That's a matter of opinion, but I think history doesn't bear this out. The late economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said, for example that there were no problems in New York city that couldn't be solved by tripling the budget. Of course, since he said that the budget has way more than tripled and the problems have become both larger and more numerous. Throwing money at problems is no guarantee of success. In fact, it often makes things worse. If you need other examples of this failed policy prescription look no further than our public schools and health care systems.
Private companies don't want to invest in basic research because the time 'till return is "too long" for them (5-20 years out).
American companies are often short sighted, but their foreign competitors, especially in China, India and Japan are willing to invest in long term projects. For example, Toyota brought GM to its knees over a period of decades, it didn't happen overnight, and they did this by making long term investments in engineering and manufacturing that took more than 5 years to pay off.
The login attempt does not have to be completely blocked. In fact, this gives too much information to the attackers. In practice it is better to simply fail all login attempts, even when the correct credentials are given, for the next N minutes (3-10 minutes is usually sufficient). This way, the attackers think that their brute force attempts are going along at a good clip when in fact only a very few of tens or hundreds of thousands of attempts are actually "real" attempts; the rest, whether correct or not, appear to be failed logins (i.e. wrong credentials).
For being too pussy to admit Assange has had greater impact
Who might indeed have won if hadn't been taken in by some easy pussy. Assange should have known from reading history that using female agents to ensnare unsuspecting male targets is a time honored intelligence agency trick. The East Germans and the Stasi in particular were masters of this sort of operation. It should go without saying to any man in a position of power: beware of easy pussy, it's one of the oldest tricks in the book.
If Time took a poll of programmers and asked who among us was most admired and respected for their coding ability I doubt that Zuckerberg would even receive an honorable mention. Actually, the winners would probably be people that nobody outside of the software development or computer science community has ever heard of. For the benefit of those who don't program, lets just say that the ability to churn out minimally functional hacks and spaghetti code quickly does not a good programmer make. Does anyone else remember the early Facebook PHP source code leak where one particularly messy section was commented as "tossing the tunas"?
Although technically it didn't really end, they just haven't activated it since 1973. In fact, every male reaching 18 years of age in the United States is still required to register for the Selective Service System under penalty of fines, imprisonment and, if the failure to register continues past age 26, being unable to apply for a federal job or receive benefits. Of course, the government stopped enforcing this law by the mid 1980s because is basically requires a public admission of one's own guilt to actually effect a prosecution. In any event, it is highly unlikely that the draft will be used again in the near future. However, it does remain a theoretical possibility, given the right set of circumstances. Of course, many of us here on Slashdot are either too old or too fat or both to provide any meaningful form of military service, so it's probably a dead letter in any case.
If there exists a seller for a particular security, the arrival of a buyer at that or greater price immediately settles the trade. The high frequency trader can attempt to predict that more buyers will come along after it detects those initial buyers, but how many buyers and how much volume at what price is still a gamble, however well informed. There is always a chance that the high frequency trader ends up being the last or nearly the last buyer at that settlement price and is forced to turn around and sell for a loss or hold the security for longer period than they originally anticipated. This can just as easily result in a loss as a gain. If high frequency trading offered guaranteed profits then everyone would be quitting their day jobs and doing it. The best and most successful long term investors, with durable gains, are still humans and not machines.
Look at markets, like the Heng Seng in Hong Kong, where they do enforce a "hearbeat" and trades execute every 500 ms, but no faster. There doesn't appear to be an appreciable difference between bid/ask spreads in that kind of market vs a continuously traded one. The only difference is that continuously traded markets have greater daily share volume. If high frequency traders are "taxing" every trade as you suggest, then shouldn't the bid ask spreads be a bit higher to account for all of their "fabulous" profits?
I think that you overestimate their profits. High frequency trading can be a very risky business. In fact there was an story here on Slashdot here not too long ago describing how a "mistake" in one traders algorithm was exploited by day traders, using intelligent play (i.e. the day traders didn't do anything illegal) and cost the high frequency guys serious cash before they were able to throw the kill switch on the auto-trading system.
