It wasn't a credit, trust me. You misunderstood the article. It just looked weird in the article because their stock is valued so highly compared to their actual income.
What the frick are you talking about? Do you actually know what you are saying? Have you ever paid taxes on dividends before? If you have, you'd know how to spell them.
You would also know it is not a "corporate income tax." It is an "ordinary dividend tax." They are calculated on Part II of Schedule B. And FYI, this is part of the progressive
personal income tax in the USA. Larger amounts of taxable income (dividends included) are paid at a higher rate.
He was obviously referring to the fact that the dividends will be some percent lower than they would have been had the corporation not been taxed. That percent will be the same, regardless of who receives the dividends. That was his point. Yeash.
The things that would be different would be: 1) stuff which requires insane amount of capitalization, such as massive chip-making foundries or huge construction projects -
probably only the government would be able to afford stuff like this, and 2) the "mass" media would probably be a heckuva lot more diversified, since you wouldn't have the
"homogenizing" effect that a large corporation would have.
There's also economy of scale to take into consideration. Stuff is cheaper at large stores than tiny shops. Also, I don't now where small shops would find distributors.
Other entities, such as C-CORPs can have profit/loss and are taxed (but at a fixed rate -- I think 30%). The company owners choose the structure that fits their
needs best. (e.g., If you are in the 49% tax bracket, the corp pays less on the dollar.)
I think that corporate income tax is 35%, and the maximum individual tax bracket is 39.6%, so it's not that large a difference.
So vote Nader (and I think Browne would agree on ideological terms too).
Um...while the Libertarian party might disagree with the limited liability aspect of corporations, it certainly would allow them to give money to political causes and be named in lawsuits.
Yeah, shareholders can't get their homes seized to pay corporate debt, but everyone who loans money to corporations knows that. They know that the loan isn't secured, and they take the risk. Besides, coporations get loans from other corporations, not individuals, for the most part. The individuals who loan money to corporations are likely to be wealthy investors who should know what we're doing.
Lets get this straight - trading shares causes money to flow between shareholders. Shares are still just a piece of Cisco. Shareholders pay everything out of their pockets -
Cisco does not pay these employees, they get paid by the stock market.
If Cisco doesn't pay these employees, why do they have to pay $2b in taxes on this income they don't receive from Cisco? If Cisco doesn't get to deduct it, employees shouldn't have to pay tax on their options (above the regular capital gains tax). Tax law should have some semblance of fairness. Cisco and its employees shouldn't both have to pay taxes on the same income.
That is all irrelevant to my point. I was never arguing about what punishments corporations should receive. I was merely arguing that it is essential that they receive due process, because otherwise the government can confiscate property at whim. Obviously, if there were no due process, the government could seize your restaurant even if there were no health violations. They could simply claim that there were violations, and you would have no recourse.
Either you don't know what the phrase "due process" means, you didn't read my post, or you are intentionally changing the subject. In any case, you seem to be making gross extrapolations from my statement that corporations should receive due process. I don't see how you can expect to be correctly deducing my positions on how corporations should be punished from my position on whether or not they get due process.
But those shareholders never have to face the consequences of the acts of the company, beyond the potential loss of equity. I really wonder: why do we have limited liability
at all? Why is it that an individual is held accountable for their actions, but if a bunch of individuals put their money together, we have laws that waive that accountability? It
doesn't makes sense to me. Corporations look like just another socialist/commie invention, in opposition to the principles of capitalism and basic ethics.
If a business doesn't have limited liability, then it really is a person or a group people, and perhaps it should have some rights. But if it's just a shield that lets people do
whatever they want to without having to face consequences, then I don't think it deserves any respect or consideration at all.
There are two issues here, financial liability and liability for criminal acts.
Removing the limits to financial liability would simply place corporate ownership even more out of reach of the average person. No one would dare to buy stock unless they had the resources to thoroughly research the company, and to buy enough stock that they could influence the decision making. After all, no one wants to suddenly become massively in debt because of bad decisions made by a company in which they didn't own enough stock to be in control. Besides, the people lending money to corporations or fully aware of the possibility of bankruptcy, just as credit card companies are fully aware that people can go bankrupt. They take that into account when they lend money.
