The humor in this comment is so subtle that I'm trying to figure out if it's intentional or unintentional.
Re:Keep hating Microsoft while Apple goes unchecke
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
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· Score: 1
First of all, who do you mean by "we" exactly. I don't let Apple "get away" with anything because, well, how the heck could I stop them. I don't buy their stuff anymore, but that's not exactly going to bother them that much.
Second of all - Microsoft was a big bad bogeyman mostly because they had the corporate desktop market and the home personal computer market under their thumbs. That made for a lot of people who were worried about Microsoft's actions and eventually led to an anti-trust suit. Apple, OTOH, is generally a consumer electronics company at this point and their control affects people the same way that Sony's control over the Playstation or Nintendo's control over the Wii affects them. Sure there are some companies affected - mostly software development companies and media conglomerates - but there aren't the large financial institutions, military, industrial and other companies who were concerned about Microsoft's monopoly practices. As long as Apple sticks to the consumer electronics market and doesn't make their products mission critical to companies with more money, clout and leverage than they have, they'll be fine. Apple's big misstep could come if they start looking like they could become a monopoly over media distribution - if they overstep in that direction the media companies will come down on them like a ton of bricks because they won't want Apple to have so much control over their business. As long as they don't go that far, they'll be fine.
I fully expect Google to get smacked down long before Apple does. Google is becoming far too important to far too many parts of the economy, and there's going to be a lot of corporate pressure to keep Google in check over the next decade.
Re:Am I the only one...
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Apple To Buy ARM?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Jobs has, at least since he shoved Woz off to the side, been about one thing - total vertical control of Apple's platforms.
Apple has the money and the size now that they've been expanding that vertical control upward deeper into the application level of their machines via their appstore. It's not surprising to me at all that they would want to expand that vertical control down as well into controlling more and more of the hardware. That strikes me as a very Jobs/Apple thing to do.
...because murdering babies (sorry late-term fetuses) is clearly equivalent to drawing a cartoon of a guy in a bear suit and just as likely to trigger a violent response from extremest religious activists.
If you don't understand the equivalence, you might just be a religious extremist.
Your religion might say killing a doctor who performs abortions is acceptable. Their religion might say killing a cartoonist who mocks their prophet is acceptable. In both cases you're saying murder is acceptable because your religion says so. That's pretty much textbook religious extremist.
No, he's saying that if you have an immersive game without points or rules, in his mind it ceases to have the the characteristics that make it a "game" and becomes something that is not-a-game and could perhaps then be considered art. An interactive play where one actor is a human player and the rest are scripted AI could be art in his mind, but if the interactive play has a scoring mechanism that ranks the human player based on how well they perform then it ceases to be worthy of the label of "art" and becomes "game" again.
This is, in my mind, a silly argument too. But not as silly as the one I think you've read into it.
...some kind of tipping point for corporate bullshit? A point when the most zealous of fanboys (or fangirls) realises that their beloved corporate overlords are just too evil, stupid or evil and stupid to be allowed anyone's money anymore?
I live in hope.
No. People love to take sides and root for favorite teams and have their personal choices validated. That's what's at the root of "my giant corporation can beat up your giant corporation" disputes. And once fans pick a team they generally stick with that team until they are personally affected by the stupid/evil/ugly decisions made by the "team owners".
As for this - Apple's policy is douche-tastic. Anyone who can step outside their bubble of Apple-love or Apple-hate and view it objectively can see that whether they can legally do this or not, the actual decision to pre-emptively ban any app that "ridicules public figures" is being a douche. Being able to mock our leaders is actually one of the great things about America, and the fact that Apple feels that such freedom is a threat to their consumer electronics device that is being touted as the great savior platform for newspapers and magazines is irritating at best. How the hell does this jibe with their desire to publish ebooks and whatnot for this device? Will owners only be able to buy books that don't "ridicule public figures"? Or are they going to just arbitrarily decide that some apps are okay and others aren't and you're at their whims about where the "edge" is?
And this policy is likely a direct result of their decision to have a top-down, totally controlled app store model. That makes Apple potentially liable in a lawsuit for the apps they sell. If they had an open model this wouldn't be a problem - people could self publish and take the legal onus on themselves for their own words. But Apple has chosen to act as a censor for their device - what impact that has down the road will be seen.
In a battle between two vendors, one with a closed source, insecurt framework and the other with a closed platform, which side do I root for?
