Thank you Boris, but that is my luggage combination, not my linkedin password. Admittedly my luggage is more important to me than my linkedin account, but...
Won't work, local policy prevents repeated numbers, and letters must be a mix of upper and lower case, and no sequential numbers. (I only wish I were kidding)
I haven't logged into linkedin for so long, that I don't remember my password anymore. And I blocked emails from *@linkedin.com as spam, because, well, they're basically all spam. I can't be bothered to unblock and do email based password recovery. Could some Russian friend please look up my password for me, and reply back? K thx bye
In the meantime UEFI will let you verify your boot image against rootkits and other such badness
False sense of security, unless you think keys and serial numbers have never, ever, been distributed over the internet or stolen by crooks, or for some odd reason that popular activity would suddenly stop.
UEFI will be easier to own because of the users false sense of security. "I bought me a UEFI secured system, therefore I'm unrootable so I've got nothing to worry about" "(Click on some website)" "(owned)"
Reminds me of the discussions about "windows serial number activation key" things around/over a decade ago. Well, that's the end of piracy, blah blah blah. Didn't really turn out that way, did it.
Believe it or not, that sticker is worth a LOT to OEM's
Count me as "not". The DVD and music cd standards groups thought round shiny optical media was worthless to consumers without their stamp of approval logo, the first thing all consumers do before buying shiny disks is look for the official CD/DVD logo. However, it turns out in the real world that no one cares about a stamp of approval, as long as it works.
Oh genius hits milliseconds after I hit the Fing submit button... A tee shirt with a QR code of the official microsoft secret signing key with iconic 1984 or maybe animal farm styling.
So "anyone" cannot do this. Only large corporations, with no liability, and lots of money, will be able to install malware from now on
Luckily large corporations never have data breeches, so its not like you'll be able to go to wikileaks or pirate bay to get a copy of the MS secret key, or the Dell key, etc.
That large integer will of course be made illegal, so only private citizens will have unsecured systems. The hard core crooks and the slightly-bent will of course have free reign over everyones system.
I'm sure they'll be another moronic legal battle where some 256 bit or 2048 bit or whatever integer is declared persona non-grata on the internet, stupid restraining orders, blah blah blah, all over again.
Who wants to buy a tee shirt with Microsofts UEFI secret key on it? I give it a couple months till someone releases it, maybe even before the hardware hits the shelves, and a couple hours later I'll fetch it from pirate bay or whatever, and a couple hours later I'll put up a shirt design. Just to be a complete A-hole I'll also make shirts that have equations, too, so it'll be something like 32523136136 minus 1.
I'll go further with my prediction. Malware will be found signed with a legit "major corporate" key BEFORE legit hardware/software using "major corporate" key hits the shelves, in at least one instance. In other words your new Dell, for example, will be ownable before you can even buy it.
I wonder if there is an analogy to DVDs and CDs... If you want to use the Genuine DVD logo on your shiny disk you have to follow eighty bazillion rules, at least some of which suck, and at least some of which are great ideas but people who suck don't want to do the right thing.
The logo people thought no one would ever buy round shiny disks without their holy logo of obligation inscribed upon it. Why the nerve of those barbarians to even suggest such a gauche idea as selling a shiny disk without our word of power.
Solution, ship your shiny round disk the way you want, without the Genuine Official Copyrighted Trademarked DVD logo. The consumers don't care, they just pop a round shiny disk in the player and it works, at least most of the time.
I'm trying to figure out if something like this could happen with UEFI, somehow.
Another option is the death of the preinstalled microsoft OS. If the legal barrier is just too high, start shipping free systems. Preinstalls suck and are absolutely sickeningly riddled with bloatware anyway, so first step is always to wipe the preinstall. The proverbial grandma won't be able to handle installing windows, I guess she will stick with the Ubuntu preinstall and probably not even notice the difference.
Now my explode do you mean "kaboom" or you mean the nozzle blew out and it melted a hole thru the deflector and split the model body when the ejection charge went off and the cone jammed up against the launch rod thing? That happened to me once. And it was my favorite "Big Bertha" which sounds like a really bad 4chan thread, but its actually a pretty cool model rocket. Stored at too high of a temp, bounced around in car trunk too much, who knows. Turns out a rocket engine firing at 15 feet is way cooler than at 500 feet in the air so at least it wasn't a total fail.
Hard as it might be for end users to believe, most "dollars" are electronic not paper, so any foolishness going on with paper doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things. Actually, a foreign country spending "new" dollars to import american products is not so bad of a thing.
what about remote areas??? some cash register systems may run the tapes overnight. But tieing up the phone for each transaction??
