By continually extracting money from the exchange without injecting value, they reduce the overall value of the stocks. Even on the exchanges, value isn't created from trading; it's created only by the companies being invested in. Long term investors have the value of their shares reduced as a result.

In other words, HFTs aren't gambling like everyone else.

Given that your statement is correct, "it's a free market", the best solution would be for legitimate companies to not allow their stocks to be traded on exchanges that permit HFTs. It would keep their stock values higher, but of course those exchanges wouldn't have the same amount of capital or the same volume of actual investors.

It will be interesting to watch. If regulators don't step in, will companies opt out?

Rather than a fixed length of cable, it could be solved by adding a random delay to trades, anywhere between 0.001 and 59.999 seconds. The HFT traders can't play their games without taking on a huge amount of risk.

The real problem is that exchanges make money off trades. The faster the exchange, the more likely HFTs are going to want to trade there, and make more money for the exchanges. Adding delays is going to make the HFTs go elsewhere, which would cut off a sizable chunk of their revenue, so they won't want to do it.

Plus, the HFTs have lots and lots and lots of money, and an undetectably small amount of ethics. There's plenty of money to corrupt anyone involved, including paying the developers about a gajillion dollars to insert a weak PRNG. The NSA got RSA to add Dual_EC_DRBG as a standard for only 10 million dollars; for an HFT that's just Saturday night hookers-and-blow money.

Because each cell is independently calculated, the problem with that is in visualizing it the same way you would a massively parallel program, one with crazy amounts of interdependencies, and that would be hard to represent and understand. Yes, I know a spreadsheet is not truly parallel, and that there is an order of computation, but when you look at it as a single linear task, it's like the mother of all oversized functions - which is to say it's also unreadable.

Individual areas of computation need to be modularized and encapsulated - both readable and testable. This can be done in a spreadsheet by using careful structure and organization, but it's not the default. And as most spreadsheets organically grow as new requirements or analysis is performed, it's not apparent when in the modification process such organization should be applied.

Ultimately, it requires the same skills as good software design in any system or language. And there is no requirement that a spreadsheet creator has to have good software design skills.

Works for bitcoin.

Exactly. This use of Open Data just cost the taxpayers of New York City $55,000 in revenue that they'll have to make up in some other obscure and slightly unethical way.

One Hundred BILLION dollars!

True, and they have been known to do that. Having your now-patched thermostat still hosting malware, however, still isn't an ideal situation. Such a patch grants no assurance that the hacker won't turn it into a proxy for attacking your local equipment.

Yep. Exactly no change.

My company sells gazpacho, gummy bears, and kazoos, and we just received a National Security Letter asking us to report if someone buys all three together.

Just pointing out that the first rule of comedic threat club is that you DO NOT TALK ABOUT comedic threat club. At least not without a flaming-torch-juggling attorney present.

I think that's what they're asking for.

Oh, sorry, I'll wait for it .... whoosh.

Actually, what they could do would be to correlate English language postings with equivalent German language postings. As Germans are known world wide for their fun-loving sense of humor and sarcastic wits, the difference should yield accurate, non-snarky posts in English.

My 2011 Taurus' Sync interface is a Microsoft UI designed in hell. It starts out where the destination selection is as awkward as it gets: instead of entering a nice friendly address like 1234 County O, Wausau, Wisconsin, you have to enter an address according to computer hierarchy rules: "State: Wisconsin. City: Wausau. Street "County O". Number: "1234". The first problem is that the autocomplete kicks in late, but still takes the buffered touch as the next input: W..A..U..S ... up pops the WAU listings of Wauketon, Waunakee, and Wausau, and Wauketon happens to be located where the S was. Guess who has to start over again? The next problem comes if all you have for an address is 1234 County O. The auto complete demands that you specify which County O. Do you mean North (1-4799), North (4800-9999), West, South, or Southwest? Hell if I know, I'm from Minnesota and I was just reading an address off a web site. It turned out that only one of those four choices actually happened to be located in Wausau, but the damn machine felt the need to offer me all four.

For a machine with 40GB of hard drive, limiting the address book to 100 destinations is simply insulting my intelligence. I can't have a hundred and one places to go?

There is very poor integration with smart phones. The most it can do with an iPhone is play music, but only after spending minutes downloading the entire catalog of tracks before letting me even play a song. I can't send it a contact's address for navigation, nor can it dial an entry in my contact list.

The icing on the cake was the first time I really needed to use the voice interface. As a lifelong Minnesotan, I have a flat, boring, monotone Midwestern accent, yet the so-called voice "recognition" couldn't recognize common words like 'courthouse', 'capitol', or 'state capitol'. Instead it offered me really odd choices that were nothing like the words I spoke, such as answering my saying 'capitol building' by asking 'Did you mean pizza?' (yes, that really was its clarification.) Neither my wife nor I ever did get it to take us to the State Capitol building in Madison - (we ended up stumbling upon it because it's located at the center of a pretty small city.) At one point I gave up on the voice interface and said "exit". The machine had the temerity to ask me "Did you really mean to exit, yes or no?" A freakin' pop-up dialog box in a voice interface?!?! At that point we nicknamed it "Useless".

