Slashdot Mirror

You don't understand it. The lawyers are indeed really happy. They still got paid.

My guesstimate is the lawyers are on retainer and/or are corporate salaried so they would have gotten paid anyway.

I don't think this is right. According to a recent article at Bloomberg this is actually causing a spike in lawyers and their services as this demand expands. From the article:

Costs are higher in cases before the ITC. The Washington agency has shorter timelines, squabbles over obtaining information from overseas companies, and no limits on how much pretrial evidence can be gathered or witnesses questioned. Forty or more lawyers may be assigned to each side in an ITC case, based on a review of dockets.

U.S. district court hearings can have 20 lawyers on either side. One or two wil take the lead, and the rest will be responsible for specific witnesses, the technology behind a single patent, or the legal arguments backing a key point.

“These big global cases, they become no stone unturned, no grain of sand unturned -- and for every one you turn over, you examine every facet,” Long said. “To do that, you need lots of people. You go down 1,000 rabbit holes, 10,000 rabbit holes, and most of them are empty but there’s one of them that’s not.”

The smartphone makers don’t disclose their total patent litigation costs. At some smaller companies, those expenses are enough to affect earnings. Computer-chip designer Rambus Inc. (RMBS) spent $56 million each in 2008 and 2009 when it was embroiled in trials, and chip packaging company Tessera Inc. (TSRA) has spent as much as $84 million in a year, based on their annual reports.

I believe these lawyers are assigned cases by their firm and the more cases the more lawyers and the more money paid. Of course, as that last paragraph notes, this means less innovation and more lawyers -- something nobody should want except the lawyers.

For all states to take down rules and regulations as to what type of plans must be provided to allow people to buy just what they want.

Because "what they want" is insurance that will pay for their health care. What they'll get is an insurance agent paid big bucks by the insurance company to tell them that this insurance will pay for their health care, but in actuality there's about 500 pages of exclusions and excuses, and in the end if you manage to come down with something not excluded, the insurance company will decide that your adolescent acne was a preexisting condition and terminate your coverage.

For all states to all any provider located in any state to sell health insurance in the state.

When this happens, expect all the shellcorps that insurance companies currently use to offer insurance in every state to fold up and all of the insurance on sale offered from whichever state makes it hardest to sue the insurance company for refusing treatment.

Encourage HSA accounts to the younger

This is where it needs to go: eliminate the company-provided plan and make health insurance more like life insurance: get it young and keep it for life. My million dollar life insurance policy costs me half your $120/mo health insurance, yet when I die my insurance company will pay more than your insurance company will almost certainly ever pay, and that's assuming you manage to fuck your body up before your insurance plan can ditch you onto Medicare.

What is it with people just repeating whatever wrongness they've heard as fact? Fiction: Apple invested in a Sharp plant that makes iPad LCDs. Fact: Samsung makes LCDs for the New iPad. Only short sighted American business sense demands to view actually making stuff with your own equipment as a strategy that's not viable long term.

Yes it's great right now, but there's a housing bubble:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-19/congratulations-canada-on-your-ongoing-housing-bubble.html

That's not the only problem. Basically the reason Canada is great right now is that a) it never de-regulated it's banks, so no financial crisis, and b) they have loads of oil to sell from Alberta. a) will probably continue, but b) is associated with loads of prosperity for a few years, and then a major crash. It's called the Dutch Disease, and it's a major reason why South Korea is richer then Nigeria in 2012, despite the fact Nigeria was economically better off in the 50s and then discovered billion$ worth of oil.

I'd actually say the US is the best bet. The debt situation isn't ideal, but since the US uses the US Dollar the problems this can cause are pretty limited. Inflation is the main one. We're basically printing money, which means there's more dollars but the same amount of stuff, which means that (in theory) every dollar should be worth less, in turn it should take more dollars to buy the same amount of stuff, and that is the definition of inflation; but so far the reality is we haven't experienced any. We would probably be better off with some, if only because that would make all the debts holding us back easier to pay off.

Southern Europe is in a much different situation. They don't control their currencies, and inflation is anethema to their Euro-zone partners, so they have to balance their budgets. But they can't do that without economic growth, and their economies are designed to grow only under conditions of extreme global prosperity or high inflation. Since neither is likely to be the case anytime in the foreseeable future they are totally, 100% screwed.

