Hedge funds tend to be used by the affluent, not by regular people with regular incomes. In addition, hedge funds usually lock your funds up... there may be only a few times a year where you can cash out and you have to give them notice (3-6 months, depending). Only investors with serious excess capital that they can afford to put aside for a few years uses a hedge fund.

And even then, hedge funds are hardly any guarantee of good returns. As a class Hedge funds returns have been horrible over the last year, for example. And while the media likes to hype up the returns that some hedge funds have been able to make, they tend to ignore the larger number of hedge funds that underperform the market.

-Matt

That is total and complete nonsense. Ultimately the stock price is a reflection of the company, not the other way around. If a stock winds up being mis-priced due to an out-of-control trading program (and I've seen that happen plenty of times), it doesn't stay that way for long as investors pounce on it. You should count your blessings when it happens, because being able to buy a stock that an out of control trading program drops $10 in 60 seconds is virtually guaranteed profit.

-Matt

There are a number of good solutions available. If anyone actually read the book, defeating the HFTs basically comes down to adding a delay to multi-exchange transactions such that the transaction reaches each exchange at the same time.

The real problem here is that the regular exchanges prioritized their own profits over their duty to provide a fair market to participants. That much is obvious, and frankly I think there should be criminal prosecutions for what they did (I doubt it will happen though).

This sort of things has happened in other areas. There are several market reports that sell early copies to a select group of clients. One just recently was selling an 'electronic' version even earlier than its main group of clients. It turned out that the HFTs who purchased the ultra-early version were using the data to front-run the normal clients (who in turn were trying to front-run regular investors reacting to the report when it goes public).

The instant it was revealed what the early-early group was doing, the regular clients stopped trading on the early news and the early-early group were suddenly not able to make any money front-running the regular clients. The producer of the report was forced to retract the early-early report or lose *all* of their regular clients who were tired of being front-run.

The stock exchanges are engaged in the same sort of crap with the HFTs, selling them special access and trade types that other investors do not have. Now the exchanges are in a position of having to deny that they are making things unfair when it is obvious that they are making things unfair.

This just goes to show how convoluted things can become. But once it gets into the light of day, corrective action can happen pretty quickly.

If our regulatory agencies were more competent, this would have been dealt with years ago instead of letting it fester as long as it has.

-Matt

Apple has bought back a huge number of shares, as well as increased their dividend 8% this round. The share buy-back is capital-efficient for investors and a big deal. Not only that, but at a minimum they can fold in the dividend they don't have to pay any more for those repurchased shares into the dividend they are paying the remaining shareholders, so you get the best of both worlds.

Believe me, it actually is a big deal. Ignore the crap that comes out of the media.

-Matt

Well, you are assuming that the company is valueless when you say that. Most companies are not valueless. Most, in fact, make a profit, and as an investor you own a piece of that profit. The profits are not a phantom... that's cold hard cash and it means something whether the company has a dividend or not. It's very real.

Many people treat the market like a game, and there are some game-like elements to it, but the underlying reality is that it isn't a game. The secondary markets have many uses... it is the liquidity and transactional efficiency of the secondary market that gives U.S. industry a level of flexibility that no other country can compete with. our energy infrastructure, renewables industries, small businesses. When the world changes, dollars flow where they are needed.

By dismissing the secondary market you basically dismiss any need for liquidity. You are wrong. The markets aren't about giving people a free pass... it's survival of the fittest. If anything, investors have it the easiest. We can shift our resources literally in a few seconds, and other than the crash of 1929, no crash since has lost investors who stuck with it any money in any reasonable period of time unless they were stupid and sold at the bottom (not understanding what stock ownership actually means).

Look at a graph of the 2008 crash. The economy might have gotten screwed due to the lack of regulation of the financial industry, but the markets recovered relatively quickly and that happened because the efficiency of the secondary markets allowed investment resources to be shifted very quickly. Just looking at tops and bottoms doesn't give you a full picture... very few investors actually went 'all-in' at the top and sold 'all-out' at the bottom. No matter how hyped-up a story you get from the media, it isn't an accurate representation of what people actually made or lost.

If you think the stock market is a crap-shoot then you are probably thinking a bit too short-term. It's never been a crap-shoot. Not even during the 1929 crash.

