluctuates wildly in a direction that does not favor you (otherwise they will liquidate).
What about people from the future time-traveling to give us exciting new patent-free technology? Is that more likely than aliens landing on Earth and handing over the keys to their spacecraft?
If it was possible to bet on THAT I would be interested. Who cares about drones.
You should post a screencast of you typing your comment in WordPerfect, with a small Rhodes electric piano music playing in the background. This would be a big hit with people who miss the series "Doogie Howser, MD".
You can short the loser side and get an immensely bigger payout if you are right. Options are pennies on the dollar compared to a bet or actual shares.
And in any event, unless you buy in at the IPO, you don't "help" a company or technology by buying their stock since the said stock is owned by some other dude and the sale does not bring a single more dollar to the company; if anything there is administrative overhead for them. The only marginal impact you may have is that by buying or selling you have a tiny influence over the stock price, which may please or displease other shareholders, who can reward or punish executives accordingly.
The dude says: "A stranger approaches a company like Microsoft holding two envelopes, one containing $1,000 cash, and the other containing an IE security vulnerability which hasn't yet been discovered in the wild, and asks Microsoft to pick one envelope. It would sound short-sighted and irresponsible for Microsoft to pick the envelope containing the cash — but when Microsoft declines to offer a $1,000 cash prize for vulnerabilities, it's exactly like choosing the envelope with the $1,000".
That's wrong. To have access to $1,000, Microsoft has to earn maybe $1,350 on account of the federal, state and local taxes. But that's not enough because they also need to pay their staff (and their office space), plus the lawyers and accountants who process quarterly for the earnings reports, plus banking fees, and lots of other stuff.
So paying a $1,000 bounty requires them to forfeit a $1,500 income, while getting a $1,000 cash payment means a $750 profit. Even if the bug is a big one (which rarely happens), what is going to happen? People flocking to OSX and Linux? If you ask the shareholders, taking the cash is a no-brainer.
This being said, I still don't understand why Microsoft bothers with IE. What do they have to gain? They should take a small chunk of their IE budget and fund Firefox.
Microsoft will do this for a while then try to exert pressure in various ways to get their way. Due to the structure of ASF, it's probably hard for them to get anywhere because there are so many different projects lead by so many different people. They will most certainly try however.
Citation needed
Also the amount, 12 millions, is retail price. With the large number of computers they have, the IRS probably gets the Public Sector Discount, which means at least 3x the retail price (plus mysterious fees), and to make things easier they probably rounded up the number to an even 200,000 licenses.
At the moment the GAO can't even give a ballpark figure for the money wasted by the IRS. Therefore, the amount of money wasted on XP does not matter, at least it goes back to an American company so they can stash it in Ireland or Benelux.
Yeah confidential data is never compromised in the private sector because companies are careful not to use XP, except Target. That includes Experian. Or Adobe. Or Sony. Or Apple. (etc.)
People who want to store their own projects on their own servers instead of having Crapware bundled with their downloads on SourceForge or who don't like the tedious process of publishing on Github can use this thing and SEO or twitter their way to the mainstream search engines - or maybe they just want to use it internally and don't care about people knowing about their stuff.
As for a federated register, if we look at the existing models (Wikipedia, Apple App Store, Google Play Store) then THAT is the end of OSS. When a small clique decides what is acceptable and what is not then the outcome looks good but that's just because the people or projects that are crushed are lost in the background noise.
Those links are posted by the Praetorians and hide a secret portal leading to a mysterious backdoor. Thanks to CyberBob, I know how it works: hold the left shift key on your keyboard then click directly in the middle of the top loop of the "8". If you do it correctly, you will get to the backdoor and it will be wide open.
Be careful.
They said 'unmanned', not that it did not carry ennemy combattants waiting for a place at Gitmo or in Yemen torture camps.
Now let's see Stallone escape from that one.
I wish I could take back that google search I just did and live in the blissful oblivion of not knowing from what movie that quote came from. Now I'm tainted.