Google Fiber

Not to mention their great education system:
Kansas State Board Votes to Teach Intelligent Design in Schools

Much employee-owned stock couldn't be sold until the first lockup period ended. Which it just did. So, given Facebook's declining stock price, it's time to cash out. Of course they're quitting. Facebook is profitable, but the stock is overpriced by an order of magnitude or so.

Lockups are far shorter than they used to be. When I cashed out of Autodesk in the 1980s, insiders had a 2-year lockup on restricted stock. And you had to pay taxes when you exercised an option, even though you couldn't sell for another two years. That was before "deregulation", and kept insiders from cashing out before the company tanked. Now it's 90 to 277 days. This encourages hyping the stock, taking the money, and running.

> If Obama would've taken even a half-hearted swing and [sic] curbing the annual, national deficits, I'd listen

President Obama pushed for a four trillion dollar deficit reduction plan. And he kept pushing for it over and over.

There was even a framework along those lines written by the bipartisan Gang of Six. Note that President Obama and 40 or 50 odd senators from both sides of the aisle expressed support for the bipartisan plan.

But thanks to the Tea Party, the supposedly "fiscally conservative" Republican Party rejected it and anything like it. So instead of four trillion in deficit reduction, we got stuck with only two.

He used Open Source to write the original app and on leaving the company took his own code with him.

"The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Sergey Aleynikov, a naturalized US citizen from Russia, was not guilty of stealing computer code under the Economic Espionage Act (EEA)". link Feb 2012

"A defense lawyer, Kevin Marino, argued in his opening statement that Aleynikov intended to strip out pieces of open- source software" link

"During a two-week trial, Marino told jurors that his client was merely trying to copy parts of the companyâ(TM)s software that were taken from public software codes". link

Oh, this has everything to do with it: http://www.bloomberg.com/pressroom/bloomberg-hosts-latin-america-investing-conference/ Form your own opinions or continue to connect the dots. Brazil is, however, seeing an influx of foreign investments that are unadulterated and entirely unregulated. This is another unnecessary piece of legislation that infringes upon people's privacy just to sell an investor's product to the masses.

Bloomberg just released an article relating to car theft in Brazil: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-10/brazil-wonders-why-its-rich-kids-are-so-good-at-stealing-cars.html So who's the manufacturer?

Actually, lots happens while markets are closed. That's how come the open price is rarely the same as the close price - and, if you're a stop-loss sort of trader, it can open below your stop-loss, and guess what, you lose a lot more than you thought you were going to. Here's a list of big gaps: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-23/s-p-500-stocks-with-biggest-gap-between-market-price-estimate.html

If you tried to get everyone to only trade once per day or once per second, you'd actually end up with *more* radical price swings than you do today. The reason is that in the gaps between trading times people would be loading up the market with trades. However, only the matching ones get executed, so in order to guarantee a fill, you'd have to offer or bid wider than you do when you can trade instantly. If a stock looks like it's tanking, then people will be desperate to sell, so will offer at lower and lower prices to guarantee a cash-out - that will drag the price down more sharply than instant trading.

To try this another way, the "gradient" between ticks, or between seconds on any stock at any time is currently quite shallow. Of course, every once in a while, the gradient gets steep, but it won't do it for long before it smooths out a bit. Let's say a stock loses 50% of it's value in 5 minutes at most (I know, some go quicker and deeper, but let's be honest, most don't).

If you tried to limit order frequency, the gradients would be steeper, although it would take longer to achieve the same effect. So a stock may lose 50% of it's value over 10 "ticks", which might be 10 days, but that's actually faster than losing it over 5 minutes of real-time trading, where it's probably all happened in a few hundred ticks.

Yes they do, and yes they can.

Facebook Inc. hired public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to enlist reporters to write stories that would portray its rival Google Inc. (GOOG) in an unfavorable light, according to the firm and a journalist whom it approached.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-12/facebook-enlists-pr-firm-burson-marsteller-to-pitch-google-privacy-story.html

If there was some kind of penalty or cost (say, a paltry fee of $1 for every take down notice filed), we'd see these things dry up faster than a river in corn country.

You'll notice it's only Samsung if you're wearing reality-distortion glasses, because surely Apple didn't sue HTC, or Motorola. They went as far as not to sue Motorola _twice_, as you see.

