Too bad I didn't find that one an hour ago before my last mod point expired... I was instead trying to find something to mod insightful in the post under how flamewars and trolls get started.
I really don't see the application of this information. If you get a call with an ID that you don't recognize, do you really want to run to your computer first to decide whether or not to answer?
And to make it even less useful, I checked two of the sites listed: whocalled.us and numberzoom.com. The first one was painfully slow (slashdotted perhaps?) and the second one was mostly a wiki with lots of numbers that have no information. You can look up a number, and then find that nobody has added any information on it.
As long as they can find complacent registrars and ISPs to propagate their system. They left Russia when the heat was turned up on their hosting / registration providers there. At least the companies in Russia speak English - or at least admit to knowing enough English to respond to complaints from the US. So then the hacker gang packed up and went to China, where the companies get away with pretending to not speak English, in spite of hosting sites in English and selling domains with English language registration data.
Exactly what drove this most recent move I don't know yet. It will be interesting to see where they pop up next. I wouldn't be surprised if they even just decided to take a little "cooling off" period, and we'll see them there again shortly.
Err? I'm not sure how either of those really answer the question. What I was really trying to get to is this large amount of anger that people direct at KDawson. I think its interesting that this time, when he posted an article that basically went the opposite direction of most of the ones he's posted, people still want his head served on a platter for being a partisan hack.
Similarly, I recall when the questions were posted for "Ask Rob Malda anything" for the slashdot 10th anniversary, one question that was very quickly modded up was "why haven't you fired KDawson?". I just think its interesting how much anger is directed at this one editor, even when really only a fraction of the articles that he posts are at all connected to politics.
Similar to what I said before, I think if he posted an article that demonstrated the existence of gravity, someone would jump up and down attacking him as a hack and complaining endlessly that he posts articles here. Though of course, as someone else pointed out, members do have the ability to view only slashdot articles from the editors that they like.
Usually, people whine incessantly about KDawson posting anti-conservative articles (things like the articles related to Scooter Libby). Now, he posts about Google doing a special logo for Veteran's day (and posting about it through a conservative news site), and people are angry again?
Really, is it possible for him to ever please people here? I'm expecting that if he were to post an article about New Years Day falling on January 1st, people would still complain about him being a partisan hack.
Really, I think this game deserves mention in both 40 (rythym, dance, and music) and 22 (specialized I/O for music). It certainly predates the ones that are mentioned for each of those. Sure, most of us played World Class Track Meet on the power pad, but we had heard of dance aerobics.
Frankly, it seems that this article was just not concerned with many of the innovations that came out of the 8bit NES.
Those are all helpful when something is registered here, yes. But what about when evilpillspammer.com claims to live at 123 main st, in Tahiti? As I said, a lot of the bogus registrations are people who claim to reside in countries where you're not likely to find good information on what addresses are valid (especially if you only speak English).
I don't know about your own experience with these criminals, but most of the spam I get comes on behalf of spamvertised domains that are registered as being in countries at least a thousand miles off of any US shore.
Anonymous registration for individuals could be allowed in ".name"
I don't think I would advise sorting by TLD. I recall at one point seeing an obscene deluge of spam for domains that were in.info. And of course each TLD can have its own criteria for who can sell domains in it, which of course would further muck the waters.
Exactly how to discern between for-profit and non-profit domains so that the WHOIS data could be fairly released would be tricky to say the least. But I do believe it would be the most fair compromise for the situation.
that there is no provision for punishing a registrar, except by terminating them and ICANN does not want to terminate registrars because all of them do not have a good data escrow in place. (think registerfly).
I believe I have seen temporary termination happen before, where a certain registrar who claims to be in New Zealand (yet has a phone number and IP address in Colorado) lost their accreditation for some period of time. They have since become an accredited registrar again. I don't know what all brought that to happen, but I like to think I had something to do with it when I showed that they were intentionally obfuscating registration data for a known criminal who loved their services.
a registrar may cancel a registration when there is intentionally false information given.
Of course, this part is tricky. How do you convince a registrar that their customer gave them intentionally bogus information? If I live in the USA, and the registrar took information from a criminal who claims to live in China, Finland, or Tahiti, how can I possibly claim the information to be bogus? Aside from an email address that isn't answered and a phone number that may or may not be real...
Really, it becomes the claim of me (or you) against the registrar. And the registrar is (obviously) making money on their part, so its in their interest to defend their client (and make more money off them later).
