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About 20 years ago, the Audi 5000S had the same supposed problem. You can read about the problem at the "New York Times", the "Los Angeles Times", and the "Business & Media Institute".

The trouble began when "60 Minutes" (of CBS News) broadcast a story about a woman who killed her son when she accidentally pressed the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal. Her son was standing in front of the car. The woman, refusing to admit guilt, accused Audi of producing a defective car which accelerates automatically without driver intervention. She even filed a lawsuit against Audi. (Later, the court determined that she was at fault, but that fact was never broadcast in the original "60 Minutes" program.)

The sales of Audi vehicles fell dramatically after that "60 Minutes" program.

The Audi 5000S was never defective, but it did have 1 minor inconvenience. The accelerator pedal and the brake pedal were much closer to each other than they were in a traditional American car. This closeness was something to which a small subset of American drivers could not become accustomed. They sometimes did press the accelerator pedal when they intended to press the brake pedal.

As for the Toyota Camry, is it defective? The probability of it being defective is higher than the probability of the Audi 5000S being defective. Consumer-safety standards in Japan are lower than the standards in the European Union.

Even from an engineering perspective, the Toyota Camry is a dangerous design. For example, the transmission is mechanically separated from the automatic-transmission lever (that the driver uses to change gears). The lever is connected to an electronic box that sends some electrical signals -- along copper wires -- to the tranmission to control it: the process is drive-by-wire. Supposedly, Toyota used 2 identical sets of wires (for reasons of fault tolerance) from the electronic box to the transmission.

Another participant in this discussion claims that Toyota also mechanically separated the accelerator pedal from the fuel line. Toyota appears to have used drive-by-wire throughout the design to eliminate some metal -- thus saving money.

Do not trust the fault tolerance in mass-merchandise products. Fault tolerance is expensive and is meant to be expensive. Toyota likely tried to save some money on the fault tolerance, and it was not able to protect the vehicle from the 1-in-1,000,000 chance of a transient fault in the electronic circuits. The chance of a glitch is low, but the probability that it occurs exactly once among 200,000 vehicles is high.

The fact that only a handful of people have been affected by the freak accelerations matches a distribution of a low-probability electrical glitch. If you own a Toyota Camry, I suggest that you sell it as quickly as possible and get an old-fashioned-technology vehicle without the drive-by-wire. The Ford Fusion exceeds the quality of the Toyota Camry, does not use drive-by-wire, and costs much less than the Toyota deathtrap. Think about it.

Does WOFF support complex positioning, etc, like graphite? If not it won't be a lot of help for minority languages as the OS or browser will have to know their layout rules to display them properly. Remember the devanagari error in the Wikipedia logo.

You are ignoring the facts. Research shows that today, there is very little upward mobility in the US. For instance, if you are born poor, there is only a 1 percent chance you end up in the top 5% of incomes. For those born into wealth, it is a 22 percent chance. You cannot pin that difference on laziness.

Some other facts:
- People who worked long hours were more upwardly mobile in 1990-91 and 1997-98 than households who worked fewer hours. Yet this was not true in 2003-04, suggesting that people who work long hours on a consistent basis no longer appear to be able to generate much upward mobility for their families.
- Over the last decades, an increasing percentage of households had a large short-term reduction in income. It are these set-backs that make it very hard for hardworking poor people to advance.
- The median household was no more upwardly mobile in 2003-04, a year when GDP grew strongly, than it was it was during the recession of 1990-91. This suggests that upward mobility has actually slowed a great deal, since you'd expect far more upward mobility during boom times.
- There is far more upward (and downward) mobility in more socialist countries like Canada and Denmark, than in the US and the UK. This shows that the American Dream is a lie and that more capitalism doesn't necessarily mean that you get a merit-based society.

PS. See http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html
PS. And also http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A02E5D61238F934A35755C0A9639C8B63

I thank you for replying with a cut-and-paste summary of Canadian law. Please continue; I will look forward to your summaries of the UK law, and the Australian law, and the other "Commonwealth Countries" I wrote of in my post, along with your learned experiences as to what, exactly, one can expect by way of assessments and pre-sentence reports.

I've been to many a case where the Crown proceeded by Summary Conviction. Pre-sentence reports, psychiatric assessments, and the like are common. Only last week a person who is charged with a relatively minor offense, proceeding by Summary Conviction, was remanded for a Psychiatric Report, because he acted crazy in a public place; he tried to set himself on fire in an insurance office.

Your post may be interesting to some, and I thank you for it. Perhaps you might mention that the courts in Canada are under provincial jurisdiction, and practices and typical sentences vary from province to province, sometimes significantly.

But, I'm sure you've spent time in court in every province in the nation. Please tell me about traveling courts in the Yukon, where a single van or airplane often carries the judge, prosecutor, clerks, bailiff, and defense council for extended travel to remote areas. Someone such as yourself must surely wonder what they talk about. Or did you not know about that either?

" ... Same as plea bargaining anywhere else. ..."

Clearly not, but thanks for finally, in the last line, getting back on topic to my post.

