And, they probably -are- protecting the public in this case...companies should not be allowed to sell shares to the public without disclosing important information about themselves.
Maybe this is the future growth export industry in the US: securities fraud of foreign nationals.
Really? Why is that? Give me a structural argument backed with empirical evidence in the costs vs benefits of public disclosure. It defies neat categorization as either good or bad.
And what kind of information is "important"? Investors who are offered a slice of the Facebook special purpose vehicle will most certainly be given material insider information. Do not assume just because you lack certain information that those with the opportunity to invest do so as well.
Hardly. You are forgetting the VC's that invested in FB. The employees. The people Zuckerberg may or may no thave screwed over early that still have shares in the company but not longer play any role in it. And all the other high-net-worth and "sophisticated" investors that have been buying FB shares on the private secondary market. It's quite possible that if anybody did the math they would find that there are already far more than 500 shareholders of FB stock.
We should remember this next time these assholes want a bailout.
Get your f**king facts straight.
Goldman didn't want a bailout. TARP money was forced on all major banks by then Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson. Some of them absolutely needed the capital themselves. Goldman did not directly need extra capital, but had one of their competitors gone under it would have made it much more difficult for them to raise capital in future. In essence, they would have been guilty by association, even though their own balance sheet was very solid.
Moreover, the major banks were not just bailed out because Treasury just loved throwing money at their cronies. That is much to simple an explanation, however enticing. We should remember that these banks were too big to fail. Their failure would have brought down the entire US and global economy to a level much worse than the first Great Depression. Could more have been done to help individuals (homeowners, small business owners, generally broke Americans) sure? But that does not imply that giving the banks capital was in and of itself misguided
First, some claim Zuckerberg didn’t build Facebook. Zuckerberg was actually hired by fellow Harvard undergraduates to build a website similar to Facebook. The more accurate accusation as that he stole the idea of Facebook. All articles on the inception of the website clearly state that Zuckerberg wrote the code himself. No one is going to claim that Zuckerberg was the next Don Knuth, Facebook was mainly hacked together using PHP over a couple of nights.
Second, some claim Zuckerberg is just in it for the money. If that were true he could have sold out a LONG time ago for around $1 billion. I think the subtext about building things just because you like to build things is that Zuckerberg is building his company not just for the money. I seriously doubt most of the posters on Slashdot, at the age of 22 would not have taken $1billion for a side project they worked on at school. It takes a special kind of person to have that resolve. Those are the people we should venerate in this country not vilify.
Third, some claim Zuckerberg is a douche. This is largely irrelevant. Most of us geeks aren’t the nicest guys in the world, let’s be real. Borderline Asperger’s/autism is rampant as is narcissism and a complete lack of humility. Find me a geek without a major personality flaw and you haven’t found a geek.
Moreover, I find it ironic that men like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg are constantly shat on here, but Steve Jobs is lauded as the second coming of Christ. If you read about the early history of Apple, you could make perfect parallels between the criticisms leveled at Zuckerberg and Jobs’s rise and fall and rise. Steve Jobs is megalomaniac clearly demonstrated sociopathic tendencies, has questionable tech credentials and could not give two shits about his customers’ opinions. And Apple is all the better for it.
So why does/. hate Zuckerberg so much? I think it is largely a generational divide. Many of you come from the gold old days of tech (command lines, walking five miles in the snow to get your code to compile, etc) and don’t really understand that just because something wasn’t challenging in a technical sense it is still HUGELY useful to millions of people. I was basically part of the first generation to use Facebook in college. It has been a great service for keeping track of friends from high school and family on the other side of the country/world. I can share pictures, stories, articles, links, lolcats and memories on one unified platform. The interface has always been super user friendly and clean. For the vast majority of college students (and increasingly everyone else) Facebook is as essential and important as Wikipedia or YouTube (the latter’s founders sold out for around $165million to Google, I should remind you). So let’s chill with the hating on Zuckerberg’s success. It’s all just a bit tacky and hypocritical.
Linux is also the only major OS that cannot advertise. Ubuntu 10.10 has great copy on its website extolling the benefits and showing that you can do pretty much anything on Ubuntu that you can on a Mac or Windows based PC. But...you only see that if you're already on the Ubuntu landing page. Linux also doesnt come pre-installed on the vast majority of new PC's either.
Well yeah, considering that, for most of them (judging by the iPhone users and other macfans), that consists of "it's shiny and makes me look hip."
Sometimes I think these people would pay a grand for an Etch-A-Sketch if it was white and smoothly-rounded.
