I find it hard to believe someone can't track those who benefit from these crimes.
We have to request permission before we buy & sell pretty much any listed security, just to satisfy our internal compliance people who in turn have to report to The Feds.
So why on earth is it so hard for The Feds to track who purchases larges quantities of these securities before such solicitations are made, and who conveniently dump shortly before these same shares crash? After all, we're only talking 5% here! There must be large sums of money whizzing about...
I lived in New York for thirteen years, and I've been living in London for almost ten years now.
If you've ever been to London you'd notice cameras are either 1) Positioned on poles, really, really high up - some as high as fifty feet. Or 2) low lying cameras are arranged in pairs so one includes the other in its field of vision.
So you either can't steal them because they are too high up, or if in snatch range you'd be filmed stealing them. And keep in mind some are monitored by humans, so as soon as you setup your stepladder The Police are on their way.
Interesting article, but the part about "...downloading music..." made me wonder - given that by some estimates, by 2011 some 73 million cars will have iPod interfaces, is this a not so subtle way for Microsoft to fend off the dominance of Apple's iPod?
Dude, I've read the book. Got a Masters in Finance also.
"and buy out your company and some of the companies you were pitching too"
I work for a Tier One Investment Bank. We were pitching a deal to take some biz from another bank. Nope, no unassuming Geek is gonna pitch in my league and take over a biz.
Rolex DOES NOT use the ETA movements; in some parts of the world they sell a brand known as 'Tudor', which does use the ETA movement.
It's a subtle difference, one that makes me question your other conclusions.
However I do agree with your points about the other watches, however let's be realistic - you can get a new Rolex for maybe £2K (sterling); a Patek will set you back at least ten times that.
I wear a Rolex. A modestly priced (yes, such a thing exists) GMT Master Model II. Nice, solid feel on my arm, great look.
I've given lots of presentations at the board level to Investment Banks. Can't ever recall seeing a Casio or other digital stuff on the arms of the folks I was presenting to or later mingling with. Plenty of Swiss machinery, Rolexes included.
So the watch you wear, while a deeply personal statement, also reflects where you want to play. About one month ago I pitched for $500 million in a competitive bid situation. No board is gonna give half a billion dollars to someone in jeans and a TShirt, wearing a ThinkGeek digital on their arm.
Sure, down in the crowded cube farms the masses amuse themselves and each other with all sorts of cheap digital crap on their arms.
But in the board room it's Swiss all the way.
Rolexes are expensive. But like that tailor made suit, if you want to play the game you've got to dress the part. The cube farm is long behind me.
I run a rather large department for one of the Investment Banks, with users / developers / support staff dispersed between London / Amsterdam / Cairo / Milan and Rio.
About one year ago the folks maintaining our applications infrastructure were advised by the companies responsible for the municipal grid to reduce our hardware footprint in London.
The reason? The grid was close to if not already overloaded, and increases in consumption were to be discouraged.
So we've been putting all new build into Central Europe, and slowly migrating existing systems over as we can.
I teach Econometrics part time at a University here in London, and if a student stays "at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam" they ain't gonna pass no way no how unless they've been through the material before.
It was the same when I did my undergrad (Math / Comp Sci) back in the late 70's.
I hardly think the ability to pass an exam without attending class is indicative of a bad student. Maybe the student is smart and the class unchallenging?
OP must be talking about some elective; not any course with high demands for learning.
The article does seem to assume finance knowledge
on
Buy Low, Spam High
·
· Score: 1
From the article it would apppear that the return is quote per trade, so assuming a holding period (i.e., the amount of time their capital is locked up) of two days, a return of 5% over this period is equivalent to an annual return of roughly 500% ( (5%/2+1)^252), or 503.9% precisely, with 252 being the number of trading days in a year.
It's probably easiest to think of this as a very high rate deposit product that you invest in at 5% over a two day period, and reinvest every two days for entire year. Your effective return over the year is much, much higher than 5%.
A 500% return on your capital? Nice work if you can get it.
In finance, we almost always find such supernormal returns are indicative of illegal activity.
CDs are given away. No further obligation on the part of the consumer to purchase anything more.
I modeled explosive growth in the electronic (DRM issues didn't impact revenue projections) as well as the physical market (there, anticipated future CD sales really clocked in at about 10% to 12% growth, for many reasons).
No, I'm afraid this stood up to peer review and instructor criticism.
The business model is sound but none of the existing record companies - who now doubt have come to the same comclusion - will ever try it as it means cutting out wide layers of middle management. You just don't need the same number of people to run a business like this.
