I'm not sure it's Washington.

We've had a huge amount of legislation passed over the last 15 years or so where there were significant complaints that it lacked proportionality, limits and oversight and the mantra from the politicians was "Trust us, we won't abuse the powers" and "If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear"

I suspect that there are things to be released that will show that not only were these obviously meaningless platitudes but that the people saying them knew they were meaningless.

For example, there may be memos along the lines of "once we've got RIPA passed we'll be able to get this information"

It's possible to simply accelerate directly away from an object and never reach speeds anywhere close to escape velocity, until you are far enough away that you have simply exceeded (that now much lower) escape velocity threshold.

This doesn't work for a black hole though.

Using the metaphor of the 2-D rubber sheet universe the sheet has become so deformed that the neck of the hole that the mass has formed closes up. If you're on the "wrong side" of the now closed neck then you can't escape because any path loops around without allowing you out.

In the case of space-time, time stops at the neck so even if you have limitless fuel the "escape point" always seems infinitely far away as you travel towards it.

Lol, you seem convinced that by signing a treaty we signed away our rights to legislate within our borders. We didn't, I promise you.

Of course you didn't. What you did sign away was the right, except in certain restricted conditions, to treat foreign companies differently to domestic ones.

You can ban gambling, you can ban alcohol, hell, you can ban guns if you want to, the rest of the world thinks you ought to.

What you can't do is say "only American companies can sell guns to Americans"

Do countries try to push the boundaries, you bet, there are and have been numerous complaints to the WTO about the way China restricts foreign access to its internal markets. But China at least has the nonce to make it a borderline difficult case to prove.

The US is engaged in blatant protectionism - and the WTO doesn't allow protectionism.

It doesn't matter that the US's internal laws trump its treaty obligations as far as the US is concerned.

As far as the rest of the world is concerned that's the US's problem and it's up to them to deal with it.

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the US agreed to be bound by WTO agreements. It's violating those agreements and so, as a result, the financial harm that Antigua is suffering is to be compensated by allowing Antigua to violate some of the other conditions Antigua agreed to as part of the WTO.

The US can opt out of the WTO, nobody can stop them, but then Antigua doesn't need to get the WTO agreement to sell US copyrights because the WTO will no longer care about it. The US won't be in violation of WTO agreements because it's not part of the WTO treaty. Antigua won't be violating WTO agreements because the US is not part of the WTO.

These are possibly 35 allies where the US was given privileged access to telecommunications systems so they could investigate "terrorism".

And they abused that access.

The other 161 didn't give them that privileged access and so they weren't able to indulge in this wholesale phonetapping. They probably still tried but will only have got snippets of some conversations because tapping a mobile phone depend on either being close enough to the phone to intercept it's transmissions or tapping into the telecoms infrastructure after the radio phase.

If it were done properly - a room that can do a fairly rapid exchange of air with pure N2 - the person in the room wouldn't realized that they couldn't breathe before they were unconscious (and dead)

Hypothetically, room with constant gas exchange (normal air). Prisoner in room. At some point in time unknown to the prisoner you stop supplying air and start supplying pure N2.

Note that the heart will not beat once it's receiving unoxygenated blood so when breathing pure N2 (or He - people have killed themselves trying to get squeeky voices) unconsciousness occurs within a few seconds with the heart stopping very shortly after due to the reverse action of the lungs deoxygenating the blood.

Even resupplying oxygen after this moment will not cause the heart to restart. Only CPR, long enough to supply oxygenated blood to the heart, has any chance at all of revival and even that is extremely unlikely to work.

Actually, the single biggest danger with this would be someone entering the death chamber before the air was safe to breathe again. Humans in a totally anoxic environment are unconscious before they realize there is a problem and they don't get the "three minutes without air" due to the heart stopping.

Rabbits OTOH (and other burrowing mammals) are sensitive to low O2 and a rabbit will go manic when placed into an anoxic environment (and presumably will hold its breath although I don't know that for a fact)

(I'm also extremely anti-death-penalty)

If I have a runaway process that is either inflating the price due to buying or deflating the price due to selling then nominally, while it's running it looks like I'm making money. It's only when I stop and try to unwind my position does the price return to normal and I discover that what looked like an unrealized profit is actually a loss.

