elchupanebre

> tokens are issued in addition to certain securities

Could you please provide a pointer to registration paperwork of those securities? It must exist if they are "issued strictly according to the current legislation". Thanks.

SEC applies Howey Test to determine if a given security is an investment contract (security) and as such must be registered if offered to public.

The test is quite simple: * It's an investment of money * There is an expectation of profits from the investment * The investment is in a common enterprise * Any profit comes from the efforts of the one offering the investment or a third party

Cryptocurrency trading in general could be either but ICOs are clearly in the security category.

I would be curious to see Wyoming etc. try to overturn Supreme Court's decision on SEC vs. Howey. If they are successful it will be the end of SEC and the public markets in the US as we know them.

Re: Liechtenstein. They don't have a stock exchange so they don't have anything to lose.

Yay Konstantin Serebriany and his team! The dude behind these sanitizers is quite brilliant. The Universe should know its heroes.

They said they have terminated the project Dragonfly. But did they actually stop working on the censored search for China? And why was the statement made by a PR dude Karan Bhatia instead of Ceasar Sengupta who was supposedly in charge of the project?

I used to work on PDP-11 under RSX-11M and it used forward slashes as option separators. For example the equivalent of ls:

pip /li

Here is my fickle opinion of course not reflecting of market shifts.

A couple of years ago I was a CTO of a midsized company which had a misfortune of building the main product on top of Oracle DB (decision was made before me).

Oracle the database is great: performant, scalable. A bit pricey and complex to manage but that's acceptable for what it delivers.

Oracle the company is absolutely horrible. I've never dealt with anyone worse than Oracle.

Just one example: we accidentally turned on a feature called "advanced data guard" or some such. The DB is large and complex, it was a mistake of one of our DBAs who reported it right away. We never used the feature and could prove it with logs. Nevertheless Oracle demanded us to pay close to $1m or they would shut us down: we would have to discontinue the use of the entire DB in 30 days which was impossible.

The funny thing is that once ADG is turned on it cannot be turned off. Which made me suspect that such traps were created on purpose.

We ended up paying less than $1m but in the form of purchasing their cloud services. Apparently that's how their sales people get commissions.

But, dear Oracle, I've learned my lesson. Never again will I use anything with Oracle name on it. No company under my leadership will use anything Oracle. Not even Java or MySQL. Regardless of the technical merits of the product. Oracle is too underhanded to be trusted.

P.S. We also decided against using the Oracle cloud services we paid for. We just let it sit there, never even logged in. I'm sure Oracle reported their cloud as growing.

"Facebook shareholders ... can’t do anything" - that's not true. They can sell FB stock.

Second that. I worked for 5 years there including directly with Sengupta (in charge of Dragonfly) and in passing with Pichai. Pichai was a politician who saw his mission in finding a balance between power groups, nothing more.

What's going to happen next: FB will quietly layoff all US moderators after moving the operations offshore.

The Inbox was a vanity project of Clay Bavor. He got the promotion he wanted and moved on. The official version, of course, was a different one and amounted to something like "more wood behind fewer arrows".

I suspected that someone might bring it up :). I agree I was not clear.

The distinction is in having a sustained effort behind the project. One may have 6 messengers while none of them gets the resources to succeed. The projects are used for a short-term career advancement, not for a long-term effort to open a new market.

The logic is indeed to have "... 10 projects if one of them will be successful and kill others". It just does not work that way. Google's leadership (the top ~10 people) position themselves above the fight. They don't throw their weight behind one of the (for example) messengers because if it fails it's their failure too (remember Google +?). As a result the users are confused, the resources are spread thin, and none of the 10 wins the market.

In order to understand Google actions it's important to understand a bit of culture at the top as well as who Pichai is.

Pichai spent all his management career at Google. He is undoubtedly a very bright individual but his personal life experience is limited to a single company which was on the rise during his entire career. He came to prominence by inventing the MSIE Toolbar. The thing was quite insidious: when installed, it showed some proxy for the PageRank of the current page (not the real PR). That gave it a reason to call home for every visited page -- this data was used to improve search quality. In addition it distributed Google Search to IE users. Toolbar generated some billions of dollars for Google. Pichai was also instrumental for starting the Chrome project.

Pichai is an extremely shrewd politician. An excellent diplomat. He manages the company by finding the balance between internal power groups. When the company is growing that's all that is needed. That's absolutely not enough when things go sour.

Here is an example. Google Cloud is failing. The fundamental reason for the failure is quite obvious: the margins in the cloud business are much smaller than in the ads/search. Consequently it's starved of good people. After all, if you are in sales why would you work on something which has 5 or 10% margin when you can work on something with 30 or 50% margin? The solution to the problem is also simple -- spin cloud off into a separate business. But that requires splitting up Google's infrastructure. That means a conflict with Urs Hoelzle. Which is impossible for Pichai. He would rather see Google Cloud die than pick a fight with a powerful old-timer like Urs.

That brings me to the Google culture at the top. If you want to have a career at Google you need to do something visible. At the lower levels it means working on a new project. At a VP level you need to start a new audacious project (this is why Google has 6 instant messengers). If it launches you get recognition and money. If not your career slows for a year then you do it again. Once launched, the project is no longer relevant for the career and can be passed to someone else for maintenance where it's starved of resources and slowly killed. This culture was formed long time ago, under Schmidt and Page. Pichai just perpetuated it. As long as ads and search generate healthy amounts of cash this may continue indefinitely. At the same time the new challenges and the new markets are likely to be missed by Google, just like it happened under Balmer at MSFT.

Pichai is status quo.

All kinds of "absolute tests" are generally wrong.

For instance, your climate change (which was called until a few years ago "global warming") test rubbed me the wrong way because you mentioned the "climate scientists". There is no such thing as a climate scientist because there is no climate science. There is climate research or climate studies but not Science. Science means application of Scientific method: (a) making observations -> (b) formulating hypothesis (falsifiable predictions) -> (c) proving or rejecting the hypothesis through experimentation. Climate studies lack the third step and therefore they are not science.

Should I dismiss the rest of your argument based on my own test of "the person fails to understand the difference between science and ontology"?