So this is what Apple will do now that Steve is gone -- sit around and troll patents. This wouldn't hurt a competitor or a platform -- only people (developers).

If this guy was at an equities desk and suddenly needed a "miracle", I am wondering if maybe something like FXF got him. Huge one day loss after the SNB bolted the top of the swiss franc to the euro. Being long the swissie for a million a pip before the last big intervention might have done him in. Not sure what else it could have been. In any case, this guy is only a "rogue trader" because he lost money. I will wait for an earnings restatement from UBS, then I will go long if I get a chance.

...I Want My Half Life Three!

Hey, don't congratulate me yet! I got a ways to go before I cover and I could be blown out of the water any minute by a Ben Bernanke sound bite. Shorting the berserk ponzi casino always comes with plenty of risk! :)

A company squeezed between pissed off customers, greedy content providers, jilted ISPs, and an insolvent postal service looking for things to cut. I was waiting for the cracks to start showing, and it happens at an all time high! What a great short -- wish me luck!

On a more relevant note, what was so amazing about the price increase announcement was the sales pitch itself... Streaming for $8, DVDs for $8, and both for $16! What a deal! Only a Harvard MBA could think up such an insulting bargain.

Our distinguished ladies and gentlemen can hardly even rearrange 1% of the deck chairs on this Titanic without everything breaking down. 1% of the 2012 budget, and it has to result in this ridiculous piece of theater. The worst of it all is that I only have myself to blame. All those decades I went to school, went to work, chased girls, watched t.v., played video games, all the while failing to notice the global corporate tendrils gaining control over nearly every aspect of my life.

Now it doesn't matter who I vote for -- the result is the same. Lawyer types on K street write the laws of my land in computer generated 5000 page bills that I could never have a hope to understand -- all to either maintain the status quo or to advance the collective kleptocratic agenda. Doubtless, our corporate masters will steal everything they can while it all slowly collapses! I could say more, but Dancing With the Stars is on, and I never miss an episode.

Bjarne and the Community's creation was the bona fide beginning of my career. When I started, I thought I was a 7 in C++. Several years later, I was a 5. I wrote my best and worst code in the language, over 15 years, and I am still running into issues in the language that challenge me today. C++ helped me learn a lot about myself along the way, and I am grateful to Bjarne and the Community at large for that. A good article and interview, if not a tad brief.

Destroying the countries where attacks originate is a broken doctrine, IMO. Use of force should always be measured, and focused, lest history revile us. The ease of false flag operations in "cyberspace" make the nature of our responses to attacks even more important. I would dismiss Chertoff out of hand were it not for the possibility that, rather than harmless BS, talk like this may encourage a doctrine that will allow our government to start wars and engage in various intrigues, to evil ends. Chertoff co-birthed the anti-Christ fetus disingenuously called the "USA PATRIOT" act, so we should tell him to take his "overwhelming force" and sell crazy some place else. We seem to be stocked up already.

There are traders that I know who use stop loss orders reflexively. I never used them because they only purport to limit losses; they are really market orders triggered by price action, and they will chase bids down and leave you out of the game before you are even done with your coffee at the market open. I never imagined them chasing bids all the way down to zero until recently! Since the PTB don't seem intent on fixing anything, just affixing blame, I would strongly discourage stop-loss orders. They are not a substitute for being both present and disciplined while you are trading anyway!

I would have liked this post better if we lived in an alternate universe where you can't run Windows on a Mac. Respectfully, reality makes the parent post a complete waste of time. A Mac is a place where you can learn about Mac, Windows and Linux tech all in the same place either by dual booting or virtualizing; take your pick. Parent poster will not get this on his/her Dell, at least not by legal, reliable, nor easy means. Prices for Macs have gotten better but, unfortunately, are still quite high, and Apple seems to think we don't need to modify/maintain our hardware. These are, IMO, the only reasons one would need to buy a Dell at all.

Maybe this argument about which laptop this school should be *forcing* kids to buy is moot. Is it not so that online/portal/cloud type services have evolved to a point where they may obviate the need for a specific platform anyway? IMO, any school that is only pushing platform specific software down for kids to learn on has invested wrongly in our future. In 20 years, it could be that only a few big greedy companies will be left desperately clinging to this idea. The rest of us will have moved to the online platform for most of our daily needs.