Lets see the test done with the human hand held still in front of the robot hand and not waving around or flying toward the robot to signal the start of the game, and the gesture not overly-dramatically done, and have the robot triggered from a verbal cue just like the human. Yes, I get that the Japanese love robot tech. But this isn't good robot tech, and it's certainly not good science, it's just rigged pseudo-drama.

insufferable prima donna

planck time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time would suggest that the answer to your question is "no"

It's the same solution as always: simply enforce the laws we have. Enforce anti-trust law, enforce truth in advertising law, enforce laws against anti-competitive behavior by monopoly and near--monopoly sized corporations. If the SEC had enforced its regs fully against Goldman Sachs, et al, that were on one hand recommending to their customers to buy mortgage-backed securities, and on the other hand having a prohibition against them for in-house investing and NOT telling their customers about this, they would not have been able to dump as many of these junk securities on other banks or the government.

How much in fines from OSHA or the NY EPA are these companies looking at for the bucket brigade?

Leviticus is, almost entirely, about ceremonial and civil law; that is, the laws that the Israelites lived under while their form of government was a theocracy. If you are not living in a Jewish theocracy, then Leviticus isn't for you.

Governments outlive people, so there's no way you could take enough cash or resources with you if you don't already have a safe house setup somewhere. So go offensive and immediately get to your attorney who should be well versed in federal criminal law as well as civil law and have some understanding of international law with regard to protecting you from getting extradited. Have your attorney appeal to your state's/province's attorney general office for protection because you witnessed a possible criminal act and you now fear for your safety. (That you are fearing for your safety from the federal government is irrelevant as far as the A.G. should be concerned).

You will also want to simultaneously arrange for a "leak" to your local newspaper and TV station as well as sending anonymous "leaks" to national newspapers, cable news networks, and the AP in case the A.G's office just turns you over to the feds. Ensure that your attorney has several of his partners or even another law firm in on what's going on, so you have defense in-depth in case someone gets cold feet (genuine or is paid-off to), so there will be someone to file the appropriate papers with the courts. Also let you family and friends know so that if the feds are intent on making your "disappear" it won't happen without considerable notice.

And above all, don't be naive: if the feds want you, they are going to get you. Don't waste time, money, or effort preventing it, just presume it will happen and deal with it from that point on.

1. Leverage your industry knowledge and move to a company that's still in the financial industry, but doesn't handle other people's money. These companies (start-ups aside) are generally more stable now that we are 4 years beyond the home mortgage melt-down, and they have less risk. This, of course, means they offer less rewards (lower base salaries, lesser or no bonuses), but that's the trade-off for not worrying about getting laid-off

2. Management, but only if you want to embrace the accountability. I'll assume you are all too aware of the politics of accountability in the financial industry. Being a manager is willingly putting yourself in the political cross-hairs. It's going to be like that to a lesser degree in any industry, so if you can't take that sort of heat, stay out of the management kitchen.

3. Stay in programming if you love what you do and are at all good at it. It's much easier to get up and go to work everyday doing something you love, or even just like, than something you hate to do but think it's better because of the pay or benefits.

4. Look at small and mid-size companies. Ageism is much less of a factor in smaller companies. While being the jack-of-all-IT-trades has it's stress points, it also makes you somewhat indispensable to your employer, and is much easier to do in smaller IT shops.

5. Stay where you are and try to be the MVP. If you don't already know where the bodies are buried or what skeletons are in whose closet, you're not likely to find out now. So, you'll have to become valuable the old fashioned way: earning it. Find a skill set that is absolutely necessary to your companies bottom line, find out who on the business side cares about it, become and expert in the skill and the friend of those business folks. Now you have an advocate in a profit-center to go with your argument on the IT side for the company keeping you around. If you do good work and can make the effort to politically correctly for your environment to get acknowledgment for it (notice I did not say credit), then your work will *almost* speak for itself.

