Javadoc is my favorite thing about Java and the one feature/practice I wish was present in all the other languages I use.
Right on - I think the importance of Javadoc being an official part of the language as opposed to some add on is often underestimated when people wonder why Java caught on so well, and the fact that most IDEs integrate Javadocs so seamlessly is extremely helpful. I've still never seen another language that has such a practical and actually used documentation system.
When your IDE is set to automatically add Javadoc stubs to every method you write, it's almost impossible not to properly document your public interfaces; you feel "dirty" until you fill those guys in, and since it only takes a few seconds to do so, people actually tend to do it. And exporting a full set of HTML documentation based on that is a click away. Compare that to most other languages, where half the time the only way to figure out what the hell is going on in a library is to read tutorials or actually dig into the source code.
So while more restrictive, managed references might be nice, they've nothing at all to do with how the processor works. That means you have to implement additional code overhead to deal with that sort of thing, and that you are losing the ability to optimise in certain ways.
And yet a VM performing all possible optimizations is actually capable of outperforming optimized C code precisely because of the fact that there's no opportunity to mess with pointers directly; pointers end up confounding some of the most important optimizations (ones aimed at reducing cache misses, which are going to become more and more important as processor speeds go up and memory speeds stay the same - most processors currently just sit around waiting for memory access, not actually doing anything, and this will only get worse over time).
It's already very simple to show code where the JVM (yes, in its current form, where it doesn't apply even some of the most basic optimizations) outperforms similar C code; this type of thing is going to become more and more common over time as VMs get more sophisticated. And ironically, the only reason memory layout optimizations are even possible is that VM languages tend to remove the ability to directly refer to memory addresses (after all, how can you move an object around in memory safely if you let the programmer hold variables that directly refer to the location the object is stored in?).
It's like the argument about coding assembly vs. using an optimizing compiler - yes, in the "good old days" it was probably pretty easy to hand code better assembly than your compiler could produce, but over time the number of tricks that the compilers use has grown to the point where now only the hardest-core of assembly hackers could likely outdo even a decent compiler, and most people would just end up writing slower assembly than their compiler would output based on the C that they could write with a tenth the effort. Right now we're nearing the end of the "good old days" of manual memory management; pretty soon, we'll hit the crossover, and from there on out, VMs will actually be the best choice in terms of performance.
Frankly, we'd be there already if Sun wasn't in control of the Hotspot JVM - they are too resistant at the moment to adding further optimizations to the VM, even though they know exactly what they are and how to implement them, for the fear that people will balk at the miniscule increases in compilation time. Or maybe it's really because they are in poor financial shape and don't have enough people on the project to properly do these things, esp. since the bulk of business users are already satisfied with the ~50% to 75% of C speed that they already get. But make no mistake - the theory is solid, and there are already very simple cases where a literal port of C code to Java will make the code 3x faster (try computing over a pair of long float arrays in both, something like a sum of products - on my machine that simple bit of code runs quite a bit faster in Java than in C because Java doesn't have to arrange each array contiguously in memory).
McCain would tax the Poor?? really? If you really believe that then McCain's campaign has failed even worse than I'd imagined. Not once has he said he'd raise taxes on the Poor. Good Grief!
McCain would "tax" the poor in the same sense that Obama would "give" them money; it's not that it's actually happening as such, but that the balance of overall tax burden is being shifted. As long as it's not too severe (and neither of the candidates tax plans is very radical), a net increase or decrease in overall tax level is almost completely irrelevant (modulo second order effects on the economy, which are highly disputed from both sides) because we end up paying for everything one way or another, whether we pay for it now as a tax or later as inflation.
Just as a heads up, those of us who have worked and studied world economy. it takes roughly 8-10 years to see the full effect of federal economic decisions in a capitalist environment.
Not to doubt you or anything, but I was not aware that there was anything approaching a consensus on this sort of thing. Do you have any references or studies you can point to on this?
Put it this way, you won't find anyone in the finance industry saying that they sold all those dodgy mortgages "because the government made us do it". It was greed, pure and simple.
While that is to some extent true, I think it's a bit unfair to present "greed" as such a terrible thing in the financial industry; I mean, everything is done with the intent of maximizing payout, and a lot of it works just fine.
The trick is to regulate things just enough so that "greed" can't turn into "stupid greed." This is a little difficult when the individuals that make the decisions have huge upside potential and pretty much zero downside risk (if their firm goes under, they move on to the next one or just sit on the pile of cash they've accumulated; if they do well, they get multi-million dollar bonuses).
As an example, consider the following hypothetical bet, which you can play as many times as you want: you have a 99.9% chance of winning $100, and a.1% chance of losing $1,000,000. The expected value of such a bet is extremely negative (999 wins * $100 = $99,900, which is a lot less than you'd lose from the one loss every thousand plays). No rational entity should be willing to take this bet.
But now suppose we add a new rule: you can only play once a day, you're playing with your employer's money, and if you're up at the end of a year, you get 10% of your gains as a bonus; if you lose, you're out of a job. Now it makes a lot more sense to take this bet. Say you do it 100 times a year - chances are (around 90%) you'll walk away having won every time over the year, so you've now personally got a 90% chance of making $1000 and a 10% chance of losing your job and killing off your company. Since you can always move on to another company, your upside is looking much better now, and it makes more sense to take these types of risks.
Now, multiply the gains/losses by a few factors of ten, making it so that if you "get away" with your scheme for five or six years (which is reasonably likely) you'll be able to squirrel away enough money to retire. And add to that the fact that everyone else in your industry is taking these risks, too, and things look even better. If you lose, you don't even really have the downside of being seen as that asshole that ruined the company; if shit happens, it's going to be perceived as a systemic problem, not an individual one.
