Lucy Koh worked for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, through which she received Apple stock during their IPO.
Look, I'll agree she ran this trial like a "why can't we all just love Apple" circus. But when Apple issued it's IPO in 1980, Lucy (born in 1968) hadn't even hit puberty yet.
you know Occam's Razor, right
Something about 12 year old girls probably not holding large stock portfolios from clients of companies they'll work for 20 years later (2000-2002)?
Then no one would buy it at 5x the price, and we have a non-issue here.
There is no reason why it wouldn't be except for people attempting to exploit victims of an emergency.
Of course a reason exists. Look, try it like this - Do you understand why NY has started rationing gas? The "legal" selling price doesn't reflect the true value of gas in the present circumstances. As a result, people will buy as much as they can at that artificially low price, causing runouts that don't otherwise need to happen. Instead of allowing simple market forces to restrict hoarding, the government instead needs to impose rationing to balance out their intervention on the supply side.
You would, I presume, respond to that with anti-hoarding laws. More practically, allowing higher prices will serve exactly the same role as rationing, in the absence of an external force setting a price or quantity floor or ceiling. Instead of that natural solution, which leads to people valuing it more and using less, listen to people on the radio - "I don't really need it today, but I figure I'd better fill up while I can". If that same course of action cost a month's pay, you'd see a hell of a lot more people choosing to do without even if they could technically afford it.
If that's what you think a Jim Crow Dixiecrat is
Go re-read what I responded to. Now imagine Preston Brooks saying the exact same thing 150 years ago. Or Jacques Bossuet, 400 years ago (well, in French, of course).
How absurd. Supply and demand apply more in a "crisis" than they do normally - Normally, we have an effectively infinite supply throttled only by the cost of production and the available demand. In a crisis, you actually do have limited supply, which makes it not just desirable for the seller, but for the buyer as well to price at the intersection of the supply and demand curves. Lower than that causes shortages.
These areas are in an official State of Emergency.
So? If you run out of #2 heating oil on a cold winter's night, you could say the same thing. Does a nighttime run-out delivery fee count as "gouging"?
The rules of business are what the State says they are.
Bullshit. The rules of business "are", if you want what I have for sale, you pay what I will sell it for. Anything else means people will hoard rather than sell, making the situation even worse. Again, back to supply and demand, a la Micro 101.
Price gouging is its own social harm. It is exploitative and creates massive inequities during a crisis
"Social harm" doesn't exist except as a fiction convenient for demonizing those who have what we want, and justifying using the power of the state to take it away from them. The inequities you describe always predate the crisis-of-the-day - Someone doesn't just stockpile generators for the hell of it. They do it as an investment, plain and simple.
Check your local laws.
The one accurate point you made - "Dear AG-of-the-week-looking-to-make-headlines: This sale will take place in my local jurisdiction. Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut, 'kay?"
There is no such thing as "use it incorrectly". You use it as the price allows.
By the same token, you'd have no such thing as "gouging" - You price it as (high as) scarcity and demand allows.
The whole concept of "price gouging" makes absolutely no sense to me. If I stock up on emergency supplies, specifically hoping to sell them in an emergency at a profit, hey, call me scum, but where the fuck does the government have a place in regulating the sale of a legal product between two private parties?
Or perhaps a better analogy, all of health care - A dying man will pay anything for the cure. Why doesn't charging him an arm and a leg (for a drug that costs pennies) count as a form of "full-time gouging"?
The military (not just the US) has done countless studies on the performance enhancing effects of amphetamines. They wouldn't have then adopted policies of giving speed out like candy in combat situations if it impaired performance more than they helped it.
As for hallucinogens, realize that we have two different ideas under discussion here - The "active" effects of taking the drug, and the longer term effects (ie, performance some time after coming down). Not many people will claim they can code well on acid; but does it help someone grasp an algorithm in new and useful ways, by having a frame of reference for tangibly experiencing (if not literally "seeing") other abstractions?
Where the hell would you find any drug-free programmers to use as a control group?
I suppose you group them into tweakers (stimulant users) vs psychonauts (hallucinogen users), using the FDA's standard "best known therapy as the control" protocols...
One actually is marketed as a toy, the others are not.
