I thought the credit default swaps were bets against the performance of the underlying instrument. If that's the case, then how would the fact that 3 percent of the mortgages slowed down have brought down the "house of cards"?
3 percent can be deadly when combined with massive leverage.
And even if swaps are bets against the performance of the underlying, they still end up worthless if the counterparty has taken on so much leveraged risk in these things that a 3% decline in the underlying leaves them unable to pay you what you are due from your swaps.
Think of it like insurance: usually an insurance company has to show that it can reasonably meet its obligations if something bad happens, so when you buy insurance, you have a reasonable certainty that if the insured event hits you, you're going to get your money. Nobody would buy insurance without that expectation - a million dollar life insurance policy is worthless if the company you've bought it from doesn't have a million dollars. Or at least nobody should buy insurance without some sort of guarantee of payment; this is why the insurance industry is highly regulated, with all sorts of minimum holding requirements and fun stuff like that.
Well, the companies that were peddling these swaps were selling a lot more bad-credit insurance than they could afford to pay, and for some inexplicable reason this was allowed. But the people buying this insurance, when they did their risk assessment, assumed that they would be paid by these insurance policies if the defaults started to roll in. They thought they had hedged against the risk of default. But they hadn't, because they didn't factor in the right amount of counterparty risk, and these counterparties were so leveraged due to the fact that things had been going well (when any quantity rises for long enough, people will allow you to borrow way too much money based on the future gains of that quantity, which is why we have bubbles) that a disaster was just waiting to happen. Then people started to default on their loans. And then there was blood in the streets, all because someone had the brilliant idea to let any old asshole get into the insurance business (in a roundabout way, of course - they didn't actually call it insurance) without having enough money to be in that business.
At least that's my take on this thing. It's got nothing to do with shorting, naked or otherwise, and everything to do with the creation of an entire industry based on a complicated and unregulated derivative that is almost impossible to properly value and allows insane amounts of leverage.
You can't borrow a car and sell it, why should you be able to sell borrowed stocks?
"Mom, I found this guy who will pay an outrageous price for a 2003 Saab 9-5 in good condition, like the one in the driveway that you're not using since you got your BMW. I can get another one just like it at a lower price, but I can't get it until next Wednesday. If I give you a hundred bucks, can I sell yours to this guy and replace it next Wednesday?"
Which illustrates the point that shorting of borrowed shares can't be eliminated unless you make transferring shares between people illegal, because for a sufficiently liquid asset you're always going to be able to find someone willing to lend you what they've got for the right price, and this lending does not have to happen through any official channel, they just need to be able to sign the stuff over to you and negotiate a repayment plan on the side. The only reason this doesn't happen in practice with cars is that a) finding "the same" car to replace the borrowed one is not necessarily easy, whereas with a stock most shares are equivalent, and b) it's quite a bit more difficult to transfer ownership and possession of a car than a share of stock.
Well, sort of. Now (as in, since a few weeks ago) it is altogether banned, but historically it has been allowed in limited form. Particularly market makers have usually been allowed to naked short if they are unable to borrow shares, because they are responsible for maintaining liquidity and they were assumed to be legitimate enough to settle up when shares were finally available. And price manipulation by a market maker should normally be very easy to spot, so it was not considered a huge risk to allow it (there were a couple cases where market makers got busted for abusive naked shorting, though).
It probably makes sense to ban it altogether, though, as the marginal increase in efficiency is probably not worth the general sense that there's a loophole for exploitation in the market, whether or not people are actually abusing it.
A company's assets are usually fairly heavily determined by equity, whether owned by the shareholders or the direct company owners. So while margin requirements are likely far more complicated for companies than individuals, the gist is the same: if market value of your holdings (including your substantial holdings in yourself) dip below a certain point, you've either got to come up with more money, or start selling the stuff you have. So it is very possible that even a short term decline in stock price could force an end to operations, especially if these operations rely on highly leveraged transactions.
I have no problem with people who actually own the stock saying "In two months I will sell this stock for X dollars, if you wish to purchase it then you can buy this 'short' and we'll be legally bound to do that trade at that time."
A person that owns the stock being allowed to sell it immediately implies that a person that doesn't own the stock may borrow stock and short it, unless you either make illegal 1) borrowing stock, or 2) selling stock. Forget the market, these agreements could happen over the counter, and would be perfectly fair and legal, the only difference with our system is that for the sake of efficiency our brokers handle this whole borrowing thing for us instead of us having to negotiate the lending ourselves. Short of some massive big brother-ing, there's no reasonable way to completely eliminate the concept of short selling, and if brokers were permanently banned from doing it for us, someone else would show up to facilitate the process and work through the loopholes in any laws that were set up.
Shorting of all kinds should be banned. It is an abuse of the property rights that form the foundation of capitalism.
Without the ability to take on short positions, then we cannot have an efficient market, which depends on the ability of all participants to immediately take advantage of any mis-pricing in a security, whether it is too high or too low. Without being able to short something, then the only people that could take advantage of an over-pricing would be people that already own a stock, and they are far fewer in number than the market as a whole, so the whole dynamic would change. Under-pricings would disappear immediately, but even quite obvious over-pricings would linger on for far longer simply because very few people could capitalize on them and bring them back into line. You'd be open to all sorts of abuse and price manipulation on the long side of things because longs couldn't get "picked off" by shorts if they were trying to manipulate prices.
FWIW, a market can likely never be perfectly efficient without naked shorting, but in practice the more liquid markets are very close to efficient because it's always possible to find a lender of the share, so eliminating naked shorts still leaves us pretty close to efficient.
Where these rules are broken, where markets are inefficient or failing, where the right to own something is abused - as in the instance of shorting, where individuals are deliberately investing in failure - the system does not generate net benefit for all.