The numbers in reality aren't the same as my example, but the problem is there - every once in a while you see instances of traders doing fantastically for three or four years by playing with derivative bundles that have decent stable payoffs unless "something extreme" happens (selling short straddles out the ass, for instance, gets you a good payoff unless there's a market move, and sometimes people see it as "easy money" when they're in a pinch; there are ways to spread a straddle even wider, too, which further distorts the risk profile in favor of making losses rarer but bigger); there are many ways to achieve this with bundles of options. Of course, the price for those steady payouts is that you've taken on a lot of risk, and eventually it bites you, or at least it bites someone, which is what's important to a company with hundreds of traders. You (the trader) just have to hope that you do well enough to get a few year end bonuses before your epic fail, and unfortunately, a lot of them are able to.
So the "fix" requires a frank realization that the system of trading that most institutions use causes a degree of risk blindness past the one year threshold, and traders are sometimes prone to look at the median return over that period rather than the mean return overall (which is not all that unreasonable or irrational from an individual POV, btw, a fact that most statistical analyses miss altogether!). I don't have a solution to the problem, since even most regulations are easy to work around (regulations are in place at most companies to avoid blatant risk shifting like this, but all it takes to avoid them is a little inventiveness with the derivatives that you play with), but we desperately need one or else we're just going to continue to see these things unfold.
All the things you mention are spot on, but it's also important to realize that the reason banks could ignore all those problems with the loans they were making was that they could "hedge" the risk with CDSes and other derivatives which would theoretically make their positions neutral w.r.t. defaults. Unfortunately the people that really effed up were the ones selling these derivatives, since they did a lot more of that than they could actually afford.
The lesson: don't make million dollar bets with people that can't pay you if you win. You'd think that would be common sense, but these factors are frightfully underrepresented in the risk analyses that are commonly used (to be fair, it's tough to factor them in, since the risk of default, the correlation between defaults, and pretty much all the other relevant factors in determining counterparty risk in these types of trades are completely unknown and unmeasurable quantities that are hard to even guess at).
If African-Americans did not vote on the basis of race, their percentage of support for Obama would have been 66%, at most. Asian and Hispanic support for Obama hovered around 64%. Neither Asians nor Hispanics used skin color in choosing a candidate. If 66% of African-Americans supported Obama, then McCain would have received 49.6% of the popular vote, 48.4%
Your calculation assumes both that black turnout would have been the same if the Democratic candidate was not black, and that white people did not vote against Obama at all because of race. Replace Obama with a white candidate and black turnout would be down, hurting the dems, but white support for that candidate would be up, helping them. If you account for both those extra variables, I think you'd discover that whether McCain "should" or "should not" have won the election is pretty much a toss-up.
In any case, he got creamed, there's no argument about that. And frankly, I think it had more to do with Palin alienating the centrists that might otherwise have liked McCain than the race issue. Obama really should have thanked her and Bush in his acceptance speech, as without the pair he would have had a much tougher fight.
Ummm... Actually if everything was deregulated, monopolies would not form and we would have thriving capitalism.
Yes. Please do explain to us the market forces that lead to a reigning monopoly that has already extended its reach across several industries ceding power to the up and coming soon-to-be competitors that it could otherwise crush without any trouble at all by using the tried and true anti-competitive tactics that we've all become far too familiar with. And explain why it would be in the best interest of the monopoly to do such a thing.
The problem is that deregulation is not enough to prevent monopolies; economies of scale, business arrangements with material suppliers, and other barriers to entry make it so that an unregulated monopoly can very easily hold on to power without having to worry about competition, simply because it can threaten to pull business from anyone that would otherwise help out the competitors. This has happened before (see the Microsoft + OEM crapfest, which was as monopolistic and anti-competitive as things get, and a textbook case of free market failure - literally the only way to prevent such a situation is to make the business tactic illegal), so don't try and pretend that this is merely a theoretical problem.
Yeah, because you pro-regulators only want to do small stuff like:
Way to completely miss the point of my argument, which was that viewing the situation as pro-regulators vs. anti-regulators is entirely unproductive - anyone that really falls purely into either one of those camps is being an ass, and generally when you accuse someone of living at one of those extremes you're just strawmanning them.
If you're really arguing that any regulation whatsoever is bad, then you truly are deluded; the very existence of a free market depends in part on regulations ensuring one. For instance, it's only the regulatory system that makes sure that your broker can't screw with your trades (delaying them by arbitrary amounts, "accidentally" not executing them when it's convenient for him, etc.) for his own profit. Crap like that actually happened on a regular basis before that industry started to get regulated (talk to anyone that was trading personally in the 80s if you doubt me; literally every trader I know from that era has stories about getting cheated out of cash); you'd really like to return to that? In any middleman industry there are dozens of ways that the greedy and dishonest can abuse an unfettered market, and these must be regulated against or the market will be widely viewed as unfair and will become useless due to illiquidity.
FWIW, I don't personally endorse any of the things you suggested (and in fact I disagree strongly with the first two, and I'm not taking a stand on the third because I don't really know what you mean by "pick winners and losers"), and I think our current level of regulation is hovering around a decent level - we're still competitive but we're not seeing massive fraud or abuse in the business world overall. A few tweaks here and there (in both directions) wouldn't hurt, but nothing is fundamentally wrong with the overall level of regulation.
And he properly identified calling such a maneuver a "rebate" as being a deceitful bit of lying spin.
Er...wait. Wouldn't that make Bush just as much of a Marxist, given that I got a "stimulus" check in the mail despite the fact that I didn't pay any income tax this year?
