I disagree with point d - while the UK has a very low level of road fatalities, Germany's rate is higher than that of the US, and France's is 50% higher, on a deaths per km driven basis, according to the good people at the German Bundesanstalt for Strassenwesen, and their International Road Traffic and Accident Database.
One of the few data points that really exists on this is the US state of Montana, which eliminated speed limits on its interstates during the daytime (went to "safe and prudent") at the end of 1995. In 1995, fatalities were 2.28 per 100 million vehicle miles travelled. In 2001, they were 2.28 per 100 million vehicle miles travelled. There were fewer accidents on the interstates, but the higher overall speeds meant that a larger portion of those accidents resulted in fatalities. So, data seems to say: number of accidents is positively correlated with speed variance, liklihood of fatality from a given accident is positively correlated with absolute speed levels.
"When it's about funding SCO's lawsuit against Linux by "respecting their IP" it's all fine and good, but when somebody asks Microsoft to respect their IP and pay up, they fight tooth and nail."
Sure they do! Presumably, they believe a. SCO's right b. Eolas isn't
Not to comment on the validity of A and B, but if MSFT believes them to be true, their position is entirely consistent. By the same token, I'll condemn someone I think committed murder, but if I'm accused of it (and haven't done it) I'll fight tooth and nail against it. Accusation=!valid claim.
Now that this system is familiar to everybody, it's actually _extremely_ easy for the casinos to defeat it. If you look, most casinos now have signs, particularly on the higher limit tables, that say something to the effect of "Mid-Shoe Entry Not Permitted." They'll also sometimes allow mid-shoe entry, but limit how much the new entrant can bet.
MIT/BC issue is a red herring, it's purely procedural. Court ruled that a subpoena issued in DC isn't valid in Mass, so the RIAA will have to file 'em locally. Not a biggie, just ups their processing costs a bit.
Ummm...Taiwan IS the ROC (Republic of China). Mainland China is the PRC (People's Republic of China). If you're referring to this story, then there's no int'l cooperation involved, it's purely an effort of Taiwan (aka the ROC) - the PRC has nothing to do with it.
Yup. The plea agreement is that the defendant will plead guilty to charge X, and (usually) the DA will recommend a particular sentence, or drop other charges. The judge has the final discretion, and he can (albeit rarely) overrule the plea agreement if he feels that it was unreasonable. In an extreme case, if a DA made a deal with a mass murderer where the murderer would serve 5 days for 100 murders, the judge could reject the deal and assign a different penalty. By the same token, the judge could reject a plea deal that carried a 50 year sentence for a jaywalking conviction. In this case, though, there doesn't really seem to be any reason for the judge to reject the deal.
It's important to note that Cray is a _highly_ cyclical business. A new generation of product is released, and the usual buyers (esp our friends at Ft. Meade) buy a bunch, but then there's a long fallow period (read slow sales, and breakeven profit/loss at best) while the next generation of machine is developed. When that generation is released, there's a big burst of cash flow, then fallow, and so on. If you've got the cash to ride out the slow periods, Cray's a tidy little business. They haven't got the price/performance of the Japanese, but they're so close to NSA that the liklihood of the import barriers dropping and threatening Cray's viability is minimal.
$150 will get you a basic Motorola DCT 2000 (entry-level digital box), while an advanced box with DVR like the Sci Atlanta can run $400-500, depends on the drive capacity and the volume of the order.
If you're talking the US, you AREN'T a shareholder in a company that makes political donations - companies can't (neither can unions), and don't. Company PACs, which are pools of money from _employees_, can make donations, but companies themselves cannot.
Don't forget the $5 they get per subscriber is almost pure profit. They have to buy digital boxes anyway, so why not keep the extra revenue themselves?
These boxes are a LOT more expensive than a traditional cable box, to the tune of $250-300 add'l per unit. It takes a lot of months of $5/month service fees to recoup that investment. The main reason they're willing to make the investment is that it helps keep viewers from dropping cable entirely and going to satellite.
