OpenBSD?

I don't think that's the answer this time. This time it appears that only one adequate proposal was received.

This doesn't mean that just any proposal that mentions the magic words should get the nod. This seems to be a case where only ONE adequate project was proposed.

No, that was McCain and Palin. If people has seen a better choice they might have gone with it.

FWIW, I may have voted for Obama, I can't recall, but if so it was only as the lesser of two evils. He probably was that. This isn't much as praise, but it's the best I've got in stock.

If that was a joke, possible, it was a rather poor one. I think it was probably also tasteless, but as I can't identify where the joke lies, I'm not certain.

You don't need a specific law for it to be regulation of the market. Yes, it's fraud. But if you want an unregulated market, you want one in which fraud is permissible.

P.S.: Adam Smith appeared to believe that a free market implied that there would be sufficiently good information about rival goods to enable a potential customer to evaluate which was better, and probably even whether any of them were desireable. This, however, can only be (partially) achieved in a regulated market.

Please Note: That can you bought which say it contains 3 servings and 0 grams of sodium per serving may well contian more sodium that some heart patients could safely consume. And it may be more common for one person to consume the entire can at one time than for it to be divied into 3 separate servings (for either separate people or separate episodes of consumption).

Actually, a free market would be an unregulated market, were such a thing to exist. This doesn't make it desireable, and, in fact, no such thing has ever existed. The closest that I can think of are various blackmarkets, where all sorts of competition are allowed, including killing off the competition. Those are still officially regulated, but in practice are frequently only minimally regulated. (Killing off you competitors will often lead to a serious investigation by the police.)

N.B.: All laws against deceptive marketing or mislabeling of what you are vending are infringements on the free market, as are any regulations against killing your custiomers.

The really amazing thing is that people think a free market is desireable. This is because they are usually only considering certain degrees of freedom. (Which ones tend to vary in an unexpressed way between individual proponents.)

HOWEVER: Once you accept that the market will not be free, you run smack up against "Who will watch the watchmen?". Regulatory capture is so frequent that to ignore it is foolish, but no currently used approach has proven effective in the long term.

You missed on education. Cuirrently at least some schools require that the students have internet access to get assignments. Possibly for other reasons, I don't have a kid in school now, but a friend does, and here daughter is required to get her school assignments over the internet. Actually over the javascript web. I didn't ask whether Flash was required.

High frequency trading isn't the issue. The banks are the real "insiders", and are pointing fingers at small, high frequency prop shops to deflect attention from themselves, and to get back to the bad old days when they could really gouge their customers with wide spreads.

High frequency traders make their money by having better pricing models, narrowing spreads in the market, and being able to execute and then get out of a position quickly to lock in their profits and eliminate risk. The banks like to be the middleman, with wide spreads, so that they can pocket the difference.

The net result of high frequency traders is that the rest of us can get a stock much closer to their actual value (due to narrow spreads). Yes, the high freqency traders make good money by selling the stock $0.005 off the "real" value to me and then immediately getting out of the position by reselling it a millisecond later and locking in that $0.005 profit, but I have only paid a premium of $0.005 instad of the $0.35 or worse the banks would love to gouge me for (and used to, a few short years ago).

We get rid of high freqency trading and we'll be back to the bad old days, when the real insiders really did gouge us, and we all paid far too much for our investments, and were able to sell at far too little, with the likes of Goldman Sachs pocketing the enormous difference.

As for the front-running nonsense on 60 Minutes, that's always been illegal (contrary to what we're being told), and it is not at all how high frequency trading works. If someone was in fact doing that, then they're in a whole world of hurt with the SEC (and rightly so), but this entire exercise appears much more like a distraction: blame small outsider firms who've made the marketplace more effecient and tightened spreads for problems created by corruption within the big banks, and hope no one notices...at least until the next bank-induced crash.

You are making assumptions about their goals.

The US legal system derives from the British which, since the Magna Charta, has been about ensuring that nobody who is powerful enough to overthrow the government wouldn't lose more than they would gain by doing so. So the courts attempt to provide a veneer of justice while actually finding in favor of those with the most power, including wealth as a form of power. They don't always do that, but that's always the way to bet. The problem is you don't always know all the players.

Please note: I believe that the Civil Rights movement was fostered by the Dixiecrats repeatedly flouting the desires of the Democratic party, and voting with the Republicans. That's not the way it looked on the ground, and there were easy justifications based around equity, and popular mores, but those had been ignored for nearly a century. OTOH, another factor was a bulge in the population in the early 20's, when people tend to act more idealistically and without fully counting costs. So it's not all for one reason.

Well, passing the Turing test may be further away than I suggested, after all, many people have failed the Turing test.

The thing about corporations is that the same people can be the corporate officers of more than one corporation...and if I understand correctly, a corporation is enough of a person to be one of those officers. So the AI could go "sponsor shopping".

Given our conservative legislative system, I don't see AIs being given personhood through special legislation within the current century, but getting it by being a corporation seems already possible. And If I've got my legal theories correct (dubious) once you get three AIs, they can elect each other to be their own corporate officers, so you have something vaguely resembling a "bottom-up family" where you CAN choose your relatives.

If I understand recent studies on the placebo effect correctly, you don't need to deceive your customers (though that may make it more effective).

But if I'm reading my history correctly, the distinction between existing in the mind and existing in the physical world was not as clear when the term was created. Ghost and geist (as in zeitgeist) are clearly from the same root, and probably originally meant the same thing. Casper, etc., is NOT the traditional meaning of ghost, but merely a perversion created by Hollywood.

Seriously trying meant if I didn't win enough to buy a meal I wouldn't have any food for the next 12 hours. So I really wanted to win. (I had a Greyhound bus ticket to get home, and that was it, besides the quarter. I'd been a bit foolish about how I spent money earlier, but gambling wasn't involved.)

Please note, since we are talking about parapsycology, gambling schemes are out of context. But I really wanted to win, and that's in context.

OTOH, it's also clearly not statistically significant.

Please notice that there is no evidence that Google did or said anything. This story is pure speculation about why Eich resigned. Plausible, but not convincing.

FWIW, I could make up an equally substantiated story that it was because he was clearly affiliaated with the council of Boskone. It might not be as plausible or as conviincing, but it would have as much evidence in support of it.