if Morgan Stanley hadn't got bailed out by a Japanese bank, and if Bank of America hadn't bought Merrill, then Merrill would have failed, the Morgan, and Goldman and JPM would have fallen because of it.
Goldman's credit default swap business with AIG was also basically 100% bailed out by the taxpayer. Goldman would have lost massive amounts of money if it hadn't been for the deal the government gave them when it took over AIG.
there have been articles about the computer guys who were working inside the CDO machines of wall street in 2000-2008 before the whole thing came crashing down.
the only people who could hold their nose and not-care what their work was being used for are complete pscyopaths, who went through some kind of personality-cracking process so that they can act like normal people while they help destroy the planets economy.
JP Morgan, along with every other mega-bank, has no idea what is actually on it's balance sheet, and hasn't for 10-20 years.
The Shadow Banking system is too big, too complicated, and too interconnected for any of these risk metrics to mean anything.
JP Morgan did the same business as Goldman Sachs and the others, loading up with CDOs and credit default swaps and CLOs and the rest of it. JPM is portrayed as 'wiser' than the rest in the books and the articles about the crisis, but its not really true. They were less stupid than the stupidest people, that doesnt make them smart.
They got bailed out just like all the other megabanks. Why? Because they had no idea what was on their books. They are running a black box. All the supercomputers in the world cannot make up for a complete and utter lack of transparency. And that is what the world of Credit Default Swaps (invented at JPM no less) are. A gigantic black box. The rest of the Shadow Banking system is the same, and JP Morgan (and the rest of the big banks) are up to their necks in it.
Just because you can calculate lies faster, doesnt mean they aren't lies.
every time i buy food, 8% goes to the government. since i spent roughly 1/3 of my income on food, thats a 2.7% tax rate just to eat. i pay rent. i dont know how much my landlord pays in taxes, but im sure they take it out of my hide. i pay for gasoline. again, taxes. and then every month out of my paycheck, comes money to pay social security &c.
add it all up, and i am paying a hell of a lot more than 15% that i would pay if i was a day-trader swapping stocks around.
i know they sound too simple, but that is basically what happened in the US from the 1930s to circa the 1980s, when it had the 'best financial system in the world'. the SEC & financial laws were somewhat well enforced (especially compared to every other country) and these companies had to show what they were doing in public.
that broke down with the rise of the 'shadow banking system' and the end of the rule of law, which many people will say began in circa the 1980s when the big investment banks stopped being partnerships and started being 'shareholder driven'. the rise of special purpose entities, collateralized debt obligations, off-balance sheet special investment vehicles, and other various creatures of the shadow banking system destroyed all semblance of transparency. modern large banks do not have any idea what their actual financial condition is - it is simply too complicated to properly calculate it or to know what they have at risk.
yves smith covers a lot of this at nakedcapitalism.com
just because she didnt want to let lehman fail doesnt mean she necessarily wanted to bail it out.
there are other ways to do it. when ordinary banks fail the FDIC takes them over, puts a few people in prison, pays off some creditors, winds it down, and keeps things going in an orderly fashion.
of course, since Lehman was an "investment bank" (not an ordinary bank) in the US, the FDIC, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Fed did not technically have legal jurisdiction over it.
letting lehman just go bankrupt caused a lot of problems. institutions who had money saved there in europe couldnt get their savings out. also investors in lehman, like the "good as money" money market funds started losing value, which caused a mass panic and helped the credit markets seize up, which meant that ordinary business activity, like mcdonalds payroll, was threatened. it was like one of the last dominos to start the global run on the global financial system in sept 2008.
if i understand it correctly, she probably would have wanted us to 'go cowboy' on Lehman, and do something like have the FDIC take it over, even though it wasn't technically under FDIC jursidiction. in Paulsons book he talks about how he is continually hamstrung by what is allowable legally for him to do as treasury secretary. he is always worried about doing whats legal.
however, technically, we had no right to invade Iraq, to writetap american citizens, to set up secret prisons and torture POWs. why couldnt we bend the rules in this case? i think thats where she might have been coming from.
there are massive hordes of credit default swaps against US debt out there right now.
credit default swaps are almost completely secret. nobody knows how many are out there. there could be a hundred billion, there could be 10 trillion.
if you allow the US debt to default, it will make the Russian and Asian defaults of 1997/1998 look like a kids birthday party.