If A sells B a put option on American Airlines with a strike price of $10, A is giving B the right to sell one share of AMR to A at $10.
If the stock goes down, say to $3, B can go into the open market, buy a share at $3, and then immediately sell it to A for $10, netting $7. (In reality, options aren't settled this way - A just pays B $7 directly, B doesn't have to buy the stock and then resell it).
In the scenario described above, B is betting that the stock will decline, while A is betting that it will stay stable or rise.
You described selling a call option, which is also a bet that the stock will go down. If A sells B a call on American at a $10 strike price, then A has sold B the right to _buy_ a share of American from A at $10. If the stock drops below $10, the option is worthless (B would be insane to buy a share from A at $10 if he can buy in the open market at $5). If the stock goes up to $15, then B can buy the share from A at $10, and sell it in the open market at $15, netting $5. In this case, A is betting that the stock will decline, while B is betting that it will rise.
The both buying a put and selling a call are bets that the stock will decline, the two have different risk profiles - if you buy a put, the most you can lose is whatever you paid for the option; if you write a call, your losses are technically unlimited (i.e. you sell a call at $10, and the stock goes to $1 million a share - you're on the hook for $999,990 per share).
First off, claiming that enforcing copyright law is tantamount to slavery is disgusting. You're probably one of those people who bandies the phrase "Nazi" around casually. Secondly, people certainly should feel free to resist or ignore laws they view as unjust - they shouldn't be surprised, however, if they're punished for violating them. The leaders of the civil rights movement understood that they were breaking the law, and that breaking the law has consequences; they were willing to accept those consequences. By the same token, if people believe that they have the right to violate copyright, they should be willing to accept the penalties associated with it.
"Or as statisticians like to say Correlation does not mean causality."
Very true. As my statistics professor was fond of saying, however, "correlation does not equal causation, but it should make you suspicious that there may be causation."
BTW, my favorite example of a third factor driving two correlated events is the fact that taller children read better. No surprise; they're older.
Not this again. Once again, the reason for the $500 hammers, etc., is a matter of cost accounting, not nefarious fraud. These "scandals" erupted because the cost accounting used for a number of government contracts spread the large overhead and R&D costs equally by product line item. In other words, if there were 1,000,000 items being purchased, and $500,000,000 in R&D costs, each item was assigned $500 in R&D cost, whether it was a $50,000 custom circuit board or a $10 hammer. A lousy way to do cost allocation? You betcha. Fraud? Nope. See this for more info.
a) sites like yahoo are private, much like the boy scouts, they can discriminate. they will get bad press for it, but oh well.
Wrong. A private organization that constitutes a public accomodation (restaurants, most clubs, stores, sites like Yahoo, etc.) is prohibited (in the US, YMMV in other countries) from discriminating on several bases, including race (various Civil Rights legislation, and the 14th Amendment) and disability (Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA). Racial minorities and the handicapped are what's called protected classes, meaning you can't discriminate against them for being members of that class. The Boy Scouts discriminate against homosexuals, who do not (as of yet, at least) constitute a protected class under US law.
Bottom line, you can say "I don't want you in my restaurant because you're gay." You _cannot_ say "I don't want you in my restaurant because you're black" or "I don't want you in my restaurant because you're blind."
Actually, it was even worse than I remembered - the cost allocation wasn't done on a $ basis, but rather on a line item basis. In other words, $1BN in R&D, 1000 line items being procured, $1MM in cost assigned to each line item, whether they're a customized board for a supercomputer, or the handiwipes used to clean the case. For more, check out this.
