I'm not a financial advisor, but I have taken quite a number of finance and derivative courses. I've read the pdf file at least three times now, as well as some other materials, and it seems to me that the Wikileaks analysis is flawed.
In itself, the services being offered by JP Morgan are perfectly legal and ethical; they are essentially a "collar", but with different instruments. They're a way of creating a position in which you're mostly immune to changes in the stock price. Wikileaks mentions this briefly by saying
The techniques outlined in the 31-page document... are really only useful for insiders who anticipate their company shares will decline...(Emphasis added) ... which is misleading. Entering into a collar doesn't necessarily mean that you have insider information, it just means that you don't want any risk at all. I would guess that 99.99% of CEO's with stock options / stock will enter into a collar of this sort to protect the value of their portfolios.
So what I'm saying is that there isn't anything wrong with JP Morgan offering these services, period. There is a very practical and ethical reason to enter this sort of contract, and there are a number of safeguards to prevent insiders from large short-selling before things go bad. Nowhere does it even imply in the pdf that JP Morgan "wants to help you inside-trade and beat the market by 6%!"
Unfortunately, the 10b5 rules are not strict enough to prevent inside-traders from also using the services. It's still better than allowing insiders to trading around "blackout" dates.
Anyway, read the businessweek article; it will explain things better than I can. As for this story, it seems to me more of a case of someone offering legitimate services which are being abused by some bad apples.
Thank you for your insight into this election; it's nice to hear something a little different on Slashdot.
However, if you believe that Democrats are "way out on left wing commie liberals", then I want to hear what you consider "conservative". I'm Canadian, and it seems to me that the Democrats are more rightwing than our Conservative Party. Ask our European friends as well, and you'll hear that the Democrats are anything but "liberal".
The Savage2 team is planning on releasing a native linux client within the next couple of weeks. Currently it's only available on Windows, but it's a pretty fun game. It's like the original Savage, but better.
The following is my own opinion, and I don't represent the government of Canada.
Did the first and 2nd car go through the same booth? Are you sure the people in the first car said "the car right behind us, my kids are in there", etc? I didn't work in the primary inspection line, but it sounds perfectly reasonable to stop a car with one adult and two children in it, if the adult is not at all related to the children. Abductions/kids running away scenarions are actually quite common. Actually, I would say that the scenario you described would play out pretty similarly in 90% of situations; you're referred inside for 30min to ensure that you're not being abducted.
You probably shouldn't complain; if your family friend wasn't able to prove that he was supposed to be taking you into Canada, you could have been waiting there for hours.
Speaking as someone who has worked as an Immigration Officer with the Canada Border Services Agency, I can say that our immigration laws are quite fine, thank you. In addition, our antiterrorism laws are quite robust, and I would argue that the United States' laws are needlessly draconian. Thank you for your time.
[quote]"But it was on the 99-cent rack, so you *have* to sell it to me for 99 cents!"[/quote]
Actually, that situation and this situation would appear to be very different. I am not a lawyer, but I took a single university course in corporate law where we covered the elements of contracts. In general, advertisements and price labels are usually considered "an offer to treat" and are not binding contracts on a retailer (with exceptions). A store manager doesn't "have" to sell something for 99-cents if it's advertised that way, because he hasn't agreed to a contract (with exceptions).
Now, from what the GP says, this Amazon thing does appear to be a valid contract. In that case, the customer could sue for breach of the contract. Also like the GP says, that is highly unlikely since the value to be recovered is so low. Personally, I'm not convinced that the Amazon thing is a valid contract, but again I'm not a lawyer so what do I know?
All of the Stardock games have had this for awhile. Galatic Civilizations II was awesome, and apparently the new Sins of a Solar Empire is awesome too. It's nice to not be treated like a criminal.
It just struck me today, but cable internet companies have a rather similar model to insurance companies. Insurance companies work by taking a large group of people, charging each of them a fee depending on relative risk, and paying out benefits when a few of the people die. However, in the long run, the insurance company will take in more premiums than give out in benefits, thus ensuring a profit.
Cable companies do the same thing: they take a large group of customers and offer them "insurance" i.e. bandwidth. Most of the users will not use a large amount of bandwidth, but a few will "die" and use up a LOT of bandwidth. Unfortunately for the cable companies, they didn't anticipate the "mortality" of the users very well, and the amount of bandwidth being used on average is increasing as time goes by.
I guess I'm just saying that it seems stupid for the cable companies to be complaining about the 5% of users that do use up a large amount of bandwidth, because that would be like insurance companies complaining about people dying. If the cable companies are losing money because they miscalculated the amount of "insurance" they were going to be providing, then they shouldn't be blaming their customers.
