"While this means little directly for the company..."
Not true. Inclusion in a widely-invested index almost certainly means an increase in the stock's price, all things being equal. This will be most visible up front as index fund managers buy in (because they have to). But there will also be a much larger base of investors that hold this permanently insofar as they hold S&P 500 index funds (or ETFs, CTFs, etc.). This could directly provide the company more "currency" to make purchases of other firms (by paying in stock), as well as give it an advantage in attracting and maintaining talent that are partially compensated in stock (assuming they award stock/options).
It could also result in more stock analyst coverage which would bring valuable publicity to itself and its shares, and likely also more "mind share" for Linux for the average investor that follows this sector/industry.
I'd say the opportunity is more limited in investment banking, but there is still demand on the asset management side. Investment banks are the ones that created the now infamous CDOs and other complex mortgage-related structures.
Asset management using quants is done by mostly by hedge funds but also some traditional (a.k.a. "long only") investment managers (think mutual fund managers). Note that investment banks have traditionally traded their own money (known as proprietary trading), but that's happening less now because their a) many of their traders have done terribly and b) they don't have the same volume of money to trade.
To add one more wrinkle, most sizable investment banks also have asset management units where they take client money and invest/trade it for them, and/or create hedge fund structures/strategies to do the same.
I still see a lot of new job postings for PhD math people by asset managers, and occasionally investment banks. Try theladders.com or eFinancialCareers.com to get a flavor for what's out there. Another broad site that works very well for jobs if you can figure out the right search terms is indeed.com.
As another poster said, just because you specialize in one field doesn't mean you can't do something else with it. Lots of the math applies different places. If you really wanted to go whole hog you could do a math PhD in anything and then get an MBA with a finance concentration.
Note that Taleb is a smart guy, but he does have a product he's selling. He has many valid points, but there are firms still making millions or even billions of dollars using the statistical models he vilifies. Over the longer term there's too much skew/kurtosis/etc. from the human element (finance is a social science), but over shorter time periods there are lots of situations that work just fine with the kind of models you'd be able to build. Just always beware of leverage!
First, don't forget that Taleb is selling something. Very smart guy, but he wants to make a good living too.
VaR isn't something I'd want to be without, but you clearly can't depend on models alone when your assumptions are uncertain. That's what the whole mess with CDOs and such comes down to- bad assumptions.
With the mortgage-backed market (e.g. sub-prime), the assumption was that N number of borrowers would default in X period of time. If they had the models would've been fine, but in reality they didn't, and the basis for the assumptions was horribly incorrect. Why those assumptions were incorrect is another story.
One look at the tags on this story reminds me why I almost never bother with comments anymore.
Like most Slashdot readers, it's hard for me to imagine statements this blatantly stupid and biased coming from a sitting government official.
But SERIOUSLY, notwithstanding some really bright, reasonable, articulate people, it feels like this place is up to the gills in 8th graders. "Whore" and "bitch" are the kind of words I remember seeing on bathroom walls. I get emotional about some of these things too, but how can anyone take this site seriously with those kinds of responses?
I doubt any coincidence at all. The first two were cable companies, and AT&T trying to become a major TV provider with their U-verse product.
Bottom line: They see IP-delivered TV as a major threat to their business, so if they get people used to paying bandwidth caps now, they preserve their future revenue from TV revenue. The only way around this will be another, truly unlimited ISP.
I'm no fan of Google, but I love the disruption they've caused with android and I hope they'll do the same in the ISP world.
Thanks for the thoughtful, illustrative comments. Slashdot is (in my mind) full of people with conclusions in search of evidence. At least that's my conclusion;)
I was delighted that there were on-topic, thoughtful comments and that this didn't immediately degrade into bickering about politics.
Without getting into the political dimensions of your comments, the simple fact is that to live like a Manhattanite you have to live in Manhattan. It's prohibitively expensive for many to live in Manhattan, and it's even more prohibitively expensive to simply build another. It has to happen on its own, for economic reasons which may yet come to pass.
But as long as there is enough country to spread out in and it's the least bit economically feasible, a lot of people will choose to do so simply because that's the lifestyle they prefer. There are lots of good reasons to live in Manhattan, just as there are lots of good reasons to live in the suburbs.
I love the open source ethos of this project, but I wonder about the wisdom of letting every Tom, Dick, and Harry shoot stuff into space. In most places there would at least be laws against some yo-yo shooting up trash on purpose, I also have to wonder about a bunch of pseudo-terrorists of the Luddite variety wanting to crap-up space just because they hate technology, spy satellites, etc.