Similarly, criminal liability of shareholders is bad because shareholders cannot possibly monitor every aspect of the corporation. If the manager of a convenience store bribes a cop, he goes to jail, not the owner of the store (unless the owner told him to do it). Similarly, executives and managers in corporations must implicitly assume that the shareholders do not want them to break the law. If they do, it should be at their own risk. Of course, if a large shareholder told them to do something illegal, then it would be his fault. Theoretically, that's how it works now, and it seems fair to me.
This is about being sick in ones heart at the whoring of our nations political structure for the benefit of corporations and their bottom lines.
Being in favor of allowing due process to corporations, which is what this thread was originally about, is hardly the same as being in favor of allowing them to bribe politicians into enacting various subsidies, laws, and tariffs in their favor.
WHY should an immortal paper entity be given due process? A corp is a thing, with less life than a slug (and even less benefits to the planet).
I wish you corp leeches would get a clue. This is MY world, too, and every time you equate a human being with a faux entity like a corporation, you steal a bit of our collective humanity, diminishing me and everyone else right along with your sorry selves.
You get a clue. It's easy to demonize corporations if you think of huge entities like Microsoft and Union Carbide, but the protections afforded to corporations are quite important if you don't want a totalitarian state.
Imagine there is no due process for corporations. You and some friends start a restaurant. Two months later, the government claims the restaurant has violated the health code and fines it $50,000. They don't tell you what the violation was, and there is no appeal. But who cares! Your restaurant is a corporation, and deserves no due process.
Your anti-corporate hysteria is simply anathema to business of any sort whatsoever.
I don't know about American banks, but if it had been exploited against a British bank they would probably have pursued a fraud case against the person whose savings were stolen;
that's what they did when someone claimed that a crook had been withdrawing money from their account with a forged ATM card a couple of years ago, since banks would never,
ever, ever have a security flaw in their systems.
In America, our banking regulations require that a bank, upon notification of an unauthorized electronic transfer, provisionally credit the customer's account within 10 days, and conduct an investigation within 45 days, presumably to see if the individual is defrauding them. However, the law is clear that the bank is liable for any unauthorized transfer that they allow.
Not in altitude. From 18000 feet to 30000 feet (IIRC), the minimum allowable vertical separation between two aircraft traveling in opposite directions is 1000 feet. I don't know what the minimum allowable horizontal separation between two aircraft flying at the same altitude is, but it's at least a mile.
Since GPS is least accurate in measuring altitude, this might be an issue...
OK, let's think about this. The issue in question is supplanting radar with GPS. Apparently, you think that planes now get their altitude from the control tower. In fact, each plane has a device known as an altimeter. Miraculously, this device will continue to work even if GPS is installed in the plane.
On the other hand, it's a nice legal argument from the universities. "We are not responsible for the actions of our students while on line." It's almost the same argument that
Napster uses. "We are not responsible for the actions of Napster users."
Unfortunately, Napster doesn't appear to be winning with this argument.
Yeah, but if they sued some large ISP for transporting Napster packets, that's the argument the ISP would use, and the ISP would certainly win. The university's role, in allowing unfiltered Internet access, is obviously much more comparable to an ISP than to Napster.
A reasonable man would not allow others to use his property for committing felonies once he's been apprised of that use. It's
that simple.
The universities know it's going on. Prudent (if ultimately in vain) steps exist for them to take. It's their legal responsibility to take those steps. It's that simple.
So, let's say the "reasonable man" owns a piece of property, surrounded by a fence with 65535 unlocked gates. Let's say it's some sort of park, and he lets thousands of people come and go as they please, through a variety of gates. He knows that some people come onto his property through some particular gate, and exchange illegal copies of audio CDs. Does the reasonable man put a padlock on that one particular gate? Of course not, it would be futile. Does the law require the reasonable man to hire guards at his expense to individually check everyone coming onto his property for copyrighted material? I sure hope not.
