Your numbers sound pretty made up, especially anything that's 99% and 100%, or "in no cases." Let me guess, they were "not intended as a factual statement"?
If you get married the only usual out is divorce, which means that men in 99% of cases are on the hook for support for the rest of their lives.
According to the US Census, as cited in this excellent article analyzing child support, only 53.4% of custodial mothers are awarded child support (and only a fraction actually receive all the support they are awarded). Key chart here: https://espnfivethirtyeight.fi...
children in more than nine out of 10 cases living with their mothers
From the same article above, "18.3 percent of custodial parents in 2011 were fathers."
- In seven out of ten cases the judge ordered a transfer of the property into the wife's name - During 160 contested cases when an order was made to sell the home the wife received more than half of the proceeds in 25 percent of the cases, during the other 75 percent the proceeds were split
In the same article, they make the point that the wife is usually poorer and has a worse employment situation, a correlation that explains most or all of this imbalance. Judges are going to award more financial support to the poorer party, and if you don't correct for that, you're presenting very misleading stats. Though given the totally made-up numbers you scattered throughout your entire post, I guess you don't care.
Iraq under Saddam Hussain was not a religious state and did not harbor religious terrorists. Your rant makes no sense at all in the context of a war against Saddam's Iraq.
I agree. I work as an Actuary, and most of my actuarial coworkers don't typically pull those kind of hours. Maybe they meant "from time to time" rather than on average?
I want my children to live in a better world than the one that I grew up in and I don't see it happening today. [...] Candidly, I think the world is a more violent, aggressive and dangerous place to live in today than it has been in the past.
You realize this is a factual claim, not an opinion, right? Shouldn't you make a basic effort to know whether it's true or not before posting it?
Bear in mind that I'm not commenting on the rest of your post, just that one claim I quoted above. But if you care about truth more than truthiness, you should really change your tune about the violence and danger in today's (US) society.
I have a co-worker who just switched to our profession (quantitative finance) last year after being a materials engineer his entire life. His retraining was significant, including earning a masters degree. I don't know how old he is but his hair is white and his kids are in college, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's older than you.
Also, the correlation was at most 71%, note that flipping a coin is expected to correlate to around 50%.
Flipping a coin would have an expected correlation of 0%, although with only 56 samples it could easily be 20-30% in any particular trial. 71% is pretty significant.
Of course, it seems like the researchers did test a lot of different possible relationships and cognitive skills, so they were biased towards finding at least one strong one. (obligatory XKCD.) Still, 71% is a lot better than you are giving them credit for.
Their data seems to be awfully well clustered and the slope seems to be due to the outliers.
See how the data points are all paired? -- each IQ has exactly two dots above it, one red and one blue, presumably representing the same individual. From what I can tell, the important part of that graph is not the absolute position of the red or blue dots, which I agree do not have a remarkable slope, but rather the difference between red and blue for a given individual.
Their other plot from the news article seems to be just that difference, or some derived representation of it. It's a much more convincing relationship.
I followed the links through to a Guardian review of the book about Shin, only to find "This content has been removed as our copyright has expired." WTF?
I'm from Minneapolis, and although I don't fly all that much, I believe our airport (MSP) is 100% millimeter-wave. I have never seen a backscatter x-ray machine there.
This article confirms it as of August 2012, although it could have changed since then:
I can't help but picture this CEO as a 6-year-old who's been prevented from stealing his younger sister's toy and is now throwing a tantrum.
I am a libertarian. It should be a no-brainer for Republicans to attract my support (over the Democrats at least). Instead they're giving me and everyone else the finger with their absurd rhetoric and childish political games. This goes for their politicians, their pundits, and quite a few of their supporters. Everything Obama supports is automatically bad, even if it's the same thing the Republicans earlier supported.
This insane prioritization of winning vs. losing and minor social issues instead of real governance is why I agree with the sentiment of this post. The Republicans are a menace and must be stopped.
The moon is only about 1% of the mass of the earth, so let's start with a baseline estimate that it could change surface gravity by 1%. However, it's pretty far from earth's surface (around 100 times earth's radius), and gravity scales with the square of the distance, so now we're talking a 0.0001% change.