FWIW, I got an 'A' on this business plan. Not just for the write up, but for oral defense in class. I think something like this will work, and in fact believe you'll slowly start to see the emergence of startup labels operating this model.
For an MBA case study I came up with a business plan for a record company that actually gave away CDs and still had gross revenues approaching 70%! How? It's simple.
You can get CDs pressed in China for as little as $0.25 in quantities of 10K. Even cheaper, approaching $0.10 in sufficient volume. Domestic record companies already own the means of production, so I'm sure their cost would approach $0.10 per CD if not actually be sharply lower.
My business plan called for giving these CDs away, primarily at live shows but this could also be accomplished via other channels. CDs given away are intended to be nothing more than loss leaders, contain maybe six tracks, with advertisements and "hidden extras" such as Bios also included and, most importantly, prominently contained URLs leading people to iTunes.
Now it gets profitable.
iTunes pays 70% of the selling price to the distributor / band / whomver owns the music.
Give away some tracks on CD, get people interested and then reap massive margins from electronic distribution rights. The average customer on iTunes purchases SIXTY tracks (Smith, 2005). The average customer will more than pay for that CD. Just the average; we're not talking about the higher volume, rabid fans either.
I did a market analysis and we projected annual growth rates in excess of 60% from the iTunes distribution channel.
So I think record companies have it half ass backwards. Give the fucking sound away, and they'll make more money in the long run.
American, living in London, on the road betweet three to five days a week. I usually travel via Heathrow although sometimes I'm out of Gatwick.
I now use City Airport as much as possible, but they only provide short haul service into the continent.
For long haul flights I now Eurostar to Paris or Amsterdam where I pick up a connecting flight.
The fundamental problem is BAA, the airport operator, has declined to add staff to perform the required searches manually, thus protecting their profits. And the airlines are just as bad, attempting to maintain the same flight schedules to preserve revenue.
So the passengers are caught in the middle, and we're expected to strip down to our underwear and file, arms crossed above our heads, gratefully onto to the waiting aircraft.
Not me, and many like me. Business class travelers are avoiding this circus in droves.
We're all either using smaller airports that were not impacted like Heathrow / Gatwick or, if a long flight is needed (I'm off to Cairo in two weeks), we're taking the train to Paris or Amsterdam, and picking up a connecting flight from there.
None of the continental airports are doing this crap. None of the Asian airports are doing this crap. Even the US isn't going this far.
Make no mistake about it - this is all about protecting profits. Nothing more.
While she was looking into helping a friend stop smoking, Happy AOL User 17556639> was busily researching how to off his troublesome wife.
17556639 how to kill your wife 17556639 how to kill your wife 17556639 wife killer 17556639 how to kill a wife 17556639 poop 17556639 dead people 17556639 pictures of dead people 17556639 killed people 17556639 dead pictures 17556639 dead pictures 17556639 dead pictures 17556639 murder photo 17556639 steak and cheese
Is someone gonna take the time to track this whacko down, or just concentrate on the low hanging fruit (i.e., little old ladies)?
"...praising titanium (used in the construction of the 3000) for its light-weight and scratch-resistant properties..."
So what did Apple get wrong then? My TiBook was looking pretty ragged after two years of use. By contrast, my 15" Aluminum G4 PowerBook doesn't have a scratch on it....
Most of the larger corporations will have salary bands, and where you end up (i.e., the gross salary they offer) is a function of variables such as the type of job, years experience, difficulty recruiting and EDUCATION.
So at a larger corporation, you may end up at the lower end of a salary band, doing the same job (and perhaps better work) as your peers but for less pay. It's just the way bigger companies are run; standardised as much as possible across the board.
Smaller companies will have the flexibility to pay you what you're worth.
In the end you'll have to make a choice between big companies or small companies, with the benefits & liabilities associated with each.
I was a degreeless hacker working for some of the larger companies, so I've seen it from both perspectives. When you are doing the work but don't have a degree so you're paid less it sucks!
I've since taken one Masters, and I'm completing an MBA, so now I'm seeing it from a completely new perspective - I'm amazed at how much money they are willing to toss at me.
and although I've never worked for, nor personally known anyone who has worked for Google Labs, they seem to be about the closest thing I've seen since.
Bell Labs served as the R&D arm of AT&T, Maw Bell, "The Telephone Company", a highly regulated utility. Because of it's monopolistic and legally protected position, AT&T back then through off copious amounts of cash, and was considered an exceptionally safe investment.
