In canonical!HP, halfbloods are wizards/witches with one witch/wizard parent and one Muggle parent. "Dad's a Muggle, Mum's a witch. Bit of a nasty shock for him when he found out." Muggleborns have two Muggle parents.

Sometimes people with a Muggleborn and a pureblood for parents are called halfbloods (Harry is one of these). Finer gradations aren't referred to (I'm not sure what Harry and Ginny's kids would be called).

Halfbloods are more populous, and their Muggle parents probably give them some nontrivial connection to the Muggle world.

Considering that at least part of the correct solution was found within 24 hours, I think you're right, Locke. It might affect accessibility, though -- I know I would be sad if I logged on only to find that the discussion had closed already.

Having read through the speculation, I even found most of the chapter quite anticlimactic. Recognizing the correct predictions removed all the tension, since MOR's tension relies so much on plotting.

That said, though, reading through the discussion gave me a harmless and very insightful lesson into how predictions work. I learned what makes a prediction probable versus plausible, in a way that not only allows me to understand it, but to think about how I would apply it to my life (I hadn't really internalized that the percents of all possible outcomes have to add to a hundred, even though in hindsight that's fairly obvious. I also learned about the betting-real-money threshold).

All in all, despite getting in the way of the chapter, it was a nice, closed-environment rationalist lesson. Thank you for prompting the discussion, Eliezer!

Hermione will be considered a murderess

That's attempted murderess and Minion#1 in Harry's Dark Army.

Maybe Hermione needs to join Chaos Legion now. I don't see how she can be credible as a leader in opposition to Harry anymore, even in a game.

Yes, it's super sad to let a little girl be tortured to death. But there is a cost large enough that it is not worth paying to prevent it, even if the cost is only in terms of mere cash, political capital, personal reputation as not being more fearsome than Fear itself, keeping important military secrets for the coming war secret, and the enmity of those you failed to lose to. That's the meaning of the phrase "Taboo Tradeoffs", it's that stating you kept Hermione out of Azkaban is not enough justification.

Of course, if he had counted the cost, he would have been an awful hypocrite. Recall what he said after Hermione rescued him from the Dementor:

I'll say that no matter what it ends up costing you to have kissed me, don't ever doubt for a second that it was the right thing to do.

At least he's holding himself to the same standard, even if it's a bad one.

Lucius Malfoy's eyes narrowed. "By the report I received, you cannot cast the Patronus Charm, and Dumbledore knows this. The power of a single Dementor nearly killed you. You would not dare venture near Azkaban in your own person -"

Has Lucius not spoken to Draco in private yet?

If he hasn't... when he does, and tells Draco what happened at the trial, and finds that Draco isn't surprised (or at least, not more than usual when it comes to Harry)... what will he think then?

It seems like a pretty glaring one to me; I argued in the tvtropes discussion thread that I didn't think this solution was going to be implemented, because I found it hard to believe that Dumbledore wouldn't have thought of it. It was actually the first thing that came to my mind when I was reading chapter 80, and trying to think of holds Harry had on Lucius; when you know someone's been lying, catching them out in the consequences of it is one of the handiest ways to gain advantage over them. By the time I finished the chapter, I had already dismissed it on the grounds that if Dumbledore, who's been maneuvering against Lucius in the realm of politics for over a decade, hadn't suggested it, there was probably some reason why it wouldn't work. The fact that he would let such a clear opportunity to use his opponent's deceptions against him slip has forced me to revise my estimate of his cunning considerably downwards.

Get him an internet connection in Hogwarts and play the market using his time turner.

Early '90s. That'd be a JANET connection, which was an academic network. I expect AOL or Compuserve might be possible. We're talking about the mists of prehistory here, i.e. before 1995. Heck, it was even before the National Lottery was operating in the UK (that started 1994). The stock market would be playable, if he had a suitable adult to front for him.

No, how he makes serious money in the muggle world in 1991 Britain may require actual research.

It varied. Some countries used a bimetallic standard with fixed exchange rates, some used one as the standard and let the other float. There's even been trimetallic(gold/silver/copper) at times.

It's actually been a political issue which of those to use more recently than you'd expect(and no, I don't mean Ron Paul) - the 1896 US Presidential election was fought in significant part on a Democrat plan to move to a bimetallic standard away from straight gold, which was in the day an inflationary move designed to help indebted farmers. If you've ever heard of the "Cross of Gold" speech by William Jennings Bryan, that was it. A couple decades earlier, though, the US was bimetallic, and routinely had one metal or the other sucked completely out of circulation by prices changing faster than the official exchange ratio, as is to be expected of a system with fixed exchange rates and no capital controls.

The history of how to abuse commodity money systems(both from the public's perspective and from the minter's) is long and actually rather fascinating. If you ever hear someone talking about how gold is stable and can't be abused, you can feel free to laugh at them.

Bester has only thought about it for a few seconds so there could be problems that would occur to someone who is knowledgeable about the wizarding economy if they thought about it for a bit.