First, a brokerage house cannot "borrow" shares from an account holder without that account holder's explicit permission. The shares used for a short sale usually come from the investment firm's in-house accounts, or through arrangements with other brokers.
Second, short sale contracts are generally arranged like margin trades. There are percentage and time constraints built in that will trigger a "call" on the part of the brokerage that will limit loses. The broker may require reserves or portfolio value to cover any calls. I suppose it would be possible to arrange for an open ended short sale, but that would be an exception. Particularly since shorting a stock is typically an attempt to make a quick profit.
Third, stockbrokers are supposed to screen customers before they allow them to engage in riskier trading practices. Joe Blow walking in off the street with no investment history and a $1000 nest egg shouldn't be able to short stocks right off the bat. It exposes the firm to consumer lawsuits and SEC action.
I've been looking for the right spot to post my own rant on this thread. This seems a likely spot.
I've spent the majority of my career doing contract work, and frankly I tend to prefer it. I've seen a lot of silliness over the years related to the relative status of perms vs. contractors but most of it was pretty trivial stuff. I'll take my rate and light at the end of the tunnel, thank you. I've never understood people who treat contract work like it was a salaried job.
As far as the legal status goes, the restrictions that companies place on technical contract staff are usually misguided and won't save them from getting zapped with the misclassification of those workers. Generally, though the various government entities don't bother chasing companies for this as long as taxes are being withheld by someone (other than the contractor). If you are a contract IT professional, you can thank the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) for the various oddball measures companies take to differentiate you from permanent staff. At the behest of several large services firms based in N.Y., he inserted language that repealed the safe harbor provision for various engineers and professionals in the 1986 Tax Reform bill. The result being that every direct contract (and a few indirects) I've had since then has had to have additional language (at additional time and expense) to cover my and my clients' asses with regard to the infamous 20 Questions. The "provides own equipment and materials" one was especially dicey in my mainframe days. I've actually had to buy contingency time-sharing (sort of an option to use someone else's MVS box).
Gee, it's awful nice of you to dictate to the/. community what causes are actually worthy. Saves us all the time that we'd spend making choices based on our own beliefs and needs. Maybe you'd like to help with our voting next time around? Wait, I need to go to the grocery this week. Surely you can provide me with a list of items that I need or want.
With all due respect (very little at the moment), I suggest it's you with your head up your ass.
Business is business? In that case, he/she should have at least gotten a verbal commitment to pay $RATE or $FEE for services rendered. Written would be better. The writer doesn't say that theydid, leaving me to infer that the work was done for free.
I suppose sending an invoice wouldn't hurt, but barring some kind of agreement on payment, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting to get paid. Or prevailing in small claims court, for that matter.
You were laid off (presumably to save money) by a company that didn't have the foresight to have someone, somewhere on retainer to fix brokes. And when things actually did break, instead of paying someone to fix it they call you and browbeat you into doing it for free? "Kind" isn't the word I'd use for that.
As a rule, I don't mind answering a quick question from a former client or employer. I figure that it generates good will, and even if I don't have any desire to work at that site again, at least I've improved my references. That being said, if something looks like it's either going to take more than an hour on the phone, require me to visit the site, or be ongoing, I politely suggest that I can't help them with out a minimum of a signed fax committing to $RATE plus $EXPENSES (and I require a contract for anything more than 2 days work). If I can't get a commitment on that, I figure someone is just looking to abuse me.
That is a really odd amount of money to demand "or face court action". In a lot of states, $2,500 doesn't get past small claims court. I suppose they could send it to a collection agency, but without something to prove that an actual debt was incurred, collecting could be a bitch.
I wish you had a website for this "Continental Enterprises" as well. Doesn't sound much like a law firm to me. Maybe a licensing agent?
Pretty much every request is logged, its part of the business, get used to it.
Uh, connections to an ISP's network are logged, along with access to ISP owned services like mail servers. AFAIK, nobody is logging every connection to outside networks. If you can prove otherwise, I'd love to see it.
While we're on the subject, this sort of crap is exactly why I dislike being forced to use the servers provided by my ISP. As far as I'm concerned, I'm paying for a pipe. I'd rather have my bandwidth throttled than be forced to use proxy servers.
