Just as a bit of historical context: Sid Meier/Microprose used to have a favorably-priced service that offered backup disks for a few bucks. I suspect that the reason for this, at the time, was because few people (myself included) had more than one floppy drive. I took advantage of this to acquire copies of F19 Stealth Fighter and Railroad Tycoon. Sadly, I have since lost those games, although I should point out: you can get many old games, DRM-free, at GOG for next to nothing.

I think copyright is OK. As the creator of a work, you should be able to license it however you please. Many bits of software are a true labor of love, and I think that authors should be compensated for their work. Just because you do not agree with them does not mean that the law is unjust.

However, I think that copy-protection is extremely misguided. Fair-use exemptions aside, I believe that society should be allowed to archive these things, at least for historical reasons. Actually, there's a funny story about this-- I know a researcher at Microsoft who wrote a relatively famous Apple II game in the early 1980's, when he was a high school student. One of his recent projects has been developing software to get kids into programming, which is much more complicated than when we were kids hacking on Apple, Commodore, and TI machines ourselves. To prove his point, he fired up his old Apple II game in an emulator during the presentation, and he showed the kind of code that produced a game like his; simple stuff using BASIC. But that game-- he had lost it years ago, and he had to resort to using the cracked version floating around on the Internet. I couldn't get him to comment on the merits of copy protection, but I think the lesson is pretty clear.

I should also point out that I think that modern copyright terms are completely ridiculous. 15 years ought to be a reasonable amount of time to capitalize on your work before the public gets the benefit.

I have no affiliation with GOG, but I should point out that you can get your SMAC fix there as well.

Yeah, but there's a reason why statistical models are hot now and why the old AI-style of logical reasoning isn't: the AI stuff only works when the input is perfect, or at least, planned for. As we all know, language doesn't really have rules, just conventions. This is why the ML approach to NLP is powerful: the machine works out what was probably meant. That's far more useful, because practically nobody writes well. When Abdur Chowdhury was still Twitter's main NLP guy, he visited our department, and guess what-- people even write in more than one language in a single sentence! Not to mention, in the old AI-style approach, if you fill a big box full of rules, you have to search through them. Computational complexity is a major limiting factor in all AI problems. ML has this nice property that you can often simply trade accuracy for speed. See Monte Carlo methods.

As you point out, ML doesn't "understand" anything. I personally think "understanding" is a bit of a squishy term. Those old AI-style systems were essentially fancy search algorithms with a large set of states and transition rules. Is that "understanding"? ML is basically the same idea except that transitioning from one state to another involves the calculation of a probability distribution, and sometimes whether the machine should transition is probabilistic.

I think that hybrid ML/AI systems-- i.e., systems that combine both logical constraints and probabilistic reasoning-- will prove to be very powerful in the future. But does that mean these machines "understand"? If you mean something like what happens in the human brain, I'm not so sure. Do humans "understand"? Or are we also automata? In order to determine whether we've "cracked AI", we need to know the answers to those questions. See Kant and good luck.

This is not true. While complicated software can be difficult to test, and really complicated software can often only be evaluated empirically, straightforward, mathematical software you care deeply about can be reasoned about formally, even in the presence of unusual inputs. Quantifying the behavior of algorithms is, in fact, the purpose of computer science. I don't have a deep knowledge of financial algorithms, but it would surprise me if their analysis was markedly different from other algorithms. Often, best-case, worst-case, and average-case analysis for performance/runtime can be carried out, and even with nondeterministic algorithms, bounds can be put on the likelihood of their error. Good software engineering practices (using types or assertions, which would have eliminated this particular error) can also prevent your formal assumptions from being violated. It sounds to me like the people who wrote this particular algorithm did none of this. But the presence of mistakes like this don't make the idea of algorithmic trading inherently risky.

In the interest of creating a well-functioning system, I think system designers should try to catch these errors. If errors only affected the one party who made the mistake, your proposal might be worth considering, but in fact, these errors affect people who have nothing to do with it, simply because they participate in the market. Thus, it is better to eliminate errors altogether.

