I though you were joking at first but then I searched around and I found this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10394970

The end game is probably to trick other traders to think there's a real reason the price is going up, as with all bubbles they have ways to profit from it. But that's just my quick guess.

But I cannot give you definite answers, those algorithms are not public. What is public is the knowledge that they have tricks to find out bid information (via flash orders) which is supposed to be secret. All the side talk about volume, liquidity and price manipulation won't change that...

The act of trading does not affect price.

The "price" is the price at which the last trade was executed. When most of the volume is due to computer trading, they can at least temporarily manipulate the price (for whatever purposes the trading algorithm designers want to... they are getting more and more complex).

Volume is not liquidity. If you have two computers trading a stock back and forth (in order to manipulate its price) that increases volume a lot but the liquidity is basically unchanged.

Then there are things like flash orders or whatever they're called which are neither about volume or liquidity but simply about giving an edge to those with a fast connection to the stock exchange... Essentially they can find out bid information which is supposed to be secret.

Your defense of HFT is weak.

eom

(42 million kilometers) / the speed of light = 2.33494867 minutes

That's just around 4 times closer to the sun than the Earth is, although I guess the radiation intensity probably increases with the square of the distance or something like that?

At least they should be able to power it with solar panels...

"We're not being attacked, we just are totally incompetent and can't keep our site up under normal conditions"

Well, it is much better than admitting everyone is trying to get their money out due to the new debit card fees.

Is there a difference?

If someone acts indistinguishably from a human, I don't think there's any difference.

You do know that x64 has a simplified instruction set (...)

I don't remember hearing about this part... what significant chunk of instructions was removed?

On what applications? Post benchmarks...

There's no evidence to indicate that AMD's "mainline" $200 CPU will be much better than the existing "mainline" $200 2500K that's out right now

There is some, depending on your application of course. If computer chess analysis is your thing, you would see benchmarks results like these, where the $189 Phenom II X6 1100T beats the $219 Intel 2500k.

So AMD already has CPUs which are price-performance competitive, surely Bulldozer shouldn't be worse in terms of price-performance.

The price per patent is an absolute steal compared to the money Apple and Microsoft were tricked into spending for the less valuable Nortel patents.

Do you have any article supporting the claim that Motorola's patents are more valuable than Nortel's? I'm not doubting you, just want to know more about it.

I doubt their infrastructure costs are proportional to the number of users.

why GPUs are faster than CPUs inherently

I hear this a lot, but it's not true. They are faster at highly parallel tasks (like mining Bitcoins I guess), slower at highly serial tasks. They're simply tuned differently.

For example, CPUs have a lot of transistors dedicated to cache memory. This is because they can't know in advance what data they'll need, the instruction which computes an array index may be right before the access to the array.

On the other hand, GPUs rely on highly predictable code, where threads in the same group are all doing the same thing at the same moment. Memory operations always have a very high latency on GPUs, but they hide these latencies by switching the core to running another thread while the memory operation is pending. Latency doesn't matter much for GPU operations, there are thousands of threads waiting to run to cover the latency. This is definitely not the case on a CPU, instruction latency is very important there and this takes extra hardware.

GPUs are not inherently faster, they're simply oriented towards different tasks.

At 100% tax rates the government has no revenue because no-one in their right mind will work to see everything they do stolen by the government.

This is probably false. If the government seized all your income but then gave you food, shelter and entertainment I'm sure many people would work.