In this day and age, I cannot imagine that any type of blimp would be appropriate to provide additional wireless capacity near a major event. It only takes one person with a gun to puncture the blimp. The potential for terrorism would, unfortunately, be too great.
Anyone that has and uses a gun that can reach to 50,000+ feet is probably going to be noticed.
You jackass. That's enough information that someone could get a positive ID on you.
You're the ignorant Chicken Little here. The post you're fibrilating over is composed of nothing more than public information - of course Fedex is going after UPS's core business - they're competitors - that's what they do!
True, MSFT stopped gving out OPTIONS, but you seemed to have ignored the fact that they now give out STOCK -- you don't have to wait for it to 'vest'. Some would says that's a whole lot better, and it at least appears to give a clearer picture on the books, because the effect is reflected immediately.
Unless you're the recipient of said stock and have to pay taxes on it. Say you make $60,000 a year. Say you bring a big client to the table. Say the company is delighted and gives you a huge bonus - $60,000 worth of shares. Now your state wants 10% of that, and the IRS wants 40% of that - and they want it now, when you received the shares, rather than later, when you sell them, as happens with options. Dude - you owe an additional $30,000 in taxes. You can either take the $30,000 you had left from your $60,000 salary after taxes and pay the additional tax burder, and eat dog food for the remainder of the year, or you can sell the shares to pay the tax man and watch the value of those shares go up as retaining the big client makes your company worth more in the future. Which is it?
But, if you'd been granted stock options, you would now have the, well, option, of not paying those taxes until you exercise and sell. The company is happier because you don't sell your stock immediately, but retain it and work your butt off to make it worth more.
But all that has nothing to do with the expensing of options on the financial report of a company - if all companies are expensing the same way then they all have some muddied (as opposed to clarified) bottom line number assesing their profitability. The problem is that investors now have a harder time removing that mud from the financial report. Expensing options will make it harder for investors to value a company, and if something as inappropriate as Black Scholes is used, it will make it that much easier to mislead as to financial health.
Every single additional stock dilutes my share of the company.
So you rather the company you've invested in paid all their employees larger salaries, leaving less cahs for those things that can't be bought with shares, than grant them options that will have little value if the employee doesn't work his ass off and make the company worth more valuable?
Options are priced using the black scholes method (though typically it is a modified BS model.) Everyday thousands of options are traded on the open market using BS as the pricing method.
Black-Scholes is a complicated statistical assessment of the potential value of an option today based on an assumption that the asset over time will be priced along a curve that is log normal in a market that follows Brownian randomness - damn near no stock ever follows that curve - but a sufficiently large group of stocks over a sufficiently large amount of time will tend towards it. It's a nearly unuseable number for a single stock without comparing it to a large number of similar companies in the same industry, and is nearly always guaranteed to be very volatile. It certainly shouldn't be used by any single company to value its own shares (as will be advertised to the public), as the smallest of changes in the multiple input factors can cause the result to vary greatly i.e. it's easily manipulated. It's of some value to a careful analyst for a company that is not expected to have any significant events causing the value of the shares to vary greatly - i.e. a company that few would want to invest in in the first place as the growth curve will be very stagnant.
How is the offer of options a "fiduciary responsibility incentive"? With an option, you have no downside, so you have an incentive to gamble all the firm's money on producing a temporary rise in the stock price.
Options granted to employees are nearly always restricted in many fashions. For one thing, a percentage of the total grant is frequently vested over time - often 20% per year, giving a 5 year time period before fully vested. The company usually has the ability to call the options - that is, demand payment of the strike price - the average employee holding 20,000 options at $5 is probably going to be hard put to come up with $100,000 if demanded of him - most people would have to borrow on it, and you'll find few banks willing to loan against a privately held stock. The last time I checked, even a publicly held stock could only be borrowed against at 60% of market value. Many option holders would simply say "fergetaboutit" rather than go into debt on such a thing.
Also, there may be peanlties associated with early "termination for fault" - i.e. you do something dumb and get fired and you lose all your stock options. Even once the options can be converted to tradeable shares, as a company insider many employees might be required to file public documents with the SEC announcing their intent to sell - now the world knows of their intent and can react accordingly.
The whole debacle about expensing them is about the biggest irrelevant effort made in a decade by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. In a public company, any investor that knows the difference between a put and a call is going to have his own rule of thumb for the value of an option - after all the thing is simply a promise that a share may, if desired be purchased at some time in the future - it's got nothing to do with the present day financial health of a company, and is a very hazy factor in the future potential value of a company's shares.
