I know with the military issue guns, they aren't banned. You can still buy a tommy gun if you really want, but you have to pay an extremely high tax on fully automatic weapons, and register a certificate with the ATF.
There are actually quite a few hardened data centers scattered around the US. I would presume they are in Europe and elsewhere, but I know of a few in the US. They are usually located in underground buildings or bunkers, patroled by armed guards, and the like. I know Verisign will host stuff for you in their hardened data center, and there was an article in the WSJ a while back about some smaller companies that did this as well.
On a side note, you can have equity with any car, if you go with a shorter loan. Its rare for any car to not be upside down in an 60 month loan. Look at the length of the loan, not just the payment when you buy your next car. Being upside down sucks big time if you total the car.
Re:EBay and PayPal ... not my favorites
on
Ebay buys PayPal
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· Score: 1
Paypal isn't exactly a bank, but it acts alot like one especially in state regulator's minds. The company pays interest, stores funds, facilitates payments between merchants and buyers, which are all things that banks currently do. While the courts have sided with paypal so far, don't expect them to continue to be generous in the future. What the states are saying is that it walks like a duck, has feathers and a tail, and were listening for it to quack, if it does were calling it a duck and subjecting it to the duck regulations.
As we all learned with the 60/75GXP fiasco. I personally think that had alot to do with IBM's exit from the HD business. However, its difficult to know if the drive your about to buy for less than normal street price is cheap because an OEM had too much inventory, or cheap because it made from cheap parts. I agree with you on the free trade on a balanced playing field would be best, but how do you get the other guy to change his rules, when he feels that you have cheated him for centuries? And its even tougher to deal with other countries if you don't show good faith in most dealings. The steel tariffs have hurt trade negotiations pretty significantly. Down with the sugar lobby, if nothing esle it keeps your prices for sugar about 50% higher than world prices. While the average/.er doesn't do enough sugar purchasing to notice, they might enjoy better pop. Soda switched to corn syrup about the time the quota's were put in place. Incedentally I once heard a sugar farmer complain that he never got a check from the government, so he obviously wasn't getting any subsidies.
How many web servers need a copy of quicktime? Also, while Ferraris are cool, I doubt I could go down to my local auto repair shop and pick up parts for a "mainstream" Ferrari.
Your area chamber of commerce is likely to have some touristy information, you may know of some of the attractions in the area, but they can give you times, and prices for them. Also, most states have a tourism and visitor's board, which should have some information.
So is the new game try to get the eds to post the most innane Ask/. questions, and how many FPs is it worth to get one on the front page?
It is mostly about the applications that are available, including those made by the little developers. The executives make no bones about this, they firmly believe that much of microsoft's success builds on their developer support. This is actually what the anti-trust case centered on. In Microsoft executive's mind Netscape's plan was to use java and the internet to deliver an application platform that didn't matter what was beneath it. This would of course greatly reduce the value of MS Windows, and so they killed the competitor. Linux certainly has great developer support, and I believe that that is why Microsoft is fighting so hard against the GPL, it also reduces the value of the platform, since anyone can port GPL software to another platform. Also, Linux has attracted the developer population much faster than the general population.
And that is why IBM will never go broke. How many times is it that the IBM product thinks about the little things like that, even if it costs a little bit more than the others. Incedentally, Sun or a cloner like toshiba, made the Tadpole, a few years back, since it was a Sparc SunOS/Solaris laptop, it should have three buttons as well. Although trying to find one today is generally difficult and expensive.
Levis. While new designs are introduced, the basic style of 501s hasn't changed in decades. Brooks Brothers is they are admitedly less popular than the were in the 50s but they are still around. Those are just the first two I thought of while posting.
Opec mostly isn't pushing prices up for a few other reasons
1. Russia has pretty significant capacity that they would love to turn up.
2. Its pretty easy to increase supply in a year or so, as owners of wells increase production. Opec tries to minimize this because it causes those $10/barrel swings that are bad for everyone selling oil.
