Well, this will mean the Americans will put the Netherlands on the "Priority Watch List".
Which is fine, since it's mostly a government talking piece put together by industry lobbying groups.
According to Michael Geist, we ignore it too because it's drivel:
In regard to the watch list, Canada does not recognize the 301 watch list process. It basically lacks reliable and objective analysis. It's driven entirely by U.S. industry. We have repeatedly raised this issue of the lack of objective analysis in the 301 watch list process with our U.S. counterparts.
Me, I think it's time more countries stood up and said they don't want to be controlled by the US content industry and lobby groups.
Saying you don't want to risk a free and open internet is a good thing. Saying you're not willing to be bound by what American corporations want (which is the whole purpose of this stupid Name and Shame watch list) is also a good thing.
This whole stupid treaty is hypocrisy -- censorship is bad, unless you're doing it because we said so, mostly to protect corporate profits.
There's nothing patriotic, altruistic, laudable, or beneficial about screwing up legitimate national intelligence projects.
Why should they care about 'national intelligence' as it pertains to other countries? They have no duty to protect whoever created this. Hell, until they've done the analysis, they don't even know who the hell it is.
If you have code out there that's an attack vector, it's a vulnerability for everyone. If someone repurposed the attack, it's something which can be exploited.
Do you think people should have laid low on the topic of the Sony rootkit on CDs because, clearly they were justified?
I don't buy your argument -- security researchers are looking for vulnerabilities we could all be subject to.
National intelligence be damned... how the hell are you supposed to know what is being targeted and by whom? Did China write this? The US? Russia? Tuvalu?
That's like saying people should stop worrying if the police are breaking laws because they're doing it for our own good. Then ends don't always justify the means.
Yeah, I got that part, but if (as written) they have "an unwritten and unspoken agreement" implies there was, well, an agreement.
What you're describing is what was in my last sentence where I said "it's possible they've all independently decided to leave prices high until the other guys drop them"... which I would agree isn't collusion. In fact, I said that.
I believe you're either missing what I said, or somehow agreeing and disagreeing with it at the same time.
When there are only two or three competitors in a market, actual collusion is no longer necessary. They simply have an unwritten and unspoken agreement to keep prices where they are
Ummm... isn't that what collusion means??
If they have any form of agreement to keep the prices high, I kind of thought that was, by definition, collusion.
Now, it's possible they've all independently decided to leave prices high until the other guys drop them (which might be what you were getting at), but then there's not "agreement", and therefore no collusion.
Ummm. Asking a question here. What does the Patriot Act have to do with anything?
The difference being you'd need to go to court to get a warrant, and I believe there would be a legal opportunity to be notified of this. If Canadian law enforcement accessed your data, you could legally know about it.
The Patriot Act basically says they can demand it, with very little legal support, and it is against the law to tell someone that their data has been accessed from your servers under this request.
So, it comes down to the US having granted themselves access to any and all data from a US owned company or US hosted server... and made it illegal to disclose that access has happened.
If that data access comes under the guise of secrecy and not going through the normal courts, you'll never know it happened.
As I said, those provisions of the Patriot Act give access that concerns a lot of people... see here.
So, based on what I've read, and what I've been told by corporate policies... for anybody who isn't in the US, America and American owned companies are completely untrustworthy since the law reads like it bypasses local laws when it comes to data security and privacy.
Now, for a bit of balance the other way, I see that people are starting to say the Patriot Act isn't so intrusive and this is all blown out of proportion.
But, until I see company and legal policies changing here in Canada, I will continue to treat data being put into a US server as a stupid idea, and I will continue to treat those entities as hostile and not trustworthy.
Since I'm not a lawyer, and I don't have anything to gain by suddenly trusting these entities, if I stick with this, I'm in compliance with company policy. I'll just err on the side of caution -- not trusting the US government is just a bonus at this point.
Just put up your truecrypt file and you get all the convenience and almost none of the worry
From a legal perspective, I will opt to not use the cloud for work purposes. They can't crack the encryption if they don't have the files in the first place.
In theory what you propose would probably work... in practice, it's only theory.:-P
I'll stick with old fashioned access-based security. especially since it would be me who would take the risk for saying "oh, well this should work". Not using the cloud is less effort than trying to make it secure.
we should also recognize that this is self-serving to IBM because it sells IT security consulting services
Maybe yes, maybe no.
