I think you may be underestimating what C# brings to the table. The C# language has been very promiscuous over the years, borrowing the best and most clever syntax features from functional languages while improving the C/C++ style syntax to further favor the sort of "terseness" found in C/C++ but less so in Java. An opinion shared by many developers in recent years is that the Java language (i.e. the language itself, not as much the libraries) has fallen behind what C# now offers. Perhaps Oracle will work to remedy this situation? Perhaps, but for now if I had a choice between Java or C# I would choose C#. The following article is informative.
It IS however a problem that they don't know shit about crime and/or law.
Having also served on juries in the United States before, I feel compelled to point out that the three primary benefits to jury trials. First, you are judged by a jury of your peers and not simply by members of the professional legal class who may or may not fully appreciate the circumstances of each individual's life situation. Second, by creating a pool drawn from the public by random lot and serving only for a brief period of time (1 case every 5-10 years or so on average) the potential for bribery and corruption of decisions in the legal system is substantially reduced over what it might otherwise be if we had professional elected juries in the same way that we have elected politicians or even judges. Finally, the jury box is the last chance for citizens who disagree with a law or its application to nullify that law, by their power to decide the case, and check the otherwise insurmountable power of the state over the individual.
That Dartmouth grad sounds like a colossal prick, just the sort that you might expect to come out of some east-coast old money family living off trust funds and completely detached from the real world. It would be really fun to see someone like that thrown out on the street and left to his own intellect and wits to survive. Of course, his family would never allow that sort of "education" to actually happen; hell of shame. It's cases like this that demonstrate to all who can see the dangers of massive inherited wealth. Where is Bernard Madoff when you need him? There are still fools out there who desperately need to be separated from their money.
What did you expect? This is the millennial generation, the so called "trophy kids", who grew up being told constantly by their parents and teachers how special and important they were and how they could do anything. The parents and educators have decided to leave it up to future employers to take these kids down a notch or two when it's time to live in the "real world". After all, someone has to tell these kids, "No, you are not worth that much" and they will learn this lesson soon enough in the cutthroat real world of globalization and bare knuckle business.
Well, Rahm Emanuel didn't win too many friends on Capitol Hill. For instance, calling liberal activists (his erstwhile allies), "fucking retards" for planning to run ads attacking conservative Democrats who didn't support Obama care is a canonical example of the "Rahm Emanuel" way. If you disagree with me and I respond by calling you a "fucking retard" how does that make you feel about my position? Rahm apologized eventually of course, but he would do it again under similar circumstances; it's just the sort of person he is. Maybe the American people are tired of being called "fucking retards" by the high-brow left who claim a mantle of intelligence yet resort to streams of expletives when someone points out that the flaws in their reasoning.
And yet they don't like it. The problem with this issue is that there are a lot of people on both the like and don't like sides. From the polls that I have seen since Obama care passed it seems to be roughly 1/3 hate it, 1/3 like it, and the rest are undecided but afraid that their health premiums will still go up (i.e. they are deeply skeptical and it wouldn't take much more to push them into the "don't like" camp).
Alas... perhaps his analysts, during the campaign, concluded that to utter things like "multi-year recovery" would lose him the election.
One thing that is definitely true about Obama is that he could have picked better advisers and lieutenants. In many cases his choices seem to have been dictated more by political loyalty rather than practical experience and capability. Of course, Obama is a product of the machine politics of Illinois and the City of Chicago so this was inevitable.
If the Republicans/Tea partiers actually outlined a plan to actually reduce government spending in any meaningful way there would have been revolt because the two biggest pigs are entitlement programs which the largely elderly base just absolutely loves
To be fair to the tea pariers, most of them actually do recognize that entitlement reform will be painful, but they also recognize that it must be done. They say that they are willing to make those sacrifices as long as nobody is given favored status protection from cuts (i.e. seniors living in Florida for example). The elderly base seems to be mostly a constituency of the Democratic party, not the Republicans, so it doesn't seem right to credit their stubbornness to the tea party groups who are largely Republicans, center-right independents, conservatives and libertarians.
