> Of course this would depend on the courts providing a nice plain list of kiddie pr0n URLs...
Why not use a hash?
Users get bandwidth from their ISP. You, as the ISP, are the choke point for that bandwidth. Many ISPs already cache/proxy content.
You, as ISP, could see that "10.0.0.168 is making an HTTP request on port 80 (or 81, or 8080, or wherever)".
How much "smarts" would have to be in that transparent proxying gadget to peel out the URL from the HTTP request, create a hash from it, and then compare that hash to the hashes of the 423 known "evil" URLs listed in the court order.
If it (the hash of the user's requested URL) matches the hash of a prohibited URL, you can (optionally) append the request to fbilog.txt and (as required by court order) drop the rest of the packets on the floor.
If no match, it lets the HTTP transaction proceed.
This has three big wins as I see it:
The privacy of most users is protected: At no time does your (as ISP) gear ever log or compare the user's actual HTTP requests - only the hashes thereof. If you Googled for "goat terrorist pr0n", the words don't show up in any logs. Only if goatsesetupusthebomb.cx was on the list does his ISP know he tried to do something naughty.
Pervs can't use the list to get their jollies - Because the courts don't need to publish the offensive URLs, only the hashes thereof, the list of hashes is only of use for blocking purposes. The list can therefore be widely disseminated.
Users can take control of the process - because the hashes of offensive URLs can be safely published, if Joe Pr0nhead is really worried that his favorite site, goatsesetupusthebomb.cx has somehow wound up "on the list", and he doesn't trust his ISP not to log blocked HTTP requests to fbilog.txt, he can take the blocking into his own hands by running a proxy on his own box and blocking goatsesetupusthebomb.cx requests before they ever hit the ISP's proxy. The end result here is the same - if goatsesetupusthebomb.cx is "legal", he gets his goat terror pr0n. If it's not legal, his ISP never knows he clicked on it, which is fine - his own proxy prevented him from committing the crime of downloading goat terror pr0n in the first place.
Now we all know there are ways around this, considering 99% of lawyers and judges are idiots, it's conceivable that the "list of bad URLs" is just that - a list of HTTP transactions, all taking place on port 80. That's a heck of a lot easier to pick out than HTTP transactions on random ports. Considering that 99% of criminals are also idiots, port 80 is probably where most of the offensive content is served from. As such, the computational burden on the caching/proxying/URL-hashing box I envision here is probably greatly reduced.
> Considering the many, well-understood, and readily-available ways of the creating the means for blowing up--hint: *never* apply heat or spark to vaporized gasoline--
Fuck. Now my car won't start!
(Maybe this is Dean Kamen's s00per-s33kr1t plan to get us to buy Segways?)
> But, there must be some way to benefit indirectly from someone else's pump-and-dump operation. When you receive spam about a fresh company, you could buy in quickly and then unload it after a certain period of time before the 'dump' phase kicks in.
Actually, that's much easier said than done. It sounds great on paper - and like all "easy money" ideas, it really only serves the interest of the stock scammer.
The reason this sort of fraud is concentrated in the pink sheets is due to the relative illiquidity of penny stocks.
In a liquid market (say, Microsft - MSFT) millions of shares change hands each day, and hundreds (if not thousands) of people are willing to sell you their stock.
In an illiquid market, there may only be a handful of participants. The only seller, for instance, is likely to be the "pumper" - because he's already accumulated the stock at a steep discount.
So - your "buy in quickly" part - doesn't work, because you're buying from the scammer. If the stock's at $0.05, the scammer might sell you 1000 shares at $0.06, and another 1000 at $0.07. He's not likely to sell you 1,000,000 at $0.08 - because he'd rather find some poor sucker willing to buy 1000 at $0.09 - so he can sell (you!) his 1,000,000 at $0.10.
Your "and then unload it" part also fails in an illiquid market. You're not going to be sold much stock unless you pay far more than it's worth. And if you've got lots of stock, to whom are you going to sell it? Once the pumper dumps you his 1,000,000 shares at $0.10, he's out of the market, and certainly isn't going to be buying from you at $0.11. Or $0.10.
You're now the proud owner of 1,000,000 shares of worthless stock. You might sell some of it to stragglers to the game at $0.11, but the pump and dump is done - you're left holding the bag. When the buyers go away (the spammer isn't going to send out another load of emails to encourage anyone else to buy it!), the bid/ask spread widens up, and you're left holding the bag.
A few months later, you see someone bidding $0.04 for 900,000 shares, and now that you've been had, you realize that's better than nothing. That's the scammer, buying the stock back for the next round.
Remember - if you're sitting at a poker table and you don't know who the sucker is, it's you.
> While it's nice to see the "don't bug us, we're woefully underpaid and overworked" SEC finally going after one of these parasites, it's too bad they have to get geeked out about the whole spam bit to do so.
Your point about this particular pump-and-dump being the tip of an iceberk of OTCBB "pink sheet" abuse is well-made.
From where I sit, the sad part is that the SEC generally isn't geeked out about spam. It comes down to resources.
A cursory reading of ROKSO reveals this particular ring has a record going back to 1997, including death threats. (Cripes, this is the ETMP spammer from 199teyfucking7!)
Why the hell does it take SIX GODDAMN YEARS to take down one pump-and-dump dirtball?
And he's just one of dozens.