It all depends if you believe that there should be a fair market that quickly finds fair value. Some people think that in itself is a benefit for all of us; without it, I suspect we'd have far less investment overall, which would likely be devastating to the economy. Think about it - if there was a good likelihood that a significant over-pricing was present in every stock on the market because shorting was disallowed, would you be as likely to buy stock at all? I wouldn't, since I'd know that it's extremely likely I'd be overpaying for the thing.
Yes, investing in failure seems to be dirty, and it is indeed cynical, but since the stock market is all about betting (bah to you "investors" that think otherwise - you may be making a long term bet with a different risk profile, but you're still gambling with your money), why should we not be allowed to take the other side of that bet at market value if we wish?
If I read this right, does that mean developers still can't publicly bitch about their apps being rejected from the store?
While the wording is a bit ambiguous, and I don't know what it means for bitching about rejections, I have a pretty good feeling that what they're talking about when they say "software" is really Apple software, i.e. the stuff that makes up the iPhone SDK, not the applications that you are developing. In other words, once this new agreement is in effect, we should be able to freely discuss the iPhone SDK in its current release form; we will not, however, be able to discuss the unreleased betas of the next iteration (which Apple usually gives registered devs access to). I think this is much better, because any person that wanted to can see Apple's tutorials and download the SDK anyways, so it was a little ridiculous to have it under NDA. Now if you're just not allowed to talk about the unreleased features, that seems a lot more reasonable.
...which should now make it totally legit to open source software that targets the iPhone - I know people have already done this (Oolong Engine comes to mind), but technically people that did this were in a gray area, where they were probably violating the NDA, but betting on the fact that Apple wouldn't come after them as long as they weren't doing anything too sneaky. It's good to have it cleared up, finally.
Back to your original point, though, IIRC the rejection letters that many received actually came with their own NDAs attached, so I'm not sure that this new agreement will have any bearing whatsoever on that.
While I realize that your reply is much more based on bashing Behe than praising me (as it should be), it's still the nicest thing anyone has said to me all day. Thanks!
No problem - and don't underestimate how much of the praise is directed at you, your explanation was extremely clear, concise, and correct, I was very happy to see someone get this right. The Behe-bashing was mainly for good measure.:)
For those of you that missed it and still might think that Behe has some semblance of a reasonable argument, let me tell you what just happened in Free The Coward's post: We saw that a ten line post on Slashdot, likely written off the cuff without any planning, is all it takes to rigorously and quite comprehensibly debunk the evolutionary fallacy that Behe's entire argument against evolution hinges on.
I'll at least give Behe credit for filling his book with a lot of irrelevant detail that makes it seem like he's proving something.
The main thing that bothers me is the cultural framework this creates of closing science into dogma. Since we currently can do genetic engineering, and there's some possibility that intelligent life will be discovered as having existed in the past nearby, maybe some civilization nearby visited Earth and, since we can already do it, went ahead and... oops. Can't propose that, and since I can't propose it, can't ever investigate it. Academic crimestop.
No, no, no, no. NO! PLEASE propose it - at least propose something! The problem with ID is not that it claims evolution is wrong, it's that it fails to offer a solid alternative. "Something did it, we're not exactly sure what, but it's something!" is not even close to an alternative. It's a bunch of unhelpful words on a page.
Of course, the alternative could only be one of two things: 1) God (of some sort), or 2) aliens. And God knows that the people running the ID campaign don't want people thinking they're talking about aliens! This is why people assume ID is merely Creationism-lite: the people talking about it refuse to bring it into the non-supernatural realm by saying straight up that they are talking about aliens instead of gods. Which must be the case if ID is to be considered science, otherwise this is not a scientific debate, it is religion.
But you don't seriously think the people "researching" this stuff are thinking about aliens, do you? Because unless you do, you're deluding yourself when you say that the creationism tie-in is a strawman.
Seriously, though, I'd be very happy if someone actually proposed a theory to look into rather than merely talking about how the other theory is wrong. For this to work, you'd actually need some evidence for the particular theory, but hey - if you believe in it so strongly, you've certainly got some evidence for that belief. Otherwise you'd have little reason to suspect that the prevailing view, which does have lots of evidence, is wrong (as difficult as that evidence may be to wade through).
Libel and slander are illegal, and for good reason. What this kid did was libel, and should be handled through the court system.
I think that's questionable. By my reading, it sounds like the page in question was an obvious joke. Read the quote FTFA:
The profile did not use McGonigle's name, but identified the person pictured as a "principal," and described him as a 40-year-old married, bisexual man whose interests included "being a tight ass," "fucking in my office" and "hitting on students and their parents," according to Munley's opinion.
That doesn't sound like an accusation to me, it sounds like a stupid joke. And based on a quick googling, it seems that libel cases have been dismissed "because the item could not be reasonably understood as stating actual facts" - I think an adolescent Myspace page would probably qualify as something nobody in their right mind would believe, especially if it was claiming that the principal's hobbies included "being a tight ass."
Then again, IANAL, so I don't know. But if I had to guess, I'd guess that most judges would not want to waste their time on a case like this if it was brought as a libel suit.
And don't give me this "harmless prank" nonsense - accusing a professional of criminal activity online, even if "joking" about it - there's nothing funny about it whatsoever.
Right, because nobody cracks a smile when someone makes a joke about Dick Cheney eating babies for breakfast.
All across this thread people keep mixing up "accusation" with "stupid obvious parody," which is exactly what the Myspace page appears to have been (though I could not find the page to verify this for myself). If no person in their right mind could view the content and think it was anything but a joke (childish as it may be), then we're not talking about an accusation. We're talking about a harmless prank, and the only real damage it did was to the principal's ego - it's not like parents saw that page and started in with the "ZOMG! He touches children's bottoms and has sex with parents on his desk? REALLY? Quick, let's run this guy out of town before he does any more damage!"
