I rarely use my home windows box, only to play an occasional game or run a piece of windows only software Most of the time I use my powerbook. I've been too cheap to even upgrade it to XP since I use the mahcine less than 30 days a year.
From the Register article: don't seem to have needed any kind of Parliamentary approval to begin the deployment of what promises to be one the most pervasive surveillance systems on earth
Law enforcement can not be trusted ever with broad powers. To initiate surveillance on every citizen of a country with a car and not think that parliment should need to approve the plan, demostrates how the police are always out to establish a police state. They do not see parliment as running the UK, only a hurdle to get in around in their dream of being able to monitor every citizen constantly.
Speeding tickets are the least of the problems with this kind of intrusion into every citizen's life. Next, the police will claim they need to take all this data and use it find people whose travel patterns fit those of terrrorists. After they succeeded by claiming all of the critics are terrorist smapathizers, they'll continually expand the use of the data your every movement is used and analized to see if you are committing some crime or the other and the entire UK is a police state.
Printer manufacturers charge ridiculous amounts of money for ink. I'm glad consumers are wising up and having pictures lab printed. Perhaps these numbers will convince Epson, HP & Canon, they can not gouge us on ink forever and they will lower prices.
If not, consumers are getter better longevity with lab prints since they are done on photographic paper. I know all the statistics about 100 year estimated print life on newer inkjets. There's always the little asterisk about not exposing the prints to air unless this they are inkjet pigment printers. Epson has some but pigment ink cartridges are usually even more expensive. Not to mention clogged heads, smeared prints and all the other problems you get trying to print at home.
And they wouldn't have to, because there would be very few shareholders in the first place. People would make next to no investments if by buying $100 worth of stock to launch a company, they could find themselves getting sued for a million bucks.
You are correct that full liability to shareholders would limit investment. Although business was conducted this way for thousands of years and in some cases still is (Lloyd's of London), creation of limited liability corporation served society's interest in enlarging the pool of capital of investment at the expense of disallowing contracts that would hold the owners liable for corporate debts. Point being societal interest rightly trumps freedom to create contract concerns
I've never encountered a single person who had their career options impacted by a non-compete clause. They exist to head off specific, aggregious conflicts of interest, and everyone involved knows exactly which those are.
A major part of the reason you've never encountered person harmed by a non-compete clause is that even in states that don't out right prohibit them, they are hard to enforce. There are two major problems with most non-compete clauses.
The first is that they tend to be overly broad and up to discretion of the employer when to enforce.
Second, the employee does not receive anything return. One might claim the employee receives a salary. Most employment agreements are "at will" so the company can terminate the employee after one day for no reason. The one year non-compete restriction would still be in force. If the employee is so critical to the organization, the employeer should have a contract that specifies a term of service that both the employeer and the employee commit to. If the employeer wishes for employment to remain at will, I don't have a problem with non-compete if the employer wants to continue to pay the employee's salary and benefits for the duration of the non-compete. Such an arrangements are permitted in California though rarely utilized since for all the employer hollering about irreprabable harm from loss of trade secrets, employers are rarely willing to put up the money to make non-compete enforcable in California.
Congratulations on being able to neogtiate reasonable non-compete terms. Many employers refuse to negotiate employment agreement terms at all and have a take it or leave it attitude which runs counter to a contract being "a meeting of the minds." Such contracts are known as contracts of adhension and are harder to enforce than a true contract where the terms are truely neogtiated by the parties.
They exist to head off specific, aggregious conflicts of interest, and everyone involved knows exactly which those are.
Every company I have ever worked for had a zero tolerance policy on using trade secrets or propreitray information from former employers. The risks are too large. If such information was used, the liability was enormous.
Microsoft's claim is inveitable disclosure but what it really means is disclosure is possible. Penalizing somebody for possible future disclosure is not just. A standard of invetable disclosure would allow the former employer to bar an employee from working for a competitor in the abscense of a non-compete since it claims legally protected trade secrets would be lost and is thus a really troubling argument. Microsoft's claim is also problmatic due to reports that Microsoft filed to suit to stem the flow of Microsoft employees to Google. If true, this severely uncuts the trade secret argument. If Microsoft employees think their interests are better served financially or otherwise by working for Google, free market principles say they should be able to maximize their interests.
