"Time-Traveler" Busted For Insider Trading

Chester sent in a story that has been making the rounds for a bit, but if you haven't bumped into it, "Yahoo! TV came up with this weird story about a guy who caught police's attention by gaining $350 million from mere $800 in two weeks. The twisted part is that he justifies his knowledge about stocks by saying he is a time-traveler from year 2256!"

is it me...

[Recoil_42]

or is slashdot getting really slow at the news these days? Lockergnome [lockergnome.com] had this bit last month

Validity of Internet news stories

[GregGardner]

If you read carefully you see that the source is the "Weekly World News." You know that trashy tabloid newspaper at the grocery store right next to the National Enquirer? If you saw this story on the front cover of the tabloid while picking up some Doritos, you would chuckle and move on. But in the world of the Internet, it's posted on Yahoo and looks just like every other Yahoo news article, except for the fact that it's on tv.yahoo.com instead of news.yahoo.com. Even Slashdot picks it up (in jest, right guys?) and it looks even more legit.

So it just goes to show you that on the Internet, you need to check the source of news a little more carefully since tabloid news can have the same exact "look" as the real news.

Two minutes Googling reveals the truth

[descubes]

From http://www.theanomaly.net/blog

Updated: See what happens when you donâ(TM)t pay attention to the big picture? Eric Bogs was kind enough to tell me Iâ(TM)m an idiot and a gullible fool for not realizing this was Yahooâ(TM)s Weekly World News [yahoo.com], which is akin to The Onion. Hey, itâ(TM)s still a fun article.

The rest of the Yahoo web site is also funny, though. I did not know about it.

Time travel into the future of programming: http://mozart-dev.sf.net [sf.net]

Re:What's his address?

[On Lawn]

Hey good idea for a slashdot poll,

What would you like to find out from the future?
When I will die?
Should I invest in RedHat and OSDN?
Will JLo's marraige last?
Do you know Cowboy Neal?
Will they ever make Survivor Redmond?

Time travel

[pmz]

Regardless of the fictional aspect of this story, it made me think of an interesting question:

If a person devises a time machine, how can they both (1) travel back in time and (2) account for the displacement of the Solar System and its planets in that time?

For example, if he traveled back 200 years but remained in the same position, he would have appeared not in Wall Street but in space to quickly die in a vaccuum. The comfort of Earth would literally be billions of miles away.

Seems to be from the StarTrek Universe.

[GrimReality]

...from year 2256!

Isn't this about the time the events in the StarTrek universe takes place?

GrimReality
2003-04-17 19:06:47 UTC (2003-04-17 15:06:47-0400)

Weekly World News plagarizes...

[Dimensio]

It's true.
Several months ago they ran a story about a woman who was killed when she believed that the rapture was occuring after a man dressed in a toga (headed to a costume party), driving a truck filled with inflatable dolls filled with helium (as a gag) crashed and the contents spilled and floated upward.

The names were changed, but the events in the story were identical to that of a story posted by alt.atheism regular Elroy Willis as part of his satirical "EAP" (Evil Atheist Press) articles. Of course, before they stole the story, some idiots had reposted it in various places and changed "EAP" to "AP", so it had turned into something of an urban legend [snopes.com] before that, but still -- it wasn't hard to track down the original author. Elroy said that he'd never been contacted by WWN prior to their publishing of the story.

Re:HOAX REVEALED!

[wolf-]

I would agree with you, except, I'm not laughing.
The dupes are getting worse.
The content is becoming hum drum.

Apparently so many are paying now, that there is no concern about losing readership now.

Weekly World News: not all of it made up!

[coult]

You know, sometimes they actually print things that are true. When I was in high school in the 80's, someone at my school got really drunk at a party and was dropped off at 2 a.m. by his "friends" in a snowbank near his house. He nearly froze to death - his body temperature got well below the level where normally you would die. His feet and hands were ice chunks, but he miraculously survived. The Weekly World News picked up the story, and reported it very accurately.

Occam's razor

[Anonymous Coward]

Applying Occam's razor to the known facts, I'd say the simplest, most likely explanation is that he is indeed a time traveler.

Actually, no.

[AzrealAO]

I submitted a PCWorld story on the 10th and 11th about AOL applying to the FCC for release from the requirement to make AOL Instant Messener interoperable with other provider's services.

The story that was posted on the 12th was about tests of Video Messaging.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,110158,t k,dn040703X,00.asp [pcworld.com]

Re:Time travel

[BoneFlower]

Good point. There are many ways a simple position drift of Earth could be compensated for. That is the most trivial of the issues involved.

More serious is possible disruptions to the time stream and what could occur to correct them.

Most significant is his new found wealth could ripple through and prevent him from being born, or affect society in such a way that he would have no need to make the journey in the first place. Thus he doesn't come back- But, he did come back or else he wouldn't have not come back... thus all hell breaks loose and the fabric of our collective perception of time unravels and the universe is destroyed.

Another possibility is the "everything that can happen does happen in an alternate universe". Problem with this is, ok, yeah he gets filthy rich here, but since it simply creates a new reality that by the theory would have been created anyways, he really hasn't accomplished anything.

Now, the time machine could have seperated him sufficiently from the space time contimuum that he is capable of changing past events without harming his own "past". But I don't expect to see that untill around 2885, according to my friend whose from 2886 and the Cartman TimeCo brochures he showed me. But then again I haven't seen that friend since Cartman called his future self an asshole.

Re:No basis in fact, 100% fiction

[Exitthree]

Actually, the way you worked it out is only true if he only bought $800 of stock with each trade. Rather, after selling his first stock he could buy another stock with his original $800 plus whatever he just made. If this were the case the number of trade he needs to reach $350 is significantly less if each investment doubles in value. It's $800 * 2^n where n is his number of trades. (n is far less than 126 in this case, so actually each trade could have less than doubled each time.)

Re:No basis in fact, 100% fiction

[demaria]

Assuming an average of 3% inflation, around $175,000 to $225,000.

Re:Weekly World News...?

[Chump1422]

Actually, since losing some libel suits a few years ago, the Enquirer is one of the most reliable papers out there. Not to say they don't oversensationalize things, but if you read through the tortured prose, the stories are based on verified facts. It's just that they turn a "Ow! Watch out, you stepped on my toe!" from Brad Pitt to Jennifer Aniston into a "Major blowup! Is their marriage in trouble?!?!?!"