If this was brought forth as a libel suit, I'm certain it would be resolved extremely quickly, as there is no conceivable way for a person to take that page as anything but a joke - for crying out loud, even from the couple of quotes in the article it's clear the page was written by an immature kid!
I disagree - Google should feel free to take a healthy bite out of a sale if they provide a good marketplace and a healthy pool of customers that might buy the app. That's why the iPhone is such a hot independent developer platform right now, there are people actually buying stuff, and you can actually sell stuff just by signing up and submitting it. If Google gets something like that going for Android, it will be an extremely useful service to developers, so I think there is enough value added that they deserve a slice of the pie.
BTW, I think it's worth mentioning that the main reason people are willing to buy iPhone stuff is the seamless integration of the purchasing system - you're always logged in, you just need to punch in your password to purchase. No fiddling about for a credit card number, or trying to remember your paypal info, or any garbage like that; just a few clicks and you're done. Google should really shoot for something similar if they do a store.
I'd like people who view the human thought process as an algorithm to put it in software.
Don't be ridiculous - I'd assume that every person here views Ubuntu as an algorithm, but not one of them could put it into code from scratch. And Ubuntu is a hell of a lot less complex than the human brain.
Thus far, we know of no information processing system that does not function algorithmically. In fact, I'll go much further: we don't have any idea what it would even mean to process information non-algorithmically. There's no alternative to an algorithm, except magic. So I'd say that anyone that doubts that the human thought process is an algorithm has the burden of proof squarely on their shoulders, not the other way around.
For the moment, yes, at least mostly - I suspect most employers do discriminate quite heavily against online degrees. But in the future, this just won't be possible, especially as real world physical schools start to grant full, unasterisked degrees to students that have done at least a portion of their coursework online and remotely. This is inevitable: it's pretty much the only way to further grow a business that was up until now not scalable due to physical resources. Even the higher level colleges would be foolish not to offer these sorts of programs - exclusivity is great and all, but quite frankly, most top tier schools could admit up to four or five times as many students as they currently do without degrading the quality of the class in any significant manner, and as long as most schools start to offer online courses, the relative rankings will not be much affected by the decision to do so. So I think the concern is not so much that the University of Phoenix might have less rigorous standards than real life schools, but that eventually employers are going to see Yale, Harvard, and Princeton degrees coming across their desks with no way of determining whether the coursework was completed on site or over the Internet.
Of course, I'm not saying that I think there should be a law (I don't!), I'm just noting that eventually online schooling will be a lot more ubiquitous, and harder for an employer to check, so there is a real quality control concern that employers will have. These proposed measures will do little to stop a resourceful cheater, just like real life proctors do little to stop cheaters in person. Personally I would think the responsibility for evaluating this type of thing and putting restrictions on it should rightly be in the hands of the accreditation boards (some of which, last time I checked, still have physical attendance requirements in place, though I think that's getting relaxed more and more lately), not the government, but you know how those effing politicians are...
Having undergone a brief and unpleasant stint attempting to educate American students, IMO you're dead on - the problem with the American educational system is primarily the lousy uninterested Americans that pass through it, more interested in sports, drugs, sex, and popularity (which is largely a function of the first three items) than in actually learning anything. No amount of money will make these degenerates any more interested in learning, and that's the fundamental problem. To put it plainly, nothing about our educational system will improve unless our culture shifts so that the nerd is socially more respected than the jock.
The Feynman Lectures aren't nearly as relevant as one might think, for an astrophysicist. They'd be brilliant if he wanted to do a general physics degree, but there are far better specialist texts which don't require all the pain of quantum.
For a math major, QM should be a cakewalk. However, nobody should be learning QM from Feynman's lectures, there are far better texts to use for that (Shankar comes to mind, Griffiths if Shankar is too hard, Bohm if you want to be totally weird and pervert your brain).
As a physicist I should tell you that the Feyman Lectures on Physics are not really en vogue anymore. The style is often very nice and entertaining and they contain a few brilliant chapters. But they severely lack mathematics: hence inappropriate for a mathematician. They also lack a structure that allows you open the book at a random topic and teach yourself about just that.
Meh - while I'd agree that you can't call yourself a serious physicist just based on having read the Feynman lectures, I can't think of a single physicist that hasn't read them (or at least browsed them from time to time), and they are basic enough that it just takes a couple days of dipping in and out of to get through them. The Feynman Lectures for me fall into the category of light pleasure reading - there's just enough detail to keep you thinking, but overall, you read them for fun, not to grind up your skillset.
If for no other reason, they are worth reading so that you have some idea how a good teacher explains things to people not already familiar with the subject. Most physics PhDs at some point or another will have to teach introductory physics classes, and I think they could do a lot worse than to base some of their lectures on Feynman's style, if not his actual content.
Oh, I forgot - I wanted to comment on the rest of those books and add a couple.
Re: Griffiths books - they are both really good as intros to these topics (both are amongst my favorite "pleasure" reading physics books), but in the field they are often considered too elementary to be "serious," for better or worse. It's not that they are wrong, just that they are a little too user-friendly, which to me is a good thing.
If you can manage to wade through the extreme density that is that Shankar book, that should rectify things for QM - I have to say, though, I did not particularly enjoy that book, which surprised me since I adored his "Basic Training in Mathematics" book (likely too basic for a math major, I'd guess) and found him to be a fascinating lecturer (I never took one of his classes, but I occasionally slipped in and watched while between other classes). I think it's just too difficult to be so brutally thorough and remain interesting throughout an entire tome like that.
Jackson's E+M book is really the gold standard for classical E+M, though I'd really recommend hitting the literature if you're into stuff like self-action and all that.
