The ten month calendar was also a part of the grande plan. And the French started the count of years over again at zero. Why aren't the Metric geeks fighting for that as well?
I wrote this song once. Please forgive me:
My baby believes in the decimal clock
She thinks an hour has a hundred minutes In it My baby believes in the decimal clock, and the decimal calendar too
I said to my baby "See you half past eight" When she turns up, she's twenty minutes late My baby believes in the decminal clock, and the decimal calendar too
My baby said to me, "I'll meet you at noon" She shows up at five o'clock and says "Where were you?" My baby believes in the decimal clock and the decimal calendar too.
Ten months a year Ten days a month Last night we celebrated here one hundred and oneth! My baby believes in the decimal clock and the decimal calendar too
[piano solo]
One two three o'clock, four o' clock Rock! Five six seven o'clock, eight o'clock Rock! Nine ten...
if GM issues a recall, and you don't go get your car fixed and then the next day you get in a wreck and something bad happens as a result of the defect, ITS YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT
Like heck! If a faulty product is distributed, then it is distributed under the assumption that people will use it. Recalls are Good Things, but there is a huge onus on the provider to make best efforts to stop someone from being damaged as a result of their faulty product. It's fundamentally their fault for designing a product with holes in it, and so it's the manufacturer's responsibility to make sure that the mistake is put right.
And I am not aware of Red Hat having carried out anything like the level of effort which GM goes through in product recalls. Just saying "a good network admin would have kept up with this" doesn't make it. Your product, your liability.
Unless the take-over-the-world faction among Linux advocates want to plaster every commercial distribution with disclaimers shouting "THIS PRODUCT MAY HAVE SERIOUS SECURITY HOLES -- IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY AND YOURS ALONE TO KEEP UP TO DATE WITH THEM" (actually, a quite sensible approach), then the commercial distributors have to make a quantum leap in *making* system admins adhere to best practice. Personally, I'd go down the disclaimer route -- the luser sysadmins are more trouble than they're worth as a market.
I entirely agree, as someone who found it very helpful to use the login. To be charitable, I think someone misunderstood the use of "slashdot_effect" above.
Please, someone, give this chap his karma point back (and perhaps even a bonus one, because it was a useful post).
It might also be possible to use the brain-links to carry out a form of distributed computing, spreading the load of thought over peoples' minds. They say that you can only hold seven distinct ideas in your head at once -- what would things be like for a joined system of humans thinking about 49 things at a time.
It strikes me that if you combined the mental powers of the world's top ten professors of Anglo-Saxon literature into a sort of distributed human processing system, it might be possible to translate some of the more obscure parts of the early English sagas. I even have a name for the project... I'd call it a "Beowulf cluster".
I agree that this guy is a terrible self-publicist, but on a point of fact, m'lud:
What the article says is something about "rejection" by the body... But how the hell is that going to happen in nine days?
IANAD, but in my limited experience of knowing people who've had kidney transplants and various prosthetics, rejection is something that happens frighteningly quickly. Even if no symptoms showed up in nine days, I would guess that blood and tissue tests would be able to show pretty quickly whether the chip had been identified as "other" and attacked by the immune system. Although I must say that talk of "rejection" in the context of a non-organic implant doesn't exactly make that clear ringing sound of truth in my head.
That was a hasty statement (I tend to prefer not to go around calling people ignorant). I am well aware that rural areas are less densely populated than cities. But I was talking about the whole US, relative to the whole UK, in response to a statement about same. A greater proportion of the UK population lives in densely populated areas than the US population. If you make city vs. city comparisons, then the US looks incredibly bad -- even at the height of the troubles, Belfast never had a murder rate more than 20% of that of Los Angeles (which says something to the "people will just use bombs" crowd too).
I'm quite prepared to agree that I'm fantastically ignorant. But it looks like you selected the only statement in my post which wasn't wrong, and said that it was. Talk about missing a barn door with a blunderbuss . . .
jsm
(I have, uncharacteristically, checked these: the UK has 238.9 people sq/km while the US has 29.5 people sq. km. Obviously this isn't the same as the urbanisation rate, but I would expect that to give a less dramatic version of the same conclusion.)
Like the bilious, moronic blowhard I am, it seems that I have now not only made a fool of myself, but been caught out at it.
I retract my assertion and hide stealthily behind my original disclaimer "unchecked at that". I don't think I can be sued for fraudulent misrepresentation, but it might be worth a try, if only to teach me a lesson.
Since I can't seem to get an accurate measurement for my own waistline, I doubt I'll have any luck with Scottish crime statistics. I might as well spologise to all Scots living, dead or missing presumed drunk, while I'm at it.
