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re John Hussman
actually, i posted that notice here just a few weeks ago ...
And likewise, never has there not been a sell off.
from april to september last year, there were no significant selloffs ...
isn't dell also next week? (does anyone really care about chambers anymore??)
RELEASE: Monster Employment Index [United States]: 125.0
FIRST TAKE: Monster.com's on-line employment index jumped in April to a reading of 125, from 109 in March. The increase bodes well for tomorrow's employment report. The largest gains in listed job openings were in professional and technical services, real estate, healthcare, retail trade and finance & insurance.
basically they want proteins made out of sterner stuff
not just that. if we knew how to engineer proteins to do things they normally don't do, or do them in a different context, that could be revolutionary too. (that's likely an understatement.)
but the 'vision' might never pay off in a big way. designing small devices at a larger scale - like MEMS (micro electromechanical systems, etched on a chip) - is already pretty hard, and though it can be done, it still hasn't led to a much of a revolution yet. resonateors, actuators, micro-optics ... is there anything else on the shelf now? i dunno ... but its hard because everything has to be engineered individually (although optics is a bit more lego-like.)
hehe. 'bob' is to 'clippy' what larry kudlow is to marc faber.
Actually, any truly unidimensional (thickness of an atom or less) is nano and thus nanotechnology.
well, i suppose if discussing anything on the scale of parsec's is cosmology, than anything at nanoscale can be nanotechnology. but to my ear, this sounds like e.g. the advanced "artificial intelligence" that microsoft put into 'bob' or 'clippy'.
nowadays "nanotech" has become a 'catch-all' it seems. the "technology" in nanotech was intended to be in the material or its construction, itself at a nanoscale, making it somewhat different from nanoscale materials (nanomaterials). however, its all so rudimentary that in theory, i suppose, virtually anything is relevant to the "holy grail".
def: As introduced by the author, a technology based on the ability to build structures to complex, atomic specifications by means of mechanosynthesis.
Edit; rewritten I was too harsh.
awww, be harsh. i can defend myself.
No, no, using AFM is not at all like lifting a rod.
well, more like lifting a rod than writing poetry, say. actually, to me it felt like pushing jello, although that might have been an artifact of the software of the force-feedback interface.
anyway, my point still stands, you are being much too harsh with the writer who presented the layman's view: e.g. folks splice genes and reassemble dna all the time, reconstruct parts of viruses, whatever, but they don't physically manipulate them. the indirectly set things up and let their nanomachines - in this case, enzymes - do the job. we still talk, in lay terms, about positioning, assembly, and legos.
Foresight.org contains some of the worst misinformation you can find, and contrarily is one of the worst sources for nanotec information. The nanoceramics stuff is going to give you much more benefits in the next 10-20 years than any sci-fi coming out of Ralph Merkles head.
whatever. that is what has been called "nanotechnology" for years, and i'd think that the guy who invents the term has a claim to what it refers to. nanotechnology was introduced as the "future", smart materials, in materials science. it was about being able to engineer materials, not just about discovering interesting properties of nano materials that can be exploited in one way or the other.
about sci-fi: well, its provably not fiction, since we have numerous examples of these systems - namely proteins. whether we can engineer them is another question, since we still can't engineer proteins. heck, we can't even predict how they'd fold, and that's the current holy grail.
I was once told of an idea to assemble a roof using "nanorobots" that harvested raw materials such as carbon dioxide from the air to produce a roof. This sort of thing is literally the stuff of sci-fi. So is foresight.org.
hmm. then i suppose you think biochemistry is some sort of fairy tale.
as i said, i wouldn't expect to see anything like that in my lifetime -- and statistically i should live a good 50+ yrs. but i object to your objection: drexler defined nanotech as something, applying ideas from computation to materials. now if you don't like it, cool. but exploiting properties of really tiny stuff isn't it. and if you insist that that's nanotech and his definition isn't because its merely sci-fi, then at least you can admit that you (and many others, not just you) are stealing the term because its sexy, not because its descriptive. (where's the "technology" in the ceramics? they're materials, no more.)
if you don't like the "vision thing" of foresight.org, then ieee nanotech is less preachy, of course. but its also less accessible to the layman.
Ralph Merkles? you mean eric drexler?
grr. dup'd.
