Release Candidate: No one who's testing it can break it anymore, but we're still going to wait a set amount of time with no known bugs before we release it.
My only (minor) quibble with your post is this. Instead of "Release Candidate", call it "Gold" and this basically exactly matches the development terms we used at the game design company I worked for.
Looking at this, it seems pretty obvious that most commercial "Beta" software is really of Alpha quality, with some nice exceptions -- Gmail is release quality, with features occasionally being added,
If there were a "Ding!" mod, I'd give it to you. As the mods have already come through and left, this is between us, so let me say, good post. I will say that I think there is a downside to watering down the definition of the word "beta" the way that Google has done at times, but I also think that is outweighed by lowering expectations, which can only be a good thing for the consumer.
An MBA is literally training on how not to be a human being. Business schools rob students of their humanity, and teach them only to worship short term profits
I don't know why I'm surprised that this got modded up, but you really need to get out some. Are some people with MBAs worthless know-nothings? Of course. As are some people with every certification or degree known to man. It doesn't impugn the value of that education.
More and more, Slashdot seems to be sliding towards the groupthink that "People who are interested in business are bad." You know what? You can be a dynamite engineer with a fantastic development group and a kick-ass product. But if your salesforce can't sell, your management can't keep the company focused, your CFO can't get the financials straight (including making good decisions regarding cash flows and investments to make sure that you, the kick-ass engineer, gets paid every month), your product doesn't mean shit. Because it will never see the market.
The problem of course is the potential legal/financial liability that goes with that, which is what this new law would eliminate.
Does the law eliminate liability for any screwup as long as the entity apologizes for it before getting sued/charged with a crime? Or does it just eliminate liability for anything that wasn't public knowledge before the apology?
In either case, but especially the former, I can see problems with that law big enough to drive a truck through. (Unless that truck were a Ford with Bridgestone tires, in which case they'd be big enough to slide through sideways after the rear left blew. And if they apologized for it before I got to court, I couldn't sue.)
1. SOX is not effective due to it's scope. You must monitor systems which relate purely to reporting the bottom line or general ledger, but then downstream systems which are being defrauded can legitimately be considered outside of this scope, and subsequently be utilised to further fraud with SOX impunity.
I'm certainly not as technically-inclined as your average/.er, but it seems to me that this would be solved by simply extending the compliance requirements (or at least some of them) to include machines that directly give information to those systems that are currently covered. This would raise the expense, but it doesn't seem that it would be by that much. I could very well be wrong.
2. SOX auditors are, in my experience, technically challenged dunces, chancers, and bullshitters of the highest order, and they are far too expensive. I think that the solution, over the next ten - twenty years or so, will come from the tech sector, and from technologists, when we have a de-facto, high profile set of standards and methodologies that ensure all systems and applications are developed and maintained securely. This will probably only happen when a tech security issue engages public and commercial consciences in spectacular fashion, eg DNS being pwned for weeks. I think the solution, for IT, should come from inside, not outside.
If that's true outside of just your experience, that's certainly a problem, though not one that we're not all used to. About their expense, I would say that as we get further away from SOX's enactment, auditor prices will very likely drop and stabilize considerably lower than what they're currently at. That's typical behavior in an emerging market for particular "knowledge" and "skills" of a hypertechnical nature. In the beginning, few people have them, and they charge a ton. As others enter the field (either because they enjoy it, which mitigates the lack of knowledge problem to some degree, or purely because of the salaries to be made), prices will drop. Longterm, I think your solution is pretty dead-on.
2) For those who are claiming that the original intent of SOX is wrong, could you please explain why you think so in those parameters? There are certainly downsides to SOX, but a million posts saying "SOX sucks" or "I have to do a whole bunch of extra things so that my company is SOX compliant" doesn't mean anything. First, obviously it doesn't provide any kind of example. Second, there's no reasoned logic as to why these downsides are worse than the upsides. Which leads me to...
Ugh, I hate responding to my own posts, but I'm more than a little f'ed up right now, and in my somewhat incoherent rambling, I lost track of what I was trying to say in this point. What I was trying to say is that if you think the underlying intent of SOX (again, increasing the accuracy of public filings and holding management responsible for what is filed) is wrong, then please, at least simply say why you think so. The way that Slashdot works, given that often the OP is not the one who responds to the people who reply to the OP, can present a moving target when it comes to reasoning. If the OP explicitly states why they think this, then the people who reply can address that specific issue, and we don't end up with 30 different issues spreading across the whole thread and never being addressed.
