There's plenty government etc conspiracy theories but the #1 concern is just how high value a target a centralised personal information resource is. It also means the inevitable situation where the ID card is always assumed to be correct and all other indicators to the contrary must be false. If you rely 100% on one thing that is not 100% secure then not only are you completely insecure, but you don't have any way of knowing that fact.
In the UK if you dispute items on your credit card bill they are cancelled and reversed against the retailer. My credit card was used fraudulently (for a second time) the other week and the card issuer simply went through the list of recent transactions with me and without question cancelled every item I said was not mine. It certainly does not put the credit card system under any threat, actually it's about the only good reason for having them at all.
I agree with the general principle of your argument at least some of the time, in that often the person who's identity is being "stolen" is often not their fault at all. I dispute heavily however the concept that retailers "fraudulently attempt to recover that money from an innocent third party" or that "technically proprietors who accept false credentials should be charged until they can provide evidence that leads to the arrest of the guilty party". This is not the "technical" position at all, retailers are not committing fraud unless they are aware the details are false. They do of course have a duty of care (and usually a contractual requirement) to take reasonable measures to ensure the transaction is genuine, but these alone are not enough to stop fraud and it is ridiculous to suggest they are committing a crime if events were wholly out-with their control.
The problem with "identify theft" is the inability to determine who is ultimately responsible for it. Consider just a few of the possibilities:
- I made some transactions then fraudulently claimed those transactions were false (my fault)
- my good nature led to my assisting Nigerian royalty escape persecution; (my fault)
- malware on my PC (could be seen as my fault, but also shouldn't my bank be designing systems to counter such a common issue?)
- a hacker steals my details from a retailer I used months ago (that retailer's fault, not the fault of the retailer who later gets hit with the fraudulent transaction)
- a retailer has inadequate systems (the retailer's fault)
- some government employee leaves an unencrypted disk with my personal details on the train, allowing a fraudster to open an account in my name (partly the government's fault, partly the account provider should have controls to defend against this e.g. always sending a confirmation letter to my address, which they have confirmed as genuine and current by other means e.g. electoral roll);
- the processing system used by the retailer is ran by a contractor [as is almost always the case] and their equipment has a flaw which was exploited by hackers to obtain my details (fault mostly of the contractor, though the retailer also has a duty to audit those systems)
It goes on and on. The worst bit is most of the time nobody has any idea which if any of the above is what actually happened. There is no silver bullet allowing the cost of the fraud to be passed onto the person responsible for it.
Well either you didn't read beyond paragraph 2 or you simply didn't comprehend what I meant by "Contrast this with say the problem with the leak being that it is embarrassing - here the 'news' is not the substance of the advice as advice, it is the fact that it is embarrassing."
Perhaps I was unclear so I will attempt to demonstrate further using your scenarios:
If I'm a CEO and my lawyer tells me to put the money I've embezzled in the Cayman Islands and the Wall Street Journal finds out about it, that's professional advice and not news.
No that's both (un)professional* advice and news. Let's break it down into the two elements:
- If a lawyer tells you to put your legit savings into some legit investment plan, that's professional advice (well, it might be if there was enough to it to really qualify as professional advice, but I digress).
- Now, when illegality & immorality are introduced, it becomes news.
If I'm the mayor of my town and my wife is leaving me because I've been philandering with prostitutes, that's private information (to the family, and pertinent to the divorce proceedings) and not news.
philandering with prostitutes, see above. There isn't any element to this information other than as news.
If I'm a private contractor and I'm hired by a government to write a report detailing radiation leaks in nuclear power plants around the country and some reporter gets a copy of that report, that's private information and not news
Ah so you didn't get beyond paragraph 2 in my post. OK just ask yourself: does the public want to read the contents of this report because they want to personally arrange for fixing radiation leaks? See:
Nobody wanted this as some retrospective news about some event, they wanted to know this information for the exact same reason and no other reason than those for which Merril Lynch's clients were paying for it.
Oh and yes, if the government was paying for the report in order to cover up leaks, that would fall under immorality.
Where does it end?
It ends when the public has a right to be informed.
* Actually it's not professional advice at all. By definition for anything to be "professional" it must conform to the rules or standards of a profession. Any advice that is illegal cannot be professional.
Let's be clear on this, the issue has nothing to do with having up-to-the-second stocks news or not. It has nothing to do with an RSS aggregator having a feed from a news site.
It is about a news aggregator publicly disseminating PRIVATE information - buy/sell is professional advice and not news. Professional advice is subject to a two-party contract - it can be given confidentially. This is leaked advice.
Usually leaks aren't much of a problem because there's copyright and so on, they can't just reproduce the detail necessary to completely steal your advice usefully. But, in this case all that's really interesting is the company name and whether the word after it is "buy" or "sell". The entirety of the substance can be in the article. Contrast this with say the problem with the leak being that it is embarrassing - here the "news" is not the substance of the advice as advice, it is the fact that it is embarrassing.
Secondly, absolutely key to the value of that information is extreme timeliness. It only has value if you have that information before most other people, after which point the information becomes obsolete. Thirdly, the person giving the advice is also of high importance. "Sell Microsoft" has a greatly different value as information when Merrill Lynch says it than say, Bob down the pub. So people were paying thefly to get Merrill Lynch's advice more cheaply than buying it from Merrill Lynch.
