1. someday someone with voting stock will want a dividend--paying only to one class of stock would be tortious; 2. someday someone will buy the company--the board agreeing to allow the purchase of one class of stock for one price and another for a significantly lower price would be tortious; 3. The company repurchases shares for the market price.
So, basically, you have the right to sue if you are screwed. This is basically the only right you have owning a small piece of equity in a major company anyway, voting or no (voting your stock is a sham, as we all know.)
Actually, I think this may be an integration problem... the SEC can be pretty prickly about these.
Given the closeness to the IPO, the previous offering may no longer be considered exempt. This would mean that a required registration was missed, meaning potential civil penalties.
But, the extremely poor quality of the linked articles doesn't really allow one to say if this is the problem or not.
Incognito craveness is a trade secret of this firm. As such we will be suing you for corporate espionage, misappropriation of intangibles, taking up space and unconstitutionality. After beating you about the head and ears in a court of jurisprudence, we will sell you into servitude.
Settle down, man. Analogies are by nature not perfect. That's why they are analogies not similitudes. Just because he used some of your hobbies in his analogies doesn't make them obtuse.
My grandmother, daughter of Irish immigrants, told me a story about driving down to Florida in her NY-plated car. A police officer in one of the intervening states pulled her over for speeding and attempted to extract the fine on the spot. My grandmother refused, on the grounds that she was not speeding, and was threatened with a night in jail.
She spent the night in jail; the ticket was thrown out the next day.
Was she right or was she wrong? She told the story as a parable, because right or wrong, she was Right. And for a girl who grew up in a coal-mining town and lost most of her siblings in early childhood to poverty, her strength and willingness to get along in the world was in righteousness.
For those of us who grew up in decadent bourgeoisity, convenience often trumps right. My grandmother lives as a proud woman and no night in jail could change that.
How come/. can't follow the first rule we all learned about online forums: "don't feed the trolls." (OK. maybe the second rule, after that one about all flamewars devolving to discussion into accusations of fascism.)
Well, welcome to the world of difference between theory and practice. Your statements are false on the face of them, if you put down the textbook and look around. (On the other hand, if you're a student, as it sounds like you are, you should know that there is no agreement among academics as to why corporations pay dividends. If your professor is giving you the efficient market line, then it is out of laziness. Efficient Market Theory is far from universally accepted. Here's a source whose author's name you should recognize: Black, Fischer, "The Dividend Puzzle," The Journal of Portfolio Management, Winter 1976, pp. 634-639.)
1) If what you say is true, why has Microsoft been sitting on a huge pile of cash for years, earning far less than their equity cost of capital? Any valuation of Microsoft must take into account that they're part operating company, part bag of cash. The bag of cash piece has been dragging down their valuation metrics for years.
2) If what you say is true, why would banks pay dividends? The business of banks is investing: in debt or in equity. If banks can't find better investments than their own cost of capital (prety low, as it is) then who can?
3) If what you say is true, then why do so many public corporations have investor relations professionals, and why do the IR folk spend so much time meeting with buy-side analysts (those are the people who recommend investments to mutual funds and other institutional investors)?
4) If what you say is true, why do so many corporations maintain their sacrosanct dividend policy in the face of changes in their underlying business? (According to your theory, dividends should be changing all the time as investment opportunities come and go inside a corporation. This does not happen--probably because the market interprets a change in dividend policy rather more catastrophically than it might warrant.)
Once you're done reading your economics textbooks, I would pick up a book on poker (or iterated game theory, pick your poison.) Corporations spend a lot more time worrying about signalling than they do about wonderig whether they could deploy their dividend money more profitably elsewhere. The other piece you're missing is that corporations often manage risk in preference to maximizing profit. As any EM theorist will tell you, profit maximization would come from increasing risk as much as possible... why don't all companies do that? The reasons are obvious, of course, but are not reflected in the formulas. (The cost of risk depends on individual human nature... how much would you pay for a 50% chance at $1,000,000? The formulas say $500,000, but there are very few people in the world who would pay exactly that amount; most people would pay either less or more.)
As to tax rates in Sweden, check your sources. All I know is that I have done business in both places and corporate income taxes in Sweden are lower. This does not include VAT (a consumption tax) or employee taxes (which are taxes on employees, not corporations) or asset taxes (which are taxes on investors.) The tax burden in Sweden is undeniably higher overall, but my point was to efficiency--how the taxes are levied.