I'm making these comments in virtually every subthread, so I thought I'd just bring them all to the front.
1) For those who are claiming that the implementation/specific requirements are too strict, could you give an example? I have had to do things required for SOX compliance (and I know of plenty of other things that my company, and others, have done), and I have to say, I have yet to see anything that I consider overly burdensome. And certainly not so overly burdensome that they outweigh the benefits of the intended effect of SOX: ensuring more accurate and honest reporting in filings by public companies, and ensuring that management is held responsible for what is in those filings.
2) For those who are claiming that the original intent of SOX is wrong, could you please explain why you think so in those parameters? There are certainly downsides to SOX, but a million posts saying "SOX sucks" or "I have to do a whole bunch of extra things so that my company is SOX compliant" doesn't mean anything. First, obviously it doesn't provide any kind of example. Second, there's no reasoned logic as to why these downsides are worse than the upsides. Which leads me to...
3) For those who are claiming that the original intent was good, but the implementation is faulty, again, could you provide examples? Personally, I feel that extra work for you (or your accounting department, or whoever) is worth it if it helps to ensure that 10-Ks and the like are as accurate as possible. There is certainly a point at which the expense to make them more accurate outweighs the benefit of that improved accuracy. But remember, as I pointed out upthread, these filings are not FOR the company, or even really FOR the government (nearly every company has two sets of books, one for tax purposes and one for annual reports); they're for you, me, and every other person (and institutional investors) trying to decide whether investing in that company, be it through stocks, bonds, or any other avenue, is a good investment. The purpose of these filings and the role of the government in ensuring the accuracy of those filings is to make sure that investors have as much (and as accurate) information as possible. This is a good thing. If you'd like to argue that it's not, I (and probably others) will be happy to do so. If you're simply trying to point out that SOX doesn't fulfill its intent, then please, please say WHY you think that, and please give some thought to how much more work you would be willing to put up with, and how much expense you think is acceptable for a company to incur, to help the markets get better information.
4) Finally, there is a very interesting argument against SOX that is getting ignored upthread. SOX is definitely a regressive expense. Small businesses are paying a higher percentage of their revenue (or pre-tax income, if you want to be pedantic) than larger companies. Is this fair? What, if anything, can be done to alleviate that problem? What slope of regression (I'm probably butchering this terminology-wise, but I think you know what I mean) is acceptable to you, assuming you believe that SOX is otherwise a net benefit?
On the whole, obviously I am in favor of SOX. I wholeheartedly agree with the thought process behind it, and in my experiences dealing with it, I haven't found anything to change my mind. If you disagree, let's talk about it. This is a very, very important issue. But let's talk about it rationally and logically. Throwing out "it sucks", "I hate SOX", and "It doesn't work" don't do anything to further the discussion.
And yes, I am a longtime Slashdot reader, and I know that it's sometimes hard to find real, thought-out discussion. But we can certainly try for it.
As has already been pointed out in another response to your post, Enron didn't create their mess all by themselves. Arthur Andersen, as both their auditor and their consultant, did as much, if not more, that led to Enron's downfall. But even if it had been Enron all by themselves (meaning that they would have had to present false books to Andersen, and cover up the existence of the shell companies [called 'Raptors' internally by Enron] when actual physical checks were made, which is much harder to do than you think), the severity of the resulting disaster made the people, the government, and the FASB think about the overall climate of business. They found that it was lacking, and they made a move to fix it.
While I think that the argument that Sarbanes-Oxley is deficient in solving the issue is false, I will listen to arguments to the contrary. Any attempt to claim that a public company should not be doing everything in their power to ensure that their books are correct and that they are following GAAP (along with other compliance) is ludicrous. It doesn't benefit the public, and in the long term, it rarely benefits the shareholders. Is any company going to be perfect? Of course not. But for GE to complain that spending a tenth of a percent of their pre-tax income on one of the most important fundamental shifts in regulation is not merely laughable, it would give me long pause if I were a major shareholder or potentially one.