The point the judge upheld is that thefly were not announcing news, they were reproducing a private professional opinion - and an opinion that was of value because of whose it was. Nobody wanted this as some retrospective news about some event, they wanted to know this information for the exact same reason and no other reason than those for which Merril Lynch's clients were paying for it.
This is little different than say, someone finding out the Coke formula, setting up a factory and marketing it as Coca Cola. The one difference is that in this case the product is "knowledge". The judge seems to have been quite savvy in differentiating the "product" and "knowledge" elements on the basis of the extent that timeliness was important.
You'd think, if you are spouting about economics, that you'd have found an economist to gently and slowly explain to you the meaning of 'elastic' and 'inelastic' markets. IOW, not lowering their prices isn't a sign they don't have such an economist as it isn't at all clear that lowering their prices will lead to significantly increased sales. People don't buy CD's like toothpaste (because that brand is on sale this week), they buy them because they like the artist.
To elaborate, well there's a Wiki on elasticity of demand, which basically considers the proportionate change in quantity demanded to the proportionate change in price. But, that's just one influence over what we're really interested in: monopoly profit. That Wiki page has a textbook chart though perhaps it is not clearly explained:
The monopoly position is PmQm whereas under perfect competition the position is PcQc. The former makes the most profit, whilst the latter has the most quantity being demanded without the supplier making a loss*, and hence is the best-possible position consumers can reasonably expect, all else being equal.
However. See those bits in italics? Theories should rightly try to keep other variables and other considerations constant and therein lies the rub.
Firstly, the "loss" is not completely accurate. At PcQc, the supplier is not breaking-even, it is actually making the absolute minimum profit it will accept to continue producing the goods. Consider, would you invest in a company for a 3% return when you can make 2% in a savings account? Probably not: the company would have to make you the 2% (the risk-free opportunity cost) PLUS sufficiently more from the company to account for the increased risk. Economics often treats this minimum return as effectively a finance cost - and, in this context, what really is the difference between dividends that "must" be paid vs. loan interest?
Secondly, music is (aside from personal grumbling about the crap produced these days) wholly about not all being the same - we specifically do not want all else to be equal, it is a creative industry not a commodity. So that means investing in new artists; new artists means new risks. It might help to consider that chart refers to one product and now we are thinking about many. See how this feeds into the minimum profit/finance costs?
Differentiating between monopoly profits and "finance cost" gets very muddled when examining, say, one album or wondering why a CD costs so much. The labels do have a very valid argument when they talk about needing to make lots of money from some in order to suffer the losses on the others. The ONLY way to determine if a music label is making monopoly profits is to examine their overall profits relative to investments and risk, over the long term. Only then can you see if what society is losing through individual albums being "overpriced" is what society is getting back though new creative music (yes this does still make the fatal assumption that the music industry has competent management and is efficient).
Working in audit there is a great deal of importance in the approach you take to testing. Do you take an invoice and check it exists on the ledger, or check the ledger and then see if the invoice exists? One tells you something completely different to the other.
Sure, with stored profiles testing can still be done the right way (getting the profile from the scene and then comparing to the alleged perp). But what assurance is there? How certain can you be that they did not take your profile and then "find" it at the scene? Yes, by getting the profile afterwards it still could be faked, but the controls are inherently stronger when they did not already have the profile. Administrative controls such as time stamps for example, and it would require more people to collude.
More importantly perhaps, if they have to first find someone to test in order to match the DNA, they have to do some police work - they need other evidence. With stored profiles there is a strong risk the police could decide they have their perp based soley on the DNA and then limit all other investigations into proving that guy is their man. The result is DNA becomes nothing more than a police tool for finding suspects and its true value as evidence is compromised. True, more perps are likely to be caught, and more quickly, but there will also be more miscarriages of justice. Juries already convict too easily due to DNA evidence (who says that strand of my hair didn't just blow there in the wind?).
Any doubters consider fingerprinting and Shirley McKie.
The issue isn't proprietary laptops nor the student's control over them. It's bad governance. A bad decision arising from good intentions simply not thought out nor with proper controls and disclosure in place.
With good governance they never should have made a decision that would so obviously bring the school into such disrepute. With proper controls they could demonstrate how the function could not be abused, or at a minimum that abuse would be detected. With proper disclosure the school kids and their parents could have objected and this farce never would have happened even with the school having made the bad decision. With proper disclosure there is an entirely different scope for alarm - spying on kids with their knowledge is appalling but without them knowing, that's really something.
Using non-proprietary laptops merely adds one avenue for detection of the wrongdoing here. It's trivial compared to the other causes of the failure that need to be rectified, starting with the removal of the entire board responsible for the decision because of their utterly incompetent governance.
But they are simply saying that jobs that are currently filled with a contractor will be filled with full-time "at will" employees now.
That's all good and fair and whatnot but the question is what actually happens in future. Why would they make permanent hires when they could go with temporary ones? One of the biggest reasons for subcontracting is because you can get rid of them easily, unlike employees whose many rights are a major pain in the ass for organisations. This goes double for government (local, national, whatever).
They're doing this to save money. The margin the contractor makes is just one opportunity for them to save money here, they'd be negligent if they did not at least consider the others too. Maybe they are going into this with the best of intentions, but inevitably what's going to happen is that in say 5 years time the ratio of contractor/temp workers to permanent staff will have increased.