Yeah, and the Brits have the Empire mentality, the Germans have the after-war mentality, the Africans have the slavery mentality, the Australians have the convict mentality, the Swedes have the Viking mentality, the Irish have the most-oppressed-people-ever mentality and the French have God knows what kind of mentality.
Every nation has its own hang-ups, and I think it's a bit poor for we Euros and Anglos to talk about the "Wild West Mentality" as if it were some sort of disease or, worse, some sort of moral failing. It's how Americans are, and Europe has had cause to be grateful for that Wild West mentality on several occasions. They have to solve their own problems in their own society, and suggesting that they copy a society as amazingly homogeneous as Sweden (or Switzerland, for that matter), is just wrong.
This isn't a flame -- I actually agree with your statement:
Obviously this type of mentality doesn't fit in a modern society where people have to cooperate and trust each others to keep things going smoothly
which is as good sense as I've read on this issue. But the "far-west" tag seems to me like an unanalysed assumption.
Guns equalize people so that people can't use superior physical prowess to overpower victims.
Actually, guns don't equalize people -- they just change the grounds of competition from physical strength to "aggresssion", or "willingness to use a gun". So they would select for a society of the short-tempered, rather than the merely strong.
I think that this is the root of the problem with guns in America -- it's basically an aggression problem rather than a gun problem. A society which developed in the pioneer days has a set of social norms which are appropriate when everyone has 400 acres to let off steam in, and a number of very real natural and manmade threats to defend against. If you then try to transport those norms to an urban society, where everyone has to live on top of each other, then you're bound to get trouble.
I don't know what the solution is, but I doubt it will involve banning guns -- they have such an important role as symbols of individual identity and freedom that any attempt to curtail them would definitely have bad consequences.
(and recently, England has had more robbery per-capita than the United States - modern society, even in England, still has crime)
That would be "Britain" -- England has much lower rates, but Scotland drags up the average. (I state this merely as a criminological "fact", and an unchecked one at that, not out of any anti-Scottishism -- I'm Welsh myself).
If one wants to make comparisons between the UK and US, you have to take into account the population density of the UK, which is much greater. Given the number of people we pack onto this island, the crime rates are incredibly low -- if you put rats at the same density, they'd be tearing each others' throats out.
Coutts & Co. are as English as one could reasonably expect, and are owned by the National Westminster Bank. They don't use pen and paper bankers' books - they have the same transactions processing software as the rest of the NatWest group.
But they are bankers to the Queen (and to my immediate boss), and they will give you a handwritten statement if you want one.
Good point about there being Swiss banks and "Swiss banks" -- the vast majority of the domestic market is served by Kantonalbanks, which are similar to US Savings and Loan institutions. I was talking about the "high end" of the banking market. I utterly agree with you about security problems.
A few things don't quite add up here... as far as I'm aware, they should not be advertising broking services into the US without prior approval by the SEC. (From the article cited)
The Securities and Exchange Commission, meanwhile, has blocked the bank's plans to let U.S. residents place trades through the accounts.
I also note that MFC Merchant Bank SA is owned by a company with quotes on NASDAQ and the Frankfurt Neuer Markt, which makes it very atypical for a Swiss bank (almost all of which are partnerships). And their main service appears to be discount brokerage in American equities, which once more doesn't scream "Swiss Bank" to me.
[brief pause]
Yup, I was right. A quick trawl through EDGAR reveals that they're a subsidiary of MFC Bancorp, incorporated in Yukon Territory of Canada. They used to be part of Mercer (the paper and pulp people) and now they're a Swiss Bank, having bought an operation from an unnamed vendor and then acquired the shell of an insolvent Swiss bank: (from 20-F report)
In September 1997, the Company acquired all of the shares of Bank Rinderknecht AG ("BRA") for approximately U.S.$7.0 million. BRA, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, was active in private banking and securities trading for Swiss and foreign customers since 1870. BRA had been placed in liquidation by the Swiss Federal Banking Commission in August 1997.
The other major asset of this company is a sizeable interest in the Wabush Iron Ore mine in Newfoundland, for those who care.
Far be it from me to say "bunch of opportunists cashing in on the good name of Swiss banking", but if the cap fits . . .
I'm not casting any aspersions on this firm -- the fact that they're regulated by the Swiss authorities provides a baseline guarantee that they're a legitimate bank -- one cannot just march into Geneva and set up business without any checks. But they are not, IMO, a "proper" Swiss bank of the kind you read about in James Bond novels. Everyone should do their own due diligence before making an investment decision -- you should check out the 20-F I linked to, at least, before moving any of your money.
hrrmmmm... I don't think it does anyone any favours to pretend that a lot of money laundry doesn't go on in Switzerland.
