Still, I'm hardly deterred by that. I'd like to see them try to sue someone for playing a disc that they personally own. I after all know the Kryptonite of any standard corporate lawyer-ninja squad: the jury trial. You'll be hard pressed to find a jury that will award against Joe Q. Public to a multi-billion dollar corporation for doing something that seems reasonable.
Maybe that is indeed kryptonite for them, but it is way down the road. YOUR kryptonite however, is right here right now - attorney fees and defense costs. They have millions and you have your paycheck. They hire a team of lawyers and sue 100 people and it cost them almost nothing per person. You however, are totally screwed. You could easily lose everything you have before they let it get anywhere near a courtroom. What's more, even if you did happen to win, they still don't have to pay your attorney fees.
Just because you're a wuss who wouldn't know how to cope doesn't mean everyone is. Killing a lion alone, with nothing but a pointy stick, is a traditional rite of passage for mid teen Masai.
And how is this done exactly? By ambush, as in staking out a goat and killing the lion from a tree as he comes to take it? Still balsey, I admit, but it hardly supports your suggestion that a man with a pointy stick is more than a match for a lion.
Killing a lion alone, with nothing but a pointy stick, is a traditional rite of passage for mid teen Masai. A human being with a pointy stick, who knows how to use it, is about the most fearsome thing out there. So fearsome that they can literally scare the piss out of a lion just because he's seen one.
There is a big difference between a steel-tipped spear and a pointy stick. Even though you elegantly called me a wuss for thinking it, I hold to my original positition that a lone man with a pointy stick will almost always be killed when going mano-a-pussy with an adult lion.
I don't have an answer for you regarding the weapons, but hunting is considered rather instrumental in our evolution as a species. Access to greater amounts of animal fats in our diet allowed us to deveolp the much larger cranial capacities than those from whom we evolved, helping put the 'sapiens' in homo sapiens, so to speak.
From this paper: [uark.edu] More animal fat in the diet meant not only additional energy, but also a source of ready-formed long chain PUFAs, including AA, DTA(docosatetraenoic acid (DTA, C22:4, w-3), and DHA. These three fatty acids together make up over 90% of the long chain PUFA (i.e. the structurally significant and biochemically active fat) found in the brain gray matter of all mammalian species. (Sinclair, 1975)
I did not go read it, but if that is the primary conclusion of that study I think it is likely baloney. Sounds more like a hypothesis than an established fact. There are many vegetarian societies today and their offspring are just as smart as the meat-eating population, with brains just as large. More important is good nutrition, period. I think it unlikely that any prehistoric humans ever derived a large portion of their nutrition from animal fat (except perhaps from scavenging or some trapping of mice and birds). It was probably 99% gathering and 1% meat (the same as wild chimpanzies today BTW). Just look at our teeth - clearly not made for meat eating, but for grain chewing. To have grain-chewing mandibles, but to have a meat-eating theory for our evolution seems contradictory to me.
Hunting of small animals is very energy inefficient. Hunters can use up more energy chasing and tracking small animals than they gain from the animal caught (plus small animals are of little relative value to the group). Hunting larger animals in more efficient but much more dangerous. It would be very possible to lose ten to twenty percent of your group's entire population on a large-animal hunt gone bad. That is too high an expense for hunting to be a common survival tool among prehistoric man (IMHO). I think most people here have a great over-estimation of how dangerous a person with a spear is. More dangerous than a person withoout a spear, surely, but still a babe in the woods compared to most full-time preditors (and even prey). Large animals are more hazardous to kill, and large-animal kills attract even more-dangerous preditors.
Further, it's not clear how valuable hunting was. Contemporary hunter-gatherers get more calories, more regularly, from gathering than from hunting. Raising the question, were the first weapons primarily defensive?
Yes they probably were, but as defense against other humans, not [non-human] preditors. They were probably adapted to hunting/defense.
However if the Australopithicine is part of an organised group the leopard might not live long enough to enjoy his or her meal...
In fact the real advantage of groups in nature is not to provide more "firepower", but to distribute the risk. It is a lot safer being in a group of 20 australiopithises because you only have a 1 in 20 chance of being the one selected to be lunch.
A Homo Sapiens with a pointy stick is about the most fearsome thing in existence and when going up against a lion the lion had better be a pretty sharp cookie to come out of it alive.
