You know protecting whatnot is all good and fine. I'd just like it to happen in a fashion that doesn't clog up court time and does not cost the taxpayer money. But besides that, suing each other isn't accomplishing anything other then to finance the Lawyer industry. The issue, if you want to put it so succinctly is, that you Americans stopped doing stuff (like cars, electronics, etc.) and increasingly rely on an industry of imaginary property and lawsuits. The issue with that is that ultimately imaginary property and lawsuits do produce nothing of tangible inherent worth. You'll figure that out sooner or later I'm sure.

Because the judicial system is paid for by you, the taxpayer. So instead of doing important things, like processing violent crime, the courts get DDOSed now by a bunch of companies who like to play games with the system and you pay for it to happen.

This whole cyclic undirected graph of lawsuits with varying levels of reference cycles will never be resolved. At some point pretty soon it'll just deadlock out, unable to move one suit forward because it depends cyclically on another suit.

I won't create an account with any of the gazillion of news sites out there just to read what they feel compelled to vomit on the internet. Since I'm of late only seeing the NY times registerwall whenever I click one of their links, I simply stopped clicking any link going to the NY Times. For my intends and purposes, the NY times is dead online. In fact, if I get around to, I'll put links to it on my spamfilter so I won't see them and accidentially click it.

If nothing happens, whoever implemented it sucks.

We've been applying genetic algorithms with ANNs for quite a while now, quite often also making groups of them cooperate. yawn?

If you somehow think that having user/password authentication would prevent you from being owned, then you're even more incompetent then the admins of the exploited memcached servers.

Yeah like... all these open a socket to listen to, and man, if somebody logs into it, they're like, owning your server! Geeze, what where mysql/ssh/postgres/ftp/etc. thinking?!!!

The EFF and Public Knowledge are doubtlessly on the relaxed side of copyright. Also doubtlessly the ASCAP is not in any way relaxed about copyright. In fact, it would seem that the ASCAP is a fervent pro-draconian-copyright troll.

The question isn't weather the EFF and Public Knowledge are radical contra-copyright. The question is who will be radically contra-copyright if the radical pro-copyright trolls force an equal opposition to emerge to their radical pro-copyright views. I've got doubts though that the EFF or Public Knowledge would be polarizable enough in the coming copycalypse. I'd peg them as mid-field. The Pirate Party (I'm a member of the swiss one) seems a much more natural contra pole to the pro-draconian-copyright trolls.

This tax exists, and it applies to participants in the market who're identified as pattern traders (are not holding on to stock more then 5 times a week for less then 24 hours). Their tax is 50% fixed. Not happy with that? Yeah, people like you'd like to have that tax be 99.999% or something I bet.

I looooove high volatility + CFDs where you can specify the lever yourself.

If you're only halfway serious about trading, you pick a broker with negligible commissions, like 0.008%, and anyway, you don't pay commission on canceled transactions.

You can look at it yourself.

2007: 42$, +2.94$ dividend
2008: 28$, +1.96$ dividend -14$ share drop
2009: 28$, +1.96$ dividend

Congrats, you've gotten -17% profit (we call that loss) on your Buy&Hold investment. Assuming AT&T doesn't drop any further, you'll have to wait anything between 2 to 4 years to get back to 0%, during which time, AT&T could of course drop further, removing your return to 0% to some very far future indeed. It could also rise, but really, it's just pure gambling at that point. Because if you get out now, you have lost. If the stock drops further, you've lost. If you get out before you're back to 0%, you've lost. You're counting on your luck now to make a profit? Like really? Wouldn't you rather go to vegas or something? Buy&Hold does not generally have a positive expectation for earnings, nor any sufficient risk controls. Of course if you do monitor your stock and get rid of it at an opportune moment, you're not doing Buy&Hold now, are you?

Sorry to thinking to fast for you, but in applying negative interests interest, it helps to think of the drops down from the perspective what's required to get back up.

You're ignoring the teensy tiny "and consequent losses". If Microsoft makes IE insecure, it's not going to cost them any % of their networth overnight. Besides, an automated trading system isn't going to deal with all your risk capital at once, just a tiny percentage, and if that doesn't work out, you're going to adjust it BEFORE you've run out of any money to trade with. Anybody who did it in any other fashion, has gone out of the automated trading business reeeeaaaal quick.