No.... employment or hiring employees is not an investment, companies hiring employees is a necessity but
a drag and a friction on the economy which lowers production per invested dollar, but often a requirement,
and a cost of doing non-passive business in the real world.
Employment one of the largest costs of doing business, so successful companies that build our economy
and produce most of the things we require seek to minimize this expense, which maximizes the benefits
to society of that company's production output (by keeping costs low for consumers).
There are many ways they minimize it; mostly by leveraging overseas employees, and using machines instead of employees to
do as much production work as possible.
The ideal company for society would spend all their $$$ on production and growth, and employ zero homo sapiens.
Also, the cost of their products to end consumers would be close to zero, and their profit margin would be close to 100% of
the money they take in.
It's called currency because it only functions when moving. When corporations sit on cash, everyone else suffers.
Nonsense..... people only suffer from cash hording when the cash is limited and scarce. In our economic system, the federal reserve bank decides what borrowing rates should be and manufacturers more cash on demand, as much needed to reach targets, whenever interest rates exceed whatever their target number is, therefore, there is an unlimited amount of cash as needed.
The real suffering of the public is caused by low interest rates on savings and inflation.
This is a consequence of pumping endless amounts of money in the system to help the big banks make profits.
Why do you think technology companies sit on cash? It's not because there is no motive to make a re-investment.
It's because a judicious opportunity does not exist for them to invest that cash; any tax-based motivation is attempting
to pressure them into making an otherwise unworthy or reckless investment.
If interest rates were higher, they would find a judicious investment more easily, such as by lending it out,
since the interest would be more comparable to potential returns from their business.
It just seems to me that anyone who is making less than that, say $45,000 would just get a pay increase to the minimum and continue to be worked 50-60+ hours a week.
Yeah... the $50K doesn't even seem adequate. It would have been 5 or 6 years ago.
They should put the threshold at $80K today.
Exactly.... Imagine of cars were sold this way. Advertised as: Can go from 1 to 60mph in 6 seconds; In the fine print: the engine is limited how long it can operate a speed above 25 Mph.... the limit is 5 minutes per day.
they also have to be motivated to reinvest a healthy portion, in which case they won't have to part taxes on it.
Why? What's wrong with them holding cash which they might require at any moment, that it should be penalized?
It would also be satisfactory if they give shareholders a refundable tax credit against dividends for taxes paid by the company, step up in cost basis for their share of taxes paid not credited by dividends.
Companies should pay income tax, OR their shareholders should, But NOT both, otherwise the shareholders are paying tax TWICE for the same profits (Once when the company makes them, And again when the shareholder is paid their dividends, Or they sell their units to realize the value increased by the company's profit).
Also, it is probably preferable that only the shareholders should pay the tax,
Because making the company pay the tax is unfair to Low-income shareholders who would be in a lower income tax bracket.
Also, making the company itself pay income tax is unfair to "Qualified investors" such as Retirement accounts which are supposed to be Tax-Free or Deferred Tax in order to help Low-Income/Middle-class people to provide for their financial needs in retirement, when they will be too old to work.
But considering that the hacked device yielded no useful information, I think the only statement that the FBI has made is that they're fucking idiots.
They were going on a fishing expedition...... Seeing as they had no real reason to believe the phone would have contained evidence of a crime. They just figured that since they knew who the criminals were, there might be a chance that they left some incriminating artifact on their cell phones ---- whose nature they were only guessing.
If they had put that $1 million into actual legwork, true sleuthing and investigative work on this case early on, and no lazy "Hope to scan their phones bullshit", then they might have solved whatever mystery remained open.
For starters..... Cookies are why I can navigate to http://slashdot.org/ every evening and post a comment without having to go through the repetitive task of typing in Yet another username and password every day.
Cookies are why I can go to Youtube and watch a video..... the first time I see one, there will be an Ad shown.....
Then I can go back and visit Youtube.com a few minutes later, find a new video, and they will give me a break because i've just seen an Ad ---- they won't force me to sit through another 2 minute pre-roll Advert again for at least a while, because Cookies told them they already made me watch that crap on their website.
Those are just two uses of cookies that benefit me greatly and aren't a privacy issue.
Everybody tracks though.... essentially.... every major company has reasons to; it's not a privacy issue; it's to the users' benefit, and should not be impeded by the government.
Tracking users moving between pages on your own website is vital for administration of your website for various reasons; at the very least, all responsible webmasters want to know if you got a 504 or 503 error, which page it came from, and the stream of clicks you made within their website will provide debugging clues.
Then your user design folks want to know some basic information, like which clusters of pages do different groups of users view, And this plays into future choices regarding what the page layouts should look like in later versions of the website.
