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I was much more surprised to read, in an out-of-print '80s novel written by a lesser-known SF author, about drone operators remotely carrying out surgical strikes halfway across the planet, all while being denied any credit or commendation because the traditional military community doesn't consider them "pilots."

I disagree about apple. see: http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/06/25/big-apple-bigger-google/

Not all. I just quoted four. How you can extrapolate that to all when I specifically said they are not to be trusted as much as reliable ones?

How can you extrapolate that if your sources are right this time, they are always right? And they were not always right. One source said the re-org would happen July 1. That wasn't entirely correct.

The difference should be obvious if you have any background in journalism. It is that reputable organizations like the ones I have listed vet their sources and don't post everything from every anonymous email or tip they get. They spend a minimum time and effort to make sure their reputation stays intact. You can add Reuters and AP to the list I quoted. Most other news organizations just print anything regardless of the reliability of their sources.

Again, you are assuming the source was given all the correct information. The source isn't lying to the reporter but the information they were given may not have been correct. That's why reputable news organization specifically word their articles as coming from a source.

Everyone? Care to reference a couple from WSJ, Bloomberg, Reuters, AP, Washington Post, NYT that say "from our sources"? Or are you making up things as you go ?

WSJ: Apple Moves Closer to Making TV Set
New York Times: What’s Really Next for Apple in Television
Business Insider: Apple Could Announce New TV This December, Says Top Apple Analyst

Satisfied or do you need more?

That made me laugh, you're clutching at straws here. The whole point of the reorg is to have new divisions and heads. Ballmer need not name the head of every small subdivision. Is there even a Xbox division anymore?

That's as idiotic as saying Apple doesn't need someone in charge of iPhones. GE doesn't need anyone in charge of jet engines. Larson-Greene will oversee everything involving Xbox, Windows Phone, Surface, third party developers, and studios. She's never going to eat or sleep again right?

Not this again, I got tired of it because you were not willing to concede the point after losing it. In one post you claimed Microsoft had a option not to let go of Mattrick. I replied no they cannot. After a couple of posts you changed your tune saying that Microsoft can't prevent him from leaving if he pays his way out. I am tired of arguing this again and again.

Since you can't or won't bother to look it up: Wikipedia

A contract of employment usually defined to mean the same as a "contract of service".[2] A contract of service has historically been distinguished from a "contract for services", the expression altered to imply the dividing line between a person who is "employed" and someone who is "self-employed". The purpose of the dividing line is to attribute rights to some kinds of people who work for others. This could be the right to a minimum wage, holiday pay, sick leave, fair dismissal, a written statement of the contract, the right to organize in a union, and so on. The assumption is that genuinely self-employed people should be able to look after their own affairs, and therefore work they do for others should not carry with it an obligation to look after these rights.

or About.com

An employment contract is a written legal document that lays out binding terms and conditions of employment between an employee and an employer. . .

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324879504578597883383524650.html

On topic: The path of least regret would have been single payer system, but we somehow ended up with a Republican profit-utopia called "Obamacare".

Infinity Imaginary mod points to you sir.

Infinity irony points to you, fellow poster.

It is often claimed that Obamacare is a Republican creation by way of the Heritage Foundation. In fact the Heritage plan was substantially different, and they figured out quite some time ago that plan was not a good idea, and they disowned it.

In fact, Obamacare was written by Democrats in Congress with help from a progressive think tank.

Center For American Progress President Shares Part In Obamacare: "I Helped Write The Bill"

Obamacare was passed in Congress on a straight party line vote.

House passes health-care reform bill without Republican votes

Obamacare was signed into law by President Obama.

So how is a law written by Democrats assisted by progressive think tanks, passed solely by Democrats, and signed into law by a Democrat President a "Republican" plan?

PRUDEN: Obamacare called ‘The fiasco for the ages’
Democrats' New Argument: It's A Good Thing That Obamacare Doubles Individual Health Insurance Premiums
Analysis: Obamacare to cost $2.6 trillion over first full decade

President Barack Obama promised his health-care law would cost approximately $900 billion over ten years when he first proposed it. Since then, the price tag has continued to climb. Total spending under the Affordable Care Act will reach $2.6 trillion over its first full decade, according to a Senate Budget Committee analysis, which was based on Congressional Budget Office estimates and growth rates.

It is said that success has many fathers but failure is an orphan. Trying to leave the Obamacare baby in a basket on the Republican's doorstep won't work. The bastard stepchild of Obamacare belongs to the Democrats.

