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The Tangled Web Of Fiber Optics Lines & Gates
sdirector writes "Monday, super investor Warren Buffett jolted the nearly prostrate telecom industry by leading an investment of $500 million in Level 3 Communications ... Buffett's investment could set in motion a complex web of relationships and -- if you play it all out in just the right way -- put Bill Gates in charge of every fiber-optic line in the USA." The actual article itself is pretty interesting reading. Update: 07/12 08AM GMT by C :The link was broken, it has now been fixed. Sorry about that.
Here's the fixed link. The submitter didn't code the HTML correctly.
here
Please mod me down if an editor corrects it.
On a related note, how much do you think information-technology.com's worth?
Are you sure you included a URL?
Didja test them for typos?
Sorry, that was too tempting...
Submitted yahoo version of same story. I wonder how many submissions of this there were? It's certainly relevant to slashdot...
There are a number of misspellings in the web-log you link. Where can I send the grammerical corrections?
I think you would've had a lot more success with posting this story without the obvious tie ins to conspiracy theories. It is sad enough that it happened, but why tie in the anouncement with conspiracies instead of condolences. (I would say leave the conspiracy to the follow ups / replies if you realy need to get them out of your system)
My condolences to his family and friends and all those who he touched in his life, and it's always a sad event when one of us decides he doesnt want to live on anymore.
I wonder how a major screwup in the HTML like that got through. Maybe it's because the EDITORS DON'T READ THE STORIES BEFORE PUTTING THEM ON THE FRONT PAGE? Nah, couldn't be. Probably just a supernatural screw up - act of God/CmdrTaco sort of thing. :)
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Worthless? I've heard good, excellent and terrible so far...
After reading that article, I must say there's some pretty strange possibilities. It seems silly to think of Bill Gates owning the entire telecom industry, but with the way things are now, the author's little prediction of the future may very well come true. And we'd all be in deep shit then.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
What tie ins to conspiracy theories? You mean the update? That wasn't part of my original story submission.
/. a zillion times by now I'm sure, and no doubt at least one was expressed in less diabolical tones. Why wasn't that submission posted?
Gene Kan was a guy who was developing the most feared technology in America. The RIAA, MIAA, Microsoft... all these guys absolutely loath him. And then he supposedly kills himself, and we only get to find out about this a week after?
And only after the body is cremated? Think about that for a moment.
The story has been submitted to
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
He's trying to get $65k+ and he's worried about the $15 transfer fee?
Think about that for a moment.
Thought about it. For two moments. Nothing out of the ordinary (aside from the unfortunate suicide). I don't think it would be an amazing happenstance for his family to ask that nothing be revealed until after he was cremated.
Besides, the cat is long since out of the bag. He already created the technology. What would anyone have to gain by killing him (if that is even what you are implying)? To send a message to other rogue developers? Is corporate America at that point yet? I doubt it, especially when buying laws is so much easier to do.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
i love the part about just dismissing at&t at all... yeah ok... whatever... this is fantasy...
....................
The author is really reaching here. Such a deal would never make it past the regulators without selling off large portions of the network. Of course, GWB could always decide that such regulations are un-American, and tell his people to look the other way, but that is not likely considering the lack of trust that most US citizens have for corporations these days.
Additionally, Warren Buffett never buys into a company with plans to turn around and sell it; he's almost always in for the long haul. Still, Buffett has always stayed away from tech stocks in the past, so maybe he's turning over a new leaf.
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
From the Net-Nexus Seoul article - will Bill G focus on pushing content over the pipes, requiring DRM, or will it be interactive person to person applications?
I've thought about it.
Unfortunately, it makes little sense. The p2p cat is already out of the bag. The Copyright/IP has little to gain from his demise. These companies exist to make money. Revenge is not their business.
Agreed, the circumstances surrounding Mr. Kan's passing are strange, but not inplausible. It'll take considerably more to start me laying such heavy accusations against anyone.
