I apologize for being unclear, but apparently you really did not understand what I was saying in that last post.

Whatever phrase you finance guys have come up with involving "algorithm" apparently has very little to do with the CompSci definition of the term. In CompSci an algorithm is any repeated process that can be approximated by a series of instructions. Any process. If you only data blondes your mate choice algorithm includes a a step about hair color. If you think Apple's long-term worth per share is $125, and therefore whenever you see that it's below $125 you buy and whenever you see it's above you sell; that is an algorithm even if you don't set up a computer program to do it automatically.

Thus, if the market price is what the last guy paid, then the algorithm is the price is what the last guy paid.

If the algorithm is that simple then it's harder to prove because you can't just turn the steps into a computer program that nobody could argue with. You could turn the steps into a computer program, but that would apparently involve guesses about how his unexecuted trades affected actual executed trades, which makes it hard to prove beyond any doubt. But the standard is not "any doubt," the standard is "reasonable doubt."

But that kind of hard is typical in financial crimes, which tend to be things that are perfectly legal except under certain arguable circumstances (ie: Martha Stewart would have gotten off if she'd had a diary that gave some other reason for selling her shares that day).

So I suspect they've got something besides the trades. Perhaps his latest business included him boasting about making money off a crash he'd help create, or an email to a snitch said something about actively manipulating market prices, or they think they really have isolated the effect of a single unexecuted trade on the market price.

You do realize your entire chain of logic is predicated on the assumption that the Judge believes them when they claim they can't access it? Change that and even you admit that Twitter gets fined until it complies, which means installing a back door..

Moreover I think you need to do some research on the ability of the US Legal system to penalize Americans for failing to ensure foreign legal systems don't kiss the ring of a random District Court Judge. Denny Chin, for example, is generally a pretty good Judge. He has recently been in the news because he's repeatedly ruled that Argentina's sovereign default has no standing under US Law; and therefore the American banks who are running their bond programs have to pay vulture funds at the pre-default rate. The Appeals Court has backed him up. The Supremes refused to even hear the case.

No form of IR small enough to be mounted on an aircraft has a range of more then 75 miles, which is not a lot of range at Mach 1.6. Land-based installations aren't any better.

As for equal powers, there aren't any. A single carrier battle group has the military power to conquer all but a half-dozen or so nations all by itself. The Chinese will probably get there in 20-30 years (military investments are long-term, so even if they hit our absolute level of defense spending tomorrow it would take them a decade to catch up in combat power), but the other potential competitors just don't have the resources. The Russians are mostly still selling Soviet-era tech (the Su-35 you are so high on is the same airframe as 1988's Su-27).

But if you're right they wouldn't need to be equal powers to dominate their own bit of the sky. They'd need some WW2-era electronics, and a bunch of RADAR techs. This doesn't work IRL because a RADAR building can't dodge, so cruise missiles and stealth bombers level the things before they can be used against our other combat aircraft.

Then the Algo is the combination of most recent bid/ask prices.

He was doing something that was affecting the market price, or his defense wouldn't be "but everybody does it," it would be "but the market price is not affected by my fake bids and therefore I could not have caused the crash."

If the fake trades don't get directly calculated in it gets trickier to prove, but it's still possible. The evidence becomes circumstantial, but that's not unusual in financial crimes cases because financial crimes tend to be complex multi-step acts which are only illegal in aggregate. ie: Martha Stewart had every right to sell her stock, she had every right to know the company wasn't getting the approval it wanted, but selling it right after learning about the non-approval got her sent to jail.

So there's a mysterious form of RADAR, that's been widely available since the 90s, which can shoot down stealth aircraft at will, yet we have lost only one manned stealth aircraft in combat in 20 years?

What's more likely, that the above scenario is the case, or that some RADAR geeks are over-estimating the practicality of using their equipment in combat situations?

The reason I like Federal funding of this stuff is that it means you don't get weird market-based distortions.

For example if Microsoft funded it they would actually be breaking multiple business ethics rules if they let anyone else us it, because their major ethical duty is to make sure their shareholders get paid. That means incorporating the research into Windows and then using it as a selling point. To get away with letting Google and Apple use the research they'd have to have evidence the PR value was greater then the research cost.

OTOH if the Feds do it through their science budget it's public domain, and anyone can use it.