As TFA all-but underlines, child safety is not the issue here, it is that Harriet Harman is being seen to be taking action. "Doing something".
I'm not quite sure how "getting in touch with Facebook to urge the use of the CEOP button" (i.e. asking for a favour that FB seems happy and well-armed to openly criticise) is to be considered an achievement, but use of FB is in the press a lot so our government instinctively feels the need to exert control over it, however ineffectual and petty.
People giving authority are usually doing so within boundaries. You don't get given authority to say what you please, you get given authority to apply policy. Everyone has their boss.
Seeing as careless talk can lead to image problems and/or lawsuits (or harming your case if prosecuting them). If you're in a senior position and you talk publicly in a work-related context, you talk on behalf of the organisation whether you intend to or not. OTOH if you are "blowing the whistle" on wrongdoing, there is a specific procedure for that which offers protection.
But with ACTIVELY suppressing competition, aren't they removing that choice, and hence opening themselves up to liability (Since you had no choice in the first place)?
No, they aren't. You do not assume responsibility for anything just because someone would like you to do something and you choose not to. Apple would have to deliberately or at least constructively assume responsibility for the data. It's plausable a class-action could attempt to claim the product failed to deliver on features the consumer reasonably expected, but there will be a licence agreement taking care of that and anyway at most this is a refund not damages.
Not that it matters, but there is ample choice: non-Apple systems are available on non-Apple phones, or don't use a phone for such purposes.
No I'm not a lawyer either, but this is slashdot/the internet where actual expertise is not required/actively discouraged when speaking as if with authority. The important thing is to come across as authoritative whilst saying something the reader agrees with.
Well this looks promising but no reason to take the pressure of them yet. Something I find odd with voting is that something can be effectively reintroduced continually until it is accepted, whereas it is much harder to reject something once accepted.
If we were to be highly sceptical we could point out that these guys weren't involved in the talks so could just be actioning their annoyance, or negotiating for their cut. Or, remember there were corporations - local corporations - who were set to suffer from this legislation. Maybe the ISPs were wiser with their 'donations' than the American-led movie and music lobby.
The issue is that of cost and risk. If I am paying for the entirety of the cost of designing the software I expect entirety of ownership. These contracts also typically put the burden of risk on the client since it is usually very difficult to avoid paying at least the majority of the agreed fee regardless of whether the software is up to scratch.
If I was only paying a fraction of the cost of the software, i.e. the cost was being shared between multiple customers, then no I would not expect to control/own it in the same way.
If I buy a bible, I don’t own the original Lindisfarne Gospels;
No, but I didn't buy the Lindisfarne Gospels, I bought this bible, I own it and it's my bible. I do whatever I like with it. Tear pages out, glue new ones in, make a lot of paper aeroplanes if I like. But example is only at all comparable if I was paying for finished, mass-produced software. If I pay someone to write a new bible, the default position is that the publisher owns it. They take the cost and risk burden and hence they generally take ownership.
if I pay a plumber to fix my tap, I don’t ask him to leave his toolbox so I can fix it myself next time;
No but I expect him to leave the tap. I expect to be able to pay another plumber to fix the tap, or to do so myself. And by the way, taps do actually come with instructions and use standardised tools so that anyone can fix them. Regardless, again the example is not applicable since the article is talking about creating something new not fixing something old. If a developer is paid to fix an existing piece of software does he expect to own the software?
if I buy Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince on Blu-ray, I don’t own the movie but only a copy (whose usage is restricted by the terms of the licence);
Technologists aligning their argument with the MPAA, interesting. I'll not bother posting a retort since they're posted here frequently.
if I buy Microsoft Word, I own one copy of the compiled code, not the source.
Again this is the purchase of a finished, mass produced piece of software, not payment to design a custom piece of software for me. If I pay an architect to design a building, the architect does not continue to have any rights over any use of that building.
People who smoke, drink or use porn are their own problem (if any), make their own choices and have options for dealing with it.
With abused animals and children, their problem is someone else, they have no choices and no options for dealing with it.
The way we actually protect things runs more in line with what we like most. Like we care more about a capable 11 year old than, say, an invalid 85 year old. Go visit the children's ward then check out the elderly ward, visit daycare then an old-people's home.
(This is not a comment in favour or against the particular method in the OP).
Strange everyone immediately is so confident Kotick is in the wrong here. TFA has them being rolled out the door by security and there's a SEC filing for litigation (admittedly, it doesn't say who will be the pursuer). Maybe Kotick is an asshole (never met him myself) but there's a lot of possibilities here. I understand the US favours employees less than it does in the UK, but over here being thrown out the door either means the company is about to get shafted by an employment tribunal or those guys did something really, really bad.
P.S. I am a "bean counter" (accountant & auditor) and those kind of comments from a CEO are like sirens in our ears. The attitude goes contrary to modern business thinking and introduces significant risks. Secondly, saying it publicly is really, really stupid.
I'd like to see what kind of justification politicians will come up with to argue that corporations can make suggestions, governments can provide input, but god forbid the people actually have a say in the way this sausage is made.
It's all secret so everyone gets to blame unspecified others. When it comes to publish this thing governments will be disowning provisions they worked very hard to put in place. Why couldn't the public participate? Well YOUR government fought hard for that but the others wouldn't let them, of course.