I do not believe now to be the time nor place for blame. I consider it to be the time for lamenting the loss of a good person. One who made significant inroads in technological advance, and political awareness.
Remember: umount it before you fsck it.
Ahhhh poopbot...It's stuff like this that makes me question the TRUE worth of humanity...and dream of the possibilities with a weapon like this.
Taco has been "gotten to." He wouldn't dare post the story now, lest he have an "accident."
Which is kind of scary. Especially as mr Gates has the money to make that bid mentioned in the last paragraph, and apparently the goodwill-between-friends to make the offer stick. And of course he's shown that he's the kind of man who likes non-competetive markets (read: monopolies). And even more bothersome is that KPNQwest also has lotsa cable running through Europe...and I thought I was safe here :(
What's funny though is the bit about mr Gates telling the three friends all about this internet thing...yup, the same mr Gates who ignored the browser market because he saw no future in that internet thingy...
Now if only he'd had the same attitude about OS', back in the day...
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
What were the details of his agreement with Sun?
Yes, we know it was a stock swap, but was there language that allowed Kan to pursue the technology independently if Sun didn't follow through with Gene's original vision?
If you look at JXTA it seems Sun is selling it as server-enabled peer-to-peer. I take that to mean that the P2P stuff only happens after the server makes the necessary introductions. It seems to me that Sun is thinking they can market this technology not as a way of returning power to individual users as was Gene's ideal but rather as a way of saving bandwidth costs for businesses.
And yeah, to those who say that Sun is a corporation that is about making money so why should they care about a free Internet, I say this: first, Gene may have been naive enough to believe they'd do the right thing (has was only 25) and second, can you honestly say with a straight face that Sun has the first clue about what they're doing business-wise? With AMD 64-bit systems on the horizon running Linux tell me exactly why we're all going to be buying Sun systems in the future?
If Gene had rights to pursue JXTA development outside the scope of Sun's server-enabled P2P model, then he's a threat.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Yes it is sad that there was a life lost here, but to go as far as to say "Gene Kan was a guy who was developing the most feared technology in America. The RIAA, MIAA, Microsoft... all these guys absolutely loath him. And then he supposedly kills himself, and we only get to find out about this a week after?
And only after the body is cremated? Think about that for a moment."
I mean come on, you really need to pull your head out of your ass. Have you thought for a moment that he had a family that wanted some privacy? The fact of the matter is, this is a guy who felt that he had no more to live for, and just took the easy way out. No conspiracies or any of that other crap. He was a smart person who turned out to be a big pussy!
Stay negative.
You could have put it in your journal and a link in your sig, and avoided Karma loss and being banned from moderation for life. All respondents to this will be blacklisted as well as those who moderated it up. I just hope I'm not included for trying to give you this heads up, even though I'm doing it AC. Prepare for oblivion.
Story: a few people own a lot of fiber. Gates could offer them money for this fiber and then he owns it.
Ok the article (thanks to earlier posters for the correct url, do they ever check their html?) is interesting enough. But to say that buffet investing in telecoms means he will sell it to gates at the first opportunity is a bit of a long shot
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
The p2p cat is already out of the bag.
Is it?
JXTA has amongst its many features giving developers the opportunity to deal with firewall issues, things like Network Address Translation, that usually spell the end for more homegrown P2P efforts.
The way I see it, it was a P2P toolkit, that would let any idiot, even me, construct their own P2P application as easily as most any other Java application and freely distribute it and enjoy the ability to work despite firewalls and NAT and whatever other issues JXTA is able to tame.
Something like this released into the wild poses a much more difficult scenario than, say, applications that aren't designed to be extended or piggybacked in any way, doesn't it?
And, isn't time an issue here? Once a technology becomes widely used, it is much more difficult to censor than when in infancy, no?
Does anybody here really believe that the bicycle, if introduced today, would stand a chance against overzealous legislators once the first child experienced a serious accident?
Killing the true P2P capabilities inherent in JXTA now, before they became widely available, could easily be seen as being key to any number of players on global-economic stage.