And I happen to have a few Swiss bank accounts.
If you're living in Switzerland, I'll bet that your accounts are either with UBS or Credit Suisse, or with the local Kantonalbank. That's a different kettle of rostis from what we're talking about here, which is the Geneva and Zurich private banks. These banks sell a product, and that product is secrecy, and a fair proportion of the people who are prepared to pay for secrecy want it for some nefarious purpose.
There are utterly legitimate reasons for wanting a secret bank account (if I was a Chinese businessman living in Indonesia, I'd want one, for example), but these are definitely the exception rather than the rule.
It's true that Switzerland has cleaned up its act of late, and now has decent money laundering laws. It's not a real den of laundering like some of the West Indies financial centres. But it still comes with the territory.
jsm
PS: I'd prefer to remember Switzerland for the Jungfrau and for Lake Neuchatel.
Well, the question then arises of who can patent the human genome. . .
I notice that Pope John Paul has recently made a statement saying that evolution is "More than a theory", and is now accepted as fact by the Catholic Church.
Their position would be that God created the seeds of life, and developed the process which allowed the human genome to evolve, guiding the process at all stages. . . . kinda hard to patent something you don't believe exists, but if the Pope is now admitting evolution, that removes the last obstacle for the Catholic Church claiming to represent the Original Inventor of the source material.
I think I need to get me one of those Jesuit IP lawyers....
If nobody knows your name how do they identify you, and how do you transfer money, etc?
In the words of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber:
Oh what bliss to sign your cheques as 3-1-0-2-7! Never been an account in the name of Eva Peron!
(from Evita)
Basically, you can sign a cheque with your number instead of your name (you may want to go to a big bank to do this rather than your local Wells Fargo). Or you can ask for money to be transferred from your anonymous account to your checking account. To do this, you'll need to know the a/c number, plus probably a password arranged with your banker.
But you shouldn't really be using a Swiss a/c for your everyday bank account. It's only worthwhile if you're only occasionally withdrawing money to buy a boat, or because your family has just been made refugees by a coup (a good reason for bank secrecy). Or something else which would make the trip to Switzerland worthwhile. A really good banker will meet you anywhere in the world with a suitcase full of cash, although this service costs a bit more.
Is this done on the phone? How do they know you, by your voice? What if the person who recognizes you is dead - how do you carry out transactions?
See above. Passwords are sometimes used, or the banker may indeed recognise your voice, or you may prefer to do business face to face. The death of your banker is a serious problem -- that's not a silly question at all, and is a real problem for the industry -- they will usually have a secondary banker assigned to your account. When a senior Swiss banker has a heart attack or something, it's a real crisis for a Swiss bank; they have to work some serious overtime sorting out his accounts.
And...what if the ledger of names/numbers gets burned in a fire? Billions of dollars in one book lost?
In principle, yes. In practice, the Swiss solution to this is "well don't let it get burned then". It would probably be possible to reconstruct about 70% of the book from other records, but there would be a real problem here.
The price of secrecy is that you forgo a lot of these safeguards. There is a huge pool of "orphan assets" in the Swiss banking system (including, scandalously, a lot of accounts of German Jews which went dormant in the 1930s). It's quite possible to lose money in the system entirely -- and unless your heirs know exactly the right questions to ask of your bankers, they'll never admit to the account's existence.
I once seriously considered giving up my job and working as a "treasure hunter" in the Swiss banking system, to help people look for this kind of asset. But you really need a Swiss lawyer's certificate to be in that kind of business. So I took up programming instead.
Of course, if you have an account with a real Swiss Bank (clue: you'll need an initial deposit a touch more than $5000, and I doubt they'll be advertising on slashdot, or anywhere else for that matter), then the method of record keeping is safe from all manner of computer attacks.
That's because they write down your balance in a ledger. With a fountain pen. (I kid you not, I've seen it done). And that is the banker's book. You pay through the nose for a full-service Swiss bank account, but you get total confidentiality, and you don't have to worry about computer security.
If, on the other hand, you sign up for a spivvy online banking service, then I for one would definitely not just assume that it's any more secure than Hotmail. I would do plenty of due diligence (for starters, I'd check whether they're members of the Swiss Bankers' Association) before I started trusting them to the extent I would a Swiss banker. It could be that all you're getting is the same service as your local American bank, but with a flashy.ch address.
www.bil.lu is Banque Internationale a Luxembourg, which is a subsidiary of the Dexia group, while fortisbank.lu is a member of the Fortis group. Both of these are well-known international banking groups whose financial strength is beyond question. I've never heard of Robecobank, so I can't commment on that.