Bell Labs was funded by part of this cash flow and had an incredibly broad mandate towards basic research which showed up in the work people did, that often didn't have (immediate) commerical applications.
Unix, for instance - AT&T couldn't even sell it back then, due to their monopoly. But folks at The Labs kept on exploring, improving, conducting basic research into Operating Systems that we still benefit from decades later. My office mate at the time was working in fiber optics, and thought back then in 1984 that his work "might" have commericial telephony applications sometime past the year 2000 after the development of several enabling technologies.
Everyone was encouraged to present papers internally; every day there were loads of seminars and working groups during office hours and, of course, the informal meetings and brainstorming sessions that took place at pubs and strip clubs along the New Jersey coast.
Your manager typically was also doing his or her own research, and would help you to explore specific areas of interest that might not be precisely part of the department manadate.
Highlight of my time there: taking several lunchtime seminars in a new programming language called C++, presented by Bjarne Stroustrup himself.
I think Google with their model of lettign engineers do whatever they'd like one day a week is the best sustainable compromise between fully commericial companies such as Microsoft or Apple and pure research organisatins such as Bell Labs.
Short of government funded, open ended research military reseaerch - I did that as well, and while it may not seek to commericalise the research but they sponsors will have "other" uses in mind - it's probably the best thing we've got going for us right now.
I'll leave you with a toast that I picked up from some of the older engineers during my time at Bell. We used it during many an evening at the local strip clubs:
But you're still operating on DRAM, no? I realise that iPaq's have a standby charge, but mine is only good for 72 hours after power loss (the way I've got them configured). Once I was on an ocean cruise, forgot to charge my iPaq (don't using a PDA much in those circumstances), and wham! Data loss.
I actually prefer the iPaq hw - are any of the current WinCe PDAs sporting persistent storage? I have to admit I really like the LifeDrive's 4GB hard drive, but the device has it's own set of problems - lots of legacy sw is incompatible with Palm OS5, and while that's to be exepcted the stuff just installs and then can mess you up. I'd prefer it the sw wouldn't install, truth be told.
I recently migrated off an HP iPaq 5450 to a Palm LifeDrive, solely because I couldn't deal with data loss. Because it uses DRAM if the device loses all power, data loss. I had a couple of crashes, data loss.
Sure, I got around that by backing up frequently, but still what a drag. I'd keep using the iPaq if it was a little more robust about data.
Now the LifeDrive you ask? Well, it's got it's own set of problems, data loss (knock on my wooden head) not one of them.
I admit I'm nostalgic; nobody has ever matched my Apple Newton (MP2K) or Apple eMate for reliability...
"...it all comes down to the industry finding ways to maximise profit..."
Actually, the industry is trying to maximise REVENUE, not profit. These business practices might spike revenues in the short term, but it will have a long and - and negative - impact on profit, for many of the reasons you've (correctly) pointed out.
Look no further than the record companies for proof of this.
Now I hate fans in computers as much as any other Mac Fanboy, but as Parallels on the MacIntel hw is just too damn compelling to ignore any longer I'm pricing out one of these notebook computers.
So I got to thinking - if the fan kicked on at a lower threshold, perhaps the case wouldn't get so unreasonably hot? Is the fan threshold temperature in PRAM or some other place that's reasonably easy to manipulate?
I've got two G4 PowerBooks (a 12" and a 15") and after cooking my the logic board in the fifteen inch have learned to always have the computer sitting on a book of some kind, to help insure airflow about the box.
Anyone have a clue if this is possible? I'd rather hear the fans earlier if it meant a much cooler system overall.
"...execute on the US judgment in the foreign country..."
But there are countries that won't honour US judgements and in fact even won't extradite criminals!
Cuba and The Dominican Republic are but two that come immediately to mind. I'd be surprised if Russia or Venezuela would rush to honor any US civil judgement, and Middle Eastern countries? Not a chance.
And as laws change these companies will move about, away from more restrictive regulatory enviromments to domains where enforcement is lax. You see this type of activity all the time with Hedge Funds (a biz that I've got some experience in); many funds, previously based in the Cayman Islands, are now moving further afield, in the South Pacific simply because many of the Carribbean regimes now will honour US Judgements.
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I find it hard to believe someone can't track those who benefit from these crimes.
We have to request permission before we buy & sell pretty much any listed security, just to satisfy our internal compliance people who in turn have to report to The Feds.
So why on earth is it so hard for The Feds to track who purchases larges quantities of these securities before such solicitations are made, and who conveniently dump shortly before these same shares crash? After all, we're only talking 5% here! There must be large sums of money whizzing about...