The obvious problems are a) Some people probably said the same thing about the Wright brothers and b) People are going to figure this out at some point anyway, so this prize will (at most) just hasten and publicize this capability.
The next prize should be one for creating an affordable galactic garbage truck.
Your arguments are rather broad here- militarily, the invasion and elimination of the Iraqi regime was extraordinarily successful. Iran fought Iraq for years, losing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million men, and ultimately all that was achieved (by either side) was a stalemate. The US captured Iraq (admittedly, to varying degrees of control) in a few months, losing a relative handful of men.
Invasion and conquering are one thing, and occupation is another. To your point, the Iraq experience has underscored that our military was not built to be an occupying force, but yet it has also shown that they are fairly adaptive.
For instance, there are now rifle-toting sociologists in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq, so that the military can more clearly understand the cultural sources of conflict. This should have been done a long time ago (e.g. we should have more thoroughly understood our enemy before invading, at least in the case of Iraq where we arguably had much more latitude in our choice), and if it had then we may have never invaded Iraq (which was a mistake IMHO).
That's an interesting idea (not allowing for downward mods). It would not allow for modding down stupid things like "first post" posts, but then again something like that would never be modded up to begin with, so on a relative basis you wouldn't ever see it. I suppose the other downside to this idea would be for people who regularly read comments at lower levels, and had to contend with more flamebait/troll type of posts. But then again we're back to who's making the call on those issues, and it seems that all too often it's moderators who have a strong opinion in one direction or another so they mod on the basis of that opinion rather than the merits of a given post.
In any case I'd love to see this implemented on an experimental basis. I have to believe that the best stuff would float to the surface like you said, and that would include posts on any side of a debate. I'm sure there'd be a rebellion amongst many, but I suppose a guy can dream.
By the way, I like your idea of a "...lack of intellectual firepower..." mod. Maybe it could be released at the same time with a "I'm too lazy or too childish to mod up a good opposing argument" mod.
Well said. I don't believe the poster is an American based on some of the phrasing, which doesn't invalidate his/her opinion out of hand, but at the same time, it does matter for the reasons you stated.
In any case, the ironic thing is that this rant was almost completely off-topic and totally out of step with the thread, and yet got moderated to a +5. What makes this ironic is that this dopey moderation is happening in a thread about Slashdot. It's moderation like this that has made me avoid even bothering to read comments for topics that have even a remote chance of becoming political.
What's sad about this is that there are so many smart people from so many points of view that read this site, and the kind of dialogue that could be had could be very interesting, enlightening, and perhaps even change someone's mind. But instead we get childish moderation that amounts to quasi-censorship of opinions not liked by the moderators, rather than modding up the best counter-argument to the disliked opinion. There's a reason that Taco suggests modding up is more virtuous than modding down, but unfortunately that seems lost on the majority of moderators/metamoderators.
Oh well. The Slashdot community is what it is, and I keep coming back if for no other reason than the breadth and quality of the stories, and on occasion, the really insightful comments on non-political issues.
While PowerPoint's intended purpose was for creating presentations, in my line of work it's as much or more often used in a quasi-desktop publishing role. That is, you create a bunch of canned slides with information which others in the company (e.g. sales staff) can use to create semi-custom presentations that are virtually always printed.
That being said, I absolutely LOATHE PowerPoint for this purpose. There are incredibly annoying bugs related to OLE (Object Link Embedding, e.g. pasting in a graph you've created in Excel) that have been there for several versions (i.e. YEARS, probably going on 10 by now).
Then they forced the whole "smart paste" thing on users in the 2003 version. I don't know if they fixed that in the latest version, but it's IDIOTIC. I'm sure it helps some people a lot for certain things they do, but some aspects of how it behaves are just plain dumb and won't help anybody. Sometimes I think the Office people make these changes in order to justify their existence, but in any case, if they're going to introduce a major functionality change that purports to be an improvement, fine- it probably is genuinely helpful for many, but don't leave zero recourse for the rest of us.
Which is why I spent hundreds of dollars on 2 copies of the newest Office and haven't even installed it- I'm not willing to deal with the #%&* ribbon, and so when I get around to it, I'll find a 3rd party application that is solid that will add back the "classic" menus and buttons. I'm all for progress, but customizability is too important if you actually know what you're doing in the software, and this is where they went wrong with the ribbon. For the average office worker who wouldn't have a clue how to customize it, it's probably better in the long run.
