PayPal is no longer the best vendor to use if your transactions are not happening on eBay...
- If you're taking donations on the web, Amazon.com has a much friendlier service going.
- If you're running a porn site, there's subscription billing companies designed especially for you out there.
- If you're running a low-volume e-store that's not using eBay, you're best positioning yourself on Yahoo Shopping or a simlar storefront-providing network.
- Large volume stores should be handling their own credit card transactions. Contact your favorite bank.
eBay's clear modus operandi for PayPal ever since they got their hands on it is "high availablity". They made sure PayPal got out of any and all questionably legal transactions, and even those that might cause credible anti-something groups to declare a boycott of PayPal.
The reason for eBay's aquisition of the business clearly wasn't because they thought PayPal would be profitable. However, they saw a problem as the money transfer services of the web's free-wheeling days started to fall... if PayPal were ever to shut down for any reason, eBay's transaction volume would suddenly pulmet with it, wiping out eBay too. They bought it to make sure nothing funny happens with it.
Freenet seems to have steped over the line of things eBay doesn't want to see. It's not that they did anything eBay thinks itself is wrong... they're scared of anything any politically active group might call wrong leading to boycotts. Hello, ??AAs...
Since their takeover of the company, PayPal's free-wheeling days abruptly ended. PayPal can no longer be used to fund online gambling of any kind, it can't even be used to fund porn of any kind.
Now, online gambling is of questionable legality in all fifty states and many other places in the world where real gambling is prohibited or heavily restricted. However, most forms of pornography are legal in nearly all parts of the world except where the government is heavily controled by religious influence.
Here in the USA, the government's nowhere close to banning porn.
I think eBay's concern is keeping the PayPal name from being soiled by anything contraversial becase if anybody says "Boycott PayPal... they're helping fund Thing X!", then that indirectly means a boycott of eBay.
Well, memory you grab in Linux with malloc(...) and friends isn't *supposed* to be executable, though some applications (XFree86 comes to mind, amongst others, not to bash XFree86) think that it is.
This is why using NX and friends on Linux can break apps. Any application that loads code into memory it grabbed with malloc or similar will get killed when it tries to run code in that memory space (since that memory isn't supposed to be executable).
There are plenty of dumbly-written Windows apps that have the same bad programming logic. Afterall, it takes bad programming to create a buffer flaw anyway.
The best thing to do would be to present an option to the user in the configuration of the operating system whether they want malloc reqests that not marked with an NX value to be presumed data, presummed executable, or just outright refused on the assumption that even a properly written program that's unaware of NX just isn't worth the risk.
Programming languages that have a Malloc function can simply implement Malloc with an optional parameter that's highly recommended, create a Malloc_NX or simmilar function, or simply pull the rug out from under the old Malloc syntax to force programmers to upgrade or die.
Because any time you're allocating memory for yourself, the OS isn't quite sure just what you're going to put there. When it's assembly-written code, the OS really can't tell the difference between the load of more code and the load of data.
Besides, what if the buffer exploit is inside the operating system itself? Even Linux could fall victim to that kind of mistake. We've found that as long as bad code is distributed, somebody will still be running it long after the issue has been discovered and patched, and there's been worms to prove it.
Just so we're clear here... NX isn't any sort of DRM technology.
It's a pretty smart idea, moving the core concept of "file permissions" into the RAM addressing space. Simply put, if the chip has been told that a certain area of memory has been marked "No eXecute", and then the execution point somehow gets there, an error event is raised to the operating system and that process is killed.
Basically, it's an unreliable but better-than-nothing safety backstop behind unchecked buffers. If somebody manages to exploit a buffer overflow, there's a semi-random chance that the virus code might just crash into being allocated into another area marked NX, and when the execution point gets there the underlying application starts to crash.
Of course, any memory space intended for data and not code should be marked NX... are people going to be smart enough to actually do that when on hardward that supports it? Let's hope so... it'll at least limit the spread of worms.
Leads to the mortgage industry are worth just as much as they used to be. There's also still money in selling the sexual-aid pills to people who don't really need them and can't get them from their own doctor.
There's always something willing to pay big for spam advertising, either because it's really hot or becuase it can't buy legit ads.
You could have made more if you sold it all, then bought the same number of shares back after it tanked (before it recovered) -- In general, this is fairly safe when you have reason to believe a stock is about to tank, since you're only risking a small portion of your winnings on the boundback.
