VCs do not operate on loans. They do not hoard their own cash because they make more money on the interest than they do in their own investments.
The money a VC invests is contributed by their investors. Some are seriously rich people, some are institutions (think.edu endowment funds with $100s of millions or $billions). None of it is a loan. If the VC loses all the money, the investors are out the money, period, though they often have a claim on the VC's carry fee (typically 20% of the investment) in that case.
Commercial paper is also not an interbank loan. It's a short term unsecured loan to finance operating expenses. Non-banks absolutely participate in this market.
It's not all or nothing. Live in a cave or put your entire life on facebook. You can keep some of your life private, and still connect with friends and coworkers in social media.
It's all about a little discretion. Just step back 100 years and this conversation is about talking. Do you blurt out everything about yourself to everyone, or take a vow of silence?
They're both a bad answer. Talk some. Set reasonable limits, but don't be a digital hermit. There are going to be bumps, like some of my friends who post their religious and political affiliations may learn, but opening up a little and admitting we disagree about things, but can rationally disagree and still find value in each other is a really good thing. Today, your future boss may look you up and not hire you because you're a rabid McCain or Obama supporter. Hopefully someday soon, they'll just see that your friends think you're a good programmer and not really care about your politics, because hey, everybody has some opinion about politics and it's a plus that you care at all.
Too many people have this painfully naive idea that Open or Free software is better or morally superior to closed or commercial. It isn't necessarily.
As you correctly point out, OSS can suck. It has its own version of the Tragedy of the Commons. Most open source software is not very good. Either poorly written, poorly documented, poorly maintained, or just junk period. Anybody can write it (and does). Some, of course, rivals closed and commercial. Not surprisingly, the answer should be that the model doesn't dictate the quality of the end product. The quality and constraints of the team producing it do.
This all made a lot of sense to me when $100 was a lot of money. GCC was a godsend almost 20 years ago, but once you're in the real world, if people aren't willing to part with a little money for your product, it's because you're writing crap or you're just scratching an itch nobody has.
You make a very well reasoned explanation of this.
Stallman is still a crackpot. A curious combination of fanatic, technologist, and luddite.:)
I don't know quite a lot about how food makes it to my dinner table. If it stopped working, society as we (ok, I, for those of you hand-cranking your OLPCs) would screech to a halt and massive starvation would ensue.
And yet, having everyone not only KNOW how to make their own food, but actually do it because the mega-farms, chemical producers, grocers and their massive supply chains might screw up is plainly stupid.
Yes, we create new technology. New business models. Some of them entail relying on the new technology and new business models. The choice is not between Stallman and the hallelujah choir. The choice is risk/benefit, like always.
Stallman is not part of the market for this service. His sky will perpetually be falling. I figured out years ago that I'm a market outlier. What I'm willing to buy has no real relation to the market as a whole. Stallman needs to learn this, or perhaps just the Slashdot crowd does. What Stallman finds objectionable is more or less irrelevant as far as the business world is concerned.
1) is crazy. I don't believe a single person that says this. Its like reading Penthouse for the articles. Those that play for fun play in the basements or for free online for worthless pieces of plastic or credits.
Nope. I've tried yahoo and facebook. The play is ungodly awful because the players don't care if they win or lose. Playing against people whose play is irrational, uninformed, or just plain stupid is really not that fun.
I think it's something about announcing launches, with detailed transcripts of conversations, before they happen. Sending underage athletes to international events, swearing they're of age even after evidence is found that they're not. Sadly, the list goes on and on.
At some point, distrust and skepticism becomes the norm.
Your point is well taken that all governments lie, and necessarily so. Some governments lie a lot about things that don't seem worth lying about.
It's a pity you posted that as AC. That's actually true. Professional associations in general fulfill that role. Nobody wants to say it out loud, but what rational person spends a lot of money and 8 years of their life (PLUS residency) to join a profession, then says "ya know, we need a lot more of us, and it's ok with me that supply and demand means I'll get paid less".
No, you promote quality and safety and how there need to be all these fences to separate the Great Unwashed from the medical profession. If they instead said "It's for the children!" you'd recognize it for what it really is.
According to $SmartLaywer from $BigNameLawFirm, if you use your personal email for work business, those emails are the property of your company. It may be a private email account, but the email itself is very likely government property.
Of course, IANAL. If you want a real opinion from someone legally qualified to stand behind it, hire AL.
You're talking about brand awareness. Brand awareness is not the goal of your marketing when everybody who remotely has enough capital to buy a PC already either knows your brand, or is going to buy it anyway because 90% of other people do.