"Is total BS. nano-scale structures are not manipulable as are macroscopic objects, and it really pisses me off when scientists dumb down their work for a "hot" press release."
actually, this isn't entirely true, and the medium they're using tells you how they're doing it: they're moving gold atoms around using an afm or similar (atomic force microscope).
yah, so its sort of like an academic-style parlor trick. (like that famous pic of, what "IBM"? in au atoms), although technically i suppose you can say you're prototyping things that way ... although also not suggesting any practical way of manufacturing anything other than the prototype.
but i'm with you on this: http://foresight.org is the best source for nanotech stuff, and if i see any real nanotech stuff in my lifetime i'll be pleasantly surprised. (meaning real nanotech, not like the auto glazes that just use "nano" to mean "ceramics ground up really really tiny").
scox - endgame (?)
national retail federation press release calls IP claims baseless.
http://www.nrf.com/content/default.asp?folder=press/release2004&file=scosuit0504.htm&bhcp=1
"They have the purple liquid"
grape juice?
interesting thing: i had a "grapple" tonight, for the first time: an apple that tastes like a concord grape. not too bad really ...
and actually, if you read the whole article, you'll see he wasn't really intending to be disrepectful or angry, just trying to tell everyone what his brother was like, instead of letting them go on with all of their solemn hero-worship.
or, on a lighter note, "the shining" in 30-secs, reenacted by bunnies.
http://www.angryalien.com/0504/shiningbunnies.html
here's an "inspiring" story that probably won't play on the news:
Just when we thought we had a pure and simple hero, a millionaire athlete who gave up wealth and fame to become the ideal patriot, to make the ultimate sacrifice, his friends and family complicated everything. They turned Pat Tillman into a human being Monday, showing us what was really lost during that ambush in Afghanistan, insisting that we question every assumption we've made since he died an icon on April 22.
[...]
Tillman's youngest brother, Rich, wore a rumpled white T-shirt, no jacket, no tie, no collar, and immediately swore into the microphone. He hadn't written anything, he said, and with the starkest honesty, he asked mourners to hold their spiritual bromides.
"Pat isn't with God,'' he said. "He's f -- ing dead. He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's f -- ing dead.''
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/05/04/SPG5K6FD091.DTL
brave man!
hmm. bombing police in athens ... sounds like students (as my greek friends used to describe them ...)
funny! so that's how google makes all that money ....
India's secret army of online ad 'clickers'
N VIDYASAGAR
TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ MONDAY, MAY 03, 2004 08:20:34 AM ]
NEW DELHI: With her baby on her lap, Maya Sharma (name changed) gets down to work every evening from her eighth-floor flat at Vasant Vihar. Maya's job is to click on online advertisements. She doesn't care about the ads, but diligently keeps count — it's $0.18 to $0.25 per click.
A growing number of housewives, college graduates, and even working professionals across metropolitan cities are rushing to click paid Internet ads to make $100 to $200 (up to Rs 9,000) per month.
"It's boring, but it is extra money for a couple of hours of clicking weblinks every day," says a resident of Delhi's Patparganj, who has kept a $300-target for the summer.
Traffic to click overseas Internet ads — from home loans to insurance — is spreading fast in India. "I have no interest in what appears when clicking an ad. I care only whether to pause 60 seconds or 90 seconds, as money is credited if you stay online for a fixed time," says another user.
Here's how it works: online advertisers in developed markets agree to pay hosting website each time an ad is clicked. With performance-based deals becoming dominant on the Internet, intermediaries have sprung up to "do the needful”.' Why, type in 'earn rupees clicking ads' in Google — you get 25,000 results.
"I'm not surprised. As competition intensifies, people are using every trick to increase their revenues," says Sam Balsara, CMD, Madison.
The trend is catching up in India. Says Goutam Rakshit, chairman, Advertising Council of India: "It's a numbers game as far as media buying is concerned. And anybody who can manipulate numbers gets the edge. This is unethical, and needs to be curbed."
[...]
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-654822,curpg-1.cms
re tomorrow. dunno. i suppose i'd expect either (1) quiet day before the fed or (2) continuation of the pattern.
interesting thing to me is that the pattern for the last 9 months has always been: rally during the week and sell off on friday, OR sell off during the week and rally on friday. (with the exception being that the friday rally/selloff might actually happen on thursday instead). the fact we sold off all of last week and it got heavier, kinda says to me that there are real sellers still out there.
that, and bubble tech was really clobbered. pmcs, klic, swks. not relenteless selling but just no buyers.
anyway, i'm watching/waiting. i have some $$ in ucpix. (profunds inverse wilshire 2000.)
here's some good evening reading if you're bored: the latest by seymour hersh, in the new yorker.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact
i'm up i'm up! its hot!
willing suspension of disbelief coming unglued?
