Sounds very similar to the "IR35" rules we have in the UK (nickname comes from the Inland Revenue press release kicking of the debacle, now codified into statutes). Enforcement also very similar, they treat the "employer" company's payments to the "employee" as the amount net of tax and then gross it up to get the tax from the company.
The arguments in favour are basically to protect employees by preventing companies from avoiding all the protection/benefits employees (but not contractors) are given by law. They have a very valid point here, some industries were really abusing this, literally forcing staff to become self-employed so they didn't have to pay them sick time or redundancy. They'd also only get paid for hours worked, no guaranteed minimum pay, leaving a lot of (particularly construction) workers with no income for uncertain periods (particularly winter).
The other reason companies were doing it is to avoid employers' NIC, a "tax on jobs" that the employer pays based on the employee's wages, roughly 12.8%). Hence the tax man's interest - and let's not ignore that rather a lot of the self-employed people were not paying their taxes, and those that were have relatively generous expense rules if they are self-employed compared to those of an employee. And then there's the lower tax rate from taking dividends rather than salary or trade income. So IR35 is significantly an anti- tax-avoidance measure.
But, they also did over people who genuinely wanted to be and were better off as self-employed. For these guys it's just time to make an appointment with an accountant or lawyer, getting round it is often not very difficult provided you have room to negotiate in your contracts and that, well, the whole thing isn't a blatant sham. HMRC helpfully tells us things they look for in determining employee-status therefore you construct your business and contracts to show the reverse. Two key things are firstly to ensure that you only need to do what is required - when, how and who actually does it is totally up to you; even if in practice this is always you, the mere fact that you are allowed to delegate work is what matters. Secondly, have more than one customer/employer.
This could be mostly legal, the servers may have always been owned by the parent company and leased back to the Australian subsidiary. The IP very likely was also never owned by the Australian firm. If the subsidiary did hold assets I expect the parent company had security over them, so if they had loaned the subsidiary money then in the event of being wound up they take control of the assets. Lying to creditors/employees on the other hand, well there's a mess there but it's probably wrongful trading etc on the part of the subsidiary's directors while the parent's may or may not have known.
It will be up to the administrator to find out if there is anything to be done, and the employees, in their position as creditors, should be applying their pressure on him. The company may have knowingly traded whilst insolvent in which case the directors may be charged with wrongful trading, and potentially be personally liable for debts. The nature of the relationship with the parent company and related transactions may also offer some scope - it's not unheard of for courts to lift the veil and treat parent & subsidiary undertakings as one entity. Furthermore he may well be able to show the parent acted as a shadow director. There is room for some optimism here for two reasons, firstly a "million dollar tax bill" implies profits (though it may be tax on salaries that hasn't been paid over). Secondly the government grant should have all sorts of covenants, you have to be an utterly incompetent complete idiot to grant or loan money to any subsidiary and not enforce appropriate covenants and security over the parent company.
While I sympathise with the employees, there were lots of things they could have done, and given the amounts they should have taken some advice. Sure, in start-ups it's not uncommon for employees to give some leeway and "muck in". But this is a subsidiary! Why do this if there is a parent with money? Secondly, if you're a creditor, act like one. Take a look at the accounts, check for assets and file security over them. Negotiate for some equity - if they had just 20% between them minority protections kick in. An accountant probably would have given them this advice for free if they suggested that some audit fees might be coming their way later on.
The usual response to a broken phone is that it has suffered water damage and the insurance does not cover it. They do this without having looked at the phone.
Re-worked summary of TFA:
- All that has been damaged is the System32 folder of user machines.
- 'Destroyed' I imagine is an IT staff trying to dumb down his language to his perception of the level of the reporter's IT knowledge
- Their IT may have done quite well, the only 'damage' is to PCs that were shut down in the 1 hour window between the attack starting and IT containing it
- Employees were supposed to save to the network. The only issue stated is that some staff were breaking the rules and saved things to their own PC.
All they need to do with the affected machines is to boot from a Windows or Linux CD, copy the files to memory stick and throw their standard "new install" image on. No data loss. No network down time. All they're looking at is some hassle for the ~ 18% of users affected and a very busy IT department. Provided the affected users have other machines to work on (or however not losing much productivity) they're not far off having the best scenario any It department can realistically hope for (well, I'd like to say it's reasonable to hope for not having pissed off employees). Sure, no doubt a dozen IT managers can post their "perfect" system, and another dozen IT managers can show how they could destroy it.
