Useless numbers. Consider Ford: They generate budget numbers on a product line basis. Actual results are based on management group basis. They can't compare the one to the other. So why spend the resources generating useless budget projections?
Groklaw notes that SCO was pulling from both groklaw.net and tuxrocks.com. Even accepting that these are legal documents in SCO's own cases, it is amusing that they can't convert their own documents, but have to pull from OSS sites.
"Although the burglary occurred in the Verizon building, the stolen equipment belonged to some half-dozen other telecommunications companies that use the premises to house part of their operations. No Verizon customers were affected, a company official said."
Does this mean that the telecommunications companies using the Verizon premises are not Verizon customers? Is that what it says on the rent check?
No. The judge did not rule that SCO was correct on the response time. This was a motion for summary judgement by DC. On the response time point, the judge merely said that "reasonable time" was a question of fact, not a question of law. As a "question of fact", she could not make this decision on a summary judgement motion. (For purposes of deciding on a summary judgement motion, she has to view the facts in the most favorable light for the party not bringing the motion. Remember, no witnesses yet.) If SCO wants to actually try the case on that single issue, they can do so. (Of course, it is likely that they would lose). Personally, I would strongly advise a client not to pursue that question.
If they stayed in the workers compensation system, they would definitely have received some compensation. They elected, instead, to try the lotto and, apparently, the jury did not agree with them.
I agree with your description of the idiotic and numercially precision regulations with no justification. And they are generally dictated by the plaintiff's bar. But even if the defendent meets those requirements, he/she/it will still be sued and some jury will award money to someone who was 98% responsible for the accident in the first place.
So start a letter writing compaign, call your Congressperson, do something instead of justing whining on Slashdot. The only way to overcome big money lobbying activity is to get the politicians to realize that a large amount of voters are unhappy. Remember, corporations can only contribute money, they can't vote. And it is the deliver of votes (or threat of delivery of votes) that is the only score that counts.
Copyright law is in the US Constitution, but the ridiculous stuff is in the law (passed by Congress) and the regulations (enacted by 'mere' regulators.) You don't need a constitutional amendment, you need intelligent government.... sorry... worldwide shortage of that.
Minor Correction. Plant managers for the big three, for a small old plant, do not make $500,000. Try $200,000.
Stricter Checking - Programmers Check Your Stuff
on
GCC 3.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
I believe this version has stricter checking. It is probably a good idea for everyone with programs out there to do a quick recompile and see if there is something you can improve or error messages you can fix.
Correction. No one wants EV1s at the price it costs us to make them. Sure, a lot of people would take them at the lease price we offered, which was way below cost. Not too many would take them if the lease price was several thousand per month.
Why would we lease them below cost? Because California required us to put some type of electric vehicle on the road and losing money on a few thousand EV1s was cheaper than walking away from the entire California car market.
>>I want to know why only 1000 were made. They spent a billion on a program and only sent it out to a wishlist? Or did they withhold it from the market because the infrastructure didn't exist?
Because we lost money on every single unit and because the demand wasn't there at a price where we could recover our costs.
Fun cars. I drove them on the test track, but they couldn't keep a charge in a Michigan winter. And don't expect to carry a family and groceries.
We are still looking for technology that works in real life not just the lab, at a price that consumers are willing to pay, and that meets auto safety requirements. Believe me, if we thought we could sell 100,000 and make a 2% profit, we would be falling all over ourselves to get them out.
I know Ford runs some mailservers on Linux in Dearborn. And that group complains bitterly about feeding email to Outbreak (sorry, Outlook), but client desktops are controlled by another group.
Which reminds me of the Monday I came into the office in Brussels to discover water leaking from dozens of points in the ceiling in one particular room. Turns out the company on the floor above us had a coffee machine with a permanent connection to the water supply...except that the connection had broken some time over the weekend, flooded the space between their floor and our ceiling and eventually found many exits into...our currency trading room, taking out 10-15 traders' computers. Fortunately, we had just done a test for offsite emergency operations just three weeks before, so everyone knew the drill and we were up and running in under two hours.
many car makers have quite a bit of money invested in the oil market
Last time I looked, most of GM and Ford's money was made on SUVs (high gas usage). When oil prices rise, sales fall, profits fall. Looks exactly the opposite to having money invested in the oil market. If they could get electric cars to really work, and make money, they would do it in a heartbeat.
