Except that in this case it was anything but. That's the trouble - stock options that give the company the right to revoke them (which is what buying them back at the issuing price means) are 100%, absolutely, completely worthless. This is akin to "selling oceanfront real estate in Arizona" - its a deceptive trade practice at best, and quite possibly illegal (we'll have to see after the lawyers finish fighting over it). The company got a lot of value in the form of retaining key employees because of this - there are often protections against such a one-sided contract, but IANAL.
>>The ACLU, for instance, is a Libertarian organization by definition.
Unless, you know, it's about a Valedictorian trying to throw props out to their deity of choice during a graduation ceremony, or a city government giving a cheap lease to religious charitable groups or the Boy Scouts.
Their definitions of freedom and liberty doesn't seem to encompass those concepts.
On the contrary. A local government is free to give out a cheap lease to a religious charitable group. They're not free to only do so for the charities they deem "proper," and charge double-rent to others to drive them out of town.
On the offchance that this is a serious question, I actually ran the numbers a little while ago - I've lived in both the UK and the US and was curious myself. This is a cut-and-paste of something I wrote back in 2009, so some of the conversions may be a little off:
During the current debates a lot of people keep talking about how bad the taxes are in countries with "socialized medicine". Let's take the UK as an example. I'll compare the tax burden on someone making USD 80,000 and GBP 50,000 - I know they're not completely comparable, but its a rough note. I'm ignoring a lot of minor taxes/fees here on both sides.
The US individual pays $16,188 in federal income taxes and $6,120 in FICA/Medicare taxes. This gives them a take home pay of $57,692. Their employer also pays $6,120 in FICA/Medicare taxes, for a total cost of $86,120.
The UK individual pays £9,930 in income tax, and £4,258 in NI (national insurance). This gives them a take home pay of £35,812. Their employer pays £5,668 in NI, for a total cost of £55,668.
Let's convert those UK numbers into their USD variants at the same rate, just for fun:
The UK individual pays $15,888 in income tax, $300 less than their US counterpart, and $6,812 in NI, or $692 more. This gives them a take home pay of $57,299, $392 less than the US guy (only 1/2 of 1% less). Their employer pays $9,068 in NI, for a total cost of $89,068, which is $2,948 or 3.5% more than the US cost.
The big difference here, of course, is that the US employee still has absolutely no health care. Reasonable coverage for a single person in good health easily consumes that $3,000 difference - and that's ignoring any family obligations, what happens when they're laid off, etc.
The only trouble with those is that if your net worth is such that saving a couple hundred bucks a month on healthcare is significant, then paying 20% of even a moderate hospital stay (a major procedure and several days stay) will probably bankrupt you.
And if you have one serious accident that requires a major surgery, often running into hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then.... what?
a) You die b) You get it anyway and enjoy the fact that other people end up paying for you (just as if you had had insurance) but you didn't have to pay for them (unlike the insurance situation).
Which would you pick? And how comfortable are you with that, really?
I'm young also and I have really great insurance paying $400 for my entire family. However, I recently filed a claim over something simple and it ended up charging me $400 for a simple doctor visit because of a loophole the insurance company found in the claim. Looks good on paper until you need care and realize that a profit organization will try to swindle their way out of providing service any way they can. Its very easy for me to sympathize for older and/or sick people. More substantial health care reform will happen in the next 10 years or so since the baby boomers will (increasingly) see how ugly our system is.
Did you buy that 1-on-1 from an insurer? I'm betting that you didn't. Blue Cross Blue Shield here in Texas is costing about $900 a month for a family, at group rates through a massive plan (Administaff). My employer pays for about half of that, I pick up the rest. And that's just two adults in our mid-thirties and one healthy two-year-old.
I wonder what environmental issues there might be if the factory was ever completely decommissioned.
Pretty much the exact same issues there would be if it doesn't get decommissioned or if they had decommissioned it sooner.
It doesn't magically make bad things when you tear it down. They are already there, already leaching into the soil, water and air around the plant. Eventually it will all come out, its just a question of when. Cleaning it up at once, before it has leaked into the environment and been dispersed across a large region is FAR easier and better for everyone involved.
A better statement might be, "I wonder what legal issues there might have been based on unknown environmental issues that would have been discovered during decommissioning." Which is a bit FUDlike in that the GPP has no actual knowledge that there are any, but its basically impossible to prove otherwise and will generate a lot of "Well, he might have a point," beard-stroking. There may be issues. There may not.