Have to disagree. Some non-dividend paying companies accrue cash at a fantastic rate. Microsoft and Google come to mind. The reason old-line companies pay dividends is that there is a large segment of the investing world that demands them; this segment is also interested in more stable investments, so companies that are larger and stable pay dividends to attract those investors (if you don't believe that companies target their stock to particular investor classes, ask a corporate IR person over a drink--spending time with buy-side analysts is a large piece of a Fortune 500 CFO's job.)
As to the 'cut taxes across the board' argument: I believe cutting corporate taxes could raise the government's take. Individual tax rates are higher in general than corporate rates. By eliminating corporate-level taxes (and taxing dividends as ordinary income again and treating gains from stock buybacks as dividends), you accomplish several interesting things: you eliminate the disparate tax treatment of loans and equity which has caused so many companies to become overleveraged, you eliminate the corroding temptation to create corporate tax shelters, you create a huge incentive for companies to relocate (or re-relocate) to the US, and (I believe) you actually end up with more money in the pockets of lower-paid workers (because companies will have more money to pay salaries and our tax code is regressive.)
If you look at the tax codes of countries where social justice is a higher priority than in the US like, say, Sweden, you'll find that the corporate tax rates are lower than in the US. That's because the Swedes tried to create a tax code that was good for the country, not one they could sell most easily to neo-populists.
When I was in India (admittedly, 10 years ago) there were people crouching in the middle of the street painting the yellow lines. Scared the hell out of me, considering how my taxi driver was driving.
I guess it was cheaper than buying a truck with a paint brush attached.
Brand equity is a fancy name for reputation. Noone can be an expert on everything they purchase. Sometimes you buy from a trusted source. For instance, Slashdot has great brand equity: I believe everything I read on it.
Well, I'd say that the hierarchy of preference for the publisher would be:
1. You pay cash money for the content 2. You promise to purchase something advertised on the website 3. You have some probability of purchasing something advertised on the website 4. You take note of the ads on the website (increasing the advertiser's brand equity) 5. You attempt to ignore the ads but see them anyway 6. You remove the ads and have no possibility of seeing them
From the publisher's point of view, there is a break-even point somewhere in this list, probably in the middle of 3. It costs money to host and deliver content. If the publisher could screen out everyone below the break-even point, it would. Since there is not yet any good way to reliably distinguish between 3, 4 and 5, the publisher may resort to unreliable ways to distinguish, like audience selection. In this case, the audience selection was a negative one (certain groups don't see the content) rather than a positive one (creating content that would appeal to 18-49 year old males, for example.)
It may make a minimal difference on an individual basis, but it can make a large difference in the aggregate.
In any case, the publisher doesn't really care what you want, you're not a customer. So, it will use any technical means possible to screen you out, if it can figure out who you are. It's not personal, it's business.
Nobody has a right to expect anyone to buy their products -- or listen to advertisements for them
And nobody has the right to expect anyone to provide information for free. So... you don't listen to or see ads, they don't provide you with content. As a previous poster said, what's your problem with that?
No, no, you check your facts. McDonalds served coffee at the correct temperature to get the best flavor out of the beans (lower temperatures won't allow extraction of the flavors from coffee, just the bitter acids.) The other fast food places willingly served inferior coffee to save money on coffeemakers.
So, while you're drinking either your bitter, undercooked coffee or your $5 Java Elitus, ponder why you can't get good, affordable coffee even though it costs pennies to make same at home. Maybe because you can't sue yourself?
You don't want to send that letter because, in addition to a reply, you'll get a bill. And the three hours of partner time and ten hours of associate time answering that question will take will cost you, say, $3,800.00.
The company wasn't sued into bankruptcy. It went bankrupt on the merit of its business model.
For a lawsuit to drive it into bankruptcy, there would have either had to be a judgement or a drop off in sales because of the litigation. Neither of these was the case.
Here's a safer way to bet that SCO will lose than by selling them short. Wait for Novell to drop on this news and then buy it. Since you're backed up by a cushion of real business, it's much less risky than shorting SCO.
