People here are having a good laugh at HFT's expense and overlooking the actual issue here: someone trusted a single tweet to be a good enough of a source for a news event like this.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge lover of HFT either, it's just that in this case it didn't cause the prblem, lack of fact-checking of any sort did. Think about it for a moment, if you were working at any of these banks and saw a tweet saying that there has been an explosion at white House, would you:

A) Make a decision right away upon seeing the tweet
OR
B) Type "whitehouse explosion" into google or just open up BBC or CNN or any major news channel and confirm that this has actually happen before staring to move about vast sums of money based,

I would somehow be able to understand it if it was their webpage that was hacked and somebody posted a headline about the fake attack or something but it's not even that, it's a tweet. A single tweet from a single source.

This is a case of major user error. I am not the boss of these traders but if I were they'd be out of jobs right now. I understand that speed is a key factor in these things - and that is largely because of the way HFT operates so it certainly has its problems. However, checking something like this only takes a few seconds and should really be the first thing anybody does upon reading such news from a god damn microblog.

To conclude: Yes, HFT made the situation worse and caused to escalate so quickly but the decision that led to that chaos was still made by a human or humans.

I'm aware of this. But even those people still accept certain core beliefs such as there being a supernatural being who can somehow interact with the world around us yet not be detected in any way, the idea of souls, heaven and so on. All of these are beliefs which any truly skeptic person would have to abandon because there's not a shred of evidence to support them. That's why I think the term "skeptic christian" is BS.

I'm sorry but that's just silly. Christianity (and pretty much all religions for that matter) is a belief system which rests on accepting stuff on faith, ie.without proper evidence to support them.

Anybody can label the as "skeptic" but if one is wiling to believe in virgin birth, non-existent floods, angels, walking on water and people rising from the dead (just to name a few) all because it says so in an old book then one hardly fills the criteria of a skeptic.

That is not to say that belief in a god/gods is altogether incompatible with skepticism. It's possible to be a deist and a skeptic but believing in any religion that makes testable claims about the universe around us means that if you want to truly be skeptic you need to apply same standard of evidence to those claims as to all others - and failing to do so and reverting to "well this is what I believe so I don't question it" -mentality is intellectually dishonest.

The only christian skeptics in the true sense of the word are ex-christian skeptics.

Okay, let's have a thought experiment. Let's say that some unkown force starts to bomb places in the US. They claim they're targetting only "militants" and warmongerers but every now and again they happen to kill the entire family, a few neughbours etc. Are you telling me that this would not cause everyday citizens to become enraged at whoever it was that was doing this? And that the recruitment officials wouldn't use it as a marketing tactic to get young men (and women) to enlist? Because that's essentially what you're doing right now. And your take on this seems to be along the lines of "well, we can't reason with their ideological leaders, so we might just as well not give a fuck about what the general populace thinks of us."

You're missing something important here: jihadists don't appear out of nowhere. These kids don't list "suicide bomber" as their dream job when they grow up. They're recruited - just like american soldiers. The difference is, recruiting is not exactly hard when you can just walk into a neighborhoodthat recently had a drone strike and find the relatives/friends of those who've died on that strike and start talking to them about vengeance.

So it is a legitimate question to ask whether or not the drone strikes are acutally helping or just making the problem bigger. No matter what the media would often want you to believe the world isn't neatly black and white. Believe it or not the way your foreign policy is conducted affects how people all over the globe judge you and if you're seen as the world police who will use whatever means to destroy those who disagree with it with little to no regard for civillian lives... well, let's just say you're not making life any easier for yourselves.

You tried the "The communists hate because they hate us and you can't reason with them so we must destroy them all" -tactic with much greater force in Vietnam and it failed there. And islam played no part in that whatsoever. All you've done now is replaced the Viet Cong with terrorists/jihadists and communism with islam.

Maybe it's time to try something else? Just a thought.

That doesn't seem likely. In fact, I think this is a side effect of Microsoft preparing to integrate the 100 million msn messenger users into Skype. Somebody has been trying to ensure that the accounts will overlap nicely and has obviously made a huge mistake which allows this to happen.

Yes but many libertarians seem to have no issue whatsoever with Ron Paul wanting to ban abortion (he would want to overturn Roe v. Wade and has co sponsored 4 separate bills to "To provide that human life shall be deemed to exist from conception.")

I've never understood all the hype about Ron Paul. The guy has some good ideas but also very many that are close to sheer lunacy (many of them being because he's very much a religious conservative. Among other things he sponsored the original Marriage Protection Act).

Anti-IP or not, I could never vote for someone who wants to mess with people's right to their own bodies. No-one can honestly hold a "pro-life" (quotes because I think the very term itself is loaded) stance and at the same time claim that they're for small government. It doesn't get bigger than government telling you what to do and what not to do with your own body.

"If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people." -House

I get and fully agree with your point about gullibility being the real issue. However what you're proposing (ignoring the religious part of the matter) sounds a bit like saying that instead of getting treatment for an illness a person should simply switch to a healthier lifestyle and the disease will magically fix itself.