My advice: stop worrying about the philosophical fairness of these things, and worry more about the economic effects. Punitive taxation of the rich is a bad idea not because it's unfair, but because it will lead to economic problems down the road in the form of lower investement and a general brain drain out of the US. Similarly, regressive taxation is a bad idea because it pulls money out of the hands of the people likely to spend it. There is an optimal balance between how much money is available for people to spend (which largely means putting money in the hands of the poor to middle class) and how much money is invested in producing products for the bulk of the people to buy (which means getting money into the hands of the upper class). Redistribution is a perfectly valid means of addressing imbalances here, and without tweaking the system like that we end up with an inefficient economy where either a) people don't have enough money to buy crap, or b) companies don't have enough money invested in them to make crap for people to buy (or alternatively but more or less leading to the same outcome, the incentives to produce are so low due to taxation that nobody bothers). I'm not sure b) has ever been the "bottleneck" in our country (in communist or overly socialist countries it becomes a real issue), which would suggest that we're still at a level where more progressive redistribution would help the economy; I'm no expert, though, so I could be wrong.
Nobody's exactly sure where the "sweet spot" is, which is why we continue to argue; pure free market leans too far towards wealth concentrating in the hands of the rich, and communism is the opposite. But let's not delude ourselves and pretend that the optimal solution economically is necessarily "fair," either in the sense of equality or freedom; everyone's likely to be a little pissed off at the optimal point.
If you regulate our economy as you suggest (and who decides how much regulation is enough?), you will simply make our entire country non-competitive.
"how much regulation is enough" is exactly the question on the table, and just as it's foolish to say "as much as we can muster" it's foolish to say "none." There is some optimal balance, and that's what we're fighting over. Any argument that leads to either extreme conclusion is simply flawed - we've seen ample evidence that zero regulation leads to excessive risk-taking (particularly since the individuals that stand to profit off of high risk deals have very little to lose if the company whose money they're gambling with goes under, as we're seeing right now, with execs at disastrously failing banks returning home to humongous piles of money, earned from the past few years bonuses when these stupid risky bets happened to pay out), and that high regulation stifles markets. Arguing that any regulation at all will make our entire country non-competitive makes no more sense than arguing that any freedom of business will make our entire country corrupt.
The same argument holds for taxes, btw - if your bullet point can be used to argue that you should ALWAYS lower taxes on the rich, or ALWAYS raise them, no matter what the current level, then your point is not worth discussing. Unfortunately most of the arguments presented on any of these issues continue to apply regardless of the level the "knob" under discussion is set to, which means they're all worthless.
I think each party needs to stop pushing as hard in they can in the direction they want and start trying to show us the equilibrium point that they really want to get to; it would seriously increase the quality of political discourse in this country, and would end a lot of the straw-man arguing that takes place.
The latest from the Obama surrogates was $120,000 a year (Gov. Richardson), but I don't think many believe they will stop there.
To my knowledge this claim has been debunked, and the Obama campaign still firmly stands behind the original $250,000 cutoff.
If you don't want to believe them, that's fine, and another issue altogether; but this crap about "surrogates" is ridiculous. The Obama campaign has been clear and stable on their plans from the time they laid them out until now, all that's changing is how other people are talking about them or interpreting them (in particular, the press to some extent misinterpreted the original plan and presented it as a lot more win-win than it was). Regardless, Gov. Richardson has no authority to set Obama's policy, so I don't know why anyone considers that statement in any way indicative of Obama's stance.
But hey, you keep believing the $250,000 fairy tale, just like those who voted for Clinton to get that middle class tax cut -- NOT!
Frankly I don't care about whether anyone got a tax cut under Clinton - whatever he did, his tenure in office resulted in one of the most steady periods of economic growth that this country has ever seen, so his policies were clearly within the bounds of what we require to thrive (not to attribute the success of his economy to his policies or the failure of ours today to Bush's, though - I don't think presidential policy ultimately has a very large effect on the economy, at least in any predictable way, to be perfectly honest - if there was such an effect, we could calculate the "right" answer to these political questions, but every calculation I've seen comes up with a different result, so there's just way too much interpretation involved to be sure that there's any causative effect at all). I think that's the most we can hope for.
I'm not sure if Obama will cross that line or not; I suppose you probably think he will, and I sympathize a bit with that fear. It's not so much that I think his stated policies are over the line (we've had other periods with parameters at those levels and we came through them just fine), but that I worry that a full Democrat Congress will push things even further, to a ridiculous point. I half expect that things may get so nutso that we'll swing the other direction four years from now and play political ping-pong for the rest of my life, each party screwing the country further into the ground with each tap of the paddle.
Where's the freaking reasonable middle when you need it? Sheesh!
Integrated search in iPhone Safari is through Google, and you only have the option to switch to Yahoo; maybe there's some sort of financial incentive for Apple coming along with each of those?
Porting a JVM that only needs to support a few select bits is vastly easier than porting a full-blown rendering engine from c/cpp to obj c.
Hm? C++/Objective C mixing is pretty straightforward, I've never had any problems at all using pre-existing C++ libraries in iPhone projects, there are just little things like making sure you're using the right forms of standard library calls and stuff like that.
Wow. That was almost completely unintelligible, and I can't even exactly figure out who you were trying to offend. But props on at least getting across the point that you were trying to offend someone - that's a good first step!
Amendment 5 - No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Why is it that the unborn are deprived of life without due process?
Because despite the ridiculous partisan arguments to the contrary, there is some point after sperm meets egg when it is not reasonable to call the resulting blob a person, just as there is some point before the baby comes out when it's unreasonable to assert that it's not a person.
