> The result of a Capitalistic Society that practices Capitalism would be Open and Free Markets, right?

Wrong. Left to themselves, these tend to degenerate into monopolies as the incumbents use their profits to keep competitors out. Open and free markets must be maintained by forces outside of the market mechanism, such as regulations.

Capitalism doesn't produce free markets, it requires them (most definitions of it do anyway), so wrong causality direction.

This. Imposing somebody's views of what constitutes 'proper' behavior on others should always be hard and expensive, so that it's reserved for the important stuff like murder and fraud. You think I should be fined because I crossed the street at a red light with no car in sight? Well, fuck you. My ideas of propriety happen to be different from yours, and I think it the height of arrogance to impose on other people one's ideas of good behavior (except in grave cases like murder), and yes that includes my own.

There's kids standing outside of my house usually on summer weekends, they're OK but when they get drunk they get very noisy (and litter, of course) and if it's late someone calls the police eventually, and they come by and ask the kids to go away. Yes it's a nuisance, but they're on public property and have a right to be there; tolerating this is part of living in a free society, I'd much rather live like this than have everybody's behavior continuously monitored to match someone's norms.

Are you one of those people I ran across while living in the US who thinks it's a public duty for a houseowner to mow their lawn (I could never actually understand why, but there was even a law I think)? If so, please move in a neighborhood of people who share your views, you can all monitor and censor each other, and leave the rest of us in peace.

I'm mostly with you, but expiration on death is a really bad idea as it give would-be users an incentive to kill the authors. I'd much rather go with a fixed, short protection period, and then public domain.

Yes, I also think I have the right to use the image in such a context. I also believe there should be no copyright protection for non-commercial use of anything by individual persons (as opposed to organizations), as it happens, of which this is a special case.

Firstly, it's perfectly possible to buy -6 shares, it's called selling. It's even possible to buy -6 shares if you don't have any, that's called short selling and is more complicated but still possible (though illegal for some shares such as, currently, Spanish ones I believe).

Here they were talking of futures contracts not shares, you can buy or sell as many as you want, it's totally symmetrical. And that $69T was just referring to the notional, which misleading since you don't pay the notional when you enter a futures contract - you just post margin which is a tiny fraction of that. The margin on that kind of amount would still be monstrous, but not measured in the trillions.

No, politicians at Obama's level are being scrutinized constantly and intensively, and are squeaky clean certainly where the small stuff is concerned becaused simple cost-benefit analysis says it's the strategic thing to do. 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant' at work.

Do I hear a condescending tone there? Me, I'm with the GGP in that I like my games to be beautiful, engaging, easy interactive movies. My competitive spirit is getting all the workout it needs at work, and whatever energy I got left after that, my 1yo daughter has first claim on.

So when I grab an hour or two to play a game, I want beautiful and fun, and yes I want guaranteed progress, as I simply have no time or energy to try over and over again.

Not saying my way is better than yours, to each his own - it's just that people with my kind of priorities, regarded as a group, probably have a total budget for purchasing games that is at least comparable to that of people who have the time and inclination for really hard gaming challenges; thus, a lot of games lately accomodate my priorities, and I think that's a good thing.

The usages of my Samsung Note 2 are:

Play music: 70%
Play video games while in the bus, train etc: 10%
Record videos of my little daughter to share with relatives: 5%
Google chat and SMS: 5%
Read personal mail at work: 5%
Phone calls are somewhere in the remaining 5%

Oh, and while on holidays it's invaluable to have a GPS navigation device that allows you to click right through to the website of the hotel you found on the overlaid map and yes, call them to reserve a room for the night.

And the GPS + satellite photo maps have saved me from getting badly lost in a forest at least once, and kept me from being late while taking a picturesque route to a rendez-vous another time. Maps-on-demand that include your location are a god-given when you're traveling, hiking, etc.

  Try any that with a brick phone.

Are you working for Google or something? I work in a large corp, and the hiring procedures are insane, especially on the IT side. There is one process for getting budget to pay people (which is fair enough), then you have to get permission at damn near board level to actually start looking for an actual person to hire, and once all the people in that would-be hire's command chain have signed off on hiring them, it can still take HR weeks to months to get an actual written offer out. And then there are yearly hiring freezes that strike about every September, last till next year, and supersede any approvals you might have achieved by then. These, again, can be bypassed by pushing hard enough - overall, none of this makes hiring impossible, but an incredible time sink, not to mention causing us to lose candidates because the competitors were faster on the draw.