Refuse to play the game. Playing "My Giant Corporation Can Beat Up Your Giant Corporation" may be a common pastime on the Internet, but that doesn't make it anything other than stupid.
If you own stock in Adobe, root for Adobe. If you own stock in Apple, root for Apple. If you own stock in both, ask your financial adviser if he has any advice on the matter. Otherwise what the hell do you care? They're corporations. It's not like they care what you think about it. And neither one has your best interests at heart so no matter which one "wins" they're going to do something that pisses you off or makes your life difficult eventually anyway.
How come when Apple does something people take notice. But when a hundred others go through more traditional channels such as trade shows people who think they are industry insiders don't have a clue?
Such is the magic of Apple - Steve Jobs knows how to whet an appetite. You don't announce your product at a generic trade show and hope that the tech press picks it up, you let rumors grow for months - sometimes years - allowing the momentum behind your product to build a life of its own. Then you have the big reveal and everyone in the tech media (and often, the mainstream media) picks up on it and talks about it.
Jobs is an excellent showman - he knows how to get people excited about products. He knows how to work the press and work public opinion to his advantage. In another universe he might have been a very successful politician (the skillset is comparable for the best pols), but in this one he can take a 10-year-old product (tablets) slip some minor improvements into it (multitouch) and sell it as revolutionary. All the while convincing customers and developers both that a sales model that involves Apple taking a cut of everything they buy/produce is in their best interest.
He's a phenomenal businessman. I may not like his vision of the world, but he's certainly good at what he does.
A conference call with Kotick was the inspiration for the penny arcade comic - a different conference call than the one Ars talked about in your link. So apparently he really likes that word "exploited".
Same reason you pay more to go in the evening than in the morning - perceived value. As long as there are enough people who think that the 60% markup on 3d vs. 2d is worth it to them, the theaters will charge the markup. When enough people decide that it isn't worth it, ticket prices will either start to drop off or theaters will stop doing the 3d altogether.
If that's the way things are going, I predict the death of 3D.
3d is going to live or die by the home theater, not by the movie theater. If TV manufacturers can convince people that they want 3d tv in their homes, 3d will thrive no matter what happens in the theater market. If they can't, 3d will idle for a while until someone comes up with a 3d technology people want in their homes. I don't know how popular 3d TV will be (I can't see shelling out the money for it myself, but I've long come to terms with the fact that I'm not in many people's "demographic target"), but that's where success will be measured - long term sales to home viewers, not opening weekend ticket sales.
Of course, if it were truly modeled after our tax code, that 47% wouldn't get nearly as much use out of it as the other 53% either. Rich people have more need for police than poor folks do. Folks who can afford to buy a car have more need for roads. The military is much more useful to people who actually own resources that an invasion force might want. And that's before getting into quality of life issues.
It is all about social networking now. You own press has been saying this. I am doing it now. Jump on in - you have brilliant people in your IT departments, you have brilliant people in your Business Development units... use them. Build something special. Build the nest generation of news. God knows you have the money to do it - an in doing it you'll help your grandkids grandkids be as wealthy as you are.
Amusingly enough, Murdoch's media empire includes MySpace. Which could have been the social media giant if it weren't so freaking horrible.
Actually today she'd be able to answer back: "Kids don't read comics anymore - we're targeting this at the 30-something adult male demographic" and be dead-on.
If that's what he wanted he could set up his sites to do that. It actually wouldn't be that hard to do.
What he wants is for Google to give him money to "syndicate" his content. That's what this is about. He's still on old-media model mode and doesn't get that the rug was pulled out from under that model a decade ago. Google is probably one of the few things keeping a steady stream of eyeballs pointing at his lesser-known rags (though the WSJ, the Times and FOX News would probably do okay without Google, they probably do slightly better with Google than they would without it).
I guess that depends on your point of view. You say "MS wont perform an act because it is evil". That may be true. However I still think that MS is inherently evil because their objective is to satisfy their greed without any regards for consequences for others. This in itself is evil (particularly the "without any regards" part), not just the actions that result from that paradigm.
You do realize that you've just condemned every single corporation in the US as evil, right? By the metric you lay out, every corporation is inherently evil because their stated purpose is to satisfy their greed without regard for the consequences for others. The only thing that keeps corporations from doing horrible things are competitors taking advantage of their missteps and regulations put in place to stop them from doing horrible things - if it's not against the law they can actually be sued by their shareholders for NOT taking actions that are legal and profitable but ethically dubious.