But the company I work for has banned DropBox and other things for some time. The problem with "the cloud" is you really don't know where your data goes, and you can't really be guaranteed of who might be accessing it.
So there's definitely a perception that unless you're dropping in strongly encrypted files, it's no longer secure. So depending on what it is, something like DropBox is potentially a bad idea.
I'll use DropBox to move around stuff that isn't sensitive, but anything proprietary or confidential, I just move it via another mechanism.
Also, since I do some occasional work for the Canadian government, I couldn't use DropBox or anything which might end up on a US server (so not even gmail)... because under the Patriot Act, we have no guarantee that this data wouldn't become visible to American law enforcement. Which means I could be running afoul of Canadian privacy laws -- so by policy any service ran by an US company, or in the cloud, is just something I can't use for work purposes.
Sadly, this is no different that the situation in which companies like Microsoft can either be in compliance with EU data laws, or in compliance with US Patriot Act -- but not both. From a professional perspective, the US has made themselves and many of their corporations untrusted parties -- I just assume that since the US has given themselves legal rights to snoop without disclosure, they do. So it's just easier to treat them as a hostile entity who isn't trustworthy. And, considering that EU financial and air passenger data is handed to the US, I find it hard to go against that stance.
From a legal perspective, once something hits the cloud, you lose a lot of safeguards and access controls to it unless you implement them yourself.
In many cases, what IBM is doing is just sound business.
So, how have the big traditional space contractors like the Rockwell, Boeing, Lockheed, etc., of old, and now United Space Alliance and United Launch Alliance not delivered on their contracts?
It's not that they didn't (eventually) deliver. It's that those were done on a cost + basis of if we keep throwing money at it, eventually we'll get it done.
I believe SpaceX is working under a different model. NASA has said "if you can achieve this, we'll pay you $x for each of this many trips". So the costing is fixed up front. Yeah, here:
The company has a five-year, $1.5 billion contract to make 12 more deliveries.
So SpaceX did their own development up front and are then selling the lift services for a fixed cost. Hell, I think that works out cheaper per flight that the shuttle was. And it sounds like they've created a more overall usable platform.
Someone like Boeing will spend a decade building it with you, spend a large amount of money, probably have cost overruns. They'll give you something, and it will probably be cool, but you don't really know what it's going to cost you.
SpaceX has just become the longest haul trucking company around.;-)
The Internet already made this point moot, friend.
Yes, because we all know you can believe everything on the internet.
Seriously, look at Wikipedia and loads of other things which get petty little squabbles about what is "true" and people spinning it to make their own point.
Good, solid, reliable peer-reviewed stuff (and I mean qualified peers, not random people on the internet) is much harder to achieve than wikipedia.
Think of how many "think tanks" put out position papers on behalf of whoever is paying for them -- much of that would utterly fail in a peer-reviewed context, but they get put out there to say "see, our opinion on science is just as valid as these guys". Joe Average has no idea this is just a tactic to muddy the waters -- it sounds awfully science-y to him.
I think the internet has done the opposite of making peer-reviewed journals moot. Hell, we keep hearing how much of science is absolutely unbelievable as the authors fail to use any meaningful scientific rigor.
Not too smart, the best the regional Mensa does I believe are a few brunches. That doesn't seem all that entertaining.
Not to slag Mensa too badly here, but the few people I've met who are Mensa members have made me go "if it's a club full of people like you, I'm not really interested".
Mensa is a group that self selects to get together and wallow in how smart they are. It just may not be everybody's cup of tea. There's a perception that it might be a bunch of insufferable boors who like to feel smug together.
You just need to branch out and find more friends.
Or, you need to branch out and engage in the kinds of things other people like to do.
It's not uncommon for my friends to get together at someone's house for a potluck or a pool party and mill around the various conversations and groups that form.
You know, 40 or so people interacting and socializing, variously discussing work, kids, vacations, cars... that kind of stuff.
There is life outside of geek, and it can actually be quite rewarding.
What's amusing is that you started out complaining about DNS
I didn't start out by complaining about it... I merely said that your oh-so-useless statement of "Maybe you should try DNS sometime" wasn't really offering much insight as to why people still use IPV4 addresses.
and when we get to the bottom of your complaint, it turns out that it's all based on your ignorance of Windows authentication.
So, did you have anything useful or constructive to add? Or are you mostly just here to snark and act like a petulant dick?
