bayes · HackerTrans

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Interesting. So maybe it is an evolutionarily stable strategy, if you assume it's too hard for the fish to keep track globally of where they are in the shoal (and are therefore limited to strategies where they only react to what's immediately around them). It would be fun to simulate this and see if there are any other strategies that offer an advantage.

bayes

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Why would they do this though? Why wouldn't a gene for 'cheating' (e.g. not slowing down when you reach the front) to avoid danger be favoured by natural selection? Animals with complex social structures (like us) avoid this by evolving to identify and punish cheaters, but there must be some other mechanism in these fish?

bayes

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

You're probably right - although saying the accusations are "nonsense, utterly ridiculous and should be ignored" isn't strictly speaking the same as saying that they're untrue. GCHQ could believe that (although they happen to be true) it's nonsense and utterly ridiculous for commentators to be asserting so without any evidence, and it would be much better for everyone to ignore the accusation.

bayes

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1314/

bayes

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

So if hypothetically Gox was the only buyer for bitcoins trapped in Gox, would they be buying them with real USD, or with 'trapped in Gox' USD that may or may not turn out to have any value?

bayes

vor 12 Jahrendiscuss

Question from someone who doesn't know much about this: is it possible to know that there is a genuine market in these MtGox bitcoins i.e. that $350 is a genuine market price and not just something made up by the exchange to conceal a complete collapse in value?

bayes

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Currently (I'm in London UK) Minecraft has a huge folllowing among boys aged (roughly) 8-14. As long as that demographic remains obsessed there'll be a constant new market.

bayes

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

I think "how many golf balls can you get in a double decker bus" is a fair question for assessing whether someone can apply basic maths to a to a real life (i.e. not perfectly defined) problem. If that's a skill the job needs it's a perfectly reasonable question.

bayes

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Presumably an Apple-run bank would protect me from scams by only allowing me to spend my money on Apple-approved products and services?

bayes

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light

bayes

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

This makes me worried about hash collisions as well. The article implies that a file whose hash matches something they already have will never even reach their servers - so presumably I just have to keep my fingers crossed that the file they're synchronising to all my machines is the one I uploaded, and not some other user's completely different file that happens to have the same hash?

bayes

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

This makes no sense to me. If it's really possible to "resell these domains for considerable profit" then why aren't you doing it yourself? Or, if it's not, then surely you're just preying on the greed and gullibility of those who sign up?

bayes

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

I don't see why you had to be so rude to them, just because customs in their circle are different to your own.

A simple "You go ahead, I'm just going to pay for my own" would have sufficed.

bayes

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

I fear some naive young US-based Anonymous participants may soon be getting a very rude awakening (if the FBI and Secret Service respond to this by making an example of them).

Edit: downvote me all you like, but you should read the post about what happens when you're busted by the feds (from the hacker crackdown): http://web.textfiles.com/hacking/agentsteal.txt

bayes

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

I've often wondered how long it will be before TV companies edit the video of sporting events to replace the adverts in the stadium with different ones they've sold themselves. Given the adverts are in fixed places it would be easy to do you'd think.

bayes

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

I greatly enjoyed his eccentric and opinionated book 'Calculated Bets' on writing an automated system for betting on jai alai (although the story petered out rather lamely when the grad students he relied on to write and maintain the code left and he couldn't run it any more).

Sadly jai alai seems to be dying out - otherwise I would have been tempted to have a go myself.

bayes

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

Do you know what a meme is? How could a cliched rhetorical device not be one?

bayes

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

It's certainly possible to imagine universes in which that would work.

But in ours, where stuff is made of atoms, I can't see you positioning the mark on the rod any more precisely than the width of an atom, which I think is about 10 to the -10 meters. So I'm guessing you could only encode 30 or 40 bits, even with super-advanced etching and measuring equipment.

bayes

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

But I would imagine a lot of those market makers are betting their own money. This is a fund i.e. they're betting other people's money. I won't be investing!

bayes

vor 17 Jahrendiscuss

Perhaps I'm stupid - certainly I'm no economist - but I don't see what's wrong with naked short selling.

For a market to work well you want liquidity, in order for the traded prices to reflect all the information known to market participants. One of the problems in the UK electricity market (which happens to be my day job) is that relatively few companies trade other than those who physically produce or use electricity, which hampers the effectiveness of the markets and (probably) increases the prices customers end up paying for their electricity.

So why are shares so different to any other market? Why should only people who physically own them be able to trade them?

Presumably the attraction of such a policy is that it allows share prices to remain artificially high. Even if many market participants believe that a price is too high, they won't necessarily be able to act on that belief, and the bubble will remain inflated. But is that such a good thing in the long run?

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