When Lehman went under, the money market funds started to crash, and then the credit system started to crash. Yes, McDonalds was going to have problems meeting payroll.
the US government is like tens of thousands of Lehman Brothers, not in its operation but in the tentacles it has to every other financial product and financial system on the planet. credit default swaps against US debt are just the tip of the iceberg - and they are completely secret. we have no idea how many other products and institutions of the 'shadow banking system' are linked to US debt, or what the repercussions would be.
we would see currency devaluation on a massive scale. we could see entire companies disappear overnight. we could see entire countries central reserves emptied, overnight.
it could make the AIG bailout look like a child asking for 5 cents for a gumball.
it would be like taking a cigarette lighter and throwing it into a fireworks factory.
----
some people want to see the factory blow up. yes, it would be awesome, and serve the factory owners right for running such a sweatshop. but it is completely irresponsible to allow it to happen.
the only safe way to take apart the fireworks factory is brick by brick, slowly, over time. not in a massive explosion that will destroy an entire quadrant of the city.
it comes from people being forced out of rural areas and into concentrated centers because of politics, economics, warfare, and corruption.
why are there millions in refugee camps in africa? because of wars, often funded by corrupt 'developed' nations to extract natural resources and prop up dictators. and they use weapons from the 'developed' nations to do it. people used to be spread out in rural areas - then like in sudan, militias go around committing genocide and the people flee to centralized population centers.
why is england full of immigrants? because the corrupt nature of countries like Iran or Pakistan doesnt allow people to escape poverty there, so they flee.
why are american cities full of central and south american immigrants? because mexico and south america have too much violence and not enough jobs. why? because they are corrupt societies that have not enough opportunity for honest work, and too much opportunity for corruption and crime.
why are rural areas of america emptying of people? there are no jobs, and people cannot afford to live there. they move to cities.
none of these migrations are caused by 'too many people', they are caused by social and political choices made by the leaders of society - - to allow corruption, to allow things that prevent people from living in rural areas, etc etc etc.
nobody forced you to use contraception, and if you had an 'accident', no government agent would force your wife to have an abortion.
you naturally chose it because you are a knowledgable person. the answer then is to provide more people with opportunities to become knowledgable and educated, not to knock their doors down and arrest them for fucking.
they have profoundly disrupted the balance between male and female, leading to social unrest and massive mental health problems.
the idea that there is insufficient land is bogus as long as we are paying farmers to not grow things. there is plenty of food, the problem is distribution and marketing. we throw away food every day from supermarkets and restaurants, and people go to jail if they try to dig in the trash for food to eat. there is no food shortage, there is a shortage of low-priced food, and that has nothing to do with the supply of land (except maybe as it relates to ethanol). it has to do with things like the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index Fund and other investment banks and hedge funds attempts to manipulate food markets for profit . . . something that is very old, a good 20th century example being the potato market and NYMEX.
the problem with 'population control' is that someone has to decide what 'sort of people' are 'better' - nobody who thinks they know the answer to that should ever be in any position of power because it is amongst the basest, most primitive and violent impulses of the human species, to 'wipe out the other clan'.
see also. eugenics. t4. genetic health courts. etc etc.
on the dark side of this planet. this ugly, misbegotten planet. another hole in space to make, another sphere full of screaming, dying blobs of flesh.
i try not to think about it, but it gets to you after a while. last week lenni went crazy. he started writing on the wall with his blood and his shit mixed together... sort of like an 'outline font'. he wrote something about the 'last coming of the jesus lizard'. i couldnt read the rest of it. they closed off his bunker and hosed it down so nobody was really sure what happened to him, exactly. someone said they heard a shot, a loud shot in the night. but i dont think that was like lenni. lenni was more into knots and ropes. although i guess a plasma burst would be a hell of a lot faster and more painless.
i wonder what he was thinking, those last seconds before he pulled the trigger. probably nothing. thats what this job does to you. a hundred years of extermination. a hundred years of terror. a hundred years of making way for civilization - a civilization that you will never get to take part in. sure, maybe if you retire, but how many make it that far? out of my first squad class, there are only 3 left. 3 out of 50. all of the rest are dead or insane.