That's the goal of far too much legislation. This way law enforcement always has something they can charge people with that they don't like and lets everyone else go about their business. We no longer have a "rule of law" in this country, we have a "rule of staying on law enforcement's good side." In all likelihood, you committed 3 felonies yesterday and will do so again today:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842.html

When I see my local politicians doing this, it just shows how much they like the current setup:

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/ken-cuccinelli-virginia-oral-anal-sex-sodomy

Obamacare was written by members of the Democratic party with assistance from the progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress.

Center For American Progress President Shares Part In Obamacare: "I Helped Write The Bill"

The Heritage Foundation did at one point have a plan for a vaguely similar idea, but it differed significantly in important details, and they eventually concluded it was the wrong path to take. You can find details here: ObamaCare's Heritage

Are we going to penalize (by monetary means) those that have the wrong BMI

Safeway cut their costs by ~1/3 by doing just that. So yeah, we're probably going to end up doing exactly that. Those kinds of savings are hard to pass up.

The people get fucked even harder, and the healthcare system still makes obscene profits. I guess its a win-win situation, right?

Lose-lose, actually. Because the profits you are talking about simply do not exist. So much so, health-insurers close the shop and simply withdraw from certain (highly progressive) states.

First, this isn't something that is unique to Korean or East Asian societies. Western nations, including the supposedly more egalitarian United States, had the exact same problem of cockpit hierarchy through the 1970s. Only after the crash of United Airlines Flight 173 did the West begin reorganize the way it trains its pilots, leading to the implementation of Cockpit Resource Management which retrained the way American aircrews operated.

Second, it should also be noted that Korean Air underwent similar reorganization following the 1999 Guam accident, leading to an effectively accident free record 14 years onward even with a crew of primarily Korean pilots. So you can wave all this nonsense about cultural hierarchy and whatnot, but in the end, it's more a matter of training and personnel organization.

In a broader view, this sort of hierarchical issue is less a unique problem to Korean society and more a problem of managing a chain of command. You see these sorts of problems all the time in the West: operating rooms, military units, etc. I would even argue that the real problem was that both the American pilots and Korean ones are all former Air Force pilots, used to operating in strictly hierarchical cultures where the pilot is on top of the food chain. It required CRM-type training to "deprogram" some of those authoritarian tendencies and play nicely.

Here's a little assist with the history. You're a bit off.

ObamaCare's Heritage

Obamacare is a Republican idea. That's the reason that it's a byzantine maze of profiteering middlemen: Republicans love their corporate welfare.

Liberals originally wanted single-payer system like that found in most civilized countries.

I'm sorry, but I can't let you abuse history like that. The Affordable Care Act was written by Democrats and passed by Democrats, with little if any input from Republicans. It was Progressives that had input, not Republicans:

Center For American Progress President Shares Part In Obamacare: "I Helped Write The Bill"

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was passed with only 1 Republican vote from the sources I see. 1 Republican in the House, and 0 in the Senate voted for it. The Democrats wrote it, the Democrats passed it, a Democrat President signed it, the Democrats own it from start to finish.. You can't legitimately blame this on Republicans in any way. It's time to grow up and own up.

Even if you want to associate the Republicans or conservatives with having shared the idea for it in some way in the past, there is an issue:

ObamaCare's Heritage

In that 11th Circuit appeal, which is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department cited Heritage as an authority in support of its position. Heritage responded with an amicus brief explaining that its view had changed:

If citations to policy papers were subject to the same rules as legal citations, then the Heritage position quoted by the Department of Justice would have a red flag indicating it had been reversed. . . . Heritage has stopped supporting any insurance mandate.

Heritage policy experts never supported an unqualified mandate like that in the PPACA [ObamaCare]. Their prior support for a qualified mandate was limited to catastrophic coverage (true insurance that is precisely what the PPACA forbids), coupled with tax relief for all families and other reforms that are conspicuously absent from the PPACA. Since then, a growing body of research has provided a strong basis to conclude that any government insurance mandate is not only unnecessary, but is a bad policy option. Moreover, Heritage's legal scholars have been consistent in explaining that the type of mandate in the PPACA is unconstitutional.

The Democrats still own it completely, much to their growing discomfort.

PRUDEN: Obamacare called ‘The fiasco for the ages’

From this source:

Germany's unemployment rate was unchanged for the seventh straight month at a relatively low 6.9% in May, after seasonal adjustment.

Yet nearly one in five working Germans, or about 7.4 million people, hold a so-called "minijob," a form of marginal employment that allows someone to earn up to E450($580) a month free of tax.

Sigh. Do you read anything you link? You are linking to an article that is speculating on the re-org. They are rumors until MS actually announces it:

You seem to lack the basic knowledge that when Bloomberg, WSJ, NYT, Washington Post say "According to people familiar with the matter" they're pretty much 100% right.

