Apparently a combination of regulations and manufacturing problems. See here:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/37403276/ns/health-health_care/

Now that is old news (2010) and apparently both Teva and Hospira are going to restart production ... slowly. However, unless and until they get a significant output going (not soon), Fresenius is the sole supplier, more or less. See here:

http://www.in-pharmatechnologist.com/Processing/Propofol-Lethal-Injections-Blocked-as-Teva-and-Hospira-Re-Enter-Market

You my friend need to learn about exponential growth and, as in this case, decay. At 40% withdrawals each year there'll be water for ... somewhat more than a hundred years. By then we'll have the technology to give each citizen the correct number of water molecules they're allowed to withdraw from the bank.

Sadly, the H2O molecule is finite, however small - were water infinitely divisible we'd have had water forever AND test Planck scale effects in the not too distant future. Provided we also developed suitably small spoons, of course.

Together with Roger Zelazny for This Immortal, obviously :-)

It's understandable that one does not have time to keep up with the news, but at least RTF summary TITLE. Digia releases Qt 5.1. Nokia has had nothing to do with Qt for the last year or so, which is a Good Thing for the toolkit's evolution.

Since you want to touch on this ... heck, I have karma to burn, so why not?

As you well pointed out, this is not a realistic option. And the cause is simple, profit maximization misalignment with other motivations - in fact, it's inherent in free markets, where competing interests (for profit) motivate everything. Hence various side effects like negative externalities, worker exploitation, slavery, and so on.

My personal take on this is that while a real-world free market would be a system with too much complexity and chaotic behaviour to represent in a general model, simplified models with free-market rules can easily show ways in which the system reaches ... inefficient outcomes, like unfortunate equilibrium points (such as monopolies) or destructive oscillating behaviour (boom-bust cycles). It does not even require human flaws to get there, game theoretical models with rational agents will reach the same problem, due to inherent limitations such as imperfect information and unstable equilibria. Socialism in turn, besides not really being the alternative, has its own issues, some specific and some not so much (the unstable equilibrium of requiring every participant to have motivations aligned with a common good for one). The tricky part is, imho, the fact that legislating the market is not a true solution - introduce into the game the motivations of legislators and the issue of technical expertise required for tuning the system and you'll just run into a different 'who watches the watchers' class of problems.

To close this rant, IMHO markets need to be seen through dynamic models where there are often (if not always) segments to be watched for developments of bad outcomes - and I'm including regulators in the definition of 'markets'. Having a blind faith in either 'free' or 'regulated' is a lazy man's easy way out of an argument that is too complex to tackle, as market efficiency is something that requires vigilance from all participants, much like liberty.

The way I see it it's about the structure of the trades. From their text above the plots:

The price dropped from $796 to $775 in about 3/4 of a second, then rebounded to $793 a second later. The drop invovled 307 trades and 57,255 shares from 10 exchanges + dark pools. During the drop, there were 5 orders placed for every trade executed (meaning 4 orders placed/canceled for every trade).

Having about 1.5k quotes posted in 0.75s (with 80% being canceled) surely shows that HFT algos were active and yet did not absorb 57k shares of GOOG (that's about 2.5% of the daily volume at the time). Which is not a thinly traded stock by any measure. It's not a conclusive proof of HFT causing a drop of 2.5% in less than a second though, but I don't think you can easily get such a proof without knowing who traded what. There is only so much one can glean from trade data at this level after all.

Due to some time constraints I'll beg to be excused if, in lieu of the rest of the comment I was going to post, I'll give you this example (originally from here but the harvard link seems unavailable) of a HFT technique that, shall we say, 'plays' liquidity to increase volatility. The problem, as I see it, is how to discourage people who have the means to use them in such a fashion. Bear in mind that HFT requires quite an investment in infrastructure and software, so voluntarily refraining from taking advantage of that infrastructure in ways that exploit its advantage at the expense of slower traders is not a believable option. However, I'll also freely state that I have little faith in simple-sounding solutions to complex problems, which is what most pro- and anti-HFT rhetoric brings. Fortunately, it is not my job to find the proper solutions :-)

Apologies, but you are mistaken. Market makers, in order to qualify as such (and receive the official designation from an exchange) have to satisfy certain condition that are not satisfied by HFT operations. The relevant ones for the 'provide liquidity' part are: to always maintain bid/ask quotes and stand by to execute trades at the quoted prices. There are rare exceptions when one can pull off, but that's the gist of it. Bit of a quaint notion nowadays, what with multiple connected electronic venues, but some exchanges still have it and it does use electronic quoting nowadays. However, this little detail does disqualify the majority if not all HFT shops from market making in the conventional sense.

Now, the good part that fast electronic trading does (which is not exactly the same as HFT) is pricing arbitrage between exchanges. Securities listed on multiple exchanges and/or in dark pools often enough get crossing prices, where one can arbitrate the difference and re-bring quotes in line. For example, when a price starts moving on one exchange (due to a block trade, let's say) price propagation is something that nowadays happens a lot faster. Similar things can be done with arbitrages between underlying instrument prices and derivative ones. If you choose to include this in HFT, then I'll grant you it's a good thing and it does improve liquidity[*]. It still does not make HFT players market makers, but arbitrageurs are good for price discovery[**]. However, you can't quite separate this part from the *ahem* 'evil' one, as you called it. It's simple market opportunity taking. Well, at least you cannot unless you start requiring a set of conditions that would make it unprofitable to engage in the behaviour you want to prevent.

