Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
A Google on Holaamerica produces a lot of hits, mostly in English and it seems they do offer U.S. to Brazil calls @.06/min prepaid. Also VOIP, and other services. If our scheme charges $14.95/mo, then one is ahead of the game with the 250th minute. I don't know the calling habits of Brazilians, but I'm willing to bet that they would spend more than one hour and 2 minutes a week talking to relatives in the old country or the new world at this price.
The beauty of anonymity is that you can have a beer in Pembroke Pines or anywhere else and not be pestered by some rabid shareholder for your opinions.
The biggest impediment to GTE getting a government contract is they have nothing in the showroom to sell. Do you remember the old joke: "Pork chops are cheaper across the street, but they are out of them."? Well, GTE has stratellite and magic money and magic phone plastered all over the store windows, but the shelves are empty and not because they sold all the inventory; it hasn't arrived yet. But keep adding to your "core holding". Who knows, you might be rewarded some day, even if it's only a tax writeoff.
I was worried about so many posters hoping for a drop in SP so they could add to their "core holdings", but that seems to have stopped for the most part. I thought I was missing an opportunity.
Gary: Wouldn't it be something if he went over to Delta Aero Sciences, which he owns with Bob Jones, and negotiated a sale of Stratellites to the Feds.
Don't do a video. That would mean that everyone making a presentation would have to buy a new suit, get a haircut, shave the facial hair and borrow a tie. Because they would be playing to the camera. We don't need a beauty contest; this is not American Idol; we need numbers. Give us a cheap but clear audio and then go out and sell some product. The execs can put their pictures in next year's annual report.
Mide: Did anyone happen to ask if GTE has a contingency plan if One of our six company presidents suffers some catastrophic event?
Verizon Wireless Expands Its Network in Northampton County; Investing to Stay Ahead of Growing Demand for Wireless Calling, Data Access
Friday June 2, 10:19 am ET
HELLERTOWN, Pa., June 2 /PRNewswire/ -- In a continuing effort to provide the best wireless service for residents and commuters in Northampton County, Verizon Wireless, operator of the nation's most reliable wireless network, has expanded its network with a new cell site in Hellertown. The new site increases coverage and capacity along Routes 78 and 412 and around the Lehigh University Murray H. Goodman Campus, specifically Stabler Arena and Goodman Stadium.
ADVERTISEMENT
This expansion is part of the company's aggressive multi-billion-dollar network investment each year (more than $1 billion every 90 days) to stay ahead of the growing demand for Verizon Wireless voice and data services like two-way text, picture and video messaging and V CAST, which brings full-length songs, TV and other multimedia services to wireless phones over the company's high-speed wireless broadband network. Verizon Wireless has invested $30 billion in the last six years -- $5 billion on average every year since the company was formed -- to increase the coverage and capacity of its national network and to add new services. The company has invested more than $700 million over the last six years in its Philadelphia Region network.
Strong demand for Verizon Wireless services continued during the first quarter of 2006 as the company added 1.7 million net new customers. Verizon Wireless is the leader in wireless customer loyalty. In the first quarter of 2006, the company posted a record-breaking low customer turnover rate of 1.18%, well below the rate reported by the other major wireless carriers.
The company's investment in its Philadelphia Tri-State Region wireless network reflects its commitment to offer customers the most reliable wireless service available. The company's 'most reliable network' claim is based on network studies performed by real-life test men and test women throughout the country who inspired the company's national advertising campaign. These engineers conduct more than 3.6 million call attempts yearly on Verizon Wireless' and other national carriers' networks while traveling over 1.2 million miles a year in specially equipped, company-owned test vehicles.
A
Crashman: $300 Million would do for the down payment. The remainder can be worked out.
Is this "irrational exuberance" or what? Say it ain't so, Crash.
I'm by no means an engineer, but I thought that, after a slow start, Huff did very well. If his audience was analysts and not techies, he struck just the right note. To get anything in that line of stuff to me, you have to talk in Peter Rabbit talk, and that's just whet he did. That last questioner was probably a shill who wanted to embarrass Huff at the end, but Huff rebuffed him with style and grace. I'd give Huff a 9.8 for this performance and I'll bet you the stock performance will validate that.
I'll teach you how to spell Bertram for nothing.
You may be right.