It gets worse, though: because we are in mutual orbit with the moon, we are actually in microgravity (freefall) relative to it. In other words, the moon pulls on you with roughly the same strength as it pulls on the earth, so the total 0.0001% change in gravity mostly cancels out! The only part of it that's left is from you being slightly closer to the moon than the earth is (when the moon is above you) or slightly farther (when it's on the other side of the earth). This difference is what causes the tides, but it's incredibly small relative to the gravitational pull of the earth.
Not to mention that the moon was probably not around when the earth was fully molten, or that the earth *does* have heavier elements (iron) predominantly in the center, or any number of other reasons why this idea doesn't seem likely...
You seem legitimately interested in hearing a perspective different from your own, so I'll oblige. Note that libertarianism is diverse, like any political affiliation, so not everyone who identifies with that label would agree with my responses.
Insurance is a common libertarian answer in this situation, and one that makes sense to me.
i guess he could take an insurance policy in theory, but even if an insurer were willing to cover this, the premium if correctly computed would probably be more than he could afford
Then he can't do it. If the fair premium is higher than the benefit of the project, that tells you that the total benefits of the project are lower than the total costs, so the project should not be undertaken. If he thinks the premium is unfairly high, or if nobody will cover it due to the size and uncertainly, he could work to build up significant evidence of the safety of the proposed activity (which is exactly what most people would probably want to see before he started anyway, libertarian or not).
so he would just go ahead and do it anyway.
This seems like an argument that applies to any crime under any political system... but if he did that in a libertarian society, then anyone who was potentially going to be affected would be eligible to defend themselves by preventing him from doing it. Note that people could delegate their self-defense, so even someone who lives far away and/or has a busy life already could still exercise their right of self-defense without undue inconvenience.
what would happen in the real world is, of course, that private interests would have this guy arrested and maybe worse. but that's initiation of force
I don't know of many people who consider self-defense to be initiation of force. Of course people would only be justified in using as much force as reasonable to stop him... initiating an experiment like this would not be carte blanche for dialing up the assassins. (This just follows from current common-law precedent for justifying self-defense.)
libertarians would have to admit that private prisons would still exist in their paradise
Yep. The main problem I personally have with prisons is not their existence but the high number of people locked up for acts of non-aggression (e.g. marijuana possession). Also note that, in the hierarchy of monopoly government institutions that libertarians want to get rid of, the justice system is typically near the end of the list because of the problems inherent in having two people with opposing interests (plaintiff and defendant) jointly select from multiple competing private court/prison systems.
you could say that the entrepreneur is "initiating force" by doing something very risky, but that's a definition which would admit many of the government regulations we have today.
"Regulations" are not necessarily against libertarian principles. After all, most libertarians want to live in stable modern society too, and are against direct aggression such as theft as well as indirect and/or probabilistic aggression like pollution of other people's property or reckless endangerment (e.g. driving drunk or attempting large-scale unproven geo-engineering experiments affecting other people's property). Remember not to confuse us with anarcho-capitalists!
I appreciated your reasonable tone when referring to libertarian principles so I was actually willing to respond, unlike in most slashdot flamefests. Hope you found the perspective interesting at least.
It seems in this particular case that Wikipedia editors wanted something they could cite. This strikes me as rather reasonable. If I read the statement "according to the author, the book was inspired by an unhappy event in the life of his late friend Melvin Tumin," with no citation, how could I possibly verify that? If the citation was "the author sent Wikipedia private correspondence, trust me," is that any better? For all you criticizing this decision, is that what you want the encyclopedia to look like?
Asking the author to put a previously unknown fact into a citeable public record before reflecting it in the Wikipedia article is a process that I am personally in favor of, since it now allows me to follow up and see exactly where that information came from and why it's in the article.
Wikipedia does have its problems with overzealous and protective editors, but this particular case doesn't seem to be one. Perhaps there is some additional detail that I've missed in this case but reading TFA actually makes me more confident in the information in Wikipedia.
If you look at the actual breakdown of the charges Ravi was convicted of, you'll notice that he was acquitted of all the bias intimidation sub-charges that he knowingly intimidated Clementi.
According to your own link, this is completely false.
