Yeah certainly. I don't necessarily think they need a new or different test, just to be more rigorous; if they could filter out "obvious" consistently I think that would pretty much solve things (especially if terms were also shorter).

But in practice, there seems to be a lot of bad ones get through - and perhaps more sweeping reform is the only way to fix it.

I agree with you in principle (and I think it's silly you got marked troll). To me the test for a patent's validity should be vaguely: assuming you wanted to do X, would a skilled person with access to relevant area knowledge quickly or obviously come up with solution Y. In the cases you've listed, I think the answer is "no" - and those smell like valid, patentable ideas (though I couldn't actually judge without knowing the landscape and what was common knowledge/technique at the times of invention). However, in many software patent cases, I feel like the patent is being awarded, essentially, for "doing X" in an obvious way (simply because X hasn't been done or done often).

I also think patent duration should be shorter across the board. Things can spin up faster than they used to; 20 years is an eternity when we're talking about technology or software - on balance, I think we'd be better served by much shorter durations.

Taxi licenses/medallions aren't really about any of that - they're about limiting the number of taxis. After that, it's just supply and demand as medallions are resold.

For an example of how crazy this gets: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix...

So the reasonable complaint here would be something like "there'll be too many taxis if their numbers aren't capped somehow" or "the competition here is completely unfair". Insurance (and associated regulation) would mostly be a separate matter, and have very little to do with that $200,000.

A legitimately intelligent computer wouldn't have to do much tricking. It'd have to lie, sure, if it was asked "are you a computer?" - but it could demonstrate its intelligence and basic world understanding without resorting to obfuscation, filibustering, and confusion. Those are "tricks".

By contrast, building a system that can associate information in ways that result in reasonable answers (eg. Darwin), is not so much a "clever trick" as a reasonable step in building an intelligent agent. Both are clever, but hardly in the same way.

Maybe you design an obstacle course that required the leg to function in a range of everyday scenarios, that tests its endurance, comfort, and flexibility.

These chat bots would be the equivalent of calling a helicopter a "prosthetic leg" and flying over the course.

In both cases, they're avoiding the meat of the challenge. Yes, arriving at the finish line is the goal, but it's how you got there that is the interesting part. That's not to say these are useless projects - they're fun, and there's some legitimately interesting stuff there. But it'll be a very different beast that truly passes the Turing Test.

Whoops, my bad. Didn't read the comment close enough.

No mistake - 150 APM is not really even that high for professional players.

Skip to the middle of https://www.youtube.com/watch?... to get any idea what it looks like. On the best players, like Flash, both hands are pretty much a blur from start to finish.

Can you describe a lot that simultaneously has sufficient parking but also commands a price in the $100 for a free space? What would that look like? I'm assuming by "sufficient parking" you mean "full but with a reasonable amount of turnover."

My work would be a place like this. Lots of work places rely on public/street parking, and often there's about as much public parking available as there is people who work there. At my work, you'd need to bring in maybe 5 cars to upset the balance - but I'm sure there's other places you could do with less. They probably wouldn't be able to charge $100 (there's a grocery store maybe 500m away you could park at in a pinch), but even if it was only $20, that could certainly be worthwhile for the seller for a few minutes work.

. Although when parking is measured in the hundreds of spaces,

Yeah - I agree it probably wouldn't be a big problem for dedicated lots; I think you'd want to target smaller niches, like city commercial blocks that rely on street parking. And again, to monetize you'd probably want to hit the business owners rather than individual parkers (who likely would just choose to shop/eat elsewhere).

And you'd need some organization. But I think that kind of organization would come together quickly if people managed to make money with an app like this.

2) Any place where the "scalper" price is high is likely to be chronically full. That is, in general, you should expect to be unable to find parking during busy times at those locations. That means that if we ban this practice, more often than not, the people who you describe as desperately needing those spaces won't get them at all.

I don't see any reason this would need to be true. There's lots of places where public parking is sufficient for normal use, but would still be great places to extract a little money (your expected price would mostly vary with the quality of alternatives). You could create parking problems wherever you wanted - heck, you could just go from business to business, ransoming the close public parking with your 20 vehicles.

Would you also think that's similarly benign arbitrage?

Me? I think you'd get a fine under some generic nuisance law (which seems about right to me).