I completely agree. The only people who hand build their own computers these days are hobbyists and gamers who typically want specific brands and higher end component parts (i.e. dual processors with quad cores, higher FSB speed and more cache memory, super fast video card, dual channel memory, RAID, etc) for better performance and more customization and/or tinkering options. They spend more money on average for every part in the finished computer. They generally end up with a high performance (and sometimes less stable) machine built from high quality parts, but by no means did they save money over a comparable mass market desktop. Even if you tried to spec the same parts as a given Dell model it would still cost more to buy them all and assemble them. You could try buying bulk parts but then there is the cost of inventory and storage plus keeping track of warranties for individual bad parts (you have to deal directly with the hard drive or memory manufacturer in a custom built computer, Dell had nothing to do with it after all). To sum up: there is no way that you will save money building 1000 PCs yourself from parts. The other posters are right, put the contract out for bid with the big PC manufacturers: HP, IBM, and yes Dell. You can also use the other manufacturer's price quotes as leverage when negotiating with their competitors. The bigger the potential order, the more leverage you have.
I agree with ending subsidies for the oil and gas industry, but using taxes as a tool for social engineering is subject to the same sorts of political manipulation and malcontent that subsidies cause. It would be better, IMHO, if the government did not interfere in the transportation market by collecting more taxes than are strictly necessary for road maintenance and other reasonable and necessary transportation regulation expenses. The people will tolerate reasonable regulations designed to manage externalities, such as pollution, but they recoil from higher taxes and higher gasoline taxes especially. Taxing people heavily in order to force their hands financially is political poison here in the United States and high gas prices, for whatever reason but especially due to high taxes, are a sure fire way to ignite public anger against incumbents. Even the Iranians, who are not exactly known for their democratic institutions, understand the political value of keeping gasoline affordable for the average citizen.
The problem with Wankels has always been that of maintaining good seals between the rotor tips and the chamber housing. The normal wear and tear makes for unacceptably short intervals between overhauls in standard automotive applications where people expect at least 100,000 miles, or even 2-3 times that, out of their engine before needing an overhaul. The engineers over at Mazda supposedly solved this problem in the new Renesis engines (used in the RX8s) with some sort of high temperature durable ceramic for the rotor tips, but only time will tell how well these hold up over the long run. I haven't seen too many RX8s on the road so it seems that the Wankel will remain a niche engine for niche applications for some time to come.
Preventing manufacturers from building the sorts of vehicles that people want to buy at a price that they can afford is a recipe for political suicide and both parties know this. The best that can be done is some reasonable regulation. However, if these regulations prevent the average American family of four from buying a family hauler at a reasonable price, there will be hell to pay for those politicians who are seen as being responsible. If CAFE resulted in the SUV and the minivan then perhaps it would have been better for the regulators to concentrate more on cutting tailpipe emissions and oil and gas subsidies, thereby allowing the true price to be communicated to the market, instead of attempting to regulate mileage by "class" of vehicle while all of the other market distorting policies and taxes where still in place.
Quite a lot of smoke though; they had to open up a garage-sized door for ventilation.
They should try driving it around San Francisco. Some angry greenies would probably smash the mirrors and let the air out of the tires while they were waiting for the light to turn.
Are they seriously proposing to run a turbine at over 10,000RPM* on bearings that have no oil? You need oil at those speeds for mechanical bearings.
What about magnetic levitation of the rotating parts so that metal is not actually touching metal? I seem to remember hearing something about that in high speed turbine applications for precisely that reason.
It was an incompetent TV exec that wanted to give priority to shows appealing to the female tween market.
You know, its funny that you should bring that up that because I mentioned Firefly to one of my coworkers last year and, after watching a few of the episodes on Hulu with his tween daughter, they liked the show so much that he bought the television series and Serenity on DVD as a birthday gift for her. Firefly was, to paraphrase Leonard Nemoy, one of those "lightning in a bottle" type shows that come around only once in great while and the executives at Fox still managed to frak it all up because they can't tell good programing from a re-run of Survivor: Idiots' Canyon.
Tweens rule the broadcast market
And yet the executives have no idea what they really want to watch. They think they know and they try to market programs to them by telling them what the *should* "like", but they end up appealing only to stereotypes instead of giving tweens what they really want to see.
So why don't they just do the same thing that Europe and Asia did that works for them, and be done with it?
It's not quite that simple. The Europeans and Asians thought things through a bit better when they were building out their networks and setting up the hardware in the first place. To completely upgrade or replace the existing cell network infrastructure with something that uses dynamic channels for all communications, like the Europeans and Japanese do, would be very expensive and why should the US companies bother? They are too busy charging you $100 per month for your "smart phone" contract while dropping your calls and hitting you with over the limit charges on your command channel texting. In the US you pretty much have to go with one of the four horsemen (verizon, at&t, sprint or t-mobile) and they are all notorious, at least to some degree, for these sorts of practices.