At the end of the day, there is no soceital interest in permitting non-competes that do not compensate the employee. California proves that a vibrant and innovative technology industry can flourish even when anybody can pick and work for a compeititor on any day.
Corporations are really just aggregations of capital. A corporation without capital to pay its franchise fee to the state is automatically put to death. You can have an "organization unit" without a corporation but you can not have a corporation without capital. There are other business structures like partnerships that are fundamentally different from corporations. Are you so dumb to think that no organizational unit for commerce existed before the corporation? I stand by my earlier claim that you are an idiot since it's quite clear you don't know anything about the invention and history of corporations.
Try reading up on the history of the limited liability corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#Origins. The current form of corporation is almost always limited liability. They were invented to further colonialism since the risks involved were too great for investors to take the risk on. Investors could not negotiate contracts that did not hold them liable for the debts of an exploring entity so the government decide to fiat that they could not be held liable.
What you're really saying is, "allowing people to enter into contracts with each other does not serve society's interest."
Society holds all sorts of contracts to be invalid. For example, you can't sell yourself into slavery nor sell your organs. Unless you willing revoke those and many other limits, the argument is about what restrictions are appropriate and not general enforceability of contracts.
Where's the meddling? If an investment contract (the sale of stock) says that the only thing the investor is risking is the investment itself, then it's as simple as that.
It's the law that prevents shareholders from being held liable. If the law were not written this way, no bank or institutional investor would loan money to corporations under terms of the shareholders not being liable.
Why would you agree to take a job that would prevent you from making a living?
I don't but that is only because I live in California where the state protects me from such nonsense. Other states that envy California's economic success with technology ought to fashion their laws similarly.
Corporations are a creation of the government. Idiots like you think corporations are of some natural entity. The citizenry through the government can strip corporations of any power and even arbitrary put them to death since a corporation is simply and aggregation of capital.
Allowing the corporations to prevent people from earning a living does not serve society's interest. Corporations exist to serve the common good. Corporations grant their owner's limited liability which is prevents owners (stockholders) from being held liable for corporate debts. All this nonsense about contract law forgets owners are granted immunity from corporate debts which is the government meddling in contract law.
I think it's not too much to ask in return that corporations don't stop me from making a living. If strict contracts are so beneficial, corporate limited liability should be scrapped from the law. Once the owners must make good on their debts, then we can talk about contractual restrictions when it comes to employees.
When there's a software bug at the mothership and tens of thousands of players get disabled for no reason at all, maybe consumers will learn their lesson about buying electronics controlled by the Hollywood. Sadly, the inevitable class action suit will only get consumers with boat rock DVD players a five dollar off coupon for another DVD player.
that implies the private key is in the paladium chip so it can "sign" a token sent by the OS
Even if the chip is uncrackable, the binaries need to have the public key for the chip embedded in them to validate the chip's private key. The public key is certainly hidden but once it's found, modifying the binary to use a different public key that corresponds to a well known private key baked into a replacement kext will circumvent the hardware lock.
From what I've read, the windowing system is using a kext to validate the hardware. The kext could be replaced with a fake one that replies anything. The real question is can software authenticate the TCPA chip through the kext. To do so, the chip would have have a private key embedded in it that was chained to a public key embedded in the OS.
I don't known anywhere near enough to know if TCPA supports this. Apple would be the only user of the OS authenticating the hardware I can think of so it's possible TCPA leaves out this feature. There are plenty of uses for the hardware authenticating the OS but the other way around is rare since most software vendors want to run on as many types of hardware as possible.
I really don't see how any hardware tie can work when the Darwin kernel is open source. Everything running is user space has to rely on kernel to get access to the hardware and it will be trivial to modify the kernel to tell all the user space process esthat Apple tries to protect that yes this is indeed a Macintosh.
Since the darwin kernel is open sourced, it's already possible to run it on a PC. What's to stop me from getting the Darwin kernel and grabbing all the x86 Aqua binaries and combining them to create OS X on a PC? How is stuff at the application level going to know it's running on a Dell instead of the mac since the kernel interfaces will all be the same?
