I am sure its just geo-ip location. I don't think they'd put GPS on the device. To many applications have inside structures with metal roofs, and underground where GPS works poorly if at all.
So you are pretty much a VPS host someplace and GRE tunnel away.
Reagan? Already senile. His was a Weekend At Bernie's presidency.
True possibly but he some good people around him (and some bad) and good things were accomplished, and the bad can just easily be laid at the feet of the majority Democratic Congress he had to work with.
Bush the Elder? A retread, complete with barfing on foreign dignitaries.
Yea because nobody has even become suddenly and violently ill, that was clearly a failing of his part as a person, sure. Actually Bush Sr. Is I think one of our most under rated presidents. In general he kept his promises; but did compromise when being a good steward of the nation required it. He was a care taker president, but a good one.
Then they moved on. BobDole... yeah.
Not sure what you are trying to say here?
Shrub the Younger, whose intelligence could be measured in scoops of raisin bran. McCain, who while a "war hero" from years prior basically campaigned like a zombie.
Alright.
And then we get the "brain trust" of this latest batch. Herman "couldn't even make an edible pizza" Cain. Mitt "robber baron" Romney. Rick Sanctimonous, champion of home schooling and anti-science rants.
Again Alright.
Michelle "hehe, I went into law because my hubby said we were done having babies and I should make myself useful in the daytimes before his nightly blowjob" Bachmann.
Whoa there, there is no evidence to support the idea that he wants a blow job, at least no one from anyone named Michelle.
The great depression happened AFTER the creation of the FED. Prior to the FED the American economy was characterized by booms and busts. The thing was they were short and shallow. 2-5 years up than two down. Post FED you have first the GD and lately these 10-20 year cycles that ruin the entire productive period of some citizens lives. Government intervention thru the creation of the FED has been harmful to the generational equality of the nation and that is before you even start to discuss the national debt.
That is not the only solution. There are plenty of multi-path, Multi-controller SAN solutions out there. You can install more than one HBA in your hosts.
However! Once you are talking about controller or HBAs as failure points you need be rethinking your architecture. Disk failures are pretty common but its very unlikely silicon is going to up and die on you. If you can't tolerate those rare events. You really need to be looking at some cluster / application layer redundancy.
You will never eliminate all the single points of failure from a host, or if you do you will have this called a mainframe which is hugely expensive.
That is just ignorant. The facts are the actually record of Supreme court justices don't have much correspondence with the political leanings of those who appointed them.
Its also true that conservative / liberal as those terms pertain to Justices don't match up well with what happens on the Hill or at the White House.
Right lets be realistic about this. You are protected under the bill or rights from "unreasonable search..."
The SCOTUS essentially ruled its not unreasonable to strip search someone who is already a prisoner. Lots of people are posting, that you can now be strip searched for anything, hardly the case; you have to have already done something to warrant cause for arrest. If you are arrested without cause than you still have civil recourse to sue for false imprisonment.
I have to agree with them here. If we have already met the standard needed to remove an detain you; than its implicitly reasonable for your safety, that of law enforcement, and other prisoners, that you should be searched.
I for one am much more concerned about what probable cause is to arrest someone in the first place and keeping that standard appropriately high! What is really important is the government not be allowed to snatch citizens from their homes or the streets without solid evidence.
sounds a lot like something that is going to by definition have false positives, which would be a nightmare when trying to debug an app.
Well welcome to world IT now lives in. We have piles of s**t apps that are unmaintained, and filled with issues. We have stuff that is current that has unresolved zero days. This is just one more wrinkle but probably has a place. IPS/host IPS/ as well as various anti virus, anti malware, and isolation/sand boxing solutions have been adding a non deterministic element application debugging for a long time now. You just need lots of logs and some way to correlate them.
Right what would be interesting is if the retailers took a stand. This certainly will end the business model of all the game specific retailers, who as you say do make most of their money in the used market. The Targets, Best Buys, and Walmarts of the world less so.
What would it do the launch of these next gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft if the likes of Game Stop, Fye, FunCo, etc got together formed a little video game retailers working group and agree to not carry these consoles or their games?