Fine. Send us a design that (a) actually works; (b) survives a collision; (c) has a range that people are willing to settle for and (d) that we can actually make and sell at a profit and I will personally walk it through GM R&D. You need to get all four out of four. If you can't, stop complaining about our difficulties in getting there.
Ignoring the legal reasons why you are wrong; the moral question is "Why not"? A company consists of people. If people have a right to privacy, how do you take it away from them at work simply because they are now "at the company". Have I given away all my rights against you and the world as soon as I reach the company parking lot? Do I get it back at 7:00PM? Is the right to privacy somehow connected to the time clock?
A real, live person wrote that document. Another real live person received it. They may be "cogs in the machine", but that machine consists solely of living people.
>> I think they should pass a law that requires companies to store copies of all documents in escrow with an independant third-part for as long as they are in business.
Fine. So long as you are willing to pay for it. The storage does nothing for my clients' businesses, so why should they pay for it. Or just be honest and declare it to be a tax. Electronic storage is getting cheaper, but it is not free. Neither is the cost of scanning millions of documents.
Interesting theory. Not true in any country I've ever had legal dealings in, but that limits my universe to Western Europe, Australia and North America.
I get ~100 emails/day, many of them 1k, many of them 1000k. You are suggesting that I keep every single email I get. Not going to happen. IT gives me 40 meg total to store email. I can hit that in one week. No matter how "cheap" hardrives are, that kind of storage is not going to be in the budget.
True with respect to what internal auditing actually does. Personally, I've had more problems with document destruction by people who "just needed the storage space" on documents that I needed to defend them than the current debacle of "Andersening documents".
Any records that substantiate the correct tax need to be held for a minimum of 3 years after the due date of the tax return. If you are currently under audit, that period gets extended while the audit is in process.
Basically, the _US_ tax authorities have 3 years after you file your tax return to _start_ to look at you. If they can show you omitted at least 25% of your taxable income, they get another three years on top of that. If they can show fraud, they have forever. Other countries have different time limits.
From a tax law standpoint, you don't have to keep anything that doesn't go to prove the "correct" taxable income. I can't speak to other areas of law. BTW, my clients are typically complaining about document storage costs rather than liability issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Useless numbers. Consider Ford: They generate budget numbers on a product line basis. Actual results are based on management group basis. They can't compare the one to the other. So why spend the resources generating useless budget projections?
Groklaw notes that SCO was pulling from both groklaw.net and tuxrocks.com. Even accepting that these are legal documents in SCO's own cases, it is amusing that they can't convert their own documents, but have to pull from OSS sites.
Does this mean that the telecommunications companies using the Verizon premises are not Verizon customers? Is that what it says on the rent check?
No. The judge did not rule that SCO was correct on the response time. This was a motion for summary judgement by DC. On the response time point, the judge merely said that "reasonable time" was a question of fact, not a question of law. As a "question of fact", she could not make this decision on a summary judgement motion. (For purposes of deciding on a summary judgement motion, she has to view the facts in the most favorable light for the party not bringing the motion. Remember, no witnesses yet.) If SCO wants to actually try the case on that single issue, they can do so. (Of course, it is likely that they would lose). Personally, I would strongly advise a client not to pursue that question.
Yes, I am simplifying. Yes, IAAL.
If they stayed in the workers compensation system, they would definitely have received some compensation. They elected, instead, to try the lotto and, apparently, the jury did not agree with them.
They may block a lot of garbage, but they also refuse to admit that my email to my mother is not spam.
Maybe there is something she's not telling me.
Mom!
I agree with your description of the idiotic and numercially precision regulations with no justification. And they are generally dictated by the plaintiff's bar. But even if the defendent meets those requirements, he/she/it will still be sued and some jury will award money to someone who was 98% responsible for the accident in the first place.
So start a letter writing compaign, call your Congressperson, do something instead of justing whining on Slashdot. The only way to overcome big money lobbying activity is to get the politicians to realize that a large amount of voters are unhappy. Remember, corporations can only contribute money, they can't vote. And it is the deliver of votes (or threat of delivery of votes) that is the only score that counts.
Credit for ideas, yes. Laws that are microscopic in detail and miss the actual target are hated.
Copyright law is in the US Constitution, but the ridiculous stuff is in the law (passed by Congress) and the regulations (enacted by 'mere' regulators.) You don't need a constitutional amendment, you need intelligent government. ... sorry ... worldwide shortage of that.
