btw, does he have any children to carry on his evil legacy? wouldn't want it to be a family tradition.:/
Yes, Darl has a wife and children, which proves two things: Females can also be afflicted by bad judgement, and it doesn't take intelligence to procreate.
[well, the timing sort of decided to go out of sync a lot and shot the alternator belt backwards and blew that up], and now my catalytic converter has stopped doing its work and smog is backing up into my cylinders so my car doesn't move.
What you really need is a mechanic who doesn't lie to you.:)
Repeat after me: Bush did not create the economic crisis we're currently recovering from, he dealt with it swiftly and boldly.
As a Republican, I have to say that Bush's guns-and-butter policy "boldly" following the example of LBJ doesn't impress me at all. The $20 per month income tax cut isn't fueling wild spending on my part to restart the economy. The massive deficit spending, as it did several decades ago, is causing higher interest rates and renewed inflation.
Repeat again: Bush did not create the terrorist crisis we're in, he dealt with it as no one else would do.
For the country's sake, I hope no one else would handle the problem as Bush did. Attacking a straw man and antagonizing the rest of the world is hopefully something most American leaders wouldn't do. Creating a massive new money hole like the DHS while refusing to police our borders is patently absurd. Promoting the exportation of American jobs because it's good for the economy is equally ridiculous. Replacing social welfare with corporate welfare is reprehensible. The neocons have to go - they are not really Republicans.
This is civil law, so no prison. There are plenty of class action suits by shareholders against companies who's stock tanked.
I wasn't serious about prison, although Carly's trespasses seem more damaging than Martha Stewart's. Agreed, there are many shareholder suits, and the number is growing. The suits are generally for mismanagement and/or failure to perform fiduciary duty. In some cases, the shareholders are right. Losing a shareholder's investment due to mismanagement is a breach of fiduciary duty. Failure to provide shareholders a profit is not (at least as far as I can determine). If Slashdot ever has another Q/A with Larry Rosen, I'm going to submit the question.
Unfortunately, 90% of programs on windows require admin install, and for no good reason. They spew dll's in system directories instead of application local directories, write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of HKEY_CURRENT_USER, or simply use restricted API functions instead of less capable alternatives.
In the book "The Corporation" there are number of other quotes, which I cannot find on the net. Here is one from a law professor Janis Sarra (you can find her on the net):
. . . Courts usually only consider shareholder wealth maximinzation as the benchmark of whether the directors and officers are acting in the best interest of the corporation. Directors and officers are therefore restricted by what has been a very powerful set of court decisions.
(I studied under a few published professors - it doesn't necessarily mean much.:)) I'd like to be able to read the actual text of some of these "decisions". If true, this sounds like the meltdown of American business due to decisions by activist judges making their own laws.
How could the courts ever determine whether "wealth maximinzation" (shouldn't that be "maximization"?) has been achieved? Every American company in existence would be in court defending itself against hindsight. Carly Fiorina would be in prison instead of firing all of her subordinates and raking in millions. There still seems to be a disconnect between the conventional wisdom and the real law.
I've been working with XP, 2000, and Windows 98 in a business environment. In an enterprise business environment, where IT controls the PCs, and people who install Yahoo Search Bar and other webtastic crap are fired, the O/S run great. A single, well built build with a good and constantly updating AV program will not fail 8% of the time.
So you're saying Windows is not yet ready for the real-world desktop. That's good to know.:)
No matter how much you *want* to believe Windows 2000/XP is poorly coded, it's not. I've had Slackware crash several times on me in the past few years. I don't blame Slackware for it.
I've had Win2K lock up hard and fast a number of times. It just won't let you quit or shut anything down. You can get to the task manager, but it has no effect.
The only way out is to power-cycle. It's worse than a BSOD. I've been using Mandrake for years at home, and I can recall only one lock-up/crash, and then I was playing with a beta release.
Here is one from Maine: How Corporate Law Inhibits Social Responsibility
Thanks, this is by far the closest anyone has come to tracking down this so-called law:
In Maine, where I live, this duty of directors is in Section 716 of the business corporation act, which reads:
...the directors and officers of a corporation shall exercise their powers and discharge their duties with a view to the interests of the corporation and of the shareholders....
Although the wording of this provision differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, its legal effect does not. This provision is the motive behind all corporate actions everywhere in the world. Distilled to its essence, it says that the people who run corporations have a legal duty to shareholders, and that duty is to make money.