1. someone on Samsung's legal team screwed up and didn't include the evidence in discovery
2. the Samsung attorneys realized the screw up and are now trying to make a silk purse from a sow's ear
3. the evidence is actually quite weak (See this excellent takedown of how the F700 is not much like the iPhone at all.)
4. by releasing the evidence in a press release, the attorney is trying to manipulate the judge, not get a fair outcome.

Combined with the evidence destruction by Samsung, they've really been screwing this one up.

Yeah, the comment is doubly ridiculous when you note that Morgan Stanley propped up the price to keep the IPO from falling even earlier.

Here are some facts for your ignorant ass: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-22/facebook-investor-sues-nasdaq-over-delays-in-offering.html

Consider looking at population through the prism of a world without fossil fuels and other natural resources.

They look a lot healthier.

These fossil fuels pretty much make modern agriculture what it is today.

Yes, toxic and destructive.

It is hard for us to picture a world in which human beings become less capable and have less technology because it is not something we have observed in our lifetimes.

No, it is not difficult. All we have to do to picture such a world is look at history.

However, it can happen, and currently we have no mitigating plan to deal with the dwindling availability of fossil fuels.

You are either a liar or grossly underinformed. We have numerous plans to deal with this situation, all of which have less environmental impact than using fossil fuels.

Once fossil fuels become too expensive for agriculture, we could all be in big trouble.

We could be, if we were very very stupid. As long as you avoid monocultures which are only necessary to enable machine cultivation, you can produce more food per acre using sustainable agricultual techniques such as actual organic farming, which doesn't just mean you use what's on the USDA Organic permitted list. It means (among other things) that agriculture is treated as the cyclical thing that it needs to be for sustainability. Currently the food is turned into fertilizer in our guts, and then we flush that down the toilet and to a "waste treatment plant" where feces is wasted. We don't even need to give up flush toilets, only sewage treatment plants as they are currently implemented.

As well, we have long since developed the technologies for sustainable biofuels to replace our transportation fuels, including biodiesel which could cost-effectively be made from algae today and butanol which BP and DuPont have been suppressing through their shell company Butamax, though they do not even own the complete technology (and though the technologies involved were developed at a public university, and partly funded with tax money.)

Further, we have long been able to produce viable solar panels. Taking PV solar alone, the panels can easily repay the energy cost of their production in just a couple years now, but even back in the seventies a crystalline panel that lasts 20-30 years could repay its energy cost in just seven years. That means that if we had built even PV-solar farms (let alone theoretically more efficient thermal plants) back when we first gained the technology to create them, they would have produced net power for at least 13 years, and maybe 23. And here I'm not even getting into hybrid solar panels which are both PV and water heaters, which not only convert substantially more solar energy into a useful form, but which also operate more efficiently and even have a longer life due to being cooled.

Solar power is not the only bulk generation technology available to us, either. The romans were using windmills to pump water into aqueducts using an Archimedes' screw and there's no reason we can't be using them today to produce far more of our power than they produce today. Indeed, we can combine them with elements of the petroleum technology that you love so well, and use the structures we normally use to site oil wells to place windmills offshore where they produce the most constant power. And then there's nuclear, which we could wrin

The service that Steve Gibson from GRC has vetted to be safe and secure

That was in July 2010.

This is from May last year:

LastPass, a company that offers to safeguard and simplify managing subscribers’ online passwords, said hackers may have broken into its database and stolen information on as many as 1.25 million accounts.

Just picking example, I'd have to call the Taliban taking 40 hostages in a hotel last month domestic terrorism.

Keep in mind it's been awhile since they were the rulers of Afghanistan. Back then, they were the 'legitimate' government. Now they're not.

Just picking example, I'd have to call the Taliban taking 40 hostages in a hotel last month domestic terrorism.

Comcast and Verizon and ATT are purely evil in that they want only money and the larger society can go fuck itself. They have no sense of civic duty nor do they care about the fate of this nation or its peoples , except as a PR move.

So is that why Google dodges taxes using tax havens?

"

you have to be a complete and utter idiot to want to give money to the government if you don't have to:

why? well it's simple: government has a decades long history of of financial mismanagement. You now have states like louisiana that have a 45% budget deficit, and politicians are stil doing business as usual.

The debt of european countries may be getting all the press but Us debt is actually growing faster then the total european debt.