What about satellite internet that has lag, small bandwidth and rail fade.
This kind of stuff was figured out for digital cash in the 90s. Look up a dude named Chaum (maybe misspelled) and his digital cash protocols. If you know how SSSS works and think about signing a note 100 times not once when you "spend" and think about zero knowledge proofs then you're about 90% of the way there already.
"Oh so this is why a digital $20 bill requires 10 megs of memory"
Then the clerk doesn't have the power to create money
Its a lot simpler if they do. When I was a kid working at the supermarket we did not modify gift certificates we printed and issued new ones, and the old ones were put into a file and presumably shredded after some time (not my department). This was... some time ago, they don't do it this way anymore, at least partially because we only accepted our store certs and were our own mint, and now a days they like nationwide gift cards/certs.
Simply have the kid at the counter shove "used" $20 bills into a lockbox that magically spits out a newly minted $20 in exchange. Hard to do mechanically in real life, but I assume it woundn't be too much more expensive than an ATM.
Basically make what a chem eng would call a low latency continuous process instead of a ultra high latency batch process.
Looks like someone read one of Chaum's old blind signature scheme papers and some zero knowledge proof papers from the early 90s, then thought it would be cool to store the bits as quantum states instead of flash memory or bar codes (why?) and it got rammed thru a journalist filter to totally screw up the protocol.
If that is the case, its really important that unlike the journalists interpretation of the protocol, you have like 200 sigs and only break 100 to prove they're all probably real. That is, if 100 randomly selected sigs work then you know you've got 2**100 odds that its all legit (um, more or less) and you have no idea whats stored in the other 100 sigs but they're probably real sigs. But if you double spend, then enough SSSS shares will be unlocked (well, maybe all of them will be unlocked depending on scheme) to identify the double spender.
This cash idea in the above article would only work if each bill was spent precisely once before being returned to be reminted. Not unlike a gift card.
Oddly enough a complete digital cash protocol cannot be completely correctly described in one little/. post. But the TLDR version is something like: 1) A piece of cash doesn't get one sig it gets like 500 2) If you want 2**64 odds that its not fake, after you collect the 500, you make the other guy break your random choice of 64 of the sigs, leaving 500-64 good unbroken ones. 3) If you double spend a lot of mathematical tomfoolery (usually SSSS based) magically cracks enough sigs to figure out the double spenders name. This is actually the hard part.
Probably 10 years ago I did a 15 minute demo in a classroom of Chaum's digital cash system, with some major (huge) simplifications, using something like a whole box of thank you notes and envelopes (walmart to my rescue). I thought it was "old" at the time since it was more than half a decade old. I donno if there is anything newer/better or interesting results since then, haven't kept up. You still need a mint for every transaction, you just don't need a LIVE connection to the mint for every transaction, as I recall. I remember it was a PITA sealing and tearing up all my envelopes, and the prof liked my topic and liked my prop but it was a little slow paced for a good demo. And I remember I got a paper cut. Oh well.
the stock market was meant to provide a way for people to invest in businesses.
that's how it's wrong. there's no investing here.
So, the best way to invest in businesses is to make the spread between bid and ask prices as large as possible, and lower liquidity as much as possible. Hmm. Not really agreeing the goal meets the methods.
What is investing? Determining a value for a security, comparing it to the current price, and entering the appropriate market order. What is HFT? Same thing. Faster than traditional 1960s era trading, sure, but nothing different. That makes regulating it very hard.
Its kind of like arguing that free donuts in a brokers office should be illegal, because eating donuts is not investing, and anything not compulsory is forbidden and anything not forbidden is compulsory. However, if indirectly it makes a better market that is easier to invest in, then I guess both HFT and donuts are great ideas for investment.
To some extent its a symptom of failure in a centrally controlled non free market. The market has rules preventing price discovery more accurate than one cent. Well, it turns out we can price out a security more accurately than one cent and we will essentially trade in that realm, because its not a free market and the bad rules have screwed up the market, resulting in a "market within a market". Some people have an axe to grind although it has no impact on them or their trading. Oh wait, I know the solution to the screwed up rule! More rules! What could possibly go wrong, after all more rules always results in more freedom.
A penny per share tax is a buck on a round lot trade of 100 shares to kill HFTs. The problem is I don't lose a buck to HFTs but I would lose a buck to the govt. Its just a cheesy stealth taxation plan. Blame the HFTs, rich people suck, horray for the 99% we're gonna destroy HFTs, but the only real end result is the govt takes more of my money. So a transaction tax is a great way to cause a couple orders of magnitude more damage to the economy than HFTs could theoretically ever cause.
