ahk

HFT algos going crazy? ZeroHedge is going to have a field day with this one

"Obviously stolen"? Where is this reported as being true?

And even so, would it have made a difference to you if it was on Wikileaks instead? Be careful what you're choosing to condemn in your support of Apple.

What's the big diference between government secrets and company secrets? Just that one is more tawdrier and of less consequence?

These days companies are getting so unaccountable to anyone that I'd rather not have reporters make any such distinctions.

Your articles seem to follow a theme of "no new ideas/breakthroughs". The anecdote of the NASA head imploring people to come up with ideas was striking. Any guesses as to why this is happening now? After all, we _were_ having critical breakthroughs through much of the last century.

Maybe so, but I think it's different this time.

Would you be able to walk into a Apple store again and buy something there knowing that this was a company that ordered the goons to break down the doors of some guy's house? Face all those cheery Apple employees and Geniuses and not silently think if they supported the actions of their company?

What a turnaround! Just a few days ago everyone was highly sympathetic towards Apple losing one of their most valued secrets (not really all that much though) and boycotting Gizmodo and everything. Now with even Jon Stewart mocking them, calling them Big Brother and asking them to look in the mirror, this has turned into a major PR disaster for Apple. IMO, if they don't respond quickly and positively, this could turn out to be the point where they start losing the coolness/"with it" factor.

I dont think so. All the big sites are converting to HTML5 now since the highest paying audience is on the iPad. New features will be targeted to that market first as well.

The flash audience will be second class citizens. But with users needing only to change their browsers for a better experience, I think they will do so surprisingly quickly.

It can be beneficial to all "participants" but disastrous to society as a whole, can it not? Look at the current rage against free market instruments like CDOs and other complex unregulated derivatives.

Are you really claiming we dont need "coercion or force" from regulators like the SEC or FTC?

Ok, so what else is it? My understanding that the new Go language is not officially called object-oriented because it supports only interfaces and not inheritance or type hierarchy.

It's amazing to me that the guy actually changed his mind on the issue. It's like getting some Vatican Cardinal to convert to atheism.

Russia Today (live video feed: http://rt.com/On_Air.html ) and France24 (live feed on the site: http://www.france24.com/fr/ ) also do a credible job. RT is a bit suspect when it comes to Russian govt. issues however.

Actually, since these are the only guys to have live feeds online, they've become my mainstays for news. The BBC nowadays is just plain annoying with their gratingly slow byte-sized news clips full of ads.

Hmm, I've not seen anything like that in payments I've made using them. Only used them for the past year or so and generally like their services (including their branch-less b2 service)

If that's a genuine incident you're talking about, you could try contacting Shashi Tharoor (the local MP, who's on Twitter and seems very accessible) to see what can be done for the future. Nothing's going to change if you don't atleast try to fix them.

Rediff and Indiatimes are the swamplands of online stores. Hesitant to even provide them my email-id leave alone banking details.

Not sure what issues you have with ICICI. I find them to be excellent. Not seen any captchas on their site. I think their number-grid security system is a decent one but would be happier with an SMS passcode system.

Yes, quite a few items this past year or so. No issues with any so far. Most items have been books, ps3 games or supplements in the 500 to 3k range, so nothing past 5k yet. Not too sure about insurance, but companies like DHL/BlueDart should have something I guess.

Shipping charges have ranged from free to Rs 50/ Rs 100 (for local items) to Rs 500/ Rs 750 (for US shipments). Shipment times range from a couple of days to about a month depending on if you're paying anything for it.

Customs is terrible only because people don't want to pay the actual customs duties as set by the government and will try anything possible to avoid paying including indulging in corruption.

Sorry, that's just wrong. Delivery systems in India are pretty good in most cities and online stores are a dime a dozen (nothing as dominant as Amazon however). There are even sites which deliver direct from the US (pretty much everything available there). Online payment systems are actually more advanced than in the US.

The real reason is due to a penny-pincher mentality. Even young highly educated people with well paying jobs tend to forego internet connectivity at home and scrounge about in internet cafés or libraries. The value and productivity gains of access is completely discounted. Laptops are still considered luxury items for the elite. Folks here consider actually paying for shipping to be stupid and will spend entire an afternoon walking about in the sun shopping for second-hand books at road-side stalls etc in lieu of forking out hard earned cash just for convenience.

My guess is China and/or India will come up with their own solutions for transition and the rest of the world will be forced to follow that. It will probably represent a defining moment in history of the internet, when leadership passes from the West to the East.

If you want to follow that thought through, the future us would probably like higher fidelity of their memories and recordings, approaching real life quality. The limiting factor in doing this is likely the energy consumption (and in many other ways as well). The cheapest energy source by far is the Sun, consequently we will need to build Dyson spheres, thus pushing us off the Earth. Once we are at that stage the only way to get more energy (to support further fidelity or population growth) will be the other stars and similar mass concentrations, which will eventually lead to colonization of the galaxy and beyond to galaxy clusters/super clusters. Even the light speed barrier can't prevent such a movement for too long.

A Singularity will likely only hasten the process (there will be nothing else to do).

The other way to look at it is, technology is delivering into the hands of individuals the ability to do what only governments could do earlier. Thus you have Burt Rutan and other ragtag teams able to compete in the new space race to LEO and the moon.

Let the government take care of the weak and protect and preserve, that's what it's mainly for in a society, and leave the adventurism to the adventurous. Obama's steps seem consistent with this.

Surprisingly tame. Any American radical left-winger would probably have come out with much more damning statistics and anecdotes.

Pity that the only response this will get in the US is possibly a derisive snort from the White house press secretary.

Unless I'm mistaken a majority of Chinese actually support their government and matters such as this are viewed through the prism of nationalism.

One could argue it's because of the education/brain-washing but the facts remain.

And still uses those same worthless benchmarks to try to prove the point of sqldbs ability to scale.

Or instead it could be a case of warring Greek states growing strong enough that they were able to take on Persia. Asimov had a great sci-fi short story based on this premise called "In a good cause"

Youtube is getting there in terms of content and is already there for music videos.

For people with a strong bias towards "pay as you go", it's not a sad future at all. The headache of managing bought content in terms of backups, syncing to various devices, changing formats, essentially making everyone a expert in storage management is one that could use some creative destruction.

I already got rid of my collection of music videos in favour of youtube playlists, movie collection in favour of a netflix subscription, document store for Google docs and would dearly love to get rid of my mp3 collection in favour of a streaming service. Spotify et al cant get here soon enough for me. Once that happens I wont be in perpetual fear of my laptop breaking down (just replace with another netbook) or losing my various cd/dvd/flash-drive backups. If one day I'm not able to afford these services or a net connection, I have bigger issues to worry about than being able to enjoy the movies/music.

This stuff is not rare enough to make it worth me owning a copy (unlike in the 90s or before)

Broken could also be correct if it was a "law" currently in effect universally and only the high energy of the event lead to its violation i.e the physicists using high energies managed to circumvent something that usually holds true.

VW the car manufacturer? An industry where innovation consists of switching the color of paint to yellow?

And Aldi's? The poor man's Walmart?

Highly unlikely that a German company will be able to muster a global mass market audience. They just don't think that big.

Apple is not going to be too worried of losing their base over something that's likely of the same quality as a windows beige box

FYI, a HSBC Advance savings account gets you 1.1% at the moment