it's just accounting software is really hard to develop, so it doesn't have many strong competitors.
Not only that but accountants (aka bean counters) are notorious for being cheap as hell. Almost none of them would be willing to pay the likely unit price of a really good small business accounting system. Indeed, I wonder what the piracy rate on QuickBooks is? I'll bet that it's probably pretty high.
Perhaps we should single her out for special attention at the Airport. Nevermind that middle eastern gentlemen with the robes and the turban, he can just go right on through, but look out grandma, were coming for you!
It's strange that a German publication would be so quick to make these sorts of suggestions. Did they learn nothing from the examples of the Stasi and East Germany? If the leaders of East Germany and the Stasi could have seen the Facebook of today they probably would have be green with envy. How else to describe billions of people willingly and naively participating in their own mass surveillance? To what sinister purpose might this information be put in the future? It's impossible to believe that the governments of this world, even those who claim to be democratic, will not be sorely tempted to acquire and misuse the information currently being gathered by the likes of Facebook. That's a pretty high price to pay, in my opinion, for keeping up with your friends. To those using Facebook: Have you not considered the long term consequences of what your doing? Are you nuts? Delete the Facebook account and pick up some good history books instead. You will see that history has not been kind to the gullible and the naive.
creating "site" certificates on the proxy with arbitrary domain names shouldn't be hard, should it?
Probably not. However, they wouldn't be able to fake the SHA-1 fingerprint of the signing certificate, so you would still know that www.yourbank.com was signed by the company cert and not directly by VeriSign. That should be a dead giveaway that interception of SSL is underway, although it wouldn't generate a browser warning because the company signing cert is still "trusted". If anyone else is reading this and wants to be sure, view the certificate details and make sure that the cert that signed the site certificate wasn't the company cert. If it wasn't signed directly by VeriSign or one of the other public majors, then it's a safe bet that your SSL session is being snooped, whether the browser says it's "trusted" or not.
I suppose that the only way to tell would be to look at the certificate authority that signed the cert. If the cert for www.yourbank.com wasn't signed directly by VeriSign or one of the other public majors, it's a good bet that you're being intercepted ala MITM, whether the cert is "trusted" or not.
You'd never know unless you clicked on the certificate in your browser and read the details.
Won't most browsers still complain, whether or not the certificate is trusted, if the domain on the certificate doesn't match the one in the address bar? This condition should be a HUGE security warning flag when detected by the browser, resulting in a modal "are you sure?" dialog explaining the problem and asking the user for confirmation to proceed or cancel the request.
The war on drugs, as well as all other wars, only profit the profiteers. The wars are a lost cause. The first casualties in any conflict are truth and innocence.
Michael Douglas, in his role as Judge Robert Wakefield in the film Traffic, said it best:
"If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don't know how you wage war on your own family."
with a nudge and a wink to the OEMs it's going to end up at MAY NOT.
There will always be OEMs willing to ignore the "rules". For example, during the heyday of the DVD and Blueray players it was very easy to purchase one that ignored region codes, "user prohibited operations" and other such DRM nonsense and these "hacked" players remain available to this day. If demand exists the market will supply it no matter what the laws or rules say. Don't allow yourself to be ruled by silly laws; those who know don't care and those who care don't know.
To be fair to the Ben Bernanke and Mr. Geithner, any attempt to sell large amounts of bank assets or liquidate during the height of the crisis would only have intensified the credit crunch as assets were sold off at fire sale prices and banks which were not previously under pressure now saw their assets devalued by those fire sales and were themselves forced by capital requirements to enter the market as distressed sellers. This could very quickly have blown up the entire financial system in a chain reaction and lead to the complete collapse of the global credit markets with very serious consequences. It's a good thing that you weren't the Federal Reserve chairman or the US Treasury Secretary during the height of the crisis because your proposed solution would basically have blown up the world.