so why do i keep doing it, you ask? and who are you, i wonder? im writing this in a secret code in an ancient form of communication, called 'paper'. i picked it up on beta star seven stroke 6, alpha quadrant. some dead rat had a whole room full of the stuff, and a long cylindrical object that you use to scratch with onto the surface. it leaves an impression and a marking. its kind of fun once you get the hang of it really.
but im just avoiding your first question. why keep doing it? this shit hole fuck up of a job? no life, no future, no responsibilities, no nothing. actually thats kind of the good part. the bad part, the nightmares, the voices, the memories. the emptiness. you fill it up. the ship has an endless supply of drugs, of joues, of fake anthropods from every species upon which you simulate procreation. they even got simulated babies and families if you want it. dont know why you would, sick fuckers who do that shit are the ones you have to watch out for. they are the ones that really got nuts - they dont just off themselves in the privacy of their own cube hole. no. they take out an entire squad with them. they rain down parts onto whatever shit hole we are invading, like some kind of kid throwing candy from a pinata. they laugh, like corricks, that guy, he just started laughing and killing everyone. friend, enemy, commander, didn't matter. base lost 4 of its top ribbons, each with 200 years planet clearing experience... wives, pensions, families.
they tell us we arent supposed to mention his name. they killed a guy last week for doing it. actually it wasnt 'they', it was this shit hard sergeant named dooley. he's about as fucked up as lenni was, but dooley would never off himself. he loves pain too much - seeing other people in pain. he keeps them like that for weeks, keeping them barely alive so he can listen to them scream. then he offs them right as he ejaculates. dont ask me how i know this.
i would like to chop his dick off, though. just to see the look on his face. and then what? id become like him i guess. whatever. thats just a way to stay alive - either go crazy and off yourself, or go crazy and off everyone else. where is the middle ground here? go crazy and write into a little secret book, that nobody can find. hide it under your sleeper, train yourself to pass the mind-scanning test they do every week. become expert at logic twists and bending diagrams, to explain that 'no, you have no contraband information on your person or in your thoughts' because, well, technically, they dont even know that 'paper' exists... and so how can it be contraband?
anyways. another mission up. some shit fuck ass planet called 'earth'. it looks blue with smears of brown all over it, some green. and white all over the place. the inhabitants are like little blood pustules, stubby
i expect any article, let alone book, on wiretapping and security to at least mention the NSA.
The "hysteria and hyperbole and the threat of an Orwellian society" is based on facts, the facts of the 20th century.
The Nazi state was built upon mass surveillance, as was the Soviet, with the NKVD (KGB, Cheka, etc).
The biggest threat to security has never been rogue terrorists, it has been state actors destroying their own citizenry.
Surveillance is one of their primary tools. This is not 'lunacy' and it is not 'paranoia'. It is fact-based analysis of actual, real security threats.
Fascism - 60 million dead in WWII, untold others. Communism - countless tens of millions from starvation and war (China, Soviet Union, Cambodia, etc)
Terrorism - perhaps 50,000, probably much less.
Statistically, overweilding state power is something like 1000 times more deadly, just in the last century, than any "terrorists" or other groups that the author appears to want to lump in with that bizarre vague phrase "our enemies". Who, exactly, is "Our", and who exactly, are "enemies"?
A few weeks ago, an "enemy" who was an "insider leaker of sensitive information" turned out to be innocent when just about the entire internet objected to his being called an 'enemy' , instead finding him to be a whistleblower. He blew the whistle on illegality and massive money wasting at the NSA. Where is his story in this academic tsunami of abstract theory? Where is reality? Where are the facts?
if i am giving contributions to some obscure non-profit project on github i think it would be nice to have some official-ness to the copyright status of my patches... right now its kind of in limbo yes?
Slashdot Mirror
you dont understand. they go with my monster cables.
considering that Macintosh would not exist without Jobs directly 'stealing' ideas from Xerox PARC,
this whole thing is hilarious and sad.
all stolen from others.
its utter hypocrisy. the entire PC industry was founded on what would today be considered egregious IP theft.
if Morgan Stanley hadn't got bailed out by a Japanese bank, and if Bank of America hadn't bought Merrill, then Merrill would have failed, the Morgan, and Goldman and JPM would have fallen because of it.
Goldman's credit default swap business with AIG was also basically 100% bailed out by the taxpayer. Goldman would have lost massive amounts of money if it hadn't been for the deal the government gave them when it took over AIG.
