The real problem you have been facing in (at least) 90% of the you've been on is that you've allowed yourself to be contained in your developer bubble (and marketeers in their marketing bubble, managers in their management bubble).
Why don't you take responsibility for everything in your project (company/world) and inspire your peers to do the same? Labels like "developer", "manager", "marketeer" are useless. Aren't we all on the same team, sharing the same vision and working towards the same goal?
Actually 1. Mathematics is finite sequences of symbols and rules to translate 1 into the other 2. The rules were inspired by what we see around us and how we experience our world, but they are the result of human observations and human thought 3. Mathematics is famously incomplete: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... 4. Mathematics has not (yet) been proven to be consistent, and may never: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... 5. If we ever find an inconsistency, it will render the whole of mathematics null and void: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
You have a misconception of what science is. None of the facts you mention result from measurements that you did yourself. Rather you heard it from others, and you trust them. If you did measure them yourself, you would have to rely on the correctness of someone else's measurement device. If you made your own measurement devices, you'd rely on someone else's established theory of the phenomena you're measuring. And so on...
In the end, nothing in science is beyond doubt. Science does not deal in truth. What does science deal in? Well, there's a whole scientific discipline to answer this question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Additionally, offering such a weak*) excuse for sitting on this story (apparently) for a week actually rings all my alarm bells. Please slashdot editors, explicitly deny (or confirm) there has been any kind of pressure influencing your treatment of this topic.
*) Weak to react to it cynically, dismissively, the editor just had a busy weekend, and how dare the readers ever even imagine there might be some sort of hesitation on your part for not publishing this article promptly. After all, it's only a very grave accusation to a service run by the same company for the same audience.
You mean, you would have been able to come up with google's optimization (which one would that be exactly?) or with any classic algorithm, without understanding the problem? I think you're merely benefiting from other people's understanding of these problems.
My DNA came from a billion year run on a gigantic parallel processing farm (you know, all organisms on the earth ever). I'm still puzzling on how to interpret this run's output however. I don't even know what problem needed to be solved in the first place.
To think that because the tax system is so complicated, a more simpler solution must exist without any by-effects seems to be inspired by a religious belief in technology as a solution to anything we can't figure out by ourselves. This belief is the product of not really understanding then nature of technology: to be able to solve a problem, one needs to understand it first.
Let's apply the same principle to exchange rates (let's use a computer to determine the exchange rates between currencies, those computers are so smart), democracy itself (no more need for arguments or elections), the distribution of rewards, making consumptive choices... I haven't read anything by David Brin, but I would expect him to specialize in fantasies about dystopian societies where a skynet-like system controls the fate of humanity.
To be more exact, there is no easy formula of the hypergeometric kind, which is a formula "involving binomial coefficients, factorials, rational functions, and power functions" according to http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HypergeometricIdentity.html. It would thus theoretically still be possible that an easy formula exists, but it must involve constructions more exotic than that.
This paper seems to prove that there is no easy formula short cut for the tree: if one wants to know the answer, one really needs to build the entire tree.
It's not about decisions but about information (did I tell you I'm a mathematician working in the industry?)
Marginal information has a marginal influence on human decision making, and thus its providers should be allowed to charge a marginal fee for it. The point you should be making is that this fee is too large, not that it is there in the first place.
BTW, perhaps you should provide more information regarding the exact mechanism of your delay mechanism. I do not see how it is going to prevent arbitrage at all: is all trade information delayed? then all arbitrage will take place at a delay, with similar profits.
Market participants will also invest in acquiring superior information as long as this process is profitable. There are other ways to acquire price information than from the exchange (for instance by collecting information from a sample of the traders themselves, at a charge). Non-arbitrageurs will not invest the resources to beat your delay, whereas arbitrageurs will. Therefore I expect the extra hurdle for the retrieval of information to benefit the arbitrageur.
First of all, you're not talking about HFT really, but about arbitrage: making use of inefficiencies in the dissemination of information in a market. Arbitrage is as old as trading itself and now that trading happens with fast computers, the same goes for arbitrage. If some knowledge becomes available in some place, it will quickly spread over the entire market. In this process, the arbitrageur plays an important role: the parties that profit from trading are the parties that actually spread the information: if you buy/sell an instrument because it's under/over priced, you actually help to in/decrease its price. The fact that arbitrage rakes up big profits only means that the trading system is efficient. You should thus work to make it more efficient instead of killing the arbitrageur.