That would presume Martha had more info than she actually had. She just knew the stock was headed down... she didn't quite know why.
I wouldn't take her advice. Afterall, the "insider info" that she was convicted of covering up was a tip to sell the stock shortly before news that the main product of IMClone was about to suffer a setback at the FDA.
However, the drug wasn't dead. And in fact, it overcame that bad study to eventually be approved. Martha's decision to sell the stock in the long run turned out to be a mistake. She would have made money if she kept the shares between then and now...
If there are that many people willing to pay 73.95 for a share of Google such that at the end of the day that's the lowest price at which a share can be had, then just how in your universe did the Dutch Auction settle at 25?
Try filping the closing an opening signs and you might be on to something. Google's more likely to crash downward than rocket upward on day one thanks to the Dutch Auction.
But, you are right that this auction will bid up the price because people are not rational -- they tend to be more confident than they should be and they like to "win".
If that's what you truely expect to happen, then you should bid what you think a Google share is really worth, and if you "lose" the dutch auction, place a limit order to buy the shares when they fall to the price you wanted. If you're right, the Dutch Auction will end up settling at an overvalued price, but then when the "winners" start placing sell orders they'll end up losers. If you're wrong, all you lose is the fee your broker charges for placing a limit order that never goes through.
Re:The real object of the game...
on
Google IPO Swami
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Your average Joe Daytrader cannot do this. The only people who are able to get shares during the immediate beginning of an IPO are insiders, investment banks, friends of the company, etc.
Joe Daytrader can't get in on the IPO itself, but he can sit and be the buyer shortly after the bell when first one of the "lucky few" decides to sell their shares, antispating that there will be a lot of Jane Investors calling their brokers later in the day wanting that "hot stock" and willing to pay more.
It's not a certain play, but during IPO mania it worked far too many times for it to be healthy...
What do those factors have to do with the price of a tech ipo?
Because Google's stock has to compete in the universe of all investments. In short, the value of a share of Google will be in part influced by the value of all other potential investments available.
Each macro force has very little direct impact on the Google price, but there's a whole lot of them out there, and they all add up...
What happens when a large number of people realize this and it artificially increases the price?
If too many people bid $500/share... then the cutoff price will turn out being something like $400/share, which will likely be artificially high considering the true value of Google.
You'll pay $400/share to get a ton of shares, but then only be able to sell them at their true value which the market will quickly realize is in the sub-$100s. What a way to lose 3/4 of your money!
That's the key of this Dutch Auction system. Instead of the lucky few with the right connections getting a pre-market chance to buy at a lower-than-fair-value price, this takes a stab at determining the fair value before the first shares are distributed. If too many people try to drive the IPO price upwards, everyone will find themselves holding shares that they'll only be able to sell at a loss.
The "I'm smarter-than-you, so I can make a quick buck off this..." gang is really better off sitting this one out.
That's highly unlikely. There shouldn't be very many people wishing they had gotten in on the IPO and willing to pay more the same day just by the nature of this Dutch auction scheme. The whole point of choosing this method is to lock out the rich people who want to quickly double their money on same day turn arounds...
The real object of the game...
on
Google IPO Swami
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The contest entry form has some interesting subtexts to them... 3. Do you intend to place a bid for shares in the Google IPO? (Yes/No) 4. What price will you bid for Google shares? Enter 0 if you do not intend to bid. The value must be between 0 and 999, inclusive. 5. How many shares do you intend to bid for at this price? Enter 0 if you do not intend to bid There's the true motivation for this exercise. The person running this contest clearly states on his site that he's going to try to sell the results of the survey to people who want to have some way of peering into a crystal ball and determining what people would be willing to pay for Google before the dutch auction price is determined.
The day-trader investors who ususually love IPOs hate this Dutch Auction system because it gives them less room to try to buy up the early shares and then sell them the same day to people who wished they had gotten in on the IPO and are now willing to pay more to get their shares at market prices. (Smarter investors would place a limit order rather than a market order and just wait for the day-one spike to wear off and the price to be more in line with reality.)
11. Would you like to be contacted by someone to help you bid for shares in the Google IPO? You will receive one email if you say Yes. (Yes/No) Talk about "highly targetted e-mail marketing list." That's sure to go to the highest bidder too...
This guy most certainly has a right to make a buck... we just should be smart enough consumers to realize that he's doing so by running this, and possibly withhold our information if we deem it too valuable to hand over.