Well, I was an undergraduate at Harvard until my graduation in May and I have to say this is a new spin for Harvard. Last year Harvard's Office of the General Counsel
received a cease and desist bully-letter with no legal basis from the MPAA that a student (me) was distributing DeCSS which they determined was illegal, even though no
legally binding court injuction in our district had been issued. Harvard got down on its knees like a two dollar whore for the MPAA and threatened me to force me to remove
DeCSS from my own computer and to cease electronic distribution of this "illegal" software. University administrations are NOT our friends in this area. Perhaps Harvard's
General Counsel's office has had a change of heart, but I am seriously doubtful. They have NO qualms about following the pack on these issues but they are too chicken
shit to stand up for their students rights on their own.
The difference is that in your case they pointed to a specific instance of claimed infringement, so Harvard was required to have you remove it under the DMCA. However, IIRC, you should have been able to sign something saying that it wasn't infringing, and have it put back up, but IANAL.
the DMCA!! Man, It seems that the DMCA is involved in half of the slashdot articles these days. And it keeps getting better and better.
King, the attorny representing metallica claims, that:
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, requires that ISP's take reasonable steps to put an end to copyright violations which they are made aware of
by the copyright holder.
You just think the DMCA is harmful here because King is lying through his teeth. While the DMCA includes some heinous provisions about bypassing access control devices, it also grants a fairly broad immunity to ISPs against copyright infringement. Universities act as ISPs for their students. While ISPs must stop specific infringements they are made aware of, you can't just say that some unidentified users might be infringing some unindentified copyright. Unless King has been smoking some bad crack, this can't seriously be his legal strategy. I'm sure he just said that for the reporter.
I stopped using my card and
started paying cash - the discount just isn't worth it. From the store's perspective, there is no connection between me and what I buy. Some people may wonder, "What's the big
deal?" Well, people need to realize that they're PEOPLE, and not just revenue feeds for the commerce machine.
So people can show that they're not "revenue feeds for a commerce machine" by... paying the commerce machine more money for their groceries?
The horror, my grocer knows what groceries I buy! If I don't do something quick, they might base local advertising on our aggregate purchase patterns, or even offer targeted discounts to cardholders! Why can't we go back to the good old days before these large corporations, when you bought your groceries from small town independent stores, where the proprietor knew you personally and rang up your purchase himself, but you had your privacy because... um... if you wanted to make unusual purchases you could buy them from another town to avoid gossip?
They don't want their intellectual property to be reverse engineered.
Correction, that should be: "They don't want their intellectually property to be reversed engineered." See their CEO's letter for more useful grammar and spelling tips.
I received a CueCat in the mail. I have accepted no license, and I don't plan to. I'm not going to install their software by any means. They have given me no ability to refuse the
terms of their license. It was sent to me without any action on my part, other than being a subscriber to a magazine- that sounds like a gift to me.
As others have pointed out, under US postal law, the CueCat you received in mail is an unequivocal gift. If I were you, I'd mirror the Perl scripts Digital Convergence has been complaining about, write letters to DC telling them that you're mirroring the scripts, write letters telling DC they're morons, etc. Then, when they invoke some provision of the EULA requiring you to return the CueCat or something, report them to your friendly neighborhood Postal Inspector. I wish I got a CueCat in the mail. That could be fun.
Weirdly enough though, this was determined to only govern the software in the result of commercial transactions. If you find a random copy of software on the street, you're
NOT bound by the license.
So... have your friend buy the software and drop it in the street for you to pick up later.
Then why is the standard language so different from the colloquial one?
So what? Are you arguing that "unitedstatesian" is a word in standard English?! I'd also like to point out the newspapers, which traditionally use standard English, use "American" to mean resident of the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't a credit, trust me. You misunderstood the article. It just looked weird in the article because their stock is valued so highly compared to their actual income.