Don't try to paint this as some clever ad campaign Billy G and his buddies put together to get people talking about Microsoft. This was a disaster, pure and simple, and either nobody grew a spine and told the powers that be at MS in time, or those powers wouldn't listen.
Supervisors do NOT need access. Any competent manager knows that's the case.
Agreed. However, the network admin does not have the right to make that decision. A competent manager should be more than happy with the system you describe--provided it's tested often enough to be believably reliable. Ever work somewhere that did escrow passwords like that, but often forgot to update them? Who do you suppose is responsible for this guy doing his job correctly? You do realize, don't you, that management is tasked with taking a big pile of work, finding, hiring, and keeping people competent to do it, making sure they're *actually* doing it well enough, and transitioning the work to the next guy when the previous one leaves? I would love to work in a company where we always make the right hires, and our employees always diligently and correctly do the work. Most of the time they do, but occasionally they don't. Peter Drucker wrote that the job of management is to take an organization composed of average, fallible human beings and make it work reliably and well.
BTW, did you miss the part of the case where for _years_ the admin in question begged, _BEGGED_ for someone else who was competent to be hired so he wasn't a single point of failure? That he continually pointed out that there was no DR plan whatsoever?
I did, in fact, forget that. There is a wide ethical gulf between pointing out that someone is doing something inadvisable and actually precipitating the disaster.
Nope, this guy made a serious error in judgment in not making sure that the mayor's office had the access information ahead of time. His supervisors are clearly incapable of administering that network and shouldn't be let anywhere near a console.
Exactly. He screwed up by vastly exceeding his authority rather than getting someone who did have the right to deny them access to do it. Is it the supervisor's job to administer the network, or is it their job to administer the work?
Mea culpa. I just RTed the FA again, and his supervisors DID ask for access. He should have been fired immediately. IANAL, so I can't speak to the validity of the criminal charges, but this guy is clearly WAY in the wrong.
I don't know what part of this you think he's technically right on, other than that he worked for incompetents, which seems to be true. The cardinal sin in this whole mess is that he apparently had exclusive access to a lot of stuff, and nobody was clued enough to say "Hey, that's a bad idea." This is a massive failure of IT management, who should not have let this guy build a house of cards that he can knock down at will, and only he can rebuild.
That said, his actions are still beyond reprehensible.
Read TFA. He didn't patent gigabytes of music in your pocket. His device stored a few minutes of audio. It was, in some sense, an evolutionary yet novel application. Before, we store music on tapes or vinyl disks. Now that this solid state storage is around, let's store music on that!
Part of the thrill of the games, and of sport in general, is witnessing _human_ competition. When it becomes chemical, I lose interest. McGwire vs Bonds? I honestly didn't care, and wouldn't blow my nose on their so-called achievement. They didn't do it. Marion Jones Olympic achievements are no more impressive to me than an MD writing a prescription.
I still have some interest because there are real people actually competing. People who compete man vs. man (or woman), who put countless hours of un-chemically assisted work into becoming truly great athletes.
When they're all just steroid filled meat, I'll just completely lose interest. It'll be the final nail in the debacle the IOC has made of the modern Olympic games.
IANAL, so I hope someone with a credible opinion knows the answer to this.
Is there a legal doctrine under which a vendor can compel the customer to return something that's already bought and paid for? Psystar says gimme, customer says no, is the game not over?
ObWhyImAskingALegalQuestionOnSlashdot:
Because the answer isn't important enough to pay for, I ask only out of curiosity, and won't be relying on it for anything.
I have read The Art of War. I play Go, though not well. It makes chess look like tic-tac-toe in comparison.
That said, you're describing notable accomplishments of people who have been dead for a really, really long time. I admire the longevity of the culture, but the phrase "What have you done lately?" comes to mind.
You might also ask why China has a trillion of their money in our hands. Any decent economist will tell you it's safer here (more stable government, institutions, rule of law, etc) and it earns better risk adjusted returns here. Think about it. If your economy was going gangbusters, would you invest it in someone else who wasn't doing as well? Of course not.
That's an interesting perspective. I think ReiserFS is a darned useful filesystem. I wouldn't think less of anyone for continuing the work, and I wouldn't hesitate to do so myself. I don't consider continuing a useful invention to be an endorsement of the inventor.
Not remotely. Statutory damages are deterrent, not compensation. You can also bet that the cost of finding and successfully prosecuting or suing someone is well in excess of the cost of the game. You can bet they're going to try to recover more than their actual cost of recovery, or it isn't even worth doing at all. Your average, or even below average, lawyer isn't even getting out of bed for £10.