If the intent of intellectual property law is as stated in the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, which seems to me to be promoting creative innovation, how do you reconcile that with the media industry's use of copyright as an attempt to supress technological advancement?
Of course, there is always the "IP law as revenue stream garuantee" school of thought.:)
Uhm, you're gonna have to define a potential public health or crime issue to make the recreational drug use analogy stick. But then again, my mom always told be I was gonna go blind from watching to much TV. Wait, maybe that was something else.
This is an attempt to control viewing of content. Big media would like very much to charge each an every person for every time any content is used, and Phillips is proposing something that would aid in that. Next thing you know, they'll be proposing biometric chips embedded in every consumer so if you are in the vicinity of a broadcast, your account can be automatically debited. Of course, the advertisers will want to know whether you were actually awake.
Gah. RMS tilting at windmills again, what a huge surprise. In this case I happened to be sypathetic, albeit for different reasons, so how about this:
Hi!
I received your email, but unfortunately our security scanner strips out Microsoft Office formats due the fact that they are known to carry macroviruses. Could you please resend your document in plain text format?
Model number sounds right. It was actually attached to a 4341, but a large chunk of the accounting system ran on an S/3 and the tapes moved back and forth between the systems. I never, ever want to see a 96-column punch card again.
Oh man, does that bring back memories (pardon the pun)!
In 1986, I was working for a small IBM shop that had a couple of those tilted 9-track jobbies (I forget the model, but it looked kinda like a psychotic drafting table), along with other assorted equipment of varying vintage. I came in one morning to find the whole place in a complete uproar over the fact that the previous night's accounting run was completely fsck'ed (ditto-ed?), with none of the totals syncing up. Since the on-line system needed that data to be correct, no one aside from the DP department was able to do anything. After 4 hours, we finally determined that the night operator (we had no tape-apes) had somehow inverted the tape while loading it, and the batch system simply disregarded the input for lack of a tape mark. 12 hours after that, every thing was finally synced and ready to go. The VP of DP ordered 2 brand spanking new 3480 drives the next day.
The law is indeed unambiguous, and states exactly what you say it does. However, the intent was to eliminate discrimination against older workers, and this is how it has been interpreted and enforced. The gentleman in question can certainly file a claim with EEOC or get a lawyer, but, as I noted previously, Satan is gonna have frosty balls before he gets anywhere with it.
Incidently, your second paragraph is a classic "he/she brought it on him/her self" reaction to a discrimination complaint. Not that I disagree.
That's real nice for you, and it probably gave you some valuable insights as to how things work in the real world. However, for what ever reasons, the American corporate community does not seem to regard any experience garnered while under 18 years of age as "real". Maybe it's the idea that a 16 year-old is just messing around earning video game money, maybe it's the perception that no one would really entrust anything worthwhile to a kid who can't even really be held legally accountable. It sucks, it's not fair, and it's life.
The really sad thing is that age discrimination is pretty much a one way street. The guy would have a better-than-even shot at collecting compensation if he were a 42 year-old coder being forced out because of his age (most HR departments demand such heavy documentation that managers don't even bother trying), but the chance that a 20 year-old can win on an age discrimination claim is approaching zero. He also runs the risk of being let go "without cause", which can happen to any "at will" employee. The only cost to the employer is higher unemployment insurance premiums, if the employee actually files a claim.
Yeah. The panic-mongers don't seem to understand that bankruptcy comes in different flavors, and that Chapter 11 is supposed to provide a company the ability to force a restructuring of its debt. Zilog should emerge from this in decent shape.
The real question here is when are people going to realize that hiring management from Lucent is a really bad idea? I haven't heard of a single company that hasn't had problems after installing one of these PHBs.
Established legal precedent can be overturned a number of ways, and this is exactly what is happening in the US right now. The DMCA and some novel approaches to IP litigation are eroding your and my right to make fair and legitimate use of material that we have paid for.
My ignorant view has nothing to do with it. The Entertainment industry's greed coupled with campaign donations to grease the skids of slanted legislation and money for judicial seminars on IP have everything to do with it.
Since you've obviously missed the point, let me spell it out for you: people who set up business models based on tools or services that will be predominated by what the entertainment and media industries perceive as copyright violations are providing the traction for damage that's being done to the concept of fair use. They are not helping, they are hurting.