Based on your post, we can deduce you don't own an iPad (and probably not an iPhone), nor are you likely to ever have used one. Furthermore, you are likely an atheist or agnostic, have no children. Additionally, you are not one of the elites, and no one finds you sexy, although you wish someone did.
Sorry, it's science.
A short primer on the liberty/security tradeoff...
If the president and congress deem it necessary to do anything in the name of national security they can do it. Federal authorities can order ISP's to shut down access. They can also order universities that receive federal funding (i.e., all of them) and federal research labs (duh) to do likewise. This would effectively disable the internet for the vast majority of Americans.
But that is irrelevent. In the event of a major internet-based attack by a hostile nation or non-state actor (i.e. terrorist), the government will not have to ask for permission to impose restrictions on internet traffic, we will beg them to do it.
FACT: In the event of war or attack (e.g. 9/11) the government can and has shut down interstate travel, air travel and the port system.
FACT: In the event of war or attack the government can and has controlled radio and television broadcasts (as previously noted here)
FACT: In every case there was no sense of suppression of freedom. We, the people, viewed such measures as necessary and appropriate.
PREDICTION: When such a "cyber 9/11" (or cyber Pearl Harbor(!)) happens history will rhyme, if not repeat itself.
That first bet of.5 probability to win $1000 has a HUGE variance, and is in fact infinite compared to the variance of 100% chance of $400.
If you said I get to play this game a million times I would definitely take the 50-50 chance in both cases. But expected value if statistically meaningless with a sample size of one (that is, playing the game just once).
This, I find to be the main fallacy with the recently published popular behavioral finance examples.
Well said. It always amazes me that even among/.ers, a non-representative selection of the population in terms of intelligence, there is a lack of sound reasoning. That is, outside of the domain-specific knowlwedge of most/.ers. Take, for example, the immediate debunking of some sharlatan's claim that Windows 7 uses up all your available memory. That argument was torn apart with the first few posts. Take, as a counter-example, the discussion on Google's unwillingness to disclose the race, gender or nationality stats of its workforce. It seemed as if most posters came to the discussion with their own view of how the world works and their own biases about diversity. Not much useful insight was gained from this latter discussion. The difference: domain-specific knowledge. (I am making the assumption that most/.ers are experts in technology and not sociology, race/gender studies, or politics).
That is upsetting. Logical thinking is one of the most highly transferable skills a human being can have.
Is not privacy essential to a high quality of life?
Not for me.
Just stating a trite belief in an axiomatic fashion does not make it so. Privacy as a concept has not been shown as fundamental as free expression or thought.
Prove that.
Based on what metrics were standard of living higher?
Is the decline in SOL that you state uniform across the population or have some groups fared worse than others? If so, which groups?
IF true, there other exogenous factors or confounding variables that can explain it?
It would be nice of more engineers or just people in general took some econometrics courses or remembered basic statistics and experimental design. Or we could all just make decisions and observations about the universe based on our limited personal experience.
Rant. Over.
The only thing worse than a statistic is an anecdote. The author has his personal experience- fine. But my personal experience directly contradicts his. And the only statistics on the subject (from NACE and BLS) give a fairly Normal distribution of salaries between 57,000 and 151,000
(http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos304.htm)
Median annual wages of computer and information scientists were $97,970 in May 2008. The middle 50 percent earned between $75,340 and $124,370. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $57,480, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $151,250. Median annual wages of computer and information scientists employed in computer systems design and related services in May 2008 were $99,900.
Agreed. But I don't own GOOG stock...can anyone say "shareholder lawsuit". The key issue will be, as asked earlier, how much will this affect Google's profits.
Or maybe it has something to do with audiences today being more finicky. They had to reboot the Bond franchise a few years ago because audiences didn't click with the old school Bond. And having seen every film, I can tell you that Casino Royale and especially QoS are *very* different from the first 18 or so films.
This thing is as old as my beat up Pentium III Inspiron 5000. Varying GPU clocks is also old.
What is interesting is seamless switching between GPUs. Everything else is just marketingese for "we do what everyone else does and we actually bothered to put some extra effort into power optimization".
But enabling non-expert users to look under the hood and moderate behavior accordingly is new. Healthy skepticism aside, Asus has built up mad street cred recently and deserves the BOTD to some degree.
Slashdot Mirror
And, they probably -are- protecting the public in this case...companies should not be allowed to sell shares to the public without disclosing important information about themselves. Maybe this is the future growth export industry in the US: securities fraud of foreign nationals.