And in any case, even if I am wearing the tin-foil hat, you should all become better acquainted with the facts necessary to prove that. Right now we know squat. That is simply unacceptible.
I want to know the details of Gene's contract with Sun.
I want to know why it is we didn't learn of his death until a week after the fact.
I want to know what he was cremated before the public did get to know of his death.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
If you don't like which stories /. covers, then start your own site.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Obviously, the slashdot crowd is anti-gates. We all imagine Gates reaching into our pocketbooks with Montgomery-Burns-like limp-wristed glee. It would cost the end user a lot of money - that's what monopolies are about.
I gotta figure that close a marriage of "the network IS the computer" would produce some interesting output, however. Yeah, yeah, so online free music would go away. For this discussion nobody cares about online content delivery. It's old news everybody talks about.
What kind of wacky new tech would something like this spawn? In Gates' mind is echoing the quote from the "Net-Nexus Seoul" article: "(We) wanted to focus on interaction. And what is more interactive than games? We made this market. We made new sectors. American media companies were just using online capacity to distribute offline media."
Gotta wonder what we'll see. Something has gotta make us give gates that nickle and get the 666 tattooed on our arms...
Adam
Note to all Readers: As of now all your postings are moderated by Bill Gates, owner of the internet in the US.
This sounds more likely. Buffett decided the stock was undervalued after the beating it's taken lately and a good longterm investment. A Hack writter noticed Buffett's investment and wanted to grab page hits for the online version of the story, so he invented some half ass conspircy to attract the paranoid.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
ok, there's one nad, is the other one still in there? Post pix of his girlfriend too! I like it when girls play rough... mmmm.
The telecommunications industry is definitely ripe for consolidation. There is just too much bandwidth and too much telecom competition for any company to be very profitable. The article predicts that L3, with Warren Buffett's investment, will buy up the assets of WorldCom and Qwest to consolidate their customer bases, reduce costs, and lower competition. Since Gates has a relationship with Buffett, and current investments in L3 and WorldCom assets, he will be in a powerful position in the telecom industry after the mergers go through. But he'll still only own about 5-10% of L3. Then the article goes completely off a limb and states:
Gates could approach Buffett to buy it all. Gates would own the Internet.
This is stupid. If Gates (or probably Microsoft) wanted to own telecom, he could just buy it now at lower prices. He has enough money to buy L3, Qwest and WorldCom now. Why would he wait for consolidation to occur, the market to improve, and the price of these companies to probably triple?
Sure, Gates could own the infrastructure. But if he was still interested in infrastructure, why did he stop investing in MSN? Over the past few years Microsoft has abandoned most of its infrastructure projects and focused once again on software. And the Qwest/L3 investments are years old, back when MS cared about MSN.
Saying that Gates is trying to buy the telecom industry is just flamebait. There's nothing recent to suggest that he's trying to do that.
my blog
/. is sold goods. The status quo is the only thing that matters. Most of the stories are advertisements.
Anyone who mods the parent or this post down doesn't believe in free speach and is just as bad as the riaa if not worse.
From the American perspective it does not take an evil conspiracy to explain why providers would prefer the Internet to be used to deliver content not interactivity. If there is a market it is likely considering the American culture that this is the best way to make money by satisfying consumer demand. Americans with money will have relatively big houses and the willingness to spend thousands of dollars on home entertainment systems. In the past decade American consumers have shown they are willing to purchase billions in content in the form of DVDs. In the US at least it is not considered shameful to spend whatever free hours one has on self-emersed isolated personal entertainment, and there is a strong psychological demand for such entertainment.
The fly in the ointment is simply the classic analysis by Tanenbaum that one should not underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon transporting tapes down the highway. That is, if one can ignore latency of 12 hours, there is no bandwith advantage to the Internet when it comes to delivering content. In the US at least it is very easy for the lone commuter in an automobile to stop by the store on the way home to pick up a DVD. Unless the Federal Government were to launch a program on the scale of the building of the Interstate highway system to close the last mile gap with fiber, something that will not happen, the average US consumer will suffer less latency from just dropping by the local store versus waiting for content to be downloaded. The current cable/DSL piddly bandwidth relative to what DVD quality content demands simply can't cut it.
