No, actually it's not. The CEO is hires to act in the best interest of the company as a whole, not just in a fiduciary setting. Otherwise, you could successfully sue for not liquidating all of the corporate assets and distributing them to the shareholders to maximize current quarterly dividends.
If you have 50%+1 shares you can put in place a board of directors which you can then coerce into firing him. But you can't fire him directly. It's how the process works.
Still shooting TechPan and Ektar 25 from your freezer vault, eh? C&N(&others) have left all but the finest grain, slow films in the dust for years. If you shoot anything but base ISO, you should be shooting digital - or you're missing out on details you'll never get in even moderate ISO film. (And, yes, I still own an F4s film camera)
Actually, we ended up buying one. At the time we already had two working vehicles. We ended up selling one as the kid's gear got more and more cumbersome. In hindsight, it probably was not the best move, as the mini-van is a piece of shit as a day-to-day automobile. The ride is generally poor (and gets worse by the day), the short-trip mileage is pretty poor (18mpg), can't handle in snow worth shit, and it loses street value like nobody's business. We've since gone back to a sedan and I use the van for work because it gets better mileage than my truck and does a respectable job of holding the various test gear I need in the field. We still use it for big trips, so it's good in that sense, but I will not be sad when it is no longer serviceable.
The cost difference in gas turns out to be about $650/yr for us, which is about break-even for two trips, but also means the long distance miles are on someone else's car.
Not sure where to go with this one. Is the joke supposed to be "So, Boeing has teamed up with Sony to use their batteries in a new smart phone..." or "Leveraging the battery technology used in the 787 Dreamliner..."
"Right now, the ONLY thing that is preventing me from getting a Tesla is that I have to travel longer than 500 miles a few times a year, and renting a car for a week, three times a year is too expensive an option."
Renting a car for $500/pop three times a year is "too expensive" for a guy who has no problem dropping $90,000 on a car? I could see that the inconvenience might be a reason, but cost? We rented a mini-van a couple times a year for our family vacations because the sedan wasn't big enough. NBD.
Amazingly, there are actually people living outside of the I-5 corridor. I know, seems crazy - but it's true. There are people, in the US even, that live on the Atlantic Ocean side of the continent!
Really? Marketplace acceptance when they can get $90k for a sedan?
No, the real question(s) left are - can you make it affordable and can you accelerate and standardize recharging, because most people out there wouldn't care if their cars ran on donkey shit if it was affordable, quiet, efficient, and you could "fill up" whenever and wherever you needed to.
So you want a Moller sky car. Which oddly enough, may be no too far off if projects like the one that mated a quad (or hex?) copter with an SUV-like frame.
Neutral is in the eye of the beholder. In this case, the statement is entirely factual. GEMA has, in fact, NOT granted the rights. It is actually the youtube poster who is required to obtain (what I assume is the German equivalent of) synchronization rights in order to post the video. Youtube has found it in their commercial interest to secure those rights in the video poster's stead where they can. However, the right - BECAUSE IT IS NOT STATUTORY* - is solely at the whim of GEMA. Youtube may have offered them less than they wanted, or less than they felt was fair compensation. It doesn't matter - GEMA grants or does not grant; it is not Youtube has no say in the rights granting process. Youtube could offer them $100 per play, and GEMA could still say no, because is their right.
*I presume that US and German copyright law is similar; if it is statutory then the above is not as compelling. Note that in the US, some broadcast and all mechanical licensing IS statutory, and rights holders have no say, but synchronization (video rights) is different.
Actually, every dollar spent on acquiring your vehicle is a dollar which has been burned as energy somewhere in the chain. Until renewable sources of energy come on line in a significant fraction, and are self perpetuating (i.e. the sources themselves produce most of the energy to produce), the truth is that every dollar spent has been (or will be) respent on energy. Coal is free, oil is free, gold is free, steel is free. What costs money is the extraction and processing, roylaties (profit for the resource "owner") plus overhead and profit...the last two of which get respent on "stuff" which is really just raw materials converted into goods via energy.
For a vehicle with a 200,000mi life expectancy, $90,000 purchase price means you have to save more than $60,000 in fuel costs, or 30c/mile, over a $30,000 vehicle just to break even. And that's not going to happen. While you could argue that *your* electric is nuclear/solar/hydroelectric, the fact is that *on average* electricity is still based largely on a non-renewable fuel.
