This is just stupid. We WANT AT&T and T-mobile to merge because having one carrier maintain all the GSM infrastructure and manage that spectrum is simply more efficient.

What the government needs to regulate is consumer's access to the competitive market. Require all phones to come with both GSM and CDMA radios (or have a cheap, replaceable part to do so) and be compatible with all networks. Then allow consumers to get out of their contracts if they find a minimum data speeds or voice quality isn't met. The markets will take it from there.

Them's the jokes folks. This was supposed to be a FF version idiocy dig, not a true indignant bashing of Microsoft. I had hoped to get a bit more insightful audience here on slashdot. Can someone please add a 'hide my comment from anyone with a UID greater than 6 digits' checkbox to this site.

> Right. CA's are supposed to be financially liable if they issue a cert to a party other than the one they're certifying.

But the authenticity of a server is dependent on the handling of the private key by whoever runs the server. And CA's have no control over that. So if financial liability were actually enforced, no one would dare be in the CA business.

And yes, the agreements could have clauses about compromised keys not being the CA's fault, but we'd get in to all sorts of hard-to-prove-in-court stuff and waste a lot of money on lawyers instead of spending it on real computer security.

I agree that browser makers need to both cooperate and grow a pair and blacklist CAs found to have issued bad certs, but this has to be done just enough to scare webmasters away from using disreputable CAs. And then we can't all complain about the CA Mafia when we're all forced to use Verisign at $399/year.

But it's a too late for that anyway. Browser makers already threw up the SSL roadblocks before fixing the other SSL issues, so users have already been trained to click through them, so SSL is probably truly dead. And worse yet, nothing can take it's place, because users already know to just click through whatever shit the browser throws at them to get to their content. The internet is filthy and anonymous and there's no fixing it.

Yet again another M$ sponsored study makes IE look better by using an ancient version of Firefox. FF4 is like way out of date. How dare they make such claims.

I'm not saying having market makers doesn't add value. I'm saying that market makers using HFT specifically doesn't add any more value than market makers using slower trading and, in fact, causes more problems, lessening or even negating the value of having the market maker. An no, I don't have any empirical evidence of that, nor that HFT causes more volatility. But it seems quite logical, so, having no evidence one way or the other, I'm inclined to believe that HFT is a detriment unless someone presents convincing evidence to the contrary. Why the default position should be "it's okay unless we prove otherwise" is beyond me. It's just like use of antibiotics in feed animals and GMOs. Maybe they're perfectly safe. But I'd prefer to error on the side of caution.

And no fair trying to end my anonymous internet rant my agreeing with me! Don't you know that on the internet you're supposed to disagree just for the sake of being disagreeable to keep things interesting.

(Pardon the preaching-to-the-choir rant, but what's slashdot for if not that.)
I voted it sucks, like most of the rest of you, and here's why: Because I'm a hard-working middle-class American.

Some politicians are against tax hikes on the rich. I'm not rich, so I think we need tax hikes on the rich. Will it kill jobs when they move their investment elsewhere? Where else are they going to send it? Europe is bankrupt just like us, but we'll be looking up when higher taxes help our deficit problem. China is well known to simply take over successful businesses. Who's going to invest there? And you're certainly not going to put your money in some third-world country with no infrastructure, an unstable government and no history of private property protection. We're the best place in the world to invest and we'd better take advantage of that while it's still true.

Some politicians are for cutting entitlement programs. I don't get social security, medicare or medicaid, so I'm all for cutting them. Wouldn't that cut consumer spending? Not that much if we means test the cuts. Beside, the job-killing cuts they are making will do the same. And in all fairness, asking seniors to cut 10% is a lot nicer than asking laid off workers to cut 100%. We're also loosing all the benefit of the labor of those workers. Cutting money from seniors at least only hurts the demand side of the equation. And as for medicare and medicaid, healthcare is an astronomical part our spending. It's as much as my mortgage, and my family is all young and healthy. There just has to be lots of waste there, especially since other 1st world countries spend much smaller percentages on their medical care and get better outcomes. Healthcare is expensive /because/ of those programs. If you give the industry lots money, they'll find a way to spend it. If you take it away, they'll find a way to get the job done anyway.

