The HFTs are buying in response to your order. Before you've even bought the good. They pay to get your orders before your orders are even filled.

It's a straight up insider trading contract between the exchanges and the HFTs. The fact that it is carried out over the course of microseconds does not alter the basic dynamics of the scheme, which amounts to the exchanges engaging in insider trading at the expense of their customers.

I'm guessing it's because they honestly believe what they are doing is necessary to keep America safe.

This is like the banks and sub-prime lenders "honestly believing" that house prices would go up forever and money would always be cheap.

Read my lips: Everyone involved knew exactly what was going on.

Everyone inside the NSA with so much as a high school Diploma, when encountering even a low level program, knew that it was fundamentally wrong, probably illegal, and corrosive to the civic society. You don't even need to know what civic society is to know that tapping and permanently recording all calls in the US is both dangerous and wrong.

The on the record denials are effectively the NSA aping of the likes of John Corzine's claims of "We have no idea where the money is", despite being the man who took it right out of customers accounts. I dwell on the financial crisis because the breakdown in the rule of law, propriety, common sense, and all morality there is a mirror image and ultimately a fore-runner of the excesses and lies we now see in the NSA.

All that Keeping America Safe is BS. This is all about budgets, contracts, staffing levels, prestige and power seeking on the part of an entire city block of executives, officers, and IT workers throughout the NSA. The purpose of the NSA is to procure BMWs and range rovers for its management, and for favored private contractors and sub-contractors. That is why the price of a incorporated city is being spent on all these ludicrously overblown surveillance programs.

Forget the lies. Follow the money. Men will do anything, say anything, to anyone to keep such a gravy train flowing.

All it will take is one incident, one incident of a ride-sharing assaulting or mugging one of their passengers or vice versa, and the whole operation will collapse overnight.

And rightly so. At least there is some quality control/accountability among licenced Taxi-Drivers.

But to learn what "Darmok" means, you'd have to have an entire comic book or something -- "Darmok on the ocean" means something like "loneliness." "Darmok and Jilhad at Tanagra" means something like "people coming together to face a common obstacle or foe or problem." "Darmok and Jilhad on the ocean" means something like "friendship," perhaps "friendship resulting from overcoming a shared problem."

I'm not an early educator, so I don't know how children are actually taught what words like "loneliness" or "friendship" mean, but my understanding is that they learn them through stories and picture books. Looking at a simple childs picture book, it's a not a stretch to suggest this is how a sptry like Darmok would be learned.

Except this is terrible. The point is precisely what you identified in English -- we have idioms all over the place, and that's actually how most languages work. So, if the universal translator fails to work for this alien language, it should fail for ALL languages, including English. That's the stupidity in the premise.

I think this is being too pedantic. The universal translator is meant to translate, presumably language with things like atomic nouns, adjectives, etc. Basically the Chomsky model of language.

And in the episode, it does actually do this. The problem was that the sentences themselves did not make sense without a deeper context -- without actually having read the Darmok and Jalad picture book. The translator was basically translating "Coloured green ideas sleep furiously" or "Buffalo, buffalo buffalo buffalo , buffalo buffalo buffalo." or "Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra".

By the way, speaking of Chomsky, his Universal Grammar was challenged recently by the description of the language of a particularly obscure Amazonian tribe which seemingly breaks the rules of Universal Grammar. Once again, I note that, especially compare to some of the standard technoballe in Start Trek (FTL Drives, teleportation, psychics), the idea of an alien species who communicate through idioms, methaphor, analogies, etc is not actually that much of a stretch.

If Karpeles was smart enough, he would have been careful to avoid the accounts of Russian Oligarchs etc, and instead simply have stolen money from unconnected, largely unmonied Libertarians who have little to no legal recourse. Since there is no society, these types would have little means of coming back at him.

Try to imagine "bootstrapping" the alien language in this episode. How do kids learn who Darmok is in order to understand what he represents in the many different metaphors and analogies in which his name could appear?

The same way they learn about triangles. Somebody shows them a picture.

And if they never bothered to tell the kids the actual stories of Darmok, then within a couple generations, no one would remember who Darmok was.

You mean like Charles Boycott, or Teddy bears, or The Three Princes of Serendip. I think it's more than possible to pick up the meanings of works without knowing any of their original context. Perhaps your knowledge would be the poorer, but you would still be able to hold a conversation. The conversation we are holding right now, in english, uses dozens of words which come from another language altogether, and to whose original context and meaning most English speakers are oblivious of.

Faced with this, it is not such a stretch to put a language based on idioms into an episode of a science fiction show.

Amidst all the outright ridiculous scientific technobabble fans are prepared, nay eager, to accept, I find myself surprised to see how many of the same will turn down innovative and well though out linguintic science fiction from the same show.

This reminds me of how a lot of people claim that water on alien worlds is "essential" for life. Sometimes I think there is a dearth of imagination among the scientific classes.