You, sir, have no experience with accused in most situations in the US, obviously. Please tell me of the time someone in Canada was charged with a rape offense carrying a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison and ended up being sentenced, after a plea bargain based on a guilty plea, to misdemeanor sexual assault, a $750 fine, no record.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/20/nyregion/prosecutor-defends-plea-bargain-in-rape-case.html

Oh, and that was just the first Google hit.

Don't worry, you can still be president:

Clinton:

Many character issues were raised during the campaign, including allegations that Clinton had dodged the draft during the Vietnam War, and had used marijuana, which Clinton claimed he had pretended to smoke, but "didn't inhale."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1992

Bush:

A conversation between Bush and an old friend, author Doug Wead, touched on the subject of use of illegal drugs. In the taped recording of the conversation, Bush explained his refusal to answer questions about whether he had used marijuana at some time in his past. “I wouldn’t answer the dope questions,” Bush says. “You know why? Because I don’t want some little kid doing what I tried.”[15] When Wead reminded Bush of his earlier public denial of using cocaine, Bush replied, "I haven't denied anything."[16]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_substance_abuse_controversy

Barack:

'For one thing, he said, "When I was a kid, I inhaled."
"That was the point," Obama told an audience of magazine editors.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/world/americas/24iht-dems.3272493.html

Income level doesn't have much to do with the risk level of a given loan.

Sure — I agree with you... Actual income and the amount of savings are just parts of the picture — banks have spent decades figuring out their formulas. They already want to give mortgages, because it is profitable (in a Capitalist society anyway), so the bank, that overestimates the risk (and thus turns away some good customers) loses to competitors. In a free society, though anyone ought to be able to set their own standards and thresholds...

What the article was talking about was that lowering the requirements: ''Yet there remain too many borrowers whose credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in the so-called subprime market.''

See, "many borrowers" are "a notch below", our standards, so let's lower our standards. This was not done to make money (a properly Capitalist mind would've rejected it in a heartbeat), but to "help people"... And, hey, it worked against soo well, one may suspect Clinton and the rest of the people pushing this in 1999 to have done this on purpose. Oh, and then — the masterminding brilliance of hanging this catastrophe around McCain and Republicans! Evil anti-Capitalist geniuses...

Someone making $100k might be a poor candidate for $300,000 30 year mortgage.

$100k per annum is not poor. Average salary in the US was just over $42k (gross) in 2005. Your using this number suggests, you don't really have a grasp of facts...

there's no indication there was any public pressure to ignore credit scores

Of course, there was, even if nobody said so outright. You don't need to explicitly demand lowering standards — it is much easier to simply accuse the lender of racism... Since the CRA's inception in 1977, it is estimated, the banks have given at least $10bln to the non-profit groups (such as ACORN) — to keep the pressure at tolerable levels. But $10bln is nothing — just "the cost of doing business", passed onto the rest of us.

The banks were paying these assholes off, resisted suicidal changes to their risk-assessment and remained profitable. Until 1999, when it became possible to off-load crappier mortgages to the Fannie Mae. When this happened, the banks caved in, because their risk went down dramatically — they no longer had to keep the crappy mortgage, which they wouldn't have given without undue pressure in the first place, on their own books...

And thus the bubble began to inflate. There were suddenly fewer homes, than people able to buy them, which increased the prices. Our efficient Capitalist economy responded immediately with feverish construction activity. There were some early warning signs, but they were ignored. People unable to keep up with payments could refinance for a while (because the market values of their homes kept increasing), but that's not indefinite either. Banks' attempts to foreclose were met with the same resistance from the same non-profits — including the brilliant idea of littering the lawns of bank-executives with plastic sharks, and more of the same race-

The Bush administration based their court arguments on an extended interpretation of executive privilege , whereas the Obama administration is making an argument based in precedent and case law - state secrets.

That you've presented your argument as "See, Bush is right because Obama seems to be doing the same" shows you probably know nothing about the arguments in this case, or the executive privilege abuses Bush's administration made in the name of our country.

You do your country a serious disservice with the same old mindless "my team right, your team wrong" dittohead rhetoric. Means another ignorant voter, with no idea what their government is up to, regardless which party is in office -- and no clue how to fight it.

Eliminate Warrantless Wiretaps. Barack Obama opposed the Bush Administration’s initial policy on warrantless wiretaps because it crossed the line between protecting our national security and eroding the civil liberties of American citizens. As president, Obama would update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to provide greater oversight and accountability to the congressional intelligence committees to prevent future threats to the rule of law.

Also, I thought he was assembling a cabinet critical of warrantless wiretapping?

Strange... since Apple is consistently ranked as the top for years now in customer service. But don't let the facts get in the way of your nonsense. The same goes for the rest of your post.

As Barry Ritholtz notes in this fine rant, the CRA didn't force mortgage companies to offer loans for no money down, or to throw underwriting standards out the window, or to encourage mortgage brokers to aggressively seek out new markets.

Oh, yes, of course, if somebody named Barry Ritholts rants about it on his blog, then it must all be true. Sure...

Community Reinvestment Act and similar legislation allowed pressure-groups (such as ACORN and affiliates) to pressure the banks into lowering their standards. On the other hand, the government-controlled mortgage-underwriters — to whom all banks resell most of their mortgages — were arm-twisted by Clinton's government to lower their lending standards. So, pressured by crazy Lefties on the streets on one side to give mortgages to people, who can't afford them, and allowed to do that by the "respectable" Lefties in government, the banks complied...

