Sounds like you are calling far too many people to have time to be doing calculations.
Calling too many people without the use of an automated directory of some sort (of which there are many many available). I mean hell, are you sitting there with a paper phone book just calling people for shits?
"As intuitive as it seems to a human being, spontaneously planning a trajectory around obstacles in free space is a monstrously complex computation"
I was going to say a similar thing; observe any major highway in any major city in the USA and you will realize that many many people are absolutely terrible at "planning a trajectory around obstacles in free space"... So bad that it causes as many as 90 deaths *every day*.
This is only a perversion of capitalism if a) the out of state funding over-compensates for the in-state taxpayer funding the schools receive (which is becoming more of an issue as many have pointed out) and b) if the school actually admits out of state students with lower qualifications than in-state ones (it has yet to be proven, the only "evidence" is an anonymous survey). The fix for both of these issues is just a little bit more transparency; expose how much extra revenue is derived from out-of-state students and see if it matches up per head with the in-state students and the state's contribution to the school (the school has an obligation to require more money from out of state students). Then, publish anonymous admissions data and challenge anyone to find a pattern of statistically significant leniency on out of state students.
HP sells printer ink, right? do they need so many people just to do that?
(HP was once great. sun was once great. so was DEC and so was SGI. now, all gone. what the hell happened to this world?);(
We have Apple... And Google. After all, what would the US do if there weren't a hefty demand for marketing executives? I mean shit, it's not like they can just take any old job.
So HP, fresh on the heels of several disastrous CEO tenures, one of which happened to include a certain would-be politician running the company virtually into the ground, decides that hey it's time for a fresh attitude, let's find another failed female politician to come set things straight... Is there ANYONE at HP with a memory that goes back more than 5 minutes?
It does if there is an invisible proxy on port 80 that treats all traffic like HTTP... If it's not, it simply won't get through the proxy. Port 443 introduces a bit of a challenge since the invisible proxy isn't allowed to know whats in those SSL/TLS encrypted packets, it just knows that they should be encyrpted.
No offense but a successful career in a high-stakes environment like the military is no preparation for being a complete waste to society and eventually losing $2B on top of it all... For that you need a business degree.
You're right, in the end it's net negative thanks to the commissions skimmed by the traders and fund managers. If a company like UBS bought and sold at a loss to the tune of $2B, you can be sure there were benefactors on the other side (say, someone or a group of someones who bought/sold and ended up UP by $2B). If they made one super-stupid purchase that later dropped by $2B, you can be sure that the price bump caused by the buying of all those shares was profited by someone. If it wasn't, the value of their positions would not have dropped, prices don't just go up and down for no reason at all, they change as money goes in or out of a particular stock.
Of course, why would a company give one guy the authority to make horrible trade after horrible trade? Unless of course they were facing huge losses and had to do something to explain it to shareholders (yes companies whose revenue is obtained via buying/selling stocks are themselves bought and sold on the exchange. beautiful, isn't it?)
just talk to the top ten users, if they have no explicit reason for consuming so much data. If they cant explain it, search their computer, if they have done something wrong fire them and make sure everybody in the office knows why.
This is novel and effective. Find the total use, divide by the number of users, and then seriously question anyone who uses more than 2 or 3 times the average. Unless *everyone* is torrenting, of course.
Back many years ago when I had concerns like this, I used the ACID network monitor that allows for complete tracking of all activity. It doesn't do any blocking but it does make report generation of all network activity very simple. However, it sounds like the solution to go for is something like Squid doing transparent proxying with content filtering. Also, block any ports in AND out that arent used for HTTP (80 and 443) to completely nix the chance of P2P working in any reasonable way. But alas, if the submitter were after a good filter why should they care what the users are doing; they surely aren't doing it on any illicit sites (assuming the filtering rules are effective?)
Seems like this should be two questions: one is what free/open ruleset can be trusted (as there are many good free tools at hand to enforce the rules) and two what additional inspection should take place to all content that might not be blocked, to find employees that spend too much time doing stuff on the "edge" of permissibility?
If you think the US (founders of the Internet) would be anything like it is today, were it not for financial influences that not only shaped it but brought about it's very discovery (by modern peoples), feel free to pick up a history book some time. You might find it interesting. Sure, it is possible to go on all day about this lead to that which led to the other thing, but it is almost impossible to understate the role of financial institutions in modern society (any of them, anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of China.) Go ahead and try, but unless you are a medieval Portuguese yak farmer who has stumbled onto a computer that a wealthy financier no doubt dropped on his tours of your humble country, you will not be able to do it.
