FASB's "mark-to-market" accounting rules forced AIG and Bear Stearns to admit that their liabilities had exceeded their assets, instead of allowing the companies to invent a price for the assets until the assets were finally sold.
For too darn long, companies could just make up prices for assets they wanted to value. Forcing the assets to be valued at what they're actually worth (i.e., what somebody will pay for them) is just common sense.
Sick and tired of people ragging on mark-to-market
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How To Create More Jobs
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· Score: 1, Interesting
FTFA:
FASB's "mark-to-market" accounting rules helped drive AIG and Bear Stearns into bankruptcy, even though they were cash-positive.
should be:
FASB's "mark-to-market" accounting rules forced AIG and Bear Stearns to admit that their liabilities had exceeded their assets, instead of allowing the companies to invent a price for the assets until were finally sold.
You have some of your facts wrong. According to the NY Times and Felt's Wikipedia entry, Felt wasn't Hoover's #2 - Clyde Tolson was. Felt was Hoover's #3, and only for a few years.
I'm not saying Felt was clean (his conviction on the Weather Underground case proves that), but he wasn't version 2 of Hoover.
You keep using that word^Wphrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.
What is wrong with free speech having consequences? If it didn't have consequences, it wouldn't be a right worth having. What, exactly, is the responsibility that needs to be exercised carefully here?
but now that every student has Internet access and a Myspace page makes it a lot more possible to create a serious disruption off-campus that spills into the school.
For several hundred years, it's been possible to mass-produce libelous documents. The Internet is not required for this.
One of the nice things about public schools is that they are supposed to teach the students about civil rights. This decision changes that. Now, the students are learning that they have no free speech rights, anywhere, as long as they are students.
Hopefully this will get reversed on appeal before it goes before SCOTUS. With the current, "whatever the government wants" mode that the Supreme Court is in, it would probably get affirmed.
The difference between tax law and accounting regulations means that even legally-run businesses have to keep books 1 and 2 anyway. The books are not exactly separate, but the numbers are different due to differences in depreciation schedules, etc.
But assuming that business are keeping books 1 and 2 entirely separate for fraudulent reasons, I think the government would pick up on the implied discrepancy between books 1 and 2 pretty quickly. If a business was losing money, surely the banks wouldn't keep lending it money (unless it's 1999 and the business's name ends with.com). To get at book #2, the IRS could easily issue subpoenas to the banks which issued the loans. So I think it would be risky to show a big discrepancy between 1 and 2 (though this is true for tax evasion and theft in general).
If they want to track your browsing, they'll install a proxy server on the network, and force all traffic through that. Any IT department that depends on disabling the Clear Private Data button is asking for trouble. Disabling the button can be done in conjunction with the proxy server, of course.
I'm a manager in a California-based software company, and "Are you legally authorized to work in the United States" has been a standard interview question in the many interviews I've been in (on either side of the desk). The only acceptable answer is "yes". You will be expected^W required to provide supporting documentation when you show up for work on your first day. If you can't provide this, you'll be escorted off the premises (or at least out the door).
Sure, you can get a job mowing lawns or cleaning houses if you want to work in the US illegally, but don't expect a software company of any reputation to hire you with no paperwork.
What if this is used by some terrorist organization to mount an attack?
What kind of terrorist organization is that - one that can't afford to buy its own fare cards? That's the only kind of group which would be affected by the ruling. You can buy a fare card for cash in every bus/train/subway system that I've been on, including the T.
Because anyone (latest DNS vulnerabilities for instance) can easily forge these certificates.
I agree with much of your post, but the above statement is incorrect. A self-signed certificate can be created by anyone, but they can't be forged. That is, the (self-created) certificate authority you use to sign the certificates won't be trusted by all browsers.
Scenario:
You create a site and secure with a certificate signed by a certificate authority that you created (aka a self-signed certificate).
You have a non-secure page that instructs users to add a security exception for your certificate authority.
Users connect to your site, add the security exception for your certificate authority, and use your site. So far, so good.
Someone hijacks your DNS and users get redirected to their web site.
Users who previously added an exception for your certificate authority get a warning message that the certificate authority is unknown.
So DNS vulnerabilities create no problem for your old users. The bad news is that new users and new browsers (who did not add your certificate authority to their browsers before the DNS attack) will be vulnerable to the attacker. The only defense to this is that the attacker's certificate authority will have a different MD5 fingerprint. In order to combat this attack, you should make sure that everyone knows the MD5 fingerprint for your certificate authority. You have to push this out not just via your web site, but in all your emails and other communication paths.
The other major downside of self-created certificate authorities is that the users have to really trust you. If someone acquired the private key for your CA (or if you turned evil) and decided to hijack DNS and create a certificate for citibank.com, signed by your certificate authority, those users who added a security exception for your CA would be fooled into thinking it was the real citibank.com.
