Nothing you can do will bring about a faster or harsher reaction from Government than challenging their power. This is true of any Government. Though the US seems to be getting harsher and harsher about it.
Another possibility is that we have here is predictive trading. Many institutional traders and hedge funds have spent vast sums on advanced systems that predict the market and find opportunities for outsized returns. It is entirely possible that somebody’s predictive software came up with some series of trades that simply caused them to move before the fed announced. Especially if you get a situation where you can get large returns of comparatively small positions they might be inclined to take the risk. It would be interesting to see whether these trades were matched with hedging behaviors. Like placing other positions that would cover them should the Fed go the other way.
I do not know about better for freedom but the reason most countries gave control of their telecommunications infrastructure private companies is cost. In a former job my company dealt with telecommunications companies from all over the world. One thing we consistently found was that the state run carriers were the worst. Their services were more expensive, sometimes literally 10x the going rate in the rest of the world for commercial service. Their infrastructures were invariably antiquated. In some cases they were so far behind that we simply couldn't buy the same services we could everywhere else. If something broke you were in trouble because those people worked 9 to 5 weekdays and they wouldn't think twice about leaving your down all weekend or longer. Their SLA was "you'll be up when we feel like it". The problem with the state run telecommunications companies, that in my view caused all the stuff listed above, is that they aren't really that interested in providing service. These state run carriers were all monopolies. The monopoly has no motivation to provide new services, provide reliable services or keep prices down. What they are motivated to do is kick as much money as possible back to connected politicians, union bosses etc so that they get to keep their monopoly. State run enterprises invariably become huge slush funds for politicians. To the point that if you find an example that doesn't appear to be that my guess is whomever is running it simply clever enough that we can't find the scam. Recreating the state telecommunications companies is basically a recipe for disaster. If you want certain practices out of your companies you just regulate the.
Thing is the new cert is required if a private company, or individual, wants to do it. In the case of the NSA that really isn't a requirement. The Federal Government has billions of dollars and the full force of their enforcement powers. Recent revelations have shown just how much power these guys have to coerce industry into doing what they want. It is entirely possible that some of the trusted certs that we are already using also work for the NSA. If that is the case, and at this point I would be shocked if it wasn't, then they don't need to install anything since your system was shipped with what they need already installed. The only thing they'd need is a choke point to do the decryption and scanning. Which it sounds like virtually all of the major ISPs have thoughtfully provided them.
Do not put to much confidence in SSL. I have tested several firewall products that allow corporations to decrypt SSL traffic coming into their networks. Basically all they need is the ability put a trusted cert on the machine and force you to use a proxy. On a lot of corporate networks your SSL traffic is being decrypted and scanned. My guess is the NSA can do the same thing to you pretty much anytime they want.
Hopefully they continue to work on it and refurbish it. If we are ever going to have a robust long term presence in space we are going to have to learn how to build reliable structures that can be repaired and maintained over the long term. The IIS seems like a perfect test bed for that sort of development and we already have a huge sunk cost so why not use it?
That could be part of it. At least in the major markets the duopoly providers in the US are reaching the point where they don't have to invest a lot in the current network. So if they just agree to stay at this level they can sit back and milk their current infrastructure for profits for quite sometime before they have to upgrade again. So my suspicion is that the NSA is simply a beneficiary of the lack of a real free market. On the other hand I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the NSA doesn't have a hand in some of the FCC decisions that help keep us from having an open market.
Planes get named after all sorts of things. Friend of mine used to fly ANA to Japan quite a bit. One flight they plane they used was named after Pikachu, with a Pokemon paint job and the aircrew all had Pokemon themed uniforms etc. Apparently a lot of people with kids had waited for that plane to get onto the route to make their flights. So he spent the entire 13 hour flight in a plane where at least 1/3 of the passengers were screaming kids. He claims it was the worst flight he ever had. He also went to great pains to make sure he never got put onto that plane again.
You could argue that the larger firms actually benefit from the system as it is now. Sure they have to pay the occasional troll a few million here and there but they tend to have billions in reserves so that they can afford it. The small start up companies that could present a risk to their market position generally do not have those kind of reserves. At the very least their growth is slowed by this and at worst they might even be put out of business. So it is like the big companies are taking a controlled dose of a toxin that they know they will survive but which their weaker competitors may well not survive.
