It's simply not a good law, any time it's designed to punish someone other than the perpetrator as the responsible party.
Agreed, so long as we go the other way as well: no more letting people off the hook for crimes they commit acting under the aegis of a corporation. I don't know how NZ law is about this, but US law is lousy with it.
So if the trade took 1 second instead of 0.01 seconds, it would have been easily noticed???
Was it one trade worth $2 billion? I kind of doubt it. Most likely it was a bunch of trades, spread out over days or weeks. And yes, if those trades had taken a hundred times longer, maybe they would have been caught before such an insane amount of money was lost. (I'll note that the 0.01s you suggest is actually much, much slower than modern trading; it's more like a factor of a thousand, or ten thousand.)
This is total nonsense. This has nothing at all to do with high-speed trading, if anything it has to do with policy enforcement, plain and simple.
Again, policy enforcement is easier when the system isn't structured to make it easy for people to do this kind of thing under the radar -- or, as some posters on this story have quite reasonably suggested, to give the higher-ups plausible deniability. High-speed trading isn't the only culprit here by any means, but it sure doesn't help.
You're dealing with an ideology here: "Animals can't think, noway, nohow." It's pointless to present data or logical arguments to these people. Like creationists, they've already chosen what to believe, and interpret all evidence through the filter of that belief; and like creationism, it's a belief deeply rooted in the idea that humans are something distinct from the rest of nature, which makes it almost impossible to overcome in those who choose it.
The idea is that the fraud wouldn't have been nearly as easy if it weren't for the insanity of the trading system. Your question is kind of like asking, "how does a human stealing secure data say anything about operating system security?" Humans choose to commit the crimes, sure; that doesn't mean we should structure the system to make it as easy for them as possible, which appears to be what we've done with trading.
If one write's one's own research paper, there is no need to check for plagiarism.
True. Unfortunately, if one's school uses Turnitin or a similar service, there is a need to check that one's original work will not be flagged for plagiarism, since the software they use is well known for producing an absurdly high rate of false positives. (Here is one reference out of many; Turnitin's steadfast refusal to discuss their algorithms in any other than vague PR terms doesn't help inspire confidence that anything's improved in the last couple of years.) Given the dire consequences of being accused of plagiarism in an academic setting, it's entirely reasonable for students to take steps to defend themselves.
Do you agree that GWB had the same level of problems that BHO has or do you think Obama has it harder?
Bush inherited a prosperous country at peace. Obama inherited a broke country at war. To pretend that these are the same level of problems is absurd.
If you're going to be critical, at least be fair and criticize both sides on the same points. To do otherwise is hypocritical.
No, it's acknowledging the reality that the two sides are not the same (no matter how fashionable it may be to declare that there's no difference between the R's and the D's, it is patently not true). If two people, or two groups of people, disagree on an issue, at least one of them is wrong; they may both be wrong, but they're usually not equally wrong.
Part of the golden parachute is being a fall guy for things you did not cause.
The board makes a decision which cannot turn out well and you follow it as directed despite logging opposition to that decision Bad things happen and someone (you) are to take the blame for the implementation of that decision.
The payment for leaving is for not arguing or airing bad laundry.
Yeah, well, being blamed for someone else's bad decision is a risk that everyone runs, in any job, at any level. It's just one of those things that can happen, like your company having to lay you off because business is down, or a personal conflict that makes it impossible to stay on the job, or whatever. These are risks that you know exist, and that you should prepare for -- which is, BTW, a lot easier to do if you're a multimillion-dollar-per-year CEO than if you're earning a regular person's salary. And yet CEOs and other top executives are about the only people who don't have to worry about what will happen to them if they lose their jobs through no fault of their own, because they know they'll be taken care of either way. Nice gig.
Haven't you been listening to the US right's hatred and contempt for government?
Sure, I've listened to the rhetoric. I've also observed the reality. Conservatives despise government... unless it's putting power in their hands and money in their pockets.
Isn't it the circle of life? Aren't species supposed to die off eventually?
Should we be interfering with the laws of nature?
There is no "supposed to" involved (unless you believe it's a divine plan, in which case He, or She, or It, or They should let us know in unequivocal terms.) Species don't die off for the hell of it, they die off when their environment changes too much for them to survive and/or reproduce; and every species on Earth "interferes with the laws of nature" from every other species' perspective, simply by existing. Humans are, as far as we know, the only species capable of seeing the consequence of this interference and deciding to do something about it. If we choose not to do something about it -- guess what, we're interfering no less.