Which is just the opposite of what Martin Luther King said which is that if you break laws protesting an unjust law, you should gladly go to jail.

He set up a laptop in a cabinet and downloaded files. The charges -- at best -- should have concerned interference with property. There have been MIT pranks which warranted more serious charges.

Instead Schwartz was faced with a 35 year sentence and the full weight of a Federal prosecution. It's as if Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, and instead of a $10 fine, found herself charged under anti-terrorism legislation with a 15 year prison sentence for disobeying TSA regulations and a $10 million fine. In other words, a cruel and unusual punishment. Even Dr. King would have found it difficult to rally support in the face of that kind of state reaction to protest.

This is precisely why Pearson dropped Occulus after the buyout. We had a cool piece of tech, and a company ready to deliver it the the place best suited to it -- video games.

Now we have a multi-billion dollar social media site willing to spend more on the marketing and propaganda budget for the deal itself than they are on the actual technology. Hence this article.

Facebook is the Walmart of the Internet. Occulus should have taken their cue from Snapper and walked away.

Not just any somebody. This particular somebody had been instrumental in organizing public opposition to the SOPA act. Schwartz was targeted by the Justice Department in a clear cut case of political suppression.

As we all know, the Department under Holder and Breuer has better things to do with their time(banks, guns, etc), but instead chose to politicize their offices instead of upholding justice.

Because those running modern industries are intimidated by the simplicity and reliability of the services that came before.

I'm talking about Grammatical constructions of headlines. You're talking about TFA. It appears that one of us has forgotten what Slashdot threads are for.

"Aardvark Oppressed Anthill Insects in Fed Excavation Forages."

That's about as much as I understood from that headline. Is the headline talking about China-prosecuted Internet-Policement or how China Prosecuated an Internet Policeman. Or did China Prosecute the Internt, by paying a policeman to do it.

I'm sick of these Lumpen-Intelligentia creative disasters appearing everywhere like buzzfeed headlines on a sidebar. For god's sake, try to write something people can read without needing to do double takes.

As somebody who studies language - I agree. You can't make analogies in the first place without a functional language. And if you have a functional language, why make up analogies? And seriously, how can the communicate complex ideas? Can you imagine them trying to write a book explaining microprocessor design?

Well I'm a mathematician, and basically you're wrong. It is far easier for me to present 3 concrete examples of a problem, the method of solution, and then write down the general case than it is to bother with trying to define the minutae of required to functionally explain the general case and how the method actually works. Most people will learn by following the examples and through them "grokking" the general method than will ever learn from reading a formally descriptive algorithm of the process.

Concrete example: Demonstrate base ten addition by writing the examples (152+27 , 132+45, 174+19, 199+36, 999+1) on the board, vs demonstrate base ten addition by discussing the properties of carrying units, overflow, and adding columns.

Even more conrete example: Demonstrate a triangle by drawing one, vs demonstrate a triangle by decribing it as a three sided figure made by straight line segements whose endpoints are joined cyclically.

One of the things that made Picard such a memorable character is that, once or twice a season, he would break out of the British Sea captain shell and reveal the character beneath, particularly the flaws and weaknesses.

In this regard, some of the best Picard Episodes are, to obviously begin with

- Chain of Command II (There are Four Lights!)
- Family (Picard reveals how much his Bord capture affected him)
- Tapestry (Reveals Picard's stabbing and its effect on his life)

However, I find one of the most striking aspects of Picard's character is revealed while he is offscreen, by Worf, in an otherwise fairly corny 5th season episode called "The Perfect Mate".

PAR LENOR: Perhaps your captain would care to invite us to join him for dinner this evening...

WORF: The captain dines alone.

It's almost a throwaway line, but manages to crystalise a lot about Picard's behaviour and relationships with the rest of the crew. He's never too close to any of them, or anyone, personally, but instead lives and relates to people through his leadership role as Captain, an effectively Father figure to the crew. There's a pay-off made on this during the last Episode (All Good Things - II) where Picard finally joins one of the poker games.

However, I think that the single best Picard moment related to this is his wordless reaction on hearing of Ensign Ro's defection, at the very end of the penultimate episode (Preemptive Strike). Ro betrays Star Fleet for personal, patriotic, emotional reasons, and does so precisely because Picard professionally pushed her into an undercover mission.

Here Picard finally tastes the bitter pill of consequence that he's been dishing out to aliens and miscreants for seven seasons, as his adoptive officer-daughter Ro finally makes her personal, matured, self-determined choice to not live the rest of her life in his perfect Star Fleet family, or by his cherished Federation rules. And after being betrayed by someone he trusted, for reasons he understands but cannot accept, Picard's livid silence makes for a deliciously dramatic conclusion. A crowning moment, no doubt.

Or maybe, in order to play Minecraft, etc with an Occulus Rift, or eventually play them at all, everyone would first need to sign up for a Facebook account. Notch made the right call on this one.