tax the transactions?

Reason No. Eleventy Gajillion Why We Need a Transaction Tax : Mike the Mad Biologist:

A while ago, I discussed the observation that seventy percent of stocks are held for eleven seconds (yes, you read that correctly). It's absurd, since there's no way that the status of the underlying companies has changed (and that information has been made public) in an eleven second time span. This is nothing more than speculation which provides no useful purpose. A transaction tax would penalize this behavior and make it unprofitable.

Article continues with a story about an energy company in NC that lost 90% of its value in spite of no action or bad news on their part (and a healthy 3.1 million customers) - the "system" simply saw a slight drop in price caused by one sale, and suddenly everybody's system went "SELL" and that was that.

Reason No. Eleventy Gajillion Why We Need a Transaction Tax : Mike the Mad Biologist:

Others are far more blunt. "I am very upset by the flash crash," said George P. Schwartz, who manages the Ave Maria mutual funds. "I am upset by how high-speed traders have taken over the market. They make a mockery out of capitalism."

Taxing the transactions would slow this down to a crawl.  Another problem in today's "clever software" market is that of the ETFs taking over fresh IPO stocks and turning them into slow-growth mutual funds before they've actually done their traditional job (making the company founders rich), leading to more and more companies avoiding IPOs and just staying private - that way there can be SOME control over the stock price.  Under the ETFs, stocks are added or dumped merely at the whim of the software trying to keep the right balance (really, just a stupid rules-based engine), and so prices can drop like a rock when they get dumped in spite of there being no technical or newsworthy reason for a dramatic drop.  This is even more complicated by the fact that these ETFs can be short-saled (trans: you don't have any actual money on hand to screw someone else big-time).

Replaced by REST

The End Of The Road For Web Services - Simon Says...:

Once all the smoke had been cleared from the mirrors by the hand-waving and hot air, it became obvious to most thinking technologists that attempting to implement CORBA on the internet was even worse than implementing it on a private network. Despite cries of protest even now at that description that's essentially what WS-I was all about.

Before too long the lightweight, stateless, web-inspired approach documented by Roy Fielding in his doctoral thesis and named REST at his suggestion became the norm for internet use, and once we had JSON too, the outcome was inevitable. All the work of WS-I was clearly doomed to lead a webless existence as part of the complexity big vendors encourage their corporate customers to use internally, ironically leading them to be locked-in to the tools the vendors supply to mitigate the complexity.

It took many, many years for that doom to be made reality. In the course of a decade of corporate politics in smoke-filled rooms, many fine and talented corporate standards engineers have spent countless hours perfecting a set of specifications that are expertly crafted and logically complete. Fine work, and many lessons learned, but sadly irrelevant to most of us. Goodbye, WS-I. I know and respect many of your participants, but I won't mourn your passing.

New directions in web architecture. Again. - O'Reilly Radar:

Important as Ajax and REST have been to the history of the web, each only represents half of a larger revolution. And in the past few months, we've seen some new sites that have taken the revolution to its logical conclusion. Specifically: take a look at the new Twitter. It's a nice web application, sure -- but look at the HTML. There's not much there. The HTML page you get from Twitter is largely a bunch of empty divs, with a big wad of JavaScript. What's happening? The JavaScript is the entire application; the divs exist only to provide tags so the JavaScript can rewrite the DOM at will. In turn, the JavaScript is constantly (and asynchronously) making requests from the Twitter site, which is just returning data from its API. In fact, the Twitter site is returning the same data for its web page that it would return for its mobile app, for TweetDeck, or for any of the apps in the Twitter ecosystem.

This design isn't particularly new; we've seen it ever since developers started reverse-engineering GMail and Google Maps to get ideas for their own projects. Those big Google apps may have been the first examples of this architectural trend. They were certainly among the first to use JavaScript as a full-fledge client programming language. But we're seeing many more sites built along these lines.

This latter style of app, all javascript and minimal HTML, processed by a fancy framework like SproutCore (in my case) or Sencha, talking to a RESTful server throwing JSON back at it, is what I'm doing now.  And that server could be anything - .NET, J2EE, Ruby, PHP, or some simple layer built directly into the database, or even entirely self-contained SQLite layers that talk to the new HTML5 datastore in your (upcoming or mobile) browser.

Throw in a wrapper framework like PhoneGap, and you can take that very complex web application and turn it into a "native" app for an iPhone, iPad, or Android-based device (Windows Mobile coming soon) with minimal effort.

finally killed a bug

something slipped into my computer that nothing seemed to want to get (malwarebytes, hijack this, superantispyware, avg - all never found it).  the symptoms:

• windows update wouldn't work, causing multiple running (and useless, but completely valid) instances of wuauctl.exe
• google search results would look fine, but clicking on a link would take you to some random site's search page
• firefox would occasionally just randomly open tabs to random search pages

What it was?  TDSS, a backdoor bug that attached itself to the cdrom.sys driver file.

http://usa.kaspersky.com/ had the fix, here.