Adam Lanza brushed his teeth. Clearly, toothpaste causes school shootings.

X-37 is a NASA design. The Air Force rescued it when NASA couldn't find the money to keep it going.

We need to carpetbomb all these countries with flyers showing every blasphemous depiction of Muhammed anyone can think of, daily, until they realize its been a few centuries since racking up a body count made anyone respect Muhammed.

On the other hand, considering the original was secret, who's to say how accurately he reproduced it? In the 1700s, it was standard practice to notate music as a series of chords and let the musicians improvise within that framework.

And that is exactly the kind of mind it takes to program. The good and bad programmers I've known divide fairly equivalently to those that taught themselves before high school and those who wrote their first code in CS 101.

They do, for a certain value of "they". My only claim is "they" does not include buy-and-hold investors, the supposed virtuous everyday people that are the poster children for all this hand-wringing. "They" does include all the slightly-less-high-frequency traders, which I suspect are the drivers of this kind of agitation for reform.

The historical dead paper encyclopedia wouldn't even have entries on these kinds of things. It is true wikipedia's math articles are written at a graduate or higher level, though. Personally, my response was to stop settling for less than the real deal and become a math grad student - one course at a time (taking my third now).

HFT is a zero-sum game played with other HFT traders. Occasionally there's a flash crash, but that's a profit opportunity for day traders. Retail buy-and-hold investors are unaffected in any way.

Sure, its unfortunate our enemies have strengthened ties with one another, but my first thought on hearing the news was this comic:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/12/05

There are certainly challenges in getting a game like Skyrim on the PS3. The strange thing is, given that it does run on the PS3, how can they be unable to add a few new weapons and monsters?

The purpose of security questions is not security - its reducing customer service workload due to forgotten passwords.
In most implementations its an overall reduction in security, since the security questions constitute a backdoor to the password, rather than an additional factor of authentication.

The fear about HFT seems to boil down to "things are happening that didn't used to happen before, must be bad." The algos are playing a high-risk zero-sum game, but only for the participants that are trading at the same timescale. For the classical buy-and-hold investor, its inconsequential. In the unlikely event a flash crash would occur and not get rolled back, it doesn't mean stock value has been "destroyed". It would be a tremendous windfall for fundamentals investors, who would buy it up to a fair value. In other words the HFT algos would lose the zero-sum game to players on a longer timescale. The reverse, a flash spike benefiting HFT at the expense of long term, wouldn't occur in practice. Traders would wait the extra 5 minutes to execute, like a tortoise playing a waiting game with a gnat.

What caused the economic collapse was the bubble in the housing market that caused people to take out unreasonably large mortgages they had no possibility of repaying. Saying derivatives caused it is like saying a dropped object falls because of the air between it and the ground.

[citation needed]

The Silmarillion as a whole is not a story per-se given the vast spans of time and overwhelming cast of characters, but there are three major story arcs in it each with enough unity of time/place/character to receive a similar film treatment as the Lord of the Rings: The Children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, and the Fall of Gondolin.