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Fines are not enough and hurt shareholders more than those who are responsible: the executives. The true punishment should be fines and jail time for the COO, CFO, CEO and all the other Cx0's. What does fining a company do except bleed the shareholders?

Dude, the whole function of the corporation as we know it is designed as such to shield individuals from direct legal action. That's why they're so popular.

The dividend tax rate is payed out by corporations. The rate that Bush changed was on the so-called "double-taxation of dividends" -- this has NOTHING TO DO with personal income tax. You're quite confused, my friend.

Also, you're not even factually accurate. From the AP wire: "President Bush reported adjusted gross income of $784,219 for last year on which he paid $207,307 in federal taxes." That's a whopping 26% of his gross income. And if you'd take the time to understand the marginal rate, you'll see that as income levels increase, so does the mean rate of taxation. Here's a link if you care about educating your brain to share an informed opinion.

Get your facts straight, bub.

Here is the Quicken Eula I could not find anything in it about a length of support for the software. Perhaps someone else can?

Even if you do itemize it's a miscellaneous deduction subject to a 2% floor. So just your miscellaneous deductions have to exceed 2% of your AGI (adjusted gross income, basically your income). Here's a list of other miscellaneous deductions.

In order to take most "deductions" (including a deduction for tax preparation expenses, or charitable donations), the total of all such deductions must exceed the standard deduction. This only rarely happens.

It's not really that rare to itemize. If you've got a mortgage, most of the time you can itemize (mortgage interest and property taxes are generally big itemized deductions). And this year you can take sales taxes, which is a big boon for people in states like Florida with no income taxes (and for tax preparers in Florida like me who make more money when people itemize).

I think your argument is correct. Who could possibly think there's other companies or organizations that build influential software that people use all the time?

No, truly, Microsoft is the only place to create influential software...

Oil futures prices are down 2.7% today. The rumor on the Drudge Report is that Iraq is already pumping oil above expected output...

Meanwhile, the USA is filling its strategic oil reserves to the highest levels ever. The thought is that with the proper reserves, they could soak any future terrorist attack that may cut off supply... recall that Bill Clinton tapped the oil reserves in 2000 for price control, a move widely seen as covering up effects of the dot-com recession that had begun earlier in the year. In 2000, it was noted that the reserves could support 100% production levels in the USA for two months, and that was at 571m barrels. Prices at the time were only about $26/barrel as shown on this graph.

But then again so is the entire NASDAQ, so it's probably unrelated.

Steadily droppingtoday...

It seems not a week goes by without seeing an article regarding offshore outsourcing on Slashdot.

Yeah, I suppose the concept is an important one to a lot of readers here, and probably a real fear. And yes, while I will see the occasional luicid argument, the lot of them here are ill-conceived, and the same old protectionist BS rehashed over and over again. Strangely enough, it smacks very much of the same protectionist Pat Buchanan rhetoric, a figure I don't generally see as particularly savoury to most of the Slashdot crowd.

In the end, however, I am most tired of seeing these articles on Slashdot, because, quite simply, you're not going to get an unbiased view -- the OSDN itself outsources jobs offshore. Realistically, how are you going to expect Slashdot to deliver an opinion that strays much from corporate mindset?

Look, whether you think outsourcing is good or bad, there are better places to beat the dying horse; it's not worth submitting such stories here. A slashdot query for 'outsourcing' returns plenty of results, and while, for the most part, such posts have been made pretty objectively without much commentary by the editors, it's evident that these ideas nonetheless go against the OSDN's corporate outlook.

This brings us to today's posting. I think today's editorial comment of "I don't think the comparasion [sic] to Dot Bombs is entirely accurate - the trend to globalization overall has been going on for decades. Still interesting piece." is fairly representative of the baby steps that could occur in a website teetering towards corporate influence.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to start a firestorm here, and I don't think Hemos meant anything inflammatory either -- if anything, maybe this is an attempt by Hemos to indicate full-disclosure of OSDN's view. I'm just saying, seeing as the OSDN already outsources, I don't think Slashdot is the most level playing field to make such arguments, anymore. Argue Linux vs BSD, vi vs emacs, AMD vs Intel, etc.. but it's hard to be objective when the corp. parent of the website has already show its hand on the newswires.

