If NYSE is down to "technical" reasons it's because one or more of the high-frequency-theft algorithms has lost its shit again and messed everything up.
Mark my words, this will be about protecting the clowns who are skimming off the top from their own stupidity and greed.
Except Microsoft, then and now, had no real experience in the phone market... Nokia was never a good fit, got the scorched earth treatment from an idiot who was grooming it to be bought out, and basically left a rotting corpse.
This at the time it was happening was listed as a "WTF is Microsoft thinking?", and which then became what appears to be a comedy of stupid by Elop.
Other than taking someone out of the phone industry, it's pretty much debatable if Microsoft did anything other than flounder around in stuff they had no idea about and leave a mess in their wake.
Microsoft was always the wrong fit for Nokia. Because once again it was all about "Not Invented Here" as Microsoft tried to take an existing company and turn it into a Microsoft division.
This just seems like such an epic failure as to demand the question... did they really think they knew WTF they were doing? Or did some idiot CEOs just blunder around and do stupid things?
Me, I'll believe the latter. This sounded doomed from the beginning.
So, basically Microsoft successfully killed the actual Nokia, successfully transferred the IP to themselves, have completely screwed the pooch in terms of being able to manage an acquisition which never made any sense... and now they've written off the purchase.
I'm sorry, but if you're taking over $7 billion in writedowns, maybe the decision to but it in the first place was stupid and misguided?
This just sounds like Microsoft pissed away billions trying to prop up their failing phone, and are now leaving the rotting carcass of Nokia in their wake.
Is this anything but mismanagement and hubris? Because it sounds like other than fucking up Nokia it hasn't achieved a damned thing.
Sorry, that's false. The stock market (rather accurately) reflects the earnings and intrinsic values of the underlying companies
Wow, speaking of delusion and wishful thinking.
Sorry, but I think you're pretty much full of shit. The market has become very separated from intrinsic values.
It's what speculators and morons think the company will be worth in the future. Just look at any company going IPO... it's massively overvalued, unrelated to any actual valuation... it's priced on the manic glee of people knowing they'll sell the stock for way more than they paid, get the heck out, and leave some other idiot holding the bag.
So much of the stock market these days is a complete fiction. Some of it is real, yes, but absolutely scary amounts of it are underwritten with bullshit, lies, and false optimism.
And, in many cases, bullshit ratings by companies paid to give bullshit ratings.
The financial meltdown in 2008 was caused by companies selling junk debt which had been carefully packaged to appear as if it actually had value.. which was done with the cooperation of the ratings agencies who basically lied to get their cut.
Wall Street is a fucking Ponzi scheme, not some objective valuation. It's a business run by crooks to take the money from the rubes and move it around, ensuring they can skim off the top each time.
Put all these pieces together, and here's what we have: a rise in Chinese share prices in the last year that seemed to be driven more by investor psychology than by anything fundamental
Lately this seems to be how stock markets work.
It has nothing to do with actual value, just the psychotic glee of investors and speculators who envision doubling their money every six months.
The stock market has become separated from reality, with the people running the giant pyramid scheme feeling entitled to skim off the top with high-frequency trading.
In the long term, the assumptions used in the stock market seem to be irrational, unsustainable, and pretty much impossible. And corporations are often overvalued based on valuations which is more than the company will ever earn in the next few centuries.
Stock markets are going to fuck up our economies more than they seem to be helping. Because they stopped having anything to do with fundamentals and sane valuations a VERY long time ago.
The stock market is a reflection of mass delusion and wishful thinking.
Yes, essentially they want ISPs to be responsible for policing what we do, and handing it over -- for now if it's terrorism, eventually for anything else they can think of.
What they're saying is sites should be monitoring our activities to report us to the authorities.
They have coopted the internet, and essentially turned it into the thought police. They've basically privatized the surveillance state.
America has finally reached the point of turning into bad cyberpunk, and people are saying yes.
Papers, please, comrade. Anything you say will be used against you.
The scope creep of pretty much everything draconian and fascist will pretty much start coming true if they can get enough popular support.
even though it seems they could do that themselves, as the customer software apparently has secret backdoors
So basically even security researchers are morons who put in secret back doors?