Are you aware that you can run software on windows machines that is not provided by microsoft but by other vendors?
Why, no. Here I've been limiting myself to minesweeper, notepad, solitaire, and the calculator. Stupid me. I've been doing this computer thing wrong for the last 20 years.
But, seriously, what software would you suggest which will give me in-house DNS that my locked down work laptop will play nicely with? I can't change the workgroup/domain it's a member of. I've never had much luck in getting two Windows machines to handle file sharing without opening up perms fully since there's no mutual authentication that I can work out unless you have a domain controller.
As I said, some of the things I've tried to do it seems like Windows just refuses to do, so if you actually have some suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Not sure if DNS solves all of the problems though.
On my home network, I've got my own machines, and I have my work laptop. Since my work laptop isn't allowed to join my "home" workgroup, there is no DNS which will work between by laptop and my machine. I can't change that part of my network config either.
The only way to do file/printer sharing is by IP address. Possibly a limitation of Windows that doesn't allow you to do any 'real' networking between machines unless you buy the Enterprise Super Happy Fun edition... clearly my Vista Home Ultimate edition isn't capable of doing this.
I'm not convinced that in all cases we have viable DNS which makes these things work... at least, in my experience Microsoft seems to have removed some functionality which would allow that to work. I'm not really looking to set up a domain controller.
For internal to my own network, I'm not sure what IPV6 offers *me* -- it's a handful of machines behind my firewall, and using IPV4 is far easier. I don't care what happens on the other side of my firewall, but internally I don't see what benefit IPV6 has to me as a home user.
And we are just a bunch of software consultants, not company insiders. How is anyone going to claim ignorance on this one?
Oh, but we're talking about two slightly different things.
You, and I, and loads of other people all independently predicted Facebook would slide, and that the IPO was way overvalued according to the fundamentals. That's one thing.
The fact that so many of us thought this was overvalued is irrelevant -- because if they'd played by the rules, and everyone had the same risk that would have been just a bad bet. But this wasn't a level playing field.
But, in this case the analysts (who by law are supposed to be somewhat independent) published numbers which more explicitly stated all of the above -- the problem is that people then bought the stock based on the numbers provided to the public, not the most recent ones.
Buying an over-hyped stock and losing money on it is one thing. Buying an over-hyped stock that the company itself and the analysts have provided lower numbers for, but which they didn't tell everybody about, is something entirely different.
This isn't about how many of us could see this train wreck coming -- this is about the legal obligation under SEC rules to provide a certain level of disclosure to everyone.
That didn't happen in this case -- which puts them into some very shaky legal territory. The big institutional investors got told one thing, and the rest of the world got told something else. That is illegal.
This reads more like they violated SEC guidelines by putting forth numbers which made their cash grab look better on paper, and when someone put forth more realistic numbers, those didn't get shared quite so readily. This is more like insider trading since they had an unfair advantage in the form of additional information.
The judge is a moron. The public has no interest in stupid ass IP lawsuits.
No, the judge is applying the law as it stands.
The claim is that patents are "in the public interest" and that somehow they makes the world a better place.
But if you look at the sheer tangled web of patent lawsuits which cover Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, Motorolla, Google, and I'm not even sure who else... I'm not convinced that patents help the 'public', or helps to spur innovation. They have the opposite effect.
You can say you don't care, but the fact of the matter is there's huge swaths of products and technologies you couldn't get into the market with because you'd violate a gazillion patents and unless you have a couple of billion in licensing fees, you'd get sued into oblivion.
I believe one of the patents in this whole mess is "scheduling an appointment from a mobile device"... which is almost exactly the same as "scheduling an appointment in real life", and nearly almost exactly similar to "scheduling an appointment with a computer".
But, some drooling idiot decided that something that is well known but with a mobile device is an "invention". And then we get patent stupidity like this. (I'm sure there's more to it than that, but some days it feels like it.)
The plaintiffs charge that the changes to the forecast by several underwriters of the IPO were only "selectively disclosed" to a small group of preferred investors and not to the investment community at large.
So, Wall Street got told one set of numbers, and everyone else got told another set.
There were two classes of buyers (it is claimed) -- those who were given the actual estimates, and the rest of us.
A report from well-known Wall Street watcher Henry Blodget, citing an unnamed source, posits that a Facebook executive was responsible for telling institutional investors, but not smaller investors, about the reduction in revenue estimates.
So, that would be illegal according to SEC rules.
