Some of the 'pricing' that goes into a bribe are

A) chances the person taking the bribe will be caught accepting the bribe.
B) chances the person taking the bribe will be caught doing whatever they were bribed to do
C) risk level after considering any negative consequences for the bribed associated with B
D) actual difficulty executing B
E) how likely the briber can expect his payoff to secure the desired outcome

Lets look at this situation:

A)
Group of officers starts a "Fraternal Order of Police" or something similar its ostensibly a charity for injured officers but also throws some fancy thank you and holiday parties for the force (the payoff). They pass out window stickers to contributors at certain levels. They know this helps because people like show off how generous they are (legit reason many charities do this (the cover)), they also know some people will cynically believe it will buy them special treatment and this badge is how they prove their entitlement. The officers with a nod and a wink agree to actually provide this special treatment because they think it will increase the donations leading the fancier and more frequent parties.

B)
Will they get caught? Not very likely unless someone does anything very stupid. They time when they collect the funds vs the time when they commit the act are widely separated. They act itself is in the negative. Not pulling someone over in the first place because you saw an FOB sticker in the window creates no audit-able event. Even fairly honest members of the public are unlikely to call the mayors office and complain that they just blew an officers doors off and he sat and did nothing. If there are lots of people around and the behavior is egregious they can pull someone over and warn them, none of the whiteness are likely to be able to tell if a warning or a ticket was issued.

C) The risk is low because the odds getting caught are low and even if someone suspects their shot at proving anything is almost nil. It will be very hard to make any conspiracy charges stick, the worst the will likely happen is officers might be dismissed for under performance. Proving negatives are not easy; especially when there is already a discretionary element to writing tickets or not in the first place.

D) Could not be any easier to execute, in fact its probably easier than doing their job correctly.

E) Not every officer, likely not even most, will be in on the conspiracy, the payer cannont know for sure he won't get pulled over by an honest cop.

So considering the situation the 'price' of this bribe should be low.

Um pretty much by your own admission "Absolutely" is really "Maybe." We cannot know what would have happened without the stickers and we don't have any solid statistics around similar incidents with and without stickers. Anecdotally I have never had and FOP or IAFF stickers on my cars and I have only been warned for speeding myself. Which says nothing about their effectiveness but is proof you can get let off without having them. So possession of such stickers is not a necessary condition for being let go; therefore form the available evidence we can draw no real conclusion about how effective they are.

No clearly you don't understand. Politics requires people voting for you, they do that based on what they think, which does not require it be true. Its often easier if it isnt.

Personally I still consider the ACA to be a completely immoral redistribution of wealth and so I don't care if it works really smoothly, I am still against. Clear cutting a forest is an efficient way to acquire lumber but that does not make it the right way.

Fuck you! plenty of them are willing to run that risk. I have at least two family members who were found dead in early middle age. Both died of causes that if they had been visiting a doctor probably would have been caught and treated. They made life style choices that left them without insurance, knowing full well that if they had a major problem it would bankrupt them they never got checked out. Lots and Lots of people choose that.

Yes if you show up at the ER "we" pay the cost of stabilizing you, but by no means treats something or puts the rest of us on the hook for years of chemo treatments for something like cancer.

The only selfish jerks are people like you who want to impose your life style choices on everyone else because you can't afford the real cost of the protection YOU insist on having.

My own health insurance costs are going to double this year! People who support the ACA are thieving assholes with entitlement problems.

They are obligated by law to have those documents either postmarked or otherwise furnished to you by Jan 31st. You might want to contact the IRS and report the worst offenders if it continues to be a problem next year.

Far more important is that if the intermediate certificate is compromised, you as the CA have ability to act. You know from your records who your customers are. What you need to do is:

1) Fix the glitch
2) Get the media that stores the trusted root certs private key out of the vault
3) Issue new intermediate certificates
4) return the root certs private key to vault
5) Start contacting your certificate customers and issuing them new certs, revoking the old ones along the way as customers reported they have switched, or if there *is* indication of a compromised cert, revoke immediately.
6). Revoke the old intermediate certificates as soon as 5 is complete.

If were signing client certificates directly with the trusted root like they once did you (as the CA) would be screwed royally. You would need to somehow get every client device to update their trusted roots. Or you'd have upset customers crying about how their reissued certs are untrusted by 3/4ths of the clients out there that nobody bothers to update and nobody who understands these things manages directly..

In that case i say all the more reason to stick with Ruby but use an abstract database API like DBI. You can keep throwing additional front end processors at the problem, good horizontal scaling on the front end, so Ruby's CPU heavy nature won't be an issue, raw compute is still getting cheaper faster than I/O. So I think it makes total sense to keep using tools like Ruby and Python that enable efficient development even at a hit to execution.

DBI will let you change database later with as little rework as possible, if you keep your database use to just storage, and keep you usage to basic table and constraint feature sets widely supported across all database engines. The RDBMS will take care of plumbing around locking and ACID considerations across multiple front ends for you. As well as allow you to run your reporting jobs or data warehouse ETLs without having to either take your main system offline or tightly integrate them with the front end.

Back on the scaling front using the more traditional database engines will give you the last 40 years of developed talent pool, and case studies on what works where scaling is concerned. The tools exist to build these things out for almost any use case. The tools exist on the NOSQL side to but they are more tools for building tools, its still immature and very much DIY.

