Optical drives are one of those things that people need very rarely, but that's not the same as never.
Sure I could probably make do with a single optical drive in the entire home. At work, we could probably share one external unit between 50 people. I'd view an optical drive in a laptop as a negative - wasted space and weight.
On this new Guardian piece? Not that I can see yet. But having read the piece, why would they? There's nothing new in it. The Guardian now get to add some quotation marks to exact wording for things which were all described before.
Worse, they quote plain-English paragraphs then paraphrase it and tell you what you should interpret from it. All supposition, opinion and subjectivity.
DRM on BBC broadcasts is an arse, but so is this article.
Unfortunately many companies do not have good procedures in place to handle the death of a customer, adding frustration to an already unhappy time. However, it is the good ones who do require the death certificate.
You need to be executor in order to settle his affairs. These companies asking for death certificates aren't just doing it for their own security purposes. They are legally required to act only on instruction from your father or someone he has expressly authorised them to recognise as an agent (an executor is a form of agent that everyone is obliged to recognise).
There are many reasons for this. There are related frauds committed against people still alive, and frauds against the deceased. Families squabble a lot over these and related matters so the institutions rightfully want to ensure they deal with the appointed person. Even with the best of intentions, the deceased may have wanted someone specific to settle their affairs and the particular person might not be it.
As regards you personally, record passwords in an encrypted file, Keypass or whatever, and leave your lawyer with instructions and a sealed envelope containing the password to your encrypted file. Alternately use a safety deposit box, the bank is usually the first place anyone goes with the death certificates and they will advise of the box - however they charge an annual fee.
More importantly, arrange your will and set who will be executor while you're at your lawyer.
If an economist argues that good customer service is a consequence of pursuing profit, he is talking about macroeconomics.
If an economist argues that profit is a consequence of good customer service, he is talking about microeconomics.
If a manger confuses the two he has neither an understanding of economics nor any commercial sense.
For what it's worth, MBAs are usually obtained (here in UK anyway) by people who do not have business or management backgrounds. It's a second degree taken later in life, intended to assist moving into management. People who were hot shit at whatever specialism they had being given a rudimentary introduction to high-level business academic theory because they're trying to get on the Board. The result is a proportion of them think they're still hot shit at this management thing, or are too embarrassed to admit they're not and so are desperate to prove themselves. Sure you do get great managers with MBA's but most of them were just getting a bit of paper to back up the substantial management experience they already had.
What's the rationale that robots or software costs us jobs?
First we had one way of doing it, then we found a better way. You think it's right that we should keep doing it the wrong way? You think people are entitled to jobs even though it's not the best way of doing it?
Hey, maybe we should adopt the same policy to everything. Make code buggy so we can employ more people in IT support. Make cars less reliable so more people are needed to fix them and build replacements.
And you realise that makes everything more expensive, right? So everything costs more. This isn't some economics shenanigans either; absolutely more resources are required for the same level of production. There's three fundamental ways to improve quality of life: find more resources, make things in a way that requires less resources and manage resources better. Sure, there's arguments within the economy for the distribution of resources (or money, anyway) but when you're asking that we make the same thing with more resources you're always losing and still not addressing your distribution issue.
The/. summary can easily be confused for ad hominem arguments, TFA cannot. It's one of those rare quality pieces of journalism.
The porn background is absolutely core to the notion that the organisation is being set up with the intention to issue legal letters encouraging people to pay a fee to avoid humiliation of being taken to court for pirating porn. Or, as the House of Lords succinctly described it: ''straightforward legal blackmail".
The secretive, murky background to the individuals and their organisations is also highly relevant to the above.
More notably perhaps, Maj. Richard D. Winters (Damian Lewis).
None of this disproves the AC's point however. British actors act American when playing an American hero and American actors act American when playing a British hero.
I find the villain side slightly different. I suspect much of this stems from British plays where it is more common for villains to be complex and charismatic characters. Notably, American Shakespearian actors such as Walken play such roles.
Re:Like Their Lawyers Would Let Something Slip
on
IRS Auditing Google
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm, maybe I'll just transfer all my profits to Bermuda... oh, right, I'm poor. We pay taxes. Corporations and people rich enough to afford shifty accountants don't.
Without wanting to disagree with the broader point and certainly not trying to defend it, it's not just "rich" people scamming taxes.
It's more about activities providing the opportunity. Big companies and many rich people have international operations so mucking around with where the income falls taxable becomes possible. Annoyed about cruise lines not paying tax? Well neither do the waiters working on the ships.
Many small business owners are "at it" to some extent, whether they're inflating expenses or taking cash out the till instead of recording the sale. The smaller they are, the more likely it is, in my experience - it's remarkable how many people seem to live off fresh air alone. Admittedly much of that is again due to opportunity: it's less convenient to hide income when you have an employee processing invoices and doing the books. Instead a medium sized company is more likely to be underestimating the value of stocks or saying some of their debts are bad.
Not just companies either. I'd bet money that a salaried plumber doing a wee job for his neighbour at the weekend isn't declaring it on a tax return. Of course that's "just a bit cheeky", a small time guy getting by right? Tax evasion is tax evasion.
Wouldn't it be better if the networks agreed that phones can use each other's networks under specified circumstances?