I didn't rtfa (since it's probably paywalled as all of CR are), but I stand by my theory - the less expensive it is over it's full life cycle, the more green it really is.
Except for the eco-proud, nobody wants a car that looks like a Leaf, or a Prius, or anything like an economy car. Yeah, we get it - little high pressure tires and aerodynamics matter, but you need to learn to hide that shit. Bland sedan or cute 2 seater (miata/mr2/Z3/Z4/TT) style for even lower drag - don't even let me know it's electric.
And give an option for a built in mini-generator (honda style - small, quiet, 2kW) that will give drivers the option of never getting stuck.
Actually, there is no solution. Humans are note meant to function in groups as large as modern governments. It's like trying play single deck poker with 12 people.
No, we'd have less. We'd have a useless patchwork of incompatible systems even worse than the clusterfuck that exists right now. The endgame always converges to a single large player in nearly any industry with large barriers to entry. If not for DOJ, we would have a very large number of monopolies. With them we have consolidation to 2-3 players in every market carrying 80+% of all business. And that's true for so many services.
Seriously, the train takes FOREVER in the mid-atlantic/northeast corridor. In fact, it takes longer to take the train than it does to drive. And it costs the same as gas if you're going solo, much more if you have 2 or more people travelling together.
Ex: fly to NY, INCLUDING arriving 1.5h before departure to allow for parking/TSA/etc. takes about 3.5 hrs from my town in S/W Virginia to NYC (6 if you have a connecting flight). The drive is 7 hours. The "direct" train is just shy of 9 hours if I count parking and arriving just 20 minutes before departure. And it's 30 miles closer to NYC than the airport. WTF? And the cheapest ticket, when they're available, is $65. Now, that's pretty good considering it would cost me $50 in gas. Definitely worth the $15 extra, probably worth the $80 for two of us. Except that there are exactly 2 trains that run on a typical day and only one on the weekend. You get there when you get there, which usually means at least one extra day of travel and one extra night in a hotel.
It has it's place, but with freight having first priority on US rails, I don't ever expect the train to become a preferred mode of transportation.
It's linux you have to watch out for - they'll patch the kernel and just keep on going, though it's a reasonable chance most of it will work. And if it doesn't they'll tell you to write your own fscking update. Microsoft would require that you stop the car entirely for the simplest of changes, and you'll have to turn it off - possibly multiple times - just to get the damned thing running on the new software.
Apple won't worry about patches much - after three years they won't support software updates for your "legacy hardware" anymore, and will expect that in that time you should have bought a new car anyway.
I know, hold off on the troll mod for just a second...
Seriously, Apple has always taken the "my way or the highway" stance. You WILL use MP4s. You WILL have a fingerprint reader. You WILL have the iTunes store. And, sonofabitch, it's working for them. And it's not even Apple - every manufacturer does this. There's all sorts of weird or in-house developed features which could be optional but which aren't because making it optional doesn't serve the purpose of the manufacturer.
I like to hate on Microsoft as much as the next guy, but this isn't some special Microsoft dance.
There are two ways to think of this - as a problem devoid of human emotion, "you are worth whatever people think your worth," or as one which accepts that, as a human trading time for money there is a limit to the value you have when compared to others working on the same team/company.
If you agree with the former, we can eliminate any form of social welfare or assistance. If you are poor and get sick, you die. If you don't work, you don't get any food, even if you are disabled. Insurance can (or should) not exist - you pay your way, and if fate frowns on you, tough shit. Minimum wage should never exist.
As soon as you move off that emotionally-void stance, you land at some form of wage shaving or wage inflation, on the presumption that every human life is valuable in some way or to some degree. It can be implemented as a minimum wage, a salary cap, a progressive tax, a soup kitchen, a church homeless shelter, non-profit or reduced cost medical care, an estate tax - you name it. A multiplier is just a different way to look at preventing one human being from being recognized as being infinitely more valuable than another. You're really just negotiating the line once you step out of the capitalist theoretical circle and believe (as every single religion in the world, and nearly every human believes about the other humans in his or her monkeyspace).