What the frick are you talking about? Do you actually know what you are saying? Have you ever paid taxes on dividends before? If you have, you'd know how to spell them. You would also know it is not a "corporate income tax." It is an "ordinary dividend tax." They are calculated on Part II of Schedule B. And FYI, this is part of the progressive personal income tax in the USA. Larger amounts of taxable income (dividends included) are paid at a higher rate.
He was obviously referring to the fact that the dividends will be some percent lower than they would have been had the corporation not been taxed. That percent will be the same, regardless of who receives the dividends. That was his point. Yeash.
So if they sold that them selves and made the $90,000 themselves, then gave the $90,000 to the person, they wouldnt get the deductuction.
Of course they'd get the deduction. It would be your salary. Paying employees is a deductible expense.
Microsoft isn't "losing" $90,000 in your example. They are expecting to recover that through work done by the employee.
Yeah, but if they just paid you a straight $90,000 salary, they'd get to deduct that, which is the whole point.
The things that would be different would be: 1) stuff which requires insane amount of capitalization, such as massive chip-making foundries or huge construction projects - probably only the government would be able to afford stuff like this, and 2) the "mass" media would probably be a heckuva lot more diversified, since you wouldn't have the "homogenizing" effect that a large corporation would have.
There's also economy of scale to take into consideration. Stuff is cheaper at large stores than tiny shops. Also, I don't now where small shops would find distributors.
Other entities, such as C-CORPs can have profit/loss and are taxed (but at a fixed rate -- I think 30%). The company owners choose the structure that fits their needs best. (e.g., If you are in the 49% tax bracket, the corp pays less on the dollar.)
I think that corporate income tax is 35%, and the maximum individual tax bracket is 39.6%, so it's not that large a difference.
So vote Nader (and I think Browne would agree on ideological terms too).
Um...while the Libertarian party might disagree with the limited liability aspect of corporations, it certainly would allow them to give money to political causes and be named in lawsuits.
Yeah, shareholders can't get their homes seized to pay corporate debt, but everyone who loans money to corporations knows that. They know that the loan isn't secured, and they take the risk. Besides, coporations get loans from other corporations, not individuals, for the most part. The individuals who loan money to corporations are likely to be wealthy investors who should know what we're doing.
Lets get this straight - trading shares causes money to flow between shareholders. Shares are still just a piece of Cisco. Shareholders pay everything out of their pockets - Cisco does not pay these employees, they get paid by the stock market.
If Cisco doesn't pay these employees, why do they have to pay $2b in taxes on this income they don't receive from Cisco? If Cisco doesn't get to deduct it, employees shouldn't have to pay tax on their options (above the regular capital gains tax). Tax law should have some semblance of fairness. Cisco and its employees shouldn't both have to pay taxes on the same income.
That is all irrelevant to my point. I was never arguing about what punishments corporations should receive. I was merely arguing that it is essential that they receive due process, because otherwise the government can confiscate property at whim. Obviously, if there were no due process, the government could seize your restaurant even if there were no health violations. They could simply claim that there were violations, and you would have no recourse.
Either you don't know what the phrase "due process" means, you didn't read my post, or you are intentionally changing the subject. In any case, you seem to be making gross extrapolations from my statement that corporations should receive due process. I don't see how you can expect to be correctly deducing my positions on how corporations should be punished from my position on whether or not they get due process.
But those shareholders never have to face the consequences of the acts of the company, beyond the potential loss of equity. I really wonder: why do we have limited liability at all? Why is it that an individual is held accountable for their actions, but if a bunch of individuals put their money together, we have laws that waive that accountability? It doesn't makes sense to me. Corporations look like just another socialist/commie invention, in opposition to the principles of capitalism and basic ethics.
If a business doesn't have limited liability, then it really is a person or a group people, and perhaps it should have some rights. But if it's just a shield that lets people do whatever they want to without having to face consequences, then I don't think it deserves any respect or consideration at all.
There are two issues here, financial liability and liability for criminal acts.
