scott00

One key difference is how much time operators have to figure out what's going on before action is necessary. If an aircraft autopilot fails, time before crash is likely measured in minutes, so the pilot taking 10 seconds to snap back into pilot mode still gives a pretty good likelihood of a favorable outcome. In a car, 10 seconds of no or bad driving on the part of the autopilot is pretty likely to cause a collision.

Even so, it's been implicated in crashes, notably Air France 447.

The two roles are not comparable in my opinion. In most cases an instructor of humans has no capability to control the car. I've heard of some cases where they have brakes installed on the passenger side, but I'm not sure how common that is. I've never heard of a teaching car with full duplicate controls, though it's certainly possible they exist. I think even a bad new human driver is still better than an Uber automated system at the moment.

I like mined diamond vs lab diamond.

Greater flexibility in hours and reduced scrutiny of immigration status are two reasons I can think of someone may knowingly prefer a lower than minimum wage job driving for Uber than making minimum wage at, say, a fast food restaurant.

My non-lawyer opinion: I would be shocked if a motivated Illinois Assistant State's Attorney couldn't turn this into a criminal conviction. The definition of wire fraud in Illinois (720 ILCS 5/17-24) is "A person commits wire fraud when he or she... devises... a scheme or artifice to defraud or to obtain money or property by means of false pretenses, representations, or promises" and as part of that scheme communicates using a wire or radio waves. Basically, if you lie in connection with a financial transaction and use a telephone or the internet, you've committed wire fraud. The state doesn't prosecute many wire fraud cases as far as I know, but nearly every white collar federal case includes a wire fraud charge, because basically anything nefarious is wire fraud in addition to whatever else it may be.

Of course, just because a prosecutor _could_ prosecute someone for a crime doesn't mean they will or should. And I think Reserve's lawyers have probably come to the conclusion that the State's Attorney probably has better things to do with her staff's time than prosecute this case.

He was most likely referring to the proper noun "Spectrum", rather than the common noun "spectrum". It's a cable tv/internet company owned by Charter.

Mine does this as well. They do it because they've convinced their regulator to let them raise prices in exchange for doing it.

What would you recommend as a minimum budget to have a reasonable chance of success?

I would expect deferred payment for goods already received to show up on the balance sheet as accounts payable, and would put that in the "short term liabilities" bucket along with short term debt for modeling purpose. I'm skeptical this technique would have any influence on debt ratings or pricing. Am I missing something?

Because fraud protection costs money, and it's useful to have an electronic payments medium that doesn't have it, and therefore avoids those costs.

It's very hard to get regulatory approval for a banking charter right now. The FDIC has been approving less than 1 new bank a year since 2009, as compared to an average of 154 a year in the eight years prior to 2009[1]. And that's just one of several regulatory bodies that would need to approve a crypto bank.

[1] https://www.bankdirector.com/index.php/magazine/archives/2nd...

It does. I'm sure some would move, but New York and California maintain high tax rates without turning into ghost towns. To be clear, I'm not arguing the union position is correct, just that it's not ridiculous on its face. It's feasibility depends on subtle second order effects like the one you describe, not on raising tax collection to obviously impossible levels.

The unions simply want taxes to be raised to whatever level is necessary to pay them what they want. It's been a while since I did the math, but my recollection is the level of taxation required to balance Illinois' books is not completely insane (though it is high).

Everything's negotiable, but the wisdom of trying it depends on the strength of your negotiating position. Many severance agreements simply reiterate obligations to which you've already agreed in employment/non-compete/non-solicitation agreements. If this is the case, you have basically no leverage. If they're asking for substantial concessions (say, you have a 3 month non-compete and the severance agreement extends it to 12), you've got more of a shot.

> what is the basis for the prohibition on selling shares? How are those prohibitions enforced? If the basis is contract law, then you can't necessarily prevent people from undertaking the prohibited action, can you? Just collect damages if they do.

The organizing documents will have language that specifies the right to injunctive relief. That clause can be used by the court as a basis to order you not to complete a contemplated sale. (Obviously, only works if they catch you before it happens.)

> If an employee sells their shares in violation of a company contract, what happens? Can the company repossess the shares? Or are the shares structured so that they can be made worthless?

The organizing document will specify that shares must be registered and all transfers must be done by filing appropriate paperwork with the company. The company will refuse to process transfers that don't comply with the rules, and refuse to recognize as shareholders anyone who claims to own shares but doesn't have them registered in their name.

> Can employees construct a security based on their shares and then sell that instead? ... an asset-backed security.

Agreements that prohibit transfers often also prohibit pledging the shares as collateral, which means it couldn't be used to secure a derivative contract (making it asset-backed). But it's difficult to prohibit every possible derivative contract, so if someone really wanted to sell some transfer-restricted stock, I believe it's somewhat doable via this route. If you're interested in learning more about it, look at what SharesPost is up to, from what I understand, they buy exposure to private companies in the form of unsecured derivatives contracts.