So, if Novell drops at opening, and you believe the SCO suit is completely meritless, you should be able to earn the amount of the drop when the suits are dismissed or lost.
(If Novell doesn't drop on the news, then it becomes clear that the market doesn't really believe SCO's claims have merit, but that there is a small group of misguided traders controlling the movement of the stock.)
Well, jeez, tyranny is a monumental failure too, just not from the perspective of staying power. Like communism, its failure is to the people being governed.
So, since you sound like you know what you're talking about, how does this theory solve the problem that it is purported to, i.e. where does the entropy go? Is the theory that objects with entopy that enter the event space increase the entropy inside the gravastar?
Well, as the sage said "When I make money, I'm investing. When I lose money, I'm speculating." Under your definition, it would be fair to say that anyone buying stocks without inside information is speculating.
SCO at some price is a reasonable investment. It is akin to an option: you have paid some price for a possible upside, while your downside is limited. Given the complete unpredictability of the court system, especially if a jury is involved, you have to assign the scenario of an SCO win some weight. What this weight *is* is better addressed by a trial lawyer than by software engineers or legal theorists.
I can think of trials where the wrong side won, can't you?
The license probably does allow them to request certification that the customer is complying with the license. If the license is indeed how it is described in the referenced PDF, it sounds like their request is legitimate. (Giving the ability to audit license compliance is a really bad idea, as anyone who works for a large company that has a Microsoft license can testify. But, then, what can you do? Use Linux?:))
Also, if I understand correctly, these licensees are not the ones who recently signed the licenses with SCO but, rather, the ones whose licenses SCO inherited by buying the rights to Unix. These licenses might be on very favorable terms, so if SCO could terminate them, they could then offer to reinstate them on more onerous terms. A company who has done a lot of development might feel forced into complying with these terms. But now I'm just speculating.
Slashdot Mirror
Because you can sell it to someone else?
Seriously, though, three possible cash scenarios:
1. someday someone with voting stock will want a dividend--paying only to one class of stock would be tortious;
2. someday someone will buy the company--the board agreeing to allow the purchase of one class of stock for one price and another for a significantly lower price would be tortious;
3. The company repurchases shares for the market price.
So, basically, you have the right to sue if you are screwed. This is basically the only right you have owning a small piece of equity in a major company anyway, voting or no (voting your stock is a sham, as we all know.)
Actually, I think this may be an integration problem... the SEC can be pretty prickly about these.
Given the closeness to the IPO, the previous offering may no longer be considered exempt. This would mean that a required registration was missed, meaning potential civil penalties.
But, the extremely poor quality of the linked articles doesn't really allow one to say if this is the problem or not.
Dear Anonymous Coward,
Incognito craveness is a trade secret of this firm. As such we will be suing you for corporate espionage, misappropriation of intangibles, taking up space and unconstitutionality. After beating you about the head and ears in a court of jurisprudence, we will sell you into servitude.
Best regards,
The SCO Group.
Settle down, man. Analogies are by nature not perfect. That's why they are analogies not similitudes. Just because he used some of your hobbies in his analogies doesn't make them obtuse.
My grandmother, daughter of Irish immigrants, told me a story about driving down to Florida in her NY-plated car. A police officer in one of the intervening states pulled her over for speeding and attempted to extract the fine on the spot. My grandmother refused, on the grounds that she was not speeding, and was threatened with a night in jail.
She spent the night in jail; the ticket was thrown out the next day.
Was she right or was she wrong? She told the story as a parable, because right or wrong, she was Right. And for a girl who grew up in a coal-mining town and lost most of her siblings in early childhood to poverty, her strength and willingness to get along in the world was in righteousness.
For those of us who grew up in decadent bourgeoisity, convenience often trumps right. My grandmother lives as a proud woman and no night in jail could change that.
Springfield is in Canada.
I think the answer is right in front of us... if they sent a list of 120,000 possible terrorist suspects, they prefer false positives.
Tell it brother.
/. can't follow the first rule we all learned about online forums: "don't feed the trolls." (OK. maybe the second rule, after that one about all flamewars devolving to discussion into accusations of fascism.)