The real "Placebo effect" is me clicking on the dislike button in Pandora.
My god let VMS die already.
What is the problem with VMs? I use one all the time when I browse some areas of the internet that I don't want to appear in the history of my main browser.
The guy that maintains the code used in critical systems...
... lives in Bangalore and is a big fan of Russel Peters. Unless you consider that banking systems are not critical (*cough* RBS)
Wishful thinking.
You can also get a free tattoo in prison, but the available designs are limited to a specific subset based on the color of your skin and/or the number of your street.
That's the difference with Apple customers, who don't admit they're getting royally screwed over on price.
I believe that the only Windows involved in The Lattice is Windows XP, which happens to be the operating system used by the underlying SAN (an EMC Clariion) where all the data of the "known universe" (ours) is stored.
Yes people: your dearest memories could in fact stored on a device running Windows XP. One would need to be both a systems engineer and a neuroscientist to confirm this, but I suspect that the root cause of what we call Alzheimer is the WUAUCLT.EXE agent kicking into high gears and putting pressure on the SAN CPUs, preventing some bits of human memory to be properly serialized and stored.
This sucks but thanks to Windows XP at least we know that if the universe ends up crashing it won't be because the underlying storage infrastructure controller ran out of inodes while there is still plenty of disk space.
Since black is not a color, the meaning of your comment could qualify as a zen riddle. Thank you, this will give me something to ponder next time I'm in line at Starbucks*.
*Now I really want a salted caramel square...
Maybe the problem is that they hired an actress that was 24 years old to play a high school student in the original series. Back then she was young and fresh but since women age faster than men, of course at her 10 years reunion she looks like someone who could have kids in high school herself.
My point is: try installing VMware workstation in a VM created with VMware workstation. It does not work. Ergo, since I can install VMware workstation in the "real world" it means that the "real world" is not a VM running on VMware workstation.
The Lattice HAS to run on ESX or Hyper-V, unless Root has access to a better technology. Maybe Sun LDOMs?
In any event I hope it's not an organic/slimy technology like those pods in Existenz.
Thank you for posting that link. This is fascinating but they left out the most important question: does the Lattice run on ESX or Hyper-V? We already know it can't be VMware workstation because the product won't let one install an hypervisor inside a VM (I tried).
Kristen Bell is not the young beautiful nymph she was when the series came out. After seeing her playing a corporate whore vomiting during drunken sex with a Wesley Snipes wannabe in House of Lies it's difficult to picture her as Veronica Mars, fresh and bubbly college girl. She does not look the part anymore.
When the Batman movie came out nobody was surprised that Adam West was not playing the hero. Even for the remake of Get Carter they took a younger guy (but at least gave a role to the old one). Why the double standard with women?
The movie is not about Kristen Bell. She's just an actress, and years did not do her any favor. I'm sure she can star in many movies where they need an older woman and she will do a great job, but there are plenty of talented younger girls available for playing younger girls characters.
Example; if someone said a watermelon is blue on the inside, but turns red when you cut it open, how could you prove them wrong? How could they prove they're right?
You couldn't and they can't. There is no method available to confirm or disprove what was said about the watermelon.
WHY does it turn red when you cut it open? Because it's exposed to oxygen in the air? Then cut one open in a vacuum. Or in an oxygen-free atmosphere. or maybe it turns red because of an interaction with the steel of the knife. So use a plastic knife. And so on. These are all testable.
Same with evolution. Point out a fossil that doesn't fit, and win a prize. except you can't, so you don't.
You can spend a lifetime making up WHYs and figuring out ways to prove or disprove them. That does not even come close to answering the fundamental question about the color of the watermelon.
The only solution to this problem is to have faith and live your life according to what the inside color of the watermelon means to you. You can even believe that there is no watermelon - that's a type of faith as well.
Now can we go back to being insulted that big companies found a way to minize risk in their commercial ventures by using a bait & switch approach so fans are the ones taking the risk?