My point exactly. I understand the concept of economic efficiency, and how inefficient jobs are replaced first - in theory. Etc. But if you think about the long term then every single job can eventually be replaced, because ultimately machines are more efficient than humans at everything except thinking - and eventually who knows, they might even become smarter than us. So where will that leave us?
Simple, really. Either we will be living fat dumb and happy as robot pets because they have the means to keep us around and make our lives very comfortable, or we are all dead at their merciless hand... I mean (not to troll, honest) back 5000 years ago when slaves were a common thing to be found in advanced societies, the ruling class literally didnt have anything to do but rule. Now instead of exploiting each other we can exploit the machines, and as long as they don't rise up we can basically count on the same or better standard of living, without the actual *work*. Sounds OK to me.
I just wonder who is going to buy all those goods and services when we are all replaced by robots.
The question to be asking isn't what will happen when there are no more jobs... There will always be jobs: to design/build/service the robots, and no I am not kidding. The replacement of a human with a robot results in the same (at least) net production so it's no different than saying "well what will happen to all the jobless farmers when this whole ox-drawn plow thing takes off?" or any of the other society-reshaping paradigms that have taken place in history.
The question we should be asking is how high are we setting the bar for a decent wage (a high school degree? 2 years of college? 4 years of college?) and at what point will we expose design differences (bear with me on this) where certain humans simply won't subject themselves to that and are OK living homeless or otherwise at the bottom rung of society? That number already exists, and it is certainly only going to grow as the prevailing amount of productivity from a human required to compete in the labor pool for a good amount of money continues to rise. And no, I am not trolling, this is a question that really needs to be thought about regardless of how you think it's answered.
The traditional model towards profitability was to sell more product, grow your operation, hire more workers and build more factories, wash-rinse-repeat.
Today it seems like the road to profitability is to not grow, increase short-term profits by downsizing, make existing workers do more work, wash-rinse-repeat.
That's great news if you're a CEO only concerned with the short-term profitability of your brief stint as CEO (before you bail out with your golden parachute). But it's pretty shitty news if you're a worker or a long-term investor in said company. And it's even worse news if you're out of work and looking for a job.
This is nothing new, actually if a company can come up with an excuse to get rid of workers aside from "our revenue is plummeting" is is almost always heralded as a good thing; after all it means that fewer employees will be taking up the work of those let go and the bottom line will most certainly improve. However poorly it bodes for the future, improvement to the bottom line this FQ makes investors happy. For a while it was "right-sizing" and then "restructuring" and the newest buzzword is apparently "delayering" but they always mean the same thing, cut the dead weight.
Allowing the app would have let apple owners (who possess a certain flair for cognitive dissonance) a chance to have fun on their i-device at the expense of apple's reputation (but let's face it, if you have an i-device you have already bought in and could care less about it). Instead, now we have a news story that transcends apple users and the whole world is hearing about not only the hilarious app, but apple's intent on censoring it. The net effect, I predict, will be that apple users will continue to find it easy to be oblivious to negative aspects of their devices given they are "kept safe" from knowing, and other non-apple users are left to poke fun at them which will merely give them more reason to have an isolationist attitude.
In summary, this move is totally predictable as it is indeed a "Win" for apple, after all they are keeping their flock "in line" which means a future revenue stream for them.
But alas, open source and patents are not mutually exclusive. The presence of an open source demonstration of the technology in the patent would only make it possible for some interested third party to later claim that the patent was filed despite prior art that the inventor does not own, and they would then stand a slightly better chance at having the patent invalidated. See also: "Royalty Free Patent" which is a construct aimed at using the patent system to protect against abuse of the patent system, albeit at a significant cost.
Go get that $350 water heater and tell me how long it is before you spend another $350 on a new one because that one failed miserably. Then take the $350 off the repayment of the investment of the tankless one and re-run the numbers. Tankless units don't have a fixed self-destruct mechanism like new tank heaters do, so it's probably not fair to compare them. Your 27 year old tank heater was truly a marvel, and sadly you will NOT find any like that for sale today. As for drainwater heat reclamation, it all depends on the climate you live in. If you suffer from any sort of cold winter, and your pipes are not VERY deep in the ground, the energy cost to heat ~42 degree water is sharply different than heating ~58 degree water (the summer-winter difference I have measured in tap water in my part of Ohio) so the overall payoff of the relatively cheap system (unless your home has a significant problem with installing one) can be quite short.
