Yeah, both Muslims, but different flavors. Saddam and his crew were Sunni despite the fact that Iraq is majority Shiite. Now that he's gone, the government in Iraq, when it finally emerges, will likely by Shiite, reflecting the majority of the Iraq population. The natural assumption is that Iraq and Iran will strengthen ties.

Sigh, I wonder about this, too. For whatever reason, our country seems to be a more violent place to live than some others. A friend of mine was attacked in her home, had her throat slit, and her house set on fire with her still in it. She managed to crawl out and go for help, but it was a near thing. Does that happen where you live? I have a permit to carry a concealed weapon and I am grateful to have it.

An argument could be made that this kind of activity increases the efficiency of the markets involved as a whole. One of the results of high-volume, high-speed trading is that the difference of the top-of-the-book for a particular security at different exchanges tends to approach zero. These systems are designed to analyze market data from many different exchanges at the same time. One of the simplest strategies is to look for a brief arbitrage opportunity based on a termporary gap between the best bid of one exchange with the best offer of another. As this gap approaches zero, the overall efficiency of trading that security increases. Everybody benefits from a more efficient market because it becomes simpler to determine the value of a particular security, which, under certain circumstances, is decidedly non-trivial.

Yeah, agreed, a more thorough search is called for. But that search should be conducted by the police, not school administrators. And call the parents. This is not in school administrators' remit.

Exactly, to put it differently, "steal an iPhone one day and have a free laptop delivered to you the next."

There's an mplayer-plugin for Firefox that streams flash (and many other formats) right in the browser.

to summon moral outrage. I know it's wrong. Really. Any help would be appreciated.

Agreed, but what if you could fix both problems? Ban hummers (the vehicles) and make dark-colored cars more energy-efficient and you're better off than if you did only one or the other.

It seems to me that, when faced with a proposal that makes, say, a 5% improvement on a problem, a common negative response is that the solution doesn't entirely correct the problem so why bother? A 5% improvement gets us to a 5% better world. Solve the hummer (the vehicle) problem next. The two are not zero-sum.

The natural contributions referred to do contribute to climate change, of course, as do other factors like fluctuations in the Earth's orbit around the sun and continental drift. The thing that makes the anthropogenic contributions to climate change troublesome is that they happen over a dramatically shorter period of time than is typical for natural events.

And when I say, "troublesome", I mean, of course, troublesome to us. The Earth will cheefully cruise along whether we infest it or not.

The implication seems to me to be that an automated trading program made a decision that an actual human trader wouldn't have. In fact, automated trading programs typically make the same decisions that human traders do, they just make them faster. A trader who sets up an automated trading program typically will set the program up to do just what he himself would do; he just wants to gain some leverage from a decrease in lapsed time before the order gets placed. Without automated trading programs, the same problem might easily have occurred as human traders read the flash from Bloomberg.

Full disclosure: I work for a company that produces automated trading software.