I lived in New York for thirteen years, and I've been living in London for almost ten years now.
If you've ever been to London you'd notice cameras are either 1) Positioned on poles, really, really high up - some as high as fifty feet. Or 2) low lying cameras are arranged in pairs so one includes the other in its field of vision.
So you either can't steal them because they are too high up, or if in snatch range you'd be filmed stealing them. And keep in mind some are monitored by humans, so as soon as you setup your stepladder The Police are on their way.
Interesting article, but the part about "...downloading music..." made me wonder - given that by some estimates, by 2011 some 73 million cars will have iPod interfaces, is this a not so subtle way for Microsoft to fend off the dominance of Apple's iPod?
Dude, I've read the book. Got a Masters in Finance also.
"and buy out your company and some of the companies you were pitching too"
I work for a Tier One Investment Bank. We were pitching a deal to take some biz from another bank. Nope, no unassuming Geek is gonna pitch in my league and take over a biz.
Rolex DOES NOT use the ETA movements; in some parts of the world they sell a brand known as 'Tudor', which does use the ETA movement.
It's a subtle difference, one that makes me question your other conclusions.
However I do agree with your points about the other watches, however let's be realistic - you can get a new Rolex for maybe £2K (sterling); a Patek will set you back at least ten times that.
So is that Patek really good value for money?
I wear a Rolex. A modestly priced (yes, such a thing exists) GMT Master Model II. Nice, solid feel on my arm, great look.
I've given lots of presentations at the board level to Investment Banks. Can't ever recall seeing a Casio or other digital stuff on the arms of the folks I was presenting to or later mingling with. Plenty of Swiss machinery, Rolexes included.
So the watch you wear, while a deeply personal statement, also reflects where you want to play. About one month ago I pitched for $500 million in a competitive bid situation. No board is gonna give half a billion dollars to someone in jeans and a TShirt, wearing a ThinkGeek digital on their arm.
Sure, down in the crowded cube farms the masses amuse themselves and each other with all sorts of cheap digital crap on their arms.
But in the board room it's Swiss all the way.
Rolexes are expensive. But like that tailor made suit, if you want to play the game you've got to dress the part. The cube farm is long behind me.
I run a rather large department for one of the Investment Banks, with users / developers / support staff dispersed between London / Amsterdam / Cairo / Milan and Rio.
About one year ago the folks maintaining our applications infrastructure were advised by the companies responsible for the municipal grid to reduce our hardware footprint in London.
The reason? The grid was close to if not already overloaded, and increases in consumption were to be discouraged.
So we've been putting all new build into Central Europe, and slowly migrating existing systems over as we can.
A strange situation all around, if you ask me.
Good thing I don't have to use them on Virgin.
My PowerBook goes everywhere with me; not close by, not partially disassembled, but sleeping nearby and ready to be used.
I like Virgin but they can go to hell. And I'm not booking any more long haul BizTrip in Virgin Upper Class either.
I'll give the Biz to a more rational airline.
I teach Econometrics part time at a University here in London, and if a student stays "at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam" they ain't gonna pass no way no how unless they've been through the material before.
It was the same when I did my undergrad (Math / Comp Sci) back in the late 70's.
I hardly think the ability to pass an exam without attending class is indicative of a bad student. Maybe the student is smart and the class unchallenging?
OP must be talking about some elective; not any course with high demands for learning.
From the article it would apppear that the return is quote per trade, so assuming a holding period (i.e., the amount of time their capital is locked up) of two days, a return of 5% over this period is equivalent to an annual return of roughly 500% ( (5%/2+1)^252), or 503.9% precisely, with 252 being the number of trading days in a year.
It's probably easiest to think of this as a very high rate deposit product that you invest in at 5% over a two day period, and reinvest every two days for entire year. Your effective return over the year is much, much higher than 5%.
A 500% return on your capital? Nice work if you can get it.
In finance, we almost always find such supernormal returns are indicative of illegal activity.
Uhhmmm, read the original post.
CDs are given away. No further obligation on the part of the consumer to purchase anything more.
I modeled explosive growth in the electronic (DRM issues didn't impact revenue projections) as well as the physical market (there, anticipated future CD sales really clocked in at about 10% to 12% growth, for many reasons).
No, I'm afraid this stood up to peer review and instructor criticism.
The business model is sound but none of the existing record companies - who now doubt have come to the same comclusion - will ever try it as it means cutting out wide layers of middle management. You just don't need the same number of people to run a business like this.