Stock fraud continues because justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.
A six-year delay between the start of the scam and the SEC finally issuing a "Stop breaking the law, or we'll make you sign a consent decree wherein you don't admit to guilt but promise not to break the law in the future" is unacceptable.
It's unacceptable because it's not just useless - it's worse than useless - it's practically an invitation to dirtballs from around the world to get into the fraud business, because by the time the SEC actually catches onto the scam, the scammed money has either left the country or has been laundered.
If anyone from HomeSec is reading this - hook up with some SEC folks. Fund them. Fund the hell out of them. Because if even a tenth of the pump-and-dump scams are being used for money laundering (as opposed to mere fraud), you've got one hell of a conduit for drug money and/or terror money, and the SEC's Enforcement Division as currently set up, clearly doesn't have the resources to stop it.
My nose rankles at my use of the word "mere" to describe stock fraud - but it's a reflection of reality, which is that the government doesn't give a fuck about "mere" fraud, because it's only the serfs getting ripped off, and the dumb serfs at that.
So to hell with the serfs. It's no excuse for being blind to the the opportunity for money laundering (perhaps more precisely, the opportunity to camouflage money laundering) brought on by continual, ongoing pump-and-dump stock fraud operations. And honestly, maybe that is more HomeSec's bailiwick than the SEC's. But the two organizations definitely need to start sharing data, and they need to start now.
Re:How does this reply affect your mood???
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> > I don't care who likes me and who doesn't. > > It's possible your family support was much greater than hers.
Yeah, I was lucky on that front. Most kids aren't.
> Good for you, to think that way in high school. I myself tried, but I think I was 25 before I actually got it.
I think it's usually around 18-30 before anyone really has a chance to "get it". I put up a good front in high school, but deep down, I also needed acceptance. I just chose the "acceptance" of the ones who were handing out the grades. I used grades to keep score, rather than the number of friends I had.
That's why I had to put in that paragraph about university being the ultimate reality check for geek megalomania. It wasn't until partway through that particular wringer that I truly "got it", in that I figured out it was also OK not to have a 4.0 GPA, so long as I was learning something and making progress towards the goal of a degree in a field you enjoyed - and to stop beating myself up every time I got a 3.5.
> Wouldnt it be advantageous to the UN to clean up a majority of the stuff (manmade) in space to prevent further problems such as the speculated involvement in the recent Columbia crash?
REUTERS - Feb 1, 2023:
UN Secretary General Clinton said in a speech today that while the loss of the privately-launched and operated "Armadillo" space plane last weekend is regrettable, but that the United States is obliged to "give the collections process time to work", and called for the UN Space Council to pass a resolution calling for the complete cleanup of space debris by 2033.
BACKGROUND: The UN Space Council was formed following the loss of Shuttle Columbia 20 years ago. After passing resolutions calling for permanent funding form the UN, it promptly passed a series of resolutions concerning the issue of space debris in low earth orbit.
Following the loss of Shuttle Discovery to space debris in 2005, the UN Space Council passed Resolution 1042, calling for a programme that would investigate the feasibility of LEO debris collection.
In response to the stranding of the crews of the ISS and Shuttle Atlantis due to damage a surprise recurrence of the Leonids in 2006, the UN Space Council passed Resolution 1334, lauding the process of investigation, and calling for additional time to study the problem.
Rescue shuttle Endeavor was launched one month later, but failed to make it into orbit after the main engine was punctured by space debris. All three vehicles were loss. This catastrophe prompted Resolution 1349, demanding an extension of the deadline for submission of the debris collection feasibility study, and an expansion of the study to include weapons of meteoric destruction below the tropopause.
Secretary-General Clinton hailed this week's decision by the UN Space Council to proceed on another resolution, and in his speech, reminded the world that despite the Armadillo tragedy, it was due to the diligence of the UN Space Debris Collections Process that there had been no losses of manned spacecraft since the loss of the last Shuttle in 2006.
A furious Tom Paine, former NASA administrator during the Apollo years, was ejected as he attempted to disrupt the proceedings from the visitors' gallery. Rumors that the words "You sick bastards, the reason NASA hasn't lost a manned mission since the loss of the last shuttle in 2006 is because it hasn't launched anything since then! For fuck's sake, it hasn't even frickin' built a new manned vehicle based on post-1982 technology!" are completely false.
UN Secretary-General Clinton kept his composure despite the disruption in the gallery, and concluded his address to the UN Space Council without further incident.
His call for a new UN Space Council resolution to "let the debris collectors assess the situation" has received great support, particularly from representatives of Arianespace.
> Utimately outsiders do not matter, just your
circle, those people she thought were her friends werent really her friend. > >
Fitting in isnt important, having real friends who accept the true you is important. Hell I only have
a few friends but thats all I need, whats the point of dozens of fake friends and not knowing who is real and whos not, when you can have real friends who accept you for you? > >
Of course most teenagers dont understand the difference between their peers and their friends.
That, too.
I'm glad I'm male. At least males have that "grin and bear it", or "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" kind of ideal to live up to. The worst that was likely to happen to us was the odd beat-down or locker, which I and my geeky compadres somehow managed to escape. (For all our bitching, it looks like we went to a pretty decent HS after all!)
But girls - damn - they can be evil to each other in ways that us guys couldn't even dream of. (I didn't even appreciate that until years after high school. If you have a female SO, ask her about it. Evil, man, frickin' evil.)
