DJIA ranks by share price, not market value, which is why there's a problem. If they split the stock a few times, the nominal stock price would drop, meaning that it wouldn't be a too-large component of the DJIA. (Not weighting it more than by share price is silly, but here we are.)
They have $69 Billion in equity, $23 billion in annual income (generously taking the four most recent quarters), and market cap of 382 Billion. That means it would take 13.6 years of income, at present rates (which are MUCH higher than historical rates) to break even. Around 207-230 Billion would be a fairly safe price, assuming they can keep up this level of income--and is a tad under 60% of their current market value.
They're not overvalued by 30x -- that would imply they were worth $12 billion, and their equity alone is better than five times that. But they are overvalued by at least 20-30% from the standpoint of a prudent investor.
Did you see the part about "not plain from the face of the document?"
You have the right to bare arms. But "arms" might include only the arms invented when the Constitution was passed, since those are the arms the founders had in mind when they wrote "arms," and giving the word any other meaning would be an undemocratic restriction in the power of the state. "Arms" might include everything from machine guns to atomic bombs to a knife. Or "arms" might mean something in the middle. It's not always obvious what something means.
It's not always obvious what "interstate commerce" means. What if you walk to the store through a shortcut that takes you through a neighboring state? What if your goods don't move to another state, but they influence goods that do?
When I, as a citizen, tell my representative that I want a law prohibiting murder, someone may have to come along twenty years later and decide whether murder includes, for example, the deliberate assault on a pregnant girl made in order to kill the fetus. (I read a case like this recently.) Someone has to decide whether that is legitimately an act that the law punishes.
Everything is not black and white. The Constitution is not some universally dogmatic truth that has a single meaning that works across every case where it comes up. What does "Due Process" mean? What process is due? What is unreasonable search and seizure? What makes it unreasonable?
You can decide not to obey the interpretations people give, but this isn't like the notes in the back of old Protestant family bibles, given by a church--this is there because not to interpret the language consistently would be unjust. Suppose Alice lives somewhere where people think "arms" include machine guns, but Bob lives in a place where people think "arms" only includes handguns. Now Alice has a constitutional right that Bob lacks, and that lack of uniformity--the lack of a body of precedent to establish meaning in the face of potential ambiguity--is unjust.
I agree that there is argument from "false justification," as you put it, but that is certainly not the only argument or basis for common law.
And if you think they are the worst sort of criminals... that you're wrong about. You may even hate them, but they are by no means the worst sort of criminals. Even if we were to take as a given that their action were crime. We live in a world where slavery, rape, and murder are exceedingly common. The Members of the judiciary, for the most part, are simply not that bad. Some of them may be arrogant, some of them may rule unjustly or unwisely, and most of them will do something pretty stupid at least once in their careers that has serious consequences for people. But I will not say that someone who sits on a bench and makes rulings for society as he was taught to do and as his society considers just is in any way a worse criminal than the men who routinely rape and arrange for the rape of sixteen-year-old girls. And that is even sticking to the common crimes, and leaving out things like genocide and war crimes.
$1000/hour is a lot for this kind of thing, unless you're bigpharm. It's worth noting that patent litigation--being in court--unlike patent "prosecution" (getting a patent)--can be done by any lawyer. You wouldn't want any lawyer, but it means the market is much bigger, so the prices don't have to be out of the budget of a corporation with limited capitalization.
So what you're saying is that we need legal reform of the way patents are handled in court, not just reform of the patenting system itself. That would be the only way to handle the "license is cheaper than lawsuit" problem. Maybe make the troll put up cash, which they loose if they can't show in court that their patent is valid? Making invalid lawsuits very expensive for the trolls.
That requires (1) that you take away the legal presumption of validity given to issued patents and (2) that VALID lawsuits will also be VERY expensive for inventors. The more expensive it is to file, defend, or otherwise be involved in a lawsuit, the more lopsided the legal system is in favor of major corporations.
Is it no longer required that the person filing be an inventor? Because if they stole your invention, even from a public website, I wouldn't think they'd be an inventor.
If it's obvious enough, I can walk into court and prove it. Although it's hard if I have better stuff to do with my time, then get stuck in discovery. And there is always the risk--however small--that the judge will side against you.
If the price tag for good representation makes it prohibitive for you to walk into court and prove it, then yes, you're screwed.
BUT the fact that prior art invalidates the patent means it may not get issued in the first place. And I think this has some more post-grant review procedures, doesn't it?
See -- you're mixing your terms there. Small, in the political sense, is a reference to "S" class corporations -- businesses with small ownership pools that pay tax like a partnership (owners treat corporate income as personal income). The "S" stands for "small," but many S corporations are anything but small, as in money and employees.