Are you serious! Have you ever even seen a lion up close? A lone human with a stick has zero chance of survival if attacked by a lion. The lion MIGHT say "ouch", but probably not.
All you get are summaries from the news, holy crap the public doesn't know anything about why he's upset and no one has gotten upset?
They actually got the most recent one on the net and in it he was talking about being denyed the option of peace talks... super.
I don't believe he wants peace talks, but that's just because every side is being as nationalistic or as religious as possible for PR reasons. We never hear the truth either from western mainstream media or from Al Jazeera.
The way to end terrorism is NOT by guns and armies (that just makes more terrorists) but by trying to find out WTF is pissing these people off and trying to fix it without giving up any of our own principles. There will always be the lunatic fringe that can't be pleased (on both sides) but you only make more lunatics if you use armies to invade holy lands.
Has everyone forgotten that even across the Middle East most people were appalled by the September 11 attacks, but not any more. That's where our armies have gotten us - not further down the road to peace and ending terrorism, but further down the road to destruction and elevation of terrorists.
Welll... there's no saying what would have happened if we hadn't gone to Iraq, but there haven't been any terror attacks on US soil since 9/11 (unless you count Cheney shooting that guy). Yes, a lot of US troops have died, but I'd rather put our best trained military forces against terrorists than, say, stockbrokers and secretaries.
I can't believe this! How many times does it have to be said!? Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorists!! Even Bush has admitted it! If there was one country Bin Laden hated even more than America it was Saddam's Iraq!
No, it would probably be some sort if intergalactic smiley: %*&. An we'd figure that the pointy bits were probably teeth, and get all pissed at them, so we'd send them a snarky message back, and then it's just flame-flame-flame for a few millennia.
(Of course on the planet Arkthon IV you have to turn your head to the right rather than the left to read the smileys.)
Except for the lefthanded smileys, a lot like slashdot. (-:
So Rumsfeld wants a 24-hr propaganda network? Two years after "Mission Accomplihed" Iraq and Afghanistan only have a couple of hours of electricity a day. Who exactly is going to be watching this 24 hour propaganda?
Once again this administration displays its mind-boggling ability to substitute its own spin for reality.
So why are we looking for life on planets we won't be able to get data back after a generation later? This really fits the meaning of "shooting for stars". After waiting 50 - 100 years, find out there is nothing there?
Why not? It's not like the human race would be sitting around doing nothing during that time. We just leave a note for the next generation reminding them to check the inbox every once in a while.
If we did get a response it would probably be more than just "Got your message, please reply." Communications would not be in the form of asking a question and then waiting 100 years for a reply - that would be really stupid. I suspect we would start receiving and sending a constant streams of unsolicited data. True, if you ask a specific question you might not get the answer for 100 years, but then again it may have been sent to you six months after the data exchange started.
If there is more information in the detected signal than "hello there", who knows what could be learned? Markets may move in a big way (here's how antigravity works, immortality, existence of god, a big black hole is headed your way, etc.).
I think you are underestimating the effect that just the knowledge that there are other intelligences out there would have. The "Hello there" message would be quite enough to roil stock markets, cause riots, etc. Tens of people have been killed in riots over cartoons lately, what do you think would happen if three of the world's major religions had their basic beliefs challenged?
Frankly, if I knew that an announcement was going to be made that intelligent life had been discovered in another solar system, I'd be wishing for a remote mountain hideaway in the Southern hemisphere.
One alternative is to fix up a couple of cameras in Police Stations under his precinct and stream the video to ALL tax-paying citizens who fund the cops jobs.
This idea is constitutional and is permitted by US constitution in that the the citizens have a right to monitor the government.
An excellent idea and one that really puts the shoe on the other foot. It should be proposed to make a point. Realistically it will never happen of course, ironically because the police will cite their concerns about the privacy of the suspects they haul into the station.
Such arrogance, Wildclaw, and so inappropriate. For the record, I'm a Mensan, I scored in the 99th percentile for vocabulary on the ACT, and I consider James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and John Stuart Mill a little light reading. Suffice it to say, I have an above average vocabulary. And I swear all the fucking time.