Actually, I just noticed that the Griffith's recommendation was for his particles book, not QM, so scratch my QM comments - though if you find Shankar's book too weighty, pick up Griffith's QM book as a start, like most of his books it's very digestible (should take just a couple days to get through). If you find Griffith's particles book too light, which you hopefully will after a couple reads, you'll want some real field theory. The "standard" here is the Peskin/Schroeder book. That can be a little tough if you don't already know something about it; as a slightly more basic step in that direction, check out Zee's Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, which I was very pleasantly surprised with.
You'd also be remiss not to pick up something that Feynman has written on field theory, as I don't know that anyone else has understood it in as straightforward a manner as he has - there's always his various QED papers, which you MUST read all of, but as an astrophysicist, your thoughts will likely turn to gravity, in which case the often overlooked Feynman Lectures on Gravitation are definitely worth your time. Take the later chapters with a grain of salt, as some of the claims about stars are wrong; that said, his approach is quite interesting, and his approach to the Einstein equations is freaking amazing (he starts with a "bare" spin-2 theory, figures out how it's "wrong," and "fixes it up" until it "works," and lo and behold, Einstein's equations pop out of nowhere; those quotation marks hide all of the hard work required to get there, of course!).
Er, and also, I kind of hate to dump another 1000+ page monster of a book on your list, but as an astrophysicist you probably ought to read Misner/Thorne/Wheeler's Gravitation. It's great, though I can't promise it's just a few days work. The Wheeler stuff at the end is too speculative and flowery for my tastes, but the rest is pretty useful, and it's definitely worth keeping in your bookcase to intimidate anyone that might enter!
Robert Wald also has a great General Relativity book that might be less threatening; IMO, you should definitely own Wald and MTW. I'd suggest you avoid anything written by either Einstein or Dirac on the subject like the f***ing plague.
While I mostly agree with you, I'd still suggest picking up "The Road To Reality," as it's a truly fun read, if for no other reason than that Penrose is just a little bit nuts - he's got to be the first person ever to manage to get a "layman's" (i.e. it shows up at Barnes and Noble) book to include detailed calculations involving tensor calculus... Beyond that, though, he really looks at everything in a different light, and in a very non-standard order, so I think it's 100% worthwhile. The 1000 page thing is annoying (too big to fit alongside your laptop in your bag, to be sure), but as a physics PhD all you're going to be doing is reading and calculating all day anyways, so that shouldn't be a very large deterrent.
They would have spent all that money for nothing, and I think there's a pretty damn good chance that an analysis of the logs might come out that way, given that YouTube's primary use is not as a source of pirated material.
Damn straight - does anyone actually go first to Youtube to find copyrighted stuff? I can't think of many TV shows or movies that I've actually seen there, apart from stuff that's been off the air for so long that I don't think anyone cares about it anymore...
The point is, of course, that the places that people actually do go to for this stuff are for the most part not based in the US (Tudou and Youku being the biggest offenders) and don't have nearly as much money as Google, so it's not possible/profitable to go after them. Which puts US-based media companies shit out of luck, stuck trying to swing the hammer of justice at someone that hasn't actually done very much to hurt them.
While there's definitely the possibility I'm wrong, I suspect that 1) a proper analysis of the data will show that Youtube has played an insignificant role in the declining profits of Big Media, and 2) Viacom knows this very well and just wants this data for mining purposes - if I could come up with some half baked excuse to get my hands on that dataset, you can be damn sure I'd go for it, and I'm not even in the media business!
The question is, would the loss of forced contributions due to GPL enforcement be more than counterbalanced by the free distribution of all media?
Personally I think the tradeoff would be worthwhile - I suspect that the majority of useful open source contributions are driven more by a commitment (either at the personal or corporate level) to the principle of open source than by the fact that the licensing terms force contributions. I don't think we'd see the freely available pool of source code dry up in any significant way, though we would have to swallow the fact that a lot of companies might be making money distributing binaries created with formerly open source components. Of course, it would become very difficult to make money selling software without copyright protections, so I suspect this would be less of an issue.
I wouldn't hold your breath for any of this, though...
Which is better? In my opinion a moral society in which people can do what they want with their money is desirable to a morally corrupt society where everything goes as long as you're paying extortion money to the liberal government. But that's just my opinion.
Meh. The insinuation that if liberals had their way everyone would be morally lacking, and that the "conservatives" (if you can even call them that anymore, which IMHO is truly a perversion of the word's meaning) would make things more morally righteous, is all dependent on the fact that you view the concept of morality through the glasses of a pretty extremist Christian. Some of the most detestable people that I know are cut from the fire and brimstone neocon mold, and I really don't think giving these loons any more legislative power would help make any of us more moral.
A lot of the rest of us find the idea of the death penalty to be extremely immoral, especially when its application is racially biased. We also see it as immoral to start wars, give guns of any sort to anyone that wants them, ignore the economic plight of our neighbors, and keep consenting adults from being happy in any way they choose as long as it doesn't directly affect our lives (nope, being disgusted by it doesn't count).
FWIW, I'm libertarian in most ways, though I can't believe in a flat tax because I don't believe that such a thing is unsustainable in a democracy, regardless of its dubious "fairness" (which IMO has been vastly overstated by its proponents, since at the core it's main effect is to shift more financial responsibility from the rich to the poor). Assuming one person == one vote, the tax rate must decrease for the brackets with the highest numbers of citizens at the expense of the rich, where there is less pressure due to the lower number of people; the rate doesn't increase for the poor despite their fewer numbers because the middle class generally speaking aren't assholes, and realize that a 10% tax bump for someone at the low end of the pay scale will dramatically affect their quality of life, whereas it will not for someone at the high end. Any non-progressive tax scheme is inherently undemocratic given the current income distribution, as in any democracy each person should have the "power" to influence an equal amount of tax liability allocation, regardless of their individual income.