I mean, you don't need Einstein to tell you than when you offload real risk from the lending institution to investors

The first and foremost such "investors" were Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac — then-quasi (and now fully) government owned corporations, pressured by the government to lower the requirements on the mortgages that could be off-loaded to them by the private banks.

That pressure to buy ever-riskier loans was what caused these "investors" to allow the banks sell ever-riskier mortgages. The Democrats were doing it "help the poor" of course — in their attempts to make the poor richer, they made the rich poorer...

you want to blame the Community Reinvestment Act or other similar legislation to kickstart lending to low-income areas

What we blame — with figures, dates, and names — are the misguided attempts by the government to "do good" (such as "kickstarting" something for the "low income"). It never works, and it always makes things worse. That it is also anti-Constitutional bothers some of as as well...

"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." James Madison

And here is the 1999 New York Times article matter-of-factly reporting on Fannie Mae easing credit to aid mortgage lending:

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

Possibly I've gotten smarter and wiser, but so has the techie community in general. You no longer have so many people babbling about sovereign squatters and the end of proprietary software. In general the wingnut element in western society is on the decline, as last year's elections pretty thoroughly testified.

Thing is, the wingnut element doesn't recognize this trend, and still likes to tell itself that it's in charge. In general, I support this delusion, since it hastens their social and political irrelevance. But they still have the ability to gang up and shout down anybody who disagrees with them.

If I had any management skills, I'd go and start my version of Slashdot. I'll bet there are lots of disaffected people who'd like to have a forum where they can have actual conversations instead of shouting matches.

Your facts are less correct than they were 50 years ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/index.html
"The movement of families up and down the economic ladder is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. But it does not seem to be happening quite as often as it used to."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4662456
Eighty percent of Americans still believe it's possible to pull yourself up by the proverbial bootstraps. That's according to a New York Times poll reported last week, but a recent mobility study suggests the American Dream may be more style than substance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
Upper nonmanual occupations have the highest level of occupational inheritance. [3]

http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/27/news/companies/lashinsky_hurd.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009030310
As his father did before him, Hurd attended the Browning School - a prestigious all-boys school where classmate Jamie Dimon, now CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, remembers seventh-grader Hurd as a good basketball player

The wealthy own the media and push the "you could be wealthy!" idea hard. It helps keep the lower class folks voting against their own self interests. It's why the wizard of wall street pays a lower tax rate on his monumental earnings than his secretary pays on her salary.

There is a tiny chance you will break into the wealthy classes. But, for the most part, they pass the good jobs down to their own. Just look at the way hollywood has been taken over by 2nd and 3rd generation actors. CEO jobs are less obvious but essentially the same.

Any idiot can bankrupt themselves-- but it takes a lot more than simple hard work to get into the executive class.

Here's your precious NYTimes article...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/us/14explorers.html

The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence — an intense ratcheting up of one of the group’s longtime missions to prepare youths for more traditional jobs as police officers and firefighters.

“This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,” said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. “It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts.”

much like communist propaganda made a herd of idiots support autocrats at the expense of their impoverishment, libertarian propaganda makes a herd of idiots support monopolists at the expense of their impoverishment

libertarian propaganda, of course, being the mirror image of the evil that is marx's das kapital: the holy text of ayn rand

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html

Rand's particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism -- to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand's teaching. The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.

Heller maintains an appropriately critical perspective on her subject -- she writes that she is "a strong admirer, albeit one with many questions and reservations" -- while allowing the reader to understand the power of Rand's conviction and her odd charisma. Rand labored for more than two years on Galt's radio address near the end of "Atlas Shrugged" -- a long paean to capitalism, individualism and selfishness that makes Gordon Gekko's "Greed is good" sound like the Sermon on the Mount. "At one point, she stayed inside the apartment, working for 33 days in a row," Heller writes. She kept going on amphetamines and willpower; the writing, she said, was a "drops-of-water-in-a-desert kind of torture." Nor would Rand, sooner than any other desert prophet, allow her message to be trifled with. When Bennett Cerf, a head of Random House, begged her to cut Galt's speech, Rand replied with what Heller calls "a comment that became publishing legend": "Would you cut the Bible?"

market fundamentalists and agrarian fundamentalists loudly rage about their incredibly retarded ideologies, and us normal folk have to tolerate these ignorant assholes who do nothing but create suffering for us. i liked how this biography of rand linked her creation to her upbringing in revolutionary russia. in other words, the prophet of the libertarians was born as an angry revenge, a living vendetta, against the suffering of her upbringing in the birthing pains of communist russia. fitting and poetic: the idiocy of communism begat the idiocy of libertarianism, directly

Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. This was, perhaps, an understandable reaction against her childhood experience of Communism. Born in 1905 as Alissa Rosenbaum to a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, she was 12 when the Bolsheviks seized power, and she endured the ensuing years of civil war, hunger and oppression. By 1926, when she came to live with relatives in the United States and changed her name, she had become a relentless enemy of every variety of what she denounced as "collectivism," from Soviet Communism to the New Deal. Even Republicans weren't immune: after Wendell Willkie's defeat in 1940, Rand helped to found an organization called Associated Ex-Willkie Workers Against Willkie, berating the candidate as "the guiltiest man of any for destroying America, more guilty than Roosevelt."

death to libertarians and communists, mirror image morons and assholes who create suffering for us all with their loud ignorance they call an ideology

This one is just blatantly false. The iPhone hit all Apple's announced targets,

Not exactly true.