What arrogance! The arrogant calling the arrogant arrogant.
but it raises an interesting point. Its not really worth the effort on ATI's part to try to cover their tracks. If the fact is they falsely advertised (and sold) products, a careful search through archive.org or other web-caches should provide sufficient basis for class-action. Also, it will probably be fairly easy to find actual product packaging or manuals that corroborate the accusations of the class-action suit.
You are giving ATI too much credit. It will be the lawyers and PR folks that are eliminating HDCP references. That group wouldn't know the Way Back Machine existed unless someone had shown it to them.
The impossibility of pulling off a cover-up does not mean that ATI isn't trying to do it, it just means that their lawyers and PR types don't know it's impossible.
Maybe you missed your economics class the day the professor explained this, but economics is a science that involves every aspect of all life (not just human).
What a smarmy repy. I have opinions on the issues and addressed them, but you have to resort to personal attack to make yours. Every point you replied to had a personal insult attached. Since I make my living in the market my thoughts on self-delusional stock-picking algorithms may have some validity. Surely you don't think that just becaue some funds managers use some algorithms that they have any real validity. About ten years ago some hedge fund managers spent tens of millions developing now-infamous software algorithms to make a killing in the market. They tested for a year. It was a sure thing. They were flat broke and out of business in two years, having lost literally hundreds of millions. Significant academic study of what went wrong uncovered that there was an inherent flaw in the basic concept and what they were trying to do was impossible. (So no, I don't need to do more research - you might want to though). Funds managers can hire all the programmers and collect all the data they want but its still GIGO.
By using algorithms to do the analysis (and allowing market forces to refine those algorithms), we should be able to get a much better understanding of the REAL economy.
There is no "REAL" market! (given the context of the thread I think you mean "market" and not "economy"). There is no holy grail of a perfect technical stock picking algorithm.
We could have all the information in the world and all the computing power to analyze it and we would still not be able to predict the market because it is driven by psychology, not by data. The dot.com boom was not driven by indictors, it was driven by the mob. If you had done all the analysis of the technicals of those stocks you would never have bought any of them. They were a self-fulfilling prophecy - the stocks went up because people were buying them and people bought them because they were going up. And of course they went down for exactly the same reason.
The best we can hope to do is to use data mining to determine the factors that make the majority of the mob react in a certain way. "These 20 things have happened therefore people are more likely to think XYZ stock will go up and are therefore more likely to buy XYZ stock, therefore I should buy XYZ stock". There will never be a black box that accepts data and then spits out the "REAL" market decision to buy or sell.
Even if there were somehow a program that could predict the market then it would immediately nullify itself and become useless. If it said that XYZ was going up for sure then no one would sell XYZ. Since no sellers also means no buyers, XYZ would remain unchanged (and was therefore unpredictable in the first place). It seems clear that as programs become more accurate at predicting stock prices the market will self-correct to make their predictions less accurate.
A friend of mine has developed software that goes even further. It parses streaming news stories for good/bad news and executes orders before humans even finish reading. That advantage is enough to make this company a mint.
Yeah, riiiight. Who knew it was so easy! Baloney.
I read financial news stories, and even with my human brain focusing on the article it is difficult to tell whether the information presented is a positive or a negative indicator for the price of the stock.
Here's an example: "XYZ Corp today reported a 23% increase in earnings over the same period last year due to +8% positive sales growth in regional stores."
"Good news" right? Wrong - because if the market was expecting a 26% increase in earnngs the stock price will immediately corrected down. Or maybe 23% earnings was well below the company's peer group average of 28%. Even humans have trouble determining what is good and what is bad news, and no moronic piece of software that "reads" news streamers for good news is going to do anything other than put you in the poorhouse. (And BTW where exactly are these hypothetical super fast streaming news sources that are ahead of all the financial networks?)
My suspicion: you are just sitting around knowing nothing about the market or investing and it seems really cool to you that a streaming news reader would make money. So to make it sound better you invent a "friend with a program" that has made a mint. Baloney.
And exactly how is this different from Clinton and Carnivore/Echelon?
How? Echelon was specifically prohibited from spying on US citizens before Bush II. Carnivore was a Bush II program, not a Clinton program. That's how.
It's not google's fault that the current regime that resides in washington has an appetite for illegally invading the privacy of american citizens.
