They've been robbing their customers for years.

Their customers, who are by and large not idiots, would obviously leave them if this were the case. Yet, they do not leave. They realize the simple truth that Goldman is extremely good at what they do and that includes helping customers make money.

Just because you don't understand something doesn't make it bad.

Maybe to be physically close to Wall Street computers.

Which, as mentioned, are all in New Jersey.

ARCA: Weehawken, NJ (to be moved to Mahwah, NJ early next year)
NYSE: Mahwah, NJ
NASDAQ: Carteret, NJ
ISE: Jersey City, NJ (to be moved to Secaucus, NJ early next year)
Direct Edge: Secaucus, NJ
CBOE C2: Secaucus, NJ

111 8th is more important for the fiber going into it. It is the place you want to be if you're a telco.

I'm sure it's a peripheral factor, but it's not one of those "but.. but... but Best Buy's price is 8.5% higher than Amazon!" because of an 8.5% sales tax...

Really? It directly factors into my purchases pretty much every day.

Don't you yank peoples have an equivalent of the metro? A paper that knows what it's worth?

Yes, it's called (wait for it) Metro.

I can be grudgingly convinced to accept auto-trading, after all it only takes a small portion from me since I make longer term trades,

Or it may give you a small portion. By providing liquidity, the price might have been 1 cent cheaper for you to buy than you otherwise could have paid.

one question I asked was, "is it true that at Apple you work really hard?"

Why in the world would you possibly ask this? All it does is make you sound scared of hard work. Of course they work hard! Anyone at the top of their field always does. It's how you get there.

Because no one hates an honestly earned dollar more than the wealthy, greedy aristocrats that run Wall St. That's why they hate unions.

I'm sorry. You just used "honest" and "union" in the same line. Boy have you been bamboozled.

That may be an excuse to break the encryption, but it isn't an excuse not to purchase a copy.

I agree. Since many people pay for cable TV, one could argue they're well within their rights to break HDCP encryption in order to time/format shift much as one would with a VCR (which we know were affirmatively held up as being legal to record TV shows for one's own use).

only excuse you may have is that you're outside the USA and want US content

Or if I want to use it under my terms and my choice of file format. On my choice of device. Using my choice of "unsupported" operating system.

It's people like you who let us get into this sort of situation in the first place.

If I didn't know any better, I'd honestly think this is the next plot in Stieg Larsson's Millennium series.

Hell, even Jersey bots are out of luck.

NYSE (Arca) is already in Weehawken, NJ, and everything (including NYSE proper) is moving to Mahwah, NJ, beginning Monday, 2010-08-09.

I don't disagree they should get paid whats fair. Its definitely not fair that the traders get paid so much more

It depends on the firm. I'm sure there's exploitation at some of the low and mid-tier firms. The fact of the matter is that at a top firm, if you're truly talented, you will be taken care of very well. It is not unheard of for programmers to have a salary + bonus close to $400-$500k. More for senior guys.

Cream floats to the top.

You can live an awesome lifestyle with that kind of salary.

You forget that it means living in New York City or its environs. $100,000/year is lower middle class in New York City. Things are expensive.

where are all these magical jobs that pay such huge salaries?

Mostly NYC. Some in Chicago. It's very tough to find good people. Not just coding, but infrastructure as well.

And in other news, I continue to close YouTube when I go to a video that doesn't have an HTML 5 version.