I've actually been using mine as one again for a few months because my wife and I haven't figured out what to do with the living room in our new house and consequently haven't set up the surround sound system with the integrated DVD player.
But we haven't been watching all that many DVDs, either.
What logical relationship exists between a giant, inept and incompetent beaurocracy that tries to regulate foods and drugs, and nano-tech, which is mostly tech related?
The FDA regulates (see their homepage) things marketted to treat and to prevent disease, generally, including both drugs and (though its not part of the name) non-drug biological products and medical devices (they also regulate food -- obviously -- cosmetics, animal feed and veterinary drugs, and radiation-emitting devices.) Nanotech is sometimes currently and quite likely more in the future applied to prevent and treat disease, and to that extent comes under the FDA's scope of responsibility, as either a "drug" or a "medical device", depending on how you look at it. Expanding their brief to explicitly include nanotechnology designed for use on or in the human body would make a lot of sense even if it isn't, per se, a "drug" or "medical device".
Now what part of this is either "Food" or "Drug", and why should the FDA be regulating it?
Sunscreen (one of the areas of nanotech application in TFA), for instance, is a nonprescription drug currently regulated by the FDA, used to prevent various kinds of disease.
Law Enforcement (in this day and age of 0wned PCs, insecure wireless access points, Tor, RIAA tracking IPs to people who don't have computers, etc) STILL considers IP addresses to be valid and accurate identifiers of people. If something got traced to it and the ISP told them you had it at the time, guess what? You did it. The burden of proof would really be on YOU to prove that it was not you who was sending out a threatening email, communicating with a known terrorist, uploading child porn, or whatever. If they do know about Tor, they probably consider it more evidence that you are up to something illegal (just like PGP)
No matter what Law Enforcement "considers" it, the law considers it no such thing, and in court (in criminal cases) the government bears the legal burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt that you did whatever was prohibited.
Now, of course, with this administration, one shouldn't forget the risk of being punished without any recourse to law at all, but that is another issue.
Given the history and current reality of racism in the U.S., I don't think it's reasonable to expect the market to overcome racism in the P2P lending market.
True, then again, it doesn't really end-run around the laws (which is one reason I'd never make any but automated bids if I started investing through one of these). The laws apply, and the Prosper "lender" agreement makes you explicitly agree not to violate the terms of those laws.
People making manual bids ought to be very careful; automated bids are fairly safe unless they use very dumb criteria (like explicitly putting racial, ethnic, etc. terms into the criteria) in which case they are even more asking for trouble.
Yep that's what I like to see in my financial planner's strategy: Novelty. *rolls eyes*
Yeah, whatever. No doubt plenty of people said that about novel investment mechanism like "joint stock companies", too.
It's amazing what people are willing to believe and put up with.
The investment criteria are a lot less opaque doing automated bids through Prosper or Zopa than investing with a mutual fund company; the latter seems to require quite a bit more faith (and, giving the proven poor returns of most stock-based mutual funds compared to simple, objective, deterministic strategies operating in the same markets, demonstrably unjustified faith) than the former.
They need to find a way to bundle 1000 of these guys together os it becomes a sure loss of ~3% vs 97% zero loss and 3% total loss.
Both Prosper and Zopa (with USD 50 and GBP 10, respectively, quantum increments) seem to allow this automatically with automated bids ("standing orders" on Prosper, with Zopa it seems from a quick read through of their docs to be the main [only?] way of lending), so they don't seem to need anything new for this. Also, you don't need to spread to 1,000 to get reasonably close to risk free. While people selling investment products with hundreds of different investments in one general area (like, say, many mutual funds) like to pretend that such wide diversification is necessary to manage risk, usually you'll have essentially eliminated specific risk with a couple dozen holdings of one type, and then be exposed almost exclusively to market risk that affects the entire category, and cannot be affected by diversification within the category.
First test this fails is credibility. Mostly due to jumping on a hyped up technical term from one industry (P2P, IT) and attempting to use it out of context in a different industry (Finance). I smell snake oil.