The most obvious fix is that negative trades should not be allowed. Even better would be a type system which expresses valid order sizes. But even within the range of valid orders, some order sizes are more likely than others. Given the volume of orders, it ought to be pretty easy to characterize the distribution of order sizes-- I think a smarter system should flag outlying order sizes for secondary human review. This is a pretty easy check to implement, and it surprises me that it doesn't already exist in the system.

But clicking is such hard work!

While ZMM certainly borrows some ideas from eastern philosophy, this is not the central point of the book. Eastern thinking is mainly used as a counterpoint to the classical Western way of thinking.

I've read ZMM about seven times. I get something different out of it on every read. It is an attempt to apply rational thinking to the idea of rationality itself, in addition to just being a great story. The section on 'gumption traps' is worth the price of admission alone.

Definitely my favorite book.

I suppose you could say that, because that's what lots of people think, but it's not quite true. COM is alive and well, and indeed, lots of .NET is hooked into it.

Disclaimer: Today was my last day at Microsoft, in their PL research group.

In my opinion, someone who knows their way around the various interoperability issues with Windows/UNIX is what you really should be asking for. Some things are easy (did you know that Active Directory offers LDAP and Kerberos services?), but other things are harder (domain trusts with non-Windows machines). Somebody who has experience integrating Samba with a fairly recent Windows domain will tend to have a pretty good idea how the entire ecosystem works.

I am also biased, because I am a programmer, but I think that anyone who spends time programming on a Windows machine is going to have a great deal more understanding than someone who just reads about how things work in books. For one, they don't throw their hands up in the air when they can't solve something-- they poke and prod and eventually program their way out of it. IT workers with programming experience aren't the easiest people to find (and Windows hackers seem to be more elusive than UNIX hackers for cultural reasons), but they're out there. I did this for years. Anyway, someone who can answer "What's the difference between COM and .NET?" probably has a pretty good idea how Windows is put together.

I work with a former Microsoft intern about whom I have a similar story. Microsoft plans a "special event" every summer for its interns, and they're often things like cruises or concerts. So I asked him-- what was your special event? He said, "Oh, it was just some wedding band or something. Totally boring." I later found out that it was Dave Matthews Band. Gah.

I ditched Gentoo when the "rolling release" schedule you so highly praise decided to upgrade libc. Practically the entire system stopped working. I haven't touched Gentoo since 2005, so maybe things are better now, but it left a bad impression.

It's pretty clear from Exhibits A, B, C, and D that virtual assistants are just out there to kill you. No thanks!

The part you're missing though is services-- that's Apple's diversity. Apple has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that all of its physical products are tied to services that you need to pay to use. With the iCloud, they don't just want you to pay once, they want you to pay regularly.

There are many millions of people with their music and videos in iTunes AAC/M4V format. Given the choice between buying a (let's suppose) superior music player/phone and ditching their media collection or just buying another iPhone and retaining their library, I think most people will choose the latter. Sure, us nerds can move that music to another (non-Apple) machine, but the vast majority of people: 1) can't do this, or 2) can't be bothered to do this.

I have a hard time seeing how Android is diverse and Apple's iPhone is not. There's a HUGE ecosystem for the iPhone.

I believe that you can get IDE-SCSI bridges, so you might be able to stick a CF card in there, too. I also have an old Mac (SE/30) that I've been dying to have the time to play with, but the disk is totally dead. I actually have a set of A/UX installer disks I've been meaning to use with this machine. There's something about the old unibody Macs that I love-- maybe it's just because I was really getting into computers around the time we bought our first Mac (SE). I also have my old Quadra 605 from high school sitting in a closet somewhere-- sadly that thing does nothing when I try to power it on. I haven't had the time to determine whether is it a problem with the PSU or the logic board.