Finance income and charges are added/deducted after operating profits. Investors usually want to look at how a company manages it's finances differently to how they want to analyse operations. Wiki has an example income statement.
Independence Day is a piss-take, though it took my second viewing to decide it was intentional.
Try the trailer that Channel 4 played before airing the film in the UK (admittedly, their trailers often poke fun at content that isn't meant to be funny, quite skilfully pointing out that something is crap but why you'll enjoy it anyway). The SF Chronicle is the only text review of a sample from Metacritic that seems to get it.
I think the movie failed in this respect because it is so inconsistent, the first half is standard Hollywood popcorn fare and by the time it's descended into pantomime the movie has already established itself as exactly what it then tries to mock.
"Too big to fail" is the wrong phrase and is overused. Add "too quickly" and the issue is revealed. The failure of massive corporations is not a problem, but a sudden collapse is. This is not special to corporations, it applies to any critical piece of infrastructure - economic or other.
Bridges are failing from the moment they are opened. This is not a problem when failure occurs in line with engineering expectations, we have the resources to make rational responses. Even if it suddenly turns out your bridge us a piece of crap that needs a lane closed and be replaced within a decade, well that sucks but you have the time to deal with that. But when a major bridge just collapses unexpectedly it is a disaster. The problem is not the loss of the asset "bridge" being worth a lot of money but rather the fact that a substantial portion of your transport network relies upon it, and a substantial part of your economy depends on that transport network. And you have no time to deal with it.
Actually there's a complication here not made clear in the summary nor highlighted in TFA.
Little is from California but was tried in Tampa after investigators here ordered his videos through the mail and downloaded them over the Internet.
By shipping goods he is exporting, the seller reaches out and does business in Tampa. Mailing the goods is an act of the seller appointing the carrier as his agent for the purpose of making goods available in Tampa.
The internet download OTOH is usually seen as the goods being made available on the server and the buyer importing from there.
A careful reading of the TFA, it does not disclose whether the internet download or physical supply is a factor here, it only says "materials sold over the Internet" (and then repeated instances of "the materials"). It does note that "the sentence had to be limited to the defendants' activities in the district" (my emphasis), which could be interpreted to support my theory.
My attempt at brevity makes me sound quite certain, but actually it's my vague recollection from accountancy studies - where the focus is more on spotting potential complications to raise with a lawyer rather than on being able to make legal advice, but the message about being very careful where you do business was a strong one. Secondly, my studies were based on Scottish law. It's just logical though, following the principle that goods lost in shipping make the seller liable to replace the goods.
If you're feeling a need to point fingers, go look over at the shareholders. Sure, exec's basically set their own remuneration through undue influence over the "remuneration committee", but it gets approved by the shareholders.
It's not going to stop until the broad body of shareholders as a whole start exercising their power. Not just at a few companies with good governance, but everywhere. Shareholders can't be left thinking that they have to turn a blind eye to absurd remuneration or they will simply go get it elsewhere. As it stands, frankly if an exec is not trying to wangle himself some fantastic pay deal then he's probably not fit for the job.
Turning up at the AGM would be a start. Legislation, guidance and listing rules can help significantly though, for example the UK Combined Code of Corporate Governance puts pressure on institutional investors to participate. Allow internet streaming of the AGM together with voting over the internet - how many people have a sufficiently large investment that it's worth travelling to the AGM?
Everything in Europe has been traditionally unlocked and unsubsidized phones.
I don't know about the rest of Europe but here in UK phones come with the carrier plan, locked and heavily subsidised. Hardly anyone buys a phone as a stand alone piece of hardware (ignoring the second hand market).
In fact it's tempting to suggest that the phones are not so much subsidised by the carrier as the stand-alone units being artificially expensive. For example the Hero costs £399 alone*, or how about a total of £366 when bought as part of a plan** which means it's £30 CHEAPER to get what amounts to a small amount of free usage*** for two years plus a 2 year credit plan.
By the way, If the above happens to be the exact plan you want, buying the package means the phone costs you £126 (plus 3Gb free internet thrown in), so you could conclude that the phone is 66% subsidised. If you'd rather only be contracted for 18 months, well you can but it doesn't make sense to do so: total cost is now £396 so it becomes £30 more expensive simply so that you get 6 months less free usage and a shorter free credit period! (You'd bet better off taking the 24m plan and paying a settlement to cancel early)
From what I can gather UK consumer is in a better position than in the US (I think mostly due to coverage) but the situation is still far from what you would expect in a properly competitive market.