Governments are supposed to have power because they also have accountability, but that requires transparency. Even if all the politicians really were doing their very best with only our interests at heart that would not be good enough. They must be seen to be doing so, just like justice must be seen to be done, an agent must be seen to act on behalf of his principal and a professional must be seen to be independent.
We give them some room for national security and so on, in the hope that the bond of trust is so sacrosanct they would be unable to break it, or at least that someone would feel it and the truth would come out. Naive perhaps, but it's happening right here with these leaks. There's a good egg somewhere.
How would anyone who needs to call tech support because the Ethernet cable isn't correctly plugged in possibly know what an Ethernet cable or network card is?
They have some cables and a box. Shit, the "network card" isn't even a card any more (and "card" was always a bit of a stretch), but no matter since it's hidden away inside the box so they never had much chance of knowing anyway.
If you do something regularly and people usually understand then yeah maybe the rare guy that doesn't is stupid. If people often do not understand, then by definition they are not stupid, but your carrying on with this fruitless pursuit implies you probably are.
You've actually given an argument in favour there. If you hand out bottles of water you become as liable for them as a retail store. You also become liable for anything that happens to anyone on your property, as a retail store would. Letting the neighbours use your pool? Better make sure you have the right signs and fencing up.
But there is the key difference that the legislation is protecting nobody on your property, it favours a third party. A more appropriate analogy is to say that it is the equivalent of you being held responsible if you allow a visitor to use your CDs but then the visitor also (without your knowledge) copies them.
For me environmentalism is all about quality of life. Energy efficiency makes for an easy example: the savings in electricity cost should approximately cover the increased capital cost, so we have a net added value in the form of reduced pollution and reduced use of energy resources. Those benefits are to society rather than me individually, but doing it this way is not sacrificing my standard of living much and if everyone is doing this kind of thing then in the grand scheme it comes back to me eventually.
Sure it's not always so clear-cut, but examples are supposed to be straight forward. Some things being put forward in the name of environmentalism don't have a good enough cost vs. benefit, for example electric cars are useless with even a 1 hour charge time because it means the car is impractical as anything other than a form of local transport (on the other hand maybe we could swap in pre-charged batteries, but I digress).
Therefore, the idea of living in slums to be more environmental is that we should massively sacrifice our standard of living in order to avoid sacrificing our standard of living. Huh?
But... The article doesn't say that. I doesn't actually say slums are a good thing. I only says slums have SOME good things, which we can learn from. Unfortunately it does also highlight that some slums aren't necessarily quite the cesspools we imagine them to be from watching Slumdog Millionaire, but this is just confusing his message, it's not saying slums are some way forward. It's there in the title: "The squatter cities that have emerged can teach us much about future urban living".
Gentlemanly competition is where suppliers compete on things other than pricing. It's close to price-fixing, with the important difference being that none of them have expressed it to one another, it's at most tacit. This happens a lot to some extent, and consumers can win in the long term, provided the extra money is going on service and R&D.
Basically it gives a little room to shift the emphasis of competition from very short-term pricing. Of course, there's lots of different places for that emphasis to go.
When companies are actually agreeing to fix prices, there is no reason to believe the money is going anywhere that benefits consumers. The idea that the high prices would draw a new competitor does not really hold because price fixing only happens where there are substantial barriers to the entry of new firms into the market. For example, massive investment into machinery and patents together with the knowledge that your competitors are colluding against the consumer and will do the same to you.
People carrying out plans need to make contractual commitments, otherwise nobody would invest in it (either their money, capital equipment, reputation, education or career). It can seem disgusting to be paying out for things you no longer require, but these guys made investments and plans based on promises and they shouldn't suffer - unduly! - because they lived up to their bargain but the other guy broke his word.
True, they shouldn't be compensated for nothing. They should be paid for work they have done and everything else is to take them to a position neutral to what he would have had if the contract had never taken place.
The question really is on whether the contracts were reasonable in the first place. People entering into contracts tend to be convinced there will be no backing out on their part and therefore are happy to agree to a 100% commitment in return for a 2% price cut. This is where protocol and leadership comes in - people with foresight concerned about risk. But much of the time with any major organisation (government, corporation, whatever) the guy who makes the decisions to commit is actually short sighted - he knows, assumes or at least fears he will lose responsibility for it well before it becomes an issue.
Worse, the detail is being arranged by guys who are aware that their ultimate boss is relatively short term. They are wont to make contracts solid basically to make it as unappealing as possible for the next guy to back out - acting against their employer's best interests in order to entrench their position and secure their own jobs.
Agency risk does not only apply to deliberate action against the interests of the principal, most of the time it's just people acting human.
P.S. In evaluating whether Obama is making the right decision here, it's a fallacy to consider all this money as being wasted. The money was already committed, it's a sunk cost - irrelevant to decisions. The decision today must be based on whether a) the additional money to continue Constellation or b) the additional money to pursue the new plan is better. If you want to discuss this committed money, you're appraising decisions made in the past.
Now get creative. Like to go to theme parks? Set up another LLC and create a website dedicated to reviewing them, talking about which ones have what etc. Now you get to write off trips to Six Flags and Cedar point as legitimate business research.
Basically the tax man is going to argue there is a) no view to a profit therefore expenses are not deductible for tax (see revenue expenditure) and/or b) a substantial element of the expense is employee benefit and therefore counts as taxable income to you personally.