The solutions you propose are exactly symptom killers: 1. Adding a delay means you're withholding information from the markets. With less information, market participants make decisions that are less informed and thus poorer. 2. Adding a tax has actually the same result: if you raise a tax, you're actually putting a threshold on the level of information that can be disseminated with a profit. This will in effect mean that new information will only be sent once it reaches a certain level of impact and the tax thus functions as a delay for this information.
Why don't you propose a more open economy, where information is easier to get by and cheaper. This will automatically result in better prices (one of the important functions of financial markets: knowing what something is comparatively worth) and it will reduce the profits of the arbitrageurs.
Ofcourse I haven't read the article. The summary provides enough information:
1. The subject is arbitrage, not trading. The impact of the ideas summarized here on trading is negligable. For actual trading, latency is a much less important issue.
2. Arbitrage makes money by exploiting (and thereby reducing) inefficiencies.
3. The profits made by arbitrageurs should go down to reasonable levels, under the assumption that markets are efficient
4. The fact that arbitrageurs are still making enormous profits shows that we have much more serious issues in our financial system than the lag between exchanges
In fact if we were to have a Slashdot survey on this site and the question was "would you turn in Julian Assange for $5 million dollars in cash" I'd bet that 25% of Slashdot would be willing.
I wouldn't turn in Assange for $5 million dollars. CowboyNeal on the other hand...
This kind of activity is an abuse of the free stock market system.
This activity does not generate wealth. It doesn't create something from nothing. And it doesn't add value to society. If they generated 21 billion, then 21 billion was necessarily lost by others.
People should look down on this kind of business and method of trading.
A common and understandable misconception.
For the remainder of this comment, I choose shares in Google as an example. I have no position in Google, not an opinion on their current price.
Both arbitrage (making use of inconsistencies in the market) and speculation (trading for immediate short term profit, and not for long term investment) are activities that add value. It is important to understand that markets are not only there to facilitates exchanges (e.g. trading in securities), but they also play a vital role in information processing. The activity of trading feeds information into the world: If a person buys 1 share of Google for the price of x, this person is also saying "I am willing to put my money on the notion that 1 share of Google is at least x". The current price of Google is nothing else than the consensus opinion of all market participants.
The accuracy and efficiency of said consensus depends heavily on the tools available to the speculators and arbiters. Say I think that Google is currently overpriced. If the market rewards me for supplying this information, then I would do it. For instance, I could sell Google shares short (i.e. I would sell shares that I don't have, hoping to buy them later on at a lower price and thus make a profit). At the beginning of the financial crisis, a lot of governments disallowed trading short, naively expecting the market to stabilize. What actually happened ofcourse is that information exchange slowed down: if Google was indeed overpriced, this would be known much later to the world if short trading wasn't possible.
The bottom line: speculation and arbiters bring their information into the market and are rewarded for this by their profits. If the information is incorrect, they will be punished with a loss.
Yes, I claim however that shooting human shields used by irregular opponents (non-uniformed or otherwise not clearly recognizeable or people who fight in an urban zone) is NOT a crime in the geneva convention. I counterclaim that the non-uniformedness of the opponents is of no consequence here. If a party undertakes an operation that puts civilian lives at risk, the importance of the operation must be so that it justifies taking that risk. These are the principles of proportionality and the protection of civilian lives at work.
The other parts of your response are mere conspiracy theories. Is this the best you can do?
For chapter 4 (pertaining to the treatment of the civilian population) of the actual conventions, see: this link.
Let's take some of your statements:
Did you know that they really don't protect civilians under "contemporary" conditions ? It specifically states that if "the enemy" (anyone whom you're at war with) does not clearly identify itself (which is defined to mean military bases OUTSIDE of population centers and CLEARLY uniformed troops) that civilians, enemy troops AND casualties are fair game ?
What the conventions actually say is that it's forbidden to perform certain acts. However, if one party commits such acts, it doesn't mean that any civilian population is then "fair game". Civilians are never "fair game".