Bloody idiots.
This is really simple: companies need to have very strict liability for doing stupid stuff like this. Putting secret backdoors should be treated the same as hacking into it... especially if someone else exploits that.
Cool... Star Blazers is definitely the one. I've seen the modern live-action Space Battleship Yamato, and it dredged up some vague memories, but I never could get any more specific.
I remember it being on TV before I became aware of Akira, and it was when animation was first be smart and complex.
It's always been one of those dim memories like the TV series Quark... nobody else seems to have seen it or knows WTF it is, and you can never dredge up enough to explain it, and people look at you like you're crazy. Even more than usual.
*sigh* Such fleeting, yet important moments in a lifetime of geek.
Definitely need to check out the anime store soon.
Honestly, from what I've been seeing... it's more like "you're still not getting your money, we want you to forgive some of the debt, and we want you to give us even more money so we can pay other bills".
I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Only on Tuesday it's another hamburger, and can you loan me $20 until Thursday.
That's not "negotiating", that's "sponging" or panhandling.
The Greek government thinks that the will of the people now means they have more leverage to negotiate.
The problem is they're asking for handouts and free money from other governments who have to explain to their citizens Greek pensions are being funded by everybody else.
Greece is essentially bankrupt, and wants more money. So either every other EU government is going to throw even more taxpayer money into the pit which is Greece's economy, or they're going to tell Greece to piss up a rope.
This sounds like someone having their house foreclosed demanding the banks forgive their debt, lower their interest rate, and give them more money to pay bills.
In other words, it sounds like the Greek government is living in a fantasy where everybody else pays for their society.
I have so many hazy geek neurons firing off thinking about this I can't stop giggling.
From TV shows I barely remember (some space aircraft carrier with a huge cannon -- which Google shockingly dredged up Star Blazers), to early mech comics and video games,, To Voltron or Gundam, to the modern screen adaptation of "Space Battleship Yamato" or even Pacific Rim.
I know this won't come close, but hot damn if that doesn't sound cool.
I'm not grasping at straws, I think Microsoft has a long enough history as lying bastards that I simply don't believe them.
Direct opposition to what Microsoft is stating publicly? And I should believe them why?
If Microsoft loses the revenue from selling the licenses on the update cycle, they're going to have to monetize something. If that isn't the updates, it will be something else.
I don't have a need to say that everything which comes out of Redmond is evil -- I actually *do* use Windows. But that doesn't mean I believe or trust a damned thing they say publicly, because I've been watching them change their tune for a few decades now. I also don't trust Google when they claim to be benevolent.
In fact, I don't trust any corporate entity to be anything other than self-serving bastards who will do anything they can get away with.
A lot of times it seems what they state publicly is there to see how people react, and nothing more.
I hold the "yarg, XBone must be always connected to intertubes" to be as credible as "upgrades will always be free". It's a weak pledge in a press release, but is otherwise not binding, carries no weight, and is subject to whatever whims at Microsoft drives these things.
It's a statement by a corporation. Take it with as much certainty as you would a claim from any sociopath.. absolutely self serving, possibly well intentioned, but definitely not something you can take as fact.
These were, in all likelihood, written by industry and handed to government to implement.
Which means they've been carefully crafted to mean whatever is most advantageous to corporate interests and interpreted however they need it to be interpreted.
These are noting more than gag laws, designed to block and intimidate people.
You're not supposed to be able to know when they apply.
Honestly, how much trust do you put in what Microsoft publicly says?
It's not binding, they repeatedly change their mind, and they're a huge multinational who doesn't give crap what their consumers want.
Microsoft has said many things publicly which they've reversed course on.
But the current Microsoft which says Home versions of the OS can't defer patches, that they'll share your wifi password because they say so, wants to embed ads into the OS, and whatever other crap they feel like doing -- this entity doesn't give a fuck about what we want, and increasingly act like they get to make decisions about computers and not the owners.
So you'll pardon us for having ZERO faith in the fact that Microsoft has said anything. Because it doesn't mean a damned thing.
They will do whatever maximizes profits, and what their lawyers say they can get away with.
Your blindly saying you believe them makes you either naive, or clueless.
