Let me guess: Liara's mission where she wants you to find out who one of the Shadow Broker's agents is? It makes you think it's a logic puzzle but it's really just a swerve, which I realized only after I flubbed it. I won't write any more lest I spoil it.

Stories can't be filtered out of the RSS feed, nor can you even tell what section they're under if you're using a Firefox live bookmark.

Two HFT supercomputers passing the same 100 shares back and forth all day making fractions of a penny every time isn't liquidity. There's no valid reason that a solid business like IBM typically trades a few million shares per day in volume while a bailed-out insolvent shell like Citigroup trades in the hundreds of millions, sometimes even billions. That's the "liquidity" HFT provides.

Fuck, to listen to HFT defenders spout this nonsense, you'd think the stock markets were completely functionless before they came along, that the previous century were full of crooks out to hose investors until the white knights of HFT came along. All the HFT big boys really do is siphon off all the difference in the spreads for themselves.

I'm with the commenter below; this shit is not "insightful". It's a lot of pretty words meant to look insightful, but all it did was suck up otherwise good mod points. Just like HFT is a lot of trading meant to look valuable, but all it does is suck up a lot of otherwise good money from the real investors.

Interesting you linked to a Canadian article to explain that, because Canada (in a rare moment of government sanity) actually legalized exactly this situation several years ago. Private non-commercial copying is legal so long as you don't distribute the copies. Who knows if it will stay legal with this new POS copyright bill being discussed, mind you..

/Raises hand!

To this day I don't know what the KDE (and Amarok!) developers were thinking in blowing apart their fantastic software, rebuilding it from the ground up, and choosing to throw out all the great functionality they had and replace it with "Look isn't this shiny!".

I switched to Ubuntu from Mandriva after the first KDE4 Mandriva release came out and haven't looked back. I never particularly liked GNOME but KDE took a flying leap backward and put GNOME in the lead by default.

When you've got a legal document that needs to be signed, dated, and potentially witnessed, there's no other sure-fire, legally-binding way to do it besides putting pen to paper. After that's done you can scan in the now-signed document, provide copies to those who need it, but that original one, with the original ink, is the one you want when TSHTF.

Not at all; I'm saying the apparent stance of the GP poster, that because DNA matching is not 100% accurate it should not be used by the police/courts, is flat-out stupid. It's a tool, sometimes a very valuable tool, and sometimes subject to abuse, just as any other police power can be. That does not mean you take it away from them, now and forever.

That said, whether or not the police should have a perpetual DNA database of anyone they ever get DNA samples from is a legitimate public policy debate. I'd probably lean toward "no" on privacy grounds, but I'd like to see metrics such as: cases solved using said database that otherwise would not have been, false positives leading to false arrests and/or false convictions, cost of the database, etc.

You say all this as if the police walk into a crime scene having absolutely no clue who the perpetrator could possibly be, taking some DNA samples, running it through the computer, then arresting the resultant match and passing it on to the courts. In reality the list of suspects is going to be considerably narrowed by old-fashioned police work: finding witnesses, finding out the victim's history, looking for motive, etc.

In other words, fat lot of good it's going to do you to claim, "But there's a 0.1% chance that DNA isn't mine!" when you've been spotted leaving the crime scene by a witness, were seen having an argument with the victim a couple days prior, he owed you money, etc. Not to mention that if you go to find those other, say, 30 DNA matches, you find out that 21 of them live hundreds of miles away, 3 of them are in nursing homes, 1 is a kid, 2 are already in prison and have been for years...

I plead bad sarcasm. It probably should've read something like, "The most perfect example of ruthlessly perfect exploitation of our so-called 'free market' in existence today." The Wall Street big boys are pikers compared to the corporate fascists that are the IOC.

VANOC trademarked the line, "With Glowing Hearts", which comes directly out of Canada's national anthem.

Today's Olympics are all about whoring themselves out to corporate sponsors, being absolute dicks to anyone who isn't one, and stiffing local taxpayers with the bills for years if not decades on end. If you're the type who worships at the altar of the free market, you've got to admire their ruthlessly perfect exploitation of it.

I keep thinking that it's only a matter of time before they figure out they don't need to. Forget defeating the security lineup; just strap on some old-fashioned bombs, walk into said security lineup, and before being searched, blow themselves to hell and take a hundred or so innocents with them. Coordinate that at a few different airports around the world, and watch the entire airline industry collapse overnight.

Wow. Just .. wow. You completely undermined your own fantastic point less than 3 sentences after you made it. I could try to respond to this by pointing out all the good the United States does in the world, and how I believe they're second to none in that department, but what would be the point? I'm apparently not one of your "everything thinking people," just some dumb Canadian who'd rather have the USA, flawed & imperfect as it is, at the top of the food chain than any other country out there.

I thought about this but rejected it; if I had to spend another, what, $40 on an adapter to use the PS3 with my universal, that's just more sunk cost over the standalone player that worked out of the box. Or worse, end up having to buy another universal. All I wanted was to watch Blu-rays; not overhaul my entire HT setup.

For me (I bought a Blu-ray player before Christmas) it was several reasons. The first two were my show-stoppers, the last two more incidental.

• The PS3 has no infrared port, hence it cannot be used with my universal remote.
• The Blu-ray player was more than $100 cheaper and came with 3 movies (though they all suck it's still something).
• The player has much lower power consumption than the PS3; 18W versus about 100W, depending on the PS3 model.
• I never owned a PS2 thus have no games. In fact I've never owned a console period so console gaming just isn't a big deal to me.

I never said the prequels were kids movies. I think Lucas fully expected the prequels to be well-received and intended them to be all-ages just as the originals were. It wasn't until after Phantom got such a, "WTF was that?" reception that Lucas came out with the, "Oh this was made for kids" line as a retroactive excuse, then tagged it onto the originals as well to stroke his ego.

The last hour of Sith was the only decently written part of the prequels and it still doesn't hold a candle to the originals.