One thing that this data will almost certainly show is that data entered today will we totally wild guesses and be totally disconnected from the real factors that determine the IPO price.
Macro-economic factors such as interest rates, price of oil, unemployment, and who the US President will be on the date of the IPO are still unknown. Hey, even the date of the IPO is still an unknown!
Bookmark the site and revisit it as Google gets further along the road to IPO. That's the only way to win at this game unless you're an extremely good guesser.
Of course, they could edit anything embarrassing that it says and make the document more accurately predict the future to make themselves look smarter.
Something along the lines of "We are at war with Iraq. We were always at war with Iraq."...?
The concept of "lesser of two evils" also comes into play... which is to say that it's okay to comitt a crime if it's being done in order to get in the way a larger crime.
In order for the scammer to claim that he was the victim of a fraud, he'd end up confessing to the original scam which was much more serious. Most judges and prosecuters would grant immunity to the people who sent the "P-P-P-PowerBook" in order to bring down the larger scam artist.
The other way to get around this problem would be to do the blackouts against a digital version of the document, so that the words are all replaced with blocks of equal size without revealing any information about how long the oriignal words were.
The student didn't actually solve for any real US secrets, because the documents she was using were already declassified. However, as an academic exercise this demonstrates that there's still information being conveyed in the typical black-out way of "redacting" certain words from documents.
And, since the information was known, we're sure that she did come up with the correct solutions.
One thing to note is that the providers apply most of these fees on a per-line basis, so it's the customers with the cheapest monthly plans that end up with the highest percentage of their bills turning out to be fees and taxes.
Number portablity was actually a break-even proposition for most of the cell phone carriers.
It turned out to be a knockout blow to AT&T Wireless because they botched an IT upgrade that ended up not allowing them to accept new customers during the critical moments when portability first opened up. All off the other companies, ended up just trading customers leading to higher customer satisfaction rates.
In short, this was one of the best advertising boons the cell providers ever had, as unhappy customers could move to a company that better serves them, and overall customer complaints went down.
Slashdot Mirror
PayPal is no longer the best vendor to use if your transactions are not happening on eBay...
- If you're taking donations on the web, Amazon.com has a much friendlier service going.
- If you're running a porn site, there's subscription billing companies designed especially for you out there.
- If you're running a low-volume e-store that's not using eBay, you're best positioning yourself on Yahoo Shopping or a simlar storefront-providing network.
- Large volume stores should be handling their own credit card transactions. Contact your favorite bank.
eBay's clear modus operandi for PayPal ever since they got their hands on it is "high availablity". They made sure PayPal got out of any and all questionably legal transactions, and even those that might cause credible anti-something groups to declare a boycott of PayPal.
The reason for eBay's aquisition of the business clearly wasn't because they thought PayPal would be profitable. However, they saw a problem as the money transfer services of the web's free-wheeling days started to fall... if PayPal were ever to shut down for any reason, eBay's transaction volume would suddenly pulmet with it, wiping out eBay too. They bought it to make sure nothing funny happens with it.
Freenet seems to have steped over the line of things eBay doesn't want to see. It's not that they did anything eBay thinks itself is wrong... they're scared of anything any politically active group might call wrong leading to boycotts. Hello, ??AAs...
This is eBay's house, they get to set the rules.
Since their takeover of the company, PayPal's free-wheeling days abruptly ended. PayPal can no longer be used to fund online gambling of any kind, it can't even be used to fund porn of any kind.
Now, online gambling is of questionable legality in all fifty states and many other places in the world where real gambling is prohibited or heavily restricted. However, most forms of pornography are legal in nearly all parts of the world except where the government is heavily controled by religious influence.
Here in the USA, the government's nowhere close to banning porn.
I think eBay's concern is keeping the PayPal name from being soiled by anything contraversial becase if anybody says "Boycott PayPal... they're helping fund Thing X!", then that indirectly means a boycott of eBay.
Well, memory you grab in Linux with malloc(...) and friends isn't *supposed* to be executable, though some applications (XFree86 comes to mind, amongst others, not to bash XFree86) think that it is.
This is why using NX and friends on Linux can break apps. Any application that loads code into memory it grabbed with malloc or similar will get killed when it tries to run code in that memory space (since that memory isn't supposed to be executable).
There are plenty of dumbly-written Windows apps that have the same bad programming logic. Afterall, it takes bad programming to create a buffer flaw anyway.