If both sides would acknowledge this rather than relying on asinine hyperbole, we could actually come to a compromise as to what constitutes a "person," and we might find that we could actually have a meaningful debate. But I'll say it again: a clump of a few hundred cells is not a person, and a fully developed baby that still happens to be in the womb is, and every time someone asserts that it's a black and white issue they merely display the fact that they are pushing as hard as they can from their partisan standpoint rather than actually trying to find a just solution.
He just doesn't get that some people do things not for the money.
Worse, even if they were just doing it for the money, he totally misunderstands even the most basic of economics.
The gist of his argument is, in essence, "People will be unemployed/underemployed, thus a) the rate that they expect to be compensated will go up, and b) the goods they choose to consume will be the expensive ones, not the free ones." If this guy's theory was correct, then businesses would thrive on recession rather than being pummeled into the ground. If anything, the facts he uses to support his conclusion argue exactly the opposite point, that it's the free/open source model that will come out of this as the biggest winner. Am I the only one that had a WTF moment as I read the article?
Er...actually, I likely am, given that nobody reads the articles anyways...
I suspect you're pretty close on that one - I might go even further and say that conservatives and liberals have directly opposed views on the morality of pursuing large sums of money, conservatives generally feeling that it is healthy and virtuous (since you're "contributing to the economy"), liberals taking the view that it's greedy or exploitative ("profiting off the labors of others").
Because on the Right we don't go much for pedigree.
Seriously. Why can't these pot smoking unemployed hippie liberals seethink, and we just don't care who your father was, where you went to school, or what sort of connections you have?
I mean, what's the last time you can think of when an underqualified person was elevated in the Republican party just because of who he was as opposed to what he could do?
Bill Buckley was an intellectual giant but it is painfully obvious he failed to impart the importance of intellectual rigor to his son.
Hmm, that reminds me of something, or someone...I just...can't put my finger on it. Oh well!
As an aside, I'm getting real tired of all this content-free name calling when it comes to politics on Slashdot ("We think, you guys feel"? Come now, if you really believe that, you're seriously underestimating your opponents, just as they would be doing if they said the same about you). That someone is a liberal doesn't make them stupid, and that someone is conservative doesn't make them cold or unfeeling. It just means that they have a slightly different set of priorities that you happen to disagree with (or re: the economy, a different set of equally [un]justifiable economic beliefs about what is best for our country's financial well-being and growth - yes, that DOES mean that I'm making the claim that lowering taxes on the rich is not necessarily a panacea for a slowing economy, and that raising them does not unconditionally help those that make less have more money in their pockets in the long term - there is a balance necessary in most economic issues, and the problem with our parties is that each side is trying to push the other one into the ground by screaming about how RIGHT they are rather than trying to achieve this balance).
Which is not to say that some individuals don't deserve what they get when they behave like children (Michael Moore, Ann Coulter, et al). But don't make the crucial mistake of equating these loonies with the rest of the mostly reasonable people in the parties they unfortunately pretend to represent. From anywhere remotely near the middle, it makes you all look like ass-wieners.
I would tend to disagree, some of the issues are subjective while a lot of issues have pretty good and very technical mathematical models to back up a lot of conclusions.
As someone that's dealt with a lot of these models (mainly in the area of risk analysis and options valuation), I can tell you that quite frankly, they suck. It's quite easy to come up with a model that can fit most economic processes perfectly, but there are always variables that you can't directly measure that factor crucially into your equations. For instance, even if Black-Scholes was a decent model of options pricing (which it's not, as last week's market showed quite clearly - the classical model would have assumed the probability of seven or eight big down days in a row to be so close to zero that you don't even need to consider it), you still need to essentially guess the volatility of the market to use it. And that's about the simplest model you can imagine when it comes to valuation; most have several, if not dozens, of unobservable "constants" (which, even worse, are usually not constant over time, asset, or price) that must be guessed at.
Which turns applied mathematical finance into something of an art. Buffett didn't make his money because he blindly bought and held, or even because he had a "better" model that he used to value stocks; it was just that he really was that damn good at guessing the variables in the equation that he did use (which is also the reason most people have very little to learn from him or his methods, since almost nobody is at good at that "artistic" bit as he is). Macroeconomics gets even worse than financial valuation, since half the time the quantity you're trying to model and predict isn't even directly observable.
Having said that, I absolutely agree that it's a real mess waiting to happen when the suits in charge have no idea how the hell valuations are arrived at when they watch them pop up on their pre-fab Excel spreadsheets. They rely on the nerds to get everything right, and simply get mad at them when the risky trades they make based on those models go wrong (even if the risk profiles showed that it was likely to happen). And they get even madder if the geeks tell them that the methods they are using have limits (like, as you noted, when you have to try to value something based on dozens of unobservable variables that doesn't even trade on a free and liquid market).
The other option is that the nobel committee has a clear bias towards what Americans view as the left, and people who point that out are doing so in an attempt to find the truth.
The truth is, for better or worse, most people that remain in academia (and generally speaking, most people with high levels of education) tend to lean left. Blame academic bias, truth, or tradition as you choose, it doesn't matter; it's probably a bit of all three, honestly. Regardless, since a) academics usually win Nobels, and b) most academics lean left, the fact that those that win Nobels lean left is not a matter of bias on the part of the judges, it's just what happens when your pick winners from a pre-skewed population.
In other words, move along, folks, there's nothing to see here.
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI
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Loebner Talks AI
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· Score: 2, Informative
Jeff Hawkins thinks that intelligence is not defined by behavior but by the accuracy of the predictions it makes about the world
Careful - Hawkins doesn't just think the predictions about the world are important, he thinks that the real magic comes when the system tries to predict its own behavior. Without that self-referential prediction, the essential non-linearity that intelligence and perception requires is not present.
Whether this is enough is another matter...
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI
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Loebner Talks AI
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· Score: 1
Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is what psychologists define it to be.