There hasn't been a bit of outstanding government debt actually payed back in at least 4 decades. That's true for the USA and it's true for virtually all of Europe (the one exception is Norway, but that's their government run oilfields). When it comes to government debt it's a situation of 'the emperor has no clothes'. If any non-government entitiy was robbing peter to pay paul like the government has been doing for litterally decades when it comes to government debt it would be called a ponzi-scheme.

Google (whom I do not work for) does seem to me to be a company apart.

You really need to open your eyes and stop buying into propaganda. I agree to a certain extent that Google puts some effort into behaving, but at the end of the day they are a for-profit company bent on creating a digital empire.

Google have pretty much lived up to the "don't be evil" slogan, a bout of WIFI panty-sniffing excepted .

Google now has a long history of disregarding privacy, and the WiFi sniffing is just one example. Other examples are not deleting email when requested by the user, the Buzz privacy fiasco, pervasive tracking (including forcing cookies on Safari via a loophole), and keeping data around for too long. Most of these problems have been addressed after public outcry, though the pervasive tracking is still there.

Comcast and Verizon and ATT are purely evil in that they want only money and the larger society can go fuck itself. They have no sense of civic duty nor do they care about the fate of this nation or its peoples , except as a PR move.

So is that why Google dodges taxes using tax havens?

"Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.

Google's income shifting -- involving strategies known to lawyers as the "Double Irish" and the "Dutch Sandwich" -- helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries. "

I doubt the USA will ever build a significant natural gas refueling station network to let it take advantage of cheaper natural gas for transportation

Commercial trucking may go to natural gas. Once that's well along, getting it deeper into the suburbs for light vehicles may not be a stretch.

I'm with Musk on this one. It's really easy to underestimate the growth of emerging technologies.

In the 2000 World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency forecasted that the installed capacity of PV solar cells in Europe in 2010 would be 1.6 GW (see page 294). To hedge their bet, they also included an "alternative policy scenario" where PV capacity reached 2 GW in 2010, corresponding to an average capacity growth rate over 1997 levels (0.5 GW) of 11.3% per year. So, what really happened? In 2010, there was 28 GW of PV capacity in the EU. And just last year Europe installed another 22 GW.

Sometimes, revolutions happen.

I initially assumed this was about indigestion caused by all the fast food restaurants opening up in Shanghai.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-26/mcdonald-s-no-match-for-kfc-in-china-where-colonel-sanders-rules-fast-food.html

The Fed wrote checks for ~$630 billion to the banks, regardless of the outcome in Congress.

The fed knew (on Sept 29, 2008) the asshats in Congress were going to vote it down the first time (so that they could add gazillions in pork for the second set of votes on Oct. 1 and Oct 3, 2008).

The Fed cut that $630B check because if they hadn't, it would have been the end of the fucking world that day. Stock market was already off 800 points from Congress' fuckery. For me it was pretty close to the end of the world, because at the time I thought even Congress wouldn't be so fucking stupid as to refuse a direct order from Wall Street with the markets as fucked-up as they were that week.

Unfortunately for me, Congress gambled that the system could live another week, and they voted TARP down the first time. They won that gamble, and were able to add $125B of pork to the $700B in TARP over the next 2-3 days. Everyone who called it right made 10%-20% that week. (I called it wrong - I thought they'd follow their orders the first vote, and it cost me 10%. Oops. I didn't know about the Fed backstopping the programme with or without Congress' help, which is what gave Congress the breathing room to (a) add another $120B in pork for themselves, and (b) fuck over most retail investors that day.)

tl;dr: the Fed knew Congress was going to fuck up the vote, and cut the $630B check to prevent Congress from ending the world. I'm grateful to the Fed for that, it kept me solvent and enabled me to make back what I lost. But I'm still really bitter that Congress thought it had the time to spend another 4 days fucking around with $125B in pork for itself. In 99% of legislative crisis situations, Congress has the right to rape the sponsors of the legislation for its customary 10-20% in graft because the money's all being printed out of thin air or taxed out of voters too stupid to care. September 2008 was not one of those situations, and Congress really shoulda just STFU and done what it was told in the first place.

Not that I'm bitter, or anything.

That (needing to be an FDIC bank to get money) is for the public, by-the-rules process.

In the other process (handled inside closed doors), they give money to whoever they want to. I mean, are the European banks "regulated by the FDIC"? Or the Arab Banking Corp, owned in part by Libya?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-31/libya-owned-arab-banking-corp-drew-at-least-5-billion-from-fed-in-crisis.html

Vote?