The best thing to do would be to present an option to the user in the configuration of the operating system whether they want malloc reqests that not marked with an NX value to be presumed data, presummed executable, or just outright refused on the assumption that even a properly written program that's unaware of NX just isn't worth the risk.
Programming languages that have a Malloc function can simply implement Malloc with an optional parameter that's highly recommended, create a Malloc_NX or simmilar function, or simply pull the rug out from under the old Malloc syntax to force programmers to upgrade or die.
It won't. So long as the user insists on granting run permission to something they shouldn't run, it's gonna run.
This only works when the problem is when something is trying to apply the buffer exploit way of taking over the execution point.
Still... just because it doesn't cure cancer is no reason to throw out a cure for the common cold.
Because any time you're allocating memory for yourself, the OS isn't quite sure just what you're going to put there. When it's assembly-written code, the OS really can't tell the difference between the load of more code and the load of data.
Besides, what if the buffer exploit is inside the operating system itself? Even Linux could fall victim to that kind of mistake. We've found that as long as bad code is distributed, somebody will still be running it long after the issue has been discovered and patched, and there's been worms to prove it.
Just so we're clear here... NX isn't any sort of DRM technology.
It's a pretty smart idea, moving the core concept of "file permissions" into the RAM addressing space. Simply put, if the chip has been told that a certain area of memory has been marked "No eXecute", and then the execution point somehow gets there, an error event is raised to the operating system and that process is killed.
Basically, it's an unreliable but better-than-nothing safety backstop behind unchecked buffers. If somebody manages to exploit a buffer overflow, there's a semi-random chance that the virus code might just crash into being allocated into another area marked NX, and when the execution point gets there the underlying application starts to crash.
Of course, any memory space intended for data and not code should be marked NX... are people going to be smart enough to actually do that when on hardward that supports it? Let's hope so... it'll at least limit the spread of worms.
Leads to the mortgage industry are worth just as much as they used to be. There's also still money in selling the sexual-aid pills to people who don't really need them and can't get them from their own doctor.
There's always something willing to pay big for spam advertising, either because it's really hot or becuase it can't buy legit ads.
He doesn't have to aquire the shares in the IPO process... just place a market order on the first day if his IPO bid fails.
You could have made more if you sold it all, then bought the same number of shares back after it tanked (before it recovered) -- In general, this is fairly safe when you have reason to believe a stock is about to tank, since you're only risking a small portion of your winnings on the boundback.
That would presume Martha had more info than she actually had. She just knew the stock was headed down... she didn't quite know why.
I wouldn't take her advice. Afterall, the "insider info" that she was convicted of covering up was a tip to sell the stock shortly before news that the main product of IMClone was about to suffer a setback at the FDA.
However, the drug wasn't dead. And in fact, it overcame that bad study to eventually be approved. Martha's decision to sell the stock in the long run turned out to be a mistake. She would have made money if she kept the shares between then and now...
opening 25.00 closing 73.95
If there are that many people willing to pay 73.95 for a share of Google such that at the end of the day that's the lowest price at which a share can be had, then just how in your universe did the Dutch Auction settle at 25?
Try filping the closing an opening signs and you might be on to something. Google's more likely to crash downward than rocket upward on day one thanks to the Dutch Auction.
But, you are right that this auction will bid up the price because people are not rational -- they tend to be more confident than they should be and they like to "win".
If that's what you truely expect to happen, then you should bid what you think a Google share is really worth, and if you "lose" the dutch auction, place a limit order to buy the shares when they fall to the price you wanted. If you're right, the Dutch Auction will end up settling at an overvalued price, but then when the "winners" start placing sell orders they'll end up losers. If you're wrong, all you lose is the fee your broker charges for placing a limit order that never goes through.
Your average Joe Daytrader cannot do this. The only people who are able to get shares during the immediate beginning of an IPO are insiders, investment banks, friends of the company, etc.
Joe Daytrader can't get in on the IPO itself, but he can sit and be the buyer shortly after the bell when first one of the "lucky few" decides to sell their shares, antispating that there will be a lot of Jane Investors calling their brokers later in the day wanting that "hot stock" and willing to pay more.
It's not a certain play, but during IPO mania it worked far too many times for it to be healthy...
What do those factors have to do with the price of a tech ipo?
Because Google's stock has to compete in the universe of all investments. In short, the value of a share of Google will be in part influced by the value of all other potential investments available.