But that's not a reasonable argument. Sickle cell anemia is an extreme edge case, and most of the genetic variants we're talking about are unambiguously harmful, at least based on our current knowledge. And if that knowledge changes we'll adjust, but the way I see it is that at the moment we have at least a bit of an edge on the house. That we don't know exactly how much of an edge or which hands we might lose doesn't mean we shouldn't play the game, it just means that there's still some uncertainty. The odds are still for us.
While I'm with you that we don't necessarily know what we should and shouldn't be selecting for or against for the greater good of our race, are you really suggesting that given the choice (which we will very soon have as a species) there is ever any reason to choose to have the baby that's likely to die of colon cancer over the one without that increased likelihood? Keep in mind that natural selection tunes us a lot more blindly and with a lot less consideration for these possible consequences than direct selection - that appears to have worked fine, so I don't think adding a bit of thoughtful choice into the mix will cause us any great harm as a species. And we can, perhaps, start to select for traits that allow us to live significantly longer than childbearing age, which is the point where natural evolution says "screw it, I'm done!"
I say f--- natural, we're imperfectly constructed in a lot of obvious ways that we can maybe do something about for our children, and they could really use all the help they can get...
Now if someone could make those visualizations interactive GUIs to archives and people, we might finally be getting somewhere. While I'm not sure entirely what that means, it's worth mentioning that this visualization was created in Processing, a Java dialect/IDE geared towards rapid prototyping of exactly that type of thing (highly interactive visualizations), particularly aimed at people that aren't experienced programmers. Ben Fry, the main coder for the project, does a lot of interesting data visualization stuff, and even wrote a whole book about data visualization, which is definitely worth checking out.
Slashdot Mirror
3 percent can be deadly when combined with massive leverage.
And even if swaps are bets against the performance of the underlying, they still end up worthless if the counterparty has taken on so much leveraged risk in these things that a 3% decline in the underlying leaves them unable to pay you what you are due from your swaps.
Think of it like insurance: usually an insurance company has to show that it can reasonably meet its obligations if something bad happens, so when you buy insurance, you have a reasonable certainty that if the insured event hits you, you're going to get your money. Nobody would buy insurance without that expectation - a million dollar life insurance policy is worthless if the company you've bought it from doesn't have a million dollars. Or at least nobody should buy insurance without some sort of guarantee of payment; this is why the insurance industry is highly regulated, with all sorts of minimum holding requirements and fun stuff like that.
Well, the companies that were peddling these swaps were selling a lot more bad-credit insurance than they could afford to pay, and for some inexplicable reason this was allowed. But the people buying this insurance, when they did their risk assessment, assumed that they would be paid by these insurance policies if the defaults started to roll in. They thought they had hedged against the risk of default. But they hadn't, because they didn't factor in the right amount of counterparty risk, and these counterparties were so leveraged due to the fact that things had been going well (when any quantity rises for long enough, people will allow you to borrow way too much money based on the future gains of that quantity, which is why we have bubbles) that a disaster was just waiting to happen. Then people started to default on their loans. And then there was blood in the streets, all because someone had the brilliant idea to let any old asshole get into the insurance business (in a roundabout way, of course - they didn't actually call it insurance) without having enough money to be in that business.
At least that's my take on this thing. It's got nothing to do with shorting, naked or otherwise, and everything to do with the creation of an entire industry based on a complicated and unregulated derivative that is almost impossible to properly value and allows insane amounts of leverage.
"Mom, I found this guy who will pay an outrageous price for a 2003 Saab 9-5 in good condition, like the one in the driveway that you're not using since you got your BMW. I can get another one just like it at a lower price, but I can't get it until next Wednesday. If I give you a hundred bucks, can I sell yours to this guy and replace it next Wednesday?"
Which illustrates the point that shorting of borrowed shares can't be eliminated unless you make transferring shares between people illegal, because for a sufficiently liquid asset you're always going to be able to find someone willing to lend you what they've got for the right price, and this lending does not have to happen through any official channel, they just need to be able to sign the stuff over to you and negotiate a repayment plan on the side. The only reason this doesn't happen in practice with cars is that a) finding "the same" car to replace the borrowed one is not necessarily easy, whereas with a stock most shares are equivalent, and b) it's quite a bit more difficult to transfer ownership and possession of a car than a share of stock.
Well, sort of. Now (as in, since a few weeks ago) it is altogether banned, but historically it has been allowed in limited form. Particularly market makers have usually been allowed to naked short if they are unable to borrow shares, because they are responsible for maintaining liquidity and they were assumed to be legitimate enough to settle up when shares were finally available. And price manipulation by a market maker should normally be very easy to spot, so it was not considered a huge risk to allow it (there were a couple cases where market makers got busted for abusive naked shorting, though).
It probably makes sense to ban it altogether, though, as the marginal increase in efficiency is probably not worth the general sense that there's a loophole for exploitation in the market, whether or not people are actually abusing it.
A company's assets are usually fairly heavily determined by equity, whether owned by the shareholders or the direct company owners. So while margin requirements are likely far more complicated for companies than individuals, the gist is the same: if market value of your holdings (including your substantial holdings in yourself) dip below a certain point, you've either got to come up with more money, or start selling the stuff you have. So it is very possible that even a short term decline in stock price could force an end to operations, especially if these operations rely on highly leveraged transactions.
A person that owns the stock being allowed to sell it immediately implies that a person that doesn't own the stock may borrow stock and short it, unless you either make illegal 1) borrowing stock, or 2) selling stock. Forget the market, these agreements could happen over the counter, and would be perfectly fair and legal, the only difference with our system is that for the sake of efficiency our brokers handle this whole borrowing thing for us instead of us having to negotiate the lending ourselves. Short of some massive big brother-ing, there's no reasonable way to completely eliminate the concept of short selling, and if brokers were permanently banned from doing it for us, someone else would show up to facilitate the process and work through the loopholes in any laws that were set up.
