If Musk makes the charitable contribution, it will be a $1m tax deduction, which is accounted for by reducing the net pre-tax income. Given that SpaceX and Tesla are both in startup phase, I doubt he's drawing any kind of significant salary. Even given his cash-out of eBay stock for living expenses and the capital gains involved, the deduction will probably offset his total income for the year, resulting in zero taxes.
The money isn't free -- he could buy expensive cars with it and pay taxes -- but it is significantly discounted.
...it should be illegal for entrepreneurs to be optimistic. They should be legally obligated to know the realistic probabilities of their endeavors' success based on hindsight available years later.
Whatever the actual issues are, reading armchair legal opinions combined with dim and distorted memories of the MS antitrust case just hurts.
Some day, someone will reply to a/. post with something like "I don't know, that's interesting but it's way beyond my area of expertise. Does anyone have an informed opinion?" And then, of course, the world will end.
The word "fortune" has several meanings. You're referring to finances, the parent was referring to well-being. The two are related but not the same.
Microsoft may be turning record profit, but it's clearly a company in decline. Their stranglehold on operating systems is loosening as OSX gains market share and web browsers make underlying OS less relevant. Office, their cash cow, has hit the point where nobody really sees a reason to upgrade, and its features are also being commoditized by open source and lower cost software. Xbox / Kinect are the two bright spots for a company otherwise drowning in bureaucracy and searching for relevance and innovation.
So yes, their fortunes are sagging, even as their fortune accumulates. English is funny that way.
Why is it that peoples vehemence and certainty is directly proportional to their ignorance?
Here are some of the many things you managed to get wrong in a very short post:
1) A government is not a family. Some government spending increases GDP. Not all of it, and it's rarely 1:1, but things like roads contribute to the economy. Net exports is also huge and has no household analog.
2) You seem to think that a deficit is always bad. It is not. As long as debt:GDP ratio stays sane (which it isn't in the U.S.), a deficit that increases the rate of increase in GDP is both fine and beneficial.
3) Debate is never over in economics, especially with complex systems like the U.S. economy. And if debate is ever going to be over, it's not going to be with a teabaggy ignorant rant like yours. Sorry, but anyone who thinks national economies are in any way analagous to household spending has no business offering opinions on the subject. You might as well shout "touchdown!" at a tennis match.
- Doesn't know that Sony is a Japanese company - Doesn't understand that the First Amendment applies to government regulation of speech - Doesn't understand that the Fourth Amendment applies to government search&seizure, and does not make subpoenas illegal - Doesn't understand that the First and Fourth Amendments don't apply to "other citizens around the world" - Doesn't realize how idiotic it sounds to want the FBI to investigate a company should they comply with a subpoena issued by a federal judge
Your heart is in the right place. But your brain, well, it could use some work.
Are you kidding? Once I get my hacked client together to return Rick Astley videos for every search any peer does, there will be even more complaining.
Well, thank God you have the legal right not to be pissed, then.
All that silly stuff like actual copyright law, fair use, and even the original intent of copyright -- to promote creation of works, not to enrich authors -- is just meaningless crap in the face of your emotional responses.
So says JK, so says you, so says a judge. Apparently I'm the odd man out here. Me, I don't believe in copyright of fictional facts -- what happens in books -- any more than I believe in copyright on store prices or baseball player statistics. And I say that we have here proof positive that the misapplication of copyright law, and misunderstanding of intellectual "property", is actively *preventing* the creation of new works.
Bah, I'm disgusted. I'm glad you're happy, at least. By the way, you're not allowed to quote my post if you respond. It's mine and I get to say what people can do with it.
Did you really just use the word "unreasonable" in a negative sense? On Slashdot? Have you not *read* any of the posts here? Or did just think that "...so that's exactly what we should demand" was implicit at the end of that sentence?
They have identified that there are 1T pages out there, somewhere. They have indexed 40 billion pages. Read the entire Google post. It says it right there.