Really? Why is that? Give me a structural argument backed with empirical evidence in the costs vs benefits of public disclosure. It defies neat categorization as either good or bad.
And what kind of information is "important"? Investors who are offered a slice of the Facebook special purpose vehicle will most certainly be given material insider information. Do not assume just because you lack certain information that those with the opportunity to invest do so as well.
Hardly. You are forgetting the VC's that invested in FB. The employees. The people Zuckerberg may or may no thave screwed over early that still have shares in the company but not longer play any role in it. And all the other high-net-worth and "sophisticated" investors that have been buying FB shares on the private secondary market. It's quite possible that if anybody did the math they would find that there are already far more than 500 shareholders of FB stock.
We should remember this next time these assholes want a bailout.
Get your f**king facts straight.
Goldman didn't want a bailout. TARP money was forced on all major banks by then Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson. Some of them absolutely needed the capital themselves. Goldman did not directly need extra capital, but had one of their competitors gone under it would have made it much more difficult for them to raise capital in future. In essence, they would have been guilty by association, even though their own balance sheet was very solid.
Moreover, the major banks were not just bailed out because Treasury just loved throwing money at their cronies. That is much to simple an explanation, however enticing. We should remember that these banks were too big to fail. Their failure would have brought down the entire US and global economy to a level much worse than the first Great Depression. Could more have been done to help individuals (homeowners, small business owners, generally broke Americans) sure? But that does not imply that giving the banks capital was in and of itself misguided
This is really the most accurate, most insightful thing I have ever read on /.
Thank you.
Don't call me Shirley.
Please mod up
R.I.P. Lesley Nielsen
...um, you can toggle the menu bars and the bookmarks on and off...I suggest you RTFM
Chrome makes sense. It refers to the borders and toolbars on a browser.
I completely agree.
First, some claim Zuckerberg didn’t build Facebook. Zuckerberg was actually hired by fellow Harvard undergraduates to build a website similar to Facebook. The more accurate accusation as that he stole the idea of Facebook. All articles on the inception of the website clearly state that Zuckerberg wrote the code himself. No one is going to claim that Zuckerberg was the next Don Knuth, Facebook was mainly hacked together using PHP over a couple of nights.
Second, some claim Zuckerberg is just in it for the money. If that were true he could have sold out a LONG time ago for around $1 billion. I think the subtext about building things just because you like to build things is that Zuckerberg is building his company not just for the money. I seriously doubt most of the posters on Slashdot, at the age of 22 would not have taken $1billion for a side project they worked on at school. It takes a special kind of person to have that resolve. Those are the people we should venerate in this country not vilify.
Third, some claim Zuckerberg is a douche. This is largely irrelevant. Most of us geeks aren’t the nicest guys in the world, let’s be real. Borderline Asperger’s/autism is rampant as is narcissism and a complete lack of humility. Find me a geek without a major personality flaw and you haven’t found a geek.
Moreover, I find it ironic that men like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg are constantly shat on here, but Steve Jobs is lauded as the second coming of Christ. If you read about the early history of Apple, you could make perfect parallels between the criticisms leveled at Zuckerberg and Jobs’s rise and fall and rise. Steve Jobs is megalomaniac clearly demonstrated sociopathic tendencies, has questionable tech credentials and could not give two shits about his customers’ opinions. And Apple is all the better for it.
So why does /. hate Zuckerberg so much? I think it is largely a generational divide. Many of you come from the gold old days of tech (command lines, walking five miles in the snow to get your code to compile, etc) and don’t really understand that just because something wasn’t challenging in a technical sense it is still HUGELY useful to millions of people. I was basically part of the first generation to use Facebook in college. It has been a great service for keeping track of friends from high school and family on the other side of the country/world. I can share pictures, stories, articles, links, lolcats and memories on one unified platform. The interface has always been super user friendly and clean. For the vast majority of college students (and increasingly everyone else) Facebook is as essential and important as Wikipedia or YouTube (the latter’s founders sold out for around $165million to Google, I should remind you). So let’s chill with the hating on Zuckerberg’s success. It’s all just a bit tacky and hypocritical.
Linux is also the only major OS that cannot advertise. Ubuntu 10.10 has great copy on its website extolling the benefits and showing that you can do pretty much anything on Ubuntu that you can on a Mac or Windows based PC. But...you only see that if you're already on the Ubuntu landing page. Linux also doesnt come pre-installed on the vast majority of new PC's either.