3. The members largely cheat. There are a few member countries that hold to their quotas pretty well, but most of them cheat like crazy. The most recent estimate I saw, was that OPEC is producing 20% more than their quotas. This is pretty common among cartels since its in their intrest to do so individually. The old prisoner's dilemna explains why fairly well, even if only in a single term game.
Asset lite companies are simply the companies that own very little, Cisco is a good example of this, they outsource almost everything but engineering and sales. Dell is another good example. In addition to BCCI, most other banks don't carry alot of assets. They have their branches, and their comptuers, what else do you want them to own. It makes for an efficient company because, they can make a lot of money with very little. Enron was movind towards this because they were trying to become a financial company rather than a pipeline company. They got in to trouble, selling financial assets that didn't have a market value, so they could largely assign what ever value they wanted to the assets. They then set up subsidiary companies to through assets that lost money, and didn't have to show the losses, however to get other investors, they pledged their corporate credit or equity in return for those liabilities.
The downside of an asset lite model, and life is full of trade-offs, is that you don't have the assets when times get bad. If you own a factory, you can sell it during the down times. World com has lots of assets, they spent billions running fiber accross the country, its just that the fiber isn't selling now, so its not worth much, but their debt didn't devalue in the same manner. That makes you broke, not asset lite.
That's because when social security was started, people paid in for their whole life and died quickly after retiring. Now we are living longer, and collecting more and the balance is shifting away from a surplus. I don't understand why more young people don't support Social security privitization. Its not like it just gets put into the market, you would get an account to manage, and if you wanted to leave it in what its currently in, just buy government bonds.
Yes there has been quite a bit of fraud in the market lately but how many companies are there that have had fraudulent data in their financial statements, not just aggressive, but actual fruad. I can recal about 10 from the post bubble period, but remember there are more than 6,000 companies, most of them are fairly honest about their performance, but they don't make the front page of the paper.
The point of the parent is that once a company is in debt as much as WorldCom is, its basically on life support anyway, so revoking the charter doesn't accomplish much.
I don't see why everyone is so excited about this news breaking, it's certainly surprising, but what were you expecting from a company that has already lost 90% of its value since January first. I would guess that most equity investors had written off their stock prior to today. I'm sorry if you didn't, and I really feel for you if you owned the bonds, since it looks a whole lot less likely to make it now.
Finally, this is pretty common following a boom bust cycle, managment starts pushing the rules to make their estimates, that are too high, and like a lie, they have to do increasingly large and tricky adjustments to continue to make them. When their business doens't recover, they finally run out of tricks, and the whole thing falls apart. It sucks when it happens, but the cycle is a part of business, and will always be.
The refresh rate is a microsoft issue, its required to have the drivers certified. My understanding is that since there is no auto undo changes in 3d refresh rates, like there is in 2d refresh rates, the only way out is a reboot. Because Microsoft thinks all their customers are idiots, this was required.
Also to take advantage of falling hardware costs. Dell had component costs decrease in the neighborhood of 5% per week during 2001. Of course they were always using just the newest hardware, older stuff doesn't decrease in price nearly as fast. Since your platform will be locked for several years. It makes sense buy the best hardware you can get a the time of creation, even if you have to sell it at a loss in the beginning, and wait for the prices of your components to fall over time, and if neccessary lower prices to increase sales. All the while you're making money on the games licensed to sell on the console.
However, since Microsoft used hardware that had mostly fallen in price (PIIIs and small hard drives don't have the same price curves) they seem to be finding that price decreases are not coming as quickly as for other new consoles. I would guess that the magnitude of the unit loss was much larger for Microsoft, but they have more cash and profits to cover such a loss, and wanted to gain market share quickly.