I don't have any problem with high frequency traders as long as two rules are enforced:
All trades are final once the order is placed regardless of why it was placed (i.e. no excuses for mistakes, accidents, "just kidding", etc).
If your trade finds a buyer within the allotted time for the trade to complete then it happens, no reversals allowed.
As a small value investor, I don't really care if some high frequency trader runs in front of the steam roller to snatch pennies because I don't try and beat them at their own trading games. I typically buy and sell stocks with time horizons of years, not microseconds. I value the liquidity provided more than I care about the fraction of a cent better price that I may or may not have received. In my investment career thus far I am ahead substantially (I began investing when I was 25) and I have always taken a value investor outlook. In other words, the high frequency traders and small investors like me are not really in competition; they look at the price first and foremost every second of every day whereas I look at the long term value of the underlying business and its management first and price is the last thing that I look at, only when I have decided that I would like to own that business.
Seriously people, how can this be modded insightful? No social benefit whatsoever? I don't have much sympathy for Wall Street traders, especially when they lose, but even I can acknowledge that professional traders, high frequency and otherwise, have an important role to play in the marketplace: they provide liquidity. I don't know about the rest of you, but I like being able to tender my shares on the exchanges and know that there will always be a buyer, no questions asked, whenever I am ready to sell. Liquidity is the oil which lubricates the engine of the marketplace and without liquidity there would be even wilder price swings, greater uncertainty and still higher unemployment. The Wall Street traders may not be saints, but credit should be given where credit is due (pun intended): liquidity is NOT worthless.
As a gamer who enjoys single players games, especially those of the Fallout series (with the exceptions of Tactics and that half-finished console sellout that Interplay threw together), I think that EA getting out of this space would actually be beneficial to the smaller independent game studios who still have the passion and skill to put together a compelling storyline, memorable characters and quality game play experiences. Let EA and the other mass-market game studios like Rock Star keep churning out un-original rehashes of their same tired franchises Madden version whatever and Grand Theft Console Game: Your Wallet. There is room for a good niche in boutique, well put together and story based games that would develop much more readily if EA and their McGames would get out that market.
They can't give that money to governments like the Democratic Republic of the Congo because government corruption will wick away much of that. And they might buy small arms and attack their neighbors with them. They get treated like children and they stay children.
They are treated that way because they have proven time and again that they cannot be trusted. If people and nations wish to be treated as adults then they must put aside childish ways and begin acting like adults. I wouldn't invest my money in any Congolese companies, so I don't blame Zuckerberg and the other billionaires for likewise refusing to invest in corruption. If you want some examples of what happens when monetary aid is given to corrupt African governments just take a look at the various IMF programs or the US foreign aid payments for the last 30 years. The only people happy with the results are the Swiss bankers. Africa would be better off without foreign aid payments and the more honest African politicians have said as much. Indeed, they would much prefer that Europeans and Americans end their farm subsidies and quit dumping tons of free or extremely low cost grain because such handouts undermine local development and fuel corruption.
is it really necessary to have 1 USDA employee for every 9 farmers?
That's just the tip of the iceberg, the amount of waste and incompetence in the United States Federal Government is truly a sight to behold. In fact, if people knew how poorly the feds ran things they would be hopping mad. Why, they might even start demanding spending cuts, tax breaks and smaller government...oh wait.
I didn't say that throttling solids was impossible, but compared to the mature and well understood liquid fuel technology it doesn't offer any serious advantages in this category. Solid fuel rockets have generally been selected where high specific impulse and long term storage capability, their two biggest strengths, were desirable (i.e. missiles with warheads and the like). The Space Shuttle was unusual in the history of launch vehicles in that it was a hybrid of both liquid and solid fuel technologies. In space applications the well-known, less complicated and above all reliable solutions tend to work out best. In fact, the Space Shuttle program is really the canonical example of a overly complex launch vehicle that tried to do too many different things in one package and ended up being, at best, a mixed bag: some great successes combined with huge cost overruns and some equally spectacular failures.
a chip on its shoulder about not being treated with sufficient respect.