* Carphone Warehouse
** (TMobile £126 for phone with £10 x 24 month contract)
*** 100mins, 100 texts and actually-quite-good 3Gb internet usage per month
Yes, the drinking-water limit isn't particularly useful, since these levels aren't being found in drinking water. As such we should be comparing to "safe" limits for the scenario (or at least levels for the "general environment*").
I think drinking water levels however are often used - seemingly out of context - in this way because they are perceived as more reliable. People reason that much more scrutiny would be placed on whether something is safe for human consumption than for any other purpose. They then have to evaluate themselves how unsafe it has to be to drink for it to be unsafe or damaging to the environment*.
People are more inclined to rely on a piece of trustworthy information that has to be brought into relevance by their own inexpert/vague estimation than they are to rely on a piece of untrustworthy information regardless of how relevant. Sometimes there's a thin blurry line between ignorance and a healthy dose of scepticism.
* I use the term "environment" quite loosely, some people may be thinking of the cute bunny-rabbits while others may be thinking about crop yield. The distinction isn't really relevant to the point.
Worth pointing out perhaps that of the £1.16m spent a significant amount will be clawed back through income taxes, and there's no detail there of how much of that cost is actually incremental rather than an allocation of central costs that were going to be spent anyway. The taxation point, by the by, is quite significant since one of the important points surrounding the excessive claims is that they were not being taxed, often at direct odds with the taxation rules governing you and I.
I suppose this has nothing to do with commercial considerations, such as ensuring customers have to re-stock, or enforcing the payment of licensing fees?
No, and any company should be doing just that. The company's auditors should be detecting if it's not required, and reporting such weakness to management. Failing to implement such basic controls will cost the company, whether or not there is fraud. The auditor will face much greater audit risk and hence have to increase his workload (and hence fee) to compensate.
On the other hand, such a control probably would not be very effective against this. For example Person A gets tricked and then gets Person B who probably does not go through the detailed mechanics - if anything he'd go check out the official website and approve it on that basis.
A more relevant control would be authorised supplier lists combined with set procedures. For example, a company would only allow emissions trading through a specific broker and the payments would always be made to that broker's escrow account. That way you can get fiddled and all you get is a call from your broker wondering why they have your money.
For what it's worth transactions were a lot better controlled when everything was paid by cheque. Cheques required two signatories. Banks were very good at ensuring authorised signatories were authorised. Now for smaller businesses with internet banking you have a bookkeeper who needs access to print statements and the same login can complete transactions from start to finish - half the time they're using the managing director's login. Well, you can't have the MD's time being used up doing silly things like printing statements can you? And bookkeepers, it's not like they're in a high-risk position and able to hide fraud....
The intelligence services have apparently done quite well, and we usually don't know much or anything about their successes. This is perhaps their biggest weakness, the better they do the less politicians can be seen to be "doing something". Not that I wish to imply politicians would deliberately weaken intelligence, but rather that they rely on intelligence for effect while also implementing ineffective and annoying measures simply because they are publicly visible.
Personally I feel most vulnerable in the security lines.
- Large room very densely populated with people,
- many people are fidgeting with baggage/clothing e.g. taking of belts & emptying pockets
- accessible prior to going through any security at all,
- strong political message
The downside however is these security measures are a good propaganda tool for terrorists. Going through them is a non-stop reminder of terrorism and how frightened of it we/the government is. But for watching the news and enduring security measures I would very rarely think about terrorism.
The quote bears no reflection of any opinion on the security or quality of IE in general. The "user" being referred to in the quote is UK government staff, using UK government IT, and his response is wholly within that context. As is very often the case on Slashdot (and, to be fair, much of the media), the summary shifts the context slightly and then omits significant information and thus infers something other than what was communicated at the time.
Immediately after the quoted text, unmissable except by the most... Let's give the benefit of the doubt and say hurried of submitters and editors, is the following: (my emphasis added for the most hurried of Slashdot readers)
26 Jan 2010 : Column WA317
Microsoft issued a patch to fix the recent Internet Explorer vulnerability on 21 January. Prior to this, government departments had been issued with a GovCertUK alert on how to deal with this particular incident and to mitigate vulnerabilities in relation to particular versions of IE.
A government user, operating on government systems, such as the Government Secure Intranet (GSi), will benefit from additional security measures, unlikely to be available to the average home computer user. These include tools which actively monitor for evidence of any malicious attacks.
technology isn't very good for a "community environment", usually quite the reverse. People sending emails when they could be getting up and talking face-to-face (or at least using the telephone) is a bug-bear for many people and many organisations actively discourage it.