Proof:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter.svg

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/technology/24cnd-phone.html

Found this article matching the criteria only dated February 28, 1991.

It just didn't seem plausible did it... How this correlates to modern computer FP calculations is beyond me.

Because they'll stop working if they can't. And yes, there are printers that need to access the network. Home printers tend to pretty simple-minded (though many now have their own network addresses) but office printers often double as fax machines and scanners -- which means they have to look up the name of a mail server to forward those. And the mail server might well be named .

(Oops, Slashdot still barfs on non-Latin characters. Here's the cute Chinese name I came up with: http://tiny.cc/MUhUL )

Elevators too. Some of these are pretty smart and probably have the ability to report malfunctions, usage patterns, etc.

Of course, it's because a developer in Texas can just buy the land and build a wind farm.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18galbraith.html?_r=3

The irony is quite telling -- environmental regulations making it harder to build a renewable energy source. The most telling part of this (and recall that the New York Times was not a particular fan of this TX governor):

But here again, Texas and California have behaved very differently. Texas set a strong renewable energy requirement back in 1999 (when George W. Bush was governor) -- and quickly exceeded it. Last year, 5 percent of the state's electricity came from wind power. California set a very high bar, requiring big utilities to get 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources next year, although they are not expected to meet it.

That is, measured purely by results, the track record of the state that doesn't give a shit is miles ahead of the state that makes a big complicated deal about caring.

[ Aside: I'm not against environmental regulation by any means. At the very minimum, however, we ought to insist that the benefits a cleaner environment outweigh the costs of regulation. In cases like this where it seems like the regulations are actually counterproductive to the goals, well then the costs are truly wasted.]

Not like they're buying out Morgan Stanley...

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/2009/06/03/CIC-to-buy-447M-shares-of-Morgan-Stanley/UPI-45271244026009/

Or NBA teams...

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/2009/columns/story?columnist=stein_marc&page=CavsChina-090601

Or Automobile companies like Hummer...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/business/03auto.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1256911465-MYcwhz7EQCEgv2gHJoLH7Q

Or tried to buy out our oil/energy corporations in the past...

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/08/chinese_ownersh_2.html

Yes, Chinese needs a 'backdoor' entry. This would be similiar to having a co-owner of a house putting in a back door to the house.

Kinda hard to get a backdoor entry when they're already sitting in your living room.

"The penalty was overruled but not the finding of facts."

I wasn't referring to that case. I was talking about an earlier case see http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/24/business/excerpts-from-appeals-court-ruling-on-microsoft.html?pagewanted=all

This might also explain Judge Jackson's attitude toward Microsoft since the Appeals Court had already rejected his arguments.

It depends on the situation, but a lot of the laws out there do demonstrably make you less safe. Careful note: this does not include seat belt laws or helmet laws on motorcycles. Opponents of these often cite examples of these safety measures causing more harm, but statistically speaking, they vastly improve safety. Anecdotes are not data.

What is data is that child seats are crap. While seat belts clearly won't work for very young children, child seats make no difference for kids much over 2 years old. NHTSA's data was to compare child seats against using nothing at all . They are also only tested in head-on collisions, and fail hard in side collisions. They're also very hard to setup correctly, and any safety benefits they might have disappear when they're not.

The data also supports that going over the speed limit isn't as dangerous as many make it out to be. You should drive at whatever speed everyone else is driving, no matter what the speed limit is.

Most states have laws specifying that speed limits should be put at the 85% speed (the speed that 85% of the people are driving), but I think we can all list counterexamples of that in our respective areas, especially in small towns that like their speeding ticket revenue. Further, there are many circumstances where even very fast speed is safe. On an empty 3-lane highway with a car in good condition (especially tires), there's not much that can go wrong even at 150mph. Of course, doing the same at rush hour is very dangerous.

If you're driving through snow, you drive wherever the snow has been worn down by other drivers the most. If that happens to be straddling two lanes (assuming you can even see the line, which you probably can't), then so be it. Your tires will have their greatest traction there, so that's where you should be.

The most dangerous driver is the one that feels safe. Cell phones aren't so much a problem in themselves as the fact that the driver felt comfortable enough to use a cell phone. Safe drivers are paranoid. Sure, that guy might have his turn signal on, but is he really going to turn?

A common statement made by female SUV buyers is that it makes them feel safer. That's exactly what we don't want.

It depends on the situation, but a lot of the laws out there do demonstrably make you less safe. Careful note: this does not include seat belt laws or helmet laws on motorcycles. Opponents of these often cite examples of these safety measures causing more harm, but statistically speaking, they vastly improve safety. Anecdotes are not data.