As in, if there is a faction using people as human shields, any army fighting them is completely within their rights to shoot all the human shields first. (think about what rights this theoretically gives Israel in fighting Gaza, they go above and beyond what Geneva requires of them, since a genocide in Gaza would be clearly within Israel's rights under the Geneva conventions)
The fact that some of the acts of one party are forbidden, doesn't mean the other party may commit crimes in response. Specifically, the Geneva conventions talk of proportionality: "Art. 53. Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations." Given furthermore the fact that Israeli's occupation of Gaza is illegal by international law in general, any action taken by Israel to keep Gaza occupied is in fact a crime (though not necessarily by the Geneva conventions, which only deals with very specific humanitarian issues).
Even in an open war a military is completely within their rights to let a civilian population starve. Everything except direct, unprovoked attacks is not the subject of the Geneva conventions.
Actually the Geneva conventions cover several aspects about war that have humanitarian consequences: the treatment of prisoners of war, the treatment of a population by their occupier, and so on.
The convention also CLEARLY states who gets to judge (obviously without possibility of appeal) whether the provisions of the Geneva conventions allow you to shoot a certain person : the field commander. His decision is final, and he gets to be judge, jury and executioner.
It's the responsibility, not the discretion of the commander.
Besides, there isn't a single warring faction in the world today, except the United States (and Israel, Turkey and "maybe" China (insofar you call Tibet a war, besides I doubt you will find China respecting Geneva in Africa)), that even pretend to respect the Geneva conventions. E.g. hezbollah has declared upon multiple occasions that it doesn't, nor does it ever intend to (and then they say something about some prophet not respecting them as justification).
It's very true that no army ever respects the Geneva conventions. Israel, the United States and many other countries tend to profess how humane their acts of war are. Ofcourse, the harder they claim this, the more of a lie it usually is. (Collective punishment in Palestine, 10,000s of civilian prisoners of war without any outlook on a trial, but with rampant torture going on, the United States ofcourse has Guantanamo Bay, the en-masse destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iraq during both wars there, and so on). Regarding the statement you make about Hezbollah's declarations on multiple occasions, would you mind providing a reference to one such declaration?
Of course there are always enemies that do not respect the rules of war, that is why the Nurenberg trials were held.
The Nuremberg (and Tokyo) trials were examples of victor's justice: allied war crimes and crimes against humanity (the Dresden bombing, the nuclear bombs on Japanese civilian targets, the firebombing of Japanese cities, and so on...) were out of scope. It's quite ok to commit war crimes, as long as you win the war.
in modern usage, ashkenazis come from europe. Sephardic jews come from the near/middle east.
Sephardic jews come originally from spain/portugal and fled to other places in europe and to the middle east. In the middle east, there has been a very old jewish diaspora (dating back before christ). Descendants of this community are referred to as Mizrahim. Mixing up Mizrahim and Sephardim is considered to be disrespectfull if not ourtight racist.
Slashdot Mirror
So, instead of whining using self-defeating logic, why don't you grab the steering wheel? ...oh wait, you're an anonymous coward.
The real problem you have been facing in (at least) 90% of the you've been on is that you've allowed yourself to be contained in your developer bubble (and marketeers in their marketing bubble, managers in their management bubble).
Why don't you take responsibility for everything in your project (company/world) and inspire your peers to do the same? Labels like "developer", "manager", "marketeer" are useless. Aren't we all on the same team, sharing the same vision and working towards the same goal?
...and console them when their employer goes broke and they're back on the street, no more competent than before
Actually
1. Mathematics is finite sequences of symbols and rules to translate 1 into the other
2. The rules were inspired by what we see around us and how we experience our world, but they are the result of human observations and human thought
3. Mathematics is famously incomplete: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
4. Mathematics has not (yet) been proven to be consistent, and may never: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
5. If we ever find an inconsistency, it will render the whole of mathematics null and void: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
You have a misconception of what science is. None of the facts you mention result from measurements that you did yourself. Rather you heard it from others, and you trust them. If you did measure them yourself, you would have to rely on the correctness of someone else's measurement device. If you made your own measurement devices, you'd rely on someone else's established theory of the phenomena you're measuring. And so on...
In the end, nothing in science is beyond doubt. Science does not deal in truth. What does science deal in? Well, there's a whole scientific discipline to answer this question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Additionally, offering such a weak*) excuse for sitting on this story (apparently) for a week actually rings all my alarm bells. Please slashdot editors, explicitly deny (or confirm) there has been any kind of pressure influencing your treatment of this topic.