For HFT firms, I'd say that the primary alarm needs to be if you're building up positions. AFAICT, for Knight that would have been proof that things were wrong.

If I'm reading the various reports correctly they were also building up naked short positions, which was probably illegal. Again, an alarm for this when it first happened should have triggered a "Shit, I don't know what it's doing but it's illegal so we've got to shut it down"

So, there are eight production servers. How many configurations do you think they should have tested?

There are 256 ways of deploying a combination of the old and new code to those servers. Times two because the platform sending orders to those servers was changing too.

The old code was good, and the new code was good, the bad deployment was the problem.

Maybe even the order of deployment to those 8 servers matters - even if they're nominally identical I doubt they're exactly identical.

Ok. So there's around 200 million different configurations to test to make sure that it fails safe in all circumstances.

So there's a budget of around $2 per configuration test before the testing stops making financial sense even based on the huge losses that were incurred.

There were failures, undoubtedly, but they're not trivially avoidable just by saying "If they had followed best practices and done testing ahead of time, they would have known before losing hundreds of millions of dollars"

This is the typical management hindsight knee jerking that I was saying leads people into doing nothing and pushing decisions up the chain when things go wrong.

It's not 100% certain what happened when but my understanding was that the original fire continued to burn and, eventually, melted those high pressure gas lines. Only at that point was total destruction of the rig inevitable.

Had the original fire burned itself out due to lack of fuel (and I was wrong, it was oil that continued to be pumped into the initial fire that kept it burning, not gas) then the high pressure gas lines would not have melted and there would not have been the second explosion that destroyed the rig.

The problem with this is that they didn't know they were losing money.

The trading had gone haywire and they didn't understand why it was doing what it was doing but at the time it was happening they couldn't say if they were making or losing money.

They built up positions of billions of dollars and only once it was all unwound and settled were the losses finally known.

I can feel for the programmers and sysadmins. Maybe this was right - maybe pulling the plug out would prevent the unwinding of positions that would then make money for the firm.

I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't previous problems where programmers and admins had been criticized by management for "doing the wrong thing with hindsight" when they didn't understand what was going on. If you have that sort of management culture then the natural inclination becomes to do nothing and push the responsibility up the chain.

Similar disasters have happened in the past - one that springs to mind was Piper Alpha where the other nearby rigs continued to pump gas to it even when they could see it was on fire - because if you stop pumping it takes days and costs a fortune to get things back up and running and it might just have been an easily controllable fire.

There's a very fine line to be drawn between reacting to the unknown too soon and reacting too late. There's also a fine line between making a reasonable best guess with the facts available and just making a random guess.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha

The fire would have burnt out were it not being fed with oil from both Tartan and the Claymore platforms, the resulting back pressure forcing fresh fuel out of ruptured pipework on Piper, directly into the heart of the fire. The Claymore platform continued pumping until the second explosion because the manager had no permission from the Occidental control centre to shut down. Also, the connecting pipeline to Tartan continued to pump, as its manager had been directed by his superior. The reason for this procedure was the huge cost of such a shut down. It would have taken several days to restart production after a stop, with substantial financial consequences.

You seem to be missing the lapse rate in your calculations which is probably why you've got confused about something that has been completely settled for about 70 years, the physics has been understood for about 100 years and was predicted about 150 years ago.

Nobuyuki Tsujii

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6livoZENT4

I saw him at the BBC proms this year - totally awesome!

I'm not sure how the block is supposed to work. The buzzfeed article is on about how people are able to see where people live etc but I don't see how a block will help.

The block that seems to be being asked for is to block particular people - but anyone who wants to stalk someone can just register with a different account.

The buzzfeed article appears to be:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/linkedin-has-a-stalker-problem

The powerful are fine with inflation. They hold a wide range of assets, some of which will be inflation proof.

While their net wealth might go down in a time of high inflation, it will go down more slowly than the vast majority of people and the powerful's income is likely to be somewhat inflation proof allowing them to buy up yet more assets as people are forced to sell the few things they own that are inflation proof in order to raise funds for day to day living.