Another thing the larger players have is that if one of these trolls every really threatens them they have billions of dollars, in house legal council and top law firms on retainer. They can put up one hell of a legal defense if they want to. Another thing their smaller competitors can't really do anywhere near as effectively.
That is increasingly the case in my area as well. Basically the older toll roads have booths but the newer ones do not. I also notice that increasingly the booths on the older ones are only manned at peak travel times. So realistically if you use those roads much at all you pretty much have to have an EZ Pass. Fortunately my current job doesn't take me through the areas with the tolls very much so I haven't had one for years. The rest of the time I just detour around the toll roads whenever possible.
He did however get the explosives onto the plane. As did the underwear bomber. They ran into the 2nd most important security change post 9/11, after sturdy locked doors, which is passenger and air crew attitudes toward, and reaction to, hijackers. Pre 9/11 the mantra was OK don't make any trouble for the hijackers. Post 9/11 the reaction of passengers and crew has been to vigorously restrain such people. The presumption with any security measure shoudl be that it will eventually fail. Somebody will find a way to get past security. Somebody will try to light something off on the plane, draw some manner of weapons or try to find a way into the cockpit. This is why you want defense in depth if you can get it.
Moving their data, or your data, outside of the US isn't going to work. First off Google is a US company. The US Government has a very long history of, successfully, asserting their authority over US citizens and companies no matter where they are. The second is that the NSA isn't a law enforcement agency. They are an intelligence agency. Local standards, laws and practices in these other countries won't even slow them down. In fact virtually all of the restrictions they face are only targeted at US citizens and organizations located in the US. Outside of the US you don't even get the minimal protection that the FISA court provides. You may gain that the companies don't actively cooperate as much but as far as I can tell that cooperation is just a convenience to them. If they don't have it they get it via other means.
Those people aren't stocking up because the Government is out to get them specifically. What they are typically afraid of is that the Government will push the public to far and that all hell will break loose. They want to be able to hole up at home or in some safe place with their canned food and shotguns and wait it out. If they decide to come after you specifically you are toast. Other than have top notch lawyers on retainer there isn't much you can do in that situation. So what those people are preparing for is to avoid being collateral damage.
Is that a sane response? I'd say it depends upon the scale. Realistically having supplies on hand is something you should be doing as a matter of course. Down where my mother lives people typically keep hurricane supplies because you could find yourself sort of stranded for as much as a week. So if your "preperations" are on a scale like that probably it isn't insane and those supplies would serve you well in any disaster or disruption that comes along. If on the other hand you have a 5,000 square foot bunker under your house with 25 years of food and enough fire power to fight WWII you may have an "issue".
Your story doesn't surprise me. Having delt with some agencies myself and knowing people who have delt with many others the situation you describe isn't unique to NASA. The sad truth is the US Federal government is a total mess right now. Management is at best inept and at worst corrupt. Projects are poorly defined. In most agencies there are very few people with the technical skills to really administer the project much less do the engineering work. So all of the real work gets outsourced to contracting firms whose managment is primarily concerned with keeping the contracts flowing. So you have government managers, who frequently don't even come close to understanding the technical work, overseeing contractors who are incentivized to drag it out and do a bad job. Then you add congress which has put so many insane rules and set asides in place that a huge chunk of any project is consumed with that stuff. Frankly under these conditions it is amazing that anything ever gets done. If you are an actual government engineer who is interested in doing real technical work you are just about in hell. So it is of no surprise to me that those people just give up and leave. From what I have seen and talking to people that seems to be the trend government wide.
I don't know about other places but in my area of the US the response to situations like this has been to blame the test and not the students. Most of the schools I have dealt with would admit the students. Then they require additional testing, after you are accepted to the school, to show that you really can or cannot manage the course material in areas like math and english. For the students who can't they end up teaching, or outsourcing to the local community college, remedial courses in those subjects. Basically reteaching what you should have learned in high school.
I suspect the difference here is that Universities in the US have the resources to teach these remedial courses or at least access to a community college system to teach them. Were the University of Liberia most likely has neither of those things. Whether the Universities should be responsible for making up for the failings of the public schools and of the students is open to debate. In practice though at least the state schools here do exactly that.