Wait... You weren't kidding. I see the story on quicken now. I guess the link didn't work for me. My apologies!

Wow. Lots of errors. First off, MS isn't worth $50B, they have $50B in cash and liquid assets. They are worth far more than that (at least as far as stock market valuations go). As of this weekend, MS has a stock market valuation of $285,646.9 million (said holding pinkie to mouth). For those of you that have problems with decimal math, that's about $285 billion.

At $50M per settlement, 100 settlements leads to $5B. $50B - $5B = $45B. So, 100 settlements will lead to a reduction in total cash and equivalent assets of $5B / $285B of net worth (or less than 1/50 of their net worth). Of course, empirical evidence shows that market capitalizations have less to do with total assets and more to do with total discounted expected future earnings. So losing $5B in cash would reduce their stock market valuation by more than $5B.

It's all pretty bad for Microsoft, but not the end of the world for them. But the math quoted in this post (and most of its children posts) are pretty horrible.

Actually, Billy-boy has sold almost 5% of his shares in the last month (that's almost 8 million shares, btw). This means nothing except that the money involved was worth more to the seller either invested in something else or as cash.

You may also notice that he has gone from a total of over 600,000,000 shares at the end of 2001 to less than 200,000,000 shares today.

I'm not trying to claim that M$ or SCO are on the up-and-up, just pointing out that these numbers don't necessarily mean what you all are trying to claim they do...

Think like that, and you'll practically be in Bill's head.

Bill's head, in my opinion has already left. He is looking for greener pastures. He had 651,749,300 shares of MSFT stock on or around November 1st, 2001. He currently has 172,612,893 shares as of 8/5/03. He knows that if he sells any faster, the media will catch on, as they did when Mr. Balmer unloaded around 12 million shares around the 5/30/03.
Follow the money. The smart money is leaving Microsoft.

link

Lets see, chief shareholder of MS

Uh, no. Please check your facts.

link

I'd like to know where that information came from. Under SEC regulations, insiders are required to report large buy and sell transactions. A quick check at Quicken Insider Trading for SCO shows that so far, as of approximately 5/13, when the stock started to rise, only one Senior VP has sold 5,000 shares, on 6/20. No other insiders are listed.

A check at MSN Insider Trading for SCO shows additionally a Divisional Officer who sold 7,916 shares on 6/4.

That's not to say that you are definitely wrong. You could be right. The lying cheating scumbags commonly known as chief officers may be just lying in wait for enough time to go by that their sells can't technically be linked to the lawsuit.

--Rob

The problem is that it is very difficult to time anything on the stock-market. Most intelligent investors stay away from it. Those that try to time stocks or the market are trends-analysists. Looking at porfolios that use that strategy, it's a losing one. Individuals who do that regularly are not investors, but speculators; it's no different than gambling.

Just because the market prices something at $X does not mean it's actually worth that much, or has that much value. Nike shoes are priced significantly higher (hundreds of dollars) compared to other shoes, yet they are most certainly not that much better.

The true value of a company is determined by a number of things, such as book price, growth, earnings, P/E, PEG, outstanding debt, the type of debt a company has, quality of management, quality of products, etc. By all reasonable measures, SCO is worthless.

Check out Quicken.com's information on SCO.

Some relevant quotes:

SCOX has had negative or zero earnings in the last 12 months.

in the course of SCOX's daily business operations, the company is using more cash than it generates...At this rate, SCOX may be in danger of having to borrow money or issuing more shares of stock (which dilutes current ownership).

Positive earnings are needed to calculate a price/earnings ratio. SCOX's earnings are zero or negative, so this ratio cannot be calculated.

SCOX is trading at 10.36 times book value so it fails this test.

SCOX has 0 institutional investors holding 0.0% of the common shares outstanding

Both historical earnings and estimated future earnings are either negative or unavailable for SCOX. As a result, a positive intrinsic value cannot be calculated since SCOX's future cash flow is uncertain.

SCOX's 1 year revenue growth is 400.79% lower than the industry average, which means the company is growing significantly slower than its peers.

SCOX's 1 year ROA is 28.98% lower than the industry average, which may indicate that SCOX has not used assets as successfully as its competitors have.