Without the ability to take on short positions, then we cannot have an efficient market, which depends on the ability of all participants to immediately take advantage of any mis-pricing in a security, whether it is too high or too low. Without being able to short something, then the only people that could take advantage of an over-pricing would be people that already own a stock, and they are far fewer in number than the market as a whole, so the whole dynamic would change. Under-pricings would disappear immediately, but even quite obvious over-pricings would linger on for far longer simply because very few people could capitalize on them and bring them back into line. You'd be open to all sorts of abuse and price manipulation on the long side of things because longs couldn't get "picked off" by shorts if they were trying to manipulate prices.
FWIW, a market can likely never be perfectly efficient without naked shorting, but in practice the more liquid markets are very close to efficient because it's always possible to find a lender of the share, so eliminating naked shorts still leaves us pretty close to efficient.
It all depends if you believe that there should be a fair market that quickly finds fair value. Some people think that in itself is a benefit for all of us; without it, I suspect we'd have far less investment overall, which would likely be devastating to the economy. Think about it - if there was a good likelihood that a significant over-pricing was present in every stock on the market because shorting was disallowed, would you be as likely to buy stock at all? I wouldn't, since I'd know that it's extremely likely I'd be overpaying for the thing.
Yes, investing in failure seems to be dirty, and it is indeed cynical, but since the stock market is all about betting (bah to you "investors" that think otherwise - you may be making a long term bet with a different risk profile, but you're still gambling with your money), why should we not be allowed to take the other side of that bet at market value if we wish?
While the wording is a bit ambiguous, and I don't know what it means for bitching about rejections, I have a pretty good feeling that what they're talking about when they say "software" is really Apple software, i.e. the stuff that makes up the iPhone SDK, not the applications that you are developing. In other words, once this new agreement is in effect, we should be able to freely discuss the iPhone SDK in its current release form; we will not, however, be able to discuss the unreleased betas of the next iteration (which Apple usually gives registered devs access to). I think this is much better, because any person that wanted to can see Apple's tutorials and download the SDK anyways, so it was a little ridiculous to have it under NDA. Now if you're just not allowed to talk about the unreleased features, that seems a lot more reasonable.
...which should now make it totally legit to open source software that targets the iPhone - I know people have already done this (Oolong Engine comes to mind), but technically people that did this were in a gray area, where they were probably violating the NDA, but betting on the fact that Apple wouldn't come after them as long as they weren't doing anything too sneaky. It's good to have it cleared up, finally.
Back to your original point, though, IIRC the rejection letters that many received actually came with their own NDAs attached, so I'm not sure that this new agreement will have any bearing whatsoever on that.
No problem - and don't underestimate how much of the praise is directed at you, your explanation was extremely clear, concise, and correct, I was very happy to see someone get this right. The Behe-bashing was mainly for good measure. :)
For those of you that missed it and still might think that Behe has some semblance of a reasonable argument, let me tell you what just happened in Free The Coward's post: We saw that a ten line post on Slashdot, likely written off the cuff without any planning, is all it takes to rigorously and quite comprehensibly debunk the evolutionary fallacy that Behe's entire argument against evolution hinges on.
I'll at least give Behe credit for filling his book with a lot of irrelevant detail that makes it seem like he's proving something.
No, no, no, no. NO! PLEASE propose it - at least propose something! The problem with ID is not that it claims evolution is wrong, it's that it fails to offer a solid alternative. "Something did it, we're not exactly sure what, but it's something!" is not even close to an alternative. It's a bunch of unhelpful words on a page.
Of course, the alternative could only be one of two things: 1) God (of some sort), or 2) aliens. And God knows that the people running the ID campaign don't want people thinking they're talking about aliens! This is why people assume ID is merely Creationism-lite: the people talking about it refuse to bring it into the non-supernatural realm by saying straight up that they are talking about aliens instead of gods. Which must be the case if ID is to be considered science, otherwise this is not a scientific debate, it is religion.
But you don't seriously think the people "researching" this stuff are thinking about aliens, do you? Because unless you do, you're deluding yourself when you say that the creationism tie-in is a strawman.
Seriously, though, I'd be very happy if someone actually proposed a theory to look into rather than merely talking about how the other theory is wrong. For this to work, you'd actually need some evidence for the particular theory, but hey - if you believe in it so strongly, you've certainly got some evidence for that belief. Otherwise you'd have little reason to suspect that the prevailing view, which does have lots of evidence, is wrong (as difficult as that evidence may be to wade through).
Right?
I think that's questionable. By my reading, it sounds like the page in question was an obvious joke. Read the quote FTFA:
That doesn't sound like an accusation to me, it sounds like a stupid joke. And based on a quick googling, it seems that libel cases have been dismissed "because the item could not be reasonably understood as stating actual facts" - I think an adolescent Myspace page would probably qualify as something nobody in their right mind would believe, especially if it was claiming that the principal's hobbies included "being a tight ass."
Then again, IANAL, so I don't know. But if I had to guess, I'd guess that most judges would not want to waste their time on a case like this if it was brought as a libel suit.
Right, because nobody cracks a smile when someone makes a joke about Dick Cheney eating babies for breakfast.
All across this thread people keep mixing up "accusation" with "stupid obvious parody," which is exactly what the Myspace page appears to have been (though I could not find the page to verify this for myself). If no person in their right mind could view the content and think it was anything but a joke (childish as it may be), then we're not talking about an accusation. We're talking about a harmless prank, and the only real damage it did was to the principal's ego - it's not like parents saw that page and started in with the "ZOMG! He touches children's bottoms and has sex with parents on his desk? REALLY? Quick, let's run this guy out of town before he does any more damage!"
If this was brought forth as a libel suit, I'm certain it would be resolved extremely quickly, as there is no conceivable way for a person to take that page as anything but a joke - for crying out loud, even from the couple of quotes in the article it's clear the page was written by an immature kid!