If China wants the respect of other nations then they must demonstrate, through actions, that they are worthy of that respect according to our value systems and not what they think our value systems should be. Everyone decides for themselves who is worthy of respect; respect is in the eye of the beholder. China is a somewhat odd in that they claim cultural superiority and profess not to care what others think of their deeds and yet they complain when the rest of the world responds with "tsk, tsk, tsk". It seems to me that, despite the age and pedigree of their civilization, the Chinese have much to learn when it comes to respect and deeds worthy of praise.
A liquid fueled rocket can easily be throttled so as to vary the rate and amount of acceleration, but this is very difficult to achieve in a solid rocket motor. If what you are launching can survive 20+ gforce, like an object made out of silicon and metal, then it's not a big deal. Humans, on the other hand, are squishy bags of water that don't handle g forces nearly as well which means liquid fuel, as the parent said, is really the only way to go.
Perhaps, but landmines are cheap, reliable and effective in denying the area, especially the narrow strip of the Korean DMZ, to an invasion force. The North Koreans do not have substantial sea or air lift capability and the South Koreans, with their US allies, enjoy substantial air and sea superiority in any case. Any invasion of South Korea by the North would be forced to cross the DMZ, landmines and all, before proceeding further south. The landmines are important in this case because they would serve to delay the North Korean advance long enough for the South Koreans to organize an orderly fighting retreat to prepared positions further south while awaiting amphibious landings of US troops further north to cut off the North Korean supply lines. The landmines, with or without automated gun turrets, are an important part of
the South Korean deterrent to invasion by North Korea.
The fact that Wall Street folks support free trade isn't proof it's a bad idea.
Perhaps not, but it's a pretty good piece of circumstantial evidence. The wall street traders don't give two shits about you and your family. They will sell you down the river for thirty pieces of silver. They support what is in their best interest, country be damned, so maybe you too should be looking out for numero uno instead of saying how great it is to get a fantastic deal at WalMart while your neighbor is unemployed.
You do realize that the H1-B program if full of liars right? So yeah, they bring in some "algorithm designer" and supposedly pay him 90K per year, but since nobody ever comes back to investigate what is *really* happening they don't see that Pradesh the "algorithm designer" is actually doing basic IT admin and help desk work for about 1/5 the stated rate of pay. Pradesh doesn't complain because it's more than he would get in India and he knows that any insubordination and he will find himself back in the slums of Bangalore so fast that his head will be spinning. Meanwhile, Pradesh doesn't pay much tax on his much lower income and doesn't spend very much in the US economy either because (a) he doesn't have much left to spend after expenses and (b) he is trying to send money back home to support his parents. The H1-B program is rife with abuse and really should be abolished. The large companies, like IBM et al, don't even bother anymore and just open up a development center in India which means that even fewer legitimate H1-B's remain in the program (i.e. mostly smaller and medium sized companies who are even more likely to cheat). Obama likes to talk about STEM jobs for smart young Americans and then he goes to India and tells the outsourcing firms, "don't worry, we won't have any problems". Why should any smart US student choose a STEM career under these circumstances? Study and work hard for 5+ years so that your job can be outsourced? No, the smart ones are choosing business, law and medicine, not STEM, and who can blame them? If American companies want qualified Americans, as they say that they do, then they need to do more to prove that STEM is the path to a stable and well paying career, not some sucker bet where new graduates are hired and then cast aside after a few years in favor of other new graduates or offshore outsourcing.
Slashdot Mirror
we'd be so much better off in a couple years.
That's a matter of opinion, but I think history doesn't bear this out. The late economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said, for example that there were no problems in New York city that couldn't be solved by tripling the budget. Of course, since he said that the budget has way more than tripled and the problems have become both larger and more numerous. Throwing money at problems is no guarantee of success. In fact, it often makes things worse. If you need other examples of this failed policy prescription look no further than our public schools and health care systems.
a turmoil in middle east
The middle east does turmoil well enough all by itself, it doesn't need America's or anyone elses' help.