Except for one thing: arbitration clauses rarely stop people from going to court if they really want to. The real courts, as you might well imagine, take a rather dim view usurpers. The law is only put in jeopardy if arbitration effectively blocks access to the courts, but it doesn't appear to be too effective in preventing attorneys from filing lawsuits and forcing parties to show up in real court. In the days before the Magna Carta there was real power behind arbitrary tribunals because the people in charge of those tribunals were the same people with the weapons and armies to back it up. As far as I can tell, the arbitration panels of today are still dependent upon the real courts, the ones backed by force of arms, to make their judgments stick.
Until 2 tier access comes into play and "Net Neutrality" goes out the window
Precisely. The reason why TV is full of crap these days is the "channelization" of content into pre-packaged streams selected by those running the cable and satellite networks and the content providers. This oligopoly power over the TV content markets gives them the ability to choose what people see while at the same time preventing effective competition. Even Steve Jobs, when presenting the Apple TV as a "hobby", acknowledged the difficulties of breaking into and being disruptive in the media business, regardless of new technologies. The package deals and lock-in agreements associated with cable and satellite networks make any real innovations extremely difficult.
He feels bad for precisely the same reason that a man who pulls up to a soup kitchen in a Mercedes and casually takes a seat should feel bad.
What if the gentleman in the Mercedes is simply the patron and chief benefactor of that particular soup kitchen? If the philanthropist shows up unannounced to look in on his social investment, why should he be ashamed? If anything it shows genuine caring and humility that such a person is willing to eat with the down and out instead of pulling his Mercedes into the valet parking area of the swankiest restaurant in the city.
Mechanical trading algorithms are either fair game, or preferably, should be illegal. If mechanical trading algorithms are legal, then what these men did should definitely not be illegal.
I absolutely agree. If Norwegian law cannot be reconciled with this position then the law needs to be changed. These high speed traders demand the power to make essentially unlimited trades with execution times measured in nanoseconds so it is only fair that they be exposed to the full risk of the game that they are playing. The bottom line is this: people who make bets in the marketplace must, in the absence of clear fraud, be prepared to accept the downside risks. Now, if these Norwegian gentleman had hacked into the computerized trading system or otherwise went "outside the game" then that would be a different matter, but by all accounts they merely observed carefully what was going on and then executed legal trades on the open market to gain advantage or exploit weaknesses in the "play" of the algorithm. This is no different than intelligent play in casino games such as blackjack. The casinos, or the traders in this case, may not like intelligent play (by anyone else but themselves of course), but that doesn't make it illegal. The fact that professional traders whine and take people to court for beating them at their own games is the height of hubris and chutzpah.
To Timber Hill and Interactive Brokers: Quit whining, start acting like men and take your losses. It is shameless and pathetic losers like you who give real investors a bad name with your hypocritical bullshit. You wanted high speed trading and you got your ass handed to you; welcome to the frakin jungle, enjoy your stay.
BTW, this is what happens when you let computers make million dollar trades based upon voodoo market metrics. Making nanosecond trades on electronic exchanges is like playing iterated stochastic, non-deterministic, imperfect information games complete with random variables. It is provably impossible to construct an intelligent agent that can "win" an infinitely iterated series of these games with a win rate of better than 50% in the general case. If you try to specialize the agent to a more "narrow" set of sub-games, like in the currency markets for example, people are going to spot your trades and probe your algorithm for weaknesses; as the aforementioned Norwegians did. Of course, these high flying traders are too busy and too important to pay attention to what some computer scientist has to say about intelligent agents and games. The other posters are right: either the high speed traders should be forced to accept risks that they willingly took OR high frequency trading should be banned. I am actually leaning towards ban here or at the very least regulation of amounts. It could even be argued that such high frequency trades do not contribute enough liquidity benefit to fully compensate society for the systemic risks that they impose. Perhaps someone else, who knows more than I about financial markets, can make that case.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that C# is Java with a fair few mods.