I'm all in favor of leaving WHOIS alone for the time. As I've said before, the WHOIS records are very useful when dealing with people who use domain names for nefarious purposes. A large portion of the domains that sell discount v!@gra and pirated s0ftwar3 are sold to a small number of big-name crooks (Leo Kuvayev and company). If we leave the WHOIS data open we can at least find out who they are in cahoots with. This is a good thing, because it can lead to taking action against the registrars and ISPs that are keeping them up and running (and likely getting a cut of the action themselves).
I wish the privacy advocates would just settle down and be willing to negotiate a compromise. Frankly, I could care less about getting the data on domains that exist to host peoples blogs and pages about their dogs or whatever. But if you want a domain so you can sell something, you should be willing to let the world know who you really are.
In the mid-1990s, one marketing dweeb at a low-end hard drive manufacturer (I want to say Maxtor but don't recall for sure) convinced his company to start defining 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes. It let them sell a smaller (and thus cheaper to manufacture) drive while labeling it as the same capacity as everyone else's drives. I think the one you're thinking of was Samsung, and their 560MB drives, when everyone else was selling 540MB drives. I remember that debacle as well, and I even bought one for myself to replace my old Seagate 130MB drive. It did seem like too good of a deal at the time, but I was young and dumb enough to buy into it anyways.
Maybe I'm alone on this (though I doubt it). I personally think this is about par for the course with Seagate. From my own experience, the quality of both their product and their customer service has really gone down the crapper in the past several years - at least for consumer hard drives.
One of the very first drives I ever purchased was a 130MB Seagate IDE drive (yes, megabytes.). I think I paid around $220 for it, as an OEM drive. Without getting excessively nostalgic, that was one of the better drives I ever owned in terms of longevity.
I also managed many servers over the years with Seagate 'cudas or cheetahs, and those drives were also great.
But then I bought a drive for myself more recently and was sorely disappointed. Something in the neighborhood of 250gb (reporting as 286168MB in FreeBSD). The capacity is not my complaint, however - the reliability is. The first drive lasted about 2 months before it started coughing up endless errors and had to be replaced. And Seagate was a nightmare to deal with for support. The person I talked to on the phone - I'll call him Habib - told me that Seagate no longer offer cross-shipping for replacement drives (as certain other manufacturers still do). Habib then also cheerfully told me that if I shipped the drive in anything other than "approved" shipping material, they would void the warranty and I would not receive a replacement. Once I found the list of "approved" shipping material, I found that the materials most normal people use were all excluded - things like bubble wrap and foam peanuts are just not good enough for Seagate anymore! The specifically required that I use their clamshell packaging to send back my drive, which of course I couldn't buy locally - though they did suggest a friendly internet reseller who would sell me the packing for $20!
Eventually, I talked to Habib long enough that he talked to his "manager" and got "approval" to cross ship anyways. This all took a good 20 minutes or more out of my life - not including time on hold before Habib first answered the phone. They also included a friendly note with Habib's version of the conversation, where he said I was "very irate" and "refused to pay for packaging materials".
I don't know what happened, but I know I for one miss the old Seagate...
I agree with you, up to a point. I really have come to feel that if a domain exists for a non-profit purpose (ie they are not selling anything), then I don't care who owns it.
But if you open a website and you want to sell something, then you damn well better be willing to be held 100% accountable. I think the process of opening a business (in most US states) is a good parallel. Most states require you register your business information with the state. Otherwise most places don't require you to list your home address in the phone book.
I wish you good luck with that. Far too many registrars have intentionally sold WHOIS obfuscation services to known spammers. I encountered the same thing with "Leo Kuvayev / Alex Rodrigez / BadCow", who took advantage of those services from several registrars (pacnames.com comes to mind immediately).
At least you found a registrar that you can sue over that. Most of the ones I have encountered thus far have been based in other countries (or at least claiming to be), which of course makes a lawsuit pretty well worthless.
I would say the best use of WHOIS is when you need to contact the owner of a business domain. Like many others I've seen boatloads of complaints from people here about their own private domains and how badly they hate WHOIS.
To those private owners, I could care less if their home information is available through WHOIS, as long as they aren't selling illegal merchandise through said domain and pumping spam for it all over the world.