-GiH
WTF?
When Congress refers to Small Business owners they're only talking about S Corps?
Can you give some sort of citation for that claim. That's a pretty remarkable claim, considering that 90+% of America has little or no clue what an S-Corp is and Congress discusses small business owners not infrequently.
And yet in 2009, [IBM] received 4900 patents and in 2010 they received nearly 5900 which is more than any other company. IBM has for 18 consecutive years held the #1 position in granted patents . Reality doesn't seem to march your assertion.
That seems like a strange misuse of funds, if they're not using the patents for anything.
Although in the SCO debacle, they did whip out a patent for "hierarchical menu systems" IIRC. Talk about a "don't mess with IBM" patent...
> Microsoft supported it, Google opposed it. What more proof do we need that this act is evil?
So pro-data-privacy laws, for example, where Microsoft might benefit (via data privacy functionality it builds into healthvault, for example) where Google would not (since its goal is generally to collect all data) are necessarily evil?
The simple fact is that Microsoft has probably the largest patent warchest of any Corporation (not necessarily by dollar value--see bigpharm). They would be out of their minds not to support legislation favoring the big guy, and their board would have to be incompetent to do so under most ways of looking at corporate responsibility. If you had 10% of your savings in microsoft, would you want them to support something that will devalue a large asset of theirs?
Of course there are competing interests. I'm not saying it's the best law, or even an improvement. For many people it's not. For most slashdotters it's not.
On the other hand, you also have some pretty ridiculous transaction costs in the old system that this system gets rid of. If I'm working on developing a drug or software project, why should I need to have a day-by-day log of my progress each day, and a good excuse if I don't work on it on any day, or else I risk losing the patent? First-to-file eliminates the "you'd-better-not-take-a-vacation" rule (and the associated transaction costs) that used to apply when you wanted to prove that you invented before the first person to file. Even though those cases come up relatively rarely, it costs society a fair amount to *prepare* for that eventuality during the research on every major invention.
There is also a problem, in my view, that different fields really ought to have slightly different patent laws. It's crazy that a software patent has the same life as a major new transformative industrial process.
.. but I also can't really stand up for someone that posts utter dribble online then whines about not getting that professional job they want because they aren't professional..
There is something wrong when a profession seeks to regulate conduct beyond the bounds of the profession, whether formally or informally. If you do the job well, but you also, for example, have a drunk driving record, or a civil disobedience record, or even a felony murder record but you've served your time, why shouldn't you be able to be a doctor or lawyer where, for example, none of this has ever interfered with your duties to a patient or client?
We prohibit discrimination on the basis of race or sex or national origin. Why not prohibit discrimination based on, for example, the presence of racy photos of you online?
It really depends on what fairness is. If the government provides a fire department, the guy who owns the ten million dollar house may fairly be charged more than the guy who owns a shoebox. If the government provides a Defense Department, it may be fair to tax the guy who has more to lose if a war is lost more.
The real question is, what justifies taxation? If you should tax consumption because people consumer resources, then someone rich may well pay much more in absolute terms, or even in percentage terms, than someone poor, and it may still be fair under your definition.
But if you should tax wealth, not income or consumption, then fair may be proportional.
Consider this--how is it remotely fair to give a rich person the same fine for speeding that you give a poor person? The rich person can then simply buy noncompliance with the law, because the tax for speeding is not adjusted for personal utility.
Similarly, how is it fair that the rich have a disproportionate representation in Congress?
Why is it that sacking peons as fast and impersonally as possible makes you a strong, visionary, leader who is willing to make tough decisions; but sacking your CEO good and hard makes you a panicky dumbass?
Because your CEO is well-connected enough to have friends in the media.
Political games don't get work done, just theater for the idiots.
Political games can, however, determine who is in power for the next four years, which in turn has ramifications that can easily impact hundreds of millions of people. A democratic president might not have gone into Iraq the second time, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
nominal, i.e. zero. I'm leaving in some big margins, though. Straight 23 billion by six years or so, plus some leeway.
DJIA ranks by share price, not market value, which is why there's a problem. If they split the stock a few times, the nominal stock price would drop, meaning that it wouldn't be a too-large component of the DJIA. (Not weighting it more than by share price is silly, but here we are.)
Although come to think of it, being overpriced has never bothered Apple in the past. :)
They have $69 Billion in equity, $23 billion in annual income (generously taking the four most recent quarters), and market cap of 382 Billion. That means it would take 13.6 years of income, at present rates (which are MUCH higher than historical rates) to break even. Around 207-230 Billion would be a fairly safe price, assuming they can keep up this level of income--and is a tad under 60% of their current market value.