It has often been said that you don't get hurt unless you jump off the rollercoaster. A few years back, I owned a stock called JMAR, which I had bought for under 2 bucks. It languished and the board on Silicon Investors went back and forth about its future. I grew bored with it and moved on when it dropped to about a buck. Several weeks later, I checked JMAR's price on Schwab and it was 19 dollars. Needless to say, I hit the silk. It eventually went up to about $22 before it headed south again. Sometimes, the stew tastes better if it's left to simmer for a while.
Ryan: The presentation is 30 minutes, with an indetermined question and answer period afterwards.
Craig: Thanks for the ad. That's pretty neat, and I don't blame Murdoch for getting P.O.ed if he saw it.
I don't think we are going anywhere until we give the public good numbers to chew on; how's that old song go: "Words of love are not enough"? Until we have something to take to the bank, we're just treading water.
Oh, comeon, Pit; everyone knows that in times of falling stock prices, the markets turn to safe havens and quality issues. Hence, GTE will soar today.
I think form letters have a lot less effect than personal letters, because of the ditto-head (me, too) effect.
Cleary, Gottlieb is not going to put out a PR; they will probably attach an affidavit to GTE's answer to the complaint, and that should be all that allegation requires to be dismissed. I am assuming the GTE will file a counterclaim with their answer so that when the plaintiff's case is dismissed, we can still go forward and pursue damages.
What you say is very true, but alas, it hasn't happened yet and the stock is worth about the cost of a beer. I yearn for the day when it will be worth the price of a 1959 Lafite Rothschild.
In spite of Byron's article, note the following post by an RB member:
By: ordnryprsn0
22 May 2006, 02:15 PM EDT
Msg. 186553 of 186602
Jump to msg. #
"go to the Rubikon website. Under "who we are" it describes in detail Kissinger's relationship with Rubikon. He was a founding shareholder, among other things."
The website is:
Rubikonpartners.com
That article is 6 years old. Don't send it to Seth; he'll accuse us of fogging the facts.
Never in a hundred years would BONY have told GTE that they screwed up a customer's instructions for handling a stock transaction, unless GTE was the customer, and they weren't. Maybe the hedge fund or whoever it was informed GTE, which is not likely, but it wasn't the Bank of New York, and if Rob said it was, I find it hard to believe.
Pit: "we have a revolutionary product that many do not want to see do what msft did back in the day? maybe"
Pit, could you put that in Peter Rabbit talk? Thanks
Mide: Thanks for the explanation. Now it makes sense.
Mide: I have a problem with your analysis. If HBK or whoever was trying to cover their short position, wouldn't they have been a buyer? It would make more sense to me if they were selling their position in the face of expected good news and subsequent runup next week. Where am I off track here?
This in today's NYT. It's long, but worth a read. Note Global Hawk mention.
Seeking to Control Borders, Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors
By ERIC LIPTON
Published: May 18, 2006
WASHINGTON, May 17 — The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors.
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders.
Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan — like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment — the military contractors are zeroing in on the rivers, deserts, mountains and settled areas that separate Mexico and Canada from the United States.
It is a humbling acknowledgment that despite more than a decade of initiatives with macho-sounding names, like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso or Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego, the federal government has repeatedly failed on its own to gain control of the land borders.
Through its Secure Border Initiative, the Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders — a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success. It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers.
"This is an unusual invitation," the deputy secretary of homeland security, Michael Jackson, told contractors this year at an industry briefing, just before the bidding period for this new contract started. "We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."
The effort comes as the Senate voted Wednesday to add hundreds of miles of fencing along the border with Mexico. The measure would also prohibit illegal immigrants convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors from any chance at citizenship.
The high-tech plan being bid now has many skeptics, who say they have heard a similar refrain from the government before.
"We've been presented with expensive proposals for elaborate border technology that eventually have proven to be ineffective and wasteful," Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said at a hearing on the Secure Border Initiative program last month. "How is the S.B.I. not just another three-letter acronym for failure?"
President Bush, among others, said he was convinced that the government could get it right this time.
"We are launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history," Mr. Bush said in his speech from the Oval Office on Monday.
Under the initiative, the Department of Homeland Security and its Customs and Border Protection division will still be charged with patrolling the 6,000 miles of land borders.
The equipment these Border Patrol agents use, how and when they are dispatched to spots along the border, where the agents assemble the captured immigrants, how they process them and transport them — all these steps will now be scripted by the winning contractor, who could earn an estimated $2 billion over the next three to six years on the Secure Border job.
