MP3 is a great format for storing and propagating music, but if the music isn't theirs to give away, the students should not post it. The punishment seems appropriate under the circumstances.
By the way, the complaint that inspecting publicly available files in invasion of privacy registers a zero on the cluemeter.
There are two reasons the Appeals Court won't do much with this. One, it is a finding of fact. appellate courts have to have an extremely good reason to overturn a finding of fact. They regularly tell the judge that he didn't understand the law, but are expected to be able to show that the finder of fact was totally clueless before overturning a finding of fact. This finding of fact may not be 100%, but it is still top notch. The rest of the case will depend on this finding of fact.
Two, the whole thing might be certified directly to the Supreme Court when all is said and done. If so, the DC Circuit won't be able to say anything.
Disney only licenses the product. If the media fails, I still have the license, so they should replace the media, right? Some SW companies were very good about that, but I haven't tried lately.
Both the music industry and the movie industry charge more for the shiny silver platter because they can. Customers feel that they are getting a better product than the one that comes on magnetic tape. The cost of duplication has no impact on thes pricing decisions.
"Microsoft does buy the shares to fill the options on the open market, so they are better than companies that use treasury stock to give to employees who exercise their options. Their fotnotes are good and are not misleading about the amount of options outstanding and the exposure that Microsoft shareholders face."
I disagree. If you actually check Microsoft's financial statements for the last three years, you'll see essentially the same footnotes stating that their option repurchase program is drastically underfunded, but claiming that they plan to accelerate it to catch up. Year after year, but they never do what they promise, and the repurchase program falls further behind each year.
How did you miss that?
Your point is true, but doesn't negate mine. I only said that Microsoft was better than the ones that issued treasury shares. Those are the ones who truly water their stock (legally) to pay off their options. It is true that MSFT has not fully funded their option program, but that appears to be part of the problem that MSFT is having with the SEC and complaints about managed earnings. MSFT is a long way from perfect, but they are not the worst of the lot, either.
Personally, I think the problem is with accounting theory. Options are the large business equivalent of "Work for me for five years and I'll make you partner." FASB might be able to deal with it, but the IRS won't buy it and there is a big tax effect here.
To my mind, the best approach is to forbid direct company-to-employee option grants. Require the company to buy the option on the open market and tax the recipient for this largess. Using Buffett's logic, the option value should be taxed at the time of offer, shouldn't it?
>>If options aren't compensation, what are they?
Equity redistribution. Of course they are compensation, but there is nothing in our accounting theory that allows options to be treated as compensation. Conditional promises have always caused problems for American financial accounting and I'm not sure that any solution that doesn't give us a third party intermediary will ever solve the problem.
>>If compensation isn't an expense, what is it?
Equity redistribution. I don't disagree with the FASB's original proposal, but they did a lousy job of selling it and the original proposal failed to fit into any accounting theory. I realize that a lot of accounting decisions are very pragmatic, but this one wasn't good enough to fly.
>>And if an expense doesn't belong in the P&L, where in heaven's name does it belong?
Balance Sheet. The solution is terrible, but it is better than the prior solution which required no disclosure.
One of the biggest problems with the shadow option price that had been proposed by the FASB is that it still didn't deal with the fact that the options were speculative until exercised because the company retained all the risk.
Market-purchased options solve the objections of the companies, fully fund the options, and give fixed costs to the options.
Read the entire financial statement of any company before you invest. If you do, you will find in the footnotes the exposure the company faces. The Finacial Accounting Standards Board wanted more, but were persuaded to live with clear disclosure in the footnotes.
Yes, options can dilute the value of your stock. No, options are not being accounted for in the P&L because they don't really fit there. No, options are not very well accounted for in the balance sheet either, but every solution that has been tried has a serious problem.
Microsoft does buy the shares to fill the options on the open market, so they are better than companies that use treasury stock to give to employees who exercise their options. Their footnotes are good and are not misleading about the amount of options outstanding and the exposure that Microsoft shareholders face. Critics of options have no problem identifying the exposure because it is well documented in the footnotes. If you cannot or do not read and understand a financial statement, ask someone to help you or find a different investment vehicle.
