DHS absorbed the Customs department, which has power to deal with issues surrounding counterfeit goods. The domains DHS has been taking down have redistributed digital content without license/permission, which DHS considers to be a form of counterfeiting.
(Not saying they're right, just explaining why they're involved.)
I think that the prestige associated with chess is appropriate. It's quite a difficult to play and there really is no entertainment value to the game outside of the gameplay itself. Why would you say that its prestige has nothing to do with the game's merits?
It's a fine game, but it's still just a game. The comparison to Starcraft makes it clear.
I'm all for filling in your spare time by playing games, but if it's all you're doing in life then that seems pretty sad.
Especially true if chess playing ability really is an indicator of general intelligence. All those grandmasters could be doing amazing things for the human race, but nope, their brains are filled with queens and rooks.
Yes, that's a very good point. The perfect example of this was Emanuel Lasker. He was an extremely talented mathematician, noted for work in commutative algebra, but he poured the vast majority of his efforts into chess. He was world champion for 27 years, easily the most dominant player of his era and amongst the best ever.
Just imagine if mathematics had been his passion and chess the side hobby!
> All those grandmasters could be doing amazing things for the human race
I'm not so sure chess masters would necessarily be good at other things like say physics as they would have to have a passion in that to even become remotely viable for race saving. Grandmasters likely have been playing and practicing and have been absolutely absorbed in chess for many years in order to achieve their status, but I don't know if it would be as easy for someone who thinks chess to become absorbed in something like medicine or aeronautics or other such things.
They'd likely be equally good at things that also require large-scale, long-term thinking about complex zero-sum competitive resource optimization problems. Like, for example, war strategy. I don't know if it generalizes beyond that, though.
There are a lot of ways to use your intellect that don't benefit the world: crossword puzzles, inventing new programming languages, World of Warcraft, and sudoku all come to mind. Chess is one of the few that can get you laid. That doesn't change the fact that you're not helping anyone.
First of all, C++ is one of the hardest languages to implement — Clang only got to the point where it could compile Boost less than a year ago. The complexity and difficulty of the task severely culls the number of independent parties willing to work on it.
Second, the language syntax and semantics just don't lend themselves very well to a REPL. For example, there is no top-level execution context in C++. Should we pretend like the lines entered into the interpreter are part of main()? That would mean we couldn't do useful things like define functions. And should typing `int foo = 3` lock up the identifier "foo" for use as an int forever, like it would in normal C++, so that we couldn't later write `float foo` or `string foo` without restarting the interpreter ?
I might add: especially to entry level jobs. These jobs are hard to judge candidates for- you can't evaluate their past work, you have to evaluate their potential for future work.
This is what happens when your approach to system design revolves around whacking out the latest bugs with quick fixes rather than creating something logical and consistent. How many of these loopholes were created in order to stimulate a particular activity, or to close another specific loophole? At no point have lawmakers ever sat down to completely plan out the tax code, carefully considering the consequences of various interactions between laws, and this is the result.
> If high frequency trading is so needless, why does the entire market go into shock when the traders panicked and left on may 6th 2010?
Because HFTs, who enjoy the privilege of walking away from the market at the worst possible moment, had largely displaced traditional market makers who make expensive commitments not to do that. Nobody specifically chooses to do business with them, they're exploiting flaws in the way trades clear to front-run them and become unwanted middlemen.
...they're exploiting flaws in the way trades clear to front-run them and become unwanted middlemen.
Could you explain the mechanics of how this works?
Near as I can tell, the only way to become a "middleman" is to offer a better price than your competitors or to offer the same price at an earlier time. Is there a "front-run my competitors" FIX command I'm not aware of?
http://blog.themistrading.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/tox... describes a predatory algorithm deliberately making inconsequential trades solely to discover a buyer's limit, then selling short at that limit only to cover after the dip they themselves caused. This is basically scalping, a strategy designed to steal the surplus value from both the buyer and seller. Such abuses were even more egregious back when most exchanges offered flash orders, which is more like poker with certain players allowed to see your cards.
When a HFT buys and sells with a holding time in milliseconds, they are in no way guiding the correct allocation of our economy's resources, they are merely bleeding those who are. That they can do so profitably is showing us what we should fix about the way trades clear.
Huh. So basically, before HFT, the clever institutional trader could use HFT techniques to buy a bunch of shares from less sophisticated retail investors at $20.00 in spite of high demand.
On net, the institutional trader is gaining $0.01 at the expense of retail investors.
Now, in a world with professional HFTs, the institutional investor can't do this as easily and must pay the retail investors $20.01. How horrible!
It's hard to see why you are calling the HFT an "unwanted middleman". I mean sure - the institutional investor would love to keep taking money from the retail investors. But the retail investors want to keep their pennies - they certainly want the HFT to be present.
As I said, the only way to become a middleman is to offer a better price than your competitors.
Can you tell me more about these commitments and what makes them expensive?
No one may explicitly choose to trade with HFT firms, but that doesn't mean they don't value their presence
"Although Vanguard does not engage in "high
frequency trading" and does not operate a "dark pool," we believe much of the public
concern over "high frequency trading" is misplaced and believes such activity,
appropriately examined, contributes to a more efficient market that benefits all investors."
He is probably referring to NASDAQ market makers, who are obligated to have a quote at the NBBO at least 10-15% of the time. Of course, there is no obligation that their 10-15% include the 1 hour or so of the flash crash...