SCOX's 1 year ROA is 28.98% lower than the industry average, which may indicate that SCOX has not used assets as successfully as its competitors have.

Sounds like a great buy, right? My summary of trend-investing on Wall-Street is simple: If everyone else poked out their eyes, would you do it too?

At the end of the day, you've really got to hand it to Bill. You don't become the richest person on earth by standing down by the train station and begging for money. You get there by being damn smart in everything you do,

You also get there by investing/ creating the most profitable companies & getting out before the bottom drops out. That being the case, what would that say about Mr. Gates' massive selling of his Microsoft stock? Does he see some financial trouble in Microsoftâ(TM)s future? Take a look at the dates & the number of shares he owns:

07/24/01 664,049,300
04/29/03 183,499,336

Here is a link for the non-believers:

Insider Trading

I think he sees some rough sailing for Microsoft ahead.

And read the rest of mine, please...

Once the general public* starts treating a trademarked term as generic, it is, regardless of how actively defended it was.

A company can defend its trademarks as aggressively as they like, but if the public perception is that the trademark is generic, sooner or later a judge will notice that and rule against the trademark owner. This is what happened with asprin, for example.

I suggest you read that article from Quicken you linked to, especially the first dot point.

Unix is well on the way to this, IMHO... especially with industry analysts constantly lobbing Linux into the "Unix category".

* General public, of course, being the appropriate section thereof that actually cares about the trademarked product.

I'm not so sure. I don't think the OpenGroup has been sloppy/lazy enough:

criteria for trademark loss

one that lists Unix

However, just to freak you out, find unix as a trademark for things other than operating systems

1, 2, 3, 4.

SCO's stock symbol, if anyone was wondering, is SCOX.

sheephead

Well, actually MS is now traded on the NYSE

No, it's not. It's part of the DJIA (which is merely an average of a bunch of unrelated stocks), but it's still traded on the NASDAQ market.

It's called Quicken.. get it, use it and practice some self control.

This to reverse it's trend. Company that makes no profits == company that doesn't buy me and my office mate brand-new (or even used) macs. :-)

Another article here: on quicken.com

Even lists names. :( One of the guys goes to my school...

then why did oil futures drop?

TurboTax for the Web will let you electronically file your taxes for free. The catch?? You have to file ONLY the 1040-EZ and make less than $25K, but since that's what I've filed the last 5 years, it's no real problem for me (yeah being a student!). If you want to file a 1040 or 1040A it's something like $10.00. But they will do your state and federal taxes online and submit them electronically.

Why would this matter to /.? Well because for the last 2 years I've used it with netscape on linux with no troubles at all. So now you can do your taxes for free with linux electronically and get a refund in around 2 days.

So don't sit there for hours and do it with the "easy to follow IRS workbook" or load windows up to use a windows only program, or go pay someone far too much money to do it for you, do them online cheaply.

Best way to get around the registration hassle of software is to not use the software that requires you to register it.

In fact, some people have suggested to the company that they work for, that in view of how i makes the vast percentage of its revenue charging for configuring, setting up and maintaining the software they develop, that it might be worth it to open source the product and give the software away, but charge for everything else. So if you're really broke you can get it for free, or if you want to look at it before putting it on your machines, you can do that. But if you want anything else, even instructions on how to install or use it, you have to pay something.

Why is this such a problem for you? Is it that you think they should give everything away? They have to eat, too. If you don't like it, don't agree to their terms. Since the source code is available without restrictions, take the time and effort to study the code and learn how it works, pay someone else to do that, or pay them and/or agree to their restrictions.

Has anyone noticed there are no open-source tax preparation or payroll software programs? (If I am wrong, someone e-mail me). Because those aren't very sexy for programmers to work with - which means that people aren't volunteering to do them for free - and because they require constant maintenance. (Not [merely] because of bugs, but because the tax laws and payroll processing rules change every year.)

Someone has to pay for the maintenance since this is not something your average programmer either wants to do for free (in the case of a payroll product) or has the resources to do on his own (in the case of a tax preparation program.)

Now, I know that there is GNU Cash as a workalike for Quicken but I know of no open-source software for mundane apps like payroll or tax preparation, and if there were, I can't see how we could expect them to be kept up to date without significant resources to handle the average of 10,000 tax law changes yearly. And that's just the U.S.