From the source, with my emphasis:
"2nd Degree Bias Intimidation (For 3rd Degree Invasion of Privacy charge on Sept. 19) [...] * Invasion of Privacy, knowing that the conduct constituting invasion of privacy would cause Tyler Clementi to be intimidated because of sexual orientation: GUILTY"
"3rd Degree Bias Intimidation (For 4th Degree Invasion of Privacy charge on Sept. 21) * Invasion of Privacy, with the purpose to intimidate Tyler Clementi because of sexual orientation: GUILTY [...] * Invasion of Privacy, knowing that the conduct constituting invasion of privacy would cause Tyler Clementi to be intimated because of sexual orientation: GUILTY"
"2nd Degree Bias Intimidation (For 3rd Degree Attempted Invasion of Privacy charge on Sept. 21) * Invasion of Privacy, with the purpose to intimidate Tyler Clementi because of sexual orientation: GUILTY [...] * Invasion of Privacy, knowing that the conduct constituting invasion of privacy would cause Tyler Clementi to be intimidated because of sexual orientation: GUILTY"
Let's say I'm a factory owner. I make widgets. My factory dumps poison into the sky and into the water. After all, it's my air and water, too, right? And it's next to my factory. If you stop me from dumping the waste, you are imposing on my property rights; you are decreasing the value of my factory. If I change this, I will have to cut back payment of my workers, thus impacting their property rights.
This is a ridiculous strawman mockery of the position held by most small-government advocates. If you seriously believe that anyone other than perhaps the unscrupulous factory owner himself would make that argument with a straight face, you are the problem with modern political discourse. That sort of complete unwillingness to attempt to understand the positions of those you disagree with is what creates hostile, unproductive standoffs at all ranges of the political hierarchy, from your water cooler at work all the way up to congress.
There is a class of high-end non-SLR cameras called "ultrazoom." They don't have removable lenses, but the built-in lens is versatile (with long optical zoom as well as macro capability) and they are smaller and lighter than SLRs or probably MILCs. It's a good compromise if you don't think you'll appreciate the SLR or if you're on a budget.
I've has a Sony DSC-HX1 for a few years and have been very happy with it. Looks like you can get one new for $350 on Amazon. It has a 20x optical zoom, gyroscopic stabilization so you can actually take reasonable pictures at those zoom levels without a tripod, and of course a host of software features including a pretty smart "intelligent auto" mode. The quality of photos is excellent: I've framed some 18"x12" prints as gifts, and people have been surprised when I tell them I took the photo myself.
What makes you think it's honest, or that it's mourning for Kim Jong-Il?
In the absurdist documentary The Red Chapel, the director speculates that when their North Korean guide starts crying at the monument to Kim Il-Sung, she is actually crying for her relatives who died under his policies.
Looks like you stumbled across a textbook example of Simpson's Paradox. Like with the Monty Hall Problem, gaining a thorough understanding of it will dramatically improve your intuitive understanding of probability and statistics. (At least it did for me!)
CarrierIQ bandwidth is not counted against your cap. At least it's not supposed to be, although we know how good the telcos are at billing you properly.
Each device I worked on, each firmware release, each line of code, does something useful for many, many people. Some of those people don't even know that audio equipment, leave alone software, is involved with what they are hearing.
Awfully arrogant of you to claim that some people benefit from your work without realizing it, without acknowledging that the same could be true of his. If he adds liquidity to the market, then you save money every time you buy or sell stock (or your 401k/mutual funds do). It's not necessarily true that he does, but you certainly aren't in a position to know. You could read more here, but I suppose that would just get in the way of your populist rage so maybe you'd rather not.
Oh, and you follow it up with another stunning display when you criticize him for not using his real name and then you wish him death in the very next sentence. Wow.
Do you ever buy or sell stock? Perhaps indirectly, through a mutual fund or 401k type plan? If so, then you benefit from high liquidity in the market. HFT and other Wall Street shenanigans do skim from the top, but they also provide liquidity. It's almost certain that the liquidity benefits small market players more than the skimming hurts them. In other words, the money they're skimming comes from the banks and brokers rather than you and me.
For example, take the stock of Red Hat (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=RHT). Yahoo Finance right now shows that, as of the last time the market was open, I could buy 100 shares for $42.56 (that's the "ask" or best current asking price), or I could sell 300 shares for $42.09 (the best available "bid"). That's a bid-ask spread of about 50 cents. That spread is a hidden cost to either buying or selling stock: If you buy and then sell RHT, you will have paid about 50 cents per share just for the privilege, even if nothing in particular happens to the company. Let's split that 50-50 and say that every stock transaction in RHT (buy or sell) costs you 25 cents per share in implied fees.