If all of this information had been made public, and the people lost their money (like some of us expected they would), that would be one thing. But in this case, there was some material omissions.
That's illegal. (At least, if there actually were two different sets of numbers provided to investors.)
Facebook was overvalued, that's true. But it was likely even more overvalued than most were led to believe, which means the institutional investors had an unfair advantage in selling it off to the suckers -- they knew just how much more overvalued it really was. They got to short the stock for free basically.
As we used to say on the playground, "NO DO-OVERS!"
Except in this case, some of the analysts were revising down their numbers just before the IPO, and there is some suspicion that the institutional investors got told one thing, and the rest of the plebes got told something else.
Sorry, but that's a violation of SEC laws, and possibly fraud. This is a little more than caveat emptor, this is failing to live up to the legal responsibilities imposed by the SEC.
Yes, the stock seemed over-valued from the get go, but there was information that it was even worse than what had been disclosed publicly. That part is illegal.
This is one of those things that serves to reinforce my belief that much of the market is a Ponzi scheme, and that an IPO is a good way to fleece investors as the big guys take their cut and then get out of it.
up to and including their CEOs crawling on their knees weeding
I think if we had a couple of CEOs on their knees pleading we might start to see them stop being solely focused on this quarter and executive bonuses.
As long as they continue to pursue unlimited growth and profits without any regard for anybody else, I think we should be culling that herd a little.
Corporate greed is causing us all sorts of problems, but the people who believe Capitalism is the magic cure all keep bleating that's how it's supposed to work. Despite the fact that it's an unsustainable model.
Look at the bill of goods which was the Facebook IPO... the bankers and institutional investors skimmed off their chunk, and the rest of the market gets sold something which is overvalued.
ALSO: The interesting bit of this story is that France is no longer a sovereign nation.
Well, this isn't suddenly new... people have been making the observation that the unelected EU people can often override the governments of these nations.
France is now just a province of the EU
Well, since it looks like the EU might begin to tear itself apart as people discover that it doesn't seem to be working, it will be interesting to see what happens.
I'm of the opinion that the EU was doomed from the beginning and that this was fairly inevitable.
Well, the title of the actual article is "Microbots Made of Bubbles Have Engines Made of Lasers" which sounds even cooler to me.:-P
This reminds me of when IBM did something similar with a fancy electron microscope or something like that quite a while back.
Doing it with bubbles and lasers sounds totally cool, and makes me really want to see the first mechanical application of this. That's gotta get you something seriously cool, right?
My point was instead of acting like a douchebag, he could have simply explained his position.
Instead he went straight to being a dick... so he's not much better than an AC who trolls, and doesn't have enough presence for me to treat him otherwise.
I'm willing to concede I'm wrong. I'm not as willing to listen to some whiny prick who has barely posted anything if he's going to act like an asshole out of the gate.
And you continue jabbering about things you don't know anything about.
It's Slashdot, that's what we do.
In the mean time, you'll forgive me for not giving a shit if someone with a 7 digit ID and a posting history of all of 6 comments wants to impress us by waving his pecker around.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this will mean the Americans will put the Netherlands on the "Priority Watch List".
Which is fine, since it's mostly a government talking piece put together by industry lobbying groups.
According to Michael Geist, we ignore it too because it's drivel:
Me, I think it's time more countries stood up and said they don't want to be controlled by the US content industry and lobby groups.
Saying you don't want to risk a free and open internet is a good thing. Saying you're not willing to be bound by what American corporations want (which is the whole purpose of this stupid Name and Shame watch list) is also a good thing.
This whole stupid treaty is hypocrisy -- censorship is bad, unless you're doing it because we said so, mostly to protect corporate profits.
Why should they care about 'national intelligence' as it pertains to other countries? They have no duty to protect whoever created this. Hell, until they've done the analysis, they don't even know who the hell it is.
If you have code out there that's an attack vector, it's a vulnerability for everyone. If someone repurposed the attack, it's something which can be exploited.
Do you think people should have laid low on the topic of the Sony rootkit on CDs because, clearly they were justified?
I don't buy your argument -- security researchers are looking for vulnerabilities we could all be subject to.
National intelligence be damned ... how the hell are you supposed to know what is being targeted and by whom? Did China write this? The US? Russia? Tuvalu?
That's like saying people should stop worrying if the police are breaking laws because they're doing it for our own good. Then ends don't always justify the means.