Grossly Distorted Product
Apr 7th 2004
From The Economist print edition
Are official statistics exaggerating America's growth?
DESPITE the welcome leap in American employment in March (see article), America's job market has been surprisingly weak in the past couple of years—surprising, at least, to economists. Some have explained this by pointing to rapidly rising productivity figures. Perhaps firms have not needed more workers. But there is another explanation: America's GDP figures, which have been strong, may be inaccurate, and may be exaggerating the extent of economic growth.
In the two years to the fourth quarter of 2003 America's real GDP grew at an annual rate of 3.6%. Going by past recoveries, this should have meant a rise in employment of 2% a year. Instead, non-farm payrolls have fallen. Most economists say that this reflects a sharp increase in productivity growth. Jan Hatzius, an economist at Goldman Sachs, is not so sure. Other economies that have enjoyed rapid productivity gains in recent years, such as Canada and Australia, have also seen strong increases in employment.
Nor does Mr Hatzius accept the argument that the employment figures have been understating job creation. It is too soon to tell whether March's data (which were published after his study) mark the start of a delayed catching-up. This leads Mr Hatzius to suggest that GDP is being overstated. The standard measure of GDP is calculated by totting up aggregate expenditure; but another estimate, found by summing incomes—which in theory should be the same—says that GDP has grown at an annual rate of only 2.8% since the end of 2001, 0.8 percentage points less than the expenditure measure.
Another piece of evidence is the unusual divergence of the growth rates of GDP in the goods sector and of industrial production. The two series used to track each other closely; but in the past two years a wide gap has opened up (see chart). In the year to the fourth quarter, industrial production rose by only 1.4%, while goods-sector GDP surged by 8.0%.
Industrial-production figures are likely to be the more reliable of the two, because they come directly from industry reports. In contrast, goods-sector GDP is estimated indirectly by adding together final sales of goods, changes in inventories and net exports. If goods-sector GDP is replaced with the industrial-production series in estimating GDP, then the economy grew by only 2.2% in the year to the fourth quarter, not the reported 4.3%.
Why might official statisticians be overstating America's GDP—and productivity with it? Mr Hatzius suggests that they may be undercounting imports of intermediate inputs of goods and services produced abroad by American firms that have outsourced jobs to cheaper countries. Since GDP is calculated as domestic spending plus exports less imports (including imports of intermediate inputs), this would lead to an overstatement of GDP.
For example, when American firms outsource call-centre and information-technology-support jobs to India and other Asian countries, the result should be higher imports of services, yet official statistics do not show such an increase. America's recorded imports of software services from India are also much smaller than India's reported exports of such services to America.
If Mr Hatzius is right, then jobs have been slow to pick up largely because this has been, at least until now, an exceptionally weak economic recovery. That is exactly what you might have expected after the bursting of the biggest financial bubble in history.
interesting "problem" for microsoft, it seems. at least to me:
google has taken advantage of alot of university/research lab work on clustering technology that all got put into linux. (a few years ago, they said they had 10K cpu's in their cluster; a recent calculation reverse engineered from their S-1 figures it might be 40-80K; someone else claims knowing that they surpassed 100K in november ...) anyway, that's alot of cpu's.
so what does microsoft do to be competitive? do they give in to running their high profile system off linux (like they continued to do for hotmail), or struggle along with their own OS, which isn't up to the task?
Bulls are up from last week. Very interesting.
is this really surprising, though? i mean, the measure here is not very discriminating, and (by casual observation) folks are very bullish on energy, defensive stocks, etc.
this is news?? haven't folks been saying this for over a year? or maybe i just hear it cuz i read bearish sites ...
Fed May Have Acted on False Alarm
By GREG IP
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 30, 2004; Page A2
WASHINGTON -- The Fed may have been responding to a false alarm last year when it cut interest rates to four-decade lows and held them there over fears of deflation, a Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta study suggests.
The study concludes that much of the drop in inflation between 2001 and 2003 was due to unusual behavior of residential rents and used-car prices indirectly caused by low interest rates. "These results suggest that the concern and discussion regarding overall price deflation were perhaps overstated," the Atlanta Fed economists conclude.
