BearOfNH

In the US such an entity has a legal obligation to act in the best interests of his clients, and can be held liable for failing to act properly. Bernie Madoff is a prime example.

Regrettably, The Authorities often look the other way. Ken Lewis decided (well, was pushed) to go ahead and buy Merrill Lynch even though he knew he was screwing his Bank Of America shareholders. Still, it was a violation of the law and he should have been prosecuted. So while it's wrong to screw clients for personal benefit, evidently it's not wrong to screw clients for the government's benefit. (I don't know what that's called, but it's not "capitalism".)

The chart in the original article (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/files/31560/Shang...) clearly depicts (forecasts) topping action in late July. Plus, the chart labels indicate a "100% range" of 10-Jul thru 10-Aug which actually works out well given the current 4-Aug top.

I don't think we've seen any "crash" yet. We've seen big moves down but The Shanghai Composite Index is characteristically volatile. Usually, to the extent such a term has any meaning here, it's a 55-day trip from market top to crash low. The heavy action happens near the low which works out to ( ... counts on fingers ... ) 9/28/2009.

It's OK to ridicule voodoo forecasting. But common courtesy demands you to first understand what is being said, before you declare it BS. (The people at TR share some blame; they could have stated things more clearly.)

Should one write about nature

or technology?

Still better than London's though.

I peruse (listen to) the bits of a song much, much more frequently than I peruse a book. This makes the book outrageously overpriced relative to the song. And I've pretty much stopped buying music, but I still buy books. Looks like I won't be buying any ebooks anytime soon, though.

This is an excellent aphorism. I wish I'd been the first to put it that way!

Of course if you've got a liberal arts degree from a diploma mill, that won't be you.

Admittedly this is not something that journalists would or could use. Despite being (say) as easy as Wordpress, it just won't fit into today's journalist's worldview. But that's OK, journalists as we know them are a dying breed -- many just don't know it yet.

What could happen is (a) the rise of a new class of low-cost, low-profit "mini-publishers" using new turnkey applications to design content+layouts that appeal to their target audience. Then (b) what we think of today as "journalists", both newswriters and columnists, will disappear from the "news" industry. Columnists have already largely gone to blog but the newswriters have yet to change. My guess is that change will be forced upon them, and newswriters who want to continue in journalism will need to adapt. How? Possibly by becoming their own newswire. Instead of a few large wire services (AP and ilk) we will see thousands of individual "wire services", basically individuals covering local, family and/or specialty events. Few if any will be making a lot of money at this, but that's because of the economics of Internet news. The days of Clark Gable (and Clark Kent) journalism are over.

The key to all this is having a turnkey newspaper-in-a-box application that lets wannabe publishers design their own interfaces, choose their own content suppliers and publish on their own schedule. That's what YC should be funding. It's where the money (if any) will be made.

It also occurs to me that there is a business opportunity in helping folks start their own mini-wire-services. Structure the whole thing from scratch. Standardized processes for submission of news articles plus standardized usage and reimbursement terms (Michael Yon might be able to charge more than Jan Michael), but the process of choosing and using their output would be the same.

Maybe that's not the correct vision of the future, but I'm still sure the profession of "journalist" is going to change. Throw out today's molds and take a stab at what makes most sense to you. There's a fistful of dollars somewhere in there.

Any hackers also trade futures? The trading system known as "scaling" (buy dips, sell rallies based on N-point moves) behaves a lot like the Martingale system ... risk a lot to win a little. It's not as foolproof at its proponents would have you believe.

I get annoyed at CNBC when they report government statistics as if they were quoting scripture. They ignore the constant upward revisions in last week's unemployment data, which happens every week and makes this week's losses look less bad. And why they don't report reconstructed M3 as many web sites have done lately (hint: it's plunging). While it may sound arcane it's a lot more important than hearing the prewritten patter of the CEO of Amalgamated Cowbells.

Several months ago there were guests on CNBC laughing at Peter Schiff for suggesting an imminent mortgage meltdown. This was soon followed by the mortgage meltdown. I often wonder why CNBC doesn't show that clip (available on YouTube) to those same laughing guests and give them the opportunity to explain what was so funny. (Are Schiff's current predictions worthwhile? I don't know, but I'm not laughing. Nor am I laughing at Abby Cohen's rosy scenarios. Predicting markets is hard. Shooting the messenger is stupid.)