Yeah, I got that part, but if (as written) they have "an unwritten and unspoken agreement" implies there was, well, an agreement.
What you're describing is what was in my last sentence where I said "it's possible they've all independently decided to leave prices high until the other guys drop them" ... which I would agree isn't collusion. In fact, I said that.
I believe you're either missing what I said, or somehow agreeing and disagreeing with it at the same time.
Ummm ... isn't that what collusion means??
If they have any form of agreement to keep the prices high, I kind of thought that was, by definition, collusion.
Now, it's possible they've all independently decided to leave prices high until the other guys drop them (which might be what you were getting at), but then there's not "agreement", and therefore no collusion.
The difference being you'd need to go to court to get a warrant, and I believe there would be a legal opportunity to be notified of this. If Canadian law enforcement accessed your data, you could legally know about it.
The Patriot Act basically says they can demand it, with very little legal support, and it is against the law to tell someone that their data has been accessed from your servers under this request.
So, it comes down to the US having granted themselves access to any and all data from a US owned company or US hosted server ... and made it illegal to disclose that access has happened.
If that data access comes under the guise of secrecy and not going through the normal courts, you'll never know it happened.
As I said, those provisions of the Patriot Act give access that concerns a lot of people ... see here.
So, based on what I've read, and what I've been told by corporate policies ... for anybody who isn't in the US, America and American owned companies are completely untrustworthy since the law reads like it bypasses local laws when it comes to data security and privacy.
Now, for a bit of balance the other way, I see that people are starting to say the Patriot Act isn't so intrusive and this is all blown out of proportion.
But, until I see company and legal policies changing here in Canada, I will continue to treat data being put into a US server as a stupid idea, and I will continue to treat those entities as hostile and not trustworthy.
Since I'm not a lawyer, and I don't have anything to gain by suddenly trusting these entities, if I stick with this, I'm in compliance with company policy. I'll just err on the side of caution -- not trusting the US government is just a bonus at this point.
From a legal perspective, I will opt to not use the cloud for work purposes. They can't crack the encryption if they don't have the files in the first place.
In theory what you propose would probably work ... in practice, it's only theory. :-P
I'll stick with old fashioned access-based security. especially since it would be me who would take the risk for saying "oh, well this should work". Not using the cloud is less effort than trying to make it secure.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
But the company I work for has banned DropBox and other things for some time. The problem with "the cloud" is you really don't know where your data goes, and you can't really be guaranteed of who might be accessing it.
So there's definitely a perception that unless you're dropping in strongly encrypted files, it's no longer secure. So depending on what it is, something like DropBox is potentially a bad idea.
I'll use DropBox to move around stuff that isn't sensitive, but anything proprietary or confidential, I just move it via another mechanism.
Also, since I do some occasional work for the Canadian government, I couldn't use DropBox or anything which might end up on a US server (so not even gmail) ... because under the Patriot Act, we have no guarantee that this data wouldn't become visible to American law enforcement. Which means I could be running afoul of Canadian privacy laws -- so by policy any service ran by an US company, or in the cloud, is just something I can't use for work purposes.
Sadly, this is no different that the situation in which companies like Microsoft can either be in compliance with EU data laws, or in compliance with US Patriot Act -- but not both. From a professional perspective, the US has made themselves and many of their corporations untrusted parties -- I just assume that since the US has given themselves legal rights to snoop without disclosure, they do. So it's just easier to treat them as a hostile entity who isn't trustworthy. And, considering that EU financial and air passenger data is handed to the US, I find it hard to go against that stance.
From a legal perspective, once something hits the cloud, you lose a lot of safeguards and access controls to it unless you implement them yourself.
In many cases, what IBM is doing is just sound business.
It's not that they didn't (eventually) deliver. It's that those were done on a cost + basis of if we keep throwing money at it, eventually we'll get it done.
I believe SpaceX is working under a different model. NASA has said "if you can achieve this, we'll pay you $x for each of this many trips". So the costing is fixed up front. Yeah, here:
So SpaceX did their own development up front and are then selling the lift services for a fixed cost. Hell, I think that works out cheaper per flight that the shuttle was. And it sounds like they've created a more overall usable platform.
Someone like Boeing will spend a decade building it with you, spend a large amount of money, probably have cost overruns. They'll give you something, and it will probably be cool, but you don't really know what it's going to cost you.