Thankfully my car is slightly too old to suffer from MyTouch, which was inflicted on the model year 2012 cars, and newer. The problems are as obvious as a cold sore: next to a touch screen interface, capacitive buttons are about the worst possible user interface possible in a car. When driving, you need to access controls by feel, as your eyes need to keep looking out the windows. And tactile feedback is a simple concept that people intuitively understand: when you reach for a knob, you feel if it's the twisty kind or the clicky kind, and you can easily adjust it without looking. But if you reach a touch-button by feel, though, you are by definition touching it - therefore you are also triggering it. If you would normally expect to run your fingers down the dash, feeling for the third button in order to turn on the defroster, you can easily trigger the air conditioner and the fog lamps before reaching the defroster. And it turns out they don't even work at all with gloved fingers (cf. Minnesota and Wisconsin in the winter!) When you hear "touch" and "driver", if they're not talking about the car's handling, you are listening to a very stupid person.

Consumers who hate Sync and the MyTouch interface are not alone: Consumer Reports consistently reduces the scores of Ford vehicles so equipped by 4-6 points, which typically drops them from a tie for a top-of-the-class rating to a middle-of-the-class rating. They are really, really bad systems.

Shiny sells better.

Here's the problem at Microsoft: the biggest competitor of Microsoft X (version N) is Microsoft X (version N-1). They already produce the corporate standards for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software. They've incorporated every possible feature they could think to invent (or could buy from a third party.) They've dramatically changed their software engineering practices, and are now producing very stable, high quality code. There simply isn't a compelling reason for anyone to go out and buy version N+1. So instead of inventing another useless feature, they need to make some kind of visible change so that people think they're buying something better.

Frankly, I think their Office365 products are really a clever idea: they take all the bad parts of owning a computer (backups, crashes, viruses, patches, updates, laptop thefts, left my files on my other thumbdrive at home) and hide most of that away in the cloud. For only $9.95 a month, you don't have to bother with computer pain. And as a bonus, they get to market it to customers claiming they always get the newest features (glossing over the fact that they've added almost nothing of value in the last 7 years.) And the revenue stream is unending, because you always need a word processor.

As far as operating systems go, while Vista was a performance stinker, Windows 7 really hit a home run. It's good enough for just about every Windows user. But Microsoft is still stinging from their utter failures with WinCE, Windows Phone, Zune, and every single attempt at embedded systems products. Embarrassingly Apple came in and learned every painful lesson Microsoft had to teach them, and used that to redefine the smartphone experience. And just to throw sand in the vaseline, Apple then extended that to create the entire tablet market. Ironically, Microsoft failed to learn from every single lesson Apple taught them (save one): they thought that because people liked the iPhone GUI that it should be extended to the desktop, completely missing the idea that human computer interface design doesn't work like that. (The lesson they did learn is that "Walled Gardens are Profitable", but that was actually their goal about 15 years ago when they introduced .Net and began their push towards Software as a Service.)

Of course they seem to forget that users are dependent systems, just like any other system dependency, and that change generally makes their lives worse. The bigger the change, the worse it hurts. So for a long time they didn't try to change the desktop too much, but then along came Windows 8. Gestures with a mouse were studied and found to be stupid and unusable over a decade ago, but they didn't let that prevent common sense, usability testing, or the anguished cries of beta testers sway them from their path.

It's too bad that Ballmer has such an ego that he feels no shame, because his punishment for Windows 8 should have been a lot worse humiliation than simply leaving the company.

You haven't really been properly underwhemed until you've been disappointed by a Smart TV. I got to experience it because it came with a friend's flat-screen purchase, and all I can say is *!*Yawn*!* It came complete with a creepy camera that watched us wave our arms like drowning Parkinson's victims, then it let us rotate a virtual cube with stuff on it! Woo hoo, that's some damn fine User Experience right there, boy howdy!

All I can give you of value is the information that Onkyo and LG aren't the only companies that are producing WTF tech. Sony's Google TV, Samsung's Smart TV, and Panasonic's whatever-the-hell-Blu-Ray-thing, all of them rated about 4.5 cat-turds on my Useless-Shit-O-Meter. Put another way, none of them are nearly as useful as my Comcast receiver box, which I had previously held up as the litterbox standard for crappy interfaces.

Except this is already past tense. They have already rolled out millions of internet-enabled appliances, including washers, dryers, refrigerators, thermostats, door locks, cameras, TVs, alarms, light bulbs, DVRs, cable boxes, phones, doorbells, garage door openers, and pretty much anything you can think of. (I haven't seen commercially available on-line toasters, but there are home-brew hacks out there.)

There are billions of dollars to be made in the on-line appliance market. Maybe they won't sell any to you, but they have sold millions to other people. It's already done.