They're certainly allowed to bitch about the cost (and they always will, no matter what it is), but when it's as generally as low as it is, especially for corporations the size of GE, it makes one wonder about their dedication to proper reporting. And that's not a good thing to be wondering about.
How did this get modded insightful? (I know, I know, don't bitch about moderation.)
There's no analysis here. Would you care to tell us why you think this? Sarbanes-Oxley, as discussed all over this thread, provides a number of very real and tangible benefits. I'm certainly willing to listen to an argument that the downside outweighs those benefits (especially from someone who "works with it"), but that's nowhere to be seen here. The article only mentions the costs associated with it, and in my post upthread (and in the first response to it), we see that the costs are $33 million per year for GE (the example in the article) out of $20 billion in pre-tax income. If you think that's too much, or if you've got another reason why it's a net bad thing, let's hear it.
As one of the people upthread who didn't specifically mention the word "public" (though I was specifically talking about 10-Ks), I presumed that someone who chose to read this thread would be aware of this distinction.
(or less directly, through share prices, which are essentially expectations of dividends)
For non-growth oriented companies, this is typically true. It is certainly not true of growth-oriented companies. There are obviously many, many investors putting their money into growth-oriented companies, and they really don't give a rat's ass about dividends, except as they pertain to a later willing buyer's concept of the value of the stock. Would the world be better if the people in the market were actually concerned with dividends (and therefore, concerned with things like future cash flows and liabilities)? Probably, as this would tend to highlight stronger companies with the consistent revenue streams and forecasting abilities to consistently return high dividends. On the other hand, it would also make it harder to get those start-ups out of the gate, because with the difficulty of predicting dividends for them and few people investing purely for the potential of the stock price increasing, there wouldn't be a whole ton of money flowing their way.
What I liked better is that the London suburb of Brentford has more people searching for porn than Delhi.
What I liked even more than that was that Brentford rates as number 3 in the world, falling just behind.... Birmingham and Manchester. We Brits are a horny lot!
Or you're just the worst at using the most generic search terms.:) Seriously, who searches for their porn by just hammering "porn" into Google? I go to a sports site often, and there is a pretty free-wheeling chatroom there. People (read:guys) are always in there asking for links to porn pictures. I usually make fun of them (how stupid do you have to be to be incapable of finding your own porn on the Intarweb?), but perhaps I'll just start giving them this solution!
Not bad, though expenses generally tend to add up, I don't know what compliance to other regulations cost.
Expenses do add up, but this is one of the most necessary expenses around. If you can't trust the 10-K, what the hell good is it?
Compliance (to accounting standards) generally involves a bit of staffing and their accoutrements (PC, office space, etc.), but it isn't typically more than that. Sarbanes-Oxley is more expensive than most to comply with, because it involves fairly detailed examinations of internal practices. However, in the general sense, these are very good things for a business. I haven't read Sarbanes-Oxley with a magnifying glass, so I can't state with 100% certainty that it doesn't require anything overly burdensome. However, I would be very wary of any company that is so averse to turning their eye inwards that they actually publicly complain about it.
First, of course companies are saying this. Sarbanes-Oxley requires them to do things that they don't want to do, namely properly assess their controls and have the CEO and CFO officially sign off on financial reporting.
But the real issue is that proper external financial reports aren't for the business (though they do help it, as long as the business pays attention to what they say.) They're for external users. And I can tell you right now that while banks who are looking to loan money, analysts who are grading performance, and investors who are looking to invest in a company's stock or bonds wouldn't mind seeing any costs cut, they don't think that the benefits are outweighed by the costs. They'll take the best information they can get, no matter what has to be done (within some modicum of reason.) And that's the point of Sarbanes-Oxley.
In 2004, GE spent about $33 million on Section 404 compliance, and costs ran about the same in 2005, Ameen said. According to a quick perusal of GE's 2004 10-K, they had $20 billion in pre-tax income. I don't think $33 million is remotely too much to insure that that 10-K is correct.
So, other people do their work for them? I realize they're understaffed and could use some help, but really, this is the best they could come up with? I have an idea: I'll outsource all of you guys to do my job. Between school and work, I'm understaffed, and this way, things get done better. I'll even implement a peer-review moderation system. It's win-win!