What can they do now? Well, if they've truly miscalculated the amount of bandwidth people were going to be using (and aren't just lying so they can increase their prices), then they can't keep charging the same fees or else they will eventually go bankrupt. This means that they must either increase their general or "aggregate" fees, or to increase the fees for the users that are anticipated to use a large amount of bandwidth (select fees). Alternately, they can get out of the "insurance" business altogether, and to go to this "pay per gigabyte" model.
This was reported on December 3rd by Dr. Michael Geist on his blog here. If you're interested in copyright issues in Canada check out his site; he's very informed and an interesting source of information.
While the SAC could have taken a stronger stand against DRM, this proposal should (though likely won't) cause the government to rethink its decision to import the DMCA into Canada. Even if you disagree with portions of this proposal, it is great to see Canadian songwriters, musicians, and music labels now singing the same song, promoting ways to make money from P2P rather than engage in failed attempt to stop it. - Michael Geist
Well, it is receiving some exposure in the press; it was listed on the frontpage of the cbc.ca news website. However, it's now been pushed down to the "Science and Technology" section.
Here's Dr. Michael Geist's take on it: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2552/125/
While this kills the application of the private copying levy to iPods (subject to a possible appeal by the CPCC), it also means that Canadians who copy music from their CDs to their iPods are not covered by the exception and thus arguably infringe copyright. The issue therefore moves from the Federal Court of Appeal to Industry Minister Jim Prentice who must decide whether he will amend the law by creating a clear, uncompensated exception to format shift (as the United Kingdom has just proposed) or leave millions of Canadians in legal limbo.
You realize that less then three years ago he was a state legislator? Can you picture your Assemblyman or State Senator running for President in the next three years? I know that I can't. I can, but I'm also Canadian. Our Prime Minister has to be an elected member of parliament, so the above scenario occurs in every election.
When did you play? Perhaps some of the earlier demo's were less balanced.
The way it is now is the complete opposite of your experience; there is a huge flexibility of gear, and each requires different counters. There are at least 12 different "implants" which you use to customize your character, and you constantly change them as you move through a level. Cyberspace is one of my favorite parts of the game; its fun, and very important. Its absolutely crucial to capture most cyberspace objectives because without them taking meatspace objectives are usually incredibly difficult. Also, if you're a good player, you can be in cyberspace for practically the entire round, depending on the map. That's hardly "little impact".
For everyone interested in a Shadowrun-esque FPS, you should try out the Dystopia Half-life2 Source Mod. It's free if you have the Source SDK, and it's extremely polished and a blast to play. In my opinion, it's pretty much everything the Shadowrun FPS wanted to be, but better. To quote the overview page:
Dystopia places the player into tense combat situations in a high tech world spanned by computer networks. As either Punk Mercenaries or Corporate Security Forces the player will fight through the physical world to gain access, via jack-in terminals, to cyberspace.
Cyberspace is a three dimensional representation of the world's network. Inside cyberspace, players will launch programs to hack into systems linked to the physical world while fighting off enemy hackers and defending critical systems. Gameplay progresses through inter-linked physical and cyberspace objectives, some are completed in either the physical world or cyberspace, others only by a well timed combination of the two.
Whether the player is a heavily augmented combat mercenary armed to the teeth with the latest in firepower, or a twitch reflex cyberdecker racing to infiltrate a cyberspace node; they'll be immersed in an action packed battle. Only through skillful use of the high tech arsenal we're making available and intelligent team play will players truly jack-in and kick ass. Check out the trailer here
In case you're wondering, I'm just an enthusiastic fan who is interested in having more people to play with. If you like Shadowrun, download and come play!
A susceptibility to being conned is part of your character, not a function of your intelligence or education. Why can't it be a function of both education and character? This sounds an awful lot like the "nature versus nuture" debate.
... or that the videogames have a huge negative influence, and the rest of the factors have an even larger positive influence. In other words, we don't know anything.
Essentially, this is how you should look at that first graph:
"Mr. Ferris makes one of the biggest errors in statistics by not accounting for other factors that changed over the same period. In fact, I could plot the same graph showing a steady increase in youth incarceration rates beginning in the mid-1990s, but it would be equally flawed (although somehow I doubt that it would get as many diggs). The point is that an analysis of crime needs to use multivariate regression. Simply making a two-dimensional plot and attributing the subsequent drop in violent youth crime to playing video games, as some people have unfortunately done based on this graph, is simply wrong when more significant factors like economic conditions, youth incarceration, and passage of state laws that try children as adults dramatically increased over the same period. In fact, it's theoretically possible for exposure to media violence to cause a small increase in violent youth crime and yet to observe the same downward trend when these other factors have a larger and negative influence on violent crime rates. Just my two cents. " My personal opinion is to agree with you, but your analysis of that data is too simplisitc.