I'd be happy with either tax cuts or entitlement reform. I'd be ecstatic about both. This turd of a bill did neither.

What it did do was:
- Increase the national debt.
- Cut spending on military and other discretionary items which both provide me with government services I want and job opportunities.
This means either through inflation or job loss and bankruptcy, my hard-earned savings is getting more and more likely to disappear in the future.

So if I, the hard-working middle-class American, am the big looser, who won? The rich and the old, that's who. If you're rich, we decided to keep paying the interest on those every-so-safe US bonds you hold AND we decided not to even ask you to pay more of you income, which is in the lowest effective tax bracket because it's all capital gains. If you're old, you'll keep getting your full-amount social security check, WITH cost of living increases based on just-plain-stupid measurements of inflation that overstate it quite thoroughly. (If you don't believe me, do some goggling on how it's measured. Economists are way out of touch with reality.)

But wait, isn't Social Security a promise we made to our seniors? Don't we have a responsibility to keep that promise? The "we" who made that promise are the very seniors who are now receiving social security checks. They voted for the politicians who set up that pyramid scheme. They made that promise to themselves before I was old enough to vote. Bernie Madolf is small potatoes compared to Social Security. Now Social Security is collapsing, as evidenced by the statement I get that tells me I'll only get 75% of what I'm owed when I retire. I'm compelled to pay by force of law into an investment that's clearly declining. If that's not outright theft, I don't know what is. It also means the United States is already bankrupt, but social security investors (that's all of us, by the way) simply don't have a way to take the government itself to court.

So instead we must vote. The tea party is just a tool of the rich tricking the poor and the stupid into voting against their own best interest. What we need is a Frat Party: a party for the young, working American that will demand both tax hikes on the rich AND entitlement reform. And while we're at it, we may as well demand both free speech (net neutrality) and free beer (no metaphor, I just want free beer).

So if you've had enough, reply to this comment with your support. And if you want to be our nominee, please speak up. I'm far to busy working so I can pay my bills to run for office.

> I think you're confused by what "spread" means. It doesn't mean that for every transaction, we're getting a cut of investor money. Think of it this way.

> Say MSFT bid is $99.50 and ask is $100.50. That means you can sell for $99.50 and buy for $100.50. What market makers do is tighten that spread so it
> becomes $99.75 and $100.25, for example. Now in the first situation, if you wanted to buy 100 shares you would have paid $100.50 per share + broker fees. Let's
> say broker fees are zero. You just paid $10050. In the second case, you would have paid $10025, saving you 25 dollars. Note that broker fees are the same in both
> cases.

I may be a bit confused, and I'd be grateful if you explain it to me, but that was a piss-poor explanation. The example above assumes that HFT is responsible for reducing the ask. But is that really the case? I'll buy that frequent trading reduces the spread, but on an undervalued stock, it seems that the bid would rise quickly with little effect on the ask. The opposite would be true for an overvalued stock (the ask falls quickly while the bid changes little). So your example where there's this nice meeting in the middle probably doesn't happen very much, does it?

Now I'm sure your next argument will be that this is simply Adam Smith's magical invisible hand working hard to find the "true" price of a stock almost instantly. It's magic because there's no effort on behalf of buyers and sellers needed. In fact, there's no effort on behalf of buyers and sellers even possible because the system moves so quickly that when an stock price is changing there's no time to examine the fundamentals and see if the change is warranted. You have to either hope you were right when you took your position (in which case the price will return) or trade without any true knowledge (which is just gambling).

But isn't the end result that stocks are traded at fair value? If I own MSFT and I think it's still a good value at $100.25 but I need to raise cash, I can get $99.75, most of what I think it's worth. A larger spread allow me to get in and out of MFST at minimal cost (i.e. liquidity). Isn't that a good thing? Yes -- if you're a gambler. If you're decisions to buy and sell are primarily based on how prices are changing, you need liquidity. If you need to get in and out of a position quickly to buy some other stock that you think will move more in price and you can therefore make more money on, you need liquidity. If you make big, risky bet on one stock, then knowing your other stocks can be dumped at pretty close to what you paid for them if you need to cover you losses is quite an advantage.

