Wow, just to be clear, you don't mean private schooling though. You mean religious schooling. And a rather radical sort of religious schooling at that.
I went to one of New York City's top private schools, and my education shared absolutely nothing with what you just described. After that I went on to a top Ivy League school where I was a physics major, and with the exception of top tier science and technology magnet schools like Stuyvesant and Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia, the kids from your average public school were at a tremendous disadvantage. I had at least had a year of multivariable calculus and linear algebra in high school, and enough rigorous computer science work that I was able to eventually catch up on proof oriented mathematics. If you'd had nothing beyond AP Calculus, it would take a whole year to catch up.
Most of my friends there went to private schools for high school. I never met a single person who went to a school anything like what you describe. I met plenty of people who went to somewhat religiously affiliated private schools, and many who went to secular private schools.
I know we on the coasts often falsely assume that everything in the middle part of our country is a scary hell-hole of radical right wingers, but you guys from those places (and it's an assumption I'm making here, but I am pretty sure you're not from New York City or Los Angeles) should realize that concepts like "private school" just don't correlate in general to your very particular and rather unusual experience.
The problem is that the statutory *minimum* for copyright infringement in this case would have been $18,000. So that was the lowest number the judge could come up with. Because of the strong arguments that the behavior was "willful" and the strong need for deterrence because of the low cost of infringement and high cost of enforcement pushed him into the "treble damages" routine, just tripling the minimum number and saying that is basically as high as you can justify for the purposes of deterrence.
Still, I think $18,000 is a number that already more than took into effect the need for deterrence and costs of enforcement, since it's already massively higher than any actual damages or lost revenues, which are in the several hundreds of dollars.
Seems like the effort would be much better spent just porting Gnash to iPhone. It's been talked about for two and a half years now, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody's just done it.
If you read the actual post, what this guy is doing makes a lot of sense. He's not re-writing ReactOS from scratch, he's just taking the parts of ReactOS that have worked out reasonably well (the kernel, bootloader, etc.) and tossing the stuff that hasn't worked out so well (the Win32 API subsystem). It just so happens that another project, WINE, did a really impressive job at getting that Win32 API layer implemented, and rather than maintaining two completely independent versions of it, piggybacking off the WINE work should make ReactOS usable relatively soon, and able to run a large number of existing Win32 applications.
Whether you think ReactOS is a sensible project or not, clearly some people think a complete, Open Source, Windows-compatible OS has some real value, and kudos to them for figuring out how to make that happen, or at least getting very close.
A common misconception is that microwave ovens cook food from the "inside out". In reality, microwaves are absorbed in the outer layers of food in a manner somewhat similar to heat from other methods. The misconception arises because microwaves penetrate dry non-conductive substances at the surfaces of many common foods, and thus often induce initial heat more deeply than other methods. Depending on water content, the depth of initial heat deposition may be several centimetres or more with microwave ovens, in contrast to broiling (infrared) or convection heating, which deposit heat thinly at the food surface. Penetration depth of microwaves is dependent on food composition and the frequency, with lower microwave frequencies (longer wavelengths) penetrating better.
Also, very interesting article in that I've read many times before that microwaves operate at a resonant frequency of water molecules. Turns out that's bullshit. They heat by dielectric heating, and anything with a high dipole moment (such as water) will be heated - but other molecule types will experience some heating as well, depending on how polar they are. See the Wikipedia article for more info.
Assuming this isn't a troll, then you should probably see an allergist as another poster suggested. Additionally, you should try fasting for a day and adding back in a couple of foodstuffs at a time - could be a food intolerance or allergy. If that doesn't seem to make a difference, what about other environmental factors in your home - do you feel the same way if you sleep in a different location/different climate/at different times of year?
I take Zyrtec every day and it's been a life-changing medication for me - far more effective than the earlier non-drowsy antihistamines were for my seasonal allergies, which were always terrible in the summer season in New York City. Going to a nice dry western climate always helped me out - I love the summers in Colorado, I can breath out there and don't even need to take Zyrtec.
