.. please tell me you were being sarcastic!

This thing has the right size and lift capability for deploying "rods from God". Scary, isn't it?

"Getting on the no-fly list might very well be the best way to ensure that your employer will arrange less humiliating travel options when they need you to be somewhere...."

Either that or your employer will give you the pink slip and hire another guy. Hmmm... What would most employers do?

Water? Instead of slivovitza? You must be joking! :D

Hummm... From the Merriam Webster 11 Collegiate Dictionary:

"...2 a : an agreement among conspirators b : a group of conspirators

synonyms see PLOT"

'Group' is a synonym of 'set' - " 21 : a collection of elements and especially mathematical ones..."- and sets can have a single element.

Perhaps it's stretching it a bit too much, but I think that you can "conspire with yourself" the same way you can "plot by yourself".

Of course, the legal meaning of 'conspiracy' is a different matter.

And copyrighting integers is not different from trademarking common words like Apple or Windows. "Whoever has the gold, makes the rules".

I hope none of THEM reads your post, or we'll start running short of integers any time soon. ;)

Note: My browser had some hiccup while editing and sent my other, half finished post of his own volition, I promise! I'll leave now and discreetly perform seppukku.

Hum, the previous market price ,then . And it doesn't count as 'true' market price if the purchaser is one of your friends acting in your behalf.

Everybody knows that a Ferrari can't cost $5000, but no fucking body knows what the price of some stocks should be. It's just too much data from a gazillion sources, and it's extremely chaotic. A company could see a huge 'proper' increase in their stock value due to some local war in Africa or the untimely death of a pop star. Now we have programs specialized in finding those trends and profitable stock-and purchasing it automatically, and we have programs specialized in deceiving them.

I think those kind of programs should be both forbidden by law. Automatic buyers are extremely dangerous, and the only way to decrease the risk they pose is by putting a human being in the chain of command, with the responsibility of giving approval before placing the orders. The difficult part is that it should be a human being with some common sense.

Having the bad guys placing their orders manually would cripple to a great extent their ability to manipulate markets. Of course one of these guys could make a program simulating human behavior, but then they wouldn't be able to place thousands of orders per hour.

My 0,02 €

There is lots of this kind of manipulation going on in WoW's Auction House. Whenever someone sells goods at 800% their market price, someone is trying to pump up the said price. This way whoever visits the AH with an Auctioneer robot will be tricked into thinking that purchasing those goods is a worthy business.

It reminds me of those sorry pathetic bastards that offer publicly to purchase some useless trinket for 1000 gold, through the commerce channel. By pure chance there is one of these items being auctioned at 600 gold. When the happy entrepreneur tries to contact the sorry pathetic etc. to collect his earnings he usually finds out that other did it first, or that the prospective purchaser has temporarily left the game, or just ignores him . ^_^

WoW is only a game, but I shudder when I consider the things that may be lurking in the Real World's markets.

How does this beat the use of magnetic tethers, also proposed for this task some time ago? Wouldn't the balloon's draft reduce the speed enough for the satellite to survive reentry and fall to earth in a single piece? Or are they planning to free the balloon before entering the first layers of atmosphere?

Just curious.*

*:Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna read TFA. :)

I mostly agree. Except for the fact that Dell, a company based in a country with strong customer privacy laws and the ability to enforce them, is sending their customer's data to third counties that either lack these laws, or lack the ability to enforce the above said laws. That should be totally forbidden, but sadly it is not. Making Dell -or any other company doing the same thing- legally responsible for these kind of privacy breaches makes perfect sense.

My 0.02 €

So, instead of making a call to the support center and wasting an hour or two to discover the cause of those strange glitches in a new model of computer your company purchased by the dozens, your ideal IT department would start by investigating the issue from scratch and wasting 10s of man hours to discover the cause of the issue , eh? Makes perfect sense. Not.

Because quite often the support center doesn't have a clue. Perhaps the relevant information is somewhere in their technical dept, but no mater what you do, you can't contact 'the right guy' who knows the answers. Perhaps it's that your computers are the only ones that suffer the issue, due to your company using non-standard software or hardware. Perhaps the issue is extremely difficult to pinpoint, or extremely difficult to explain. In those cases the two or three hours the IT dept spends calling support are not lost, they're just part of the time needed to investigate and fix the problem.

Well, I guess that's more common than you think

The word 'defaultly', I meant. :D