Microsoft may actually be afraid of pissing off GE. Jack Welch didn't get the nickname "Neutron Jack" because he was a pushover. I've been waiting for the day MSFT tries to stab GE in the back just as they've stabbed every other company they've partnered with. But these things make me wonder. Maybe they will play nice at least as long as Jack is around because they know they cannot outwait GE, they cannot out-PR GE, they cannot buy GE silence and they cannot buy better lawyers. GE would have nothing to lose if there were a grudge match because MSFT doesn't have anything GE needs.
How do you propose a system like this, and in the same breath remove the federal agency that would implement your regulations? Sounds like you want to have it both ways.
Why would we need an extra federal agency to make sure that crimes aren't committed. FEC doesn't prosecute, it harrasses. It's the job of the Department of Justice to enforce the laws. Do we really need a department to make sure that you filled out the paperwork just so? Journalists can do the auditing if they want.
Your idea of restricting donations by organizations strikes me as being non-democratic. Organizations are the way that equal citizens band together to get their point across. Restricting them from donating as a group is a serious restriction of their rights.
No. I'm just taking away the right to be an anonymous coward when donating money for elections. You would still be allowed to donate as a member of an organization, and I would encourage organizations to donate as a group: "Here are the checks from fifty slashdotters in Juneau, Alaska who believe in freedom. The names on the checks are the donors' names." I don't think that AC's should be donating to political causes. This does give a lot of room for abuse.
I don't think the law is what the FEC said it was. I'm certain that their interpretation of it is wrong. If I put a booster page on Geocities does that put the value of all of Yahoo's equipment behind it. The FEC is wrong.
Complex laws have lots of unforeseen results because they are complex. Good laws are clear and straightforward and have very few unpredictable boundary conditions. Good laws are simple at the appropriate level of abstraction.
I love the ACLU, but they often have this bizarre notion that more government is the solution to screwed up government. The FEC and the current campaign contribution laws are broke. It is not clear to me that public funding of elections will not as a side effect take away the first amendment right to say what you want in support of unpopular and marginal politicians.
The FEC has shown itself to be truly high-handed and arrogant. They have been stopped cold a couple of times by the Supreme Court, but still they persist in ingnoring the constitution.
I don't think there is any hope for them any more.
Abolish the FEC. End limits on donations, but make all donations extremely public. All donations and donors go into a searchable database on the internet, large donations ($1,000 or more) go into newspaper ads, very large donors ($50,000 or more) are identified in TV ads. If you spend a $100,000 to buy a congresscritter, I want to know who you are. Donations must be done by individuals, no organization of any kind would be allowed to donate, nor would cash be allowed.
The various Chinese languages are all mapped (with a reasonably good degree of confidence) to the same written language. Translating written languages is easier than translating spoken languages.
Maybe we could all map our written languages to written Chinese. This already works for a number of languages in eastern Asia. Europeans might have to adjust their grammar to meet the needs of written Chinese, but the lesson I take from Babelfish and other automatic translators is that grammar is so trivial that translators can just ignore it.
The first amendment does not guarantee that a bad artist can have public funding to show offensive material. Rudy is doing the right thing (but none of what he is doing is censorship). People will only have the first amendment if they execise it for themselves, not if they try to get the government to pay for their forum.
Professors have the right to believe and advocate what they want. So do governors. Whatever they say, the way they say it and the way the press misreports it has more to do with the reaction of people than whether the claims are controversial. When Governor Lamb said that the elderly "have a duty to die. [IIRC that was what my paper said]", I understood his point and assumed that he wasn't as stupid or callous as the press reports made him out to be.
Still, when people make outrageous statements, they better be willing to take the heat for it. Certainly it is a crime for people to threaten others for their statements, but it is not a crime, nay it is our duty, to tell people that they have beliefs that are totally outside reality.