Forums have no more value than email, it just doesn't pop up on your screen when you're trying to work. Instant messengers are merely an even worse form of email, because they positively demand an instant response and at best you get cliques forming (it's an exclusive, not inclusive form of communication).
Facebook does have some advantages, but mostly for colleagues who are already friends - if I had to join my work's Facebook there's no way I'd be using by real profile (despite approaching Facebook with the assumption that anybody I might not want to be reading it is doing so). A work Facebook is more like a collaborative newsletter - people put their carefully selected and sanitised holiday snaps up, in order to be seen to be contributing while offering nothing of any real social or community value.
If you want community and a social work environment, be social. Have a good Christmas event. Recognise that having a couple of very gregarious people on staff is important. Keep a small pot of money to fund staff excursions - BBQ, paintball, karting, whatever, maybe with a bus so they can drink. Those gregarious people will probably be very good at organising these. The relatively social and friendly senior management can come sometimes, but make a timely exit when people look like they want to behave as they do with friends rather than as they do in front of the boss.
People have modded the "get a water cooler" comment funny. Funny because it's so true.
If overpopulation is an issue and you want to truly, effectively do something about it, that's simple. Come up with a version of "the pill" for men. End of population problem.
No this technological problem is already solved with the female pill. The remaining problem in this regard is distribution, i.e. it (nor other forms of contraception) is not available/wanted/accepted in developing nations. There are numerous other problems in addition to this. Secondly condoms are preferable in any case since the spread of HIV is frankly astonishing in many developing nations.
All other points aside, never forget that a death prevented by a vaccine is a human life saved. Nothing is more sacred than any human life.
Usually when I see one of these computer screens the absurdity is quite distracting - often because it looks like a computer game and not software being used by highly skilled professionals at work. Actually that's a bit unfair, most games' UI is and looks much more usable. It doesn't help when the script calls for software that apparently comes with a button simply labelled "magically solve your problem".
BBC produced content is sold Worldwide, making a tidy contribution*. Most of this is broadcast to the UK well before internationally, so (for example) an American TV exec would naturally be concerned that any show they were interested in licensing might just be all over the torrents well in advance.
* Though this is quite difficult to determine, since while the Annual Review indicates dividends paid of around £70m in 2008-09, there's presumably a lot of scope for costs shared with the BBC (i.e. that the BBC would otherwise have had to pay themselves). Last year BBC Worldwide sales were £1b.
By next week many people may have signed up with AT&T whom, had they known, would have waited to check for better deals / a preferred carrier.
Don't hold your breath though. The situation in the UK after the iPhone recently became non-exclusive is a bunch of remarkably similar deals, the only notable exception being that Tesco offers a 12 month contract.
This is really the fault of the person who decided to keep their assets in a PayPal account. And this isn't the first time? Well, they just don't learn do they.
I'd assumed there was the usual fail in the/. summary, but the wikileaks page does indeed say "frozen WikiLeaks assets". I still suspect this is a mistake with the wording however - taken literally it could only mean Paypal has appointed an administrator and taken over all the assets (presumably Wikileaks has at least a computer as a physical asset), which seems unlikely. All that's been frozen is the Paypal account.
This leaves a question unanswered as to whether there was a lot of money in there at the time. Perhaps Wikileaks were very stupid, or had some specific reason (e.g. they make a lot of Paypal payments and this minimises fees, or they fear regular banks even more).
Or perhaps they had little money in the account but they had to shut down expensive operations in order that they could maximise the duration that their available banked funds will keep them on life-support, since little more will be coming in. An sensible course of action given the only obvious alternative. This theory appears to be supported by the first line on their website:
To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations
A lot of posters have questioned Wikileaks' use of Paypal. That's the wrong question - you should be asking why lots of people use Paypal. Wikileaks needs donations from people. They need to be as convenient as possible for as many people as possible to make donations. LOTS of people won't make a donation if they have to make an account with some other provider for that sole purpose. They detail numerous other (still available) methods of making a donation, but I bet at least 90% comes through Paypal.
I value my time as much as my money. Some games have very boring periods and frankly there's better things I could be doing with that time, so I see an opportunity cost there - the section actually makes the game less valuable, despite adding time. I'd pay good money to never have to watch that Indiana Jones crap again.