Agreed - and to strike with deadly, serious, respected force when we are fucked with. The war in Afghanistan should have been swift, brutal, and left lots of people dead. The result should have been utter fear to ever fuck with the US again, lest your country end up as a post-nuclear holocaust wasteland. And that should have been that - instead we've dawdled around for 8+ years now, started a second war in Iraq that was basically unjustified, and essentially a waste of resources. And we forgot to finish the job with the first war we started, and refused to pursue the enemy where they set up shop to get away from our troops - in Pakistan.
We utterly fail in this. And we seem incapable of living our lives as freedom-loving people because there's some small chance we'll die tomorrow. Grow the fuck up already - there's a chance we'll die every time we get behind the wheel of a car - that doesn't justify living life like a bunch of pansies. Taking our shoes off in security lines at airports, banning taking beverages onto planes, requiring multiple rounds of security checks at every office building in Manhattan - if we live like this, the terrorists win.
Companies use PHP to develop and run web app functionality because it saves them huge amounts of time and money over rolling out the same thing if you were to write it all in C++. Realize what the cost structure of a company like Facebook is - the amount they pay their engineers, marketing personnel, and so on is significantly more than their amortized server expenses and server operating expenses (including energy costs, etc.).
Furthermore, the 10x speedup assumption seems ridiculous - how much time is spent on their server in compute-intensive PHP loops where huge gains would be made from switching to C++? And how much of the "code" is really database queries of various sorts? Furthermore, you can generally isolate small areas like that in your codebase and rewrite them as modules in C or C++ to be invoked from PHP land - and if they could easily cut their server expenses even in half (let alone by 90%) by having a few engineers spend a few weeks rewriting some components, don't you imagine they've probably set about doing that already?
Re-casting a discussion in terms of greenhouse gas emissions or energy use doesn't change any of this - saving energy generally means saving money, unless it takes more expensive resources (such as 100s of humans, who have to spend hundreds of months re-writing code in C++, while they, their families, and dependents emit tons upon tons of greenhouse gases, use electricity, buy groceries, and so-on and so-forth). The cheapest solution certainly isn't always the most environmentally friendly solution (such as when negative externalities are involved - lower labor and pollution standards in China, for example, that make a less "green" product manufactured there less costly in the US), but a vastly more expensive solution that no company in its right mind would implement isn't necessarily greener just because it might save some electricity and a few servers once it was implemented.
Shoveling bits does suck. The software world can however still be very profitable, enjoyable, and rewarding if you are 1) a real innovator and entrepreneur with a sense of your market (and thus get rewarded for turning great ideas into great products or great companies), 2) a brilliant computer scientist (and thus get rewarded for solving the problems that are too hard for other engineers or developers to solve), or 3) first and foremost a domain specialist (and only secondarily a software developer/engineer/etc.), in which case you are likely to get rewarded for the fact that you can bring your domain knowledge to play, and you just happen to use technology as a tool to solve the domain problems that you are really getting paid to solve.
Or else you can get on the IT or engineering management track and perhaps make a decent salary but probably be bored as hell with your life.
All the enjoyable experiences I've had in tech-related industries basically fit into one of the above categories. The people who hated their jobs that I have seen in the industry were usually basically what you said - bit shovelers - guys gluing together other people's products at non-tech companies, grunt-line implementers inside tech companies, and so on. Basically, not the kind of jobs I'd encourage my kids to aspire to.
So if you really love technology, you need to figure out if you are temperamentally and intellectually suited for categories 1 or 2 above. If not, then I suggest you consider developing some deep domain knowledge and expertise in an area you love and that has a significant market out there.
I thought every app on the App Store was rated 4 stars... or at least it seems that way! The ratings system must be pretty gummed up, since an app has to be completely non-functional to get less than 3 and a half stars.