Yea but as a percentage the kings took less wealth from a serf than the us tax payer is asked to fork over today, if you look at those who pay some income tax.
I can see doing it via routes for ISPs who have many peers. I have never done a BGP implementation for anyone with more than three Internet gateways. Frankly I'd rather put few NAT rules on two or three gateways to make sure I have all the egress traffic covered than try to advertize a few/32s in BGP and either foul up or be fouled up by route summery.
They never should have setup replacement DNS servers.
At most they should have put up a special server that just pointed every A record request to webserver with page explaining that you have or have had some malware on your system and are vulnerable, some instructionss to fix your DNS and patch your box or call your Administrator for help. Simply return NXDOMAIN for everything else.
All this has accomplished is keeping a bunch of un-patched machines which lets face it most likely have or will have other malware on them as well in use by users making the possible victims of someone else.
I have not bought into the argument about ISPs or corporate uses being effected severely either. Anyone effected by this thing is not using DNSEC. It would be trivial to NAT tcp53/udp53 requests to the addresses of the malicious DNS servers to safe in house one. ISPs and corporations then could go through those logs with their own resources and contact those users / customers for a fix, instead of being allowed to just shift the cost of their security failure onto the tax payer as they have. Such organizations should be going after the estate of the perps for damages and eating the costs that cannot be recovered or forcing their insurers to do it.
Right how many times does it take for it to sink in Sony does not care about their customers. Why if you have a choice would you ever purchase a product from them? I certainly can't think of reason.
There are plenty of other vendors who stand behind their products and *for the most part* take good care of their customers. Even when they don't they don't usually just flip you the bird without a second thought as was done here and with the root kit. I'd certainly prefer to send my dollars their way at least until Sony gets a clue.
Most of the time Sony's products really don't offer the best features+quality/dollars value anyway. That is a little harder to measure where it comes to movies, and music but again. Picking up a copy of consumer reports would confirm that. Honestly unless you're a fanboi there is no reason not simply drop Sony outright from consideration in whatever market you happen to be it, its not going hurt. You won't pay more, and will come away with something just as good or better.
I think they key is it you change your mind on major policy plank you ought to be able to explain what brought you around to this new way of thinking. A new fact that was discovered, an experience you had, something of substance. Adults ( people who have formed their opinions) don't just change your mind one day about phisophical and ethical issues like individual liberties or abortion. Something happens.
With politicians that something all to often is wining the election, and deciding they don't need to telling those dumb rubes their voting base what they want hear anymore. At least that is what I have to assume it is when a better explanation is not provided and it rarely is.
Capitalism as an economic system never stated you have a fundamental right to externalize costs and generally avoid responsibility for your actions. The problem is capitalism its one of implementation. The corporate vale needs to be more permeable; capitalism would work better and be more equitable if it were.
If you as an owner knew you were GOING to be held personally responsible for the clean up it would be in your self interest not to make such a mess. When shitc goes bankrupt and leaves a superfund site you simply assess shitc owners for the clean up costs according to the number of shares or equity they had in the business at the time it folded. Yes the entire costs, whatever shitc could not pay has to come out of their other personal assets.
I don't think so. Progressive taxation is fundamentally unfair. A consumption tax with exclusions for basic necessities is much more just. If you exclude a few things like:
un-prepaired foods for human consumption, rent, or purchase of a primary residence, rent or purchase of up to one vehicle, non-luxury clothing (as already defined by the tariff schedule), fares on public transportation,
you have excepted from taxation all things that lower income people spend a disproportionate amount of their income on; government is therefore not creating drag on them unless and until they start to experience more success. Its fair because rich and poor benefit alike from the exemptions, they are not special hand outs to certain groups. Its proportional because the more you make the more you are going to spend, the more tax you are going to pay and that means you have benefited more from things like roads and public education. Good roads lowered the cost of transportation to bring those products to market, good schools provided a work force to produce them.