Note that the last sentence is the author's opinion. The actual law says what I said earlier: Company officers are required to act in the best interests of the company. The law does not mention mandatory profits. If that is being perverted by litigous shareholders, that's certainly a problem, but that's not what the law says.
And here is a note about the Ford vs. Dodge case:
OMG. Green-on-purple? That's worse than the Slashdot IT scheme. That supports your argument well, but my first thought was that the conclusion was again the author's interpretation, and the suit was about mismanagement, which is reinforced by something further down:
The Dodges, somewhat inconsistently, having just taken him to court for mismanagement, vowed that he would not be allowed to leave.
I searched for a while for the original decision, but there doesn't seem to be a lot available unless it concerns the SCOTUS. (This isn't really pertinent, but I thought it was interesting that Ford was eventually proven right, the judge was wrong, and the Dodge brothers would have made more money by staying out of court and holding their stock.)
Anyone can sue anyone for anything in this country, but the only shareholder suits I've heard of concerning profits were during company sales or mergers, where it actually would be the CEO's duty to perform the final task of getting the most for the company. Looking at it logically, a law requiring companies to provide a profit would have to include a time-frame. This quarter? Two quarters? This year? This decade? A ten thousand percent profit in 100 years is really great, but it wouldn't benefit any current shareholders. As Enron proved, short-term profits are great for shareholders if you know when to sell but not for most shareholders. While there are decisions that apparently support your argument, I have still seen no law that requires a company to make a profit. If there were such a law, every CEO who ever had a losing quarter would be in court.
You are right. Corporations are limited by laws and regulations imposed by the goverment. So in these cases laws were broken.
So, I still want to see these other laws requiring profits which would be an excellent defense for CEOs who are being indicted for increasing shareholder wealth.
Still, while working within exiting laws, the corporation is required to "increase shareholder value", not do public good.
Again, please provide relevant code and section where any corporation or company officer is required to do more than act in the company's and shareholder's best interests. Cite the law where *anyone* is "required to increase shareholder value". This is the chimera I chase on Slashdot.
For example, why do SUVs get such lousy gas milage? They could be build with more efficient engines and lighther materials so that gas consumption would be reduced (and hence polution, dependence on oil) - clearly a public good.
I don't see how that is relevant. I never said there were laws requiring companies to work for the public good, but there are laws penalizing companies that cause public harm. Google on EPA for a million hits. There are laws protecting the public from automobiles that blow up or roll over without cause even though they increase shareholder value. There is no law stating that a company must provide products that benefit the public, just like there is no law stating that companies must provide a profit for shareholders. Unless you can provide that citation that I'm waiting for? . ..
See the book I mentioned in my post. And here is another reference: Shareholder Primacy Norm.
I don't want to pay for a book that probably is not saying what you are. The link you provided says what is actually true: Company officers have a fiduciary duty to the company, which includes shareholders. In plain English that means company officers have to act in the best interests of the company. The best interests of a company may mean acquiring a competitor and foregoing profits for several years to secure long-term survival. Again, I don't believe there is any U.S. law that requires companies to maximize profit (which is a common claim on Slashdot).
No. They put their own welfare ahead of the shareholders welfare. They majorly screwed the shareholders.
Wrong. Some of the indictments against Enron execs are for kiting the price of energy, which hurt the general public. Actions against Qwest are for cooking the books and gouging customers. Actions against Arthur Andersen were for not performing their duty and not providing an honest assessment of companies' accounting to the public. All these questionable activities resulted in higher stock prices and dividends for shareholders at the time. By your standards, those actions should be completely legal, since they increased shareholder value.
Not that 60 minutes would intentionally mislead the public, but did they mention their source? What criteria was used to qualify that statement?
It was a claim in an interview by Stahl, and 60 Minutes caught a lot of flak for it. When the dust settled, it turned out the original source was an Indian medical doctor who is now a U.S. resident. In typical fashion, 60 Minutes refused to apologize or retract their claims. They even re-ran the program. Those yellow-sheet hacks have no ethics or shame.
Actually, corporations have a legal obligation (under US law) to look after the interest of the shareholders.
If you are saying there is a law requiring companies to maximize profits, please cite it. I have been trying to get people making this claim to actually cite the law. So far, nobody has been able to do it.
Any CEO that would put the welfare of the public ahead of profits is breaking the law.
It seems to me that some (past) executives of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Qwest, Arthur Andersen, etc., are paying fines or facing jail time for putting profits ahead of the public welfare.
Yes. I believe it was at $35M. The SCO lawyers haven't reached that yet. I think they'll give up when they do.