A quick search on EPA's web site lists 41 products are registered with the EPA for killing bed bugs. Judging by the list of active ingredients it looks like there are at least six pesticides that will kill bed bugs.
Lets see... because they made it public they had the data? thats we fucking stupid on their part.
Whether that is a stupid thing or not depends upon your view of just how far these agencies will go to keep their secrets. If you think that they might know that you have their data and you suspect that they are perfectly willing to disappear you to protect that from being exposed you have a problem. It seems to me that you can handle that one of two ways, you can hope they don't know and risk being disappeared or you can expose that you have it and become public enough that you are more difficult to just erase in an "accident". If you take the first path and you are wrong you end up dead or otherwise neutralized and the data never sees the light of day at all. If you take the second path and you are wrong you at least survive and get some amount of data out. At that point it is all a matter of how good you have been at hiding and dispersing it. At least with the second path you have better odds of living to talk about it. It is easy for us who aren't in any potential danger to dismiss that risk. If I was one of these folks actually involved I am not at all sure I would dismiss it so easily.
There are a lot of different learning styles. Personally I have found that I have to listen to the professor and write down the important points. Just the act of distilling what is said down to those key points and recording them helps me to memorize them. Other people I know are more visual and really need things like power point slides in order to really learn it. Where I barely look at stuff like that as it doesn't really help my understanding in most cases. Figuring out what your learning style is can be a great help when it comes to selecting instructors, class formats etc. Once I realized what I needed to succeed I got better grades in my classes and was much better at recognizing instructors whose teaching style was or was not going to work for me.
Because the customer's first requirement will be that the new system comes up with the "same numbers as the old system" (even if they are wrong).
That is the truth there. At one point in college I worked at a place where they had a legacy accounting system that ran on ancient mainframe that it was becoming incredibly expensive to keep running. They were unable to get it to function properly on any other hardware. So they finally gave up and reimplemented the system on what was then the latest and greatest hardware using modern programing techniques and languages. The software in question implemented an incredibly complicated set of rules to various transactions. They spent a fortune having people go through the old code, as well as the original source documents, to map what all these rules were. Just one problem, in some cases the new system would sometimes come out a few cents to a couple of bucks off from the old system. This on transactions frequently in the multiple, or even hundreds, of millions of dollars. The end result of that was that for the entire time I worked there they had to enter everything into both systems. Last time I talked to anybody from there they were still doing that. All the while the organization has spent a fortune trying to find out why the numbers are different. That is despite the fact that as far as they can tell everything is implemented exactly right in the new system. So there is every possibility that it is the old system that is wrong. Management just can't accept that and take the leap of faith to declare the new system right and move on.
According to both Douglas MacArthur and the memoirs of the Japanese prime minister at the time, Kijuro Shidehara, article 9 was written by the prime minister. Because he was afraid that having a weak military would only provide an opening for those wanting to rearm. His answer to that was to preclude that in the constitution. So it was Japanese internal politics rather than the US ramming it down their throats that gave them article 9. Just as their politics have prevented it from being changed. Simply becaue a substantial portion of the Japanese population still supports the idea behind article 9. The current LDP government would like to change article 9 but can't even really push it because their coalition partners, New Komeito, are commited to preserving article 9.
There is one part of that constitution that I have read was rammed down Japan's throats over the screaming objections of their government. That is the part about equal rights for women. They were not the least bit happy about that.
I think we are going to see the same thing happen with electronic records that happened with paper records in the past. The things that survive will be the things that people take an active effort to preserve. In the past that meant if the books and records were valuable enough that they took care in storing them and made additional copies. In the future it will be the things that are valuable enough that people keep moving it to ever newer data storage formats. Things like DRM, proprietary formats etc just make it less likely that any given piece of data will survive long term. Things that only have a few copies will be less likely to survive than things that have vast numbers of copies. I would not be surprised if in the far future there won't be an entire branch of archeology dedicated to reverse engineering ancient data formats.
Beyond downtime what if your "cloud" service provider goes bankrupt. It isn't at all uncommon for failing companies to keep up the pretext of being viable and then just melt down over night. So you come in one morning only to find that some vital service with your data tied up in it has gone under. Now unless you are keeping some local backups you are in a world of hurt.