Those bids and asks are set by individuals and companies who are competing. They want to get a good deal for either buying or selling the stock, but they also know that if they set asking price too high or their bid too low, they'll never make any trades. The more competition there is, the tighter the bid-ask spread will be. HFT and other algorithmic approaches allow firms to set prices on tons of stocks without requiring human attention for each one, which dramatically increases the competition and thus tightens the bid-ask spread.
In this example, if you outlaw HFT and similar trading strategies, maybe RHT will have a spread of $1 intead of 50 cents. Maybe you'll be happy that HFTers aren't making ther 5 cent skim off the top anymore, but it'll be cold comfort when you're paying 25 cents more on each transaction and it's just going to a different Wall Street firm.
If you think I'm exaggerating the effect of computerized trading of the spread, have a look at slide 8 (page 4) of this study: http://fisher.osu.edu/~diether_1/b822/trading_costs_2up.pdf. Starting in 1960, the average bid-ask spread has ben dropping steadily every decade to a small fraction of what it used to be.
Background: I am an actuary trained in quantitative finance. I've never worked in Wall Street or done any HFT or other algo trading.
Slashdot Mirror
Your numbers sound pretty made up, especially anything that's 99% and 100%, or "in no cases." Let me guess, they were "not intended as a factual statement"?
If you get married the only usual out is divorce, which means that men in 99% of cases are on the hook for support for the rest of their lives.
According to the US Census, as cited in this excellent article analyzing child support, only 53.4% of custodial mothers are awarded child support (and only a fraction actually receive all the support they are awarded). Key chart here: https://espnfivethirtyeight.fi...
children in more than nine out of 10 cases living with their mothers
From the same article above, "18.3 percent of custodial parents in 2011 were fathers."
- In seven out of ten cases the judge ordered a transfer of the property into the wife's name
- During 160 contested cases when an order was made to sell the home the wife received more than half of the proceeds in 25 percent of the cases, during the other 75 percent the proceeds were split
In the same article, they make the point that the wife is usually poorer and has a worse employment situation, a correlation that explains most or all of this imbalance. Judges are going to award more financial support to the poorer party, and if you don't correct for that, you're presenting very misleading stats. Though given the totally made-up numbers you scattered throughout your entire post, I guess you don't care.
If we had opted out of the second Iraq war
Islamic Jihadists
Iraq under Saddam Hussain was not a religious state and did not harbor religious terrorists. Your rant makes no sense at all in the context of a war against Saddam's Iraq.
I agree. I work as an Actuary, and most of my actuarial coworkers don't typically pull those kind of hours. Maybe they meant "from time to time" rather than on average?
I want my children to live in a better world than the one that I grew up in and I don't see it happening today. [...] Candidly, I think the world is a more violent, aggressive and dangerous place to live in today than it has been in the past.
You realize this is a factual claim, not an opinion, right? Shouldn't you make a basic effort to know whether it's true or not before posting it?
Since you're talking about your own children, I'll assume you grew up in the 80s to early 90s. And since your comment focused on US culture, I'll use US crime rates since then to illustrate my point, which is that children today will grow up in a world about half as violent what you grew up with:
Violent crime, 1993-2012
Violent crime, 1973-2003
Homicide
Property crime (theft)
Even non-crime dangers are way down:
Fire deaths since 1918
Traffic deaths since 1900
Bear in mind that I'm not commenting on the rest of your post, just that one claim I quoted above. But if you care about truth more than truthiness, you should really change your tune about the violence and danger in today's (US) society.
China's massive espionage ends at their borders, outside there it's just the usual
This exhaustively researched report claims the Chinese army has a division that actively hacks Western corporations to steal their data:
https://www.mandiant.com/blog/mandiant-exposes-apt1-chinas-cyber-espionage-units-releases-3000-indicators/
While China is behind the NSA in some regards, they are beyond it in others. I think 'comparable' is appropriate.
I thought the new movies were good. In fact, I watched the Wrath of Khan after the most recent star wars movie
This is why I feel just fine about Abrams directing the next Star Wars: he's already directed two Star Wars movies, and they were good!
Retraining at age 40 to change my career?