Not likely - IMO, intelligence will always be defined as "whatever humans can do that machines can't." When machines can pass the Turing test, people will start to shift and think of emotions as the most important quality of intelligence; if machines appear to have emotions, people will just assert that machines have no intuition; from there, we can start to argue over whether machines have subjective experience of the world, at which point a lot of people will just assert "No!" and we'll argue forever.
Of course, by that time it will be irrelevant, as we'll be the inferior ones and the computers will really be in charge of things. So it will fall to us to convince them that we need to have rights, not the other way around.
I think the real question is this - does any form of short selling benefit the market in any way, and if not, why still allow it? If the intentions of the agent and the availability of insider information cannot be easily determined, why not just shut down the avenue altogether?
Yes, short selling is necessary because otherwise it's very difficult for prices to correct themselves downwards. Imagine you have a market composed of 10,000 people, of which 100 own stock in XYZ Corp. Now, if the price of XYZ is too low, any of the 10,000 players in the stock market can immediately jump on that and correct the price by buying until the price is fair. But if the price is too high, only one of the 100 owners can correct the price. Which means that roughly speaking, underpricings will be corrected 100x as fast as overpricings, so the overwhelming likelihood is that any stock on the market is currently trading at greater than fair value. Which is when people go and find another market to play in, preferably one with rules that allow fair market value to be converged on far more quickly...
Slashdot Mirror
Right on - I think the importance of Javadoc being an official part of the language as opposed to some add on is often underestimated when people wonder why Java caught on so well, and the fact that most IDEs integrate Javadocs so seamlessly is extremely helpful. I've still never seen another language that has such a practical and actually used documentation system.
When your IDE is set to automatically add Javadoc stubs to every method you write, it's almost impossible not to properly document your public interfaces; you feel "dirty" until you fill those guys in, and since it only takes a few seconds to do so, people actually tend to do it. And exporting a full set of HTML documentation based on that is a click away. Compare that to most other languages, where half the time the only way to figure out what the hell is going on in a library is to read tutorials or actually dig into the source code.
And yet a VM performing all possible optimizations is actually capable of outperforming optimized C code precisely because of the fact that there's no opportunity to mess with pointers directly; pointers end up confounding some of the most important optimizations (ones aimed at reducing cache misses, which are going to become more and more important as processor speeds go up and memory speeds stay the same - most processors currently just sit around waiting for memory access, not actually doing anything, and this will only get worse over time).
It's already very simple to show code where the JVM (yes, in its current form, where it doesn't apply even some of the most basic optimizations) outperforms similar C code; this type of thing is going to become more and more common over time as VMs get more sophisticated. And ironically, the only reason memory layout optimizations are even possible is that VM languages tend to remove the ability to directly refer to memory addresses (after all, how can you move an object around in memory safely if you let the programmer hold variables that directly refer to the location the object is stored in?).
It's like the argument about coding assembly vs. using an optimizing compiler - yes, in the "good old days" it was probably pretty easy to hand code better assembly than your compiler could produce, but over time the number of tricks that the compilers use has grown to the point where now only the hardest-core of assembly hackers could likely outdo even a decent compiler, and most people would just end up writing slower assembly than their compiler would output based on the C that they could write with a tenth the effort. Right now we're nearing the end of the "good old days" of manual memory management; pretty soon, we'll hit the crossover, and from there on out, VMs will actually be the best choice in terms of performance.
Frankly, we'd be there already if Sun wasn't in control of the Hotspot JVM - they are too resistant at the moment to adding further optimizations to the VM, even though they know exactly what they are and how to implement them, for the fear that people will balk at the miniscule increases in compilation time. Or maybe it's really because they are in poor financial shape and don't have enough people on the project to properly do these things, esp. since the bulk of business users are already satisfied with the ~50% to 75% of C speed that they already get. But make no mistake - the theory is solid, and there are already very simple cases where a literal port of C code to Java will make the code 3x faster (try computing over a pair of long float arrays in both, something like a sum of products - on my machine that simple bit of code runs quite a bit faster in Java than in C because Java doesn't have to arrange each array contiguously in memory).
McCain would "tax" the poor in the same sense that Obama would "give" them money; it's not that it's actually happening as such, but that the balance of overall tax burden is being shifted. As long as it's not too severe (and neither of the candidates tax plans is very radical), a net increase or decrease in overall tax level is almost completely irrelevant (modulo second order effects on the economy, which are highly disputed from both sides) because we end up paying for everything one way or another, whether we pay for it now as a tax or later as inflation.
Not to doubt you or anything, but I was not aware that there was anything approaching a consensus on this sort of thing. Do you have any references or studies you can point to on this?
While that is to some extent true, I think it's a bit unfair to present "greed" as such a terrible thing in the financial industry; I mean, everything is done with the intent of maximizing payout, and a lot of it works just fine.
.1% chance of losing $1,000,000. The expected value of such a bet is extremely negative (999 wins * $100 = $99,900, which is a lot less than you'd lose from the one loss every thousand plays). No rational entity should be willing to take this bet.
The trick is to regulate things just enough so that "greed" can't turn into "stupid greed." This is a little difficult when the individuals that make the decisions have huge upside potential and pretty much zero downside risk (if their firm goes under, they move on to the next one or just sit on the pile of cash they've accumulated; if they do well, they get multi-million dollar bonuses).
As an example, consider the following hypothetical bet, which you can play as many times as you want: you have a 99.9% chance of winning $100, and a
But now suppose we add a new rule: you can only play once a day, you're playing with your employer's money, and if you're up at the end of a year, you get 10% of your gains as a bonus; if you lose, you're out of a job. Now it makes a lot more sense to take this bet. Say you do it 100 times a year - chances are (around 90%) you'll walk away having won every time over the year, so you've now personally got a 90% chance of making $1000 and a 10% chance of losing your job and killing off your company. Since you can always move on to another company, your upside is looking much better now, and it makes more sense to take these types of risks.
