That's why you (as a stockholder) want to pay the officers of your company with stock and stock options rather than cash. That way, executives who make the albatross acquisitions end up with worthless underwater options.
I actually think that there's a flaw in that compensation model, in that a lot of executives would prefer to have 10,000 subordinates and a net worth of $10 million rather than 2,000 subordinates and a net worth of $50 million. Unless you're into serious world-changing philanthropy such as Ted Turner or Bill Gates (yes, I know, flame him for his business practices and how he earns it, but he really does spend a large percentage of his MSFT gains on education and third world health)... anyways, unless someone is into that level of philanthropy, it doesn't matter how much $$$ they have after the first $10 million or so. So they start maximizing other things instead, such as their head count.
Meanwhile, if you, as an employee, want to get paid all cash+benefits and little or no options, it's easy enough to find a large company that pays that way. You can have it either way: you can get paid based on your own performance, or you can get paid based on other people's performance too. But you can't have it both ways.
Are Enron investors outraged at the amoral actions of chief executives, or outraged that their amoral actions lost them money instead of
The former.
I make my daily bread by predicting which companies will fail to live up to their hype and then short-selling their stock. I also invest on the long side, but this year, it's a lot easier to find stocks going down than stocks going up.
So I make money by finding the next Enron (I think it's going to be Computer Associates). And I'm outraged by Enron and Worldcom. For the record, I've never had a position in Enron or Worldcom, and I am short CA.
Short sellers are part of the ecosystem of the market that help broom out the hype and corruption. But there is so much corruption now, it's disgusting. I should have to work hard to find a Worldcom, not see clusters of them splashed across a non-financial news site.
When will it end? It ends with capitulation. It ends when a whole fucking Beowulf of these companies collapse at once, in a big crescendo of panic, when everybody and their brother finally pukes up the evil stock, and the questionable stock, and the blue-chips, every damn thing on the market, indiscriminately.
And that's when I can cover all my shorts and pay some reasonable prices for some quality companies that actually make and sell stuff that customers actually buy.
I agree that Echelon will be more effective if the agencies that operate Echelon continue to stonewall.
The question is whether it's good or bad for the people of this country for Echelon to be optimally effective. The FBI has spied on and infiltrated the organizations of non-violent activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. In the past, the White House has turned up with 900 FBI files of its political opponents (Mrs. Clinton's office, 1993).
The purpose of this government (unlike most governments) is to protect the rights of the people. I want a lot more transparency in my government's surveillance operations so that I can really tell whether they are protecting me from Al Qaeda or whether they are protecting me from legal and peaceful protestors and legal and peaceful opposition candidates.
It's like any relationship. You weren't happy with one aspect of your job -- and, as you say, there was only one unhappy aspect.
Instead of telling your manager "I have a counter offer", you could have told them "I need more money to be happy here" (or words to that effect) without mentioning the other offer at all. Then, if your current company decides to meet your needs, there's less of a loyalty hit. And if they decide to terminate you just for asking, you have the other job.
I also kind of doubt that money is the only thing that makes you unhappy at your current job. I've never had a job where I was happy with everything else but unhappy with the money. But it's your experience and you say that is the case, so I'll take your experience as stated, but with a grain of salt.
Blacklists are cool ... for people WE hate
on
Surveillance Update
·
· Score: 1
So yesterday, we're talking about blacklists of spammers, and the Slashdot party line is: a black ist is only advisory; each individual subscriber to the blacklist makes their own decision to shun the blacklistees; the only people who have to worry about blacklists are evil spammers, who are all liars and thieves; and if you don't want to be blacklisted, don't be a spammer.
Which is all fine with me.
But everybody gets to play at this game. As much as you hate spammers... that's how much some people hate terrorists. And they are willing to profile and blacklist terrorists.
So stop and think about what kinds of protection you want in a blacklist. At a minimum, if anyone in the world is telling large numbers of people that I'm an undesirable (terrorist | spammer | anti-globalization protester), I want easy access to copies of what they say about me, and I want legal accountability if they disseminate false information about me.