AC's post on the tax/secrecy regime in Luxembourg is broadly right, but I have to make two caveats:
1)The bank secrecy in Luxembourg is not as total as AC implies -- Luxembourg is fully compliant with the EU's Money Laundering Directive, so if it suspects that you are laundering money, it will give up your details (end of story). That includes tax evasion, but it will usually only grass you for this in response to a specific inquiry from domestic tax authorities.
2) It has to be said that Luxembourg's tax haven status is not definitely secure for all time. It is a source of vast irritation to the Germans that Luxembourg bank accounts siphon off a material chunk of their potential tax base. Because of this, there are negotiations underway to introduce a common withholding tax in Europe, in which case Luxembourg would be obliged to deduct a proportion of your tax at source.
If you're serious about banking secrecy, then Austria is the place for you, as you can still get proper numbered bank accounts there if you hurry -- ("proper" numbered accounts are ones where literally nobody knows your name, as opposed to Swiss accounts where the CEO of the bank has a ledger of names vs. numbers). It's entirely illegal under EU law, but the Austrians have been dragging their feet on implementation.
Or, if you want to be really secret, a bank in Antigua is the current vehicle of choice. But don't come running to me when they disappear with your money.
No, I think you're being too harsh on this one. The Swiss Internet account would be very useful in the "rinse cycle" of a laundering operation. If you'd already introduced your dirty money (not just cash -- the results of wire fraud and securities stings also need to be laundered) into the banking system in, say, Colombia, then you would still need to get it to a more respectable jurisdiction if you didn't want to attract raised eyebrows when it came back into the US. An internet-available Swiss account would be very useful for this -- big transfers coming in from Switzerland are not subjected to anything like the same sort of scrutiny as transfers coming in from, say, Antigua.
Oh yeah, and your casino idea is strictly small-time. You could do it a couple of times, but before long, the casinos would begin to recognise you, and on your next visit to Vegas, you'd be greeted by a Secret Service man asking about your strange unwillingness to gamble. Believe me, it happens -- the casinos' obligation to report suspected money launderers does not start at $10,000, and they have very good systems for keeping track of "funny" behaviour, developed to catch card-counters.
You'd be better off actually gambling with that money to cover your tracks. If you lost less than 40% of your initial stake, you'd be paying well below what is considered the market price for laundered funds.
But the classic method of money laundering is to open a pizza restaurant. It's very hard for a lawman to estimate how much pizza you sell, so make lousy pizzas, but claim to the IRS that you're doing a roaring trade. Then you have a very good excuse for having loads of cash round the shop, and it will be tax-paid and for all practical purposes clean. (And even if the IRS catches you, they are legally prohibited from grassing you up to the Feds -- strange but true)
Money is no use in itself, but it has one very useful property: it stops you from having to worry about money.
That's the really bad thing about being poor, IMO -- the fact that so much of your time and mental energy is taken up on such a draining subject. Having a stack of benjamins hanging round lets you take a lot of risks with the rest of your life.
I think you misunderstand my emphasis. I think it's a good thing that the money goes to a bunch of people who actually made something rather than the first-day speculators. Given that I have no responsibilities to/. (and you even fewer, as an AC), the idea that I might have some rights over them seems curious, not to mention selfish.
Yeah, that would be cool. However, the OpenIPO process is a Dutch auction, meaning that you shouldn't expect a crazy post-IPO runup, because the thing will have been priced correctly in the first place. Think Salon.com rather than RedHat.
Basically, the Dutch auction mechanism is the most efficient way to conduct IPOs, but it does have the effect that CmdrTaco, Mr. Andover et al. will be the ones making the mad phat crazy Benjamins, rather than the people buying into it.
"Freedom to enjoy the monopoly profits of innovation", I think.
You can actually construct a twisted argument for the use of the word "freedom" here if: a) you are a libertarian, so you believe that freedom is essentially a matter of property rights. b) you believe in intellectual property rights.
Needless to say, I think it's a pretty weak argument. My personal belief is that a) is not what libertarianism should be about and that b) is downright inconsistent, but there are a lot of people (probably the mainstream of libertarianism) who would believe in a) and b).
Of course, there are some who believe that Microsoft are just asserting their democratic rights. Like the democratic right to organise a political lobbying campaign against the decision of an independent court... how democratic...