If the study is correct, underlying inflation may not be as low as it appears. Further, it suggests that once the Fed begins to raise rates, the unusual behavior of used-car prices and rents may stabilize or reverse, pushing up measured inflation rates, said Jonathan Basile, an economist at Credit Suisse First Boston who has examined the issue.
Between November 2001 and December 2003, the "core" inflation rate -- the annual increase in the consumer-price index excluding food and energy prices -- plunged to 1.2% from 2.8%. The fall prompted the first serious worries at the Fed about deflation, or generally falling prices, in more than 50 years and contributed to the central bank's decision to cut its short-term rate target to 1% last June, its lowest since 1958, and hold it there since.
The study finds that two-thirds of that decline in the core inflation rate reflected slowing increases in rents and rapid declines in used-car prices. When the Fed slashed rates, auto makers introduced 0% financing. The move increased demand for new cars, but it hurt demand and increased the supply of used cars, driving down their price. Similarly, Fed policy drove mortgage rates down sharply and spurred many apartment renters to buy homes. Rising apartment vacancy rates restrained rent increases. That also indirectly held down the measured cost of owner-occupied housing, which is based on rents for similar housing units rather than house prices.
These developments "reflect not a fundamental weakening in housing and vehicle demand, but, instead, the dynamic effects of interest rates on consumer demand for substitutes," according to Andrew Bauer and Nicholas Haltom, of the Atlanta Fed, and William Peterman, now at the Brattle Group, a consulting firm. If price trends for used cars, rent and housing had remained the same after November 2001, core inflation today would be 2.7%, instead of 1.6%. After accounting for the used-car prices and rents, "the recent downturn in the business cycle appears to have had little impact on the path of overall core inflation," the authors write.
The study, which made no inferences about monetary policy, doesn't represent mainstream Fed thinking. Chairman Alan Greenspan and most of his fellow policy makers consider productivity growth and the degree of unused slack in the economy more important to the course of inflation than the behavior of individual prices.
Indeed, it's impossible to know how the prices of cars, rents or other items would have behaved without the Fed's rate cuts. The economy may have been so weak that overall inflation may have been lower, not higher.
Still, it isn't unprecedented for statistical quirks to throw off a central bank's reading on inflation. Fed policy makers do believe the downward trend in core inflation last year was exaggerated somewhat by the way housing costs last year were adjusted for higher heating-gas prices.
The study has interesting implications for when the Fed starts to raise rates. CSFB's Mr. Basile noted that higher rates can be expected to dampen demand for new cars and houses while putting a floor under used car prices and rents. In fact, he that noted used-car prices have risen in recent months, contributing to an uptick in inflation.
The study's authors don't address that possibility. But after examining the trends in services and goods prices, they do say "low inflation will likely persist in the near term."
bearmove, maybe your trader doods were reacting to this story:
[from drudge]
The Oval Office session began at 9:30 a.m. and ended at 12:40 p.m., and two Democrat commission members -- Lee Hamilton, the vice chairman, and Bob Kerrey -- walked out! The departure has ignited talk throughout official Washington; the panel had pushed Bush/Cheney to expand the session beyond the White House's suggested 60 minutes... In a written statement, Kerrey said he left to attend 'a previously scheduled meeting with Senator Pete Domenici on Capitol Hill'... Hamilton left Bush/Cheney to meet with the Canadian Prime Minister... Developing...
microsoft's strategy memos: public and (summary of) internal versions
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/29/1541254&mode=nested&tid=109&tid=187
"Terror threat in LA?"
was on the news last night. even before the story about the olsen twins. but just before it ...
fed, its odd but i had cnbc tuned in last night at about 2-3am local time here, and this is the way their british counterparts were talking ... here in the u.s. all i hear about is msft's cash hoard (lol! same talk from back during the september distribution) and google ...
you're welcome. i got that from here about a year ago, so its appropriate to give back
for what its worth: hussman is apparently fully hedged now.
re oil. marc faber is very bullish on it ...
http://www.gloomboomdoom.com/marketcoms/indexmarketcoms.htm
his last prediction (the turn in the dollar in jan) was on target ...
semiconductor market outlook
http://www.instat.com/rh/en/newmk.asp?id=946&SourceID=00000158000000000000
April 21, 2004
Semiconductor Market to Outshine 2003 with 29% Growth in 2004
After its disastrous 32% decline in 2001 and a lackluster 2002, the worldwide semiconductor market turned up in 2003 and grew by 18.3%. In-Stat/MDR (http://www.instat.com), the high-tech market research firm who’s 2003 forecast was a mere .2% higher than actual, now projects that growth will be an even stronger 29% in 2004, bringing total revenue to $214.7 billion and vying with 2000 for record-high annual revenue.