They're trying to make it happen by declaring to have already happened, of course. Sometimes this works ("the floppy is dead," ca. 1998) and sometimes it doesn't. I suspect (and hope!) that this time will fall into the "doesn't" category, but the truth is that if anyone's in a position to make it happen, Google is.
its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable, while those of other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being overthrown by newly discovered facts
Which is a strong argument for not considering it a science at all. As far as authority goes, you'll find plenty of eminent names on both sides of the debate.
Computer Science can be proper science. Algorithms, Formal Languages et cetera are ultimately based on mathematics and scientific principles. So Computer Science is forgivable.
Algorithms and formal language design are based on mathematics, period. So the question is whether you consider mathematics to be a science or something else, and there's a good bit of debate on that.
Hell, I wouldn't trust the Chinese not to "accidentally" drop the thing on top of the US, for a start. And in case you ask, no, I wouldn't trust the US not to "accidentally" drop one on Peking either.
The US and China already have a fairly well-established technology for wiping out each other's cities, and while a genuine accident is certainly possible, a suspicious "accident" would invite massive retaliation. If China or anyone else ever tows an asteroid into Earth orbit, I guarantee you there will be a whole lot of very alert people in holes under the North Dakota prairie watching very closely to see where it goes.
True enough, but it could still make a lot of money. Say enough metal gets dumped on the market to drive the price down by a factor of five, so it's worth "only" $5 trillion instead of $25 trillion. And suppose the entire program costs $4 trillion (which is more money by far than every country on Earth combined has spent on space exploration to date.) That's still a trillion dollars worth of pure profit. Not to mention that whatever country actually manages to pull this off would get the benefit of having an enormous supply of raw materials lying around, which would have all sorts of economic multiplier effects for a very long time to come.
Conservatives actually differ from liberals only in how best to assist the less fortunate. There is a false perception that they care less because they are less tolerant of ideas that feel good or feel right but actually accomplish little.
Like the idea that if we cut taxes on billionaires even more, jobs will follow? Conservatives seem pretty "tolerant" of that bit of magical thinking.
So when they oppose an idea that has the best of intentions, not because they disagree with the goal but because they think the idea is flawed, they "look bad".
No. They look bad because their policies fail, over and over again, to the point where any reasonable person might start to suspect that "assist[ing] the less fortunate" is not actually on the conservative agenda. To be fair, it depends on how you define failure: if your goal is a nation full of desperate peasants who will work themselves to death for scraps from the nobility's table, conservative policies are a resounding success.
Most aren't. Some are. That's pretty much the way R&D works: most projects fail, but the ones that succeed change our lives, generally for the better. If you're not interested in hearing about the early stages, when success or failure is impossible to predict, that's fine; no one's making you read those stories.
It's silly because "off the grid" is a modern phrase with a well-understood meaning referring to a way of life that does, in fact, exist in the modern world. You can try to redefine it all you want, but don't expect the rest of us to play along.
Thanks for this clear and cogent post. A lot of/.ers who aren't physicists (i.e., the vast majority of us) seem to really enjoy beating up on modern physics for some reason, and one of the most common complaints is "it's all math, there's no connection to reality any more." It's good to see a reminder that (a) a lot of physics has always been math, (b) there's still plenty of experimental work generating interesting real-world observations which the math is necessary to describe, and (c) the math that's used is pretty damn good at describing the way things work.
Well, yeah, you're not really off the grid unless you're living in a grass hut, wearing animal skins you tanned yourself, and chipping your own tools out of flint. But there is a gigantic continuum of "grid-ness" between someone living in a big city and someone living in a remote rural area without electricity, running water, paved roads, or telecommunications of any kind -- even if the person in the latter case makes a living from farming with tools manufactured in a big city far away. By your strict definition, practically nobody on Earth has lived off the grid for several thousand years, and that's just silly.
I'm not sure I see how particle physics is any worse than... oh... say... software engineering in that regard. Seriously, we here on/. don't tend to notice it as much because we're immersed in it, but have you ever noticed how fast any programming-related discussion here becomes an exchange of jargon? That's because new languages, new data structures, new API's, and new toolsets are being developed all the time, and they all need names. If you're working in the field, you know what these things are; if you're not, a discussion about them might as well be a string of random alphanumeric characters on the screen. I have no doubt that to physicists, all the terms the OP was mocking make perfect sense (a lot of physicists may disagree about whether the things the terms describe actually exist, but that's a separate issue -- and again, one not unique to physics.)
Slashdot Mirror
Fox-piss flavor Kool-Aid, yum yum!
It's simply not a good law, any time it's designed to punish someone other than the perpetrator as the responsible party.
Agreed, so long as we go the other way as well: no more letting people off the hook for crimes they commit acting under the aegis of a corporation. I don't know how NZ law is about this, but US law is lousy with it.