Bad on Google for the misleading post. Bad on the submitter for not reading the misleading post. Bad on Slashdot for further descending into mindless repetition of mindless submissions of mindless PR announcements.
Anyone who's worked in IT knows how temperamental the server gods are. The only reasonable solution is to name servers in ways that will ensure uptime.
Because the server gods are perverse, you'll want to indicate that you *expect* the server to crash, so that the gods will perversely prevent that from happening. Names from famous disasters are good: hindenberg, challenger, that sort of thing. When the server gods see a DNS name like titanic.company.com, they laugh to themselves and say "ha, we'll show him! that thing is *never* going down."
The corollary is giving troublesome DNS names to projects you don't like. The HR director pissed you off? His new personnel management app should reside on uncrashable.company.com, or ninenines.company.com. You can do an absolute good faith effort to keep that thing running, but the server gods will explode power supplies and hard drives (several at a time, of course) left and right.
Wow, so on the one hand we have the submitter, who characterized anyone who has privacy concerns as being a "crazy cat lady", and on the other hand we've got people like you, who seem to be freaking out about a company publishing photos taken in public (just like, as others have noted, hundreds of thousands of amateur photographers and flicker users already do).
That really sums up Slashdot, doesn't it? Everything is teh bestest thing evar unless it's teh worsets thing evar.
Wow. Just wow. You managed to make an ends-justify-the-means argument, a false dichotomy, a red herring, and probably a few other fallacies I missed because I was already laughing so hard.
AVG is breaking two key rules of good app behavior on the internet: they are making huge numbers of requests that users don't want or know about, and they are providing fraudulent info in the request headers to prevent affected services from mitigating the problem.
How many companies write internet-enabled apps? What do you think? 1000? 10000? 100000? If AVG's behavior here is OK, is it also OK for all of those other apps to pile on as well, each one adding another 6% of overhead to *the entire internet*? Or is AVG special for some reason that allows them to play by different rules than everyone else?
This is very abusive on AVG's part, and your spirited defense relies on logical fallacies and hand waving. Your "if you don't want AVG to eat bandwidth and lie about its useragent, you must want your users to be infected with malware" bit is just icing on the cake.
Also, if you have money or a pet lawyer, another possible response to a C&D letter is to file for a declaratory judgment in your local jurisdiction. Assuming you're not in the immediate vicinity of the original letter writer, this forces them to put up or shut up.
So on the one hand you expect him to live up to the terms of his contract (fair enough), and on the other hand you want him to care about whether the folks on the other side "look fondly" on his speech? Unless the contract expressly forbids this kind of speech, he is perfectly within his rights and does not have to give a damn about being "looked fondly" upon.
Contracts work both ways. Sure, he's an idiot for signing a contract that he now obviously regrets, but his label is finding out that it's not always advantageous in the long run to squeeze artists and markets until they bleed.
You know what's worse? People with health issues should contact doctors! How oppressive is that? And they don't let passengers fly commercial jets!
I'm with you. It's utterly ridiculous that there are aspects of life which can be performed more effectively by the highly trained. INjustice INdeed!!!1
Cool. So Apple is targeting consumers who are outside of major urban areas, and isn't so interested in people who live in NY, SF, Seattle, Dallas, etc. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but at least it's a viable theory.
Now will you explain why you don't want MMS or GPS either? The way I see it, the iPhone is basically a modern iPod duct taped to a state of the art cell phone from 2004.
Slashdot Mirror
If Musk makes the charitable contribution, it will be a $1m tax deduction, which is accounted for by reducing the net pre-tax income. Given that SpaceX and Tesla are both in startup phase, I doubt he's drawing any kind of significant salary. Even given his cash-out of eBay stock for living expenses and the capital gains involved, the deduction will probably offset his total income for the year, resulting in zero taxes.
The money isn't free -- he could buy expensive cars with it and pay taxes -- but it is significantly discounted.