Another thought on the whole bankruptcy thing is what happens to your data when the court starts selling off the assets of your former cloud provider. I know people who have bought equipment from bankruptcy liquidations and many times that stuff is just pulled from the rack and sold. They have gotten more than one piece of gear from bankruptcy sales that had all of the old owner's business data still on it.
I looked into putting solar panels on my roof. In my state the issue wasn't regulation. Neither my state or county really put any barriers up that I could find. The HOA might have been a different story but I never got that far. The state even offered a subsidy. The factor preventing it was cost of the panels, cost of installation and the amount of energy produced. Essentially even with a subsidy the break even point on the installation was about five years longer than the expected life of the panels. So here at least it just isn't a cost effective thing to do. I still like the idea and would love to have it on my house but the cost needs to come down substantially before that will be feasible.
In the case of the program described in the article it sounds like we are talking about areas where there just isn't an electrical infrastructure. In that sort of situation solar panels are a much better choice. In my case it was can I produce it cheaper than I can buy it and save enough to justify the cost? The answer to that was no. In the case of this program the question is can you produce it cheaply enough for the benefits of getting people off of oil lamps to be worth it. My guess is the answer there is yes. I also suspect that in some of these areas it is much cheaper for the government of Peru to put in some solar panels than to run power lines to some isolated communities.
What concerns me about this method of controlling this is the compliance costs. Whenever there is a tax there are forms to be filled out, reports to be filed and audits to be done. Which frequently ends up costing vast sums of money. Well if these brokerages spend all of this money complying with a tiny tax to stop an undesirable behavior they are going to pass that on to customers. Now I personally don't do any stock trading. I do have a 401(k) plan at work that includes stock funds. Which make large trades on a fairly regular basis. So in effect to stop these people from abusing the system my pension plan is going to have a lower rate of return due to paying this tax and paying the compliance costs.
It seems to me that a far better way to get rid of high frequency trading is to just make it illegal or issue standards for its implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing you can do will bring about a faster or harsher reaction from Government than challenging their power. This is true of any Government. Though the US seems to be getting harsher and harsher about it.
Another possibility is that we have here is predictive trading. Many institutional traders and hedge funds have spent vast sums on advanced systems that predict the market and find opportunities for outsized returns. It is entirely possible that somebody’s predictive software came up with some series of trades that simply caused them to move before the fed announced. Especially if you get a situation where you can get large returns of comparatively small positions they might be inclined to take the risk. It would be interesting to see whether these trades were matched with hedging behaviors. Like placing other positions that would cover them should the Fed go the other way.
I do not know about better for freedom but the reason most countries gave control of their telecommunications infrastructure private companies is cost. In a former job my company dealt with telecommunications companies from all over the world. One thing we consistently found was that the state run carriers were the worst. Their services were more expensive, sometimes literally 10x the going rate in the rest of the world for commercial service. Their infrastructures were invariably antiquated. In some cases they were so far behind that we simply couldn't buy the same services we could everywhere else. If something broke you were in trouble because those people worked 9 to 5 weekdays and they wouldn't think twice about leaving your down all weekend or longer. Their SLA was "you'll be up when we feel like it". The problem with the state run telecommunications companies, that in my view caused all the stuff listed above, is that they aren't really that interested in providing service. These state run carriers were all monopolies. The monopoly has no motivation to provide new services, provide reliable services or keep prices down. What they are motivated to do is kick as much money as possible back to connected politicians, union bosses etc so that they get to keep their monopoly. State run enterprises invariably become huge slush funds for politicians. To the point that if you find an example that doesn't appear to be that my guess is whomever is running it simply clever enough that we can't find the scam. Recreating the state telecommunications companies is basically a recipe for disaster. If you want certain practices out of your companies you just regulate the.
Thing is the new cert is required if a private company, or individual, wants to do it. In the case of the NSA that really isn't a requirement. The Federal Government has billions of dollars and the full force of their enforcement powers. Recent revelations have shown just how much power these guys have to coerce industry into doing what they want. It is entirely possible that some of the trusted certs that we are already using also work for the NSA. If that is the case, and at this point I would be shocked if it wasn't, then they don't need to install anything since your system was shipped with what they need already installed. The only thing they'd need is a choke point to do the decryption and scanning. Which it sounds like virtually all of the major ISPs have thoughtfully provided them.