They're not overvalued by 30x -- that would imply they were worth $12 billion, and their equity alone is better than five times that. But they are overvalued by at least 20-30% from the standpoint of a prudent investor.
*Shrugs*
So? If they want to be in the Dow they can run a few stock splits.
Did you see the part about "not plain from the face of the document?"
You have the right to bare arms. But "arms" might include only the arms invented when the Constitution was passed, since those are the arms the founders had in mind when they wrote "arms," and giving the word any other meaning would be an undemocratic restriction in the power of the state. "Arms" might include everything from machine guns to atomic bombs to a knife. Or "arms" might mean something in the middle. It's not always obvious what something means.
It's not always obvious what "interstate commerce" means. What if you walk to the store through a shortcut that takes you through a neighboring state? What if your goods don't move to another state, but they influence goods that do?
When I, as a citizen, tell my representative that I want a law prohibiting murder, someone may have to come along twenty years later and decide whether murder includes, for example, the deliberate assault on a pregnant girl made in order to kill the fetus. (I read a case like this recently.) Someone has to decide whether that is legitimately an act that the law punishes.
Everything is not black and white. The Constitution is not some universally dogmatic truth that has a single meaning that works across every case where it comes up. What does "Due Process" mean? What process is due? What is unreasonable search and seizure? What makes it unreasonable?
You can decide not to obey the interpretations people give, but this isn't like the notes in the back of old Protestant family bibles, given by a church--this is there because not to interpret the language consistently would be unjust. Suppose Alice lives somewhere where people think "arms" include machine guns, but Bob lives in a place where people think "arms" only includes handguns. Now Alice has a constitutional right that Bob lacks, and that lack of uniformity--the lack of a body of precedent to establish meaning in the face of potential ambiguity--is unjust.
I agree that there is argument from "false justification," as you put it, but that is certainly not the only argument or basis for common law.
And if you think they are the worst sort of criminals... that you're wrong about. You may even hate them, but they are by no means the worst sort of criminals. Even if we were to take as a given that their action were crime. We live in a world where slavery, rape, and murder are exceedingly common. The Members of the judiciary, for the most part, are simply not that bad. Some of them may be arrogant, some of them may rule unjustly or unwisely, and most of them will do something pretty stupid at least once in their careers that has serious consequences for people. But I will not say that someone who sits on a bench and makes rulings for society as he was taught to do and as his society considers just is in any way a worse criminal than the men who routinely rape and arrange for the rape of sixteen-year-old girls. And that is even sticking to the common crimes, and leaving out things like genocide and war crimes.
If they can keep as a trade secret forever under the new one, expect some SCOTUS litigation over constitutionality.
$1000/hour is a lot for this kind of thing, unless you're bigpharm. It's worth noting that patent litigation--being in court--unlike patent "prosecution" (getting a patent)--can be done by any lawyer. You wouldn't want any lawyer, but it means the market is much bigger, so the prices don't have to be out of the budget of a corporation with limited capitalization.
Why would a hack you're trying to get funding for be prior art anyway, assuming you have NDAs?
So what you're saying is that we need legal reform of the way patents are handled in court, not just reform of the patenting system itself. That would be the only way to handle the "license is cheaper than lawsuit" problem. Maybe make the troll put up cash, which they loose if they can't show in court that their patent is valid? Making invalid lawsuits very expensive for the trolls.
That requires (1) that you take away the legal presumption of validity given to issued patents and (2) that VALID lawsuits will also be VERY expensive for inventors. The more expensive it is to file, defend, or otherwise be involved in a lawsuit, the more lopsided the legal system is in favor of major corporations.
Is it no longer required that the person filing be an inventor? Because if they stole your invention, even from a public website, I wouldn't think they'd be an inventor.
If it's obvious enough, I can walk into court and prove it. Although it's hard if I have better stuff to do with my time, then get stuck in discovery. And there is always the risk--however small--that the judge will side against you.
If the price tag for good representation makes it prohibitive for you to walk into court and prove it, then yes, you're screwed.
BUT the fact that prior art invalidates the patent means it may not get issued in the first place. And I think this has some more post-grant review procedures, doesn't it?
See -- you're mixing your terms there. Small, in the political sense, is a reference to "S" class corporations -- businesses with small ownership pools that pay tax like a partnership (owners treat corporate income as personal income). The "S" stands for "small," but many S corporations are anything but small, as in money and employees.
-GiH
WTF?