But more importantly, just FIX THE $^#! OLE THING!!! Microsoft should be sincerely embarrassed that this problem still exists (unless by some miracle they've fixed this in 2007 and the fix is compatible with the pre-2007 file structure).
I'll quit ranting now, but seriously, I love Excel- it's not perfect, but the level of power, flexibility and programmability mean that I can get it to do almost anything I can imagine. Word has almost always been more than adequate for anything I've ever wanted to do. But PowerPoint just plain sucks. I long for an alternative, but given the market share MS has with PowerPoint I'm afraid this is a pipe dream.
You raise a good point and obviously know more about taxes than I do.
However, I also think you confirmed my primary point, which is that as individuals we get shafted with regards to selling things like cars. What's good for the goose in this case is not good for the gander (that is, you have to pay on gains but don't get to write off losses).
But at the same time, if they made it "fair", then they'd have to do something else to the tax code to collect the same measure of taxes. This is one reason why I'm scared to see what becomes of AMT reform, assuming it ever happens. With something as huge as reforming AMT, there are always winners and losers, and I'm afraid I may be a loser, but then again you never know.
I don't have a problem with people getting taxed in principle- as some here have already said, some people make a living doing this and why shouldn't they pay their taxes like the rest of us?
BUT, unless you got the stuff you're selling for FREE, your income is only your profit.
My point is that if they're going to tax you for your profits, they should also tax you for your losses, just like with sales of stocks, bonds, etc.
In reality the IRS is NOT fair (but neither is the tax code in my opinion). Their mandate is to collect enough money, fairness be damned. For instance, when you sell your car at a loss, you can't report that, while if you sell your care for a gain, you have to pay tax on the gain.
Now arguably the loss you normally take on a car is depreciation, but as far as I know, there's simply no allowance to take a loss on your car that is faster then true economic depreciation.
Anyway, beyond my tangential discussion of fairness, I think they'll focus their efforts on those above $X in revenue, and those people will have to start recording their cost basis on each item they sell, just like any other seller of goods.
He did, but what I think a lot of posters are missing here is that this isn't news because it's a new invention, it's news because it's a new innovation.
Some may choose to argue even this point, but I cannot believe that this technology wouldn't have been used for implanted medical devices earlier had it been available (assuming the radio waves won't interefere with the device, which the article seems to imply they wouldn't).
This reminds me of a radio story I heard about some locale in Michigan (I think) where the obviously late middle-aged town council members had declared that they were going to make their town "cool". This way it would attract a new population of young "hip" people and support the local enconomy, etc.
She even admitted that they didn't know exactly what "cool" was, but that they had to provide the infrastructure for "cool", e.g. high speed internet access.
This is the same thing on a national scale. The Chinese government is essentially claiming the ability to will innovation leadership into existence. Truthfully, I think they could make a lot of progress towards their goal if they just let capitalism do its thing. But concepts like the "creative economy" probably don't give communist party leaders good dreams at night.
You make an interesting point, but by your logic showing footage of little kids being sexually abused would've been ok, because hey, who are we to say what someone else can't or shouldn't see, even if 99.9% of us think it's heinous? Short of complete anarchy, we have laws/regulations, and any law/regulation curtails someone's liberty. In most cases, those laws protect the majority of us. In others they protect the minority from the "tyranny of the majority". In my opinion, sometimes the minority gets away with things that essentially tyrannize the majority.
However, this is debatable, and this comes back to my point. Just because having a rule or regulation is debatable doesn't mean we shouldn't have it all, because in the end, and I'll say it again, every law or regulation is a curtailment of someone's liberty.
True, MS has more than enough cash on hand to survive for years to come, but that's not what stockholders want. They want profit growth and a primary way of doing that is with top line growth, e.g. growth in sales.
The real impact for Microsoft will be less revenues and a lower stock price.
It's nice to see a post on the upside of wiretapping in its various forms. While everyone should be concerned about the government's (or anyone else for that matter) ability to tap into our communications, I for one think we need to face the realities of dealing with the modern terrorist.
The bottom line of all of these discussions and talk about how this and other Patriot Act provisions, etc. are a huge infringment on our civil liberties is that the only way to completely guarantee our civil liberties is to have no civil authorities. 99% of us wouldn't want this, because we know the inevitable result.