...it should be illegal for entrepreneurs to be optimistic. They should be legally obligated to know the realistic probabilities of their endeavors' success based on hindsight available years later.
Whatever the actual issues are, reading armchair legal opinions combined with dim and distorted memories of the MS antitrust case just hurts.
Some day, someone will reply to a /. post with something like "I don't know, that's interesting but it's way beyond my area of expertise. Does anyone have an informed opinion?" And then, of course, the world will end.
The word "fortune" has several meanings. You're referring to finances, the parent was referring to well-being. The two are related but not the same.
Microsoft may be turning record profit, but it's clearly a company in decline. Their stranglehold on operating systems is loosening as OSX gains market share and web browsers make underlying OS less relevant. Office, their cash cow, has hit the point where nobody really sees a reason to upgrade, and its features are also being commoditized by open source and lower cost software. Xbox / Kinect are the two bright spots for a company otherwise drowning in bureaucracy and searching for relevance and innovation.
So yes, their fortunes are sagging, even as their fortune accumulates. English is funny that way.
So, sort of like a generic BMW versus a customized 1970's muscle car with lots of aftermarket parts that you can easily wrench on yourself, then?
No, sell it to a coin collector for only $1T. It's worth taking pennies on the dollar to mitigate risk.
A $5T coin? You could spend $100B on the ultimate heist and still turn a tidy profit.
Fencing it might be hard, though.
Why is it that peoples vehemence and certainty is directly proportional to their ignorance?
Here are some of the many things you managed to get wrong in a very short post:
1) A government is not a family. Some government spending increases GDP. Not all of it, and it's rarely 1:1, but things like roads contribute to the economy. Net exports is also huge and has no household analog.
2) You seem to think that a deficit is always bad. It is not. As long as debt:GDP ratio stays sane (which it isn't in the U.S.), a deficit that increases the rate of increase in GDP is both fine and beneficial.
3) Debate is never over in economics, especially with complex systems like the U.S. economy. And if debate is ever going to be over, it's not going to be with a teabaggy ignorant rant like yours. Sorry, but anyone who thinks national economies are in any way analagous to household spending has no business offering opinions on the subject. You might as well shout "touchdown!" at a tennis match.
That means it's sure to win. This reminds of of when OS/2 mopped the floor with Windows because it had superior multitasking and memory management!
Yes, you are the only one who:
- Doesn't know that Sony is a Japanese company
- Doesn't understand that the First Amendment applies to government regulation of speech
- Doesn't understand that the Fourth Amendment applies to government search&seizure, and does not make subpoenas illegal
- Doesn't understand that the First and Fourth Amendments don't apply to "other citizens around the world"
- Doesn't realize how idiotic it sounds to want the FBI to investigate a company should they comply with a subpoena issued by a federal judge
Your heart is in the right place. But your brain, well, it could use some work.
Are you kidding? Once I get my hacked client together to return Rick Astley videos for every search any peer does, there will be even more complaining.
Well, thank God you have the legal right not to be pissed, then.
All that silly stuff like actual copyright law, fair use, and even the original intent of copyright -- to promote creation of works, not to enrich authors -- is just meaningless crap in the face of your emotional responses.
So says JK, so says you, so says a judge. Apparently I'm the odd man out here. Me, I don't believe in copyright of fictional facts -- what happens in books -- any more than I believe in copyright on store prices or baseball player statistics. And I say that we have here proof positive that the misapplication of copyright law, and misunderstanding of intellectual "property", is actively *preventing* the creation of new works.
Bah, I'm disgusted. I'm glad you're happy, at least. By the way, you're not allowed to quote my post if you respond. It's mine and I get to say what people can do with it.
Did you really just use the word "unreasonable" in a negative sense? On Slashdot? Have you not *read* any of the posts here? Or did just think that "...so that's exactly what we should demand" was implicit at the end of that sentence?
But I thought everything that wasn't compulsory was forbidden? Surely floating a balloon isn't compulsory, is it?