For example, see how WSJ got news of the iPad before it was launched. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703580904574638630584151614.html

Equating these professional organizations' sources to the same level as "rumors" by users on Apple fan forums or Slashdot does not make any sense. How many times do I have to prove that all rumors and speculation are not the same and the source and their track record matters a lot? This basically shows your willingness to argue for the sake of disagreeing rather than argue any facts and shows that debating with you is a complete waste of time.

Those Windows sites don't speculate? Since when? Perhaps you need to read more carefully.

Again, all speculation is not the same. See some of Mary Jo Foley's track record in this link which I provide again.

http://tracour.net/author/Mary%20Jo%20Foley

All you have brought is speculation unless you work at MS and have first hand knowledge. I suspect if you work for MS, you won't disclose it.

No, I don't work for MS, if I did, I would declare it, why hide it? There's nothing wrong with working for MS, as you seem to think. My speculation is from informed sources with a stellar track record and a lot of big revelations under their belt while you seem to have no clue about MS watchers who work in the press. Again, you're trying to color all speculation the same, it's not.

And Spain's Foreign Minister has said that Spain was told that Edward Snowden was aboard the Bolivian presidential jet, and that that was why the plane was diverted.

I think that Evo Morales, the Bolivian President, was the "designated drunk" in this case. My guess is that Morales didn't know anything and that someone is playing a deep game, leaking misinformation (about Snowden being on Morales's plane) to the CIA so that the CIA could destroy its credibility and cause a diplomatic debacle by asking Spain (and others) to stop the flight.

You can bet that the next South American leader flying out of Moscow will not have their plane stopped. That is so convenient for certain parties that I have to feel that it was not accidental.

Such materials are commercially available as wallpaper for years. (See http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/05/25/wallpaper-that-blocks-wi-fi/)

But I'm afraid the FCC will become upset because it can _block_ signals outside the movie theater. The shadow of the cage itself is a noticeable dead zone. And I'm afraid that it will only take one litigious parent whose baby sitter is trying to reach them, or one doctor who can't be paged, to create a dangerous lawsuit for for any theater that tries this.

I have seen it done for certain conference rooms, that were clearly marked this this way, and even then people became quite upset at not having their cell phones work.

Such materials are commercially available as wallpaper for years. (See http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/05/25/wallpaper-that-blocks-wi-fi/)

But I'm afraid the FCC will become upset because it can _block_ signals outside the movie theater. The shadow of the cage itself is a noticeable dead zone. And I'm afraid that it will only take one litigious parent whose baby sitter is trying to reach them, or one doctor who can't be paged, to create a dangerous lawsuit for for any theater that tries this.

I have seen it done for certain conference rooms, that were clearly marked this this way, and even then people became quite upset at not having their cell phones work.

How could you call 911 if (wink wink) happened?

Such materials are commercially available as wallpaper for years. (See http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/05/25/wallpaper-that-blocks-wi-fi/)

But I'm afraid the FCC will become upset because it can _block_ signals outside the movie theater. The shadow of the cage itself is a noticeable dead zone. And I'm afraid that it will only take one litigious parent whose baby sitter is trying to reach them, or one doctor who can't be paged, to create a dangerous lawsuit for for any theater that tries this.

I have seen it done for certain conference rooms, that were clearly marked this this way, and even then people became quite upset at not having their cell phones work.

Such materials are commercially available as wallpaper for years. (See http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/05/25/wallpaper-that-blocks-wi-fi/)

But I'm afraid the FCC will become upset because it can _block_ signals outside the movie theater. The shadow of the cage itself is a noticeable dead zone. And I'm afraid that it will only take one litigious parent whose baby sitter is trying to reach them, or one doctor who can't be paged, to create a dangerous lawsuit for for any theater that tries this.

I have seen it done for certain conference rooms, that were clearly marked this this way, and even then people became quite upset at not having their cell phones work.

How could you call 911 if (wink wink) happened?

In the past there have been very suspicious deals where for example in China an Airbus contract was at last minute handed to Boeing, we don't need more of this crap were government organisations are doing dirty legwork for corporation.

There may be a different explanation. And, as noted below: "95% of U.S. economic intelligence comes from open sources."

Why We Spy on Our Allies - R. James Woolsey - March 17, 2000 (Also available here )

What is the recent flap regarding Echelon and U.S. spying on European industries all about? We'll begin with some candor from the American side. Yes, my continental European friends, we have spied on you. And it's true that we use computers to sort through data by using keywords. Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we're looking for?

The European Parliament's recent report on Echelon, written by British journalist Duncan Campbell, has sparked angry accusations from continental Europe that U.S. intelligence is stealing advanced technology from European companies so that we can -- get this -- give it to American companies and help them compete. My European friends, get real. True, in a handful of areas European technology surpasses American, but, to say this as gently as I can, the number of such areas is very, very, very small. Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing.