I disagree - Google should feel free to take a healthy bite out of a sale if they provide a good marketplace and a healthy pool of customers that might buy the app. That's why the iPhone is such a hot independent developer platform right now, there are people actually buying stuff, and you can actually sell stuff just by signing up and submitting it. If Google gets something like that going for Android, it will be an extremely useful service to developers, so I think there is enough value added that they deserve a slice of the pie.
BTW, I think it's worth mentioning that the main reason people are willing to buy iPhone stuff is the seamless integration of the purchasing system - you're always logged in, you just need to punch in your password to purchase. No fiddling about for a credit card number, or trying to remember your paypal info, or any garbage like that; just a few clicks and you're done. Google should really shoot for something similar if they do a store.
Don't be ridiculous - I'd assume that every person here views Ubuntu as an algorithm, but not one of them could put it into code from scratch. And Ubuntu is a hell of a lot less complex than the human brain.
Thus far, we know of no information processing system that does not function algorithmically. In fact, I'll go much further: we don't have any idea what it would even mean to process information non-algorithmically. There's no alternative to an algorithm, except magic. So I'd say that anyone that doubts that the human thought process is an algorithm has the burden of proof squarely on their shoulders, not the other way around.
For the moment, yes, at least mostly - I suspect most employers do discriminate quite heavily against online degrees. But in the future, this just won't be possible, especially as real world physical schools start to grant full, unasterisked degrees to students that have done at least a portion of their coursework online and remotely. This is inevitable: it's pretty much the only way to further grow a business that was up until now not scalable due to physical resources. Even the higher level colleges would be foolish not to offer these sorts of programs - exclusivity is great and all, but quite frankly, most top tier schools could admit up to four or five times as many students as they currently do without degrading the quality of the class in any significant manner, and as long as most schools start to offer online courses, the relative rankings will not be much affected by the decision to do so. So I think the concern is not so much that the University of Phoenix might have less rigorous standards than real life schools, but that eventually employers are going to see Yale, Harvard, and Princeton degrees coming across their desks with no way of determining whether the coursework was completed on site or over the Internet.
Of course, I'm not saying that I think there should be a law (I don't!), I'm just noting that eventually online schooling will be a lot more ubiquitous, and harder for an employer to check, so there is a real quality control concern that employers will have. These proposed measures will do little to stop a resourceful cheater, just like real life proctors do little to stop cheaters in person. Personally I would think the responsibility for evaluating this type of thing and putting restrictions on it should rightly be in the hands of the accreditation boards (some of which, last time I checked, still have physical attendance requirements in place, though I think that's getting relaxed more and more lately), not the government, but you know how those effing politicians are...
Having undergone a brief and unpleasant stint attempting to educate American students, IMO you're dead on - the problem with the American educational system is primarily the lousy uninterested Americans that pass through it, more interested in sports, drugs, sex, and popularity (which is largely a function of the first three items) than in actually learning anything. No amount of money will make these degenerates any more interested in learning, and that's the fundamental problem. To put it plainly, nothing about our educational system will improve unless our culture shifts so that the nerd is socially more respected than the jock.
For a math major, QM should be a cakewalk. However, nobody should be learning QM from Feynman's lectures, there are far better texts to use for that (Shankar comes to mind, Griffiths if Shankar is too hard, Bohm if you want to be totally weird and pervert your brain).
Meh - while I'd agree that you can't call yourself a serious physicist just based on having read the Feynman lectures, I can't think of a single physicist that hasn't read them (or at least browsed them from time to time), and they are basic enough that it just takes a couple days of dipping in and out of to get through them. The Feynman Lectures for me fall into the category of light pleasure reading - there's just enough detail to keep you thinking, but overall, you read them for fun, not to grind up your skillset.
If for no other reason, they are worth reading so that you have some idea how a good teacher explains things to people not already familiar with the subject. Most physics PhDs at some point or another will have to teach introductory physics classes, and I think they could do a lot worse than to base some of their lectures on Feynman's style, if not his actual content.
Oh, I forgot - I wanted to comment on the rest of those books and add a couple.
Re: Griffiths books - they are both really good as intros to these topics (both are amongst my favorite "pleasure" reading physics books), but in the field they are often considered too elementary to be "serious," for better or worse. It's not that they are wrong, just that they are a little too user-friendly, which to me is a good thing.
If you can manage to wade through the extreme density that is that Shankar book, that should rectify things for QM - I have to say, though, I did not particularly enjoy that book, which surprised me since I adored his "Basic Training in Mathematics" book (likely too basic for a math major, I'd guess) and found him to be a fascinating lecturer (I never took one of his classes, but I occasionally slipped in and watched while between other classes). I think it's just too difficult to be so brutally thorough and remain interesting throughout an entire tome like that.
Jackson's E+M book is really the gold standard for classical E+M, though I'd really recommend hitting the literature if you're into stuff like self-action and all that.
Actually, I just noticed that the Griffith's recommendation was for his particles book, not QM, so scratch my QM comments - though if you find Shankar's book too weighty, pick up Griffith's QM book as a start, like most of his books it's very digestible (should take just a couple days to get through). If you find Griffith's particles book too light, which you hopefully will after a couple reads, you'll want some real field theory. The "standard" here is the Peskin/Schroeder book. That can be a little tough if you don't already know something about it; as a slightly more basic step in that direction, check out Zee's Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, which I was very pleasantly surprised with.
You'd also be remiss not to pick up something that Feynman has written on field theory, as I don't know that anyone else has understood it in as straightforward a manner as he has - there's always his various QED papers, which you MUST read all of, but as an astrophysicist, your thoughts will likely turn to gravity, in which case the often overlooked Feynman Lectures on Gravitation are definitely worth your time. Take the later chapters with a grain of salt, as some of the claims about stars are wrong; that said, his approach is quite interesting, and his approach to the Einstein equations is freaking amazing (he starts with a "bare" spin-2 theory, figures out how it's "wrong," and "fixes it up" until it "works," and lo and behold, Einstein's equations pop out of nowhere; those quotation marks hide all of the hard work required to get there, of course!).