The truth of the matter is that there is a gray area where most of us want to be, and just becuase we step a little more towards one side today does *not* ensure that we end up living in a 1984-like world.
What I find intriguing about a private equity firm investing in SCO is simply what it implies.
Private equity firms only invest after they have established a well-defined exit strategy. By this I mean how the firm gets its money back (hopefully with some return attached) after the investment has matured.
In a typical early stage private equity deal, the private equity firm gets a sizable stake in a company that has not yet gone public. When the company finally does go public (or gets acquired by another company) the private equity firm makes a bundle. If the company goes under, the private equity firm gets nothing.
This case is a little different because this is a PIPEs investment (Private Investment in Public Equity). That is, the private equity firm is attaining a stake in the company without simply buying its publicly traded shares. This helps SCO because SCO gets a cash infusion without trying to sell new shares (not an easy task for them right now). The private equity firm gets a lot more say through this investment since it's a structured deal.
The point of all of this is that unless the conspiracy theories (MS being behind this, etc.) are true, the SCO management has pitched these private equity guys some kind of story about how they will eventually get their money back, and with a juicy return attached. The obvious answer is the old "Let's get IBM to buy us" idea. But perhaps something else is afoot. I'd be curious as to who else would want to acquire SCO, for one reason or another. Anyone have any ideas?
I would have to partially disagree, but agree too- I'm in finance, and there are certain of the higher level jobs where it's hard to find someone with the right combination of skills. The sales guys at my old company had to have a good left brain as well as right brain to be good. We used recruiters, but certainly not exclusively. A lot of guys came in through other sales guys.
Which brings me back to your other point about knowing people- this is the absolute best way to find an employee (through someone you know and trust) and the absolute best way to find a job. There have been two or three big studies done that came back with numbers on how many of the available jobs were being "advertised" through what method. The results differed somewhat depending on the study, but the most optimistic found that the percentage of jobs offered through the web, classifieds and headhunters combined was something like less than 20%.
In other words, you have to take the time to network to get access to most of the jobs that are out there. This is also a good idea because the jobs that are only being "advertised" via word of mouth are going to have much fewer people to compete against.
It's true that there are always places to invest money that will result in a profit. But the question is, how does this return compare to the return you're receiving rom the rest of your existing business. One way of looking at it is ROE- Return On Equity.
If Microsoft has (these aren't real numbers), say, $100 billion in equity, and they earn a $7 billion profit, their ROE is 7%. Now let's say they look at a new investment opportunity, and its expected return is say, 5%. By investing in this, they'll lower the ROE of the company as a whole, even though this new opportunity would provide a profit.
Normally (that is, the heady days of the bubble aside), when the ROE of a company starts to suffer, that stock starts to decrease in price for obvious reasons. A big reason that a mature/maturing company would pay a dividend is to get rid of that extra equity by giving it back to shareholders. Remember, ROE is Return divided by Equity, so you want to shrink the denominator (equity) to make the number go up (or stay the same if your numerator is shrinking). This comes back to the comment that was attributed to Scott McNealy about what it would mean for Sun to declare a dividend. He really was stating a simple financial truth.
Slashdot Mirror
"While this means little directly for the company..."
Not true. Inclusion in a widely-invested index almost certainly means an increase in the stock's price, all things being equal. This will be most visible up front as index fund managers buy in (because they have to). But there will also be a much larger base of investors that hold this permanently insofar as they hold S&P 500 index funds (or ETFs, CTFs, etc.). This could directly provide the company more "currency" to make purchases of other firms (by paying in stock), as well as give it an advantage in attracting and maintaining talent that are partially compensated in stock (assuming they award stock/options).
It could also result in more stock analyst coverage which would bring valuable publicity to itself and its shares, and likely also more "mind share" for Linux for the average investor that follows this sector/industry.
I'd say the opportunity is more limited in investment banking, but there is still demand on the asset management side. Investment banks are the ones that created the now infamous CDOs and other complex mortgage-related structures.
Asset management using quants is done by mostly by hedge funds but also some traditional (a.k.a. "long only") investment managers (think mutual fund managers). Note that investment banks have traditionally traded their own money (known as proprietary trading), but that's happening less now because their a) many of their traders have done terribly and b) they don't have the same volume of money to trade.