Let's see... Guns - Sporting equipment (so toy-like). Knives - Standard issue Boy Scout tool. Mace - Not toy. Tazers - Not toy. Baseball bats - Sporting equipment (so toy-like). FPS games - Definite toy.
Buckballs - Have "Not a toy" / "Not for kids" printed in no fewer than four places on the packaging.
But I do have one more for you: Dildos - Toy. Does that have any bearing on whether or not you'd give one to your apparently-retarded kids?
So... Sorry, but can you explain the distinction again?
Oh, and just to inject some actual facts into this discussion - Toddlers do not eat these. Tweens do, trying to look cool with a fake tongue piercing. And no one has actually died from them.
Imagine that the police have reason to suspect you might have committed a crime; do they then have the ability to just walk into your place and take every single thing you own, make those public, and then ask the public to sort through them for evidence of a crime?
The government doesn't have a constitutional right to a fair trial. It has unlimitedaccountability to all its citizens, from Bradley Manning to you and I.
Unfortunately, "accountability" doesn't mean much in an information vacuum. Fortunately, Bradley Manning is a fucking hero and helped fill that vacuum in the face of egregious offenses by our government. Also unfortunately, that just happens to make him a criminal, but that doesn't make his actions any less noble.
As for Assange - Seriously folks, lose the hard-on for the poor bastard - Our lying cheating murdering leaders would like nothing more than for us to get distracted by what he did or didn't do, rather than asking what our leaders did or didn't do. Instead of a special prosecutor indicting the whole goddamned government, we had a media circus of politicians praying we'll fall for all the finger pointing in the direction of Sweden. Assange, for his part, amounts to nothing more than an attention whore who happened to end up in the right place at the right time. If not Wikileaks, you would have seen the same info as a Pastebin, or on Rapidshare, or perhaps just leaked to a few major media outlets.
in some states you even have to pay sales tax on the full $649 price of a smart phone sales tax is on GOODS AND SERVICES are slashdotters really that dumb not to realize this?
Sales tax exists by state laws, and sometimes county/town. You have no fewer than 50 entirely different sets of rules for collecting it (and actually more like hundreds). Naturally, as a non-dumb Slashdotter, you already know this, right?
That accounts for Amazon (and others) putting up such a fight over sales tax. They don't give the least damn about having a small pass-through fee; they do care that, for exactly what you describe, they can expect to find 49 Attorneys-General (excluding California, and possibly even them if they don't get "enough" from this cash grab) going after them in a year for doing it "wrong".
The internet gave us a chance to finally abolish the single most regressive, without-representation tax in America today. Instead, we can thank California for fucking it up in a money-grab. Thanks guys! Let me know if you need anyone to piss on your graves, 'kay?
Judges don't like "good design". They don't like clever marketing tricks (like the first "apology"). They like absolute, immediate compliance (and not "technical" compliance) with the spirit of their demands.
Apple needs to suck it up and obey the court's order, or for the next round, you can expect executives to give their apologies on live TV from the inside of a cage.
If you have clicked on this Slashdot article and are now reading this comment, it is almost certainly below the fold. Yet you read it, right? It's not invisible?
Do you remember the SlashQuote at the bottom of your page when you wrote that comment? Did you even scroll down far enough to ever see it in the first place?
If you are paid 1,000 bitcoins a month, and you gamble with them, the government knows what you did.
Half true (thus my stressing the word "semi" as a modifier of "anonymously"). If you gamble with 1000 BTC, the whole world knows that "someone" paid "someone else" 1000BTC.
"They" don't know who paid it, who received it, or what it paid for. "They" don't know if the transaction originated in the US, or from China, or from the latest Mars rover for that matter. "They" don't even know, when you cash out 1500BTC at the end of the month, that you and the casino count as the same trading partners that exchanged the 1000BTC earlier in the month.
So yes, the whole world can see that "something happened", in a way that doesn't apply with cash. But that ends how much more anyone can know vs using cash.
The freedom of being able to buy something anonymously is soon coming to an end.
I know, right? Like how they scanned my driver's license last time I bought something with cash; or how I had to register with the Bureau of Private Transactions this past week when I traded a friend a Snickers for a Milky Way.