I'm not saying that corporations are evil - I think corporations are amoral and that our laws are structured in such a way that often promotes bad behavior. That's all that happened at Microsoft (and AT&T, and IBM, and just about any historic monopoly you can think of) - they set out to do what they were supposed to do as a corporation - maximize profits - and they push the law as far as they think they can to do it. Microsoft is no more or less evil than any other corporation in the US - they just had greater opportunity for bad behavior than a lot of others because of their runaway success. (And that's the position that Apple is in now as well - now that they're successful they have a lot of opportunity for bad behavior. Count on them using it to maximize profits because that's what they're supposed to be doing. The only real way to counteract bad behavior is either through competition or, if that fails, regulation - there's really no other way to do it given how corporations are structured).
Yes, but Google has told him they will honor the robots.txt file. If he doesn't want them searching his site, he can tell them to sod off and they'll merrily go on their way ignoring every precious bit of content on his site.
The problem is that he wants them to search his site - he wants those links to show up in Google News and have the traffic directed to his websites. But he wants Google to pay him for the privilege of providing that traffic to him. To anyone who has an understanding of how the Internet works this sounds like an utterly ludicrous idea - the search engine is providing a valuable service for a content provider by getting eyeballs over to the site. But Murdoch works in the pre-Internet mindset. As far as he's concerned, Google is a copyright violator that is illegally syndicating his content without his permission. He's not seeing it as free advertising (which essentially it is), he's seeing it as Google making money off of his precious, precious content and he wants his cut.
This has been the burr up Murdoch's ass for well over a decade now - he wants the Internet to work like a syndication model and he refuses to understand that the model he wants would not only be completely unprofitable to him, it would make the Internet almost unusable at this point.
nor is there (far as I am aware) any professional Scrabble scene so it is not like there is any great need for an official revision of the Scrabble rules.
Don't know what you mean by "professional Scrabble scene" but there are a good number of Scrabble tournaments around the world. I doubt the folks in the Scrabble tournaments play Scrabble as their only job, but there are cash prizes.
I don't know what the tournaments will do with this rule. My guess is that they will ditch it - it would be too hard to adjudicate in a tournament setting, I'd think.
The title of the Slashdot summary is unsurprisingly misleading and inflammatory. Reading TFA it doesn't suggest that money going into compliance is "wasted" - it suggests that companies aren't spending enough money to protect their own IP from corporate thieves.
IOW - the article suggests that companies are spending the same amount of money to protect so-called "custodial" data (i.e. information they've collected about their employees and customers that are protected by HIPAA and other statutes) and their own IP. But the financial losses from losing their own IP are substantially higher than the losses they'll incur through leakage of "custodial" data, so they actually should be spending more money protecting custodial data than they spend on protecting custodial data.
The underlying assumption in the article is that, unless you've implemented your compliance stupidly, you actually can't fix this disparity by spending less money. You can't cut your budget on compliance because it's required by statute. So instead you should be spending more money on protecting IP assets so that the ratios more realistically reflect the importance of the data being protected. Money that Microsoft and RSA, the funders of the study, are happy to take to help you implement solutions to protect your oh-so-valuable IP assets.
As a predictor, stuff like twitter or facebook or blogs can tell you what might be popular. Twitter is particularly a good indicator because with a few exceptions people use it as if it was a private conversation among small groups of friends even though in reality they're broadcasting to the entire world. That means you've got a good set of data from people in certain demographics (mostly people with extra time and money to spend on entertainment - exactly the demographic that movie marketers are looking for).
If you're looking for stock picks, data off of twitter is probably not a good bet. The same folks who are going to be able to tell you what movies are going to be popular this weekend (not necessarily good - just popular) are probably not going to be able to give an indication of what stocks are going to be going up this week.
OTOH, I suppose Twitter might be usable for a pump-and-dump scam. If you can figure out a way to get day traders twittering. But then, the yahoo finance message boards are already pretty good for pump-and-dump scams, and I'm not sure that twitter really provides anything new on that front.
Not his math, the math of the reviewer he's quoting. Which is quoted in TFA. Which was the point of his posting the line under the subject "Greatest Opening to a book review ever:".
Slashdot Mirror
You pay a hundred bucks a month for cable?
Just for cable? Without internet, or phone or anything else?
Wow. I'm glad I don't live in your market. I don't even pay that much with Internet service bundled in.