But if you do fundamental research and buy stocks to share in the profits of good companies that make a profit by making useful goods and services, then liquidity isn't of much use.Volatility, however makes your job much harder, because that good company may loose you money if you happen to buy or sell at the wrong time. And while HFT provides a lot of liquidity (which is only really useful to gamblers) it also causes a lot of volatility.

HFT simply keeps tight spreads on stocks, but because prices can change so quickly, big market players can manipulate the markets with big orders and make money on the volatility while fundamental researchers have no chance of keeping up. Prices change not just because of the realities of the economy but because of trading itself.

So I DO deny that market makers add value by offering liquidity and availability. There's nothing magic about Adam Smith's invisible hand. It should be hard working people who decide where money is best invested through research and deep understanding of markets. But at the moment Adam Smith seems to be using his other hand, the one holding a some playing cards. He's betting big, but he may only have a low pair.

Now we can go back and forth on the benefits and drawbacks of volatility and liquidity, but the the fundamental facts remain:
- The financial sector is both a huge portion of GDP and an externality to the real economy
- Financial crashes seem to be getting bigger and more frequent and hurting more people
- The rich continue to get richer while the poor get poorer
Facing these facts means admitting there's something seriously wrong with our financial system. And if regulation (self or otherwise) doesn't fix it, eventually war and violence will. Hopefully we're still a long way from that point, but there's clearly a problem and we're all better off addressing it now rather than later.

All of you HFT programmers almost had me with the "we minimize the spread" arguments. But a $0.01 spread x 1000 transactions per second is still $10/sec while a $10 spread on a transaction that happens once a day is a hell of a lot less. I read somewhere that before the great recession, there was a year when the financial sector was 40% of GDP. One way or another, you're skimming a huge and undeserved (as the great recession proves beyond a shadow of a doubt) amount of money off the top.

The keys is to the lies you tell yourself is this:
> Trading is a zero-sum game.

Zero-sum games don't, by definition, contribute to the greater good, and no civilized person would ever play one for any serious stakes. If you do, you've either got a gambling problem or you've figured out your opponent's tell and you've unscrupulous enough to use that knowledge to take advantage of him.

Trading should NOT be a zero sum game. It should involve 4 parties: sellers, buyers, workers and consumers. Sellers are people who need cash to buy something else, like a house or retirement. Buyers are people who have more money than then need to spend right now. Workers are people who produce goods and services for wages. Consumers are the people who benefit from what's produced. That's not a zero sum game. In that game, everyone is a winner. It's honest, hard-working people who produce, consume, save and invest to benefit both themselves and their neighbors.

As stated earlier (see the post about wheat and bread), no one in the non-zero-sum economy needs anything traded at the ms or ns level. Once an hour or even once a day is more than frequent enough. And if that means liquidity goes down, that's fine. The only one who needs that much liquidity are the gamblers. If I'm buying stock, it's because I think it will pay a good dividend and it's value will increase over time. It will be years, not nanoseconds, before I sell it. And if you trick me into buying a bad stock that I know nothing about because, hey, it's only $0.01/share, you can always just sell it again, then shame on me for gambling and shame on you for deception.

And if less frequent transactions means the spread goes up, that's fine too. Because instead of paying someone thousands and thousands of pennies on thousands and thousands of transactions, I'm paying an honest stock broker a few bucks on a few transactions. And I'm getting a service in exchange for that price. I expect my broker is watching out for me. I expect he's a smart guy who knows useful things about the markets that I don't know. I expect he's researched the stocks he's recommending and I expect he'll keep track of them and call me with a sell recommendation if the company's management takes actions he find questionable.

But those type of brokers (if they even exist anymore) now have to contend not just with the fundamentals of an investment, but with the large ups and downs cause by the gambling that HFT allows. That can't give sound advice because they can't possibly predict the randomness you introduce into prices.