To add one more wrinkle, most sizable investment banks also have asset management units where they take client money and invest/trade it for them, and/or create hedge fund structures/strategies to do the same.
I still see a lot of new job postings for PhD math people by asset managers, and occasionally investment banks. Try theladders.com or eFinancialCareers.com to get a flavor for what's out there. Another broad site that works very well for jobs if you can figure out the right search terms is indeed.com.
As another poster said, just because you specialize in one field doesn't mean you can't do something else with it. Lots of the math applies different places. If you really wanted to go whole hog you could do a math PhD in anything and then get an MBA with a finance concentration.
Note that Taleb is a smart guy, but he does have a product he's selling. He has many valid points, but there are firms still making millions or even billions of dollars using the statistical models he vilifies. Over the longer term there's too much skew/kurtosis/etc. from the human element (finance is a social science), but over shorter time periods there are lots of situations that work just fine with the kind of models you'd be able to build. Just always beware of leverage!
First, don't forget that Taleb is selling something. Very smart guy, but he wants to make a good living too.
VaR isn't something I'd want to be without, but you clearly can't depend on models alone when your assumptions are uncertain. That's what the whole mess with CDOs and such comes down to- bad assumptions.
With the mortgage-backed market (e.g. sub-prime), the assumption was that N number of borrowers would default in X period of time. If they had the models would've been fine, but in reality they didn't, and the basis for the assumptions was horribly incorrect. Why those assumptions were incorrect is another story.
One look at the tags on this story reminds me why I almost never bother with comments anymore.
Like most Slashdot readers, it's hard for me to imagine statements this blatantly stupid and biased coming from a sitting government official.
But SERIOUSLY, notwithstanding some really bright, reasonable, articulate people, it feels like this place is up to the gills in 8th graders. "Whore" and "bitch" are the kind of words I remember seeing on bathroom walls. I get emotional about some of these things too, but how can anyone take this site seriously with those kinds of responses?
I doubt any coincidence at all. The first two were cable companies, and AT&T trying to become a major TV provider with their U-verse product. Bottom line: They see IP-delivered TV as a major threat to their business, so if they get people used to paying bandwidth caps now, they preserve their future revenue from TV revenue. The only way around this will be another, truly unlimited ISP. I'm no fan of Google, but I love the disruption they've caused with android and I hope they'll do the same in the ISP world.
Thanks for the thoughtful, illustrative comments. Slashdot is (in my mind) full of people with conclusions in search of evidence. At least that's my conclusion ;)
I was delighted that there were on-topic, thoughtful comments and that this didn't immediately degrade into bickering about politics.
Without getting into the political dimensions of your comments, the simple fact is that to live like a Manhattanite you have to live in Manhattan. It's prohibitively expensive for many to live in Manhattan, and it's even more prohibitively expensive to simply build another. It has to happen on its own, for economic reasons which may yet come to pass.
But as long as there is enough country to spread out in and it's the least bit economically feasible, a lot of people will choose to do so simply because that's the lifestyle they prefer. There are lots of good reasons to live in Manhattan, just as there are lots of good reasons to live in the suburbs.
I love the open source ethos of this project, but I wonder about the wisdom of letting every Tom, Dick, and Harry shoot stuff into space. In most places there would at least be laws against some yo-yo shooting up trash on purpose, I also have to wonder about a bunch of pseudo-terrorists of the Luddite variety wanting to crap-up space just because they hate technology, spy satellites, etc.
The obvious problems are a) Some people probably said the same thing about the Wright brothers and b) People are going to figure this out at some point anyway, so this prize will (at most) just hasten and publicize this capability.
The next prize should be one for creating an affordable galactic garbage truck.
Your arguments are rather broad here- militarily, the invasion and elimination of the Iraqi regime was extraordinarily successful. Iran fought Iraq for years, losing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million men, and ultimately all that was achieved (by either side) was a stalemate. The US captured Iraq (admittedly, to varying degrees of control) in a few months, losing a relative handful of men.
Invasion and conquering are one thing, and occupation is another. To your point, the Iraq experience has underscored that our military was not built to be an occupying force, but yet it has also shown that they are fairly adaptive.
For instance, there are now rifle-toting sociologists in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq, so that the military can more clearly understand the cultural sources of conflict. This should have been done a long time ago (e.g. we should have more thoroughly understood our enemy before invading, at least in the case of Iraq where we arguably had much more latitude in our choice), and if it had then we may have never invaded Iraq (which was a mistake IMHO).