The 401k laws and rules bother me more than the prospect of HFT. I don't choose actively managed funds in my 401k because I don't believe that these money managers are any better than I am. Almost none of them beat a 10 year market average so why pay their fees? With regard to HFT, my own experience in large and heavily traded blue chip stocks tends to suggest that their influence, if it exists at all, is negligible, at least in large cap and widely held stocks (the sort that most people ought to be holding in their IRAs anyway). Perhaps their influence is more pronounced in smaller and more thinly traded securities, but I don't invest in those so I cannot comment on them. However, in general, despite what you may have heard, the individual small investor, investing his own money, still has a number of distinct advantages over larger institutional and hedge fund investors. For example, there are plenty of good opportunities to invest several hundred thousand or even several million dollars, but it becomes much more difficult to put billions of dollars to work successfully. Indeed, no less than Warren Buffet himself has commented on this seeming paradox on numerous occasions.
You will not defeat these people through violence. They are too powerful for that and control much better means of violence than we could ever hope to. No, the only recourse is to speak, argue and debate in the public arena. However, part of that means buying some shares and voting them intelligently. You don't need 200M shares to force a change so long as the questions and issues raised at the shareholder meeting have merit and receive good media coverage. There are still plenty of reporters out there who would jump at the chance to publish a well thought out and intelligent piece against the pay of the bankers. Indeed the financial press loves to take big companies down a notch or two and the short sellers are always ready in such cases too.
Okay, technically, thanks to the recent financial reform, stockholders get a non-binding vote, but the execs can (an do) just ignore it and pay themselves whatever they want.
I would say that it depends upon who is doing the complaining. There's a reason why boards everywhere fear and respect Carl Ichan. A negative opinion from other well know investors, such as Warren Buffet or George Soros, can also be fairly damning to the board of directors. It brings serious heat and pressure from other shareholders and even the public in general. The PR fallout can often be enough to force the board to "change their minds".
Do you actually get better management by paying $100M per year than if you pay $1M per year?
Apparently, most shareholders believe that the answer to that question is "yes", especially at the biggest blue chip banks like JP Morgan and Goldman. Although you will notice that the Citi board, which has not done as well in recent quarters, received some fairlysternquestioning of Vikram Pandit's bonus. In fact, I think that they eventually forced him to accept a substantial cut as a result of the worse than expected performance. Sounds like the system is working to me.
One they've received billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars,
That debt has been completely repaid; it no longer exits. Goldman and most of the other large banks didn't actually want the money in the first place. Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner summoned the CEOs of the major US banks to a conference room at the Treasury Department building in downtown Washington DC, Goldman Sachs among them, and told them in no uncertain terms that they weren't leaving the conference room until they signed the papers agreeing to accept the loans. They did it because the Fed Chairman and the US Treasury Secretary ordered them to, not because they actually wanted to take the taxpayer's money.
the top execs are always willing to accept reponsibilty and accept an obscene bonus
Who decides what is and what is not obscene? Shouldn't that be the decision of the shareholders? If the shareholders vote for the bonus, the what business is it of those who aren't shareholders? If you want a say on pay at Goldman then buy some of their shares and vote them. If more of the occupy people did this instead of screaming in the streets and voted as a block, then perhaps something might actually change. Maybe they should each buy 20 shares of Goldman Sachs instead of that Mac Book Pro? A strong minority vote at the shareholder's meeting, binding or not, can provoke greater scrutiny and perhaps lead to bonuses more in line with long term performance of the company and the value thus created for shareholders who are in fact the owners of the business.
They take the little guys money and bend them over (without a tube of Vaseline).
If that's the way you feel then perhaps you shouldn't entrust them with your money?
Re:Let them talk forever, it's what the EU is for
on
Bye ACTA, Hello CETA
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Greeks and the other countries that have been forced to beg for aid feeling they've lost all sovereignty and is being dictated by France and Germany
In a way they already have lost their sovereignty to their creditors. In previous centuries, a profligate Greece would have been invaded by a foreign army bent on enforcing the debt. That doesn't happen anymore in Europe because it's no longer necessary. The European Central Bank and the IMF can very effectively bring Greece to heel as evidenced by the votes in the Greek parliament for continued austerity in order to continue receiving bail out monies from those who have effectively become their political masters. Invasion and occupation are thus no longer necessary to place a country like Greece under foreign control.