*) Weak to react to it cynically, dismissively, the editor just had a busy weekend, and how dare the readers ever even imagine there might be some sort of hesitation on your part for not publishing this article promptly. After all, it's only a very grave accusation to a service run by the same company for the same audience.
You mean, you would have been able to come up with google's optimization (which one would that be exactly?) or with any classic algorithm, without understanding the problem? I think you're merely benefiting from other people's understanding of these problems.
My DNA came from a billion year run on a gigantic parallel processing farm (you know, all organisms on the earth ever). I'm still puzzling on how to interpret this run's output however. I don't even know what problem needed to be solved in the first place.
To think that because the tax system is so complicated, a more simpler solution must exist without any by-effects seems to be inspired by a religious belief in technology as a solution to anything we can't figure out by ourselves. This belief is the product of not really understanding then nature of technology: to be able to solve a problem, one needs to understand it first.
Let's apply the same principle to exchange rates (let's use a computer to determine the exchange rates between currencies, those computers are so smart), democracy itself (no more need for arguments or elections), the distribution of rewards, making consumptive choices... I haven't read anything by David Brin, but I would expect him to specialize in fantasies about dystopian societies where a skynet-like system controls the fate of humanity.
To be more exact, there is no easy formula of the hypergeometric kind, which is a formula "involving binomial coefficients, factorials, rational functions, and power functions" according to http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HypergeometricIdentity.html. It would thus theoretically still be possible that an easy formula exists, but it must involve constructions more exotic than that.
When pricing options the bionomial way, one creates a sort of decision tree for movements the underlying value makes. (scroll down on http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/high-performance-computing-with-binomial-option-pricing-part-1/ to see such a tree).
This paper seems to prove that there is no easy formula short cut for the tree: if one wants to know the answer, one really needs to build the entire tree.
I would assume Firefox handles its MHTML itself?
a
...when Judit was 12, with just Judit with a blindfold, 10-0 in a 10 game match.
Judit Polgar is the best femal chess player in history, by a long margin. Let's stop the propagation of this nonsensical news.
It's not about decisions but about information (did I tell you I'm a mathematician working in the industry?)
Marginal information has a marginal influence on human decision making, and thus its providers should be allowed to charge a marginal fee for it. The point you should be making is that this fee is too large, not that it is there in the first place.
BTW, perhaps you should provide more information regarding the exact mechanism of your delay mechanism. I do not see how it is going to prevent arbitrage at all: is all trade information delayed? then all arbitrage will take place at a delay, with similar profits.
Market participants will also invest in acquiring superior information as long as this process is profitable. There are other ways to acquire price information than from the exchange (for instance by collecting information from a sample of the traders themselves, at a charge). Non-arbitrageurs will not invest the resources to beat your delay, whereas arbitrageurs will. Therefore I expect the extra hurdle for the retrieval of information to benefit the arbitrageur.
First of all, you're not talking about HFT really, but about arbitrage: making use of inefficiencies in the dissemination of information in a market. Arbitrage is as old as trading itself and now that trading happens with fast computers, the same goes for arbitrage. If some knowledge becomes available in some place, it will quickly spread over the entire market. In this process, the arbitrageur plays an important role: the parties that profit from trading are the parties that actually spread the information: if you buy/sell an instrument because it's under/over priced, you actually help to in/decrease its price. The fact that arbitrage rakes up big profits only means that the trading system is efficient. You should thus work to make it more efficient instead of killing the arbitrageur.
The solutions you propose are exactly symptom killers:
1. Adding a delay means you're withholding information from the markets. With less information, market participants make decisions that are less informed and thus poorer.
2. Adding a tax has actually the same result: if you raise a tax, you're actually putting a threshold on the level of information that can be disseminated with a profit. This will in effect mean that new information will only be sent once it reaches a certain level of impact and the tax thus functions as a delay for this information.
Why don't you propose a more open economy, where information is easier to get by and cheaper. This will automatically result in better prices (one of the important functions of financial markets: knowing what something is comparatively worth) and it will reduce the profits of the arbitrageurs.