Private companies don't want to invest in basic research because the time 'till return is "too long" for them (5-20 years out).
American companies are often short sighted, but their foreign competitors, especially in China, India and Japan are willing to invest in long term projects. For example, Toyota brought GM to its knees over a period of decades, it didn't happen overnight, and they did this by making long term investments in engineering and manufacturing that took more than 5 years to pay off.
That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!
Really? The TSA broke my luggage locks years ago. How does your combination luggage lock still work?
The login attempt does not have to be completely blocked. In fact, this gives too much information to the attackers. In practice it is better to simply fail all login attempts, even when the correct credentials are given, for the next N minutes (3-10 minutes is usually sufficient). This way, the attackers think that their brute force attempts are going along at a good clip when in fact only a very few of tens or hundreds of thousands of attempts are actually "real" attempts; the rest, whether correct or not, appear to be failed logins (i.e. wrong credentials).
Messing around with sovereign governments is not a game.
Julian Assange is learning this first-hand as we speak...
For being too pussy to admit Assange has had greater impact
Who might indeed have won if hadn't been taken in by some easy pussy. Assange should have known from reading history that using female agents to ensnare unsuspecting male targets is a time honored intelligence agency trick. The East Germans and the Stasi in particular were masters of this sort of operation. It should go without saying to any man in a position of power: beware of easy pussy, it's one of the oldest tricks in the book.
If Time took a poll of programmers and asked who among us was most admired and respected for their coding ability I doubt that Zuckerberg would even receive an honorable mention. Actually, the winners would probably be people that nobody outside of the software development or computer science community has ever heard of. For the benefit of those who don't program, lets just say that the ability to churn out minimally functional hacks and spaghetti code quickly does not a good programmer make. Does anyone else remember the early Facebook PHP source code leak where one particularly messy section was commented as "tossing the tunas"?
The draft ended in 1973.
Although technically it didn't really end, they just haven't activated it since 1973. In fact, every male reaching 18 years of age in the United States is still required to register for the Selective Service System under penalty of fines, imprisonment and, if the failure to register continues past age 26, being unable to apply for a federal job or receive benefits. Of course, the government stopped enforcing this law by the mid 1980s because is basically requires a public admission of one's own guilt to actually effect a prosecution. In any event, it is highly unlikely that the draft will be used again in the near future. However, it does remain a theoretical possibility, given the right set of circumstances. Of course, many of us here on Slashdot are either too old or too fat or both to provide any meaningful form of military service, so it's probably a dead letter in any case.
If there exists a seller for a particular security, the arrival of a buyer at that or greater price immediately settles the trade. The high frequency trader can attempt to predict that more buyers will come along after it detects those initial buyers, but how many buyers and how much volume at what price is still a gamble, however well informed. There is always a chance that the high frequency trader ends up being the last or nearly the last buyer at that settlement price and is forced to turn around and sell for a loss or hold the security for longer period than they originally anticipated. This can just as easily result in a loss as a gain. If high frequency trading offered guaranteed profits then everyone would be quitting their day jobs and doing it. The best and most successful long term investors, with durable gains, are still humans and not machines.
Look at markets, like the Heng Seng in Hong Kong, where they do enforce a "hearbeat" and trades execute every 500 ms, but no faster. There doesn't appear to be an appreciable difference between bid/ask spreads in that kind of market vs a continuously traded one. The only difference is that continuously traded markets have greater daily share volume. If high frequency traders are "taxing" every trade as you suggest, then shouldn't the bid ask spreads be a bit higher to account for all of their "fabulous" profits?
I think that you overestimate their profits. High frequency trading can be a very risky business. In fact there was an story here on Slashdot here not too long ago describing how a "mistake" in one traders algorithm was exploited by day traders, using intelligent play (i.e. the day traders didn't do anything illegal) and cost the high frequency guys serious cash before they were able to throw the kill switch on the auto-trading system.
