There is no platform that will satisfy all objectives; arguments can be made for Win, OSX and Linux.

Of course, my vote would be for Linux. Let's remember that this is for a high school. Octave is more than capable of serving as a matlab replacement.

R has now supplanted S-Plus as an industry-standard (at least academia-wise) statistical programming language, one I also use frequently.

Between octave and R, and the other general purpose programming languages that are a breeze to develop with in a Linux environment, there is a great deal of important scientific work you can do with free software.

Linux is also the only platform that makes sense when you start needing to crunch lots of data on many servers, especially with a small budget. Linux is standard on all academic clusters I have seen. Give these students the skills to manage data crunching on a small cluster of linux machines and you will do them a tremendous favour.

If you have some tools which are proprietary and specialised, you can easily set up a couple of windows/osx machines for their use specifically. But it's hard to beat the value of Linux as a general purpose scientific platform.

Yes, even though there is the "Safe Harbour" program for US-based companies to comply with the EU directive, it is unclear what laws are given priority.

On a side note, this might be why Canada decided to fully comply with the directive, presumably to encourage transatlantic businesses to locate data centers there. With strong privacy protection, a cold climate and plenty of renewable electricity, it is a wonder to me why there isn't a much stronger push for data centers...

Perhaps I'm oversimplifying, but the approach to privacy in the EU and US is fundamentally different. EU privacy laws involve explicit regulation of what can/cannot be done in many specific scenarios, while the US approach is much more 'laissez-faire'.

An important example of this is the EU Data Protection Directive requirement that personal data not be transferred to here-be-dragons, privacy-unsafe countries -- including the US. Some countries like Canada and Argentina brought their privacy legislation into compliance with the directive, while the US compromised and offered a voluntary "Safe Harbour" program that allows a US company to assert their compliance if they wish to do so.

The simple fact that US companies must work to achieve compliance with EU privacy laws, while i'm not aware of any similar problem for European companies in the US, would seem to me a good indication of their relative strength.

Well, "us", maybe in Switzerland or another direct democracy. In most of the rest of the world, it should be our elected representatives doing this. Vote for who you believe will enact change.

As a start, we need to reverse exactly this race-to-the-bottom thinking throughout the world. Slavery was long considered a necessary evil, since to eliminate it would be to reduce a region's 'competitiveness'. We see the same trend today of wages being squeezed while money floats effortlessly to a small tier at the top.

A small example: If banks want to move abroad to escape regulation? Fine. Revoke their license to conduct business in your country. Perhaps simplistic, but in principle, it should be as easy as that.

A one character typo should never, ever be capable of causing the damage that was done today. It is literally an affront to decades of research in numerous branches of computer science and engineering.

For starters, there are algorithms designed to deal with Byzantine agreement, used in a number of fields. While I'm not an aerospace engineer, to my knowledge this is used for example when a having to come to a decision on what to do given a number of sensors readings, when one or more could be not only failing, but showing arbitrary, incorrect behaviour.

This has been researched since the 1980s. Now compare that to a simple rule:

if (trade.value() > Constants.RIDICULOUSLY_LARGE_AMOUNT) Alert ("Um, are you sure about this?");

Great comment. The key problem you pointed out is the lack of accountability from those who are in a position to do serious damage.

Let financial "innovators" do whatever they want, with their own capital. If a financial institution has failed due to poor risk management, and is systemically important, I want to see every last cent of the personal assets of management stripped before a dime is contributed by the taxpayer. Then we'll see if risk management is taken seriously, and who are the real innovators and who are the turkeys flying in a tornado.

Of course equities are risky. So are operations. That does not give a doctor malpractice immunity if I die during a heart transplant because he confused the scalpel for a bone saw.

While there's a certain populist appeal there... i don't think it needs to go that far. Western societies have pretty robust ways of dealing with industries critical to the functioning of society, but somehow we cannot manage to bring banking and finance under this umbrella where it absolutely must be.

Doctors, lawyers, accountants and (real) engineers all have strict ethics rules and standards they must follow. They are personally liable for their conduct.

If an engineering firm builds a bridge for a county for $X, while taking a huge profit because the bridge was really built with a combination of super glue and balsa wood, I am pretty sure the whole firm will be done for, fortunes wiped out and many would go to prison.

