"Each user would have the phone situated on different surfaces with different resonances, which I presume would lead to different readings and waveforms."

Sure, but if you combine a couple of thousand readings from roughly the same location, it will give you a pretty exact picture. That way you can eliminate trucks, metro or other sources of data pollution.

... were also looking for the cheapest labour they could get.

I'm suspecting that you'll also find that those were the banks handing out the biggest bonuses for their executives.

When this disaster is over, I recommend lots of government regulations to ensure that, in the future, none of the banks (or other financial institutions) ever get "so big that we cannot let them fail".

In theory, with the "Free Market", these banks WOULD fail because they were badly managed. Instead, we're propping them up and rewarding their failed management.

It's pretty impressive that Facebook has been able to grow so quickly and handle so much traffic. Their down time has been pretty insignificant related to the sheer number of requests that blow through their servers every day.

There's probably a thing or two that can be learned from their developers and IT folks. I just wish I knew more about the whole underlying structure so I could appreciate exactly what they've done.