What is data is that child seats are crap. While seat belts clearly won't work for very young children, child seats make no difference for kids much over 2 years old. NHTSA's data was to compare child seats against using nothing at all . They are also only tested in head-on collisions, and fail hard in side collisions. They're also very hard to setup correctly, and any safety benefits they might have disappear when they're not.

The data also supports that going over the speed limit isn't as dangerous as many make it out to be. You should drive at whatever speed everyone else is driving, no matter what the speed limit is.

Most states have laws specifying that speed limits should be put at the 85% speed (the speed that 85% of the people are driving), but I think we can all list counterexamples of that in our respective areas, especially in small towns that like their speeding ticket revenue. Further, there are many circumstances where even very fast speed is safe. On an empty 3-lane highway with a car in good condition (especially tires), there's not much that can go wrong even at 150mph. Of course, doing the same at rush hour is very dangerous.

If you're driving through snow, you drive wherever the snow has been worn down by other drivers the most. If that happens to be straddling two lanes (assuming you can even see the line, which you probably can't), then so be it. Your tires will have their greatest traction there, so that's where you should be.

The most dangerous driver is the one that feels safe. Cell phones aren't so much a problem in themselves as the fact that the driver felt comfortable enough to use a cell phone. Safe drivers are paranoid. Sure, that guy might have his turn signal on, but is he really going to turn?

A common statement made by female SUV buyers is that it makes them feel safer. That's exactly what we don't want.

For 2008, with it's incredible oil boom, those budget figures were true. At the end of 2009 they are not even close. Russia is perilously close to bankrupt again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/world/europe/31russia.html

http://russiatooat.blogspot.com/2009/08/bank-rossii-eases-further-as-russias.html

http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/economics-country-briefings/russias-economy-contracts-by-7-in-q1-2009/

I'd love to be wrong. But I don't think I am.

He'll probably be properly "censored" soon.

He was arrested before and went into exile for a while as well. He's been at this for several years.

It is called high-frequency trading — and it is suddenly one of the most talked-about and mysterious forces in the markets.
Powerful computers, some housed right next to the machines that drive marketplaces like the New York Stock Exchange, enable high-frequency traders to transmit millions of orders at lightning speed and, their detractors contend, reap billions at everyone else’s expense. (The slower traders began issuing buy orders. But rather than being shown to all potential sellers at the same time, some of those orders were most likely routed to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds — 0.03 seconds — in what are known as flash orders. While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.)
These systems are so fast they can outsmart or outrun other investors, humans and computers alike. And after growing in the shadows for years, they are generating lots of talk.
Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed. High-frequency trading is one answer.

Again, a blogger;

Even today, when I'm looking for a movie with my friends, we'll look in the newspaper.

In the New York Times, I can see all the movies displayed, in proportion to how heavily the studio is buying ads to promote it, by flipping through just a few pages, and I can see which ones are playing in my neighborhood. I can circle the ones I'm interested in and decide which one to go to at the end.

In principle, I should be able to do the same thing online. In reality, it's not as easy. http://movies.nytimes.com/pages/movies/index.html It's funny, when it finally comes down to deciding which movie to go to, I actually prefer the ads.

Similarly, I picked up a Sunday newspaper the other day and it had advertising sections. I forgot how convenient they were to look through. I could see the latest printers, how much Best Buy was selling netbooks for, etc. I really can't get that from the online web sites. http://www.bestbuy.com/

Newspapers are great for browsing and deciding what you might want to buy. That's a seller's dream, and they're willing to pay for it.

Of course, when I know exactly what I want, like a specific product, I can find it more easily online,

I'm sure there will be a time when we'll have portable displays equal to or better than a newspaper page. I'm sure we'll have better user interfaces to help me pick out movies. But I don't see anything ten years out.

Maybe people growing up with the Internet will have different preferences.

Those Egyptians did a good job with paper. It's had a long run.

Wouldn't it be more accurate if it showed that some of the terrorists worked for the government and were engaged on false-flag operations ?

It would also be more accurate if the government you were trying to install in a foreign country comprised of drug lords and war criminals.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/ssi/wpc/ResignationLetter.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html?_r=1
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/world/asia/05afghan.html

I suspect that the DOD has a hand in putting things like this in popular video games (not to mention TV and movies). It is a great way to make such atrocities seem acceptable to a young, susceptible audeicne. These types of things have been in games for awhile. These types of messages have been in TV shows and movies for a long time. 24 turned into an advertisement for torture. The DOD has long been in the TV and movie business, giving producers equipment and information for positive messages and propaganda.

The last expansion of World of Warcraft had many quests to torture people for information. They also added a quest chain to spread disinformation about a group of dissenters in Theramore, then assassinate their leader. It reminded me of the FBI operation known as COINTELPRO.

You can call me a conspiracy theorist all you want but you can find plenty of proof with a few simple google searches.

Wouldn't it be more accurate if it showed that some of the terrorists worked for the government and were engaged on false-flag operations ?

It would also be more accurate if the government you were trying to install in a foreign country comprised of drug lords and war criminals.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/ssi/wpc/ResignationLetter.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html?_r=1
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/world/asia/05afghan.html

I suspect that the DOD has a hand in putting things like this in popular video games (not to mention TV and movies). It is a great way to make such atrocities seem acceptable to a young, susceptible audeicne. These types of things have been in games for awhile. These types of messages have been in TV shows and movies for a long time. 24 turned into an advertisement for torture. The DOD has long been in the TV and movie business, giving producers equipment and information for positive messages and propaganda.