Laws should request the result, not the method of getting there.
Cookies have many important uses; most of them perfectly legitimate with no privacy ramifications.
It is only abuse of cookies that pose a risk, and what might be regulated should be the potential result of motivations for abuse, not the means.
They should repeal the cookie directive and replace it with a "Privacy Directive", regarding
retaining and linking personally identifiable information to web history gathered from 3rd party websites And only linking, making record of an association, or inferring personal information gathered by the same website when the information is requested and submitted through an interactive form, and all information that will be linked when information was provided is conspiciously disclosed.
In the case of the sale of a publicly traded company, shareholders do get to make the decision, not Management.
FALSE. Many companies have multiple classes of shareholders, The Common shares, and another class of shares held by management and their heirs, where the Common shares have Zero or reduced voting rights.
Example: The Blackstone Group LP (BX): Our common unitholders do not elect our general partner or vote on our general partner’s directors and have limited ability to influence decisions regarding our business
In Tesla's case; Shareholders are prevented from influencing the business by the Articles of Organization requiring a very high Supermajority for any resolution. More than 66% required to be in favor; meaning that management's 34% stake in Tesla is sufficient to block any action.
He opted to go with the IPO and now a number of us own shares in the company.
Shareholders provide investment funds but do not manage the company or get to make decisions about it; if the management doesn't approve the
sale it's not likely to be doable, and doesn't matter if the CXo has 1/5 or 1/10 the shares.
In some companies, shareholders have additional rights --- it just depends on organizational structure and bylaws.
You don't buy and retain shares in a company, if you fundamentally do not agree with what direction management will be expected to take the business.
If you want your investment property sold out to the highest bidder anytime the price is right, then buy shares in a company whose management will do that.
At this point, you'd think there would be a whole industry of companies you could sell your interest in the $42 to, who would give you five bucks and automate the process of suing the parasites to hell.
Because we love capitalism and hate the government for any and everything?
That's not why. The current situation is almost as far-removed from capitalism as you can get --- it's the opposite of capitalism, where the government creates a monopoly and incentivizes the monopolist to abuse their position, and doesn't do much to reign them in.
A shell is not built to prevent you from shooting yourself into the foot. It's built to optimize the aiming
It is a UI design defect however, that it makes it too easy to accidentally aim it in the wrong place and shoot.
Even firearms generally have a trigger safety of some kind.
What do you use "rm $foo/*" for? I find that if I want to empty a directory, I generally want it deleted as well.
Maybe don't want to delete the directory if it contains temporary or spool files, for example
rm -rf $tmpdir/*
Of course it would be possible to design new safeguards, But I think they're unlikely to be implemented...
1. Shell modification: When a variable is unset Or set to Blank, the shell should return an error by default, instead of executing the command with a blank; require a declarative structure such as ${tmpdir:-""}
OR Shell modification with/bin/rm modification:
2. The shell is modified to export an environment variable containing the *ACTUAL* command line After variable expansion, and after compression of globbing E.g./** to/*, but before "list of files" expansion.
3. Rm is modified to check if a subdirectory of / is referenced; If so, the variable is inspected for shell globbing.
Rm is modified to require a command line option to proceed with the delete if files in / or an immediate subdirectory were expanded by Shell globbing
OR/bin/rm modification:
4. Instead of just checking for "/" check for the 2nd level as well.
Any directory directly under / has a --no-preserve-first that also has to be used, instead of just a --no-preserve root.
5. This gets expanded with an/etc file listing critical system directories. Any recursive deletion of the root of a critical system directory requires a --no-preserve-system
Customers who want broadband don't really care if the medium is cable or wireless if the service is the same.
Nonsense..... We know wireless is always subject to interference and limitations that come from wireless; we need both landline and wireless for different applications. The fact is SERVICE IS NOT THE SAME, And Physics dictates that service cannot be made the same.
The competition comes from the same service; the medium is irrelevant.
No it isn't.... The change of medium is a step change. There MUST be competition within comparable medium to achieve efficient conditions for consumers.
The internet and ebooks and e-magazines have put local magazine stores out of business.
So what? Some methods of sale are superior to other mediums. They are competing technologies, not competing businesses. The shift from local magazine stores to electronic distribution doesn't reflect anything about the quality of the local magazine stores.
Their costs are different, and so are the costs of buying from them.
By the way, the Electronic magazine stores could be literally raping consumers and STILL be less expensive than local magazine stores due to the different costs of the different publication media.