I don't get spam calls on my cell phone, probably because there's a federal law against making unsolicited calls to cell phones.
So, when a business wants my phone number, I give them my cell phone number. They can call me if they have a legitimate business reason (like, "your order is ready for pickup"), but they can't make any money selling that phone number to anyone else.
Once in the past year I did get a spam call that was covered by "existing business relationship", but the guy doing it seemed a bit sheepish about it.
The whole idea of open source is to allow contributed development.
Sort of. Open Source, as it is practiced on many projects today, is based on the idea of contributors mailing in contributions. But it's also based on the idea of users mailing in bug reports.
Instead of Open Source, think Open Review. Think of aerospace geeks looking for simple coding errors, such as a conversion from 64-bit floating point to 16-bit integer with no overflow check. That's the software error that brought down Ariane 5 Ariane 5 Report.
Besides the human beings who might want to review code, researchers also write automated programs to look for program bugs. For instance, someone at Stanford enhanced gcc to look for code patterns in the Linux kernel that accessed memory in insecure ways, or that allocated memory without freeing it.
The end result of these processes is not a source code patch, but a bug report.
Also note that if the cost of failure is millions of dollars or hundreds of lives, then the organizations who operate these systems have a good reason to pay bounties for discovered bugs. On a personal scale, Donald Knuth pays bounties for bugs discovered in TeX, which is one practice that has led to the legendary high quality of TeX.
I read David Brin's article a year ago and I really liked it.
About halfway through Brin's article, I started thinking about all the SF I read as a teenager. Heinlein's juveniles had a streak of meritocracy combined with the idea of open access to everyone. See especially "Starman Jones" and "Citizen of the Galaxy".
And then I thought "this guy would probably love _The Stars My Destination_" by Alfred Bester. And sure enough... Brin did.
Free Software is in the same tradition. I think of RMS as the Gully Foyle of software, throwing giant tarballs into an ignorant crowd. "This is important! Learn it! Use it!"
When I use Internet Explorer (which is not very often), I install Google's GoogleBar on it. This is a little toolbar on the browser where I type in a word and get a google search.
RealNames could do exactly the same thing, without paying millions of dollars in cash and 20% of their stock to Microsoft.
Neo and Trinity shoot a lot of people who didn't attack them first.
But when Neo is running through a crowd near the end of the movie, the agents take very few shots at him. And they don't drop bombs into crowds. As far as I can see, the agents emply violence only against the unplugged, rogue humans.
Maybe Morpheus is completely lying about the "battery" explanation. Maybe some group of humans hosed the ecology so badly that the only way for a lot of people to survive was to climb into the pods voluntarily (heck, a lot of Slashdot readers would probably do it just to get into the nifty VR). Maybe the agents are the good guys -- or at least perceive themselves as good, with the mission of preserving human life.
I agree, I'm a lot more interested in seeing what happens to Agent Smith than Neo. Agent Smith shows more emotional development than Neo. Check out the scene where the other agents ask him what he's doing talking alone to Morpheus -- it sure looks like he had his hand caught in some cookie jar. I'd like to know more about that.
Hey, maybe take page from The Empire Strikes Back...
I developed a passphrase about 10 years ago. Actually it's more than a passphrase, it's a handshaking protocol with some non-verbal components. If anyone ever comes up to me and does the protocol, especially if they look older than me, I'll know that they are a time-travelling version of me, and I'll listen real carefully to what they have to say.
(Or maybe they are a telepath... or maybe I've been secretly drugged and have spilled the protocol... or maybe I'm living in the Matrix and they are an agent of the Matrix that has lifted the protoocol straight from my brain...)
7:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time: I talked to Vicki (no last name given) (extension withheld). I asked her if they had allocated the Directed Shares Program shares yet. "no". I asked her when they would allocate them. "this evening or tomorrow morning."