However, when international criminals register domains to sell pirated software / bogus pills / etc... I do believe WHOIS is still useful. When you can obtain the WHOIS information for the criminal domain, it gives you someone to contact about that activity. People who care enough to do this have managed to progressively change the policies of registrars who were frequently used by spammers for nefarious purposes.
And further investigation into WHOIS data can lead someone to even more critical information, as well. Being as the WHOIS record contains information on the DNS servers that are resolving the domain, a person who wants to really dig deep can find where those were sold as well. A little hint: the spammers often use only a short list of DNS servers for a large number of their domains.
So in summary, before people rally around ICANN with pitchforks and torches to demand the demise of WHOIS, I ask you please consider a solution for the applications where WHOIS is still useful before insisting that it goes away completely.
Yes I also love websites so laden with flashvertisements that they bring my 1.8Ghz P4 with 2 Gb RAM to its knees. This obviously was what the internet was intended for...
Because I'm not anything of an audiophile. I do, however, enjoy the fact that a posting that talks about how parts of an article are irrelevant was modded "informative".
The only good solution would of been for them to be honest to EVERYONE, but that wouldn't of helped their employees any as by being honest, the stock price still would have plummeted before employees could get out, but at least that's the legal and ethical thing to do.
Except if they'd have been honest in the first place, then their employees wouldn't have invested so heavily in the company. The company was built on lies, and perpetuated by lies, until the executives knew that the shit was due to hit the fan - at which point they bailed themselves out and pretended to be innocent.
Of course, that kind of honesty would place the burden of risk on the executives, which clearly we don't expect in this country any more.
have you ever worked in any sort of industry that has any sort of sales, marketing, or human resources department? I'd guess not, if you'd ask such a question...
You could hardly be more wrong on your guess. One of many jobs I've held over the years was a 2-year stint at a CompUSA (circa 1997-1999). From the sales floor, we could literally see the company falling apart even then. We the workers were constantly victims to the idiotic decisions made by the upper management, but it was so obvious to us how far their collective heads were up their own collective asses that we knew to steer clear.
There was, however, one guy at the same location as I that did choose to buy stock in the company not long after that store opened (I remember when they were publicly traded, and even proudly showed their ticker symbol in the store). He lost his shirt on that one, but he was retired from the Navy and already had a decent pension so I think he still did alright. I never heard of any Enron employees who could say the same.
I also remember working there when the Palm VII came out - the first PDA with mobile wireless internet. We joked that we could watch our stock price fall in real-time from the floor. Not too much longer after that, the company was bought out by Carlos Slim (the richest man in Mexico). More recently, the store I worked at, and all the other locations in that area, were closed down by the corporation.
Trading based on information you have privileged access to, would violate insider trading laws. If OTOH you believe they should have just publicly said that the stock sucks and you should sell it, see below.
Except that they were hyping the stock to their employees, knowing that it was garbage. They knew that what they were doing with the business was wrong, and did it anyways, and made lots of money in the process. They knew that their house of cards was due to collapse, and yet they intentionally gave deceptive information.
Sure, if insider trading is only insider when you are doing something based on privileged and accurate information, then of course they were doing no such thing. Because they were willingly and intentionally giving a line of bull to their employees.
In other words, why shouldn't they accept self-serving statements at face value, in contravention of universally-known advice to diversify one's investments?
One would hope that your employer is not aiming to deceive. They expected that their employer was encouraging them to buy the stock because it was a good investment, not because it was garbage and the executives wanted to expand their golden parachutes before plummeting down to earth. Obviously its wrong to take the statements of anyone with that much money at face value, but that doesn't excuse the executives from doing what they did.
Asking that executives tell people not to buy their stock because it's overvalued is basically the same.
No, it isn't. I ask that executives not willingly and intentionally lie to their employees about the value of their corporation. These guys intentionally crapped all over their employees for their own fun and profit. They were hyping the stock while the company was starting to unravel. Even worse, they were hyping the stock the whole time while they knew of the company's impending demise. In a corporation, why should the risk fall almost entirely on the employees, and the reward almost entirely go to the executives? Aren't the people who start a company supposed to be responsible for the risk? They basically pulled off a horrible pyramid scheme and made off extremely well financially in the end.
But if you're OK with that kind of behaviour from executives, and believe that is the correct reward for them, then again we will just have to agree to disagree.
He started lining up armor and troops as though seriously considering doing the exact same thing across Saudi Arabia's northern border.