When Congress refers to Small Business owners they're only talking about S Corps?
Can you give some sort of citation for that claim. That's a pretty remarkable claim, considering that 90+% of America has little or no clue what an S-Corp is and Congress discusses small business owners not infrequently.
Corporations are people.
Large corporations are rich.
Not necessarily. They may be bankrupt.
And yet in 2009, [IBM] received 4900 patents and in 2010 they received nearly 5900 which is more than any other company. IBM has for 18 consecutive years held the #1 position in granted patents . Reality doesn't seem to march your assertion.
That seems like a strange misuse of funds, if they're not using the patents for anything.
Although in the SCO debacle, they did whip out a patent for "hierarchical menu systems" IIRC. Talk about a "don't mess with IBM" patent...
Read the opinion on AT&T's personal privacy right... it's hysterical.
"We trust that AT&T will not take it personally..."
> Microsoft supported it, Google opposed it. What more proof do we need that this act is evil?
So pro-data-privacy laws, for example, where Microsoft might benefit (via data privacy functionality it builds into healthvault, for example) where Google would not (since its goal is generally to collect all data) are necessarily evil?
The simple fact is that Microsoft has probably the largest patent warchest of any Corporation (not necessarily by dollar value--see bigpharm). They would be out of their minds not to support legislation favoring the big guy, and their board would have to be incompetent to do so under most ways of looking at corporate responsibility. If you had 10% of your savings in microsoft, would you want them to support something that will devalue a large asset of theirs?
Of course there are competing interests. I'm not saying it's the best law, or even an improvement. For many people it's not. For most slashdotters it's not.
On the other hand, you also have some pretty ridiculous transaction costs in the old system that this system gets rid of. If I'm working on developing a drug or software project, why should I need to have a day-by-day log of my progress each day, and a good excuse if I don't work on it on any day, or else I risk losing the patent? First-to-file eliminates the "you'd-better-not-take-a-vacation" rule (and the associated transaction costs) that used to apply when you wanted to prove that you invented before the first person to file. Even though those cases come up relatively rarely, it costs society a fair amount to *prepare* for that eventuality during the research on every major invention.
There is also a problem, in my view, that different fields really ought to have slightly different patent laws. It's crazy that a software patent has the same life as a major new transformative industrial process.
Why would you want to work for a company which feels justified in snooping and spying on their employees in the first place?
Because you can make a lot more money than working for a company that doesn't?
A political body fails to demonstrate the type of action it requires of others?
Shocking.
Now we live in a "that's more than good enough" landscape where sub-par is considered above average.
I'm not sure there was such a time, although it was certainly more common in certain cultures fifty years ago.
Also, if you come in under par, aren't you above average?
.. but I also can't really stand up for someone that posts utter dribble online then whines about not getting that professional job they want because they aren't professional..
There is something wrong when a profession seeks to regulate conduct beyond the bounds of the profession, whether formally or informally. If you do the job well, but you also, for example, have a drunk driving record, or a civil disobedience record, or even a felony murder record but you've served your time, why shouldn't you be able to be a doctor or lawyer where, for example, none of this has ever interfered with your duties to a patient or client?
We prohibit discrimination on the basis of race or sex or national origin. Why not prohibit discrimination based on, for example, the presence of racy photos of you online?
It really depends on what fairness is. If the government provides a fire department, the guy who owns the ten million dollar house may fairly be charged more than the guy who owns a shoebox. If the government provides a Defense Department, it may be fair to tax the guy who has more to lose if a war is lost more.
The real question is, what justifies taxation? If you should tax consumption because people consumer resources, then someone rich may well pay much more in absolute terms, or even in percentage terms, than someone poor, and it may still be fair under your definition.
But if you should tax wealth, not income or consumption, then fair may be proportional.
Consider this--how is it remotely fair to give a rich person the same fine for speeding that you give a poor person? The rich person can then simply buy noncompliance with the law, because the tax for speeding is not adjusted for personal utility.
Similarly, how is it fair that the rich have a disproportionate representation in Congress?
One of the nice features of the US is Civilian leadership of the military, based on something as odd as a vote.
See, e.g., MacArthur.
Why is it that sacking peons as fast and impersonally as possible makes you a strong, visionary, leader who is willing to make tough decisions; but sacking your CEO good and hard makes you a panicky dumbass?
Because your CEO is well-connected enough to have friends in the media.
Political games don't get work done, just theater for the idiots.
Political games can, however, determine who is in power for the next four years, which in turn has ramifications that can easily impact hundreds of millions of people. A democratic president might not have gone into Iraq the second time, for example.