Why, then, have we spied on you? The answer is quite apparent from the Campbell report -- in the discussion of the only two cases in which European companies have allegedly been targets of American secret intelligence collection. Of Thomson-CSF, the report says: "The company was alleged to have bribed members of the Brazilian government selection panel." Of Airbus, it says that we found that "Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official." These facts are inevitably left out of European press reports.

That's right, my continental friends, we have spied on you because you bribe. Your companies' products are often more costly, less technically advanced or both, than your American competitors'. As a result you bribe a lot. So complicit are your governments that in several European countries bribes still are tax-deductible.

When we have caught you at it, you might be interested, we haven't said a word to the U.S. companies in the competition. Instead we go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials that we don't take kindly to such corruption. They often respond by giving the most meritorious bid (sometimes American, sometimes not) all or part of the contract. This upsets you, and sometimes creates recriminations between your bribers and the other country's bribees, and this occasionally becomes a public scandal. . .

Why do you bribe? It's not because your companies are inherently more corrupt. Nor is it because you are inherently less talented at technology. It is because your economic patron saint is still Jean Baptiste Colbert, whereas ours is Adam Smith. In spite of a few recent reforms, your governments largely still dominate your economies, so you have much greater difficulty than we in innovating, encouraging labor mobility, reducing costs, attracting capital to fast-moving young businesses and adapting quickly to changing economic circumstances. You'd rather not go through the hassle of moving toward less dirigisme. It's so much easier to keep paying bribes.

The Central Intelligence Agency collects other economic intelligence, but the vast majority of it is not stolen secrets. The Aspin-Brown Commission four years ago found that about 95% of U.S. economic intelligence comes from open sources. --- more

Apparently there is more than one form of corrupt practice.

No offense to you, but the person you are quoting, "RADACK," is a nitwit. The FISA court is a federal court that deals with secret material, not a secret court. Issuing search warrants is not an adversarial process to begin with, and wouldn't be at any other court. There is more.

Secret Court's Oversight Gets Scrutiny

Michael Mukasey, who was attorney general under President George W. Bush, said in an interview that the lack of rejections by the FISA court doesn't mean the court is a rubber stamp. He notes the court sometimes modifies orders and that the Justice Department's national-security division is careful about the applications it presents to the court.

Of 1,856 FISA applications the Justice Department made in 2012, the court denied none but modified 40, the Justice Department reported.

Timothy Edgar, who was a top lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said he believed the FISA court was a rubber stamp until he saw the process firsthand when he became a senior civil-liberties official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2006. "It's definitely not a rubber stamp," he said in an interview Sunday. "On a very superficial level, they tend to approve pretty much everything that comes before them. They do meet in secret. It's just more complicated than that."

The reason so many orders are approved, he said, is that the Justice Department office that manages the process vets the applications rigorously. The lawyers there see themselves not as government advocates so much as neutral arbiters of the law between the executive branch and the courts, he said, so getting the order approved by the Justice Department lawyers is perhaps the biggest hurdle to approval. "The culture of that office is very reluctant to get a denial," he said.-- more

No offense to you, but the person you are quoting, "RADACK," is a nitwit. The FISA court is a federal court that deals with secret material, not a secret court. Issuing search warrants is not an adversarial process to begin with, and wouldn't be at any other court. There is more.

Secret Court's Oversight Gets Scrutiny

Michael Mukasey, who was attorney general under President George W. Bush, said in an interview that the lack of rejections by the FISA court doesn't mean the court is a rubber stamp. He notes the court sometimes modifies orders and that the Justice Department's national-security division is careful about the applications it presents to the court.

Of 1,856 FISA applications the Justice Department made in 2012, the court denied none but modified 40, the Justice Department reported.

Timothy Edgar, who was a top lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said he believed the FISA court was a rubber stamp until he saw the process firsthand when he became a senior civil-liberties official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2006. "It's definitely not a rubber stamp," he said in an interview Sunday. "On a very superficial level, they tend to approve pretty much everything that comes before them. They do meet in secret. It's just more complicated than that."

The reason so many orders are approved, he said, is that the Justice Department office that manages the process vets the applications rigorously. The lawyers there see themselves not as government advocates so much as neutral arbiters of the law between the executive branch and the courts, he said, so getting the order approved by the Justice Department lawyers is perhaps the biggest hurdle to approval. "The culture of that office is very reluctant to get a denial," he said.-- more

Such materials are commercially available as wallpaper for years. (See http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/05/25/wallpaper-that-blocks-wi-fi/)

But I'm afraid the FCC will become upset because it can _block_ signals outside the movie theater. The shadow of the cage itself is a noticeable dead zone. And I'm afraid that it will only take one litigious parent whose baby sitter is trying to reach them, or one doctor who can't be paged, to create a dangerous lawsuit for for any theater that tries this.