Well yeah, considering that, for most of them (judging by the iPhone users and other macfans), that consists of "it's shiny and makes me look hip."
Sometimes I think these people would pay a grand for an Etch-A-Sketch if it was white and smoothly-rounded.
Based on your post, we can deduce you don't own an iPad (and probably not an iPhone), nor are you likely to ever have used one. Furthermore, you are likely an atheist or agnostic, have no children. Additionally, you are not one of the elites, and no one finds you sexy, although you wish someone did. Sorry, it's science.
Can't argue with science.
But that is irrelevent. In the event of a major internet-based attack by a hostile nation or non-state actor (i.e. terrorist), the government will not have to ask for permission to impose restrictions on internet traffic, we will beg them to do it.
FACT: In the event of war or attack (e.g. 9/11) the government can and has shut down interstate travel, air travel and the port system.
FACT: In the event of war or attack the government can and has controlled radio and television broadcasts (as previously noted here)
FACT: In every case there was no sense of suppression of freedom. We, the people, viewed such measures as necessary and appropriate.
PREDICTION: When such a "cyber 9/11" (or cyber Pearl Harbor(!)) happens history will rhyme, if not repeat itself.
Researches also asked Watson, "What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?"
It replied 41.9999999999, so I think the technology still has a ways to go.
That first bet of .5 probability to win $1000 has a HUGE variance, and is in fact infinite compared to the variance of 100% chance of $400.
If you said I get to play this game a million times I would definitely take the 50-50 chance in both cases. But expected value if statistically meaningless with a sample size of one (that is, playing the game just once).
This, I find to be the main fallacy with the recently published popular behavioral finance examples.
And now the mandatory xkcd insight: http://xkcd.com/198/ Where the hell are my flying cars?
Bet it goes rogue...
Well said. It always amazes me that even among /.ers, a non-representative selection of the population in terms of intelligence, there is a lack of sound reasoning. That is, outside of the domain-specific knowlwedge of most /.ers. Take, for example, the immediate debunking of some sharlatan's claim that Windows 7 uses up all your available memory. That argument was torn apart with the first few posts. Take, as a counter-example, the discussion on Google's unwillingness to disclose the race, gender or nationality stats of its workforce. It seemed as if most posters came to the discussion with their own view of how the world works and their own biases about diversity. Not much useful insight was gained from this latter discussion. The difference: domain-specific knowledge. (I am making the assumption that most /.ers are experts in technology and not sociology, race/gender studies, or politics).
That is upsetting. Logical thinking is one of the most highly transferable skills a human being can have.
Is not privacy essential to a high quality of life?
Not for me. Just stating a trite belief in an axiomatic fashion does not make it so. Privacy as a concept has not been shown as fundamental as free expression or thought.
Prove that. Based on what metrics were standard of living higher? Is the decline in SOL that you state uniform across the population or have some groups fared worse than others? If so, which groups? IF true, there other exogenous factors or confounding variables that can explain it? It would be nice of more engineers or just people in general took some econometrics courses or remembered basic statistics and experimental design. Or we could all just make decisions and observations about the universe based on our limited personal experience. Rant. Over.
The only thing worse than a statistic is an anecdote. The author has his personal experience- fine. But my personal experience directly contradicts his. And the only statistics on the subject (from NACE and BLS) give a fairly Normal distribution of salaries between 57,000 and 151,000 (http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos304.htm) Median annual wages of computer and information scientists were $97,970 in May 2008. The middle 50 percent earned between $75,340 and $124,370. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $57,480, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $151,250. Median annual wages of computer and information scientists employed in computer systems design and related services in May 2008 were $99,900.
"I would only agree that a symbolic clock is as nourishing to the intellect as a photograph of oxygen to a drowning man. "
Agreed. But I don't own GOOG stock...can anyone say "shareholder lawsuit". The key issue will be, as asked earlier, how much will this affect Google's profits.
Or maybe it has something to do with audiences today being more finicky. They had to reboot the Bond franchise a few years ago because audiences didn't click with the old school Bond. And having seen every film, I can tell you that Casino Royale and especially QoS are *very* different from the first 18 or so films.
This thing is as old as my beat up Pentium III Inspiron 5000. Varying GPU clocks is also old.
What is interesting is seamless switching between GPUs. Everything else is just marketingese for "we do what everyone else does and we actually bothered to put some extra effort into power optimization".
But enabling non-expert users to look under the hood and moderate behavior accordingly is new. Healthy skepticism aside, Asus has built up mad street cred recently and deserves the BOTD to some degree.