> Anyway if she were smart she would have tried to make friends with you, considering you
accepted her while these others do not.
For all I know, perhaps she was trying to do precisely that, and I, with the emotional-IQ barely approaching room temperature, was too much of a "nerd" to see it for what it was.
Sometimes I think God gave us all 200 points to distribute between IQ and EQ. Now, I ain't telling whether my room-temp EQ is in Celsius or Farenheit, 'cuz I honestly don't know myself.
But I do know that if I'd heard about EQ back in high school, I'd probably have said "Great. Do whatever it takes to give me a room-temp IQ... in Kelvins!", so any discussion of EQ would probably have been lost on me anyways:)
> > I can go the rest of my entire life without ever seeing any of my [high school] classmates again and still be happy. > > How odd.....I had the exact same reaction when I attended my 10th year high school reunion. I've never bothered going to another one and probably never will.
Ditto.
I've stayed in touch with the few I wanted to stay in touch with. To hell with the ones I said "to hell with".
The only reason I can imagine going to a reunion would be to play one-upmanship and bragging games about how I made it bigger than $LOSER, at the risk of being shown up by $WINNER who made it bigger than me.
Sure, there are days when I'm curious to see just how many of my classmates I "beat" in the Game of Life - and then I remember that the parts of high school I hated most were the parts that dealt with social hierarchies, dominance, rank, and/or pecking order.
On pain of hypocrisy, I refuse to perpetuate that system. I've never attended a high school or university alumni reunion, and never will.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
- WOPR, from War Games
> Because nerds dont WANT to be popular. What advantage is there to being popular? I mean really? The more popular you are the more people hate you. You have no advantage or incentive to want to be popular. Nerds dont seek popularity because there is no value in it.
It's a hard concept to communicate, too - that you don't want to be popular, because you don't see "popularity" as anything worth having.
I was a nerd/geek at the "D" table. My most fucked-up high school memory was when a girl from the "C" table who demonstrated she was deliberately faking wrong answers on the tests to lower her grades, lest she end up at the "D" table) confided suicidal thoughts to me.
As I recall, my response (what the fuck, any statute of limitations has long since past, it was long ago that it probably was legally OK for students to just deal with shit like this amongst themselves, and hey, I was a minor and therefore too dumb to know what I was doing:) was something like this:
"You went through the trouble of making two sets of answers - one for me to read, and the ones you ansewred on the multiple choice test - so I could know you weren't bullshitting me. Fine - we'll compare answers when we get the tests back, and then talk."
(After the marks came back, and her "real" answers were almost 100% right, and her actual score was in the 70% range)
"OK, you weren't bullshitting. You told me you were thinking of wasting yourself because nobody liked you when you were smarter than they were, and you asked me how I put up with it. Well, OK, no bullshit - I don't care who likes me and who doesn't. I stopped giving a shit what the rest of 'em think back in public school, because every time they insult me for showing 'em up in class, it just proves I'm better than they are. "
"Not different, BETTER. I don't wanna be like them. If being what they are means being like them, I wanna be as much unlike them as I can be."
"Now finally, this suicide stuff. Life sucks for me, too. So I'll see your test answers, and if you're not bullshitting me, I'm gonna do what I think is 'wrong' thing - I'm not gonna rat you out like our parents and guidance idiots have all told us to. If you wanted to get ratted out, you picked the wrong nerd, and you'll have to find someone else. But in return, you're going to do what you think is 'wrong' -- you're not gonna off yourself for the crime of being smarter than the rest of the fucking morons in this class, no matter how badly you want to - because IT'S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO DO."
"You wanted to know how I dealt with it, there it is - you're the one who's gonna have to choose whether to live or not. I can't stop you either way, but I choose to live because I don't wanna give them the satisfaction of knowing they beat me."
I have no idea what happened to her; other than that she kept her end of the bargain. I didn't know her that well to begin with and we never really spoke after that; all I know is that she didn't off herself in the remaining four years of high school and graduated with "B+" grades just sufficient to get her into university, though she was probably capable of "A"s.
On my darker days, I like to think I did something good. It's reasonable to presume that if she survived high school, she survived university, and found her way to cubicle-bound conformity along with the rest of us.
On my lighter days, I reflect back on the "better" part of the rant and realize that that going to university is a wonderful cure for nerd megalomania. Nothing like sitting in a room with 130 people and being told "Most of you were A+ students in high school. That ends here. You're still just as smart as you were six months ago, but you're in a room of people, all of whom who are also just as smart as you were six months ago, or they wouldn't be here." in your first Calculus class, and then having the prof prove it to (all of) you, over and over and over and over again:)
> The thing to remember about the Oscars is that they are promotional tool to sell movies.
They're also a promotional tool to sell celebrity. Not celebrities, but celebrity - the notion that there's a group of people ("celebrities") who are prettier, wealthier, more knowledgeable on world affairs, and just plain better than you.
It's not that a CGI Gollum threatens the ability of $MOVIESTAR to demand a multimillion-dollar contract. (It does, but that's beside the point.)
It's that a CGI Gollum threatens the whole concept of "movie star" in the first place.
Once we realize that $MOVIESTARs are little more meat puppets that can be rendered by having anybody go the same motions in front of a bluescreen and using software to overlay an appropriate skin and bump-map on our pasty little knobbly bodies, we might stop paying attention to them.