According to his lawyers the trademark 'Linux' isn't protected in germany, contradicting german linux federation LIVE
My understanding is that "Linux" is a trademark in other EU states, and that this trademark protection is enforceable in Germany (I happen to know that trademarks are EU-wide under EU law). So, it's not specifically trademarked in Germany, but that doesn't mean that someone else can steal the [tm]
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote this song once. Please forgive me:
Sorry about that
jsm
if GM issues a recall, and you don't go get your car fixed and then the next day you get in a wreck and something bad happens as a result of the defect, ITS YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT
Like heck! If a faulty product is distributed, then it is distributed under the assumption that people will use it. Recalls are Good Things, but there is a huge onus on the provider to make best efforts to stop someone from being damaged as a result of their faulty product. It's fundamentally their fault for designing a product with holes in it, and so it's the manufacturer's responsibility to make sure that the mistake is put right.
And I am not aware of Red Hat having carried out anything like the level of effort which GM goes through in product recalls. Just saying "a good network admin would have kept up with this" doesn't make it. Your product, your liability.
Unless the take-over-the-world faction among Linux advocates want to plaster every commercial distribution with disclaimers shouting "THIS PRODUCT MAY HAVE SERIOUS SECURITY HOLES -- IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY AND YOURS ALONE TO KEEP UP TO DATE WITH THEM" (actually, a quite sensible approach), then the commercial distributors have to make a quantum leap in *making* system admins adhere to best practice. Personally, I'd go down the disclaimer route -- the luser sysadmins are more trouble than they're worth as a market.
jsm
I entirely agree, as someone who found it very helpful to use the login. To be charitable, I think someone misunderstood the use of "slashdot_effect" above.
Please, someone, give this chap his karma point back (and perhaps even a bonus one, because it was a useful post).
Anyway, thanks
jsm
It might also be possible to use the brain-links to carry out a form of distributed computing, spreading the load of thought over peoples' minds. They say that you can only hold seven distinct ideas in your head at once -- what would things be like for a joined system of humans thinking about 49 things at a time.
... I'd call it a "Beowulf cluster".
It strikes me that if you combined the mental powers of the world's top ten professors of Anglo-Saxon literature into a sort of distributed human processing system, it might be possible to translate some of the more obscure parts of the early English sagas. I even have a name for the project
sorry about that.
jsm
I agree that this guy is a terrible self-publicist, but on a point of fact, m'lud:
What the article says is something about "rejection" by the body... But how the hell is that going to happen in nine days?
IANAD, but in my limited experience of knowing people who've had kidney transplants and various prosthetics, rejection is something that happens frighteningly quickly. Even if no symptoms showed up in nine days, I would guess that blood and tissue tests would be able to show pretty quickly whether the chip had been identified as "other" and attacked by the immune system. Although I must say that talk of "rejection" in the context of a non-organic implant doesn't exactly make that clear ringing sound of truth in my head.
Please, correct me if I'm wrong.
jsm
That was a hasty statement (I tend to prefer not to go around calling people ignorant). I am well aware that rural areas are less densely populated than cities. But I was talking about the whole US, relative to the whole UK, in response to a statement about same. A greater proportion of the UK population lives in densely populated areas than the US population. If you make city vs. city comparisons, then the US looks incredibly bad -- even at the height of the troubles, Belfast never had a murder rate more than 20% of that of Los Angeles (which says something to the "people will just use bombs" crowd too).
I'm quite prepared to agree that I'm fantastically ignorant. But it looks like you selected the only statement in my post which wasn't wrong, and said that it was. Talk about missing a barn door with a blunderbuss . . .
jsm
(I have, uncharacteristically, checked these: the UK has 238.9 people sq/km while the US has 29.5 people sq. km. Obviously this isn't the same as the urbanisation rate, but I would expect that to give a less dramatic version of the same conclusion.)
Like the bilious, moronic blowhard I am, it seems that I have now not only made a fool of myself, but been caught out at it.
I retract my assertion and hide stealthily behind my original disclaimer "unchecked at that". I don't think I can be sued for fraudulent misrepresentation, but it might be worth a try, if only to teach me a lesson.
Since I can't seem to get an accurate measurement for my own waistline, I doubt I'll have any luck with Scottish crime statistics. I might as well spologise to all Scots living, dead or missing presumed drunk, while I'm at it.
what a f'kng great day this is turning out to be.
Yrs sincerely,
A. Moron.
(jsm)
the US stayed into the far-west mentality
Yeah, and the Brits have the Empire mentality, the Germans have the after-war mentality, the Africans have the slavery mentality, the Australians have the convict mentality, the Swedes have the Viking mentality, the Irish have the most-oppressed-people-ever mentality and the French have God knows what kind of mentality.