Sure, everybody knows someone who seems to be pulling stunts like these. Some of them aren't really: I did tax and VAT for a second hand car salesman who was like a comedy cartoon epitome of a tax evader - I suspect he utilised the image as a sales pitch - but was actually ultra clean. Some people actually are doing it then suddenly aren't after they get an inspection (with penalties and interest). Many people think they are being "a bit cheeky" with the expenses, though the accountant is probably adding back much of the non-deductible stuff in the tax comp.
And yeah, some are getting away with it. Some from being lucky with their gamble and never being inspected, and some because they are very good at it. Of course this is quite the risk and IMO not worth it. A good accountant should have you running quite tax efficient - through good business structure, some avoidance but not evasion (even paying yourself dividends through the LLC can be a great tax advantage compared to the same income as salary).
Slashdot Mirror
There's plenty government etc conspiracy theories but the #1 concern is just how high value a target a centralised personal information resource is. It also means the inevitable situation where the ID card is always assumed to be correct and all other indicators to the contrary must be false. If you rely 100% on one thing that is not 100% secure then not only are you completely insecure, but you don't have any way of knowing that fact.
are redundant.
In the UK if you dispute items on your credit card bill they are cancelled and reversed against the retailer. My credit card was used fraudulently (for a second time) the other week and the card issuer simply went through the list of recent transactions with me and without question cancelled every item I said was not mine. It certainly does not put the credit card system under any threat, actually it's about the only good reason for having them at all.
I agree with the general principle of your argument at least some of the time, in that often the person who's identity is being "stolen" is often not their fault at all. I dispute heavily however the concept that retailers "fraudulently attempt to recover that money from an innocent third party" or that "technically proprietors who accept false credentials should be charged until they can provide evidence that leads to the arrest of the guilty party". This is not the "technical" position at all, retailers are not committing fraud unless they are aware the details are false. They do of course have a duty of care (and usually a contractual requirement) to take reasonable measures to ensure the transaction is genuine, but these alone are not enough to stop fraud and it is ridiculous to suggest they are committing a crime if events were wholly out-with their control.
The problem with "identify theft" is the inability to determine who is ultimately responsible for it. Consider just a few of the possibilities:
- I made some transactions then fraudulently claimed those transactions were false (my fault)
- my good nature led to my assisting Nigerian royalty escape persecution; (my fault)
- malware on my PC (could be seen as my fault, but also shouldn't my bank be designing systems to counter such a common issue?)
- a hacker steals my details from a retailer I used months ago (that retailer's fault, not the fault of the retailer who later gets hit with the fraudulent transaction)
- a retailer has inadequate systems (the retailer's fault)
- some government employee leaves an unencrypted disk with my personal details on the train, allowing a fraudster to open an account in my name (partly the government's fault, partly the account provider should have controls to defend against this e.g. always sending a confirmation letter to my address, which they have confirmed as genuine and current by other means e.g. electoral roll);
- the processing system used by the retailer is ran by a contractor [as is almost always the case] and their equipment has a flaw which was exploited by hackers to obtain my details (fault mostly of the contractor, though the retailer also has a duty to audit those systems)
It goes on and on. The worst bit is most of the time nobody has any idea which if any of the above is what actually happened. There is no silver bullet allowing the cost of the fraud to be passed onto the person responsible for it.
Well either you didn't read beyond paragraph 2 or you simply didn't comprehend what I meant by "Contrast this with say the problem with the leak being that it is embarrassing - here the 'news' is not the substance of the advice as advice, it is the fact that it is embarrassing."
Perhaps I was unclear so I will attempt to demonstrate further using your scenarios:
No that's both (un)professional* advice and news. Let's break it down into the two elements:
- If a lawyer tells you to put your legit savings into some legit investment plan, that's professional advice (well, it might be if there was enough to it to really qualify as professional advice, but I digress).
- Now, when illegality & immorality are introduced, it becomes news.
philandering with prostitutes, see above. There isn't any element to this information other than as news.
Ah so you didn't get beyond paragraph 2 in my post. OK just ask yourself: does the public want to read the contents of this report because they want to personally arrange for fixing radiation leaks? See:
Oh and yes, if the government was paying for the report in order to cover up leaks, that would fall under immorality.
It ends when the public has a right to be informed.
* Actually it's not professional advice at all. By definition for anything to be "professional" it must conform to the rules or standards of a profession. Any advice that is illegal cannot be professional.
Let's be clear on this, the issue has nothing to do with having up-to-the-second stocks news or not. It has nothing to do with an RSS aggregator having a feed from a news site.
It is about a news aggregator publicly disseminating PRIVATE information - buy/sell is professional advice and not news. Professional advice is subject to a two-party contract - it can be given confidentially. This is leaked advice.
Usually leaks aren't much of a problem because there's copyright and so on, they can't just reproduce the detail necessary to completely steal your advice usefully. But, in this case all that's really interesting is the company name and whether the word after it is "buy" or "sell". The entirety of the substance can be in the article. Contrast this with say the problem with the leak being that it is embarrassing - here the "news" is not the substance of the advice as advice, it is the fact that it is embarrassing.
Secondly, absolutely key to the value of that information is extreme timeliness. It only has value if you have that information before most other people, after which point the information becomes obsolete. Thirdly, the person giving the advice is also of high importance. "Sell Microsoft" has a greatly different value as information when Merrill Lynch says it than say, Bob down the pub. So people were paying thefly to get Merrill Lynch's advice more cheaply than buying it from Merrill Lynch.