They have identified that there are 1T pages out there, somewhere. They have indexed 40 billion pages. Read the entire Google post. It says it right there.
Bad on Google for the misleading post. Bad on the submitter for not reading the misleading post. Bad on Slashdot for further descending into mindless repetition of mindless submissions of mindless PR announcements.
Anyone who's worked in IT knows how temperamental the server gods are. The only reasonable solution is to name servers in ways that will ensure uptime.
Because the server gods are perverse, you'll want to indicate that you *expect* the server to crash, so that the gods will perversely prevent that from happening. Names from famous disasters are good: hindenberg, challenger, that sort of thing. When the server gods see a DNS name like titanic.company.com, they laugh to themselves and say "ha, we'll show him! that thing is *never* going down."
The corollary is giving troublesome DNS names to projects you don't like. The HR director pissed you off? His new personnel management app should reside on uncrashable.company.com, or ninenines.company.com. You can do an absolute good faith effort to keep that thing running, but the server gods will explode power supplies and hard drives (several at a time, of course) left and right.
Wow, so on the one hand we have the submitter, who characterized anyone who has privacy concerns as being a "crazy cat lady", and on the other hand we've got people like you, who seem to be freaking out about a company publishing photos taken in public (just like, as others have noted, hundreds of thousands of amateur photographers and flicker users already do).
That really sums up Slashdot, doesn't it? Everything is teh bestest thing evar unless it's teh worsets thing evar.
And these are supposedly the *smart* people. Ugh.
Wow. Just wow. You managed to make an ends-justify-the-means argument, a false dichotomy, a red herring, and probably a few other fallacies I missed because I was already laughing so hard.
AVG is breaking two key rules of good app behavior on the internet: they are making huge numbers of requests that users don't want or know about, and they are providing fraudulent info in the request headers to prevent affected services from mitigating the problem.
How many companies write internet-enabled apps? What do you think? 1000? 10000? 100000? If AVG's behavior here is OK, is it also OK for all of those other apps to pile on as well, each one adding another 6% of overhead to *the entire internet*? Or is AVG special for some reason that allows them to play by different rules than everyone else?
This is very abusive on AVG's part, and your spirited defense relies on logical fallacies and hand waving. Your "if you don't want AVG to eat bandwidth and lie about its useragent, you must want your users to be infected with malware" bit is just icing on the cake.
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
I spend $150/year to insure $30k worth of electronics from theft. Are you really going to find a better cost/benefit solution?
Also, if you have money or a pet lawyer, another possible response to a C&D letter is to file for a declaratory judgment in your local jurisdiction. Assuming you're not in the immediate vicinity of the original letter writer, this forces them to put up or shut up.
Read the article. It does not cost them anything. They use domain tasting and let the registered domains expire after 5 days.
So on the one hand you expect him to live up to the terms of his contract (fair enough), and on the other hand you want him to care about whether the folks on the other side "look fondly" on his speech? Unless the contract expressly forbids this kind of speech, he is perfectly within his rights and does not have to give a damn about being "looked fondly" upon.
Contracts work both ways. Sure, he's an idiot for signing a contract that he now obviously regrets, but his label is finding out that it's not always advantageous in the long run to squeeze artists and markets until they bleed.
You know what's worse? People with health issues should contact doctors! How oppressive is that? And they don't let passengers fly commercial jets!
I'm with you. It's utterly ridiculous that there are aspects of life which can be performed more effectively by the highly trained. INjustice INdeed!!!1
-b
Cool. So Apple is targeting consumers who are outside of major urban areas, and isn't so interested in people who live in NY, SF, Seattle, Dallas, etc. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but at least it's a viable theory.
Now will you explain why you don't want MMS or GPS either? The way I see it, the iPhone is basically a modern iPod duct taped to a state of the art cell phone from 2004.
-b
Kudos to you for doing your part to keep both the roads and the planet less crowded!