The best part is the system become simple, and is nearly impossible to cheat! No more goofy separate rules for capital gains, NO you pay sales tax on the sale price of the security when you buy it, no ifs ands or buts, there is not tax at sale time, the new owner will be paying that. The long complex filing process will be gone! Most people would not have to file at all most years. Places like grocery and clothing stores would simply not collect tax on excluded items in the first place. Situations like if you bought a first vehicle and sold you existing you than you'd file a simple form form to be reimbursed.
Government ownership in the USA won't work either for the same reasons private ownership does not. Politicians will want to buy votes of individuals and industrial concerns a like under billing(taxing) for the true costs. They may even push rate reductions as 'economic stimulus' or other such nonsense. The end result will be the same. Through the life of the plant their will be maintenance problems due to budget deficiency and near the end of the plants life we will discover the trust fund for its clean up has been raided.
Only military projects seem to be able to hang on to their budget commitments in this nation and lately even some of them have seen the chopping block. Just look at Social Security. Left mostly to its own devices it would be solvent, but cuts to contribution, added benefits have left it financially hollow, on the books. That was all to buy votes. Off the books its assets are really government bonds because the CONgress has pulled out the cash and replaced it with the bonds. Now really the SSA is a whole owned subsidiary of the government if you will. Money is fungible within an entity. Its fine to say there is a huge heap of money in the trust fund but really its all got to come from the same general revenue as the money in the trust fund is just IOUs. That means current revenue has to cover the past expense and current operation, you see how that snow balls into a problem. This was all to lower taxes over the short term without giving anything up to cover the lost revenue, and long term the nation is bankrupt even if the SSA isn't. I think there is every reason to believe a federal nuclear power generation program would follow exactly the same pattern.
I suspect that the owners will end up going bankrupt and leave the problem to the government.
You are partly right. The problem will be left to the government and the tax payers. The companies won't go bankrupt though. They are part of the few the proud the rent seekers. You see they will get bailout, because they are vital to public interest or some such reasoning. The executives and bond holders (banks) will get paid, the share holders (your 401K) will be wiped out, you will be expected to go on paying your electric bill and your taxes as if nothing happened.
I find it telling that the only screen shots they include in the article are ones of report screens. I don't see any data entry, you know the 99% of work people do in an ERP system. My guess is the interface for that is pretty much the same forms app look Dynamics has always had and or its awful to work with and they hope they can just distract procurement people with shiny until the check is signed.
You might not have liked the outcome but to me it sounds like the process worked.
The representatives and the executive were able to agree that raising taxes was needed. They raised the taxes.
They were not able to agree that special tax rates for the poor were a good idea. They did not create a special tax rate for the poor.
The idea that we need to levy a new tax or raise an existing one is a separate matter from should we provide tax relief to a specific group. They should IMHO be treated independently. We have the same issue here in the USA. Lots of people agree we should raise taxes to increase revenue, because the government needs the revenue to restore fiscal sanity. Those folks get divided though because some feel (rightly IMHO) that everyone ought to pay equally and want a consumptive tax, others feel we need a more progressive system with lots of special relief. So people like me end up politically opposed to bills that would raise taxes because we object to what we feel are unfair giveaways to certain groups, be they oil lobbies, mulch-national banks, people who have to many children, people who bought to much house and spend half their income on mortgage interest, people building wind turbines, or whatever.
On the one hand I am happy to see anything that tries put sun shine on the political process. In a democratic republic I think its reprehensible that how much of this takes place in secret. The public has a right know.
OTOH
One of the biggest things I think is broken about our current political process is the lack of atomicity in the legislative process. There should be no such thing as "Job's bill" or "Omnibus", etc. It lets a few people tie unpopular ideas to the necessary business of the nation. Legislation should be simple and cover a single topic. That way each idea can be evaluated on its own merit. IE you don't have Financial Reform, you have bill to require minimum reserve assets value at a commercial bank, bill to classify assets that may be used as reserve assets, bill determine the rate adjustment that may be made on a revolving credit account within a reporting period etc. These bills could naturally be brought to the floor and each could get a quick upper or down vote. The public would be able to find who voted on what when by searching easily.