You also picked just about the hardest efficiency investment to sell (short of a refrigerator) so if you had the same ruminations over a central heating/cooling system, your results would have pointed you sharply at the more expensive (in the short term) option. Of course, if you want to merely look for data that suits the conclusion that "Green is not practical" you go right ahead and stick to your numbers.
The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. Here's to Bash! If it weren't for you, I would be a terrible sysadmin. Thanks to you, I am a terrible sysadmin!
You are confusing Modern financial institutions (those that, in your opinion, exist only to abuse HFT) with financial institutions in general; (this goes for the other commenters too) but the reality is that finance has indeed been the catalyst for EVERYTHING you see around you right now, unless you are perhaps in a cave, in which case pretend you are in a house or other structure for a minute. You can complain all you want about how big and evil these corporations are, but financial institutions predate just about every other feature of modern society, even industrialization. In fact, it could be said that the Renaissance (you know, the modern start of all that sciency, artsy, engineeringy stuff you seem to like) was brought about thanks almost entirely to banking, since it was trade and the subsequent need to better organize wealth (and subsequent concentration of wealth) that paid for all those layabouts to paint and draw and sing and shit.
I am not saying HFT is a good thing or that HFT is going to create a new Renaissance or anything like that, I am just asking for a little perspective. Your claim that "money is being removed from the overall system through abuses" is laughable, you could say that ANY charge for financial services is an abuse (as some religions do) but if you want to go there, you might as well be living in a tribe, beating rocks against sticks for a living because that's where all those cultures are at (or worse).
A weak constitution is a nurture thing, not a nature thing. Also, the effect of everyone having a "problem" is thanks to the sharp decline (or lack of maintenance) of critical thinking skills necessary to tell the difference between a web site that says you have something (usually alongside serious comments about how doctors are not to be trusted), and actually trusting a doctor who is skilled in medical diagnostics. As if their 4+ years spent doing nothing but study genuine illnesses somehow disqualifies them from giving a reliable answer, but "skynrdfan88" can gain trusted followers with his/her spew of nonsense about every little "disease" their precious little snowflakes have come down with.
Never has Matt Taibbi's description of Goldman Sachs, and by extension, all the big banks, as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" seem even more apt.
Any derision of Wall Street or it's constituent institutions needs to be made by way of comparison to Faust. After all, if it were really nothing more than a giant squid we could collectively say we've had enough and be done with it (we outnumber them by a great degree...) However, they are still here and we still line up to support them. We have made a deal with the devil, if want to be bearish on finance; or you could say we have transcended the yelling and screaming and back-room deals that perpetuated the "good old days" of Wall street, in favor of computers that are as fast as they are transparent (all trades are recorded and pricing discrepancies are subject to scrutiny).
What would *you* have us doing with all the free time we now enjoy thanks to the relative cheapness of food and shelter? It's easy to criticize financial institutions for their recent transgressions but don't ignore the fact that they are what organized modern society from a bunch of farmers and tradesmen into a modern, world-wide machine of massive innovation and resulting prosperity. If you don't like prosperity, fine, but don't blame Wall Street for it; they are only there because we (meaning a majority of everyone in modern society) want them there, doing just what they are doing.
This kind of thing is the direct proof that the way the stock exchange is built is deeply flawed. Why don't they try to build it on sounder bases than "the fastest takes all" ?!?
If you look at the history of all of the international exchanges, they basically have been playing the faster-is-better game for over 100 years. The point to faster trading has always been to make the process better by having less of a delay that can be leveraged. The problem we are seeing now is that instead of humans making the trades, it's all computers without even human intervention to decide *when to trade*. The value of a few ms of latency has gone up thanks to that, it's merely a symptom of the "new market".
What, you would rather an engineer AND a communications major be required to produce the press release, in order for it to change from "uncontrolled fall" to either "planned gravitationally-assisted descent process" (if you were told to spin it "for") and "massive, fiery man-made meteor raining death on unsuspecting victims" (if you were told to spin it "against")?
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you are calling far too many people to have time to be doing calculations.