I think you may be underestimating what C# brings to the table. The C# language has been very promiscuous over the years, borrowing the best and most clever syntax features from functional languages while improving the C/C++ style syntax to further favor the sort of "terseness" found in C/C++ but less so in Java. An opinion shared by many developers in recent years is that the Java language (i.e. the language itself, not as much the libraries) has fallen behind what C# now offers. Perhaps Oracle will work to remedy this situation? Perhaps, but for now if I had a choice between Java or C# I would choose C#. The following article is informative.
Socrates was a pretty wise man. Perhaps he had a point?
It IS however a problem that they don't know shit about crime and/or law.
Having also served on juries in the United States before, I feel compelled to point out that the three primary benefits to jury trials. First, you are judged by a jury of your peers and not simply by members of the professional legal class who may or may not fully appreciate the circumstances of each individual's life situation. Second, by creating a pool drawn from the public by random lot and serving only for a brief period of time (1 case every 5-10 years or so on average) the potential for bribery and corruption of decisions in the legal system is substantially reduced over what it might otherwise be if we had professional elected juries in the same way that we have elected politicians or even judges. Finally, the jury box is the last chance for citizens who disagree with a law or its application to nullify that law, by their power to decide the case, and check the otherwise insurmountable power of the state over the individual.
That Dartmouth grad sounds like a colossal prick, just the sort that you might expect to come out of some east-coast old money family living off trust funds and completely detached from the real world. It would be really fun to see someone like that thrown out on the street and left to his own intellect and wits to survive. Of course, his family would never allow that sort of "education" to actually happen; hell of shame. It's cases like this that demonstrate to all who can see the dangers of massive inherited wealth. Where is Bernard Madoff when you need him? There are still fools out there who desperately need to be separated from their money.
What did you expect? This is the millennial generation, the so called "trophy kids", who grew up being told constantly by their parents and teachers how special and important they were and how they could do anything. The parents and educators have decided to leave it up to future employers to take these kids down a notch or two when it's time to live in the "real world". After all, someone has to tell these kids, "No, you are not worth that much" and they will learn this lesson soon enough in the cutthroat real world of globalization and bare knuckle business.
These people are going to find out rather quickly why owls are among the worst possible animals to keep as pets.
Well, Rahm Emanuel didn't win too many friends on Capitol Hill. For instance, calling liberal activists (his erstwhile allies), "fucking retards" for planning to run ads attacking conservative Democrats who didn't support Obama care is a canonical example of the "Rahm Emanuel" way. If you disagree with me and I respond by calling you a "fucking retard" how does that make you feel about my position? Rahm apologized eventually of course, but he would do it again under similar circumstances; it's just the sort of person he is. Maybe the American people are tired of being called "fucking retards" by the high-brow left who claim a mantle of intelligence yet resort to streams of expletives when someone points out that the flaws in their reasoning.
Actually, the public likes the healthcare reform.
And yet they don't like it. The problem with this issue is that there are a lot of people on both the like and don't like sides. From the polls that I have seen since Obama care passed it seems to be roughly 1/3 hate it, 1/3 like it, and the rest are undecided but afraid that their health premiums will still go up (i.e. they are deeply skeptical and it wouldn't take much more to push them into the "don't like" camp).
Alas... perhaps his analysts, during the campaign, concluded that to utter things like "multi-year recovery" would lose him the election.
One thing that is definitely true about Obama is that he could have picked better advisers and lieutenants. In many cases his choices seem to have been dictated more by political loyalty rather than practical experience and capability. Of course, Obama is a product of the machine politics of Illinois and the City of Chicago so this was inevitable.
If the Republicans/Tea partiers actually outlined a plan to actually reduce government spending in any meaningful way there would have been revolt because the two biggest pigs are entitlement programs which the largely elderly base just absolutely loves
To be fair to the tea pariers, most of them actually do recognize that entitlement reform will be painful, but they also recognize that it must be done. They say that they are willing to make those sacrifices as long as nobody is given favored status protection from cuts (i.e. seniors living in Florida for example). The elderly base seems to be mostly a constituency of the Democratic party, not the Republicans, so it doesn't seem right to credit their stubbornness to the tea party groups who are largely Republicans, center-right independents, conservatives and libertarians.
Attempts to use the Hatsune Miku vocaloid to do anything in English are usually hilariously awful.
Captain: What Happen?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: Main screen turn on.