Unrelated crap would not be bundled as riders. It would prevent the I am going to veto/block any legislation that contains X, oh so we can't ever pass any part of budget kind of grid lock we haven now.
Outside of the occasional "flash crash", which by the way have been mostly handled by the SEC reversing sales and pushing the reset button pretty effectively, I see HFT as mostly harmless. It might not add any value to the enterprises being traded but it makes the market better for investors not worse over all. The more orders out there at any time means the better shot an actual investor has at having their order filled when the want it.
Liquidity in the market is a good thing. I don't have to wonder if my shares will sell, I know I can push the button if selling and KNOW there will be buyers, or I can push buy and KNOW there will be sellers for the other side of the transaction.
Less transactions would mean potentially having to wait for a buyer or seller (okay not really pre-HFT electronic trading was already pretty quick) or worse having my order actually move the market by driving up or down the bid, in order to find buyers or sellers strike prices. By having tons of HFT machines out there ready to pounce on any movement of a few hundredths of cent off the current ask, actual investors get a solid price book.
No actually this is going suck. Let me tell you what will happen. Many or possibly all of the major distributions are going ship Firefox / Seamonkey binaries without h264 support compiled in. Its going to be just like the mp3 fiasco a couple years ago.
Microsoft and their kind are going to run around say pfft, Linux boxes can't even play web video, you need us for multimedia again. Linux users are going to nod and wink at each other and download libx264 and do their own Firefox / SeaMonkey / ffmpeg builds surging off the licensing concerns. Which is find for home users, but its one more thing that will keep Linux off institutional desktops.
Right because we don't want children to ever get the idea that while there may be consequences for their actions sometimes that not applied justly or universally. That never happens in the real world.
I have not read it in a number of years but there is the fight scene in the showers, where they kids would be naked. Which is a fight, its not a sex act, so I would say its not pornographic. I do think there are some other references to nudity in the dorms at Battle School, again only pornographic if you already have a pretty perverse imagination about what say takes place in a mens locker room normally.
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I am sure its just geo-ip location. I don't think they'd put GPS on the device. To many applications have inside structures with metal roofs, and underground where GPS works poorly if at all.
So you are pretty much a VPS host someplace and GRE tunnel away.
Reagan? Already senile. His was a Weekend At Bernie's presidency.
True possibly but he some good people around him (and some bad) and good things were accomplished, and the bad can just easily be laid at the feet of the majority Democratic Congress he had to work with.
Bush the Elder? A retread, complete with barfing on foreign dignitaries.
Yea because nobody has even become suddenly and violently ill, that was clearly a failing of his part as a person, sure. Actually Bush Sr. Is I think one of our most under rated presidents. In general he kept his promises; but did compromise when being a good steward of the nation required it. He was a care taker president, but a good one.
Then they moved on. BobDole... yeah.
Not sure what you are trying to say here?
Shrub the Younger, whose intelligence could be measured in scoops of raisin bran. McCain, who while a "war hero" from years prior basically campaigned like a zombie.
Alright.
And then we get the "brain trust" of this latest batch. Herman "couldn't even make an edible pizza" Cain. Mitt "robber baron" Romney. Rick Sanctimonous, champion of home schooling and anti-science rants.
Again Alright.
Michelle "hehe, I went into law because my hubby said we were done having babies and I should make myself useful in the daytimes before his nightly blowjob" Bachmann.
Whoa there, there is no evidence to support the idea that he wants a blow job, at least no one from anyone named Michelle.
The great depression happened AFTER the creation of the FED. Prior to the FED the American economy was characterized by booms and busts. The thing was they were short and shallow. 2-5 years up than two down. Post FED you have first the GD and lately these 10-20 year cycles that ruin the entire productive period of some citizens lives. Government intervention thru the creation of the FED has been harmful to the generational equality of the nation and that is before you even start to discuss the national debt.
That is not the only solution. There are plenty of multi-path, Multi-controller SAN solutions out there. You can install more than one HBA in your hosts.