Calling too many people without the use of an automated directory of some sort (of which there are many many available). I mean hell, are you sitting there with a paper phone book just calling people for shits?
"As intuitive as it seems to a human being, spontaneously planning a trajectory around obstacles in free space is a monstrously complex computation"
I was going to say a similar thing; observe any major highway in any major city in the USA and you will realize that many many people are absolutely terrible at "planning a trajectory around obstacles in free space"... So bad that it causes as many as 90 deaths *every day*.
This is only a perversion of capitalism if a) the out of state funding over-compensates for the in-state taxpayer funding the schools receive (which is becoming more of an issue as many have pointed out) and b) if the school actually admits out of state students with lower qualifications than in-state ones (it has yet to be proven, the only "evidence" is an anonymous survey). The fix for both of these issues is just a little bit more transparency; expose how much extra revenue is derived from out-of-state students and see if it matches up per head with the in-state students and the state's contribution to the school (the school has an obligation to require more money from out of state students). Then, publish anonymous admissions data and challenge anyone to find a pattern of statistically significant leniency on out of state students.
HP sells printer ink, right? do they need so many people just to do that?
(HP was once great. sun was once great. so was DEC and so was SGI. now, all gone. what the hell happened to this world?) ;(
We have Apple... And Google. After all, what would the US do if there weren't a hefty demand for marketing executives? I mean shit, it's not like they can just take any old job.
So HP, fresh on the heels of several disastrous CEO tenures, one of which happened to include a certain would-be politician running the company virtually into the ground, decides that hey it's time for a fresh attitude, let's find another failed female politician to come set things straight... Is there ANYONE at HP with a memory that goes back more than 5 minutes?
It does if there is an invisible proxy on port 80 that treats all traffic like HTTP... If it's not, it simply won't get through the proxy. Port 443 introduces a bit of a challenge since the invisible proxy isn't allowed to know whats in those SSL/TLS encrypted packets, it just knows that they should be encyrpted.
No offense but a successful career in a high-stakes environment like the military is no preparation for being a complete waste to society and eventually losing $2B on top of it all... For that you need a business degree.
You're right, in the end it's net negative thanks to the commissions skimmed by the traders and fund managers. If a company like UBS bought and sold at a loss to the tune of $2B, you can be sure there were benefactors on the other side (say, someone or a group of someones who bought/sold and ended up UP by $2B). If they made one super-stupid purchase that later dropped by $2B, you can be sure that the price bump caused by the buying of all those shares was profited by someone. If it wasn't, the value of their positions would not have dropped, prices don't just go up and down for no reason at all, they change as money goes in or out of a particular stock.
Of course, why would a company give one guy the authority to make horrible trade after horrible trade? Unless of course they were facing huge losses and had to do something to explain it to shareholders (yes companies whose revenue is obtained via buying/selling stocks are themselves bought and sold on the exchange. beautiful, isn't it?)
just talk to the top ten users, if they have no explicit reason for consuming so much data. If they cant explain it, search their computer, if they have done something wrong fire them and make sure everybody in the office knows why.
This is novel and effective. Find the total use, divide by the number of users, and then seriously question anyone who uses more than 2 or 3 times the average. Unless *everyone* is torrenting, of course.
Back many years ago when I had concerns like this, I used the ACID network monitor that allows for complete tracking of all activity. It doesn't do any blocking but it does make report generation of all network activity very simple. However, it sounds like the solution to go for is something like Squid doing transparent proxying with content filtering. Also, block any ports in AND out that arent used for HTTP (80 and 443) to completely nix the chance of P2P working in any reasonable way. But alas, if the submitter were after a good filter why should they care what the users are doing; they surely aren't doing it on any illicit sites (assuming the filtering rules are effective?)
Seems like this should be two questions: one is what free/open ruleset can be trusted (as there are many good free tools at hand to enforce the rules) and two what additional inspection should take place to all content that might not be blocked, to find employees that spend too much time doing stuff on the "edge" of permissibility?
If you think the US (founders of the Internet) would be anything like it is today, were it not for financial influences that not only shaped it but brought about it's very discovery (by modern peoples), feel free to pick up a history book some time. You might find it interesting. Sure, it is possible to go on all day about this lead to that which led to the other thing, but it is almost impossible to understate the role of financial institutions in modern society (any of them, anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of China.) Go ahead and try, but unless you are a medieval Portuguese yak farmer who has stumbled onto a computer that a wealthy financier no doubt dropped on his tours of your humble country, you will not be able to do it.