Do not put to much confidence in SSL. I have tested several firewall products that allow corporations to decrypt SSL traffic coming into their networks. Basically all they need is the ability put a trusted cert on the machine and force you to use a proxy. On a lot of corporate networks your SSL traffic is being decrypted and scanned. My guess is the NSA can do the same thing to you pretty much anytime they want.
Hopefully they continue to work on it and refurbish it. If we are ever going to have a robust long term presence in space we are going to have to learn how to build reliable structures that can be repaired and maintained over the long term. The IIS seems like a perfect test bed for that sort of development and we already have a huge sunk cost so why not use it?
That could be part of it. At least in the major markets the duopoly providers in the US are reaching the point where they don't have to invest a lot in the current network. So if they just agree to stay at this level they can sit back and milk their current infrastructure for profits for quite sometime before they have to upgrade again. So my suspicion is that the NSA is simply a beneficiary of the lack of a real free market. On the other hand I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the NSA doesn't have a hand in some of the FCC decisions that help keep us from having an open market.
Planes get named after all sorts of things. Friend of mine used to fly ANA to Japan quite a bit. One flight they plane they used was named after Pikachu, with a Pokemon paint job and the aircrew all had Pokemon themed uniforms etc. Apparently a lot of people with kids had waited for that plane to get onto the route to make their flights. So he spent the entire 13 hour flight in a plane where at least 1/3 of the passengers were screaming kids. He claims it was the worst flight he ever had. He also went to great pains to make sure he never got put onto that plane again.
You could argue that the larger firms actually benefit from the system as it is now. Sure they have to pay the occasional troll a few million here and there but they tend to have billions in reserves so that they can afford it. The small start up companies that could present a risk to their market position generally do not have those kind of reserves. At the very least their growth is slowed by this and at worst they might even be put out of business. So it is like the big companies are taking a controlled dose of a toxin that they know they will survive but which their weaker competitors may well not survive.
Another thing the larger players have is that if one of these trolls every really threatens them they have billions of dollars, in house legal council and top law firms on retainer. They can put up one hell of a legal defense if they want to. Another thing their smaller competitors can't really do anywhere near as effectively.
That is increasingly the case in my area as well. Basically the older toll roads have booths but the newer ones do not. I also notice that increasingly the booths on the older ones are only manned at peak travel times. So realistically if you use those roads much at all you pretty much have to have an EZ Pass. Fortunately my current job doesn't take me through the areas with the tolls very much so I haven't had one for years. The rest of the time I just detour around the toll roads whenever possible.
He did however get the explosives onto the plane. As did the underwear bomber. They ran into the 2nd most important security change post 9/11, after sturdy locked doors, which is passenger and air crew attitudes toward, and reaction to, hijackers. Pre 9/11 the mantra was OK don't make any trouble for the hijackers. Post 9/11 the reaction of passengers and crew has been to vigorously restrain such people. The presumption with any security measure shoudl be that it will eventually fail. Somebody will find a way to get past security. Somebody will try to light something off on the plane, draw some manner of weapons or try to find a way into the cockpit. This is why you want defense in depth if you can get it.
I thought they stopped allowing lighters on board? The alcohol on the other hand is often readily available on the plane.
Moving their data, or your data, outside of the US isn't going to work. First off Google is a US company. The US Government has a very long history of, successfully, asserting their authority over US citizens and companies no matter where they are. The second is that the NSA isn't a law enforcement agency. They are an intelligence agency. Local standards, laws and practices in these other countries won't even slow them down. In fact virtually all of the restrictions they face are only targeted at US citizens and organizations located in the US. Outside of the US you don't even get the minimal protection that the FISA court provides. You may gain that the companies don't actively cooperate as much but as far as I can tell that cooperation is just a convenience to them. If they don't have it they get it via other means.
Those people aren't stocking up because the Government is out to get them specifically. What they are typically afraid of is that the Government will push the public to far and that all hell will break loose. They want to be able to hole up at home or in some safe place with their canned food and shotguns and wait it out. If they decide to come after you specifically you are toast. Other than have top notch lawyers on retainer there isn't much you can do in that situation. So what those people are preparing for is to avoid being collateral damage.