Expensing options is nothing but a big press deal - disclosure of options is all that is needed, and that is required to be done in publicly held companies already. A clear rule set of how they should be disclosed would be beneficial, but it seems no one is talking about that.
Mac, Linux and other non-Windows operating systems are immune from this attack.
At least he said "this attack" instead of "attacks".
Yeah - it'd have been even more accurate if he'd said, "Mac, Linux, and other non-Windows operating systems are immune from this attack, and 99.9% of the 75,000 other known worms and viruses."
Just remember that you will be paying for any cure that Folding at Home comes up with. The pharma companies will make sure of that...
Having spent a few weeks on my deathbed once in my life, and, well, cheating death once again, I'd be quite happy paying for any cure anybody comes up with the next time I'm in a world of hurt.
Maybe it's easier to get funding for medical work because it's actually worth spending money on it. Why does the fact that SETI is less worthy of getting money make it more worthy of getting spare CPU cycles?
Thank you for deciding how I should spend my computing cycles. Perhaps you missed your calling in politics and could take over the same decisions regarding my money?
I have always wondered, just how easy it is to "Just look at the logs" ? I imagine the "log" from Hotmail servers must be huge. What would it take to look for one email, from one account ? Could they even do it ?
Not bloody likely - that would require they condescend to use something as archaic as the command line and the grep command.
They're not exactly governors, but the speed-limiting devices on automobiles these days are for safety, because automobile manufacturers fear lawsuits. They're set at the maximum speed that the tire manufacturer (original tires) will certify their tires to withstand over a long period of time in less-than-ideal circumstances.
Not necessarily. For example, the BMW 328 is chip-limited to 128 MPH - it however comes with Z-rated tires (good for constant speeds of up to 186 MPH). The European version of the same car, mechanically identical, is not chip-limited and can cruise about 150 MPH.
Car manufacturers do fear lawsuits of course - people sue those with money for their own incompetence all the time.
Creating a web page without knowing HTML is like driving a car without knowing how to read.
I wouldn't say that. I would say it's like driving a car without knowing how it works under the hood. And there are a lot of people that don't know how a car works under the hood but can get done what they need to do.
You mean like irritate the rest of us by acting like they know how a car (the web) works since they now know how to drive (use frontpage) and wish to occupy "their space" in the fast lane to the frustration and detriment of all others around them?
I find it much more likely you're doing your part to help line a government contractor's wallet (the likes of Halliburton).
Yeah, how dare the people that work for the likes of Halliburton expect to actually get paid for risking their lives to try to establish a decent way of life for Iraqis - they should be willing to give up their lives and do it for free, nay, why even paying to be there, just like I'm sure you with all your insight into world affairs certainly are... oh wait...
All they nned to do is to restrict SMTP outbound connections to their own mailservers. Forcing traffic through their won machines will qucik;ly point out who the abusers are, and they can likewise filter for viruses and worms preventing propogation.
Mozilla-Thunderbird needs to make their version more like Evolution's, which has the option of allowing inline images from addresses you have put into your address book.
Slashdot Mirror
Congress? But, you repeat yourself ...
...the imporant stuff
Anyone that has and uses a gun that can reach to 50,000+ feet is probably going to be noticed.
You're the ignorant Chicken Little here. The post you're fibrilating over is composed of nothing more than public information - of course Fedex is going after UPS's core business - they're competitors - that's what they do!
Unless you're the recipient of said stock and have to pay taxes on it. Say you make $60,000 a year. Say you bring a big client to the table. Say the company is delighted and gives you a huge bonus - $60,000 worth of shares. Now your state wants 10% of that, and the IRS wants 40% of that - and they want it now, when you received the shares, rather than later, when you sell them, as happens with options. Dude - you owe an additional $30,000 in taxes. You can either take the $30,000 you had left from your $60,000 salary after taxes and pay the additional tax burder, and eat dog food for the remainder of the year, or you can sell the shares to pay the tax man and watch the value of those shares go up as retaining the big client makes your company worth more in the future. Which is it?
But, if you'd been granted stock options, you would now have the, well, option, of not paying those taxes until you exercise and sell. The company is happier because you don't sell your stock immediately, but retain it and work your butt off to make it worth more.
But all that has nothing to do with the expensing of options on the financial report of a company - if all companies are expensing the same way then they all have some muddied (as opposed to clarified) bottom line number assesing their profitability. The problem is that investors now have a harder time removing that mud from the financial report. Expensing options will make it harder for investors to value a company, and if something as inappropriate as Black Scholes is used, it will make it that much easier to mislead as to financial health.
So you rather the company you've invested in paid all their employees larger salaries, leaving less cahs for those things that can't be bought with shares, than grant them options that will have little value if the employee doesn't work his ass off and make the company worth more valuable?
