i have to agree here. most of the demos and screenshots i've seen include too much white space.

while in theory your idea is correct, the harsh reality is that in practice, the large investment firms increase their profits drastically because there are actually two markets. this isn't strictly legal, but it's there. the large firms have dedicated connections to the exchanges with guaranteed SLAs and lower latencies than any other regular participant in the market. this allows them to stuff the buy/sell queues and rapidly cancel orders before they go through. the purpose of this is to deduce other bidders' price points and gain an edge. there are a number of such hedge funds (and even a major bank whose name escapes me), for example, that have had perfect trading days for over a year. statistically impossible outcomes like this only come from gaming the system in the above mentioned manner. as usual, the regulators are asleep at the wheel and the markets become more volatile week to week with increasing flash-crashes exactly because of these schemes. more efficient markets these are not.

There he is. Everytime theres a story about a developing nation spending on something scientific, atleast one guy has to come up with this sameoldsameold bullshit.

There are problems in the developed world too - problems that could use money that the developed world wants to spend on the ISS or the LHC, to name a few "big science" examples. US doesn't even have universal health care for cryin out loud! Why don't they stop all their space funding and use that to provide universal health care first instead?

The idiots who whip out this argument think that powerty alleviation or slum improvements or food assistance programs somehow have to happen in a vacuum - "you must only do this, not that". You try and do many things - there is no "serialization" requirement.

The logic that every last cent of money must somehow be spent first on powerty alleviation before anything else is done is facetious - the same way you can't make a baby gestate fully in 1 months instead of 9 by "throwing" 9 women at the problem, you cannot "fix" the slums by just throwing money at it. Its a complex problem and it takes coherance in funding, social improvements, labor environment changes, etc to slowly feed on one another before the problem is resolved. The USians know that - they tried to fix their problem by throwing money at it in the form of "the projects" - all that was achieved was just a change of geography of the slums.

You really should go google for "tyranny of the O" - heres something to start you off: http://www.well.com/~bbear/collins.html#RTFToC10

I hope you don't "tyrannize" (is that a word? it should be :-) your own life by this false dichotomy. It would be a pity.

Oh, and a few nitpicks:

-- No, Half the population DOES NOT live in slums - Half the population does not live in cities even, theres no question of half the population living in slums. You KNOW how much their population IS, don't you? You are possibly thinking of Mumbai - surveys say half the population of Mumbai lives in slums, and it could quite possibly be true given what I have seen of that city, but Mumbai holds only about 1% of Indias population.

-- Majority of the population is functionally illiterate? Where did you get this? You must be thinking of the US ;-)

It is said that a major milestone in the development of a human young adults' brain is when he becomes capable of holding two seemingly contradictory thoughts in his head without going all "Angsty" about it.

I counter suggest that its high time you crossed that threshold "Smart Fellow".

my take is that the biggest problems with the new release will be traceable back to hardware issues, compatibility or otherwise.

personal anecdote: dell inspiron mini 1012 that i just got over the summer. netbook and desktop editions work great with lucid, but the RC and the final release both botch up the sleep mode power management on the mini. the netbook goes to sleep and i can't wake it up without a hard reboot. i haven't tried sshing in or filing a bug report because i'm lazy. :P

stop upgrading to shittier technology.

Okay, you've got yourself a predator/prey situation and the best solution you can come up with is a feeble attempt to artificially mask the prey? I suppose a more obvious and cheaper alternative, say, using the bird scent as bait to trap the predators escaped the geniuses at this agency.

People wonder why the cost of health care is spiralling out of control. MRI scans are a very EXPENSIVE way to diagnose anything. I fear the additional cost (via increased demand) of scans will only put greater pressure on health care budgeting. I can already see greedy marketroids wringing their hands in anticipation of the forthcoming lucre.

... isn't that the mysterious bidders are "testing" the market to see if anyone is selling or buying at outrageous prices. the problem is that the bids being placed are not placed in good faith -- this is against the law in the USA.

the crazy, high-frequency bids are placed and then cancelled at high speed. they act as place holders waiting in line for the price to move in their favoured direction. however, since the vast majority of the time the bids are cancelled, they never execute. this results in the mirage of liquidity and the inevitable "Flash Crash" where sellers come in and all the buyers instantly disappear.

maybe i'm thick or something, but why in bloody blazes is a REGSTRAR not just registering all these domains automatically to cut off the botnet? the cost to the registrar is marginally ZERO. you people are crazy to pay for so many domains yourselves. convince the registrar to do it at little or no cost to the greater community and we're gold.

you want LyX (www.lyx.org).

The "Star of David" fighters from "Jews in Space" in the "preview" of "History of the World, Part II."

The main difference is better marketing. Also that there is (theoretically) an end in sight that isn't death, and the promise of land to farm or money to buy said land.