I'm taking management courses (yeah I know, *booo hisss*), and in my HR class this semester some of my classmates did an analysis and presentation on that book. Unfortunately, I can't remember that much about their presentation except that the overall concensus was that it was complete nonsense. If I were you, I'd take it with a grain of salt.
I'm currently attending the U of M, and I got a tour of the mainframe room in April 2007. I'm afraid I don't know if it was responsible for telnet or not, but the new mainframe has nice blinkenlights on it:)
I don't think he's saying that there was no fraud. I believe what he was arguing was that the data provided in the article doesn't support it. You're providing extra evidence, which may prove the claim of fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
In itself, the services being offered by JP Morgan are perfectly legal and ethical; they are essentially a "collar", but with different instruments. They're a way of creating a position in which you're mostly immune to changes in the stock price. Wikileaks mentions this briefly by saying The techniques outlined in the 31-page document
So what I'm saying is that there isn't anything wrong with JP Morgan offering these services, period. There is a very practical and ethical reason to enter this sort of contract, and there are a number of safeguards to prevent insiders from large short-selling before things go bad. Nowhere does it even imply in the pdf that JP Morgan "wants to help you inside-trade and beat the market by 6%!"
Unfortunately, the 10b5 rules are not strict enough to prevent inside-traders from also using the services. It's still better than allowing insiders to trading around "blackout" dates.
Anyway, read the businessweek article; it will explain things better than I can. As for this story, it seems to me more of a case of someone offering legitimate services which are being abused by some bad apples.
Thank you for your insight into this election; it's nice to hear something a little different on Slashdot.
However, if you believe that Democrats are "way out on left wing commie liberals", then I want to hear what you consider "conservative". I'm Canadian, and it seems to me that the Democrats are more rightwing than our Conservative Party. Ask our European friends as well, and you'll hear that the Democrats are anything but "liberal".
Shameless plug for a good game:
The Savage2 team is planning on releasing a native linux client within the next couple of weeks. Currently it's only available on Windows, but it's a pretty fun game. It's like the original Savage, but better.
Hmmm yeah, I see your point. I guess I WAS tired when I read your post.
Honestly, yeah, that guard sounds pretty slack; nothing like that ever happened at the POEs where I worked.
I can't imagine why she would leave to go to another building... she can't have thought you were very important if she just left you like that.
The following is my own opinion, and I don't represent the government of Canada.
Did the first and 2nd car go through the same booth? Are you sure the people in the first car said "the car right behind us, my kids are in there", etc? I didn't work in the primary inspection line, but it sounds perfectly reasonable to stop a car with one adult and two children in it, if the adult is not at all related to the children. Abductions/kids running away scenarions are actually quite common. Actually, I would say that the scenario you described would play out pretty similarly in 90% of situations; you're referred inside for 30min to ensure that you're not being abducted.
You probably shouldn't complain; if your family friend wasn't able to prove that he was supposed to be taking you into Canada, you could have been waiting there for hours.
Anyway, I'm tired. Does that make sense?
Speaking as someone who has worked as an Immigration Officer with the Canada Border Services Agency, I can say that our immigration laws are quite fine, thank you. In addition, our antiterrorism laws are quite robust, and I would argue that the United States' laws are needlessly draconian. Thank you for your time.
Hey, I resent that! I'm in a business faculty, majoring in actuarial mathematics. Some of us business-types are quite fond of science.
[quote]"But it was on the 99-cent rack, so you *have* to sell it to me for 99 cents!"[/quote]
Actually, that situation and this situation would appear to be very different. I am not a lawyer, but I took a single university course in corporate law where we covered the elements of contracts. In general, advertisements and price labels are usually considered "an offer to treat" and are not binding contracts on a retailer (with exceptions). A store manager doesn't "have" to sell something for 99-cents if it's advertised that way, because he hasn't agreed to a contract (with exceptions).
Now, from what the GP says, this Amazon thing does appear to be a valid contract. In that case, the customer could sue for breach of the contract. Also like the GP says, that is highly unlikely since the value to be recovered is so low. Personally, I'm not convinced that the Amazon thing is a valid contract, but again I'm not a lawyer so what do I know?
All of the Stardock games have had this for awhile. Galatic Civilizations II was awesome, and apparently the new Sins of a Solar Empire is awesome too. It's nice to not be treated like a criminal.
It just struck me today, but cable internet companies have a rather similar model to insurance companies. Insurance companies work by taking a large group of people, charging each of them a fee depending on relative risk, and paying out benefits when a few of the people die. However, in the long run, the insurance company will take in more premiums than give out in benefits, thus ensuring a profit.