Once you're in the system, it's actually a pretty good place to work (and getting a bit better every year IMO, as the number of bright people around me grows), but the hiring procedures are just damn crazy.

The trick is to throw them edgewise onto concrete and give them enough spin that it lands on a corner and bounces back upright.

Did that experiment when I discovered its music player had no folder browsing, no custom EQ, and reset the on-the-go playlist everytime I connected to charge. Now a happy Note 2 user.

Yes, and that reason is that people brainlessly copy whatever the 'latest thing' is. I far, far prefer physical keyboards so can't regard the wave of iPhone lookalikes as a good thing; and of the no-keyboard phones, I think the best is Galaxy Note because it has a reasonable-sized screen, again very unlike the iPhone; and Android lets me install whatever I want without trying to force me to the One True Way, ditto.

Yes, iPad and iPhone had a huge impact, but not for the better as far as I'm concerned. I want more buttons on my MP3 player so that I can use it without taking it out of pocket - it's Steve Jobs' (and brainless copymonkeys') fault stuff doesn't have buttons anymore...

Sorry, can't agree with your comparison of Richard Dawkins and religious nuts. Richard Dawkins would be more than happy to re-evaluate his views were he presented with any scientifically valid evidence that any religion's statements about reality are actually true (eg, God does respond to prayer, etc). In the face of complete absence of such evidence, he rightly continues to call bullshit on these claims, and just as rightly points out that we shouldn't tiptoe around bullshit claims and intolerance just because they're driven by religious views.

Note that, unlike religious nuts, he does not call for censorship of the views he objects to, merely does his best to present his views.

I find the resurgence of religion in the last decade or so truly scary, people take for granted all the advances science keeps bringing us and keep trying to impose their medieval views on everybody around them, regardless of the damage it causes.

I'm doing a machine learning course with them right now, and they ask you as one part of the homework to write Matlab code, and include a script that connects to their servers, and checks your code for correctness. This, plus a set of partly randomized multiple-choice questions for each lecture are a great help for me to focus on the content.

That's pretty awesome in my book, way more than any forums (well already at Uni I mostly skipped the lectures and discussion groups, and passed everything by reading the lecture notes, then doing the homework).

All this needs to match everything a real university can give me is the option for those few that can pass that sort of course with flying colors (doing the advanced homework well etc) to get a chance for a follow-up advanced course where after passing the automated code check you'd get a real human to comment on your solutions to the more interesting problems. I'd be more than happy to pay for that sort of course, too, after I'd had a chance to check out the professor and material during the free initial course. I already have a career so couldn't care less about getting a piece of paper out of it, but could always do with learning some bleeding-edge techniques.

Well there is high-freq execution, that's a service very much in demand as it allows to lower market impact and thus get filled at a better price. Secondly, a lot of what's described on Slashdot as HFT is marketmaking (Knight for example), these folks have an obligation to provide tight prices all the time, which is a service.
Finally, as for pure HFT prop guys, they mostly make money off each other, contrary to what you read on slashdot it's not at all easy to make money in HFT these days, this is not 2009. Also the spreads on equities have collapsed in the last decade, so a very plausible scenario is that the money that the brokers were earlier getting from charging high spread, HFT traders are getting now while lowering the spreads for the rest of us.

And why does HFT provoke so much vitriol when for example the fact that retail currency exchange points routinely quote spreads of several cents on the dollar, while the professional markets are 0.01 cent wide means that the money lost by retail consumers when exchanging currencies is a very large multiple of anything they might lose due to HFT (if anything)?

There are murky corners in finance, no denying that (LIBOR anyone?), but HFT just isn't one of them.

Well that doesn't answer my original question, how any of this can make your pension pot to become worthless in 0.005 seconds.

Making decisions on information before it's public knowledge is called insider dealing, is a criminal offense that lands people in jail, and has nothing to do with HFT, in fact algos don't generally trade events or use information like that even if it was available.

Ditto for market manipulation.

Of course every trade made affects the market, what you haven't given a single argument for why HFT's effect is _adverse_.