I'm not sad about this. Frankly, I don't know if US Fair Use principles extend to the EU, but this type of stuff is the worst enemy of legitimate sharing of materials. The bottom line is that when you set up an enterprise to make a profit from the wholesale transfer of copyrighted material, you're gonna get hit. I know that some people are going to scream "it's just software". Bullshit. These folks are running an companies based on copyright violation, plain and simple. They get what they deserve.
Lest anyone think I'm sympathetic with the current system, everyone in the Net community already knows how to fix this: roll yer own. Trade amogst yourselves, break the encoding, distribute free of charge. It may take a while, but if the technically literate help the clueless to make fair use of materials, then eventually the IP hardcore types will lose.
Very true, but I really don't know of anyone offering that type of service anymore. Frame is much easier to deal with for the ISP than having to deal with each individual DS0 and the multiplexing issues involved in a channelized T1. For that matter, throttling the bandwidth at the ISP's switch for a straight T1 is easier still.
I agree, except with one thing: the cost of laying the cable is irrelevant because they will do this to provide Cable TV to a very large percentage of customers who do not (and probably will not in the near future) subscribe to broadband internet service.
Actually, T1 is unmetered by definition. Burstable frame relay over a T1 last mile is something different.
I actually looked into what it would cost me to put in a point-to-point T1 connection with a first tier ISP, versus what it would cost me to contract with Time Warner for Business Class Roadrunner service with the same features. By the time I added up all the a la carte stuff for TW (extra IPs, service, and whatnot), the T1 was cheaper.
The entire Internet is "shared bandwidth". If I pay for a pipe, whether it be OC48 or dialup, I'm paying for bandwidth, not a device count. How I use that bandwidth is up to me. The cable companies have the option of throttling customers bandwidth usage (aside from the advertising, there really isn't anything promising X/kbps), but they probably won't because of the resultant bad publicity. From where I sit, this looks like a case of out and out, big company greed.
This also something of a red herring. Remember, cable companies aren't really telcos. They have no institutional concept of things like demarcs, CPE, and CME. As far as they are concerned, it's their network, and they have the right to talk to any device connected to it.
That being said, I'm not terribly worried about this. The bottom line is that walling then off from your home network will still be possible, plus I don't really see the equipment makers buying into this. There are already cable "routers" that not only have programmable MAC addresses, but that automagically adopt the MAC of the first device plugged into the hub side, so it looks like your cable/DSL modem is speaking to a pee-cee. Failing that, a cheap miniboard 486 or pentium with 2 ethernet cards works nicely.
The primary issue I've always had with RMS is his ego-driven approach to running the FSF. And to top it off, lately he seems to have adopted some sort of weird "ebmrace and extend" approach to dealing with the rest of the world (insisting on sticking GNU on the linux name being the first example I can think of).
Don't get me wrong. The world is a better place for having the GNU tools and projects, and the fact that they exist has certainly made my life easier over the years. But I'm starting to believe that Stallman thinks of himself as GNU and the FSF, and that is not good for either him or the free software community.
First off, one of the primary selling points of RDBMSes originally was a standard DML that was relatively easily learned. Anyone who has ever written any IMS DML knows what a pain going done multiple trees to get the correct result set can be in a "hierarchical" model. Plus the fun of possibly losing your place in the chain. Think multiple, interrelated linked lists and you start to get an idea of the pain involved. Of course, this doesn't mean that the average programmer writes good SQL.
Second, "hierarchal" vs. "relational" is a logical concept. People seem to get wrapped up in what is better way of storing things and not remembering that they are dealing with an abstraction. It is completely possibly to put a SQL front end on another style DBMS and force coders to think in sets (CA did this with IDMS 10 years ago). Conversely, you could store LDAP data in Oracle and you'd still think of it as a tree structure.
As far as XML goes, if I were only dealing with data that would be handled in XML documents, and there was a standard "XML database management system", then I would be inclined to use that XDMS. However, I suspect that the real world set of that intersection is rather small.
Slashdot Mirror
First, a brokerage house cannot "borrow" shares from an account holder without that account holder's explicit permission. The shares used for a short sale usually come from the investment firm's in-house accounts, or through arrangements with other brokers.