More Border Patrol agents are part of the answer. The Bush administration has committed to increasing the force from 11,500 to about 18,500 by the time the president leaves office in 2008. But simply spreading this army of agents out evenly along the border or extending fences in and around urban areas is not sufficient, officials said.
"Boots on the ground is not really enough," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday at a news conference that followed Mr. Bush's announcement to send as many as 6,000 National Guard troops to the border.
The tools of modern warfare must be brought to bear. That means devices like the Tethered Aerostat Radar, a helium-filled airship made for the Air Force by Lockheed Martin that is twice the size of the Goodyear Blimp. Attached to the ground by a cable, the airship can hover overhead and automatically monitor any movement night or day. (One downside: it cannot operate in high winds.)
Northrop Grumman is considering offering its Global Hawk, an unmanned aerial vehicle with a wingspan nearly as wide as a Boeing 737, that can snoop on movement along the border from heights of up to 65,000 feet, said Bruce Walker, a company executive.
Closer to earth, Northrop might deploy a fleet of much smaller, unmanned planes that could be launched from a truck, flying perhaps just above a group of already detected immigrants so it would be harder for them to scatter into the brush and disappear.
Raytheon has a package of sensor and video equipment used to protect troops in Iraq that monitors an area and uses software to identify suspicious objects automatically, analyzing and highlighting them even before anyone is sent to respond.
These same companies have delivered these technologies to the Pentagon, sometimes with uneven results.
Each of these giant contractors — Lockheed Martin alone employs 135,000 people and had $37.2 billion in sales last year, including an estimated $6 billion to the federal government — is teaming up with dozens of smaller companies that will provide everything from the automated cameras to backup energy supplies that will to keep this equipment running in the desert.
The companies have studied every mile of border, drafting detection and apprehension strategies that vary depending on the terrain. In a city, for example, an immigrant can disappear into a crowd in seconds, while agents might have hours to apprehend a group walking through the desert, as long as they can track their movement.
If the system works, Border Patrol agents will know before they encounter a group of intruders approximately how many people have crossed, how fast they are moving and even if they might be armed.
Without such information, said Kevin Stevens, a Border Patrol official, "we send more people than we need to deal with a situation that wasn't a significant threat," or, in a worst case, "we send fewer people than we need to deal with a significant threat, and we find ourselves outnumbered and outgunned."
The government's track record in the last decade in trying to buy cutting-edge technology to monitor the border — devices like video cameras, sensors and other tools that came at a cost of at least $425 million — is dismal.
Because of poor contract oversight, nearly half of video cameras ordered in the late 1990's did not work or were not installed. The ground sensors installed along the border frequently sounded alarms. But in 92 percent of the cases, they were sending out agents to respond to what turned out to be a passing wild animal, a train or other nuisances, according to a report late last year by the homeland security inspector general.
A more recent test with an unmanned aerial vehicle bought by the department got off to a similarly troubling start. The $6.8 million device, which has been used in the last year to patrol a 300-mile stretch of the Arizona border at night, crashed last month.
With Secure Border, at least five so-called system integrators — Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop, as well as Boeing and Ericsson — are expected to submit bids.
The winner, which is due to be selected before October, will not be given a specific dollar commitment. Instead, each package of equipment and management solutions the contractor offers will be evaluated and bought individually.
"We're not just going to say, 'Oh, this looks like some neat stuff, let's buy it and then put it on the border,' "Mr. Chertoff said at a news conference on Tuesday.
Skepticism persists. A total of $101 million is already available for the program. But on Wednesday, when the House Appropriations Committee moved to approve the Homeland Security Department's proposed $32.1 billion budget for 2007, it proposed withholding $25 million of $115 million allocated next year for the Secure Border contracting effort until the administration better defined its plans.
"Unless the department can show us exactly what we're buying, we won't fund it," Representative Rogers said. "We will not fund programs with false expectations."
Ken, if you had a machine that could cause automobiles to run on water and get phenomenal mileage, do you think there would be any obstacles to bringing it to market in your path? I see something similar here and little David is surrounded by Goliaths.
Kevin: I'm missing something here. How can you short shares you've already delivered for Sale? Maybe they wanted to sell next week for whatever reason, but why would they buy back?
Come on, Jim. Be a sport and donate them to the Bank of New York clerk. He'll probably need the money after this.
Pit or anyone: It appears that most of the low trades came from the NYSE. Does that give a clue as to the significance?
Maybe a whole bunch of sell orders accumulated overnight and they are being executed.
His Excellency will be an independent member of the board. He is not an employee of GTE.