I have seen it done for certain conference rooms, that were clearly marked this this way, and even then people became quite upset at not having their cell phones work.

Wrong again, in many ways.

1. The banks aren't extorting anything. They are not getting any significant profit from this, only some small short term benefits from the origination of new mortgages. The interest rates they loan money at, and in particular the flatness of the yield curve is suppressing their normal profitability, quite severely. Meanwhile Americans taking loans to buy homes are making out like bandits with the low loan rates.

http://www.standardandpoors.com/ratings/articles/en/us/?articleType=HTML&assetID=1245346055206

2. It isn't particularly inflationary. Low interest rates increase money supplies a bit, yes, because of the loans. But the money printing is not because the money the Fed creates is held in reserve accounts at the Fed. It never goes into circulation. Why do you think inflation rate has been ZERO three out of the past four months?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324081704578233751687277638.html

3. The government pays interest because of the loans it issues. It would ALWAYS pay interest regardless of whether the Fed bought the loans or not. What the Fed purchase does is a gift to the taxpayers because the resulting interest rates are much LOWER than would be the case in a free market.

Good news is that Google is just about to bury that guy. They have done it before, and they will do it again. Soon.

Google Inc. is developing a videogame console and wristwatch powered by its Android operating system, according to people familiar with the matter, as the Internet company seeks to spread the software beyond smartphones and tablets.

http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-264424/

It'll be good to see them humble Microsoft in this arena as well.

There is some talk of them subsidising the price manufacturers pay for energy. If they just repealed the subsidies to the 'green' power companies, they wouldn't have to.

IBM Plans New Center in Iowa (2009): "The terms of the deal underscore how coveted new jobs are among the states at a time of rising unemployment. Iowa is paying up generously to attract the plant. Mike Blouin, president of Greater Dubuque Development Corp., said it is providing "a $55 million package." That includes an $11.7 million loan from the state that will be forgiven if IBM maintains the jobs for two years.Local community colleges will pay IBM $10 million for job training expenses for its employees. Under an Iowa program that he called unique, Mr. Blouin said the colleges sell bonds to finance the training expenses, and pay off the debt from the state income taxes generated by the trained IBM employees. In addition, the government will guarantee a $25 million loan to a local nonprofit group that will renovate the building, and lease it to IBM at what Mr. Blouin said was a "very low" rate. IBM will also receive tax credits and a 20-year tax abatement. In return, Mr. Blouin said IBM will create a $58 million a year payroll plus benefits and add to local spending."

The upshot: "Based on the vast majority of the empirical work to date, HFT and automated,competing trading venues have substantially improved market liquidity and reduced trading costs for all investors. Share prices are almost surely higher as a result of this reduction in trading costs, benefiting long-term investors. Higher share prices also have favorable implications for firms\ cost of equity capital. "

You are mixing apples and oranges here. Automated trading and HFT are not the same thing. Automated trading does provide substantially improved liquidity and reduced trading cost. HFT on the other hand does not demonstrably reduce trading costs (or at best the jury is still out on that) and the liquidity it provides means your transaction can go through in a fraction of a second rather than in one second. It provides no liquidity when the market is under stress as the HFT machines are plugged out immediately in non-standard situations. On the other hand, HFT takes a lot of capital out of the market for that 'service'. Is that fraction of a second of additional liquidity worh it? IMHO not.

There is so much FUD around HFT it is hard for people to think rationally about it. I had wasted the following study on a troll once already earlier this morning and therefore it would be a shame not to repost it: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/HFT0324.pdf [wsj.com]

That article is funded by Citadel LLC that owns a HFT platform. It provides no hypothesis, no metrics, no tangible goals. It's pretty much an essay reiterating a couple dozen pro HFT papers and press pieces

Maybe you could educate yourself as well and listen to some other opinions - like that of one of the fathers of automated trading.

Demand Surges for Supercomputers

Do Supercomputers Still Matter?

Oil giant Total builds "world's largest commercial supercomputer"

I suggest you read this PDF, which was posted by someone else but has some very good information. It's quite an education. (I had trouble opening, had to download it.)

1. See This PDF.
2. Economic policy is (generally, or rather a subset of) social policy. There are lots of papers out there showing that using taxation to accomplish a social (or economic) objective is rife with unintended consequences and perverse incentives. Just as a direct example, according to the PDF above, both theoretical and empirical research has shown that imposing a transaction tax on trades has the effect of reducing liquidity, increasing volatility, increasing the cost of trades for retail customers, and reduces stock prices substantially. These are generally the opposite of the desired effect.