Minor Correction. Plant managers for the big three, for a small old plant, do not make $500,000. Try $200,000.
I believe this version has stricter checking. It is probably a good idea for everyone with programs out there to do a quick recompile and see if there is something you can improve or error messages you can fix.
Correction. No one wants EV1s at the price it costs us to make them. Sure, a lot of people would take them at the lease price we offered, which was way below cost. Not too many would take them if the lease price was several thousand per month.
Why would we lease them below cost? Because California required us to put some type of electric vehicle on the road and losing money on a few thousand EV1s was cheaper than walking away from the entire California car market.
>>I want to know why only 1000 were made. They spent a billion on a program and only sent it out to a wishlist? Or did they withhold it from the market because the infrastructure didn't exist?
Because we lost money on every single unit and because the demand wasn't there at a price where we could recover our costs.
Fun cars. I drove them on the test track, but they couldn't keep a charge in a Michigan winter. And don't expect to carry a family and groceries.
We are still looking for technology that works in real life not just the lab, at a price that consumers are willing to pay, and that meets auto safety requirements. Believe me, if we thought we could sell 100,000 and make a 2% profit, we would be falling all over ourselves to get them out.
I know Ford runs some mailservers on Linux in Dearborn. And that group complains bitterly about feeding email to Outbreak (sorry, Outlook), but client desktops are controlled by another group.
Which reminds me of the Monday I came into the office in Brussels to discover water leaking from dozens of points in the ceiling in one particular room. Turns out the company on the floor above us had a coffee machine with a permanent connection to the water supply...except that the connection had broken some time over the weekend, flooded the space between their floor and our ceiling and eventually found many exits into...our currency trading room, taking out 10-15 traders' computers. Fortunately, we had just done a test for offsite emergency operations just three weeks before, so everyone knew the drill and we were up and running in under two hours.
many car makers have quite a bit of money invested in the oil market
Last time I looked, most of GM and Ford's money was made on SUVs (high gas usage). When oil prices rise, sales fall, profits fall. Looks exactly the opposite to having money invested in the oil market. If they could get electric cars to really work, and make money, they would do it in a heartbeat.
Fine. Send us a design that (a) actually works; (b) survives a collision; (c) has a range that people are willing to settle for and (d) that we can actually make and sell at a profit and I will personally walk it through GM R&D. You need to get all four out of four. If you can't, stop complaining about our difficulties in getting there.
The name says it all. They actually had T-shirts. My company actually paid me good money to go....Once.
>> It's not like a company has a right to privacy
Ignoring the legal reasons why you are wrong; the moral question is "Why not"? A company consists of people. If people have a right to privacy, how do you take it away from them at work simply because they are now "at the company". Have I given away all my rights against you and the world as soon as I reach the company parking lot? Do I get it back at 7:00PM? Is the right to privacy somehow connected to the time clock?
A real, live person wrote that document. Another real live person received it. They may be "cogs in the machine", but that machine consists solely of living people.
>> I think they should pass a law that requires companies to store copies of all documents in escrow with an independant third-part for as long as they are in business.
Fine. So long as you are willing to pay for it. The storage does nothing for my clients' businesses, so why should they pay for it. Or just be honest and declare it to be a tax. Electronic storage is getting cheaper, but it is not free. Neither is the cost of scanning millions of documents.
Interesting theory. Not true in any country I've ever had legal dealings in, but that limits my universe to Western Europe, Australia and North America.
I get ~100 emails/day, many of them 1k, many of them 1000k. You are suggesting that I keep every single email I get. Not going to happen. IT gives me 40 meg total to store email. I can hit that in one week. No matter how "cheap" hardrives are, that kind of storage is not going to be in the budget.
True with respect to what internal auditing actually does. Personally, I've had more problems with document destruction by people who "just needed the storage space" on documents that I needed to defend them than the current debacle of "Andersening documents".
Any records that substantiate the correct tax need to be held for a minimum of 3 years after the due date of the tax return. If you are currently under audit, that period gets extended while the audit is in process.
Basically, the _US_ tax authorities have 3 years after you file your tax return to _start_ to look at you. If they can show you omitted at least 25% of your taxable income, they get another three years on top of that. If they can show fraud, they have forever. Other countries have different time limits.
From a tax law standpoint, you don't have to keep anything that doesn't go to prove the "correct" taxable income. I can't speak to other areas of law. BTW, my clients are typically complaining about document storage costs rather than liability issues.