The official stock market justification for HFT is that it provides "liquidity" (that's the actual word they use) to the market. Translated into human-speak, that means that the trading companies get transaction fees for every transaction under HFT and that money is very important to them. Of course the traders don't pay the kind of fees that us normal people pay. They get volume discounts. But the justification is that somehow the HFT fees that get paid benefit all of us by allowing them to lower the fees that we normal people pay for our rare transactions.

After reading the book Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone, I've come to the conclusion that the stock market will always be gamed by those with money and if HFT were banned, they'd just find something to exploit, maybe even worse. I do admit to being amused by this thread because I thought that the advocates were swearing that BitCoin stealing was impossible - too many safeguards you know.

Then again they could just be trying to make money.

I'm definitely in favour of open disclosure and would like to think they'd do better businesswise releasing the info and getting good PR. But if you're looking to make money off the info that is the way to do it.

Of course it could also be a scam, if they're planning on this business strategy they should have someone respectable under an NDA to at least vouch that the information is legit.

If I had to guess, "free" service users will have to provide a credit card and then hope that if they try to cancel that the cancellation is actually honored rather than getting into a common situation where they keep getting billed for months for a service that is almost impossible to actually cancel.

I can assure you that Correa is anti-American first and above all things just like most of those in South American presidencies right now. He is an economist at absolute best second. This has very little to do with MMT and is all about reducing dependency on the US, including the dollar. He's just barely less anti-American than the governments of Venezuela and Cuba. Like his similar minded fellow presidents in most of the region, the US provides a convenient evil boogey man to blame government mismanagement and corruption on. Correa can't really see very far into the future and he has no great plan. It took a call from Joe Biden to point out that the US buys a lot of stuff from Ecuador that we could buy elsewhere. There's nothing special about Ecuador as a source for those things. That got him to back off a pretty virulent and typical anti-US rant related to Edward Snowden when he realized that he could very quickly be looking at an economy destroying US boycott. All he really cares about is staying in power and providing little scraps to the citizens to keep his job. Whether this idea works or not, it's not part of any great plan or forward thinking. It's all just part of his general anti-US outlook. He can't really scrap the dollar and go back to the worthless sucre, so this is his only alternative.

Any educated person there, and in countries that use Cyrillic in case you wondered, will learn the Latin alphabet in school. By the way, their keyboards always have the Latin alphabet on them along with symbols for certain characters in their own writing systems.

We had posts on this subject maybe a few months after the acquisition blew up on HP and it became to clear to everybody that HP got suckered. The posts at the time said that HP's upper management put heavy pressure on all parts of the company to quickly approve the purchase of Autonomy and dissenting voices who wanted a closer look were silenced. There were various outside sources prior to the purchase who were warning that simple logic dictated that Autonomy's claimed sales figures could not be correct, but we had several HP employees post here saying that nobody in upper management wanted to hear any "negativity" about the acquisition, so "due diligence" was rushed through.

In the US talk of Obama assassinating critical journalists is rightly considered moronic.

In Russia talk of Putin assassinating critical journalists is rightly considered quite plausible.

In the US talk of Bush orchestrating 9/11 is rightly considered moronic.

In Russia talk of Putin orchestrating the Moscow apartment bombings is far fetched, though disturbingly plausible.

The idea of US government screwing with high profile critical bloggers is plausible, but a bit paranoid.

The idea of the Russian government threatening, imprisoning, or even killing moderately popular critical bloggers is a very legitimate fear.

Since you are French I am shocked that you made such a big mistake, but Orange is not a "spinoff" of France Telecom. Orange is France Telecom. The FT name is no more. It is now Orange.

I'm not very good at the HMTL linky thing, so I'll skip that, but interested parties may want to check the Wikipedia article on the late Ron Stewart, former hockey player in the NHL. If you go through the history of edits and look at the original article, you probably don't have to know much about hockey to realize that the article content is absurd with multiple references to his supposed love of pottery and other ridiculous claims. Yet the absurd and unsubstantiated claim from the original article that his father was a lumberjack and Stewart grew up in Mobile, Alabama (there is no way an NHL hockey player of his era could have grown up in the Deep South of the USA and made it to the NHL) persisted for over 3 and a half years before finally being removed. The current article on Stewart seems factual.

I disagree. I'd be surprised if the standard deviation for an individual test taker was less than 2%. If you take the office who scored 95% and the officer who scored 93%, then made them take another test on the same subject, I wouldn't be remotely surprised if the scores were reversed. This is a good rational to make the test pass/fail and drop the grades.

As an American with an above average grasp of the US legal system thanks to a long time friend who is an attorney, I can tell you that anything can happen if this case goes to court. Should the AARC lose? Yes. But will they? Who knows? Juries aren't made up of people who understand technology. If Ford and GM's lawyers botch the case or the jury has quite a few members who are obsessed with punishing rules breakers, the AARC can win. I agree that it seems likely that an undisclosed settlement will be reached. The AARC probably knows that most likely it won't prevail so getting something is better than losing in court and getting nothing and GM and Ford would prefer not to take the risk that a crazy jury will rule against them and view a limited settlement as the best option available. Even having judges decide cases is no guarantee against craziness. I know of one case where a court was overruled by an appellate court who accused the original court of making up the law out of nothing on the case in question. My attorney friend told me that he agreed with the appellate court ruling but he'd never seen a court use that kind of language before in slapping down another court.

Assuming that ripping your own CDs is actually legal.

If it's not legal then the case gets a lot more interesting.

Who wanted to secede and join Russia.

That's tragic but blame the people who started the war.

Russia is promoting, recruiting, and supplying the rebels. Russian soldiers are shelling across the border. It's not official Russian troops in Ukraine but it's sure as hell a Russian invasion.

Everything except the fascism of course.

Did you miss Crimea? The floods of Russians streaming across the border being equipped by the Russian government.

And you're still dodging the question. Tens of thousands of foreign fighters stream across your border, occupy your cities, and claim them as an independent state.

What do you do?

This. The fact that Syfy (hate that spelling) passed may actually be a good thing, but I can't really offer a thought on what it means that the BBC passed. Maybe it was a cost issue for them. Syfy's recent track record is not good unless Sharknado and it's ilk are all you are after.

Are they "growing rapidly" in any developed market like the USA, Canada, EU, Japan, Australia, New Zealand? The only person I know who has one lives in Taiwan and she admitted to me she bought it for cost reasons but would have preferred an Android or iPhone. And billions of what, exactly, behind it? If you mean sales then that is certainly not true. If you mean Microsoft is throwing billions of dollars at trying to get suckers to buy them, maybe. They don't even advertise Windows Phone on TV any more in the USA and at least a few years ago they were doing that.