I have a co-worker who just switched to our profession (quantitative finance) last year after being a materials engineer his entire life. His retraining was significant, including earning a masters degree. I don't know how old he is but his hair is white and his kids are in college, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's older than you.
He's incredibly happy.
Go for it.
Also, the correlation was at most 71%, note that flipping a coin is expected to correlate to around 50%.
Flipping a coin would have an expected correlation of 0%, although with only 56 samples it could easily be 20-30% in any particular trial. 71% is pretty significant.
Of course, it seems like the researchers did test a lot of different possible relationships and cognitive skills, so they were biased towards finding at least one strong one. (obligatory XKCD.) Still, 71% is a lot better than you are giving them credit for.
Their data seems to be awfully well clustered and the slope seems to be due to the outliers.
See how the data points are all paired? -- each IQ has exactly two dots above it, one red and one blue, presumably representing the same individual. From what I can tell, the important part of that graph is not the absolute position of the red or blue dots, which I agree do not have a remarkable slope, but rather the difference between red and blue for a given individual.
Their other plot from the news article seems to be just that difference, or some derived representation of it. It's a much more convincing relationship.
I followed the links through to a Guardian review of the book about Shin, only to find "This content has been removed as our copyright has expired." WTF?
Fortunately, the Wayback Machine is a bit more sane and has the full story: http://web.archive.org/web/20120320021739/http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/escape-north-korea-prison-camp
I'm from Minneapolis, and although I don't fly all that much, I believe our airport (MSP) is 100% millimeter-wave. I have never seen a backscatter x-ray machine there.
This article confirms it as of August 2012, although it could have changed since then:
I can't help but picture this CEO as a 6-year-old who's been prevented from stealing his younger sister's toy and is now throwing a tantrum.
I am a libertarian. It should be a no-brainer for Republicans to attract my support (over the Democrats at least). Instead they're giving me and everyone else the finger with their absurd rhetoric and childish political games. This goes for their politicians, their pundits, and quite a few of their supporters. Everything Obama supports is automatically bad, even if it's the same thing the Republicans earlier supported.
This insane prioritization of winning vs. losing and minor social issues instead of real governance is why I agree with the sentiment of this post. The Republicans are a menace and must be stopped.
That doesn't seem too plausible.
The moon is only about 1% of the mass of the earth, so let's start with a baseline estimate that it could change surface gravity by 1%. However, it's pretty far from earth's surface (around 100 times earth's radius), and gravity scales with the square of the distance, so now we're talking a 0.0001% change.
It gets worse, though: because we are in mutual orbit with the moon, we are actually in microgravity (freefall) relative to it. In other words, the moon pulls on you with roughly the same strength as it pulls on the earth, so the total 0.0001% change in gravity mostly cancels out! The only part of it that's left is from you being slightly closer to the moon than the earth is (when the moon is above you) or slightly farther (when it's on the other side of the earth). This difference is what causes the tides, but it's incredibly small relative to the gravitational pull of the earth.
Not to mention that the moon was probably not around when the earth was fully molten, or that the earth *does* have heavier elements (iron) predominantly in the center, or any number of other reasons why this idea doesn't seem likely...
You seem legitimately interested in hearing a perspective different from your own, so I'll oblige. Note that libertarianism is diverse, like any political affiliation, so not everyone who identifies with that label would agree with my responses.
Insurance is a common libertarian answer in this situation, and one that makes sense to me.
i guess he could take an insurance policy in theory, but even if an insurer were willing to cover this, the premium if correctly computed would probably be more than he could afford
Then he can't do it. If the fair premium is higher than the benefit of the project, that tells you that the total benefits of the project are lower than the total costs, so the project should not be undertaken. If he thinks the premium is unfairly high, or if nobody will cover it due to the size and uncertainly, he could work to build up significant evidence of the safety of the proposed activity (which is exactly what most people would probably want to see before he started anyway, libertarian or not).
so he would just go ahead and do it anyway.
