Hydrogen isn't even close to petroleum's last gasp. 99% of that hydrogen is going to be made by reforming natural gas and other fossil fuel feed stocks.

Why do you think the Bush admin pushed hydrogen so hard?

Because the market operates on lots. A Lot is 100 shares. Say you want to buy 28 shares of a stock, you put in your order and it shows up on the trading boards. Joe blow investors wants to sell 8 shares, Jane wants sell 15 and Loki wants sell 10. The market maker (just a broker that trades in the stock), buys all three for sale lots then sells you the 28 shares, he plays a spread on each and takes roughly 3-5% of the transaction buy executing the trades at higher or lower prices to net his spread. The remainder shares he holds until the next transaction.

If you trade is clean even lots and do so nice even numbers you can probably net a transaction with another investor that eliminates the middle man. If you don't you get fucked by the market maker. Who doesn't trade in even lots? Small investors.

HFT has eliminated the market maker. The systems are buying and selling across dozens of different exchanges and driving the spread down to fractional percents. 10 year ago if you made a market order for stocks it would execute 3% less than the market was when you put the order in. If you put a limit on it the stock would execute at the price you set but miraculously there would still be 1-3% premium lost. I've had this happen to me a dozen times. It doesn't happen since HFT has taken over the market. Billions of shares are being traded daily now as the HFTs each try to beat each other for that 0.00001% margin between stock exchanges and markets.

Without HFT we go back to the bad old days of Market makers. It's a world I'd prefer not to see again. This is a fact, HFT is providing the volume and market, without it there isn't the market available in anything but blue chips to drive buy and sell during the day. You might not understand this but if you buy or sell any volume that isn't a whole lot (100 shares) you went through a market maker. HFT has eliminated that, even with small partial lots the HFT moves in and buys and sells on the spread between markets. It's creating markets in almost every stock (even pink sheets) that didn't exist 10 year ago.

Only idiots who've never traded in their lives and think they are experts on this think HFT is always bad. Those of us that have been investing for long enough know that what existed before HFT was significantly worse.

HFT, through the very nature of what it is and that there are dozens of competing HFT firms, has been driving buy/sell spreads down to micro percent spreads. You can execute a market order these days and actually get the price on the ticker. 10 years ago that wasn't the case and that is because of HFT. The firms buy and sell so rapidly that the spread has decreased from the 3-5% normal to fractional percents that often don't even add a penny to the price.

All the opposition to HFT I see is people who've never traded stocks in their life. How many trades do you make per year?

Yea welcome to the club, there are 700K of us.

And then we go back to the grand old days of the market where a broker (called market maker) skims 3-5% off every trade because he's the buyer and seller of last resort.

Personally I'll take the HFT.

Considering Dyn bought several promised "free for life" DNS services then promptly killed them you need to realize they'll probably do it again. They've apparently decided the best business model is buy out their free competitors and put them out business.

At $2Billion or so per launch for the satellite and the launch it gets real expensive real quick. And if you put them in geostationary orbit you can count on ping times counted in the seconds. We're not going to be getting reliable internet from satellites any time soon.

With our without poop throwing?

Revenge porn is 99% of the time pictures taken by a significant other during a relationship and then spread after the breakup or taken by the victim themselves and distributed to the significant other for their (ahem) personal use.

Voyeurism and hidden camera shots are illegal in almost every jurisdiction, in fact one of the few that wasn't just changed their law after a guy was acquitted. You are building a straw man talking about these already illegal actions. Much like all the other strawmen in this thread such as child porn and bestiality.

The fact is if the victim took the pictures themselves (or participated in taking them) they own the copyright and can DMCA the pictures and if they are not removed they can sue the pants off the website. If the victim's significant other took the images then they are frankly SOL and should be. They still have the right to sue the website for commercial use of their image and they can still go after the ex-significant other for the action. What they are proposing is using the power of the state and force of the truncheon to enforce what is a civil complaint brought on by their own actions.

The very idea that you could sue Google for someone linking to some website distributing images for which they have the legal right from the copyright holder is absurd on the face. Putting loopholes like this into the first amendment is going to lead to more loopholes like anti-bullying and hate speech exceptions and pretty soon you won't have free speech anymore. These revenge porn sites can already be prosecuted (in most cases) for blatant fraud and blackmail. In fact many of them already are.

The simple answer here is that if you don't want naked pictures of you on the internet don't take naked pictures.

Did that include Voyagers command software?

After all, VGER's command and communication software could be essential.

People comparing this to McCarthy show more lack of understanding about the issue than the fools that are raking Eich over the coals.

McCarthy was government and he was using the direct threat of government power for oppression. There is no comparison here. Your free speech rights don't extend to me having to be tolerant of them, they prevent the use of government force, not social retribution. If you equate the two you are no different than the jackasses that want to put a hate speech exception into the 1st. It's lunacy of the highest order.

They won't be the next Rockefeller, Kennedy or Bush. The multinationals will run them out of business overnight. As soon as pot is legal Philip Morris is going to start selling machine rolled joints in handy cellophane wrapped packs and cartons just like they do cigarettes and in the process nearly every boutique pot grower/seller will be out business overnight. The cartels don't have the expertise, nor will they wind their organizations down quickly enough that the existing profits won't be eaten alive.

Unlike alcohol prohibition I fully expect governments to keep going after their assets long after prohibition ends. In the end there will be a small trust fund, for future generations that will likely be mostly wiped out in one or two generations of their families. That is if interfamily war doesn't destroy the whole thing. These cartel families are nothing like the mob.

The templars make more money selling Iron Ore to China than they do moving drugs. Problem is the drug side of the operation is what keeps things going, most cartel members use drugs heavily so it's questionable whether they would be able to control their muscle without the drug trade because that muscle is essential to running the Iron ore portion of the business.

I feel bad, I should've sourced where I got the saying from. To quote wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_proof) which more eloquently describes the origin of the saying I used to post in my cubicle which is a quote of Douglas Adams from Mostly Harmless.

Along those lines, Douglas Adams wrote in Mostly Harmless, "a common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."