SpaceX has just become the longest haul trucking company around. ;-)
Yes, because we all know you can believe everything on the internet.
Seriously, look at Wikipedia and loads of other things which get petty little squabbles about what is "true" and people spinning it to make their own point.
Good, solid, reliable peer-reviewed stuff (and I mean qualified peers, not random people on the internet) is much harder to achieve than wikipedia.
Think of how many "think tanks" put out position papers on behalf of whoever is paying for them -- much of that would utterly fail in a peer-reviewed context, but they get put out there to say "see, our opinion on science is just as valid as these guys". Joe Average has no idea this is just a tactic to muddy the waters -- it sounds awfully science-y to him.
I think the internet has done the opposite of making peer-reviewed journals moot. Hell, we keep hearing how much of science is absolutely unbelievable as the authors fail to use any meaningful scientific rigor.
Not to slag Mensa too badly here, but the few people I've met who are Mensa members have made me go "if it's a club full of people like you, I'm not really interested".
Mensa is a group that self selects to get together and wallow in how smart they are. It just may not be everybody's cup of tea. There's a perception that it might be a bunch of insufferable boors who like to feel smug together.
Or, you need to branch out and engage in the kinds of things other people like to do.
It's not uncommon for my friends to get together at someone's house for a potluck or a pool party and mill around the various conversations and groups that form.
You know, 40 or so people interacting and socializing, variously discussing work, kids, vacations, cars ... that kind of stuff.
There is life outside of geek, and it can actually be quite rewarding.
Are you this much of a douchebag in real life? Or just on the internet?
Because if you're like this in real life, one of these days someone is going to separate you from some of your teeth.
I didn't start out by complaining about it ... I merely said that your oh-so-useless statement of "Maybe you should try DNS sometime" wasn't really offering much insight as to why people still use IPV4 addresses.
So, did you have anything useful or constructive to add? Or are you mostly just here to snark and act like a petulant dick?
Why, no. Here I've been limiting myself to minesweeper, notepad, solitaire, and the calculator. Stupid me. I've been doing this computer thing wrong for the last 20 years.
But, seriously, what software would you suggest which will give me in-house DNS that my locked down work laptop will play nicely with? I can't change the workgroup/domain it's a member of. I've never had much luck in getting two Windows machines to handle file sharing without opening up perms fully since there's no mutual authentication that I can work out unless you have a domain controller.
As I said, some of the things I've tried to do it seems like Windows just refuses to do, so if you actually have some suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Not sure if DNS solves all of the problems though.
On my home network, I've got my own machines, and I have my work laptop. Since my work laptop isn't allowed to join my "home" workgroup, there is no DNS which will work between by laptop and my machine. I can't change that part of my network config either.
The only way to do file/printer sharing is by IP address. Possibly a limitation of Windows that doesn't allow you to do any 'real' networking between machines unless you buy the Enterprise Super Happy Fun edition ... clearly my Vista Home Ultimate edition isn't capable of doing this.
I'm not convinced that in all cases we have viable DNS which makes these things work ... at least, in my experience Microsoft seems to have removed some functionality which would allow that to work. I'm not really looking to set up a domain controller.
For internal to my own network, I'm not sure what IPV6 offers *me* -- it's a handful of machines behind my firewall, and using IPV4 is far easier. I don't care what happens on the other side of my firewall, but internally I don't see what benefit IPV6 has to me as a home user.
Oh, but we're talking about two slightly different things.
You, and I, and loads of other people all independently predicted Facebook would slide, and that the IPO was way overvalued according to the fundamentals. That's one thing.
The fact that so many of us thought this was overvalued is irrelevant -- because if they'd played by the rules, and everyone had the same risk that would have been just a bad bet. But this wasn't a level playing field.
But, in this case the analysts (who by law are supposed to be somewhat independent) published numbers which more explicitly stated all of the above -- the problem is that people then bought the stock based on the numbers provided to the public, not the most recent ones.
Buying an over-hyped stock and losing money on it is one thing. Buying an over-hyped stock that the company itself and the analysts have provided lower numbers for, but which they didn't tell everybody about, is something entirely different.
This isn't about how many of us could see this train wreck coming -- this is about the legal obligation under SEC rules to provide a certain level of disclosure to everyone.
That didn't happen in this case -- which puts them into some very shaky legal territory. The big institutional investors got told one thing, and the rest of the world got told something else. That is illegal.