For what it's worth, removing "*" recursively is a weird use case (99% of the time, you would just delete the directory),
Is that 99% supposed to be based on actual research? I have seen developers commit many accidents involving the rm command and shell globbing. Also, many newbies using Shell globbing when it is not needed, and command options when they are not needed such as "-r", Or running as a root user when they should not be.
One example is the user types 'rm -rf *.o' when they intended to key 'rm -rf *.o'
If their Current Working Directory happens to be/, then it's equivalent to rm -rf/*.
This prevents the root itself from being deleted, but you can still do rm -rf/*
even with no --no-preserve-root
There are iterations which still accidentally cause a full system deletion, even with this safeguard in place.
Netflix did do video wrong; they really do stream it in real time like VoIP.
I think they were all but physically forced to do it wrong by copyright holders.
But if you are an ISP with enough traffic to Netflix, they'll deploy caching boxes into your POPs/datacenters
For free.
It's just that the largest service providers who want to charge Netflix for the privilege of more bandwidth are unwilling to do that, while Mid-Sized providers such as local ISPs are very happy to do so, But due to "Industry consolidation"; (The US regulatory climate favors large providers and hurts small ISPs!), there are not that many providers left who prioritize maximizing the customer experience.
It is this myopic view that is really the fault of "there ought to be a law" crowd
Actually; it's more like Dear Federal government: YOU created this monster by giving special grants to incumbents and approving corporate mergers that resulted in a centralization of what used to be local ISPs into a few major companies. Now YOU tame your monster and work on a plan of putting permanent free-market checks against it.
By the way: 4G, Cable Internet, DSL, Satellite Internet, Fibre, and providers are NOT competitive with each other. There is competing technology there, Yes.
You only have true competition, when there are multiple providers with access to the same kind of service medium; such as multiple Fibre providers attempting to serve an entire market.
Comcast Cable Internet, Verizon Wireless, and ATT DSL are NOT competitors; They are monopolists with slight variations on a theme, and many people are only willing to be served by Zero or One landline broadband provider.
Slashdot Mirror
Investment means employment.
No.... employment or hiring employees is not an investment, companies hiring employees is a necessity but a drag and a friction on the economy which lowers production per invested dollar, but often a requirement, and a cost of doing non-passive business in the real world.
Employment one of the largest costs of doing business, so successful companies that build our economy and produce most of the things we require seek to minimize this expense, which maximizes the benefits to society of that company's production output (by keeping costs low for consumers).
There are many ways they minimize it; mostly by leveraging overseas employees, and using machines instead of employees to do as much production work as possible.
The ideal company for society would spend all their $$$ on production and growth, and employ zero homo sapiens.
Also, the cost of their products to end consumers would be close to zero, and their profit margin would be close to 100% of the money they take in.
It's called currency because it only functions when moving. When corporations sit on cash, everyone else suffers.
Nonsense..... people only suffer from cash hording when the cash is limited and scarce. In our economic system, the federal reserve bank decides what borrowing rates should be and manufacturers more cash on demand, as much needed to reach targets, whenever interest rates exceed whatever their target number is, therefore, there is an unlimited amount of cash as needed.
The real suffering of the public is caused by low interest rates on savings and inflation. This is a consequence of pumping endless amounts of money in the system to help the big banks make profits.
Why do you think technology companies sit on cash? It's not because there is no motive to make a re-investment. It's because a judicious opportunity does not exist for them to invest that cash; any tax-based motivation is attempting to pressure them into making an otherwise unworthy or reckless investment.
If interest rates were higher, they would find a judicious investment more easily, such as by lending it out, since the interest would be more comparable to potential returns from their business.
It just seems to me that anyone who is making less than that, say $45,000 would just get a pay increase to the minimum and continue to be worked 50-60+ hours a week.
Yeah... the $50K doesn't even seem adequate. It would have been 5 or 6 years ago. They should put the threshold at $80K today.
claimed that black holes could be portals to a parallel universe.
Portal to a parallel universe in which you no longer exist, or time stops for you, forever; if you are foolish enough to fly into one.
Exactly.... Imagine of cars were sold this way. Advertised as: Can go from 1 to 60mph in 6 seconds; In the fine print: the engine is limited how long it can operate a speed above 25 Mph.... the limit is 5 minutes per day.
they also have to be motivated to reinvest a healthy portion, in which case they won't have to part taxes on it.
Why? What's wrong with them holding cash which they might require at any moment, that it should be penalized?
It would also be satisfactory if they give shareholders a refundable tax credit against dividends for taxes paid by the company, step up in cost basis for their share of taxes paid not credited by dividends.