If you're concerned about the poor MBa who is working his fingers to the bone 70 hours a week, you need not fret - simply set the threshold at an acceptable level to you. Minimum wage is $7.25/hr in the US, or $15100/yr. I'll grant you an MBa from an ivy league school at $100k/yr for 6 years, $72,000 in interest to get that degree, and 6 years of lost wages at double the federal minimum wage. We'll presume, for the sake of argument, that with such lofty qualifications, razor sharp intellect, and 70hr/wk work ethic that you will be hired straight away. We'll take the bottom of the 99th percentile (aka "1%er") as a benchmark for a comfortable lifestyle *plus* pay off all that hard-earned money you spent on the MBa in just 3 years. So $762,000/3 years and $250,000/yr to "live".
That gives us multiplier of 33, which seems like enough to assuage your problems with a "cap" - AND, all you need to do to make more money is to raise the salary of your lowest paid workers. Double your lowest paid worker to $15 an hour (hey, that's almost 150% of the poverty level for the US!!), and you can bang out that million dollar salary - that'll cover those tuition bills and still leave you a few nickels for your brilliance! Oh, and the pain and suffering of your stressful job - can't forget that - as you take the corporate jet top your next meeting!
3500 cents per user. At a fraction of a cent per user per dataset sold, that's going to be a lot of marketing demographic / dat mining pulls to even think about breaking even. It's one thing to sell click-though or impression adds for fractional cents (on average, sure you might get 10c on some, but not everyone is a homosexual male 22-35 with a 6+ figure income), but there's currently no ad stream for this set.
As for monetizing the product, we've moved out of desktop and winmobile apps that could reasonably charge $20-40 for purpose application - people hesitate at spending more than $0.99 on an app nowadays. Can you imagine the outrage if they tried to get $9.99 for an app? That puts it in the very top tier of pricing for the app marketplaces.
Slashdot Mirror
No, actually it's not. The CEO is hires to act in the best interest of the company as a whole, not just in a fiduciary setting. Otherwise, you could successfully sue for not liquidating all of the corporate assets and distributing them to the shareholders to maximize current quarterly dividends.
If you have 50%+1 shares you can put in place a board of directors which you can then coerce into firing him. But you can't fire him directly. It's how the process works.
Still shooting TechPan and Ektar 25 from your freezer vault, eh? C&N(&others) have left all but the finest grain, slow films in the dust for years. If you shoot anything but base ISO, you should be shooting digital - or you're missing out on details you'll never get in even moderate ISO film. (And, yes, I still own an F4s film camera)
Actually, we ended up buying one. At the time we already had two working vehicles. We ended up selling one as the kid's gear got more and more cumbersome. In hindsight, it probably was not the best move, as the mini-van is a piece of shit as a day-to-day automobile. The ride is generally poor (and gets worse by the day), the short-trip mileage is pretty poor (18mpg), can't handle in snow worth shit, and it loses street value like nobody's business. We've since gone back to a sedan and I use the van for work because it gets better mileage than my truck and does a respectable job of holding the various test gear I need in the field. We still use it for big trips, so it's good in that sense, but I will not be sad when it is no longer serviceable.
The cost difference in gas turns out to be about $650/yr for us, which is about break-even for two trips, but also means the long distance miles are on someone else's car.
Not sure where to go with this one. Is the joke supposed to be "So, Boeing has teamed up with Sony to use their batteries in a new smart phone..." or "Leveraging the battery technology used in the 787 Dreamliner..."
You left coasters are so cute
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
"Right now, the ONLY thing that is preventing me from getting a Tesla is that I have to travel longer than 500 miles a few times a year, and renting a car for a week, three times a year is too expensive an option."
Renting a car for $500/pop three times a year is "too expensive" for a guy who has no problem dropping $90,000 on a car? I could see that the inconvenience might be a reason, but cost? We rented a mini-van a couple times a year for our family vacations because the sedan wasn't big enough. NBD.
Amazingly, there are actually people living outside of the I-5 corridor. I know, seems crazy - but it's true. There are people, in the US even, that live on the Atlantic Ocean side of the continent!
Really? Marketplace acceptance when they can get $90k for a sedan?