The humor in this comment is so subtle that I'm trying to figure out if it's intentional or unintentional.
First of all, who do you mean by "we" exactly. I don't let Apple "get away" with anything because, well, how the heck could I stop them. I don't buy their stuff anymore, but that's not exactly going to bother them that much.
Second of all - Microsoft was a big bad bogeyman mostly because they had the corporate desktop market and the home personal computer market under their thumbs. That made for a lot of people who were worried about Microsoft's actions and eventually led to an anti-trust suit. Apple, OTOH, is generally a consumer electronics company at this point and their control affects people the same way that Sony's control over the Playstation or Nintendo's control over the Wii affects them. Sure there are some companies affected - mostly software development companies and media conglomerates - but there aren't the large financial institutions, military, industrial and other companies who were concerned about Microsoft's monopoly practices. As long as Apple sticks to the consumer electronics market and doesn't make their products mission critical to companies with more money, clout and leverage than they have, they'll be fine. Apple's big misstep could come if they start looking like they could become a monopoly over media distribution - if they overstep in that direction the media companies will come down on them like a ton of bricks because they won't want Apple to have so much control over their business. As long as they don't go that far, they'll be fine.
I fully expect Google to get smacked down long before Apple does. Google is becoming far too important to far too many parts of the economy, and there's going to be a lot of corporate pressure to keep Google in check over the next decade.
Jobs has, at least since he shoved Woz off to the side, been about one thing - total vertical control of Apple's platforms.
Apple has the money and the size now that they've been expanding that vertical control upward deeper into the application level of their machines via their appstore. It's not surprising to me at all that they would want to expand that vertical control down as well into controlling more and more of the hardware. That strikes me as a very Jobs/Apple thing to do.
...because murdering babies (sorry late-term fetuses) is clearly equivalent to drawing a cartoon of a guy in a bear suit and just as likely to trigger a violent response from extremest religious activists.
If you don't understand the equivalence, you might just be a religious extremist.
Your religion might say killing a doctor who performs abortions is acceptable. Their religion might say killing a cartoonist who mocks their prophet is acceptable. In both cases you're saying murder is acceptable because your religion says so. That's pretty much textbook religious extremist.
Welcome to slashdot.
No, he's saying that if you have an immersive game without points or rules, in his mind it ceases to have the the characteristics that make it a "game" and becomes something that is not-a-game and could perhaps then be considered art. An interactive play where one actor is a human player and the rest are scripted AI could be art in his mind, but if the interactive play has a scoring mechanism that ranks the human player based on how well they perform then it ceases to be worthy of the label of "art" and becomes "game" again.
This is, in my mind, a silly argument too. But not as silly as the one I think you've read into it.
...some kind of tipping point for corporate bullshit? A point when the most zealous of fanboys (or fangirls) realises that their beloved corporate overlords are just too evil, stupid or evil and stupid to be allowed anyone's money anymore?
I live in hope.
No. People love to take sides and root for favorite teams and have their personal choices validated. That's what's at the root of "my giant corporation can beat up your giant corporation" disputes. And once fans pick a team they generally stick with that team until they are personally affected by the stupid/evil/ugly decisions made by the "team owners".
As for this - Apple's policy is douche-tastic. Anyone who can step outside their bubble of Apple-love or Apple-hate and view it objectively can see that whether they can legally do this or not, the actual decision to pre-emptively ban any app that "ridicules public figures" is being a douche. Being able to mock our leaders is actually one of the great things about America, and the fact that Apple feels that such freedom is a threat to their consumer electronics device that is being touted as the great savior platform for newspapers and magazines is irritating at best. How the hell does this jibe with their desire to publish ebooks and whatnot for this device? Will owners only be able to buy books that don't "ridicule public figures"? Or are they going to just arbitrarily decide that some apps are okay and others aren't and you're at their whims about where the "edge" is?
And this policy is likely a direct result of their decision to have a top-down, totally controlled app store model. That makes Apple potentially liable in a lawsuit for the apps they sell. If they had an open model this wouldn't be a problem - people could self publish and take the legal onus on themselves for their own words. But Apple has chosen to act as a censor for their device - what impact that has down the road will be seen.
In a battle between two vendors, one with a closed source, insecurt framework and the other with a closed platform, which side do I root for?
Refuse to play the game. Playing "My Giant Corporation Can Beat Up Your Giant Corporation" may be a common pastime on the Internet, but that doesn't make it anything other than stupid.