Now, multiply the gains/losses by a few factors of ten, making it so that if you "get away" with your scheme for five or six years (which is reasonably likely) you'll be able to squirrel away enough money to retire. And add to that the fact that everyone else in your industry is taking these risks, too, and things look even better. If you lose, you don't even really have the downside of being seen as that asshole that ruined the company; if shit happens, it's going to be perceived as a systemic problem, not an individual one.
The numbers in reality aren't the same as my example, but the problem is there - every once in a while you see instances of traders doing fantastically for three or four years by playing with derivative bundles that have decent stable payoffs unless "something extreme" happens (selling short straddles out the ass, for instance, gets you a good payoff unless there's a market move, and sometimes people see it as "easy money" when they're in a pinch; there are ways to spread a straddle even wider, too, which further distorts the risk profile in favor of making losses rarer but bigger); there are many ways to achieve this with bundles of options. Of course, the price for those steady payouts is that you've taken on a lot of risk, and eventually it bites you, or at least it bites someone, which is what's important to a company with hundreds of traders. You (the trader) just have to hope that you do well enough to get a few year end bonuses before your epic fail, and unfortunately, a lot of them are able to.
So the "fix" requires a frank realization that the system of trading that most institutions use causes a degree of risk blindness past the one year threshold, and traders are sometimes prone to look at the median return over that period rather than the mean return overall (which is not all that unreasonable or irrational from an individual POV, btw, a fact that most statistical analyses miss altogether!). I don't have a solution to the problem, since even most regulations are easy to work around (regulations are in place at most companies to avoid blatant risk shifting like this, but all it takes to avoid them is a little inventiveness with the derivatives that you play with), but we desperately need one or else we're just going to continue to see these things unfold.
All the things you mention are spot on, but it's also important to realize that the reason banks could ignore all those problems with the loans they were making was that they could "hedge" the risk with CDSes and other derivatives which would theoretically make their positions neutral w.r.t. defaults. Unfortunately the people that really effed up were the ones selling these derivatives, since they did a lot more of that than they could actually afford.
The lesson: don't make million dollar bets with people that can't pay you if you win. You'd think that would be common sense, but these factors are frightfully underrepresented in the risk analyses that are commonly used (to be fair, it's tough to factor them in, since the risk of default, the correlation between defaults, and pretty much all the other relevant factors in determining counterparty risk in these types of trades are completely unknown and unmeasurable quantities that are hard to even guess at).
Your calculation assumes both that black turnout would have been the same if the Democratic candidate was not black, and that white people did not vote against Obama at all because of race. Replace Obama with a white candidate and black turnout would be down, hurting the dems, but white support for that candidate would be up, helping them. If you account for both those extra variables, I think you'd discover that whether McCain "should" or "should not" have won the election is pretty much a toss-up.
In any case, he got creamed, there's no argument about that. And frankly, I think it had more to do with Palin alienating the centrists that might otherwise have liked McCain than the race issue. Obama really should have thanked her and Bush in his acceptance speech, as without the pair he would have had a much tougher fight.
Yes. Please do explain to us the market forces that lead to a reigning monopoly that has already extended its reach across several industries ceding power to the up and coming soon-to-be competitors that it could otherwise crush without any trouble at all by using the tried and true anti-competitive tactics that we've all become far too familiar with. And explain why it would be in the best interest of the monopoly to do such a thing.
The problem is that deregulation is not enough to prevent monopolies; economies of scale, business arrangements with material suppliers, and other barriers to entry make it so that an unregulated monopoly can very easily hold on to power without having to worry about competition, simply because it can threaten to pull business from anyone that would otherwise help out the competitors. This has happened before (see the Microsoft + OEM crapfest, which was as monopolistic and anti-competitive as things get, and a textbook case of free market failure - literally the only way to prevent such a situation is to make the business tactic illegal), so don't try and pretend that this is merely a theoretical problem.
Way to completely miss the point of my argument, which was that viewing the situation as pro-regulators vs. anti-regulators is entirely unproductive - anyone that really falls purely into either one of those camps is being an ass, and generally when you accuse someone of living at one of those extremes you're just strawmanning them.
If you're really arguing that any regulation whatsoever is bad, then you truly are deluded; the very existence of a free market depends in part on regulations ensuring one. For instance, it's only the regulatory system that makes sure that your broker can't screw with your trades (delaying them by arbitrary amounts, "accidentally" not executing them when it's convenient for him, etc.) for his own profit. Crap like that actually happened on a regular basis before that industry started to get regulated (talk to anyone that was trading personally in the 80s if you doubt me; literally every trader I know from that era has stories about getting cheated out of cash); you'd really like to return to that? In any middleman industry there are dozens of ways that the greedy and dishonest can abuse an unfettered market, and these must be regulated against or the market will be widely viewed as unfair and will become useless due to illiquidity.
FWIW, I don't personally endorse any of the things you suggested (and in fact I disagree strongly with the first two, and I'm not taking a stand on the third because I don't really know what you mean by "pick winners and losers"), and I think our current level of regulation is hovering around a decent level - we're still competitive but we're not seeing massive fraud or abuse in the business world overall. A few tweaks here and there (in both directions) wouldn't hurt, but nothing is fundamentally wrong with the overall level of regulation.
Er...wait. Wouldn't that make Bush just as much of a Marxist, given that I got a "stimulus" check in the mail despite the fact that I didn't pay any income tax this year?