I want to know:
How many shares e*trade actually allocated under the Directed Shares Program.
How many account holders placed conditional orders under the Directed Shares Program.
How many account holders were actually allocated shares under the Directed Shares Program.
The guy I talked to said they haven't done allocation yet and are likely to this afternoon.
A friend of mine who's been a director of a public company suggested an ugly scenario: the underwriter holds out on the shares as long as they can. If the first-day trading goes well, they hang on tight to the shares and bump as many people as they can. If the first-day trading sucks, they stuff everybody's account with lots of shares.
I don't think e*Trade is doing this. They left me voicemail this afternoon, they are calling lots and lots of people, that's not the action of a broker who is trying to cheat people. I think they just were not qualified to handle this job. They had better get on the stick pretty fast though!
No problem, see, because we are the people who build things. You just lean on them. Next we'll build some Dutch Auctions and open IPO processes, and that particular capitalism bug will evaporate.
Deep down, I really don't mind making you rich as a side effect of getting to live in the open source world I want to live in. But it is a bug, and we will fix it.
BTW, Rob Malda's probably made more from open source than you have. And he knows how to throw a better party.:)
RE: Public Offering Order RHAT. We were unable to allocate shares. Possible reasons: Offering priced above limit or high demand for shares.
My limit was $14.25, order entered 07:51 this morning for 1200 shares by e-trade representive M____ A_____ (poor guy doesn't deserve to get slashdotted. Yet.)
My first guess is they screwed up the directed-shares bit.
Just now, 13:01 Eastern time, I talked to an e*trade rep about my DSP order. He says the DSP shares have not been allocated yet, that they will be allocated over the "next couple of days", and that e*trade will notify me by the alert mechanism. All you guys posting your allocation messages, this is very good to see, and I'll post mine when I get it, too. Please, please though, say whether you are in the Directed Shares Program or not.
I've never written a HOWTO, but I think I can cover some of the gotchas that people have run into: such as "the initial range was $10 to $12 so I only have $1200 in my account", or how to say "I am in the Red Hat Directed Shares Program" at the beginning of every conversation, et cetera.
This is only the first of several Linux IPO's. LinuxCare, VA Linux, Caldera; they may have affinity programs, they may not. But I know that the more educated I am, the less stress I feel going through this process.
... $17.2k account, order for 1200 shares at $14.25.
I figure Scott got a phone call because e*trade doesn't want to see another salon.com article.
I dragged my night-owl ass out of bed this morning at 7:00 AM so that I could get on the Net and the phone. I reconfirmed my order. I would like to have done it on the Internet, but there is no screen anywhere even to display my order! e*trade's rep could not tell me if my order from yesterday (after the price bump) was still effective or not!
He took a new order. I hope he marked it "Directed Shares Program" as I stated at the beginning, middle, and end. I suppose if it wasn't DSP, he wouldn't even be talking to me.
To the e*trade guy that is here asking that we not slashdot the e*trade reps: put up some better news on your site already. An "IPO HOWTO" would help, too. And Jesus Christ, I know IPO's are special, but you are the first offline or online broker I've used that can't tell me the status of an existing order.
Those of you who understand will forgive me. Well, I do, and yet:
I've put more than a year of full-time, 50-a-hour-a-week development time into an open source project. And it's not even done yet.
This isn't an "I'm entitled" argument. Rather, if I do get a Red Hat windfall, I'm using it to pay my rent while I put some more man-months into my project.
Also, it is definitely not a "zero-sum game". Red Hat totally fits the model of a company that needs capital to expand. As a by-product of raising money, they have to leave some money on the table. They are offering us a chance to collect some of the money on the table. It's a very positive-sum game.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually think that there's a flaw in that compensation model, in that a lot of executives would prefer to have 10,000 subordinates and a net worth of $10 million rather than 2,000 subordinates and a net worth of $50 million. Unless you're into serious world-changing philanthropy such as Ted Turner or Bill Gates (yes, I know, flame him for his business practices and how he earns it, but he really does spend a large percentage of his MSFT gains on education and third world health)
Meanwhile, if you, as an employee, want to get paid all cash+benefits and little or no options, it's easy enough to find a large company that pays that way. You can have it either way: you can get paid based on your own performance, or you can get paid based on other people's performance too. But you can't have it both ways.