1st Lawyer: Your Honor, I have here in my hand undeniable, irrefutable, incontrovertible evidence that IBM willfully and knowingly appropriated immensely valuable SCO intellectual property and gave it to those communist hippy Linux riffraff.
2nd Lawyer: Objection!
Judge: On what possible grounds? You are also SCO counsel.
2nd Lawyer: The money just ran out, this ain't pro bono, and those SCO execs have lied to everyone including us since day one.
Election officials have no more ability to affect an electronic election than they do with paper ballots. They're still people, still in charge of the details, and we still have no alternative but to trust the process (or become an election official, thus begging the question).
Someone hasn't been reading the (many) articles on E-voting posted lately. The Diebold tallying program, which would be run at district level on a single computer, allows someone with a two-digit code to change the election results and change the logs so that there is no evidence of tampering. It's pretty difficult for an election official to change several thousand paper ballots.
Nonsense, a computer running Linux is only a little less of a "black box" than a computer running a closed source OS.
That's not even the major problem since Diebold admitted to running uncertified, untested software on voting machines in California. The code that is tested and certified is tested only by a company (that refuses to disclose what they test) they hire to test it, so I'm sure the testing is comprehensive. Not.
You really don't have anyway for sure to know if the source code you have on the machine is the code running.
Nonsense. If I have the publicly available software, compile it myself, and do a simple diff against the installed software in a voting machine, I can be absolutely certain the program running is what it's supposed to be. Your position seems to be "trust the vendor". Hi! I'm from Enron, and I'd like to help you with your energy bills!
Check my math here, but America would also have nine times the people to do the counting. Or are the high-school graduates innumerate as well?
The problem is that we use senior citizens to handle polls here. With the country constantly raising the costs of Medicare, health care, and prescription drugs by double digits while raising Social Security benefits at about 1% per year, the pool of available workers is dwindling quickly. E-voting is yet another serendipitous technological advance. It allows us to replace volunteer old people with expensive machines from a diverse group of three companies and help the American economy all at the same time by supporting non-communist, closed-source software. It couldn't get any better than this. (That was sarcasm for those with a non-functional detector.)
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else see a problem with a *nix vendor having a web site that only works properly for IE?
And you think they should tick off the guys supplying the money by supporting other browsers?
btw, does he have any children to carry on his evil legacy? wouldn't want it to be a family tradition. :/
Yes, Darl has a wife and children, which proves two things: Females can also be afflicted by bad judgement, and it doesn't take intelligence to procreate.
Okay, increased back pressure I can understand. :)
[well, the timing sort of decided to go out of sync a lot and shot the alternator belt backwards and blew that up], and now my catalytic converter has stopped doing its work and smog is backing up into my cylinders so my car doesn't move.
What you really need is a mechanic who doesn't lie to you. :)
Repeat after me: Bush did not create the economic crisis we're currently recovering from, he dealt with it swiftly and boldly.
As a Republican, I have to say that Bush's guns-and-butter policy "boldly" following the example of LBJ doesn't impress me at all. The $20 per month income tax cut isn't fueling wild spending on my part to restart the economy. The massive deficit spending, as it did several decades ago, is causing higher interest rates and renewed inflation.
Repeat again: Bush did not create the terrorist crisis we're in, he dealt with it as no one else would do.
For the country's sake, I hope no one else would handle the problem as Bush did. Attacking a straw man and antagonizing the rest of the world is hopefully something most American leaders wouldn't do. Creating a massive new money hole like the DHS while refusing to police our borders is patently absurd. Promoting the exportation of American jobs because it's good for the economy is equally ridiculous. Replacing social welfare with corporate welfare is reprehensible. The neocons have to go - they are not really Republicans.
It's called principal.
What, the guy who runs your high school tells you how to vote?
This is civil law, so no prison. There are plenty of class action suits by shareholders against companies who's stock tanked.
I wasn't serious about prison, although Carly's trespasses seem more damaging than Martha Stewart's. Agreed, there are many shareholder suits, and the number is growing. The suits are generally for mismanagement and/or failure to perform fiduciary duty. In some cases, the shareholders are right. Losing a shareholder's investment due to mismanagement is a breach of fiduciary duty. Failure to provide shareholders a profit is not (at least as far as I can determine). If Slashdot ever has another Q/A with Larry Rosen, I'm going to submit the question.
aka Overly Critical Guy
Oh, yeah. I could believe you're that moronic Microsoft astroturfing troll.