Bitcoin makes it easier to make semi-anonymous purchases online. It makes it easier to get around stupid government regulations on how I can spend my money, like anti-gambling laws. It makes it easier to engage in almost any transaction with someone from another country (or rather, "another currency", for those of you in the Eurozone), though that largely goes back to getting around insanely archaic pre-internet regulations.
But anonymity? I'd like to see the governments of the world try to eliminate that from the markets, because it would effectively put an end to any support whatsoever for their useless-in-the-modern-world oversight.
Every time you make a system too efficient, you reduce the number of workers but with economies it's important to have as many people working as possible.
Working to create goods or value does not equal working to shuffle goods or value around on paper (as distinct from physically relocating goods, ie shipping, which does create actual value).
Some jobs just should not exist in the first place. Putting people out of them merely means having people available to do "real" work.
Under the right conditions any registered person can be called up for service, all it takes is an act of Congress.
True, of course, but an extreme situation (and one in which I would have no qualms about telling them where to stick their "act"). I'd rather spend a war in Canada than getting tortured by Muslims/Koreans/UnknownFoeX, thankyouverymuch.:)
I mean more of a basic contractual agreement - Short of Congress choosing to terminate my interest in the well-being of the USA, an understanding that I work as a geek, not as a meat-shield.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's up for forming a lynch mob?
I'll bring the torches if you bring the pitchforks...
What happens January 1st?, Bubba?
Why, nothing happens, Lunch Meat. Just keep spending those welfare checks and smiling.
I'm moving my money in my 401K to the government securities fund so I wont make any return but at least I may not lose all of it.
At least, not until January 1st...
Anyone know of a practical way to invest your money in ammo (as a commodity, not a manufacturer thereof)?
Lucy Koh worked for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, through which she received Apple stock during their IPO.
Look, I'll agree she ran this trial like a "why can't we all just love Apple" circus. But when Apple issued it's IPO in 1980, Lucy (born in 1968) hadn't even hit puberty yet.
you know Occam's Razor, right
Something about 12 year old girls probably not holding large stock portfolios from clients of companies they'll work for 20 years later (2000-2002)?
So it seems to me that it's disingenuous at best to claim that the judge didn't request a full list.
That question doesn't request a full history, it doesn't even request an explanation. It asks a yes-or-no question.
When a cop, auditor, or lawyer asks you a question - You give exactly enough information to answer the question, and not half a breath more.
It is available at 1/5th the price
Then no one would buy it at 5x the price, and we have a non-issue here.
There is no reason why it wouldn't be except for people attempting to exploit victims of an emergency.
Of course a reason exists. Look, try it like this - Do you understand why NY has started rationing gas? The "legal" selling price doesn't reflect the true value of gas in the present circumstances. As a result, people will buy as much as they can at that artificially low price, causing runouts that don't otherwise need to happen. Instead of allowing simple market forces to restrict hoarding, the government instead needs to impose rationing to balance out their intervention on the supply side.
You would, I presume, respond to that with anti-hoarding laws. More practically, allowing higher prices will serve exactly the same role as rationing, in the absence of an external force setting a price or quantity floor or ceiling. Instead of that natural solution, which leads to people valuing it more and using less, listen to people on the radio - "I don't really need it today, but I figure I'd better fill up while I can". If that same course of action cost a month's pay, you'd see a hell of a lot more people choosing to do without even if they could technically afford it.
If that's what you think a Jim Crow Dixiecrat is
Go re-read what I responded to. Now imagine Preston Brooks saying the exact same thing 150 years ago. Or Jacques Bossuet, 400 years ago (well, in French, of course).
something that should be available at 1/5th the price.
...But isn't.
Face it, it is the world we live in and you really have no reason to be upset just because you just now realized it..
Spoken like a Jim Crow Dixiecrat.
This isn't about supply and demand.
How absurd. Supply and demand apply more in a "crisis" than they do normally - Normally, we have an effectively infinite supply throttled only by the cost of production and the available demand. In a crisis, you actually do have limited supply, which makes it not just desirable for the seller, but for the buyer as well to price at the intersection of the supply and demand curves. Lower than that causes shortages.
These areas are in an official State of Emergency.
So? If you run out of #2 heating oil on a cold winter's night, you could say the same thing. Does a nighttime run-out delivery fee count as "gouging"?
The rules of business are what the State says they are.