Not to mention that this also drives the market to other jurisdictions - when Sweden imposed a 1% transaction tax they lost over 60% of their market to London, and even after eliminating the tax, 20 years later those customers (and jobs) have never returned.

It's true, I've blathered on beyond all sensibility. There's just so much misinformation and folks believing what the unedumacted media say about this stuff, forgetting the nearly nobody in the media has ever so much as taken an Economics course.

Case in point - analysis has shown that the flash crash in May 2010 was not caused by HFT (the PDF linked below talks about this in several places). It was in fact greatly moderated by HFT, until the HFT traders went past their own circuit breakers and withdrew from the market. Then, after a five minute 'rest' period instituted by the SEC, the HFT went back to work and everything was back to normal within 20 minutes. But ask anybody who reads the 'news', and they'll spout the media line that HFT caused the flash crash.

TFA provides pretty good evidence:
1) profits per trade are down by some 90% (IIRC what TFA said);
2) actual revenues are down by a factor of three according to the PDF below;
3) many institutions have left the business or gone bust because they couldn't compete as the market matured;
4) HFT has become an essential element of almost all market activity - according to SEC, 68% of large cap stock trades are made using HFT (this last item is in the link below);
5) 'Everybody' is now doing it - your neighborhood broker uses HFT to complete your trade of 10 shares of IBM.

IOW, HFT has transitioned from being the hot new way to make $zillions to the new combination of the ticker tape and the market makers. (but 'tis true, there are several kinds of HFT.)

And SEC is considering _requiring_ HFT traders to stay in the market during 'flash' events, because they are instrumental in reducing the impact of those events. (again, read the PDF, all the way through.)

These are all classic elements of a busted tech bubble. From Econ 102, the interesting thing about tech bubbles (which HFT certainly exemplifies) is that in the bubble the majority of the original players - sometimes 99%, sometimes less, drop out, are merged out of existence, or otherwise leave the market; and ten years later, _almost without exception_ the market is more than four times the size as it was at the peak of the bubble.

This was posted by someone else, and covers the topic pretty well. (I had to click the download link from the apparent PDF, then read it from the file manager - YMMV).

There is so much FUD around HFT it is hard for people to think rationally about it. I had wasted the following study on a troll once already earlier this morning and therefore it would be a shame not to repost it: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/HFT0324.pdf

Maybe someone may be bothered to actually learn something about HFT before they declare it the spawn of Satan. The upshot: "Based on the vast majority of the empirical work to date, HFT and automated,competing trading venues have substantially improved market liquidity and reduced trading costs for all investors. Share prices are almost surely higher as a result of this reduction in trading costs, benefiting long-term investors. Higher share prices also have favorable implications for firms\ cost of equity capital. " Exactly, and that makes FUD out of the sentiment that HFT is somehow squeezing out mom and pop investors, or siphoning billions out of the market.

In fact, do you know who doesn't like HFT? The investment banking arms of too-big-to-fail banks. Yes, they run HFT operations as well, but they would love to see a return to the days when the roost was ruled by the company with the biggest pile of money instead of the other guy who had better technology. Every time one of these articles shows up I am amazed by the number of supposedly technically minded slashdotters who come out on the side of big banks over the guys who write software for a living, and the trolls who can't be bothered to even understand what HFT is before they attack it.

What about the better bid/ask spreads? That helps everybody in the market - especially the small mom and pop investors who don't have to see a stock price move as far to generate a profit. http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/HFT0324.pdf

It seems to me that since HFT makes liquidity available to everyone, then it is HFT itself that is providing a valuable community purpose. In fact, one of the early criticisms of HFT was that it was detrimental to large, institutional traders like the "too big to fail" big banks.

Lower bid/ask spreads: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/HFT0324.pdf

Why is it good? Because a liquid stock price with a small bid/ask doesn't have to rise as far for me to make a profit.

Try harder, it's going to launch in Brazil, but not in Portugal and I seriously doubt that Kinect will get to work with Russian/Finnish/Norwegian (which is just a continuum of dialects) languages at all during its lifetime. So, no, it's not Kinect the cause of the 1 year delay in Asia.

Use Verizon Wireless or T-Mobile. U.S. government cannot spy on the users of those two cellphone services because they are both partially owned by foreign companies. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324049504578543800240266368.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLE_Video_Third

The amount of stimulation is over two orders of magnitude lower than the amount needed to cause damage, as interpolated from studies in rats. This has scientists and medical professionals worried about potential dangers, as the effects of low-level stimulation have not been adequately studied.