Each macro force has very little direct impact on the Google price, but there's a whole lot of them out there, and they all add up...
What happens when a large number of people realize this and it artificially increases the price?
If too many people bid $500/share... then the cutoff price will turn out being something like $400/share, which will likely be artificially high considering the true value of Google.
You'll pay $400/share to get a ton of shares, but then only be able to sell them at their true value which the market will quickly realize is in the sub-$100s. What a way to lose 3/4 of your money!
That's the key of this Dutch Auction system. Instead of the lucky few with the right connections getting a pre-market chance to buy at a lower-than-fair-value price, this takes a stab at determining the fair value before the first shares are distributed. If too many people try to drive the IPO price upwards, everyone will find themselves holding shares that they'll only be able to sell at a loss.
The "I'm smarter-than-you, so I can make a quick buck off this..." gang is really better off sitting this one out.
opening: 23.65 closing: 46.13
That's highly unlikely. There shouldn't be very many people wishing they had gotten in on the IPO and willing to pay more the same day just by the nature of this Dutch auction scheme. The whole point of choosing this method is to lock out the rich people who want to quickly double their money on same day turn arounds...
The contest entry form has some interesting subtexts to them...
3. Do you intend to place a bid for shares in the Google IPO? (Yes/No)
4. What price will you bid for Google shares? Enter 0 if you do not intend to bid. The value must be between 0 and 999, inclusive.
5. How many shares do you intend to bid for at this price?
Enter 0 if you do not intend to bid
There's the true motivation for this exercise. The person running this contest clearly states on his site that he's going to try to sell the results of the survey to people who want to have some way of peering into a crystal ball and determining what people would be willing to pay for Google before the dutch auction price is determined.
The day-trader investors who ususually love IPOs hate this Dutch Auction system because it gives them less room to try to buy up the early shares and then sell them the same day to people who wished they had gotten in on the IPO and are now willing to pay more to get their shares at market prices. (Smarter investors would place a limit order rather than a market order and just wait for the day-one spike to wear off and the price to be more in line with reality.)
11. Would you like to be contacted by someone to help you bid for shares in the Google IPO? You will receive one email if you say Yes. (Yes/No)
Talk about "highly targetted e-mail marketing list." That's sure to go to the highest bidder too...
This guy most certainly has a right to make a buck... we just should be smart enough consumers to realize that he's doing so by running this, and possibly withhold our information if we deem it too valuable to hand over.
One thing that this data will almost certainly show is that data entered today will we totally wild guesses and be totally disconnected from the real factors that determine the IPO price.
Macro-economic factors such as interest rates, price of oil, unemployment, and who the US President will be on the date of the IPO are still unknown. Hey, even the date of the IPO is still an unknown!
Bookmark the site and revisit it as Google gets further along the road to IPO. That's the only way to win at this game unless you're an extremely good guesser.
Of course, they could edit anything embarrassing that it says and make the document more accurately predict the future to make themselves look smarter.
Something along the lines of "We are at war with Iraq. We were always at war with Iraq."...?
The concept of "lesser of two evils" also comes into play... which is to say that it's okay to comitt a crime if it's being done in order to get in the way a larger crime.
In order for the scammer to claim that he was the victim of a fraud, he'd end up confessing to the original scam which was much more serious. Most judges and prosecuters would grant immunity to the people who sent the "P-P-P-PowerBook" in order to bring down the larger scam artist.
The other way to get around this problem would be to do the blackouts against a digital version of the document, so that the words are all replaced with blocks of equal size without revealing any information about how long the oriignal words were.
The student didn't actually solve for any real US secrets, because the documents she was using were already declassified. However, as an academic exercise this demonstrates that there's still information being conveyed in the typical black-out way of "redacting" certain words from documents.
And, since the information was known, we're sure that she did come up with the correct solutions.
One thing to note is that the providers apply most of these fees on a per-line basis, so it's the customers with the cheapest monthly plans that end up with the highest percentage of their bills turning out to be fees and taxes.
Number portablity was actually a break-even proposition for most of the cell phone carriers.
It turned out to be a knockout blow to AT&T Wireless because they botched an IT upgrade that ended up not allowing them to accept new customers during the critical moments when portability first opened up. All off the other companies, ended up just trading customers leading to higher customer satisfaction rates.
In short, this was one of the best advertising boons the cell providers ever had, as unhappy customers could move to a company that better serves them, and overall customer complaints went down.