Lay off the toilet seats. They weren't that expensive, it's an overhead (read cost accounting) issue. Imagine a project, Weapon X, with $1BN in R&D expense required to design the weapon, but where actually producing the full run of Weapon X only costs $100MM (not an unusual situation in military procurement). Then imagine that, as part of that $100MM, there's a wrench needed to tighten the bolts on Weapon X. Since only 10 of these wrenches will ever be produced (they're oddly shaped to fit into the chassis of Weapon X, and the bolt is a strange size), so the cost of the mold and casting is $500 - it's a $50 wrench - pricy, but not ridiculous. For the project as a whole, though, remember you have to allocate that $1BN in R&D cost. From a cost accounting point of view, every dollar spent on the wrench gets $10 in R&D allocation. Voila, a $550 wrench.
I believe it was Warren Buffett who said the recent tax reform would give him an additional $310,000,000 annually. That is rediculous. He said himself that it would make much more sense to give 1,000,000 people $310, and as far as I can tell he is a pretty bright man when it comes to the economy.
That being said, I didn't hear him planning on handing out 1MM $310 checks...
I read it slightly differently, that 45% of purchases are albums, which would mean that (assuming 10 songs/album, again), 89% of songs were purchased as part of albums. Since Jobs was making the point that the album format isn't dead, and "45% of people prefer to buy as an album anyway," it seems unlikely he'd punch up a stat showing the opposite.
Seems to me that a perfect defense, were such a law in place, would be for a patent-owner to ask "If it were obviously invalid, then why was it granted in the first place?" If it wasn't "obviously invalid" to the patent office, who are, by statute, supposed to decide these things, then a reasonable case can be made that it just wasn't "obviously invalid." It'd be an unenforcable law.
Since defining obviously invalid in this situation is futile, we'd be better served by just mandating that, in proceedings challenging a patent, the loser pays the winner's legal fees. Not a bad idea for all civil case, btw - cuts down on the number of spurious claims in general.
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I disagree with point d - while the UK has a very low level of road fatalities, Germany's rate is higher than that of the US, and France's is 50% higher, on a deaths per km driven basis, according to the good people at the German Bundesanstalt for Strassenwesen, and their International Road Traffic and Accident Database.
One of the few data points that really exists on this is the US state of Montana, which eliminated speed limits on its interstates during the daytime (went to "safe and prudent") at the end of 1995. In 1995, fatalities were 2.28 per 100 million vehicle miles travelled. In 2001, they were 2.28 per 100 million vehicle miles travelled. There were fewer accidents on the interstates, but the higher overall speeds meant that a larger portion of those accidents resulted in fatalities. So, data seems to say: number of accidents is positively correlated with speed variance, liklihood of fatality from a given accident is positively correlated with absolute speed levels.
"When it's about funding SCO's lawsuit against Linux by "respecting their IP" it's all fine and good, but when somebody asks Microsoft to respect their IP and pay up, they fight tooth and nail."
Sure they do! Presumably, they believe
a. SCO's right
b. Eolas isn't
Not to comment on the validity of A and B, but if MSFT believes them to be true, their position is entirely consistent. By the same token, I'll condemn someone I think committed murder, but if I'm accused of it (and haven't done it) I'll fight tooth and nail against it. Accusation=!valid claim.
"...valued at $65 billion dollars"
Come on editors, I know it's early on the West Coast, but really.
and of course the 2002 and 2003 National Spelling Bees on my Replay.
:)
Yeah, uh, you know those things that you might not want to bring up at cocktail parties?
Now that this system is familiar to everybody, it's actually _extremely_ easy for the casinos to defeat it. If you look, most casinos now have signs, particularly on the higher limit tables, that say something to the effect of "Mid-Shoe Entry Not Permitted." They'll also sometimes allow mid-shoe entry, but limit how much the new entrant can bet.
"Nintendo is making a huge profit."
Not from GameCube, though - the profit is being driven by the Game Boy.
MIT/BC issue is a red herring, it's purely procedural. Court ruled that a subpoena issued in DC isn't valid in Mass, so the RIAA will have to file 'em locally. Not a biggie, just ups their processing costs a bit.