....and so on
I completely agree. The only people who hand build their own computers these days are hobbyists and gamers who typically want specific brands and higher end component parts (i.e. dual processors with quad cores, higher FSB speed and more cache memory, super fast video card, dual channel memory, RAID, etc) for better performance and more customization and/or tinkering options. They spend more money on average for every part in the finished computer. They generally end up with a high performance (and sometimes less stable) machine built from high quality parts, but by no means did they save money over a comparable mass market desktop. Even if you tried to spec the same parts as a given Dell model it would still cost more to buy them all and assemble them. You could try buying bulk parts but then there is the cost of inventory and storage plus keeping track of warranties for individual bad parts (you have to deal directly with the hard drive or memory manufacturer in a custom built computer, Dell had nothing to do with it after all). To sum up: there is no way that you will save money building 1000 PCs yourself from parts. The other posters are right, put the contract out for bid with the big PC manufacturers: HP, IBM, and yes Dell. You can also use the other manufacturer's price quotes as leverage when negotiating with their competitors. The bigger the potential order, the more leverage you have.
I agree with ending subsidies for the oil and gas industry, but using taxes as a tool for social engineering is subject to the same sorts of political manipulation and malcontent that subsidies cause. It would be better, IMHO, if the government did not interfere in the transportation market by collecting more taxes than are strictly necessary for road maintenance and other reasonable and necessary transportation regulation expenses. The people will tolerate reasonable regulations designed to manage externalities, such as pollution, but they recoil from higher taxes and higher gasoline taxes especially. Taxing people heavily in order to force their hands financially is political poison here in the United States and high gas prices, for whatever reason but especially due to high taxes, are a sure fire way to ignite public anger against incumbents. Even the Iranians, who are not exactly known for their democratic institutions, understand the political value of keeping gasoline affordable for the average citizen.
Use a Wankel.
The problem with Wankels has always been that of maintaining good seals between the rotor tips and the chamber housing. The normal wear and tear makes for unacceptably short intervals between overhauls in standard automotive applications where people expect at least 100,000 miles, or even 2-3 times that, out of their engine before needing an overhaul. The engineers over at Mazda supposedly solved this problem in the new Renesis engines (used in the RX8s) with some sort of high temperature durable ceramic for the rotor tips, but only time will tell how well these hold up over the long run. I haven't seen too many RX8s on the road so it seems that the Wankel will remain a niche engine for niche applications for some time to come.
Preventing manufacturers from building the sorts of vehicles that people want to buy at a price that they can afford is a recipe for political suicide and both parties know this. The best that can be done is some reasonable regulation. However, if these regulations prevent the average American family of four from buying a family hauler at a reasonable price, there will be hell to pay for those politicians who are seen as being responsible. If CAFE resulted in the SUV and the minivan then perhaps it would have been better for the regulators to concentrate more on cutting tailpipe emissions and oil and gas subsidies, thereby allowing the true price to be communicated to the market, instead of attempting to regulate mileage by "class" of vehicle while all of the other market distorting policies and taxes where still in place.
Quite a lot of smoke though; they had to open up a garage-sized door for ventilation.
They should try driving it around San Francisco. Some angry greenies would probably smash the mirrors and let the air out of the tires while they were waiting for the light to turn.
Are they seriously proposing to run a turbine at over 10,000RPM* on bearings that have no oil? You need oil at those speeds for mechanical bearings.
What about magnetic levitation of the rotating parts so that metal is not actually touching metal? I seem to remember hearing something about that in high speed turbine applications for precisely that reason.
It was an incompetent TV exec that wanted to give priority to shows appealing to the female tween market.
You know, its funny that you should bring that up that because I mentioned Firefly to one of my coworkers last year and, after watching a few of the episodes on Hulu with his tween daughter, they liked the show so much that he bought the television series and Serenity on DVD as a birthday gift for her. Firefly was, to paraphrase Leonard Nemoy, one of those "lightning in a bottle" type shows that come around only once in great while and the executives at Fox still managed to frak it all up because they can't tell good programing from a re-run of Survivor: Idiots' Canyon.
Tweens rule the broadcast market
And yet the executives have no idea what they really want to watch. They think they know and they try to market programs to them by telling them what the *should* "like", but they end up appealing only to stereotypes instead of giving tweens what they really want to see.
So why don't they just do the same thing that Europe and Asia did that works for them, and be done with it?
