It is clearly illegal for your broker to purchase or sell securities on their own account before making the trades that you have ordered - that's the "classic" front running.

But I don't think it is illegal for a third party to use public information to make a trade. If you loudly tell someone on the bus that you are going to order a million shares of XYZ Corp as soon as you get to the office (maybe because E.F. Hutton told you to, a la classic 19870s commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ) anyone on that bus is free to whip out their smartphone and "front-run" you. I don't know that I would even call this type of thing unethical.

Figuring out technical solutions to this type of "abuse" by introducing delays or taxes is probably better than trying to prohibit them within a legal framework.

But the number of generations until such changes become significant enough to prevent cross breeding is going to be much more than "a few".

I would say that without some MAJOR differences in selective pressure (like imposing a "only people with weird penises get to have kids" rule) there is no way we are going to "bifurcate" within 20 generations, and 20 generations is something like 500 plus years. This is not really a problem I would be worrying about.

Now, in only a few generations I could see social systems develop that would limit cross-breeding: "Those smelly Martians are not good enough to marry my child!" However as a global species we seem to be moving more towards wider acceptances of differences rather than away from (with some highly visible counter examples, to be sure).

I didn't say that everyone would come up with the same decision as to the importance of "ease of pluggin in". Certainly the USB standards decided that the tradeoffs of having a reversible plug were not worth it. I don't know if they were right or not, but I have spent a measurable amount of time flipping USB plugs around to get them in the right way, on an almost daily basis. It is not a *big* deal, but it would be nice not to wast that time.

The advantages of having a plug standard should not be undervalued however, even when that standard is not perfect. I certainly prefer the "U" in USB over the non-universality of almost every other form.

Yeah, we get to eat TWO PIES!

Often though, the "simpler" equation with the pi in it is masking the more illustrative tau/2 that arises from the structure of the relationship. The reason that the area of a circle is (1/2)(tau)(r^2) due to the same type of integration that gives us (1/2)(m)(v^2) for kinetic energy or (1/2)(k)(x^2) for energy of a spring for example.

The fact that 2pi appears so very often in math and physics is a strong indication that it is a more "fundamental" quantity.

If anything helps a larger fraction of the student body deal with trigonometry and radian angle measurement, it would be a great win, in my opinion.

In any case, I have more hope that the US will go all in on the Metric System than Tau will make significant inroads against Pi in my lifetime.

Canada has officially moved to ISO 8601: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... at least according to the Treasury Board and the Canadian Standards Association since 1997 it looks like.

Man does it bug me when they don't use a four digit year! I can't wait until 2032 when that part at least will no longer be ambiguous.

well played sir, well played.

Sure, but what we seem to get is not-so-well thought out laws with lots of added-on-non-related bits of pork or complete deadlock. Sometimes it makes the golden-plates thing look like a more effective method.

Or the 2014th day in the 56th month, using an even more sane date convention. ISO 8601 but it needs a few zeros to pad things out:
0003/56/2014

It might be difficult to show damages. With a dead body, the damages are a bit more clear.

I wonder what sort of schools you went to where people "kept harping on the coming ice age". No school system that I am aware of in the past few decades has done anything like enough coverage of climate in any grade to justify the label of "kept harping" on anything.

I am guessing your schooling occurred sometime between the 1970s and the 2000s and in that time frame, I would be surprised if there was any district that did more than two weeks of instruction with at most one hour per day, on the entire topic of "climate" let alone possible future climate changes. I wish there was enough science instruction in schools to legitimately complain that any one "kept harping" about any one item.

With that said, there are valid criticisms to be made about science instruction that focuses on facts or current models without developing the understanding of how our knowledge about the world is refined and how better models are developed.

In terms of "contributions of the majority" vs "contributions of the minorities" I suspect you are picking your groupings in a way that has huge cultural biases (which of course we all do). Who is the "majority"? Males? White folk? People of Western European descent? Rich males of WE descent? While it is undeniable that Rich males of WE descent have done lots of important things, it is also true that understanding the histories experienced by poor females of non-European descent is important for a more well rounded picture of the world. I don't know that skimping on coverage of Hurst to devote some time to Parks is such a sin. Even future plutocrats could benefit by increasing knowledge of "the other", if only to make for better manipulation.

Lots of people do this all over the world.

The last time I was in Paris for an extended stay, back in 2009, at least one of the major ISPs was doing this on all their customer routers. The world did not seem to come to an end (or at least I haven't noticed it - maybe I'm oblivious). I can't recall if it was SRF, Numericable or Orange or "free" or one of the other big telecom companies, but they certainly had a lot of hotspots. They might have started working with FON to get an international system going I seem to recall.

https://corp.fon.com/en

The "public" wifi did not eat into the subscriber's bandwidth or whatever data caps they had. I don't know how (or if) they addressed the potential for honeypots stealing credentials.

Well, I got at least one "overrated", so there's that.

http://www.google.ca/tisp/

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

Installing TiSP

Installing a typical home TiSP system is a quick, easy and largely sanitary process -- provided you follow these step-by-step instructions very, very carefully.

#1 Remove the spindle of fiber-optic cable from your TiSP installation kit.

#2 Attach the sinker to the loose end of the cable, take one safe step backward and drop this weighted end into your toilet.

#3 Grasp both ends of the spindle firmly while a friend or loved one flushes, thus activating the patented GFlush system, which sends the weighted cable surfing through the plumbing system to one of the thousands of TiSP Access Nodes.

#4 When the GFlush is complete, the spindle will (or at least should) have largely unraveled, exposing a connector at the remaining end. Detach the cable from the spindle, taking care not to allow the cable to slip into the toilet.

#5 Plug the fiber-optic cable into your TiSP wireless router, which has a specially designed counterweight to withstand the centripetal force of flushing.

#6 Insert the TiSP installation CD and run the setup utility to install the Google Toolbar (required) and the rest of the TiSP software, which will automatically configure your computer's network settings.

#7 Within sixty minutes -- assuming proper data flow -- the other end of your fiber-optic cable should have reached the nearest TiSP Access Node, where our Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers (PHDs) will remove the sinker and plug the line into our global data networking system.

#8 Congratulations, you're online! (Please wash your hands before surfing.)