It could have something to do with salinity. Typical seawater freezes at about -2 C because of the high salt content, but if the local salinity has dropped because of the introduction of a large amount of fresh meltwater then it might freeze closer to 0 C. Warming could lead to more meltwater, lower salinity and therefore more ice under certain specific conditions.

The article states that the crew is measuring both temperature and salinity, so we'll find out if the conditions are met and that is a possible explanation. I'm not holding my breath though...

US Patent Pending

A Method To Allow Device Insertions In Any Orientation

A device being any device that can be held in the hand between two fingers, too large to be grasped by two fingers yet small enough to be grasped by the whole hand, or too large to be grasped by a hand, an insertion being a process by which a device is brought close to another larger device with a receptacle and the first device placed into the receptacle to facilitate mutual operation, and orientation being the angular position of the first device relative to the second device along the common axis defined by the midpoint of the first device and the receptacle of the second device or being the skew position of the first device major or minor axis relative to the major or minor axis of the receptacle of the second device. This patent asserts a new method covering insertions of devices into receptacles of other devices in any orientation, and if it just works, whatever it is, you owe us a million dollars.

NSA: Sheik Abdul Muhammad Hussein likes to look at boobies.

Sheik: The NSA is lying.

Follower #1: Yeah, the NSA is lying.

Follower #2: Boobies? Where's the boobies?

Lol- they didn't reprint the photographs in question in the original article. I guess ABC (Australian Broadcasting Service, the company in the URL of the OP) didn't want to pay a random Haitian photographer. They seem to have no problem paying Getty - a search for Getty on their site turns up lots of images.

I guess you have to demonstrate ownership AND be in the special club to get royalty payments.

In an age where you can patent a rectangle, is it really about innovation anymore?

This isn't an example of bad Samsung capitalizing on Apple's good ideas. This is about major corporations being encouraged to stick their flags in the obvious and make else everyone pay. Whether you pay Apple or whether you pay Samsung (who then has to pay Apple), you're paying up and up for a fucking rectangle and whatever else is in their catalog of the obvious.

Just remember the next time you fork over $12 for a movie ticket, who are you supporting with that money.

Instead of dreaming up new ways to interpolate over spotty and incomplete data, why don't they invest in some thermometers and stick them where they need to fill in the data gaps going forward? Real measurements trump "we think this is what the measurements would have been" any day of the week.

And if the response is, it's hard to put up weather stations in all of these far off and exotic locales, tough beans. The fact that science is hard doesn't make incomplete measurements and convoluted interpolations any more solid.

Good point. Technically thought, the assignment doesn't return a boolean, it returns a number.

The "if" statement on the other hand treats integer arguments as implicit booleans: if (a != 0) ... that's where the type unsafety lies.

According to the article posted elsewhere on slashdot about this:

"within a millisecond or two" is still physically impossible given the 3.2 millisecond bound implied by the speed of light in a vacuum, but even the 2-3 millisecond figure quoted in your other article is much less than the actual fiber latency of about 6.5 milliseconds between Chicago and NYC (presumably similar between Chicago and DC), and is still somewhat less than the fastest microwave links available between NYC and Chicago, which come in at about 4.1 milliseconds. (I'm not sure there are any microwave links operational between Chicago and DC as of yet.) These figures are somewhat worse than physical speed of light bounds because they include actual geographical routes and hops, and an index of refraction in the fiber case.

Which is why there should be an investigation - it certainly looks like someone was sitting on the news beforehand and traded on it as soon as 2PM rolled around. But it could also be that a local news organization broke the news embargo ahead of Washington DC. If I understand the article, it seems like news organizations have access to such announcements beforehand so they can prepare ahead of time release their canned articles at the same time. That would be interesting to find out too - I can see local newsmen tipping off their trading buddies where/what to look at precisely 2PM, or just inaccurate network time synchronization.

Well yes you're right; more precisely, it is arbitrage that contributes to the price stability. But most arbitrage takes place today with HFT. Before HFT was possible, sure, there were other means to accomplish arbitrage. However, that doesn't change the fact that today, you have HFT to thank for the benefits of arbitrage.

One of the side benefits of the electronic trading is the traders are anonymous to each other (but not the regulators) and an audit trail gets automatically generated. Some people might call those the main benefits. Why is speed necessary? Because the matching algorithms are mostly FIFO. If you can think of a more fair way to match up buyers and sellers you're welcome to try. But FIFO is the least biased, and therefore being first is a premium.

The news you refer to was notable precisely because it is physically impossible for an electronic signal to get from DC to Chicago in the specified timeframe. I think your culprit is a leaker and accomplices guilty of insider trading, not HFT.