Every nation has its own hang-ups, and I think it's a bit poor for we Euros and Anglos to talk about the "Wild West Mentality" as if it were some sort of disease or, worse, some sort of moral failing. It's how Americans are, and Europe has had cause to be grateful for that Wild West mentality on several occasions. They have to solve their own problems in their own society, and suggesting that they copy a society as amazingly homogeneous as Sweden (or Switzerland, for that matter), is just wrong.
This isn't a flame -- I actually agree with your statement:
Obviously this type of mentality doesn't fit in a modern society where people have to cooperate and trust each others to keep things going smoothly
which is as good sense as I've read on this issue. But the "far-west" tag seems to me like an unanalysed assumption.
jsm
Guns equalize people so that people can't use superior physical prowess to overpower victims.
Actually, guns don't equalize people -- they just change the grounds of competition from physical strength to "aggresssion", or "willingness to use a gun". So they would select for a society of the short-tempered, rather than the merely strong.
I think that this is the root of the problem with guns in America -- it's basically an aggression problem rather than a gun problem. A society which developed in the pioneer days has a set of social norms which are appropriate when everyone has 400 acres to let off steam in, and a number of very real natural and manmade threats to defend against. If you then try to transport those norms to an urban society, where everyone has to live on top of each other, then you're bound to get trouble.
I don't know what the solution is, but I doubt it will involve banning guns -- they have such an important role as symbols of individual identity and freedom that any attempt to curtail them would definitely have bad consequences.
jsm
(and recently, England has had more robbery per-capita than the United States - modern society, even in England, still has crime)
That would be "Britain" -- England has much lower rates, but Scotland drags up the average. (I state this merely as a criminological "fact", and an unchecked one at that, not out of any anti-Scottishism -- I'm Welsh myself).
If one wants to make comparisons between the UK and US, you have to take into account the population density of the UK, which is much greater. Given the number of people we pack onto this island, the crime rates are incredibly low -- if you put rats at the same density, they'd be tearing each others' throats out.
jsm
Coutts & Co. are as English as one could reasonably expect, and are owned by the National Westminster Bank. They don't use pen and paper bankers' books - they have the same transactions processing software as the rest of the NatWest group.
But they are bankers to the Queen (and to my immediate boss), and they will give you a handwritten statement if you want one.
Good point about there being Swiss banks and "Swiss banks" -- the vast majority of the domestic market is served by Kantonalbanks, which are similar to US Savings and Loan institutions. I was talking about the "high end" of the banking market. I utterly agree with you about security problems.
Sweet trains, though, I agree.
jsm
Well, because I had included some important background info on this bank. But then I decided to post it higher up, here.
Sorry to waste your time, really
jsm
The Securities and Exchange Commission, meanwhile, has blocked the bank's plans to let U.S. residents place trades through the accounts.
I also note that MFC Merchant Bank SA is owned by a company with quotes on NASDAQ and the Frankfurt Neuer Markt, which makes it very atypical for a Swiss bank (almost all of which are partnerships). And their main service appears to be discount brokerage in American equities, which once more doesn't scream "Swiss Bank" to me.
[brief pause]
Yup, I was right. A quick trawl through EDGAR reveals that they're a subsidiary of MFC Bancorp, incorporated in Yukon Territory of Canada. They used to be part of Mercer (the paper and pulp people) and now they're a Swiss Bank, having bought an operation from an unnamed vendor and then acquired the shell of an insolvent Swiss bank: (from 20-F report)
The other major asset of this company is a sizeable interest in the Wabush Iron Ore mine in Newfoundland, for those who care.
Far be it from me to say "bunch of opportunists cashing in on the good name of Swiss banking", but if the cap fits . . .
I'm not casting any aspersions on this firm -- the fact that they're regulated by the Swiss authorities provides a baseline guarantee that they're a legitimate bank -- one cannot just march into Geneva and set up business without any checks. But they are not, IMO, a "proper" Swiss bank of the kind you read about in James Bond novels. Everyone should do their own due diligence before making an investment decision -- you should check out the 20-F I linked to, at least, before moving any of your money.
jsm
hrrmmmm ... I don't think it does anyone any favours to pretend that a lot of money laundry doesn't go on in Switzerland.
And I happen to have a few Swiss bank accounts.
