Uh, how does the first graph not have a correlation? As a first order guess, that looks like a very strong correlation to me, probably at least .10 R^2 if you fit a regression to it. I'm guessing the author avoided fitting a regression to the original data because it actually is significant.
Not to mention, it's just plain incorrect statistics if you don't do weighted least squares regression (instead of OLS) on the averaged data set.
>But I think most people also think that a guy who burns movies to DVDs and sells them on the street corner is an asshole.
Do you actually think that? All that talk on HN recently about the new megaupload would have me think the opposite, unless MU's bandwidth costs were a quarter billion dollars.
Actually, that's not entirely reflective of reality. You would have to access www.python.org in order to download python, so you'd have to write some sort of TCP/IP handler to connect to that interface...actually let me back up, you first would have to solder together a few million transistors to create a CPU before you could do that. You're making it seem way easier than it actually is, please don't go exaggerating the truth so blatantly.
Why do you think that would stop drug trade? The market is driven by demand, not by supply, and the US demands a 150,000 strong army of drug traffickers to keep making the drugs for us.
What makes you think increasing the tick size would help? HFT would still be at the front of every book, except in larger quantities now. Most people support MORE decimalization than less.
I think your problem is with government bailouts of private companies, not with HFT. The effect of most HFT firms completely blowing out would be completely unnoticed in the market.
I think you're overstating the importance of perfect design principles or things like UML diagrams, whatever those are. The point of a software company is not to write great code -- it's to write a program that does what you need it to do as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Why do you think it's so surprising that when comparing CS graduates and someone who's spent 4 years in the workforce doing real programming work, the latter is better at doing exactly that? I was CS grad from Stanford, and I agree with the other guy -- an enormous amount of the work I did in college was mental masturbation that, yes, did help me get better at programming, but didn't make me nearly as prepared for work outside academia as I would have been had I been working outside academia.