The Fed's expansion of liquidity, the biggest since credit markets seized up last year, came hours before the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a $700 billion bailout for the financial industry.

The Fed wrote checks for ~$630 billion to the banks, regardless of the outcome in Congress.

A guy built his own electric pickup truck and documented the process well enough that others could duplicate his work.

The vehicle has a range of better than 40 miles and can travel at highway speeds. If gasoline and other fuels became very expensive, such a vehicle would be attractive.

http://www.evprogress.org/

I was seriously considering converting a pickup truck. Then I found out about shale gas. If, for some reason, gasoline became very expensive, almost any vehicle could be converted to run on natural gas. We have a lot of that and it probably won't become expensive. In fact, T. Boone Pickens wants America's commercial truck fleet to convert to natural gas. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-29/trucks-run-on-natural-gas-in-pickens-clean-energy-drive.html

Converting a vehicle to run on natural gas is much more practical than converting it to run on electricity. Electric vehicles are, for the time being, pointless.

challenge accepted:

Rare Earth Alternatives in Critical Technologies (REACT)
National Lab Developing Alternatives to Rare Earth Materials
Idaho may provide rare earth alternative
Semiconductor nanocrystals as rare-earth alternatives
Rare Earths Fall as Toyota Develops Alternatives: Commodities

Chinese leadership wealth makes Romney look "middle class" in comparison.

No, they'll go up faster because the insurance companies can say "We have to pay for Obamacare," when in fact they are benefiting from it as you mentioned. This is the way most corporations, especially insurance corporations, work.

That is not true. The law also includes provision that the overhead (aka expenses and profit for the insurance companies) is limited to 20%. If they collect premiums in excess of that they have to return the money. Current estimates are that as a result of ACA (or Obamacare if you prefer it) insurance companies have to return 1.3 billion from the premiums collected in 2011. The only thing they can do to keep the extra premiums is to jack up the costs and launder the money trough subsidiaries. This however is illegal and very risky.

That's how I used to think too. Then I realized that hearing lies on all sides didn't make me any more informed, it just made me think I was.

Today I'm relatively picky with my news and sources of news. I look for sources I can trust, and if they betray that trust, I'm hard on them.

Who to trust? Not many sources. Some organizations, such as the Guardian Newspaper, have a history of strong independent reporting that means I'm more likely to get the truth from them. Others, such as those parts of the financial press that concentrate on core news, not opinion, are good too. Both the FT and the news part of Bloomberg are pretty good. The comment on the latter is fairly awful and can be safely consigned to a trashcan.

And the BBC? Well, that's more complex than most people give credit for. The BBC is mostly independent, and to be honest, the government connections have never been an issue with the Beeb. The issue is some guy called John Birt, who, before becoming DG of the BBC ran its news department, and changed its culture, from what I can figure out, pretty much permanently. That is, I take a peek from time to time, decades later, and still see the same hacks and analysis style.

Basically, Birt implemented something called the "Mission to Explain", which meant news was mixed with analysis.

How would this work? Well, imagine if the news department had to cover sports (thankfully, this hasn't happened... yet.) At the beginning of the program, the news would report that Team A has lost its match against Team B. The anchor would defer to their Team A vs B playing game C correspondent, who would introduce three experts, who would explain how Team A did so badly, what Team A needs to do from here, and what Team B did right.

Seem reasonable? Well, the report would go out Friday. The game would be played on Saturday. Saturday in three months from now...

That's why I don't care much for BBC News. Especially as we weren't even talking about real experts, just the "armchair general" types.

BBC's independence? First class. The BBC was never fearful of government, it would bully politicians on air. Politicians in government actually hate it. Actual quality of reporting though? With some exceptions, dreadful.

To get back to the point though: the truth can rarely be found by looking at a group of biased media coverage, even if you're lucky enough to find contradictory outlets. You have to try to find the good journalists. Unfortunately, there aren't that many out there.

It's management alright. It's been management for years. Microsoft consistently hires the best people in the field (well, those that Google doesn't snag—prior to that, though, they were nearly unchallenged, and consequentially MS has had a huge number of very respectable older researchers and engineers, including a large contingent of ex-DEC people) and then squashes them with bad managers, who spend so much time politicking and infighting that they can't recognize genius like the Courier.

