To circle around a bit back to a hacker news favorite topic - this is exactly why high-frequency traders put their equipment in data centers as close to the action as possible. They're seeing the and trading on the future if your frame of reference is some data center in California.

Until just now, I always thought this was a silly practice. My line of reasoning was "What difference does a 30ms ping make?" I guess I hadn't thought about it too much though.

Now, after reading a comment elsewhere in this thread, which talks about how a cpu can execute six instructions in the time it takes the light from my monitor to reach my eyes, the data center thing seems a lot more reasonable.