Specifically, try doing past algorithm competitions - probably starting with their High School level competitions (that may sound insulting, but there's some very good programmers in that division). Once you've done some TopCoder, the data manipulations and calculations you do in "normal" programming will seem really easy. And they always post good solution explanations (or you can look at other people's solutions) to get you started.

Algorithm work like this isn't the end and and be all of programming, but getting good at it will make you better at everything else you do - and you'll understand algorithms at a much deeper level once you've used them hands on at your own prompting (rather than using Dijkstra at the end of the chapter on Dijkstra). You'll also be directly prepared to implement the algorithms you need for games, physics simulations, efficient data processing, and all sorts of "heavy lifting" programming work that many experienced programmers fail at.

You're right, at least in a way. At some point, other money has to enter in order for a valuation to make sense. In practice, this happens a few ways: a company starts paying out profits as dividends, it can use profits to buy back shares (which effectively works a lot like a dividend - a transfer of money from the company to its owners), or a company can stop being publicly traded (by being liquidated, sold, or re-privatized).

If a company doesn't do any of these, and never will, there'd be little reason to own their stock (not zero - there's still control and prestige and other marginal benefits - but nothing substantial). That said, it's perfectly reasonable to buy a company that's not currently doing any of these things - as long as there's an expectation that they'll do so later.

If a company is profitable, and they're plowing money back into effective growth (ie. making more money) that is often better for the investors than just paying the money out now. Apple would not be making billions now if it had not re-invested the millions it made in the past. (And now that it has billions of cash and can't effectively spend it all on growth, it's doing more dividends/buybacks).

Of course in reality, a company's valuation is not always terribly rational and things are often definitely overvalued. But in principle the market makes sense and is not a zero sum game. If nothing else, for those who don't trust "growth stock" valuation, there's certainly stocks that do still operate on a "pay out about 7% dividend, year after year, sort of basis".

The article says:

"One could even say that it played a significant role in bringing down the Republic."

The Roman Republic preceded the Roman Empire. The historically literate person is saying that concrete helped in the transition from the Republic - which was controlled by the senate and consuls with limited terms, to the Empire, which was ruled by a single emperor for long stretches.

Concrete helped start the Empire, not end it.

The empire wouldn't end in Rome for another 600 years. It wouldn't end in general for another 1600 or so. It lasted so long, at least partly, because of all its durable buildings and bridges.

We just put a fan on ours, and it stayed up. But yeah, the power supply was the only thing Commodore hardware I ever heard of problems with.

Yes. That's probably what it is. You're probably me in the future.

That's bad news for me, because that means I'm going to lose most of my net worth, start earning well under half what I make now, and become really, really stupid. And I'm not sure how I'll reconcile my experience doing things like "presenting in board meetings of large companies", and "planning acquistions and deciding on company valuation" with what will be my newfound understandings of how these things "really work", that deep understanding that you have based on paying off your house and buying windows and retiring on $500,000. All these revelations I'm about to have will be very disconcerting. Maybe my university will give me a refund on all those economics, business, and accounting courses?

I guess I'll also be 3 or 4 years younger - and I'll also be extremely confident, impervious to reason, and desperately smug about my stupid cynical worldview. So I guess that's cool too.

or by making more and more ludicrous statements which can be more easily dismissed

Yes.. I've said some crazy stupid crap here - that the stock market is a zero sum game, stock prices don't affect executive pay, "the ability to access money.. is 'solvency'", and that stock prices don't reflect earnings.

Oh wait, those were all you. Or maybe you're right about all those things, and it's basic enonomic theory and observable reality that's wrong.

To call the difference between financial earnings and share price "hair splitting" is to say that you have no clue whatsoever what "Earnings Per Share" (a fundamentals analysis benchmark) is, or P/E ratio, or anything about the stock market.

Yep. That's what it is: I don't know what PE is. I had predicted "pathetic attempts at condescension" before, so I'm glad you delivered on that.

No wonder you're so whacked. You actually think stocks reflect earnings.

People usually grow out of their "reflexively contrarian" phase in high school. Again, read the whole conversation again. Look at the stupid crap you've argued for. How could anything I say make you sound dumber?

I'm not providing new fodder for conversation. I'm just going to insult you from here on out. I kind of thought you'd get more angry, so I'm still looking for some of that.