This reads more like they violated SEC guidelines by putting forth numbers which made their cash grab look better on paper, and when someone put forth more realistic numbers, those didn't get shared quite so readily. This is more like insider trading since they had an unfair advantage in the form of additional information.
No, the judge is applying the law as it stands.
The claim is that patents are "in the public interest" and that somehow they makes the world a better place.
But if you look at the sheer tangled web of patent lawsuits which cover Microsoft, Samsung, Apple, Motorolla, Google, and I'm not even sure who else ... I'm not convinced that patents help the 'public', or helps to spur innovation. They have the opposite effect.
You can say you don't care, but the fact of the matter is there's huge swaths of products and technologies you couldn't get into the market with because you'd violate a gazillion patents and unless you have a couple of billion in licensing fees, you'd get sued into oblivion.
I believe one of the patents in this whole mess is "scheduling an appointment from a mobile device" ... which is almost exactly the same as "scheduling an appointment in real life", and nearly almost exactly similar to "scheduling an appointment with a computer".
But, some drooling idiot decided that something that is well known but with a mobile device is an "invention". And then we get patent stupidity like this. (I'm sure there's more to it than that, but some days it feels like it.)
Seriously, RTFA:
So, Wall Street got told one set of numbers, and everyone else got told another set.
There were two classes of buyers (it is claimed) -- those who were given the actual estimates, and the rest of us.
So, that would be illegal according to SEC rules.
If all of this information had been made public, and the people lost their money (like some of us expected they would), that would be one thing. But in this case, there was some material omissions.
That's illegal. (At least, if there actually were two different sets of numbers provided to investors.)
Facebook was overvalued, that's true. But it was likely even more overvalued than most were led to believe, which means the institutional investors had an unfair advantage in selling it off to the suckers -- they knew just how much more overvalued it really was. They got to short the stock for free basically.
You're going to need to back that one up. I believe Canada does the same thing.
If there's two there's probably three.
So I'm afraid I don't think what you say is true.
Except in this case, some of the analysts were revising down their numbers just before the IPO, and there is some suspicion that the institutional investors got told one thing, and the rest of the plebes got told something else.
Sorry, but that's a violation of SEC laws, and possibly fraud. This is a little more than caveat emptor, this is failing to live up to the legal responsibilities imposed by the SEC.
Yes, the stock seemed over-valued from the get go, but there was information that it was even worse than what had been disclosed publicly. That part is illegal.
This is one of those things that serves to reinforce my belief that much of the market is a Ponzi scheme, and that an IPO is a good way to fleece investors as the big guys take their cut and then get out of it.
I think if we had a couple of CEOs on their knees pleading we might start to see them stop being solely focused on this quarter and executive bonuses.
As long as they continue to pursue unlimited growth and profits without any regard for anybody else, I think we should be culling that herd a little.
Corporate greed is causing us all sorts of problems, but the people who believe Capitalism is the magic cure all keep bleating that's how it's supposed to work. Despite the fact that it's an unsustainable model.
Look at the bill of goods which was the Facebook IPO ... the bankers and institutional investors skimmed off their chunk, and the rest of the market gets sold something which is overvalued.
Well, this isn't suddenly new ... people have been making the observation that the unelected EU people can often override the governments of these nations.
Well, since it looks like the EU might begin to tear itself apart as people discover that it doesn't seem to be working, it will be interesting to see what happens.
I'm of the opinion that the EU was doomed from the beginning and that this was fairly inevitable.
Well, the title of the actual article is "Microbots Made of Bubbles Have Engines Made of Lasers" which sounds even cooler to me. :-P
This reminds me of when IBM did something similar with a fancy electron microscope or something like that quite a while back.
Doing it with bubbles and lasers sounds totally cool, and makes me really want to see the first mechanical application of this. That's gotta get you something seriously cool, right?
My point was instead of acting like a douchebag, he could have simply explained his position.
Instead he went straight to being a dick ... so he's not much better than an AC who trolls, and doesn't have enough presence for me to treat him otherwise.
I'm willing to concede I'm wrong. I'm not as willing to listen to some whiny prick who has barely posted anything if he's going to act like an asshole out of the gate.
It's Slashdot, that's what we do.
In the mean time, you'll forgive me for not giving a shit if someone with a 7 digit ID and a posting history of all of 6 comments wants to impress us by waving his pecker around.
Now run along.