Only in nutville does a right mean using force to get someone else to give you something they have for free.

Because 2 percentage points away from a super-majority is only a "slight" preference.

Harvard Business School Study Sponsored by Ad Group Says Internet Accounts For 5.1M US Jobs, 3.7% of GDP

Pussy Riot was a group of vandals that trespassed and trashed the place. Comparing such scum to an actual expert in chemistry who did her job is just disgusting.

HFT only adds costs to those that are trading at high-frequency. If one believes the benefits outweigh the costs, it's a rational course of action. Personally, I think re-evaluating a holding every 3 months makes more sense, but different people will use different strategies based on their own judgment. I'd rather avoid excessive commissions and have less complicated taxes.

People have been looking at numbers and not meaning since the beginning, e.g. "technical" analysis. I suspect the majority gamble, and I don't think that's going to ever change. Security analysis takes work, isn't glamorous and doesn't deliver a fix or high. The problem is not when people gamble, but when people gamble and think they're doing something else; however, that has nothing to do with HFT, which only presents yet another gambling avenue. It also gives opportunities to actual investors, that can buy now "undervalued" stocks that have experienced a flash-crash.

The speed of trading is irrelevant to the serious investor. Speculators will always make trades as quickly as possible to make a quick buck regardless of the fundamentals; investors will buy and hold based on the fundamentals, buying and selling after months, not fractions of a second. Prices will always revert to a more "intrinsic" value, regardless of any skewing by speculators.

I relied nearly entirely upon "Statistics for Dummies," took an exam, and got the highest possible score. Perhaps some things are better taught in a book through independent study, instead of a classroom, online or off.

Windows 7's Device Manager, there is a Policies tab, allowing you to "Enable write caching on the device" and additionally to "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device." The former warns "a power outage or equipment failure might result in data loss or corruption." The latter states "do no select this check box unless the device has a separate power supply that allows the device to flush its buffer in case of power failure." In Windows 7, by default, write-caching is on, and write-cache buffer flush is off. It does note that not all drives allow you to change these settings, possibly indicating that the article's author recommends any modern drive that allows one to manually choose reliability over performance. The major issue with both is that data may reside in primary memory and has not been written to the drive, there's a power failure, and your data disappears.

1) This article isn't about ATA, ignore it.

2) The article's point on NCQ is that many consumer drives do not implement it correctly, and disable the write cache on the disk and issue cache-flush requests to increase performance, but leading to possible file-system failures if there is a power outage.

I think this article is saying that for the enterprise, buy enterprise drives, not consumer drives. Most consumers use laptops now, so power failure doesn't fit in, and consumers prefer speed over reliability, which is why I've always been stuck using laptops lacking ECC RAM.