The former.
I make my daily bread by predicting which companies will fail to live up to their hype and then short-selling their stock. I also invest on the long side, but this year, it's a lot easier to find stocks going down than stocks going up.
So I make money by finding the next Enron (I think it's going to be Computer Associates). And I'm outraged by Enron and Worldcom. For the record, I've never had a position in Enron or Worldcom, and I am short CA.
Short sellers are part of the ecosystem of the market that help broom out the hype and corruption. But there is so much corruption now, it's disgusting. I should have to work hard to find a Worldcom, not see clusters of them splashed across a non-financial news site.
When will it end? It ends with capitulation. It ends when a whole fucking Beowulf of these companies collapse at once, in a big crescendo of panic, when everybody and their brother finally pukes up the evil stock, and the questionable stock, and the blue-chips, every damn thing on the market, indiscriminately.
And that's when I can cover all my shorts and pay some reasonable prices for some quality companies that actually make and sell stuff that customers actually buy.
I agree that Echelon will be more effective if the agencies that operate Echelon continue to stonewall.
The question is whether it's good or bad for the people of this country for Echelon to be optimally effective. The FBI has spied on and infiltrated the organizations of non-violent activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. In the past, the White House has turned up with 900 FBI files of its political opponents (Mrs. Clinton's office, 1993).
The purpose of this government (unlike most governments) is to protect the rights of the people. I want a lot more transparency in my government's surveillance operations so that I can really tell whether they are protecting me from Al Qaeda or whether they are protecting me from legal and peaceful protestors and legal and peaceful opposition candidates.
It's like any relationship. You weren't happy with one aspect of your job -- and, as you say, there was only one unhappy aspect.
Instead of telling your manager "I have a counter offer", you could have told them "I need more money to be happy here" (or words to that effect) without mentioning the other offer at all. Then, if your current company decides to meet your needs, there's less of a loyalty hit. And if they decide to terminate you just for asking, you have the other job.
I also kind of doubt that money is the only thing that makes you unhappy at your current job. I've never had a job where I was happy with everything else but unhappy with the money. But it's your experience and you say that is the case, so I'll take your experience as stated, but with a grain of salt.
So yesterday, we're talking about blacklists of spammers, and the Slashdot party line is: a black ist is only advisory; each individual subscriber to the blacklist makes their own decision to shun the blacklistees; the only people who have to worry about blacklists are evil spammers, who are all liars and thieves; and if you don't want to be blacklisted, don't be a spammer.
... that's how much some people hate terrorists. And they are willing to profile and blacklist terrorists.
Which is all fine with me.
But everybody gets to play at this game. As much as you hate spammers
So stop and think about what kinds of protection you want in a blacklist. At a minimum, if anyone in the world is telling large numbers of people that I'm an undesirable (terrorist | spammer | anti-globalization protester), I want easy access to copies of what they say about me, and I want legal accountability if they disseminate false information about me.
I don't get spam calls on my cell phone, probably because there's a federal law against making unsolicited calls to cell phones.
So, when a business wants my phone number, I give them my cell phone number. They can call me if they have a legitimate business reason (like, "your order is ready for pickup"), but they can't make any money selling that phone number to anyone else.
Once in the past year I did get a spam call that was covered by "existing business relationship", but the guy doing it seemed a bit sheepish about it.
Sort of. Open Source, as it is practiced on many projects today, is based on the idea of contributors mailing in contributions. But it's also based on the idea of users mailing in bug reports.
Instead of Open Source, think Open Review. Think of aerospace geeks looking for simple coding errors, such as a conversion from 64-bit floating point to 16-bit integer with no overflow check. That's the software error that brought down Ariane 5 Ariane 5 Report.
