saneshark

The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia currently has Einstein's brain on display. With all the controversy surrounding how his brain was stolen against the will of Einstein and his heirs, it would be ironic if all one really needed to recreate his genius was his fecal matter.

I learned to code at age 7 with QBasic, deconstructing Gorrilas in DOS, and later SmallTalk. Both languages are horrible, but were incredibly easy to learn. No one taught me, I played with them until I learned, and back then there was no internet.

There are so many aspects of Ruby that make it well suited for teaching kids about programming that go WAY, WAY beyond the ridiculous observations you've made. You might as well have pointed out the performance limitations of Ruby too. Installing Ruby is as easy as opening a macbook. It's already there. It's not like little kids, learning the language for the first time are provisioning servers and installing from scratch.

It's not a matter of Ruby programmers being emotionally invested. It's a matter of Ruby, very often, being the right tool for the job. And for teaching purposes, I don't think anything else comes close. The fact that just about everything in Ruby is an object makes for some very interesting syntactical niceties that a child's mind can easily grasp. For children, the higher level the language, the easier it will be to grasp and remember. It doesn't get much easier than

    100.times do

Whether or not a programming language has 1st level functions or is production ready is not a consideration most people make when teaching a child. Learning how to code isn't about performance and elegance, it's finding your creativity, perseverance to stick with a problem, flexibility to adapt and change based on new constraints. After all these are the young minds that will be building the higher level programming languages of tomorrow.

M3hr, I am Iranian too. I am signing up now. Who knows, maybe I can help. :) I wish you the best of luck.

Kamyar

It's much easier to do this with Commodity ETFs and Futures.

Doing it with equities or baskets of equities gets very complicated and if you read the prospective of most ETFs pretty much all of them track the indexes within some margin of error.

Commodity ETFs on the other hand have an underlying asset that will expire or require taking delivery. Most of these ETFs are managed by a group of less than 10 people. They simply do not have the resources to take delivery of an underlying asset. They don't deal with the hassle of storing / taking delivery unless things are really out of whack. Therefore, as a the underlying futures contracts approach maturity, they need to rebalance their portfolio, almost daily, and at minimum once every couple months. In a contango market, it is very easy to front run these funds compared to ETFs that track equity indexes.

I should know, this was my primary trade 4 years ago before quantitative easing killed all volatility in the market.

That being said, the Russell 2000 index is rebalanced only once per year. Opportunities to front run that index with the futures contracts are one of those trades that I miss dearly.

Stackoverflow runs Microsoft?!? I feel like I was just punched in the gut by a best friend. Throwing up...

Rather than bickering about how this is bad for the market, why don't you folks write to the DOJ or your congressmen and voice your opposition?

The DOJ rightfully stopped the AT&T / T-Mobile merger in its tracks, who is to say that they wouldn't do something similar in this case?