Economists use utility in an attempt to quantify satisfaction, though most concede it's almost meaningless to do so in practice so they'll go with preferences when possible (preference, i.e. "more utility than the other" is reasonably reliable, trying to quantify how much more is nigh impossible).
It's even more complicated than that though. you can't necessarily just sample the best bits, or cut out the worst bits, and arrive at more entertainment per hour. With any story the whole should be much more than the sum of it's parts.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds very similar to the "IR35" rules we have in the UK (nickname comes from the Inland Revenue press release kicking of the debacle, now codified into statutes). Enforcement also very similar, they treat the "employer" company's payments to the "employee" as the amount net of tax and then gross it up to get the tax from the company.
The arguments in favour are basically to protect employees by preventing companies from avoiding all the protection/benefits employees (but not contractors) are given by law. They have a very valid point here, some industries were really abusing this, literally forcing staff to become self-employed so they didn't have to pay them sick time or redundancy. They'd also only get paid for hours worked, no guaranteed minimum pay, leaving a lot of (particularly construction) workers with no income for uncertain periods (particularly winter).
The other reason companies were doing it is to avoid employers' NIC, a "tax on jobs" that the employer pays based on the employee's wages, roughly 12.8%). Hence the tax man's interest - and let's not ignore that rather a lot of the self-employed people were not paying their taxes, and those that were have relatively generous expense rules if they are self-employed compared to those of an employee. And then there's the lower tax rate from taking dividends rather than salary or trade income. So IR35 is significantly an anti- tax-avoidance measure.
But, they also did over people who genuinely wanted to be and were better off as self-employed. For these guys it's just time to make an appointment with an accountant or lawyer, getting round it is often not very difficult provided you have room to negotiate in your contracts and that, well, the whole thing isn't a blatant sham. HMRC helpfully tells us things they look for in determining employee-status therefore you construct your business and contracts to show the reverse. Two key things are firstly to ensure that you only need to do what is required - when, how and who actually does it is totally up to you; even if in practice this is always you, the mere fact that you are allowed to delegate work is what matters. Secondly, have more than one customer/employer.
This could be mostly legal, the servers may have always been owned by the parent company and leased back to the Australian subsidiary. The IP very likely was also never owned by the Australian firm. If the subsidiary did hold assets I expect the parent company had security over them, so if they had loaned the subsidiary money then in the event of being wound up they take control of the assets. Lying to creditors/employees on the other hand, well there's a mess there but it's probably wrongful trading etc on the part of the subsidiary's directors while the parent's may or may not have known.
It will be up to the administrator to find out if there is anything to be done, and the employees, in their position as creditors, should be applying their pressure on him. The company may have knowingly traded whilst insolvent in which case the directors may be charged with wrongful trading, and potentially be personally liable for debts. The nature of the relationship with the parent company and related transactions may also offer some scope - it's not unheard of for courts to lift the veil and treat parent & subsidiary undertakings as one entity. Furthermore he may well be able to show the parent acted as a shadow director. There is room for some optimism here for two reasons, firstly a "million dollar tax bill" implies profits (though it may be tax on salaries that hasn't been paid over). Secondly the government grant should have all sorts of covenants, you have to be an utterly incompetent complete idiot to grant or loan money to any subsidiary and not enforce appropriate covenants and security over the parent company.
While I sympathise with the employees, there were lots of things they could have done, and given the amounts they should have taken some advice. Sure, in start-ups it's not uncommon for employees to give some leeway and "muck in". But this is a subsidiary! Why do this if there is a parent with money? Secondly, if you're a creditor, act like one. Take a look at the accounts, check for assets and file security over them. Negotiate for some equity - if they had just 20% between them minority protections kick in. An accountant probably would have given them this advice for free if they suggested that some audit fees might be coming their way later on.
Er, I meant to say "a" TED video, since obviously this isn't the same talk.
ahem.
TED: Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia (20m).
The usual response to a broken phone is that it has suffered water damage and the insurance does not cover it. They do this without having looked at the phone.
Re-worked summary of TFA:
- All that has been damaged is the System32 folder of user machines.
- 'Destroyed' I imagine is an IT staff trying to dumb down his language to his perception of the level of the reporter's IT knowledge
- Their IT may have done quite well, the only 'damage' is to PCs that were shut down in the 1 hour window between the attack starting and IT containing it
- Employees were supposed to save to the network. The only issue stated is that some staff were breaking the rules and saved things to their own PC.