It's interesting watching your post get modded.
I just have two observations.
First, even though slashdot sucks, a lot of the people who post on it are truly righteous. I was very pleased to see that many people actually care about what happened to Gene Kan, and totally stunned to see the parent post get modded up to Score: 5 at one point.
Second, the administration of slashdot is totally corrupt. I watched as my three secondary posts got modded down within less than a minute. Given the traffic this topic is receiving at this hour, that is just bullshit. It's clear to me that some monkey at OSDN has unlimited mod power and that they just routinely run through the posts doing what they please.
If I want PDA ads, I'll go to ZDNet. If I want Star War spoilers, I'll go to starwars. And if I want to slum with overbooked whores who sold their collective ass for the chance to lick out any and every used condom thrown their way, I'll come to slashdot.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Human logic: 1) I can't so you mustn't. 2) I can but you mustn't.
We never learn i guess. This monoply will again lead to antitrust cases mebbe 10 yesrs from now.. and by then, the states may be powerless to stop anything
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Good job I'm not in the office or I'd have to explain what was so funny.
Ooops, typo.
That should read:
I'll come on slashdot.
Hehe, fuck you Malda. When somebody blows your brains out with a gun I hope I'm there to put down everybody who gives a shit.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
I would not exactly say pussy. But if you look at the commentary he wrote in ZDNet "The last chapter" he was massively depressed.
I think he is part of a generation that now has to come to grips with a word called "Recession". This guy was 25. He developed tech, became king of the world. Then the bubble burst and folks like him were jettisoned. As they say easy come easy go. Of course since we are talking about human emotions this has the result that it becomes difficult to cope with.
Unless of course you are a few years older and have lived through a recession already...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
If Bill Gates owned every single piece of fiber in the US, it's definately a step in that direction. Perhaps even the only thing preventing a standards change now.
You can find the article here:. html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
It's clear to me that some monkey at OSDN has unlimited mod power....
/.ers to read them?
It's no big secret.
Second, the administration of slashdot is totally corrupt.
How exactly would this indicate corruption? No one ever said that moderation was fair or that you have freedom of speech here. You have freedom of speech because you can go start your own website. People who bitch about freedom of speech on Slashdot are always just grousing because they aren't capable of creating their own audience, so they want to hold the Slashdot audience captive. If your opinions are so insightful and valuable than would you need to force
If I want PDA ads, I'll go to ZDNet [zdnet.com]. If I want Star War spoilers, I'll go to starwars [starwars.com].
Good. Don't let the door hit you on the ass.
I watched the price jump by $10 a share 2 weeks ago when my gramps bought the stock, maybe I should listen to him instead of buffet.
I want to know why those damned giants turn into windmills every time I fight them.
Can someone tell me what this new troll piccy is? I'm curious, but not THAT curious :).
Did I miss something? Where in the article does it say that Gates sitll has shares in WorldComm?
He "apparently" sold his 15% stake in WorldComm.
BillG is to competition what food is to a fat babe. He craves it...Err destroying it.
How would you know they're not giants?
Ever fought one?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
The simple obvious reason that gates doesn't want to directly own telcom companies is his company is built on high margin intellectual capital they barely support. Why go mucking that up and have a giant arm of the company with tons of physical assets, support issues, and real complications. It's just not necessary for how he wants to run the show. It's a software company, not a hardware company.
Communications will be all about wireless.
Let's look at the 802.11x market: the little local guys who used to pull Cat 5 for companies are probably sufferring, because a lot of companies are moving to 802.11x.
Wireless home networks (and public ones, such as at Starbuck's or public parks) are ruining the chances of the major equipment manufacturers to move their existing product lines into homes.
Those same networks are causing broadband providers to fuss about "bandwidth sharing" as if it were a capital offense.