The point the judge upheld is that thefly were not announcing news, they were reproducing a private professional opinion - and an opinion that was of value because of whose it was. Nobody wanted this as some retrospective news about some event, they wanted to know this information for the exact same reason and no other reason than those for which Merril Lynch's clients were paying for it.
This is little different than say, someone finding out the Coke formula, setting up a factory and marketing it as Coca Cola. The one difference is that in this case the product is "knowledge". The judge seems to have been quite savvy in differentiating the "product" and "knowledge" elements on the basis of the extent that timeliness was important.
To elaborate, well there's a Wiki on elasticity of demand, which basically considers the proportionate change in quantity demanded to the proportionate change in price. But, that's just one influence over what we're really interested in: monopoly profit. That Wiki page has a textbook chart though perhaps it is not clearly explained:
The monopoly position is PmQm whereas under perfect competition the position is PcQc. The former makes the most profit, whilst the latter has the most quantity being demanded without the supplier making a loss*, and hence is the best-possible position consumers can reasonably expect, all else being equal.
However. See those bits in italics? Theories should rightly try to keep other variables and other considerations constant and therein lies the rub.
Firstly, the "loss" is not completely accurate. At PcQc, the supplier is not breaking-even, it is actually making the absolute minimum profit it will accept to continue producing the goods. Consider, would you invest in a company for a 3% return when you can make 2% in a savings account? Probably not: the company would have to make you the 2% (the risk-free opportunity cost) PLUS sufficiently more from the company to account for the increased risk. Economics often treats this minimum return as effectively a finance cost - and, in this context, what really is the difference between dividends that "must" be paid vs. loan interest?
Secondly, music is (aside from personal grumbling about the crap produced these days) wholly about not all being the same - we specifically do not want all else to be equal, it is a creative industry not a commodity. So that means investing in new artists; new artists means new risks. It might help to consider that chart refers to one product and now we are thinking about many. See how this feeds into the minimum profit/finance costs?
Differentiating between monopoly profits and "finance cost" gets very muddled when examining, say, one album or wondering why a CD costs so much. The labels do have a very valid argument when they talk about needing to make lots of money from some in order to suffer the losses on the others. The ONLY way to determine if a music label is making monopoly profits is to examine their overall profits relative to investments and risk, over the long term. Only then can you see if what society is losing through individual albums being "overpriced" is what society is getting back though new creative music (yes this does still make the fatal assumption that the music industry has competent management and is efficient).
Working in audit there is a great deal of importance in the approach you take to testing. Do you take an invoice and check it exists on the ledger, or check the ledger and then see if the invoice exists? One tells you something completely different to the other.
Sure, with stored profiles testing can still be done the right way (getting the profile from the scene and then comparing to the alleged perp). But what assurance is there? How certain can you be that they did not take your profile and then "find" it at the scene? Yes, by getting the profile afterwards it still could be faked, but the controls are inherently stronger when they did not already have the profile. Administrative controls such as time stamps for example, and it would require more people to collude.
More importantly perhaps, if they have to first find someone to test in order to match the DNA, they have to do some police work - they need other evidence. With stored profiles there is a strong risk the police could decide they have their perp based soley on the DNA and then limit all other investigations into proving that guy is their man. The result is DNA becomes nothing more than a police tool for finding suspects and its true value as evidence is compromised. True, more perps are likely to be caught, and more quickly, but there will also be more miscarriages of justice. Juries already convict too easily due to DNA evidence (who says that strand of my hair didn't just blow there in the wind?).
Any doubters consider fingerprinting and Shirley McKie.
The issue isn't proprietary laptops nor the student's control over them. It's bad governance. A bad decision arising from good intentions simply not thought out nor with proper controls and disclosure in place.
With good governance they never should have made a decision that would so obviously bring the school into such disrepute. With proper controls they could demonstrate how the function could not be abused, or at a minimum that abuse would be detected. With proper disclosure the school kids and their parents could have objected and this farce never would have happened even with the school having made the bad decision. With proper disclosure there is an entirely different scope for alarm - spying on kids with their knowledge is appalling but without them knowing, that's really something.
Using non-proprietary laptops merely adds one avenue for detection of the wrongdoing here. It's trivial compared to the other causes of the failure that need to be rectified, starting with the removal of the entire board responsible for the decision because of their utterly incompetent governance.
That's all good and fair and whatnot but the question is what actually happens in future. Why would they make permanent hires when they could go with temporary ones? One of the biggest reasons for subcontracting is because you can get rid of them easily, unlike employees whose many rights are a major pain in the ass for organisations. This goes double for government (local, national, whatever).
They're doing this to save money. The margin the contractor makes is just one opportunity for them to save money here, they'd be negligent if they did not at least consider the others too. Maybe they are going into this with the best of intentions, but inevitably what's going to happen is that in say 5 years time the ratio of contractor/temp workers to permanent staff will have increased.
As TFA all-but underlines, child safety is not the issue here, it is that Harriet Harman is being seen to be taking action. "Doing something".
I'm not quite sure how "getting in touch with Facebook to urge the use of the CEOP button" (i.e. asking for a favour that FB seems happy and well-armed to openly criticise) is to be considered an achievement, but use of FB is in the press a lot so our government instinctively feels the need to exert control over it, however ineffectual and petty.