Microsoft will be as much greedy bastards as they can possibly manage. That is all you can count on.
But, really, there has to be a degree of cognitive dissonance between the hope you'll do well and be super rich... and the actual reality that, it's a tough slog, you might not get there, and you might have to trade away some equity to someone else to get there... in which case your payout might not be as big as you hoped.
The difference between con-man and entrepreneur can be a thin line.
I've known a few people who fancied themselves the latter, but had worked themselves into such a feverish pitch trying to get there ended up as the former.
Sometimes people convince themselves things really are going to work out OK, even when completely unfounded. The human brain doesn't always like lying to itself.
Yes, it's not a continuous flight. But it will, nonetheless, be the first time a solar powered aircraft will do it, and every leg is pretty much an epic task.
It's still circumnavigation.
So, boo hoo, you disagree with the terminology. Nobody else gives a damn.
I don't care about a plane making a series of relatively short flights under optimal conditions (daylight), and I don't see why anyone else does either.
Well, that doesn't seem to be what is happening:
Solar Impulse 2 took off from Nagoya, Japan on Sunday for its audacious five-day flight across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii with Swiss pilot and Solar Impulse co-founder Andre Borschberg at the helm. It has since stayed in the air for three days and nights without using a single drop of fuel, grabbing the distance and duration records, 5,663 km (3,518 mi) and 80 hours respectively, in the process.
This isn't some jet engine which does this in a few hours.
You can whine all you want, but the records are real.
They're for solar aviation, which means it's a lot harder and a lot slower.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh ... years ago when they spelled IBM by dragging around individual molecules hasn't really turned into much in the way of practical.
Nonetheless, IBM does a lot of basic research into things, because some of it will eventually pay off.
At least someone is doing it.
*shudder* Wow, that whole Rule #34 thing just won't go away, will it?
Bad internets! Bad bad internets.
Dirty, naughty internets. There must be punishments. A spanking, I think.
If NYSE is down to "technical" reasons it's because one or more of the high-frequency-theft algorithms has lost its shit again and messed everything up.
Mark my words, this will be about protecting the clowns who are skimming off the top from their own stupidity and greed.
Except Microsoft, then and now, had no real experience in the phone market ... Nokia was never a good fit, got the scorched earth treatment from an idiot who was grooming it to be bought out, and basically left a rotting corpse.
This at the time it was happening was listed as a "WTF is Microsoft thinking?", and which then became what appears to be a comedy of stupid by Elop.
Other than taking someone out of the phone industry, it's pretty much debatable if Microsoft did anything other than flounder around in stuff they had no idea about and leave a mess in their wake.
Microsoft was always the wrong fit for Nokia. Because once again it was all about "Not Invented Here" as Microsoft tried to take an existing company and turn it into a Microsoft division.
This just seems like such an epic failure as to demand the question ... did they really think they knew WTF they were doing? Or did some idiot CEOs just blunder around and do stupid things?
Me, I'll believe the latter. This sounded doomed from the beginning.
So, basically Microsoft successfully killed the actual Nokia, successfully transferred the IP to themselves, have completely screwed the pooch in terms of being able to manage an acquisition which never made any sense ... and now they've written off the purchase.
I'm sorry, but if you're taking over $7 billion in writedowns, maybe the decision to but it in the first place was stupid and misguided?
This just sounds like Microsoft pissed away billions trying to prop up their failing phone, and are now leaving the rotting carcass of Nokia in their wake.
Is this anything but mismanagement and hubris? Because it sounds like other than fucking up Nokia it hasn't achieved a damned thing.
Wow, speaking of delusion and wishful thinking.
Sorry, but I think you're pretty much full of shit. The market has become very separated from intrinsic values.
It's what speculators and morons think the company will be worth in the future. Just look at any company going IPO ... it's massively overvalued, unrelated to any actual valuation ... it's priced on the manic glee of people knowing they'll sell the stock for way more than they paid, get the heck out, and leave some other idiot holding the bag.
So much of the stock market these days is a complete fiction. Some of it is real, yes, but absolutely scary amounts of it are underwritten with bullshit, lies, and false optimism.
And, in many cases, bullshit ratings by companies paid to give bullshit ratings.