That's an interesting idea (not allowing for downward mods). It would not allow for modding down stupid things like "first post" posts, but then again something like that would never be modded up to begin with, so on a relative basis you wouldn't ever see it. I suppose the other downside to this idea would be for people who regularly read comments at lower levels, and had to contend with more flamebait/troll type of posts. But then again we're back to who's making the call on those issues, and it seems that all too often it's moderators who have a strong opinion in one direction or another so they mod on the basis of that opinion rather than the merits of a given post.
In any case I'd love to see this implemented on an experimental basis. I have to believe that the best stuff would float to the surface like you said, and that would include posts on any side of a debate. I'm sure there'd be a rebellion amongst many, but I suppose a guy can dream.
By the way, I like your idea of a "...lack of intellectual firepower..." mod. Maybe it could be released at the same time with a "I'm too lazy or too childish to mod up a good opposing argument" mod.
In any case, the ironic thing is that this rant was almost completely off-topic and totally out of step with the thread, and yet got moderated to a +5. What makes this ironic is that this dopey moderation is happening in a thread about Slashdot. It's moderation like this that has made me avoid even bothering to read comments for topics that have even a remote chance of becoming political.
What's sad about this is that there are so many smart people from so many points of view that read this site, and the kind of dialogue that could be had could be very interesting, enlightening, and perhaps even change someone's mind. But instead we get childish moderation that amounts to quasi-censorship of opinions not liked by the moderators, rather than modding up the best counter-argument to the disliked opinion. There's a reason that Taco suggests modding up is more virtuous than modding down, but unfortunately that seems lost on the majority of moderators/metamoderators.
Oh well. The Slashdot community is what it is, and I keep coming back if for no other reason than the breadth and quality of the stories, and on occasion, the really insightful comments on non-political issues.
That being said, I absolutely LOATHE PowerPoint for this purpose. There are incredibly annoying bugs related to OLE (Object Link Embedding, e.g. pasting in a graph you've created in Excel) that have been there for several versions (i.e. YEARS, probably going on 10 by now).
Then they forced the whole "smart paste" thing on users in the 2003 version. I don't know if they fixed that in the latest version, but it's IDIOTIC. I'm sure it helps some people a lot for certain things they do, but some aspects of how it behaves are just plain dumb and won't help anybody. Sometimes I think the Office people make these changes in order to justify their existence, but in any case, if they're going to introduce a major functionality change that purports to be an improvement, fine- it probably is genuinely helpful for many, but don't leave zero recourse for the rest of us.
Which is why I spent hundreds of dollars on 2 copies of the newest Office and haven't even installed it- I'm not willing to deal with the #%&* ribbon, and so when I get around to it, I'll find a 3rd party application that is solid that will add back the "classic" menus and buttons. I'm all for progress, but customizability is too important if you actually know what you're doing in the software, and this is where they went wrong with the ribbon. For the average office worker who wouldn't have a clue how to customize it, it's probably better in the long run.
But more importantly, just FIX THE $^#! OLE THING!!! Microsoft should be sincerely embarrassed that this problem still exists (unless by some miracle they've fixed this in 2007 and the fix is compatible with the pre-2007 file structure).
I'll quit ranting now, but seriously, I love Excel- it's not perfect, but the level of power, flexibility and programmability mean that I can get it to do almost anything I can imagine. Word has almost always been more than adequate for anything I've ever wanted to do. But PowerPoint just plain sucks. I long for an alternative, but given the market share MS has with PowerPoint I'm afraid this is a pipe dream.
However, I also think you confirmed my primary point, which is that as individuals we get shafted with regards to selling things like cars. What's good for the goose in this case is not good for the gander (that is, you have to pay on gains but don't get to write off losses).
But at the same time, if they made it "fair", then they'd have to do something else to the tax code to collect the same measure of taxes. This is one reason why I'm scared to see what becomes of AMT reform, assuming it ever happens. With something as huge as reforming AMT, there are always winners and losers, and I'm afraid I may be a loser, but then again you never know.
BUT, unless you got the stuff you're selling for FREE, your income is only your profit.
My point is that if they're going to tax you for your profits, they should also tax you for your losses, just like with sales of stocks, bonds, etc.
In reality the IRS is NOT fair (but neither is the tax code in my opinion). Their mandate is to collect enough money, fairness be damned. For instance, when you sell your car at a loss, you can't report that, while if you sell your care for a gain, you have to pay tax on the gain.
