It doesn't matter why something is volatile when considering an investment, just that it is, and is unlikely to stop being volatile. Market manipulation is not something you can do something about, and actually gold is already quite regulated, but still the market is full of fake gold, paper gold (ETFs etc) which encourages speculation, and as it is a popular inflation hedge, it is liable to manipulation, panics, cornering etc etc. On top of the volatility, It's also vulnerable to being targeted by governments when they run out of other ways to tax people (as it has been in the past), precisely because it is popular as a store of value (in spite of being unreliable).

It doesn't tend to track inflation when set against something like the Dollar, on the contrary, it is prone to sudden booms (as everyone piles in to protect their wealth), and long busts (as everyone converts it to something they can actually spend and forgets all about it in the good times), which are completely outside your control. I'd say it fluctuates even more than fiat currencies, which are usually pretty reliable in depreciating slowly.

YouTube is full of pirated material nowadays, and it gets put back up as fast as it comes down, even with their automated systems. Here's a long list:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22full+movie%22

About 13,200,000 results, of which the vast majority are not there with copyright holder's permission. As to the adverts, those are making money for Google, not for the copyright holders, which is why they don't really care if the situation continues.

It's interesting to see just how sociopathic Google is becoming now that they are in a position of dominance, and have grown to be a large company. What's interesting about Google's position now is that because they dominate search, and yet make money from ads, the less effective the search is at finding things the better for them - it means they sell more ads to sites desperate to rank well again.

Not joining Facebook is not an antisocial indicator.

There are plenty of other social networks, some people run their own blog/site and want nothing to do with the sociopath who runs Facebook and the massive tracking of all internet activity they indulge in.

Err, they've been saying that since Malthus at least, so for centuries.

You mean countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, staunch US allies who receive billions in funds?

Your naive trust in the congruence of progress and American involvement astounds me.

Another possibility is to use jquery 2 for all other browsers and jquery 1.9 for ie 10 via conditional comments.

Is that the same sort of boolean as the states of Legal/Illegal, or some other rarefied form with which we are not familiar?

That's great, but who remembers the one password to your encrypted database of passwords?

Lisa, I want to buy your rock...

How do you know the spam comes from android devices?

It depends on your definition of AGPS really. In the real world, systems like iOS, skyhook, (and probably Android, not sure) do exactly what this article describes already - they use signals like cell phone masts and Wifi SSDs to work out where they are, as a separate and independent step to GPS location (though they may then use that rough location to assist GPS locating). They call this AGPS, but you can call it whatever you want. If you turn off the GPS in your iPhone, or use a wifi only iPod it will still locate you, just with not quite as much accuracy as an unobstructed GPS signal or a location generated from GPS and other signals.

Stock markets are for investment, not speculation.

Sub-ms speeds for trades implies algorithms are doing the trading, not humans, as humans obviously can't keep up at that speed - they set the algorithms in motion, but cannot control them except by unrolling deals (which happens a scary amount on our current exchanges after flash crashes etc). So the only people benefiting from this market 'liquidity' are speculators trying to take a share of each transaction by ending up in the middle, or manipulate the market to their advantage (being on the right side of a flash crash in the example you cite). Theres nothing wrong with middlemen when they are tightly regulated, but at this speed of transactions they are providing negative worth to the other market participants, and limits should be set on their behaviour, just as we have limits on insider dealing and other abuses of the market mechanisms which would be vastly profitable for the participants (but not for the companies being traded).

If you accept that markets are for investment in companies, it follows we should limit HFT and other abuses of the market - instead of technical limits I would simply impose a tax on each transaction - that would soon remove those market participants who are only there to skim off tiny percentages on tiny deals performed millions of times per second, while not introducing the distortions and workarounds which would be inevitable with some sort of hard limit to transactions or clever system to limit frequency. It would also let us remove some of the obscene wealth generated by the participants in financial markets and use it to support other parts of our civilisation.

HFT is faster, but it is not better or stronger except in some crude darwinian sense of nature red in tooth and claw - that's not something I agree our markets should try to emulate. HFT and algorithmic trading are potentially very dangerous and abstract the products traded until what is being traded hardly matters, which is entirely the wrong direction for our markets. We need more regulation in place to stop this sort of control of the market by a few major players who play everyone else for suckers, just as we should have had regulations on CDOs, CDSs, and the incredibly corrupt ratings agencies who are at the heart of our financial breakdown. We've had far too little regulation of the financial markets for far too long.

How can you talk of 'Pax Americana' when America is currently embroiled in two occupations, and several eternal wars (e.g. war against drugs, war against error) - or are these merely police actions where tens of thousands of civilians happened to die? These are/were serious wars, and there is and has been no Pax Americana (at least not in the last few decades). Those not in the military in the states can perhaps kid themselves that this is some kind of peace, but it's not long lasting and not perceived as peace by the rest of the world. If the last decades of invasions, threatened nuclear armageddon and terror are peace, you can keep it.

Protecting client/allied states (Nato for example) is entirely different from funding terror (via Pakistan ISI, or the Mujahideen for example), funding revolutions (Iran), funding religious states (Israel), setting up secret prisons around the world, invading Iraq, Afghanistan and maybe next Iran. That's just misguided empire building, it's not legitimate defence. Regardless of your opinion of whether these interventions are in the interests of the US, if your government is investing huge amounts of your budget in the military and in military aid, and the lives of your armed forces in foreign intervention, it behooves you to find out exactly what they are doing and why.

When your politicians go war on false premises, or authorise extra funding for Saudi Arabia/Pakistan/Israel/..., I guarantee events in Syra/Iran/Other countries you consider unimportant will have a major impact on the finances of your country, the way your money is spent, and on the course of your life. The news that is presented to you (particularly when it is in digest form as you seem to prefer) dictates how you think about world events, whether you think that Pakistan is a hotbed of islamists which sponsors terror, or a staunch US ally which receives billions a year and bulwark against communism, or both, whether you think that Iraq is a useful ally against Iran and worth supporting (1980s) or an evil dictatorship (1990s). That in turn dictates who you might support or vote for in US elections, and where your taxes will be spent around the world and on your military.

When the time comes that the US decides to stop managing an empire of satellite states and dependencies abroad, that'll be the time you can stop worrying about anything but local news. I agree that local news is more important, particularly for more trivial items, but international news is incredibly important - if you want to make decisions on international events you should try to be well informed about them - if you don't want to have to bother with that, encourage your government to stop interfering in the rest of the world (a habit not unique to the US, so this applies to citizens of any country really).

Since you have to ask, the words 'sky high' - this sort of hyperbole undermines the message, and marks it as an obvious joke.

This sort of silly threat *might* merit investigation (though frankly I think it is such an obvious joke investigating would be pointless, there are plenty of real crimes to investigate), but on finding someone without the means, motive, or motivation to actually bomb an airport, perhaps the police and CPS should have thought better of wasting public money on a trial and incarceration.