This still doesn't explain the fixation on killing HFTs. So they get a "sin" tax. On what sin, exactly? nobody knows.
WRT increasing transaction volume to make more than $1000... Remember that superman movie where Richard Pryor took all the fractional cents out of everyone paycheck, put them in a pile, and kept that substantial amount? Well HFT is like that in trades where a bunch of competing HFTs fight each other to, on long term average, determine the sub-cent price of a share priced in cents, and then, essentially, the HFT who skims off the least amount on top of the sub cent slice beats the greedier HFTs and keeps the extra skim. Well, in the movie, if Richard Pryor wanted more money, he'd have to make more transactions, make more paychecks. But Mr Pryor doesn't get to decide how many times paychecks are written per month (Weekly checks? Daily checks?), or how many people are employed... This tired old hollywood plot was recycled into Office Space, and probably many more movies. There's only like 50 movies, endlessly redone.
Think about making a competitive system to determine the sub cent fractional price of shares traded at cent rounded prices. Read the wikipedia article below. You pretty much end up reinventing HFT.
I like the idea of a lot of competing HFTs from a lot of companies fighting each other in a race to the bottom to rip me off the least. Worst case is we damage the HFT ecosystem just enough that two companies get all the fractional skim and have no limits on greed because the government helpfully destroyed all the competition for them. Yes. That would be bad. We (as a country) always make the worst possible decision, so this is probably what we'll implement.
Switched to Chrome about 2 weeks ago because FF was just too bloody slow. Now I have no desire to switch back.
There's a speed difference? I switched about the same time and didn't notice any difference at all. It must be pretty small or only weird corner cases.
I will say that "chrome to phone" sounded like the most exciting development in computing for the year 2012, installed it, tested it, and haven't used it once since. Oh well.
Addon installation is much smoother, I never realized how annoying restarting the browser was until I didn't have to anymore. Like moving from windows to linux.
The start page web apps page was the greatest disappointment. Basically you use the app store to install a bookmark with a big icon. Thats about all it does. Boo.
I found it amusing that if you want something like "adblock plus" and "flashblock" from firefox on chrome, you install "adblock plus" and "flashblock" on chrome. Yeah, it is the same name. Firebug lite is sooo close to firebug on firefox.
I'm still looking for a way to improve the UI and move the tabs below the address bar. I certainly switch tabs a lot more often than I do address bar stuff. There must be some extension that'll fix that.
The problem with HFT is that it undermines the whole point of central markets and business investment into human endeavour
Please advise me as to the purpose of "central markets" and "business investment" and then explain why increasing the bid ask spread and decreasing liquidity by the destruction of HFTs somehow helps achieve those goals. Or alternately, why lowering the bid ask spread and increasing liquidity somehow magically prevents the achievement of those goals. I strongly suspect you can't.
The problem with a tax is, from the retail non-HFT perspective, a HFT looks to them like a microscopic tiny transaction tax in the sub thousandth of a percent range. The solution proposed is always to smack everyone with a tax perhaps a thousand times higher, but more than a thousand times higher for HFTs in order to destroy them.
So lets say for the sake of experiment that on long term average when I sell a block of 100 shares of electric company stock, HFTs increase the sales price by a buck by improved liquidity and narrower bid/ask although they reduce the amount I take home by about a penny. So they gave me a buck but stole a penny from me. I disagree, but whatever, we'll roll with this "they stole my penny" thing. Anyway find me a tax proposal that won't simply result in the destruction of the HFT industry, and lower liquidity means I'll get an even lower sales price, costing me maybe $10, and the new tax means I'll pay the fedgov maybe $10 as a tax. So we've saved a penny of HFT loss at a cost of only $20 to my bottom line.
So with HFTs I make an extra 99 cents, would have been a buck but they stole a penny from me. Without HFTs I'd have the baseline With taxes designed to destroy HFTs I'd lose $20, but at least those nasty HFTs would be dead so I can dance on their grave, even in my poverty.
also, I'm still a bit confused how that wouldn't create further issues?
The HFT idea is to "win" maybe 1% of time on a 50% of the bid ask spread times number of shares traded by retail non HFT investors.
Assume the non-HFT quantity remains the same.