> Well, you could heat things up a bit by dropping a comet on it. That would give you your carbon dioxide at the same time. > > Of course, you'd need to pick an "earth crosser" (well mars crosser), or the energetic considerations would be a bit steep.
Well, they've got it working for space probes. It's just a matter of scaling up. *rimshot*
1.Flowers at the beginning. 2.Dinner & drinks 3.Entertainment (club, movie) 4.Foreplay 5.Sex >
> If you get past 5, and she makes you breakfast in the morning, you've found the perfect woman.:)
But you haven't truly won unless you get 6)...profit!!!
> Yes, but the key is, saying hi while not doing any of the following: >[...] >Staring at anatomical parts other than the eyes. > Looking in some other direction that at their eyes.
Eyes. Those are the two big bumps on females' chests, aren't they? Cool.
> Grinning like a psychotic megalomaniac preparing to take over the world.
Doesn't the love of your life deserve at least some honesty?:)
> this in reference to the "Engineer Your Love Life" [geocities.com] piece) > Never, ever, ever, ever compare your prospective mate to a "suitable commercial off-the-shelf
(COTS) product" in front of him/her.
Corollary: But if you should break rule #1, and she says "Yeah, that makes sense", for fsck's sake, marry her!
> Get yourself a subscription to The Spice Channel and a 12 pack. It's about as close as you need to get. I know what I'm talking about here, I'm married and it's Valentine's Day and I'm going to go broke before the day is over.
Spice channel? You mean, like pay for pr0n? You're new to this "geek" thing, aren't you?
Nothin' says lovin' like a 12-pack of Arrogant Bastard, a subwoofer vibrating the chair, and an entire room glowing a spooky shade of reddish-orange as the bombs go off.
(The only thing redder than the fireball from the explosion was the redshift of my last date's ass as she receded at z=5.9:)
The guy who did the visual effects from Star Wars spent a few years restoring declassified test footage and presenting the history of the weapons programme in an format intelligible to the layman. It's educational (though by no means nearly as so as the books you cite), the explosions are hauntingly beautiful (which sounds weird, but see the video before you declare me to on crack), and if you've got a sound system, the DVD will present your subwoofer with a serious workout. 10/10 in my books.
> I'd say that most people today don't even consider why we dropped the bombs (aside from: "we were at war?"), let alone the details of the details of the event. I am not a WWII history buff and what I do know about Japanese history is pre-Meiji Restoration.
I think some of that is due to Western culture's proclivity to parse everything in terms of soundbites.
Consider the following "typical" debate:
Alice: Nuking Japan was wrong!
Bob: We were at war!
Alice may have actually said something as strong as "Truman was a war criminal", or as moderate as "Why did we drop two bombs, not one?"
Bob parses as "Alice believes it was a war crime", thinks for a minute about how Dresden was nasty, but not a war crime, the firebombings of Tokyo were nasty but not war crimes, and concludes that because of the military importance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, neither of those nasty events were war crimes either.
On Slashdot, he could type all that out. But in face-to-face conversations, Alice would probably fall asleep (or would interrupt him) before he finishes his argument. So Bob gives the soundbite: "We were at war" - meaning "the force used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was within the bounds of acceptable conduct in wartime."
Now, if we take the second example - Alice merely questioning the second bombing - we have a different problem.
Bob's probably had this horse flogged before. Most of the times, he's discovered that his opponent in the debate didn't really care one way or the other about the second bomb, he/she just wanted Bob to admit that one of the bombings was unnecessary, in order to advance an argument. If Bob budges an inch on the necessity of the second bombing, Alice will use that to claim that the second bombing, if not the first, was a war crime, and that therefore, Truman was a criminal, or whatever extreme position she really holds, that Bob argues against.
So Bob's real answer is "Alice, I think you have a hidden agenda. I'm not going to dignify that with a reponse, except to say that I think both bombings were required to bring about Japanese surrender."
Alice - whether she has a hidden agenda or not - parses that as "We were at war".
What usually happens next is that Bob and Alice get into the debate about whether or not Japanese and US casualties in a land invasion would have exceeded those from the bombings.
One can see the same thing in the present situation with respect to France vs. the US. The entire debate boils down to the US hearing the word "inspections", and thinks "ineffective for past 12 years, ineffective now, therefore not an option, war's the only option". The French hear the word "war", and think "offends our sensibilities, threatens income stream from 12 years of selling stuff to Iraq, therefore not an option, more inspections are the only option".
Go back one step, and that immediately becomes "anything where the UN is involved" being parsed as "ineffective / you have a hidden anti-US agenda" in the US's mind, and any hint that "inspections haven't worked" or "Saddam's lying" being parsed as "war / you have a hidden pro-war agenda" in the French mind.
> > I get at most 1 a week, and then its usually from charity organization like the local police or something, so I dont know if thats really considered telemarketing...
> > No, that's called extortion!
Actually, it's closer to fraud - though the "extortion" angle is part of how the fraud works.
Most of the time, such calls are NOT from your local police. They're from a telemarketing operation that's registered itself as a "charity", that happens to have a name that falsely implies it's being run by/for your local cops.
For instance, if "$YOURTOWN Police Benevolent Fund" is the real Police charity, the scammers will call the scam organization the "Police Benevolent Fund of $YOURTOWN", or "$YOURTOWN Police Benevolence Fund".)
