While it may increase the liquidity of the market, it doesn't necessarily promote good ideas.

Society benefits when good ideas are promoted through shareholder investments. The stock market did just great for 100 years without algorithmic trading, and the intro to algorithmic trading has caused several large instabilities in just the past two years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_capital

This amazing graphic illustrates the effect of this type of trading on the volumes, and ...I believe that instabilities will only get worse with this type of activity.

http://www.nanex.net/aqck/2804.HTML

As the underlying article states the growth of "Quote SPAM" is really the problem. Most of this is "testing the waters" where a quote is tossed out to see the response and immediately cancelled with no resulting trade.

Fundamentally, it is simply gambling.

Actually this is a pretty good way to do two factor authentication. In theory, you need possession of the login credentials as well as possession of the phone to do the transaction.

RSA SecureID with the "number that changes once a minute" is another two factor authentication system that is in wide use, and if I understand the attack vector would be just as easy to compromise with a trojan in the PC. Just have the Banks WWW site ask for the securID token for some innocuous thing (sync the securID for example), and trojan takes care of the rest.

The fact that they were able to infect two devices for a single user testifies to the ingenuity of this attack. If I am honest with myself, I can't say I would be immune to it either...even though I am probably more sensitive than the average computer user. I still find myself being the lemming when accessing some site and wanting to get the transaction done. Click here, put in code there, who knows whether it is legit or not. Especially since this trojan did some sort of greasemonkey type injection directly into the banks real WWW page.

It is more complicated than that. This is all about what today's society expects and how people conform to those expectations.

I believe a better analogy would be "I draw a picture, make a large number of copies, and leave them in a public building. Do I expect that people walking by won't pick one up?".

The answer depends on how hard it is to make the copy, where in the public building the copies were left, what notices were posted at the door of the public building, what the passer-by intends to do with the copy, and whether the original producer is deprived of anything.

If each copy was an oil painting on canvas I suppose you might reasonably expect a passer-by to leave them lie. Especially if that passer-by intends to pick up the entire stack and sell them on a street corner. After all each copy cost the original artist something in materials and time, and I would be depriving the original artist of those costs.

If each copy was a photocopy, I can't see anyone assuming that they can't pick up a copy. Material/time costs to the original artist are minimal, so as a passer-by I won't feel that I have deprived anybody of anything by picking up a copy to take home and hang on my wall. In today's society a stack of photocopies in a public place implies they are to be taken.

Of course, if I take that photocopy and publish it in my newspaper in order to sell more newspapers, The original artist might have cause to object, as that act isn't generally supported in today's society.

In GitHub, if I put some sourcecode there, and make no attempt to protect it with password or license, I don't feel today's society would not allow me to object to people downloading it for personal use. But if I include it in a project for sale, I should take care to read the licenses and get the necessary permissions.

Ever try getting an appointment for a specialist for a non-urgent procedure in the USA? While I am sure it isn't every case, I have been told a couple of times that the "first available slot" is 6-8 weeks out, and only after the first visit can the procedure be scheduled which may be delayed yet another couple of weeks.

I live in Florida, have decent corporate Health Insurance (~ $5000 per year premium from my paycheck, plus $25 copays for every visit up to $2000, plus 10% of all charges for any procedure). Most all procedures are now done off premises in Surgical centers where you get 2 bills: the doctors, and the facility which tend to total to more than $1000 per procedure to my insurance company ($100 or more out of pocket). Add to the "wait" and the "cost" that I must find an "in-network" provider.

Sounds like "standing in line" to me.....I have lived 11 years in Europe and Asia, and have always found the health care better overseas than in the USA. I think most of that is because the lawyers aren't as involved in healthcare overseas. Go see any USA provider and count the number of forms you need to read and sign.

I can't wait to see what kind of malware this type of scheme would produce. I have no proof, but if feels like running a compiled bytecode would be easier to exploit than text based javascript.

I will agree with this....having dealt with AT&T as a vendor, I would say their customer service people probably have no idea who in the company might be able to answer the question, so it easier to just punt and give the "proprietary" answer.

Furthermore, I would guess they know which market the caller is coming from, and whether they are the only provider in the area. If they know you can't vote with your feet, they are much less inclined to make you happy.

I had the same problem...once they started charging for exceeding the bandwidth caps I wrote a program to log usage.

I have an old Fedora box with two ethernet cards doing the router work (everything to and from the house goes through this box) and use Etherape to track the usage. A cronjob once a minute makes sure Etherape is always running, and a kill -10 every minute gets it to dump the usage data in XML which I process into a CSV for analysis and charting.