-Matt

have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

Sounds idiotic to me. Non-linear steering is great, but any sort of dynamic/adaptive steering that changes according to conditions is stupid beyond belief and will cause an endless stream of accidents because the driver can no longer predict how the car will react to similar steering motions.

-Matt

Reading Rainbow was a wonderful show on PBS that ran for a long long time, and LeVar Burton has been involved with it and with kids education for decades (even before playing his role in Star Trek TNG). Even though it has reached its goal, I'm throwing in a hundred or two myself. My opinion: Anything donated will be well spent, LeVar Burton is just that type of person, who you know you can depend on.

-Matt

It's kinda hard to have any sympathy when only an idiot connects these 'smart' consumer devices to the internet in the first place. These devices do not have any functionality that I can't already get simply using a Roku or AppleTV or Airplay or Chromecast.

I have a bunch of these... VCRs, Receivers (for the integrated Pandora), etc. I leave them all disconnected from the internet, and so should everyone.

Having just one media device be connected to the internet is kinda like picking your poison, but at least you have a choice. And something like a Roku or an AppleTV is going to be far, *far* more secure than the crap you find in VCRs and SmartTVs and other devices of that ilk.

-Matt

The Fourth Amendment only applies to the Federal government, and no state statute can reduce or increase those rights. Of course, the state itself may be limited by the Fourth (through the Fourteenth), and in that case, no state statute can reduce those rights. California may try to pass laws that provide additional protection not governed by the Fourth, provided it does not violate the Supremacy clause, and that's fine, but its unlikely to limit federal activities expressly provided for by federal statute.

There is no real dispute over the right to wiretap without a warrant (although some claim to the contrary, its not the Federal government doing the claiming), at least not since the Bush administration got into hot water over that issue.

As to the applicability of the Fourth to metadata acquisition, the Supreme Court addressed that point more than thirty years ago in Smith v. Maryland. Cases claiming that Smith is somehow inapplicable to the NSA issues are working their way through the courts, and time will tell. But it is still a legal reach to assert
that metadata acquisition somehow violates the Fourth Amendment, without qualification, given the clear Supreme Court law on the subject.

The question whether copyright existed to protect the "look and feel" of an application was open until the Supreme Court affirmed (4-4 en banc without opinion) the First Circuit decision in Lotus v. Borland. That case took decades to litigate, but addressed whether Borland was permitted in Quattro to execute Lotus 1-2-3 macros (the damned "/" tree of letter commands), even though the macro language was not aptentable. The mere "embodiment" of the "/" tree was deemed by Lotus to be protectible copyright. (In my view, Kapor should have been made a pariah for this assertion, but hey, its just me.)

The First Circuit held that when expression (if you can call the letter tree expression) equates to funtionality, it has merged with the unprotectible functionality. That has been the basis of almost all Copyright law since that time regarding reverse engineering and competition in the software industry. Any other rule would yield considerable chill to adopting new technologies, and in implementing imrpovements. The Internet itself might not have evolved as it did.

The most significant example was the Phoenix BIOS, a reverse-engineered implementation of the BIOS for the IBM PC that made clones possible. Under the Federal Circuit rule in Oracle, the Phoenix (and its progeny) would have been infringing, and we would live in a very different world than we do today.

I am cautiously optimistic that the Federal Circuit will take this matter up en banc and reverse, or perhaps SCOTUS will set it right. Until then, the conflict between Oracle and Borland cases will create a chilling uncertainty in the industry that will educate my granchildren's education, but serve little other good purpose.

In my view, an API merges with its functionality and should be unprotectable. That was the law everywhere in the United States, until today.

written by richard lightman [ ... ] his web site is now offline: you can get a copy of depinit however using archive.org.

Last snapshot I could find on archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/200...

I was driving down the street and noticed something odd about the car in front of me... the keys were dangling off the back of the trunk! We came to a red-light and I hopped out and tapped on the woman's window.

She was rather startled but I put on my most innocent face and she rolled down her window a little and I said "Miss, sorry for startling you but your car keys are dangling off the back of your trunk!". She did a double take and then realized that it was true! Her button ignition switch had worked because the keys just happened to be 'close enough'.

I said "wait a moment, I'll get them for you now" (I didn't want to get them first because she might have driven off and would then not have had her keys at all). I went to the back, got the keys, and handed them to her through the window. She smiled and said thank you.

I went back to my car and managed to get my seatbelt back on and ready to go before the light turned green again.

True story :-)

-Matt