The financial meltdown in 2008 was caused by companies selling junk debt which had been carefully packaged to appear as if it actually had value .. which was done with the cooperation of the ratings agencies who basically lied to get their cut.
Wall Street is a fucking Ponzi scheme, not some objective valuation. It's a business run by crooks to take the money from the rubes and move it around, ensuring they can skim off the top each time.
Lately this seems to be how stock markets work.
It has nothing to do with actual value, just the psychotic glee of investors and speculators who envision doubling their money every six months.
The stock market has become separated from reality, with the people running the giant pyramid scheme feeling entitled to skim off the top with high-frequency trading.
In the long term, the assumptions used in the stock market seem to be irrational, unsustainable, and pretty much impossible. And corporations are often overvalued based on valuations which is more than the company will ever earn in the next few centuries.
Stock markets are going to fuck up our economies more than they seem to be helping. Because they stopped having anything to do with fundamentals and sane valuations a VERY long time ago.
The stock market is a reflection of mass delusion and wishful thinking.
Yes, essentially they want ISPs to be responsible for policing what we do, and handing it over -- for now if it's terrorism, eventually for anything else they can think of.
What they're saying is sites should be monitoring our activities to report us to the authorities.
They have coopted the internet, and essentially turned it into the thought police. They've basically privatized the surveillance state.
America has finally reached the point of turning into bad cyberpunk, and people are saying yes.
Papers, please, comrade. Anything you say will be used against you.
The scope creep of pretty much everything draconian and fascist will pretty much start coming true if they can get enough popular support.
Maybe this was just some lawyer deciding they wanted to avoid liability from someone using a motor which isn't rated for that?
But now they have more secret "national security" laws which can be used to force it without people knowing or having the choice to reject it.
So you'd never know if they're demanding it from companies.
So basically even security researchers are morons who put in secret back doors?
Bloody idiots.
This is really simple: companies need to have very strict liability for doing stupid stuff like this. Putting secret backdoors should be treated the same as hacking into it ... especially if someone else exploits that.
Cool ... Star Blazers is definitely the one. I've seen the modern live-action Space Battleship Yamato, and it dredged up some vague memories, but I never could get any more specific.
I remember it being on TV before I became aware of Akira, and it was when animation was first be smart and complex.
It's always been one of those dim memories like the TV series Quark ... nobody else seems to have seen it or knows WTF it is, and you can never dredge up enough to explain it, and people look at you like you're crazy. Even more than usual.
*sigh* Such fleeting, yet important moments in a lifetime of geek.
Definitely need to check out the anime store soon.
Bah, tinfoil hat defense ... uninstall Flash on the premise it's full of security holes and is waste of time.
It always has been.
I don't trust most sites to set cookies or run Javascript ... run Flash?
No fucking way.
Honestly, from what I've been seeing ... it's more like "you're still not getting your money, we want you to forgive some of the debt, and we want you to give us even more money so we can pay other bills".
I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Only on Tuesday it's another hamburger, and can you loan me $20 until Thursday.
That's not "negotiating", that's "sponging" or panhandling.
From what I can tell, nobody knows WTF it means.
The Greek government thinks that the will of the people now means they have more leverage to negotiate.
The problem is they're asking for handouts and free money from other governments who have to explain to their citizens Greek pensions are being funded by everybody else.
Greece is essentially bankrupt, and wants more money. So either every other EU government is going to throw even more taxpayer money into the pit which is Greece's economy, or they're going to tell Greece to piss up a rope.
This sounds like someone having their house foreclosed demanding the banks forgive their debt, lower their interest rate, and give them more money to pay bills.
In other words, it sounds like the Greek government is living in a fantasy where everybody else pays for their society.
And I'm not sure that's gonna happen.
Yeah, I remember not only was it some of the first anime I ever saw, but it was the first animated show I ever saw which had a story arc.
I didn't watch it on UHF, but it certainly was the first I'd seen of anime and not just cartoons.
And I certainly do remember racing home from school to see it.
Thanks. Many many hazy childhood memories can be nicely described in this guide I found.
Giant robots have been around a long time, and many of us remember the initial shows from when we were kids but can't quite dredge up the specifics.