However, although we do not expect a replay of 2001 anytime soon, the strength of the current recovery should not be interpreted as a return to the good old days. Fundamental changes are taking place in both the demand and supply aspects of the semiconductor market that will cause the next decade to be significantly different from the last. Specifically, In-Stat/MDR notes, that on the demand side, there lacks the existence of a single new "killer app" on the horizon to drive future market growth as PCs and mobile phones did in the 1990s. And, the wide variety of lower volume products that have emerged are subject to standardization and/or extreme competition, both of which tend to suppress ASPs and limit revenue growth. On the supply side of the equation, commoditization of the CMOS process is holding prices down. The growth of the foundry industry, particularly in China, is expected to keep competition high, and therefore wafer prices low, in the long term. On the design side, the shift of design work to low cost locations will ease growing design costs, while the growth of standards based designs will limit intellectual property (IP) costs.
In-Stat/MDR’s newest semiconductor market forecast also reports the following:
* Although semiconductor prices are expected to rise moderately in the short term as capacity tightens, over the long term, In-Stat/MDR expects that price erosion will cause revenue to grow somewhat slower than unit shipments.
* While 2005 will also see some growth, 2006 will experience a downturn. Growth is expected to resume in 2007 and 2008 as unit growth continues and ASP remains relatively flat, at a level lower than any recent year except 2002.
This Market Alert is drawn from the In-Stat/MDR report, Semiconductor Market Outlook (#IN0401550SI), which draws on a variety of In-Stat/MDR reports to look at trends in a cross section of end product markets. The report also examines recent trends within the semiconductor industry and ends with a top level 5 year forecast.
hi dan,
his most recent is this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/22/google_optout/
and there are links at the bottom to related stories. the first quote was from this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/13/asymmetric_privacy/
and the second from this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/03/google_mail_is_evil_privacy/
OT stowboat,
Sorry, I'm not getting the connection to the original topic ...
hunh? the original topic was gmail and privacy concerns. you said those aren't an issue, caveat emptor, "its like buying a hotdog on the street".
well, the guy that made that hot dog is likely still subject to the oversight of the usda etc, and the vendor himself has to answer to the department of health. we don't allow the post office to open and scan and archive our mail arbitrarily, and neither do private companies like fedex or ups. but the situation with google could be even worse than that, since they not only have an archive of your mail, but they have a profile of your web searching, and perhaps also shopping (froogle) and more extensive personal information (orkut).
orlowski again:
But it isn't so much Google searching email that has caused the anxiety from privacy watchdogs this week, as the company's confused retention policy. What will Google do with that data? Google's cookie is an index for all your searches until 2038, and sits alongside an Orkut cookie that tells Google - or friendly law enforcement officials or marketeers - exactly who you are. Google's Gmail will complete the picture, indexing private electronic discourse under the main Google search cookie.
"Once users register for Gmail, Google would be able to make that connection, if it chose to," Pam Dixon, head of the World Privacy Forum told the Los Angeles Times. "And if Google ever compared the two sets of data there are some people who would be chilled and embarrassed." Richard Smith, formerly at the Privacy Foundation pointed out that "Google kind of makes it easy to connect all the dots together."
Rather than allay these fears, Google's accident-prone co-founder Larry Page refused to rule out a future policy of 'joining the dots'. A simple "No, Never" would have prevented much of the damage. But asked if Google planned to link Gmail users to their Web search queries, Page replied:
"It might be really useful for us to know that information. I'd hate to rule anything like that out."
Google's Gmail privacy policy points out that your email will be retained even after you close your account -
"The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account."
At a time when the American Library Association is advising librarians to destroy records of borrowing as soon as they can, to protect users privacy, it's an odd time to be boasting about infinite retention.
Clearly there's something of a reality gap in the upper echelons of the Googleplex. There's a disconnect between the jokey launch, and the statement that "machines, not humans" will read email that's every bit as unnerving as a President making jokes while citizens are being dismembered.
For archivist Daniel Brandt, it's reminiscent of the Doubleclick privacy scandal.