Agreed - Apple is more the exception than the rule here. Lots of other manufacturers that have been relatively innovative over the years are still being crushed out of their businesses. Companies are now going beyond just outsourcing their manufacturing to China, and are replacing American engineering teams with Chinese engineering teams because to compete as an American company that outsources to China against the companies that operate in China with vastly less overhead than you have is nearly impossible. Their engineers, management, finance and sales staff are paid less than your line workers would have been in the US, their health care costs are drastically lower, etc.
The logical end of this in many industries is more like the Lenovo story than the Apple story - the brands, which have value in the Western marketplace, will eventually be eaten up by Chinese manufacturing companies to market their goods themselves.
Not sure if your argument would still hold up if you factored in all the negative externalities from something like coal (i.e. cost of air pollution, etc.). While your points about nuclear are obviously correct in the short run, I would not be so quick to make a prediction about the rest of human history - some changes in legislation, perhaps spurred by climate change or related issues could easily shift those economics around enough to lead to new investment in nuclear power again.
And what led you to think I didn't realize that? Wow, a bunch of people replied to my reply, not realizing that I fully got the point of the GP's (IndustrialComplex's) irony and was seconding it. Sigh, so much for the people criticizing MY reading comprehension.
CNN does suck. But I remember a time when they actually wanted to broadcast real news. I remember CNN in the first Gulf War.
The problem is that CNN's decided it's more profitable to try to be a mid-left version of Fox News, and it just sucks. And to have no fewer than two anchors that look like Barack Obama (news exec thoughts: young Americans like Barack Obama - we need some half-black anchors on our cable news channel!).
CNN doesn't suck in the same way that Fox News sucks i.e. making up fake news, putting the world's biggest idiots and pussies on TV and call them representatives of the liberal point of view, up against baseball bat wielding, ballkicking Republicans. No, CNN sucks in a wholly lame, sucky, devoid of content way. They just don't care about news anymore. Kind of MTV has nothing to do with music videos.
And to clarify further - that doesn't mean Microsoft copied the code from ImageMaster - there are lots of other potential original sources for these sections of code. But clearly this goes way beyond a couple similar function names.
Yes, we all know that the Romans and Greeks never slaughtered all the residents of a rebellious city upon taking it, and raped and enslaved the women who remained. No, nothing like that happened in ancient times at all. Combat was noble, and only men with weapons in their hands were killed, nobly and civilly.
This is clearly not the intent of the trademark system. The fact that it's technically a sound mark rather than a trademark is basically obfuscation, since what they are trying to do is use the soundmark to protect a business practice of making duck calls during tours around a city.
I mean, do you think you should be able to trademark the *act* of drawing a duck while taking a tour around a city? Of course not. A trademark doesn't cover the act of drawing a duck, it covers a specific image of a specific duck.
Just because something was at some point a reasonably creative marketing gimmick doesn't mean it's entitled to intellectual property protection. The guys that copied you may be lame losers, but I see nothing here that should be protectable IP.
The question wasn't whether there was an illegal organ trade in Israel. There is an illegal organ trade in quite a few countries - I've heard of it existing in parts of Africa including South Africa, as well as being fairly widespread in India. Israel has actually prosecuted people for it, however (the article you reference is here and it describes the prosecution of some people involved in this).
There is a big gap however from saying there has been a trade in organs in a country to saying that the country's government or military actually are killing people *in order to* harvest their organs (a claim I have seen in this thread). It's almost as big a gap to saying that the government or military are harvesting organs of people who happen to have died or been mortally wounded in conflict in order to profit.
I don't really believe the amount of money involved would be sufficient for a government or military to take this sort of risk to their reputation to do something like this. The Israeli military budget is over $13B US.
What some unscrupulous individuals may have done to line their pockets, however, is another story. As an American Jew, I actually think any legitimate claims that organs were illegally harvested in Israel should be investigated and any perpetrators prosecuted. If somebody illegally harvested organs from a dead/mortally wounded person, they should go to jail. If somebody actually killed somebody to harvest their organs, they should be imprisoned for the rest of their life.