However! Once you are talking about controller or HBAs as failure points you need be rethinking your architecture. Disk failures are pretty common but its very unlikely silicon is going to up and die on you. If you can't tolerate those rare events. You really need to be looking at some cluster / application layer redundancy.
You will never eliminate all the single points of failure from a host, or if you do you will have this called a mainframe which is hugely expensive.
That is just ignorant. The facts are the actually record of Supreme court justices don't have much correspondence with the political leanings of those who appointed them.
Its also true that conservative / liberal as those terms pertain to Justices don't match up well with what happens on the Hill or at the White House.
Right lets be realistic about this. You are protected under the bill or rights from "unreasonable search..."
The SCOTUS essentially ruled its not unreasonable to strip search someone who is already a prisoner. Lots of people are posting, that you can now be strip searched for anything, hardly the case; you have to have already done something to warrant cause for arrest. If you are arrested without cause than you still have civil recourse to sue for false imprisonment.
I have to agree with them here. If we have already met the standard needed to remove an detain you; than its implicitly reasonable for your safety, that of law enforcement, and other prisoners, that you should be searched.
I for one am much more concerned about what probable cause is to arrest someone in the first place and keeping that standard appropriately high! What is really important is the government not be allowed to snatch citizens from their homes or the streets without solid evidence.
sounds a lot like something that is going to by definition have false positives, which would be a nightmare when trying to debug an app.
Well welcome to world IT now lives in. We have piles of s**t apps that are unmaintained, and filled with issues. We have stuff that is current that has unresolved zero days. This is just one more wrinkle but probably has a place. IPS/host IPS/ as well as various anti virus, anti malware, and isolation/sand boxing solutions have been adding a non deterministic element application debugging for a long time now. You just need lots of logs and some way to correlate them.
Right what would be interesting is if the retailers took a stand. This certainly will end the business model of all the game specific retailers, who as you say do make most of their money in the used market. The Targets, Best Buys, and Walmarts of the world less so.
What would it do the launch of these next gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft if the likes of Game Stop, Fye, FunCo, etc got together formed a little video game retailers working group and agree to not carry these consoles or their games?
Yea but as a percentage the kings took less wealth from a serf than the us tax payer is asked to fork over today, if you look at those who pay some income tax.
I can see doing it via routes for ISPs who have many peers. I have never done a BGP implementation for anyone with more than three Internet gateways. Frankly I'd rather put few NAT rules on two or three gateways to make sure I have all the egress traffic covered than try to advertize a few /32s in BGP and either foul up or be fouled up by route summery.
They never should have setup replacement DNS servers.
At most they should have put up a special server that just pointed every A record request to webserver with page explaining that you have or have had some malware on your system and are vulnerable, some instructionss to fix your DNS and patch your box or call your Administrator for help. Simply return NXDOMAIN for everything else.
All this has accomplished is keeping a bunch of un-patched machines which lets face it most likely have or will have other malware on them as well in use by users making the possible victims of someone else.
I have not bought into the argument about ISPs or corporate uses being effected severely either. Anyone effected by this thing is not using DNSEC. It would be trivial to NAT tcp53/udp53 requests to the addresses of the malicious DNS servers to safe in house one. ISPs and corporations then could go through those logs with their own resources and contact those users / customers for a fix, instead of being allowed to just shift the cost of their security failure onto the tax payer as they have. Such organizations should be going after the estate of the perps for damages and eating the costs that cannot be recovered or forcing their insurers to do it.
This was just another abuse of the public.
Right how many times does it take for it to sink in Sony does not care about their customers. Why if you have a choice would you ever purchase a product from them? I certainly can't think of reason.
There are plenty of other vendors who stand behind their products and *for the most part* take good care of their customers. Even when they don't they don't usually just flip you the bird without a second thought as was done here and with the root kit. I'd certainly prefer to send my dollars their way at least until Sony gets a clue.
Most of the time Sony's products really don't offer the best features+quality/dollars value anyway. That is a little harder to measure where it comes to movies, and music but again. Picking up a copy of consumer reports would confirm that. Honestly unless you're a fanboi there is no reason not simply drop Sony outright from consideration in whatever market you happen to be it, its not going hurt. You won't pay more, and will come away with something just as good or better.