Selling below marginal cost is considered predatory pricing, which is the intent to drive competitors out of business so you can raise prices in the future. This is generally considered one way of showing intent to monopolize which was prohibited by the Sherman Act. Congress has never made it clear what the terminology of the act means, so the courts have interpreted the act quite differently. Also, no one has come up with a measure of marginal cost, so very few predatory pricing cases make it to the courts. When they do average variable costs, costs of items that are used up in the making of the product, are generally used as a close approximation of marginal costs. Even the browser case delt with bundling rather than predatory pricing.
Anti-Dumping laws are similar but generally only deal with international trade. They were designed to prevent foreign governments from "stealing" jobs with lower costs, by subsidising their industries and dumping cheap products in the domestic country. The most common examples of these subsidies are in most contries' farming policies, and Japan's MITI. Most of the time they are used to protect industries facing more efficient foreign competition in a senator's district.
Finally, price fixing is cartel behavior, in which the competitors in an industry meet and establish price or volume quota's or limits on competiton. OPEC and Baseball (they were granted an anti-trust exemption) are the two most famous price fixing examples I can remember.
However, since there is a method of profiting on a console that was sold at a loss, namely the games. It would be quite odd if a sucessful anti-dumping case was presented in either the US or Japan. The other side could argue that this is a common practice in many industries.
If you found any of this interesting, you're sick, and you should try to take an industrial organization econ class, in college, if you get the opportunity.
Also in the Law, the rules for slavery were something more like indentured servanthood. They were all to be set free every fifty years so prices would reflect the years of service left until the next year of jubilee. Which is a pretty cool concept, a year of rest (no farming allowed), worship, and all the families got their clan territory returned, and enslaved members made free. The year of Jubilee is described fully in Leviticus Ch 25.
I love how one of the early justifications of Napster was that unknown bands would get much better access to fans. Yet you still can't find most small bands on any of the p2p networks. I'm with you on sound quality of mp3s. The are great for work, I can take 1 cd with a month's worth of music, rather than a case, but just aren't the same on my stereo at home. There isn't enough bass. I'm no audiophile, but even with my cheap system, the bass isn't there nearly as much as with CDs.
Most Amish are actually quite wealthy, its just that they frown on extravagent displays of wealth. They invest conservativly, mostly money markets, and so they didn't experience an evaporation of wealth over the past 2 years like everyone else. They are expanding houses and buying land quite a bit. There was even a Wall Street Journal article on the growing trend. We would probably have more money too, if we didn't pay a cable, power, phone, and ISP bill my my own reaconing these would save me about $3000 a year. Would we really be that much worse off? I would guess that most/.ers were once pretty avid readers, I know I hadn't read something in several months, untill just recently I picked up a copy of an old book I had been wanting to read for years during a T-storm.
That's because the gray market lowers your chip prices. Big OEMs more than about 5,000 units a year have to purchase from AMD at the prices they sell 1,000 units for (its about 50% more than you pay. However, really big OEMs especially in Europe can get a better deal on larger volumes 10,000+. So order more then they need to get the discount and sell the extra for very large discounts. The pricewatch vendors, or their wholesalers buy these and sell them to you for very large discouts. AMD chips are not nearly as cheap as the relative street prices would seem to indicate.
Intel's street prices do not seem to follow this pattern. Street prices are about 10% below wholesale. I don't know if Intel controlls their channel better or if they don't make the same level of price breaks if you order in very large quantities. That's why hobbiests can build AMD systems for so much less than Hewlett-Packard or Gateway.
This guy is exactly right, outside of the Yen in the late 80s and mostly in Asia, there has been no currency that has challenged the dollar in foreign currency holdings.
If you're too lazy to look up why this is a good deal, its because the currency costs less to produce than it sells for, so we can produce extra currency sell it for goods and services and they keep it.
Now that the Euro is trading and in cold currency, it represents a larger economic area, and should have similar reach, we have a competitor.
Also, one other reason that 3rd world countries moeny is less trusted is the dictator's tendancy to fire up the presses when their expenses are higher than their tax recipts. That tends to upset the people currently holding its currency.