But it is their fault if, knowing this, they nevertheless build a system that can be abused by the regime that has a history of abuse.
If you have a neighbor who has a long history of drunk driving it would wrong for you to give him your car keys when he was drunk. You could not claim later that you didn't really know he was going to use it.
This would be the "Red Cross" or the local Sgt Bilkos...? My money's on the latter, especially in wartime with a *huge* black market economy.
Sorry I gave the impression that it was just my father's local experience - it was a theater-wide practice. Even the Red Cross acknowledges that it happened. I once mentioned it to a friend who used to work at the Red Cross headquarters in Washington, D.C. and she had heard it talked about there (evidently they still get complaints). I'm sure you are right and a lot of the money went to line individual pockets, but selling cigarettes out of the relief boxes was a Red Cross thing.
this jingoism you speak so highly about is rather called for. those hospitals and ambulances wearing the red cross were found to house weapons and transport enemies.
The problem is that I don't believe much of anything I read or even see in our great PR war. I think a great example was the raid on the hospital where Jessica Lynch was being "held". It turned out that her elevation to Hero was all government PR spin done without her knowledge. Also it turned out that the midnight commando raid to rescue her (how convenient was it that the commandos took along video cameras!) was also staged. The doctors and staff at the Iraqi hospital were protecting her and had actually contacted US forces to come and get her.
So did the hospital/arms depots in Falluja consist of a few AKs for protection? Were the arms found all in one room (can you not see doctors telling fighters - "No guns! Leave all weapons in this roonm! No guns in the hospital!"). Were arms caches found at ALL hospitals? Were the hospital's staff forced at gunpoint to allow the fighters to store arms there? Were ALL ambulances being used to transport weapons or did we find one? We don't know those facts because all our news goes through government PR hacks whose job it is to present the picture the way they want us to see it.
Maybe the hospitals deserved to be bombed, but maybe they didn't - we can't tell from the PR garbage we are fed. BTW Jingoism is never "called for" - it is bad by definition.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, I'm hardly deterred by that. I'd like to see them try to sue someone for playing a disc that they personally own. I after all know the Kryptonite of any standard corporate lawyer-ninja squad: the jury trial. You'll be hard pressed to find a jury that will award against Joe Q. Public to a multi-billion dollar corporation for doing something that seems reasonable.
Maybe that is indeed kryptonite for them, but it is way down the road. YOUR kryptonite however, is right here right now - attorney fees and defense costs. They have millions and you have your paycheck. They hire a team of lawyers and sue 100 people and it cost them almost nothing per person. You however, are totally screwed. You could easily lose everything you have before they let it get anywhere near a courtroom. What's more, even if you did happen to win, they still don't have to pay your attorney fees.
And one more thing while I'm at it...
Just because you're a wuss who wouldn't know how to cope doesn't mean everyone is. Killing a lion alone, with nothing but a pointy stick, is a traditional rite of passage for mid teen Masai.
And how is this done exactly? By ambush, as in staking out a goat and killing the lion from a tree as he comes to take it? Still balsey, I admit, but it hardly supports your suggestion that a man with a pointy stick is more than a match for a lion.
Killing a lion alone, with nothing but a pointy stick, is a traditional rite of passage for mid teen Masai. A human being with a pointy stick, who knows how to use it, is about the most fearsome thing out there. So fearsome that they can literally scare the piss out of a lion just because he's seen one.
There is a big difference between a steel-tipped spear and a pointy stick. Even though you elegantly called me a wuss for thinking it, I hold to my original positition that a lone man with a pointy stick will almost always be killed when going mano-a-pussy with an adult lion.
I don't have an answer for you regarding the weapons, but hunting is considered rather instrumental in our evolution as a species. Access to greater amounts of animal fats in our diet allowed us to deveolp the much larger cranial capacities than those from whom we evolved, helping put the 'sapiens' in homo sapiens, so to speak.