Companies should pay income tax, OR their shareholders should, But NOT both, otherwise the shareholders are paying tax TWICE for the same profits (Once when the company makes them, And again when the shareholder is paid their dividends, Or they sell their units to realize the value increased by the company's profit).
Also, it is probably preferable that only the shareholders should pay the tax, Because making the company pay the tax is unfair to Low-income shareholders who would be in a lower income tax bracket.
Also, making the company itself pay income tax is unfair to "Qualified investors" such as Retirement accounts which are supposed to be Tax-Free or Deferred Tax in order to help Low-Income/Middle-class people to provide for their financial needs in retirement, when they will be too old to work.
But considering that the hacked device yielded no useful information, I think the only statement that the FBI has made is that they're fucking idiots.
They were going on a fishing expedition...... Seeing as they had no real reason to believe the phone would have contained evidence of a crime. They just figured that since they knew who the criminals were, there might be a chance that they left some incriminating artifact on their cell phones ---- whose nature they were only guessing.
If they had put that $1 million into actual legwork, true sleuthing and investigative work on this case early on, and no lazy "Hope to scan their phones bullshit", then they might have solved whatever mystery remained open.
care to offer any proof for this asertion?
For starters..... Cookies are why I can navigate to http://slashdot.org/ every evening and post a comment without having to go through the repetitive task of typing in Yet another username and password every day.
Cookies are why I can go to Youtube and watch a video..... the first time I see one, there will be an Ad shown..... Then I can go back and visit Youtube.com a few minutes later, find a new video, and they will give me a break because i've just seen an Ad ---- they won't force me to sit through another 2 minute pre-roll Advert again for at least a while, because Cookies told them they already made me watch that crap on their website.
Those are just two uses of cookies that benefit me greatly and aren't a privacy issue.
Everybody tracks though.... essentially.... every major company has reasons to; it's not a privacy issue; it's to the users' benefit, and should not be impeded by the government.
Tracking users moving between pages on your own website is vital for administration of your website for various reasons; at the very least, all responsible webmasters want to know if you got a 504 or 503 error, which page it came from, and the stream of clicks you made within their website will provide debugging clues.
Then your user design folks want to know some basic information, like which clusters of pages do different groups of users view, And this plays into future choices regarding what the page layouts should look like in later versions of the website.
Laws should request the result, not the method of getting there.
Cookies have many important uses; most of them perfectly legitimate with no privacy ramifications. It is only abuse of cookies that pose a risk, and what might be regulated should be the potential result of motivations for abuse, not the means.
They should repeal the cookie directive and replace it with a "Privacy Directive", regarding retaining and linking personally identifiable information to web history gathered from 3rd party websites And only linking, making record of an association, or inferring personal information gathered by the same website when the information is requested and submitted through an interactive form, and all information that will be linked when information was provided is conspiciously disclosed.
In the case of the sale of a publicly traded company, shareholders do get to make the decision, not Management.
FALSE. Many companies have multiple classes of shareholders, The Common shares, and another class of shares held by management and their heirs, where the Common shares have Zero or reduced voting rights.
Example: The Blackstone Group LP (BX): Our common unitholders do not elect our general partner or vote on our general partner’s directors and have limited ability to influence decisions regarding our business
In Tesla's case; Shareholders are prevented from influencing the business by the Articles of Organization requiring a very high Supermajority for any resolution. More than 66% required to be in favor; meaning that management's 34% stake in Tesla is sufficient to block any action.
He opted to go with the IPO and now a number of us own shares in the company.
Shareholders provide investment funds but do not manage the company or get to make decisions about it; if the management doesn't approve the sale it's not likely to be doable, and doesn't matter if the CXo has 1/5 or 1/10 the shares.
In some companies, shareholders have additional rights --- it just depends on organizational structure and bylaws.
You don't buy and retain shares in a company, if you fundamentally do not agree with what direction management will be expected to take the business.
If you want your investment property sold out to the highest bidder anytime the price is right, then buy shares in a company whose management will do that.
This is exactly what they are counting on.
At this point, you'd think there would be a whole industry of companies you could sell your interest in the $42 to, who would give you five bucks and automate the process of suing the parasites to hell.
Taking them to court for $42 doesn't really seem worth it,
Taking them to court for $42 PLUS legal expenses PLUS the cost of time off from work.
Because we love capitalism and hate the government for any and everything?
That's not why. The current situation is almost as far-removed from capitalism as you can get --- it's the opposite of capitalism, where the government creates a monopoly and incentivizes the monopolist to abuse their position, and doesn't do much to reign them in.