Yeah. Makes you wonder why Ferrari doesn't just sell a stripped-down version for $20k too.
The platform that the Tesla Roadster was built on is going away. That's why Tesla isn't building on it any more. They'll do another sports car at some point - probably all in-house - that won't have this problem.
As a web developer, I'm going to make sure that my site works well in the "lowest common denominator" of mobile browsers, basically just basic Webkit functionality and standard sizing.
As primarily an iPhone user, I'm probably going to stick with whatever's built in, because the last thing that I want to do is to actively change my convenience-gadget to match someone's fancy website; the same reason that I'll never change my DNS servers to a random root server set just to access a.ihateicann domain. Sorry, don't care - your content is actually not that important to me.
Websites are, and should be, generally seen as a convenience for the user.
Oh, and extolling the virtues of changing the theme of a browser that runs on my phone? If I even see the browser itself most of the time, that's a big bucket of fail. The last thing I want to have to do is try to figure out the best way to see it.
Please report to the nearest/. reeducation center.
You think you're being sarcastic, but your comment is 100% accurate. Apple is the single most evil corporation I'm aware of, and Google is the single most ethical corporation I'm aware of.
Not needing a car is not equivalent to not needing to travel.What, the buses and subway are free in NY now?
Yup. At least they are compared to needing a car. Many people continually pay a car payment, the average of which is around $500/mo. Add in $75/mo for basic insurance, then money for gas, tires, maintenance, air fresheners, &c, and you're easily up around $25/day, 7 days a week.
So? Other than trying to imply something, what exactly does this add to the story?
Or to put it another way, how would you feel if it had read "a black teller," or "a wheelchair-bound teller," or, for that matter, "a male teller."
The implication is that either tellers are rarely female (untrue), or that female tellers were somehow targeted by the robber, or that her ability to handle the situation was notable because, well, she was female... If replacing "female" with "male" results in a ridiculous sentence, it was probably ridiculous to begin with.
Agreed. Low level language features exist for a reason, but their use (outside of a few specialized fields where bit-level optimization is preferred to code-readability-and-use optimization) is limited. Making it slightly less convenient (ie: use an int like we always have) for a (relative) few, while encouraging the many to use the more comprehensible variant, is not a bad idea.
Somehow with a major break-in or other fault appearing virtually every day in the news, I am beginning to think large operations just don't have the required level of professionalism and funding of a proper testing environment (software & hardware) to get things right before they roll out the code publicly.
The prior news story which made me roll my eyes was the airline which lost use of some of its computers and stranded passengers.
Alternately, it might be the case that getting security right is actually really, really hard when you have teams of very smart people dedicated to breaking it. Which isn't what happened in this case, but could just as well have been.
There's a reason everyone bitches about having to jump through hoops to pass, for example, a PCI Level 1 security audit. There's a reason that in most breaches its found out that there were practices that violated their PCI (or HIPPA, or insert-standard-here) customary and expected practices. We know how to get a really good head start on keeping systems secure, but it takes a lot of time, money, and will to succeed.
For the dimensions of an iPod?!? Why the fsck would that be $SECRET?!?
So you're saying that it should be up to the employee who agrees not to disclose a trade secret whether or not it really is a secret, and if in the judgement of the employee it is not, they should be immune from prosecution when they share that trade secret?
18 months in prison for corporate espionage. In the US, the penalty can run up to $500,000 and 15 years imprisonment for individuals, $10,000,000 for corporations. Why do you think this has something to do with China being bad? Or with commerce being corrupt? The idea behind these penalties was, believe it or not, to reduce corrupt business deals.
No. The band from 20 to 30kHz doesn't work. The maximum sampling rate that can be reasonably expected to be supported by a reasonably modern, existing (remember the context) phone is 48kHz, which means that frequencies above 24kHz cannot be handled at all. Remember, this is supposed to work with existing devices.
Hang on there - 30kHz wouldn't work for anything complicated, I'd probably grant you that - but for this idea to work, all you'd actually need is the ability for a phone to make any kind of noise at 30kHz +- 3kHz. It could simply use an on/off stream with a good warning burst in front of it and send out the programmed number, and broadcast that series of pulses whenever a button was pressed.