Surprisingly, their monthly usage figures have matched my full month calculations within 1%.

What irritates me is that their monthly totals are not available on their WWW site for a full week after the end of the month, and their current month totals are also delayed a couple of days sometimes wildly inaccurate since they are missing days. Example is the November totals for my account seem to be currently missing 2-5 November, and they haven't posted 12,13 November yet. Hence they show lower usage than what I really used. If this were the end of the month, I might think I can squeeze that extra download in before the end of the month, but I am sure they would figure it out and charge for it.

I hit this issue once when I breached the 150Gb cap with 6 hours remaining. They claim to sell you another 50Gb for $10, but of course that doesn't roll into the next month. That is where I would complain....if they are going to charge by the Gb, they need to accurately report usage during the month.

AT&T just sent me a letter that they are switching me to U-verse with a 250Gb cap. They claim it will be the same price as DSL for the next year, but after that who knows....only other game in town is Comcast which cost even more.

Waited in line outside an elementary school for 1.5 hours. Everybody was civil and no electioneering to be seen. We had a 7 page optical ballot (use black pen to fill in the little ovals), which is scanned as you are leaving. There were 12 amendments to the Florida constitution which were all very wordy, and which all seem to be special interest or religious in nature.

I noticed that they had put the output of the "zero'ing" on the wall for those to inspect that the optical readers had been set to zero. We had to show a picture ID to vote, which everybody had.

I was number 225 for the day who voted...the precinct captain told me that they normally only get 200-250 for the whole day....I was there at 11AM.

 

I do that! Works great. Cuts the cost to about 20cents per cup and I can use my favorite coffee. Only caveat is that you need the Heavy Duty foil. You can reuse one K-cup 5-10 times...I just rinse it out and let it dry.

The flaw in the DMCA is that costs for filing a counter notice are not "easily" refundable from the entity filing a faulty takedown notice.

Make the media companies filing faulty takedown notices pay the attorney/other costs of the rightful owners for the restoring content the media companies incorrectly took down and we will see a lot less of this.

Perhaps the law should state that each takedown notice, and each counter claim requires an escrow amount that will go to the rightful owner after settling ownership. Loser pays the others' costs....

If you are sure you are the owner then nothing to worry about.

You think that democrats are the only ones who behave like this? Republicans aren't susceptible to this type of abuse of power?

Do you really think that this is a "blueness" trait and not just a bunch of politicians spouting to get in the news? There are plenty of incidents where politicians of all colors who abuse their governmental powers against people who don't think like them. I don't think either party can claim with a straight face that they are better at supporting the constitution.

I am tired of people using recent incidents as "proof" of their point...there are lots of data points in historical record, and I while I haven't done the statistical analysis I would guess that there is a nice even distribution in the "abuse of power" category.

It depends on your skill set.

I personally will get much more information/analysis/correlation with an awk/sed script then I will get with any SQL query, with the added benefit that I can import data from ANY text file and correlate it. I won't be dependent on having all data I am analyzing be in a common format.
TEXT is a common denominator....most any binary file can be converted to text and then the resulting text files can be analyzed. It doesn't work the other way around. You example of windows event logs is perfect....When I want to correlate them to some other text file that isn't in that format, I have to convert them.

It is pretty arrogant on the part of those RedHat devs to think that any system they will devise will have the entire ecosystem of Linux running to use it. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. That will always be the case.

I have no idea how they do it, but if I were designing to thwart your idea, OnStar would be part of the Engine Control Unit, and the only way to disable it would be a FW update or replacing the ECU with a third party unit that doesn't include OnStar. Then they hit you with DMCA for reverse engineering their software or void the warranty because of non-factory parts. I suppose you could always try to locate the antenna and clip that off, but you haven't disabled it....

They also need a law that will ding the credit agencies when they get it wrong....

More handsets in a particular cell sector means that the cell is transmitting a much greater percentage of the time on the various signaling and traffic channels that would be quiet without calls. GSM has multiple channels. Some of them are "broadcast" channels that continuously transmit the GSM cell ID and other info. Other channels only transmit when paging a handset or signaling with a particular handset. More calls means the occupancy of these channels is much higher. Then there are the traffic channels which carry the "bearer" voice or data for the duration of a call. If there are 100 simultaneous conversations then you are transmitting voice on 100 separate frequencies. CDMA (3G UMTS/4G LTE/CDMA 2G/CDMA-2000) radio is different in this respect. It uses "spread spectrum" techniques where additional calls add to a single wide band signal. From the perspective of each handset, the calls on all the other handsets look like noise. But the principal is simlar....additional calls means more power consumption at the tower.