So if the trade took 1 second instead of 0.01 seconds, it would have been easily noticed???
Was it one trade worth $2 billion? I kind of doubt it. Most likely it was a bunch of trades, spread out over days or weeks. And yes, if those trades had taken a hundred times longer, maybe they would have been caught before such an insane amount of money was lost. (I'll note that the 0.01s you suggest is actually much, much slower than modern trading; it's more like a factor of a thousand, or ten thousand.)
This is total nonsense. This has nothing at all to do with high-speed trading, if anything it has to do with policy enforcement, plain and simple.
Again, policy enforcement is easier when the system isn't structured to make it easy for people to do this kind of thing under the radar -- or, as some posters on this story have quite reasonably suggested, to give the higher-ups plausible deniability. High-speed trading isn't the only culprit here by any means, but it sure doesn't help.
You're dealing with an ideology here: "Animals can't think, noway, nohow." It's pointless to present data or logical arguments to these people. Like creationists, they've already chosen what to believe, and interpret all evidence through the filter of that belief; and like creationism, it's a belief deeply rooted in the idea that humans are something distinct from the rest of nature, which makes it almost impossible to overcome in those who choose it.
The idea is that the fraud wouldn't have been nearly as easy if it weren't for the insanity of the trading system. Your question is kind of like asking, "how does a human stealing secure data say anything about operating system security?" Humans choose to commit the crimes, sure; that doesn't mean we should structure the system to make it as easy for them as possible, which appears to be what we've done with trading.
If one write's one's own research paper, there is no need to check for plagiarism.
True. Unfortunately, if one's school uses Turnitin or a similar service, there is a need to check that one's original work will not be flagged for plagiarism, since the software they use is well known for producing an absurdly high rate of false positives. (Here is one reference out of many; Turnitin's steadfast refusal to discuss their algorithms in any other than vague PR terms doesn't help inspire confidence that anything's improved in the last couple of years.) Given the dire consequences of being accused of plagiarism in an academic setting, it's entirely reasonable for students to take steps to defend themselves.
Do you agree that GWB had the same level of problems that BHO has or do you think Obama has it harder?
Bush inherited a prosperous country at peace. Obama inherited a broke country at war. To pretend that these are the same level of problems is absurd.
If you're going to be critical, at least be fair and criticize both sides on the same points. To do otherwise is hypocritical.
No, it's acknowledging the reality that the two sides are not the same (no matter how fashionable it may be to declare that there's no difference between the R's and the D's, it is patently not true). If two people, or two groups of people, disagree on an issue, at least one of them is wrong; they may both be wrong, but they're usually not equally wrong.
Part of the golden parachute is being a fall guy for things you did not cause.
The board makes a decision which cannot turn out well and you follow it as directed despite logging opposition to that decision Bad things happen and someone (you) are to take the blame for the implementation of that decision.
The payment for leaving is for not arguing or airing bad laundry.
Yeah, well, being blamed for someone else's bad decision is a risk that everyone runs, in any job, at any level. It's just one of those things that can happen, like your company having to lay you off because business is down, or a personal conflict that makes it impossible to stay on the job, or whatever. These are risks that you know exist, and that you should prepare for -- which is, BTW, a lot easier to do if you're a multimillion-dollar-per-year CEO than if you're earning a regular person's salary. And yet CEOs and other top executives are about the only people who don't have to worry about what will happen to them if they lose their jobs through no fault of their own, because they know they'll be taken care of either way. Nice gig.
Haven't you been listening to the US right's hatred and contempt for government?
Sure, I've listened to the rhetoric. I've also observed the reality. Conservatives despise government ... unless it's putting power in their hands and money in their pockets.
How do capitalists exploit people when the economic system is fundamentally based on voluntary, free trade?
By making it less voluntary as soon as they acquire the power to do so. Which they do. Every. Single. Time.
If you're incapable of understanding this simple fact, you are too ignorant or too deluded to have anything meaningful to say on the subject.
Isn't it the circle of life? Aren't species supposed to die off eventually?
Should we be interfering with the laws of nature?
There is no "supposed to" involved (unless you believe it's a divine plan, in which case He, or She, or It, or They should let us know in unequivocal terms.) Species don't die off for the hell of it, they die off when their environment changes too much for them to survive and/or reproduce; and every species on Earth "interferes with the laws of nature" from every other species' perspective, simply by existing. Humans are, as far as we know, the only species capable of seeing the consequence of this interference and deciding to do something about it. If we choose not to do something about it -- guess what, we're interfering no less.