They still have to pay medicare and social security payroll taxes on that $7.15 which seems like a lot when you're just barely scraping by. The sales taxes in some states are also quite high, notably here in California and also in New York. There are also relatively high taxes on cigarettes and alcohol in many US states. Now some of these are state and local taxes, not federal, but collectively they all contribute to a feeling that the government is "taxing them to death". Finally, many of the poor lack the computer skills or credit necessary to shop online where most of the best non-food bargains are found these days. So yes, they may not pay federal or state income taxes, but that doesn't mean that they aren't, relatively speaking, heavily taxed.
Those people with something worthwhile to say ought to simply say it without associating themselves with crazies. Indeed, they would almost certainly be more effective by not being so "inclusive" of crazy people who advocate crazy things. This whole "distributed movement" thing dilutes whatever good messages might come out of the "diverse" group and prevents those with genuine criticism from being effective. That is the problem with the Occupy Wall Street "brand"; they have no cohesive message and so are politically and socially ineffective. The activists are wrong to think that people don't agree with them simply because they haven't been shouting loud enough or marching far enough. We've seen them and heard what they had to say, decided that it was nuts or that we didn't agree, and moved on.
As for Fox news, I'm not a regular viewer. However, I do like some of their weekend programming and particularly Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, son of the late Mike Wallace whose reporting on 60 minutes and The Twentieth Century I often admired. Also, being of a libertarian bent, I enjoy John Stossel's programs. I'm not as much of an O'Reilly fan and I cannot stand to watch either Sean Hannity or Anne Coulter. I also enjoy Anderson Cooper on CNN and I'm a regular viewer of Frontline on PBS. So as you can see, my taste in political news and commentary is actually quite varied.
There is no singular official list of demands as there is no official organization that speaks for the whole. Admittedly, that's not always easy
Indeed it's their greatest weakness. It's what makes them ineffective. Saying anything and everything, in the name of inclusiveness, is essentially the same as saying nothing and as we've seen, it's about as effective too.
The message that I came away with from OWS was that these people are largely composed of lazy bums, political opportunists with crazy things to say and idiots. That's the message that OWS projects, from what I've seen, and nothing I've read here today has changed my opinion on that matter. For those with something worthwhile to add to the political debate, perhaps it's time to leave the tainted OWS brand behind you.
but otherwise what other position has the Occupy movement tried to force on the entire country?
How about (from their list of demands), "Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end." Liquid hydrocarbons pumped out of the ground currently have an ROI of 100 units returned for every 1 unit of energy spent in their extraction. There is no other energy source on the planet, at present or even likely in the near future, that is anywhere near as cheap and economical as light crude, especially for transportation uses. So any effort to be begin a "fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end" must necessarily be accompanied by government force. There is ZERO chance that the economy would do this absent government force. Indeed, it would require extreme violence to even try and make this happen and plenty of nations and people would rather kill than do without fossil fuels, so it never will. In general, the occupy demands are naïve and their proposed "solutions" are positively asinine. This, among other reasons, is why their "movement" has accomplished nothing and continues to go nowhere. As long as they say things like "end all fossil fuel use now!" and other economically ignorant things, most Americans will continue to regard them as fringe and crazy and rightfully so. They need to put down their signs, get cleaned up and occupy a job.
Be happy with your own choices and don't obsess over people who make a different choice.
Here's the problem with that:
You have a group of people advocating for the government to step in and force everyone else to make the choices that they prefer, choices which they believe (wrongly) will bring about some bullshit eco-utopia. At the same time, ironically, they whine and complain when that police power, the same power that they want to use against others (read their crazy list of demands) to force choices that wouldn't happen otherwise, descends upon them in the form of pepper spray, baton strikes and plastic handcuffs. I don't have any problem with people making their own choices and living their own lives, live your own life how you want. However, when you say that the government ought to force everyone else to make those same choices because you're "right" and everyone else is either wrong, misguided or stupid; well, that's when I take issue with filthy hippies who would appoint themselves as philosopher kings to manage other people's lives and choices through government decree.
Excuse me. What I meant to say is that the US courts will not enforce a contract that specifies payment in anything other than recognized legal tender. In order to be enforceable here in the US, debts and payments must be handled in US dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as a curiosity, why do you have a single file of more than 30K lines? Isn't that way over the top?
Not if the entire program is one enormous switch statement in the main() function.
it's just accounting software is really hard to develop, so it doesn't have many strong competitors.