Are you kidding me? The average worker does NOT have more purchasing power today than they did 20 years ago. I don't know where you're getting this misinformation (polling people in the Walmart parking lot?)
Here's one link.
You can Google to your heart's content. Wages are not keeping up with inflation.
The average american can afford to buy more goods and services with the same income now than he could 20 years ago and they curse Walmart for offering them what they want at a low price...you just cant win with some people.
Really. Well the people who produced all those studies that have shown that real wages have dropped significantly in the last 30 years would love to know what methodology you used in your study that invalidates theirs.
After loosing tons of money over this, the companies finally realise that they have to listen to consumers.
Phillips will lose nil money, or next to it, because of this. Have fun in your dream world.
You know, there are different meanings to the phrases "is rarely wrong" and "is never wrong". Arguing against the latter means nothing with regards to the former, unless you can come up with enough examples to invalidate the former.
The GP's argument about the dot-com bubble is somewhat valid, but falls apart on closer scrutiny. The vast majority of people who participated in the bubble were doing little to no research, much less evaluating the merits of lawsuits. The vast majority of the rest were making money off of the original vast majority. When the market is doing research and making evaluations, it is rarely wrong.
We often have no idea what kind of pieces of crap are running on our computers which we rely so much upon.
I would say that every single person on this earth has at least one piece of software running on their computer that they don't know everything about. Even those of you who are software engineers don't have time to go through every line of code in every piece of software you install. Those of us who are merely interested in technology, even if we formerly or currently work in the field, rely on third party evaluations. Those who don't care (so what, 97, 98% of the population?) are even worse off.
I steal my internet connection from my clueless (or generous, I haven't decided) neighbors who leave their routers wide open. I don't P2P out of respect for their download speeds; I basically just have HTTP traffic. Living in an apartment building in Austin, I have 13 available networks, 5 of which are left open. I bounce back and forth.
Am I stealing? Sure. But at least I'm a somewhat honorable thief. And for the year that I'm back in school, that $50 a month is better spent on beer (because we all know that free as in beer doesn't exist).
Count me in as someone who doesn't answer their phone for people they don't know. Unlike the poster above, I don't just limit it to calls that show up "unknown". If I don't recognize the number and I'm not expecting a call from a number I won't recognize, I don't answer. Let them leave a message. If I'm around my computer, I'll Google the number to see if I can find out who/what it is. If I'm not (or I can't find it) and they don't leave a message, then I don't bother.
The employees, customers, and community should always come first.
Their interests should be taken to heart, especially if a business wants to succeed long term. Without employees, there can be no product. Without customers, there can be no sales. Without the community (and I'm assuming this is the community that are not customers or prospective customers), there can be no company itself.
However, there are mandates (both contractual and legislative) that determine a publicly traded company's obligations towards each of these four groups. You have no right of privacy when it comes to dealing with Google. If they feel that the government is in the wrong and that they are right to fight, then fine. However, the original poster supposed that they know that they are going to lose, and this is a marketing ploy. The responder stated (properly) that this is costing the company billions, and if they aren't actually protecting the rights of customers, then there is no benefit to the company, and they are improperly endangering the money of their shareholders, with whom they do have an obligation that they would be violating. You claim that if he were an investor, he should "shut up".
That's all well and good for you to think, but investors have real money involved, and Google has real obligations towards them. In the scenario described by the original poster, they would be in the wrong, plain and simple. You can think what you want, but you're not living in the real world. This was the concern with Google going public, and we're seeing it raise its head now.
If you were an investor, I'd say shut the hell up. You have no say in the matter. The interests of the employees, the customers, and the community come before yours.
Your lack of knowledge (or interest) in how the business world works is frightening.
Oh? And what, exactly, other site lets you do a search for images? Because that MSN image search tool is really a competito...oh, wait. (Note to pedants: Yes, this is but one example. But the statement that there is no innovation from Google is fucking patently ridiculous.)
Agreed. If you're doing any sort of line-by-line dispute, or point-by-point analysis, you should do inline posting. That still doesn't solve the "top posting vs. bottom posting" for all the other times. And honestly, how often are you going point-by-point?