Complicity to auhtority is an integral part of most religions. And I'm not talking just about muslims here. Members of the abrahamic religions usually gorw up in an enviroment where they are told that their view of the world is the correct one and everyone else - no matter what kind of reasoning or evidence they might use - is wrong. Likewise they are most often than not told that questioning anything told to them by their religious leaders is wrong. No adult would swallow all of this without questioning it but the mind of a child is extremely gullible, especially when it comes to information coming from his/her own parents so they come to accept it as the norm.

Don't get me wrong. The problem isn't that these people are stupid. The problem is that they've been told to never question anything that comes from a position of authority, no matter how much they dislike it. Many of the Iranian people probably disagree with the regime but - just like they're afraid to question the existence of God (in public) - they're afraid to question their leaders, no matter how vastly they might outnumber the people in power. Some people see and understand this but they tend to escape from the country instead of risking their lives (and the lives of their families) by trying to speak up because they also know that the majority of their fellow men will - out of fear - be demanding their public execution rather than standing with them.

That is essentially what organized religions are used for by both religious and govermental leaders: as a tool to control people and make them obidient and fearful. So while I agree with you that the true problem is indeed gullibility: I don't agree that religioin is a red herring because as far as I can see the vast majority of these people wouldn't be so gullible if it wasn't for their religion and religious upbringing.

Recent leaked documents have revealed the email sent by CIA to the Iranian officials, it reads:

"These are not the drones you are looking for, move along."

I cannot speak for everybody, but at least with me your statement is more than true.

I listen to a wide variety of music, but metal and its extreme forms are my favorite genre overall. And most of the bands I love I would never had heard about if it wasn't for piracy. Bands like that aren't much played on the radio and I as a stundent can't really afford to buy unkown albums to sample them out.

So, what I do is I pirate much of the works of larger bands that I know are doing well and I support them by paying 50-100 dollars of their concert tickest every once in a while when they happen to come around here and perhaps by buying a t-shirt.

But the cds that I buy are mostly from smaller, unkown bands that a friend or a friend of a friend has recommended and I have decided they're worth supporting. I also subscribe to Spotify premium which alone costs me 120 euros a year but allows me to listen to thousands of artists on my cellphone (I don't even use my mp3-player anymore). And even thouygh I haven't bought a dvd in over a year, I go to the movies a lot.

So yes, I pirate a lot of stuff. But despite that and largely because of that I spoend a lot money on music and art in general, I haven't done exact figures but a fair estimate (counting all the cds, concert tickets, plays, movies and so on) would be that in the past year I've spent in between 500-700 euros on art. I'd gladly spend even more, but I can't afford it,

These (among huge concerns for things like privacy) is also the reason why I am a member and a supporter of the Finnish Pirate Party.

Just my 2 (euro)cents on the matter.

As is usual with these types of news the story has been blown out of proportion. Other then some social security numbers, nothing "personal" was leaked. The information in the leak ios mostly data like adresses and phone numbers which are puiblicly available in the first place.

Yes, someone could in theory use the leaked SSNs to do something malicious but that's extremely difficult. Don't get me wrong, I don't like the fact that these sorts of leaks are becomming more and more common even though you'd think the security would've improved by now, but this time it seems we got lucky. Hopefully whoever is responsible for the security of whereever the data was leaked has learned his/her lesson.

Also, as far as I know this was done by a single individual, not "anonymous".

That's one of the things I always wonder when you get these types of "X causes autism" studies. These people treat autism as if it's a thing that can be contracted, that you can somehow "catch" autism from something (like vaccines).

Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not a medical professional), but isn't it like OP said that autism is indeed a genetic defect. This means that it cannot be caught after birth. You either have it or you don't. As far as I know excessive exposure to radiation is one of the only things that can potentially damage your DNA in each cell, but that's not systematic as the damage done to each cell is random so it usually causes things like tumors (or death) but should not be able to cause autism.

So if my understanding of things is correct - again, please correct me it's not - the only studies about "causes" of autism that have any credibility are those which link some acitivity done by the mother or the father to autism, because that's the only thing that can cause genetic defects. And even if that was what the study was going aftert it would still be a load of BS because there is no way a person spending too much time in front of a screen can damage his/her genes.

I understand why regular people blame things like vacciness for causing autims since it's is usually diagnosed when the child is a couple years old, usually some time after they've gotten their first vaccinations. But they're still every bit as wrong

There seems to be a strange cult of personality surrounding Ron Paul and a lot of people who see him as a huge revolutionarist and something completely new. Well, here are some reasons why I'd never vote for Paul:

1) Paul claims to be a constioutionalist and a libertarian but he opposes the seperation of church and state, apparently wishing to emphasize that america is a christian nation. He is also claming that the constitution is ""replete with references to God.", which is false.

