The salts used to cure meat are the preservatives that are responsible for colon cancer.

Which of these is more likely?

A) A coalition of scientists in the US and Italy conspired to generate propaganda for Whole Foods grocery stores

B) Meat packers since the 1800s have used nitrates as cheap preservatives that also make hot dogs pinker, and have been known since the 1950s to increase the risk of colon cancer, but meat packers keep using them because they are cheap preservatives that also make hot dogs pinker.

Intel's not brining their best R&D to bear on the desktop. Starting with the "Core" line, Intel has made mobile their core focus, advancing desktop/server chips a side-effect. The last several generations have done little except expand the on-board graphics and reap automatic benefits of smaller manufacturing processes. That's why this window of opportunity was open for AMD to actually make a desktop chip to the best of their ability.

That's a pretty apt description of the Ares system, but SLS is the embodiment of the engineer-led DIRECT/Jupiter movement inside NASA that opposed Ares. SLS is the rocket that NASA needs.

I one read an overview of the CMM levels, and what struck me was this:

At level one, it doesn't say the organization is hopeless, doomed to failure, it says "success depends on the skills of exceptional individuals"

The rest of the levels are built on a fantasy it could be otherwise.

The whole post reads like a bio version of "And then I cloud-sourced an internet to my giga-drive!"

Don't forget the Farenheit 3D API effort with SGI (SGI made it their focus, while Microsoft quietly worked on DirectX instead)

Adam Lanza brushed his teeth. Clearly, toothpaste causes school shootings.

X-37 is a NASA design. The Air Force rescued it when NASA couldn't find the money to keep it going.

We need to carpetbomb all these countries with flyers showing every blasphemous depiction of Muhammed anyone can think of, daily, until they realize its been a few centuries since racking up a body count made anyone respect Muhammed.

On the other hand, considering the original was secret, who's to say how accurately he reproduced it? In the 1700s, it was standard practice to notate music as a series of chords and let the musicians improvise within that framework.

And that is exactly the kind of mind it takes to program. The good and bad programmers I've known divide fairly equivalently to those that taught themselves before high school and those who wrote their first code in CS 101.

They do, for a certain value of "they". My only claim is "they" does not include buy-and-hold investors, the supposed virtuous everyday people that are the poster children for all this hand-wringing. "They" does include all the slightly-less-high-frequency traders, which I suspect are the drivers of this kind of agitation for reform.

The historical dead paper encyclopedia wouldn't even have entries on these kinds of things. It is true wikipedia's math articles are written at a graduate or higher level, though. Personally, my response was to stop settling for less than the real deal and become a math grad student - one course at a time (taking my third now).

HFT is a zero-sum game played with other HFT traders. Occasionally there's a flash crash, but that's a profit opportunity for day traders. Retail buy-and-hold investors are unaffected in any way.