Ultimately what you have to decide here is where are you going to get the most value for your time. NOSQL *might* offer you some better back end performance down the line, so if you think the data volume is going to get real big real fast give it look. It will certainly mean you will spend more energy working on the plumbing, and force you into dealing with many more unknowns. A RDBMS will provide almost all the plumbing to you; meaning you focus on the front end.

I disagree, he is concerned about scaling. The last thing in the world he should do is use a bunch of flat files, unless he really just needs to store the data, but he already said he needs to do reports and totals on it.

Also he is working in Ruby. The smart thing for him to do IMHO is write his program against ruby/DBI. It isn't the pretty database api, but it supports plenty of different backend options and it does not sound like his program needs especially complex database operations or queries. He can start working with something like SQLite as the database "server", and move up to something else, perhaps Postgress (which can be every bit as fast as the NOSQL solutions unless you are getting highly highly custom) without needing to alter his program.

More than that though the range of applications people use their computers for is stabilizing. First it was the spreadsheet than the word processor, than the WYSIWYG word processor. Next came the graphic arts and page layout stuff like Publisher (talking consumers end here not industrial uses) and Power point and photo editing. The PIM tools, and small database applications, got friendly somewhere around here. Next it was internet communications E-Mail and the WWW. People got some basic amateur design tools Visio sketch up etc; and then finally the masses got video editing, followed shortly by streaming media. The games and what was possible in terms of gaming was always expanding across this period of time as well 1978-2003ish.

Honestly there hasn't been much in terms of new 'killer apps' for the mass market. Unless you count Facebook and second wave of social media, but that isn't pushing the technology envelop on the client end by any stretch. The games have gotten a little fancier, and there have been other trendy fads but really what can your typical home user do now they could not pretty comfortably and completely do with circa 2003 software and equipment? My guess is almost nothing. I have no doubt someone can name a bunch of specific hobbies and trades that have evolved in that's 10 or 12 years but I am talking about what the average person leaves the Best Buy with here, and imagines doing when they walk in. There just have not been many new Applications for the PC lately.

1) BAHAHAHA

2) Damn people are thoughtless jerks

3) Someones insurance rates are going up

This is a good point, but if they try to game the system stuffing a large batch of orders for very small numbers of shares to in order to as you describe stuff the box increasing their odds of acquiring or selling at least some shares over other peoples complete orders, any advantage they gain should be lost in increased commission fees; (hopefully)

Honestly I don't think it would do any harm to implement something like this. I don't think it will do much good personally, but I would not be opposed to it.

3 Days is a looong loooong time. I don't think minimum holding periods are fair to anyone, at least not above intervals of more than a few seconds. At three days imagine this situation.

On the 1st Joe buys 100 shares of $OIL_COMPANY at $10 a share. On the 3rd Jim buys 100 shares of $OIL_COMPANY for $11 a share. On the night of the third Joe and Jim are sitting at the bar watching the news, and discover $OIL_COMPANY just had a tanker run aground and its probably going to destroy a major fishery, the damages are almost certain to bankrupt $OIL_COMPANY.

Joe should be allowed sell his shares at the open on the fourth leaving Jim and everyone like him holding the bag? Joe has owned the company longer, possibly collected more dividends, paid less for the shares, he should be allowed to keep his profits at the expense of Jim and others like him? even though he and Jim both have the same quality information?

I don't see any justice or stabilizing effect to be gained with such long hold times, it will just discourage investing over all because anyone who makes a new purchase has to take the risk of sitting in a burning building while everyone else heads for the exists, until their hold period expires.

I can see doing trades in baskets of orders entered in say 60 second intervals and processed in random order inside the interval. That prevents a class system where guys with access to HFT have a shot at the getting in or out first all the time and moves it to where anyone with an Internet connection, a E-trade account, and a willingness to sit with three or four of the major news networks on a few tvs has a fair chance of transacting on whatever securities they are playing as quickly as anyone else. That seems okay.

This solution does more or less solve that problem as well. Nobody but the exchange will have a view of the orders for at least a 250ms but possibly as long as a half second under the parents scheme. That will anyone selling or buying in enough volume to be a market mover on anything but the smallest of micro caps likely has the technology to submit orders to each exchange they mean to trade on inside that window where the HFT guys will not have the opportunity to do any new price discovery.

That should effectively thwart the front running ( if its really happening on the scales many claim ). It will help the retail level investor who owns funds, that may have been themselves victims of front running. It will also minimally impact the operation of the market and price discovery behaviors for not HFT trading. This may help prevent a flash crash type situation as well because the HFT machines will have to wait to see if an exchange is really dropping before the open up their sales and short sales on other exchanges. I think its a good solution in those terms; but I remain unconvinced that HFT is really the problem many say it is; the evidence just isn't there.

As an American I am okay with that. I would not expect USAID to provide material support to groups the rest of the State Department wants to see go away.

Its one thing for USAID to give money in an overt and legal way to group some foreign regime might not like much, but tolerates within its boarders.

Its quite another for our aide organization to violating the laws for foreign countries, which at least in this case with Cuba they must have been because otherwise why the shell companies and secrecy.