FWIW, I got an 'A' on this business plan. Not just for the write up, but for oral defense in class. I think something like this will work, and in fact believe you'll slowly start to see the emergence of startup labels operating this model.
For an MBA case study I came up with a business plan for a record company that actually gave away CDs and still had gross revenues approaching 70%! How? It's simple.
e als_itunes_stats/ [Accessed September 10th 2005]
You can get CDs pressed in China for as little as $0.25 in quantities of 10K. Even cheaper, approaching $0.10 in sufficient volume. Domestic record companies already own the means of production, so I'm sure their cost would approach $0.10 per CD if not actually be sharply lower.
My business plan called for giving these CDs away, primarily at live shows but this could also be accomplished via other channels. CDs given away are intended to be nothing more than loss leaders, contain maybe six tracks, with advertisements and "hidden extras" such as Bios also included and, most importantly, prominently contained URLs leading people to iTunes.
Now it gets profitable.
iTunes pays 70% of the selling price to the distributor / band / whomver owns the music.
Give away some tracks on CD, get people interested and then reap massive margins from electronic distribution rights. The average customer on iTunes purchases SIXTY tracks (Smith, 2005). The average customer will more than pay for that CD. Just the average; we're not talking about the higher volume, rabid fans either.
I did a market analysis and we projected annual growth rates in excess of 60% from the iTunes distribution channel.
So I think record companies have it half ass backwards. Give the fucking sound away, and they'll make more money in the long run.
----
References
Smith, T., 'Apple Touts iTunes customer total', [online], Available from: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/08/apple_rev
American, living in London, on the road betweet three to five days a week. I usually travel via Heathrow although sometimes I'm out of Gatwick.
I now use City Airport as much as possible, but they only provide short haul service into the continent.
For long haul flights I now Eurostar to Paris or Amsterdam where I pick up a connecting flight.
The fundamental problem is BAA, the airport operator, has declined to add staff to perform the required searches manually, thus protecting their profits. And the airlines are just as bad, attempting to maintain the same flight schedules to preserve revenue.
So the passengers are caught in the middle, and we're expected to strip down to our underwear and file, arms crossed above our heads, gratefully onto to the waiting aircraft.
Not me, and many like me. Business class travelers are avoiding this circus in droves.
We're all either using smaller airports that were not impacted like Heathrow / Gatwick or, if a long flight is needed (I'm off to Cairo in two weeks), we're taking the train to Paris or Amsterdam, and picking up a connecting flight from there.
None of the continental airports are doing this crap. None of the Asian airports are doing this crap. Even the US isn't going this far.
Make no mistake about it - this is all about protecting profits. Nothing more.
While she was looking into helping a friend stop smoking, Happy AOL User 17556639>
was busily researching how to off his troublesome wife.
17556639 how to kill your wife
17556639 how to kill your wife
17556639 wife killer
17556639 how to kill a wife
17556639 poop
17556639 dead people
17556639 pictures of dead people
17556639 killed people
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 murder photo
17556639 steak and cheese
Is someone gonna take the time to track this whacko down, or just concentrate on the low hanging fruit (i.e., little old ladies)?
"We became aware of this impropriety about two years ago, and pushed out the former CFO who was solely responsible...."
Or some such variant thereof.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
"...praising titanium (used in the construction of the 3000) for its light-weight and scratch-resistant properties..."
So what did Apple get wrong then? My TiBook was looking pretty ragged after two years of use. By contrast, my 15" Aluminum G4 PowerBook doesn't have a scratch on it....
at bigger companies, at least.
Most of the larger corporations will have salary bands, and where you end up (i.e., the gross salary they offer) is a function of variables such as the type of job, years experience, difficulty recruiting and EDUCATION.
So at a larger corporation, you may end up at the lower end of a salary band, doing the same job (and perhaps better work) as your peers but for less pay. It's just the way bigger companies are run; standardised as much as possible across the board.
Smaller companies will have the flexibility to pay you what you're worth.
In the end you'll have to make a choice between big companies or small companies, with the benefits & liabilities associated with each.
I was a degreeless hacker working for some of the larger companies, so I've seen it from both perspectives. When you are doing the work but don't have a degree so you're paid less it sucks!
I've since taken one Masters, and I'm completing an MBA, so now I'm seeing it from a completely new perspective - I'm amazed at how much money they are willing to toss at me.
and although I've never worked for, nor personally known anyone who has worked for Google Labs, they seem to be about the closest thing I've seen since.