That the employer might have to pay to reengineer without GPL code is their fault for poor management oversight. It's really not any different if Daimou had spent his days surfing the net or playing Doom and not righting any code. An employee engaged in activity that's not economically productive for the employer and they were too clueless to notice.
Pretty standard corporate behavior
on
Google Fires Blogger?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The only thing interesting about this to me about it is that when the Google recruiters call me, they babble on about how different Google is. As I suspected, big public companies are all pretty much the same. An employee says something publicly they don't like about them, they get fired. So much for being different. The only difference I see is that that Google suits found out about the blog and fired him quicker than much other big companies.
The email or other electronic records are property just as paper letters are. By default, you don't have privacy in death as your paper letters are inherited by someone unless you leave provisions in your will for them to be destroyed. If you are a famous person, your person letters are likely valuable property.
I don't see why email should be considered any different. Yahoo's position really is that your email is not personal property. They "own" in the sense of controlling the property while it's on their servers. I don't think Yahoo's objection is really about privacy. They don't want your email to be considered property because they could then be sued when they accidently lose it, not to mention the administrative costs of dealing with probate transfers. If this was really about privacy, they could give make the disposition at death user controllable when the account is created.
I doubt this issue will be fully decided by the courts until some famous author dies and the only copy of their unpublished work in on some server somewhere and worth a lot money. Then the family will sue for access to the valuable property which they've rightly inherited through the will and the courts will be forced to decide whether ISPs can destroy property on somebody's death.
The executives will continue to grant themselves massive amounts of options whether they are counted as an expense or not. Public companies will probably for the most part just quit granting options to the rest of us so FASB just decreased most of our potential compensation. Thanks alot FASB!
There's no accurate way to estimate the value of an option regardless of what the accountants tell you since doing so requires a crystal ball. The accountants could not stand that that somebody figured out a way to incentivise employees that only cost a fraction future shareholder gains (which may not exists without motivated workers) and wasn't an expense so they are killing it.
for schools if they are going to waste $180,000 on an unnecessary and intrusive big-brother systems. If schools have nothing better to spend money on than garbage like this, I say their budget needs cutting.
Since I live in California where parcel taxes (which are the principle source of increased funding for schools) need a 2/3rds majority to pass, it's not going to take very many people joining me to put a stop to this non-sense, at least in my state.
It isn't that the cost is too high, it is that the number of procedures to amortize the cost over is too low.
Insurance companies base their premiums on risk. If doctors are doing fewer procedures, then the risk should be lower. Either the risk really isn't lower because the risk is that some of the doctors are lousy and are likely to make horrible mistakes no matter the number of producedures or the insurance malpractice insurance system is broken and all the anti-lawyer sentiment should be directed to the insurance companies.
Also, if rural doctors are doing fewer procedures, they would also be making less money regardless of the malpractice issues since they would be billing less. Considering how much medical school costs and the debt levels of graduates, attracting doctors to a rural area where there is less money is always going to be a tough sell.
All of them have horror stories about how hard it is to find specialists for certain fields, particularly in rural areas (which Texas, which I'm in, has a lot of), because the cost of malpractice insurance is so high for those specialties.
Big surprise that well educated, highly paid professionals don't want to live in rural Texas. If malpractice were really the problem, then there would be no specialists in Houston and Dallas as well. After all, they could come to California where non-economic damages have been capped at $250,000 for 2 decades. By the way, health care costs are skyrockting in California as well even though we have those damage caps.
Not being a lawyer I can't say for sure but generally applicable employment law is in the state where you do the work. My employer is not headquatered in CA and has a separate NDA for California employees since the standard one is not valid in CA.
Two things we accountants like are comparability and consistancy. impairment of goodwill brings both of these to the table.
Goodwill is a meaningless measurement for technology companies since it places ZERO value on intellectual property. The primary function of software business is the creation of intellectual property which gets valued at zero when the company gets acquired. Goodwill is a perfect example of why we should not let accountants decide rules that affect how the technology sector operates.