Every week new technologies are announced that extend the reach (and reliability) of wireless networks. Five years ago, only the adventurous would connect a corporate campus using only wireless. Now wireless MANs can connect an entire city.
Let's take another wireless technology, that which makes cellphones possible. AT&T, the grandfather of modern telecommunications, is practically out of the long-distance market. It's wireless division has been going gangbusters for the last 5 years. That means AT&T, who built most of the land-lines in the world, including the last mile to most homes, is still making great money, but not off those decades of investment in cabling.
Oh, one more: we live in a security conscious world. Fear of weak physical infrastructure means the US Government (and military) is continualy looking for ways to remove single points of failure from essential public or strategic infrastructure.
Add it all up? Investment in physical telecom infrastructure is sure loser in the long-term. If Gates wants to "own" the land-lines, so be it. With the continued growth (and interest) in wireless technology, using wires to connect people and machines will become old-fashioned and a specialty need. One can cut a trunk cable to block communications, but you have to be good to block every wireless communication technology under the sun.
Sure, all that investment in last mile cabling and undersea pathways and trans-national networks won't rot overnight. There may always be a need for such networks, but only as a specialty. As time goes on, the need or such networks will be reduced, as the continued evolution of cheap, effective wireless technology makes all of it seem antiquated.
So even if I was paranoid enough to believe Bill Gates could pull off such a feat as owning the Internet (how many billion in cash does Microsoft have right now?), it may not matter for very long.
Gee,that explains the problems I lived on broadcast.yahoo.com with Opera... Oh it can't be true? I mean, they completely ignore Opera browser (unknown browser) on their so called "media wizard" or something... also,wait... They select windows media by default, even if you have latest realplayer installed... Most cool of all, while all this stupidness and browser discrimination happens (note,exprienced guys, starting from Opera 6,it supports liveconnect), I see a single tiny logo... "Level3 enabled"
I don't want to believe all my unanswered feedback, stupid replies like "no it doesn't support" while watching videos etc on other places like CNN, doesn't happen just because of that tiny logo and its partner or something?
Can't be that simple? or?
Its a sad story, its something not explained by family and Slashdot takes my respect for not publishing it.
Also, seeing morons like you trying to run "another slashdot" via messages(as the guy on thread cleverly pointed) makes me sick and also more sure it was a good thing not to cover it via Slashdot.
Snow Crash here we come.
-Mark
Gates could approach Buffett to buy it all. Gates would own the Internet.
Huh?
What a ridiculous conclusion. By the article's author's reasoning Martians could land on earth as well. Atlantis could be found. Pigs could fly. The article was completely tangential to his conclusion and did not support it in the least.
While this would be unlikely behavior for Gates, it's even less likely for Buffett.
His strategy is based on taking a very long-term view. Generally, when he buys stock (or the company, outright) he intends to hold on to it "forever." Why would he go ahead and sell this company he just invested in - to make a quick buck? Not his style at all.
Of course they did. Slashdot is forever banging on about censorship, and the management make regular claims to be in favour of free speech. So what exactly is your objection to having it pointed out that these claims are lies ?
Let's look at the 802.11x market: the little local guys who used to pull Cat 5 for companies are probably sufferring, because a lot of companies are moving to 802.11x.
Uhm...right. Wireless can't get me 100Mbps or 1000Mbps like cat5/fiber can. Until then, wireless is best suited to PDAs and laptops. At my house, the desktops are all cabled while my laptop and Zaurus are on 802.11. At work, there is some wireless, but security issues have everyone looking for a better solution. The cable pullers are still very much in business here, and I don't think they will be fearing for teir jobs for quite a while.
have to do with Bill Gates?
They aren't the same person, are they? Or is it Michael/Latoya/Bill/Warren split personality?
The two are so different it isn't even funny.
It boggles the imagination. Buffet doesn't tend to invest in companies to make money simply on the stock trade. He tends to buy things (businesses) to make them profitable, and profit off the business more than the stock.