If you own stock in Adobe, root for Adobe. If you own stock in Apple, root for Apple. If you own stock in both, ask your financial adviser if he has any advice on the matter. Otherwise what the hell do you care? They're corporations. It's not like they care what you think about it. And neither one has your best interests at heart so no matter which one "wins" they're going to do something that pisses you off or makes your life difficult eventually anyway.
Sometimes in a democratic country it's easier to switch a government than it is to switch an ISP.
Take away people's cat videos and you might just see chaos in the streets...
Who does he owe the debt to?
How come when Apple does something people take notice. But when a hundred others go through more traditional channels such as trade shows people who think they are industry insiders don't have a clue?
Such is the magic of Apple - Steve Jobs knows how to whet an appetite. You don't announce your product at a generic trade show and hope that the tech press picks it up, you let rumors grow for months - sometimes years - allowing the momentum behind your product to build a life of its own. Then you have the big reveal and everyone in the tech media (and often, the mainstream media) picks up on it and talks about it.
Jobs is an excellent showman - he knows how to get people excited about products. He knows how to work the press and work public opinion to his advantage. In another universe he might have been a very successful politician (the skillset is comparable for the best pols), but in this one he can take a 10-year-old product (tablets) slip some minor improvements into it (multitouch) and sell it as revolutionary. All the while convincing customers and developers both that a sales model that involves Apple taking a cut of everything they buy/produce is in their best interest.
He's a phenomenal businessman. I may not like his vision of the world, but he's certainly good at what he does.
A conference call with Kotick was the inspiration for the penny arcade comic - a different conference call than the one Ars talked about in your link. So apparently he really likes that word "exploited".
so why do I have to pay 60% more for my ticket?
Same reason you pay more to go in the evening than in the morning - perceived value. As long as there are enough people who think that the 60% markup on 3d vs. 2d is worth it to them, the theaters will charge the markup. When enough people decide that it isn't worth it, ticket prices will either start to drop off or theaters will stop doing the 3d altogether.
If that's the way things are going, I predict the death of 3D.
3d is going to live or die by the home theater, not by the movie theater. If TV manufacturers can convince people that they want 3d tv in their homes, 3d will thrive no matter what happens in the theater market. If they can't, 3d will idle for a while until someone comes up with a 3d technology people want in their homes. I don't know how popular 3d TV will be (I can't see shelling out the money for it myself, but I've long come to terms with the fact that I'm not in many people's "demographic target"), but that's where success will be measured - long term sales to home viewers, not opening weekend ticket sales.
Of course, if it were truly modeled after our tax code, that 47% wouldn't get nearly as much use out of it as the other 53% either. Rich people have more need for police than poor folks do. Folks who can afford to buy a car have more need for roads. The military is much more useful to people who actually own resources that an invasion force might want. And that's before getting into quality of life issues.
It is all about social networking now. You own press has been saying this. I am doing it now. Jump on in - you have brilliant people in your IT departments, you have brilliant people in your Business Development units... use them. Build something special. Build the nest generation of news. God knows you have the money to do it - an in doing it you'll help your grandkids grandkids be as wealthy as you are.
Amusingly enough, Murdoch's media empire includes MySpace. Which could have been the social media giant if it weren't so freaking horrible.
Actually today she'd be able to answer back: "Kids don't read comics anymore - we're targeting this at the 30-something adult male demographic" and be dead-on.
If that's what he wanted he could set up his sites to do that. It actually wouldn't be that hard to do.
What he wants is for Google to give him money to "syndicate" his content. That's what this is about. He's still on old-media model mode and doesn't get that the rug was pulled out from under that model a decade ago. Google is probably one of the few things keeping a steady stream of eyeballs pointing at his lesser-known rags (though the WSJ, the Times and FOX News would probably do okay without Google, they probably do slightly better with Google than they would without it).
I guess that depends on your point of view. You say "MS wont perform an act because it is evil". That may be true. However I still think that MS is inherently evil because their objective is to satisfy their greed without any regards for consequences for others. This in itself is evil (particularly the "without any regards" part), not just the actions that result from that paradigm.
You do realize that you've just condemned every single corporation in the US as evil, right? By the metric you lay out, every corporation is inherently evil because their stated purpose is to satisfy their greed without regard for the consequences for others. The only thing that keeps corporations from doing horrible things are competitors taking advantage of their missteps and regulations put in place to stop them from doing horrible things - if it's not against the law they can actually be sued by their shareholders for NOT taking actions that are legal and profitable but ethically dubious.