Every country has its own rules and thus a tax package to handle the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rules would be worthless for Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (CCRA) or for the UK's Inland Revenue (IR). Or the other tax authorities in the other 160+ jurisdictions around the world, almost all collecting some form of income tax. Then there's the 30+ states in the U.S. that also impose taxes on income, provinces in Canada (if they do, I'm not sure) and other subdivisions of governments elsewhere.

Now, some of these agencies are providing on-line tax preparation over their websites, but the method to do this is not open source, and would you expect to pay the lowest possible tax by using, or would you really want to trust, a tax package developed by the taxing authority? :)

Historical note: the typical quote "The power to tax is the power to destroy" was originally written by U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall as "That the power of taxing by the States may be exercised so as to destroy..." McCulloch v. Maryland 4 Wheat. 316 (1819), the first case declaring a statute void for violating the constitution.

Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>
http://paul.washington.dc.us

• Quicken or
• San Jose Mercury News or
• Salt Lake Tribune or
• Salon.com or
• ABC News or Time Warner's own
• Money magazine.

US market slumps sees Dow Jones hit four-year low.

Dow Industrials Plunge to Near Five-Year Low at Midmorning

Dow Falls 162 in Morning Trading

U.S. stocks tumble after weak economic news

U.S. Stock Markets [all down]

NASDAQ STOCK MKT

However, I'd be hesitant about using an online version of Quicken. One of the biggies: I would feel like I no longer would have control of _my_ laboriously entered data. Add in shifting privacy statements, server availability, advertising overload, and simply different usage patterns for a personal finance package, and you get a less appealing online product.

I guess there is a reason one is free and the other is $20.00 a year.

On the other hand, if I had a business, and wanted to provide access to several people, an online accounting package might look attractive ...

Quicken 2002 on OS X. *wink*

But seriously...

I used to work for Intuit, and at one time there was an initiative to do an online version of Quicken. Some of that work seems to have shown up in their My Finances offering:

"Track checking, savings and cash accounts here. You can download balances from your financial institution..."

I'm turning off my +1 bonus since this is a bit of a rant. However, its a rant with some insider knowledge, so it may be worth reading. I used to work for a company that has been mentioned here on Slashdot twice. They make/made a multimedia convergence box that ran Linux and did DVD, MP3 ripping, MP3 jukebox, streaming audio and video, etc.

Our company effectively ran out of money last July/Aug./Sept. We still had partners with a major newspaper for $2M in advertising, and with a major audo components manufacturer (if you look at the box you would know whose products it looks like).

Anyway, we were looking for buyers, and SonicBlue made an offer. We accepted it, and the lawyers went into legal stuff. For months we all waited, until SonicBlue eventually pissed off our other partners so much that they walked from the deal. Needless to say, without the advertising money we were not as desirable and SonicBlue dumped us.

I guess my point is, SonicBlue is a bad company. They have a bunch of cash in the form of stock from the video card days, and they are spending it screwing up small companies (like us and the Rio Car).

I met Ken Potashner (sp?), CEO of SonicBlue. He was a whiny, slick marketer guy, may he roast in hell.

TiVo is a good company that customers can believe in. They make a good product (I have one), and they don't screw over their customers or business partners. I hope TiVo captures the whole market and SonicBlue goes bankrupt. Now that UltimateTV has been cancelled by Microsoft, it's a two horse race.

Exact links are:

here here here here

They do. It's even free if your AGI was less than $25,000.

For people whose AGI was under 25000 here. I used it last year and it was great, but it is a large web app so doing it over a 56k could mean a long night downloading instead of looking at tax tables and reciepts.

Yes, charitable contributions are tax deductible .. if you itemize. If you don't itemize, they won't change your tax picture at all.

Would it make sense to itemize? Only if you can accumulate more deductions than the default "standard deduction", which is $4550 for tax year 2001 for single people in the US. The big (and common) itemized deductions are home mortgage interest and points, state income taxes paid, real estate taxes paid, charitable contributions, substantial unreimbursed medical expenses (they're deductible to the extent that they exceed 7.5% of your adjusted gross income), and miscellaneous items like tax prep fees, safe deposit boxes used to store tax records or investment records, but only to the extent that the miscellaneous deductions exceed 2% of your adjusted gross income.