Second, short sale contracts are generally arranged like margin trades. There are percentage and time constraints built in that will trigger a "call" on the part of the brokerage that will limit loses. The broker may require reserves or portfolio value to cover any calls. I suppose it would be possible to arrange for an open ended short sale, but that would be an exception. Particularly since shorting a stock is typically an attempt to make a quick profit.
Third, stockbrokers are supposed to screen customers before they allow them to engage in riskier trading practices. Joe Blow walking in off the street with no investment history and a $1000 nest egg shouldn't be able to short stocks right off the bat. It exposes the firm to consumer lawsuits and SEC action.
I've been looking for the right spot to post my own rant on this thread. This seems a likely spot.
I've spent the majority of my career doing contract work, and frankly I tend to prefer it. I've seen a lot of silliness over the years related to the relative status of perms vs. contractors but most of it was pretty trivial stuff. I'll take my rate and light at the end of the tunnel, thank you. I've never understood people who treat contract work like it was a salaried job.
As far as the legal status goes, the restrictions that companies place on technical contract staff are usually misguided and won't save them from getting zapped with the misclassification of those workers. Generally, though the various government entities don't bother chasing companies for this as long as taxes are being withheld by someone (other than the contractor). If you are a contract IT professional, you can thank the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) for the various oddball measures companies take to differentiate you from permanent staff. At the behest of several large services firms based in N.Y., he inserted language that repealed the safe harbor provision for various engineers and professionals in the 1986 Tax Reform bill. The result being that every direct contract (and a few indirects) I've had since then has had to have additional language (at additional time and expense) to cover my and my clients' asses with regard to the infamous 20 Questions. The "provides own equipment and materials" one was especially dicey in my mainframe days. I've actually had to buy contingency time-sharing (sort of an option to use someone else's MVS box).
Gee, it's awful nice of you to dictate to the /. community what causes are actually worthy. Saves us all the time that we'd spend making choices based on our own beliefs and needs. Maybe you'd like to help with our voting next time around? Wait, I need to go to the grocery this week. Surely you can provide me with a list of items that I need or want.
With all due respect (very little at the moment), I suggest it's you with your head up your ass.
Business is business? In that case, he/she should have at least gotten a verbal commitment to pay $RATE or $FEE for services rendered. Written would be better. The writer doesn't say that theydid, leaving me to infer that the work was done for free.
I suppose sending an invoice wouldn't hurt, but barring some kind of agreement on payment, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting to get paid. Or prevailing in small claims court, for that matter.
You were laid off (presumably to save money) by a company that didn't have the foresight to have someone, somewhere on retainer to fix brokes. And when things actually did break, instead of paying someone to fix it they call you and browbeat you into doing it for free? "Kind" isn't the word I'd use for that.
As a rule, I don't mind answering a quick question from a former client or employer. I figure that it generates good will, and even if I don't have any desire to work at that site again, at least I've improved my references. That being said, if something looks like it's either going to take more than an hour on the phone, require me to visit the site, or be ongoing, I politely suggest that I can't help them with out a minimum of a signed fax committing to $RATE plus $EXPENSES (and I require a contract for anything more than 2 days work). If I can't get a commitment on that, I figure someone is just looking to abuse me.
That is a really odd amount of money to demand "or face court action". In a lot of states, $2,500 doesn't get past small claims court. I suppose they could send it to a collection agency, but without something to prove that an actual debt was incurred, collecting could be a bitch.
I wish you had a website for this "Continental Enterprises" as well. Doesn't sound much like a law firm to me. Maybe a licensing agent?
The applicable patent for GIF had to do with LZW compression, and was/is owned by Unisys.
Pretty much every request is logged, its part of the business, get used to it.
Uh, connections to an ISP's network are logged, along with access to ISP owned services like mail servers. AFAIK, nobody is logging every connection to outside networks. If you can prove otherwise, I'd love to see it.
While we're on the subject, this sort of crap is exactly why I dislike being forced to use the servers provided by my ISP. As far as I'm concerned, I'm paying for a pipe. I'd rather have my bandwidth throttled than be forced to use proxy servers.