Bullshit. The rules of business "are", if you want what I have for sale, you pay what I will sell it for. Anything else means people will hoard rather than sell, making the situation even worse. Again, back to supply and demand, a la Micro 101.
Price gouging is its own social harm. It is exploitative and creates massive inequities during a crisis
"Social harm" doesn't exist except as a fiction convenient for demonizing those who have what we want, and justifying using the power of the state to take it away from them. The inequities you describe always predate the crisis-of-the-day - Someone doesn't just stockpile generators for the hell of it. They do it as an investment, plain and simple.
Check your local laws.
The one accurate point you made - "Dear AG-of-the-week-looking-to-make-headlines: This sale will take place in my local jurisdiction. Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut, 'kay?"
There is no such thing as "use it incorrectly". You use it as the price allows.
By the same token, you'd have no such thing as "gouging" - You price it as (high as) scarcity and demand allows.
The whole concept of "price gouging" makes absolutely no sense to me. If I stock up on emergency supplies, specifically hoping to sell them in an emergency at a profit, hey, call me scum, but where the fuck does the government have a place in regulating the sale of a legal product between two private parties?
Or perhaps a better analogy, all of health care - A dying man will pay anything for the cure. Why doesn't charging him an arm and a leg (for a drug that costs pennies) count as a form of "full-time gouging"?
Funny, I see it just fine on my portrait-mode 1080p display...
Floe. Ice floe.
The military (not just the US) has done countless studies on the performance enhancing effects of amphetamines. They wouldn't have then adopted policies of giving speed out like candy in combat situations if it impaired performance more than they helped it.
As for hallucinogens, realize that we have two different ideas under discussion here - The "active" effects of taking the drug, and the longer term effects (ie, performance some time after coming down). Not many people will claim they can code well on acid; but does it help someone grasp an algorithm in new and useful ways, by having a frame of reference for tangibly experiencing (if not literally "seeing") other abstractions?
Interesting idea, but one problem...
Where the hell would you find any drug-free programmers to use as a control group?
I suppose you group them into tweakers (stimulant users) vs psychonauts (hallucinogen users), using the FDA's standard "best known therapy as the control" protocols...
And I'll bet they're a hell of a lot safer for kids than Buckyballs. Look it up.
Dildo related fatalities - Greater than zero.
Buckyball fatalities - Zero.
You lose that bet.
No, but using phrases like "your apparently-retarded kids" does tell me what level of discourse is available here.
Hmm, survey SAYS - A step up from "dead toddlers", when not a single toddler (or stupid tween, or even stupid adult) has died from them?
One actually is marketed as a toy, the others are not.
Let's see... Guns - Sporting equipment (so toy-like). Knives - Standard issue Boy Scout tool. Mace - Not toy. Tazers - Not toy. Baseball bats - Sporting equipment (so toy-like). FPS games - Definite toy.
Buckballs - Have "Not a toy" / "Not for kids" printed in no fewer than four places on the packaging.
But I do have one more for you: Dildos - Toy. Does that have any bearing on whether or not you'd give one to your apparently-retarded kids?
So... Sorry, but can you explain the distinction again?
Oh, and just to inject some actual facts into this discussion - Toddlers do not eat these. Tweens do, trying to look cool with a fake tongue piercing. And no one has actually died from them.
Imagine that the police have reason to suspect you might have committed a crime; do they then have the ability to just walk into your place and take every single thing you own, make those public, and then ask the public to sort through them for evidence of a crime?
The government doesn't have a constitutional right to a fair trial. It has unlimitedaccountability to all its citizens, from Bradley Manning to you and I.
Unfortunately, "accountability" doesn't mean much in an information vacuum. Fortunately, Bradley Manning is a fucking hero and helped fill that vacuum in the face of egregious offenses by our government. Also unfortunately, that just happens to make him a criminal, but that doesn't make his actions any less noble.
As for Assange - Seriously folks, lose the hard-on for the poor bastard - Our lying cheating murdering leaders would like nothing more than for us to get distracted by what he did or didn't do, rather than asking what our leaders did or didn't do. Instead of a special prosecutor indicting the whole goddamned government, we had a media circus of politicians praying we'll fall for all the finger pointing in the direction of Sweden. Assange, for his part, amounts to nothing more than an attention whore who happened to end up in the right place at the right time. If not Wikileaks, you would have seen the same info as a Pastebin, or on Rapidshare, or perhaps just leaked to a few major media outlets.
in some states you even have to pay sales tax on the full $649 price of a smart phone
sales tax is on GOODS AND SERVICES
are slashdotters really that dumb not to realize this?
