S&P is a ratings agency.

As a private entity, its valuations (sold to investors) are its main cash cow. You don't have to believe what they say--that's your prerogative. If you think what they say is BS, out of touch with reality, or a "$X trillion mistake," that's what the other rating agencies are for (Fitch, Moody's, etc.).

Who gave S&P the authority? Private enterprise gave them that. They happen to be very good at gauging these things, which is why people tend to trust them.

OK, so they were manipulated (or manipulating) for mortgage pass-through securities during the 2008 credit crisis. They fell asleep at the wheel, should have been paying more attention, should have been better at figuring it out. They could have been more savvy to realize that the CDS market was getting bigger and bigger all at AIG's expense. But they weren't. That also happens to NOT be their primary market. Fannie and Freddie are supposed to be responsible for securing mortgages. S&P is all about stocks, bonds, and indices.

Think of how many times does S&P get it right compared to how many times it is off base. If there is one plane crash, does everyone decide not to fly ever again?

I'm no big fan of S&P, but at the end of the day, S&P is answerable to its investors and its clients, no one else. Certainly not Robert Reich. Who gave HIM the authority?

Actually, there is zero (0) evidence that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the works of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Nobody even thought the idea possible until "evidence" came from a Delia Bacon (no relation) who was a total nutter.

Then people like Mark Twain started to probe into some of the "biographies" of the Bard written by people who had no concept of history or any business writing such biographies, and a conspiracy-that-was-never-a-conspiracy was born as a result. Now there are a wide range of theories from Marlowe to de Vere to UFOs to Elvis.

Two hundred years from now, people are going to claim that someone else was Walt Disney because there is no way he could have drawn every single cartoon by hand.

""Anonymity" is a nonsense commodity generated by the information age, and which has had much emo-currency invested in it by those with vested interests, but which is a complete sham."

Tell that to Mark Twain, George Eliot, and Homer. All of them had a vested interest in anonymity--resulting in their pseudonymity.

--Ear Phantom

Grandfather it in like this: if you file a patent by the rules of Patent 2.0, then you can no longer sue or be sued using the Patent 1.0 system. Furthermore, you have to abandon all existing Patent 1.0 lawsuits. In exchange, any Patent 1.0 lawsuits filed against your organization are void.

How much would that level the playing field?

I really hope the SEC comes down hard on this. Using an SPV (special-purpose vehicle) as a "single investor" is breaking the spirit of the law, if not the letter of the law. This deal makes Goldman Sachs an insider trading infinite fraud machine with the power to print as much money as they want and defraud as many investors as they can. As usual, you are doomed if you can't get on the investment bandwagon and get some of that "good old privately traded Facebook stock", and doubly doomed if you are one of the investors who actually does buy the stock, only to be killed by Goldman's credit default swaps when the bubble pops and you find out that the stock is worthless. In no universe should it be legal, but you know Goldman, they're Too Big to Fail. Get ready for the taxpayer to foot the bill (again).

I hope everyone here appreciates the irony of a Disney movie with a protagonist who wants to give away IP for free.

Thank you, Firefox, for blocking them.

The comments here on Slashdot are far, far more useful than the original article, which I found to be rather trite and derivative ("don't do X. don't do ~X").

What are Mr. Peter Wayner's credentials? Sounds like he hasn't touched a single line of code in his life--even the examples won't compile and don't do the same thing that he says they do.

What Stock Exchange regulators? And just how, exactly?

Normally a company has a simple profit and loss summary. With banks, it's an entirely different matter. Banks have the power to move things off their balance sheet completely--poof! That's the whole point of most structured products, including credit derivatives.

Until the Wall Street reform bill got passed, nobody had the power to do anything about the situation at all. Now it's ostensibly fixed, but that takes time before the new regulators can even get a handle on what's been going on for the last 2-3 years. It's still easy peasy when most financial instruments can be traded over the counter (i.e., not through an exchange), without rules (especially for the big banks, who have special immunity) and don't have to be recorded.

It's only a matter of time before Goldman is the next Enron, only far, far worse. They may even get away with it.

And their "big secret" is... ...the emperor has no clothes and their balance sheet is entirely made up. They simply make up the number they want and use alchemy, I mean, custom derivatives traded over the counter with SPVs (special purpose vehicles).

Their technology is 100% proprietary and in house, at the programming language (Slang), database (SecDB) and networking levels (yep, even custom screen editors, no IDEs for Goldman) for added obfuscation. They brag internally about how much they spend on technology, the bulk of which is spent on training people just out of school on their proprietary system. It is almost impossible to audit.

I don't think it's a question of the technology. We already have things that fly, and I remember a flying car model that worked coming out about 15 years ago. It's a question of fuel efficiency (discussed in another thread) the allocation of resources, and social priorities.