Besides the human beings who might want to review code, researchers also write automated programs to look for program bugs. For instance, someone at Stanford enhanced gcc to look for code patterns in the Linux kernel that accessed memory in insecure ways, or that allocated memory without freeing it.
The end result of these processes is not a source code patch, but a bug report.
Also note that if the cost of failure is millions of dollars or hundreds of lives, then the organizations who operate these systems have a good reason to pay bounties for discovered bugs. On a personal scale, Donald Knuth pays bounties for bugs discovered in TeX, which is one practice that has led to the legendary high quality of TeX.
I read David Brin's article a year ago and I really liked it.
... Brin did.
About halfway through Brin's article, I started thinking about all the SF I read as a teenager. Heinlein's juveniles had a streak of meritocracy combined with the idea of open access to everyone. See especially "Starman Jones" and "Citizen of the Galaxy".
And then I thought "this guy would probably love _The Stars My Destination_" by Alfred Bester. And sure enough
Free Software is in the same tradition. I think of RMS as the Gully Foyle of software, throwing giant tarballs into an ignorant crowd. "This is important! Learn it! Use it!"
Gnu/Matrix ... finally, a platform powerful enough for emacs!
When I use Internet Explorer (which is not very often), I install Google's GoogleBar on it. This is a little toolbar on the browser where I type in a word and get a google search.
RealNames could do exactly the same thing, without paying millions of dollars in cash and 20% of their stock to Microsoft.
... much the way that GCC is obscured from us by the marketing people at the FSF.
... wanna go in on it with me?
Dude, no problem. Post your e-mail address and I'll send you a couple of different versions of gcc source.
Plus I know this dude who promised to get me a 0-day rip of gcc 3.1 when it comes out if I pay him some $$$
Neo and Trinity shoot a lot of people who didn't attack them first.
...
But when Neo is running through a crowd near the end of the movie, the agents take very few shots at him. And they don't drop bombs into crowds. As far as I can see, the agents emply violence only against the unplugged, rogue humans.
Maybe Morpheus is completely lying about the "battery" explanation. Maybe some group of humans hosed the ecology so badly that the only way for a lot of people to survive was to climb into the pods voluntarily (heck, a lot of Slashdot readers would probably do it just to get into the nifty VR). Maybe the agents are the good guys -- or at least perceive themselves as good, with the mission of preserving human life.
I agree, I'm a lot more interested in seeing what happens to Agent Smith than Neo. Agent Smith shows more emotional development than Neo. Check out the scene where the other agents ask him what he's doing talking alone to Morpheus -- it sure looks like he had his hand caught in some cookie jar. I'd like to know more about that.
Hey, maybe take page from The Empire Strikes Back
Neo: You killed my father!
Agent Smith: Neo. I am your father.
The guy in the article says that he does not have one hour to spare in the day. I'll bet that he doesn't have an hour to RTFM, either.
I developed a passphrase about 10 years ago. Actually it's more than a passphrase, it's a handshaking protocol with some non-verbal components. If anyone ever comes up to me and does the protocol, especially if they look older than me, I'll know that they are a time-travelling version of me, and I'll listen real carefully to what they have to say.
... or maybe I've been secretly drugged and have spilled the protocol ... or maybe I'm living in the Matrix and they are an agent of the Matrix that has lifted the protoocol straight from my brain ...)
(Or maybe they are a telepath
You are holding a ticket with a probable value of $24,000 (400 shares * $60 more or less).
You are about 300 miles from e*trade's physical office in Braintree, MA.
Get on the phone and call the affinity number. Then get on a plane. Work your credit cards. Get the trade on.
7:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time: I talked to Vicki (no last name given) (extension withheld). I asked her if they had allocated the Directed Shares Program shares yet. "no". I asked her when they would allocate them. "this evening or tomorrow morning."
I want to know:
How many shares e*trade actually allocated under the Directed Shares Program.