Slashdot Mirror
Release Candidate: No one who's testing it can break it anymore, but we're still going to wait a set amount of time with no known bugs before we release it.
My only (minor) quibble with your post is this. Instead of "Release Candidate", call it "Gold" and this basically exactly matches the development terms we used at the game design company I worked for.
Looking at this, it seems pretty obvious that most commercial "Beta" software is really of Alpha quality, with some nice exceptions -- Gmail is release quality, with features occasionally being added,
If there were a "Ding!" mod, I'd give it to you. As the mods have already come through and left, this is between us, so let me say, good post. I will say that I think there is a downside to watering down the definition of the word "beta" the way that Google has done at times, but I also think that is outweighed by lowering expectations, which can only be a good thing for the consumer.
An MBA is literally training on how not to be a human being. Business schools rob students of their humanity, and teach them only to worship short term profits
I don't know why I'm surprised that this got modded up, but you really need to get out some. Are some people with MBAs worthless know-nothings? Of course. As are some people with every certification or degree known to man. It doesn't impugn the value of that education.
More and more, Slashdot seems to be sliding towards the groupthink that "People who are interested in business are bad." You know what? You can be a dynamite engineer with a fantastic development group and a kick-ass product. But if your salesforce can't sell, your management can't keep the company focused, your CFO can't get the financials straight (including making good decisions regarding cash flows and investments to make sure that you, the kick-ass engineer, gets paid every month), your product doesn't mean shit. Because it will never see the market.
The problem of course is the potential legal/financial liability that goes with that, which is what this new law would eliminate.
Does the law eliminate liability for any screwup as long as the entity apologizes for it before getting sued/charged with a crime? Or does it just eliminate liability for anything that wasn't public knowledge before the apology?
In either case, but especially the former, I can see problems with that law big enough to drive a truck through. (Unless that truck were a Ford with Bridgestone tires, in which case they'd be big enough to slide through sideways after the rear left blew. And if they apologized for it before I got to court, I couldn't sue.)
1. SOX is not effective due to it's scope. You must monitor systems which relate purely to reporting the bottom line or general ledger, but then downstream systems which are being defrauded can legitimately be considered outside of this scope, and subsequently be utilised to further fraud with SOX impunity.
/.er, but it seems to me that this would be solved by simply extending the compliance requirements (or at least some of them) to include machines that directly give information to those systems that are currently covered. This would raise the expense, but it doesn't seem that it would be by that much. I could very well be wrong.
I'm certainly not as technically-inclined as your average
2. SOX auditors are, in my experience, technically challenged dunces, chancers, and bullshitters of the highest order, and they are far too expensive. I think that the solution, over the next ten - twenty years or so, will come from the tech sector, and from technologists, when we have a de-facto, high profile set of standards and methodologies that ensure all systems and applications are developed and maintained securely. This will probably only happen when a tech security issue engages public and commercial consciences in spectacular fashion, eg DNS being pwned for weeks. I think the solution, for IT, should come from inside, not outside.
If that's true outside of just your experience, that's certainly a problem, though not one that we're not all used to. About their expense, I would say that as we get further away from SOX's enactment, auditor prices will very likely drop and stabilize considerably lower than what they're currently at. That's typical behavior in an emerging market for particular "knowledge" and "skills" of a hypertechnical nature. In the beginning, few people have them, and they charge a ton. As others enter the field (either because they enjoy it, which mitigates the lack of knowledge problem to some degree, or purely because of the salaries to be made), prices will drop. Longterm, I think your solution is pretty dead-on.
2) For those who are claiming that the original intent of SOX is wrong, could you please explain why you think so in those parameters? There are certainly downsides to SOX, but a million posts saying "SOX sucks" or "I have to do a whole bunch of extra things so that my company is SOX compliant" doesn't mean anything. First, obviously it doesn't provide any kind of example. Second, there's no reasoned logic as to why these downsides are worse than the upsides. Which leads me to...
Ugh, I hate responding to my own posts, but I'm more than a little f'ed up right now, and in my somewhat incoherent rambling, I lost track of what I was trying to say in this point. What I was trying to say is that if you think the underlying intent of SOX (again, increasing the accuracy of public filings and holding management responsible for what is filed) is wrong, then please, at least simply say why you think so. The way that Slashdot works, given that often the OP is not the one who responds to the people who reply to the OP, can present a moving target when it comes to reasoning. If the OP explicitly states why they think this, then the people who reply can address that specific issue, and we don't end up with 30 different issues spreading across the whole thread and never being addressed.