That marketing strategy is so frequently used (for good or ill) as to be of little use in distinguishing good from bad. Not, of course, that the objection really applies all that well, even if it were useful: Prosper, for instance, doesn't seem to use "Peer-to-peer" in their own material, they do use "People-to-people lending: an old idea that's new again", which fairly reasonably describes both what they are doing, and the fact that the basic idea isn't novel though the implementation is.
I'm not sure that's true. Sure, that's why unregulated, anonymous person-to-person loans with no intermediary won't work, but that's not what these are. There is an intermediary doing transparent credit scoring using objective criteria, the "legal and accounting systems" (particularly, legal) are still involved, and the "one-strike" policy at Prosper limits the capacity for bad actors to game the system, as there is no forgiveness.
The community elements present a potential additional field of useful information and filtering, though they will need some time to mature.
Assuming the amount of effort in the initial investment is the same between propser and a CD, you get better returns and better security with the CD.
I dunno. Zopa, maybe, given the rates some people have quoted from their. There seems to be little on prosper below 10% and lots up to 20%+. Even adjusting for the expected default rates in the various credit categories and the fees, Prosper allows you to realize far better returns than any CD rates I've seen quoted recently, though your personal risk tolerance may affect whether the risk is worth it.
Since you can diversify automatically with no additional effort using the standing order system on Prosper, I don't see much justification for the claim that "you have to spend more time diversifying with prosper" to get "low returns".
To invest $1000 into either of the above banks, you simply send in a deposit. To invest $1000 into prosper, you have to diversify to spread your risk. So, maybe you break it up into $100 chunks. Now you have to find 10 people who you want to lend the money to.
Or you have to set up a standing order based on credit grade and other criteria, splitting it into as small as $50 chunks without about the same amount of work as making one manual bid. Nothing restricts you to making only manual bids on Prosper.
What would be nice is if the system would manage a limited (perhaps configurable) size, persistent hard drive "game cache", and if too many games try to store stuff in it, it wouldunloaded the least-recently-used in favor of the new game (this would be exclusively for material cached from the game disc, not saved-game, etc., content).
...perhaps misleading. Sure, pretty graphics (or higher quality sound, etc.) alone won't sell next-gen games -- heck, they aren't what sells this-gen games or sold last-gen games, either. But better visual, sound, etc. enables better experiences and more intuitive interfaces and better feedback -- IOW, better gameplay.
Sure, people will buy what provides them the best subjective experience (or at least, what they expect to do that, based on previews, reviews, cover art and copy, etc.) But you couldn't provide the kind of interface and gameplay experience you get from (to take a PC rather than console example) the Total War series on a 4.77Mhz 8088 PC with CGA graphics.
Similarly, the power to push more polygons at higher framerates and do better positional sound and physics simulation and more involved AI enabled by better hardware performance (but still also requiring new advances in software) will continue to enable gameplay experiences that you can't get without those bells and whistles. Graphics alone won't sell games, but taking full advantage of the capacity provided by high-end graphics will continue to often be a big factor in building the gameplay experience that does.
Hmmm, so Sony make a "backup" copy of media that they own and broadcast it in public. Legal precedent here?
Its not a "backup copy" of media that they own, its a copy of content that they own (or more precisely, that they hold, by paid-for license from the creator, the exclusive right to copy and distribute in the North American market; I don't think they are the legal creator.)
..whether end users or IT staff, has been when they are happy that their organization has decided to transition off of it.
Of course, someone, somewhere must be sticking with it and buying into it, since its still selling. But I've never personally met anyone who praised it as software that "just works", in fact, I've heard that more often as praise (by comparison to notes) for whatever was transitioned to from Notes, usually Outlook/Exchange (which I'm not a big fan of either, myself.)
Why on earth do you think it is "lawless" lending? There is this whole myth that the the internet is some kind of "law free zone". Its not. These companies are real companies, existing in the real world, and bound by the regular laws governing lending in the countries where they operate.
This is no more "lawless" than conventional lending engaged in by banks.
Even if I trust the whole system, given a default rate of 3% quoted somewhere in their website, a risk-neutral lender will at least demand an interest rate of the "risk-less" rate (the return that you deposit in a reputable regular bank) + the default rate + their annual handling fee, which means at least 4.5+3+0.5=8%.