No, the real question(s) left are - can you make it affordable and can you accelerate and standardize recharging, because most people out there wouldn't care if their cars ran on donkey shit if it was affordable, quiet, efficient, and you could "fill up" whenever and wherever you needed to.
So you want a Moller sky car. Which oddly enough, may be no too far off if projects like the one that mated a quad (or hex?) copter with an SUV-like frame.
Neutral is in the eye of the beholder. In this case, the statement is entirely factual. GEMA has, in fact, NOT granted the rights. It is actually the youtube poster who is required to obtain (what I assume is the German equivalent of) synchronization rights in order to post the video. Youtube has found it in their commercial interest to secure those rights in the video poster's stead where they can. However, the right - BECAUSE IT IS NOT STATUTORY* - is solely at the whim of GEMA. Youtube may have offered them less than they wanted, or less than they felt was fair compensation. It doesn't matter - GEMA grants or does not grant; it is not Youtube has no say in the rights granting process. Youtube could offer them $100 per play, and GEMA could still say no, because is their right.
*I presume that US and German copyright law is similar; if it is statutory then the above is not as compelling. Note that in the US, some broadcast and all mechanical licensing IS statutory, and rights holders have no say, but synchronization (video rights) is different.
Actually, every dollar spent on acquiring your vehicle is a dollar which has been burned as energy somewhere in the chain. Until renewable sources of energy come on line in a significant fraction, and are self perpetuating (i.e. the sources themselves produce most of the energy to produce), the truth is that every dollar spent has been (or will be) respent on energy. Coal is free, oil is free, gold is free, steel is free. What costs money is the extraction and processing, roylaties (profit for the resource "owner") plus overhead and profit...the last two of which get respent on "stuff" which is really just raw materials converted into goods via energy.
For a vehicle with a 200,000mi life expectancy, $90,000 purchase price means you have to save more than $60,000 in fuel costs, or 30c/mile, over a $30,000 vehicle just to break even. And that's not going to happen. While you could argue that *your* electric is nuclear/solar/hydroelectric, the fact is that *on average* electricity is still based largely on a non-renewable fuel.
I didn't rtfa (since it's probably paywalled as all of CR are), but I stand by my theory - the less expensive it is over it's full life cycle, the more green it really is.
Compared to the aftermarket leader in infotainment, Kenwood, I'd say that sounds about typical.
Money
(and since /. abhors concise answers, did you know that Verizon still doesn't do IMAP?)
Except for the eco-proud, nobody wants a car that looks like a Leaf, or a Prius, or anything like an economy car. Yeah, we get it - little high pressure tires and aerodynamics matter, but you need to learn to hide that shit. Bland sedan or cute 2 seater (miata/mr2/Z3/Z4/TT) style for even lower drag - don't even let me know it's electric.
And give an option for a built in mini-generator (honda style - small, quiet, 2kW) that will give drivers the option of never getting stuck.
Actually, there is no solution. Humans are note meant to function in groups as large as modern governments. It's like trying play single deck poker with 12 people.
No, we'd have less. We'd have a useless patchwork of incompatible systems even worse than the clusterfuck that exists right now. The endgame always converges to a single large player in nearly any industry with large barriers to entry. If not for DOJ, we would have a very large number of monopolies. With them we have consolidation to 2-3 players in every market carrying 80+% of all business. And that's true for so many services.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Seriously, the train takes FOREVER in the mid-atlantic/northeast corridor. In fact, it takes longer to take the train than it does to drive. And it costs the same as gas if you're going solo, much more if you have 2 or more people travelling together.
Ex: fly to NY, INCLUDING arriving 1.5h before departure to allow for parking/TSA/etc. takes about 3.5 hrs from my town in S/W Virginia to NYC (6 if you have a connecting flight). The drive is 7 hours. The "direct" train is just shy of 9 hours if I count parking and arriving just 20 minutes before departure. And it's 30 miles closer to NYC than the airport. WTF? And the cheapest ticket, when they're available, is $65. Now, that's pretty good considering it would cost me $50 in gas. Definitely worth the $15 extra, probably worth the $80 for two of us. Except that there are exactly 2 trains that run on a typical day and only one on the weekend. You get there when you get there, which usually means at least one extra day of travel and one extra night in a hotel.