2) He is a creationist who says that evolution is "just a theory". Now, I'm not sure whether or not he actively seeks to increase the teaching of creationism in schools (I think not) but this is an important point because the man is a doctor and calls himself "a scientist" while evidently he does not have a firm grip of either the definition of a scientific theory or genetics, which is something that modern medicine is heavily reliant on and which could not function without evolution. Paul should, as a doctor, have a far better understanding of these mechanisms than a layperson, yet he chooses to ignore the reality and put his own religious views ahead of it while still having the guts to call himself a "scienticst". This point alone demonstrates such levels of cognitive dissonance that I have a hard time understanding how anyone on Slashdot could actually vote for this guy.

3) He wants abortion to be banned on a federal level because in his words "If you can't protect life then how can you protect liberty?". There are several problems with this proposition. Now, I am pro-choice, but I have no problem as such with presidential candidates being against abortion. What I do have a poroblem with is when they seek to legislate their own ethics with no consideration of the consequences. Paul is a doctor, he should be more than aware that there are several means to abort the pregnancy other than the medical procedure, all of them (such as drinking excessive amounts of alcohol) are widely known and all of them are far more dangerous to the mother than an abortion performed by medical professionals. Now, Paul seems to think that banning abortions will end them, which is not true. Making abortions illegal will perhaps make some women reconsider it but it will also cause signifficant harm to a lot of women who end up choosing a back-alley abortion.

In addition, it's inconsistent with his stance on death penalty. According to Paul, the states should be allowed to decide whether or not to use the death penalty but the states should not be allowed to decide whether to alllow abortion. Not only is this stance ass-backwards (IMO the death penalty shopuld be banned on federal level and abortion allowed), it's also a conflicting position. According to him it seems, it should never be allowed to end the "life" of a couople weeks old fetus but it's alright for the state to terminate living adults if they so choose.

4) Paul claims to oppose "congressional overspenfdng" and claims that the goverment should not interfere in business at all, yet for example in 2007 he requested about 400 million dollars in earmarks, including 8 million dollars for the marketing of american shrimp. (source yes, I know, Fox News as a source is stupid but the figures come from the wall street journal)

5) He does not suppor equal rights for minorities, wishing to repeal affirmative action kee the IRS from investigating whether private schools used race as factor in denying entrance,

6) His enviromental policies would cause even more strain to the enviroment than the current ones. Among other things he supports off shore drilling, building more oil refineries, mining on federal lands, no taxes on the production of fuel, and would stop conservation efforts that could be a "Federal obstacle" to building and maintaining refineries. He has also sought to amend the Clean Air Act, repeal the Soil and Water Conservation Act of 1977, and to amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to "restrict the jurisdiction of the United States over the discharge of dredged or fill material to discharges into waters".

7) He wishes to withdraw the us form the United Nation

8) He has introduced legislation that would keep the Federal Government "from planning, developing, implementing, or administering any national teacher test or method of certification and from withholding funds from States or local educational agencies that fail to adopt a specific method of teacher certification." In a separate piece of legislation he seeks to "prohibit the payment of Federal Education assistance in States which require the licensing or certification of private schools or private school teachers." So basically the federal government can't regulate teaching credentials and if states opt to require them for private schools they get no aid. So he thinks it's a good idea for teachers with no certification to teach in private schools that are allowed to discriminate on the basis of race.

Now, I admit he does have some good points when it comes to military spending but the above mentioned points (not to mention the whole thing with the gold standard) make me wonder why anyone, especially people as educated and thoughtful as the /. crowd, would want to vote for him.

But then again, I'm not american so maybe I just don't get it. But if I were, I would not want Ron Paul to lead my country.

Maybe so, but tell me: how is that different from history? Ever since the birth of organized societies, wealth has always equalled power.

I dislike Apple too but it's not as if they invented greed.

And unlike Sony, they aren't sending cease and desist letters to kinect hackers.- -And they could easily be far worse patent trolls than they currently are.

That still doesn't make them ethical though. Just because someone is not being as much of a douchebag as they potentially could be does not mean they're automatically ethical. That'd be like saying that a dictator is ethical because he only executed half of the citizens.

The Egyptions protests have demonstrated the incredible utility of social networking sites in enabling a large pool of people to organize around a common idea.

As nice as that does sound it's not true. The egyptian protests had at the most 300 000 people involed. Now, while that's a lot of people we must remember that Egypt has nearly 80 million inhabitants so compared to thatt the protests were actually pretty small. And more importantly: most of the people arrived to the streets after the social networking sites had been blocked.

The media seems to be painting a picture of some sort of revolution facilitated by social networking sites while completely forgetting the fact that no revolution actually took place: Mubarak is gone but the millitary regime that he hailed from is still in power and in fact stronger than ever (actually, the reason the millitary allowed and even endorsed the protests was that Mubarak wanted his son - who has no ties with the military - to be his successor and that angered most of the people in the armed forces). In addition, as I alreasdy stated the 300 000 protestors is not a major achievement for "social media". There have been protest even in middle-east before the era of the internet where millions of people joined the protests, such as the 1979 revolution of Iran. The crowd in Cairo never swelled to the point that it involved a substantial portion of the city.