Nobody trades like this, and nobody traded like this in the early 2000s. That trading style has been obsolete for 20 years, and predates HFT. You don't see something, decide you want that, and then hit Enter or click your mouse button.

In this example, you decide the maximum price you want to pay in advance, and you enter a limit order. If you're selling you decide upon your minimum selling price, and in the same way you enter a limit order. You've locked in your profit, regardless of timing.

If you're setting up some sort of combination, you enter the triggering parameters in advance, and you don't even need to see what was being done on screen.

People say that computers are trading with each other. That is false. That's like saying that Microsoft Word writes documents. Trading companies, their traders, and their programmers write trading software and adjust parameters. 30 years ago, the "software" was held in the traders' minds, and the execution was done via outcry. The underlying mathematics is the same, and traders don't have to hold these calculations in their minds.

The problem here is this. Extremely rich companies can have the fastest links to the exchanges, but this is no different from the olden days where the oldest and richest companies had the smartest and most well-connected traders. The tools of the trade are slightly different, but rich and successful companies will leverage their money to be the most successful, or else they will be replaced by somebody else.

My own background is that I wrote a derivative trading system between 1999-2006 for a tiny company that ultimately didn't make it because we couldn't compete against the big boys. This angst about HFT is largely technophobia. The traders trade, they learn the software, and they often don't understand how it works. To programmers like me, the algorithms are a black box, but the traders do understand the mathematics pretty well. When you have traders coming out against HFT, you have traders who couldn't understand the software or were burned because their companies weren't rich enough.

People who have never worked in this field who are against HFT really don't understand computer-based trading very well, from either a programmer's perspective or a trader's perspective. Keep in mind that the job of a computer is to make mundane things happen more quickly, so we can focus on more human things. You want your 401K to execute as accurately-priced trades as possible. HFT ensures that both styles of trading benefit.

The Great Lakes region has a significant percentage of the US's population and I would not consider it "way too risky."

Southeast Michigan, part of this region, has around 5.5 million people. We haven't had a significant natural disaster that I'm aware of in the last 100 years or more. We are not subject to tsunamis or earthquakes. We're far away from the ocean and fault lines. We aren't subject to volcanoes or rock slides. This region is flat; no mountains here. Remnants of hurricanes cause little more than some rain. We don't have the kinds of tornadoes you see in the central plains states. We might have one tornado every few years that causes a handful of deaths. We're not prone to severe flooding. We're used to minor floods that drain into the Great Lakes. They're simply an annoyance. It doesn't get very hot here, so you're not going to die of heatstroke. By the same token, due to the effect of the lakes, it doesn't get very cold here compared to other states at this latitude. In the southeast we don't get much snow, either. The snow dies out crossing the state.

In the pre-Columbian days, Michigan's lower peninsula had a large Native population, for very good reason.

Hi, you would be right except there is definitely something punitive in the settlement. Both formal security audits and formal certification procedures are very expensive to small business. If you have only a handful of developers and the audit or certification takes him out of circulation for 3-6 months that's very expensive. Even having your developers distracted by the necessarily niggling and picky auditors is expensive even if they aren't on it full time.

Okay, SSL has its flaws. But if you say SSL and don't have validation turned on then you're lying. If you don't believe in SSL then don't use it. Encrypt contents, but don't screw that up. A PCI-compliant installation might use SSL, encrypt the credit card data using a public key, and decrypt using a private key only on a server accessible via two-factor authentication. SSL is only one layer of the onion.

I'll bow out after this one. Thanks for the good discussion.

This should be a lesson: If somebody is having trouble connecting with you, or you're under some kind of deadline pressure and you can't connect to them, don't turn off SSL validation. Get your connection working properly before going live. Because once you go live, you won't want to/may not be able to properly set up SSL.

I thought the same thing, but it might depend upon the specific alloy.

Anything without acceleration is an experiment. It doesn't matter how many lines of code you've written, or how efficient it seems. 100% of the required functionality is acceleration.

Acceleration is why X is being replaced by Wayland. 2D X11 requires a separate driver for every different type of hardware. 3D X11, from what I read by the Wayland people themselves, has three different APIs. For a long time, the only drivers with good 3D acceleration were proprietary drivers from AMD and nVidia.

I want Wayland to succeed, but I feel that it's still a long way off. The devil is in the acceleration. Think about the time spent by XFree86 developers over the decades writing acceleration code versus everything else, and that's the part we're missing right now. I'm not very clear on just where the acceleration is missing, but it sounds like it's missing in a foundational piece.

