I'll bet l that California and the dozen or so other CARB states could still prosecute. At minimum they could change the smog test methodogy to defeat the defeat so that the cars cannot get a smog cert and could not be registered. This would open the door to civil suits for sure.

HFT could be curbed simply by raising the execution price for each consecutive trade a firm makes in an hour (or even in a minute). Won't affect most traders, but HFTs would become more expensive. There's really no incentive for the exchanges to do this, since they're raking in millions in co-location fees and they're able to claim lower execution times for most trades.

Looks like I'll just have to get my kid Lawn Darts for Christmas instead.

Deploy the counter-Watsons to talk to the sales-Watsons. Only then will Watson learn that the only winning move is not to play.

WordPerfect file from an Apple IIe. Used a ProTerm on the Apple IIe, and null-modem serial cable to a Mac with a Keyspan USB->Serial adaptor. Worked great.

It's not a question of backup and time required to backup, it's more of a question of what happens when your company gets sued. The plantiff's legal team could request that all of your records relevant to the complaint be turned over. It could take hundereds of man-hours to go through decades worth of data to find the relevent documents. After all, you don't want trade secrets and the like to be entered into any sort of public record.

This is especially important in the healthcare field. Hospitals and Doctors get sued all of the time. To respond to discovery requests and subpoenas, they can waste a lot of the IT team's time just scrubbing through years of personal e-mails. When I worked at major hospital a few years back, this was a huge concern.