Unfortunately this is an increasing trend in the whole software industry; the very recent example of Diablo 3's utter failure to live up to hype, even though it's now the fastest-selling game in history, can largely be attributed to management changes in Activision. The underlying problem seems to be hiring management and leadership from non-computing sectors instead of promoting from within, although in MS's case it's more like a long-term family feud.

is that after the recently announced bump or didn't she tell you ;)

up to 25% wages
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-21/apple-retail-store-workers-said-to-receive-wage-increases.html

and $500 off a mac, $250 off an ipad (every three years) - ON TOP of the 25% discount.
http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/06/21/retina.display.macbook.pros.excluded.from.program/

LOL.
Where is the leaf currently produced at? The leaf is currently produced right outside Fukishima, Japan. Needless to say, production is down just a little bit . Thankfully, they have a new plant coming on-line

The batteries were THOUGHT to be at risk, but none ever had caught on fire. OTOH, the cruiz HAS caught on fire. So has a number of gas powered cars.

I had not thought about movie theaters. That is actually a good one. And you are right that there needs to be many more stations around. There is a chicken-egg issue. In fact, that is why I also support the NAT GAS act. It addresses the issues of adding natural gas refueling on highways, as well as ramping up commercial vehicles with NG engines (though I would like to see these be serial hybrids; better torque ; abiliity to change the generators later on).

I am not sure about 200. I think for the east coast of America, a true 120 miles is more than enough, while 160-200 in rural or western mountain areas are needed. Regardless, the ability to do 5 minute charges WILL be important down the road.

...in this article, citing "two people familiar with the matter."

Post secondary education in Canada is not free.

Iceland went through a economic collapse and currency devaluation in 2008, savaging the savings of it's citizens. It's stock market fell 90%. At one time it's external debt was nearly 8x GDP. For weeks external currency transactions were frozen making critical imports difficult.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aVFtDRGwcc50&refer=europe

It was the largest economic collapse by any country in history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932012_Icelandic_financial_crisis

assembling a phone is the equivalent of playing with Lego's. its simple tedious work. why would i want my kids to aspire to this kind of work?

They are not just closing plants according to this.

From the bloomberg article: "The biggest share of cuts will come in research and development, where Nokia is killing whole projects to preserve others that are more important, Chief Financial Officer Timo Ihamuotila said on a call. Sales is the second-biggest area affected and general overhead is third, he said."

So they are now at the stage where they have to stop developing tomorrow's products in order to pay today's bills.

Except this is already policy in the United States. All computer programs that are "works of the United States Government" enter the public domain upon publication.

maybe that was wishful thinking but then why is the Federal Reserve Bank/ US Treasury prosecuting and convicting people and getting them to admit to "theft" of public domain stuff (some accounting program)?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/29/usa-crime-fed-idUSL1E8GTBG120120529
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-18/man-said-to-be-charged-by-u-s-in-federal-government-computer-data-theft.html

"but a large group of them successfully managed to block the Brooklyn bridge"

Uh, I dont live in NY so I wasnt there but the only OWS incident I remember on Brooklyn bridge the NYPD intentionally lead a protest on to the bridge so they could make a mass arrest, 700 as I recall. They herded them on the bridge so they could charge them and so no one could get away since they had both ends of the bridge blocked. Surest way to break the back of marginally committed protestors is to arrest them, give them a night in jail, court appearances, fines and a criminal record for life.

"Government is corrupt⦠Do you know how to fix it?"

Aleksei Navalny has taken an interesting approach in Russia where corruption is suffocating the country and speaking against it is a good way to get killed.

Iceland appears to be the one recent success story where people actually threw out their corrupt government and gave the finger to the bankers that crashed their economy. They suffered for a few years but they are rapidly recovering compared to places like Ireland which did what the bankers told them to do, paid off the corrupt bankers that crashed their country, and are unlikely to recover any time soon as a result. Iceland is a small place though, and the powers that be weren't entrenched to nearly the level they are in the U.S.

Americans are still largely complacent and as long as they have a job, a place to live, food to eat, a car, iPad, smartphone and/or TV I doubt they really care enough to change anything and sure aren't going to risk their well being, as tattered as it is, to stand up against a completely broken government. The one thing OWS did achieve last year was it did get the subject in to daily conversation. Now there is nothing again except a stupid horse race between two equally bad Presidential candidates.

Only way anything is likely to change in the U.S. is for another crash to occur and it for it to be so severe that it puts people out of work en masse and in to breadlines. With the nearly inevitable crash of Europe on the horizon it may not be that far off.