Similarly fraudulent activity happens in the financial sphere and in the end we must bail them out with tax dollars because of all the damage they have done!

I feel like our whole society is standing on a financial balsa wood bridge, with the financial masters of the universe holding a big hammer ready to take out one of the supports if we dare threaten their right to "innovate".

It amazes me that the financial industry continually gets a free pass on matters that would result in public outrage towards any other industry that deals with people's livelihoods.

This explanation, whether true or not, is equivalent to saying that an airplane crashed because of a single faulty sensor.

Or a bridge fell due to one rusted bolt.

But, here, one fat finger led to the temporary destruction of nearly 1 trillion dollars of value! Would we tolerate such bogus explanations from aerospace engineers or architects? Why can we not demand the same from our financial "engineers"?

You can throw someone in prison for consuming an addictive narcotic, which is clearly bad for them. When you try to reduce oil consumption, it's an affront to the American way of life! An attack on freedom!

I have not owned a car in nearly 3 years. I now take transit and trains everywhere I go, both of which are powered by electricity.

I'm not suggesting that I am "better" than anyone by doing those things, I just personally prefer to not deal with the stress of being in a car. My point is that there are alternatives to just consuming more of a resource which is clearly becoming more difficult, costly and downright dangerous to extract (the mess from this spill is going to make the Athabasca oil sands seem like a Greenpeace-approved project)

I think it is mostly due to laziness on the part of American businesses and the administrative headache of dealing with different country-level regulations.

There are two markets for the American MBA: America, and not-America. When your average PHB looks at the potential money to be made in Canada selling products/services, he looks at it as going through a whole lot of effort to gain an (English-speaking) market a bit bigger than Texas (Quebec brings Canada's population up to 34m, but adding another language to the mix makes it even less desirable)

Once a business has saturated the US market and is looking to expand abroad, that's when we seem to get the goods, although I'm increasingly seeing US businesses bypass Canada and head for the UK market first.

This often works in reverse though -- many European businesses look at Canada as pseudo-European (or America-lite, depending on your viewpoint) and will test out products here first. For example, the Smart car was available in Canada long before it was available down in the US.

Thank you -- now please go back home and tell your friends, so that I don't have to see stale "eh?" jokes every time Canada is mentioned...

You are right, my rant did go astray and I realize that debt and equity are not the same thing. I am, however, trying to explain things from the perspective of a small business owner, you know, the little guy that the financial industry is walking all over.

If we reverted to a very old fashioned banking system, 3% on deposits, 6% loans, bankers on the golf course at 3pm, i would be better off. With all the "innovation" and technology giving us "liquidity" in the debt and equity markets, what do i see? My deposits at 0.1% and loans up at 10 or higher. I wouldn't dream of putting good money into what is clearly a rigged equity market. How can I support anything that continues to push in that direction when my most basic financial needs are being neglected?

Give me capital at a decent price, (i.e. stop looting it into bonus pools) and you'll have my support to "innovate" all you want.

And regarding being well-capitalised, I have money and cash-flow, but I wanted to get a credit line so that I could have a life line while taking on some riskier jobs. Of course, at 8-9%, I consider it unacceptably expensive to do so, and so I operate much more conservatively than I otherwise would.

Parent characterises the complete detachment from reality that characterises the modern "innovative" financial industry.

I operate a small business. I don't give a fsck about your claims that we need "liquidity" when I can't get a simple business loan for less than 8-9%, despite being well-capitalised, while my personal savings attract all of r pct, where 0.01 < r < 0.1. Quite the scam there. As a result, I use only retained earnings to pay for anything, which while a prudent thing to do given my situation, is hardly a recipe for large-scale economic growth. The financial industry does not fulfil its most basic imperative of funnelling capital to productive use, why should I care about whether some institutions can hold a stock for 1ms or 1 day?

I suppose things could be worse. Maybe in addition to being completely starved for capital, I may be subject to "protection" payments in the near future just to be able to stay in business at all! Financial innovation, 'Ndrangheta style! Wouldn't that be a boon for Wall Street and the City of London.