Removing the limits to financial liability would simply place corporate ownership even more out of reach of the average person. No one would dare to buy stock unless they had the resources to thoroughly research the company, and to buy enough stock that they could influence the decision making. After all, no one wants to suddenly become massively in debt because of bad decisions made by a company in which they didn't own enough stock to be in control. Besides, the people lending money to corporations or fully aware of the possibility of bankruptcy, just as credit card companies are fully aware that people can go bankrupt. They take that into account when they lend money.
Similarly, criminal liability of shareholders is bad because shareholders cannot possibly monitor every aspect of the corporation. If the manager of a convenience store bribes a cop, he goes to jail, not the owner of the store (unless the owner told him to do it). Similarly, executives and managers in corporations must implicitly assume that the shareholders do not want them to break the law. If they do, it should be at their own risk. Of course, if a large shareholder told them to do something illegal, then it would be his fault. Theoretically, that's how it works now, and it seems fair to me.
This is about being sick in ones heart at the whoring of our nations political structure for the benefit of corporations and their bottom lines.
Being in favor of allowing due process to corporations, which is what this thread was originally about, is hardly the same as being in favor of allowing them to bribe politicians into enacting various subsidies, laws, and tariffs in their favor.
WHY should an immortal paper entity be given due process? A corp is a thing, with less life than a slug (and even less benefits to the planet).
I wish you corp leeches would get a clue. This is MY world, too, and every time you equate a human being with a faux entity like a corporation, you steal a bit of our collective humanity, diminishing me and everyone else right along with your sorry selves.
You get a clue. It's easy to demonize corporations if you think of huge entities like Microsoft and Union Carbide, but the protections afforded to corporations are quite important if you don't want a totalitarian state.
Imagine there is no due process for corporations. You and some friends start a restaurant. Two months later, the government claims the restaurant has violated the health code and fines it $50,000. They don't tell you what the violation was, and there is no appeal. But who cares! Your restaurant is a corporation, and deserves no due process.
Your anti-corporate hysteria is simply anathema to business of any sort whatsoever.
I don't know about American banks, but if it had been exploited against a British bank they would probably have pursued a fraud case against the person whose savings were stolen; that's what they did when someone claimed that a crook had been withdrawing money from their account with a forged ATM card a couple of years ago, since banks would never, ever, ever have a security flaw in their systems.
In America, our banking regulations require that a bank, upon notification of an unauthorized electronic transfer, provisionally credit the customer's account within 10 days, and conduct an investigation within 45 days, presumably to see if the individual is defrauding them. However, the law is clear that the bank is liable for any unauthorized transfer that they allow.
Not in altitude. From 18000 feet to 30000 feet (IIRC), the minimum allowable vertical separation between two aircraft traveling in opposite directions is 1000 feet. I don't know what the minimum allowable horizontal separation between two aircraft flying at the same altitude is, but it's at least a mile.
Since GPS is least accurate in measuring altitude, this might be an issue...
OK, let's think about this. The issue in question is supplanting radar with GPS. Apparently, you think that planes now get their altitude from the control tower. In fact, each plane has a device known as an altimeter. Miraculously, this device will continue to work even if GPS is installed in the plane.
On the other hand, it's a nice legal argument from the universities. "We are not responsible for the actions of our students while on line." It's almost the same argument that Napster uses. "We are not responsible for the actions of Napster users."
Unfortunately, Napster doesn't appear to be winning with this argument.
Yeah, but if they sued some large ISP for transporting Napster packets, that's the argument the ISP would use, and the ISP would certainly win. The university's role, in allowing unfiltered Internet access, is obviously much more comparable to an ISP than to Napster.
A reasonable man would not allow others to use his property for committing felonies once he's been apprised of that use. It's that simple.
The universities know it's going on. Prudent (if ultimately in vain) steps exist for them to take. It's their legal responsibility to take those steps. It's that simple.
So, let's say the "reasonable man" owns a piece of property, surrounded by a fence with 65535 unlocked gates. Let's say it's some sort of park, and he lets thousands of people come and go as they please, through a variety of gates. He knows that some people come onto his property through some particular gate, and exchange illegal copies of audio CDs. Does the reasonable man put a padlock on that one particular gate? Of course not, it would be futile. Does the law require the reasonable man to hire guards at his expense to individually check everyone coming onto his property for copyrighted material? I sure hope not.