Er, and also, I kind of hate to dump another 1000+ page monster of a book on your list, but as an astrophysicist you probably ought to read Misner/Thorne/Wheeler's Gravitation. It's great, though I can't promise it's just a few days work. The Wheeler stuff at the end is too speculative and flowery for my tastes, but the rest is pretty useful, and it's definitely worth keeping in your bookcase to intimidate anyone that might enter!
Robert Wald also has a great General Relativity book that might be less threatening; IMO, you should definitely own Wald and MTW. I'd suggest you avoid anything written by either Einstein or Dirac on the subject like the f***ing plague.
Also, check out http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Administrivia/rel_booklist.html for Joh
While I mostly agree with you, I'd still suggest picking up "The Road To Reality," as it's a truly fun read, if for no other reason than that Penrose is just a little bit nuts - he's got to be the first person ever to manage to get a "layman's" (i.e. it shows up at Barnes and Noble) book to include detailed calculations involving tensor calculus... Beyond that, though, he really looks at everything in a different light, and in a very non-standard order, so I think it's 100% worthwhile. The 1000 page thing is annoying (too big to fit alongside your laptop in your bag, to be sure), but as a physics PhD all you're going to be doing is reading and calculating all day anyways, so that shouldn't be a very large deterrent.
Damn straight - does anyone actually go first to Youtube to find copyrighted stuff? I can't think of many TV shows or movies that I've actually seen there, apart from stuff that's been off the air for so long that I don't think anyone cares about it anymore...
The point is, of course, that the places that people actually do go to for this stuff are for the most part not based in the US (Tudou and Youku being the biggest offenders) and don't have nearly as much money as Google, so it's not possible/profitable to go after them. Which puts US-based media companies shit out of luck, stuck trying to swing the hammer of justice at someone that hasn't actually done very much to hurt them.
While there's definitely the possibility I'm wrong, I suspect that 1) a proper analysis of the data will show that Youtube has played an insignificant role in the declining profits of Big Media, and 2) Viacom knows this very well and just wants this data for mining purposes - if I could come up with some half baked excuse to get my hands on that dataset, you can be damn sure I'd go for it, and I'm not even in the media business!
The question is, would the loss of forced contributions due to GPL enforcement be more than counterbalanced by the free distribution of all media?
Personally I think the tradeoff would be worthwhile - I suspect that the majority of useful open source contributions are driven more by a commitment (either at the personal or corporate level) to the principle of open source than by the fact that the licensing terms force contributions. I don't think we'd see the freely available pool of source code dry up in any significant way, though we would have to swallow the fact that a lot of companies might be making money distributing binaries created with formerly open source components. Of course, it would become very difficult to make money selling software without copyright protections, so I suspect this would be less of an issue.
I wouldn't hold your breath for any of this, though...
Meh. The insinuation that if liberals had their way everyone would be morally lacking, and that the "conservatives" (if you can even call them that anymore, which IMHO is truly a perversion of the word's meaning) would make things more morally righteous, is all dependent on the fact that you view the concept of morality through the glasses of a pretty extremist Christian. Some of the most detestable people that I know are cut from the fire and brimstone neocon mold, and I really don't think giving these loons any more legislative power would help make any of us more moral.
A lot of the rest of us find the idea of the death penalty to be extremely immoral, especially when its application is racially biased. We also see it as immoral to start wars, give guns of any sort to anyone that wants them, ignore the economic plight of our neighbors, and keep consenting adults from being happy in any way they choose as long as it doesn't directly affect our lives (nope, being disgusted by it doesn't count).
FWIW, I'm libertarian in most ways, though I can't believe in a flat tax because I don't believe that such a thing is unsustainable in a democracy, regardless of its dubious "fairness" (which IMO has been vastly overstated by its proponents, since at the core it's main effect is to shift more financial responsibility from the rich to the poor). Assuming one person == one vote, the tax rate must decrease for the brackets with the highest numbers of citizens at the expense of the rich, where there is less pressure due to the lower number of people; the rate doesn't increase for the poor despite their fewer numbers because the middle class generally speaking aren't assholes, and realize that a 10% tax bump for someone at the low end of the pay scale will dramatically affect their quality of life, whereas it will not for someone at the high end. Any non-progressive tax scheme is inherently undemocratic given the current income distribution, as in any democracy each person should have the "power" to influence an equal amount of tax liability allocation, regardless of their individual income.
But that's not a reasonable argument. Sickle cell anemia is an extreme edge case, and most of the genetic variants we're talking about are unambiguously harmful, at least based on our current knowledge. And if that knowledge changes we'll adjust, but the way I see it is that at the moment we have at least a bit of an edge on the house. That we don't know exactly how much of an edge or which hands we might lose doesn't mean we shouldn't play the game, it just means that there's still some uncertainty. The odds are still for us.
While I'm with you that we don't necessarily know what we should and shouldn't be selecting for or against for the greater good of our race, are you really suggesting that given the choice (which we will very soon have as a species) there is ever any reason to choose to have the baby that's likely to die of colon cancer over the one without that increased likelihood? Keep in mind that natural selection tunes us a lot more blindly and with a lot less consideration for these possible consequences than direct selection - that appears to have worked fine, so I don't think adding a bit of thoughtful choice into the mix will cause us any great harm as a species. And we can, perhaps, start to select for traits that allow us to live significantly longer than childbearing age, which is the point where natural evolution says "screw it, I'm done!"
I say f--- natural, we're imperfectly constructed in a lot of obvious ways that we can maybe do something about for our children, and they could really use all the help they can get...