hodar

How are fraudulent SEC filings by Twitter, somehow Musk's fault?  All Musk did was read the forms, and calculate a value based on the reported number of Active Subscribers.

Seems that Twitter is the one that not only misrepresented themselves, but also committed fraud to both stockholders, as well as advertisers.  I would expect to see a class action lawsuit from stockholders, as well as advertisers, who made business decisions, based upon what is supposed to be accurate data.

Secondly, fraud in vitiates EVERYTHING.  If you agree to buy a house that you are told in writing, is 4,000 sq-ft.  You have the architectural drawings on file (analogy with the SEC filings), you have the Realtor's Contract in hand - and it all says 4,000 sq-ft; but you find out that it's actually much less than 4,000 sq-ft - how is it that somehow this is your fault?  How would it be that you are still required to purchase a contract, that was presented to you, fraudulently?  How would you be liable for the Down Payment you made?

Simply said - you would not.  You would be entitled to all of  your money back; and the seller would be on the hook for your time, costs and efforts.  The Realtor would likely be investigated for a breach of ethics (if they exist).  Twitter is the one who lied, Twitter is the one that filed false SEC claims.  Seems pretty clear cut.

If history is any indicator, Apple lead the way to PowerPC with 3 distinct models, the base model was internally called Galileo, then Copernicus and the high end was named in honor of Carl Sagan, called simply Sagan.  I was one of the engineers at Motorola at the time, and we were competing against IBM for the sales of these processors, however we worked together in the design and layout of these chips.

Somehow, Carl Sagan discovered that we were using his name as a Code name, internally only, on the high end PowerPC Mac; and he sued.  Steve Jobs promptly had us change the internal code name to BHA (Butt Head Astronomer), again in his honor.

But, these 3 models launched simultaneously, and the writing was on the wall - given the performance of these units, the Motorola 680x0 was on the way out.  Most everyone adopted the new PowerPC computers.  Also, at that time, Apple opened up their OS and allowed another company to make an Apple clone under the name of Power Computing, which used designs that were ham-strung by Apple, yet they streamlined other areas of the design to make very competitive machines that essentially cannibalized Apple's market share - the cloning agreement was discontinued, an Power Computing failed shortly thereafter.

Aside from the cloning mistake - I think that Apple will likely come out with a few competitive lines of ARM Macs, that will show a superior performance level across a variety of price points, and performance will sell the ARM Macs.  It's pretty apparent, Intel cannot match the performance improvements we are witnessing year after year with the ARM processors.

Stabitha_Christie said:

“ It's not clear why Musk failed to do due diligence of the service before offering to buy, which should have included an accurate count of fake users”

Yeah…. His history of being an impulsive jackass certainly doesn’t explain it. 

Umm, you do your Due Diligence by reviewing the SEC forms (10K statements for each quarter).
These are publicly available, and are the OFFICIAL STATEMENT of the company's financials, quarterly expenses, costs, debts, plans and forward mission statements.
They are signed by the CEO and/or the CFO.
These are the forms that Stock Brokers will analyze to set a stock price target, banks will use to determine loan amounts and percentages, and are a base for taxes.  These forms are generally "audited" by a 3rd party, before release.
They are a big deal. A very, very Big Deal.

That's why Elon had a $1 Billion Deposit, so he couldn't walk away.
However, fraud in vitiates everything.  Twitter lied by overstating the actual user base, and instead of the bots being <5% as Twitter claimed, two separate 3rd party audits showed that bots were greater than 19.2% (about 400% higher than claimed).  That's serious, very, very serious.
So, now come the law suits

Elon was defrauded, Twitter lied to him, they lied to the SEC.  Oxley-Sarbanes Act sets up some very severe prison sentences for all involved for this.
So, Elon could walk away, or negotiate a much lower puchase price; due to this fraud
next, we have the stockholders, who will recieve far less share value, because Twitter committed fraud
Finally, we have the advertisers, who overpaid for advertizing, as the consumer base they thought they were reaching, did not exist.

yes, this is catetrophic.

lkrupp said:

If the deal falls through I think the SEC would have a good case of fraud to bring against Musk. Looking like this was all theatre from the get-go.

So on your planet, the person who catches the criminal is the one who gets punished?
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I don't believe that Musk filed the SEC report for Twitter.

A pre-closure audit is commonplace before a sale of any company is made.  The audit is generally an accounting of the staff, property, financial, taxes, HR and payroll, compensation packages, benefits packages, Board of Directors compensations, primary Stock Holders and breakdown of Debts and Obligations, along with Revenues and analysis of Cost of Operations.  Exposing fraud, is not a crime.

tnw2933 said:

I received my 10 core iMac Pro on December 26th 2017.  I noticed immediately that 95% of the time when I woke my iMac Pro from sleep all the external USB drives were ejected.  This occurred for various external USB3 hard drives from different manufacturers as well as with a Sandisk Extreme 64 GB USB3 flash drive and a 16 GB USB2 Kingston flash drive.  I also discovered that I could not boot into Windows 10 if any external hard drives were connected and that I could not use the Option key> Storage Manager to boot into Windows 10 regardless of whether USB drives were connected or not.  I filed a formal case with Apple Support on January 2, 2018 and I have since been in touch with a total of five Apple Support contacts regarding these two issues -- three of whom are Senior Advisors.  To date, the problem still exists, and I still have an open case with Apple.  I have been using the iMac Pro with Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 2 external hard drives without any problems as long as I do not attach USB drives to the iMac Pro and put it to sleep.  