"The government is our servant"

Now who is being naive. Our government serves the people with the money and the power. Our founding fathers tried hard to give us a system that wouldn't go that way but they failed. Our two party system is totally broken and its only putting forward a choice between candidates who are all bad. Once you cast your meaningless vote every two years you are totally out of the loop. People vote for the person with the most money and the best attack ads, whomever the TV tells them to vote for. Any voter that bothers to become informed and vote for change is going to be disappeared by party line voters.

Me personally I would have loved to see Ron Paul win the President. He probably would have been a train wreck, but he would have caused a fire storm of change. The main stream media and his own party managed to destrot him with racism charges to make him largely disappear.

Getting rid of the Fed would be step 1 for fixing our totally corrupted economy and Paul is the only one like to attempt it.

The issue is that the ban in France was even overturned by their own courts as not being scientifically based. They then tried again to get it banned throughout the entire EU and failed again.

Here is a quote;"

EuropaBio, the European biotech industry group, urged French leaders to decide "whether they want to regain their position as a leader of agricultural innovation or support an anti-science agenda that weakens Europe's competitiveness" after a judgment on Monday from Paris's highest court.

You might also want to check this out. Notice how many countries have approved the corn.

Here is an interesting piece of information from this article;

“The new ban is not justified by scientific evidence,” John Combest, a spokesman for Monsanto, said in a e-mail today. The company does not market MON810 in France because “we seek planting where we have broad farmer and government support,” Combest said.

Now why would France want to ban something not even marketed in their country? Perhaps it is that they want to protect their own seed industry at the expense of growers in other EU countries.

Take a look at this article. The EU has yet to order France to lift the ban and nothing will happen till after the election and any new government has shown its intentions. That has not happened.

To summarize, the EU reviewed the corn last year and found no issues. France banned the corn, Their own courts overturned that ban. France banned it again. France applied to get the ban applied to all EU countries. The EU declined. That is where we stand today. The French ban is still in effect but there will be no EU ban.

coal needs to die

Ah no. Coal needs to continue evacuating to Asia where it can be burned safely outside the environment to make low cost solar panels and composite windmills we can then deploy throughout our happy shiny la-la land. You know, where coal is outlawed.

The company hired 33 investment banks for the offering, with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) leading the sale.

$176 million fees between them.

"Mr. Ravi was not charged with causing Mr. Clementi’s death, but the suicide hung heavily over the trial" So that means he still gets away with invasion of privacy. I suppose he should go work for Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.Hell, make that ANY company that has access to personal information!

And that profit fee is on top of the U.S. corporate tax rate being the 1st or 2nd highest in the developed world. Does anyone think they eat those rates or don't try to offshore jobs and manufacturing?

But the effective tax rate is no where near as high. From the same article you linked to!

Of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones industrial average, 19 told shareholders their effective rate for their 2011 fiscal years, mostly ending Dec. 31, was below Obama's proposed new tax rate, according to a Reuters analysis of securities filings.

It is not mentioned in the article but the proposed new tax rate is 28%. Other industrialized nations have an effective tax rate between 22.6% and 27.7%. This is hardly a crippling difference. Not to mention may of the largest companies in the U.S. pay nothing! For example in 2010:

The most egregious example is General Electric ( GE - news - people ). Last year the conglomerate generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.

It seems pretty disingenuous to claim high corporate taxes as a major problem without looking at what companies actually pay.

Looks like it actually got down to -12% within an hour of opening. From the sounds of it, NASDAQ royally screwed up this IPO and there's probably unexecuted orders lying around which is likely going to result in some very hilarious realized losses. Look, if Goldman Sachs is securing hundreds of millions of dollars in shares ahead of time and cashing out during a tech IPO, you as an individual are probably already too late the party. Of course, that's investment advice from an anonymous idiot on Slashdot but it looks like they will be one of the few parties laughing all the way to the bank (as usual).

> the closing price ends up at the same price as the IPO price?

but only because it was proped up by the underwriters: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-18/facebook-underwriters-said-to-support-stock-at-near-38-a-share.html

"Propped Up" might also be read as "re-bought at what the underwriters thought was a good price at $38" If they are hedging that the price will continue to rise, then buying more shares at $38 will have been a good bargain.

But you are correct, it also might have been seen as a lack of strength for the price to slide significantly under the opening price.