If the intent of intellectual property law is as stated in the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, which seems to me to be promoting creative innovation, how do you reconcile that with the media industry's use of copyright as an attempt to supress technological advancement?
:)
Of course, there is always the "IP law as revenue stream garuantee" school of thought.
You think that a mere cancelation will stop Zim!!??? You have no idea, you worthless, weak . . .
.......
grr! grr! Stop that! What are you doing!!?? No! Don touch that
Uhm, you're gonna have to define a potential public health or crime issue to make the recreational drug use analogy stick. But then again, my mom always told be I was gonna go blind from watching to much TV. Wait, maybe that was something else.
This is an attempt to control viewing of content. Big media would like very much to charge each an every person for every time any content is used, and Phillips is proposing something that would aid in that. Next thing you know, they'll be proposing biometric chips embedded in every consumer so if you are in the vicinity of a broadcast, your account can be automatically debited. Of course, the advertisers will want to know whether you were actually awake.
Gah. RMS tilting at windmills again, what a huge surprise. In this case I happened to be sypathetic, albeit for different reasons, so how about this:
Hi!
I received your email, but unfortunately our security scanner strips out Microsoft Office formats due the fact that they are known to carry macroviruses. Could you please resend your document in plain text format?
Model number sounds right. It was actually attached to a 4341, but a large chunk of the accounting system ran on an S/3 and the tapes moved back and forth between the systems. I never, ever want to see a 96-column punch card again.
Oh man, does that bring back memories (pardon the pun)!
In 1986, I was working for a small IBM shop that had a couple of those tilted 9-track jobbies (I forget the model, but it looked kinda like a psychotic drafting table), along with other assorted equipment of varying vintage. I came in one morning to find the whole place in a complete uproar over the fact that the previous night's accounting run was completely fsck'ed (ditto-ed?), with none of the totals syncing up. Since the on-line system needed that data to be correct, no one aside from the DP department was able to do anything. After 4 hours, we finally determined that the night operator (we had no tape-apes) had somehow inverted the tape while loading it, and the batch system simply disregarded the input for lack of a tape mark. 12 hours after that, every thing was finally synced and ready to go. The VP of DP ordered 2 brand spanking new 3480 drives the next day.
The law is indeed unambiguous, and states exactly what you say it does. However, the intent was to eliminate discrimination against older workers, and this is how it has been interpreted and enforced. The gentleman in question can certainly file a claim with EEOC or get a lawyer, but, as I noted previously, Satan is gonna have frosty balls before he gets anywhere with it.
Incidently, your second paragraph is a classic "he/she brought it on him/her self" reaction to a discrimination complaint. Not that I disagree.
That's real nice for you, and it probably gave you some valuable insights as to how things work in the real world. However, for what ever reasons, the American corporate community does not seem to regard any experience garnered while under 18 years of age as "real". Maybe it's the idea that a 16 year-old is just messing around earning video game money, maybe it's the perception that no one would really entrust anything worthwhile to a kid who can't even really be held legally accountable. It sucks, it's not fair, and it's life.
The really sad thing is that age discrimination is pretty much a one way street. The guy would have a better-than-even shot at collecting compensation if he were a 42 year-old coder being forced out because of his age (most HR departments demand such heavy documentation that managers don't even bother trying), but the chance that a 20 year-old can win on an age discrimination claim is approaching zero. He also runs the risk of being let go "without cause", which can happen to any "at will" employee. The only cost to the employer is higher unemployment insurance premiums, if the employee actually files a claim.
Yeah. The panic-mongers don't seem to understand that bankruptcy comes in different flavors, and that Chapter 11 is supposed to provide a company the ability to force a restructuring of its debt. Zilog should emerge from this in decent shape.
The real question here is when are people going to realize that hiring management from Lucent is a really bad idea? I haven't heard of a single company that hasn't had problems after installing one of these PHBs.
And Napster is still up and running, right?
Established legal precedent can be overturned a number of ways, and this is exactly what is happening in the US right now. The DMCA and some novel approaches to IP litigation are eroding your and my right to make fair and legitimate use of material that we have paid for.
My ignorant view has nothing to do with it. The Entertainment industry's greed coupled with campaign donations to grease the skids of slanted legislation and money for judicial seminars on IP have everything to do with it.