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I know with the military issue guns, they aren't banned. You can still buy a tommy gun if you really want, but you have to pay an extremely high tax on fully automatic weapons, and register a certificate with the ATF.
There are actually quite a few hardened data centers scattered around the US. I would presume they are in Europe and elsewhere, but I know of a few in the US. They are usually located in underground buildings or bunkers, patroled by armed guards, and the like. I know Verisign will host stuff for you in their hardened data center, and there was an article in the WSJ a while back about some smaller companies that did this as well.
On a side note, you can have equity with any car, if you go with a shorter loan. Its rare for any car to not be upside down in an 60 month loan. Look at the length of the loan, not just the payment when you buy your next car. Being upside down sucks big time if you total the car.
Paypal isn't exactly a bank, but it acts alot like one especially in state regulator's minds. The company pays interest, stores funds, facilitates payments between merchants and buyers, which are all things that banks currently do. While the courts have sided with paypal so far, don't expect them to continue to be generous in the future. What the states are saying is that it walks like a duck, has feathers and a tail, and were listening for it to quack, if it does were calling it a duck and subjecting it to the duck regulations.
As we all learned with the 60/75GXP fiasco. I personally think that had alot to do with IBM's exit from the HD business. However, its difficult to know if the drive your about to buy for less than normal street price is cheap because an OEM had too much inventory, or cheap because it made from cheap parts. I agree with you on the free trade on a balanced playing field would be best, but how do you get the other guy to change his rules, when he feels that you have cheated him for centuries? And its even tougher to deal with other countries if you don't show good faith in most dealings. The steel tariffs have hurt trade negotiations pretty significantly. Down with the sugar lobby, if nothing esle it keeps your prices for sugar about 50% higher than world prices. While the average /.er doesn't do enough sugar purchasing to notice, they might enjoy better pop. Soda switched to corn syrup about the time the quota's were put in place. Incedentally I once heard a sugar farmer complain that he never got a check from the government, so he obviously wasn't getting any subsidies.
How many web servers need a copy of quicktime? Also, while Ferraris are cool, I doubt I could go down to my local auto repair shop and pick up parts for a "mainstream" Ferrari.
Hey, I think you could get the RIAA in on this, politics sure makes strange bedfellows.
Your area chamber of commerce is likely to have some touristy information, you may know of some of the attractions in the area, but they can give you times, and prices for them. Also, most states have a tourism and visitor's board, which should have some information. /. questions, and how many FPs is it worth to get one on the front page?
So is the new game try to get the eds to post the most innane Ask
It is mostly about the applications that are available, including those made by the little developers. The executives make no bones about this, they firmly believe that much of microsoft's success builds on their developer support. This is actually what the anti-trust case centered on. In Microsoft executive's mind Netscape's plan was to use java and the internet to deliver an application platform that didn't matter what was beneath it. This would of course greatly reduce the value of MS Windows, and so they killed the competitor. Linux certainly has great developer support, and I believe that that is why Microsoft is fighting so hard against the GPL, it also reduces the value of the platform, since anyone can port GPL software to another platform. Also, Linux has attracted the developer population much faster than the general population.
I believe that both computers are playing with both algorithms.
And that is why IBM will never go broke. How many times is it that the IBM product thinks about the little things like that, even if it costs a little bit more than the others. Incedentally, Sun or a cloner like toshiba, made the Tadpole, a few years back, since it was a Sparc SunOS/Solaris laptop, it should have three buttons as well. Although trying to find one today is generally difficult and expensive.
Levis. While new designs are introduced, the basic style of 501s hasn't changed in decades. Brooks Brothers is they are admitedly less popular than the were in the 50s but they are still around. Those are just the first two I thought of while posting.
Opec mostly isn't pushing prices up for a few other reasons
1. Russia has pretty significant capacity that they would love to turn up.
2. Its pretty easy to increase supply in a year or so, as owners of wells increase production. Opec tries to minimize this because it causes those $10/barrel swings that are bad for everyone selling oil.