"Doubleclick bought acquired a company that had names and address in their database, and gleefully announced that now they could monetize their massive cookie and web-bug database by correlating it with names of individuals," he told us. "The privacy advocates jumped all over that one (it was in year 2000 or so), and Doubleclick had to abandon their plans. This time it's the same issue, but it's all within one company."
"While Google brags that no humans will read your emails, the entire Gmail program will involve extensive automated profiling of you as an individual. Google will be sharing the non-identifiable portions of your profile with anyone they choose. If the ownership of Google changes, or there is a merger, the entire personally-identifiable profile will be available to the new owners or partners."
Google has done an extraordinary job of sidestepping human responsibility by deploying machine rhetoric (what we call the 'Bill Gates defense') . But now it has to deal with grown ups, and this is its severest PR test yet. The rationale behind going public is business expansion; but Google can't add services unless people trust it.
stowboat, re google gmail:
Same could be said about selling hot dogs on the street.
hmm. so how would u feel about your doctor selling your medical records at will? or your broker? what guarantees do you have that your trading software doesn't have back doors in it?
or, in brief, are you really saying that you want to personally police everyone that you need to trust with private and sensitive information? perhaps there are lines to be drawn, but its not entirely black and white.
unlike google+gmail, a hotdog vendor does not have one cookie on your computer, that it owns, that contains a profile of all of your web searching activity, and another cookie, on your machine, with personal information about you, and leave you only with its good intentions of not putting one and one together.
here's andrew orlowski of theregister.co.uk on the google case:
[...] As a measure of how much damage the episode has done to Google, the final firebreak has been reached in defense of the email service. This is the classic libertarian argument that shoppers need not use it if they so wish, or as we call it here, "The Shrug". But this fatalistic line of argument vacates any moral responsibility, throwing it instead onto the "market", which can be relied on to deliver the best of all possible worlds, as we all know. A more honest answer would be simply to profess not to care about privacy.
The erosion of privacy and the intrusion of commercial spam in our lives is subtle. Like boiling a frog alive, we rarely notice how much we've lost until its too late. Unless we draw a line now, reminding companies like Google - which exhibit a kind of corporate Asperger's Syndrome when it comes to privacy - of exactly what we value, then in ten years time it will be too late.
"It's ironic," writes one reader, "for a company that says Do No Evil - they don't know the definition." After Gmail, what price Serendipity?
re google gmail, stowboat said: Geez..nobodys being forced into it. It's a biz offer. Customers understand the rules, or they should..if not their own fault..just like buying a product. Take it or leave it. Much ado about nothin. Typical intrusion into biz(non political of course) one sided blather.
um, well, while its true that nobody is forced into it, do you really know all the consequences of using gmail? in fact, based on what i've read, there are so many gray areas that even the boys at google can't possibly know what the legal consequences might be.
here's a summary of some of brad templeton's worries. note, in addition to being an electronic frontier foundation guy, he's also a big fan of google, friend of the google boys and has worked as a consultant for the company. nevertheless:
1. While there has been over-reaction to GMail, there are some real issues here to be worried about.
2. Other webmail providers are doing, or will be doing the same things, meaning these issues apply to all of them, including MSN, Yahoo and others.
3. One key risk is that because GMail gets your consent to be more than an e-mail delivery service -- offering searching, storage and shopping -- your mail there may not get the legal protection the ECPA gives you on E-mail.
4. The storage of e-mail on 3rd party servers for more than 180 days almost certainly causes the loss of those privileges.
5. This in turn creates a danger that we may redefine whether e-mail has the "reasonable expectation of privacy" needed for 4th amendment protection.
6. Correlation of search and mail has real risks.
7. Google and others should architect to encrypt your mail.
8. Even the irrational fears over the spooky aspect of advertising being associated with e-mail creates problems that must be addressed.
... continued in more depth at ... http://www.templetons.com/brad/gmail.html
---------
as an aside: does anyone really use this stuff anyway?? i always think of hotmail and yahoo mail as pretty much "single use only" email addresses, like subscribing to something online. and as a result they're always full of spam ...
OT i didn't notice anyone mention yesterday that the previous day's outlier price on intc (26.70), which folks here were speculating was a "signal" on wednesday, was like a magnet yesterday ...
... just thinking like a paranoid criminal here ...
By the way, Bearmove, you were right about the financials, after all.