Ummm...Taiwan IS the ROC (Republic of China). Mainland China is the PRC (People's Republic of China). If you're referring to this story, then there's no int'l cooperation involved, it's purely an effort of Taiwan (aka the ROC) - the PRC has nothing to do with it.
Yup. The plea agreement is that the defendant will plead guilty to charge X, and (usually) the DA will recommend a particular sentence, or drop other charges. The judge has the final discretion, and he can (albeit rarely) overrule the plea agreement if he feels that it was unreasonable. In an extreme case, if a DA made a deal with a mass murderer where the murderer would serve 5 days for 100 murders, the judge could reject the deal and assign a different penalty. By the same token, the judge could reject a plea deal that carried a 50 year sentence for a jaywalking conviction. In this case, though, there doesn't really seem to be any reason for the judge to reject the deal.
It's important to note that Cray is a _highly_ cyclical business. A new generation of product is released, and the usual buyers (esp our friends at Ft. Meade) buy a bunch, but then there's a long fallow period (read slow sales, and breakeven profit/loss at best) while the next generation of machine is developed. When that generation is released, there's a big burst of cash flow, then fallow, and so on. If you've got the cash to ride out the slow periods, Cray's a tidy little business. They haven't got the price/performance of the Japanese, but they're so close to NSA that the liklihood of the import barriers dropping and threatening Cray's viability is minimal.
$150 will get you a basic Motorola DCT 2000 (entry-level digital box), while an advanced box with DVR like the Sci Atlanta can run $400-500, depends on the drive capacity and the volume of the order.
Wrong. The DVR boxes are on the order of $400-450 - standard digital boxes are $150-200.
If you're talking the US, you AREN'T a shareholder in a company that makes political donations - companies can't (neither can unions), and don't. Company PACs, which are pools of money from _employees_, can make donations, but companies themselves cannot.
Don't forget the $5 they get per subscriber is almost pure profit. They have to buy digital boxes anyway, so why not keep the extra revenue themselves?
These boxes are a LOT more expensive than a traditional cable box, to the tune of $250-300 add'l per unit. It takes a lot of months of $5/month service fees to recoup that investment. The main reason they're willing to make the investment is that it helps keep viewers from dropping cable entirely and going to satellite.
Actually, it's the other way around:
If A sells B a put option on American Airlines with a strike price of $10, A is giving B the right to sell one share of AMR to A at $10.
If the stock goes down, say to $3, B can go into the open market, buy a share at $3, and then immediately sell it to A for $10, netting $7. (In reality, options aren't settled this way - A just pays B $7 directly, B doesn't have to buy the stock and then resell it).
In the scenario described above, B is betting that the stock will decline, while A is betting that it will stay stable or rise.
You described selling a call option, which is also a bet that the stock will go down. If A sells B a call on American at a $10 strike price, then A has sold B the right to _buy_ a share of American from A at $10. If the stock drops below $10, the option is worthless (B would be insane to buy a share from A at $10 if he can buy in the open market at $5). If the stock goes up to $15, then B can buy the share from A at $10, and sell it in the open market at $15, netting $5. In this case, A is betting that the stock will decline, while B is betting that it will rise.
The both buying a put and selling a call are bets that the stock will decline, the two have different risk profiles - if you buy a put, the most you can lose is whatever you paid for the option; if you write a call, your losses are technically unlimited (i.e. you sell a call at $10, and the stock goes to $1 million a share - you're on the hook for $999,990 per share).
First off, claiming that enforcing copyright law is tantamount to slavery is disgusting. You're probably one of those people who bandies the phrase "Nazi" around casually. Secondly, people certainly should feel free to resist or ignore laws they view as unjust - they shouldn't be surprised, however, if they're punished for violating them. The leaders of the civil rights movement understood that they were breaking the law, and that breaking the law has consequences; they were willing to accept those consequences. By the same token, if people believe that they have the right to violate copyright, they should be willing to accept the penalties associated with it.
"Or as statisticians like to say Correlation does not mean causality."