I have my SE/30's ADB extended keyboard hooked up to my (2011) Mac Pro at the lab-- some of my labmates give me funny sideways glances about this thing. I tell them that they're fortunate I am not subjecting them to my IBM Model M, which I keep at home ;)

I recently traveled to China for a conference, and this exact question was a recurring thought to me. Aside from the restrictions on the internet (no Facebook, Google mostly doesn't work), and the large number of bored-looking (and sometimes sleeping-on-the-job) police, there were few reminders that the place was communist. To me, it seemed very much like a developing nation-- people were entrepreneurial and resourceful. To me, the main difference between the US and China for your average person is that many more Chinese live in what we'd consider poverty, and that the people there are not exactly safety-conscious.

No worries about the male assumption-- I am indeed male, and my spouse is my wife. I actually wrote 'spouse' because I wasn't sure if you were male or not ;)

I am married, and presently, have no kids, although this is going to change in the near future. Fortunately, my advisor also had his children while he was in graduate school, and he is quite understanding on the matter. But this varies quite a bit. My first advisor, who left the university permanently to pursue a startup (he had exhausted his sabbatical leave), told another of my labmates point blank that my labmate's decision to have children in graduate school was "the worst decision he ever made." So I've seen both extremes. What it boils down to is, yes, it's possible, no, it's not easy.

I am very fortunate in that I have an extremely understanding and patient wife. This does not mean that she doesn't have her moments of impatience, but she has dealt with my busy schedule and general unavailability (like, right now I am on the west coast of the US and she is on the east coast while I am on internship) fairly well. We took turns doing graduate school-- her first-- and so I am very fortunate in that she is the primary breadwinner. She's a doctor. My salary pays our apartment rent, and the rest of it goes into savings. Anyway, the fact that we took turns, and that I supported her while she was in school, is the reason why I am starting graduate school later in life.

If my wife were not OK with this situation, it would not be worth it, at all. One thing I realized about myself while pursuing a PhD is that I am capable of learning most of this stuff on my own. The role that professors, advisors, mentors, and [most especially] your peers play in your education is primarily to steer you into asking the right kinds of questions. This is the problem-- when you're an outsider, you don't know how to solve your problems because you don't even know how to ask them. Figuring out how to ask them has a huge search space. There are scads of ways to set a problem up, but which one is best? The people around you will take your half-coherent ramblings and sharpen them into the kinds of pointed questions that you can ask and, by turning the appropriate cranks, get an answer. In any case, the point of this is: if I blow it now, I'm OK with it. I know I can hack it by myself-- it'll just take longer.

Your list of priorities may currently look something like this:

1. Spend time with family.
2. Do well at work.
3. Chores.
4. Fun hobby #1
5. Fun hobby #2
n. Fun hobby #n

What you need to know is that the list will be transformed into something like this:

1. Do research for advisor.
2. Do classwork.
3. Spend time with family.

That's right. ALL of your fun hobbies will go away, and your wife and children will have to pick up your slack on chores. This is why you need to have a frank conversation with them. If they're not ready to do this, for the next 6 years, you should reconsider.

I am able to maintain a steady income with my side jobs, yes. But my primary side-job is providing bugfixes for the employer I left when I came to grad school. They were disappointed that I was leaving, and I explained that my time was going to be very valuable, and that I needed to be compensated in a manner to account for this. But if you aren't able to make a prior arrangement, I would not count on side-money. Research is your #1 priority, and they will pay you roughly $20-25k a year for this job. The way many of my peers do it (and I would say that about 1/4 of them are married, maybe an 1/8 have kids), is that they put their families on the fairly generous university benefits packages offered to grad students (often free health care and discounted daycare), their salaries go toward rent and food, and their spouses pick up the rest.

If your wife can't do this for you, grad school is not for you. I don't say that to be mean. You may have the intellectual capabilities to handle it just fine. But the circumstances need to be right. Learning and science can always be done as a hobby, and if you have the persistence to succeed at grad school, you will also have the persistence to succeed in science as a hobby.