nimble

Can't we automate sales?

> I hate going back to my home country and I love the intellectual, rational environment here.

The US is an intellectual, rational environment? What are you from Borat's country?

It surprises me that there's a unique 12 digit answer to this. If you bet proportion f of your income every round, then if you win n coin flips, shouldn't you have (1+2f)^n (1-f)^(1000-n) £? For a given f, it takes a certain number of heads for this value to exceed 1B£, but I'd expect a range of f values that all require the same minimal number of heads results to break 1B£. Unless there's a value of f that produces exactly 1B£ for the minimal needed number of heads (or the set of such f differ only after 12 digits). That seems unlikely...

EDIT: Just realized that the problem asks for the odds of being a billionaire, not f. So there are probably a good number of f that work, but they all produce the same odds.

Responding to your edit: I don't think his point was that 20,000 was too big to fail. The point is that 20,000 is too big, period.

Any company over a certain size (certainly way less than 20,000) institutes internal procedures for smaller groups within the company to coordinate. How would we not all be better off if those smaller groups were independent competing actors?

It actually get 60 net up-votes

> Jesus, what a tool you are.

This sounds like the start of a pretty angry prayer.

Eliminating the subpenny rule sounds like a good idea, but it wouldn't address the advantage of responding to news quickly, would it?

There is an obvious problem with HFT: it gives an advantage to lower latency analysis and communication, leading to huge amounts of wasted effort getting faster pipes and software, co-locating automated trading, etc. None of this is delivering real value to the economy, as far as I can see. If you have an argument for why trades that happen at millisecond time scales help liquidity and price discovery over what you'd get with a system that handled trades on the scale of minutes, I'd like to hear it. I have a hard time imagining that the benefits (to society at large) could outweigh the costs of the waste when I see what's being done.

That said, I agree that the high frequency of trades themselves are probably not the problem. The problem is rewarding a latency/processing advantage.

Now let's see it turn around and go up the hill.

Obscurity is underrated.

The proxy angle is interesting, but I don't think that's main factor here. What's walking through someone's lawn a proxy for? The cops see a kid who looks like trouble and who's technically breaking the law and they arrest him, whether the specific crime is a proxy for anything or not.

And then there's the question of what "the spirit of the law" means. The courts wouldn't allow a blanket prohibition on "gang activity," even if that may be what legislature had in mind.

They're claiming the release was accidental. Not the removal.

I wonder whether stake is correlated (perhaps inversely) with valuation.

Not to distract too much from how terrible the subject matter of the patent is, but can someone explain why they decided to put the "system for" claims separate from the "method for" claims? There is some small fee associated to each claim, so why aren't each of these claims written as "a system or method for ..."