For around seven years I programmed a derivative trading system. Unfortunately our company went out of business due to lack of capital and possibly because our large competitors were cheating (not obeying firewalls between trading for customers and trading for themselves).

I view high-frequency trading (HFT) as great for society. Here is why: What HFT gives you is the fairest and most accurate (best) price for something. When there are many, many trades, the price gap between the individual trades becomes so low that there is no chance that you'll pay too little or too much for something or that you'll wait too long for your trade to happen. I'm talking about people who just want to buy something, not HFT traders.

You're hungry and you want to cook yourself dinner. Your dinner is made up of commodities that are traded, except perhaps for the parts that you bought at the local farmers market. But you and the farmer used gas and a vehicle of some sort to make the transaction. If you rode your bike, your bike is lubed with oil and made of steel, etc. With HFT in play, everything that went into the transaction was bought and sold at the fairest price possible. Nobody got gyped because of low market volumes that day, and nobody had to pay a gigantic fee to a broker because the cost per transaction is now tiny.

Of course you have issues like the flash crash. The best way to look at the flash crash is like this. Shares of John Gotts (JG) are worth $40, based upon fundamentals (intrinsic worth) and an idea about the future. Somebody sold a gigantic number of shares of JG for $20. Excellent computer algorithms put in buy orders for JG at $15 and possibly foolish computer algorithms found a way to sell shares of JG at that price, foolish if they bought the shares for more than $15 or smart if they bought the shares for less. The spiral kept going downwards due to both foolishness and intelligence. You can see that there were many, many winners. Every algorithm that bought shares for JG at less than $40 had the potential for a huge windfall. There are no rules against creating an intelligent HFT to look for mini-flash crashes and make a killing as a result. Fortunately or unfortunately, many of the trades that did happen were unwound by the exchange.

Finally, what I need to stress here is that computers aren't trading with other computers. Teams of programmers working with traders are writing code that does their bidding. The computer is the trader's tool, not the trader itself.

Nope, I used CDE on a DEC Alpha and it crashed a lot. I barely used any of CDE, either. Mainly it was bringing up a shell to run non-CDE apps. The environment was ugly and unstable. I preferred fvwm, but never installed it on the machine.

Are you sure about your history? I used CDE on a Dec Alpha in the mid-late 90s and the machine was beefy and fast with 24-bit color. Nobody sane would do CDE over dialup and workstations by then were moving past 8 bit color displays. I think you're thinking about the late 1980s to early 1990s. Nobody was using CDE back then. Every UNIX vendor had some proprietary window manager or a variant of mwm or twm.

CDE looked really dated, and quite honestly I hated it. It crashed a lot. It had a lot of bloated and useless applications, and it was formal without being functional. I never used anything in that big, giant toolbox taking up 25% of the screen real estate except the [non-obvious] way to pop up a shell.

mwm or the free fvwm with Motif and non-Motif apps is what I preferred to use. I never did get around to disabling CDE on the particular box I was using.

What I like about T-Mobile is when I go into a rural area, I'm lucky to get GSM, let alone 3G. T-Mobile even drops out along the interstates. 3G only works in certain areas of large cities and along some major highways but not even all interstates.

Which makes it very difficult to bother me on vacation.

The programming shop where I work has no books at all. We use Google. At my three previous shops, we had plenty of books but I rarely cracked one.

The best way to learn programming is by doing and to have Google at your disposal when you have questions.

My thought is that within the next few hundred years we'll be recovering resources from landfills and all sorts of spaces too toxic to deal with now.

Already we're dealing with polluted industrial sites. We'll become more and more efficient with that. We'll start to become very efficient at remining rare earths out of landfills and it will cascade from there.

You can't have an ultimate video game collection without Odyssey II.

Possible causes:

1) Compartmentalizing.

2) People's minds decline as they age.

3) Brainwashing.

Many of these DSL customers will buy a new computer in July. And then will probably switch to cable. I think a tiny minority will realize that their DSL modem is cooked and be able to convince their ISP of the same.

Think about what type of programmers go to work for Microsoft and it should become immediately clear why they don't make good products.

The people who go to work for Microsoft care about money above all else. They're not going to work on something technically superior or interesting. They're going there to collect a paycheck from a gigantic machine and hope to be able to move into a big enough house with their wife and kids. The end result is irrelevant.

Chemists and their friends chemical engineers create industrial processes that produce chemical compounds but they seem to have little (certainly historically) care for either waste products or biological consequences of the intended end products.

For example, you have oil refineries that when designed and built didn't seem too bad but current science makes it pretty clear that these oil refineries kill people.

In my field, software, we consider one death to be one too many. If there was a piece of software written in the 60s out there killing people, well, it would have been replaced in the 60s.

Perhaps the chemicals and processes you are creating today are more benign, but you don't have a very good track record, do you?

Vehicles without trunks are for people who don't need to carry anything of value in their vehicle, in other words, for very few people. I think people who do need to drive with items of value are foolish to buy these vehicles.

For example, someone I know has a giant expensive SUV, he's almost always the sole driver, the vehicle gets terrible mileage, and he has no way to secure valuables because there is no trunk. As you can imagine he always drives with a laptop. The only security is that the rear portion of the vehicle has tinted windows.

Sad to say but vehicle purchases are mostly emotional, which isn't great for your portable electronics.

Why should the US government aid the Chinese surveillance state any more than it already does? If there is hacktivism going on against China then so be it. China would do well freeing its political prisoners, such as the Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, and then it can ask for cyber help from the US.

Looks like a great idea to me if they install it by default and turn on auto updates, because it will mean fewer botnets and less spam. It will raise visibility of virus protection so I don't think it will hurt third-party vendors too much. If people want added protection they will buy it, just like they do today.

...the more I read about Mr. Stallman the more I feel that he's a stand up guy.

I didn't read the whole rider (only about half) but everything there looked absolutely fine to me.

When you plan a conference, you really do want this kind of detail. The rider is a declarative statement. The intended audience doesn't care whether it seems rude or fails to use the word please. That's not the point. Think of it like software documentation. You want facts and thoroughness, not opinion.

Richard has selected a noble area of human endeavor to pursue, supporting openness in computer science. In order to make change in this society you have to offend people, and so his presentation is effective, if not necessarily deliberately so.

Discussing his personal habits or grooming habits is inappropriate. Software is supposed to be about the best ideas winning. And frankly, over time, virtually everything Richard Stallman has said, however disturbing to some people, has proven to be correct. This man is not affiliated with MIT for no reason.