Using penny level decimalization, the bid ask difference will tend toward... a penny. So 1% of 50% of a penny times a billion shares traded per day is $50K per day, optimistically (assuming you "win" as much as 1% of the time, probably much less). Times 200 stocks, that's $10M revenue per day well worth building the infrastructure to HFT
OK lets try billionth of a penny level decimalization. The bid ask difference will shrink, maybe not to a billionth of a penny. Lets say it shinks to a mere millionth of a penny. So 1% of 50% of a millionth of a penny times a billion shares traded per day is... drum roll... $5. Five dollars. Times 200 stocks, thats $1000 revenue per day. Kind of borderline to make it worthwhile. Maybe one guy could do this as a hobby?
The problem with HFT is the "fake" orders placed. Computer trades typically will places tons and tons of buy AND sell orders for prices they really have no intention of executing on just so they can be first in the queue.
Yeah, but why is that a problem? IF they get executed on they lose their shirt, if not who cares? Using "problem" as in ethical or moral dilemma that we should legislate out of existence, not "problem" as in "I don't personally like it, just like I don't like strawberry icecream, so men with guns should forcibly stop people from doing what I don't like". I need something more than its bad, because by definition its bad. A real world example with numbers.
AC you and I both think one internets (or karma point, or whatever) is worth about $10 and you have one internets for sale asking $10 and coincidentally I'd like to buy one internets and I toss in a at the market order for one internets.
A flaming squadron of HFT dumps a bunch of sell orders from 9.95 to 10.05 right before my order hits. So I end up with $9.95 for one internets. Whats your problem? You believe the value is $10 per internets so the HFT just got screwed out of five cents and I made a profit of 5 cents because I paid $9.95 for what we both think is $10 worth of internets. The latest price for one internets is now $9.95 but its worth $10 so you throw in a order to buy too, after all, whenever the price is less than the value, if you got cash you buy. Dumb HFT sells you something worth $10 for $9.95 so you just made money too. Dumb HFT wants to sell even more at 9.95 but it ran outta internets... well you'll sell the HFT internets at $10 a piece, after all you only paid 9.95 a piece. Ha Ha dumb HFTs they suck. Its very hard to make money off a HFT scheme. Its hardly a license to print money. I'm failing to see how its "wrong".
What exactly do you need to "integrate with numerous desktop environments". Try to be precise and not just engage in vague mindless FUD.
FUD would imply I want it to fail. One thing I'm thinking specifically of is use GTK widgets or KDE widgets. It should be possible via extremely poor design to write something that can only run under KDE.
I have a treadmill at home; I have a laptop; I have wood and saws and clamps and stuff. Doesn't take much imagination to guess what I tried years ago.
Results were it seems to be an almost stereotypical example of "sounds like a good idea but it doesn't work". I found walking made my arms/hands wiggle so much that mice/trackball were impossible, and even typing is hard. Also I stumbled a lot (insert jokes about can't chew gum and walk at same time here). Finally small detail is hard to see on a screen while walking, I found myself stopping to study error messages and find syntax errors.
If I could magically walk while it builds or while I think, that would be great.
Frankly I have a treadmill in front of the TV at home, and both socially and mentally I walk around at work every hour and go to the can or something. Since I work with guys who take ten minute smoke breaks every half hour, taking a five minute break every hour is actually a heroic effort on my part, I guess it depends where you work.
I did use the "laptop on treadmill" to watch videos and listen to music, worked pretty well for that.
Also the "whirr" noise of a treadmill would be pretty annoying 8 to 10 hours per day for me and my coworkers.
Typical education vs training situation. Never seen the campus but if the architecture of the campus is worth anything, he probably learned an awful lot via osmosis if nothing else. Although, yes if you're in training to be a solidworks operator, spending 600 hours on minecraft is a complete waste of TRAINING time. I don't know why you'd pay extreme money to go to a university merely to get training on a specific software package, I'd rather get an education in architecture or engineering for that kind of tuition...
My experience in a similar situation was the 99% female nursing college was about 100 feet from the electronics lab building. There was a biz school with excellent M/F ratio a couple blocks away, but the nurses outnumbered us guys, so never bothered with the bean counters. Technically there were no women, you had to walk at least 100 feet. The key isn't how many women are signed up, its how many women per square mile in the greater campus area. Are there "tech schools" out there that are sausage fests surrounded by 100 miles of nervous sheep with no NEARBY women?
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you Boris, but that is my luggage combination, not my linkedin password.
Admittedly my luggage is more important to me than my linkedin account, but...