Bell Labs served as the R&D arm of AT&T, Maw Bell, "The Telephone Company", a highly regulated utility. Because of it's monopolistic and legally protected position, AT&T back then through off copious amounts of cash, and was considered an exceptionally safe investment.
Bell Labs was funded by part of this cash flow and had an incredibly broad mandate towards basic research which showed up in the work people did, that often didn't have (immediate) commerical applications.
Unix, for instance - AT&T couldn't even sell it back then, due to their monopoly. But folks at The Labs kept on exploring, improving, conducting basic research into Operating Systems that we still benefit from decades later. My office mate at the time was working in fiber optics, and thought back then in 1984 that his work "might" have commericial telephony applications sometime past the year 2000 after the development of several enabling technologies.
Everyone was encouraged to present papers internally; every day there were loads of seminars and working groups during office hours and, of course, the informal meetings and brainstorming sessions that took place at pubs and strip clubs along the New Jersey coast.
Your manager typically was also doing his or her own research, and would help you to explore specific areas of interest that might not be precisely part of the department manadate.
Highlight of my time there: taking several lunchtime seminars in a new programming language called C++, presented by Bjarne Stroustrup himself.
I think Google with their model of lettign engineers do whatever they'd like one day a week is the best sustainable compromise between fully commericial companies such as Microsoft or Apple and pure research organisatins such as Bell Labs.
Short of government funded, open ended research military reseaerch - I did that as well, and while it may not seek to commericalise the research but they sponsors will have "other" uses in mind - it's probably the best thing we've got going for us right now.
I'll leave you with a toast that I picked up from some of the older engineers during my time at Bell. We used it during many an evening at the local strip clubs:
"Stronger Whiskey, Younger Woman, Faster Computers"
Ahh, the good old days.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish.
But you're still operating on DRAM, no? I realise that iPaq's have a standby charge, but mine is only good for 72 hours after power loss (the way I've got them configured). Once I was on an ocean cruise, forgot to charge my iPaq (don't using a PDA much in those circumstances), and wham! Data loss.
I actually prefer the iPaq hw - are any of the current WinCe PDAs sporting persistent storage? I have to admit I really like the LifeDrive's 4GB hard drive, but the device has it's own set of problems - lots of legacy sw is incompatible with Palm OS5, and while that's to be exepcted the stuff just installs and then can mess you up. I'd prefer it the sw wouldn't install, truth be told.
I recently migrated off an HP iPaq 5450 to a Palm LifeDrive, solely because I couldn't deal with data loss. Because it uses DRAM if the device loses all power, data loss. I had a couple of crashes, data loss.
Sure, I got around that by backing up frequently, but still what a drag. I'd keep using the iPaq if it was a little more robust about data.
Now the LifeDrive you ask? Well, it's got it's own set of problems, data loss (knock on my wooden head) not one of them.
I admit I'm nostalgic; nobody has ever matched my Apple Newton (MP2K) or Apple eMate for reliability...
"...it all comes down to the industry finding ways to maximise profit..."
Actually, the industry is trying to maximise REVENUE, not profit. These business practices might spike revenues in the short term, but it will have a long and - and negative - impact on profit, for many of the reasons you've (correctly) pointed out.
Look no further than the record companies for proof of this.
Now I hate fans in computers as much as any other Mac Fanboy, but as Parallels on the MacIntel hw is just too damn compelling to ignore any longer I'm pricing out one of these notebook computers.
So I got to thinking - if the fan kicked on at a lower threshold, perhaps the case wouldn't get so unreasonably hot? Is the fan threshold temperature in PRAM or some other place that's reasonably easy to manipulate?
I've got two G4 PowerBooks (a 12" and a 15") and after cooking my the logic board in the fifteen inch have learned to always have the computer sitting on a book of some kind, to help insure airflow about the box.
Anyone have a clue if this is possible? I'd rather hear the fans earlier if it meant a much cooler system overall.
"...execute on the US judgment in the foreign country..."
But there are countries that won't honour US judgements and in fact even won't extradite criminals!
Cuba and The Dominican Republic are but two that come immediately to mind. I'd be surprised if Russia or Venezuela would rush to honor any US civil judgement, and Middle Eastern countries? Not a chance.
And as laws change these companies will move about, away from more restrictive regulatory enviromments to domains where enforcement is lax. You see this type of activity all the time with Hedge Funds (a biz that I've got some experience in); many funds, previously based in the Cayman Islands, are now moving further afield, in the South Pacific simply because many of the Carribbean regimes now will honour US Judgements.