Of course, the potential future value of the option is not certain, but so what? The potential future value of the company's stock or debt is not certain, either, and that does not prevent their current value being reflected in the accounts.
Stocks and bonds have a market which values them not accounting formulas. There's no formula that can accurately predict present value of a non-market tradable instrument who's value is completely tied to the future movement of a single stock.
Expensing stock options will not make executives more honest. You could ban options all together and the execs would find another way to line their pockets. The current problem with options and executives is that it creates a pump and dump incentive. Execs can show a good quarter or two, talk up the prospects and then dump their dump stock at a tidy profit. Fixing this really requires stronger corporate governance rather changing accounting regulations.
If the corporate boards really represented shareholder interests, there wouldn't be this problem since those boards would not allow compensation packages to execs that ran counter to the shareholder's interests. I'd start by banning board membership by anyone who works for the company in any other capacity, CEO included. Board members should only give execs options that are exercisable after several years and at a premium to the current price to account for inflation. This way the execs would have to create some lasting shareholder value to reap a windfall.
The expensing formulas can't capture the real value of the option. The only real way to figure out the value of the option would be to make them tradable and not expire on termination of employment. The proposed formula's are just a bean counters guess and will underestimate the value for companies that do well in the future and will grossly overestimate the value for companies that do poorly.
Furthermore, putting non-cash charges into earnings reports makes it really hard to understand the reports for those of us who didn't go to business school. It's already almost impossible to figure out what a companies cash flow from operations was from an earnings report because of all the stupid non-cash charges like goodwill amortization. Goodwill amortization is much like stock option expensing in that it makes the bean counters feel better but confuses everyone else. It's a lot easier for the dishonest to cheat when no one can under earnings reports and balance sheets due to the cluttering off them by make believe (non-cash) charges
Looking at the benchmark code, the C++ code uses the STL extensively. The STL is slow and bloated. The standard Java class libraries are much better designed and written and I'm not surprised with a good JIT compiler, java beats the STL for speed.
Slashdot Mirror
I rarely use my home windows box, only to play an occasional game or run a piece of windows only software Most of the time I use my powerbook. I've been too cheap to even upgrade it to XP since I use the mahcine less than 30 days a year.
From the Register article: don't seem to have needed any kind of Parliamentary approval to begin the deployment of what promises to be one the most pervasive surveillance systems on earth
Law enforcement can not be trusted ever with broad powers. To initiate surveillance on every citizen of a country with a car and not think that parliment should need to approve the plan, demostrates how the police are always out to establish a police state. They do not see parliment as running the UK, only a hurdle to get in around in their dream of being able to monitor every citizen constantly.
Speeding tickets are the least of the problems with this kind of intrusion into every citizen's life. Next, the police will claim they need to take all this data and use it find people whose travel patterns fit those of terrrorists. After they succeeded by claiming all of the critics are terrorist smapathizers, they'll continually expand the use of the data your every movement is used and analized to see if you are committing some crime or the other and the entire UK is a police state.
Printer manufacturers charge ridiculous amounts of money for ink. I'm glad consumers are wising up and having pictures lab printed. Perhaps these numbers will convince Epson, HP & Canon, they can not gouge us on ink forever and they will lower prices.
If not, consumers are getter better longevity with lab prints since they are done on photographic paper. I know all the statistics about 100 year estimated print life on newer inkjets. There's always the little asterisk about not exposing the prints to air unless this they are inkjet pigment printers. Epson has some but pigment ink cartridges are usually even more expensive. Not to mention clogged heads, smeared prints and all the other problems you get trying to print at home.
And they wouldn't have to, because there would be very few shareholders in the first place. People would make next to no investments if by buying $100 worth of stock to launch a company, they could find themselves getting sued for a million bucks.
You are correct that full liability to shareholders would limit investment. Although business was conducted this way for thousands of years and in some cases still is (Lloyd's of London), creation of limited liability corporation served society's interest in enlarging the pool of capital of investment at the expense of disallowing contracts that would hold the owners liable for corporate debts. Point being societal interest rightly trumps freedom to create contract concerns
I've never encountered a single person who had their career options impacted by a non-compete clause. They exist to head off specific, aggregious conflicts of interest, and everyone involved knows exactly which those are.