Is that a sane response? I'd say it depends upon the scale. Realistically having supplies on hand is something you should be doing as a matter of course. Down where my mother lives people typically keep hurricane supplies because you could find yourself sort of stranded for as much as a week. So if your "preperations" are on a scale like that probably it isn't insane and those supplies would serve you well in any disaster or disruption that comes along. If on the other hand you have a 5,000 square foot bunker under your house with 25 years of food and enough fire power to fight WWII you may have an "issue".
Your story doesn't surprise me. Having delt with some agencies myself and knowing people who have delt with many others the situation you describe isn't unique to NASA. The sad truth is the US Federal government is a total mess right now. Management is at best inept and at worst corrupt. Projects are poorly defined. In most agencies there are very few people with the technical skills to really administer the project much less do the engineering work. So all of the real work gets outsourced to contracting firms whose managment is primarily concerned with keeping the contracts flowing. So you have government managers, who frequently don't even come close to understanding the technical work, overseeing contractors who are incentivized to drag it out and do a bad job. Then you add congress which has put so many insane rules and set asides in place that a huge chunk of any project is consumed with that stuff. Frankly under these conditions it is amazing that anything ever gets done. If you are an actual government engineer who is interested in doing real technical work you are just about in hell. So it is of no surprise to me that those people just give up and leave. From what I have seen and talking to people that seems to be the trend government wide.
I don't know about other places but in my area of the US the response to situations like this has been to blame the test and not the students. Most of the schools I have dealt with would admit the students. Then they require additional testing, after you are accepted to the school, to show that you really can or cannot manage the course material in areas like math and english. For the students who can't they end up teaching, or outsourcing to the local community college, remedial courses in those subjects. Basically reteaching what you should have learned in high school.
I suspect the difference here is that Universities in the US have the resources to teach these remedial courses or at least access to a community college system to teach them. Were the University of Liberia most likely has neither of those things. Whether the Universities should be responsible for making up for the failings of the public schools and of the students is open to debate. In practice though at least the state schools here do exactly that.
A quick search on EPA's web site lists 41 products are registered with the EPA for killing bed bugs. Judging by the list of active ingredients it looks like there are at least six pesticides that will kill bed bugs.
EPA-Registered Bed Bug Products
Lets see ... because they made it public they had the data? thats we fucking stupid on their part.
Whether that is a stupid thing or not depends upon your view of just how far these agencies will go to keep their secrets. If you think that they might know that you have their data and you suspect that they are perfectly willing to disappear you to protect that from being exposed you have a problem. It seems to me that you can handle that one of two ways, you can hope they don't know and risk being disappeared or you can expose that you have it and become public enough that you are more difficult to just erase in an "accident". If you take the first path and you are wrong you end up dead or otherwise neutralized and the data never sees the light of day at all. If you take the second path and you are wrong you at least survive and get some amount of data out. At that point it is all a matter of how good you have been at hiding and dispersing it. At least with the second path you have better odds of living to talk about it. It is easy for us who aren't in any potential danger to dismiss that risk. If I was one of these folks actually involved I am not at all sure I would dismiss it so easily.
There are a lot of different learning styles. Personally I have found that I have to listen to the professor and write down the important points. Just the act of distilling what is said down to those key points and recording them helps me to memorize them. Other people I know are more visual and really need things like power point slides in order to really learn it. Where I barely look at stuff like that as it doesn't really help my understanding in most cases. Figuring out what your learning style is can be a great help when it comes to selecting instructors, class formats etc. Once I realized what I needed to succeed I got better grades in my classes and was much better at recognizing instructors whose teaching style was or was not going to work for me.
Because the customer's first requirement will be that the new system comes up with the "same numbers as the old system" (even if they are wrong).