Very true. As my statistics professor was fond of saying, however, "correlation does not equal causation, but it should make you suspicious that there may be causation."
BTW, my favorite example of a third factor driving two correlated events is the fact that taller children read better. No surprise; they're older.
Not this again. Once again, the reason for the $500 hammers, etc., is a matter of cost accounting, not nefarious fraud. These "scandals" erupted because the cost accounting used for a number of government contracts spread the large overhead and R&D costs equally by product line item. In other words, if there were 1,000,000 items being purchased, and $500,000,000 in R&D costs, each item was assigned $500 in R&D cost, whether it was a $50,000 custom circuit board or a $10 hammer. A lousy way to do cost allocation? You betcha. Fraud? Nope. See this for more info.
a) sites like yahoo are private, much like the boy scouts, they can discriminate. they will get bad press for it, but oh well.
Wrong. A private organization that constitutes a public accomodation (restaurants, most clubs, stores, sites like Yahoo, etc.) is prohibited (in the US, YMMV in other countries) from discriminating on several bases, including race (various Civil Rights legislation, and the 14th Amendment) and disability (Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA). Racial minorities and the handicapped are what's called protected classes, meaning you can't discriminate against them for being members of that class. The Boy Scouts discriminate against homosexuals, who do not (as of yet, at least) constitute a protected class under US law.
Bottom line, you can say "I don't want you in my restaurant because you're gay." You _cannot_ say "I don't want you in my restaurant because you're black" or "I don't want you in my restaurant because you're blind."
take the bottom route, and angle downward between the first two plants - don't try to come in level and then drop. I can't find the walking stick!
Actually, it was even worse than I remembered - the cost allocation wasn't done on a $ basis, but rather on a line item basis. In other words, $1BN in R&D, 1000 line items being procured, $1MM in cost assigned to each line item, whether they're a customized board for a supercomputer, or the handiwipes used to clean the case. For more, check out this.
Lay off the toilet seats. They weren't that expensive, it's an overhead (read cost accounting) issue. Imagine a project, Weapon X, with $1BN in R&D expense required to design the weapon, but where actually producing the full run of Weapon X only costs $100MM (not an unusual situation in military procurement). Then imagine that, as part of that $100MM, there's a wrench needed to tighten the bolts on Weapon X. Since only 10 of these wrenches will ever be produced (they're oddly shaped to fit into the chassis of Weapon X, and the bolt is a strange size), so the cost of the mold and casting is $500 - it's a $50 wrench - pricy, but not ridiculous. For the project as a whole, though, remember you have to allocate that $1BN in R&D cost. From a cost accounting point of view, every dollar spent on the wrench gets $10 in R&D allocation. Voila, a $550 wrench.
I believe it was Warren Buffett who said the recent tax reform would give him an additional $310,000,000 annually. That is rediculous. He said himself that it would make much more sense to give 1,000,000 people $310, and as far as I can tell he is a pretty bright man when it comes to the economy.
That being said, I didn't hear him planning on handing out 1MM $310 checks...
I read it slightly differently, that 45% of purchases are albums, which would mean that (assuming 10 songs/album, again), 89% of songs were purchased as part of albums. Since Jobs was making the point that the album format isn't dead, and "45% of people prefer to buy as an album anyway," it seems unlikely he'd punch up a stat showing the opposite.
Overall, unclear from the notes, though.
Seems to me that a perfect defense, were such a law in place, would be for a patent-owner to ask "If it were obviously invalid, then why was it granted in the first place?" If it wasn't "obviously invalid" to the patent office, who are, by statute, supposed to decide these things, then a reasonable case can be made that it just wasn't "obviously invalid." It'd be an unenforcable law.
Since defining obviously invalid in this situation is futile, we'd be better served by just mandating that, in proceedings challenging a patent, the loser pays the winner's legal fees. Not a bad idea for all civil case, btw - cuts down on the number of spurious claims in general.