What really happens is that 90% of the "donations" collected go to the operators of the scam, and 10% go to the cops/firemen, just the bare minimum to make it legal.
Police and Fire Departments are commonly used in this scam for the reason implied by the last poster -- when asked for money by people claiming to be authority figures, people are much less likely to say "no".
The sad part of the scam is that for some cash-strapped municipalities, it's possible that the cops and fire departments turn a blind eye to it; better to get 10% to keep some fraudster in business than to get nothing at all.
> Yeah. The safest place to live in the world used to be Romania. One in four people were thought to be secrete police informers. That means at least one person in *every* family. Is this the road the USA is heading with "homeland security" and all?
No - the whole point of using computers is so that we can achieve the same safety/security afforded in a state like Romania or East Germany, but without wasting 25% of our population in economically nonproductive spying.
As for Ben Franklin - there's two parts people seem to forget: First, it's essential liberties, not even the tiniest liberties. If you wanna claim Ben's approval, you're going to have to ask him what he meant by "essential", which is gonna be difficult. As it stands, "essential" is a loophole big enough to drive the proverbial flogged-to-death horse through.
But second - and this is a horse that hasn't gotten so much as ten lashes with a wet noodle yet - is his contention that such people deserve neither security nor liberty; fair enough, but the world is full of people who arguably have things they don't deserve.
OK, Ben, suppose I give you the benefit of the doubt. By consistenly re-electing representatives who took (a very few of our) "liberties" in exchange for offering us (a small measure of added) "security", we've abdicated any right we ever had to either.
But does that mean we won't get both, whether we "deserve" them or not? I mean, there's a pretty vocal minority of the population that claims we also don't "deserve" to have such a large proportion of the world's produced wealth. Or to consume such a large proportion of the world's generated energy. Or to drive big fat rollover-prone SUVs to McDonald's while half the world starves.
And yet, we still do. In fact, we frickin' 0wn!
It's just as likely, IMNSHO, that even though (even if we accept Ben's view) we're no longer deserving of liberty or security, we may just end up retaining both anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not use a hash?
Users get bandwidth from their ISP. You, as the ISP, are the choke point for that bandwidth. Many ISPs already cache/proxy content.
You, as ISP, could see that "10.0.0.168 is making an HTTP request on port 80 (or 81, or 8080, or wherever)".
How much "smarts" would have to be in that transparent proxying gadget to peel out the URL from the HTTP request, create a hash from it, and then compare that hash to the hashes of the 423 known "evil" URLs listed in the court order.
If it (the hash of the user's requested URL) matches the hash of a prohibited URL, you can (optionally) append the request to fbilog.txt and (as required by court order) drop the rest of the packets on the floor.
If no match, it lets the HTTP transaction proceed.
This has three big wins as I see it:
Now we all know there are ways around this, considering 99% of lawyers and judges are idiots, it's conceivable that the "list of bad URLs" is just that - a list of HTTP transactions, all taking place on port 80. That's a heck of a lot easier to pick out than HTTP transactions on random ports. Considering that 99% of criminals are also idiots, port 80 is probably where most of the offensive content is served from. As such, the computational burden on the caching/proxying/URL-hashing box I envision here is probably greatly reduced.
Fuck. Now my car won't start!
(Maybe this is Dean Kamen's s00per-s33kr1t plan to get us to buy Segways?)
And when he does, we'll be there.
Slashdotters: Melting web servers for Homeland Security since 1997!
Actually, that's much easier said than done. It sounds great on paper - and like all "easy money" ideas, it really only serves the interest of the stock scammer.
The reason this sort of fraud is concentrated in the pink sheets is due to the relative illiquidity of penny stocks.
In a liquid market (say, Microsft - MSFT) millions of shares change hands each day, and hundreds (if not thousands) of people are willing to sell you their stock.
In an illiquid market, there may only be a handful of participants. The only seller, for instance, is likely to be the "pumper" - because he's already accumulated the stock at a steep discount.
So - your "buy in quickly" part - doesn't work, because you're buying from the scammer. If the stock's at $0.05, the scammer might sell you 1000 shares at $0.06, and another 1000 at $0.07. He's not likely to sell you 1,000,000 at $0.08 - because he'd rather find some poor sucker willing to buy 1000 at $0.09 - so he can sell (you!) his 1,000,000 at $0.10.
Your "and then unload it" part also fails in an illiquid market. You're not going to be sold much stock unless you pay far more than it's worth. And if you've got lots of stock, to whom are you going to sell it? Once the pumper dumps you his 1,000,000 shares at $0.10, he's out of the market, and certainly isn't going to be buying from you at $0.11. Or $0.10.
You're now the proud owner of 1,000,000 shares of worthless stock. You might sell some of it to stragglers to the game at $0.11, but the pump and dump is done - you're left holding the bag. When the buyers go away (the spammer isn't going to send out another load of emails to encourage anyone else to buy it!), the bid/ask spread widens up, and you're left holding the bag.
A few months later, you see someone bidding $0.04 for 900,000 shares, and now that you've been had, you realize that's better than nothing. That's the scammer, buying the stock back for the next round.
Remember - if you're sitting at a poker table and you don't know who the sucker is, it's you.
Your point about this particular pump-and-dump being the tip of an iceberk of OTCBB "pink sheet" abuse is well-made.