How many account holders placed conditional orders under the Directed Shares Program.
How many account holders were actually allocated shares under the Directed Shares Program.
The guy I talked to said they haven't done allocation yet and are likely to this afternoon.
A friend of mine who's been a director of a public company suggested an ugly scenario: the underwriter holds out on the shares as long as they can. If the first-day trading goes well, they hang on tight to the shares and bump as many people as they can. If the first-day trading sucks, they stuff everybody's account with lots of shares.
I don't think e*Trade is doing this. They left me voicemail this afternoon, they are calling lots and lots of people, that's not the action of a broker who is trying to cheat people. I think they just were not qualified to handle this job. They had better get on the stick pretty fast though!
... because they are getting $70 million and the insiders get $200 million of "money on the table".
... working a bug in the capitalist system.
:)
No problem, see, because we are the people who build things. You just lean on them. Next we'll build some Dutch Auctions and open IPO processes, and that particular capitalism bug will evaporate.
Deep down, I really don't mind making you rich as a side effect of getting to live in the open source world I want to live in. But it is a bug, and we will fix it.
BTW, Rob Malda's probably made more from open source than you have. And he knows how to throw a better party.
Me too. Smart Alert Message 1:18:44 PM ET.
Subject: Public Offering Order for RHAT
RE: Public Offering Order RHAT. We were unable to allocate shares. Possible reasons: Offering priced above limit or high demand for shares.
My limit was $14.25, order entered 07:51 this morning for 1200 shares by e-trade representive M____ A_____ (poor guy doesn't deserve to get slashdotted. Yet.)
My first guess is they screwed up the directed-shares bit.
Just now, 13:01 Eastern time, I talked to an e*trade rep about my DSP order. He says the DSP shares have not been allocated yet, that they will be allocated over the "next couple of days", and that e*trade will notify me by the alert mechanism. All you guys posting your allocation messages, this is very good to see, and I'll post mine when I get it, too. Please, please though, say whether you are in the Directed Shares Program or not.
I've never written a HOWTO, but I think I can cover some of the gotchas that people have run into: such as "the initial range was $10 to $12 so I only have $1200 in my account", or how to say "I am in the Red Hat Directed Shares Program" at the beginning of every conversation, et cetera.
This is only the first of several Linux IPO's. LinuxCare, VA Linux, Caldera; they may have affinity programs, they may not. But I know that the more educated I am, the less stress I feel going through this process.
... $17.2k account, order for 1200 shares at $14.25.
I figure Scott got a phone call because e*trade doesn't want to see another salon.com article.
I dragged my night-owl ass out of bed this morning at 7:00 AM so that I could get on the Net and the phone. I reconfirmed my order. I would like to have done it on the Internet, but there is no screen anywhere even to display my order! e*trade's rep could not tell me if my order from yesterday (after the price bump) was still effective or not!
He took a new order. I hope he marked it "Directed Shares Program" as I stated at the beginning, middle, and end. I suppose if it wasn't DSP, he wouldn't even be talking to me.
To the e*trade guy that is here asking that we not slashdot the e*trade reps: put up some better news on your site already. An "IPO HOWTO" would help, too. And Jesus Christ, I know IPO's are special, but you are the first offline or online broker I've used that can't tell me the status of an existing order.
Those of you who understand will forgive me.
Well, I do, and yet:
I've put more than a year of full-time, 50-a-hour-a-week development time into an open source project. And it's not even done yet.
This isn't an "I'm entitled" argument. Rather, if I do get a Red Hat windfall, I'm using it to pay my rent while I put some more man-months into my project.
Also, it is definitely not a "zero-sum game". Red Hat totally fits the model of a company that needs capital to expand. As a by-product of raising money, they have to leave some money on the table. They are offering us a chance to collect some of the money on the table. It's a very positive-sum game.
I received the same alert, same time stamp, 10:09:23.
I'm curious about the alert. It doesn't mention that Red Hat already bumped the price once.