The last expansion of World of Warcraft had many quests to torture people for information. They also added a quest chain to spread disinformation about a group of dissenters in Theramore, then assassinate their leader. It reminded me of the FBI operation known as COINTELPRO.

You can call me a conspiracy theorist all you want but you can find plenty of proof with a few simple google searches.

Until very recently, most Hollywood heavyweights were loath to speak too openly about the promise of digital entertainment — the downloading and streaming of movies and television shows on computers, Internet-enabled televisions and mobile devices. Nobody wanted to anger retail partners like Wal-Mart or do anything that might slow the DVD gravy train.

followed up with

A variety of factors have influenced Hollywood’s new aggression on the digital front. This year, Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers started cutting the amount of shelf space they devote to DVDs, and some other retail partners, like Circuit City, have gone out of business. So movie studios now worry less about angering them by pulling digital levers.

The article actually highlights some moves that Disney (I know, I was shocked as well) has made to improve digital ownership for the consumer. And there are going to be a lot of failures (Disney already tried Moviebeam) but it's probably pretty clear that this is the future past Blu-ray.

The film studios' reasons for falling sales? First it was piracy. Now that that's been reigned in it must be rentals, Netflix and Redbox. And once that tapers off and the DVD gravy train doesn't kick back up it'll be some other bullshit. Never will it be the fact that 99% of movie trailers I see today I don't care for and 99% of the ones I watch have little to no replay value. Never will it be the declining quality of the product. Never will it be the fact that I have bought this movie in three other formats goddammit--why do I need to pay for blu-ray? Never will it be the fact that buying it on blu-ray allows me to play it on only one device in my house when I have many more capable of playing movies.

Go ahead, pin the blame on someone else. I don't care. But you won't fix the problem until you look at all the contributing factors. It is ignorance to think it is just one of these. Die a slow painful death, I just hope my children don't have to put with you acting like children.

Once upon a time I had lots of close friends who are now Scientologists. They actively, passionately, and publicly hate me and consider me to be a deeply immoral person.

Don't worry. The Christians all think you're immoral. So do the Islamists. As for who hates whom, aren't you glad you weren't in the twin towers on 9/11? Aren't you glad you weren't around during these Christian acts of violence? Aren't you glad you were elsewhere when the Hindus got up and into the faces of the Christians, here? Or when they did the same for Islamists, here? Aren't you glad you can still draw a cartoon of Mohammad here in the US? I'm speaking legally, of course... that doesn't mean some moron Islamist won't come and clobber you for it anyway. Or, try wearing one of my atheist themed tee-shirts (right column) on the street, and see what happens. Better yet, try it in the American south. Oh yeah, you'll feel the love, all right. :)

The gulf between your 'typical' Scientologist and how they view the world and other mainstream faiths is in my own very direct experience, is an extra-ordinary gulf.

No. Your experience is in the day to day "get along" strategies of the various religions. It has nothing to do with their world view, and doesn't exempt you from hidden disrespect and hate, or eventual violence. Eventually, an issue divisive enough will rear its head, and you'll see the strength of the relationships you have across these religious boundaries is to some degree imaginary. As an atheist, you are the lowest of the low to all religionists. For your own safety and the security of your family, you should keep that firmly in mind.

One air safety expert suggested that these devices might be 'the last unrestricted fire hazard' people can bring on airplanes.

Umm... they still allow cigarette lighters... How does an "air safety expert" miss that one?

Is this considered mainstream? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/europe/28france.html?_r=1

"35-year-old Mindy Lanoux of San Antonio, who has melanoma that has spread to her liver and lungs, her odds of surviving in the single digits. She has been to the hospital 16 times in nine months, spending a week there each time for treatments so debilitating she wanted to give up. But she keeps returning, smearing peppermint oil under her nose when she walks in the medical center’s door to hide the odor.

“The smell gets to me,” Ms. Lanoux said. “It smells like cleaning products and the sickness and the medicines. It takes your brave edge off.”

From NY Times article on MD Anderson Cancer Center

I recently watched someone near the end of their life in that same hospital...it wasn't pleasant, despite the care givers' best efforts. I can imagine that there's some classical conditioning built up between the smells and sickness/death.

LED bulbs are going to render CFL bulbs a flash in the pan

no toxic mercury, no 30 second wait to dim up completely after turn on, not nearly as fragile, lasts much longer, nicer white glow, similar very low energy usage...

but currently, they are a little pricey and their lighting wattage is low

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/coming-soon-a-40-watt-led-light-bulb/

Sorry, I replaced all my incandescents more then 4 years ago and was really happy with the results. Still not happy with the cost of the LEDs. So just go ahead a replace those incandescent lights and wait on the LEDs. I will still be cheaper in the long run.

And if you're thinking the LEDs don't contain toxic materials; you should do a little research on GaAs and other environmentally friendly semi-conductors.