From where I sit, the sad part is that the SEC generally isn't geeked out about spam. It comes down to resources.
I mean, anyone can Google for meltzer stock spammer and find piles of stuff.
A cursory reading of ROKSO reveals this particular ring has a record going back to 1997, including death threats. (Cripes, this is the ETMP spammer from 199teyfucking7!)
Why the hell does it take SIX GODDAMN YEARS to take down one pump-and-dump dirtball?
And he's just one of dozens.
Stock fraud continues because justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.
A six-year delay between the start of the scam and the SEC finally issuing a "Stop breaking the law, or we'll make you sign a consent decree wherein you don't admit to guilt but promise not to break the law in the future" is unacceptable.
It's unacceptable because it's not just useless - it's worse than useless - it's practically an invitation to dirtballs from around the world to get into the fraud business, because by the time the SEC actually catches onto the scam, the scammed money has either left the country or has been laundered.
If anyone from HomeSec is reading this - hook up with some SEC folks. Fund them. Fund the hell out of them. Because if even a tenth of the pump-and-dump scams are being used for money laundering (as opposed to mere fraud), you've got one hell of a conduit for drug money and/or terror money, and the SEC's Enforcement Division as currently set up, clearly doesn't have the resources to stop it.
My nose rankles at my use of the word "mere" to describe stock fraud - but it's a reflection of reality, which is that the government doesn't give a fuck about "mere" fraud, because it's only the serfs getting ripped off, and the dumb serfs at that. So to hell with the serfs. It's no excuse for being blind to the the opportunity for money laundering (perhaps more precisely, the opportunity to camouflage money laundering) brought on by continual, ongoing pump-and-dump stock fraud operations. And honestly, maybe that is more HomeSec's bailiwick than the SEC's. But the two organizations definitely need to start sharing data, and they need to start now.
No, it has to be louder than that.
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> It's possible your family support was much greater than hers.
Yeah, I was lucky on that front. Most kids aren't.
> Good for you, to think that way in high school. I myself tried, but I think I was 25 before I actually got it.
I think it's usually around 18-30 before anyone really has a chance to "get it". I put up a good front in high school, but deep down, I also needed acceptance. I just chose the "acceptance" of the ones who were handing out the grades. I used grades to keep score, rather than the number of friends I had.
That's why I had to put in that paragraph about university being the ultimate reality check for geek megalomania. It wasn't until partway through that particular wringer that I truly "got it", in that I figured out it was also OK not to have a 4.0 GPA, so long as I was learning something and making progress towards the goal of a degree in a field you enjoyed - and to stop beating myself up every time I got a 3.5.
REUTERS - Feb 1, 2023:
UN Secretary General Clinton said in a speech today that while the loss of the privately-launched and operated "Armadillo" space plane last weekend is regrettable, but that the United States is obliged to "give the collections process time to work", and called for the UN Space Council to pass a resolution calling for the complete cleanup of space debris by 2033.
BACKGROUND: The UN Space Council was formed following the loss of Shuttle Columbia 20 years ago. After passing resolutions calling for permanent funding form the UN, it promptly passed a series of resolutions concerning the issue of space debris in low earth orbit.
Following the loss of Shuttle Discovery to space debris in 2005, the UN Space Council passed Resolution 1042, calling for a programme that would investigate the feasibility of LEO debris collection.
In response to the stranding of the crews of the ISS and Shuttle Atlantis due to damage a surprise recurrence of the Leonids in 2006, the UN Space Council passed Resolution 1334, lauding the process of investigation, and calling for additional time to study the problem.
Rescue shuttle Endeavor was launched one month later, but failed to make it into orbit after the main engine was punctured by space debris. All three vehicles were loss. This catastrophe prompted Resolution 1349, demanding an extension of the deadline for submission of the debris collection feasibility study, and an expansion of the study to include weapons of meteoric destruction below the tropopause.
Secretary-General Clinton hailed this week's decision by the UN Space Council to proceed on another resolution, and in his speech, reminded the world that despite the Armadillo tragedy, it was due to the diligence of the UN Space Debris Collections Process that there had been no losses of manned spacecraft since the loss of the last Shuttle in 2006.
A furious Tom Paine, former NASA administrator during the Apollo years, was ejected as he attempted to disrupt the proceedings from the visitors' gallery. Rumors that the words "You sick bastards, the reason NASA hasn't lost a manned mission since the loss of the last shuttle in 2006 is because it hasn't launched anything since then! For fuck's sake, it hasn't even frickin' built a new manned vehicle based on post-1982 technology!" are completely false.
UN Secretary-General Clinton kept his composure despite the disruption in the gallery, and concluded his address to the UN Space Council without further incident.
His call for a new UN Space Council resolution to "let the debris collectors assess the situation" has received great support, particularly from representatives of Arianespace.
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> Fitting in isnt important, having real friends who accept the true you is important. Hell I only have a few friends but thats all I need, whats the point of dozens of fake friends and not knowing who is real and whos not, when you can have real friends who accept you for you?
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> Of course most teenagers dont understand the difference between their peers and their friends.
That, too.
I'm glad I'm male. At least males have that "grin and bear it", or "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" kind of ideal to live up to. The worst that was likely to happen to us was the odd beat-down or locker, which I and my geeky compadres somehow managed to escape. (For all our bitching, it looks like we went to a pretty decent HS after all!)