6. Pray.

No, they are having trouble getting a proprietary OS to play efficiently with an open standard, in order to communicate with their back-end servers to cooperate efficiently enough to get it all to scale across several million simultaneous users.

if he could do that, I'd pay money to fund the war to produce the orphans.

The Defense Department? Homeland Security? The TSA? Or is Lockheed or Raytheon or BAE or some other defense contractor going to sue the kid into oblivion over patent infringement? Or for that matter, is Valve going to sue for "licensing" infringement?

From the FAQ:

"Will the certificates be awarded by Harvard and/or MIT?
As determined by the edX board, MIT and Harvard, online learners who demonstrate mastery of subjects could earn a certificate of completion, but such certificates would not be issued under the name Harvard or MIT.

Will Harvard and MIT students be able to take these courses for credit?
No. MITx and Harvardx courses will not be offered for credit at either university. The online content will be used to extend and enrich on campus courses."

Can't take a chance on watering-down the reps of either institution. So segregate the student populations, and don't directly affiliate the names. This is what happens to a good idea after marketers, lawyers, and the bean-counters get together and have had their way with it.

Your analogy is bogus. Fraud is fraud because it is intentionally dishonest and deprives a party of value. Fractional lending is sustainable because one, there's an actual exchange of value; and two, the majority of those obtaining the loans are faithful about paying them back under the terms of the loan, so you are willfully neglecting to include the on-going cash flow. If your argument is really that modern banking at the national level is a house of cards, then either limit the number of banks (i.e., the corporations, not the physical offices), increase the minimum capitalization requirements, or both. But let's not toss the baby out with the bathwater.

And again, at no point is there any "missing money" in the process. For a signature loan like a credit card, the bank pays on the cardholders behalf, so whatever purchase the cardholder makes is paid for out of the banks' aggregate operating revenue (meaning all transactions to any one other bank are aggregated between the parties and only the net difference actually changes hands). The balance is the "risk" that the bank carries, and presumably responsibly so based against the creditworthiness of the cardholder. For long term secured loans, the bank owns the asset until the loan is cleared, so there's no missing value here either. So where is the money being "created"?

The problem you have in the UK is that the banks that can issue the money are also commercial lenders. Not so in the US, where the Federal Reserve Bank only deals with the government and the banks, not individuals or commercial entities like corporations, and only the Fed prints the money.

You also seem to be missing the point that, while money = value, there is more to value than just money. The currency is just a token, and the electronic money just a tally. The real value is in assets and accumulated value through investments, commercial transactions and gainful employment, as *represented* in money. The notion that there needs to be a physical unit of currency for each expression of value (or nearly so), is to limit the economy to the possibilities of the physical travel of the currency; and today's global economy is proof-positive that that viewpoint is neither advantageous nor necessary.

The Federal Reserve bank in the US measures the money supply using two formulas, neither of which include your "money from nothing" premise about lending: http://www.ny.frb.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed49.html As banks lend money, particularly the so-called "signature loans" (credit cards and other unsecured loans), they have to increase their cash-on-hand under minimum capitalization regulations by a corresponding percentage as well, and that only comes from operating capital, not thin air.

As far as inflation goes, a gold standard would certainly help, but would not address every motive in capitalistic economy that drives inflation, i.e., the rise in cost to the consumer for goods and services. The fact is there is no single solution that does that. The US economy was on a gold standard until 1972, and the reasons it was suspended had more to do with competing with other countries than with the domestic economy, and being on the gold standard did not result in "economic collapse".

Your assumptions about the UK banking system being applicable elsewhere are not entirely true either. While there are international standards on minimum capitalization, the US has additional standards in place, and while these standards appear shockingly low to the average person (6% and 10% respectively), they are sufficient to monetize an bank in a way that encourages it to operate in a risk-averse manner in both the short- and long-term. And the US Fed works differently than the Bank of England, as the US Fed is a private corporation, not an arm of the federal government.

HTC is headquartered in Taiwan, not mainland China. Does anyone know if they manufacture their phones in Taiwan or in China?