This seems like an argument that applies to any crime under any political system... but if he did that in a libertarian society, then anyone who was potentially going to be affected would be eligible to defend themselves by preventing him from doing it. Note that people could delegate their self-defense, so even someone who lives far away and/or has a busy life already could still exercise their right of self-defense without undue inconvenience.
what would happen in the real world is, of course, that private interests would have this guy arrested and maybe worse. but that's initiation of force
I don't know of many people who consider self-defense to be initiation of force. Of course people would only be justified in using as much force as reasonable to stop him... initiating an experiment like this would not be carte blanche for dialing up the assassins. (This just follows from current common-law precedent for justifying self-defense.)
libertarians would have to admit that private prisons would still exist in their paradise
Yep. The main problem I personally have with prisons is not their existence but the high number of people locked up for acts of non-aggression (e.g. marijuana possession). Also note that, in the hierarchy of monopoly government institutions that libertarians want to get rid of, the justice system is typically near the end of the list because of the problems inherent in having two people with opposing interests (plaintiff and defendant) jointly select from multiple competing private court/prison systems.
you could say that the entrepreneur is "initiating force" by doing something very risky, but that's a definition which would admit many of the government regulations we have today.
"Regulations" are not necessarily against libertarian principles. After all, most libertarians want to live in stable modern society too, and are against direct aggression such as theft as well as indirect and/or probabilistic aggression like pollution of other people's property or reckless endangerment (e.g. driving drunk or attempting large-scale unproven geo-engineering experiments affecting other people's property). Remember not to confuse us with anarcho-capitalists!
I appreciated your reasonable tone when referring to libertarian principles so I was actually willing to respond, unlike in most slashdot flamefests. Hope you found the perspective interesting at least.
Self-defense is a widely-accepted exception.
It seems in this particular case that Wikipedia editors wanted something they could cite. This strikes me as rather reasonable. If I read the statement "according to the author, the book was inspired by an unhappy event in the life of his late friend Melvin Tumin," with no citation, how could I possibly verify that? If the citation was "the author sent Wikipedia private correspondence, trust me," is that any better? For all you criticizing this decision, is that what you want the encyclopedia to look like?
Asking the author to put a previously unknown fact into a citeable public record before reflecting it in the Wikipedia article is a process that I am personally in favor of, since it now allows me to follow up and see exactly where that information came from and why it's in the article.
Wikipedia does have its problems with overzealous and protective editors, but this particular case doesn't seem to be one. Perhaps there is some additional detail that I've missed in this case but reading TFA actually makes me more confident in the information in Wikipedia.
Came for crash blossom post. Leaving satisfied. Mod parent up.
If you look at the actual breakdown of the charges Ravi was convicted of, you'll notice that he was acquitted of all the bias intimidation sub-charges that he knowingly intimidated Clementi.
According to your own link, this is completely false.
From the source, with my emphasis:
"2nd Degree Bias Intimidation
(For 3rd Degree Invasion of Privacy charge on Sept. 19)
[...]
* Invasion of Privacy, knowing that the conduct constituting invasion of privacy would cause Tyler Clementi to be intimidated because of sexual orientation: GUILTY"
"3rd Degree Bias Intimidation
(For 4th Degree Invasion of Privacy charge on Sept. 21)
* Invasion of Privacy, with the purpose to intimidate Tyler Clementi because of sexual orientation: GUILTY
[...]
* Invasion of Privacy, knowing that the conduct constituting invasion of privacy would cause Tyler Clementi to be intimated because of sexual orientation: GUILTY"
"2nd Degree Bias Intimidation
(For 3rd Degree Attempted Invasion of Privacy charge on Sept. 21)
* Invasion of Privacy, with the purpose to intimidate Tyler Clementi because of sexual orientation: GUILTY
[...]
* Invasion of Privacy, knowing that the conduct constituting invasion of privacy would cause Tyler Clementi to be intimidated because of sexual orientation: GUILTY"
Let's say I'm a factory owner. I make widgets. My factory dumps poison into the sky and into the water. After all, it's my air and water, too, right? And it's next to my factory. If you stop me from dumping the waste, you are imposing on my property rights; you are decreasing the value of my factory. If I change this, I will have to cut back payment of my workers, thus impacting their property rights.
This is a ridiculous strawman mockery of the position held by most small-government advocates. If you seriously believe that anyone other than perhaps the unscrupulous factory owner himself would make that argument with a straight face, you are the problem with modern political discourse. That sort of complete unwillingness to attempt to understand the positions of those you disagree with is what creates hostile, unproductive standoffs at all ranges of the political hierarchy, from your water cooler at work all the way up to congress.