Content rights owners aren't suing you to make themselves whole from the lost sale. They're doing it to prevent future lost sales. If you're preparing to illegally download some £40 game, but your buddy got caught, sued, and lost 15 times that for doing the same thing, you're going to think twice about doing it. The higher the cost and greater the likelihood you're going to pay it, the higher the disincentive. It's the same reason you can get a $1,000 fine for littering when the actual cost of having some prison inmate clean it up later is near zero. It's supposed to hurt enough that most people won't do it.
Same here, and it's really unfortunate. I'm entirely turned off my the rampant commercialism of the Olympics. This is a case in point where the people who MAKE the games, the athletes, are told they can't make a buck off it.
I don't mind the IOC packaging the athlete's work and making money from it, but I strongly object to the way the athletes themselves are treated like crap.
Not to be picky, but you do know there's a little bit more to the event horizon of a black hole than the fact that light can't get out of it? Let's not confuse interesting optical effects with singularities. They are...different.
They shouldn't protect students from the consequences of their actions. They should insist on being compelled to turn over information as a general protection for all students, and they did. They resisted, the judge ordered them to comply.
Due process isn't just a protection for the (potentially) guilty. It's also protection for the rest of us.
Funny, but you'd be surprised at the degree ethics is emphasized in MBA programs. We are quite often reminded of the honor code, and the results of breaches are publicized. The most common punishment (by far) is expulsion from the program, and believe you me, after spending a ridiculous sum on the program and two years of your life, getting expelled and a permanent professional black eye is a serious big deal. Your friends know you're going. Your company knows you're going. Good luck explaining why you're not going anymore, to say nothing of the permanent note in your transcript that you were suspended, expelled, or otherwise disciplined for a breach of ethics. It could easily be a career killer. Everyone wants to work with people they can trust.
In short, they understand yours is the popular perception and they're using the tools they have not just to change the perception, but to mold tomorrow's reality. Some of us are even attracted to the path because we've tired of seeing business run badly or unethically, and we're determined to dive in and do it better. By all means, hold us accountable, but help us out, too. Some of us are just techies like you who have decided to try a different way to make life better for all of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Truly amazing. By that same argument, Calling me on my cell phone from Kentucky makes me virtually present in Kentucky as well.
I hope it won't be long before a higher court calls him an idiot.
VCs do not operate on loans. They do not hoard their own cash because they make more money on the interest than they do in their own investments.
The money a VC invests is contributed by their investors. Some are seriously rich people, some are institutions (think .edu endowment funds with $100s of millions or $billions). None of it is a loan. If the VC loses all the money, the investors are out the money, period, though they often have a claim on the VC's carry fee (typically 20% of the investment) in that case.
Commercial paper is also not an interbank loan. It's a short term unsecured loan to finance operating expenses. Non-banks absolutely participate in this market.
It's not all or nothing. Live in a cave or put your entire life on facebook. You can keep some of your life private, and still connect with friends and coworkers in social media.
It's all about a little discretion. Just step back 100 years and this conversation is about talking. Do you blurt out everything about yourself to everyone, or take a vow of silence?
They're both a bad answer. Talk some. Set reasonable limits, but don't be a digital hermit. There are going to be bumps, like some of my friends who post their religious and political affiliations may learn, but opening up a little and admitting we disagree about things, but can rationally disagree and still find value in each other is a really good thing. Today, your future boss may look you up and not hire you because you're a rabid McCain or Obama supporter. Hopefully someday soon, they'll just see that your friends think you're a good programmer and not really care about your politics, because hey, everybody has some opinion about politics and it's a plus that you care at all.
Your lack of faith is completely unwarranted. After all, when the polygraph was shown to be unreliable and thrown out as evidence of guilt...
Right. Nevermind.
Too many people have this painfully naive idea that Open or Free software is better or morally superior to closed or commercial. It isn't necessarily.
As you correctly point out, OSS can suck. It has its own version of the Tragedy of the Commons. Most open source software is not very good. Either poorly written, poorly documented, poorly maintained, or just junk period. Anybody can write it (and does). Some, of course, rivals closed and commercial. Not surprisingly, the answer should be that the model doesn't dictate the quality of the end product. The quality and constraints of the team producing it do.
This all made a lot of sense to me when $100 was a lot of money. GCC was a godsend almost 20 years ago, but once you're in the real world, if people aren't willing to part with a little money for your product, it's because you're writing crap or you're just scratching an itch nobody has.
You make a very well reasoned explanation of this.
Stallman is still a crackpot. A curious combination of fanatic, technologist, and luddite. :)
I don't know quite a lot about how food makes it to my dinner table. If it stopped working, society as we (ok, I, for those of you hand-cranking your OLPCs) would screech to a halt and massive starvation would ensue.
