I wouldn't even mind the crackers welding hotrods, if they did any of the following:
Explained what welding is and how it works, and about different types of welds.
Explained why they were welding what they were welding, and what that part does.
Actually showed some welding technique.
Didn't try to create some fake drama about the project having to be finished on time, and some fake race the clock sequences.

Those shows could be decent, but its all about the "drama" of the junior hotheads avoiding the wrath of the big honcho hothead, and no technical content at all.

Not to mention bad software. When I upgraded to win2000 I realized that really many of those crashes were not the OS at all, but the software. GPF's in particular were an application problem, not an OS issue.

Bats is a full fledged exchange now, as is direct edge. Liquidnet is still an ECN, where large institutional traders try to trade in large blocks. I meant CBOE and their CBSX, not CME, my mistake- they are still an options/futures venue. I am not sure what you mean by a retail market? When you put in a buy order with e-trade, they hit these same markets- they have to hit all the "protected markets" as defined by reg nms (any market that officially registers as an exchange).

The SEC is fairly quick with the paperwork actually, and it did not cost that much, at least not to be an ECN. The direct filing fees were somewhere in the 4 figures, how much exactly, I am not sure- I was on the technology side. Total costs were much higher, as we had to provide paperwork and evidence that we met their requirements.

Market making as a profession, where there is a guy that stands in a pit and makes markets, is pretty much dead. Its all electronic, and the electronic "paper trail" pretty much ensures that you won't get front run. Your buddy today wouldn't just send an order for $32k to the floor, he would send it to one of my algo engines, where we would spray it out and take the top of book at every trading venue we connect to until he had it filled, or sent it to a different type of algo engine that would spread the order out over a time period he controlled and sliced and diced it in the market until he got his fill- the whole point of which is to reduce market impact. HFT guys might be sniping 100 shares here and there to make a fraction of a cent on a strategy that has nothing to do with yours- they might have actually moved the market in your favor.

During market panics, the good old fashioned kind driven by fear- the difference between microseconds and 2 hours is gigantic don't you think? Imagine it being 2007, and saying what difference does it make if my house sells in 2 days or 2 years? Good old fashioned market panics are somewhat tempered by HFT btw- most of these strategies are based on mean reversion, so if prices get too out of whack with what is typical, the algos buy and sell to bring everything back in line. Of course those algos bring on new types of craziness, but no one was looking to outlaw people from trading before computers came on the scene.

You could not be more wrong. Do you realize that in the last 10 years, the number of trading venues has exploded from 3 big exchanges and a few tiny regionals (the NYSE, Nasdaq and Amex) to about 40 today? This change in market structure actually created my current job- smart order routing- which ensures that your order to buy 10 shares of IBM gets executed at the best price (as required by the SEC). BATS, Direct Edge, CME, Liquidnet, and many others (I worked at a brand new exchange/broker-dealer startup in 2008. I assure you can get a competing market up and running in 6 months to a year. Are you being deliberately ignorant, or do you just not know, how much you don't know?

As for HFT, you can thank those guys for being able to buy or sell within a penny of the last trade on liquid stocks. Did you prefer giving up 10 cents when both buying and selling to a market maker who really would front run you? Its much more difficult to front run in today's electronic market. Electronic trading is here to stay, and programs have bugs- whether they react in 10 microseconds, or 50 milliseconds, if some firm wants to bankrupt themselves by distorting the price momentarily of a particular stock, humans aren't going to be able to prevent them.

Here is the thing- those people have built very successful businesses and oversaw the growth of billion dollar businesses. Maybe it was a bit of luck, and being in the right place at the right time, but the bottom line is that they did it, and made apple billions of dollars. $60 million is a lot. But this is in some sense a bribe to keep up the good work over the next few years, and more so to prevent them from going off and doing their own startups.

Have you ever tried building a business? I have taken two stabs at it, and the ability to bring in revenue is by far the most valuable skill one can possess. And that's what these guys are being paid for.

Indeed- I have had a synology nas since 2007 (first a ds207, upgraded to a ds211j this year). There are tons of features right out of the box- I have been living in "the cloud" for years now. When I think of all the time I would have to spend setting up software packages for all of the features syno provides... it makes me want to cry. I have already spent way too much time getting serviio up and running to replace the standard crappy DLNA implementation.

Buying pre-built means it works for you, and you aren't spending your weekends tweaking, which is important for me (and my family). I like the fact that I can hear about a new show or movie from my coworker, log into my nas through the web gui, and start downloading it on bit torrent, so that when I come I can watch it that night without having to grab a computer.