A major part of the reason you've never encountered person harmed by a non-compete clause is that even in states that don't out right prohibit them, they are hard to enforce. There are two major problems with most non-compete clauses.
The first is that they tend to be overly broad and up to discretion of the employer when to enforce.
Second, the employee does not receive anything return. One might claim the employee receives a salary. Most employment agreements are "at will" so the company can terminate the employee after one day for no reason. The one year non-compete restriction would still be in force. If the employee is so critical to the organization, the employeer should have a contract that specifies a term of service that both the employeer and the employee commit to. If the employeer wishes for employment to remain at will, I don't have a problem with non-compete if the employer wants to continue to pay the employee's salary and benefits for the duration of the non-compete. Such an arrangements are permitted in California though rarely utilized since for all the employer hollering about irreprabable harm from loss of trade secrets, employers are rarely willing to put up the money to make non-compete enforcable in California.
Congratulations on being able to neogtiate reasonable non-compete terms. Many employers refuse to negotiate employment agreement terms at all and have a take it or leave it attitude which runs counter to a contract being "a meeting of the minds." Such contracts are known as contracts of adhension and are harder to enforce than a true contract where the terms are truely neogtiated by the parties.
They exist to head off specific, aggregious conflicts of interest, and everyone involved knows exactly which those are.
Every company I have ever worked for had a zero tolerance policy on using trade secrets or propreitray information from former employers. The risks are too large. If such information was used, the liability was enormous.
Microsoft's claim is inveitable disclosure but what it really means is disclosure is possible. Penalizing somebody for possible future disclosure is not just. A standard of invetable disclosure would allow the former employer to bar an employee from working for a competitor in the abscense of a non-compete since it claims legally protected trade secrets would be lost and is thus a really troubling argument. Microsoft's claim is also problmatic due to reports that Microsoft filed to suit to stem the flow of Microsoft employees to Google. If true, this severely uncuts the trade secret argument. If Microsoft employees think their interests are better served financially or otherwise by working for Google, free market principles say they should be able to maximize their interests.
At the end of the day, there is no soceital interest in permitting non-competes that do not compensate the employee. California proves that a vibrant and innovative technology industry can flourish even when anybody can pick and work for a compeititor on any day.
Corporations are really just aggregations of capital. A corporation without capital to pay its franchise fee to the state is automatically put to death. You can have an "organization unit" without a corporation but you can not have a corporation without capital. There are other business structures like partnerships that are fundamentally different from corporations. Are you so dumb to think that no organizational unit for commerce existed before the corporation? I stand by my earlier claim that you are an idiot since it's quite clear you don't know anything about the invention and history of corporations.
Try reading up on the history of the limited liability corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#Origins. The current form of corporation is almost always limited liability. They were invented to further colonialism since the risks involved were too great for investors to take the risk on. Investors could not negotiate contracts that did not hold them liable for the debts of an exploring entity so the government decide to fiat that they could not be held liable.
What you're really saying is, "allowing people to enter into contracts with each other does not serve society's interest."
Society holds all sorts of contracts to be invalid. For example, you can't sell yourself into slavery nor sell your organs. Unless you willing revoke those and many other limits, the argument is about what restrictions are appropriate and not general enforceability of contracts.
Where's the meddling? If an investment contract (the sale of stock) says that the only thing the investor is risking is the investment itself, then it's as simple as that.
It's the law that prevents shareholders from being held liable. If the law were not written this way, no bank or institutional investor would loan money to corporations under terms of the shareholders not being liable.
Why would you agree to take a job that would prevent you from making a living?
I don't but that is only because I live in California where the state protects me from such nonsense. Other states that envy California's economic success with technology ought to fashion their laws similarly.
You're such an idiot.
Corporations are a creation of the government. Idiots like you think corporations are of some natural entity. The citizenry through the government can strip corporations of any power and even arbitrary put them to death since a corporation is simply and aggregation of capital.
