So true. High-frequency trading should be made illegal, like most things which just extract money from others without providing value in return.

But since everybody seems to think paying $3.99 for the app is too much already, the changes of somebody actually paying the $25,- google fee on top of that seem pretty slim. (You could skip the $3.99 and port dosbox yourself though. Should be feasible, at least two people did so before.)

In the Netherlands countings are public (this might be true in the UK as well), anybody can just walk in after the polling station is closed and watch or even film the whole affair. Results are published per polling station so you can just sit there, count along and just along and compare your result to the published one. This makes it pretty hard to mess with the votes.

There's a nice paradox with paper ballots, because the counting is split between lots of people it does become more likely somebody tries to mess with the votes but it becomes really really hard to mess with the votes in a significant way. You can't make a full polling station vote for a candidate without at least attracting (unless everybody was voting for this candidate anyway, but in that case you won't gain much). You also can't realistically get rig the count in enough polling stations to make a difference. This is the single biggest advantage of paper ballots over computer voting. A handful of software developers might skew the results with a few percent in lots of polling stations, which could actually make a difference.

RDP can share a single application, rdesktop supports application sharing mode. You can run a single Outlook window over RDP on you linux box, works like a charm.

With automated trading systems this probably isn't entirely true anymore, since automated systems are likely take these bids into account when making their trading decisions. You could use this to trick your competitors into buying or selling a certain stock.

Automated trading shouldn't be accepted by regulators anyway. It probably is a nice game to play, but at the end of the day it takes money without giving anything back in return. Most other ways of making money without doing something useful are called theft or fraud. All those 'schemes' to become richer without actually adding any value is pretty bad for an economy (and essentially just theft, however fancy).

How is that statement not true, it works perfectly for me. If you reduce the number of guns around (which is probably pretty hard once they are all out there) you reduce the number of current and future criminals with guns.
Don't believe me? Just compare gun ownership and gun related deaths.

So if you feel an SUV is more are dangerous in accidents don't buy an SUV, instead of making the problem worse buy buying one and risking you kill somebody with it. At least when it comes to pedestrian safety SUVs are pretty bad compared to other cars, making SUVs illegal in urban areas will do more to protect your kids then buying one.

A report claiming Agile is just a scam to sell services will set you back $199,-. You just have to appreciate the irony there...

True, but owning a few million bucks worth of MS shares kind of changes your priorities doesn't it...

Not everybody lives in the US and the new Focus is sold worldwide...

Fixed.

ABS used to be pretty shitty, but the world has moved on since. It's just that GM didn't notice...

(But only in slow moving traffic)

Ford is talking about cars which are capable of following the flow of traffic automatically. But there will still be a driver in there, there will still be a steering wheel and brake pedals and they will overrule those systems if the driver decides to use them. Just do whatever you feel is the right thing to do when flashing lights show up behind you...

Which also solves the issue of responsibility, it will still be the drivers responsibility to operate the car properly. It's just a few other automatic systems. With the introduction of cruise control driver stayed responsible for the speed of the car. These systems won't be any different.

Those kind of system will, for quite some time to come, always need a human driver to override the system and deal with non-standard situations. Just like you can override (adaptive) cruise control manually right now. But that's fine, most of the road conditions will be normal and those systems will help. Ford really is capable of building this (thanks to Volvo tech b.t.w.). The current Focus has adaptive cruise control and what Ford calls Active City Stop, which actually stops the car when your driving at low speeds and don't respond to when there's something in front of you. The first system uses radar, the latter an camera. Right now those are separate systems, but combining they is just the logical next step. Lane assist systems are also available on the current Focus. Although I recall reading somewhere that the adaptive cruise control won't be sold in the US due to issues with insuring a car with systems like that.

I drive a new Focus with the adaptive cruise control and it works really well. I've actually done 180 km/h on cruise control and had the car slow down to 100 km/h because of traffic ahead without doing anything myself. It really is pretty impressive. I drive a manual, so the car can't really slow down to a full stop all by itself, but the adaptive cruise control on somewhat recent Volvo's will actually slow down to a full stop when the car in front of you stops (on models with an automatic gearbox).
Also, the current adaptive cruise control does switch back to manual mode when the radar can't get a reliable image or when the ESP kicks in because of road conditions. I've also noticed it doesn't accelerate to it's set speed if the road ahead clears while cornering, it will hold back until your traveling in a straight line again.

The believe system of RMS was created in an era largely before retail software. In those times it made all sorts of sense to demand to source code of the software for which you paid the full price. You also often needed the source code to make to software work on your systems (loadable drivers didn't exist), or to get it to do exactly what you need. Back then it all made sense, right now it's becoming an useless old dogma.

I make a living developing software and I can easily agree with that position, pay me a decent hourly rate and I'll happily hand you the source code for the software I wrote. But it doesn't work like that anymore, paying developers for custom software is often far to expensive, so the investment has to be shared with other users. So far this is generally solved when somebody makes the investment to build the software hoping he can sell it often enough to make a profit. Other models explicitly split the investment between parties (e.g. kickstarter) or they split the actual work between different parties (e.g. the linux kernel). In the latter two cases open source makes sense. In the first case not having the source is the price you pay for not having to invest or having to get involved. Judging by the success of retail software this is an acceptable trade off in a lot of cases

Anyone who feels that not having the source is unacceptable should either cough up and pay for the work involved or get his hands dirty and scratch his own itch. The same applies to hardware and documentation (and cars, ketchup, governments and most other things).