Slashdot Mirror

From london Financial Times Thursday Feb 24,article on Egg, a UK internet bank which is loosing money fast by enticing depositors with rates it cannot support (cant a city full of bond traders tell this is screwed?) says :

"In the short term no doubt, the Pru [Prudential, Egg's owners, a British insurer] will ensure Egg's stock flies. An engineered stock squeeze would certainly help, and predictably, Prudential is planning to list just 15 - 25% of the capital"

After the US saw its whole people belittled (and a world economy brought to its knees) by such machinations, simple manipulations such as those employed by Fisk were outlawed. Previous to Fisks demise, Vanderbuilt had been hailed as building a great empire upon such tricks. People will be in awe at such money - this is the nature of money. It has power over people who work for it. However it seems that we are no longer awake in vigilance against even the most puerile of deceptions.

clearly in this sector delivery times are critical, and matter to their customer base much more than a bit of corporate bulldozing. Remember, your average net consumer doesn't care about (until recently) obscure European conceptual artists. They care about getting little Jonny's toy on time, and eToys were below industry standard here.

I think that the result is fantastic, and was registered on toywar a while back, but I, and the average slashdotter, are not the same as the standard net user. The stock fall had very little to do with the domain dispute.

If their processors are fast enough, in 2 years Transmeta may be the Intel of laptops CPUs.

Not just laptops though. If the chips are as small, fast, and energy-saving as described in the ft article then you will see them in just about everything that will be performing computing and IP functions in 2 years.

Expect this to include not only cell phones and PDAs (of course), but also watches, cars, TVs, cable-boxes, home phones, MP3 players, gameboys, etc.

Could this be the first pricking of the e-commerce bubble ?

Or is it just, as the Register claimed, that Levi's couldn't ever get both legs to be the same length ?

This makes a couple of (IMO) invalid assumptions:
1. News is intended to inform. It isn't; it's intended to get advertising. In the case of magazines such as Jane's, the best way of doing this is to have the best, most-informed articles. This is demonstrably not the case for newspapers, and don't get me started about TV news.

Not always to get advertising - sometimes the aim is still to sell copies at a profit. Most newspapers will combine the two, that's why we measure both 'sales' and 'readership'. And not all newspapers are complete trash - there is a finely graduated scale. I find the Financial Times to be pretty well focussed on well-informed articles, although I couldn't tell you whether this is to get more eyeballs for advertisements, or to shift more expensive copies. TV news is, in general, worse than newspapers, but it's not uniformly dreadful (the BBC is usually tolerable).

This is not directly related to the PEZ case, but very relevent to the tradmmark discussion in general. A lot of the comments here refer to the fact that Trademarks are only valid when used in association with the appropiate trade section, eg Bills Fruit and Apple store has nothing to fear from Apple Computers.

However, this is not the case in the UK where the 1994 Trade Marks Act extended that protection to dissimilar products. but it has not been effective because companies have argued successfully that they had a valid reason to adopt the name. According to a Story in the Financial times Visa successfuly blocked the use of their trademark in regard to a unrelated product (Condoms, in this case)

This could have a worse precedent than the PEZ case
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IMHO, this issue is as least as scary as M$, especially given the history of companies like DuPont (anyone remembers Jack Herer's book ("the emperor wears no clothes"?). Clearly, companies should in general be protected to reap the rewards of their research and work. However, this protection needs to be balanced with the protection of society and (yeah, corny), humankind.

I don't see a lot of serious effort to address this issue politically. IMHO, this is the time to act.

I don't know how much truth there is in this, but if there is any, I hope the trend does not cross the Atlantic. Let students make up their own minds on issues such as this and we can have debates like happen here at /. and work out what we really think.

http://www.ft.com/hippocampus/q14ae5a.htm
Also, I don't understand how self-similarity would change the bell curve. You'd think every portion would still have the same probabilities, no?

Heh. The book is being serialized in the Financial Times. Check out http://www.ft.com/hippocampus/spgates.htm (it's a registration site, cypherpunk/cypherpunk works) and giggle as Billy boy eulogises 'digital numbers'.