How come
Well, welcome to the world of difference between theory and practice. Your statements are false on the face of them, if you put down the textbook and look around. (On the other hand, if you're a student, as it sounds like you are, you should know that there is no agreement among academics as to why corporations pay dividends. If your professor is giving you the efficient market line, then it is out of laziness. Efficient Market Theory is far from universally accepted. Here's a source whose author's name you should recognize: Black, Fischer, "The Dividend Puzzle," The Journal of Portfolio Management, Winter 1976, pp. 634-639.)
1) If what you say is true, why has Microsoft been sitting on a huge pile of cash for years, earning far less than their equity cost of capital? Any valuation of Microsoft must take into account that they're part operating company, part bag of cash. The bag of cash piece has been dragging down their valuation metrics for years.
2) If what you say is true, why would banks pay dividends? The business of banks is investing: in debt or in equity. If banks can't find better investments than their own cost of capital (prety low, as it is) then who can?
3) If what you say is true, then why do so many public corporations have investor relations professionals, and why do the IR folk spend so much time meeting with buy-side analysts (those are the people who recommend investments to mutual funds and other institutional investors)?
4) If what you say is true, why do so many corporations maintain their sacrosanct dividend policy in the face of changes in their underlying business? (According to your theory, dividends should be changing all the time as investment opportunities come and go inside a corporation. This does not happen--probably because the market interprets a change in dividend policy rather more catastrophically than it might warrant.)
Once you're done reading your economics textbooks, I would pick up a book on poker (or iterated game theory, pick your poison.) Corporations spend a lot more time worrying about signalling than they do about wonderig whether they could deploy their dividend money more profitably elsewhere. The other piece you're missing is that corporations often manage risk in preference to maximizing profit. As any EM theorist will tell you, profit maximization would come from increasing risk as much as possible... why don't all companies do that? The reasons are obvious, of course, but are not reflected in the formulas. (The cost of risk depends on individual human nature... how much would you pay for a 50% chance at $1,000,000? The formulas say $500,000, but there are very few people in the world who would pay exactly that amount; most people would pay either less or more.)
As to tax rates in Sweden, check your sources. All I know is that I have done business in both places and corporate income taxes in Sweden are lower. This does not include VAT (a consumption tax) or employee taxes (which are taxes on employees, not corporations) or asset taxes (which are taxes on investors.) The tax burden in Sweden is undeniably higher overall, but my point was to efficiency--how the taxes are levied.
Have to disagree. Some non-dividend paying companies accrue cash at a fantastic rate. Microsoft and Google come to mind. The reason old-line companies pay dividends is that there is a large segment of the investing world that demands them; this segment is also interested in more stable investments, so companies that are larger and stable pay dividends to attract those investors (if you don't believe that companies target their stock to particular investor classes, ask a corporate IR person over a drink--spending time with buy-side analysts is a large piece of a Fortune 500 CFO's job.)
As to the 'cut taxes across the board' argument: I believe cutting corporate taxes could raise the government's take. Individual tax rates are higher in general than corporate rates. By eliminating corporate-level taxes (and taxing dividends as ordinary income again and treating gains from stock buybacks as dividends), you accomplish several interesting things: you eliminate the disparate tax treatment of loans and equity which has caused so many companies to become overleveraged, you eliminate the corroding temptation to create corporate tax shelters, you create a huge incentive for companies to relocate (or re-relocate) to the US, and (I believe) you actually end up with more money in the pockets of lower-paid workers (because companies will have more money to pay salaries and our tax code is regressive.)
If you look at the tax codes of countries where social justice is a higher priority than in the US like, say, Sweden, you'll find that the corporate tax rates are lower than in the US. That's because the Swedes tried to create a tax code that was good for the country, not one they could sell most easily to neo-populists.
When I was in India (admittedly, 10 years ago) there were people crouching in the middle of the street painting the yellow lines. Scared the hell out of me, considering how my taxi driver was driving.
I guess it was cheaper than buying a truck with a paint brush attached.
Brand equity is a fancy name for reputation. Noone can be an expert on everything they purchase. Sometimes you buy from a trusted source. For instance, Slashdot has great brand equity: I believe everything I read on it.