And yet, having everyone not only KNOW how to make their own food, but actually do it because the mega-farms, chemical producers, grocers and their massive supply chains might screw up is plainly stupid.
Yes, we create new technology. New business models. Some of them entail relying on the new technology and new business models. The choice is not between Stallman and the hallelujah choir. The choice is risk/benefit, like always.
Stallman is not part of the market for this service. His sky will perpetually be falling. I figured out years ago that I'm a market outlier. What I'm willing to buy has no real relation to the market as a whole. Stallman needs to learn this, or perhaps just the Slashdot crowd does. What Stallman finds objectionable is more or less irrelevant as far as the business world is concerned.
1) is crazy. I don't believe a single person that says this. Its like reading Penthouse for the articles. Those that play for fun play in the basements or for free online for worthless pieces of plastic or credits.
Nope. I've tried yahoo and facebook. The play is ungodly awful because the players don't care if they win or lose. Playing against people whose play is irrational, uninformed, or just plain stupid is really not that fun.
I think it's something about announcing launches, with detailed transcripts of conversations, before they happen. Sending underage athletes to international events, swearing they're of age even after evidence is found that they're not. Sadly, the list goes on and on.
At some point, distrust and skepticism becomes the norm.
Your point is well taken that all governments lie, and necessarily so. Some governments lie a lot about things that don't seem worth lying about.
It's a pity you posted that as AC. That's actually true. Professional associations in general fulfill that role. Nobody wants to say it out loud, but what rational person spends a lot of money and 8 years of their life (PLUS residency) to join a profession, then says "ya know, we need a lot more of us, and it's ok with me that supply and demand means I'll get paid less".
No, you promote quality and safety and how there need to be all these fences to separate the Great Unwashed from the medical profession. If they instead said "It's for the children!" you'd recognize it for what it really is.
According to $SmartLaywer from $BigNameLawFirm, if you use your personal email for work business, those emails are the property of your company. It may be a private email account, but the email itself is very likely government property.
Of course, IANAL. If you want a real opinion from someone legally qualified to stand behind it, hire AL.
Oh $DIETY. No, this is completely wrong.
You're talking about brand awareness. Brand awareness is not the goal of your marketing when everybody who remotely has enough capital to buy a PC already either knows your brand, or is going to buy it anyway because 90% of other people do.
Don't try to paint this as some clever ad campaign Billy G and his buddies put together to get people talking about Microsoft. This was a disaster, pure and simple, and either nobody grew a spine and told the powers that be at MS in time, or those powers wouldn't listen.
Supervisors do NOT need access. Any competent manager knows that's the case.
Agreed. However, the network admin does not have the right to make that decision. A competent manager should be more than happy with the system you describe--provided it's tested often enough to be believably reliable. Ever work somewhere that did escrow passwords like that, but often forgot to update them? Who do you suppose is responsible for this guy doing his job correctly? You do realize, don't you, that management is tasked with taking a big pile of work, finding, hiring, and keeping people competent to do it, making sure they're *actually* doing it well enough, and transitioning the work to the next guy when the previous one leaves? I would love to work in a company where we always make the right hires, and our employees always diligently and correctly do the work. Most of the time they do, but occasionally they don't. Peter Drucker wrote that the job of management is to take an organization composed of average, fallible human beings and make it work reliably and well.
BTW, did you miss the part of the case where for _years_ the admin in question begged, _BEGGED_ for someone else who was competent to be hired so he wasn't a single point of failure? That he continually pointed out that there was no DR plan whatsoever?
I did, in fact, forget that. There is a wide ethical gulf between pointing out that someone is doing something inadvisable and actually precipitating the disaster.
Nope, this guy made a serious error in judgment in not making sure that the mayor's office had the access information ahead of time. His supervisors are clearly incapable of administering that network and shouldn't be let anywhere near a console.
Exactly. He screwed up by vastly exceeding his authority rather than getting someone who did have the right to deny them access to do it. Is it the supervisor's job to administer the network, or is it their job to administer the work?
Mea culpa. I just RTed the FA again, and his supervisors DID ask for access. He should have been fired immediately. IANAL, so I can't speak to the validity of the criminal charges, but this guy is clearly WAY in the wrong.
I don't know what part of this you think he's technically right on, other than that he worked for incompetents, which seems to be true. The cardinal sin in this whole mess is that he apparently had exclusive access to a lot of stuff, and nobody was clued enough to say "Hey, that's a bad idea." This is a massive failure of IT management, who should not have let this guy build a house of cards that he can knock down at will, and only he can rebuild.