.
there are people who live off the difference in those salaries.
what did you buy with that exra fifteen grand? did you need it?
dude that is horrible
there have been articles about the computer guys who were working inside the CDO machines of wall street in 2000-2008 before the whole thing came crashing down.
the only people who could hold their nose and not-care what their work was being used for are complete pscyopaths, who went through some kind of personality-cracking process so that they can act like normal people while they help destroy the planets economy.
JP Morgan, along with every other mega-bank, has no idea what is actually on it's balance sheet, and hasn't for 10-20 years.
The Shadow Banking system is too big, too complicated, and too interconnected for any of these risk metrics to mean anything.
JP Morgan did the same business as Goldman Sachs and the others, loading up with CDOs and credit default swaps and CLOs and the rest of it. JPM is portrayed as 'wiser' than the rest in the books and the articles about the crisis, but its not really true. They were less stupid than the stupidest people, that doesnt make them smart.
They got bailed out just like all the other megabanks. Why? Because they had no idea what was on their books. They are running a black box. All the supercomputers in the world cannot make up for a complete and utter lack of transparency. And that is what the world of Credit Default Swaps (invented at JPM no less) are. A gigantic black box. The rest of the Shadow Banking system is the same, and JP Morgan (and the rest of the big banks) are up to their necks in it.
Just because you can calculate lies faster, doesnt mean they aren't lies.
they could have slapped 'National Security' and 'NDA' on the whole thing and got away with whatever they wanted to do.
if anyone complained, they could sue them under the Espionage Act for "retaining national defense information"
prison will shut up a lot of people. ask Shamai Leibowitz.
hypocrisy. its whats for dinner!
just wondering.
every time i buy food, 8% goes to the government. since i spent roughly 1/3 of my income on food, thats a 2.7% tax rate just to eat. i pay rent. i dont know how much my landlord pays in taxes, but im sure they take it out of my hide. i pay for gasoline. again, taxes. and then every month out of my paycheck, comes money to pay social security &c.
add it all up, and i am paying a hell of a lot more than 15% that i would pay if i was a day-trader swapping stocks around.
except of course if you want to put long hairs in prison, then its 'we are at war!'
1. enforce transparency with laws
2. put people in prison for breaking the laws
i know they sound too simple, but that is basically what happened in the US from the 1930s to circa the 1980s, when it had the 'best financial system in the world'. the SEC & financial laws were somewhat well enforced (especially compared to every other country) and these companies had to show what they were doing in public.
that broke down with the rise of the 'shadow banking system' and the end of the rule of law, which many people will say began in circa the 1980s when the big investment banks stopped being partnerships and started being 'shareholder driven'. the rise of special purpose entities, collateralized debt obligations, off-balance sheet special investment vehicles, and other various creatures of the shadow banking system destroyed all semblance of transparency. modern large banks do not have any idea what their actual financial condition is - it is simply too complicated to properly calculate it or to know what they have at risk.
yves smith covers a lot of this at nakedcapitalism.com
just because she didnt want to let lehman fail doesnt mean she necessarily wanted to bail it out.
there are other ways to do it. when ordinary banks fail the FDIC takes them over, puts a few people in prison, pays off some creditors, winds it down, and keeps things going in an orderly fashion.
of course, since Lehman was an "investment bank" (not an ordinary bank) in the US, the FDIC, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Fed did not technically have legal jurisdiction over it.
letting lehman just go bankrupt caused a lot of problems. institutions who had money saved there in europe couldnt get their savings out. also investors in lehman, like the "good as money" money market funds started losing value, which caused a mass panic and helped the credit markets seize up, which meant that ordinary business activity, like mcdonalds payroll, was threatened. it was like one of the last dominos to start the global run on the global financial system in sept 2008.
if i understand it correctly, she probably would have wanted us to 'go cowboy' on Lehman, and do something like have the FDIC take it over, even though it wasn't technically under FDIC jursidiction. in Paulsons book he talks about how he is continually hamstrung by what is allowable legally for him to do as treasury secretary. he is always worried about doing whats legal.
however, technically, we had no right to invade Iraq, to writetap american citizens, to set up secret prisons and torture POWs. why couldnt we bend the rules in this case? i think thats where she might have been coming from.
there are massive hordes of credit default swaps against US debt out there right now.
credit default swaps are almost completely secret. nobody knows how many are out there. there could be a hundred billion, there could be 10 trillion.
if you allow the US debt to default, it will make the Russian and Asian defaults of 1997/1998 look like a kids birthday party.