I'm making these comments in virtually every subthread, so I thought I'd just bring them all to the front.
1) For those who are claiming that the implementation/specific requirements are too strict, could you give an example? I have had to do things required for SOX compliance (and I know of plenty of other things that my company, and others, have done), and I have to say, I have yet to see anything that I consider overly burdensome. And certainly not so overly burdensome that they outweigh the benefits of the intended effect of SOX: ensuring more accurate and honest reporting in filings by public companies, and ensuring that management is held responsible for what is in those filings.
2) For those who are claiming that the original intent of SOX is wrong, could you please explain why you think so in those parameters? There are certainly downsides to SOX, but a million posts saying "SOX sucks" or "I have to do a whole bunch of extra things so that my company is SOX compliant" doesn't mean anything. First, obviously it doesn't provide any kind of example. Second, there's no reasoned logic as to why these downsides are worse than the upsides. Which leads me to...
3) For those who are claiming that the original intent was good, but the implementation is faulty, again, could you provide examples? Personally, I feel that extra work for you (or your accounting department, or whoever) is worth it if it helps to ensure that 10-Ks and the like are as accurate as possible. There is certainly a point at which the expense to make them more accurate outweighs the benefit of that improved accuracy. But remember, as I pointed out upthread, these filings are not FOR the company, or even really FOR the government (nearly every company has two sets of books, one for tax purposes and one for annual reports); they're for you, me, and every other person (and institutional investors) trying to decide whether investing in that company, be it through stocks, bonds, or any other avenue, is a good investment. The purpose of these filings and the role of the government in ensuring the accuracy of those filings is to make sure that investors have as much (and as accurate) information as possible. This is a good thing. If you'd like to argue that it's not, I (and probably others) will be happy to do so. If you're simply trying to point out that SOX doesn't fulfill its intent, then please, please say WHY you think that, and please give some thought to how much more work you would be willing to put up with, and how much expense you think is acceptable for a company to incur, to help the markets get better information.
4) Finally, there is a very interesting argument against SOX that is getting ignored upthread. SOX is definitely a regressive expense. Small businesses are paying a higher percentage of their revenue (or pre-tax income, if you want to be pedantic) than larger companies. Is this fair? What, if anything, can be done to alleviate that problem? What slope of regression (I'm probably butchering this terminology-wise, but I think you know what I mean) is acceptable to you, assuming you believe that SOX is otherwise a net benefit?
On the whole, obviously I am in favor of SOX. I wholeheartedly agree with the thought process behind it, and in my experiences dealing with it, I haven't found anything to change my mind. If you disagree, let's talk about it. This is a very, very important issue. But let's talk about it rationally and logically. Throwing out "it sucks", "I hate SOX", and "It doesn't work" don't do anything to further the discussion.
And yes, I am a longtime Slashdot reader, and I know that it's sometimes hard to find real, thought-out discussion. But we can certainly try for it.
As has already been pointed out in another response to your post, Enron didn't create their mess all by themselves. Arthur Andersen, as both their auditor and their consultant, did as much, if not more, that led to Enron's downfall. But even if it had been Enron all by themselves (meaning that they would have had to present false books to Andersen, and cover up the existence of the shell companies [called 'Raptors' internally by Enron] when actual physical checks were made, which is much harder to do than you think), the severity of the resulting disaster made the people, the government, and the FASB think about the overall climate of business. They found that it was lacking, and they made a move to fix it.
While I think that the argument that Sarbanes-Oxley is deficient in solving the issue is false, I will listen to arguments to the contrary. Any attempt to claim that a public company should not be doing everything in their power to ensure that their books are correct and that they are following GAAP (along with other compliance) is ludicrous. It doesn't benefit the public, and in the long term, it rarely benefits the shareholders. Is any company going to be perfect? Of course not. But for GE to complain that spending a tenth of a percent of their pre-tax income on one of the most important fundamental shifts in regulation is not merely laughable, it would give me long pause if I were a major shareholder or potentially one.