That said, his actions are still beyond reprehensible.
Read TFA. He didn't patent gigabytes of music in your pocket. His device stored a few minutes of audio. It was, in some sense, an evolutionary yet novel application. Before, we store music on tapes or vinyl disks. Now that this solid state storage is around, let's store music on that!
Part of the thrill of the games, and of sport in general, is witnessing _human_ competition. When it becomes chemical, I lose interest. McGwire vs Bonds? I honestly didn't care, and wouldn't blow my nose on their so-called achievement. They didn't do it. Marion Jones Olympic achievements are no more impressive to me than an MD writing a prescription.
I still have some interest because there are real people actually competing. People who compete man vs. man (or woman), who put countless hours of un-chemically assisted work into becoming truly great athletes.
When they're all just steroid filled meat, I'll just completely lose interest. It'll be the final nail in the debacle the IOC has made of the modern Olympic games.
IANAL, so I hope someone with a credible opinion knows the answer to this.
Is there a legal doctrine under which a vendor can compel the customer to return something that's already bought and paid for? Psystar says gimme, customer says no, is the game not over?
ObWhyImAskingALegalQuestionOnSlashdot:
Because the answer isn't important enough to pay for, I ask only out of curiosity, and won't be relying on it for anything.
I have read The Art of War. I play Go, though not well. It makes chess look like tic-tac-toe in comparison.
That said, you're describing notable accomplishments of people who have been dead for a really, really long time. I admire the longevity of the culture, but the phrase "What have you done lately?" comes to mind.
You might also ask why China has a trillion of their money in our hands. Any decent economist will tell you it's safer here (more stable government, institutions, rule of law, etc) and it earns better risk adjusted returns here. Think about it. If your economy was going gangbusters, would you invest it in someone else who wasn't doing as well? Of course not.
That's an interesting perspective. I think ReiserFS is a darned useful filesystem. I wouldn't think less of anyone for continuing the work, and I wouldn't hesitate to do so myself. I don't consider continuing a useful invention to be an endorsement of the inventor.
Not remotely. Statutory damages are deterrent, not compensation. You can also bet that the cost of finding and successfully prosecuting or suing someone is well in excess of the cost of the game. You can bet they're going to try to recover more than their actual cost of recovery, or it isn't even worth doing at all. Your average, or even below average, lawyer isn't even getting out of bed for £10.
Content rights owners aren't suing you to make themselves whole from the lost sale. They're doing it to prevent future lost sales. If you're preparing to illegally download some £40 game, but your buddy got caught, sued, and lost 15 times that for doing the same thing, you're going to think twice about doing it. The higher the cost and greater the likelihood you're going to pay it, the higher the disincentive. It's the same reason you can get a $1,000 fine for littering when the actual cost of having some prison inmate clean it up later is near zero. It's supposed to hurt enough that most people won't do it.
Generalizations are always false. Including this one.
Same here, and it's really unfortunate. I'm entirely turned off my the rampant commercialism of the Olympics. This is a case in point where the people who MAKE the games, the athletes, are told they can't make a buck off it.
I don't mind the IOC packaging the athlete's work and making money from it, but I strongly object to the way the athletes themselves are treated like crap.
Not to be picky, but you do know there's a little bit more to the event horizon of a black hole than the fact that light can't get out of it? Let's not confuse interesting optical effects with singularities. They are...different.
They shouldn't protect students from the consequences of their actions. They should insist on being compelled to turn over information as a general protection for all students, and they did. They resisted, the judge ordered them to comply.
Due process isn't just a protection for the (potentially) guilty. It's also protection for the rest of us.
Funny, but you'd be surprised at the degree ethics is emphasized in MBA programs. We are quite often reminded of the honor code, and the results of breaches are publicized. The most common punishment (by far) is expulsion from the program, and believe you me, after spending a ridiculous sum on the program and two years of your life, getting expelled and a permanent professional black eye is a serious big deal. Your friends know you're going. Your company knows you're going. Good luck explaining why you're not going anymore, to say nothing of the permanent note in your transcript that you were suspended, expelled, or otherwise disciplined for a breach of ethics. It could easily be a career killer. Everyone wants to work with people they can trust.
In short, they understand yours is the popular perception and they're using the tools they have not just to change the perception, but to mold tomorrow's reality. Some of us are even attracted to the path because we've tired of seeing business run badly or unethically, and we're determined to dive in and do it better. By all means, hold us accountable, but help us out, too. Some of us are just techies like you who have decided to try a different way to make life better for all of us.