Liberty

http://radian.org/notebook/porsche From 2009, for those who missed it back then. nice move.

I'm impressed by the new kindles. Amazon did better than I expected (from what I can tell - I haven't tried them yet). That's speaking as a content consumer, not as an investor, though...

They don't have access to Motorola patents yet, no? And whatever deals we're hearing about now have probably been going on for a while. I think it's too early to tell if it did anything against the patent trolls.

One of the things that I've internalized about investing is that there are not bonus points for originality. Best idea wins, doesn't matter who came up with it. Trying to be original for originality's sake is just as bad as blindly copying everybody else, IMO. I'm not saying that's what you suggested. Just stating my own general guidelines.

That's what I noted too. Not the specific companies, but how qualitative he is and how important top quality management is.

I just saw it too. Quite good, quite enjoyable, and lots of lessons applicable to investing. Recommended.

Sounds good, at least we know it happened. Thanks for sharing what they told you!

TD charges 1.5% between CAD and USD. TD Waterhouse can give you a better rate (below 1%) if you call them, but that's only for larger amounts (like 50k for example). Anyone in Canada has a good way to converted between USD and CAD for smaller amounts (a few thousands)?

Still haven't seen the movie or read the book, but found this: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/09/moneyball-the-very-good-feel-bad-sports-movie-of-the-year/245536/

;D

I've been checking every day too.. Have they said when they would publish it?

Intuitively, rail shipments seem like the best single measure to me too. Raw materials, a large fraction of imported goods (from ports), coal (proxy for energy), and lots of finished good move around by rail. If rail shipments are up a good amount yet the economy is supposedly slowing down, it seems like something else in the real economy should be down a lot to more than compensate.

Yeah, margin calls make sense. A smaller version of this seems to have happened last month.

No, just wondering if there's an obvious explanation that I'm missing :)

Not much. But when it spikes up, I hear all about how gold is a refuge and a store of value and all that. But when it spikes down, I usually don't hear much.

I was looking at the price of gold just for fun, and it has been falling quite a bit in recent days. Isn't it supposed to go up when there's panic and uncertainty and all that (according to the gold bugs)? Am I missing something?

Anyone on the board sold HPQ because of recent developments? Just curious...

Same as Parsad, except I don't run a fund, and I don't have much cash left... :'( But my consolation is that the businesses I own are probably doing crazy buybacks and/or allocating capital in other businesses as we speak, so it should turn out well in the long-term.

Some people seem to be unaware of this, because the stock had a nice pop today.

SETI's the grandpa, but there are now a ton. Many in the life science, astronomy, mathematics, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects

I live somewhere where we have tons of very cheap hydro power, so we have electric heating. I figure I might as well have that electricity do something useful for humankind before it heats the place :) It would be even better if I had a dozen old PCs that I could use to heat the whole place from one end to the other during the cold months.. Comfort from science, literally!

Look at CLF...

Lovely frickin' ending to day. Wonder if it's the start of a new mini-panic..

I second that. People who are generous with their ideas - like many of the people on this forum - usually get more in return than what they give away anyways, so it makes a lot of sense.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/20/technology/microsoft_bing/index.htm?source=cnn_bin The 9 billion is since 2007, probably a lot more if you go back to the early 2000s or even late 1990s.