From this paper: [uark.edu]
More animal fat in the diet meant not only additional energy, but also a source of ready-formed long chain PUFAs, including AA, DTA(docosatetraenoic acid (DTA, C22:4, w-3), and DHA. These three fatty acids together make up over 90% of the long chain PUFA (i.e. the structurally significant and biochemically active fat) found in the brain gray matter of all mammalian species. (Sinclair, 1975)
I did not go read it, but if that is the primary conclusion of that study I think it is likely baloney. Sounds more like a hypothesis than an established fact. There are many vegetarian societies today and their offspring are just as smart as the meat-eating population, with brains just as large. More important is good nutrition, period. I think it unlikely that any prehistoric humans ever derived a large portion of their nutrition from animal fat (except perhaps from scavenging or some trapping of mice and birds). It was probably 99% gathering and 1% meat (the same as wild chimpanzies today BTW). Just look at our teeth - clearly not made for meat eating, but for grain chewing. To have grain-chewing mandibles, but to have a meat-eating theory for our evolution seems contradictory to me.
Hunting of small animals is very energy inefficient. Hunters can use up more energy chasing and tracking small animals than they gain from the animal caught (plus small animals are of little relative value to the group). Hunting larger animals in more efficient but much more dangerous. It would be very possible to lose ten to twenty percent of your group's entire population on a large-animal hunt gone bad. That is too high an expense for hunting to be a common survival tool among prehistoric man (IMHO). I think most people here have a great over-estimation of how dangerous a person with a spear is. More dangerous than a person withoout a spear, surely, but still a babe in the woods compared to most full-time preditors (and even prey). Large animals are more hazardous to kill, and large-animal kills attract even more-dangerous preditors.
Further, it's not clear how valuable hunting was. Contemporary hunter-gatherers get more calories, more regularly, from gathering than from hunting. Raising the question, were the first weapons primarily defensive?
Yes they probably were, but as defense against other humans, not [non-human] preditors. They were probably adapted to hunting/defense.
However if the Australopithicine is part of an organised group the leopard might not live long enough to enjoy his or her meal...
In fact the real advantage of groups in nature is not to provide more "firepower", but to distribute the risk. It is a lot safer being in a group of 20 australiopithises because you only have a 1 in 20 chance of being the one selected to be lunch.
A Homo Sapiens with a pointy stick is about the most fearsome thing in existence and when going up against a lion the lion had better be a pretty sharp cookie to come out of it alive.
Are you serious! Have you ever even seen a lion up close? A lone human with a stick has zero chance of survival if attacked by a lion. The lion MIGHT say "ouch", but probably not.
All you get are summaries from the news, holy crap the public doesn't know anything about why he's upset and no one has gotten upset?
They actually got the most recent one on the net and in it he was talking about being denyed the option of peace talks... super.
I don't believe he wants peace talks, but that's just because every side is being as nationalistic or as religious as possible for PR reasons. We never hear the truth either from western mainstream media or from Al Jazeera.
The way to end terrorism is NOT by guns and armies (that just makes more terrorists) but by trying to find out WTF is pissing these people off and trying to fix it without giving up any of our own principles. There will always be the lunatic fringe that can't be pleased (on both sides) but you only make more lunatics if you use armies to invade holy lands.
Has everyone forgotten that even across the Middle East most people were appalled by the September 11 attacks, but not any more. That's where our armies have gotten us - not further down the road to peace and ending terrorism, but further down the road to destruction and elevation of terrorists.
Welll... there's no saying what would have happened if we hadn't gone to Iraq, but there haven't been any terror attacks on US soil since 9/11 (unless you count Cheney shooting that guy). Yes, a lot of US troops have died, but I'd rather put our best trained military forces against terrorists than, say, stockbrokers and secretaries.
I can't believe this! How many times does it have to be said!? Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorists!! Even Bush has admitted it! If there was one country Bin Laden hated even more than America it was Saddam's Iraq!
Of course, NOW is a different matter.
Hilarious!
I guess that's why I haven't been able to register Bucky-Fucking-Dent.
No, it would probably be some sort if intergalactic smiley: %*&. An we'd figure that the pointy bits were probably teeth, and get all pissed at them, so we'd send them a snarky message back, and then it's just flame-flame-flame for a few millennia.
(Of course on the planet Arkthon IV you have to turn your head to the right rather than the left to read the smileys.)
Except for the lefthanded smileys, a lot like slashdot. (-:
So Rumsfeld wants a 24-hr propaganda network? Two years after "Mission Accomplihed" Iraq and Afghanistan only have a couple of hours of electricity a day. Who exactly is going to be watching this 24 hour propaganda?