I don't have any problem with high frequency traders as long as two rules are enforced:
As a small value investor, I don't really care if some high frequency trader runs in front of the steam roller to snatch pennies because I don't try and beat them at their own trading games. I typically buy and sell stocks with time horizons of years, not microseconds. I value the liquidity provided more than I care about the fraction of a cent better price that I may or may not have received. In my investment career thus far I am ahead substantially (I began investing when I was 25) and I have always taken a value investor outlook. In other words, the high frequency traders and small investors like me are not really in competition; they look at the price first and foremost every second of every day whereas I look at the long term value of the underlying business and its management first and price is the last thing that I look at, only when I have decided that I would like to own that business.
High frequency trading has no social benefit.
Seriously people, how can this be modded insightful? No social benefit whatsoever? I don't have much sympathy for Wall Street traders, especially when they lose, but even I can acknowledge that professional traders, high frequency and otherwise, have an important role to play in the marketplace: they provide liquidity. I don't know about the rest of you, but I like being able to tender my shares on the exchanges and know that there will always be a buyer, no questions asked, whenever I am ready to sell. Liquidity is the oil which lubricates the engine of the marketplace and without liquidity there would be even wilder price swings, greater uncertainty and still higher unemployment. The Wall Street traders may not be saints, but credit should be given where credit is due (pun intended): liquidity is NOT worthless.
As a gamer who enjoys single players games, especially those of the Fallout series (with the exceptions of Tactics and that half-finished console sellout that Interplay threw together), I think that EA getting out of this space would actually be beneficial to the smaller independent game studios who still have the passion and skill to put together a compelling storyline, memorable characters and quality game play experiences. Let EA and the other mass-market game studios like Rock Star keep churning out un-original rehashes of their same tired franchises Madden version whatever and Grand Theft Console Game: Your Wallet. There is room for a good niche in boutique, well put together and story based games that would develop much more readily if EA and their McGames would get out that market.
They can't give that money to governments like the Democratic Republic of the Congo because government corruption will wick away much of that. And they might buy small arms and attack their neighbors with them. They get treated like children and they stay children.
They are treated that way because they have proven time and again that they cannot be trusted. If people and nations wish to be treated as adults then they must put aside childish ways and begin acting like adults. I wouldn't invest my money in any Congolese companies, so I don't blame Zuckerberg and the other billionaires for likewise refusing to invest in corruption. If you want some examples of what happens when monetary aid is given to corrupt African governments just take a look at the various IMF programs or the US foreign aid payments for the last 30 years. The only people happy with the results are the Swiss bankers. Africa would be better off without foreign aid payments and the more honest African politicians have said as much. Indeed, they would much prefer that Europeans and Americans end their farm subsidies and quit dumping tons of free or extremely low cost grain because such handouts undermine local development and fuel corruption.
is it really necessary to have 1 USDA employee for every 9 farmers?
That's just the tip of the iceberg, the amount of waste and incompetence in the United States Federal Government is truly a sight to behold. In fact, if people knew how poorly the feds ran things they would be hopping mad. Why, they might even start demanding spending cuts, tax breaks and smaller government...oh wait.
I didn't say that throttling solids was impossible, but compared to the mature and well understood liquid fuel technology it doesn't offer any serious advantages in this category. Solid fuel rockets have generally been selected where high specific impulse and long term storage capability, their two biggest strengths, were desirable (i.e. missiles with warheads and the like). The Space Shuttle was unusual in the history of launch vehicles in that it was a hybrid of both liquid and solid fuel technologies. In space applications the well-known, less complicated and above all reliable solutions tend to work out best. In fact, the Space Shuttle program is really the canonical example of a overly complex launch vehicle that tried to do too many different things in one package and ended up being, at best, a mixed bag: some great successes combined with huge cost overruns and some equally spectacular failures.
a chip on its shoulder about not being treated with sufficient respect.