They're trying to make it happen by declaring to have already happened, of course. Sometimes this works ("the floppy is dead," ca. 1998) and sometimes it doesn't. I suspect (and hope!) that this time will fall into the "doesn't" category, but the truth is that if anyone's in a position to make it happen, Google is.
its laws are absolutely certain and indisputable, while those of other sciences are to some extent debatable and in constant danger of being overthrown by newly discovered facts
Which is a strong argument for not considering it a science at all. As far as authority goes, you'll find plenty of eminent names on both sides of the debate.
Computer Science can be proper science. Algorithms, Formal Languages et cetera are ultimately based on mathematics and scientific principles. So Computer Science is forgivable.
Algorithms and formal language design are based on mathematics, period. So the question is whether you consider mathematics to be a science or something else, and there's a good bit of debate on that.
Hell, I wouldn't trust the Chinese not to "accidentally" drop the thing on top of the US, for a start. And in case you ask, no, I wouldn't trust the US not to "accidentally" drop one on Peking either.
The US and China already have a fairly well-established technology for wiping out each other's cities, and while a genuine accident is certainly possible, a suspicious "accident" would invite massive retaliation. If China or anyone else ever tows an asteroid into Earth orbit, I guarantee you there will be a whole lot of very alert people in holes under the North Dakota prairie watching very closely to see where it goes.
One good-sized metallic asteroid contains more metal than we have mined out of the Earth's crust in all of human history.
True enough, but it could still make a lot of money. Say enough metal gets dumped on the market to drive the price down by a factor of five, so it's worth "only" $5 trillion instead of $25 trillion. And suppose the entire program costs $4 trillion (which is more money by far than every country on Earth combined has spent on space exploration to date.) That's still a trillion dollars worth of pure profit. Not to mention that whatever country actually manages to pull this off would get the benefit of having an enormous supply of raw materials lying around, which would have all sorts of economic multiplier effects for a very long time to come.
Conservatives actually differ from liberals only in how best to assist the less fortunate. There is a false perception that they care less because they are less tolerant of ideas that feel good or feel right but actually accomplish little.
Like the idea that if we cut taxes on billionaires even more, jobs will follow? Conservatives seem pretty "tolerant" of that bit of magical thinking.
So when they oppose an idea that has the best of intentions, not because they disagree with the goal but because they think the idea is flawed, they "look bad".
No. They look bad because their policies fail, over and over again, to the point where any reasonable person might start to suspect that "assist[ing] the less fortunate" is not actually on the conservative agenda. To be fair, it depends on how you define failure: if your goal is a nation full of desperate peasants who will work themselves to death for scraps from the nobility's table, conservative policies are a resounding success.
How many of these are going anywhere years later?
Most aren't. Some are. That's pretty much the way R&D works: most projects fail, but the ones that succeed change our lives, generally for the better. If you're not interested in hearing about the early stages, when success or failure is impossible to predict, that's fine; no one's making you read those stories.
we are pathetic and insignificant
Speak for yourself.
While intellicence do.
I'm just going to let that sentence sit there by itself for a while, in all its lonely glory.
It's silly because "off the grid" is a modern phrase with a well-understood meaning referring to a way of life that does, in fact, exist in the modern world. You can try to redefine it all you want, but don't expect the rest of us to play along.
Thanks for this clear and cogent post. A lot of /.ers who aren't physicists (i.e., the vast majority of us) seem to really enjoy beating up on modern physics for some reason, and one of the most common complaints is "it's all math, there's no connection to reality any more." It's good to see a reminder that (a) a lot of physics has always been math, (b) there's still plenty of experimental work generating interesting real-world observations which the math is necessary to describe, and (c) the math that's used is pretty damn good at describing the way things work.
Well, yeah, you're not really off the grid unless you're living in a grass hut, wearing animal skins you tanned yourself, and chipping your own tools out of flint. But there is a gigantic continuum of "grid-ness" between someone living in a big city and someone living in a remote rural area without electricity, running water, paved roads, or telecommunications of any kind -- even if the person in the latter case makes a living from farming with tools manufactured in a big city far away. By your strict definition, practically nobody on Earth has lived off the grid for several thousand years, and that's just silly.
I'm not sure I see how particle physics is any worse than ... oh ... say ... software engineering in that regard. Seriously, we here on /. don't tend to notice it as much because we're immersed in it, but have you ever noticed how fast any programming-related discussion here becomes an exchange of jargon? That's because new languages, new data structures, new API's, and new toolsets are being developed all the time, and they all need names. If you're working in the field, you know what these things are; if you're not, a discussion about them might as well be a string of random alphanumeric characters on the screen. I have no doubt that to physicists, all the terms the OP was mocking make perfect sense (a lot of physicists may disagree about whether the things the terms describe actually exist, but that's a separate issue -- and again, one not unique to physics.)