When Lehman went under, the money market funds started to crash, and then the credit system started to crash. Yes, McDonalds was going to have problems meeting payroll.
the US government is like tens of thousands of Lehman Brothers, not in its operation but in the tentacles it has to every other financial product and financial system on the planet. credit default swaps against US debt are just the tip of the iceberg - and they are completely secret. we have no idea how many other products and institutions of the 'shadow banking system' are linked to US debt, or what the repercussions would be.
we would see currency devaluation on a massive scale. we could see entire companies disappear overnight. we could see entire countries central reserves emptied, overnight.
it could make the AIG bailout look like a child asking for 5 cents for a gumball.
it would be like taking a cigarette lighter and throwing it into a fireworks factory.
----
some people want to see the factory blow up. yes, it would be awesome, and serve the factory owners right for running such a sweatshop. but it is completely irresponsible to allow it to happen.
the only safe way to take apart the fireworks factory is brick by brick, slowly, over time. not in a massive explosion that will destroy an entire quadrant of the city.
it comes from people being forced out of rural areas and into concentrated centers because of politics, economics, warfare, and corruption.
why are there millions in refugee camps in africa? because of wars, often funded by corrupt 'developed' nations to extract natural resources and prop up dictators. and they use weapons from the 'developed' nations to do it. people used to be spread out in rural areas - then like in sudan, militias go around committing genocide and the people flee to centralized population centers.
why is england full of immigrants? because the corrupt nature of countries like Iran or Pakistan doesnt allow people to escape poverty there, so they flee.
why are american cities full of central and south american immigrants? because mexico and south america have too much violence and not enough jobs. why? because they are corrupt societies that have not enough opportunity for honest work, and too much opportunity for corruption and crime.
why are rural areas of america emptying of people? there are no jobs, and people cannot afford to live there. they move to cities.
none of these migrations are caused by 'too many people', they are caused by social and political choices made by the leaders of society - - to allow corruption, to allow things that prevent people from living in rural areas, etc etc etc.
nobody forced you to use contraception, and if you had an 'accident', no government agent would force your wife to have an abortion.
you naturally chose it because you are a knowledgable person. the answer then is to provide more people with opportunities to become knowledgable and educated, not to knock their doors down and arrest them for fucking.
shrug.
did you see american idol last night?
they have profoundly disrupted the balance between male and female, leading to social unrest and massive mental health problems.
the idea that there is insufficient land is bogus as long as we are paying farmers to not grow things. there is plenty of food, the problem is distribution and marketing. we throw away food every day from supermarkets and restaurants, and people go to jail if they try to dig in the trash for food to eat. there is no food shortage, there is a shortage of low-priced food, and that has nothing to do with the supply of land (except maybe as it relates to ethanol). it has to do with things like the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index Fund and other investment banks and hedge funds attempts to manipulate food markets for profit . . . something that is very old, a good 20th century example being the potato market and NYMEX.
the problem with 'population control' is that someone has to decide what 'sort of people' are 'better' - nobody who thinks they know the answer to that should ever be in any position of power because it is amongst the basest, most primitive and violent impulses of the human species, to 'wipe out the other clan'.
see also. eugenics. t4. genetic health courts. etc etc.
on the dark side of this planet. this ugly, misbegotten planet. another hole in space to make, another sphere full of screaming, dying blobs of flesh.
i try not to think about it, but it gets to you after a while. last week lenni went crazy. he started writing on the wall with his blood and his shit mixed together... sort of like an 'outline font'. he wrote something about the 'last coming of the jesus lizard'. i couldnt read the rest of it. they closed off his bunker and hosed it down so nobody was really sure what happened to him, exactly. someone said they heard a shot, a loud shot in the night. but i dont think that was like lenni. lenni was more into knots and ropes. although i guess a plasma burst would be a hell of a lot faster and more painless.
i wonder what he was thinking, those last seconds before he pulled the trigger. probably nothing. thats what this job does to you. a hundred years of extermination. a hundred years of terror. a hundred years of making way for civilization - a civilization that you will never get to take part in. sure, maybe if you retire, but how many make it that far? out of my first squad class, there are only 3 left. 3 out of 50. all of the rest are dead or insane.
