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?

Economic value is a measure of the benefit that an economic actor can gain from either a good or service (first sentence at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_(economics) ).

My post was comparing the current system that allows millisecond scale trading with a hypothetical one that slows trades down to something on the order of minutes. Your observation that people are willing to pay to exploit information asymmetries in the current framework doesn't address the question of how my proposed change would affect net economic value.

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 ..."

And why shouldn't you be able to sell your browsing information for $30/mo?

Given that we hammer it into every kid, who do you think these kids are who aren't going?

Under methodology:

""" Return from Attending College: The main financial benefit of attending college is the gain in income received by a college graduate over a high school graduate. However, by choosing to attend college, one is giving up 4-6 years of income one could have received if one went straight to work after high school. Therefore, we calculate the gain in median pay over a high school graduate (Earnings Differential) as the difference between the 30 Year Median Pay for a 2012 Bachelor's Graduate and Weighted 34-36 Year Median Pay for a High School. """

Unfortunately, they fail to take into account that the people who go to college probably would have been more successful anyway.

What this explains is "spooky action at a distance".

So what's the explanation for why almost all interactions that we perceive seem to not be spooky or at a distance?

I agree with you. My point was: you used the wrong word. :)

The nature of torture aside, taking the life of a sentient being is the ultimate violation of its rights. I don't see how any act less than killing can be considered morally worse than killing.

Why?

Sentience doesn't mean what you think it does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience

I think its unfortunate that opposition to torturing animals is often lumped in with opposition to merely killing animals.

Re-read the sentence you quoted.

Did your cook1929 account get hell banned?

Where do you find a breakdown of the costs? Anyone have links?

Implicit in my characterization "copyright for ideas" is that this proposal will somehow extend copyright, as it's currently understood, to cover ideas. I understand your point that copyright as it exists today does not cover more abstract ideas.

The main difference I was attempting to emphasize between copyrights and patents is that copyrights are automatic whereas patents must be filed and granted. And my point is that your proposal, which seems quite reasonable to me, would seem to work just fine with the copyright model of automatic rights: no patent filing required. And for that matter, the distinction between elaborate designs, which cannot be copied, and "flashes of insight", which can, looks a lot to me like a principle of fair use.

No?

Now you're the one who's ignored that this was hypothetical.

My point was that if we go ahead with your proposal, such that patent protection becomes about preventing copying work rather than (possibly accidentally) duplicating an idea, then what's the point of filing for patents? It could work just like copyright does now.

Rayiner: I can't respond to your next post for a while, but you didn't address the main point I was attempting to make in comparison to copyright: You don't need to file. There would be rules that you can't significantly copy someone else's hard work. If someone copies your hard work, it will be evident from the facts, just as it is evident with copyright violations, and you can sue them. No patent required.

I see what you meant.

Your proposal sounds more like copyright-for-ideas than patents. In such a system, why would you need to apply for a patent? Samsung copied your phone design? Sue them for that, holistically, rather than finding some arbitrary set of "inventions" that they infringed on. It sounds like the jurors mostly looked at things this way, anyway, when deciding who's morally right. Zynga probably wouldn't like the change, though.

This was not a flash of insight. This was the result of measuring EM field strength with expensive equipment, buying lots of iPads to test product variability, doing lots of experiments and iterating the design.

So what do you think is going to happen if someone else takes the same flash of insight ("use active sensing technology to achieve a smaller stylus"), puts in their own brow sweat to work out the details, and deploys a competing product? Adonit isn't going to sue for infringement, right? And if they do, they won't win. Right?