Don't get me wrong. As a geek, I'm in awe of your abilities. I have no doubt you're smarter than me. I have no doubt that you can program faster and better than me. And I envy those abilities envy. But don't tell me (or yourself) that anything you do is in any way good for the markets or for society. It's not. You're a bookmaker plain and simple. You're like the clerics who argue over how many angles can dance on a pinhead, siting in an ivory tower, gorging yourself on the best food and wine paid for by tribute extracted from the unwashed masses by lies, manipulation and even brutality. You consume a lot. You contribute nothing. And eventually the rest of us will have to get out the torches and pitchforks and come after you.

> It's amazing to me that in this day-and-age ANYONE can claim that VIM & Makefile's are superior development environments to Eclipse, Netbeans, or name your IDE. That's simply B.S.!

Except that, outside of the M$ world, IDEs are worthless pieces of shit. I tried, I really tried, like for days, to use Eclipse when I started Android development. But the tools sucked. There was no end to time sucking bugs I encountered, most of which I found lots of others complaining about in forums, but most of which had no solutions or solutions that worked once but the problem came back and no one really knew the root cause for. Okay, so maybe I'm overstating on the number of problems with Eclipse/Android, but I truly did work with it for days and kept hitting the same few problems that no one had solutions for. So then I fired up vim and ant and everything just worked exactly as expected. So nice. Write-to-the-log style debugging may be a bit old school, but it works and it's a hell of a lot better than trying to debug the fucking IDE and IDE plugins themselves.

I think Visual Studio is good simply because it's the primary way to do development in the MS world and all the OS devs use it, so it has to be.

WOW! Post one comment that you don't re-read too carefully and it gets mod'd to a 5!

First, let me apologize for
>the second part where you explicitly say "fuck 'em" to non-white citizen.

You should have taken offense to that and that's not how I feel. I just forgot I had added that part in there. While my sympathy for adult illegal immigrants would end quite quickly if I had to deal with the IRS, I have no ill will towards legal immigrants an citizens of any type. I guess that's the downside of a diverse culture: there's no easy way to tell the rule followers from the rule breakers.

My point was that we need to make it painful for businesses who hire illegal immigrants, painless for those of use who are legal (all of us) and make sure the IRS gets their money, because that's OUR money. And I think it will take a national ID card to do it. You probably use gmail, and that's probably not very private. You probably have heath records fairly easily accessible by lots of people with little more than a phone call. Privacy is hard and not worth the trouble, so let's just give up the false idea that we currently have any and instead reap the benefits of verifiable identity.

> because it is backed by the U.S. government

The U.S. government has no such power to give the dollar value.

The dollar has value because there's a lot of people who owe money in dollars and a lot of demand for the labor those people can provide and the stuff those people have and could sell.

For example, I owe about $200k on my house. I have to pay that amount to my bank over time and I have to pay it in dollars. I'll do a lot of systems administration and programming for you if you give me some dollars so I can pay my bank and keep my house. The dollar has value because I am (and millions of others are) willing to do something in exchange for dollars. And this isn't likely to change because I owe dollar-valued debt. Even if I could all of the sudden buy my food and gas and clothes in some other currency, I'd still have to exchange that currency for dollars to pay my mortgage.

The dollar could devalued in two ways:
1) If the government printed loads of dollars, gave them to some unsavory Wall Street character to took a senator golfing one time, and then that jerk wrote me a check for $200K to code him up a website, I'd pay off my house and then be more than willing to do systems administrating and programming for bitcoins (assuming I could by other stuff I needed with those in bitcoins). If that happened on a large scale, inflation would devalue the real purchasing power of the dollar.

2) If all of the sudden no one needed programming and systems administration and I could no longer get work, I'd end up having to default on my mortgage. The bank shareholders (who all have houses and therefore don't need mine) would then try to sell my house, but because no one else had any work either, no one would be able to pay them the $200k I didn't pay and they would end up loosing all the money they lent me, despite having the house itself as collateral.

#2 really an complete economic collapse rather than a devaluation of the dollar. It's impossible because we all need food and energy an shelter to live, so there will always be demand for something. And America produces food and energy and weapons and entertainment and all sorts of stuff heavily in demand around the world. So whoever is producing the American goods and services heavily in demand would be willing to pay the bank something for my house, so the total economic collapse scenario is simply impossible without some event that severely reduces the world population (and with it the demand the drives the economy).