There's a show on CNBC at 5pm Eastern called Fast Money which, 6-12 months ago, was a real hoot. It was sort of a McLaughlin Group for the stock market, with a host and rotating panel of guests each of whom was some sort of money manager or pro trader, with no allegiance to anything except profit. The top two (IMO) were host Dylan Ratigan and panelist Jeff Macke, both of whom were evicted when their contracts were up. Evidently the CNBC execs prefer serving financial pabulum instead of hard reporting replete with finger shaking. One wonders if this is entirely voluntary.

Yes, you can have political differences (e.g., Liesman vs. Santelli). Every viewer is used to (occasionally heated) political argument. But when it comes to the financial equivalent of Woodward and Bernstein, CNBC has taken a pass ... and the audience appears to have noticed.

The recommendations at the end of the article almost look like a startup project -- not making a "local paper" but rather a platform others can use to create their own "local papers" without needing much technical knowledge. The startup provides the hosting and tons of templates and pointers to clip art, etc. The customer provides the content. The startup manages the finances and takes a cut of the ad revenues in addition to renting the hosting and software.

Or is that not an original idea?

True, but ... isn't that the case with every game in the casino?

Once upon a time, actually, blackjack wasn't terribly popular; craps was the king of casino games. But after Thorp demonstrated it was beatable there was a surge in demand for blackjack. Turns out, nearly all those new blackjack players weren't really very good at counting and lost money hand over fist. Thorp's work (among others) led to increased casino profits and lent an air of legitimacy to gambling; it wasn't just luck anymore, if you "worked" at it you could profit. [Citation needed].

I'm actually a fan of purple dye. It seems effective at stopping one form of election fraud. Preferably accompanied by a bank of cameras to show every ballot went into the box (and no others).

If not, maybe the problems PG listed are "too hard" and perhaps we should build a larger list of simpler projects.

I'm assuming here the "support group" can't change the main page, and whoever CAN doesn't want to.

Too bad nobody is weevil enough to sign up a few million bogus new users.

Isn't that an important issue for a lot of folks? Yet no comment either way in the review...

"What is this before me?" is from Macbeth ("dagger of the mind"). The "skull in one hand" is from Hamlet, in the "alas, poor Yorick" scene. Good scenes each, but they don't fit together.

I bet Roth knows that and just uses that sentence to see if anyone is paying attention ...

Here is an example. I am looking for an outdoor security camera. So it needs to be weatherproof. It needs to provide at least 1024 (preferably 1200) horizontal lines. It must have a 100+ Mbit Ethernet connection for data transport and it would be nice to support POE (Power Over Ethernet), but in any event needs to run continuously -- so no battery-powered cams. I don't care either way about pan / tilt / zoom, but might use hardware motion detection.

Try asking your favorite search engine and see the plethora of useless results thrown your way. Lenses. Weatherproof housings. Tons and tons of indoor cameras with 480 lines of resolution. But nothing that meets my needs, regardless of how I phrase my search query.

Maybe what I really want is a search engine that I can interact with and say "I don't like this result because ..." and have the engine filter out all similar results. Google squared is such an approach but it doesn't work, at least for this task.

When I read a typo I just can't help it -- I regress and reexamine the text. Dunno how common this is, but it sure limits my WPM reading typical blog posts.

It's a heck of a lot easier to pore thru a huge trace file with an intelligent editor. Instead, I get to use Notepad.

Fear due to lack of knowledge about how to start a business. Last I checked, this isn't something they teach in school. MIT and Stanford should have (undergrad) courses on founding startups that covers all the major steps. Students can make rational choices once they have the facts.

Wilson defines the "jesus" (small j) as the number of scientific facts known at the time of Jesus. Then he goes on to count how many years it takes to double that number. By his count, humanity accumulated 2j by about the year 1500. Then 4j by the year 1750, and so on. I forget the exact numbers but the point of the lecture was that our j-factor was increasing at an ever-increasing rate. By Wilson's estimation the curve would go vertical sometime around ... wait for it ... the year 2012.

This reads a lot like Kurzweil's singularity hypothesis (among others) but I'm not sure who developed the concept first.

All your movements can be monitored. Accidentally park near a crime scene last week? They can unilaterally disable your engine until the police have had a chance to interrogate and clear you.

Not scary enough? Envision your own nightmare, perhaps starting with a crook driving behind you and forcing your car to a dead stop, having broken the communications protocol.

I think the potential downside risks well outweigh the known benefits. To paraphrase Inspector Renault, it's the paranoid in me...

And don't blame the author -- the magazine did the pagination.