Won't work, local policy prevents repeated numbers, and letters must be a mix of upper and lower case, and no sequential numbers. (I only wish I were kidding)
I haven't logged into linkedin for so long, that I don't remember my password anymore.
And I blocked emails from *@linkedin.com as spam, because, well, they're basically all spam. I can't be bothered to unblock and do email based password recovery.
Could some Russian friend please look up my password for me, and reply back?
K thx bye
In the meantime UEFI will let you verify your boot image against rootkits and other such badness
False sense of security, unless you think keys and serial numbers have never, ever, been distributed over the internet or stolen by crooks, or for some odd reason that popular activity would suddenly stop.
UEFI will be easier to own because of the users false sense of security. "I bought me a UEFI secured system, therefore I'm unrootable so I've got nothing to worry about" "(Click on some website)" "(owned)"
Reminds me of the discussions about "windows serial number activation key" things around/over a decade ago. Well, that's the end of piracy, blah blah blah. Didn't really turn out that way, did it.
Believe it or not, that sticker is worth a LOT to OEM's
Count me as "not". The DVD and music cd standards groups thought round shiny optical media was worthless to consumers without their stamp of approval logo, the first thing all consumers do before buying shiny disks is look for the official CD/DVD logo. However, it turns out in the real world that no one cares about a stamp of approval, as long as it works.
Oh genius hits milliseconds after I hit the Fing submit button... A tee shirt with a QR code of the official microsoft secret signing key with iconic 1984 or maybe animal farm styling.
Coming soon, from VLM enterprises...
So "anyone" cannot do this. Only large corporations, with no liability, and lots of money, will be able to install malware from now on
Luckily large corporations never have data breeches, so its not like you'll be able to go to wikileaks or pirate bay to get a copy of the MS secret key, or the Dell key, etc.
That large integer will of course be made illegal, so only private citizens will have unsecured systems. The hard core crooks and the slightly-bent will of course have free reign over everyones system.
I'm sure they'll be another moronic legal battle where some 256 bit or 2048 bit or whatever integer is declared persona non-grata on the internet, stupid restraining orders, blah blah blah, all over again.
Who wants to buy a tee shirt with Microsofts UEFI secret key on it? I give it a couple months till someone releases it, maybe even before the hardware hits the shelves, and a couple hours later I'll fetch it from pirate bay or whatever, and a couple hours later I'll put up a shirt design. Just to be a complete A-hole I'll also make shirts that have equations, too, so it'll be something like 32523136136 minus 1.
I'll go further with my prediction. Malware will be found signed with a legit "major corporate" key BEFORE legit hardware/software using "major corporate" key hits the shelves, in at least one instance. In other words your new Dell, for example, will be ownable before you can even buy it.
I wonder if there is an analogy to DVDs and CDs... If you want to use the Genuine DVD logo on your shiny disk you have to follow eighty bazillion rules, at least some of which suck, and at least some of which are great ideas but people who suck don't want to do the right thing.
The logo people thought no one would ever buy round shiny disks without their holy logo of obligation inscribed upon it. Why the nerve of those barbarians to even suggest such a gauche idea as selling a shiny disk without our word of power.
Solution, ship your shiny round disk the way you want, without the Genuine Official Copyrighted Trademarked DVD logo. The consumers don't care, they just pop a round shiny disk in the player and it works, at least most of the time.
I'm trying to figure out if something like this could happen with UEFI, somehow.
Another option is the death of the preinstalled microsoft OS. If the legal barrier is just too high, start shipping free systems. Preinstalls suck and are absolutely sickeningly riddled with bloatware anyway, so first step is always to wipe the preinstall. The proverbial grandma won't be able to handle installing windows, I guess she will stick with the Ubuntu preinstall and probably not even notice the difference.
We seem to be raising generations of ever-less-capable people
Intentionally, for profit.
Now my explode do you mean "kaboom" or you mean the nozzle blew out and it melted a hole thru the deflector and split the model body when the ejection charge went off and the cone jammed up against the launch rod thing? That happened to me once. And it was my favorite "Big Bertha" which sounds like a really bad 4chan thread, but its actually a pretty cool model rocket. Stored at too high of a temp, bounced around in car trunk too much, who knows. Turns out a rocket engine firing at 15 feet is way cooler than at 500 feet in the air so at least it wasn't a total fail.
Hard as it might be for end users to believe, most "dollars" are electronic not paper, so any foolishness going on with paper doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things. Actually, a foreign country spending "new" dollars to import american products is not so bad of a thing.
what about remote areas??? some cash register systems may run the tapes overnight. But tieing up the phone for each transaction??