Sadly, none of the arguments of the article have anything to do with freedom. Social pressures make people unfree? JonKatz, that is what I took away from your article. This is silly. It is wrong. It diminishes the value of freedom from government controls by whining about social sanction. Social sanction is a critical part of civilization and the maturing process of humans. It's not always fun, and the punishment may often feel worse than jail, but there is no society that works without it. Even if you were not demeaning the value of legal freedoms, you would still be wrong. Few countries in the world tolerate more social variation than the US, and, of those that do, many had to suffer greatly through wars and legal repression to find the value of social tolerance.
I just have to laugh. Europe/Asia/etc. would love to have had Microsoft as a homegrown company arising from someone's garage
Microsoft would probably have felt right at home in a country where the right families make sure that all economic opportunity stays with the right families. Bill Gates is the only son of a couple of rich, connected lawyers. This is not Horatio Alger.
Microsoft just beat theirs into the ground. And now we want to punish them.
We want to punish them for breaking the law when they were beating their competitors into the ground. Are you saying that they did not break the law?
Once you have your quota of a dozen or so, the cops automatically pick you up for being an obvious menace on the road. Then you can go to court and explain why the other drivers were just being mean to you. If your story isn't interesting, you can walk for the next thirty days.
The patent block diagrams are available at EP738446B1: METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR ORDERING SERVICES on the last few pages of the patent application. The patent says that the user would use a terminal or telephone as the method to connect with a box that brokers you to the specific seller of airline tickets or hotel rooms.
Terminal to Broker to Database of Seller looks a lot like a dumb version of SABRE. Personal terminal (this guy made the application in 1993 and was apparently assuming a dedicated dialup network not internet) to Broker looks like Sabre on Compuserve. Using a telephone as an interactive voice response terminal seems to be a little late to the game, too, but I'd be happy if he put IVRs out of business.
Much of this is old news, but I noticed the article discussed one area that could offer some fun things in the future. There seems to be some bitter disagreement between those who see each syndrome as a unique, discreet and well-defined description of what is happening and those who think that each person's personality has a number of characteristics that can vary widely. For the second group, there is only a problem when those characteristics become sufficiently pronounced in a particular area to cause problems. Clearly gifted folks with some of the characteristic behaviors of Asperger's syndrome hardly are the same as a severely withdrawn child with a case of autism. The argument comes about whether it makes sense to consider the wide range of variation together in one place or consider each cluster separately without regard to similarities that other personalities may exhibit.
I understand each side and I generally agree with the spectrum of traits folks. I find that it is very difficult to get a person who thinks that all personality types and disorders are well-defined to comprehend, let alone agree with the spectrum of traits folks. Once they have heard a diagnosis, they map their understanding of the syndrome onto the child and treat them that way.
For kids, this can be a huge problem. If they have a smart teacher who is told that their learning style is this because they have some of these personality traits, the kids will be taught better than they might have been otherwise. If their teacher needs to pigeonhole them, they will probably suffer a far worse education than if the teacher just thought that the kid was lazy, distracted or disruptive. It can be even more difficult to get a school administration to avoid pigeonholes. They seldom understand that a talented and gifted program will be an integral part of the special programs that will have to be offered to meet the needs of this student.
Slashdot Mirror
MP3 is a great format for storing and propagating music, but if the music isn't theirs to give away, the students should not post it. The punishment seems appropriate under the circumstances.
By the way, the complaint that inspecting publicly available files in invasion of privacy registers a zero on the cluemeter.
There are two reasons the Appeals Court won't do much with this. One, it is a finding of fact. appellate courts have to have an extremely good reason to overturn a finding of fact. They regularly tell the judge that he didn't understand the law, but are expected to be able to show that the finder of fact was totally clueless before overturning a finding of fact. This finding of fact may not be 100%, but it is still top notch. The rest of the case will depend on this finding of fact.
Two, the whole thing might be certified directly to the Supreme Court when all is said and done. If so, the DC Circuit won't be able to say anything.
Disney only licenses the product. If the media fails, I still have the license, so they should replace the media, right? Some SW companies were very good about that, but I haven't tried lately.