Bill has MS, and then a huge stock portfolio. He doesn't really run other businesses.
Just glancing at the title I thought it had something to do with rivalry between Linux Torvalds and Bill Gates.
Meh.
They should both take a lesson from the real Buffett -- Jimmy and get wasted away in margaritaville!!
Great Linux Site
NICE FLAME!!!!
"That is, if one can ignore latency of 12 hours..."
You must not be an American. I start climbing the walls if my pizza takes longer than 20 minutes.
Talisman
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
I'll give you a quarter for it.
Of course they did.
/. Because they aren't interested in what you have to say.
Where?
Slashdot is forever banging on about censorship, and the management make regular claims to be in favour of free speech.
Free speech does not include the right to hold people captive so you can speak AT them. Your audience has rights too. The only ones who haven't seen your post are the people using moderation to sort the messages. They are opting-in to get rid of messages that are off topic, trolls, or flamebait. In other words, they are opting in to get rid of you, as an excercise of their rights. You are still free here to say whatever you want. You just think others should be FORCED to listen; you are against freedom for them. You think you deserve a captive audience.
Even if you weren't free to post your comments here, it still wouldn't be censorship. This is not a street corner, you don't have any more right to erect a soapbox here then you would in a stranger's house. That isn't censorship.
Make your own website. Claiming some right over someone else's website is censorship. Or at least the words of a wanna-be censor.
So I say again make your own website. That is your right to free speech in action. And if no one listens? Well then you'll know why so many people opted-in to not to have to listen to you on
Since Level 3 Communications is trading at $6 now.
Did Gramps also buy LNUX at $200?
The article plays up the soap opera angle, but Buffet is far too experienced to let personalities influence his investment decisions. OTOH, he is also famous for sticking to relatively simple businesses that he feels he understands. So does he now understand the ins and outs of fiberoptic telecom? Probably not. He is likely deviating from his normal practice. Let those tempted to follow his lead on the basis of his past success beware. In all liklihood he really is gambling on a relatively quick pickup in bandwidth demand. The denials are to discourage competative bidding for Worldcom's assets. Unfortunately, his guess about future demand is probably not any better than anyone else's. Perhaps he thinks some MS "innovations", maybe in the DRM area, will somehow spur demand.
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
It seems that Buffet's investment in Level3 Communications is more like $100 million. The other slice of the half-billion-dollar pie is coming from partner investors, Legg Mason and Longleaf Partners. They bought the stock on the cheap, feeling that they would survive the shake-out in the telecom sector.
Here's a good article that details the nuts and bolts of the deal.
There is only so much bandwidth to be had from any reasonable chunk of the electomagnetic spectrum. Cell phones have gotten as far as they have mainly by using "space-division" multiplexing. I.e., the same frequency channel can be reused many time among reciever/transmitter pairs that are sufficienly far separated and use sufficiently low power. But how much greater can the density of cell phone towers go given that it is not even just placement but cost that must be considered?
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
I know it's hard to believe, but Warren Buffett didn't achieve his billions by simply watching the supposedly "negligible" transfer fees slip by.
Proper accounting is good for wealth generation. Poor accounting is only good for a few select officers of a few companies (Enron, Worldcom)
the bonds had a 3.41 conversion rate.
Either way, if Level 3 blows or not, Buffet has virtually a guaranteed gain on his $500 mil.
It's not because he suddenly likes telecom, he is not a fan of tech at all, cash, yes.
Wires still rule. For long-distance hauls, relatively error-free transmission and high-speed links, fiber and wire will be the only way to go for a long time.
Wireless is susceptible to weather, depends on line of sight, and the requirements for a quality link are very strict. Wireless is also limited by spectrum licensing, data rates, and nasty things like roof-rights and buildings cropping up 5 years later in front of your installation.
Wireless is fine and dandy for 11Mbps LANs and 45Mbps WANs. But we're not talking about offices and campuses here. We're talking about highspeed datalinks spanning cities, states and continents.
