@sevenlayermuddle - I was of the opinion that in the UK at least it's basically fairly difficult to be an 'inside trader', you have to have privileged information from the company itself and have to be an employee or someone who is conspiracy with one such. Info about CPU microarchitectures in this case was all publicly available, as members of the general public, not employees of say Intel, were the ones who did that research. So having an opinion that a cpu design is rubbish and therefore it might be a good idea to sell your shares can't be illegal, because anyone out there could come to the same opinion given a sufficiently large supply of clue, not secret information. But then I am no lawyer nor an american so what on earth do I know.
Mind you, if you worked for say el reg and wrote up an article that was contained a certain quantity of bull, like numbers of 30% say, and then went off to do some short selling of say intel stock then there might be trouble, but I'm not at all sure on what legal grounds, although it is clearly unethical market manipulation.