Finally, going back to my original post, please do follow the link in there. It's not about 'the' flash crash, but one of the many single-stock flash crashes that happened since. This one was on GOOG, which is not an illiquid stock, and lasted less than 2 seconds. That's quite different from fat-finger crashes where extra-large orders are mistakenly placed and clear all the bids in the books on their way to the great below. (and btw, I do wish that my posts on this topic would stop getting irrelevant replies about the SPY flash crash when I'm not referring to that one and not even the same type of phenomenon)

[*] by decreasing quote spreads, which is the main proxy used for liquidity measuring. Still, I am yet to see convincing evidence for the part HFT played in this as opposed to the general improvement in connectivity between markets.

[**] However, having an option quote react faster to the price change of the underlying does not necessarily mean I'll get more liquidity for it. The liquidity question is thus tricker than it seems.

Well, my point is that markets (and in particular capital markets) are fundamentally about profit and nothing else. If you want to impose some additional system of values, be it social, ethical, religious (yes, there is such a thing in capital markets) ones, it has to be done from outside the 'free market' mentality. Because of that it amounts to extra regulation, so whether it is good or bad becomes a hot button issue in the US in general and on /. in particular and I chose to refrain from expressing a preference in a post that was more about facts.

Actual evidence from the guys who monitor these kind of things says nothing of the sort. I wish people would stop spouting this line about HFT and liquidity. Here is a relatively recent GOOG flash crash (April 22 2013) likely due to HFT (based on timespan and number of trades, number of orders placed per trade and number of exchanges involved).

That is a bit simplistic as well. First, stepping in front of a trade because you can (1) see it before the other guy (due to having lower latencies in talking to the exchange or having priority 'fast' data feeds) and (2) quote using fraction of a penny increments as opposed to pennies for the 'regular' guys is not adding liquidity. In fact, from the way flash crashes happen you can see exactly how HFT does not add liquidity with a stock/future going bidless and crashing. Properly supplying liquidity would not allow for something like that to happen.

Who is we? The short-termism here is the market speaking. The idea of markets setting the 'right' price is highly dependent on your definition of 'right'. As the saying goes, markets can remain irrational longer than one can remain solvent (and bet on rationality). Nevermind the fact that people in the market have different types of interests which are not always aligned to long-term value. See corporate raiders, LBO, and so on - case in point, Icahn.

That's not entirely the problem. When the upper echelons of the corporations receive stock options with short vesting periods (no, 5 years is not long term compared to typical investment horizons, and 5 years are not really that frequent) the motivation to invest in the long-term future is basically absent. Also, there are industries where that is simply not possible, as the prevailing conditions fluctuate too much.

Indeed, profit is the key word. Social value is incidental, if at all.

The thing is, you have it a bit backwards. With a refrigeration cycle, which is basically an engine cycle running backwards, you are moving heat from the lower temperature to the higher one. This requires you to supply work to the cycle - you're converting that work to heat, in fact, not the other way around as you seem to argue (and as an engine would do). It doesn't really matter what work source you use as long as it does what you need - in particular, you can use a separate heat engine system to generate it, going [kerosene wick] heat -> work, which is added to heat from inside the fridge -> heat outside the fridge, but modern appliances use electric pumps, as they scale better, are more efficient (your kerosene engine is quite wasteful) and power is more readily available.

He is right and you have it wrong, I'm afraid. Specifically, if you're running malicious code at ring 0 and you're trying to use the system API to install a driver you're doing it wrong. At that privilege level you can be the API, as you have direct access to kernel memory and the needed structures it contains - as they say, the world is your oyster at that point (at least as far as the local machine is concerned). This is exactly what rootkits do to hide themselves. A more interesting problem is how to ensure persistence across reboots without leaving a traceable fingerprint for rootkit hunters to find.

They seemed to have answered the rat strain criticism and the food intake one here, among other things:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512008149

I will grant them that all the data collected on 200 rats over several years is in sufficient quantity as to not fit into one journal article. That should not mean they did not use all the data for their analysis; however, I'd expect them to have the data available if requested for comparison purposes, otherwise this would start to look pretty fishy.

let's see ... google gmo liver damage ... first link is
http://worldcrunch.com/tech-science/new-study-says-monsanto-gm-corn-causes-tumors-kidney-and-liver-disease/gmo-nk602-monsanto-tumors-corn/c4s9636/
(paper link at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637)

Feel free to abuse google further on the subject. And ofc pertinent criticism is welcome.

... and of course this uses his assumption for the chance of false positives, which is basically ... wrong. Quite embarrassing for a math student, since instead of stating it as an independent variable (as he should have) he assumes that

P(test positive | not infected) = 1 - P(test positive | infected)

where in fact the right hand side is P(test negative | infected), quite a different thing from the left hand side.

If otoh your zombie test has 0 false positives, that .9% will be irrelevant as anyone flagged positive by the test is in fact infected so you'll not be administering the cure to healthy people.