Would that be ideal? No, but its not trying to replace the ideal. Its trying to replace the idea of handing a piece of plastic with 1/4" tall raised numbers on it to a clerk, who then runs it through some boxes and hands it back. The security bar this would need to clear to be an improvement is, in fact, very low indeed.
He's not saying that its hard to pick up audio waves. You just seem to be laboring under the impression that its somehow harder to pick up radio waves. Same series of problems, but audio waves are more understood by humans since we're sensitive to them ourselves. Of course, they're also easier to baffle in many ways.
That alone doesn't make it a scam. The people who bought Apple stock in the beginning for much cheaper have now much higher payoffs than current investors, but that doesn't make it a Ponzi Scheme.
And yes, Apple stocks also need more people coming in, since it'll crash if there's no liquidity.
Not at all the case. Apple is a real company, making real products, and making a real profit. When you purchase shares of Apple stock, you're buying a (very) small percentage of the company, which you then own. One way to profit from this ownership is to sell your share of the company to someone else for more than you paid for it. Another way to profit from it is to enjoy the value created by Apple, since it (unlike, say, Gold) is actually doing things that produce revenue.
There's a recent trend for companies that are expanding rapidly, such as Apple, to retain all earnings within the corporate structure for internal investment. When this type of growth slows, or the massively artificial incentive from low capital-gains taxes is reversed, you can expect those earnings to once again be returned to the owners of the business, also known as shareholders.
If you believe that a 3.8x difference between code that's been written by an expert, vs. code written by a novice and slightly cleaned up, presented in a paper that itself warns that its findings should only be considered useful at the order-of-magnitude level is a small one, then we read a different paper. If you read the pullquote you responded to, you would see that a couple of minor changes brought the performance directly more in line (a 2-3x improvement).
The fastest, unpublished, version of the C++ code uses extensive Google proprietary libraries. No such effort has been made on the Java version, indeed it had received substantially less tuning than the basic C++ one provided with the paper.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that in this case it was anything but. That's the trouble - stock options that give the company the right to revoke them (which is what buying them back at the issuing price means) are 100%, absolutely, completely worthless. This is akin to "selling oceanfront real estate in Arizona" - its a deceptive trade practice at best, and quite possibly illegal (we'll have to see after the lawyers finish fighting over it). The company got a lot of value in the form of retaining key employees because of this - there are often protections against such a one-sided contract, but IANAL.
>>The ACLU, for instance, is a Libertarian organization by definition.
Unless, you know, it's about a Valedictorian trying to throw props out to their deity of choice during a graduation ceremony, or a city government giving a cheap lease to religious charitable groups or the Boy Scouts.
Their definitions of freedom and liberty doesn't seem to encompass those concepts.
On the contrary. A local government is free to give out a cheap lease to a religious charitable group. They're not free to only do so for the charities they deem "proper," and charge double-rent to others to drive them out of town.
On the offchance that this is a serious question, I actually ran the numbers a little while ago - I've lived in both the UK and the US and was curious myself. This is a cut-and-paste of something I wrote back in 2009, so some of the conversions may be a little off:
During the current debates a lot of people keep talking about how bad the taxes are in countries with "socialized medicine". Let's take the UK as an example. I'll compare the tax burden on someone making USD 80,000 and GBP 50,000 - I know they're not completely comparable, but its a rough note. I'm ignoring a lot of minor taxes/fees here on both sides.
The US individual pays $16,188 in federal income taxes and $6,120 in FICA/Medicare taxes. This gives them a take home pay of $57,692. Their employer also pays $6,120 in FICA/Medicare taxes, for a total cost of $86,120.
The UK individual pays £9,930 in income tax, and £4,258 in NI (national insurance). This gives them a take home pay of £35,812. Their employer pays £5,668 in NI, for a total cost of £55,668.
Let's convert those UK numbers into their USD variants at the same rate, just for fun:
The UK individual pays $15,888 in income tax, $300 less than their US counterpart, and $6,812 in NI, or $692 more. This gives them a take home pay of $57,299, $392 less than the US guy (only 1/2 of 1% less). Their employer pays $9,068 in NI, for a total cost of $89,068, which is $2,948 or 3.5% more than the US cost.
The big difference here, of course, is that the US employee still has absolutely no health care. Reasonable coverage for a single person in good health easily consumes that $3,000 difference - and that's ignoring any family obligations, what happens when they're laid off, etc.