So, as much as I hate Verisign, getting a certificate signed by one of the big CAs is worth the money. It's a lot cheaper than dealing with users frustrated by having to create a security exception.
Re:Biggest geek movie until X-Files?
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Batman Discussion
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· Score: 1
What makes it a big geek movie is that Batman attains (some of) his powers through use of technology. He doesn't have any super-powers like Superman or Spider-Man; he uses way cool kit to beat the bad guys. Plus a healthy dose of martial-arts training. Oh, and lets not forget the anger - lots of anger. But it's a geek movie in a way that Spider-Man will never be because of the gear.
At the risk of pointing out the the obvious, having a tilt sensor on the iPhone isn't what made it innovative. Using the tilt sensor to go into portrait mode made it innovative.
Furthermore, implementing a technology that was seen in a movie also qualifies as innovation. It's quite a bit easier to implement technology using computer-generated graphics than it is to implement it in real life.
Re:Kernel debugger?
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Linux 2.6.26 Out
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· Score: 4, Informative
Compare Russian Business Network, who do this for the same purpose: you won't betray the group if they have the dirt on you also.
If the FBI could finger one of the pirates (maybe on an unrelated charge), couldn't they roll up the rest of the group by offering a deal to the nabbed guy? Reduced time, amnesty, etc. if he rats out his buddies? If this tactic worked for the Italian Mafia, I'm sure it could work for movie pirates.
20 to life without a computer or an Internet connection, that is. He could write specifications and code in longhand, maybe even a find a typewriter, but that's not going to allow him to be a productive member of an open-source project.
Oil will never run out, but it will get more expensive because of reduced supply (more difficult and expensive to extract) and the same or increased demand. The world has probably exhausted its supply of $100 / barrel oil; it will be a while before it exhausts its supply of $200 / barrel oil. But you're probably right in that wars will start over scarcity of (cheap) oil. I think they'll start with food prices first, but the price of food is dependent on the price of oil, anyway. I don't know if having bases in the Middle East will help the U.S. a lot, especially if the wars go nuclear.
All the more reason to begin changing our energy supply to nuclear now. There's no reason we couldn't be driving around in electric-powered cars that get their energy from nuclear. But this won't happen until it's cheaper to do so than to drive around in fossil-fuel-powered cars.
Does anybody have any links to studies showing that streetlights reduce accidents or crime rates (and by how much)? I think the effect would be minimal, but I'm willing to listen to evidence to the contrary. A Google search shows one British town experimenting with turning off lights between midnight and 5 AM - it will be interesting to see how the accident and crime rates change.
(1) Except as provided by clause (2) of this subsection, the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just. For the purposes of this subsection, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work.
(2) In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000. In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200. The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives acting within the scope of his or her employment who, or such institution, library, or archives itself, which infringed by reproducing the work in copies or phonorecords; or (ii) a public broadcasting entity which or a person who, as a regular part of the nonprofit activities of a public broadcasting entity (as defined in subsection (g) of section 118) infringed by performing a published nondramatic literary work or by reproducing a transmission program embodying a performance of such a work.
The penalties built into the law are to deter the behavior, not just to remedy one infraction. We don't say to burglars, "that's OK, just give the stuff back and we're square" (I'm not equating copyright infringement and stealing, I'm just pointing out the nature of penalties).
The $1.5 million per CD is consistent with the law if we assume that the infringement was willful and there are 10 songs on the CD. If you assume that the CD is a work as a whole -- see the last sentence of part (1) above -- then $150,000 per CD is appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, wrong button. The second quote should be:
FASB's "mark-to-market" accounting rules forced AIG and Bear Stearns to admit that their liabilities had exceeded their assets, instead of allowing the companies to invent a price for the assets until the assets were finally sold.
For too darn long, companies could just make up prices for assets they wanted to value. Forcing the assets to be valued at what they're actually worth (i.e., what somebody will pay for them) is just common sense.
should be:
FASB's acc
I'm not saying Felt was clean (his conviction on the Weather Underground case proves that), but he wasn't version 2 of Hoover.
You keep using that word^Wphrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.
What is wrong with free speech having consequences? If it didn't have consequences, it wouldn't be a right worth having. What, exactly, is the responsibility that needs to be exercised carefully here?
For several hundred years, it's been possible to mass-produce libelous documents. The Internet is not required for this.
One of the nice things about public schools is that they are supposed to teach the students about civil rights. This decision changes that. Now, the students are learning that they have no free speech rights, anywhere, as long as they are students.
Hopefully this will get reversed on appeal before it goes before SCOTUS. With the current, "whatever the government wants" mode that the Supreme Court is in, it would probably get affirmed.