I think they key is it you change your mind on major policy plank you ought to be able to explain what brought you around to this new way of thinking. A new fact that was discovered, an experience you had, something of substance. Adults ( people who have formed their opinions) don't just change your mind one day about phisophical and ethical issues like individual liberties or abortion. Something happens.
With politicians that something all to often is wining the election, and deciding they don't need to telling those dumb rubes their voting base what they want hear anymore. At least that is what I have to assume it is when a better explanation is not provided and it rarely is.
Capitalism as an economic system never stated you have a fundamental right to externalize costs and generally avoid responsibility for your actions. The problem is capitalism its one of implementation. The corporate vale needs to be more permeable; capitalism would work better and be more equitable if it were.
If you as an owner knew you were GOING to be held personally responsible for the clean up it would be in your self interest not to make such a mess. When shitc goes bankrupt and leaves a superfund site you simply assess shitc owners for the clean up costs according to the number of shares or equity they had in the business at the time it folded. Yes the entire costs, whatever shitc could not pay has to come out of their other personal assets.
I don't think so. Progressive taxation is fundamentally unfair. A consumption tax with exclusions for basic necessities is much more just. If you exclude a few things like:
un-prepaired foods for human consumption,
rent, or purchase of a primary residence,
rent or purchase of up to one vehicle,
non-luxury clothing (as already defined by the tariff schedule),
fares on public transportation,
you have excepted from taxation all things that lower income people spend a disproportionate amount of their income on; government is therefore not creating drag on them unless and until they start to experience more success. Its fair because rich and poor benefit alike from the exemptions, they are not special hand outs to certain groups. Its proportional because the more you make the more you are going to spend, the more tax you are going to pay and that means you have benefited more from things like roads and public education. Good roads lowered the cost of transportation to bring those products to market, good schools provided a work force to produce them.
The best part is the system become simple, and is nearly impossible to cheat! No more goofy separate rules for capital gains, NO you pay sales tax on the sale price of the security when you buy it, no ifs ands or buts, there is not tax at sale time, the new owner will be paying that. The long complex filing process will be gone! Most people would not have to file at all most years. Places like grocery and clothing stores would simply not collect tax on excluded items in the first place. Situations like if you bought a first vehicle and sold you existing you than you'd file a simple form form to be reimbursed.
Government ownership in the USA won't work either for the same reasons private ownership does not. Politicians will want to buy votes of individuals and industrial concerns a like under billing(taxing) for the true costs. They may even push rate reductions as 'economic stimulus' or other such nonsense. The end result will be the same. Through the life of the plant their will be maintenance problems due to budget deficiency and near the end of the plants life we will discover the trust fund for its clean up has been raided.
Only military projects seem to be able to hang on to their budget commitments in this nation and lately even some of them have seen the chopping block. Just look at Social Security. Left mostly to its own devices it would be solvent, but cuts to contribution, added benefits have left it financially hollow, on the books. That was all to buy votes. Off the books its assets are really government bonds because the CONgress has pulled out the cash and replaced it with the bonds. Now really the SSA is a whole owned subsidiary of the government if you will. Money is fungible within an entity. Its fine to say there is a huge heap of money in the trust fund but really its all got to come from the same general revenue as the money in the trust fund is just IOUs. That means current revenue has to cover the past expense and current operation, you see how that snow balls into a problem. This was all to lower taxes over the short term without giving anything up to cover the lost revenue, and long term the nation is bankrupt even if the SSA isn't. I think there is every reason to believe a federal nuclear power generation program would follow exactly the same pattern.
I suspect that the owners will end up going bankrupt and leave the problem to the government.
You are partly right. The problem will be left to the government and the tax payers. The companies won't go bankrupt though. They are part of the few the proud the rent seekers. You see they will get bailout, because they are vital to public interest or some such reasoning. The executives and bond holders (banks) will get paid, the share holders (your 401K) will be wiped out, you will be expected to go on paying your electric bill and your taxes as if nothing happened.