Both the music industry and the movie industry charge more for the shiny silver platter because they can. Customers feel that they are getting a better product than the one that comes on magnetic tape. The cost of duplication has no impact on thes pricing decisions.
I disagree. If you actually check Microsoft's financial statements for the last three years, you'll see essentially the same footnotes stating that their option repurchase program is drastically underfunded, but claiming that they plan to accelerate it to catch up. Year after year, but they never do what they promise, and the repurchase program falls further behind each year.
How did you miss that?
Your point is true, but doesn't negate mine. I only said that Microsoft was better than the ones that issued treasury shares. Those are the ones who truly water their stock (legally) to pay off their options. It is true that MSFT has not fully funded their option program, but that appears to be part of the problem that MSFT is having with the SEC and complaints about managed earnings. MSFT is a long way from perfect, but they are not the worst of the lot, either.
Personally, I think the problem is with accounting theory. Options are the large business equivalent of "Work for me for five years and I'll make you partner." FASB might be able to deal with it, but the IRS won't buy it and there is a big tax effect here.
To my mind, the best approach is to forbid direct company-to-employee option grants. Require the company to buy the option on the open market and tax the recipient for this largess. Using Buffett's logic, the option value should be taxed at the time of offer, shouldn't it?
>>If options aren't compensation, what are they?
Equity redistribution. Of course they are compensation, but there is nothing in our accounting theory that allows options to be treated as compensation. Conditional promises have always caused problems for American financial accounting and I'm not sure that any solution that doesn't give us a third party intermediary will ever solve the problem.
>>If compensation isn't an expense, what is it?
Equity redistribution. I don't disagree with the FASB's original proposal, but they did a lousy job of selling it and the original proposal failed to fit into any accounting theory. I realize that a lot of accounting decisions are very pragmatic, but this one wasn't good enough to fly.
>>And if an expense doesn't belong in the P&L, where in heaven's name does it belong?
Balance Sheet. The solution is terrible, but it is better than the prior solution which required no disclosure.
One of the biggest problems with the shadow option price that had been proposed by the FASB is that it still didn't deal with the fact that the options were speculative until exercised because the company retained all the risk.
Market-purchased options solve the objections of the companies, fully fund the options, and give fixed costs to the options.
Yes, options can dilute the value of your stock. No, options are not being accounted for in the P&L because they don't really fit there. No, options are not very well accounted for in the balance sheet either, but every solution that has been tried has a serious problem.
Microsoft does buy the shares to fill the options on the open market, so they are better than companies that use treasury stock to give to employees who exercise their options. Their footnotes are good and are not misleading about the amount of options outstanding and the exposure that Microsoft shareholders face. Critics of options have no problem identifying the exposure because it is well documented in the footnotes. If you cannot or do not read and understand a financial statement, ask someone to help you or find a different investment vehicle.
Microsoft may actually be afraid of pissing off GE. Jack Welch didn't get the nickname "Neutron Jack" because he was a pushover. I've been waiting for the day MSFT tries to stab GE in the back just as they've stabbed every other company they've partnered with. But these things make me wonder. Maybe they will play nice at least as long as Jack is around because they know they cannot outwait GE, they cannot out-PR GE, they cannot buy GE silence and they cannot buy better lawyers. GE would have nothing to lose if there were a grudge match because MSFT doesn't have anything GE needs.
Would "Bitter" be a plus or a minus or would the moderator get to decide?
Complex laws have lots of unforeseen results because they are complex. Good laws are clear and straightforward and have very few unpredictable boundary conditions. Good laws are simple at the appropriate level of abstraction.
I love the ACLU, but they often have this bizarre notion that more government is the solution to screwed up government. The FEC and the current campaign contribution laws are broke. It is not clear to me that public funding of elections will not as a side effect take away the first amendment right to say what you want in support of unpopular and marginal politicians.
I don't think there is any hope for them any more.