Now you might ask why the bank wouldn't trade my house for bitcoins (or perhaps Yuan) instead of dollars. It's because the bank's shareholders really want to exchange my house for food and energy and entertainment and weapons. And who produces those things? Americans, of course. Americans who need dollars to pay their own mortgages. And the bank known this. They'll demand dollars from someone for my house because that's what the people producing the things they want will demand from them.

So what about #1. As luck would have it, between the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, we've printed (or made promises to print) trillions of dollars in the last few years. But the banks and corporations who got it are sitting on it. As it turns out, they don't want a website, or at least they're not willing to pass all that money along to me to code one up for them. Eventually all that money could erode our economy, but that all depends on what happens for it. It they had me code up a website at a price that allowed me to just pay off my mortgage, and it turned out no one wanted to use that website, then I'd have a house but the cost of insurance and utilities would dwarf my former mortgage payment due to inflation. If instead they had me build a website that did something really useful (and if we also used all that money to fix roads and invent cheap, efficient electric cars and clean fuel and cheap ways to cure cancer), Id still pay off my house, but we wouldn't see inflation. My electric bill wouldn't go up because we invented cheap renewable fuels. We fixed all the potholes in the roads, so my car would last a lot longer, and because I didn't buy a new one, the lower demand for car would keep the price of cars down. Maybe the bank shareholder (who got his 200k back early and didn't get the other 200k+ I'll be paying over the next 30 years) gets cancer. But that's okay because we've invented a cheap cure for cancer. So he's cured for $50k and still has plenty left over.

So the dollar has value because we there the people producing the stuff the world needs hold dollar-valued debt. And although inflation threatens the value of that debt to the creditor, what we do with all the money being printed will have the final say on if inflation really occurs.

No, you misunderstand. It's some soldier who married a porn star and gets to see her picture when he's deployed oversees by checking out that website. Totally legit. This is why we have freedom of speech in the US: To prevent overzealous legislators from harassing hard-working patriots from doing perfectly acceptable things.

Uh, so in my small-to-medium size business I won't touch overpriced cisco crap with a 10 foot pole. But compared to the telcos, I really don't have much traffic (or distance). Perhaps Juniper and F5 and Brocade have alternatives that match performance, but Cisco has huge market share and I doubt the three of those companies could take Cisco's place quickly if telcos started dumping Cisco stuff.

Plus, if you tell AT&T that you use Comcast because AT&T uses Cisco, I'd bet AT&T is well aware that Comcast uses a lot of Cisco equipment too. So your argument seems a bit unpersuasive.

What we need is a law that allows victims of identity theft to sue companies who report that they paid wages to the victim when, in fact, they paid those wages to someone who stole the victim's identity. A special court should be set up to handle such cases, and the victim should simply need to show that they didn't actually receive the wages reported to the IRS by the company.

Companies would then be required to pay the victim all the wages they said they did, plus interest, legal and accounting costs, and any IRS fees and penalties the victim may have incurred. This way, the IRS gets their money, the victim gets his or her money back (and then some), and law enforcement doesn't have to waste tax dollars hunting down illegal immigrants that aren't otherwise criminals.

I know what you're thinking. This would hurt the legal immigrants and non-white U.S. citizens who couldn't get a job because employers weren't certain of their identity. Yes, that's an unfortunate side-effect, but imagine if some June the IRS sent a nasty reply to your tax return saying that you'd failed to report a bunch of your income. When I think about the headache that would be, fuck 'em!

Push the responsibility onto businesses, let them demand a method of verifying someone's right to work, and then don't complain when we get a national ID card with a picture and RFID chip. And don't pull out the stupid privacy argument. Of course the government already has such info on all of use. Let's make it official and perhaps the courts will get the opportunity to opine on how it's used.

Despise other comments to this post claiming that these apps had the malicious payload intentionally included, I can't find anything confirming that's the case. Are we sure it's not a matter for developer keys (or even the Google Marketplace or phone OS) getting compromised? Anyone see that info anywhere