My objections are evidenced throughout this thread: For example, someone wants to go to Radio Shack and spend $15 to build his very own brain stimulator. Hopefully nothing goes wrong but the cost to society of people with damaged or malfunctioning brains in a lot more than $15. People with damaged or malfunctioning brains can commit murder or become a ward of the state. That's liable to cost society more like in the millions.

You don't go to Radio Shack and build a kidney dialysis machine for $15, and I don't need to say how much more complex the brain is than a kidney. [But if you ask scientists how a kidney works, even, there are still mysteries and unknown mechanisms.]

This seems analogous to grabbing a smartphone, connecting a wire to some metal part, plugging that wire directly into a 120 V AC source, and hoping that the smartphone works better afterwards. Yes, smartphones have electricity running through them, too, but what you're doing isn't like to be productive.

We're only going to be able to safely operate on the brain when we can stably reprogram individual neural networks. That's the model we're going to have to have of the brain. Something on the order of sophistication of microchip and circuit designers with a cadre of millions of neuroprogrammers. Brain programming might one day be the growth field. We can't have opinions of how the brain might work. We need to have facts about how the brain does work, in minute detail.

Why should I have to make over $125,000/year to live comfortably when I can make under half elsewhere in the country and be equally content? Why should I be forced to rent unless I can afford a million dollars for a house? How am I supposed to lay down roots? Why should any home short of a mansion cost a million dollars in the first place? Silicon Valley is pretty close to my idea of hell. The only thing I like about it is the City of Berkeley and the surrounding mountains and national parks where you can get away from the people living there on the weekends. San Francisco is bleak, dirty. There's nothing I like about it. It was good in the 60's but that was 50 years ago. Why would I want to surround myself with 99% ghetto rich (making a lot of money but having to spend it all on rent and expenses) men mostly struggling, thinking that their website will be the next Facebook.

For the 1% of people living there, I bet it's great. Those same people would be happy anywhere, because they're very wealthy.

I predict that the cloned animal will be possessed by either the Devil or some other evil spirit.

Most data that people have on their hard drives can be readily re-obtained via BitTorrent or in other ways. The simple and probably best strategy is to figure out the 500 GB or less that is actually irreplaceable, and make several copies of that. I have three or more copies of my most important data.

Or, looking at the problem another way, 4 TB hard drives are selling for $160 right now including shipping. A complete insurance policy would cost $800 plus your time. What I would have done if I just had to save everything would be to simply copy all of the data in 4 TB hunks, and put each hard drive one by one into a fireproof safe, or in a safe-deposit box at the bank. A second RAID would be complete overkill, unless time to recovery is of the essence or the data churn rate is high. More than 90% of my data simply accretes over the years, and I'm sure that is true for most people.

$800 is a small price to pay for your data. I seem to recall that it cost a company I worked for over $1,000 to recover a 9 GB IBM hard drive that failed about 15 years ago.

According to this article, Seagate is promising 20 TB hard drives by 2020:

http://www.computerworld.com/s...

We frequently seem to have problems with Comcast's business-class DNS, but the sample size for this experiment is one tiny business in China. Not exactly comprehensive.

China has more Internet users than the United States, and their service is pretty good. I'm a heavy user of the Chinese Internet, and I rarely have problems traversing their networks. But at the same time, malware is common there due to software piracy. Careful, temporary, targeted blocks of Chinese malware hosts can and do happen. Perhaps this one entity was swept up unfairly [or fairly].

We have no idea how the human brain works. We throw random chemicals at people's brains after incorrectly assessing an illness and hope people function better afterwords. We apply electric shocks to the brain as medicine. Brain medicine is in the stone ages, technologically speaking.

Humans depends upon millions of non-human species inside and on the surface of our bodies, and we can't culture most of them, and we don't have a clear understanding of how they work together but we have a vague idea that they affect our thinking process. They hold the key to advancing brain medicine out of the stone ages.

Once we understand the basic chemistry of the brain, which I feel is generations away, then we will begin to see what intelligence actually is. When we can stably program the brain's neural networks, which is well beyond that point, then will have good ideas about how to do the same with robots.

By default most Android phones (which today means made by Samsung) will not install anything from outside the Google Play store, and in the case of only Samsung phones outside the Google Play store and the Samsung store. Most users do not adjust this setting, so virtually nobody is susceptible to this malware. F-Secure is making mountains out of molehills.

If you don't use a Samsung Android phone, I commend your spirit of adventure. It's not worth the hassle for me. There's where you start becoming susceptible to this type of malware, among other problems.

But don't catch me saying that Samsung phones are the best. They're just what everybody else is using and helping debug so I don't have to.