Allowing the corporations to prevent people from earning a living does not serve society's interest. Corporations exist to serve the common good. Corporations grant their owner's limited liability which is prevents owners (stockholders) from being held liable for corporate debts. All this nonsense about contract law forgets owners are granted immunity from corporate debts which is the government meddling in contract law.
I think it's not too much to ask in return that corporations don't stop me from making a living. If strict contracts are so beneficial, corporate limited liability should be scrapped from the law. Once the owners must make good on their debts, then we can talk about contractual restrictions when it comes to employees.
When there's a software bug at the mothership and tens of thousands of players get disabled for no reason at all, maybe consumers will learn their lesson about buying electronics controlled by the Hollywood. Sadly, the inevitable class action suit will only get consumers with boat rock DVD players a five dollar off coupon for another DVD player.
The Bastard Operator from Hell has plenty of tips for situations like these.
that implies the private key is in the paladium chip so it can "sign" a token sent by the OS
Even if the chip is uncrackable, the binaries need to have the public key for the chip embedded in them to validate the chip's private key. The public key is certainly hidden but once it's found, modifying the binary to use a different public key that corresponds to a well known private key baked into a replacement kext will circumvent the hardware lock.
From what I've read, the windowing system is using a kext to validate the hardware. The kext could be replaced with a fake one that replies anything. The real question is can software authenticate the TCPA chip through the kext. To do so, the chip would have have a private key embedded in it that was chained to a public key embedded in the OS.
I don't known anywhere near enough to know if TCPA supports this. Apple would be the only user of the OS authenticating the hardware I can think of so it's possible TCPA leaves out this feature. There are plenty of uses for the hardware authenticating the OS but the other way around is rare since most software vendors want to run on as many types of hardware as possible.
I really don't see how any hardware tie can work when the Darwin kernel is open source. Everything running is user space has to rely on kernel to get access to the hardware and it will be trivial to modify the kernel to tell all the user space process esthat Apple tries to protect that yes this is indeed a Macintosh.
Since the darwin kernel is open sourced, it's already possible to run it on a PC. What's to stop me from getting the Darwin kernel and grabbing all the x86 Aqua binaries and combining them to create OS X on a PC? How is stuff at the application level going to know it's running on a Dell instead of the mac since the kernel interfaces will all be the same?
That the employer might have to pay to reengineer without GPL code is their fault for poor management oversight. It's really not any different if Daimou had spent his days surfing the net or playing Doom and not righting any code. An employee engaged in activity that's not economically productive for the employer and they were too clueless to notice.
The only thing interesting about this to me about it is that when the Google recruiters call me, they babble on about how different Google is. As I suspected, big public companies are all pretty much the same. An employee says something publicly they don't like about them, they get fired. So much for being different. The only difference I see is that that Google suits found out about the blog and fired him quicker than much other big companies.
The email or other electronic records are property just as paper letters are. By default, you don't have privacy in death as your paper letters are inherited by someone unless you leave provisions in your will for them to be destroyed. If you are a famous person, your person letters are likely valuable property.
I don't see why email should be considered any different. Yahoo's position really is that your email is not personal property. They "own" in the sense of controlling the property while it's on their servers. I don't think Yahoo's objection is really about privacy. They don't want your email to be considered property because they could then be sued when they accidently lose it, not to mention the administrative costs of dealing with probate transfers. If this was really about privacy, they could give make the disposition at death user controllable when the account is created.
I doubt this issue will be fully decided by the courts until some famous author dies and the only copy of their unpublished work in on some server somewhere and worth a lot money. Then the family will sue for access to the valuable property which they've rightly inherited through the will and the courts will be forced to decide whether ISPs can destroy property on somebody's death.
The executives will continue to grant themselves massive amounts of options whether they are counted as an expense or not. Public companies will probably for the most part just quit granting options to the rest of us so FASB just decreased most of our potential compensation. Thanks alot FASB!
