Liberty

Awesome, thanks so much!

I'm 29, but was never attracted by leverage. I also don't short or use options. Guess it's a "keep it simple" thing.

Out of curiosity, how much leverage do you have? Having zero leverage is one of my risk control methods, and sometimes if feels like I'm in a minority around here doing that.

Probably another good thread to bump up. So what has everyone been buying today? I was ready to pull the trigger on a few things, but I'm all out of ammunition, as usual. :-\

Thanks! Edit: Out of curiosity, would it be possible to make the original audio (mp3 files?) available? I'd love to archive this. Thanks!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-18/hp-said-to-be-near-10-billion-autonomy-takeover-spinoff-of-pc-business.html

I think you're reading too much into it. It's like saying that Buffett must actually love derivatives despite all that he's said because he owns some. I think it just means that once in a very long while he'll find something that he doesn't like priced in such a way that he's ready to speculate with some money on it because the odds look good, but it doesn't mean he's changed his mind.

Google Docs is completely down for me right now as well. If it was a widespread outage, it'd show up everywhere on tech news websites. Chances are it's a localized problem that affects very few people.

Looks like today could be another "lovely fricking day"...

Someone tripped on the power cord? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/outage-hits-microsoft-crm-online-office-365-customers/10359

My understanding is that Munger believes strongly in doing things that are good for "the civilization", so I don't think he was kidding when he said that people who just pile up gold and hope to later sell it to someone else at a higher price are "jerks", because they're using their resources and energies for an activity that isn't really productive. Buffet's comments about "fondling the cube" lead me to believe that he thinks along similar lines, but won't be quite as abrasive about it as Munger (as usual).

Indeed. Holding gold vs. holding cash for the long term, I'd probably go with Gold. Holding gold vs. holding good businesses that I bought at low prices? No contest, the businesses actually produce something of value.

Great, thanks Paul & Parsad!

Google isn't more open than most companies? Whatever man, this is getting tiring... Almost all of their APIs and tools are open in one way or another, but expecting Google to open source core infrastructure stuff is like expecting them to open the search algorithm, or expecting Facebook to allow people to export their social graph and user data. If you expect them to fill in their moat, you're dreaming. Google is the biggest computer maker in the world (not the individual components, but they assemble more computers than HP or Dell), that's part of their core competency and can't be given away for obvious competitive reasons. If you think that culture doesn't matter at a company and that Google's culture is just marketing, I suggest you read the following books: I’m Feeling Lucky: Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, The Search, and In the Plex. Google is modeled on a grad school, and while not everything in a company can work like that, it has a big influence and it makes Google different from almost all other companies in that regard. As you know, there's more than one way to skin a cat. How much revenue something provides depends on where you set boundaries and how many indirect levels you count. In the case of Android, since they don't charge for the OS itself, that revenue is a lot fuzzier and how you define it can make a big difference. Do you count only search revenue in Android's built in search? In search used through an app downloaded afterwards? In browser search? Adsense ads clicked in mobile browsers? And btw, your 1b number is from Q3 2010, if I'm not mistaken. At the rate at which mobile is growing, I'm pretty sure that number hasn't stayed put. And you don't give them any credit for publishing the paper in the first place and making the creation of Hadoop possible in the first place? Chances are they didn't release the actual google code because studying it would have given too much information about Google's secret infrastructure, but they still put the ideas out there, which is the most important part.

I wish! Maybe some day..

Very interesting. Thanks for posting, Parsad!

Another fun trick for new Chrome users: The URL bar can also access bookmarks and pages in the browser's history based on their names. For examples, I have a bunch of Google docs that I can just type the title of in the URL bar and get to, or if I type "CBF" it brings my to the corne of berkshire and fairfax (because I named by bookmark "CBF"), etc.

Yeah, I thought those were quite bad, but that's the way these things work.. They contact a company's PR at the last minute and suggest a statement and the PR guys and CEO sign off on it, usually keeping it short and keeping the original structure, often without changing it too much. It's still better than the sound of crickets after a big announcement :)

1) I know that Google hasn't contributed as much to Linux's kernel as others (though they haven't tried to kill it like MSFT, and they contribute a lot of userland tools and libraries), but it's probably because the type of infrastructure-level modifications that they do are part of their secret sauce (how to scale massively at the lowest cost possible and with the highest performance). Facebook could lose it's performance edge and still be fine thanks to its network-effect moat, but Google's moat is in good part created by throwing more ressources at problems than anyone else (when you do things the hard way, you make it harder for competitors and you can do stuff for your users that others without the same infrastructure can't match) and being the low-cost "producer" of those computational resources. 2) I don't know what the real number is, but I know that hiding your capacities is second nature to Larry Page and has been from the very beginning (he wouldn't even tell VCs how many searches they were doing a day at first). They've waited the maximum number of time for the IPO (until they were forced to by SEC rules about number of shareholders) to avoid revealing anything about their revenues and profits and such, and I believe they're doing the same thing with Android now because it puts them in a better position to make gains in that sector. I could be wrong about that, but based on the information I have, I'd say it's likely.

This patent stuff is getting ridiculous.. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/16/us-apple-htc-idUSTRE77F38E20110816

IMO the proof will be in the pudding. Of course everybody's going to spin this announcement and say that it will benefit them. What will matter are the actions of Google over the next couple years. We'll have to wait and see.

According to Wikipedia: At the end it says they typically don't employ "significant leverage". Too bad, I'd love to see them blow up more often ;D

I'm on a Mac and don't use OE, so I can't help you with that. I did a quick search and couldn't find anything.. I'm not sure if outlook has open APIs that allow other non-MSFT software to interface with it.

Recent Firefox "major version updates" have been very disappointing lately. IMO they are playing the number's game and trying to catch up to Chrome and IE in version number (because obviously some people out there must think that IE v9 or Chrome v13 must be better than Firefox v4 or whatever), so each number major version has very few new features and UI improvements. I think they've even announce their intention to drop version numbers altogether at some point, which would bring them to something closer to Chrome, which updates in the background and doesn't make a big deal about versions.

I think you are cherry picking. You could find just as many sources that say the opposite about Motorola, the Chrome browser's engine might be webkit, but the rest of the browser (a browser is more than a rendering engine) is open sourced under the name Chromium and improvements are contributed back to the webkit main branch, and the javascript engine, which was revolutionary at the time of launch, is open-sourced under the name V8. Google contributes to TONS of open-source projects and funds external projects and competitions tool. They are probably the biggest corporate contributor along with IBM (probably ahead of IBM, in fact). Finding one thing that they didn't open source doesn't prove anything. People said the same thing about search at first - that it wasn't making any money and that it never would - but Google thought the priority was to focus on quality and marketshare at first before focusing on monetization. People just need to do the thought experiment of what would Google's mobile position be if Android didn't exist and how many more threats they would be facing.. Besides, I don't really believe the 1B number that is floating around for Android. Google took so long to IPO because they wanted to hide how profitable they were to competitors, and they're not breaking down Android precisely probably for the same reason. As for your answers in the MSFT thread, I don't remember seeing anything very convincing.