Not only that but accountants (aka bean counters) are notorious for being cheap as hell. Almost none of them would be willing to pay the likely unit price of a really good small business accounting system. Indeed, I wonder what the piracy rate on QuickBooks is? I'll bet that it's probably pretty high.
She must be a terrorist.
Perhaps we should single her out for special attention at the Airport. Nevermind that middle eastern gentlemen with the robes and the turban, he can just go right on through, but look out grandma, were coming for you!
It's strange that a German publication would be so quick to make these sorts of suggestions. Did they learn nothing from the examples of the Stasi and East Germany? If the leaders of East Germany and the Stasi could have seen the Facebook of today they probably would have be green with envy. How else to describe billions of people willingly and naively participating in their own mass surveillance? To what sinister purpose might this information be put in the future? It's impossible to believe that the governments of this world, even those who claim to be democratic, will not be sorely tempted to acquire and misuse the information currently being gathered by the likes of Facebook. That's a pretty high price to pay, in my opinion, for keeping up with your friends. To those using Facebook: Have you not considered the long term consequences of what your doing? Are you nuts? Delete the Facebook account and pick up some good history books instead. You will see that history has not been kind to the gullible and the naive.
creating "site" certificates on the proxy with arbitrary domain names shouldn't be hard, should it?
Probably not. However, they wouldn't be able to fake the SHA-1 fingerprint of the signing certificate, so you would still know that www.yourbank.com was signed by the company cert and not directly by VeriSign. That should be a dead giveaway that interception of SSL is underway, although it wouldn't generate a browser warning because the company signing cert is still "trusted". If anyone else is reading this and wants to be sure, view the certificate details and make sure that the cert that signed the site certificate wasn't the company cert. If it wasn't signed directly by VeriSign or one of the other public majors, then it's a safe bet that your SSL session is being snooped, whether the browser says it's "trusted" or not.
I suppose that the only way to tell would be to look at the certificate authority that signed the cert. If the cert for www.yourbank.com wasn't signed directly by VeriSign or one of the other public majors, it's a good bet that you're being intercepted ala MITM, whether the cert is "trusted" or not.
If you are going to burn a bridge, make sure it's epic and they can see it from orbit.
Or do it Fight Club style; that scene was the best.
Yes, but even then the domain of the certificate wouldn't match the domain of the external site, so shouldn't the browser still complain?
You'd never know unless you clicked on the certificate in your browser and read the details.
Won't most browsers still complain, whether or not the certificate is trusted, if the domain on the certificate doesn't match the one in the address bar? This condition should be a HUGE security warning flag when detected by the browser, resulting in a modal "are you sure?" dialog explaining the problem and asking the user for confirmation to proceed or cancel the request.
The war on drugs, as well as all other wars, only profit the profiteers. The wars are a lost cause. The first casualties in any conflict are truth and innocence.
Michael Douglas, in his role as Judge Robert Wakefield in the film Traffic , said it best:
"If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don't know how you wage war on your own family."
with a nudge and a wink to the OEMs it's going to end up at MAY NOT.
There will always be OEMs willing to ignore the "rules". For example, during the heyday of the DVD and Blueray players it was very easy to purchase one that ignored region codes, "user prohibited operations" and other such DRM nonsense and these "hacked" players remain available to this day. If demand exists the market will supply it no matter what the laws or rules say. Don't allow yourself to be ruled by silly laws; those who know don't care and those who care don't know.
To be fair to the Ben Bernanke and Mr. Geithner, any attempt to sell large amounts of bank assets or liquidate during the height of the crisis would only have intensified the credit crunch as assets were sold off at fire sale prices and banks which were not previously under pressure now saw their assets devalued by those fire sales and were themselves forced by capital requirements to enter the market as distressed sellers. This could very quickly have blown up the entire financial system in a chain reaction and lead to the complete collapse of the global credit markets with very serious consequences. It's a good thing that you weren't the Federal Reserve chairman or the US Treasury Secretary during the height of the crisis because your proposed solution would basically have blown up the world.