They're certainly allowed to bitch about the cost (and they always will, no matter what it is), but when it's as generally as low as it is, especially for corporations the size of GE, it makes one wonder about their dedication to proper reporting. And that's not a good thing to be wondering about.
How did this get modded insightful? (I know, I know, don't bitch about moderation.)
There's no analysis here. Would you care to tell us why you think this? Sarbanes-Oxley, as discussed all over this thread, provides a number of very real and tangible benefits. I'm certainly willing to listen to an argument that the downside outweighs those benefits (especially from someone who "works with it"), but that's nowhere to be seen here. The article only mentions the costs associated with it, and in my post upthread (and in the first response to it), we see that the costs are $33 million per year for GE (the example in the article) out of $20 billion in pre-tax income. If you think that's too much, or if you've got another reason why it's a net bad thing, let's hear it.
As one of the people upthread who didn't specifically mention the word "public" (though I was specifically talking about 10-Ks), I presumed that someone who chose to read this thread would be aware of this distinction.
(or less directly, through share prices, which are essentially expectations of dividends)
For non-growth oriented companies, this is typically true. It is certainly not true of growth-oriented companies. There are obviously many, many investors putting their money into growth-oriented companies, and they really don't give a rat's ass about dividends, except as they pertain to a later willing buyer's concept of the value of the stock. Would the world be better if the people in the market were actually concerned with dividends (and therefore, concerned with things like future cash flows and liabilities)? Probably, as this would tend to highlight stronger companies with the consistent revenue streams and forecasting abilities to consistently return high dividends. On the other hand, it would also make it harder to get those start-ups out of the gate, because with the difficulty of predicting dividends for them and few people investing purely for the potential of the stock price increasing, there wouldn't be a whole ton of money flowing their way.
What I liked better is that the London suburb of Brentford has more people searching for porn than Delhi.
.... Birmingham and Manchester. We Brits are a horny lot!
:) Seriously, who searches for their porn by just hammering "porn" into Google? I go to a sports site often, and there is a pretty free-wheeling chatroom there. People (read:guys) are always in there asking for links to porn pictures. I usually make fun of them (how stupid do you have to be to be incapable of finding your own porn on the Intarweb?), but perhaps I'll just start giving them this solution!
What I liked even more than that was that Brentford rates as number 3 in the world, falling just behind
Or you're just the worst at using the most generic search terms.
Not bad, though expenses generally tend to add up, I don't know what compliance to other regulations cost.
Expenses do add up, but this is one of the most necessary expenses around. If you can't trust the 10-K, what the hell good is it?
Compliance (to accounting standards) generally involves a bit of staffing and their accoutrements (PC, office space, etc.), but it isn't typically more than that. Sarbanes-Oxley is more expensive than most to comply with, because it involves fairly detailed examinations of internal practices. However, in the general sense, these are very good things for a business. I haven't read Sarbanes-Oxley with a magnifying glass, so I can't state with 100% certainty that it doesn't require anything overly burdensome. However, I would be very wary of any company that is so averse to turning their eye inwards that they actually publicly complain about it.
First, of course companies are saying this. Sarbanes-Oxley requires them to do things that they don't want to do, namely properly assess their controls and have the CEO and CFO officially sign off on financial reporting.
But the real issue is that proper external financial reports aren't for the business (though they do help it, as long as the business pays attention to what they say.) They're for external users. And I can tell you right now that while banks who are looking to loan money, analysts who are grading performance, and investors who are looking to invest in a company's stock or bonds wouldn't mind seeing any costs cut, they don't think that the benefits are outweighed by the costs. They'll take the best information they can get, no matter what has to be done (within some modicum of reason.) And that's the point of Sarbanes-Oxley.
In 2004, GE spent about $33 million on Section 404 compliance, and costs ran about the same in 2005, Ameen said.
According to a quick perusal of GE's 2004 10-K, they had $20 billion in pre-tax income. I don't think $33 million is remotely too much to insure that that 10-K is correct.
So, other people do their work for them? I realize they're understaffed and could use some help, but really, this is the best they could come up with? I have an idea: I'll outsource all of you guys to do my job. Between school and work, I'm understaffed, and this way, things get done better. I'll even implement a peer-review moderation system. It's win-win!