You're free to speculate on his motives, though exactly what benefit that would have had to him is questionable at best. In reality, it was more likely that he did that because he knew that the Saudi's were sharing their bases with countries like the US, and hence there was a good chance of an attack coming from that direction.
continued to build ballistic missiles right up until the end
Ballistic missiles are a far cry from the WMD's that we accused him of having. And at best a horribly flimsy excuse for invading a sovereign nation, regardless of what they may be doing to their own people.
The UN's sanctions were being laughed at, and he actually personally set out to rake in a ton of cash from the sanctions' 'oil-for-food' program, even while he diverted most of that money into building up the very same military
Sure, he did squander the money, and many of the people in Iraq recieved no benefit. But there are plenty of other countries where the same thing is happening - North Korea and Sudan come to mind. And North Korea actually has a chance of being able to do something to harm us - but yet we aren't do anything to either of them.
So, what you're saying is that we should have done it sooner? That we were too patient in the face of his continued sanctions violations and lashing out?
No! I am saying that there is a lot of non-sequitur BS being used to support this war. I didn't agree with it at its onset, and I don't agree with it now. We took a bad situation and made it orders of magnitude worse. While Saddam was bad, there is now instead a country in the middle of a civil war, in the middle of a highly volatile geographical region. We used poor logic, and outright lies, to justify this war, and we have no end game for it.
Just like the "global war on terror" or the "war on drugs", there is no victory situation defined. I'll be surprised if we are able to leave Iraq before 2025, unless we admit that we made a horrible decision and need to leave the fate of Iraq up to the people who live there (which we'll ultimately end up doing anyways).
As hundreds of thousands of their countrymen/women were killed and dumped in mass graves to keep it that way.
That was hundreds of thousands killed over a period of a dozen or more years. Our war over there has killed more than that number, in less time. Although you should also be careful with the use of the word "countrymen". If you read up on the history of Iraq, you'll see that it was created (as a "country") by the British, not by the people who lived there. So while they did live together under one flag, they didn't necessarily consider their neighbors their "countrymen". It is a "country" of at least three very distinct ethnic groups, who might or might not have ever elected on their own to live together had they ever had the choice before. Now they are fighting a civil war, which was in no small way brought on by our invasion of their "country".
What is WRONG with you?
Wrong with me? I don't believe there is anything wrong with my view on the war. I believe the war is a total quagmire that brought on a civil war and destroyed a country. I agree that Saddam was a horrible person, but I disagree with that being a reasonable justification for what we have done over there.
That's pretty much the definition of insider trading.
I don't see how that differs from lying to your employees so that they think the stock is worth much more than it really is. They were certainly part of the PR machine that lead their employees to think they were getting in on a good thing. But it would seem that lying to promote your own interests is fair game, but being forthcoming and releasing your lies is "insider trading".
Slashdot Mirror
Mordac, the preventer of information services, makes a statement on security versus usability:
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20071116.html
Too bad I didn't find that one an hour ago before my last mod point expired... I was instead trying to find something to mod insightful in the post under how flamewars and trolls get started.
Obviously, I could have spent that time better.
I really don't see the application of this information. If you get a call with an ID that you don't recognize, do you really want to run to your computer first to decide whether or not to answer?
And to make it even less useful, I checked two of the sites listed: whocalled.us and numberzoom.com. The first one was painfully slow (slashdotted perhaps?) and the second one was mostly a wiki with lots of numbers that have no information. You can look up a number, and then find that nobody has added any information on it.
As long as they can find complacent registrars and ISPs to propagate their system. They left Russia when the heat was turned up on their hosting / registration providers there. At least the companies in Russia speak English - or at least admit to knowing enough English to respond to complaints from the US. So then the hacker gang packed up and went to China, where the companies get away with pretending to not speak English, in spite of hosting sites in English and selling domains with English language registration data.
Exactly what drove this most recent move I don't know yet. It will be interesting to see where they pop up next. I wouldn't be surprised if they even just decided to take a little "cooling off" period, and we'll see them there again shortly.
Err? I'm not sure how either of those really answer the question. What I was really trying to get to is this large amount of anger that people direct at KDawson. I think its interesting that this time, when he posted an article that basically went the opposite direction of most of the ones he's posted, people still want his head served on a platter for being a partisan hack.