What *you* don't know is that I write software that designs robot design software. And it makes iPhone apps. Now who's not kidding?
My point exactly. I understand the concept of economic efficiency, and how inefficient jobs are replaced first - in theory. Etc. But if you think about the long term then every single job can eventually be replaced, because ultimately machines are more efficient than humans at everything except thinking - and eventually who knows, they might even become smarter than us. So where will that leave us?
Simple, really. Either we will be living fat dumb and happy as robot pets because they have the means to keep us around and make our lives very comfortable, or we are all dead at their merciless hand... I mean (not to troll, honest) back 5000 years ago when slaves were a common thing to be found in advanced societies, the ruling class literally didnt have anything to do but rule. Now instead of exploiting each other we can exploit the machines, and as long as they don't rise up we can basically count on the same or better standard of living, without the actual *work*. Sounds OK to me.
I just wonder who is going to buy all those goods and services when we are all replaced by robots.
The question to be asking isn't what will happen when there are no more jobs... There will always be jobs: to design/build/service the robots, and no I am not kidding. The replacement of a human with a robot results in the same (at least) net production so it's no different than saying "well what will happen to all the jobless farmers when this whole ox-drawn plow thing takes off?" or any of the other society-reshaping paradigms that have taken place in history.
The question we should be asking is how high are we setting the bar for a decent wage (a high school degree? 2 years of college? 4 years of college?) and at what point will we expose design differences (bear with me on this) where certain humans simply won't subject themselves to that and are OK living homeless or otherwise at the bottom rung of society? That number already exists, and it is certainly only going to grow as the prevailing amount of productivity from a human required to compete in the labor pool for a good amount of money continues to rise. And no, I am not trolling, this is a question that really needs to be thought about regardless of how you think it's answered.
The traditional model towards profitability was to sell more product, grow your operation, hire more workers and build more factories, wash-rinse-repeat.
Today it seems like the road to profitability is to not grow, increase short-term profits by downsizing, make existing workers do more work, wash-rinse-repeat.
That's great news if you're a CEO only concerned with the short-term profitability of your brief stint as CEO (before you bail out with your golden parachute). But it's pretty shitty news if you're a worker or a long-term investor in said company. And it's even worse news if you're out of work and looking for a job.
This is nothing new, actually if a company can come up with an excuse to get rid of workers aside from "our revenue is plummeting" is is almost always heralded as a good thing; after all it means that fewer employees will be taking up the work of those let go and the bottom line will most certainly improve. However poorly it bodes for the future, improvement to the bottom line this FQ makes investors happy. For a while it was "right-sizing" and then "restructuring" and the newest buzzword is apparently "delayering" but they always mean the same thing, cut the dead weight.
Allowing the app would have let apple owners (who possess a certain flair for cognitive dissonance) a chance to have fun on their i-device at the expense of apple's reputation (but let's face it, if you have an i-device you have already bought in and could care less about it). Instead, now we have a news story that transcends apple users and the whole world is hearing about not only the hilarious app, but apple's intent on censoring it. The net effect, I predict, will be that apple users will continue to find it easy to be oblivious to negative aspects of their devices given they are "kept safe" from knowing, and other non-apple users are left to poke fun at them which will merely give them more reason to have an isolationist attitude.
In summary, this move is totally predictable as it is indeed a "Win" for apple, after all they are keeping their flock "in line" which means a future revenue stream for them.
But alas, open source and patents are not mutually exclusive. The presence of an open source demonstration of the technology in the patent would only make it possible for some interested third party to later claim that the patent was filed despite prior art that the inventor does not own, and they would then stand a slightly better chance at having the patent invalidated. See also: "Royalty Free Patent" which is a construct aimed at using the patent system to protect against abuse of the patent system, albeit at a significant cost.
Go get that $350 water heater and tell me how long it is before you spend another $350 on a new one because that one failed miserably. Then take the $350 off the repayment of the investment of the tankless one and re-run the numbers. Tankless units don't have a fixed self-destruct mechanism like new tank heaters do, so it's probably not fair to compare them. Your 27 year old tank heater was truly a marvel, and sadly you will NOT find any like that for sale today. As for drainwater heat reclamation, it all depends on the climate you live in. If you suffer from any sort of cold winter, and your pipes are not VERY deep in the ground, the energy cost to heat ~42 degree water is sharply different than heating ~58 degree water (the summer-winter difference I have measured in tap water in my part of Ohio) so the overall payoff of the relatively cheap system (unless your home has a significant problem with installing one) can be quite short.