Ofcourse I haven't read the article. The summary provides enough information: 1. The subject is arbitrage, not trading. The impact of the ideas summarized here on trading is negligable. For actual trading, latency is a much less important issue. 2. Arbitrage makes money by exploiting (and thereby reducing) inefficiencies. 3. The profits made by arbitrageurs should go down to reasonable levels, under the assumption that markets are efficient 4. The fact that arbitrageurs are still making enormous profits shows that we have much more serious issues in our financial system than the lag between exchanges
In fact if we were to have a Slashdot survey on this site and the question was "would you turn in Julian Assange for $5 million dollars in cash" I'd bet that 25% of Slashdot would be willing.
I wouldn't turn in Assange for $5 million dollars. CowboyNeal on the other hand...
Am I the only one thinking of the predicament of bomb 20 in john carpenter's brilliant dark star: cf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjGRySVyTDk and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9-Niv2Xh7w
This kind of activity is an abuse of the free stock market system.
This activity does not generate wealth. It doesn't create something from nothing. And it doesn't add value to society. If they generated 21 billion, then 21 billion was necessarily lost by others.
People should look down on this kind of business and method of trading.
A common and understandable misconception.
For the remainder of this comment, I choose shares in Google as an example. I have no position in Google, not an opinion on their current price.
Both arbitrage (making use of inconsistencies in the market) and speculation (trading for immediate short term profit, and not for long term investment) are activities that add value. It is important to understand that markets are not only there to facilitates exchanges (e.g. trading in securities), but they also play a vital role in information processing. The activity of trading feeds information into the world: If a person buys 1 share of Google for the price of x, this person is also saying "I am willing to put my money on the notion that 1 share of Google is at least x". The current price of Google is nothing else than the consensus opinion of all market participants.
The accuracy and efficiency of said consensus depends heavily on the tools available to the speculators and arbiters. Say I think that Google is currently overpriced. If the market rewards me for supplying this information, then I would do it. For instance, I could sell Google shares short (i.e. I would sell shares that I don't have, hoping to buy them later on at a lower price and thus make a profit). At the beginning of the financial crisis, a lot of governments disallowed trading short, naively expecting the market to stabilize. What actually happened ofcourse is that information exchange slowed down: if Google was indeed overpriced, this would be known much later to the world if short trading wasn't possible.
The bottom line: speculation and arbiters bring their information into the market and are rewarded for this by their profits. If the information is incorrect, they will be punished with a loss.
Let's take some of your statements:
What the conventions actually say is that it's forbidden to perform certain acts. However, if one party commits such acts, it doesn't mean that any civilian population is then "fair game". Civilians are never "fair game".
The fact that some of the acts of one party are forbidden, doesn't mean the other party may commit crimes in response. Specifically, the Geneva conventions talk of proportionality: "Art. 53. Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations." Given furthermore the fact that Israeli's occupation of Gaza is illegal by international law in general, any action taken by Israel to keep Gaza occupied is in fact a crime (though not necessarily by the Geneva conventions, which only deals with very specific humanitarian issues).
Actually the Geneva conventions cover several aspects about war that have humanitarian consequences: the treatment of prisoners of war, the treatment of a population by their occupier, and so on.
It's the responsibility, not the discretion of the commander.
It's very true that no army ever respects the Geneva conventions. Israel, the United States and many other countries tend to profess how humane their acts of war are. Ofcourse, the harder they claim this, the more of a lie it usually is. (Collective punishment in Palestine, 10,000s of civilian prisoners of war without any outlook on a trial, but with rampant torture going on, the United States ofcourse has Guantanamo Bay, the en-masse destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iraq during both wars there, and so on). Regarding the statement you make about Hezbollah's declarations on multiple occasions, would you mind providing a reference to one such declaration?
Of course there are always enemies that do not respect the rules of war, that is why the Nurenberg trials were held.
The Nuremberg (and Tokyo) trials were examples of victor's justice: allied war crimes and crimes against humanity (the Dresden bombing, the nuclear bombs on Japanese civilian targets, the firebombing of Japanese cities, and so on...) were out of scope. It's quite ok to commit war crimes, as long as you win the war.Infringing of copyright is, in very few circumstances, also permitted by law. Consider for instance the Diebold vs. Swarthmore college case.
Jews from Ethiopia are usually referred to as Falasha.
Sephardic jews come originally from spain/portugal and fled to other places in europe and to the middle east. In the middle east, there has been a very old jewish diaspora (dating back before christ). Descendants of this community are referred to as Mizrahim. Mixing up Mizrahim and Sephardim is considered to be disrespectfull if not ourtight racist.