The 401k laws and rules bother me more than the prospect of HFT. I don't choose actively managed funds in my 401k because I don't believe that these money managers are any better than I am. Almost none of them beat a 10 year market average so why pay their fees? With regard to HFT, my own experience in large and heavily traded blue chip stocks tends to suggest that their influence, if it exists at all, is negligible, at least in large cap and widely held stocks (the sort that most people ought to be holding in their IRAs anyway). Perhaps their influence is more pronounced in smaller and more thinly traded securities, but I don't invest in those so I cannot comment on them. However, in general, despite what you may have heard, the individual small investor, investing his own money, still has a number of distinct advantages over larger institutional and hedge fund investors. For example, there are plenty of good opportunities to invest several hundred thousand or even several million dollars, but it becomes much more difficult to put billions of dollars to work successfully. Indeed, no less than Warren Buffet himself has commented on this seeming paradox on numerous occasions.
I'd rather buy a torch and pitchfork.
You will not defeat these people through violence. They are too powerful for that and control much better means of violence than we could ever hope to. No, the only recourse is to speak, argue and debate in the public arena. However, part of that means buying some shares and voting them intelligently. You don't need 200M shares to force a change so long as the questions and issues raised at the shareholder meeting have merit and receive good media coverage. There are still plenty of reporters out there who would jump at the chance to publish a well thought out and intelligent piece against the pay of the bankers. Indeed the financial press loves to take big companies down a notch or two and the short sellers are always ready in such cases too.
Okay, technically, thanks to the recent financial reform, stockholders get a non-binding vote, but the execs can (an do) just ignore it and pay themselves whatever they want.
I would say that it depends upon who is doing the complaining. There's a reason why boards everywhere fear and respect Carl Ichan. A negative opinion from other well know investors, such as Warren Buffet or George Soros, can also be fairly damning to the board of directors. It brings serious heat and pressure from other shareholders and even the public in general. The PR fallout can often be enough to force the board to "change their minds".
Do you actually get better management by paying $100M per year than if you pay $1M per year?
Apparently, most shareholders believe that the answer to that question is "yes", especially at the biggest blue chip banks like JP Morgan and Goldman. Although you will notice that the Citi board, which has not done as well in recent quarters, received some fairly stern questioning of Vikram Pandit's bonus. In fact, I think that they eventually forced him to accept a substantial cut as a result of the worse than expected performance. Sounds like the system is working to me.
One they've received billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars,
That debt has been completely repaid; it no longer exits. Goldman and most of the other large banks didn't actually want the money in the first place. Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner summoned the CEOs of the major US banks to a conference room at the Treasury Department building in downtown Washington DC, Goldman Sachs among them, and told them in no uncertain terms that they weren't leaving the conference room until they signed the papers agreeing to accept the loans. They did it because the Fed Chairman and the US Treasury Secretary ordered them to, not because they actually wanted to take the taxpayer's money.
the top execs are always willing to accept reponsibilty and accept an obscene bonus
Who decides what is and what is not obscene? Shouldn't that be the decision of the shareholders? If the shareholders vote for the bonus, the what business is it of those who aren't shareholders? If you want a say on pay at Goldman then buy some of their shares and vote them. If more of the occupy people did this instead of screaming in the streets and voted as a block, then perhaps something might actually change. Maybe they should each buy 20 shares of Goldman Sachs instead of that Mac Book Pro? A strong minority vote at the shareholder's meeting, binding or not, can provoke greater scrutiny and perhaps lead to bonuses more in line with long term performance of the company and the value thus created for shareholders who are in fact the owners of the business.
They take the little guys money and bend them over (without a tube of Vaseline).
If that's the way you feel then perhaps you shouldn't entrust them with your money?
Greeks and the other countries that have been forced to beg for aid feeling they've lost all sovereignty and is being dictated by France and Germany
In a way they already have lost their sovereignty to their creditors. In previous centuries, a profligate Greece would have been invaded by a foreign army bent on enforcing the debt. That doesn't happen anymore in Europe because it's no longer necessary. The European Central Bank and the IMF can very effectively bring Greece to heel as evidenced by the votes in the Greek parliament for continued austerity in order to continue receiving bail out monies from those who have effectively become their political masters. Invasion and occupation are thus no longer necessary to place a country like Greece under foreign control.
"the government is taxing them to death". Really?