Once again this administration displays its mind-boggling ability to substitute its own spin for reality.
So why are we looking for life on planets we won't be able to get data back after a generation later? This really fits the meaning of "shooting for stars". After waiting 50 - 100 years, find out there is nothing there?
Why not? It's not like the human race would be sitting around doing nothing during that time. We just leave a note for the next generation reminding them to check the inbox every once in a while.
If we did get a response it would probably be more than just "Got your message, please reply." Communications would not be in the form of asking a question and then waiting 100 years for a reply - that would be really stupid. I suspect we would start receiving and sending a constant streams of unsolicited data. True, if you ask a specific question you might not get the answer for 100 years, but then again it may have been sent to you six months after the data exchange started.
If there is more information in the detected signal than "hello there", who knows what could be learned? Markets may move in a big way (here's how antigravity works, immortality, existence of god, a big black hole is headed your way, etc.).
I think you are underestimating the effect that just the knowledge that there are other intelligences out there would have. The "Hello there" message would be quite enough to roil stock markets, cause riots, etc. Tens of people have been killed in riots over cartoons lately, what do you think would happen if three of the world's major religions had their basic beliefs challenged?
Frankly, if I knew that an announcement was going to be made that intelligent life had been discovered in another solar system, I'd be wishing for a remote mountain hideaway in the Southern hemisphere.
One alternative is to fix up a couple of cameras in Police Stations under his precinct and stream the video to ALL tax-paying citizens who fund the cops jobs.
This idea is constitutional and is permitted by US constitution in that the the citizens have a right to monitor the government.
An excellent idea and one that really puts the shoe on the other foot. It should be proposed to make a point. Realistically it will never happen of course, ironically because the police will cite their concerns about the privacy of the suspects they haul into the station.
Such arrogance, Wildclaw, and so inappropriate. For the record, I'm a Mensan, I scored in the 99th percentile for vocabulary on the ACT, and I consider James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and John Stuart Mill a little light reading. Suffice it to say, I have an above average vocabulary. And I swear all the fucking time.
What arrogance! The arrogant calling the arrogant arrogant.
I suspect that's not all that unusual [to take video cameras on commando raids] when we're talking about high-profile ops.
Aww come on. It was PR through and through. Whoever heard of a "high profile commando raid"?
but it raises an interesting point. Its not really worth the effort on ATI's part to try to cover their tracks. If the fact is they falsely advertised (and sold) products, a careful search through archive.org or other web-caches should provide sufficient basis for class-action. Also, it will probably be fairly easy to find actual product packaging or manuals that corroborate the accusations of the class-action suit.
You are giving ATI too much credit. It will be the lawyers and PR folks that are eliminating HDCP references. That group wouldn't know the Way Back Machine existed unless someone had shown it to them.
The impossibility of pulling off a cover-up does not mean that ATI isn't trying to do it, it just means that their lawyers and PR types don't know it's impossible.
Maybe you missed your economics class the day the professor explained this, but economics is a science that involves every aspect of all life (not just human).
What a smarmy repy. I have opinions on the issues and addressed them, but you have to resort to personal attack to make yours. Every point you replied to had a personal insult attached. Since I make my living in the market my thoughts on self-delusional stock-picking algorithms may have some validity. Surely you don't think that just becaue some funds managers use some algorithms that they have any real validity. About ten years ago some hedge fund managers spent tens of millions developing now-infamous software algorithms to make a killing in the market. They tested for a year. It was a sure thing. They were flat broke and out of business in two years, having lost literally hundreds of millions. Significant academic study of what went wrong uncovered that there was an inherent flaw in the basic concept and what they were trying to do was impossible. (So no, I don't need to do more research - you might want to though). Funds managers can hire all the programmers and collect all the data they want but its still GIGO.
By using algorithms to do the analysis (and allowing market forces to refine those algorithms), we should be able to get a much better understanding of the REAL economy.
There is no "REAL" market! (given the context of the thread I think you mean "market" and not "economy"). There is no holy grail of a perfect technical stock picking algorithm.
We could have all the information in the world and all the computing power to analyze it and we would still not be able to predict the market because it is driven by psychology, not by data. The dot.com boom was not driven by indictors, it was driven by the mob. If you had done all the analysis of the technicals of those stocks you would never have bought any of them. They were a self-fulfilling prophecy - the stocks went up because people were buying them and people bought them because they were going up. And of course they went down for exactly the same reason.