That is the truth there. At one point in college I worked at a place where they had a legacy accounting system that ran on ancient mainframe that it was becoming incredibly expensive to keep running. They were unable to get it to function properly on any other hardware. So they finally gave up and reimplemented the system on what was then the latest and greatest hardware using modern programing techniques and languages. The software in question implemented an incredibly complicated set of rules to various transactions. They spent a fortune having people go through the old code, as well as the original source documents, to map what all these rules were. Just one problem, in some cases the new system would sometimes come out a few cents to a couple of bucks off from the old system. This on transactions frequently in the multiple, or even hundreds, of millions of dollars. The end result of that was that for the entire time I worked there they had to enter everything into both systems. Last time I talked to anybody from there they were still doing that. All the while the organization has spent a fortune trying to find out why the numbers are different. That is despite the fact that as far as they can tell everything is implemented exactly right in the new system. So there is every possibility that it is the old system that is wrong. Management just can't accept that and take the leap of faith to declare the new system right and move on.
According to both Douglas MacArthur and the memoirs of the Japanese prime minister at the time, Kijuro Shidehara, article 9 was written by the prime minister. Because he was afraid that having a weak military would only provide an opening for those wanting to rearm. His answer to that was to preclude that in the constitution. So it was Japanese internal politics rather than the US ramming it down their throats that gave them article 9. Just as their politics have prevented it from being changed. Simply becaue a substantial portion of the Japanese population still supports the idea behind article 9. The current LDP government would like to change article 9 but can't even really push it because their coalition partners, New Komeito, are commited to preserving article 9.
There is one part of that constitution that I have read was rammed down Japan's throats over the screaming objections of their government. That is the part about equal rights for women. They were not the least bit happy about that.
I think we are going to see the same thing happen with electronic records that happened with paper records in the past. The things that survive will be the things that people take an active effort to preserve. In the past that meant if the books and records were valuable enough that they took care in storing them and made additional copies. In the future it will be the things that are valuable enough that people keep moving it to ever newer data storage formats. Things like DRM, proprietary formats etc just make it less likely that any given piece of data will survive long term. Things that only have a few copies will be less likely to survive than things that have vast numbers of copies. I would not be surprised if in the far future there won't be an entire branch of archeology dedicated to reverse engineering ancient data formats.
Beyond downtime what if your "cloud" service provider goes bankrupt. It isn't at all uncommon for failing companies to keep up the pretext of being viable and then just melt down over night. So you come in one morning only to find that some vital service with your data tied up in it has gone under. Now unless you are keeping some local backups you are in a world of hurt.
Another thought on the whole bankruptcy thing is what happens to your data when the court starts selling off the assets of your former cloud provider. I know people who have bought equipment from bankruptcy liquidations and many times that stuff is just pulled from the rack and sold. They have gotten more than one piece of gear from bankruptcy sales that had all of the old owner's business data still on it.
I looked into putting solar panels on my roof. In my state the issue wasn't regulation. Neither my state or county really put any barriers up that I could find. The HOA might have been a different story but I never got that far. The state even offered a subsidy. The factor preventing it was cost of the panels, cost of installation and the amount of energy produced. Essentially even with a subsidy the break even point on the installation was about five years longer than the expected life of the panels. So here at least it just isn't a cost effective thing to do. I still like the idea and would love to have it on my house but the cost needs to come down substantially before that will be feasible.
In the case of the program described in the article it sounds like we are talking about areas where there just isn't an electrical infrastructure. In that sort of situation solar panels are a much better choice. In my case it was can I produce it cheaper than I can buy it and save enough to justify the cost? The answer to that was no. In the case of this program the question is can you produce it cheaply enough for the benefits of getting people off of oil lamps to be worth it. My guess is the answer there is yes. I also suspect that in some of these areas it is much cheaper for the government of Peru to put in some solar panels than to run power lines to some isolated communities.
What concerns me about this method of controlling this is the compliance costs. Whenever there is a tax there are forms to be filled out, reports to be filed and audits to be done. Which frequently ends up costing vast sums of money. Well if these brokerages spend all of this money complying with a tiny tax to stop an undesirable behavior they are going to pass that on to customers. Now I personally don't do any stock trading. I do have a 401(k) plan at work that includes stock funds. Which make large trades on a fairly regular basis. So in effect to stop these people from abusing the system my pension plan is going to have a lower rate of return due to paying this tax and paying the compliance costs.
It seems to me that a far better way to get rid of high frequency trading is to just make it illegal or issue standards for its implementation.