Why add the default rate -- is that some kind of conventional "rule of thumb" (intuitively, it seems like it works as a rough approximation so long as both the default rate and the risk-free rate are small)? A risk-neutral lender, by definition, is looking only at expected return, so wants an expected return to match or exceed the risk free return. That seems to mean that the rate should be found by:
FYI: Its worth noting that the rates on Prosper seem to be a lot higher; it might reflect the relative maturity of the sites (or it might reflect something completely different.)
The article discusses two different lending assocations. Only one of them actually claim to use credit reports!
More correctly, the article only refers to one of them using credit reports. But both Prosper and Zopa expressly claim on their own websites to use credit scores (from Experian and Equifax, respectively), though Zopa claims to assign their ratings considering additional factors in some cases.
As of 2003, the median income for a 4-person family in the United States was $65,093 (source. Median household income in the United States was $43,318 (source).
I'm failing to quickly find comparable figures for the UK.
Seems pretty obvious this will rapidly devolve into supporting primarily folks with bad credit (or can't get loans from banks) who desparately need money FAST.
I don't see why you claim this is obvious; since there is credit rating information available to the "lenders", I don't see why bad credit would be favored (this presumes that the "lenders" will have a preference for return that makes them more risk tolerant, or that good credit borrowers will avoid the site for some reason. Neither assumption seems justified.)
New, completely unregulated financing options are really recipes for disaster and abuse - particularly in this day and age.
This isn't completely unregulated. All of the usual lending regulations apply to lending here (the lender being, in Prosper's case, Prosper).
Because identity theft is going to SKYROCKET if this catches on.
Er, why? Its certainly no easier to scam money with identity theft from this system than traditional lenders working through the mail or the net; you might convince people to give you better rates this way, but that doesn't matter if you are using identity theft to skip out on payments.
I can't see any way this is more vulnerable to identity theft then traditional lending. Its certainly more vulnerable to exploiting gullibility in other ways, though the information providing by the various ratings limits the prospect of that.
Initially, I thought "not very", but reading through Prospers agreements (Zopa is based in the UK where my limited knowledge of law is even less applicable), I think its probably competently set up. You aren't legally lending money to the borrowers, you are agreeing to purchase loans Prosper makes, and then having Prosper continue to do the work involved in getting payment, which offloads a lot of the compliance burden, as I understand it, to them. I can't say its for-sure legal, but it passes the sniff test.
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I've actually been using mine as one again for a few months because my wife and I haven't figured out what to do with the living room in our new house and consequently haven't set up the surround sound system with the integrated DVD player.
But we haven't been watching all that many DVDs, either.
Huh. So HDTV prices are going to go up between now and the PS3 launch? Why, all the demand from people buying PS3s?
CRT HDTVs are as low as ~$300 now, just from a brief web search.
The FDA regulates (see their homepage) things marketted to treat and to prevent disease, generally, including both drugs and (though its not part of the name) non-drug biological products and medical devices (they also regulate food -- obviously -- cosmetics, animal feed and veterinary drugs, and radiation-emitting devices.) Nanotech is sometimes currently and quite likely more in the future applied to prevent and treat disease, and to that extent comes under the FDA's scope of responsibility, as either a "drug" or a "medical device", depending on how you look at it. Expanding their brief to explicitly include nanotechnology designed for use on or in the human body would make a lot of sense even if it isn't, per se, a "drug" or "medical device".
Yeah, just the same way that FDA regulation of prescription drugs means no one does pharmaceutical research in the US.
Sunscreen (one of the areas of nanotech application in TFA), for instance, is a nonprescription drug currently regulated by the FDA, used to prevent various kinds of disease.
Both Prosper and Zopa (with USD 50 and GBP 10, respectively, quantum increments) seem to allow this automatically with automated bids ("standing orders" on Prosper, with Zopa it seems from a quick read through of their docs to be the main [only?] way of lending), so they don't seem to need anything new for this. Also, you don't need to spread to 1,000 to get reasonably close to risk free. While people selling investment products with hundreds of different investments in one general area (like, say, many mutual funds) like to pretend that such wide diversification is necessary to manage risk, usually you'll have essentially eliminated specific risk with a couple dozen holdings of one type, and then be exposed almost exclusively to market risk that affects the entire category, and cannot be affected by diversification within the category.