The problem is that is not a well-defined concept in all jurisdictions, and opens the door to problems (for example, somebody else claiming copyright on a derived work and suing your users). More people are going to be able to use and benefit from your software if you just slap a BSD license on it than if you don't bother or just say "it's public domain", and it takes zero incremental work to do so.
It is illegal front running IF it looks at their brokerage business order flow and trades ahead of that. Do you have evidence that they are doing that? If so, you should be talking to the SEC, not posting on Slashdot.
Lots of firms implement high frequency trading strategies based on statistical probabilities of short term market movements, and order book depth analysis. These strategies are usually capital constrained, and a lot of work to implement and maintain, but can be levered up and earn a relative huge return on a modest amount of capital utilized, when implemented properly.
Of course, they can also fail to get timely execution of orders if there are 5 people going after the same trades, in which case 4 of you are likely to lose your arses. Unlike other areas, high frequency strategies are often (though not always) a winner-takes-all world where your network latency and code execution speed are measured in microseconds, not seconds, or even milliseconds.
I actually checked tomorrow's flight to see what they thought of a general flight on this route, without benefit of today's real-time data. That's what led me to conclude something is off.
Last 2 times I have flown afternoon flights on Continental from Newark to Charleston, SC I have experienced delays on both legs of the trip there and back. The flights back from Charleston to Newark have been delayed by at least 2 hours both times. I fly this route regularly and it's very frequently delayed (>6 of the 12 times I've flown it in the last year). In fact, last time (2 weeks ago), my 6pm flight took off at 8pm, and the 4pm flight still hadn't taken off yet.
I checked this route in their system and it says it is 85% on-time, 11% delayed less than an hour, and 4% delayed an hour or more.
I am highly skeptical of this service, based on that initial result. I'll try it out the next few times I fly though.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, just to be clear, you don't mean private schooling though. You mean religious schooling. And a rather radical sort of religious schooling at that.
I went to one of New York City's top private schools, and my education shared absolutely nothing with what you just described. After that I went on to a top Ivy League school where I was a physics major, and with the exception of top tier science and technology magnet schools like Stuyvesant and Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia, the kids from your average public school were at a tremendous disadvantage. I had at least had a year of multivariable calculus and linear algebra in high school, and enough rigorous computer science work that I was able to eventually catch up on proof oriented mathematics. If you'd had nothing beyond AP Calculus, it would take a whole year to catch up.
Most of my friends there went to private schools for high school. I never met a single person who went to a school anything like what you describe. I met plenty of people who went to somewhat religiously affiliated private schools, and many who went to secular private schools.
I know we on the coasts often falsely assume that everything in the middle part of our country is a scary hell-hole of radical right wingers, but you guys from those places (and it's an assumption I'm making here, but I am pretty sure you're not from New York City or Los Angeles) should realize that concepts like "private school" just don't correlate in general to your very particular and rather unusual experience.
The problem is that the statutory *minimum* for copyright infringement in this case would have been $18,000. So that was the lowest number the judge could come up with. Because of the strong arguments that the behavior was "willful" and the strong need for deterrence because of the low cost of infringement and high cost of enforcement pushed him into the "treble damages" routine, just tripling the minimum number and saying that is basically as high as you can justify for the purposes of deterrence.
Still, I think $18,000 is a number that already more than took into effect the need for deterrence and costs of enforcement, since it's already massively higher than any actual damages or lost revenues, which are in the several hundreds of dollars.
Seems like the effort would be much better spent just porting Gnash to iPhone. It's been talked about for two and a half years now, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody's just done it.
If you read the actual post, what this guy is doing makes a lot of sense. He's not re-writing ReactOS from scratch, he's just taking the parts of ReactOS that have worked out reasonably well (the kernel, bootloader, etc.) and tossing the stuff that hasn't worked out so well (the Win32 API subsystem). It just so happens that another project, WINE, did a really impressive job at getting that Win32 API layer implemented, and rather than maintaining two completely independent versions of it, piggybacking off the WINE work should make ReactOS usable relatively soon, and able to run a large number of existing Win32 applications.