But girls - damn - they can be evil to each other in ways that us guys couldn't even dream of. (I didn't even appreciate that until years after high school. If you have a female SO, ask her about it. Evil, man, frickin' evil.)
> Anyway if she were smart she would have tried to make friends with you, considering you accepted her while these others do not.
For all I know, perhaps she was trying to do precisely that, and I, with the emotional-IQ barely approaching room temperature, was too much of a "nerd" to see it for what it was.
Sometimes I think God gave us all 200 points to distribute between IQ and EQ. Now, I ain't telling whether my room-temp EQ is in Celsius or Farenheit, 'cuz I honestly don't know myself.
But I do know that if I'd heard about EQ back in high school, I'd probably have said "Great. Do whatever it takes to give me a room-temp IQ... in Kelvins!", so any discussion of EQ would probably have been lost on me anyways :)
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> How odd.....I had the exact same reaction when I attended my 10th year high school reunion. I've never bothered going to another one and probably never will.
Ditto.
I've stayed in touch with the few I wanted to stay in touch with. To hell with the ones I said "to hell with".
The only reason I can imagine going to a reunion would be to play one-upmanship and bragging games about how I made it bigger than $LOSER, at the risk of being shown up by $WINNER who made it bigger than me.
Sure, there are days when I'm curious to see just how many of my classmates I "beat" in the Game of Life - and then I remember that the parts of high school I hated most were the parts that dealt with social hierarchies, dominance, rank, and/or pecking order.
On pain of hypocrisy, I refuse to perpetuate that system. I've never attended a high school or university alumni reunion, and never will.
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
- WOPR, from War Games
It's a hard concept to communicate, too - that you don't want to be popular, because you don't see "popularity" as anything worth having.
I was a nerd/geek at the "D" table. My most fucked-up high school memory was when a girl from the "C" table who demonstrated she was deliberately faking wrong answers on the tests to lower her grades, lest she end up at the "D" table) confided suicidal thoughts to me.
As I recall, my response (what the fuck, any statute of limitations has long since past, it was long ago that it probably was legally OK for students to just deal with shit like this amongst themselves, and hey, I was a minor and therefore too dumb to know what I was doing :) was something like this:
I have no idea what happened to her; other than that she kept her end of the bargain. I didn't know her that well to begin with and we never really spoke after that; all I know is that she didn't off herself in the remaining four years of high school and graduated with "B+" grades just sufficient to get her into university, though she was probably capable of "A"s.
On my darker days, I like to think I did something good. It's reasonable to presume that if she survived high school, she survived university, and found her way to cubicle-bound conformity along with the rest of us.
On my lighter days, I reflect back on the "better" part of the rant and realize that that going to university is a wonderful cure for nerd megalomania. Nothing like sitting in a room with 130 people and being told "Most of you were A+ students in high school. That ends here. You're still just as smart as you were six months ago, but you're in a room of people, all of whom who are also just as smart as you were six months ago, or they wouldn't be here." in your first Calculus class, and then having the prof prove it to (all of) you, over and over and over and over again :)
They're also a promotional tool to sell celebrity. Not celebrities, but celebrity - the notion that there's a group of people ("celebrities") who are prettier, wealthier, more knowledgeable on world affairs, and just plain better than you.
It's not that a CGI Gollum threatens the ability of $MOVIESTAR to demand a multimillion-dollar contract. (It does, but that's beside the point.)
It's that a CGI Gollum threatens the whole concept of "movie star" in the first place.
Once we realize that $MOVIESTARs are little more meat puppets that can be rendered by having anybody go the same motions in front of a bluescreen and using software to overlay an appropriate skin and bump-map on our pasty little knobbly bodies, we might stop paying attention to them.
Now you too, know to FEAR the Google!
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> Of course, you'd need to pick an "earth crosser" (well mars crosser), or the energetic considerations would be a bit steep.
Well, they've got it working for space probes. It's just a matter of scaling up. *rimshot*
2.Dinner & drinks
3.Entertainment (club, movie)
4.Foreplay
5.Sex
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> If you get past 5, and she makes you breakfast in the morning, you've found the perfect woman.
But you haven't truly won unless you get 6) ...profit!!!
Good point. How about "Screw someone else's ex tonight!"
If they stopped to really think about it, that's what most people in relationships will be doing tonight anyways, right?
"Burma Shave."
>[...]
>Staring at anatomical parts other than the eyes.
> Looking in some other direction that at their eyes.
Eyes. Those are the two big bumps on females' chests, aren't they? Cool.
> Grinning like a psychotic megalomaniac preparing to take over the world.
Doesn't the love of your life deserve at least some honesty? :)
> Never, ever, ever, ever compare your prospective mate to a "suitable commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product" in front of him/her.
Corollary: But if you should break rule #1, and she says "Yeah, that makes sense", for fsck's sake, marry her!
>
> Screw on Valentines Day
But what if it's parsed "Screw your ex on Valentine's day"? I'd think that'd lead to less clickthroughs, not more.
Spice channel? You mean, like pay for pr0n? You're new to this "geek" thing, aren't you?
Recommended beer: "Arrogant Bastard Ale".