I'm not sure that's true. Sure, that's why unregulated, anonymous person-to-person loans with no intermediary won't work, but that's not what these are. There is an intermediary doing transparent credit scoring using objective criteria, the "legal and accounting systems" (particularly, legal) are still involved, and the "one-strike" policy at Prosper limits the capacity for bad actors to game the system, as there is no forgiveness. The community elements present a potential additional field of useful information and filtering, though they will need some time to mature.
What would be nice is if the system would manage a limited (perhaps configurable) size, persistent hard drive "game cache", and if too many games try to store stuff in it, it wouldunloaded the least-recently-used in favor of the new game (this would be exclusively for material cached from the game disc, not saved-game, etc., content).
...perhaps misleading. Sure, pretty graphics (or higher quality sound, etc.) alone won't sell next-gen games -- heck, they aren't what sells this-gen games or sold last-gen games, either. But better visual, sound, etc. enables better experiences and more intuitive interfaces and better feedback -- IOW, better gameplay.
Sure, people will buy what provides them the best subjective experience (or at least, what they expect to do that, based on previews, reviews, cover art and copy, etc.) But you couldn't provide the kind of interface and gameplay experience you get from (to take a PC rather than console example) the Total War series on a 4.77Mhz 8088 PC with CGA graphics.
Similarly, the power to push more polygons at higher framerates and do better positional sound and physics simulation and more involved AI enabled by better hardware performance (but still also requiring new advances in software) will continue to enable gameplay experiences that you can't get without those bells and whistles. Graphics alone won't sell games, but taking full advantage of the capacity provided by high-end graphics will continue to often be a big factor in building the gameplay experience that does.
..whether end users or IT staff, has been when they are happy that their organization has decided to transition off of it.
Of course, someone, somewhere must be sticking with it and buying into it, since its still selling. But I've never personally met anyone who praised it as software that "just works", in fact, I've heard that more often as praise (by comparison to notes) for whatever was transitioned to from Notes, usually Outlook/Exchange (which I'm not a big fan of either, myself.)
The US DVD distributor for House of Flying Daggers is Sony Pictures Home Entertainment; the US theatrical distributor is Sony Pictures Classics.
Somehow, I'm not sure "bootlegged" is the right word for Sony making a copy of this film.
Why on earth do you think it is "lawless" lending? There is this whole myth that the the internet is some kind of "law free zone". Its not. These companies are real companies, existing in the real world, and bound by the regular laws governing lending in the countries where they operate. This is no more "lawless" than conventional lending engaged in by banks.
Why add the default rate -- is that some kind of conventional "rule of thumb" (intuitively, it seems like it works as a rough approximation so long as both the default rate and the risk-free rate are small)? A risk-neutral lender, by definition, is looking only at expected return, so wants an expected return to match or exceed the risk free return. That seems to mean that the rate should be found by:
(risk-free rate) = (target rate - handling fee) * [1 - (default rate)]
which reduces to:
(target rate) = ((risk-free rate)/[1 - (default rate)])+(handling fee)
or, with your assumptions:
(target rate) = ((1.0475)/[1 - (0.03)])+0.005 or
(target rate) = (approx) 8.49%
FYI: Its worth noting that the rates on Prosper seem to be a lot higher; it might reflect the relative maturity of the sites (or it might reflect something completely different.)
More correctly, the article only refers to one of them using credit reports. But both Prosper and Zopa expressly claim on their own websites to use credit scores (from Experian and Equifax, respectively), though Zopa claims to assign their ratings considering additional factors in some cases.
As of 2003, the median income for a 4-person family in the United States was $65,093 (source. Median household income in the United States was $43,318 (source).
I'm failing to quickly find comparable figures for the UK.
Initially, I thought "not very", but reading through Prospers agreements (Zopa is based in the UK where my limited knowledge of law is even less applicable), I think its probably competently set up. You aren't legally lending money to the borrowers, you are agreeing to purchase loans Prosper makes, and then having Prosper continue to do the work involved in getting payment, which offloads a lot of the compliance burden, as I understand it, to them. I can't say its for-sure legal, but it passes the sniff test.