Whether you think ReactOS is a sensible project or not, clearly some people think a complete, Open Source, Windows-compatible OS has some real value, and kudos to them for figuring out how to make that happen, or at least getting very close.
From Wikipedia:
A common misconception is that microwave ovens cook food from the "inside out". In reality, microwaves are absorbed in the outer layers of food in a manner somewhat similar to heat from other methods. The misconception arises because microwaves penetrate dry non-conductive substances at the surfaces of many common foods, and thus often induce initial heat more deeply than other methods. Depending on water content, the depth of initial heat deposition may be several centimetres or more with microwave ovens, in contrast to broiling (infrared) or convection heating, which deposit heat thinly at the food surface. Penetration depth of microwaves is dependent on food composition and the frequency, with lower microwave frequencies (longer wavelengths) penetrating better.
Also, very interesting article in that I've read many times before that microwaves operate at a resonant frequency of water molecules. Turns out that's bullshit. They heat by dielectric heating, and anything with a high dipole moment (such as water) will be heated - but other molecule types will experience some heating as well, depending on how polar they are. See the Wikipedia article for more info.
After reading that yawner of a story, I am SO FUCKING GLAD I never pursued astro research after that summer of my junior year in college.
Hey now, no reason to go insulting the yakuza like that.
Assuming this isn't a troll, then you should probably see an allergist as another poster suggested. Additionally, you should try fasting for a day and adding back in a couple of foodstuffs at a time - could be a food intolerance or allergy. If that doesn't seem to make a difference, what about other environmental factors in your home - do you feel the same way if you sleep in a different location/different climate/at different times of year?
I take Zyrtec every day and it's been a life-changing medication for me - far more effective than the earlier non-drowsy antihistamines were for my seasonal allergies, which were always terrible in the summer season in New York City. Going to a nice dry western climate always helped me out - I love the summers in Colorado, I can breath out there and don't even need to take Zyrtec.
Agreed - and to strike with deadly, serious, respected force when we are fucked with. The war in Afghanistan should have been swift, brutal, and left lots of people dead. The result should have been utter fear to ever fuck with the US again, lest your country end up as a post-nuclear holocaust wasteland. And that should have been that - instead we've dawdled around for 8+ years now, started a second war in Iraq that was basically unjustified, and essentially a waste of resources. And we forgot to finish the job with the first war we started, and refused to pursue the enemy where they set up shop to get away from our troops - in Pakistan.
We utterly fail in this. And we seem incapable of living our lives as freedom-loving people because there's some small chance we'll die tomorrow. Grow the fuck up already - there's a chance we'll die every time we get behind the wheel of a car - that doesn't justify living life like a bunch of pansies. Taking our shoes off in security lines at airports, banning taking beverages onto planes, requiring multiple rounds of security checks at every office building in Manhattan - if we live like this, the terrorists win.
Companies use PHP to develop and run web app functionality because it saves them huge amounts of time and money over rolling out the same thing if you were to write it all in C++. Realize what the cost structure of a company like Facebook is - the amount they pay their engineers, marketing personnel, and so on is significantly more than their amortized server expenses and server operating expenses (including energy costs, etc.).
Furthermore, the 10x speedup assumption seems ridiculous - how much time is spent on their server in compute-intensive PHP loops where huge gains would be made from switching to C++? And how much of the "code" is really database queries of various sorts? Furthermore, you can generally isolate small areas like that in your codebase and rewrite them as modules in C or C++ to be invoked from PHP land - and if they could easily cut their server expenses even in half (let alone by 90%) by having a few engineers spend a few weeks rewriting some components, don't you imagine they've probably set about doing that already?
