roblev's comments

I'm not sure Planck time has much to do with this. The universe is not thought to be quantized in time, i.e. there is no requirement that the time period between two events is a multiple of the Planck time.

Seems on the loop levels that clicking once or twice on the start position clears the level, or I don't understand what is happening (which is possible...)

If this theory of share buybacks were true, it would lead to some fairly simple arbitrage strategies to make free money. (Buy shares in company x, force a share buyback so shares rise in value, profit).

In reality these corporate actions are value neutral if the current share price is at fair market value.

The value of ongoing profit is reduced if a company has fewer liquid assets to invest.

>I am not about to take out a loan in a hard currency when perfectly good inflationary currencies are easily at hand.

Sadly it is not so easy to make money this way, the forward exchange rates will cancel out any gain from the interest earned in the inflationary currency. Otherwise everyone would do this.

You can make money doing this but really you are just taking a bet on exchange rates, you can easily lose money as well if the fx goes the wrong way during your investment period.

There are very few risk free ways to make more money than investing in US Treasuries.

Most corporations try to be profitable over a long term, and there is no requirement to be "maximally profitable" in a single year or over any time period. For every corporation there are judgements over the value of investing in product pipeline, sales, marketing etc. or the value of increasing short-term profits at the expense of long-term, the value of taking a risky action that may pay-off or may bring customer anger and lost sales etc.

The vast majority of single actions that a corporation takes are not mandated under some simplistic view of "maximising shareholder value".

My local supermarket has had zero days loss in trading in the last quarter. What does it do? It buys things for a cheap price and sells them at a higher price.

Traders do exactly this, it is the service they provide. It is quite unlikely that all the traders in a big bank are going to lose money on the same day.

I think the OP's point was clear, Java has a big library of tested, debugged, robust libraries.

There are a few misconceptions about money here.

- QE is about creating new money. The buying of loans is merely a way to distribute it; instead of just giving the money away, the central banks buys an asset (any asset would do) so nobody gets an unfair advantage through distributing the new money.

- all loans can be repaid. At the end, people would just own dollar bills which in turn don't depend on anything else for their value.

- a lot of the confusion around money comes from confusing different sorts of money as being the same thing. We commonly use two sorts of money: Base money (e.g. dollar bills) that depend on nothing. This form of money can only be (legally) created and destroyed by the central bank. The second form of money is Bank money which is a loan of Base money. THis form of money can be created or destroyed by many individuals and banks.

- As an example of Base money vs Bank money, when I pay $100 into a bank, I have really loaned the money to the bank - it owes me $100. Yet I can "spend" this loan with my bank card and by goods from a shop, now the shop is owed $100 by the bank. The loan is a form of money; I really did have some Bank money. But the original $100 bills were sat in the bank vault, and they are definitely still (Base) money.

The Channel Tunnel between the UK and France works fine, and if someone got sick at the start of the tunnel section then there isn't too much that could be done quickly.

The public seems to have no issue with that concept, it is a simple risk that goes with getting on the train.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel

Excel is an incredibly powerful environment to code. I learned it many years ago; I started thinking it was some arcane tool that accountants used and ended being able to deliver amazingly powerful tools to users orders of magnitude faster than systems developers. Yes they had bugs, but... so did the industrial systems!

Excel's real limitations came around scalability of developers (beyond one developer you are in a bad place) and performance that can drop of a cliff beyond a certain size. But it is an astonishingly powerful tool.

Yes indeed but the principle also applies to avoiding repetition of configuration and data.

1password integrates with dropbox so your (encrypted) passwords are available on all systems that you install the 1password client on.

One significant difference between linux and windows/mac is the planning around features and the outreach. I work for a large organisation. The number of times a linux group has come round to our office to discuss what features are up-and-coming, or should be developed? None. The number of times Microsoft staff have done the same? Some.

Now I don't really expect linux volunteers to do this, but equally I don't really expect any linux distro to provide a coherent business desktop because they are not talking to their "customers" in the same way that their competition is. And the business desktop is a large market, if a bit unsexy.

In texas hold'em your actual balance is a very significant factor in your optimal behaviour in a particular hand. Short-stack tactics are different to big stack tactics.

Not having to own a car opens up more options

Want a big car for a family trip? Just order one and it turns up where you are, ready to take you where you want to go.

A sleeper car for two? A flash sports car for the afternoon? A van for the day?

Pay-as-you-go personal transport from anywhere to anywhere where you can still be productive during the journey... Sounds pretty revolutionary to me.

I've never been remotely convinced by cycle models.

Fourier Analysis shows you can model any curve by summing enough sine waves of different amplitudes and frequencies; so given any shape of any market over any time period, I can show a selection of long, medium and short cycles that will approximately match the market. But this will have zero predictive power.

The major Microsoft products are Windows and Office.

Windows is a better corporate OS than any of the alternatives and Office is an awesome piece of software by any standard.

No, accounting is much more subtle than that. It is about trying to figure out the value of what you have now, and that is not always trivial.

For example, how many people will demand returns for sales you've recently made? 0%? 15%? you don't know, but you can't "account" for the complete value of past transactions without this estimation of future actions.