Backscatter X-ray machines are estimated to cause 1 death by cancer every 200 million scans. The government has repeatedly assured us that these are safe, and were deployed with no regulation, no testing, and no quality control (as, for example, the dose-per-scan claims by the manufacturer).

It's getting to the point where crowd-sourced information is more accurate than the experts.

Imagine a world of scientific research guided by crowd-sourced anecdotal evidence: after masses of people try something and report positive effects, the research community gets onboard and tests the evidence.

If the medical community doesn't clean up its act, they'll find themselves marginalized into obscurity. Like buggy-whip manufacturers or the MPAA/RIAA, when you stand in the way of progress, progress will leave you behind.

Of course there's this.

Funny how that study is 2 years old and we haven't heard anything more about it. Did it pass peer review? Fail? Do you even know or care?

So fuck off and die sonny boy.

Is not their problem if you feel that you don't have anything to hide. You could be committing 3 felonies a day without being aware of it. Anything that you did in your past could be used against you, even if not a matter of national security, or against some friend to frame you if they think you did something wrong. And could be in your side to prove that you are innocent, something that could be costly if even possible.

And not forget that the **AA are in bed with them, the wrong you did could be having a background music in the video you took in a birthday party or that silly theme that you were singing with your friends when drunk.

Don't think just in the present, and your precarious today's safety, Things will change. And for worse.

According to the Wall Street Journel (in 2011) there are over 4500 Federal offenses, and there is no list of them.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703749504576172714184601654.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_6#project%3DCRIMES_FEDOFFENSES_1107%26articleTabs%3Darticle

I say dubious, because for all the vaunted survelliance ongoing right now, it failed to stop the Woolwich stabbing attack [dailymail.co.uk]. It failed to stop the Boston marathon bombings

The surveillance is a tool, not magic. Even if the surveillance program provides good information it is still only an input to the security services. They still have to act upon it properly. In the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI appears to have dropped the ball, ignoring the direct warnings of the Russian security services. And somehow they didn't latch onto the trips to Dagestan. The security services are staffed flesh and blood that can make mistakes, no magic software is going to change that.

I think we are on a very slippery slope, where the temptation is all too great for the ruling parties to take the path of least resistance and extend the coverage gradually to all undesirables and enemies of the state - from terrorists to child pornographers to murderers to robbers to copyright infringers and finally to common members of the public.

Although I'm willing to agree that the security services need oversight from Parliament, I think there is a limited prospect for the sort of extension that you fear. In most democracies the dividing line between national security and ordinary criminal offenses tends to be well drawn and guarded. The two systems tend to live under different rules.

If you think this is impossible, look to China where it is happening even as we speak. The Chinese government even justified its censorship and surveillance of the internet on the basis of public security in a White Paper [english.gov.cn], including the following gem

I would hope it wouldn't be necessary to belabor the point that the British system of government is quite different in both manner and outlook from the government of the People's Republic of China, often referred to as Communist China. I think there is little danger there. They actually have a genuinely oppressive government there and have at best liberalized some.

What lies at the end of the slippery slope? Alan Moore might have the answer. [wikipedia.org] I suggest you look at his book, it is an intriguing read.

Thank you, but I'll take Alan Moorehead to Alan Moore any day. I've seen V for Vendetta. The movie is beautiful, the ideas are nonsense.

'A' for Absurd

I'm not a wine snob, but I know there are certain things that sometimes you *can't* replicate. [...] I'd argue that fine liquors -- wines, whiskeys, etc... fall into that category. I'd say it's almost an art form.

Detailed studies of professional wine judges in blind tastings have shown that prizes from contest to contest are so random that they might as well be picked from a hat. And the average professional judge, tasting the same wine on consecutive days, would on average only be able to narrow the rating to within 8 points on a 20-point scale.

Other studies have even shown that professional tasters often fare pretty poorly even in tests like, "Taste 3 wines, tell me which 2 are identical," or that when given white wines dyed with red food coloring, they start spouting out the nonsense about "flavor notes" and "nose" that would be appropriate for red wines rather than whites.

Given this information, it's pretty clear that even the so-called "expert palettes" don't know what the hell they're talking about.

So, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's pretty likely chemists could master the subtle art of getting a wine result that could satisfy even most professional judges in a blind test.

Every day you probably break dozens of laws without knowing it.

I call BS on that. Give us some examples of dozens of laws that a normal person might break every day.