No justice quite like angry mob justice!
I find it telling that the only screen shots they include in the article are ones of report screens. I don't see any data entry, you know the 99% of work people do in an ERP system. My guess is the interface for that is pretty much the same forms app look Dynamics has always had and or its awful to work with and they hope they can just distract procurement people with shiny until the check is signed.
You might not have liked the outcome but to me it sounds like the process worked.
The representatives and the executive were able to agree that raising taxes was needed.
They raised the taxes.
They were not able to agree that special tax rates for the poor were a good idea.
They did not create a special tax rate for the poor.
The idea that we need to levy a new tax or raise an existing one is a separate matter from should we provide tax relief to a specific group. They should IMHO be treated independently. We have the same issue here in the USA. Lots of people agree we should raise taxes to increase revenue, because the government needs the revenue to restore fiscal sanity. Those folks get divided though because some feel (rightly IMHO) that everyone ought to pay equally and want a consumptive tax, others feel we need a more progressive system with lots of special relief. So people like me end up politically opposed to bills that would raise taxes because we object to what we feel are unfair giveaways to certain groups, be they oil lobbies, mulch-national banks, people who have to many children, people who bought to much house and spend half their income on mortgage interest, people building wind turbines, or whatever.
On the one hand I am happy to see anything that tries put sun shine on the political process. In a democratic republic I think its reprehensible that how much of this takes place in secret. The public has a right know.
OTOH
One of the biggest things I think is broken about our current political process is the lack of atomicity in the legislative process. There should be no such thing as "Job's bill" or "Omnibus", etc. It lets a few people tie unpopular ideas to the necessary business of the nation. Legislation should be simple and cover a single topic. That way each idea can be evaluated on its own merit. IE you don't have Financial Reform, you have bill to require minimum reserve assets value at a commercial bank, bill to classify assets that may be used as reserve assets, bill determine the rate adjustment that may be made on a revolving credit account within a reporting period etc. These bills could naturally be brought to the floor and each could get a quick upper or down vote. The public would be able to find who voted on what when by searching easily.
Unrelated crap would not be bundled as riders. It would prevent the I am going to veto/block any legislation that contains X, oh so we can't ever pass any part of budget kind of grid lock we haven now.
Outside of the occasional "flash crash", which by the way have been mostly handled by the SEC reversing sales and pushing the reset button pretty effectively, I see HFT as mostly harmless. It might not add any value to the enterprises being traded but it makes the market better for investors not worse over all. The more orders out there at any time means the better shot an actual investor has at having their order filled when the want it.
Liquidity in the market is a good thing. I don't have to wonder if my shares will sell, I know I can push the button if selling and KNOW there will be buyers, or I can push buy and KNOW there will be sellers for the other side of the transaction.
Less transactions would mean potentially having to wait for a buyer or seller (okay not really pre-HFT electronic trading was already pretty quick) or worse having my order actually move the market by driving up or down the bid, in order to find buyers or sellers strike prices. By having tons of HFT machines out there ready to pounce on any movement of a few hundredths of cent off the current ask, actual investors get a solid price book.
No actually this is going suck. Let me tell you what will happen. Many or possibly all of the major distributions are going ship Firefox / Seamonkey binaries without h264 support compiled in. Its going to be just like the mp3 fiasco a couple years ago.
Microsoft and their kind are going to run around say pfft, Linux boxes can't even play web video, you need us for multimedia again. Linux users are going to nod and wink at each other and download libx264 and do their own Firefox / SeaMonkey / ffmpeg builds surging off the licensing concerns. Which is find for home users, but its one more thing that will keep Linux off institutional desktops.
Right because we don't want children to ever get the idea that while there may be consequences for their actions sometimes that not applied justly or universally. That never happens in the real world.
I have not read it in a number of years but there is the fight scene in the showers, where they kids would be naked. Which is a fight, its not a sex act, so I would say its not pornographic. I do think there are some other references to nudity in the dorms at Battle School, again only pornographic if you already have a pretty perverse imagination about what say takes place in a mens locker room normally.