People giving authority are usually doing so within boundaries. You don't get given authority to say what you please, you get given authority to apply policy. Everyone has their boss.
Seeing as careless talk can lead to image problems and/or lawsuits (or harming your case if prosecuting them). If you're in a senior position and you talk publicly in a work-related context, you talk on behalf of the organisation whether you intend to or not. OTOH if you are "blowing the whistle" on wrongdoing, there is a specific procedure for that which offers protection.
No, they aren't. You do not assume responsibility for anything just because someone would like you to do something and you choose not to. Apple would have to deliberately or at least constructively assume responsibility for the data. It's plausable a class-action could attempt to claim the product failed to deliver on features the consumer reasonably expected, but there will be a licence agreement taking care of that and anyway at most this is a refund not damages.
Not that it matters, but there is ample choice: non-Apple systems are available on non-Apple phones, or don't use a phone for such purposes.
No I'm not a lawyer either, but this is slashdot/the internet where actual expertise is not required/actively discouraged when speaking as if with authority. The important thing is to come across as authoritative whilst saying something the reader agrees with.
Well this looks promising but no reason to take the pressure of them yet. Something I find odd with voting is that something can be effectively reintroduced continually until it is accepted, whereas it is much harder to reject something once accepted.
If we were to be highly sceptical we could point out that these guys weren't involved in the talks so could just be actioning their annoyance, or negotiating for their cut. Or, remember there were corporations - local corporations - who were set to suffer from this legislation. Maybe the ISPs were wiser with their 'donations' than the American-led movie and music lobby.
The issue is that of cost and risk. If I am paying for the entirety of the cost of designing the software I expect entirety of ownership. These contracts also typically put the burden of risk on the client since it is usually very difficult to avoid paying at least the majority of the agreed fee regardless of whether the software is up to scratch.
If I was only paying a fraction of the cost of the software, i.e. the cost was being shared between multiple customers, then no I would not expect to control/own it in the same way.
No, but I didn't buy the Lindisfarne Gospels, I bought this bible, I own it and it's my bible. I do whatever I like with it. Tear pages out, glue new ones in, make a lot of paper aeroplanes if I like. But example is only at all comparable if I was paying for finished, mass-produced software. If I pay someone to write a new bible, the default position is that the publisher owns it. They take the cost and risk burden and hence they generally take ownership.
No but I expect him to leave the tap. I expect to be able to pay another plumber to fix the tap, or to do so myself. And by the way, taps do actually come with instructions and use standardised tools so that anyone can fix them. Regardless, again the example is not applicable since the article is talking about creating something new not fixing something old. If a developer is paid to fix an existing piece of software does he expect to own the software?
Technologists aligning their argument with the MPAA, interesting. I'll not bother posting a retort since they're posted here frequently.
Again this is the purchase of a finished, mass produced piece of software, not payment to design a custom piece of software for me. If I pay an architect to design a building, the architect does not continue to have any rights over any use of that building.
But how much of it will be knowledge worth keeping?
People who smoke, drink or use porn are their own problem (if any), make their own choices and have options for dealing with it.
With abused animals and children, their problem is someone else, they have no choices and no options for dealing with it.
The way we actually protect things runs more in line with what we like most. Like we care more about a capable 11 year old than, say, an invalid 85 year old. Go visit the children's ward then check out the elderly ward, visit daycare then an old-people's home.
(This is not a comment in favour or against the particular method in the OP).
Strange everyone immediately is so confident Kotick is in the wrong here. TFA has them being rolled out the door by security and there's a SEC filing for litigation (admittedly, it doesn't say who will be the pursuer). Maybe Kotick is an asshole (never met him myself) but there's a lot of possibilities here. I understand the US favours employees less than it does in the UK, but over here being thrown out the door either means the company is about to get shafted by an employment tribunal or those guys did something really, really bad.
P.S. I am a "bean counter" (accountant & auditor) and those kind of comments from a CEO are like sirens in our ears. The attitude goes contrary to modern business thinking and introduces significant risks. Secondly, saying it publicly is really, really stupid.
It's all secret so everyone gets to blame unspecified others. When it comes to publish this thing governments will be disowning provisions they worked very hard to put in place. Why couldn't the public participate? Well YOUR government fought hard for that but the others wouldn't let them, of course.
Governments are supposed to have power because they also have accountability, but that requires transparency. Even if all the politicians really were doing their very best with only our interests at heart that would not be good enough. They must be seen to be doing so, just like justice must be seen to be done, an agent must be seen to act on behalf of his principal and a professional must be seen to be independent.
We give them some room for national security and so on, in the hope that the bond of trust is so sacrosanct they would be unable to break it, or at least that someone would feel it and the truth would come out. Naive perhaps, but it's happening right here with these leaks. There's a good egg somewhere.
How would anyone who needs to call tech support because the Ethernet cable isn't correctly plugged in possibly know what an Ethernet cable or network card is?
They have some cables and a box. Shit, the "network card" isn't even a card any more (and "card" was always a bit of a stretch), but no matter since it's hidden away inside the box so they never had much chance of knowing anyway.
If you do something regularly and people usually understand then yeah maybe the rare guy that doesn't is stupid. If people often do not understand, then by definition they are not stupid, but your carrying on with this fruitless pursuit implies you probably are.
