Eh, in their pure forms they are functionally identical.

I don't know, 'enterprisey' companies pull the same stunts often enough.

Well, that is how they got Al Capone...

For the in-game currencies (WoW, EvE, etc), their value as far as the IRS is concerned is pegged to how much it sells for online. Thus if we end up paying taxes on in-game currencies it wil be because of the people who sell it out of game and thus associate a fiat currency value to it.

Well, that gets into the entire question of, is high speed trading causing negative economic effects? It is a non-trivial question, significant research and debate are going on about it and, to a degree, will continue to go on since often it comes down to different priorities. HFT does stuff to an economy, anything that redistributes massive amounts of wealth does. Who it helps, who it turns, to what degrees, and relative value of the people involved, is not all that clear.

Having said that, in theory at least this tax is designed to address the perceived increase in market volatility that HFT involves. So public policy makers are asserting that (a) HFT results in economic instability that impacts people not involved in HFT itself and (b) that this instability is something that the economy on the whole would benefit from curtailing. There is an implicit (c) that is along the lines that the people benefiting from HFT are not the ones baring the consequences of its impact, so like any situation where you have a "Group A preforms act B which benefits them but costs group C" the government is pondering if some checks need to be put on A+B to protect C.

I think the poster was referring to the idea of a tax per share rather then a tax per value, so 100 shares of $100 each would be taxed lower then 1000 shares of $10 each, which would encourage companies to have lower volumes of more expensive shares, potentially wiping out penny stocks.

I am actually kinda surprised people are surprised about this. Both British and American intelligence agencies have a long history of spying on delegates at various summits, and I suspect that the other countries just take it as part of the game, likely they are doing the same thing on smaller budgets. Not saying it is a good thing, but it is a pretty well known 'secret' at least in a general sense.

One of the things that has come out was that our two intelligence agencies are using each other to skirt domestic spying rules. The British spy on Americans citizens and vice versa, then they open up their channels to each other. So quite a bit of their information is sitting in American databanks.

Well, I think the point is that in developed nations we do not do the same types of involuntary experimentation on humans that we do on non-humans, and people are generally outraged when they hear about it being done in developing countries.

On another note though, you would be surprised at how good the simulations actually are. The issue often comes down to results being ignored if they do not have the political marketing behind them. Generally the decision makers what simulations that back up what they have already decided for political reasons.

The cost tends to be considered worth it when someone else (or some other group) is the one paying it.

eh, the belief that politicians are stupid is really important to many people. People often have trouble with the idea of intelligent people doing something different from what they would do and view it as a zero sum, that there is one right answer and either the politician is stupid, or they are. The whole 'conflicting goals' thing really does not factor in to some people's world views.

A lot of research has been done into what caused the 'perfect storm' of innovation starting in the 50, and it is hard to say what exactly the roots are.

It can, however, be argued that the rate of innovation has not really dropped off since then. There is an issue of how we perceive time. Just like we look back over the last few decades and pick out a few 'classic' movies to show how movies were 'better back then', we tend to look at innovation over a wide time frame and then look at a short horizon today and think things must have been moving faster then.

It could also be argued the problems are simply getting harder, that there is less and less low hanging fruit to go after.

Ironically, it is probably because of the stock market that Facebook is falling off the 'idea' wagon. Good investor relations and significant innovation are incompatible, so the more a company has to answer to stockholders, the less likely it is to come up with new ideas.

I am not sure where the author is getting the idea that these 3 companies "have generated most of the new ideas". Business momentum I can see, they had the brands, marketing department, and resources to get things out into the public sphere... but most of the new idea? Not by a long shot.

I do not accuse their engineers of sitting on their hands, they came up with some good stuff, but the bulk of the 'new ideas' tends to come from small companies, FOSS projects, research, and students screwing around. A lot of the ideas put out by those people are also crap, but then again a lot of the stuff coming out of the those big three are also pretty bad, even the ones that see the light of day.

I would say if anything it is the marketing departments and executive structures that are 'running out of steam'. As a company matures it tends to get entrenched people who have been there a while and are more interested in a steady return then experimentation and, more importantly, the companies tend to hire more and more 'classical' executives from other industries who are great at investor retaliations but tend to push the company into the 'endless sequels, people like what they have seen before!' direction.

And, when it comes down to it, politicians do what maximizes their chances for re-election, not what has actual value for their country or districts. It is all about doing what the people you represent THINK is a good idea, not what some ivory tower domain expert (who has actually done the work) says would benefit.