Can I get that woman's number?
Are you kidding me? The average worker does NOT have more purchasing power today than they did 20 years ago. I don't know where you're getting this misinformation (polling people in the Walmart parking lot?) Here's one link. You can Google to your heart's content. Wages are not keeping up with inflation.
The average american can afford to buy more goods and services with the same income now than he could 20 years ago and they curse Walmart for offering them what they want at a low price...you just cant win with some people.
Really. Well the people who produced all those studies that have shown that real wages have dropped significantly in the last 30 years would love to know what methodology you used in your study that invalidates theirs.
After loosing tons of money over this, the companies finally realise that they have to listen to consumers. Phillips will lose nil money, or next to it, because of this. Have fun in your dream world.
You know, there are different meanings to the phrases "is rarely wrong" and "is never wrong". Arguing against the latter means nothing with regards to the former, unless you can come up with enough examples to invalidate the former.
The GP's argument about the dot-com bubble is somewhat valid, but falls apart on closer scrutiny. The vast majority of people who participated in the bubble were doing little to no research, much less evaluating the merits of lawsuits. The vast majority of the rest were making money off of the original vast majority. When the market is doing research and making evaluations, it is rarely wrong.
We often have no idea what kind of pieces of crap are running on our computers which we rely so much upon.
I would say that every single person on this earth has at least one piece of software running on their computer that they don't know everything about. Even those of you who are software engineers don't have time to go through every line of code in every piece of software you install. Those of us who are merely interested in technology, even if we formerly or currently work in the field, rely on third party evaluations. Those who don't care (so what, 97, 98% of the population?) are even worse off.
I steal my internet connection from my clueless (or generous, I haven't decided) neighbors who leave their routers wide open. I don't P2P out of respect for their download speeds; I basically just have HTTP traffic. Living in an apartment building in Austin, I have 13 available networks, 5 of which are left open. I bounce back and forth. Am I stealing? Sure. But at least I'm a somewhat honorable thief. And for the year that I'm back in school, that $50 a month is better spent on beer (because we all know that free as in beer doesn't exist).
Count me in as someone who doesn't answer their phone for people they don't know. Unlike the poster above, I don't just limit it to calls that show up "unknown". If I don't recognize the number and I'm not expecting a call from a number I won't recognize, I don't answer. Let them leave a message. If I'm around my computer, I'll Google the number to see if I can find out who/what it is. If I'm not (or I can't find it) and they don't leave a message, then I don't bother.
The employees, customers, and community should always come first. Their interests should be taken to heart, especially if a business wants to succeed long term. Without employees, there can be no product. Without customers, there can be no sales. Without the community (and I'm assuming this is the community that are not customers or prospective customers), there can be no company itself. However, there are mandates (both contractual and legislative) that determine a publicly traded company's obligations towards each of these four groups. You have no right of privacy when it comes to dealing with Google. If they feel that the government is in the wrong and that they are right to fight, then fine. However, the original poster supposed that they know that they are going to lose, and this is a marketing ploy. The responder stated (properly) that this is costing the company billions, and if they aren't actually protecting the rights of customers, then there is no benefit to the company, and they are improperly endangering the money of their shareholders, with whom they do have an obligation that they would be violating. You claim that if he were an investor, he should "shut up". That's all well and good for you to think, but investors have real money involved, and Google has real obligations towards them. In the scenario described by the original poster, they would be in the wrong, plain and simple. You can think what you want, but you're not living in the real world. This was the concern with Google going public, and we're seeing it raise its head now.
If you were an investor, I'd say shut the hell up. You have no say in the matter. The interests of the employees, the customers, and the community come before yours. Your lack of knowledge (or interest) in how the business world works is frightening.
Oh? And what, exactly, other site lets you do a search for images? Because that MSN image search tool is really a competito...oh, wait. (Note to pedants: Yes, this is but one example. But the statement that there is no innovation from Google is fucking patently ridiculous.)
Agreed. If you're doing any sort of line-by-line dispute, or point-by-point analysis, you should do inline posting. That still doesn't solve the "top posting vs. bottom posting" for all the other times. And honestly, how often are you going point-by-point?