Recommended pr0n that's worth paying for: "Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie"
Nothin' says lovin' like a 12-pack of Arrogant Bastard, a subwoofer vibrating the chair, and an entire room glowing a spooky shade of reddish-orange as the bombs go off.
(The only thing redder than the fireball from the explosion was the redshift of my last date's ass as she receded at z=5.9 :)
"Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie" - Dir. Peter Kuran.
The guy who did the visual effects from Star Wars spent a few years restoring declassified test footage and presenting the history of the weapons programme in an format intelligible to the layman. It's educational (though by no means nearly as so as the books you cite), the explosions are hauntingly beautiful (which sounds weird, but see the video before you declare me to on crack), and if you've got a sound system, the DVD will present your subwoofer with a serious workout. 10/10 in my books.
I think some of that is due to Western culture's proclivity to parse everything in terms of soundbites.
Consider the following "typical" debate:
Alice: Nuking Japan was wrong!
Bob: We were at war!
Alice may have actually said something as strong as "Truman was a war criminal", or as moderate as "Why did we drop two bombs, not one?"
Bob parses as "Alice believes it was a war crime", thinks for a minute about how Dresden was nasty, but not a war crime, the firebombings of Tokyo were nasty but not war crimes, and concludes that because of the military importance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, neither of those nasty events were war crimes either.
On Slashdot, he could type all that out. But in face-to-face conversations, Alice would probably fall asleep (or would interrupt him) before he finishes his argument. So Bob gives the soundbite: "We were at war" - meaning "the force used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was within the bounds of acceptable conduct in wartime."
Now, if we take the second example - Alice merely questioning the second bombing - we have a different problem.
Bob's probably had this horse flogged before. Most of the times, he's discovered that his opponent in the debate didn't really care one way or the other about the second bomb, he/she just wanted Bob to admit that one of the bombings was unnecessary, in order to advance an argument. If Bob budges an inch on the necessity of the second bombing, Alice will use that to claim that the second bombing, if not the first, was a war crime, and that therefore, Truman was a criminal, or whatever extreme position she really holds, that Bob argues against.
So Bob's real answer is "Alice, I think you have a hidden agenda. I'm not going to dignify that with a reponse, except to say that I think both bombings were required to bring about Japanese surrender."
Alice - whether she has a hidden agenda or not - parses that as "We were at war".
What usually happens next is that Bob and Alice get into the debate about whether or not Japanese and US casualties in a land invasion would have exceeded those from the bombings.
One can see the same thing in the present situation with respect to France vs. the US. The entire debate boils down to the US hearing the word "inspections", and thinks "ineffective for past 12 years, ineffective now, therefore not an option, war's the only option". The French hear the word "war", and think "offends our sensibilities, threatens income stream from 12 years of selling stuff to Iraq, therefore not an option, more inspections are the only option".
Go back one step, and that immediately becomes "anything where the UN is involved" being parsed as "ineffective / you have a hidden anti-US agenda" in the US's mind, and any hint that "inspections haven't worked" or "Saddam's lying" being parsed as "war / you have a hidden pro-war agenda" in the French mind.
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> No, that's called extortion!
Actually, it's closer to fraud - though the "extortion" angle is part of how the fraud works.
Most of the time, such calls are NOT from your local police. They're from a telemarketing operation that's registered itself as a "charity", that happens to have a name that falsely implies it's being run by/for your local cops.
For instance, if "$YOURTOWN Police Benevolent Fund" is the real Police charity, the scammers will call the scam organization the "Police Benevolent Fund of $YOURTOWN", or "$YOURTOWN Police Benevolence Fund".)
What really happens is that 90% of the "donations" collected go to the operators of the scam, and 10% go to the cops/firemen, just the bare minimum to make it legal.
Police and Fire Departments are commonly used in this scam for the reason implied by the last poster -- when asked for money by people claiming to be authority figures, people are much less likely to say "no".
The sad part of the scam is that for some cash-strapped municipalities, it's possible that the cops and fire departments turn a blind eye to it; better to get 10% to keep some fraudster in business than to get nothing at all.
No - the whole point of using computers is so that we can achieve the same safety/security afforded in a state like Romania or East Germany, but without wasting 25% of our population in economically nonproductive spying.
As for Ben Franklin - there's two parts people seem to forget: First, it's essential liberties, not even the tiniest liberties. If you wanna claim Ben's approval, you're going to have to ask him what he meant by "essential", which is gonna be difficult. As it stands, "essential" is a loophole big enough to drive the proverbial flogged-to-death horse through.
But second - and this is a horse that hasn't gotten so much as ten lashes with a wet noodle yet - is his contention that such people deserve neither security nor liberty; fair enough, but the world is full of people who arguably have things they don't deserve.
OK, Ben, suppose I give you the benefit of the doubt. By consistenly re-electing representatives who took (a very few of our) "liberties" in exchange for offering us (a small measure of added) "security", we've abdicated any right we ever had to either.
But does that mean we won't get both, whether we "deserve" them or not? I mean, there's a pretty vocal minority of the population that claims we also don't "deserve" to have such a large proportion of the world's produced wealth. Or to consume such a large proportion of the world's generated energy. Or to drive big fat rollover-prone SUVs to McDonald's while half the world starves. And yet, we still do. In fact, we frickin' 0wn!
It's just as likely, IMNSHO, that even though (even if we accept Ben's view) we're no longer deserving of liberty or security, we may just end up retaining both anyways.