You've actually given an argument in favour there. If you hand out bottles of water you become as liable for them as a retail store. You also become liable for anything that happens to anyone on your property, as a retail store would. Letting the neighbours use your pool? Better make sure you have the right signs and fencing up.
But there is the key difference that the legislation is protecting nobody on your property, it favours a third party. A more appropriate analogy is to say that it is the equivalent of you being held responsible if you allow a visitor to use your CDs but then the visitor also (without your knowledge) copies them.
For me environmentalism is all about quality of life. Energy efficiency makes for an easy example: the savings in electricity cost should approximately cover the increased capital cost, so we have a net added value in the form of reduced pollution and reduced use of energy resources. Those benefits are to society rather than me individually, but doing it this way is not sacrificing my standard of living much and if everyone is doing this kind of thing then in the grand scheme it comes back to me eventually.
Sure it's not always so clear-cut, but examples are supposed to be straight forward. Some things being put forward in the name of environmentalism don't have a good enough cost vs. benefit, for example electric cars are useless with even a 1 hour charge time because it means the car is impractical as anything other than a form of local transport (on the other hand maybe we could swap in pre-charged batteries, but I digress).
Therefore, the idea of living in slums to be more environmental is that we should massively sacrifice our standard of living in order to avoid sacrificing our standard of living. Huh?
But... The article doesn't say that. I doesn't actually say slums are a good thing. I only says slums have SOME good things, which we can learn from. Unfortunately it does also highlight that some slums aren't necessarily quite the cesspools we imagine them to be from watching Slumdog Millionaire, but this is just confusing his message, it's not saying slums are some way forward. It's there in the title: "The squatter cities that have emerged can teach us much about future urban living".
Gentlemanly competition is where suppliers compete on things other than pricing. It's close to price-fixing, with the important difference being that none of them have expressed it to one another, it's at most tacit. This happens a lot to some extent, and consumers can win in the long term, provided the extra money is going on service and R&D.
Basically it gives a little room to shift the emphasis of competition from very short-term pricing. Of course, there's lots of different places for that emphasis to go.
When companies are actually agreeing to fix prices, there is no reason to believe the money is going anywhere that benefits consumers. The idea that the high prices would draw a new competitor does not really hold because price fixing only happens where there are substantial barriers to the entry of new firms into the market. For example, massive investment into machinery and patents together with the knowledge that your competitors are colluding against the consumer and will do the same to you.
People carrying out plans need to make contractual commitments, otherwise nobody would invest in it (either their money, capital equipment, reputation, education or career). It can seem disgusting to be paying out for things you no longer require, but these guys made investments and plans based on promises and they shouldn't suffer - unduly! - because they lived up to their bargain but the other guy broke his word.
True, they shouldn't be compensated for nothing. They should be paid for work they have done and everything else is to take them to a position neutral to what he would have had if the contract had never taken place.
The question really is on whether the contracts were reasonable in the first place. People entering into contracts tend to be convinced there will be no backing out on their part and therefore are happy to agree to a 100% commitment in return for a 2% price cut. This is where protocol and leadership comes in - people with foresight concerned about risk. But much of the time with any major organisation (government, corporation, whatever) the guy who makes the decisions to commit is actually short sighted - he knows, assumes or at least fears he will lose responsibility for it well before it becomes an issue.
Worse, the detail is being arranged by guys who are aware that their ultimate boss is relatively short term. They are wont to make contracts solid basically to make it as unappealing as possible for the next guy to back out - acting against their employer's best interests in order to entrench their position and secure their own jobs.
Agency risk does not only apply to deliberate action against the interests of the principal, most of the time it's just people acting human.
P.S. In evaluating whether Obama is making the right decision here, it's a fallacy to consider all this money as being wasted. The money was already committed, it's a sunk cost - irrelevant to decisions. The decision today must be based on whether a) the additional money to continue Constellation or b) the additional money to pursue the new plan is better. If you want to discuss this committed money, you're appraising decisions made in the past.
Whilst agreeing with all your other points:
I would be very surprised if the US does not have an equivalent to the UK "wholly and exclusively" rule. Secondly, there is the whole badges of a trade thing. Thirdly, more relevant to an LLC, is employee expenses and benefits. Also critical to an LLC is the accounting/legal concept of going concern.
Basically the tax man is going to argue there is a) no view to a profit therefore expenses are not deductible for tax (see revenue expenditure) and/or b) a substantial element of the expense is employee benefit and therefore counts as taxable income to you personally.
Sure, everybody knows someone who seems to be pulling stunts like these. Some of them aren't really: I did tax and VAT for a second hand car salesman who was like a comedy cartoon epitome of a tax evader - I suspect he utilised the image as a sales pitch - but was actually ultra clean. Some people actually are doing it then suddenly aren't after they get an inspection (with penalties and interest). Many people think they are being "a bit cheeky" with the expenses, though the accountant is probably adding back much of the non-deductible stuff in the tax comp.
And yeah, some are getting away with it. Some from being lucky with their gamble and never being inspected, and some because they are very good at it. Of course this is quite the risk and IMO not worth it. A good accountant should have you running quite tax efficient - through good business structure, some avoidance but not evasion (even paying yourself dividends through the LLC can be a great tax advantage compared to the same income as salary).