All they need to do with the affected machines is to boot from a Windows or Linux CD, copy the files to memory stick and throw their standard "new install" image on. No data loss. No network down time. All they're looking at is some hassle for the ~ 18% of users affected and a very busy IT department. Provided the affected users have other machines to work on (or however not losing much productivity) they're not far off having the best scenario any It department can realistically hope for (well, I'd like to say it's reasonable to hope for not having pissed off employees). Sure, no doubt a dozen IT managers can post their "perfect" system, and another dozen IT managers can show how they could destroy it.
Finance income and charges are added/deducted after operating profits. Investors usually want to look at how a company manages it's finances differently to how they want to analyse operations. Wiki has an example income statement.
Independence Day is a piss-take, though it took my second viewing to decide it was intentional.
Try the trailer that Channel 4 played before airing the film in the UK (admittedly, their trailers often poke fun at content that isn't meant to be funny, quite skilfully pointing out that something is crap but why you'll enjoy it anyway). The SF Chronicle is the only text review of a sample from Metacritic that seems to get it.
I think the movie failed in this respect because it is so inconsistent, the first half is standard Hollywood popcorn fare and by the time it's descended into pantomime the movie has already established itself as exactly what it then tries to mock.
"Too big to fail" is the wrong phrase and is overused. Add "too quickly" and the issue is revealed. The failure of massive corporations is not a problem, but a sudden collapse is. This is not special to corporations, it applies to any critical piece of infrastructure - economic or other.
Bridges are failing from the moment they are opened. This is not a problem when failure occurs in line with engineering expectations, we have the resources to make rational responses. Even if it suddenly turns out your bridge us a piece of crap that needs a lane closed and be replaced within a decade, well that sucks but you have the time to deal with that. But when a major bridge just collapses unexpectedly it is a disaster. The problem is not the loss of the asset "bridge" being worth a lot of money but rather the fact that a substantial portion of your transport network relies upon it, and a substantial part of your economy depends on that transport network. And you have no time to deal with it.
Actually there's a complication here not made clear in the summary nor highlighted in TFA.
By shipping goods he is exporting, the seller reaches out and does business in Tampa. Mailing the goods is an act of the seller appointing the carrier as his agent for the purpose of making goods available in Tampa.
The internet download OTOH is usually seen as the goods being made available on the server and the buyer importing from there.
A careful reading of the TFA, it does not disclose whether the internet download or physical supply is a factor here, it only says "materials sold over the Internet" (and then repeated instances of "the materials"). It does note that "the sentence had to be limited to the defendants' activities in the district" (my emphasis), which could be interpreted to support my theory.
My attempt at brevity makes me sound quite certain, but actually it's my vague recollection from accountancy studies - where the focus is more on spotting potential complications to raise with a lawyer rather than on being able to make legal advice, but the message about being very careful where you do business was a strong one. Secondly, my studies were based on Scottish law. It's just logical though, following the principle that goods lost in shipping make the seller liable to replace the goods.
If you're feeling a need to point fingers, go look over at the shareholders. Sure, exec's basically set their own remuneration through undue influence over the "remuneration committee", but it gets approved by the shareholders.
It's not going to stop until the broad body of shareholders as a whole start exercising their power. Not just at a few companies with good governance, but everywhere. Shareholders can't be left thinking that they have to turn a blind eye to absurd remuneration or they will simply go get it elsewhere. As it stands, frankly if an exec is not trying to wangle himself some fantastic pay deal then he's probably not fit for the job.
Turning up at the AGM would be a start. Legislation, guidance and listing rules can help significantly though, for example the UK Combined Code of Corporate Governance puts pressure on institutional investors to participate. Allow internet streaming of the AGM together with voting over the internet - how many people have a sufficiently large investment that it's worth travelling to the AGM?
I don't know about the rest of Europe but here in UK phones come with the carrier plan, locked and heavily subsidised. Hardly anyone buys a phone as a stand alone piece of hardware (ignoring the second hand market).
In fact it's tempting to suggest that the phones are not so much subsidised by the carrier as the stand-alone units being artificially expensive. For example the Hero costs £399 alone*, or how about a total of £366 when bought as part of a plan** which means it's £30 CHEAPER to get what amounts to a small amount of free usage*** for two years plus a 2 year credit plan.