If you're living in Switzerland, I'll bet that your accounts are either with UBS or Credit Suisse, or with the local Kantonalbank. That's a different kettle of rostis from what we're talking about here, which is the Geneva and Zurich private banks. These banks sell a product, and that product is secrecy, and a fair proportion of the people who are prepared to pay for secrecy want it for some nefarious purpose.
There are utterly legitimate reasons for wanting a secret bank account (if I was a Chinese businessman living in Indonesia, I'd want one, for example), but these are definitely the exception rather than the rule.
It's true that Switzerland has cleaned up its act of late, and now has decent money laundering laws. It's not a real den of laundering like some of the West Indies financial centres. But it still comes with the territory.
jsm
PS: I'd prefer to remember Switzerland for the Jungfrau and for Lake Neuchatel.
Well, the question then arises of who can patent the human genome. . .
....
I notice that Pope John Paul has recently made a statement saying that evolution is "More than a theory", and is now accepted as fact by the Catholic Church.
Their position would be that God created the seeds of life, and developed the process which allowed the human genome to evolve, guiding the process at all stages. . . . kinda hard to patent something you don't believe exists, but if the Pope is now admitting evolution, that removes the last obstacle for the Catholic Church claiming to represent the Original Inventor of the source material.
I think I need to get me one of those Jesuit IP lawyers
jsm
In the words of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber:
(from Evita)
Basically, you can sign a cheque with your number instead of your name (you may want to go to a big bank to do this rather than your local Wells Fargo). Or you can ask for money to be transferred from your anonymous account to your checking account. To do this, you'll need to know the a/c number, plus probably a password arranged with your banker.
But you shouldn't really be using a Swiss a/c for your everyday bank account. It's only worthwhile if you're only occasionally withdrawing money to buy a boat, or because your family has just been made refugees by a coup (a good reason for bank secrecy). Or something else which would make the trip to Switzerland worthwhile. A really good banker will meet you anywhere in the world with a suitcase full of cash, although this service costs a bit more.
Is this done on the phone? How do they know you, by your voice? What if the person who recognizes you is dead - how do you carry out transactions?
See above. Passwords are sometimes used, or the banker may indeed recognise your voice, or you may prefer to do business face to face. The death of your banker is a serious problem -- that's not a silly question at all, and is a real problem for the industry -- they will usually have a secondary banker assigned to your account. When a senior Swiss banker has a heart attack or something, it's a real crisis for a Swiss bank; they have to work some serious overtime sorting out his accounts.
And...what if the ledger of names/numbers gets burned in a fire? Billions of dollars in one book lost?
In principle, yes. In practice, the Swiss solution to this is "well don't let it get burned then". It would probably be possible to reconstruct about 70% of the book from other records, but there would be a real problem here.
The price of secrecy is that you forgo a lot of these safeguards. There is a huge pool of "orphan assets" in the Swiss banking system (including, scandalously, a lot of accounts of German Jews which went dormant in the 1930s). It's quite possible to lose money in the system entirely -- and unless your heirs know exactly the right questions to ask of your bankers, they'll never admit to the account's existence.
I once seriously considered giving up my job and working as a "treasure hunter" in the Swiss banking system, to help people look for this kind of asset. But you really need a Swiss lawyer's certificate to be in that kind of business. So I took up programming instead.
jsm
Of course, if you have an account with a real Swiss Bank (clue: you'll need an initial deposit a touch more than $5000, and I doubt they'll be advertising on slashdot, or anywhere else for that matter), then the method of record keeping is safe from all manner of computer attacks.
.ch address.
That's because they write down your balance in a ledger. With a fountain pen. (I kid you not, I've seen it done). And that is the banker's book. You pay through the nose for a full-service Swiss bank account, but you get total confidentiality, and you don't have to worry about computer security.
If, on the other hand, you sign up for a spivvy online banking service, then I for one would definitely not just assume that it's any more secure than Hotmail. I would do plenty of due diligence (for starters, I'd check whether they're members of the Swiss Bankers' Association) before I started trusting them to the extent I would a Swiss banker. It could be that all you're getting is the same service as your local American bank, but with a flashy
jsm
www.bil.lu is Banque Internationale a Luxembourg, which is a subsidiary of the Dexia group, while fortisbank.lu is a member of the Fortis group. Both of these are well-known international banking groups whose financial strength is beyond question. I've never heard of Robecobank, so I can't commment on that.
AC's post on the tax/secrecy regime in Luxembourg is broadly right, but I have to make two caveats:
1)The bank secrecy in Luxembourg is not as total as AC implies -- Luxembourg is fully compliant with the EU's Money Laundering Directive, so if it suspects that you are laundering money, it will give up your details (end of story). That includes tax evasion, but it will usually only grass you for this in response to a specific inquiry from domestic tax authorities.