Well, I'd say that the hierarchy of preference for the publisher would be:
1. You pay cash money for the content
2. You promise to purchase something advertised on the website
3. You have some probability of purchasing something advertised on the website
4. You take note of the ads on the website (increasing the advertiser's brand equity)
5. You attempt to ignore the ads but see them anyway
6. You remove the ads and have no possibility of seeing them
From the publisher's point of view, there is a break-even point somewhere in this list, probably in the middle of 3. It costs money to host and deliver content. If the publisher could screen out everyone below the break-even point, it would. Since there is not yet any good way to reliably distinguish between 3, 4 and 5, the publisher may resort to unreliable ways to distinguish, like audience selection. In this case, the audience selection was a negative one (certain groups don't see the content) rather than a positive one (creating content that would appeal to 18-49 year old males, for example.)
It may make a minimal difference on an individual basis, but it can make a large difference in the aggregate.
In any case, the publisher doesn't really care what you want, you're not a customer. So, it will use any technical means possible to screen you out, if it can figure out who you are. It's not personal, it's business.
Nobody has a right to expect anyone to buy their products -- or listen to advertisements for them
And nobody has the right to expect anyone to provide information for free. So... you don't listen to or see ads, they don't provide you with content. As a previous poster said, what's your problem with that?
No, no, you check your facts. McDonalds served coffee at the correct temperature to get the best flavor out of the beans (lower temperatures won't allow extraction of the flavors from coffee, just the bitter acids.) The other fast food places willingly served inferior coffee to save money on coffeemakers.
So, while you're drinking either your bitter, undercooked coffee or your $5 Java Elitus, ponder why you can't get good, affordable coffee even though it costs pennies to make same at home. Maybe because you can't sue yourself?
You don't want to send that letter because, in addition to a reply, you'll get a bill. And the three hours of partner time and ten hours of associate time answering that question will take will cost you, say, $3,800.00.
Good post... except for the 'not widely used' part. Drop D tuning is pretty common in songs by the Rolling Stones, Guns 'N Roses, Nirvana, etc.
Always a pain in the neck to switch, especially for those of us who are lazy and use electronic tuning aids.
Tell it to Hamilton, Mr. Jefferson. Hey, what are you doing, buying Louisiana? That's not an enumerated power!
The company wasn't sued into bankruptcy. It went bankrupt on the merit of its business model.
For a lawsuit to drive it into bankruptcy, there would have either had to be a judgement or a drop off in sales because of the litigation. Neither of these was the case.
Here's a safer way to bet that SCO will lose than by selling them short. Wait for Novell to drop on this news and then buy it. Since you're backed up by a cushion of real business, it's much less risky than shorting SCO.
So, if Novell drops at opening, and you believe the SCO suit is completely meritless, you should be able to earn the amount of the drop when the suits are dismissed or lost.
(If Novell doesn't drop on the news, then it becomes clear that the market doesn't really believe SCO's claims have merit, but that there is a small group of misguided traders controlling the movement of the stock.)
Well, jeez, tyranny is a monumental failure too, just not from the perspective of staying power. Like communism, its failure is to the people being governed.
Funny, that's where I keep my gravastar.
So, since you sound like you know what you're talking about, how does this theory solve the problem that it is purported to, i.e. where does the entropy go? Is the theory that objects with entopy that enter the event space increase the entropy inside the gravastar?
Well, as the sage said "When I make money, I'm investing. When I lose money, I'm speculating." Under your definition, it would be fair to say that anyone buying stocks without inside information is speculating.
SCO at some price is a reasonable investment. It is akin to an option: you have paid some price for a possible upside, while your downside is limited. Given the complete unpredictability of the court system, especially if a jury is involved, you have to assign the scenario of an SCO win some weight. What this weight *is* is better addressed by a trial lawyer than by software engineers or legal theorists.
I can think of trials where the wrong side won, can't you?
The license probably does allow them to request certification that the customer is complying with the license. If the license is indeed how it is described in the referenced PDF, it sounds like their request is legitimate. (Giving the ability to audit license compliance is a really bad idea, as anyone who works for a large company that has a Microsoft license can testify. But, then, what can you do? Use Linux? :))
Also, if I understand correctly, these licensees are not the ones who recently signed the licenses with SCO but, rather, the ones whose licenses SCO inherited by buying the rights to Unix. These licenses might be on very favorable terms, so if SCO could terminate them, they could then offer to reinstate them on more onerous terms. A company who has done a lot of development might feel forced into complying with these terms. But now I'm just speculating.