Might need to visit the local anime store sometime soon now that I have some fresh names to refer to and look for.
I have so many hazy geek neurons firing off thinking about this I can't stop giggling.
From TV shows I barely remember (some space aircraft carrier with a huge cannon -- which Google shockingly dredged up Star Blazers ), to early mech comics and video games,, To Voltron or Gundam, to the modern screen adaptation of "Space Battleship Yamato" or even Pacific Rim.
I know this won't come close, but hot damn if that doesn't sound cool.
I for one welcome our new Meccha overlords.
I'm not grasping at straws, I think Microsoft has a long enough history as lying bastards that I simply don't believe them.
Direct opposition to what Microsoft is stating publicly? And I should believe them why?
If Microsoft loses the revenue from selling the licenses on the update cycle, they're going to have to monetize something. If that isn't the updates, it will be something else.
I don't have a need to say that everything which comes out of Redmond is evil -- I actually *do* use Windows. But that doesn't mean I believe or trust a damned thing they say publicly, because I've been watching them change their tune for a few decades now. I also don't trust Google when they claim to be benevolent.
In fact, I don't trust any corporate entity to be anything other than self-serving bastards who will do anything they can get away with.
A lot of times it seems what they state publicly is there to see how people react, and nothing more.
I hold the "yarg, XBone must be always connected to intertubes" to be as credible as "upgrades will always be free". It's a weak pledge in a press release, but is otherwise not binding, carries no weight, and is subject to whatever whims at Microsoft drives these things.
It's a statement by a corporation. Take it with as much certainty as you would a claim from any sociopath .. absolutely self serving, possibly well intentioned, but definitely not something you can take as fact.
These were, in all likelihood, written by industry and handed to government to implement.
Which means they've been carefully crafted to mean whatever is most advantageous to corporate interests and interpreted however they need it to be interpreted.
These are noting more than gag laws, designed to block and intimidate people.
You're not supposed to be able to know when they apply.
Honestly, how much trust do you put in what Microsoft publicly says?
It's not binding, they repeatedly change their mind, and they're a huge multinational who doesn't give crap what their consumers want.
Microsoft has said many things publicly which they've reversed course on.
But the current Microsoft which says Home versions of the OS can't defer patches, that they'll share your wifi password because they say so, wants to embed ads into the OS, and whatever other crap they feel like doing -- this entity doesn't give a fuck about what we want, and increasingly act like they get to make decisions about computers and not the owners.
So you'll pardon us for having ZERO faith in the fact that Microsoft has said anything. Because it doesn't mean a damned thing.
They will do whatever maximizes profits, and what their lawyers say they can get away with.
Your blindly saying you believe them makes you either naive, or clueless.
Microsoft will be as much greedy bastards as they can possibly manage. That is all you can count on.
But, really, there has to be a degree of cognitive dissonance between the hope you'll do well and be super rich ... and the actual reality that, it's a tough slog, you might not get there, and you might have to trade away some equity to someone else to get there ... in which case your payout might not be as big as you hoped.
The difference between con-man and entrepreneur can be a thin line.
I've known a few people who fancied themselves the latter, but had worked themselves into such a feverish pitch trying to get there ended up as the former.
Sometimes people convince themselves things really are going to work out OK, even when completely unfounded. The human brain doesn't always like lying to itself.
It's going to take several days to fly from Japan to Hawaii. In the process he's beaten the record for longest solo flight ever.
Are you asshole? Or do you just play one on the internet?
It's a single person aircraft, travelling at an average speed of 50 to 100 km/h (31 to 62 mph).
Yes, it's not a continuous flight. But it will, nonetheless, be the first time a solar powered aircraft will do it, and every leg is pretty much an epic task.
It's still circumnavigation.
So, boo hoo, you disagree with the terminology. Nobody else gives a damn.
Well, that doesn't seem to be what is happening:
This isn't some jet engine which does this in a few hours.
You can whine all you want, but the records are real.
They're for solar aviation, which means it's a lot harder and a lot slower.
Call us back when you've done better.
Well, should that happen, then all the people who have been demanding their 2nd amendment rights be recognized will know what to do.