My point is that warrants are flexible. If the cops have a warrant to search a room you can't get out of it by arguing technicalities. The legal system is run by humans, not computers, so the guy who thinks of a clever way to reclassify his data has only made it slightly more expensive for the government to take it, and then guaranteed he'll get fined.

Many, many computer geeks see that the legal system is basically a series of algorithms, conflate that with the algorithms running their non-human computers, and think they can figure out a way to hack the algorithm. That may be the case (see Mitt Romney's tax burden), nine times out of ten the humans running the Court system will see a clever hack like this as bullshit intended to keep them from doing their very important (and they think they are very very very important) jobs.

Microsoft is gonna be a case of this real soon now. There won;t be very many public examples, because generally to be a public example you'd have to a) publicly proclaim you were using some legal stratagem to keep your user's data safe, and then b) publicly admit it didn't work.

Part of the problem with Twitter's strategy is they publicly announced it. If you're a Judge who thinks you are all that stands between Civilization and Anarchy, with your Fair Rulings sending Bad People away; you are not gonna appreciate that a multi-billion company has tried to make your rulings harder to enforce. When the DEA asks for a warrant to search some guy's private messages on Twitter, and you think they're right, you are not gonna be in the mood to rule that the legal system has been successfully hacked by an MBA and a couple engineers at Twitter.

Twitter are really going to have to prove that they cannot access the Irish data, and you aren't going to be taking their word for it when they say that [insert database feature you never learned about in law school because law school doesn't teach database theory] prevents them from accessing their Irish database.

Whether his trades pushed the market down is trivial to prove. The market prices are determined by a fairly simple algorithm. You just create a computer program from the algorithm, then feed it two data sets of trades: one with his in it and the other without.

And if they did that, and his executed trades are designed to make the maximum amount of money when the market goes down; and he continues to use the strategy for five years; it's kinda difficult to believe he was not doing it on purpose.

To get that lock you need to be mighty close to the F-35. If the US squadron let's fly 75 miles from you, changes vector, and goes Mach 1.6 for 30 seconds you ain't gonna be close enough to see where they end up with IR, much less get weapons lock.

As for drones, you could say the same about all manned aircraft. But until the technology improves some, the Mach 4, 20G turning, drones of our dreams ain't happening. The computer network couldn't keep up with the drone so the pilot in Nevada would lose control.

Which is probably why it's a good idea for the Feds to fund it instead.

Where do you get this "by your own admission is not really suitable" crap?

I just said that if it works the way it should work then we'll be Gods of the Skies and the entire Russian Air Force will be roughly as useful as the Gloster Gladiator. They all want that.

And if you're gonna ignore my entire argument because you'd rather just flame me, why bother?

I didn't say that some nation of magical saints wouldn't have said had options beyond what we did in Afghanistan, I said that there were no options that were politically possible.

Which means your case has to be based on whether it would have been politically possible for let Bin laden chill in Kandahar for six months while we waited for Prosecutors to come up with evidence or you are setting upa straw man.

You missed the phrase "politically possible." Since you said nothing about the politics of America on S12 you failed to counter my point. At all. You aren't presenting a counter-argument, you're presenting a non sequitur.

How about a second try, only this time you bother to read the whole thing.

I didn't say F-35 would win a VFR dogfight. I said the entire point of the damn thing was to avoid VFR dogfights. I said it had rails for air-to-air missiles, and it would be very difficult to impossible for Su-35s (or even F-22s) to get a strong enough lock on it to engage outside of VFR.

As for our allies, approximately how much do you think we're paying Canada to buy F-35 rather then upgrade the FA-18 Superhornet into a CF-18 Hornet II of some sort? The answer is $0.

Campaign donations are one way to get a vote, but they're far from the only one. That's why all the pressure groups you've ever heard of have frequent "Days of Action" where their minions all call the local Congressman to demand something.

Even most campaign donations are not quid pro quos. Pressure groups find people who agree with them and would be good candidates. Then they get them to run. The donation is supporting the sincerely-held-view of the candidate, not bribing the candidate to change his mind. This is particularly true these days on issues that require spending money because DC is in austerity mode and the guy you whose on your side because you paid him off will almost certainly decide not to vote for your spending package because it includes cuts to some other program from somebody else who bribed him.