Re-casting a discussion in terms of greenhouse gas emissions or energy use doesn't change any of this - saving energy generally means saving money, unless it takes more expensive resources (such as 100s of humans, who have to spend hundreds of months re-writing code in C++, while they, their families, and dependents emit tons upon tons of greenhouse gases, use electricity, buy groceries, and so-on and so-forth). The cheapest solution certainly isn't always the most environmentally friendly solution (such as when negative externalities are involved - lower labor and pollution standards in China, for example, that make a less "green" product manufactured there less costly in the US), but a vastly more expensive solution that no company in its right mind would implement isn't necessarily greener just because it might save some electricity and a few servers once it was implemented.
Shoveling bits does suck. The software world can however still be very profitable, enjoyable, and rewarding if you are 1) a real innovator and entrepreneur with a sense of your market (and thus get rewarded for turning great ideas into great products or great companies), 2) a brilliant computer scientist (and thus get rewarded for solving the problems that are too hard for other engineers or developers to solve), or 3) first and foremost a domain specialist (and only secondarily a software developer/engineer/etc.), in which case you are likely to get rewarded for the fact that you can bring your domain knowledge to play, and you just happen to use technology as a tool to solve the domain problems that you are really getting paid to solve.
Or else you can get on the IT or engineering management track and perhaps make a decent salary but probably be bored as hell with your life.
All the enjoyable experiences I've had in tech-related industries basically fit into one of the above categories. The people who hated their jobs that I have seen in the industry were usually basically what you said - bit shovelers - guys gluing together other people's products at non-tech companies, grunt-line implementers inside tech companies, and so on. Basically, not the kind of jobs I'd encourage my kids to aspire to.
So if you really love technology, you need to figure out if you are temperamentally and intellectually suited for categories 1 or 2 above. If not, then I suggest you consider developing some deep domain knowledge and expertise in an area you love and that has a significant market out there.
I thought every app on the App Store was rated 4 stars ... or at least it seems that way! The ratings system must be pretty gummed up, since an app has to be completely non-functional to get less than 3 and a half stars.
Agreed - Apple is more the exception than the rule here. Lots of other manufacturers that have been relatively innovative over the years are still being crushed out of their businesses. Companies are now going beyond just outsourcing their manufacturing to China, and are replacing American engineering teams with Chinese engineering teams because to compete as an American company that outsources to China against the companies that operate in China with vastly less overhead than you have is nearly impossible. Their engineers, management, finance and sales staff are paid less than your line workers would have been in the US, their health care costs are drastically lower, etc.
The logical end of this in many industries is more like the Lenovo story than the Apple story - the brands, which have value in the Western marketplace, will eventually be eaten up by Chinese manufacturing companies to market their goods themselves.
Not sure if your argument would still hold up if you factored in all the negative externalities from something like coal (i.e. cost of air pollution, etc.). While your points about nuclear are obviously correct in the short run, I would not be so quick to make a prediction about the rest of human history - some changes in legislation, perhaps spurred by climate change or related issues could easily shift those economics around enough to lead to new investment in nuclear power again.
And what led you to think I didn't realize that? Wow, a bunch of people replied to my reply, not realizing that I fully got the point of the GP's (IndustrialComplex's) irony and was seconding it. Sigh, so much for the people criticizing MY reading comprehension.
CNN does suck. But I remember a time when they actually wanted to broadcast real news. I remember CNN in the first Gulf War.
The problem is that CNN's decided it's more profitable to try to be a mid-left version of Fox News, and it just sucks. And to have no fewer than two anchors that look like Barack Obama (news exec thoughts: young Americans like Barack Obama - we need some half-black anchors on our cable news channel!).
CNN doesn't suck in the same way that Fox News sucks i.e. making up fake news, putting the world's biggest idiots and pussies on TV and call them representatives of the liberal point of view, up against baseball bat wielding, ballkicking Republicans. No, CNN sucks in a wholly lame, sucky, devoid of content way. They just don't care about news anymore. Kind of MTV has nothing to do with music videos.