They still have to pay medicare and social security payroll taxes on that $7.15 which seems like a lot when you're just barely scraping by. The sales taxes in some states are also quite high, notably here in California and also in New York. There are also relatively high taxes on cigarettes and alcohol in many US states. Now some of these are state and local taxes, not federal, but collectively they all contribute to a feeling that the government is "taxing them to death". Finally, many of the poor lack the computer skills or credit necessary to shop online where most of the best non-food bargains are found these days. So yes, they may not pay federal or state income taxes, but that doesn't mean that they aren't, relatively speaking, heavily taxed.
Those people with something worthwhile to say ought to simply say it without associating themselves with crazies. Indeed, they would almost certainly be more effective by not being so "inclusive" of crazy people who advocate crazy things. This whole "distributed movement" thing dilutes whatever good messages might come out of the "diverse" group and prevents those with genuine criticism from being effective. That is the problem with the Occupy Wall Street "brand"; they have no cohesive message and so are politically and socially ineffective. The activists are wrong to think that people don't agree with them simply because they haven't been shouting loud enough or marching far enough. We've seen them and heard what they had to say, decided that it was nuts or that we didn't agree, and moved on.
As for Fox news, I'm not a regular viewer. However, I do like some of their weekend programming and particularly Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, son of the late Mike Wallace whose reporting on 60 minutes and The Twentieth Century I often admired. Also, being of a libertarian bent, I enjoy John Stossel's programs. I'm not as much of an O'Reilly fan and I cannot stand to watch either Sean Hannity or Anne Coulter. I also enjoy Anderson Cooper on CNN and I'm a regular viewer of Frontline on PBS. So as you can see, my taste in political news and commentary is actually quite varied.
There is no singular official list of demands as there is no official organization that speaks for the whole. Admittedly, that's not always easy
Indeed it's their greatest weakness. It's what makes them ineffective. Saying anything and everything, in the name of inclusiveness, is essentially the same as saying nothing and as we've seen, it's about as effective too.
The message that I came away with from OWS was that these people are largely composed of lazy bums, political opportunists with crazy things to say and idiots. That's the message that OWS projects, from what I've seen, and nothing I've read here today has changed my opinion on that matter. For those with something worthwhile to add to the political debate, perhaps it's time to leave the tainted OWS brand behind you.
but otherwise what other position has the Occupy movement tried to force on the entire country?
How about (from their list of demands), "Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end." Liquid hydrocarbons pumped out of the ground currently have an ROI of 100 units returned for every 1 unit of energy spent in their extraction. There is no other energy source on the planet, at present or even likely in the near future, that is anywhere near as cheap and economical as light crude, especially for transportation uses. So any effort to be begin a "fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end" must necessarily be accompanied by government force. There is ZERO chance that the economy would do this absent government force. Indeed, it would require extreme violence to even try and make this happen and plenty of nations and people would rather kill than do without fossil fuels, so it never will. In general, the occupy demands are naïve and their proposed "solutions" are positively asinine. This, among other reasons, is why their "movement" has accomplished nothing and continues to go nowhere. As long as they say things like "end all fossil fuel use now!" and other economically ignorant things, most Americans will continue to regard them as fringe and crazy and rightfully so. They need to put down their signs, get cleaned up and occupy a job .
Be happy with your own choices and don't obsess over people who make a different choice.
Here's the problem with that:
You have a group of people advocating for the government to step in and force everyone else to make the choices that they prefer, choices which they believe (wrongly) will bring about some bullshit eco-utopia. At the same time, ironically, they whine and complain when that police power, the same power that they want to use against others (read their crazy list of demands) to force choices that wouldn't happen otherwise, descends upon them in the form of pepper spray, baton strikes and plastic handcuffs. I don't have any problem with people making their own choices and living their own lives, live your own life how you want. However, when you say that the government ought to force everyone else to make those same choices because you're "right" and everyone else is either wrong, misguided or stupid; well, that's when I take issue with filthy hippies who would appoint themselves as philosopher kings to manage other people's lives and choices through government decree.
Excuse me. What I meant to say is that the US courts will not enforce a contract that specifies payment in anything other than recognized legal tender. In order to be enforceable here in the US, debts and payments must be handled in US dollars.