Similarly, I recall when the questions were posted for "Ask Rob Malda anything" for the slashdot 10th anniversary, one question that was very quickly modded up was "why haven't you fired KDawson?". I just think its interesting how much anger is directed at this one editor, even when really only a fraction of the articles that he posts are at all connected to politics.
Similar to what I said before, I think if he posted an article that demonstrated the existence of gravity, someone would jump up and down attacking him as a hack and complaining endlessly that he posts articles here. Though of course, as someone else pointed out, members do have the ability to view only slashdot articles from the editors that they like.
Usually, people whine incessantly about KDawson posting anti-conservative articles (things like the articles related to Scooter Libby). Now, he posts about Google doing a special logo for Veteran's day (and posting about it through a conservative news site), and people are angry again?
Really, is it possible for him to ever please people here? I'm expecting that if he were to post an article about New Years Day falling on January 1st, people would still complain about him being a partisan hack.
Really, I think this game deserves mention in both 40 (rythym, dance, and music) and 22 (specialized I/O for music). It certainly predates the ones that are mentioned for each of those. Sure, most of us played World Class Track Meet on the power pad, but we had heard of dance aerobics.
Frankly, it seems that this article was just not concerned with many of the innovations that came out of the 8bit NES.
Those are all helpful when something is registered here, yes. But what about when evilpillspammer.com claims to live at 123 main st, in Tahiti? As I said, a lot of the bogus registrations are people who claim to reside in countries where you're not likely to find good information on what addresses are valid (especially if you only speak English).
I don't know about your own experience with these criminals, but most of the spam I get comes on behalf of spamvertised domains that are registered as being in countries at least a thousand miles off of any US shore.
I don't think I would advise sorting by TLD. I recall at one point seeing an obscene deluge of spam for domains that were in
Exactly how to discern between for-profit and non-profit domains so that the WHOIS data could be fairly released would be tricky to say the least. But I do believe it would be the most fair compromise for the situation.
Perhaps we need something like the Evil bit?
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3514.html
I believe I have seen temporary termination happen before, where a certain registrar who claims to be in New Zealand (yet has a phone number and IP address in Colorado) lost their accreditation for some period of time. They have since become an accredited registrar again. I don't know what all brought that to happen, but I like to think I had something to do with it when I showed that they were intentionally obfuscating registration data for a known criminal who loved their services.
a registrar may cancel a registration when there is intentionally false information given.
Of course, this part is tricky. How do you convince a registrar that their customer gave them intentionally bogus information? If I live in the USA, and the registrar took information from a criminal who claims to live in China, Finland, or Tahiti, how can I possibly claim the information to be bogus? Aside from an email address that isn't answered and a phone number that may or may not be real...
Really, it becomes the claim of me (or you) against the registrar. And the registrar is (obviously) making money on their part, so its in their interest to defend their client (and make more money off them later).
I'm all in favor of leaving WHOIS alone for the time. As I've said before, the WHOIS records are very useful when dealing with people who use domain names for nefarious purposes. A large portion of the domains that sell discount v!@gra and pirated s0ftwar3 are sold to a small number of big-name crooks (Leo Kuvayev and company). If we leave the WHOIS data open we can at least find out who they are in cahoots with. This is a good thing, because it can lead to taking action against the registrars and ISPs that are keeping them up and running (and likely getting a cut of the action themselves).
I wish the privacy advocates would just settle down and be willing to negotiate a compromise. Frankly, I could care less about getting the data on domains that exist to host peoples blogs and pages about their dogs or whatever. But if you want a domain so you can sell something, you should be willing to let the world know who you really are.
Maybe I'm alone on this (though I doubt it). I personally think this is about par for the course with Seagate. From my own experience, the quality of both their product and their customer service has really gone down the crapper in the past several years - at least for consumer hard drives.
One of the very first drives I ever purchased was a 130MB Seagate IDE drive (yes, megabytes.). I think I paid around $220 for it, as an OEM drive. Without getting excessively nostalgic, that was one of the better drives I ever owned in terms of longevity.
I also managed many servers over the years with Seagate 'cudas or cheetahs, and those drives were also great.