If China wants the respect of other nations then they must demonstrate, through actions, that they are worthy of that respect according to our value systems and not what they think our value systems should be. Everyone decides for themselves who is worthy of respect; respect is in the eye of the beholder. China is a somewhat odd in that they claim cultural superiority and profess not to care what others think of their deeds and yet they complain when the rest of the world responds with "tsk, tsk, tsk". It seems to me that, despite the age and pedigree of their civilization, the Chinese have much to learn when it comes to respect and deeds worthy of praise.
A liquid fueled rocket can easily be throttled so as to vary the rate and amount of acceleration, but this is very difficult to achieve in a solid rocket motor. If what you are launching can survive 20+ gforce, like an object made out of silicon and metal, then it's not a big deal. Humans, on the other hand, are squishy bags of water that don't handle g forces nearly as well which means liquid fuel, as the parent said, is really the only way to go.
It's pretty much a Zerg vs Protoss battle.
With the US in the role of Terran allies, providing bunkers, marines, spider mines and ghosts (nuclear launch detected!).
Those things remind me of the robot sentry units in the Special Edition of Aliens.
That's it man! Game over man! Those things are come in here just like they did before, they're gonna come in here and they're gonna get us!
Perhaps, but landmines are cheap, reliable and effective in denying the area, especially the narrow strip of the Korean DMZ, to an invasion force. The North Koreans do not have substantial sea or air lift capability and the South Koreans, with their US allies, enjoy substantial air and sea superiority in any case. Any invasion of South Korea by the North would be forced to cross the DMZ, landmines and all, before proceeding further south. The landmines are important in this case because they would serve to delay the North Korean advance long enough for the South Koreans to organize an orderly fighting retreat to prepared positions further south while awaiting amphibious landings of US troops further north to cut off the North Korean supply lines. The landmines, with or without automated gun turrets, are an important part of the South Korean deterrent to invasion by North Korea.
The film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow featured Laurence Olivier, 15 years after his real life death, in the role of the villain, Dr. Totenkopf, using previously recorded archival footage.
The fact that Wall Street folks support free trade isn't proof it's a bad idea.
Perhaps not, but it's a pretty good piece of circumstantial evidence. The wall street traders don't give two shits about you and your family. They will sell you down the river for thirty pieces of silver. They support what is in their best interest, country be damned, so maybe you too should be looking out for numero uno instead of saying how great it is to get a fantastic deal at WalMart while your neighbor is unemployed.
You do realize that the H1-B program if full of liars right? So yeah, they bring in some "algorithm designer" and supposedly pay him 90K per year, but since nobody ever comes back to investigate what is *really* happening they don't see that Pradesh the "algorithm designer" is actually doing basic IT admin and help desk work for about 1/5 the stated rate of pay. Pradesh doesn't complain because it's more than he would get in India and he knows that any insubordination and he will find himself back in the slums of Bangalore so fast that his head will be spinning. Meanwhile, Pradesh doesn't pay much tax on his much lower income and doesn't spend very much in the US economy either because (a) he doesn't have much left to spend after expenses and (b) he is trying to send money back home to support his parents. The H1-B program is rife with abuse and really should be abolished. The large companies, like IBM et al, don't even bother anymore and just open up a development center in India which means that even fewer legitimate H1-B's remain in the program (i.e. mostly smaller and medium sized companies who are even more likely to cheat). Obama likes to talk about STEM jobs for smart young Americans and then he goes to India and tells the outsourcing firms, "don't worry, we won't have any problems". Why should any smart US student choose a STEM career under these circumstances? Study and work hard for 5+ years so that your job can be outsourced? No, the smart ones are choosing business, law and medicine, not STEM, and who can blame them? If American companies want qualified Americans, as they say that they do, then they need to do more to prove that STEM is the path to a stable and well paying career, not some sucker bet where new graduates are hired and then cast aside after a few years in favor of other new graduates or offshore outsourcing.