Black-Scholes is a complicated statistical assessment of the potential value of an option today based on an assumption that the asset over time will be priced along a curve that is log normal in a market that follows Brownian randomness - damn near no stock ever follows that curve - but a sufficiently large group of stocks over a sufficiently large amount of time will tend towards it. It's a nearly unuseable number for a single stock without comparing it to a large number of similar companies in the same industry, and is nearly always guaranteed to be very volatile. It certainly shouldn't be used by any single company to value its own shares (as will be advertised to the public), as the smallest of changes in the multiple input factors can cause the result to vary greatly i.e. it's easily manipulated. It's of some value to a careful analyst for a company that is not expected to have any significant events causing the value of the shares to vary greatly - i.e. a company that few would want to invest in in the first place as the growth curve will be very stagnant.
Options granted to employees are nearly always restricted in many fashions. For one thing, a percentage of the total grant is frequently vested over time - often 20% per year, giving a 5 year time period before fully vested. The company usually has the ability to call the options - that is, demand payment of the strike price - the average employee holding 20,000 options at $5 is probably going to be hard put to come up with $100,000 if demanded of him - most people would have to borrow on it, and you'll find few banks willing to loan against a privately held stock. The last time I checked, even a publicly held stock could only be borrowed against at 60% of market value. Many option holders would simply say "fergetaboutit" rather than go into debt on such a thing. Also, there may be peanlties associated with early "termination for fault" - i.e. you do something dumb and get fired and you lose all your stock options. Even once the options can be converted to tradeable shares, as a company insider many employees might be required to file public documents with the SEC announcing their intent to sell - now the world knows of their intent and can react accordingly.
The whole debacle about expensing them is about the biggest irrelevant effort made in a decade by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. In a public company, any investor that knows the difference between a put and a call is going to have his own rule of thumb for the value of an option - after all the thing is simply a promise that a share may, if desired be purchased at some time in the future - it's got nothing to do with the present day financial health of a company, and is a very hazy factor in the future potential value of a company's shares.
Expensing options is nothing but a big press deal - disclosure of options is all that is needed, and that is required to be done in publicly held companies already. A clear rule set of how they should be disclosed would be beneficial, but it seems no one is talking about that.
At least he said "this attack" instead of "attacks".
Yeah - it'd have been even more accurate if he'd said, "Mac, Linux, and other non-Windows operating systems are immune from this attack, and 99.9% of the 75,000 other known worms and viruses. "
Having spent a few weeks on my deathbed once in my life, and, well, cheating death once again, I'd be quite happy paying for any cure anybody comes up with the next time I'm in a world of hurt.
Thank you for deciding how I should spend my computing cycles. Perhaps you missed your calling in politics and could take over the same decisions regarding my money?
Not bloody likely - that would require they condescend to use something as archaic as the command line and the grep command.
Not necessarily. For example, the BMW 328 is chip-limited to 128 MPH - it however comes with Z-rated tires (good for constant speeds of up to 186 MPH). The European version of the same car, mechanically identical, is not chip-limited and can cruise about 150 MPH.
Car manufacturers do fear lawsuits of course - people sue those with money for their own incompetence all the time.
It's not free as in "free beer", it's free as in "free love".
I wouldn't say that. I would say it's like driving a car without knowing how it works under the hood. And there are a lot of people that don't know how a car works under the hood but can get done what they need to do.
You mean like irritate the rest of us by acting like they know how a car (the web) works since they now know how to drive (use frontpage) and wish to occupy "their space" in the fast lane to the frustration and detriment of all others around them?
To boldy where no one has gone before?
Because the U.S. media hasn't figured a way to blame the problem of spyware on the Bush administration yet.
Yeah, how dare the people that work for the likes of Halliburton expect to actually get paid for risking their lives to try to establish a decent way of life for Iraqis - they should be willing to give up their lives and do it for free, nay, why even paying to be there, just like I'm sure you with all your insight into world affairs certainly are ... oh wait ...
All they nned to do is to restrict SMTP outbound connections to their own mailservers. Forcing traffic through their won machines will qucik;ly point out who the abusers are, and they can likewise filter for viruses and worms preventing propogation.
They do that because their privacy is being invaded.
Mozilla-Thunderbird needs to make their version more like Evolution's, which has the option of allowing inline images from addresses you have put into your address book.
None of the above ... and neither am I an Anonymous Coward.
"News for Nerds" ... what a concept.
Ah well, it was a fun ride while it lasted ...
On slashdot?
Copious quantities of dihydrogen monoxide is quite useful for washing biological material away from you.