Cable companies do the same thing: they take a large group of customers and offer them "insurance" i.e. bandwidth. Most of the users will not use a large amount of bandwidth, but a few will "die" and use up a LOT of bandwidth. Unfortunately for the cable companies, they didn't anticipate the "mortality" of the users very well, and the amount of bandwidth being used on average is increasing as time goes by.
I guess I'm just saying that it seems stupid for the cable companies to be complaining about the 5% of users that do use up a large amount of bandwidth, because that would be like insurance companies complaining about people dying. If the cable companies are losing money because they miscalculated the amount of "insurance" they were going to be providing, then they shouldn't be blaming their customers.
What can they do now? Well, if they've truly miscalculated the amount of bandwidth people were going to be using (and aren't just lying so they can increase their prices), then they can't keep charging the same fees or else they will eventually go bankrupt. This means that they must either increase their general or "aggregate" fees, or to increase the fees for the users that are anticipated to use a large amount of bandwidth (select fees). Alternately, they can get out of the "insurance" business altogether, and to go to this "pay per gigabyte" model.
- Michael Geist
Well, it is receiving some exposure in the press; it was listed on the frontpage of the cbc.ca news website. However, it's now been pushed down to the "Science and Technology" section.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/01/23/tech-mpaa-downloading.html
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2552/125/ While this kills the application of the private copying levy to iPods (subject to a possible appeal by the CPCC), it also means that Canadians who copy music from their CDs to their iPods are not covered by the exception and thus arguably infringe copyright. The issue therefore moves from the Federal Court of Appeal to Industry Minister Jim Prentice who must decide whether he will amend the law by creating a clear, uncompensated exception to format shift (as the United Kingdom has just proposed) or leave millions of Canadians in legal limbo.
When did you play? Perhaps some of the earlier demo's were less balanced.
The way it is now is the complete opposite of your experience; there is a huge flexibility of gear, and each requires different counters. There are at least 12 different "implants" which you use to customize your character, and you constantly change them as you move through a level. Cyberspace is one of my favorite parts of the game; its fun, and very important. Its absolutely crucial to capture most cyberspace objectives because without them taking meatspace objectives are usually incredibly difficult. Also, if you're a good player, you can be in cyberspace for practically the entire round, depending on the map. That's hardly "little impact".
Cyberspace is a three dimensional representation of the world's network. Inside cyberspace, players will launch programs to hack into systems linked to the physical world while fighting off enemy hackers and defending critical systems. Gameplay progresses through inter-linked physical and cyberspace objectives, some are completed in either the physical world or cyberspace, others only by a well timed combination of the two.
Whether the player is a heavily augmented combat mercenary armed to the teeth with the latest in firepower, or a twitch reflex cyberdecker racing to infiltrate a cyberspace node; they'll be immersed in an action packed battle. Only through skillful use of the high tech arsenal we're making available and intelligent team play will players truly jack-in and kick ass. Check out the trailer here
In case you're wondering, I'm just an enthusiastic fan who is interested in having more people to play with. If you like Shadowrun, download and come play!
... or that the videogames have a huge negative influence, and the rest of the factors have an even larger positive influence. In other words, we don't know anything.
Essentially, this is how you should look at that first graph: "Mr. Ferris makes one of the biggest errors in statistics by not accounting for other factors that changed over the same period. In fact, I could plot the same graph showing a steady increase in youth incarceration rates beginning in the mid-1990s, but it would be equally flawed (although somehow I doubt that it would get as many diggs). The point is that an analysis of crime needs to use multivariate regression. Simply making a two-dimensional plot and attributing the subsequent drop in violent youth crime to playing video games, as some people have unfortunately done based on this graph, is simply wrong when more significant factors like economic conditions, youth incarceration, and passage of state laws that try children as adults dramatically increased over the same period. In fact, it's theoretically possible for exposure to media violence to cause a small increase in violent youth crime and yet to observe the same downward trend when these other factors have a larger and negative influence on violent crime rates. Just my two cents. " My personal opinion is to agree with you, but your analysis of that data is too simplisitc.
s/girl/fbi agent :)
It'd be more impressive if it wasn't 21C there. Try putting up all those lights in 3 feet of snow.
I'm taking management courses (yeah I know, *booo hisss*), and in my HR class this semester some of my classmates did an analysis and presentation on that book. Unfortunately, I can't remember that much about their presentation except that the overall concensus was that it was complete nonsense. If I were you, I'd take it with a grain of salt.
I'm currently attending the U of M, and I got a tour of the mainframe room in April 2007. I'm afraid I don't know if it was responsible for telnet or not, but the new mainframe has nice blinkenlights on it :)
Well the guy's data is from July, so it seems you're right on that last point.
I don't think he's saying that there was no fraud. I believe what he was arguing was that the data provided in the article doesn't support it. You're providing extra evidence, which may prove the claim of fraud.