But then I bought a drive for myself more recently and was sorely disappointed. Something in the neighborhood of 250gb (reporting as 286168MB in FreeBSD). The capacity is not my complaint, however - the reliability is. The first drive lasted about 2 months before it started coughing up endless errors and had to be replaced. And Seagate was a nightmare to deal with for support. The person I talked to on the phone - I'll call him Habib - told me that Seagate no longer offer cross-shipping for replacement drives (as certain other manufacturers still do). Habib then also cheerfully told me that if I shipped the drive in anything other than "approved" shipping material, they would void the warranty and I would not receive a replacement. Once I found the list of "approved" shipping material, I found that the materials most normal people use were all excluded - things like bubble wrap and foam peanuts are just not good enough for Seagate anymore! The specifically required that I use their clamshell packaging to send back my drive, which of course I couldn't buy locally - though they did suggest a friendly internet reseller who would sell me the packing for $20!
Eventually, I talked to Habib long enough that he talked to his "manager" and got "approval" to cross ship anyways. This all took a good 20 minutes or more out of my life - not including time on hold before Habib first answered the phone. They also included a friendly note with Habib's version of the conversation, where he said I was "very irate" and "refused to pay for packaging materials".
I don't know what happened, but I know I for one miss the old Seagate...
I agree with you, up to a point. I really have come to feel that if a domain exists for a non-profit purpose (ie they are not selling anything), then I don't care who owns it.
But if you open a website and you want to sell something, then you damn well better be willing to be held 100% accountable. I think the process of opening a business (in most US states) is a good parallel. Most states require you register your business information with the state. Otherwise most places don't require you to list your home address in the phone book.
I wish you good luck with that. Far too many registrars have intentionally sold WHOIS obfuscation services to known spammers. I encountered the same thing with "Leo Kuvayev / Alex Rodrigez / BadCow", who took advantage of those services from several registrars (pacnames.com comes to mind immediately).
At least you found a registrar that you can sue over that. Most of the ones I have encountered thus far have been based in other countries (or at least claiming to be), which of course makes a lawsuit pretty well worthless.
I would say the best use of WHOIS is when you need to contact the owner of a business domain. Like many others I've seen boatloads of complaints from people here about their own private domains and how badly they hate WHOIS.
... I do believe WHOIS is still useful. When you can obtain the WHOIS information for the criminal domain, it gives you someone to contact about that activity. People who care enough to do this have managed to progressively change the policies of registrars who were frequently used by spammers for nefarious purposes.
To those private owners, I could care less if their home information is available through WHOIS, as long as they aren't selling illegal merchandise through said domain and pumping spam for it all over the world.
However, when international criminals register domains to sell pirated software / bogus pills / etc
And further investigation into WHOIS data can lead someone to even more critical information, as well. Being as the WHOIS record contains information on the DNS servers that are resolving the domain, a person who wants to really dig deep can find where those were sold as well. A little hint: the spammers often use only a short list of DNS servers for a large number of their domains.
So in summary, before people rally around ICANN with pitchforks and torches to demand the demise of WHOIS, I ask you please consider a solution for the applications where WHOIS is still useful before insisting that it goes away completely.
Yes I also love websites so laden with flashvertisements that they bring my 1.8Ghz P4 with 2 Gb RAM to its knees. This obviously was what the internet was intended for...
Because I'm not anything of an audiophile. I do, however, enjoy the fact that a posting that talks about how parts of an article are irrelevant was modded "informative".
Just interesting irony, nothing else.
Except if they'd have been honest in the first place, then their employees wouldn't have invested so heavily in the company. The company was built on lies, and perpetuated by lies, until the executives knew that the shit was due to hit the fan - at which point they bailed themselves out and pretended to be innocent.
Of course, that kind of honesty would place the burden of risk on the executives, which clearly we don't expect in this country any more.
You could hardly be more wrong on your guess. One of many jobs I've held over the years was a 2-year stint at a CompUSA (circa 1997-1999). From the sales floor, we could literally see the company falling apart even then. We the workers were constantly victims to the idiotic decisions made by the upper management, but it was so obvious to us how far their collective heads were up their own collective asses that we knew to steer clear.
There was, however, one guy at the same location as I that did choose to buy stock in the company not long after that store opened (I remember when they were publicly traded, and even proudly showed their ticker symbol in the store). He lost his shirt on that one, but he was retired from the Navy and already had a decent pension so I think he still did alright. I never heard of any Enron employees who could say the same.
I also remember working there when the Palm VII came out - the first PDA with mobile wireless internet. We joked that we could watch our stock price fall in real-time from the floor. Not too much longer after that, the company was bought out by Carlos Slim (the richest man in Mexico). More recently, the store I worked at, and all the other locations in that area, were closed down by the corporation.