It has it's place, but with freight having first priority on US rails, I don't ever expect the train to become a preferred mode of transportation.
It's linux you have to watch out for - they'll patch the kernel and just keep on going, though it's a reasonable chance most of it will work. And if it doesn't they'll tell you to write your own fscking update. Microsoft would require that you stop the car entirely for the simplest of changes, and you'll have to turn it off - possibly multiple times - just to get the damned thing running on the new software.
Apple won't worry about patches much - after three years they won't support software updates for your "legacy hardware" anymore, and will expect that in that time you should have bought a new car anyway.
I know, hold off on the troll mod for just a second...
Seriously, Apple has always taken the "my way or the highway" stance. You WILL use MP4s. You WILL have a fingerprint reader. You WILL have the iTunes store. And, sonofabitch, it's working for them. And it's not even Apple - every manufacturer does this. There's all sorts of weird or in-house developed features which could be optional but which aren't because making it optional doesn't serve the purpose of the manufacturer.
I like to hate on Microsoft as much as the next guy, but this isn't some special Microsoft dance.
There are two ways to think of this - as a problem devoid of human emotion, "you are worth whatever people think your worth," or as one which accepts that, as a human trading time for money there is a limit to the value you have when compared to others working on the same team/company.
If you agree with the former, we can eliminate any form of social welfare or assistance. If you are poor and get sick, you die. If you don't work, you don't get any food, even if you are disabled. Insurance can (or should) not exist - you pay your way, and if fate frowns on you, tough shit. Minimum wage should never exist.
As soon as you move off that emotionally-void stance, you land at some form of wage shaving or wage inflation, on the presumption that every human life is valuable in some way or to some degree. It can be implemented as a minimum wage, a salary cap, a progressive tax, a soup kitchen, a church homeless shelter, non-profit or reduced cost medical care, an estate tax - you name it. A multiplier is just a different way to look at preventing one human being from being recognized as being infinitely more valuable than another. You're really just negotiating the line once you step out of the capitalist theoretical circle and believe (as every single religion in the world, and nearly every human believes about the other humans in his or her monkeyspace).
If you're concerned about the poor MBa who is working his fingers to the bone 70 hours a week, you need not fret - simply set the threshold at an acceptable level to you. Minimum wage is $7.25/hr in the US, or $15100/yr. I'll grant you an MBa from an ivy league school at $100k/yr for 6 years, $72,000 in interest to get that degree, and 6 years of lost wages at double the federal minimum wage. We'll presume, for the sake of argument, that with such lofty qualifications, razor sharp intellect, and 70hr/wk work ethic that you will be hired straight away. We'll take the bottom of the 99th percentile (aka "1%er") as a benchmark for a comfortable lifestyle *plus* pay off all that hard-earned money you spent on the MBa in just 3 years. So $762,000/3 years and $250,000/yr to "live".
That gives us multiplier of 33, which seems like enough to assuage your problems with a "cap" - AND, all you need to do to make more money is to raise the salary of your lowest paid workers. Double your lowest paid worker to $15 an hour (hey, that's almost 150% of the poverty level for the US!!), and you can bang out that million dollar salary - that'll cover those tuition bills and still leave you a few nickels for your brilliance! Oh, and the pain and suffering of your stressful job - can't forget that - as you take the corporate jet top your next meeting!
3500 cents per user. At a fraction of a cent per user per dataset sold, that's going to be a lot of marketing demographic / dat mining pulls to even think about breaking even. It's one thing to sell click-though or impression adds for fractional cents (on average, sure you might get 10c on some, but not everyone is a homosexual male 22-35 with a 6+ figure income), but there's currently no ad stream for this set.
As for monetizing the product, we've moved out of desktop and winmobile apps that could reasonably charge $20-40 for purpose application - people hesitate at spending more than $0.99 on an app nowadays. Can you imagine the outrage if they tried to get $9.99 for an app? That puts it in the very top tier of pricing for the app marketplaces.
It's where comcast makes all of their money. No content to create/buy/manage, just gravy.
[everyone stares at the skinny guy in glasses]
Skinny guy: What?!? Everybody likes free pizza?