Now arguably the loss you normally take on a car is depreciation, but as far as I know, there's simply no allowance to take a loss on your car that is faster then true economic depreciation.
Anyway, beyond my tangential discussion of fairness, I think they'll focus their efforts on those above $X in revenue, and those people will have to start recording their cost basis on each item they sell, just like any other seller of goods.
Some may choose to argue even this point, but I cannot believe that this technology wouldn't have been used for implanted medical devices earlier had it been available (assuming the radio waves won't interefere with the device, which the article seems to imply they wouldn't).
She even admitted that they didn't know exactly what "cool" was, but that they had to provide the infrastructure for "cool", e.g. high speed internet access.
This is the same thing on a national scale. The Chinese government is essentially claiming the ability to will innovation leadership into existence. Truthfully, I think they could make a lot of progress towards their goal if they just let capitalism do its thing. But concepts like the "creative economy" probably don't give communist party leaders good dreams at night.
However, this is debatable, and this comes back to my point. Just because having a rule or regulation is debatable doesn't mean we shouldn't have it all, because in the end, and I'll say it again, every law or regulation is a curtailment of someone's liberty.
The real impact for Microsoft will be less revenues and a lower stock price.
The bottom line of all of these discussions and talk about how this and other Patriot Act provisions, etc. are a huge infringment on our civil liberties is that the only way to completely guarantee our civil liberties is to have no civil authorities. 99% of us wouldn't want this, because we know the inevitable result.
The truth of the matter is that there is a gray area where most of us want to be, and just becuase we step a little more towards one side today does *not* ensure that we end up living in a 1984-like world.
Private equity firms only invest after they have established a well-defined exit strategy. By this I mean how the firm gets its money back (hopefully with some return attached) after the investment has matured.
In a typical early stage private equity deal, the private equity firm gets a sizable stake in a company that has not yet gone public. When the company finally does go public (or gets acquired by another company) the private equity firm makes a bundle. If the company goes under, the private equity firm gets nothing.
This case is a little different because this is a PIPEs investment (Private Investment in Public Equity). That is, the private equity firm is attaining a stake in the company without simply buying its publicly traded shares. This helps SCO because SCO gets a cash infusion without trying to sell new shares (not an easy task for them right now). The private equity firm gets a lot more say through this investment since it's a structured deal.
The point of all of this is that unless the conspiracy theories (MS being behind this, etc.) are true, the SCO management has pitched these private equity guys some kind of story about how they will eventually get their money back, and with a juicy return attached. The obvious answer is the old "Let's get IBM to buy us" idea. But perhaps something else is afoot. I'd be curious as to who else would want to acquire SCO, for one reason or another. Anyone have any ideas?I would have to partially disagree, but agree too- I'm in finance, and there are certain of the higher level jobs where it's hard to find someone with the right combination of skills. The sales guys at my old company had to have a good left brain as well as right brain to be good. We used recruiters, but certainly not exclusively. A lot of guys came in through other sales guys. Which brings me back to your other point about knowing people- this is the absolute best way to find an employee (through someone you know and trust) and the absolute best way to find a job. There have been two or three big studies done that came back with numbers on how many of the available jobs were being "advertised" through what method. The results differed somewhat depending on the study, but the most optimistic found that the percentage of jobs offered through the web, classifieds and headhunters combined was something like less than 20%. In other words, you have to take the time to network to get access to most of the jobs that are out there. This is also a good idea because the jobs that are only being "advertised" via word of mouth are going to have much fewer people to compete against.
If Microsoft has (these aren't real numbers), say, $100 billion in equity, and they earn a $7 billion profit, their ROE is 7%. Now let's say they look at a new investment opportunity, and its expected return is say, 5%. By investing in this, they'll lower the ROE of the company as a whole, even though this new opportunity would provide a profit.
Normally (that is, the heady days of the bubble aside), when the ROE of a company starts to suffer, that stock starts to decrease in price for obvious reasons. A big reason that a mature/maturing company would pay a dividend is to get rid of that extra equity by giving it back to shareholders. Remember, ROE is Return divided by Equity, so you want to shrink the denominator (equity) to make the number go up (or stay the same if your numerator is shrinking). This comes back to the comment that was attributed to Scott McNealy about what it would mean for Sun to declare a dividend. He really was stating a simple financial truth.