there is absolutely nothing, whatsoever, 'valuable' behind a credit default swap. it is a bet. that is a fact, and its not rocket science, and its not a conspiracy theory, and its not "the ignorant and alarmist" decrying some nefarious boogey man.

You're completely wrong. If you buy a bond from company X, it certainly makes sense to have insurance that if company X goes out of business, you still get your money. And hence, the credit default swap was born. The fact that someone may use the instrument to speculate is a separate issue.

People speculate on everything. It's what you do when you stock up on cans of soup when it's on sale. You speculate that the price is going to go up next week.

If this is the case, you're an idiot. I'm sorry; I don't know an easier way to put it.

There is no appreciable difference between Debian and OS X in setting up a desktop environment to develop in other than that in Debian, it might make take me some time to figure out what video card driver to use.

What the hell took you 4 hours in Debian? It should take you about 15 minutes on Debian, or Ubuntu, or OS X.

Guinness has a nice history of using math and science in improving their product.

Student's t-distribution was conceived by William Sealy Gosset while working at Guinness.

Not having Flash is a feature. I don't have it on my desktop and I sure as hell don't want it on my phone or tablet.

Depends on the band. For instance, I haven't bought a CD version of a studio release from Gov't Mule in quite some time. They offer MP3 and FLAC for purchase right on their own website.

Phish even sells what they call "FLAC-HD" versions. These are 24 bit/96 KHz versions of their live shows.

Not to mention, these, and hundreds of other, bands allow people to tape and distribute copies of their live shows. Those recordings are FLAC as well, often higher than CD quality.

Because Google doesn't sell a product for which giving away free stuff for can be claimed as a significant upgrade without a price tag?

I'm tired of people complaining about this. If Apple didn't do it, and someone latched on to it as a reason for them to suffer sanctions for improperly disclosing revenue, then everyone would be saying that Apple is a fraud because they clearly have unethical accounting procedures.

Speaking as a member of the developer program, big deal. Either pay the $99 for the year or pay the one time $4.99. Chances are, you'll get XCode 4 for "free" with Mac OS 10.7.

Speaking as a shareholder, this is just one more example (in a line of many, many others), why SOX hurts the US economy and stunts ingenuity and growth of US companies.

You're an idiot. No, seriously, you are. The fact that you can take something you don't understand and make a sweeping statement about something else you don't understand is direct testimony to your [lack of] intelligence.

The proof is about lack of a closed form solution for an options pricing model. There are plenty of real world engineering problems for which analytical solutions do not exist and only numerical solutions work. Yet, we don't worry about planes falling out of the sky or your TV not working because you can't "solve for x." Same deal for this.

Yes, because Rolling Stone is the perfect place to look to understand the goings on of the world economy. Matt Taibbi is an idiot as is anyone who reads what he says and doesn't laugh.

They did the same thing with me. Overall, Ensenda was fine for some packages and a disaster for others. Makes sense if you read up on them. Your packages are basically delivered by a "man with a van." Unmarked vehicles show up and drop packages off. So, it's basically hit or miss. Especially if you get a driver who does't know your building (living in an apartment) and decides that not finding the building translates to "delivery attempted." So, whenever Ensenda screwed up, I was very vocal, as I never have a problem with either FedEx or UPS. After about a month of almost exclusively Ensenda, I haven't had it in 3+ months.

Not entirely true. Arista has little secret sauce. They're using merchant silicon. Stay tuned for the plethora of switches about to be released based on the Broadcom Trident ASIC (64 10 GigE switch on chip, manifesting itself as either 64 10 GigE or 48 10 GigE + 4 40 GigE). Some (like Force10's) are already announced. The differentiator in 10 GigE ToR switching is quickly becoming software.

How sinister of them, trying to compete with a proprietary codec by releasing free plugins for other vendors' browsers to play their unencumbered format.

Uh, it's very likely that WebM infringes on patents, so saying it's unencumbered is wrong. There's nothing wrong with supplying plugins to watch WebM video. Like Flash plugins, I won't install them. It's nice having freedom. WebM is going to remain a niche format, and Google and Adobe can enjoy their now obvious relationship together, as this serves only to prop up Flash.

It doesn't say 'Mac App Store Hacked'... it says 'Mac App Store *APPS* Hacked', which is quite clear in my book.

They're not even hacked! Since when does not implementing something count as being hacked?

The Mac App Store wasn't hacked. Developers aren't properly checking licenses when the app is run, so of course using any arbitrary license file will work. Complete FUD.

In fairness to the tranche modelers, all historical data indicated that foreclosures in geographically distinct areas were in fact largely uncorrelated. The housing bubble broke this assumption rather badly, but that was on those who made the bubble, not the quants.

My point was a bit more subtle. Those holding equity tranches want defaults to be highly correlated. Although high default correlation means if one fails, they all fail, it also means if one doesn't fail, none of the others do either. So equity tranches were priced using that correlation. Senior tranches want little default correlation, because it means that defaults are random and will be absorbed by the equity tranches. Those tranches were priced using that correlation.

Where High Frequency Trading really makes money is from trusts missing out on fractions of a percent - HFT is sort of a more legit version of the "steal the rounded off interest" scheme from Office Space - on an individual level it is meaningless, you may lose 1 cent per share, but doing this enough makes it profitable to the brokerages.

Making fractions of a cent on spreads is a market maker's reward for providing liquidity and taking risk for a large price swing in the period of time in which they are still holding the securities (in the case of an underlier) or haven't yet hedged (in the case of some derivative).

We paid for your dumb errors in the subprime crisis, so now that you are creating speculation on yet another imaginary value (physical closeness to the servers of the stock exchange ? Really ? Changes in the value of a company on the millisecond scale ? Are you serious ? ) you better show your whole scheme.

Whose dumb errors in the subprime crisis? Those errors were made by multiple parties. First and foremost, the people buying more than they could afford. It's taboo to demonize "Main Street," but let's face it, if people could, or chose to, do basic math, they would have realized they couldn't afford what they were buying. Second, stupid mortgage companies who relied on people's word that they could afford things. Third, those who thought tranching baskets of mortgages and pricing the tranches using default correlations for each tranche that were advantageous just to that tranche rather than rooted in reality.

These three groups of people have almost nothing in common with those who trade equities and equities derivatives. So, please, don't put two things you don't understand into the same bucket simply because both are products of "Wall Street."