Then they just opened the International Space Stationn Station Room, yes?
I don't usually play grammar police, but this one was a bit too obvious...
Except that they were hyping the stock to their employees, knowing that it was garbage. They knew that what they were doing with the business was wrong, and did it anyways, and made lots of money in the process. They knew that their house of cards was due to collapse, and yet they intentionally gave deceptive information.
Sure, if insider trading is only insider when you are doing something based on privileged and accurate information, then of course they were doing no such thing. Because they were willingly and intentionally giving a line of bull to their employees.
In other words, why shouldn't they accept self-serving statements at face value, in contravention of universally-known advice to diversify one's investments?
One would hope that your employer is not aiming to deceive. They expected that their employer was encouraging them to buy the stock because it was a good investment, not because it was garbage and the executives wanted to expand their golden parachutes before plummeting down to earth. Obviously its wrong to take the statements of anyone with that much money at face value, but that doesn't excuse the executives from doing what they did.
Asking that executives tell people not to buy their stock because it's overvalued is basically the same.
No, it isn't. I ask that executives not willingly and intentionally lie to their employees about the value of their corporation. These guys intentionally crapped all over their employees for their own fun and profit. They were hyping the stock while the company was starting to unravel. Even worse, they were hyping the stock the whole time while they knew of the company's impending demise. In a corporation, why should the risk fall almost entirely on the employees, and the reward almost entirely go to the executives? Aren't the people who start a company supposed to be responsible for the risk? They basically pulled off a horrible pyramid scheme and made off extremely well financially in the end.
But if you're OK with that kind of behaviour from executives, and believe that is the correct reward for them, then again we will just have to agree to disagree.
You're free to speculate on his motives, though exactly what benefit that would have had to him is questionable at best. In reality, it was more likely that he did that because he knew that the Saudi's were sharing their bases with countries like the US, and hence there was a good chance of an attack coming from that direction.
continued to build ballistic missiles right up until the end
Ballistic missiles are a far cry from the WMD's that we accused him of having. And at best a horribly flimsy excuse for invading a sovereign nation, regardless of what they may be doing to their own people.
The UN's sanctions were being laughed at, and he actually personally set out to rake in a ton of cash from the sanctions' 'oil-for-food' program, even while he diverted most of that money into building up the very same military
Sure, he did squander the money, and many of the people in Iraq recieved no benefit. But there are plenty of other countries where the same thing is happening - North Korea and Sudan come to mind. And North Korea actually has a chance of being able to do something to harm us - but yet we aren't do anything to either of them.
So, what you're saying is that we should have done it sooner? That we were too patient in the face of his continued sanctions violations and lashing out?
No! I am saying that there is a lot of non-sequitur BS being used to support this war. I didn't agree with it at its onset, and I don't agree with it now. We took a bad situation and made it orders of magnitude worse. While Saddam was bad, there is now instead a country in the middle of a civil war, in the middle of a highly volatile geographical region. We used poor logic, and outright lies, to justify this war, and we have no end game for it.
Just like the "global war on terror" or the "war on drugs", there is no victory situation defined. I'll be surprised if we are able to leave Iraq before 2025, unless we admit that we made a horrible decision and need to leave the fate of Iraq up to the people who live there (which we'll ultimately end up doing anyways).
That was hundreds of thousands killed over a period of a dozen or more years. Our war over there has killed more than that number, in less time. Although you should also be careful with the use of the word "countrymen". If you read up on the history of Iraq, you'll see that it was created (as a "country") by the British, not by the people who lived there. So while they did live together under one flag, they didn't necessarily consider their neighbors their "countrymen". It is a "country" of at least three very distinct ethnic groups, who might or might not have ever elected on their own to live together had they ever had the choice before. Now they are fighting a civil war, which was in no small way brought on by our invasion of their "country".
What is WRONG with you?
Wrong with me? I don't believe there is anything wrong with my view on the war. I believe the war is a total quagmire that brought on a civil war and destroyed a country. I agree that Saddam was a horrible person, but I disagree with that being a reasonable justification for what we have done over there.
I don't see how that differs from lying to your employees so that they think the stock is worth much more than it really is. They were certainly part of the PR machine that lead their employees to think they were getting in on a good thing. But it would seem that lying to promote your own interests is fair game, but being forthcoming and releasing your lies is "insider trading".