Even if wireless could approach the level of reliability of fiber and copper, you have that little "curvature of the earth" problem for long haul networks. And bouncing signals off sattelites is not a solution.
Level3 is heavily in debt with junk bonds, but it has an awesome network underground in both the US and Europe. They built their fiber network in a way that can be easily updated as new fiber technologies come along. They build 12 conduits, say, and fill two with fiber. When the technology changes, they have all these empty conduits to blow new fiber through. They have co-location facilities in nearly every major city, and these facilities fill up almost immediately after construction. They are doing backbone stuff for companies like AOL. It's actually Level 3 equipment that is used for dial-up in many places. It's an all-IP network.
Level 3 stems from Peter Kiweit (may have the spelling wrong) which is a hundred year old and extremely well respected construction company. Through some very weird transactions the base company turned into Level 3 and spun off the construction arm. The construction arm then contracted with Level 3 to build out the network!
As I understand it, Level 3 is taking full advantage of the WorldCom and others' problems by buying up local loops these other companies are dumping because of their distress. Of course, their stock has doubled in price in the last week because of the Buffett news. Then again, that makes it worth $5.00 when two years ago it was in the $80.00 range, so maybe that's not saying much.
My belief is that when bandwidth demand creeps up, as it surely MUST, Level 3 is going to be there to take advantage.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
It's called the Warren Buffet - all you can eat, right inside Nebraska Furniture Mart/Megamart (Nebraska's attempt at a Fry's clone)
Anyone else notice that whenever we hear about these mutigazillion dollar acquisitions and mergers all that's ever talked about is obtaining an already existing product and by extension an already existing customer base? You never hear about them, I don't know, maybe intending to create a NEW product or something? Think about the amount of money that is spent just shifting ownership from one entity to another with no items of actual worth (a subjective term I know, but I think you get the idea) being created. More likely, jobs will be lost as a result. Here's a crazy idea, how about we take all that money and invest in more research or supporting fledgeling inventions or industries. I'd love to see a breakdown of total dollars spent on mergers/acquisitions vs. R&D in this country, I bet the discrepancy is staggering.
It's just one more example of how here in the U.S. we've totally transitioned from being a nation and society of mostly producers to being a nation and society of mostly consumers - be it multibillion dollar companies, customer bases, automobiles, hamburgers or lousy mass media. I'm not saying we should all go back to being farmers, but sweet fancy jeebus, how many middle managers, investment advisors, busines oriented laywers and accountants do we really need? We've created a bizzaro culture of championing parasitic occupations which feed off the results of an ever shrinking pool of actual producers and creators. So if you're with me, go out there and hug an artist, craftsman or scientist (even a computer scientist) today!
Thanks for putting up with me, I think I'll go buy something now.
> Land-line telecom not a good long-term investment
So, you know more about investing than Warren Buffet? Somehow, I doubt that very much.
Our lack of tech insights, we should add, does not distress us. After all, there are a great many business areas in which Charlie and I have no special capital-allocation expertise. For instance, we bring nothing to the table when it comes to evaluating patents, manufacturing processes or geological prospects. So we simply don't get into judgments in those fields.
The author of the article doesn't know Buffet's style that well. When Buffet invests he tends to keep his stocks for many many years. But who knows, this is a strange move of Buffet, he might make another strange move and sell to Gates in the short term.
By the way, Buffet only invested $100 million, which is a very small investment compared with his other investments. The rest of the $500 million investment is from two others. This too is quite strange, as usually Buffet goes after majority ownership. loz
loz
Didn't Klez render this point moot?
Quintus malus puer est.
I love the pun...
The link was broken, it has now been fixed. Sorry about that.
You made me click on that right before I was going to bed.
Cheers, dude.
It's a picture of the crown jewels with one of the pearls hanging loose.
congratulations, this was extremely well done. I was laughing from about a quarter of a way through to the end of that over-wrought genius post :)
Probably because his parents didn't want 10,000 conspiracy theorist assholes clamouring to see the body to proove that he's really dead and it was really a suicide.