What about satellite internet that has lag, small bandwidth and rail fade.
This kind of stuff was figured out for digital cash in the 90s. Look up a dude named Chaum (maybe misspelled) and his digital cash protocols. If you know how SSSS works and think about signing a note 100 times not once when you "spend" and think about zero knowledge proofs then you're about 90% of the way there already.
"Oh so this is why a digital $20 bill requires 10 megs of memory"
Then the clerk doesn't have the power to create money
Its a lot simpler if they do. When I was a kid working at the supermarket we did not modify gift certificates we printed and issued new ones, and the old ones were put into a file and presumably shredded after some time (not my department). This was... some time ago, they don't do it this way anymore, at least partially because we only accepted our store certs and were our own mint, and now a days they like nationwide gift cards/certs.
Simply have the kid at the counter shove "used" $20 bills into a lockbox that magically spits out a newly minted $20 in exchange. Hard to do mechanically in real life, but I assume it woundn't be too much more expensive than an ATM.
Basically make what a chem eng would call a low latency continuous process instead of a ultra high latency batch process.
Breaks down to a OTP scheme? Just use scratch off lotto ticket technology?
One person can measure any one, but not all three.
This I'm fuzzy on. Only 3 like an old digicash protocol but with only 3 sigs, or 3 as in like 3 dimensions or something?
Looks like someone read one of Chaum's old blind signature scheme papers and some zero knowledge proof papers from the early 90s, then thought it would be cool to store the bits as quantum states instead of flash memory or bar codes (why?) and it got rammed thru a journalist filter to totally screw up the protocol.
If that is the case, its really important that unlike the journalists interpretation of the protocol, you have like 200 sigs and only break 100 to prove they're all probably real. That is, if 100 randomly selected sigs work then you know you've got 2**100 odds that its all legit (um, more or less) and you have no idea whats stored in the other 100 sigs but they're probably real sigs. But if you double spend, then enough SSSS shares will be unlocked (well, maybe all of them will be unlocked depending on scheme) to identify the double spender.
This cash idea in the above article would only work if each bill was spent precisely once before being returned to be reminted. Not unlike a gift card.
Oddly enough a complete digital cash protocol cannot be completely correctly described in one little /. post. But the TLDR version is something like:
1) A piece of cash doesn't get one sig it gets like 500
2) If you want 2**64 odds that its not fake, after you collect the 500, you make the other guy break your random choice of 64 of the sigs, leaving 500-64 good unbroken ones.
3) If you double spend a lot of mathematical tomfoolery (usually SSSS based) magically cracks enough sigs to figure out the double spenders name. This is actually the hard part.
Probably 10 years ago I did a 15 minute demo in a classroom of Chaum's digital cash system, with some major (huge) simplifications, using something like a whole box of thank you notes and envelopes (walmart to my rescue). I thought it was "old" at the time since it was more than half a decade old. I donno if there is anything newer/better or interesting results since then, haven't kept up. You still need a mint for every transaction, you just don't need a LIVE connection to the mint for every transaction, as I recall. I remember it was a PITA sealing and tearing up all my envelopes, and the prof liked my topic and liked my prop but it was a little slow paced for a good demo. And I remember I got a paper cut. Oh well.
the stock market was meant to provide a way for people to invest in businesses.
that's how it's wrong. there's no investing here.
So, the best way to invest in businesses is to make the spread between bid and ask prices as large as possible, and lower liquidity as much as possible. Hmm. Not really agreeing the goal meets the methods.
What is investing? Determining a value for a security, comparing it to the current price, and entering the appropriate market order. What is HFT? Same thing. Faster than traditional 1960s era trading, sure, but nothing different. That makes regulating it very hard.
Its kind of like arguing that free donuts in a brokers office should be illegal, because eating donuts is not investing, and anything not compulsory is forbidden and anything not forbidden is compulsory. However, if indirectly it makes a better market that is easier to invest in, then I guess both HFT and donuts are great ideas for investment.
To some extent its a symptom of failure in a centrally controlled non free market. The market has rules preventing price discovery more accurate than one cent. Well, it turns out we can price out a security more accurately than one cent and we will essentially trade in that realm, because its not a free market and the bad rules have screwed up the market, resulting in a "market within a market". Some people have an axe to grind although it has no impact on them or their trading. Oh wait, I know the solution to the screwed up rule! More rules! What could possibly go wrong, after all more rules always results in more freedom.