There's no accurate way to estimate the value of an option regardless of what the accountants tell you since doing so requires a crystal ball. The accountants could not stand that that somebody figured out a way to incentivise employees that only cost a fraction future shareholder gains (which may not exists without motivated workers) and wasn't an expense so they are killing it.
for schools if they are going to waste $180,000 on an unnecessary and intrusive big-brother systems. If schools have nothing better to spend money on than garbage like this, I say their budget needs cutting. Since I live in California where parcel taxes (which are the principle source of increased funding for schools) need a 2/3rds majority to pass, it's not going to take very many people joining me to put a stop to this non-sense, at least in my state.
It isn't that the cost is too high, it is that the number of procedures to amortize the cost over is too low.
Insurance companies base their premiums on risk. If doctors are doing fewer procedures, then the risk should be lower. Either the risk really isn't lower because the risk is that some of the doctors are lousy and are likely to make horrible mistakes no matter the number of producedures or the insurance malpractice insurance system is broken and all the anti-lawyer sentiment should be directed to the insurance companies.
Also, if rural doctors are doing fewer procedures, they would also be making less money regardless of the malpractice issues since they would be billing less. Considering how much medical school costs and the debt levels of graduates, attracting doctors to a rural area where there is less money is always going to be a tough sell.
All of them have horror stories about how hard it is to find specialists for certain fields, particularly in rural areas (which Texas, which I'm in, has a lot of), because the cost of malpractice insurance is so high for those specialties.
Big surprise that well educated, highly paid professionals don't want to live in rural Texas. If malpractice were really the problem, then there would be no specialists in Houston and Dallas as well. After all, they could come to California where non-economic damages have been capped at $250,000 for 2 decades. By the way, health care costs are skyrockting in California as well even though we have those damage caps.
Not being a lawyer I can't say for sure but generally applicable employment law is in the state where you do the work. My employer is not headquatered in CA and has a separate NDA for California employees since the standard one is not valid in CA.
Western Digital is head quartered in California and these kinds of non-competes are not enforcable in California.
Two things we accountants like are comparability and consistancy. impairment of goodwill brings both of these to the table.
Goodwill is a meaningless measurement for technology companies since it places ZERO value on intellectual property. The primary function of software business is the creation of intellectual property which gets valued at zero when the company gets acquired. Goodwill is a perfect example of why we should not let accountants decide rules that affect how the technology sector operates.
Of course, the potential future value of the option is not certain, but so what? The potential future value of the company's stock or debt is not certain, either, and that does not prevent their current value being reflected in the accounts.
Stocks and bonds have a market which values them not accounting formulas. There's no formula that can accurately predict present value of a non-market tradable instrument who's value is completely tied to the future movement of a single stock.
Expensing stock options will not make executives more honest. You could ban options all together and the execs would find another way to line their pockets. The current problem with options and executives is that it creates a pump and dump incentive. Execs can show a good quarter or two, talk up the prospects and then dump their dump stock at a tidy profit. Fixing this really requires stronger corporate governance rather changing accounting regulations.
If the corporate boards really represented shareholder interests, there wouldn't be this problem since those boards would not allow compensation packages to execs that ran counter to the shareholder's interests. I'd start by banning board membership by anyone who works for the company in any other capacity, CEO included. Board members should only give execs options that are exercisable after several years and at a premium to the current price to account for inflation. This way the execs would have to create some lasting shareholder value to reap a windfall.
The expensing formulas can't capture the real value of the option. The only real way to figure out the value of the option would be to make them tradable and not expire on termination of employment. The proposed formula's are just a bean counters guess and will underestimate the value for companies that do well in the future and will grossly overestimate the value for companies that do poorly.
Furthermore, putting non-cash charges into earnings reports makes it really hard to understand the reports for those of us who didn't go to business school. It's already almost impossible to figure out what a companies cash flow from operations was from an earnings report because of all the stupid non-cash charges like goodwill amortization. Goodwill amortization is much like stock option expensing in that it makes the bean counters feel better but confuses everyone else. It's a lot easier for the dishonest to cheat when no one can under earnings reports and balance sheets due to the cluttering off them by make believe (non-cash) charges
Looking at the benchmark code, the C++ code uses the STL extensively. The STL is slow and bloated. The standard Java class libraries are much better designed and written and I'm not surprised with a good JIT compiler, java beats the STL for speed.