It's not quite that simple. The Europeans and Asians thought things through a bit better when they were building out their networks and setting up the hardware in the first place. To completely upgrade or replace the existing cell network infrastructure with something that uses dynamic channels for all communications, like the Europeans and Japanese do, would be very expensive and why should the US companies bother? They are too busy charging you $100 per month for your "smart phone" contract while dropping your calls and hitting you with over the limit charges on your command channel texting. In the US you pretty much have to go with one of the four horsemen (verizon, at&t, sprint or t-mobile) and they are all notorious, at least to some degree, for these sorts of practices.
Except for one thing: arbitration clauses rarely stop people from going to court if they really want to. The real courts, as you might well imagine, take a rather dim view usurpers. The law is only put in jeopardy if arbitration effectively blocks access to the courts, but it doesn't appear to be too effective in preventing attorneys from filing lawsuits and forcing parties to show up in real court. In the days before the Magna Carta there was real power behind arbitrary tribunals because the people in charge of those tribunals were the same people with the weapons and armies to back it up. As far as I can tell, the arbitration panels of today are still dependent upon the real courts, the ones backed by force of arms, to make their judgments stick.
Until 2 tier access comes into play and "Net Neutrality" goes out the window
Precisely. The reason why TV is full of crap these days is the "channelization" of content into pre-packaged streams selected by those running the cable and satellite networks and the content providers. This oligopoly power over the TV content markets gives them the ability to choose what people see while at the same time preventing effective competition. Even Steve Jobs, when presenting the Apple TV as a "hobby", acknowledged the difficulties of breaking into and being disruptive in the media business, regardless of new technologies. The package deals and lock-in agreements associated with cable and satellite networks make any real innovations extremely difficult.
He feels bad for precisely the same reason that a man who pulls up to a soup kitchen in a Mercedes and casually takes a seat should feel bad.
What if the gentleman in the Mercedes is simply the patron and chief benefactor of that particular soup kitchen? If the philanthropist shows up unannounced to look in on his social investment, why should he be ashamed? If anything it shows genuine caring and humility that such a person is willing to eat with the down and out instead of pulling his Mercedes into the valet parking area of the swankiest restaurant in the city.
I use and recommend: Fake Name Generator
First rule of Internet: never tell the truth when a lie will do.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Inconceivable!
Mechanical trading algorithms are either fair game, or preferably, should be illegal. If mechanical trading algorithms are legal, then what these men did should definitely not be illegal.
I absolutely agree. If Norwegian law cannot be reconciled with this position then the law needs to be changed. These high speed traders demand the power to make essentially unlimited trades with execution times measured in nanoseconds so it is only fair that they be exposed to the full risk of the game that they are playing. The bottom line is this: people who make bets in the marketplace must, in the absence of clear fraud, be prepared to accept the downside risks . Now, if these Norwegian gentleman had hacked into the computerized trading system or otherwise went "outside the game" then that would be a different matter, but by all accounts they merely observed carefully what was going on and then executed legal trades on the open market to gain advantage or exploit weaknesses in the "play" of the algorithm. This is no different than intelligent play in casino games such as blackjack. The casinos, or the traders in this case, may not like intelligent play (by anyone else but themselves of course), but that doesn't make it illegal. The fact that professional traders whine and take people to court for beating them at their own games is the height of hubris and chutzpah.
To Timber Hill and Interactive Brokers: Quit whining, start acting like men and take your losses. It is shameless and pathetic losers like you who give real investors a bad name with your hypocritical bullshit. You wanted high speed trading and you got your ass handed to you; welcome to the frakin jungle, enjoy your stay.
BTW, this is what happens when you let computers make million dollar trades based upon voodoo market metrics. Making nanosecond trades on electronic exchanges is like playing iterated stochastic, non-deterministic, imperfect information games complete with random variables. It is provably impossible to construct an intelligent agent that can "win" an infinitely iterated series of these games with a win rate of better than 50% in the general case. If you try to specialize the agent to a more "narrow" set of sub-games, like in the currency markets for example, people are going to spot your trades and probe your algorithm for weaknesses; as the aforementioned Norwegians did. Of course, these high flying traders are too busy and too important to pay attention to what some computer scientist has to say about intelligent agents and games. The other posters are right: either the high speed traders should be forced to accept risks that they willingly took OR high frequency trading should be banned. I am actually leaning towards ban here or at the very least regulation of amounts. It could even be argued that such high frequency trades do not contribute enough liquidity benefit to fully compensate society for the systemic risks that they impose. Perhaps someone else, who knows more than I about financial markets, can make that case.