The only trouble with those is that if your net worth is such that saving a couple hundred bucks a month on healthcare is significant, then paying 20% of even a moderate hospital stay (a major procedure and several days stay) will probably bankrupt you.
And if you have one serious accident that requires a major surgery, often running into hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then.... what?
a) You die
b) You get it anyway and enjoy the fact that other people end up paying for you (just as if you had had insurance) but you didn't have to pay for them (unlike the insurance situation).
Which would you pick? And how comfortable are you with that, really?
I'm young also and I have really great insurance paying $400 for my entire family. However, I recently filed a claim over something simple and it ended up charging me $400 for a simple doctor visit because of a loophole the insurance company found in the claim. Looks good on paper until you need care and realize that a profit organization will try to swindle their way out of providing service any way they can. Its very easy for me to sympathize for older and/or sick people. More substantial health care reform will happen in the next 10 years or so since the baby boomers will (increasingly) see how ugly our system is.
Did you buy that 1-on-1 from an insurer? I'm betting that you didn't. Blue Cross Blue Shield here in Texas is costing about $900 a month for a family, at group rates through a massive plan (Administaff). My employer pays for about half of that, I pick up the rest. And that's just two adults in our mid-thirties and one healthy two-year-old.
I wonder what environmental issues there might be if the factory was ever completely decommissioned.
Pretty much the exact same issues there would be if it doesn't get decommissioned or if they had decommissioned it sooner.
It doesn't magically make bad things when you tear it down. They are already there, already leaching into the soil, water and air around the plant. Eventually it will all come out, its just a question of when. Cleaning it up at once, before it has leaked into the environment and been dispersed across a large region is FAR easier and better for everyone involved.
A better statement might be, "I wonder what legal issues there might have been based on unknown environmental issues that would have been discovered during decommissioning." Which is a bit FUDlike in that the GPP has no actual knowledge that there are any, but its basically impossible to prove otherwise and will generate a lot of "Well, he might have a point," beard-stroking. There may be issues. There may not.
Yeah. Makes you wonder why Ferrari doesn't just sell a stripped-down version for $20k too.
The platform that the Tesla Roadster was built on is going away. That's why Tesla isn't building on it any more. They'll do another sports car at some point - probably all in-house - that won't have this problem.
!story.
As a web developer, I'm going to make sure that my site works well in the "lowest common denominator" of mobile browsers, basically just basic Webkit functionality and standard sizing.
As primarily an iPhone user, I'm probably going to stick with whatever's built in, because the last thing that I want to do is to actively change my convenience-gadget to match someone's fancy website; the same reason that I'll never change my DNS servers to a random root server set just to access a .ihateicann domain. Sorry, don't care - your content is actually not that important to me.
Websites are, and should be, generally seen as a convenience for the user.
Oh, and extolling the virtues of changing the theme of a browser that runs on my phone? If I even see the browser itself most of the time, that's a big bucket of fail. The last thing I want to have to do is try to figure out the best way to see it.
Google good. Apple bad.
Please report to the nearest /. reeducation center.
You think you're being sarcastic, but your comment is 100% accurate. Apple is the single most evil corporation I'm aware of, and Google is the single most ethical corporation I'm aware of.
You need to meet more corporations.
Not needing a car is not equivalent to not needing to travel.What, the buses and subway are free in NY now?
Yup. At least they are compared to needing a car. Many people continually pay a car payment, the average of which is around $500/mo. Add in $75/mo for basic insurance, then money for gas, tires, maintenance, air fresheners, &c, and you're easily up around $25/day, 7 days a week.
Buses cost money. But not that much money.
Even in Manhattan, $1k/week is pretty much the median income: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Manhattan#Household_income
Not sure that warning is all that accurate, come to think of it. Someone told me not to trust the internet for information like that.
You can get immediate treatment at any hospital ER. You can not get ongoing, expensive, "voluntary" treatment without insurance.
So? Other than trying to imply something, what exactly does this add to the story?
Or to put it another way, how would you feel if it had read "a black teller," or "a wheelchair-bound teller," or, for that matter, "a male teller."
The implication is that either tellers are rarely female (untrue), or that female tellers were somehow targeted by the robber, or that her ability to handle the situation was notable because, well, she was female... If replacing "female" with "male" results in a ridiculous sentence, it was probably ridiculous to begin with.
Word choice can be insidious, somehow.