By the way, If the above happens to be the exact plan you want, buying the package means the phone costs you £126 (plus 3Gb free internet thrown in), so you could conclude that the phone is 66% subsidised. If you'd rather only be contracted for 18 months, well you can but it doesn't make sense to do so: total cost is now £396 so it becomes £30 more expensive simply so that you get 6 months less free usage and a shorter free credit period! (You'd bet better off taking the 24m plan and paying a settlement to cancel early)
From what I can gather UK consumer is in a better position than in the US (I think mostly due to coverage) but the situation is still far from what you would expect in a properly competitive market.
* Carphone Warehouse
** (TMobile £126 for phone with £10 x 24 month contract)
*** 100mins, 100 texts and actually-quite-good 3Gb internet usage per month
Yes, the drinking-water limit isn't particularly useful, since these levels aren't being found in drinking water. As such we should be comparing to "safe" limits for the scenario (or at least levels for the "general environment*").
I think drinking water levels however are often used - seemingly out of context - in this way because they are perceived as more reliable. People reason that much more scrutiny would be placed on whether something is safe for human consumption than for any other purpose. They then have to evaluate themselves how unsafe it has to be to drink for it to be unsafe or damaging to the environment*.
People are more inclined to rely on a piece of trustworthy information that has to be brought into relevance by their own inexpert/vague estimation than they are to rely on a piece of untrustworthy information regardless of how relevant. Sometimes there's a thin blurry line between ignorance and a healthy dose of scepticism.
* I use the term "environment" quite loosely, some people may be thinking of the cute bunny-rabbits while others may be thinking about crop yield. The distinction isn't really relevant to the point.
Worth pointing out perhaps that of the £1.16m spent a significant amount will be clawed back through income taxes, and there's no detail there of how much of that cost is actually incremental rather than an allocation of central costs that were going to be spent anyway. The taxation point, by the by, is quite significant since one of the important points surrounding the excessive claims is that they were not being taxed, often at direct odds with the taxation rules governing you and I.
I suppose this has nothing to do with commercial considerations, such as ensuring customers have to re-stock, or enforcing the payment of licensing fees?
No, and any company should be doing just that. The company's auditors should be detecting if it's not required, and reporting such weakness to management. Failing to implement such basic controls will cost the company, whether or not there is fraud. The auditor will face much greater audit risk and hence have to increase his workload (and hence fee) to compensate.
On the other hand, such a control probably would not be very effective against this. For example Person A gets tricked and then gets Person B who probably does not go through the detailed mechanics - if anything he'd go check out the official website and approve it on that basis.
A more relevant control would be authorised supplier lists combined with set procedures. For example, a company would only allow emissions trading through a specific broker and the payments would always be made to that broker's escrow account. That way you can get fiddled and all you get is a call from your broker wondering why they have your money.
For what it's worth transactions were a lot better controlled when everything was paid by cheque. Cheques required two signatories. Banks were very good at ensuring authorised signatories were authorised. Now for smaller businesses with internet banking you have a bookkeeper who needs access to print statements and the same login can complete transactions from start to finish - half the time they're using the managing director's login. Well, you can't have the MD's time being used up doing silly things like printing statements can you? And bookkeepers, it's not like they're in a high-risk position and able to hide fraud....
The intelligence services have apparently done quite well, and we usually don't know much or anything about their successes. This is perhaps their biggest weakness, the better they do the less politicians can be seen to be "doing something". Not that I wish to imply politicians would deliberately weaken intelligence, but rather that they rely on intelligence for effect while also implementing ineffective and annoying measures simply because they are publicly visible.
Personally I feel most vulnerable in the security lines.
- Large room very densely populated with people,
- many people are fidgeting with baggage/clothing e.g. taking of belts & emptying pockets
- accessible prior to going through any security at all,
- strong political message
The downside however is these security measures are a good propaganda tool for terrorists. Going through them is a non-stop reminder of terrorism and how frightened of it we/the government is. But for watching the news and enduring security measures I would very rarely think about terrorism.
The quote bears no reflection of any opinion on the security or quality of IE in general. The "user" being referred to in the quote is UK government staff, using UK government IT, and his response is wholly within that context. As is very often the case on Slashdot (and, to be fair, much of the media), the summary shifts the context slightly and then omits significant information and thus infers something other than what was communicated at the time.
Immediately after the quoted text, unmissable except by the most... Let's give the benefit of the doubt and say hurried of submitters and editors, is the following: (my emphasis added for the most hurried of Slashdot readers)
technology isn't very good for a "community environment", usually quite the reverse. People sending emails when they could be getting up and talking face-to-face (or at least using the telephone) is a bug-bear for many people and many organisations actively discourage it.
