Cogent isn't the only ISP out there for Verizon to choose from. They deserve some of the blame. And if they are choosing to bandaid the solution by implimenting QoS on a service-preferential basis, they're attempting to cover up their poor decision here; "Hey, rather than ponying up the cash for a real internet link for our subscribers, let's just throttle the hell out of everything that isn't http traffic... it'll keep customer service calls down and our network will appear to still be just fine, while everything else goes to crap!" "Brilliant! Promote this man at once!" It doesn't help that, just like Obama and Bengazi, the appearance of impropriety by having a competing service while its competitors suffer on your own network looks exactly like what people are reporting it as: A dick move.

This can be said at any point since the invention of the cell phone. These are the facts as of today, and those are the ones that matter in a purchasing decision.

Yup. From the city that brought you a ban on large fountain sodas to combat obesity comes solar panels to combat storms. o_O

I play EVE. It's not a "very stable market". Goonsquad decided to attack miners in highsec. Mining is one of the main ways raw materials are generated for product generation, and when they did that, key resources to fuel starbases (oxygen isotopes, etc.) shot up massively in price. It would be the realworld equivalent of bombing oil pipelines and refineries.

As you get farther away from the main trade hubs and out into nullsec, prices can easily triple for commodities. And many alliances have policies to prevent anyone else from getting in on their lucrative cartels of freighter transports bringing needed supplies out.

Like hell they are. Most people avoid serious trading because of the lack of easy access to information on sales volumes, pricing, etc, market volatility, and (unlike the real world) getting your products to one of the main trade hubs is risky. If blowing your ship to hell is cheaper than the cost of losing their ships to the police (concord), they'll blow it up. There's no jail in Eve -- in 15 minutes you're just like every other pilot again... and they'll loot your wreck and be on their merry.

And I'd suggest they play it to understand why government regulation and military protection of traders and merchants leads to vastly lower costs to society, and to see first hand how far the effects of market manipulation can travel.

And you're leaving out another critical component of Eve that isn't at all like the realworld: You're never sure who you're trading with. Identities can be traded, and because of this, and the interface mechanics, you can be buying supplies from your enemies one day, and selling arms to them the next.

And all of this "free market" love makes people incredibly distrustful, very manipulative, and economic power equates directly with military power. And what's more interesting... the distribution of wealth looks pretty much like it does in the United States: 1% controls over half the total wealth in the game... and that 1% can be very petty, self-centered, and short-sighted. Kings and kingdoms alike are created and destroyed every day -- there is no stability. In nullsec, you always have an exit strategy... a way to burn your assets and get out quick, because if the enemy doesn't fuck you over, your would-be kings claiming to be on your side will.

Eve is the wild-wild west, seen through the lens of a hundred spreadsheets. When it's a game, this can be fun. When it's real life... do you really want to go to bed one night and wake up the next with your house on fire and your neighbors looting each other, you, and everything else as the next Great New Power rolls in? Because this is a frequent occurrance in the game.

Okay, not that I'm disagreeing with anything you have to say but... what does any of that have to do with HFT?

And compared to European vendors...
AT&T - Slow. Expensive. Unreliable.
Verizon - Slow. Expensive. Unreliable.
TMobile - Slow. Expensive. Unreliable.
Sprint - Slow. Expensive. Unreliable. :(

This is pure speculation, not a fact.

I love magical thinking like this. It keeps me employed. In other news, "too big to fail." Businesses don't pay for their mistakes: You do. That's the reason for regulation... it's to assure a baseline level of sanity... so when they screwup, they don't do it so badly that they take the rest of us with them.

HFT isn't a system stability problem as much as it is an access problem. What it does is increase the cost of entry into the market -- those who don't engage in HFT wind up paying for those who do, and so it winds up penalizing people with smaller portfolios and shifting the costs of it onto them. What you need to understand about profit is that it is always at the expense of someone else. And HFT is the sublime example of how to nickle and dime the less fortunate to death. These fractions of a penny here and there add up because it gets compounded by interest rate. Over time, the spread between those who have it and those who don't will grow; As is the trend in any investment-based system.

This, right here. This is the only valid argument for changing an existing and well-understood model when there's no new evidence to consider.

So they're both made out of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Point stands. Also, you're a dick.

I don't think so...

Lucius Fox wouldn't be caught dead working for Apple. He wouldn't even work for the government. At Wayne Enterprises, it was setup for a short period of time, to justify a legitimate clear and imminent threat to the people, and was dismantled as soon as that threat was gone, and no "metadata" was collected; It was a targetted search. Apple collects and stores all of your searches, sells location information to the highest bidder, and could give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut about your privacy.

Well, this will be fun. Bruce Wayne is probably the only one that could sue Apple for patent infringement and win.

Know what the difference is between Strychnine and LSD is, chemically? There isn't one. But the way the atoms are arranged will make the difference between a pleasant experience and a painful death.

If right now I pushed a button and humanity suffered a total existance failure, in a thousand years there would be no buildings. No concrete. No roads. There would be almost nothing left that could still be identified as foreign, still identified as having been left by humans. Except plastic. Most of our plastic will still be here, in the same form we molded them from, thousands of years from now. Nuclear waste breaks down faster than plastic.

Actually, the main arguments is that most plastic production depends on dead dino juice and there's only a limited supply of it, that it doesn't break down on less than a geological timescale, that it's difficult to re-use, and as it shreds itself down to the molecular level, it becomes a poison that infests the entire food chain.. and is now appearing in our own blood and tissue samples in detectable quantities, as well as being linked to all manner of health problems.