A penny per share tax is a buck on a round lot trade of 100 shares to kill HFTs. The problem is I don't lose a buck to HFTs but I would lose a buck to the govt. Its just a cheesy stealth taxation plan. Blame the HFTs, rich people suck, horray for the 99% we're gonna destroy HFTs, but the only real end result is the govt takes more of my money. So a transaction tax is a great way to cause a couple orders of magnitude more damage to the economy than HFTs could theoretically ever cause.
This still doesn't explain the fixation on killing HFTs. So they get a "sin" tax. On what sin, exactly? nobody knows.
WRT increasing transaction volume to make more than $1000... Remember that superman movie where Richard Pryor took all the fractional cents out of everyone paycheck, put them in a pile, and kept that substantial amount? Well HFT is like that in trades where a bunch of competing HFTs fight each other to, on long term average, determine the sub-cent price of a share priced in cents, and then, essentially, the HFT who skims off the least amount on top of the sub cent slice beats the greedier HFTs and keeps the extra skim. Well, in the movie, if Richard Pryor wanted more money, he'd have to make more transactions, make more paychecks. But Mr Pryor doesn't get to decide how many times paychecks are written per month (Weekly checks? Daily checks?), or how many people are employed... This tired old hollywood plot was recycled into Office Space, and probably many more movies. There's only like 50 movies, endlessly redone.
Think about making a competitive system to determine the sub cent fractional price of shares traded at cent rounded prices. Read the wikipedia article below. You pretty much end up reinventing HFT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing
I like the idea of a lot of competing HFTs from a lot of companies fighting each other in a race to the bottom to rip me off the least. Worst case is we damage the HFT ecosystem just enough that two companies get all the fractional skim and have no limits on greed because the government helpfully destroyed all the competition for them. Yes. That would be bad. We (as a country) always make the worst possible decision, so this is probably what we'll implement.
Switched to Chrome about 2 weeks ago because FF was just too bloody slow. Now I have no desire to switch back.
There's a speed difference? I switched about the same time and didn't notice any difference at all. It must be pretty small or only weird corner cases.
I will say that "chrome to phone" sounded like the most exciting development in computing for the year 2012, installed it, tested it, and haven't used it once since. Oh well.
Addon installation is much smoother, I never realized how annoying restarting the browser was until I didn't have to anymore. Like moving from windows to linux.
The start page web apps page was the greatest disappointment. Basically you use the app store to install a bookmark with a big icon. Thats about all it does. Boo.
I found it amusing that if you want something like "adblock plus" and "flashblock" from firefox on chrome, you install "adblock plus" and "flashblock" on chrome. Yeah, it is the same name. Firebug lite is sooo close to firebug on firefox.
I'm still looking for a way to improve the UI and move the tabs below the address bar. I certainly switch tabs a lot more often than I do address bar stuff. There must be some extension that'll fix that.
The problem with HFT is that it undermines the whole point of central markets and business investment into human endeavour
Please advise me as to the purpose of "central markets" and "business investment" and then explain why increasing the bid ask spread and decreasing liquidity by the destruction of HFTs somehow helps achieve those goals. Or alternately, why lowering the bid ask spread and increasing liquidity somehow magically prevents the achievement of those goals. I strongly suspect you can't.
The problem with a tax is, from the retail non-HFT perspective, a HFT looks to them like a microscopic tiny transaction tax in the sub thousandth of a percent range. The solution proposed is always to smack everyone with a tax perhaps a thousand times higher, but more than a thousand times higher for HFTs in order to destroy them.
So lets say for the sake of experiment that on long term average when I sell a block of 100 shares of electric company stock, HFTs increase the sales price by a buck by improved liquidity and narrower bid/ask although they reduce the amount I take home by about a penny. So they gave me a buck but stole a penny from me. I disagree, but whatever, we'll roll with this "they stole my penny" thing. Anyway find me a tax proposal that won't simply result in the destruction of the HFT industry, and lower liquidity means I'll get an even lower sales price, costing me maybe $10, and the new tax means I'll pay the fedgov maybe $10 as a tax. So we've saved a penny of HFT loss at a cost of only $20 to my bottom line.
So with HFTs I make an extra 99 cents, would have been a buck but they stole a penny from me.
Without HFTs I'd have the baseline
With taxes designed to destroy HFTs I'd lose $20, but at least those nasty HFTs would be dead so I can dance on their grave, even in my poverty.
As a non-HFT investor, whats in it for me?
also, I'm still a bit confused how that wouldn't create further issues?
The HFT idea is to "win" maybe 1% of time on a 50% of the bid ask spread times number of shares traded by retail non HFT investors.