Agreed. Low level language features exist for a reason, but their use (outside of a few specialized fields where bit-level optimization is preferred to code-readability-and-use optimization) is limited. Making it slightly less convenient (ie: use an int like we always have) for a (relative) few, while encouraging the many to use the more comprehensible variant, is not a bad idea.
Now that's waterfall development!
Somehow with a major break-in or other fault appearing virtually every day in the news, I am beginning to think large operations just don't have the required level of professionalism and funding of a proper testing environment (software & hardware) to get things right before they roll out the code publicly.
The prior news story which made me roll my eyes was the airline which lost use of some of its computers and stranded passengers.
Alternately, it might be the case that getting security right is actually really, really hard when you have teams of very smart people dedicated to breaking it. Which isn't what happened in this case, but could just as well have been.
There's a reason everyone bitches about having to jump through hoops to pass, for example, a PCI Level 1 security audit. There's a reason that in most breaches its found out that there were practices that violated their PCI (or HIPPA, or insert-standard-here) customary and expected practices. We know how to get a really good head start on keeping systems secure, but it takes a lot of time, money, and will to succeed.
For the dimensions of an iPod?!? Why the fsck would that be $SECRET?!?
So you're saying that it should be up to the employee who agrees not to disclose a trade secret whether or not it really is a secret, and if in the judgement of the employee it is not, they should be immune from prosecution when they share that trade secret?
Yeah, no problems there...
18 months in prison for corporate espionage. In the US, the penalty can run up to $500,000 and 15 years imprisonment for individuals, $10,000,000 for corporations. Why do you think this has something to do with China being bad? Or with commerce being corrupt? The idea behind these penalties was, believe it or not, to reduce corrupt business deals.
No. The band from 20 to 30kHz doesn't work. The maximum sampling rate that can be reasonably expected to be supported by a reasonably modern, existing (remember the context) phone is 48kHz, which means that frequencies above 24kHz cannot be handled at all. Remember, this is supposed to work with existing devices.
Hang on there - 30kHz wouldn't work for anything complicated, I'd probably grant you that - but for this idea to work, all you'd actually need is the ability for a phone to make any kind of noise at 30kHz +- 3kHz. It could simply use an on/off stream with a good warning burst in front of it and send out the programmed number, and broadcast that series of pulses whenever a button was pressed.
Would that be ideal? No, but its not trying to replace the ideal. Its trying to replace the idea of handing a piece of plastic with 1/4" tall raised numbers on it to a clerk, who then runs it through some boxes and hands it back. The security bar this would need to clear to be an improvement is, in fact, very low indeed.
He's not saying that its hard to pick up audio waves. You just seem to be laboring under the impression that its somehow harder to pick up radio waves. Same series of problems, but audio waves are more understood by humans since we're sensitive to them ourselves. Of course, they're also easier to baffle in many ways.
That alone doesn't make it a scam. The people who bought Apple stock in the beginning for much cheaper have now much higher payoffs than current investors, but that doesn't make it a Ponzi Scheme.
And yes, Apple stocks also need more people coming in, since it'll crash if there's no liquidity.
Not at all the case. Apple is a real company, making real products, and making a real profit. When you purchase shares of Apple stock, you're buying a (very) small percentage of the company, which you then own. One way to profit from this ownership is to sell your share of the company to someone else for more than you paid for it. Another way to profit from it is to enjoy the value created by Apple, since it (unlike, say, Gold) is actually doing things that produce revenue.
There's a recent trend for companies that are expanding rapidly, such as Apple, to retain all earnings within the corporate structure for internal investment. When this type of growth slows, or the massively artificial incentive from low capital-gains taxes is reversed, you can expect those earnings to once again be returned to the owners of the business, also known as shareholders.
Treacle, on the other hand, remains freaky shit to me.
Well, it can be, but that just means you're doing it right...
If you believe that a 3.8x difference between code that's been written by an expert, vs. code written by a novice and slightly cleaned up, presented in a paper that itself warns that its findings should only be considered useful at the order-of-magnitude level is a small one, then we read a different paper. If you read the pullquote you responded to, you would see that a couple of minor changes brought the performance directly more in line (a 2-3x improvement).
The fastest, unpublished, version of the C++ code uses extensive Google proprietary libraries. No such effort has been made on the Java version, indeed it had received substantially less tuning than the basic C++ one provided with the paper.