Adjusted for inflation, NASA's budget is less than half of what is was back then.

Not the only factor, but it's not helping y'know? If anything they get a lot more done with the money then they used to...
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Conspiracies are the homeopathy of the paranoid delusional; the less evidence there is, the more true it must be!

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Thanks for reminding us that there is no way to generate electricity other than by burning fossil fuels. This is a simple, True Fact that nobody ever seems to remember.

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The way I understand it, this isn't and can't possibly be true.

HFT "works" by creating both buy and sell orders for stocks and commodities at the same time, and either completing those transactions or canceling the buy/sell orders and posting new ones based on new information, often several times per second.

If the HFT system ever completes a buy/sell order, it only holds the stocks it trades for typically less than a second, meaning there must be a matched bid to buy and a request to sell that stock within that time frame if any transaction is to take place. Otherwise, the orders would be canceled and reposted.

In other words, HFT can only be effective if there are already buyers and sellers in the market at that specific time, and even then only to the volume of stock that is being sold or purchased.

I have a hard time seeing it as anything other than a man-in-the-middle attack looking to shave a few fractions of a cent per transaction. Maybe this made sense before computerized transactions were a common thing and you still had humans negotiating the transactions, but now that *all* transactions are negotiated and matched by computers it seems completely unnecessary.
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So is this with or without the looming threat of billions of dollars in fines?

https://news.slashdot.org/stor...

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Subsidies do not reduce prices; the costs are still there, you're just paying for it in your taxes instead of at the pump/meter. The stick in the eye is, with subsidies you're paying for it whether you use it or not.

That said, the benefit of subsidies is as you say; to foster growth by hiding the true costs and making the sticker price more appealing, and that is not inherently a bad thing.
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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...

It's all the same machine, right? The Pentagon, Google, the police. If you do one little job, you make an free App for Android, and the next thing you know, it's two miles under the desert, the essential component of a death machine.
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Converting carbon dioxide back into carbon is a lot harder than moving mass to a higher elevation, solid or liquid, and a hell of a lot less efficient.

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If it had anywhere near the potential for disaster as nuclear, it almost certainly WOULD be as heavily regulated.

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Off the top of my head: The car can park itself in a spot that would be too tight to let you open the doors to get in and out.

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Which, of course, is exactly why the Obama administration has expanded the scope of federal loan guarantees towards nuclear power construction projects... because he's anti-Nuclear.

It's not the government that's preventing nuclear construction. Private developers (aka "The free market") don't want to spend the billions of dollars necessary to build them. They can barely be assed to spend the money to maintain the ones they have!

There is a grand total of SIX power plants currently seeking regulatory approval. You might have a point about government being a bottleneck if there were dozens of them, but nobody seems too keen on building multi-billion-dollar nuclear plants with gas and oil (and now, renewables) flooding the market with much cheaper energy.
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Yeah, and during that blackout, Indian Point was out for a full week.

The point is, "How are you planning on replacing the power loss?" is not a valid concern when they already replace the power lost when the plant goes offline on an alarmingly frequent basis.
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Renewable energy gets less than half as much subsidy as petroleum, and it becomes less than 1/5th of what petroleum gets if you exclude subsidies for ethanol.

I'd be happy if they simply made it equal.
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The same way they replaced the power loss when the either or both of the plant's reactors are unexpectedly taken offline due to equipment failure, fires, accidents etc. There have been dozens of incidents that have knocked the plant offline without little or no warning and I doubt anyone not paying close attention has ever noticed. The plant is plagued with incidents from control rod failures to transformer explosions to errant bird shit. Somehow NYC has been spared from crippling brownouts.

As it turns out, the grid is remarkably resilient! So even if you were to replace the now 40-year-old reactors with something "less reliable" like wind and/or hydro (if only there was a large body of flowing water nearby...) there would demonstrably be no deficiency in power.

All that is on top of the numerous close-calls and safety violations the plant has been written up for over the past two decades. The place is almost literally held together with duct tape and bailing wire, because maintaining it is expensive and that's bad for the shareholders. The latest tritiated water leak (which is by no means the first, or worst) is just possibly the straw that breaks the regulator's back.
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If you could directly correlate posting to Slashdot with the risky behavior... by, say, basing mod points on how fast you were driving when you posted... then yes.
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