3. The members largely cheat. There are a few member countries that hold to their quotas pretty well, but most of them cheat like crazy. The most recent estimate I saw, was that OPEC is producing 20% more than their quotas. This is pretty common among cartels since its in their intrest to do so individually. The old prisoner's dilemna explains why fairly well, even if only in a single term game.
Asset lite companies are simply the companies that own very little, Cisco is a good example of this, they outsource almost everything but engineering and sales. Dell is another good example. In addition to BCCI, most other banks don't carry alot of assets. They have their branches, and their comptuers, what else do you want them to own. It makes for an efficient company because, they can make a lot of money with very little. Enron was movind towards this because they were trying to become a financial company rather than a pipeline company. They got in to trouble, selling financial assets that didn't have a market value, so they could largely assign what ever value they wanted to the assets. They then set up subsidiary companies to through assets that lost money, and didn't have to show the losses, however to get other investors, they pledged their corporate credit or equity in return for those liabilities. The downside of an asset lite model, and life is full of trade-offs, is that you don't have the assets when times get bad. If you own a factory, you can sell it during the down times. World com has lots of assets, they spent billions running fiber accross the country, its just that the fiber isn't selling now, so its not worth much, but their debt didn't devalue in the same manner. That makes you broke, not asset lite.
That's because when social security was started, people paid in for their whole life and died quickly after retiring. Now we are living longer, and collecting more and the balance is shifting away from a surplus. I don't understand why more young people don't support Social security privitization. Its not like it just gets put into the market, you would get an account to manage, and if you wanted to leave it in what its currently in, just buy government bonds.
Yes there has been quite a bit of fraud in the market lately but how many companies are there that have had fraudulent data in their financial statements, not just aggressive, but actual fruad. I can recal about 10 from the post bubble period, but remember there are more than 6,000 companies, most of them are fairly honest about their performance, but they don't make the front page of the paper.
The point of the parent is that once a company is in debt as much as WorldCom is, its basically on life support anyway, so revoking the charter doesn't accomplish much.
I don't see why everyone is so excited about this news breaking, it's certainly surprising, but what were you expecting from a company that has already lost 90% of its value since January first. I would guess that most equity investors had written off their stock prior to today. I'm sorry if you didn't, and I really feel for you if you owned the bonds, since it looks a whole lot less likely to make it now.
Finally, this is pretty common following a boom bust cycle, managment starts pushing the rules to make their estimates, that are too high, and like a lie, they have to do increasingly large and tricky adjustments to continue to make them. When their business doens't recover, they finally run out of tricks, and the whole thing falls apart. It sucks when it happens, but the cycle is a part of business, and will always be.
The refresh rate is a microsoft issue, its required to have the drivers certified. My understanding is that since there is no auto undo changes in 3d refresh rates, like there is in 2d refresh rates, the only way out is a reboot. Because Microsoft thinks all their customers are idiots, this was required.
Also to take advantage of falling hardware costs. Dell had component costs decrease in the neighborhood of 5% per week during 2001. Of course they were always using just the newest hardware, older stuff doesn't decrease in price nearly as fast. Since your platform will be locked for several years. It makes sense buy the best hardware you can get a the time of creation, even if you have to sell it at a loss in the beginning, and wait for the prices of your components to fall over time, and if neccessary lower prices to increase sales. All the while you're making money on the games licensed to sell on the console.
However, since Microsoft used hardware that had mostly fallen in price (PIIIs and small hard drives don't have the same price curves) they seem to be finding that price decreases are not coming as quickly as for other new consoles. I would guess that the magnitude of the unit loss was much larger for Microsoft, but they have more cash and profits to cover such a loss, and wanted to gain market share quickly.