LED bulbs are going to render CFL bulbs a flash in the pan

no toxic mercury, no 30 second wait to dim up completely after turn on, not nearly as fragile, lasts much longer, nicer white glow, similar very low energy usage...

but currently, they are a little pricey and their lighting wattage is low

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/coming-soon-a-40-watt-led-light-bulb/

It's not another link to the original site, but in the NYT recently Errol Morris was researching an unrelated Civil War story, and one of the sources was David H. Kelly, who did major work deciphering the Mayan script. In passing Errol asked about the 2012 thing: http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/whose-father-was-he-part-four/

Society has this bizarre view of steroids of being a horrible drug causing anything from cancer to rage to psychotic episodes.

And that's not all that's wrong with them; thay can also cause cataracts, even in young people, as I found out after I was prescribed steroid eyedrops for an infection.

From a legal standpoint, they view as equal what is essentially a drug that increases the rate at which proteins fold to the most powerful hallucinogen known to man.

The legality has nothing to do with a drug's actual danger. LSD has no effect whatever except for its psychedelic properties, and it dialates the eyes. Marijuana is just as illegal as heroin. Alcohol and tobacco are completely legal, yet both are addictive and dangerous. You can die from alcohol overdose, you can die from alcohol withdrawal.

There is no correlation between a drug's safety and its legality.

And many geezers do get steroids, as they're used for arthritis. Doctors can and do prescribe steroids.

Grass-fed beef and organic chicken still have bits that aren't worth using for human consumption. What do you think happens to that.

It ends up as hamburger? Well, not grass-fed or organic, but that's one place where the "meat" that no one would eat ends up.

Dogs are naturally scavengers and will happily eat most anything. It's presumptuous to think that there's a vast untapped market for the meat or animal byproducts that go into commercially-prepared pet food. And certainly not one as profitable as the pet food industry. Hell, the origin of of commerical pet food in the early 20th century probably grew out of some enterpreneur realising, "Hey, I can make money selling this garbage", and consumers trading their own leftovers (the traditional method of feeding pets) with the convenience of that packaged garbage.

Me, I feed my dog from the table. I cook, so there's no convenience in buying pre-packaged dog food, and there's certainly more than enough "extras" that would otherwise end up in the kitchen trash.

Link tot he actual article please! No one cares about your buddy's brilliant blog.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/health/17chen.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1

The market has proven itself wholly incapable of regulating itself. What now?

Not even most Libertarians want an economy with no government oversight at all. Even during the Laissez Faire days of the gilded age, there was government authority. So this stupid notion that the current crises erupted from lack of regulation is pure BS. Some regulations were changed and pared back in the late 90's. But the financial sector remained, by far, the most heavily regulated sector of the economy.

The problem wasn't lack of regulation, but of corruption. And that corruption started not with private companies and individuals, but with your beloved government, who decided that banks should be punished for refusing to make housing loans to people that lacked things like a job and a credit history. It just wasn't fair after all. I mean, how racist to deny a home loan to someone that didn't have a way to pay it back, eh?

Free markets have the virtue of being self-correcting (if allowed to, that is... hello, "stimulus" pork). Governments... eh, not always so. The irony is that the conservatives... the mean people that believe in markets... actually tried to fix the housing bubble problem by reigning in Fannie and Freddie, who were giving out mortgages like candy, and then bundling them to so others could sell them as "AAA" securities.

Oh, how tunes change when fortunes change, as the good congressman Barney Frank was trying to kill regulation and oversight of Fannie and Freddie:

''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''- Sep. 11, 2003

After the gravy train stopped:

'The private sector got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it." - Sep. 28, 2008

You want to know what the markets have proven? The market have proven that, when governments and politicians manipulate it for their own power, markets will crash.

In a free market you'd simply have a cartel freeze out the new would-be competitors through anti-competitive actions, including pressuring common suppliers to not sell to the competitor. That's why we have regulation. It corrects problems in the market.

If you want to know what an unregulated free market looks like, you just have to look at the 19th century America, or modern China. (Spoiler Alert! It sucks for everyone except for the hyperwealthy.)

Editors sleeping on the job
What a sweet job

Slashdot editors and airline pilots

Recode the DNA or RNA to use the slowest, most "pessimal" coding for the same proteins. The virus is externally the same but reproduces orders of magnitude slower, slow enough for the immune system to kill it before it can cause any harm. And the extent of the recoding is such that it's effectively impossible for the virus to revert to pathogenic form.

and, in hawaii, i can stand on a street corner and say so. i can go on a website and say hawaii should be independent. no us official will punish me. in fact, if a us official tried to punish me for expressing my political opinion, that official in turn could be punished, sued, even possibly charged with a crime. would that be true of the beijing official who cracked down on the tibetan's expression of political opinion?

i can make a movie about the injustice of hawaii being part of the usa. i can create a political party to that effect. on the mainland usa, i can view said party's literature, i can agree with it, openly, and i can even give that cause money. can a resident of shanghai do that?

http://www.freehawaii.org/
http://freehawaii.blogspot.com/
http://www.hawaiiankingdom.info/

where are those servers located?

they are located in the usa

they are freely allowed to run by the us government

can you say any of those things about what tibetans can do?