The best we can hope to do is to use data mining to determine the factors that make the majority of the mob react in a certain way. "These 20 things have happened therefore people are more likely to think XYZ stock will go up and are therefore more likely to buy XYZ stock, therefore I should buy XYZ stock". There will never be a black box that accepts data and then spits out the "REAL" market decision to buy or sell.
Even if there were somehow a program that could predict the market then it would immediately nullify itself and become useless. If it said that XYZ was going up for sure then no one would sell XYZ. Since no sellers also means no buyers, XYZ would remain unchanged (and was therefore unpredictable in the first place). It seems clear that as programs become more accurate at predicting stock prices the market will self-correct to make their predictions less accurate.
A friend of mine has developed software that goes even further. It parses streaming news stories for good/bad news and executes orders before humans even finish reading. That advantage is enough to make this company a mint.
Yeah, riiiight. Who knew it was so easy! Baloney.
I read financial news stories, and even with my human brain focusing on the article it is difficult to tell whether the information presented is a positive or a negative indicator for the price of the stock.
Here's an example:
"XYZ Corp today reported a 23% increase in earnings over the same period last year due to +8% positive sales growth in regional stores."
"Good news" right? Wrong - because if the market was expecting a 26% increase in earnngs the stock price will immediately corrected down. Or maybe 23% earnings was well below the company's peer group average of 28%. Even humans have trouble determining what is good and what is bad news, and no moronic piece of software that "reads" news streamers for good news is going to do anything other than put you in the poorhouse. (And BTW where exactly are these hypothetical super fast streaming news sources that are ahead of all the financial networks?)
My suspicion: you are just sitting around knowing nothing about the market or investing and it seems really cool to you that a streaming news reader would make money. So to make it sound better you invent a "friend with a program" that has made a mint. Baloney.
And exactly how is this different from Clinton and Carnivore/Echelon?
How? Echelon was specifically prohibited from spying on US citizens before Bush II. Carnivore was a Bush II program, not a Clinton program. That's how.
It's not google's fault that the current regime that resides in washington has an appetite for illegally invading the privacy of american citizens.
But it is their fault if, knowing this, they nevertheless build a system that can be abused by the regime that has a history of abuse.
If you have a neighbor who has a long history of drunk driving it would wrong for you to give him your car keys when he was drunk. You could not claim later that you didn't really know he was going to use it.
This would be the "Red Cross" or the local Sgt Bilkos...? My money's on the latter, especially in wartime with a *huge* black market economy.
Sorry I gave the impression that it was just my father's local experience - it was a theater-wide practice. Even the Red Cross acknowledges that it happened. I once mentioned it to a friend who used to work at the Red Cross headquarters in Washington, D.C. and she had heard it talked about there (evidently they still get complaints). I'm sure you are right and a lot of the money went to line individual pockets, but selling cigarettes out of the relief boxes was a Red Cross thing.
this jingoism you speak so highly about is rather called for. those hospitals and ambulances wearing the red cross were found to house weapons and transport enemies.
The problem is that I don't believe much of anything I read or even see in our great PR war. I think a great example was the raid on the hospital where Jessica Lynch was being "held". It turned out that her elevation to Hero was all government PR spin done without her knowledge. Also it turned out that the midnight commando raid to rescue her (how convenient was it that the commandos took along video cameras!) was also staged. The doctors and staff at the Iraqi hospital were protecting her and had actually contacted US forces to come and get her.
So did the hospital/arms depots in Falluja consist of a few AKs for protection? Were the arms found all in one room (can you not see doctors telling fighters - "No guns! Leave all weapons in this roonm! No guns in the hospital!"). Were arms caches found at ALL hospitals? Were the hospital's staff forced at gunpoint to allow the fighters to store arms there? Were ALL ambulances being used to transport weapons or did we find one? We don't know those facts because all our news goes through government PR hacks whose job it is to present the picture the way they want us to see it.
Maybe the hospitals deserved to be bombed, but maybe they didn't - we can't tell from the PR garbage we are fed. BTW Jingoism is never "called for" - it is bad by definition.