Unfortunately, 90% of programs on windows require admin install, and for no good reason. They spew dll's in system directories instead of application local directories, write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of HKEY_CURRENT_USER, or simply use restricted API functions instead of less capable alternatives.
'Nuff said.
In the book "The Corporation" there are number of other quotes, which I cannot find on the net. Here is one from a law professor Janis Sarra (you can find her on the net):
(I studied under a few published professors - it doesn't necessarily mean much. :)) I'd like to be able to read the actual text of some of these "decisions". If true, this sounds like the meltdown of American business due to decisions by activist judges making their own laws.
How could the courts ever determine whether "wealth maximinzation" (shouldn't that be "maximization"?) has been achieved? Every American company in existence would be in court defending itself against hindsight. Carly Fiorina would be in prison instead of firing all of her subordinates and raking in millions. There still seems to be a disconnect between the conventional wisdom and the real law.
I've been working with XP, 2000, and Windows 98 in a business environment. In an enterprise business environment, where IT controls the PCs, and people who install Yahoo Search Bar and other webtastic crap are fired, the O/S run great. A single, well built build with a good and constantly updating AV program will not fail 8% of the time.
So you're saying Windows is not yet ready for the real-world desktop. That's good to know. :)
No matter how much you *want* to believe Windows 2000/XP is poorly coded, it's not. I've had Slackware crash several times on me in the past few years. I don't blame Slackware for it.
I've had Win2K lock up hard and fast a number of times. It just won't let you quit or shut anything down. You can get to the task manager, but it has no effect. The only way out is to power-cycle. It's worse than a BSOD. I've been using Mandrake for years at home, and I can recall only one lock-up/crash, and then I was playing with a beta release.
Here is one from Maine: How Corporate Law Inhibits Social Responsibility
Thanks, this is by far the closest anyone has come to tracking down this so-called law:
Note that the last sentence is the author's opinion. The actual law says what I said earlier: Company officers are required to act in the best interests of the company. The law does not mention mandatory profits. If that is being perverted by litigous shareholders, that's certainly a problem, but that's not what the law says.And here is a note about the Ford vs. Dodge case:
OMG. Green-on-purple? That's worse than the Slashdot IT scheme. That supports your argument well, but my first thought was that the conclusion was again the author's interpretation, and the suit was about mismanagement, which is reinforced by something further down:
I searched for a while for the original decision, but there doesn't seem to be a lot available unless it concerns the SCOTUS. (This isn't really pertinent, but I thought it was interesting that Ford was eventually proven right, the judge was wrong, and the Dodge brothers would have made more money by staying out of court and holding their stock.)Anyone can sue anyone for anything in this country, but the only shareholder suits I've heard of concerning profits were during company sales or mergers, where it actually would be the CEO's duty to perform the final task of getting the most for the company. Looking at it logically, a law requiring companies to provide a profit would have to include a time-frame. This quarter? Two quarters? This year? This decade? A ten thousand percent profit in 100 years is really great, but it wouldn't benefit any current shareholders. As Enron proved, short-term profits are great for shareholders if you know when to sell but not for most shareholders. While there are decisions that apparently support your argument, I have still seen no law that requires a company to make a profit. If there were such a law, every CEO who ever had a losing quarter would be in court.
You are right. Corporations are limited by laws and regulations imposed by the goverment. So in these cases laws were broken.
So, I still want to see these other laws requiring profits which would be an excellent defense for CEOs who are being indicted for increasing shareholder wealth.
Still, while working within exiting laws, the corporation is required to "increase shareholder value", not do public good.
Again, please provide relevant code and section where any corporation or company officer is required to do more than act in the company's and shareholder's best interests. Cite the law where *anyone* is "required to increase shareholder value". This is the chimera I chase on Slashdot.
For example, why do SUVs get such lousy gas milage? They could be build with more efficient engines and lighther materials so that gas consumption would be reduced (and hence polution, dependence on oil) - clearly a public good.
I don't see how that is relevant. I never said there were laws requiring companies to work for the public good, but there are laws penalizing companies that cause public harm. Google on EPA for a million hits. There are laws protecting the public from automobiles that blow up or roll over without cause even though they increase shareholder value. There is no law stating that a company must provide products that benefit the public, just like there is no law stating that companies must provide a profit for shareholders. Unless you can provide that citation that I'm waiting for? . . .
See the book I mentioned in my post. And here is another reference: Shareholder Primacy Norm.