so why do i keep doing it, you ask? and who are you, i wonder? im writing this in a secret code in an ancient form of communication, called 'paper'. i picked it up on beta star seven stroke 6, alpha quadrant. some dead rat had a whole room full of the stuff, and a long cylindrical object that you use to scratch with onto the surface. it leaves an impression and a marking. its kind of fun once you get the hang of it really.
but im just avoiding your first question. why keep doing it? this shit hole fuck up of a job? no life, no future, no responsibilities, no nothing. actually thats kind of the good part. the bad part, the nightmares, the voices, the memories. the emptiness. you fill it up. the ship has an endless supply of drugs, of joues, of fake anthropods from every species upon which you simulate procreation. they even got simulated babies and families if you want it. dont know why you would, sick fuckers who do that shit are the ones you have to watch out for. they are the ones that really got nuts - they dont just off themselves in the privacy of their own cube hole. no. they take out an entire squad with them. they rain down parts onto whatever shit hole we are invading, like some kind of kid throwing candy from a pinata. they laugh, like corricks, that guy, he just started laughing and killing everyone. friend, enemy, commander, didn't matter. base lost 4 of its top ribbons, each with 200 years planet clearing experience... wives, pensions, families.
they tell us we arent supposed to mention his name. they killed a guy last week for doing it. actually it wasnt 'they', it was this shit hard sergeant named dooley. he's about as fucked up as lenni was, but dooley would never off himself. he loves pain too much - seeing other people in pain. he keeps them like that for weeks, keeping them barely alive so he can listen to them scream. then he offs them right as he ejaculates. dont ask me how i know this.
i would like to chop his dick off, though. just to see the look on his face. and then what? id become like him i guess. whatever. thats just a way to stay alive - either go crazy and off yourself, or go crazy and off everyone else. where is the middle ground here? go crazy and write into a little secret book, that nobody can find. hide it under your sleeper, train yourself to pass the mind-scanning test they do every week. become expert at logic twists and bending diagrams, to explain that 'no, you have no contraband information on your person or in your thoughts' because, well, technically, they dont even know that 'paper' exists... and so how can it be contraband?
anyways. another mission up. some shit fuck ass planet called 'earth'. it looks blue with smears of brown all over it, some green. and white all over the place. the inhabitants are like little blood pustules, stubby
google image search 'china pollution' or 'china ewaste'
thats where all our 'green recycling programs' dump our e-trash
if they can breathe it, surely we can!
for the warning!
i expect any article, let alone book, on wiretapping and security to at least mention the NSA.
The "hysteria and hyperbole and the threat of an Orwellian society" is based on facts, the facts of the 20th century.
The Nazi state was built upon mass surveillance, as was the Soviet, with the NKVD (KGB, Cheka, etc).
The biggest threat to security has never been rogue terrorists, it has been state actors destroying their own citizenry.
Surveillance is one of their primary tools. This is not 'lunacy' and it is not 'paranoia'. It is fact-based analysis of actual, real security threats.
Fascism - 60 million dead in WWII, untold others.
Communism - countless tens of millions from starvation and war (China, Soviet Union, Cambodia, etc)
Terrorism - perhaps 50,000, probably much less.
Statistically, overweilding state power is something like 1000 times more deadly, just in the last century, than any "terrorists" or other groups that the author appears to want to lump in with that bizarre vague phrase "our enemies". Who, exactly, is "Our", and who exactly, are "enemies"?
A few weeks ago, an "enemy" who was an "insider leaker of sensitive information" turned out to be innocent when just about the entire internet objected to his being called an 'enemy' , instead finding him to be a whistleblower. He blew the whistle on illegality and massive money wasting at the NSA. Where is his story in this academic tsunami of abstract theory? Where is reality? Where are the facts?
virtually every case of court precedent that involves the first amendment. . .
the vast body of Freedom of Information Act cases....
the FOIA itself, which was caused to exist, by lawyers...
the public defenders who fight for the rights of whistleblowers?
i kind of like lawyers.
if i am giving contributions to some obscure non-profit project on github i think it would be nice to have some official-ness to the copyright status of my patches... right now its kind of in limbo yes?