Orlander, I fear that GTE would have to sell stock in order to raise the funds to buy back their stock. I believe that comes under the "Onanism" definition.
A few years ago, when we probated mt wife's grandmother's estate, we found a bundle of New York, New Haven and Hartford shares. Buy and hold is not always the best strategy.
Scott+Scott, LLC Files Class Action Lawsuit Against GlobeTel Communications Corp. on Behalf of Investors
Tuesday May 9, 4:56 pm ET
COLCHESTER, Conn., May 9, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- On May 9, 2006, Scott+Scott, LLC filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida against GlobeTel Communications Corp. (``GlobeTel'' or the ``Company'') (AMEX:GTE - News) and certain officers on behalf of GlobeTel securities purchasers during the period December 22, 2005 through April 11, 2006, inclusive (the ``Class Period''), for securities law violations. GlobeTel provides an integrated suite of telecommunications services. The complaint alleges that during the Class Period defendants made false and misleading statements regarding the Company's $600 million deal with Moscow-based LLC Internafta to provide internet services in Russia. As a result, the Company's stock price was artificially inflated, thereby harming Class Period investors.
If you purchased GlobeTel securities during the Class Period and wish to serve as a lead plaintiff in the action, you must move the Court no later than June 27, 2006. Any purported class member may move the Court to serve as lead plaintiff through counsel of its choice, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. If you wish to discuss this action or have questions concerning this notice or your rights, please contact Scott+Scott partner David R. Scott (drscott@scott-scott.com, 800/404-7770, 860/537-5537) or visit the Scott+Scott website, http://www.scott-scott.com, for more information. There is no cost or fee to you.
ADVERTISEMENT
Throughout the Class Period, the complaint alleges, defendants publicly touted the $600 million joint venture with Internafta to install wireless networks in Russia's 30 largest cities. The Company announced the ``binding agreement'' in a December 30, 2005 press release. CEO Tim Huff stated: ``This presents an amazing opportunity for us, for Russia and for our Russian partners. The Russian Internet market is severely limited by a lack of infrastructure and by the high cost to individual users of obtaining high speed internet access, even in those relatively rare cases where it is available. The GlobeTel Wireless network will provide city-wide high speed, wireless connectivity . . .'' On this news, GlobeTel's stock price surged from $2.19 to $3.68 per share, an increase of over 75%, on extremely heavy trading volume.
According to the lawsuit, however, the deal in reality was a sham. The complaint alleges that almost immediately after the deal's announcement, in January 2006, Internafta failed to pay GlobeTel the first $150 million installment required under the joint venture agreement. Over the coming months, Internafta repeatedly failed to meet the agreement's payment deadlines. On April 11, 2006, The Motley Fool published a shocking report, revealing that the Company's joint venture with Internafta lacked any real sense of credibility. With this news, the Company's stock price plunged 15%, on unusually high trading volume, falling to $1.78 per share.
The plaintiff is represented by Scott+Scott, a firm with significant experience in prosecuting investor class actions. The firm dedicates itself to client communication and satisfaction and currently is litigating major securities, antitrust and employee retirement plan actions throughout the United States. The firm represents pension funds, charities, foundations, individuals and other entities worldwide.
More information on this and other class actions can be found on the Class Action Newsline at http://www.primezone.com/ca
Contact:
Scott+Scott
David R. Scott
(800) 404-7770
(860) 537-5537
drscott@scott-scott.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Scott + Scott, LLC
Now: How can Pit or anyone else say what the numbers should be? Unless you are privy to the internal workings of GTE, there isn't a dog's chance you could make a defensible prediction as to future numbers. Any guess has to be tempered by the guesser's bias, hope and optomism level, no rational basis for any guesses by those of us outside the pale, and that includes PIT, who is fun to read but, don't let him date your sister.
$369 equals 10,000 rubles.
I'm only being the devil's advocate here, but isn't it remotely possible that Internafta was incorporated with only $369 dollars, and the remainder could have been loans from shareholders? We don't have a balance sheet on Internafta, just the paid in capital, according to the Tax Service. In my state, you can file for incorporation with a statement that the paid in capital will be $500 or more.
For an aerial view of what has to be thebig hangars, go to
Zillow.com and type in 30th street and Palmdale, CA. Can't tell what's inside, but there's a lot of it.
Who was it that said, "Trust, but verify.", referring to the same nationality as Mr. Chernizov? I guess D&B does not have a branch in Moscow.