My advice: stop worrying about the philosophical fairness of these things, and worry more about the economic effects. Punitive taxation of the rich is a bad idea not because it's unfair, but because it will lead to economic problems down the road in the form of lower investement and a general brain drain out of the US. Similarly, regressive taxation is a bad idea because it pulls money out of the hands of the people likely to spend it. There is an optimal balance between how much money is available for people to spend (which largely means putting money in the hands of the poor to middle class) and how much money is invested in producing products for the bulk of the people to buy (which means getting money into the hands of the upper class). Redistribution is a perfectly valid means of addressing imbalances here, and without tweaking the system like that we end up with an inefficient economy where either a) people don't have enough money to buy crap, or b) companies don't have enough money invested in them to make crap for people to buy (or alternatively but more or less leading to the same outcome, the incentives to produce are so low due to taxation that nobody bothers). I'm not sure b) has ever been the "bottleneck" in our country (in communist or overly socialist countries it becomes a real issue), which would suggest that we're still at a level where more progressive redistribution would help the economy; I'm no expert, though, so I could be wrong.
Nobody's exactly sure where the "sweet spot" is, which is why we continue to argue; pure free market leans too far towards wealth concentrating in the hands of the rich, and communism is the opposite. But let's not delude ourselves and pretend that the optimal solution economically is necessarily "fair," either in the sense of equality or freedom; everyone's likely to be a little pissed off at the optimal point.
"how much regulation is enough" is exactly the question on the table, and just as it's foolish to say "as much as we can muster" it's foolish to say "none." There is some optimal balance, and that's what we're fighting over. Any argument that leads to either extreme conclusion is simply flawed - we've seen ample evidence that zero regulation leads to excessive risk-taking (particularly since the individuals that stand to profit off of high risk deals have very little to lose if the company whose money they're gambling with goes under, as we're seeing right now, with execs at disastrously failing banks returning home to humongous piles of money, earned from the past few years bonuses when these stupid risky bets happened to pay out), and that high regulation stifles markets. Arguing that any regulation at all will make our entire country non-competitive makes no more sense than arguing that any freedom of business will make our entire country corrupt.
The same argument holds for taxes, btw - if your bullet point can be used to argue that you should ALWAYS lower taxes on the rich, or ALWAYS raise them, no matter what the current level, then your point is not worth discussing. Unfortunately most of the arguments presented on any of these issues continue to apply regardless of the level the "knob" under discussion is set to, which means they're all worthless.
I think each party needs to stop pushing as hard in they can in the direction they want and start trying to show us the equilibrium point that they really want to get to; it would seriously increase the quality of political discourse in this country, and would end a lot of the straw-man arguing that takes place.
To my knowledge this claim has been debunked, and the Obama campaign still firmly stands behind the original $250,000 cutoff.
If you don't want to believe them, that's fine, and another issue altogether; but this crap about "surrogates" is ridiculous. The Obama campaign has been clear and stable on their plans from the time they laid them out until now, all that's changing is how other people are talking about them or interpreting them (in particular, the press to some extent misinterpreted the original plan and presented it as a lot more win-win than it was). Regardless, Gov. Richardson has no authority to set Obama's policy, so I don't know why anyone considers that statement in any way indicative of Obama's stance.
Frankly I don't care about whether anyone got a tax cut under Clinton - whatever he did, his tenure in office resulted in one of the most steady periods of economic growth that this country has ever seen, so his policies were clearly within the bounds of what we require to thrive (not to attribute the success of his economy to his policies or the failure of ours today to Bush's, though - I don't think presidential policy ultimately has a very large effect on the economy, at least in any predictable way, to be perfectly honest - if there was such an effect, we could calculate the "right" answer to these political questions, but every calculation I've seen comes up with a different result, so there's just way too much interpretation involved to be sure that there's any causative effect at all). I think that's the most we can hope for.
I'm not sure if Obama will cross that line or not; I suppose you probably think he will, and I sympathize a bit with that fear. It's not so much that I think his stated policies are over the line (we've had other periods with parameters at those levels and we came through them just fine), but that I worry that a full Democrat Congress will push things even further, to a ridiculous point. I half expect that things may get so nutso that we'll swing the other direction four years from now and play political ping-pong for the rest of my life, each party screwing the country further into the ground with each tap of the paddle.
Where's the freaking reasonable middle when you need it? Sheesh!
Integrated search in iPhone Safari is through Google, and you only have the option to switch to Yahoo; maybe there's some sort of financial incentive for Apple coming along with each of those?
Hm? C++/Objective C mixing is pretty straightforward, I've never had any problems at all using pre-existing C++ libraries in iPhone projects, there are just little things like making sure you're using the right forms of standard library calls and stuff like that.
Of course this came from livejournal, I don't know why I didn't assume that right off the bat: source
Wow. That was almost completely unintelligible, and I can't even exactly figure out who you were trying to offend. But props on at least getting across the point that you were trying to offend someone - that's a good first step!
Because despite the ridiculous partisan arguments to the contrary, there is some point after sperm meets egg when it is not reasonable to call the resulting blob a person, just as there is some point before the baby comes out when it's unreasonable to assert that it's not a person.
If both sides would acknowledge this rather than relying on asinine hyperbole, we could actually come to a compromise as to what constitutes a "person," and we might find that we could actually have a meaningful debate. But I'll say it again: a clump of a few hundred cells is not a person, and a fully developed baby that still happens to be in the womb is, and every time someone asserts that it's a black and white issue they merely display the fact that they are pushing as hard as they can from their partisan standpoint rather than actually trying to find a just solution.
Worse, even if they were just doing it for the money, he totally misunderstands even the most basic of economics.