Sales tax exists by state laws, and sometimes county/town. You have no fewer than 50 entirely different sets of rules for collecting it (and actually more like hundreds). Naturally, as a non-dumb Slashdotter, you already know this, right?
That accounts for Amazon (and others) putting up such a fight over sales tax. They don't give the least damn about having a small pass-through fee; they do care that, for exactly what you describe, they can expect to find 49 Attorneys-General (excluding California, and possibly even them if they don't get "enough" from this cash grab) going after them in a year for doing it "wrong".
The internet gave us a chance to finally abolish the single most regressive, without-representation tax in America today. Instead, we can thank California for fucking it up in a money-grab. Thanks guys! Let me know if you need anyone to piss on your graves, 'kay?
it's just good design.
Judges don't like "good design". They don't like clever marketing tricks (like the first "apology"). They like absolute, immediate compliance (and not "technical" compliance) with the spirit of their demands.
Apple needs to suck it up and obey the court's order, or for the next round, you can expect executives to give their apologies on live TV from the inside of a cage.
If you have clicked on this Slashdot article and are now reading this comment, it is almost certainly below the fold. Yet you read it, right? It's not invisible?
Do you remember the SlashQuote at the bottom of your page when you wrote that comment? Did you even scroll down far enough to ever see it in the first place?
If you are paid 1,000 bitcoins a month, and you gamble with them, the government knows what you did.
Half true (thus my stressing the word "semi" as a modifier of "anonymously"). If you gamble with 1000 BTC, the whole world knows that "someone" paid "someone else" 1000BTC.
"They" don't know who paid it, who received it, or what it paid for. "They" don't know if the transaction originated in the US, or from China, or from the latest Mars rover for that matter. "They" don't even know, when you cash out 1500BTC at the end of the month, that you and the casino count as the same trading partners that exchanged the 1000BTC earlier in the month.
So yes, the whole world can see that "something happened", in a way that doesn't apply with cash. But that ends how much more anyone can know vs using cash.
The camera scanned your face.
A private store's security camera caught me on tape. If they don't get robbed in the next week, the tapes will get recycled.
Yes, we get caught on CCTV just about everywhere we go in public. Those don't go directly to Citizen Tracking central.
The freedom of being able to buy something anonymously is soon coming to an end.
I know, right? Like how they scanned my driver's license last time I bought something with cash; or how I had to register with the Bureau of Private Transactions this past week when I traded a friend a Snickers for a Milky Way.
Bitcoin makes it easier to make semi-anonymous purchases online. It makes it easier to get around stupid government regulations on how I can spend my money, like anti-gambling laws. It makes it easier to engage in almost any transaction with someone from another country (or rather, "another currency", for those of you in the Eurozone), though that largely goes back to getting around insanely archaic pre-internet regulations.
But anonymity? I'd like to see the governments of the world try to eliminate that from the markets, because it would effectively put an end to any support whatsoever for their useless-in-the-modern-world oversight.
Can I use any of these to buy cannabis on the Silk Road?
;)
Well, you can first sell your little sister for BTC, then use the BTC to buy weed, so, yes!.
Every time you make a system too efficient, you reduce the number of workers but with economies it's important to have as many people working as possible.
Working to create goods or value does not equal working to shuffle goods or value around on paper (as distinct from physically relocating goods, ie shipping, which does create actual value).
Some jobs just should not exist in the first place. Putting people out of them merely means having people available to do "real" work.
True either way. I'd rather not work on either side of torture equation.
Under the right conditions any registered person can be called up for service, all it takes is an act of Congress.
:)
True, of course, but an extreme situation (and one in which I would have no qualms about telling them where to stick their "act"). I'd rather spend a war in Canada than getting tortured by Muslims/Koreans/UnknownFoeX, thankyouverymuch.
I mean more of a basic contractual agreement - Short of Congress choosing to terminate my interest in the well-being of the USA, an understanding that I work as a geek, not as a meat-shield.