There is a class of high-end non-SLR cameras called "ultrazoom." They don't have removable lenses, but the built-in lens is versatile (with long optical zoom as well as macro capability) and they are smaller and lighter than SLRs or probably MILCs. It's a good compromise if you don't think you'll appreciate the SLR or if you're on a budget.
I've has a Sony DSC-HX1 for a few years and have been very happy with it. Looks like you can get one new for $350 on Amazon. It has a 20x optical zoom, gyroscopic stabilization so you can actually take reasonable pictures at those zoom levels without a tripod, and of course a host of software features including a pretty smart "intelligent auto" mode. The quality of photos is excellent: I've framed some 18"x12" prints as gifts, and people have been surprised when I tell them I took the photo myself.
Review sites often have a separate category for these ultrazooms, e.g.: http://www.digitalcamerainfo.com/Extended-Zoom.htm. Good luck in your search.
And when they get busted, you can just blame them and say "Hey, we didn't know anything about it".
What? That's the exact opposite of what Google is doing. I've heard of not reading the article, but did you even read the summary's title?
What makes you think it's honest, or that it's mourning for Kim Jong-Il?
In the absurdist documentary The Red Chapel, the director speculates that when their North Korean guide starts crying at the monument to Kim Il-Sung, she is actually crying for her relatives who died under his policies.
Looks like you stumbled across a textbook example of Simpson's Paradox. Like with the Monty Hall Problem, gaining a thorough understanding of it will dramatically improve your intuitive understanding of probability and statistics. (At least it did for me!)
CarrierIQ bandwidth is not counted against your cap. At least it's not supposed to be, although we know how good the telcos are at billing you properly.
Each device I worked on, each firmware release, each line of code, does something useful for many, many people. Some of those people don't even know that audio equipment, leave alone software, is involved with what they are hearing.
Awfully arrogant of you to claim that some people benefit from your work without realizing it, without acknowledging that the same could be true of his. If he adds liquidity to the market, then you save money every time you buy or sell stock (or your 401k/mutual funds do). It's not necessarily true that he does, but you certainly aren't in a position to know. You could read more here, but I suppose that would just get in the way of your populist rage so maybe you'd rather not.
Oh, and you follow it up with another stunning display when you criticize him for not using his real name and then you wish him death in the very next sentence. Wow.
Do you ever buy or sell stock? Perhaps indirectly, through a mutual fund or 401k type plan? If so, then you benefit from high liquidity in the market. HFT and other Wall Street shenanigans do skim from the top, but they also provide liquidity. It's almost certain that the liquidity benefits small market players more than the skimming hurts them. In other words, the money they're skimming comes from the banks and brokers rather than you and me.
For example, take the stock of Red Hat (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=RHT). Yahoo Finance right now shows that, as of the last time the market was open, I could buy 100 shares for $42.56 (that's the "ask" or best current asking price), or I could sell 300 shares for $42.09 (the best available "bid"). That's a bid-ask spread of about 50 cents. That spread is a hidden cost to either buying or selling stock: If you buy and then sell RHT, you will have paid about 50 cents per share just for the privilege, even if nothing in particular happens to the company. Let's split that 50-50 and say that every stock transaction in RHT (buy or sell) costs you 25 cents per share in implied fees.
Those bids and asks are set by individuals and companies who are competing. They want to get a good deal for either buying or selling the stock, but they also know that if they set asking price too high or their bid too low, they'll never make any trades. The more competition there is, the tighter the bid-ask spread will be. HFT and other algorithmic approaches allow firms to set prices on tons of stocks without requiring human attention for each one, which dramatically increases the competition and thus tightens the bid-ask spread.
In this example, if you outlaw HFT and similar trading strategies, maybe RHT will have a spread of $1 intead of 50 cents. Maybe you'll be happy that HFTers aren't making ther 5 cent skim off the top anymore, but it'll be cold comfort when you're paying 25 cents more on each transaction and it's just going to a different Wall Street firm.
If you think I'm exaggerating the effect of computerized trading of the spread, have a look at slide 8 (page 4) of this study: http://fisher.osu.edu/~diether_1/b822/trading_costs_2up.pdf. Starting in 1960, the average bid-ask spread has ben dropping steadily every decade to a small fraction of what it used to be.
Background: I am an actuary trained in quantitative finance. I've never worked in Wall Street or done any HFT or other algo trading.