The gist of his argument is, in essence, "People will be unemployed/underemployed, thus a) the rate that they expect to be compensated will go up, and b) the goods they choose to consume will be the expensive ones, not the free ones." If this guy's theory was correct, then businesses would thrive on recession rather than being pummeled into the ground. If anything, the facts he uses to support his conclusion argue exactly the opposite point, that it's the free/open source model that will come out of this as the biggest winner. Am I the only one that had a WTF moment as I read the article?
Er...actually, I likely am, given that nobody reads the articles anyways...
I suspect you're pretty close on that one - I might go even further and say that conservatives and liberals have directly opposed views on the morality of pursuing large sums of money, conservatives generally feeling that it is healthy and virtuous (since you're "contributing to the economy"), liberals taking the view that it's greedy or exploitative ("profiting off the labors of others").
Seriously. Why can't these pot smoking unemployed hippie liberals seethink, and we just don't care who your father was, where you went to school, or what sort of connections you have?
I mean, what's the last time you can think of when an underqualified person was elevated in the Republican party just because of who he was as opposed to what he could do?
Hmm, that reminds me of something, or someone...I just...can't put my finger on it. Oh well!
As an aside, I'm getting real tired of all this content-free name calling when it comes to politics on Slashdot ("We think, you guys feel"? Come now, if you really believe that, you're seriously underestimating your opponents, just as they would be doing if they said the same about you). That someone is a liberal doesn't make them stupid, and that someone is conservative doesn't make them cold or unfeeling. It just means that they have a slightly different set of priorities that you happen to disagree with (or re: the economy, a different set of equally [un]justifiable economic beliefs about what is best for our country's financial well-being and growth - yes, that DOES mean that I'm making the claim that lowering taxes on the rich is not necessarily a panacea for a slowing economy, and that raising them does not unconditionally help those that make less have more money in their pockets in the long term - there is a balance necessary in most economic issues, and the problem with our parties is that each side is trying to push the other one into the ground by screaming about how RIGHT they are rather than trying to achieve this balance).
Which is not to say that some individuals don't deserve what they get when they behave like children (Michael Moore, Ann Coulter, et al). But don't make the crucial mistake of equating these loonies with the rest of the mostly reasonable people in the parties they unfortunately pretend to represent. From anywhere remotely near the middle, it makes you all look like ass-wieners.
As someone that's dealt with a lot of these models (mainly in the area of risk analysis and options valuation), I can tell you that quite frankly, they suck. It's quite easy to come up with a model that can fit most economic processes perfectly, but there are always variables that you can't directly measure that factor crucially into your equations. For instance, even if Black-Scholes was a decent model of options pricing (which it's not, as last week's market showed quite clearly - the classical model would have assumed the probability of seven or eight big down days in a row to be so close to zero that you don't even need to consider it), you still need to essentially guess the volatility of the market to use it. And that's about the simplest model you can imagine when it comes to valuation; most have several, if not dozens, of unobservable "constants" (which, even worse, are usually not constant over time, asset, or price) that must be guessed at.
Which turns applied mathematical finance into something of an art. Buffett didn't make his money because he blindly bought and held, or even because he had a "better" model that he used to value stocks; it was just that he really was that damn good at guessing the variables in the equation that he did use (which is also the reason most people have very little to learn from him or his methods, since almost nobody is at good at that "artistic" bit as he is). Macroeconomics gets even worse than financial valuation, since half the time the quantity you're trying to model and predict isn't even directly observable.
Having said that, I absolutely agree that it's a real mess waiting to happen when the suits in charge have no idea how the hell valuations are arrived at when they watch them pop up on their pre-fab Excel spreadsheets. They rely on the nerds to get everything right, and simply get mad at them when the risky trades they make based on those models go wrong (even if the risk profiles showed that it was likely to happen). And they get even madder if the geeks tell them that the methods they are using have limits (like, as you noted, when you have to try to value something based on dozens of unobservable variables that doesn't even trade on a free and liquid market).
The truth is, for better or worse, most people that remain in academia (and generally speaking, most people with high levels of education) tend to lean left. Blame academic bias, truth, or tradition as you choose, it doesn't matter; it's probably a bit of all three, honestly. Regardless, since a) academics usually win Nobels, and b) most academics lean left, the fact that those that win Nobels lean left is not a matter of bias on the part of the judges, it's just what happens when your pick winners from a pre-skewed population.
In other words, move along, folks, there's nothing to see here.
Careful - Hawkins doesn't just think the predictions about the world are important, he thinks that the real magic comes when the system tries to predict its own behavior. Without that self-referential prediction, the essential non-linearity that intelligence and perception requires is not present.
Whether this is enough is another matter...
Not likely - IMO, intelligence will always be defined as "whatever humans can do that machines can't." When machines can pass the Turing test, people will start to shift and think of emotions as the most important quality of intelligence; if machines appear to have emotions, people will just assert that machines have no intuition; from there, we can start to argue over whether machines have subjective experience of the world, at which point a lot of people will just assert "No!" and we'll argue forever.
Of course, by that time it will be irrelevant, as we'll be the inferior ones and the computers will really be in charge of things. So it will fall to us to convince them that we need to have rights, not the other way around.
Yes, short selling is necessary because otherwise it's very difficult for prices to correct themselves downwards. Imagine you have a market composed of 10,000 people, of which 100 own stock in XYZ Corp. Now, if the price of XYZ is too low, any of the 10,000 players in the stock market can immediately jump on that and correct the price by buying until the price is fair. But if the price is too high, only one of the 100 owners can correct the price. Which means that roughly speaking, underpricings will be corrected 100x as fast as overpricings, so the overwhelming likelihood is that any stock on the market is currently trading at greater than fair value. Which is when people go and find another market to play in, preferably one with rules that allow fair market value to be converged on far more quickly...