I'm not saying that corporations are evil - I think corporations are amoral and that our laws are structured in such a way that often promotes bad behavior. That's all that happened at Microsoft (and AT&T, and IBM, and just about any historic monopoly you can think of) - they set out to do what they were supposed to do as a corporation - maximize profits - and they push the law as far as they think they can to do it. Microsoft is no more or less evil than any other corporation in the US - they just had greater opportunity for bad behavior than a lot of others because of their runaway success. (And that's the position that Apple is in now as well - now that they're successful they have a lot of opportunity for bad behavior. Count on them using it to maximize profits because that's what they're supposed to be doing. The only real way to counteract bad behavior is either through competition or, if that fails, regulation - there's really no other way to do it given how corporations are structured).
Yes, but Google has told him they will honor the robots.txt file. If he doesn't want them searching his site, he can tell them to sod off and they'll merrily go on their way ignoring every precious bit of content on his site.
The problem is that he wants them to search his site - he wants those links to show up in Google News and have the traffic directed to his websites. But he wants Google to pay him for the privilege of providing that traffic to him. To anyone who has an understanding of how the Internet works this sounds like an utterly ludicrous idea - the search engine is providing a valuable service for a content provider by getting eyeballs over to the site. But Murdoch works in the pre-Internet mindset. As far as he's concerned, Google is a copyright violator that is illegally syndicating his content without his permission. He's not seeing it as free advertising (which essentially it is), he's seeing it as Google making money off of his precious, precious content and he wants his cut.
This has been the burr up Murdoch's ass for well over a decade now - he wants the Internet to work like a syndication model and he refuses to understand that the model he wants would not only be completely unprofitable to him, it would make the Internet almost unusable at this point.
Microsoft has prior art on the big ass table computing concept.
nor is there (far as I am aware) any professional Scrabble scene so it is not like there is any great need for an official revision of the Scrabble rules.
Don't know what you mean by "professional Scrabble scene" but there are a good number of Scrabble tournaments around the world. I doubt the folks in the Scrabble tournaments play Scrabble as their only job, but there are cash prizes.
I don't know what the tournaments will do with this rule. My guess is that they will ditch it - it would be too hard to adjudicate in a tournament setting, I'd think.
The title of the Slashdot summary is unsurprisingly misleading and inflammatory. Reading TFA it doesn't suggest that money going into compliance is "wasted" - it suggests that companies aren't spending enough money to protect their own IP from corporate thieves.
IOW - the article suggests that companies are spending the same amount of money to protect so-called "custodial" data (i.e. information they've collected about their employees and customers that are protected by HIPAA and other statutes) and their own IP. But the financial losses from losing their own IP are substantially higher than the losses they'll incur through leakage of "custodial" data, so they actually should be spending more money protecting custodial data than they spend on protecting custodial data.
The underlying assumption in the article is that, unless you've implemented your compliance stupidly, you actually can't fix this disparity by spending less money. You can't cut your budget on compliance because it's required by statute. So instead you should be spending more money on protecting IP assets so that the ratios more realistically reflect the importance of the data being protected. Money that Microsoft and RSA, the funders of the study, are happy to take to help you implement solutions to protect your oh-so-valuable IP assets.
As a predictor, stuff like twitter or facebook or blogs can tell you what might be popular. Twitter is particularly a good indicator because with a few exceptions people use it as if it was a private conversation among small groups of friends even though in reality they're broadcasting to the entire world. That means you've got a good set of data from people in certain demographics (mostly people with extra time and money to spend on entertainment - exactly the demographic that movie marketers are looking for).
If you're looking for stock picks, data off of twitter is probably not a good bet. The same folks who are going to be able to tell you what movies are going to be popular this weekend (not necessarily good - just popular) are probably not going to be able to give an indication of what stocks are going to be going up this week.
OTOH, I suppose Twitter might be usable for a pump-and-dump scam. If you can figure out a way to get day traders twittering. But then, the yahoo finance message boards are already pretty good for pump-and-dump scams, and I'm not sure that twitter really provides anything new on that front.
Not his math, the math of the reviewer he's quoting. Which is quoted in TFA. Which was the point of his posting the line under the subject "Greatest Opening to a book review ever:".