Some obvious ones are:

1. Exceeding the speed limit, even by a small amount, even only for a second
2. Turning without using signals
3. Not stopping before the limit line painted on intersections
4. Jaywalking between intersections or stepping into an intersection before the walk signal is on, or after "don't walk" has started flashing even if you know you'll clear the intersection before the don't walk signal is on
5. Connecting to an open Wifi network without permission of the owner
6. Playing music loudly enough for others to hear (that's a public performance and needs to be licensed)
7. Signing on a website with a fake identity and/or various TOS violations
8. Private gambling (office football pools, betting a friend that you can run down the block faster than him, etc)
9. Riding transit with a "wide" marker (sometimes only if you're underage)
10. Possessing "child erotica" - scantily clothed children (i.e. a Sears catalog showing children in bathing suits)
11. Letting oil from your car drip on your driveway and wash into the storm drains
12. letting trash accidentally blow from your car (or fall from your pocket), even pocket lint or an apple seed
13. Eating or drinking while driving or other distracting activity
14. Taking a pen or paperclip from the office for use at home
15. Finding a penny on the ground and keeping it instead of turning it in
16. Drinking alcohol outside of your home in some jurisdictions
17. Moving prescription medications from the prescription bottle to another bottle or container

And those are only the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

There are somewhere between 10,000 and 300,000 federal regulations that you can violate, no one can possibly know them all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304319804576389601079728920.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

"There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime," said John Baker, a retired Louisiana State University law professor who has also tried counting the number of new federal crimes created in recent years. "That is not an exaggeration."

Now reports that it's not just Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, ISPs, and credit card companies are involved as well. Harry Reid said, "Everyone should just calm down and understand this isn't anything that is brand new,'' which I'm sure makes everyone feel better.

Diane Feinstein is ok with the program because she personally gets to approve it, as part of her committee position. Remember Obama voted for this before he ever got elected president, so if any of this surprises anyone, they are naive.

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/oak-cliff/headlines/20130301-firing-and-arrests-of-dallas-police-officers-could-be-opening-salvo-in-another-departmental-scandal.ece
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704720804576009812869266014.html
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-04-15/news/chi-schaumburg-drug-conviction-dropped-20130415_1_john-cichy-hudak-drug-conspiracy
http://theweek.com/article/index/220367/planting-drugs-on-innocent-people-nypds-shocking-scandal

I could go on, but you can read the results of searching for cops planting drugs on google yourself rather than plugging your ears and screaming at the top of your lungs how it can't be happening.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324423904578521542174762344.html?google_editors_picks=true

It seems that even Will Smith can't be successful all the time.. DVD/Blue Ray available in 3.. 2... 1 months?

http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/04/30/do-green-products-turn-off-conservative-customers/

"Magically", so everybody please pay attention. The poster I am replying to believes in magic, because that's the only way he thinks the dollar would be 'dropping' in case of printing - just by magic.

Tell me, oh the wizzardly one, why does the government even bother with counterfeiting laws at this point?

I'll tell you: they don't like the competition.

Printing 85 Billion a month is inflation by definition, what you don't see is WHERE it's going, where the inflation is causing the bubbles to appear, but just because YOU don't see, it doesn't mean there is no inflation.

There is inflation, MASSIVE inflation in the gov't bond market, in the stock market, some inflation is spilling into the housing market again, plenty of it is going into the 'education' market. Plenty of it is going into the various commodities markets and the foreign markets that are providing USA with its consumer goods are absorbing that inflation by responding with money printing of their own and buying up all the extra supply of the dollars.

But it's already collapsing, even before you realise that there is inflation, it's already collapsing. The interest rates in the bond market are going up, the Chinese are buying up USA properties and companies, dumping the collected dollars back INTO USA, and of-course just like with the last bubble that burst and then all these people on TV and in government said: nobody could see this coming, same thing is going to play out this time.

It's going to be a much more spectacular collapse this time, you are going to notice it when it really implodes, but until that, just like Ben Bernanke, the Federator, you think that dumping dollars from the helicopters actually achieves anything BUT inflation.

are millions of reasons to use a currency other than your own governments

- yes, being a free individual, free person that's the main reason.

Of-course people trade currencies for gain all the time, and it has nothing even to do with 'evading taxes', not that taxes shouldn't be avoided and evaded in the first place, anybody paying taxes is destroying the economy, not helping it.

The government wants to fund something? Let it cut the spending it already has.

Free and unlimited access to publicly funded research should already, without a law to enforce it, be a fact. So it is here in Europe, at least.

Yeah! That's a change the European Union made weeks ago.

The policy change brings the EU in line with the U.S. and Australia, which both recently made open-access publishing mandatory for any papers that received government funding.

Oops.

It depends what you mean by Joe q investor, but it is possible for a lot of people.

https://eresearch.fidelity.com/eresearch/ipo/ipocalendar.jhtml#eligibility

But really you don't want to mess with that sort of thing. Sound investing isn't about gambling with hot ipos. It's about using sound principles of portfolio management, diversification and risk management, and keeping management costs down.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323475304578502973521526236.html