While HFT needs to be controlled, or at least watched, I strongly suspect that it does less damange to individual investors' portfolios than a general lack of knowledge about accounting, tax, and business. HFT is an important issue, but if you don't know how to understand a 10-Q, then HFT is probably not your largest problem.

Just sayin'....

Really, though, VB6 is not BASIC, despite claims to the contrary. Program structure (numbered lines), approach (graphical), flow control (GOTO?) and syntax is entirely different.

According to the IRS, bitcoin is a property, not a currency. For the IRS, bitcoin is the equivalent of real estate or shares of stock. You don't pay capital gains on currency, but you do on property.

Sucking can help, but it is not needed.

You can immerse the siphon tube in liquid, plug the ends, and then position the siphon so that the ends are in each of two reservoirs with different water levels. When the plugs are removed, the liquid begins to move.

No sucking.

...has strong opinions about HR issues, and wants you to know that CS majors make better peons than English majors.

Why would anyone listen to the HR director about what's good for you? He's looking out for the company.

Somewhere out there, there's a sad robot missing a hand.....

"I told that student they are much better off being a B student in computer science than an A+ student in English

-might be re-phrased-

"I hire people that I think are like me."

I'll grant that there are a lot of unskilled liberal arts majors out there, but I've also interviewed hundreds of people with technical degrees and no skills, sense, or insight. Degree is just not an accurate enough heuristic to use as a filter. Unfortunately, there's not degree available in Generalized Problem Solving.

It's not the blocks that are important, it is the active use of imagination and motor skills. Comparatively less imagination and motor skills are used interact with a flat, rectangular panel of glass. Kids learn (partly) by playing and doing. With tablet screens, they are not doing as much. Fruit Ninja does is not as good as blocks.

I can't figure out how I would use this to make make a real-world decision. Just picking the "most secure" language overlooks so many other tradeoffs that I just can't see it as a valid approach, especially when the article ends with a call for more testing, not a call to select superior languages.

This is a non-finding.

Yep. I've been working with a family friend lately who is paralyzed by the difficulties of Windows 8. She's just a home user transitioning from Windows 7, but she's seriously contemplating paying for training to understand the newer/better/easier interface.

I'm always encouraged to see Linux in the workplace, but it might or might not be the right answer.

The catch here is that no matter how much you save by upgrading to any new OS, the cost of support and usability issues will be much greater than than the cost of the OS even if new PCs are included. Focus on total life cycle cost, and it may be cheaper to upgrade the PCs to windows to avoid the training, ongoing teaching and hand holding required to shift to Linux of any flavor. Of course, if you've got a capable group of users the lifetime cost of Linux could be much lower. Without knowing your situation in detail, it's hard to say.

...but the price of hardware should probably not be driving the cost/benefit analysis.

Absolutely. I know there are considerations about rigidity and strength of the frame in a crash, but I'm under 6', and have trouble seeing a traffic light at least once a day. Is it really not possible to put larger windshields on cars?

Yes, it is only the traders that gain benefit--they are the ones participating in the transactions. Fast traders (HFTs), slow traders (e.g., retirement investors), and traders with all time frames in between assume the risks and accumulate the profits and losses.

No matter how slowly the transactions move, the participants with more current information have an advantage. This is true whether you're talking about making a fast profit using stocks or investing (speculating?) in real estate because you think it will be valuable decades in the future. Information always matters, and you can't eliminate the advantage of information and still have a free (or free-ish) market.

Of course, if you're interested in making use of the money owned by market participants to achieve social/economic/political goals, you may have a legitimate point. But at that point, we're not talking about investing, we're talking about taxation. I may support that, but let's be clear about what we're doing. Until then, the people who own the money get to use it for their own profit.

Possibly, but I'm not sure I'd choose the word 'egocentric.' I do think that you can count on the fact that *everyone* in the market is working strictly for his/her own benefit. Even the 401(k) investors and the people who want to slow the transactions down.

No. Your concept of the market is incorrect.

The market organized to facilitate transactions, to buy and sell things easily, not to save money. Banks are for saving money--that's what they were invented for. However, whenever an investment is made, there's a risk, even in a bank. You might not get some or all of your money back. Banks can guarantee interest rates on small deposits because they pay you less than your risk is worth, that leaves them extra money to cover the times when their reinvestments of your money fail. (p.s. your money is not sitting in the vault, and they don't guarantee the safety of large deposits).

Loss of the ability to trade at will reduces the price that buyers are willing to pay for an asset. Nobody want to buy an asset that they won't be able to sell--it is not worth as much to buyers. So, slowing the market down reduces the values of the goods, services, and securities being traded.

High frequency traders are a serious problem, but not as serious a problem as a imposing a 1-week waiting period on market transactions.