A shell is not built to prevent you from shooting yourself into the foot. It's built to optimize the aiming
It is a UI design defect however, that it makes it too easy to accidentally aim it in the wrong place and shoot. Even firearms generally have a trigger safety of some kind.
What do you use "rm $foo/*" for? I find that if I want to empty a directory, I generally want it deleted as well.
Maybe don't want to delete the directory if it contains temporary or spool files, for example
rm -rf $tmpdir/*
Of course it would be possible to design new safeguards, But I think they're unlikely to be implemented... /bin/rm modification: /** to /*, but before "list of files" expansion. /bin/rm modification:
1. Shell modification: When a variable is unset Or set to Blank, the shell should return an error by default, instead of executing the command with a blank; require a declarative structure such as ${tmpdir:-""}
OR Shell modification with
2. The shell is modified to export an environment variable containing the *ACTUAL* command line After variable expansion, and after compression of globbing E.g.
3. Rm is modified to check if a subdirectory of / is referenced; If so, the variable is inspected for shell globbing. Rm is modified to require a command line option to proceed with the delete if files in / or an immediate subdirectory were expanded by Shell globbing
OR
4. Instead of just checking for "/" check for the 2nd level as well. Any directory directly under / has a --no-preserve-first that also has to be used, instead of just a --no-preserve root.
5. This gets expanded with an /etc file listing critical system directories. Any recursive deletion of the root of a critical system directory requires a --no-preserve-system
I just made up the 99% figure, but since you're not contradicting me or providing a contradicting use case, is that agreement?
Nope. I figure it's closer to 50% of the time rm -rf $foo/ and 40% of the time rm -rf $foo/* and 10% of the time rm -rf $foo/*${something}*
Apparently the university forgot to write their $100,000 checks to Theverge, Gawker, and Slashdot.....
Customers who want broadband don't really care if the medium is cable or wireless if the service is the same.
Nonsense..... We know wireless is always subject to interference and limitations that come from wireless; we need both landline and wireless for different applications. The fact is SERVICE IS NOT THE SAME, And Physics dictates that service cannot be made the same.
The competition comes from the same service; the medium is irrelevant.
No it isn't.... The change of medium is a step change. There MUST be competition within comparable medium to achieve efficient conditions for consumers.
The internet and ebooks and e-magazines have put local magazine stores out of business.
So what? Some methods of sale are superior to other mediums. They are competing technologies, not competing businesses. The shift from local magazine stores to electronic distribution doesn't reflect anything about the quality of the local magazine stores.
Their costs are different, and so are the costs of buying from them.
By the way, the Electronic magazine stores could be literally raping consumers and STILL be less expensive than local magazine stores due to the different costs of the different publication media.
For what it's worth, removing "*" recursively is a weird use case (99% of the time, you would just delete the directory),
Is that 99% supposed to be based on actual research? I have seen developers commit many accidents involving the rm command and shell globbing. Also, many newbies using Shell globbing when it is not needed, and command options when they are not needed such as "-r", Or running as a root user when they should not be.
One example is the user types 'rm -rf * .o' when they intended to key 'rm -rf *.o'
If their Current Working Directory happens to be /, then it's equivalent to rm -rf /*.
This prevents the root itself from being deleted, but you can still do rm -rf /*
even with no --no-preserve-root
There are iterations which still accidentally cause a full system deletion, even with this safeguard in place.
Netflix did do video wrong; they really do stream it in real time like VoIP.
I think they were all but physically forced to do it wrong by copyright holders.
But if you are an ISP with enough traffic to Netflix, they'll deploy caching boxes into your POPs/datacenters For free.
It's just that the largest service providers who want to charge Netflix for the privilege of more bandwidth are unwilling to do that, while Mid-Sized providers such as local ISPs are very happy to do so, But due to "Industry consolidation"; (The US regulatory climate favors large providers and hurts small ISPs!), there are not that many providers left who prioritize maximizing the customer experience.
It is this myopic view that is really the fault of "there ought to be a law" crowd
Actually; it's more like Dear Federal government: YOU created this monster by giving special grants to incumbents and approving corporate mergers that resulted in a centralization of what used to be local ISPs into a few major companies. Now YOU tame your monster and work on a plan of putting permanent free-market checks against it.
By the way: 4G, Cable Internet, DSL, Satellite Internet, Fibre, and providers are NOT competitive with each other. There is competing technology there, Yes.
You only have true competition, when there are multiple providers with access to the same kind of service medium; such as multiple Fibre providers attempting to serve an entire market.
Comcast Cable Internet, Verizon Wireless, and ATT DSL are NOT competitors; They are monopolists with slight variations on a theme, and many people are only willing to be served by Zero or One landline broadband provider.