Assume the non-HFT quantity remains the same.
Using penny level decimalization, the bid ask difference will tend toward... a penny. So 1% of 50% of a penny times a billion shares traded per day is $50K per day, optimistically (assuming you "win" as much as 1% of the time, probably much less). Times 200 stocks, that's $10M revenue per day well worth building the infrastructure to HFT
OK lets try billionth of a penny level decimalization. The bid ask difference will shrink, maybe not to a billionth of a penny. Lets say it shinks to a mere millionth of a penny. So 1% of 50% of a millionth of a penny times a billion shares traded per day is ... drum roll ... $5. Five dollars. Times 200 stocks, thats $1000 revenue per day. Kind of borderline to make it worthwhile. Maybe one guy could do this as a hobby?
The problem with HFT is the "fake" orders placed. Computer trades typically will places tons and tons of buy AND sell orders for prices they really have no intention of executing on just so they can be first in the queue.
Yeah, but why is that a problem? IF they get executed on they lose their shirt, if not who cares? Using "problem" as in ethical or moral dilemma that we should legislate out of existence, not "problem" as in "I don't personally like it, just like I don't like strawberry icecream, so men with guns should forcibly stop people from doing what I don't like". I need something more than its bad, because by definition its bad. A real world example with numbers.
AC you and I both think one internets (or karma point, or whatever) is worth about $10 and you have one internets for sale asking $10 and coincidentally I'd like to buy one internets and I toss in a at the market order for one internets.
A flaming squadron of HFT dumps a bunch of sell orders from 9.95 to 10.05 right before my order hits. So I end up with $9.95 for one internets. Whats your problem? You believe the value is $10 per internets so the HFT just got screwed out of five cents and I made a profit of 5 cents because I paid $9.95 for what we both think is $10 worth of internets. The latest price for one internets is now $9.95 but its worth $10 so you throw in a order to buy too, after all, whenever the price is less than the value, if you got cash you buy. Dumb HFT sells you something worth $10 for $9.95 so you just made money too. Dumb HFT wants to sell even more at 9.95 but it ran outta internets... well you'll sell the HFT internets at $10 a piece, after all you only paid 9.95 a piece. Ha Ha dumb HFTs they suck. Its very hard to make money off a HFT scheme. Its hardly a license to print money. I'm failing to see how its "wrong".
What exactly do you need to "integrate with numerous desktop environments". Try to be precise and not just engage in vague mindless FUD.
FUD would imply I want it to fail. One thing I'm thinking specifically of is use GTK widgets or KDE widgets. It should be possible via extremely poor design to write something that can only run under KDE.
I have a treadmill at home; I have a laptop; I have wood and saws and clamps and stuff. Doesn't take much imagination to guess what I tried years ago.
Results were it seems to be an almost stereotypical example of "sounds like a good idea but it doesn't work". I found walking made my arms/hands wiggle so much that mice/trackball were impossible, and even typing is hard. Also I stumbled a lot (insert jokes about can't chew gum and walk at same time here). Finally small detail is hard to see on a screen while walking, I found myself stopping to study error messages and find syntax errors.
If I could magically walk while it builds or while I think, that would be great.
Frankly I have a treadmill in front of the TV at home, and both socially and mentally I walk around at work every hour and go to the can or something. Since I work with guys who take ten minute smoke breaks every half hour, taking a five minute break every hour is actually a heroic effort on my part, I guess it depends where you work.
I did use the "laptop on treadmill" to watch videos and listen to music, worked pretty well for that.
Also the "whirr" noise of a treadmill would be pretty annoying 8 to 10 hours per day for me and my coworkers.
Typical education vs training situation. Never seen the campus but if the architecture of the campus is worth anything, he probably learned an awful lot via osmosis if nothing else. Although, yes if you're in training to be a solidworks operator, spending 600 hours on minecraft is a complete waste of TRAINING time. I don't know why you'd pay extreme money to go to a university merely to get training on a specific software package, I'd rather get an education in architecture or engineering for that kind of tuition...
My experience in a similar situation was the 99% female nursing college was about 100 feet from the electronics lab building. There was a biz school with excellent M/F ratio a couple blocks away, but the nurses outnumbered us guys, so never bothered with the bean counters. Technically there were no women, you had to walk at least 100 feet. The key isn't how many women are signed up, its how many women per square mile in the greater campus area. Are there "tech schools" out there that are sausage fests surrounded by 100 miles of nervous sheep with no NEARBY women?