I don't want to pay for a book that probably is not saying what you are. The link you provided says what is actually true: Company officers have a fiduciary duty to the company, which includes shareholders. In plain English that means company officers have to act in the best interests of the company. The best interests of a company may mean acquiring a competitor and foregoing profits for several years to secure long-term survival. Again, I don't believe there is any U.S. law that requires companies to maximize profit (which is a common claim on Slashdot).
No. They put their own welfare ahead of the shareholders welfare. They majorly screwed the shareholders.
Wrong. Some of the indictments against Enron execs are for kiting the price of energy, which hurt the general public. Actions against Qwest are for cooking the books and gouging customers. Actions against Arthur Andersen were for not performing their duty and not providing an honest assessment of companies' accounting to the public. All these questionable activities resulted in higher stock prices and dividends for shareholders at the time. By your standards, those actions should be completely legal, since they increased shareholder value.
Not that 60 minutes would intentionally mislead the public, but did they mention their source? What criteria was used to qualify that statement?
It was a claim in an interview by Stahl, and 60 Minutes caught a lot of flak for it. When the dust settled, it turned out the original source was an Indian medical doctor who is now a U.S. resident. In typical fashion, 60 Minutes refused to apologize or retract their claims. They even re-ran the program. Those yellow-sheet hacks have no ethics or shame.
Actually, corporations have a legal obligation (under US law) to look after the interest of the shareholders.
If you are saying there is a law requiring companies to maximize profits, please cite it. I have been trying to get people making this claim to actually cite the law. So far, nobody has been able to do it.
Any CEO that would put the welfare of the public ahead of profits is breaking the law.
It seems to me that some (past) executives of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Qwest, Arthur Andersen, etc., are paying fines or facing jail time for putting profits ahead of the public welfare.
Yes. I believe it was at $35M. The SCO lawyers haven't reached that yet. I think they'll give up when they do.
1st Lawyer: Your Honor, I have here in my hand undeniable, irrefutable, incontrovertible evidence that IBM willfully and knowingly appropriated immensely valuable SCO intellectual property and gave it to those communist hippy Linux riffraff.
2nd Lawyer: Objection!
Judge: On what possible grounds? You are also SCO counsel.
2nd Lawyer: The money just ran out, this ain't pro bono, and those SCO execs have lied to everyone including us since day one.
1st Lawyer: Your Honor, we rest our case.
Did anybody else read this and expect some sort of BASIC or batch file joke?
Yeah, I was thinking it was pretty strange, even for a comment in a BASIC program.
I really can't see multiple elections costing that much more especially if it means having an informed electorate.
A recent state-wide special election here was shot down because the cost was estimated at nearly a million dollars.
Of course that [informed electorate] may be the last thing the politicians want
Can't disagree with you there. :)
How long before we demand direct democracy.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." - Benjamin Franklin
Stop and consider all the areas where you are or could be in the minority before you wish for a democracy.
Election officials have no more ability to affect an electronic election than they do with paper ballots. They're still people, still in charge of the details, and we still have no alternative but to trust the process (or become an election official, thus begging the question).
Someone hasn't been reading the (many) articles on E-voting posted lately. The Diebold tallying program, which would be run at district level on a single computer, allows someone with a two-digit code to change the election results and change the logs so that there is no evidence of tampering. It's pretty difficult for an election official to change several thousand paper ballots.
Nonsense, a computer running Linux is only a little less of a "black box" than a computer running a closed source OS.
That's not even the major problem since Diebold admitted to running uncertified, untested software on voting machines in California. The code that is tested and certified is tested only by a company (that refuses to disclose what they test) they hire to test it, so I'm sure the testing is comprehensive. Not.
You really don't have anyway for sure to know if the source code you have on the machine is the code running.
Nonsense. If I have the publicly available software, compile it myself, and do a simple diff against the installed software in a voting machine, I can be absolutely certain the program running is what it's supposed to be. Your position seems to be "trust the vendor". Hi! I'm from Enron, and I'd like to help you with your energy bills!
Check my math here, but America would also have nine times the people to do the counting. Or are the high-school graduates innumerate as well?
The problem is that we use senior citizens to handle polls here. With the country constantly raising the costs of Medicare, health care, and prescription drugs by double digits while raising Social Security benefits at about 1% per year, the pool of available workers is dwindling quickly. E-voting is yet another serendipitous technological advance. It allows us to replace volunteer old people with expensive machines from a diverse group of three companies and help the American economy all at the same time by supporting non-communist, closed-source software. It couldn't get any better than this. (That was sarcasm for those with a non-functional detector.)
Farcical. Sorry, I couldn't help it. Run away! Run away!