But assuming that business are keeping books 1 and 2 entirely separate for fraudulent reasons, I think the government would pick up on the implied discrepancy between books 1 and 2 pretty quickly. If a business was losing money, surely the banks wouldn't keep lending it money (unless it's 1999 and the business's name ends with .com). To get at book #2, the IRS could easily issue subpoenas to the banks which issued the loans. So I think it would be risky to show a big discrepancy between 1 and 2 (though this is true for tax evasion and theft in general).
Beta download site: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/worldwide-sites.aspx
Sure, you can get a job mowing lawns or cleaning houses if you want to work in the US illegally, but don't expect a software company of any reputation to hire you with no paperwork.
What kind of terrorist organization is that - one that can't afford to buy its own fare cards? That's the only kind of group which would be affected by the ruling. You can buy a fare card for cash in every bus/train/subway system that I've been on, including the T.
I agree with much of your post, but the above statement is incorrect. A self-signed certificate can be created by anyone, but they can't be forged. That is, the (self-created) certificate authority you use to sign the certificates won't be trusted by all browsers. Scenario:
So DNS vulnerabilities create no problem for your old users. The bad news is that new users and new browsers (who did not add your certificate authority to their browsers before the DNS attack) will be vulnerable to the attacker. The only defense to this is that the attacker's certificate authority will have a different MD5 fingerprint. In order to combat this attack, you should make sure that everyone knows the MD5 fingerprint for your certificate authority. You have to push this out not just via your web site, but in all your emails and other communication paths.
The other major downside of self-created certificate authorities is that the users have to really trust you. If someone acquired the private key for your CA (or if you turned evil) and decided to hijack DNS and create a certificate for citibank.com, signed by your certificate authority, those users who added a security exception for your CA would be fooled into thinking it was the real citibank.com.
So, as much as I hate Verisign, getting a certificate signed by one of the big CAs is worth the money. It's a lot cheaper than dealing with users frustrated by having to create a security exception.
What makes it a big geek movie is that Batman attains (some of) his powers through use of technology. He doesn't have any super-powers like Superman or Spider-Man; he uses way cool kit to beat the bad guys. Plus a healthy dose of martial-arts training. Oh, and lets not forget the anger - lots of anger. But it's a geek movie in a way that Spider-Man will never be because of the gear.
Furthermore, implementing a technology that was seen in a movie also qualifies as innovation. It's quite a bit easier to implement technology using computer-generated graphics than it is to implement it in real life.
Wrong. XML is case-sensitive, not lowercase. XHTML uses lowercase XML elements, but in general XML elements are not lowercase only.
If the FBI could finger one of the pirates (maybe on an unrelated charge), couldn't they roll up the rest of the group by offering a deal to the nabbed guy? Reduced time, amnesty, etc. if he rats out his buddies? If this tactic worked for the Italian Mafia, I'm sure it could work for movie pirates.
Wrong. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception
Yes, and damn that co-fascist Bill Clinton who appointed her to the federal bench! (see the third paragraph).
20 to life without a computer or an Internet connection, that is. He could write specifications and code in longhand, maybe even a find a typewriter, but that's not going to allow him to be a productive member of an open-source project.
Oil will never run out, but it will get more expensive because of reduced supply (more difficult and expensive to extract) and the same or increased demand. The world has probably exhausted its supply of $100 / barrel oil; it will be a while before it exhausts its supply of $200 / barrel oil. But you're probably right in that wars will start over scarcity of (cheap) oil. I think they'll start with food prices first, but the price of food is dependent on the price of oil, anyway. I don't know if having bases in the Middle East will help the U.S. a lot, especially if the wars go nuclear.
All the more reason to begin changing our energy supply to nuclear now. There's no reason we couldn't be driving around in electric-powered cars that get their energy from nuclear. But this won't happen until it's cheaper to do so than to drive around in fossil-fuel-powered cars.
Does anybody have any links to studies showing that streetlights reduce accidents or crime rates (and by how much)? I think the effect would be minimal, but I'm willing to listen to evidence to the contrary. A Google search shows one British town experimenting with turning off lights between midnight and 5 AM - it will be interesting to see how the accident and crime rates change.
Since Dr Felten is on the faculty at Princeton, perhaps Princeton could help him out with the legal fees. They could probably use some of their $10 billion endowment if necessary (yes, I know an endowment shouldn't be used for this purpose).
Which were you waiting for - the possibility of famine or the steep increase in price of food that you eat? Maybe both?
Nobody seems to have replied directly to your point, so I will: Yes. See http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1097.html
Single page link without the trailing slash, so that it actually works.
The penalties built into the law are to deter the behavior, not just to remedy one infraction. We don't say to burglars, "that's OK, just give the stuff back and we're square" (I'm not equating copyright infringement and stealing, I'm just pointing out the nature of penalties).
The $1.5 million per CD is consistent with the law if we assume that the infringement was willful and there are 10 songs on the CD. If you assume that the CD is a work as a whole -- see the last sentence of part (1) above -- then $150,000 per CD is appropriate.