2) It has to be said that Luxembourg's tax haven status is not definitely secure for all time. It is a source of vast irritation to the Germans that Luxembourg bank accounts siphon off a material chunk of their potential tax base. Because of this, there are negotiations underway to introduce a common withholding tax in Europe, in which case Luxembourg would be obliged to deduct a proportion of your tax at source.
If you're serious about banking secrecy, then Austria is the place for you, as you can still get proper numbered bank accounts there if you hurry -- ("proper" numbered accounts are ones where literally nobody knows your name, as opposed to Swiss accounts where the CEO of the bank has a ledger of names vs. numbers). It's entirely illegal under EU law, but the Austrians have been dragging their feet on implementation.
Or, if you want to be really secret, a bank in Antigua is the current vehicle of choice. But don't come running to me when they disappear with your money.
jsm
No, I think you're being too harsh on this one. The Swiss Internet account would be very useful in the "rinse cycle" of a laundering operation. If you'd already introduced your dirty money (not just cash -- the results of wire fraud and securities stings also need to be laundered) into the banking system in, say, Colombia, then you would still need to get it to a more respectable jurisdiction if you didn't want to attract raised eyebrows when it came back into the US. An internet-available Swiss account would be very useful for this -- big transfers coming in from Switzerland are not subjected to anything like the same sort of scrutiny as transfers coming in from, say, Antigua.
Oh yeah, and your casino idea is strictly small-time. You could do it a couple of times, but before long, the casinos would begin to recognise you, and on your next visit to Vegas, you'd be greeted by a Secret Service man asking about your strange unwillingness to gamble. Believe me, it happens -- the casinos' obligation to report suspected money launderers does not start at $10,000, and they have very good systems for keeping track of "funny" behaviour, developed to catch card-counters.
You'd be better off actually gambling with that money to cover your tracks. If you lost less than 40% of your initial stake, you'd be paying well below what is considered the market price for laundered funds.
But the classic method of money laundering is to open a pizza restaurant. It's very hard for a lawman to estimate how much pizza you sell, so make lousy pizzas, but claim to the IRS that you're doing a roaring trade. Then you have a very good excuse for having loads of cash round the shop, and it will be tax-paid and for all practical purposes clean. (And even if the IRS catches you, they are legally prohibited from grassing you up to the Feds -- strange but true)
jsm
Money is no use in itself, but it has one very useful property: it stops you from having to worry about money.
That's the really bad thing about being poor, IMO -- the fact that so much of your time and mental energy is taken up on such a draining subject. Having a stack of benjamins hanging round lets you take a lot of risks with the rest of your life.
jsm
I think you misunderstand my emphasis. I think it's a good thing that the money goes to a bunch of people who actually made something rather than the first-day speculators. Given that I have no responsibilities to /. (and you even fewer, as an AC), the idea that I might have some rights over them seems curious, not to mention selfish.
word up, respect to Rob etc.
jsm
Yeah, that would be cool. However, the OpenIPO process is a Dutch auction, meaning that you shouldn't expect a crazy post-IPO runup, because the thing will have been priced correctly in the first place. Think Salon.com rather than RedHat.
Basically, the Dutch auction mechanism is the most efficient way to conduct IPOs, but it does have the effect that CmdrTaco, Mr. Andover et al. will be the ones making the mad phat crazy Benjamins, rather than the people buying into it.
you'll never be rich . . .
jsm
absolutely right. props to you, a big bucket of sick for me.
jsm
"Freedom to enjoy the monopoly profits of innovation", I think.
... how democratic ...
You can actually construct a twisted argument for the use of the word "freedom" here if:
a) you are a libertarian, so you believe that freedom is essentially a matter of property rights.
b) you believe in intellectual property rights.
Needless to say, I think it's a pretty weak argument. My personal belief is that a) is not what libertarianism should be about and that b) is downright inconsistent, but there are a lot of people (probably the mainstream of libertarianism) who would believe in a) and b).
Of course, there are some who believe that Microsoft are just asserting their democratic rights. Like the democratic right to organise a political lobbying campaign against the decision of an independent court
jsm
According to his lawyers the trademark 'Linux' isn't protected in germany, contradicting german linux federation LIVE
My understanding is that "Linux" is a trademark in other EU states, and that this trademark protection is enforceable in Germany (I happen to know that trademarks are EU-wide under EU law). So, it's not specifically trademarked in Germany, but that doesn't mean that someone else can steal the [tm]
jsm