I was consuming the feed in question via an API provided by the vendor and didn't have direct knowledge of the wire protocol, but based on how it was described to me during the sales process it was probably either FAST or a proprietary protocol with a similar design.

Using the x86-64 C struct layout as the serialization format is increasingly common in financial trading protocols. Skipping all the bit twiddling has a huge performance impact at high message rates. I once compared two feeds covering the same basic data, where the major difference was one had a complicated serialization and one was C struct layout. The former needed two 16 core servers just to process I/O and deserialize the messages; the latter used 1 core on a single server.

I keep track of fiber deployments in Chicago by looking at the city's permit database (which is public and has a pretty usable search UI hooked up to it). Might not be as easy in other cities but I'm wondering if it suggests a general strategy of looking to local government for help in finding fiber. Maybe something as basic as finding the guy who issues permits to dig up streets and asking if he remembers who's been laying conduit recently and where. No idea how well this would work in practice outside of Chicago.

> Is it a valid legal defence to say, that was just marketing lies so don't take it seriously?

There actually is a recognized defense to fraud claims along those lines. The concept is called "puffery": https://definitions.uslegal.com/p/puffery/

A recent estimate of the digital ad market puts it at $105 billion[1]. Divide $16 billion by that and you get 15%.

[1] http://avc.com/2017/12/the-digital-advertising-duopoly/

There was actually an interesting paper written about this recently: http://john-joseph-horton.com/papers/uber_price.pdf

Essentially, when Uber raises fares it increases earnings in the short term, but not long term, because more drivers enter the system and push their earnings back down as each driver gets fewer rides.

Uber could solve this problem by limiting the number of drivers. But that of course turns some underpaid Uber drivers into unemployed ex-Uber drivers. Which doesn't sound like a desirable outcome either.

Your criticisms about it not being the amount that came in or that can come out also apply to stocks.

If all I know about a crypto asset is that it has a market cap of $100 million, I know it's a very niche asset in comparison to bitcoin or ethereum. It's small enough it's reasonably likely to be a scam. For me personally, it's small enough that I'm not interested in learning any more, which has practical use because my time is finite.

Crypto market cap doesn't mean the same thing as the market cap of a stock, but that doesn't mean it's meaningless. It approximates the total amount of wealth currently held in the form of a particular crypto, which is interesting to know in comparison to more traditional asset classes (stocks, bonds, gold, etc) as well as to other cryptos. If you also have some knowledge or an assumption about the velocity of money in the crypto, it also gives you an indication as to the total amount of commerce that can be facilitated by the crypto at its current valuation.

I was wondering that myself. At least at a first pass higher bandwidth doesn't look like an advantage. The system you link to promises up to 2 Gbps, the same as a Ubiquiti AF24HD microwave system. Perhaps it's easier to put several of these on the same pole, and that's how you get the higher bandwidth?

He graduated in 1966, so it's been at least 51 years now. There's a pretty good chance the professor is dead, and a near-certainty he's retired. So I would say close to no chance at this point. Back when Esquire did the story in 1978, however, it had only been 12-15 years. It's within the realm of possibility the grade book would have been findable at that time.

Can any computer chess/stockfish experts comment on the choice of 1 GB for hash size? I have no chess or computer chess domain expertise whatsoever, but it strikes me as a suspiciously low setting for a memory-related parameter on what was probably at least a 32 core machine. It makes me wonder if they simply dialed down the hash size until they got a nice convincing win.

Update: took a look at settings used for TCEC. Looks like they used 16 GB in season 7, 64GB in season 8, 32 GB in season 9, and 16 GB in season 10. Two observations: (1) interesting that they've decreased hash sizes in recent years (2) definitely seems like 1 GB is not reflective of how an engine would be configured for TCEC.

The discounts on shipping you can get for buying multiple items from a single vendor make the objective function non-linear.

The barrier to entry is that they're building a marketplace. Building a marketplace from scratch is hard: no driver wants to drive for a network with no riders, and no riders want to ride a network with no drivers. To make it work you basically have to pay drivers to drive empty cars until your customer acquisition gets enough riders that the market is self-sustaining. That requires a lot of capital. If you follow that game plan in one market against a national monopolist, they'll cut their pricing in your market to drive you out of business. So really, you need enough capital to mount a credible attack in enough markets that the monopolist is better off accepting duopoly profits than burning what it would take to put you out of business. That's a lot of capital to raise and a lot of hassle, and you don't even get monopoly profits if you win. As a result, you'd probably have trouble raising the money. That's the theory anyway.

Commodity exchanges are actually largely unregulated in the US. The existence of a large complicated federal law called the "Commodity Exchange Act" may at first blush make you think otherwise, but the CEA establishes rules for futures exchanges (including commodity futures exchanges), not commodity exchanges.

You have a controlled environment for the workers, who do their work on locked down software and hardware. Basically, employees don't get to bring any personal possessions into the room where they do the work, the software through which they do the work does not allow them to copy or export any data, the OS that hosts the software doesn't allow them to do anything but run the software.