Sure you do.. I've seen several threads in the last couple of weeks about open source being marginalized by unlicensed MS software. ;)

PC gaming is far from dead, the revenue was $13 billion in 2009, up from $11 bn in 2008. Has it ever been healthier, despite an ever-increasing range of activities (and consoles) competing for our time?

Go read the wikipedia pages on software-as-a-service, and I doubt you'll see piracy even mentioned. It's all about cutting costs through reduced overheads and specialization.
While businesses can afford to pay for their software, 13-year old kids might not, but they still wouldn't be able to if the pirate bay wasn't an option. I simply don't buy the argument that copyright infringement equates to lost sales.

The way IP holders and their lobbyists are pushing us towards a totalitarian society, in an effort to keep their antiquated business model, is such a threat to our free society that I'm in favor of major revision/relaxation of our IP laws. Their stated purpose is to provide an incentive for creating art and driving research, but people would, and do, these things regardless of profit.

From my experience Postgres beats MySQL on single-query performance and is significantly better for high concurrency workloads. You must have been doing something wrong, or been depending on some mysql-ism like it's lower-overhead connections or the query result cache. Don't expect stellar results when your architecture clashes with the RDBMS..

And even if PG is faster, that's not why I use it. I choose PG because it's a mature, well-behaving, solid piece of engineering, that I can trust with my data.

AFAIK this was a criminal case, and Timber Hill aren't involved beyond acting as a naive market maker.

AFAIK Timber Hill isn't involved in this, beyond losing some $$ by acting as a very naive market maker.

The two men were brought up on criminal charges for market manipulation, after the stock exchange flagged their trades as anomalous and reported them to the authorities.

There is no feature parity. MySQL does have decent range of features these days, but they are often tied to some specific storage engine, which means a lot of them are mutually exclusive.

Want full-text search and GIS? Sure, but you lose ACID and are stuck with table level locking..

Let's just ignore the fact that most, if not all, of those patents would still apply to a Dalvik VM running Python..

The feds just print more money.

Who gives a crap if it's sustainable, as long as the private prison industry & politicians they have on retainer earns well..?

Why should it matter whether they "know" or not?

ISP's aren't accountable for their what their users do, should it be any different for individuals who let their neighbours check mail or whatever?

Postgres, not Postgre.

The name comes from Postgres relation to the earlier Ingres database.

Your observations on how the market moves are pretty much spot-on, but aren't specific to automated trading systems.

The market worked exactly the same back in the 20s [1], only a fair bit slower; You'd never see accenture drop to 1 cent in less than a minute back then.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscences_of_a_Stock_Operator

http://clojure.org/rationale

Compare heroin prices in your neighborhood ghetto to bulk prices in Afghanistan (at _least_ 1500% -- what kind of interest rates do you see in your bank?). It might not be ethical, but it certainly could be rational -- even when you factor in the risk of getting caught, or killed by the competition.

No amount of tax payer money wasted on police and prisons can stop that kind of profit; all we manage to do is drive up prices, thus making recruitment even more lucrative.

Selective enforcement is key here. Locking up anyone you don't like is easy when everyone's a criminal.

Unresponsive UIs tend to be written by naive/ignorant developers who don't understand threading.