May 19, 2013

An eagle-eyed colleague recently pointed me to the case of CLS Bank v Alice, where Alice Corporation is trying to enforce a set of patents against CLS Bank, the little-known (but systematically vital) central settlement point for interbank FX trades. The judgment itself is interesting because it tries to rule on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions (that is, business methods implemented “on a computer” instead of “in real life”). Alice’s patents specifically refer to computer-based implementations of certain processes, rather than the processes themselves, and the Federal Court was asked to rule whether the computer-based implementation might be patentable even when the business process itself isn’t.

Apr 2, 2013

In 2010, a Florida man parted with 10,000 units of a new-fangled anarcho-currency thing called “bitcoins” in return for two hot, fresh, tasty pizzas. At the time, that was about $40 worth of these “buttcoins” (NSFW), so that was already quite an expensive pizza. (Must’ve been a pretty serious case of the munchies.) Three years later, and Bitcoin has boomed, busted, and boomed again. It’s been used by Cypriots, Iranians, dope fiends, and people who just want to buy a pizza without Big Brother knowing whether or not they like anchovies.

Dec 10, 2012

I like to think that all of JRE’s readers would be smart enough to run a mile if they saw an investment advertising returns of “20-25% per year guaranteed!”. Unfortunately, a phenomenally large number of Singaporeans and Malaysians weren’t:  KUALA LUMPUR - A gold-trading business shut down [in October] by Malaysian authorities for suspected illegalities may have raised as much as US$3 billion (S$3.66 billion) from its clients, a government official said Wednesday.

Jul 7, 2012

Walter Kurtz at Sober Look had a great piece a few weeks ago, where he wryly suggested a way to make money if you don’t like that IRS the bank’s sold you: default on the payments and sue the bank. (Note: this is not an actual way to make money, and also not a good idea if you don’t like angry traders hunting you down.) The “sue the bank” option has a long and storied history in corporate hedging circles.

May 7, 2012

Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. #!/bin/bash export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY={path to your AWS private key} export EC2_CERT={path to your AWS certificate} export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jre