Either:
- Find a better Brokerage account to use (without an account minimum you need to maintain)
- Don't waste you're time trading with $2500, put it in a high Interest savings account (ok, they don't pay much) and get back in when you have more funds to invest
- Put it all on Black on the roulette table (May as well if you're entire "investment" is in one stock).

Simple, don't trade on Margin and ignore the daily fluctuations. Are you trading (short term) or investing (long term)?

It's more like someone wants to buy for 1.21 and someone wants to sell for 1.20, and the trade goes thought at 1.201, with the HFT skimming the 0.001 off the trade.

From the retail investor's view:
1. I want to buy 1,000 shares at 1.20.
2. The HFT is willing to sell them to me at a slightly higher cost
3. Trade gets executed at 1.201.
4. It costs me $1 for the trade to be executed quickly (against the HFT) rather than wait for the bid/ask spread to hit my trade (possibly costing me much more than $1 as the price trends up).

Now if I'm an institutional investor, whole different story when trading 1,000,000 shares.

Mod Parent Up. Exactly what I think too. I've only ever worked for small companies, and it's nice to not have to deal with the HR bull.

I use Cobian as well, backing up to a Truecrypt volume on an external hard drive. Every month or so, I swap my current backup drive with the drive I store off site (at my desk at work).

Being encrypted, I 'm not too worried if it walks at work, and the data isn't my most current copy. And if my primary backup and off site backup are both destroyed by the same event, then I've likely got MUCH BIGGER problems to worry about than my old tax returns and photos.

Oh no, I LOVE beer. And it SHOULD be kept away from me :)

I agree. Here is what I was thinking about (in the shower no less) this morning

How about the movie / music / tv industries provide a pay portal. A site where people would just go and pay "what they feel is appropriate" for a work?

So it would work something like this. Make the movie / song / tv show and distribute it via the normal avenues. Let the rest of us obtain, distribute, and pay what we feel is appropriate for the work. So lets say one was to download an NBC tv series that is from via P2P. It turns out quite a good show and one enjoys it. You might figure that's worth somewhere in $1-5 per episode.

Then one could browse over to www.nbc.com/PAYUS and pay the amount directly to NBC

The best thing is that 90% of this is already in place and NBC wouldn't need to invest in much new infrastructure to capture the revenue. The only missing bit is the website where one can pay for it. At least way, they would be capturing some of the lost revenue from "pirating".

I have a thermometer at my desk that reads 23.3 degrees C. Now that may seem hot to most of you, but believe me it isn't. I have a heating / cooling vent directly over my head, dumping cold air on me all day. I sit here in a long sleeved shirt and sweater, all day every day.

Let me google that for you:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=arm+architecture

I listen to music passively. I never listen to the words, and the music is a great way to drown out background noise.

http://www.hibermate.com/images/3m-ear-plugs.jpg

Earplugs for everyone. Buy a set for each developer and then maybe the boss will get the picture that office chatter/noises are very distracting.

Or remove the drive, put it in another computer, install the boot loader and off you go.

Without physical security, you may as well have no security.

If you've ever worked for a software development development company, it goes a little more like this:

CEO: "Are we going to meet the release date?"
Project Manager: "Most of the work is done, but we still have some bugs to work out"
CEO: "Release it, we need the revenue"
Project Manager: "But it's still pretty buggy, users are going to notice and not be happy about it"
CEO: "Release it, we need the revenue"
Project Manager: "I really think we should push the release date out a couple of weeks"
CEO: "You're fired!!!"

CEO: "Head lead developer, we need to release this software ASAP"
Lead Developer: "Yes Sir!"