The consumer grade NAS's have ARM processors in them. Couple those with some low power HD's and these things sip power. I have a synology ds211j, and its idle power draw is about 10 watts, maxing out at about 30.

Maybe you can home brew an arm based system... I wouldn't know where to start though. Another plus for off the shelf is the form factor- my nas is about the size of a small shoe box, it is small enough to fit on a shelf out of the way in my coat closet.

Yeah I was going to say, I have been using ajaxterm for a few years now. It has its quirks, but it works and gives me access to my home network. For those times when you just can't tolerate the company firewall, it will do.

I don't see how that could work. I have never bothered applying to Google because the area you work in is SO important. In the financial field, it is the difference between working on really cool and sexy stuff using C++, to writing sql queries all day, or just coding business logic all day in some java app. It affects your career path and trajectory, compensation, and prestige within the firm. There are tremendously different fields, many of which I would rather find a job elsewhere than do.

When I was job hunting, the role was the #1 important factor.

In all that ranting, you didn't even touch upon why you hate Samsung so much... maybe its common knowledge among Android users (though I don't think so, most seem to really like the Galaxy S from what I hear), but I have no idea what issues you had w/ your Galaxy...

The people who wrote those loans are amusingly enough in the 99%. Aside from the very top officers running these banks like Countrywide's Angelo Mozilo, most of these people pawning mortgages were generally ordinary people, some of whom made a bit of money during the boom, but most of which are broke now. You want to know who the boots on the ground were that were peddling these loans? A lot of them were friends of mine that grew up in middle class families, went to a state school, maybe got a 3.0 in psychology, and then were deployed to sell mortgages to people in droves, often making over 70k within a year. These are the people who were selling you your mortgages- the ones that the 99% signed their name in triplicate saying that they read the documents given to them, and understood them.

Aside from a small number of relatively isolated cases of fraud and taking advantage of people clearly incapable of understanding what they were doing, the half million people employed at the height of the crisis committed no crimes. You may not like what they did, or the consequences of it, but they committed no crimes, and it is not yet a crime to sell a sucker something more than it is worth.

I find all of this anger towards Wall St. rather absurd. The housing crisis was started, fueled, and continued by the 99% who refinanced their homes and took money out for themselves from their homes fictitious values, and those who continued to pay inflated prices despite basic math saying that should be impossible. Wall St may have been asleep at the wheel, but they were the lions up in the food chain, the last stop up the rung and they passed what was fed to them along to the likes of AIG and other entities. It was grass root's movement of the 99% signing their life away on these mortgages that enabled it.

And you don't think the 1% on wall st have paid? Ask the guys at Lehman and Bear Stearns who had most of their net worth wiped out. Most guys working at banks are upper middle class at best, its only the top few percent making anywhere near the millions, this hit the rank and file hard.

That's a good question. Aside from the girl getting pepper sprayed, I didn't really see anything too out of the ordinary for the NYPD. If you don't listen to a cop, lawfully or unlawfully, and resist arrest in any way, they are going to rough you up a bit. The NYPD is also a bit of a crapshoot, sometimes they are nice and let you off despite clearly doing something illegal, other days you get a jaywalking ticket.

A friend of mine works downtown and has a view of the protest, and the reason it isn't getting coverage, is that it has been quite small. I hear that it has been growing in size each day, but last Friday, the number of protesters was laughable, it looked to be about 100 people from the cellphone picture I saw- the plaza they are protesting in is more crowded during rush hour when people are going to/from work. Not much of a protest, especially by NYC standards. I mean every time the UN meets there are gatherings there many times that size.

I also get within a block of that park on my commute home. They certainly aren't making much of a splash, as I don't even notice them. I think this is a very small protest that is getting national media coverage only because its such a provocative subject.

That is not likely to be the total number of customers lost though. I pre-paid for a year when I signed up, so I am locked in at that rate until next february. This was likely the big bang, but the price change is going to put bring headwinds for the next year. Signing up 400k new customers at the new rates is impressive though.

I myself don't plan on renewing. I don't use it enough, and I was very disappointed by the streaming options- I was under the impression that most movies would be available for streaming and that is not the case at all. Plenty of TV shows are, and I saw documentaries I wouldn't have watched otherwise, but all in all the streaming doesn't have much value.

At $9.99 (one dvd + streaming), netflix flew under the radar on my monthly bills, I could waste it if I needed to. I figured that if it saved us one night out for dinner and a movie, I would break even. It hasn't even done that, and ~$20 a month on top of my $120 a month cable/internet bill is just too much.

Templates and general purpose API's aren't serious programming?