Abolish the FEC. End limits on donations, but make all donations extremely public. All donations and donors go into a searchable database on the internet, large donations ($1,000 or more) go into newspaper ads, very large donors ($50,000 or more) are identified in TV ads. If you spend a $100,000 to buy a congresscritter, I want to know who you are. Donations must be done by individuals, no organization of any kind would be allowed to donate, nor would cash be allowed.
The bought Amiga and have done nothing with it at all. This is fast cheap access into the server market, a market that GW has been weak in.
The various Chinese languages are all mapped (with a reasonably good degree of confidence) to the same written language. Translating written languages is easier than translating spoken languages.
Maybe we could all map our written languages to written Chinese. This already works for a number of languages in eastern Asia. Europeans might have to adjust their grammar to meet the needs of written Chinese, but the lesson I take from Babelfish and other automatic translators is that grammar is so trivial that translators can just ignore it.
Professors have the right to believe and advocate what they want. So do governors. Whatever they say, the way they say it and the way the press misreports it has more to do with the reaction of people than whether the claims are controversial. When Governor Lamb said that the elderly "have a duty to die. [IIRC that was what my paper said]", I understood his point and assumed that he wasn't as stupid or callous as the press reports made him out to be.
Still, when people make outrageous statements, they better be willing to take the heat for it. Certainly it is a crime for people to threaten others for their statements, but it is not a crime, nay it is our duty, to tell people that they have beliefs that are totally outside reality.
Sadly, none of the arguments of the article have anything to do with freedom. Social pressures make people unfree? JonKatz, that is what I took away from your article. This is silly. It is wrong. It diminishes the value of freedom from government controls by whining about social sanction. Social sanction is a critical part of civilization and the maturing process of humans. It's not always fun, and the punishment may often feel worse than jail, but there is no society that works without it. Even if you were not demeaning the value of legal freedoms, you would still be wrong. Few countries in the world tolerate more social variation than the US, and, of those that do, many had to suffer greatly through wars and legal repression to find the value of social tolerance.
There was a question that had "Lego" as the correct answer, but I believe the audience chose "Atari".
Once you have your quota of a dozen or so, the cops automatically pick you up for being an obvious menace on the road. Then you can go to court and explain why the other drivers were just being mean to you. If your story isn't interesting, you can walk for the next thirty days.
They write this stuff everyday.
Greed--the lawyer's best friend.
Terminal to Broker to Database of Seller looks a lot like a dumb version of SABRE. Personal terminal (this guy made the application in 1993 and was apparently assuming a dedicated dialup network not internet) to Broker looks like Sabre on Compuserve. Using a telephone as an interactive voice response terminal seems to be a little late to the game, too, but I'd be happy if he put IVRs out of business.
Isn't it amazing that someone with an "internet commerce" patent doesn't have an internet website?
We really need reform in the patent offices and patent law.
Much of this is old news, but I noticed the article discussed one area that could offer some fun things in the future. There seems to be some bitter disagreement between those who see each syndrome as a unique, discreet and well-defined description of what is happening and those who think that each person's personality has a number of characteristics that can vary widely. For the second group, there is only a problem when those characteristics become sufficiently pronounced in a particular area to cause problems. Clearly gifted folks with some of the characteristic behaviors of Asperger's syndrome hardly are the same as a severely withdrawn child with a case of autism. The argument comes about whether it makes sense to consider the wide range of variation together in one place or consider each cluster separately without regard to similarities that other personalities may exhibit.
I understand each side and I generally agree with the spectrum of traits folks. I find that it is very difficult to get a person who thinks that all personality types and disorders are well-defined to comprehend, let alone agree with the spectrum of traits folks. Once they have heard a diagnosis, they map their understanding of the syndrome onto the child and treat them that way.
For kids, this can be a huge problem. If they have a smart teacher who is told that their learning style is this because they have some of these personality traits, the kids will be taught better than they might have been otherwise. If their teacher needs to pigeonhole them, they will probably suffer a far worse education than if the teacher just thought that the kid was lazy, distracted or disruptive. It can be even more difficult to get a school administration to avoid pigeonholes. They seldom understand that a talented and gifted program will be an integral part of the special programs that will have to be offered to meet the needs of this student.