If you want to play with the numbers, try the TurboTax online estimator at http://www.quicken.com/taxes/taxslashing/estimator /; give it the numbers from your last paycheck(s) this year, make up some reasonable ballpark numbers for capital gain/loss and interest, and enter any deductions you can identify, and look at the bottom line .. then go back and add some charitable contributions and see if it makes a difference.

But the short version is .. if you made less than $100K, you're single, no kids or alimony, don't own a home, and are in good health, you probably should take the standard deduction, so charitable donations won't change your tax picture unless you're thinking about a donation of $5K or more. (And if you are thinking about that, you might be thinking about donating money that came from the sale of stock, in which case you ought to think about donating appreciated stock, not taking a capital gain, getting taxed on that, then donating the already-taxed proceeds, because that's a bummer.)

But the bottom line is that EFF rocks and you should donate anyway - I've donated a little every year for the last 5 years or so, even when it didn't change my taxes, and intend to continue, because they're the only ones fighting important battles.

It makes money? Oh that's right we're on Slashdot. Selling free software works like a charm.

They're tanking, even more so than others. Compare to Sun or even Red Hat.

Uhm, not more so than Sun, but Red Hat's doing better than either of them. here's the 1 month chart of all of them and here's the one week chart. For the week RHAT's up 20%, MSFT is down about 2 or 3%, and SUNW's down about 12%.

Ahhh, It's all short term changes anyway, and everyone invests for the long term, right?

They're tanking, even more so than others. Compare to Sun or even Red Hat.

Uhm, not more so than Sun, but Red Hat's doing better than either of them. here's the 1 month chart of all of them and here's the one week chart. For the week RHAT's up 20%, MSFT is down about 2 or 3%, and SUNW's down about 12%.

Ahhh, It's all short term changes anyway, and everyone invests for the long term, right?

I'm glad to see that the promise of transmeta is finally beginning to start being fulfilled.

But let the real numbers, not Business Week's, do the talking - check out the 52-week low. 160% of 40 is 64, almost 70! Wow! But a better picture is a 5-year plot (I believe it's adjusted for the stock splits). One story is that the stock was almost at 120, and instead of being dismayed that it was reduced to one-third of its value, Business Week thinks we should be happy that's it's at nearly two-thirds instead - but they forgot to mention that part...

... or perhaps they were addressing their competition -- dotcom's with a vested interest in Open Source software.

You know, like two of the signee's on that press release -- Red Hat and VA/Linux.

... or perhaps they were addressing their competition -- dotcom's with a vested interest in Open Source software.

You know, like two of the signee's on that press release -- Red Hat and VA/Linux.

Namely IGN - which shows no slow down in its Vault sections.

Sure it does. They just recently closed 10 Vault Network sites, and the company that owns IGN, Snowball (Nasdaq: SNOW), is being delisted.

Gamers.com is still around as is VoodooExtreme.

VoodooExtreme is on UGO, which is no longer paying affiliates and likely won't survive the balance of the year. Last time VE was on a network like that (GameFan) the network just suddenly went down one afternoon. I should know, my site was one of the ones that was thrown out in the cold along with VE.

And Gamers.com is likely in the same boat though I admit I don't know any details about their situation. Take a look at their site and see if they're selling anything. Think about how they're making money. Apparently, they're not (banner ads don't make money anymore). They likely won't be around much longer either.

And the worst part is... the more sites that go down, the more traffic it drives to the remaining sites, which increases their bandwidth costs and quickens their demise.

The VC has dried up. The end times for all the large sites are drawing near. You'll either be paying for quality content soon, or you'll be scrambling to find small, poorly-put-together sites that are the only kind that can afford to stay free.

Too bad they can't sell their patents for operating capital ;)

Too bad they can't sell their patents for operating capital ;)

You have to love a stock whose performance doesn't need a log chart to convey rate of change!
LNUX Or even better: CMGI

n3bulous

You have to love a stock whose performance doesn't need a log chart to convey rate of change!
LNUX Or even better: CMGI

n3bulous