The dawn of online piracy :
Glover enjoyed both albums, but he was in an unusual position: he had the power to influence the outcome of this feud. If he leaked “Graduation” and held on to “Curtis,” Kanye might sell fewer records. But if he leaked “Curtis” and held on to “Graduation”—well, he might make 50 Cent retire.
That same day, Sarao and his firm, Nav Sarao Futures Limited Plc, used “layering” and “spoofing” algorithms to trade thousands of futures S&P 500 E-mini contracts. The orders amounted to about $200 million worth of bets that the market would fall, a trade that represented between 20 percent and 29 percent of all sell orders at the time. The orders were then replaced or modified 19,000 times before being canceled in the afternoon.
About three weeks later, Sarao told his broker that he had just called the CME and told them to “kiss my ass,” the affidavit said.
They begin tuning up their devices like drag racers tuning hot rods before a race. They twist resistant wire into coils to carry electricity from their vaporizer’s battery, and weave dry cotton through the coils. The cotton acts like a wick, soaking up e-cigarette juice so the coils can heat it as electricity loops through them.
A great interview with Ken Goldberg :
There are so many aspects of human unpredictability that we don’t have a model for. When you watch a ballet or a dance or see a great athlete and realize the amazing abilities, you start to appreciate those things that are uniquely human. The ability to have an emotional response, to be compelling, to be able to pick up on subtle emotional signals from others, those are all things that we haven’t made any progress on with robots.
In a typical Ponzi scheme, like Bernie Madoff’s, the scammer moves money between investors, to pay what he claims are dividends on an investment that doesn’t actually exist. But Galbraith didn’t have a fake investment as a front. He had birds — lots of birds, and those birds created more birds, which he, in turn, was obligated to buy, then house, feed, water and medicate at considerable cost until he could sell them off to someone else. He appeared to miss the whole point of a Ponzi: He took the hidden, fungible fictions that give the scam its power and turned them into tangible liabilities.
Abnormal Capitalist 