I have also done extensive editing in FCP 10.4 (latest version) with my iMac Pro.  While some things are indeed faster than my fully maxed out Late 2013 Mac Pro cylinder, I have found that for many common tasks the CPU's and presumably the graphics card are not being used to full efficiency by the iMac Pro in FCP 10.4.  Overall, I have been disappointed with my purchase of this nearly $9,000 computer and especially with the fact that after more than two weeks of working with Apple Senior Advisors (who in turn are passing along information to an engineering team) I am no more able to effectively utilize USB external hard drives with my iMac Pro than I was the day I received it form Apple. 

Tom

Tom, have you used a different external USB3.0 Hub?

I had a very similar problem with the Mac Mini, as I had 4 external drives, Keyboard, mouse and CAC card reader all on a 3rd party powered USB3.0 Hub.  The USB3.0 spec allows over 1000 mA (1 Amp) per USB port, however the power supply for this USB3.0 hub was only 1500mA (1.5A) for 12 ports.  When you power up, a load of this type will cause the USB Hub to hang, and this hang means that the I/O Controller on your Mac is not getting a non-posted response from the USB, so it hangs (ie. waits forever).

I replaced the $30 Hub with one that was rated for 40.0 Watts vs 12.5 Watts, and my problems immediately went away.

This sounds a lot like Sonic Holography that was patented by Bob Carver and found on the lineup of Carver Pre-Amps and Receivers during the 80-90's.  Essentially, Bob injected a portion of the Left channel (180 degrees out of phase), onto the signal going into the right speaker, and then simultaneously injected an portion of the right channel, (180 degrees out of phase) onto the signal going to the Left channel.

The idea was that any listener, on axis (ie. between the two speakers) would experience the effect that your right channel would be uniquely coming from the right speaker, as the left channel would "cancel" out.  In other words, as we are basically predators, our right ear hears both speakers, so our brain "targets" the speaker source.  By using wave cancellation, the right ear would theoretically only hear the right speaker, and the left ear would only hear the left speaker.  As long as you remained "somewhat" on axis between the speakers.

On a decent stereo system, the effect was quite impressive, as the true "sound stage" was accurately reproduced, you "heard" sounds coming outside from the physical speaker placement.  Blindfolded and given a ping-pong ball gun, people would think that the speaker was 10+ feet to the right, of the right channel.  Using Sonic Holography and a set of omni-directional speakers; you could "hear" that the voice was coming from a point to the right of the speaker about 3 feet, and originating about 5 feet off the ground - as if they were in the room playing, live.

So, I'm pretty excited to see where Apple takes this.  It's been many years since Bob Carver shook up the audio world; first with his Magnetic Field amplifiers, then with Sonic Holography, then with an asymmetrical tuning system for his FM tuner, and some other stuff that dealt with vinyl records.  Bob was quite the genius.

In the US, non-compete clauses are almost impossible to enforce.  Your mind, is inherently your own.  Your ideas, while employed, may belong to your employer.  But once that employment contract is broken, your ideas are once again your property; primarily because slavery is legal, morally and ethically wrong.

Yes, he may have been shown, taught and worked with superior technologies, and while he was employed at Apple, his job was to learn and become an expert in using these technologies.  But, as anyone can do, you can master a topic, and eventually - in some cases - improve upon it.  Instead of fighting to promote change and the bureaucracy internally, this man chose to cut ties with Apple - and promote his ideas himself.

Good on him.  Roger Ross (creator of RISC computing) started life off with Motorola, and with a small team produced the first RISC 88000 Motorola RISC processor family.  Internal strife within Motorola, in Austin, TX (yeah, I was there at the time) was frustrating.  So he left, and most of the interns that helped him (because Motorola Sr. Managment "re-routed" his Sr. Engineering requisitions) took very high paying jobs with SPARC, and went on to create the HyperSPARC architecture.  At the time, they did very well for a start up.  Motorola tried unsuccessfully to invoke non-competitive clauses to stop Roger, but the principle outlined above, won in Texas court, time and again.

If I am accused of breaking the law, I expect that I will have my day in court.  I will have my chance to plead my case; then I will be either found innocent, or will face the consequences.

Why any agency (Fed, State, County or City) is exempted from this very basic idea, escapes me.  Without consequences, there is zero reason they won't continue, or further encroach on our freedoms, privacy and basic rights.