Well, I was an undergraduate at Harvard until my graduation in May and I have to say this is a new spin for Harvard. Last year Harvard's Office of the General Counsel received a cease and desist bully-letter with no legal basis from the MPAA that a student (me) was distributing DeCSS which they determined was illegal, even though no legally binding court injuction in our district had been issued. Harvard got down on its knees like a two dollar whore for the MPAA and threatened me to force me to remove DeCSS from my own computer and to cease electronic distribution of this "illegal" software. University administrations are NOT our friends in this area. Perhaps Harvard's General Counsel's office has had a change of heart, but I am seriously doubtful. They have NO qualms about following the pack on these issues but they are too chicken shit to stand up for their students rights on their own.
The difference is that in your case they pointed to a specific instance of claimed infringement, so Harvard was required to have you remove it under the DMCA. However, IIRC, you should have been able to sign something saying that it wasn't infringing, and have it put back up, but IANAL.
the DMCA!! Man, It seems that the DMCA is involved in half of the slashdot articles these days. And it keeps getting better and better.
King, the attorny representing metallica claims, that:
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, requires that ISP's take reasonable steps to put an end to copyright violations which they are made aware of by the copyright holder.
You just think the DMCA is harmful here because King is lying through his teeth. While the DMCA includes some heinous provisions about bypassing access control devices, it also grants a fairly broad immunity to ISPs against copyright infringement. Universities act as ISPs for their students. While ISPs must stop specific infringements they are made aware of, you can't just say that some unidentified users might be infringing some unindentified copyright. Unless King has been smoking some bad crack, this can't seriously be his legal strategy. I'm sure he just said that for the reporter.
You put words in my mouth, sir.
It doesn't look like it. He was mainly going off about your statement that you cannot morally approve of Apple, which you did make.
I stopped using my card and started paying cash - the discount just isn't worth it. From the store's perspective, there is no connection between me and what I buy. Some people may wonder, "What's the big deal?" Well, people need to realize that they're PEOPLE, and not just revenue feeds for the commerce machine.
So people can show that they're not "revenue feeds for a commerce machine" by ... paying the commerce machine more money for their groceries?
The horror, my grocer knows what groceries I buy! If I don't do something quick, they might base local advertising on our aggregate purchase patterns, or even offer targeted discounts to cardholders! Why can't we go back to the good old days before these large corporations, when you bought your groceries from small town independent stores, where the proprietor knew you personally and rang up your purchase himself, but you had your privacy because ... um ... if you wanted to make unusual purchases you could buy them from another town to avoid gossip?
They don't want their intellectual property to be reverse engineered.
Correction, that should be: "They don't want their intellectually property to be reversed engineered." See their CEO's letter for more useful grammar and spelling tips.
I received a CueCat in the mail. I have accepted no license, and I don't plan to. I'm not going to install their software by any means. They have given me no ability to refuse the terms of their license. It was sent to me without any action on my part, other than being a subscriber to a magazine- that sounds like a gift to me.
As others have pointed out, under US postal law, the CueCat you received in mail is an unequivocal gift. If I were you, I'd mirror the Perl scripts Digital Convergence has been complaining about, write letters to DC telling them that you're mirroring the scripts, write letters telling DC they're morons, etc. Then, when they invoke some provision of the EULA requiring you to return the CueCat or something, report them to your friendly neighborhood Postal Inspector. I wish I got a CueCat in the mail. That could be fun.
Weirdly enough though, this was determined to only govern the software in the result of commercial transactions. If you find a random copy of software on the street, you're NOT bound by the license.
So... have your friend buy the software and drop it in the street for you to pick up later.
Then why is the standard language so different from the colloquial one?
So what? Are you arguing that "unitedstatesian" is a word in standard English?! I'd also like to point out the newspapers, which traditionally use standard English, use "American" to mean resident of the United States.