You also picked just about the hardest efficiency investment to sell (short of a refrigerator) so if you had the same ruminations over a central heating/cooling system, your results would have pointed you sharply at the more expensive (in the short term) option. Of course, if you want to merely look for data that suits the conclusion that "Green is not practical" you go right ahead and stick to your numbers.
The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. Here's to Bash! If it weren't for you, I would be a terrible sysadmin. Thanks to you, I am a terrible sysadmin!
You are confusing Modern financial institutions (those that, in your opinion, exist only to abuse HFT) with financial institutions in general; (this goes for the other commenters too) but the reality is that finance has indeed been the catalyst for EVERYTHING you see around you right now, unless you are perhaps in a cave, in which case pretend you are in a house or other structure for a minute. You can complain all you want about how big and evil these corporations are, but financial institutions predate just about every other feature of modern society, even industrialization. In fact, it could be said that the Renaissance (you know, the modern start of all that sciency, artsy, engineeringy stuff you seem to like) was brought about thanks almost entirely to banking, since it was trade and the subsequent need to better organize wealth (and subsequent concentration of wealth) that paid for all those layabouts to paint and draw and sing and shit.
I am not saying HFT is a good thing or that HFT is going to create a new Renaissance or anything like that, I am just asking for a little perspective. Your claim that "money is being removed from the overall system through abuses" is laughable, you could say that ANY charge for financial services is an abuse (as some religions do) but if you want to go there, you might as well be living in a tribe, beating rocks against sticks for a living because that's where all those cultures are at (or worse).
A weak constitution is a nurture thing, not a nature thing. Also, the effect of everyone having a "problem" is thanks to the sharp decline (or lack of maintenance) of critical thinking skills necessary to tell the difference between a web site that says you have something (usually alongside serious comments about how doctors are not to be trusted), and actually trusting a doctor who is skilled in medical diagnostics. As if their 4+ years spent doing nothing but study genuine illnesses somehow disqualifies them from giving a reliable answer, but "skynrdfan88" can gain trusted followers with his/her spew of nonsense about every little "disease" their precious little snowflakes have come down with.
Never has Matt Taibbi's description of Goldman Sachs, and by extension, all the big banks, as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" seem even more apt.
Any derision of Wall Street or it's constituent institutions needs to be made by way of comparison to Faust. After all, if it were really nothing more than a giant squid we could collectively say we've had enough and be done with it (we outnumber them by a great degree...) However, they are still here and we still line up to support them. We have made a deal with the devil, if want to be bearish on finance; or you could say we have transcended the yelling and screaming and back-room deals that perpetuated the "good old days" of Wall street, in favor of computers that are as fast as they are transparent (all trades are recorded and pricing discrepancies are subject to scrutiny).
What would *you* have us doing with all the free time we now enjoy thanks to the relative cheapness of food and shelter? It's easy to criticize financial institutions for their recent transgressions but don't ignore the fact that they are what organized modern society from a bunch of farmers and tradesmen into a modern, world-wide machine of massive innovation and resulting prosperity. If you don't like prosperity, fine, but don't blame Wall Street for it; they are only there because we (meaning a majority of everyone in modern society) want them there, doing just what they are doing.
This kind of thing is the direct proof that the way the stock exchange is built is deeply flawed. Why don't they try to build it on sounder bases than "the fastest takes all" ?!?
If you look at the history of all of the international exchanges, they basically have been playing the faster-is-better game for over 100 years. The point to faster trading has always been to make the process better by having less of a delay that can be leveraged. The problem we are seeing now is that instead of humans making the trades, it's all computers without even human intervention to decide *when to trade*. The value of a few ms of latency has gone up thanks to that, it's merely a symptom of the "new market".
What, you would rather an engineer AND a communications major be required to produce the press release, in order for it to change from "uncontrolled fall" to either "planned gravitationally-assisted descent process" (if you were told to spin it "for") and "massive, fiery man-made meteor raining death on unsuspecting victims" (if you were told to spin it "against")?