And to clarify further - that doesn't mean Microsoft copied the code from ImageMaster - there are lots of other potential original sources for these sections of code. But clearly this goes way beyond a couple similar function names.
Wow, did you even look at the current example? You must be braindead if you don't realize there is a common origin.
Yes, we all know that the Romans and Greeks never slaughtered all the residents of a rebellious city upon taking it, and raped and enslaved the women who remained. No, nothing like that happened in ancient times at all. Combat was noble, and only men with weapons in their hands were killed, nobly and civilly.
This is clearly not the intent of the trademark system. The fact that it's technically a sound mark rather than a trademark is basically obfuscation, since what they are trying to do is use the soundmark to protect a business practice of making duck calls during tours around a city.
I mean, do you think you should be able to trademark the *act* of drawing a duck while taking a tour around a city? Of course not. A trademark doesn't cover the act of drawing a duck, it covers a specific image of a specific duck.
Just because something was at some point a reasonably creative marketing gimmick doesn't mean it's entitled to intellectual property protection. The guys that copied you may be lame losers, but I see nothing here that should be protectable IP.
The question wasn't whether there was an illegal organ trade in Israel. There is an illegal organ trade in quite a few countries - I've heard of it existing in parts of Africa including South Africa, as well as being fairly widespread in India. Israel has actually prosecuted people for it, however (the article you reference is here and it describes the prosecution of some people involved in this).
There is a big gap however from saying there has been a trade in organs in a country to saying that the country's government or military actually are killing people *in order to* harvest their organs (a claim I have seen in this thread). It's almost as big a gap to saying that the government or military are harvesting organs of people who happen to have died or been mortally wounded in conflict in order to profit.
I don't really believe the amount of money involved would be sufficient for a government or military to take this sort of risk to their reputation to do something like this. The Israeli military budget is over $13B US.
What some unscrupulous individuals may have done to line their pockets, however, is another story. As an American Jew, I actually think any legitimate claims that organs were illegally harvested in Israel should be investigated and any perpetrators prosecuted. If somebody illegally harvested organs from a dead/mortally wounded person, they should go to jail. If somebody actually killed somebody to harvest their organs, they should be imprisoned for the rest of their life.
The problem is that is not a well-defined concept in all jurisdictions, and opens the door to problems (for example, somebody else claiming copyright on a derived work and suing your users). More people are going to be able to use and benefit from your software if you just slap a BSD license on it than if you don't bother or just say "it's public domain", and it takes zero incremental work to do so.
It is illegal front running IF it looks at their brokerage business order flow and trades ahead of that. Do you have evidence that they are doing that? If so, you should be talking to the SEC, not posting on Slashdot.
Lots of firms implement high frequency trading strategies based on statistical probabilities of short term market movements, and order book depth analysis. These strategies are usually capital constrained, and a lot of work to implement and maintain, but can be levered up and earn a relative huge return on a modest amount of capital utilized, when implemented properly.
Of course, they can also fail to get timely execution of orders if there are 5 people going after the same trades, in which case 4 of you are likely to lose your arses. Unlike other areas, high frequency strategies are often (though not always) a winner-takes-all world where your network latency and code execution speed are measured in microseconds, not seconds, or even milliseconds.
I actually checked tomorrow's flight to see what they thought of a general flight on this route, without benefit of today's real-time data. That's what led me to conclude something is off.
Last 2 times I have flown afternoon flights on Continental from Newark to Charleston, SC I have experienced delays on both legs of the trip there and back. The flights back from Charleston to Newark have been delayed by at least 2 hours both times. I fly this route regularly and it's very frequently delayed (>6 of the 12 times I've flown it in the last year). In fact, last time (2 weeks ago), my 6pm flight took off at 8pm, and the 4pm flight still hadn't taken off yet.
I checked this route in their system and it says it is 85% on-time, 11% delayed less than an hour, and 4% delayed an hour or more.
I am highly skeptical of this service, based on that initial result. I'll try it out the next few times I fly though.