Selling below marginal cost is considered predatory pricing, which is the intent to drive competitors out of business so you can raise prices in the future. This is generally considered one way of showing intent to monopolize which was prohibited by the Sherman Act. Congress has never made it clear what the terminology of the act means, so the courts have interpreted the act quite differently. Also, no one has come up with a measure of marginal cost, so very few predatory pricing cases make it to the courts. When they do average variable costs, costs of items that are used up in the making of the product, are generally used as a close approximation of marginal costs. Even the browser case delt with bundling rather than predatory pricing.
Anti-Dumping laws are similar but generally only deal with international trade. They were designed to prevent foreign governments from "stealing" jobs with lower costs, by subsidising their industries and dumping cheap products in the domestic country. The most common examples of these subsidies are in most contries' farming policies, and Japan's MITI. Most of the time they are used to protect industries facing more efficient foreign competition in a senator's district.
Finally, price fixing is cartel behavior, in which the competitors in an industry meet and establish price or volume quota's or limits on competiton. OPEC and Baseball (they were granted an anti-trust exemption) are the two most famous price fixing examples I can remember. However, since there is a method of profiting on a console that was sold at a loss, namely the games. It would be quite odd if a sucessful anti-dumping case was presented in either the US or Japan. The other side could argue that this is a common practice in many industries.
If you found any of this interesting, you're sick, and you should try to take an industrial organization econ class, in college, if you get the opportunity.
Also in the Law, the rules for slavery were something more like indentured servanthood. They were all to be set free every fifty years so prices would reflect the years of service left until the next year of jubilee. Which is a pretty cool concept, a year of rest (no farming allowed), worship, and all the families got their clan territory returned, and enslaved members made free. The year of Jubilee is described fully in Leviticus Ch 25.
I love how one of the early justifications of Napster was that unknown bands would get much better access to fans. Yet you still can't find most small bands on any of the p2p networks. I'm with you on sound quality of mp3s. The are great for work, I can take 1 cd with a month's worth of music, rather than a case, but just aren't the same on my stereo at home. There isn't enough bass. I'm no audiophile, but even with my cheap system, the bass isn't there nearly as much as with CDs.
Most Amish are actually quite wealthy, its just that they frown on extravagent displays of wealth. They invest conservativly, mostly money markets, and so they didn't experience an evaporation of wealth over the past 2 years like everyone else. They are expanding houses and buying land quite a bit. There was even a Wall Street Journal article on the growing trend. We would probably have more money too, if we didn't pay a cable, power, phone, and ISP bill my my own reaconing these would save me about $3000 a year. Would we really be that much worse off? I would guess that most /.ers were once pretty avid readers, I know I hadn't read something in several months, untill just recently I picked up a copy of an old book I had been wanting to read for years during a T-storm.
That's because the gray market lowers your chip prices. Big OEMs more than about 5,000 units a year have to purchase from AMD at the prices they sell 1,000 units for (its about 50% more than you pay. However, really big OEMs especially in Europe can get a better deal on larger volumes 10,000+. So order more then they need to get the discount and sell the extra for very large discounts. The pricewatch vendors, or their wholesalers buy these and sell them to you for very large discouts. AMD chips are not nearly as cheap as the relative street prices would seem to indicate. Intel's street prices do not seem to follow this pattern. Street prices are about 10% below wholesale. I don't know if Intel controlls their channel better or if they don't make the same level of price breaks if you order in very large quantities. That's why hobbiests can build AMD systems for so much less than Hewlett-Packard or Gateway.
This guy is exactly right, outside of the Yen in the late 80s and mostly in Asia, there has been no currency that has challenged the dollar in foreign currency holdings. If you're too lazy to look up why this is a good deal, its because the currency costs less to produce than it sells for, so we can produce extra currency sell it for goods and services and they keep it. Now that the Euro is trading and in cold currency, it represents a larger economic area, and should have similar reach, we have a competitor. Also, one other reason that 3rd world countries moeny is less trusted is the dictator's tendancy to fire up the presses when their expenses are higher than their tax recipts. That tends to upset the people currently holding its currency.
Which is why Detroit gets so mad when folks from down here go up there to buy cars. Arbitrage is cool!