a better allegory would be if you had used puerto rico rather than hawaii as an example. puerto rico is not a state of the usa. puerot ricans can not vote for american president. yet in puerto rico, votes continue to come up, and PUERTO RICANS (not washington dc) continue to decide to be part of the usa as a commonwealth by a vast majority rather than be an independent country (they do this for the generous financial reasons of this commonwealth situation)

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/15/us/puerto-rico-votes-to-retain-status-as-commonwealth.html

By choosing to maintain the commonwealth status that has been in place here for more than 40 years, Puerto Ricans made it clear that they prefer "the best of two worlds," in the words of a pro-commonwealth campaign slogan, to the prospect of more intimate ties with the United States. By an overwhelming margin, they also rejected independence, the third option that had been offered to them in the nonbinding vote today.

do you really think any of that would be true for tibet and tibetans? if tibetans could vote like puerto ricans, what would tibetans choose?

china uses tanks and coercion, the us uses votes and consensus

so do you really believe your comparison between tibet and hawaii is valid in any way whatsoever?

i guess you missed the memo

i see whistleblowing on corporations and where they do evil all the time in western media. the same would be completely covered up and whitewashed in china. do you understand the level of pollution chinese companies get away with in china? if chinese companies tried to pull in the west the kind of crap they get away with routinely in china, the media would start a firestorm. oh, in fact they did: melamine in food, ethylene glycol in medicine, lead in toys...

witness:

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/showcase-65/

look at those pictures. this is what companies get away with in china. if you showed such pictures in the west about a western company doing that somewhere to people in the west are you going to tell me they get away with anything near remotely as murderous in the west? i'm not asking for historical examples, i'm asking for the here and now. plenty of western companies pollute outside the west... and chinese companies just as much if not more now. here in the west, western companies are sued and erin brockovitched to death. while in china its carte blanche, standard operating procedure: poison poor chinese with impunity

and deny this:

one of the most influential and deeply historically entrenched american businesses has been systematically dismantled over the last 20 years in the usa. its media edifice hamstrung and turned against itself, all of its entrenched political players and lobbying and propaganda utterly defeated. i'm talking about the tobacco industry. where's this amazing western corporate control of our lives again?

i am very sick of this meme that companies control everything in the west

of course money has too much influence in politics. as if this is unique to the west, or even the worst in the west. there are actually are laws about crass manipulation. so the money has to flow in soft ways, in indirect ways, and so its not as big a deal as certain propagandized "money controls everything in the west" fools believe. go back a hundred years, when the obsession was with preventing pinkerton gangs from breaking up union demonstrations with kneecap busting, with breaking up business monopolies, with establishing a standardized hours per workweek, from doing away with child labor, etc. meanwhile, in china, its communist in name, but more ultracapitalist than the usa in reality. try to get your stereotypes in synch with reality please

it is in fact the solid truth that in china, companies have much more influence and arrogant assumed right to pretty much murder, while in the west they are regulated and hounded by the media constantly. no such hounding in a government monopoly media in china, regulations only after they prove embarassing and hurt the bottom line in china

"Have you ever considered that it is precisely ultra-nationalism and 'tribalism' that could actually help China be the next superpower and crush the competition? I guess not."

actually, it won't help china. you need to cooperate on the world stage. you assume for some bizarre reason that india, russia, europe, brazil, etc., will simply roll over and take blatant han imperialism without any resistance

Shhhh.... People aren't supposed to know that the company crying wolf is the one who has the most to gain and is probably the one who is responsible for the alleged attacks.

US: Contractors Vie for Plum Work, Hacking for U.S. Government

And the race to develop weapons that defend against, or initiate, computer attacks has given rise to thousands of “hacker soldiers” within the Pentagon who can blend the new capabilities into the nation’s war planning.

Nearly all of the largest military companies — including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies.

Daniel D. Allen, who oversees work on intelligence systems for Northrop Grumman, estimated that federal spending on computer security now totals $10 billion each year, including classified programs. That is just a fraction of the government’s spending on weapons systems. But industry officials expect it to rise rapidly.

The military contractors are now in the enviable position of turning what they learned out of necessity — protecting the sensitive Pentagon data that sits on their own computers — into a lucrative business that could replace some of the revenue lost from cancellations of conventional weapons systems.

Domestic Spying, Inc.

http://www.corpwatch.org/section.php?id=11

that's only impressive if you'd let us know how many people were on the boat.

Is using google really too difficult for you?

From the Washington Times:
"During the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the press branded the destroyer tender USS Acadia the "Love Boat" after 36 sailors -- 10 percent of the women aboard -- became pregnant while deployed in support of Operation Desert Storm."

From the New York Times:
"Lieut. Comdr. Jeff Smallwood, said there were no indications of improper fraternization between men and women on the ship. 'These women have a right to get pregnant,' Commander Smallwood said. 'The conclusion somebody is jumping to is that the Acadia is a love boat, and that's not the case.'" http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/30/us/36-women-pregnant-aboard-a-navy-ship-that-served-in-gulf.html

That's an interesting statement, when taken in its context. He's essentially saying that (i) it's OK for the servicemen and servicewomen to service one another, and (ii) servicewomen have a right to get pregnant even on active missions. The first point is sensible enough, even if prudes ashore would disapprove. Since pregnancy is a ticket home away from danger, the second point might be a bit controversial.