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Comment Re:"free" market solution (Score 3, Informative) 452

"Because the effect of that would be to push even more transactions into unregulated "dark pools". Why do you believe that HFT is harmful? Do you have any evidence, other than fear of something you don't understand?"

Yes - (1) HFT has the potential to cause extreme volatility swings. (2) HFT essentially introduces a tax on every other buyer and seller in the market (because it actually widens the difference between the post and the offer).

On point #2, I'll just leave this here: http://qz.com/95088/high-frequency-trading-is-bad-for-normal-investors-researchers-say/

Comment Re:Bad idea (Score 1) 53

It would be fairly easy to have DHS come up with a list of things (physical locations, services, etc) to designate as critical to national infrastructure. In fact, I'd be shocked if they don't already have such a list already.

The organization that runs these these locations/services would have to build into all of their software contracts a liability clause.

Problem solved.

Comment Bad idea (Score 2) 53

This is essentially a government subsidy to software companies that produce crappy code.

Look at Walmart. it pays its employees so little money that they have to use government assistance like foodstamps and medicare. Walmart shareholders reap the benefit, and the public is left taking care of their employees.

Here's a better idea - if a company is making software that's critical to national infrastructure, make them liable for any bugs that occur (and for smaller companies, require them to carry insurance up to a certain level of liability).

Comment Re:So . . . (Score 5, Informative) 66

Back when I worked for Supercomputing group at Los Alamos, the supercomputers were categorized into 'capacity' machines (the workhorses where they did most of the work, which typically run at near full utilization) and capability machines (the really big / cutting-edge / highly unstable machines that exist in order to push the edge of what is possible in software and hardware. One example of such an application would be high energy physics simulation) . It sounds like these machines fall into the latter category.

Comment Re:Treaties (Score 4, Insightful) 154

Withdrawing from a treaty is not the same as violating it. In international law, the rule of thumb is that a country is only obligated to comply with the laws (treaties) it has ratified, and is not bound by those that it has not ratified. (Note: One debatable exception to this is the Nuremberg Principles)

Furthermore, countries are free to withdraw from ("repudiate") any treaty at any time, unless that treaty has provisions that provide specific steps for (or prohibit) repudiation.

Comment Poor mediawiki syntax (Score 1) 196

Just throwing this out there -- two of the major hurdles to doing this right are (a) that Wikipedia's syntax is not formally defined, and (b) that its current implementation is (as defined by the output of the MediaWiki parser) is not a context free grammar. Which means that writing robust, fast parser for it is very hard.

Comment Re:So... (Score 1) 347

You can claim that as a defense in court. It's called laches - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity)
Basically, the defendant asserts that the plaintiff sat on his rights rather than enforcing them, which caused others to put themselves in harm's way.

But the case has to go to trial before you can assert that, by which time you're already out several million dollars.

Comment Re:Quack (Score 2) 186

Not quite:

Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) may have coined the phrase when he wrote "when I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."[1][2] The phrase may also have originated much later with Emil Mazey, secretary-treasurer of the United Auto Workers, at a labor meeting in 1946 accusing a person of being a communist.[3]

The term was later popularized in the United States by Richard Cunningham Patterson Jr., United States ambassador to Guatemala during the Cold War in 1950, who used the phrase when he accused the Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán government of being Communist. Patterson explained his reasoning as follows:

Suppose you see a bird walking around in a farm yard. This bird has no label that says 'duck'. But the bird certainly looks like a duck. Also, he goes to the pond and you notice that he swims like a duck. Then he opens his beak and quacks like a duck. Well, by this time you have probably reached the conclusion that the bird is a duck, whether he's wearing a label or not."[4]

Comment Re:What's a derivative work? (Score 4, Interesting) 223

"have you just given permission to people to use your content from that webpage?" -- All creative commons licenses require you to post a notice that the covered material is licensed under X license (where X can be CC-BY-SA, or CC-BY, etc), and that such a statement must be made in a manner 'appropriate to the medium' or some such language. If you had a webpage, that would presumably require a statement and a link to the text of the license. If you fail to do that, you are in violation of the license and could be sued for copyright infringement. (At which point, you could claim fair use as your defense)

Businesses

Being Honest In Exit Interviews Is Pointless 550

Esther Schindler writes "Say that you're leaving a job, either on your own volition or because they decided it was time for you to 'pursue other opportunities.' Before you leave, the HR department wants to chat with you about the employment experience, in an exit interview. 'Oh goodie,' you think. 'Now I can really tell them what I really feel.' Don't do it. If your employer couldn't find the time to ask you what was good or bad about working at the company while you were still working there, writes Lisa Vaas, why bother with honesty and potentially burned bridges now? (If they did ask, give them constructive feedback before you leave this job; they deserve it). Discuss."

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