Forums have no more value than email, it just doesn't pop up on your screen when you're trying to work. Instant messengers are merely an even worse form of email, because they positively demand an instant response and at best you get cliques forming (it's an exclusive, not inclusive form of communication).
Facebook does have some advantages, but mostly for colleagues who are already friends - if I had to join my work's Facebook there's no way I'd be using by real profile (despite approaching Facebook with the assumption that anybody I might not want to be reading it is doing so). A work Facebook is more like a collaborative newsletter - people put their carefully selected and sanitised holiday snaps up, in order to be seen to be contributing while offering nothing of any real social or community value.
If you want community and a social work environment, be social. Have a good Christmas event. Recognise that having a couple of very gregarious people on staff is important. Keep a small pot of money to fund staff excursions - BBQ, paintball, karting, whatever, maybe with a bus so they can drink. Those gregarious people will probably be very good at organising these. The relatively social and friendly senior management can come sometimes, but make a timely exit when people look like they want to behave as they do with friends rather than as they do in front of the boss.
People have modded the "get a water cooler" comment funny. Funny because it's so true.
No this technological problem is already solved with the female pill. The remaining problem in this regard is distribution, i.e. it (nor other forms of contraception) is not available/wanted/accepted in developing nations. There are numerous other problems in addition to this. Secondly condoms are preferable in any case since the spread of HIV is frankly astonishing in many developing nations.
All other points aside, never forget that a death prevented by a vaccine is a human life saved. Nothing is more sacred than any human life.
Usually when I see one of these computer screens the absurdity is quite distracting - often because it looks like a computer game and not software being used by highly skilled professionals at work. Actually that's a bit unfair, most games' UI is and looks much more usable. It doesn't help when the script calls for software that apparently comes with a button simply labelled "magically solve your problem".
Also:
BBC produced content is sold Worldwide, making a tidy contribution*. Most of this is broadcast to the UK well before internationally, so (for example) an American TV exec would naturally be concerned that any show they were interested in licensing might just be all over the torrents well in advance.
* Though this is quite difficult to determine, since while the Annual Review indicates dividends paid of around £70m in 2008-09, there's presumably a lot of scope for costs shared with the BBC (i.e. that the BBC would otherwise have had to pay themselves). Last year BBC Worldwide sales were £1b.
By next week many people may have signed up with AT&T whom, had they known, would have waited to check for better deals / a preferred carrier.
Don't hold your breath though. The situation in the UK after the iPhone recently became non-exclusive is a bunch of remarkably similar deals, the only notable exception being that Tesco offers a 12 month contract.
I'd assumed there was the usual fail in the /. summary, but the wikileaks page does indeed say "frozen WikiLeaks assets". I still suspect this is a mistake with the wording however - taken literally it could only mean Paypal has appointed an administrator and taken over all the assets (presumably Wikileaks has at least a computer as a physical asset), which seems unlikely. All that's been frozen is the Paypal account.
This leaves a question unanswered as to whether there was a lot of money in there at the time. Perhaps Wikileaks were very stupid, or had some specific reason (e.g. they make a lot of Paypal payments and this minimises fees, or they fear regular banks even more).
Or perhaps they had little money in the account but they had to shut down expensive operations in order that they could maximise the duration that their available banked funds will keep them on life-support, since little more will be coming in. An sensible course of action given the only obvious alternative. This theory appears to be supported by the first line on their website:
A lot of posters have questioned Wikileaks' use of Paypal. That's the wrong question - you should be asking why lots of people use Paypal. Wikileaks needs donations from people. They need to be as convenient as possible for as many people as possible to make donations. LOTS of people won't make a donation if they have to make an account with some other provider for that sole purpose. They detail numerous other (still available) methods of making a donation, but I bet at least 90% comes through Paypal.
I value my time as much as my money. Some games have very boring periods and frankly there's better things I could be doing with that time, so I see an opportunity cost there - the section actually makes the game less valuable, despite adding time. I'd pay good money to never have to watch that Indiana Jones crap again.
Economists use utility in an attempt to quantify satisfaction, though most concede it's almost meaningless to do so in practice so they'll go with preferences when possible (preference, i.e. "more utility than the other" is reasonably reliable, trying to quantify how much more is nigh impossible).
It's even more complicated than that though. you can't necessarily just sample the best bits, or cut out the worst bits, and arrive at more entertainment per hour. With any story the whole should be much more than the sum of it's parts.