Since you've obviously missed the point, let me spell it out for you: people who set up business models based on tools or services that will be predominated by what the entertainment and media industries perceive as copyright violations are providing the traction for damage that's being done to the concept of fair use. They are not helping, they are hurting.
I'm not sad about this. Frankly, I don't know if US Fair Use principles extend to the EU, but this type of stuff is the worst enemy of legitimate sharing of materials. The bottom line is that when you set up an enterprise to make a profit from the wholesale transfer of copyrighted material, you're gonna get hit. I know that some people are going to scream "it's just software". Bullshit. These folks are running an companies based on copyright violation, plain and simple. They get what they deserve.
Lest anyone think I'm sympathetic with the current system, everyone in the Net community already knows how to fix this: roll yer own. Trade amogst yourselves, break the encoding, distribute free of charge. It may take a while, but if the technically literate help the clueless to make fair use of materials, then eventually the IP hardcore types will lose.
Very true, but I really don't know of anyone offering that type of service anymore. Frame is much easier to deal with for the ISP than having to deal with each individual DS0 and the multiplexing issues involved in a channelized T1. For that matter, throttling the bandwidth at the ISP's switch for a straight T1 is easier still.
I agree, except with one thing: the cost of laying the cable is irrelevant because they will do this to provide Cable TV to a very large percentage of customers who do not (and probably will not in the near future) subscribe to broadband internet service.
Actually, T1 is unmetered by definition. Burstable frame relay over a T1 last mile is something different.
I actually looked into what it would cost me to put in a point-to-point T1 connection with a first tier ISP, versus what it would cost me to contract with Time Warner for Business Class Roadrunner service with the same features. By the time I added up all the a la carte stuff for TW (extra IPs, service, and whatnot), the T1 was cheaper.
Bzzzt. Try again.
The entire Internet is "shared bandwidth". If I pay for a pipe, whether it be OC48 or dialup, I'm paying for bandwidth, not a device count. How I use that bandwidth is up to me. The cable companies have the option of throttling customers bandwidth usage (aside from the advertising, there really isn't anything promising X/kbps), but they probably won't because of the resultant bad publicity. From where I sit, this looks like a case of out and out, big company greed.
This also something of a red herring. Remember, cable companies aren't really telcos. They have no institutional concept of things like demarcs, CPE, and CME. As far as they are concerned, it's their network, and they have the right to talk to any device connected to it.
That being said, I'm not terribly worried about this. The bottom line is that walling then off from your home network will still be possible, plus I don't really see the equipment makers buying into this. There are already cable "routers" that not only have programmable MAC addresses, but that automagically adopt the MAC of the first device plugged into the hub side, so it looks like your cable/DSL modem is speaking to a pee-cee. Failing that, a cheap miniboard 486 or pentium with 2 ethernet cards works nicely.
Bingo.
The primary issue I've always had with RMS is his ego-driven approach to running the FSF. And to top it off, lately he seems to have adopted some sort of weird "ebmrace and extend" approach to dealing with the rest of the world (insisting on sticking GNU on the linux name being the first example I can think of).
Don't get me wrong. The world is a better place for having the GNU tools and projects, and the fact that they exist has certainly made my life easier over the years. But I'm starting to believe that Stallman thinks of himself as GNU and the FSF, and that is not good for either him or the free software community.
First off, one of the primary selling points of RDBMSes originally was a standard DML that was relatively easily learned. Anyone who has ever written any IMS DML knows what a pain going done multiple trees to get the correct result set can be in a "hierarchical" model. Plus the fun of possibly losing your place in the chain. Think multiple, interrelated linked lists and you start to get an idea of the pain involved. Of course, this doesn't mean that the average programmer writes good SQL.
Second, "hierarchal" vs. "relational" is a logical concept. People seem to get wrapped up in what is better way of storing things and not remembering that they are dealing with an abstraction. It is completely possibly to put a SQL front end on another style DBMS and force coders to think in sets (CA did this with IDMS 10 years ago). Conversely, you could store LDAP data in Oracle and you'd still think of it as a tree structure.
As far as XML goes, if I were only dealing with data that would be handled in XML documents, and there was a standard "XML database management system", then I would be inclined to use that XDMS. However, I suspect that the real world set of that intersection is rather small.