They supposedly already do it here (UK), though I have never noticed any evidence of it bar a couple of operators who have a strategy of sharing towers. I do recall reading that there are phone settings, which the operators set so that it basically never happens except for 999 (911) calls, but some people claim to have been able to convince the operator to allow them to change it.
'Government officials are often guilty of politicizing science. Egged on by business or religious interests, they [...]
Something I try to always keep in mind is that whenever anyone, including myself, says words implying "everyone else is bad" (or wrong), it's probably naive or arrogant. "Some _______ ________ are suppressed, while others are manipulated or distorted beyond recognition."
The main problem is common to any doctrine: people. Particularly people with some kind of vested interest, whether it be financial, political, ideological, power...
Strange, I thought the US code was broadly similar to the UK's employed vs. self employed + IR35 rules, which are quite easy to satisfy if you're genuinely self employed.
Simply having more than one customer puts it your way. If you don't have more than one customer, frankly it's hard not to see their point.
For what it's worth, the core purpose of the legislation (UK anyway) is anti-tax avoidance with a side line in preventing companies bypassing employment rights. Being self-employed has tax advantages for the individual and (in the UK...) especially the employer. Done through a company: * The effective tax rate comes down to 25% instead of 33% for the individual; * The employer's tax rate comes down to 0% from 14% for the employer; * The tax regime is more generous (expenses, allowances and reliefs); * You can control the timing of income to manage the tax bands; * The "employee" loses all employment rights.
In the UK, it's difficult to see the legislation providing any kind of advantage to corporations.
The BBC cannot make a profit, due to the not-for-profit charter of the organisation it can only make periodic surpluses or deficits - over the long term they can only net off to nil. Any surplus generated on popular programmes is used to subsidise either/both the licence fee and/or unpopular but "culturally significant" or whatever programmes.
I'm not really sure you have a solid grasp of the way media or any other duplicable asset is sold. Making a sale in many different ways is not the same as "being paid at least twice". Let's say a commercially successful programme like Planet Earth costs £10m to produce, maybe it makes £3m from DVD sales, £1m from BBC America and £3m from deals with other broadcasters. The remaining £3m then comes from the licence fee pot. Maybe another series is so widely successful that it made £20m from those other sources: £10m would go into the licence fee pot, subsidising the licence fee and/or other programmes.
"They can get paid at least twice" just doesn't have any meaning. I watched Inception at the cinema with 5 friends. Did Warner get paid 6 times? Another friend bought the DVD, still another bought the Bluray. Are Warner getting paid 8 times over just between my social circle? Or is it 3? What if myself and 2 of my cinema-going friends also bought the Bluray? What if the BBC then pays to broadcast the movie? Does it matter that all of us pay the licence fee, but some of us live in shared housing and split the bill? Is it relevant that Warner arguably financed the movie from the proceeds of The Dark Knight? Many of my circle bought that in various ways too. Pretty sure the sum total of all our expenditure never covers the $160m cost, though admittedly one friend is quite well off and might have bought a special edition.
To clarify, the BBC did not have their budget cut by government as some sort of punishment for making international sales, or any reason connected with international sales. They were not allowed to increase the licence fee (allowing for inflation this is a cut) in order to cut costs for the licence-paying public. This is set out in the BBC's proposal Delivering Quality First, and many BBC and government announcements widely covered by various media. Some people argue the Tory government not liking the BBC played it's part, or the lobbying from competitors such as Murdoch, but that's conjecture and regardless still has nothing to do with international sales. Cutting the licence fee serves to increase the motivation to make international sales, in order to offset the reduction in the licence fee pot.
The 2,000 staff cut is out of a total of 18,000. Although "a very small percentage" is subjective, 11% can be in your very small opinion, but personally I'm not convinced it is an appropriate turn of phrase when describing people losing their jobs. For the avoidance of doubt I note that the 18,000 figure excludes contractors, which is appropriate because the 2,000 also excludes people losing their contracts.
You are not required to pay the TV licence to own a TV, only to watch broadcast TV (which does include recorded TV on VCR or computer, more info if required).
Blessed with 20/20 hindsight, any failure such as this people react like it's something that was glaringly obvious. Controls can be very difficult to design, implement and monitor effectively. They have to be sensitive enough that they trip when something goes wrong, yet rare enough that they're taken seriously. When they do trip, the response has to be appropriate. They have to be effective yet also not be an endless cycle of bureaucratic red tape.
Generally the best controls are ones that almost prevent and detect fraud as a by-product of helping people do their job properly. The bank reconciliation isn't just a check for missing money, it helps ensure all the sales ledger receipts have been recorded and thus the sales ledger clerk keeps on track. The comptroller doesn't just authorise the bank reconciliation to catch the cashier stealing, the cashier is the one first in line to demand the comptroller reviews and authorises the bank rec because otherwise people are looking at him if there is a problem that he missed.
Most of all, controls are about culture. You can design all the effective controls you want, if the day-to-day mentality is that "detect[ed] unauthorised or unexplained activity... was not sufficiently investigated" then you might as well not have any. Again, take 100 people nodding their heads in hindsight and find 99 who were moaning about red tape and cutting corners the day before.
I'm a stone's throw from a large exchange in a (UK) city centre with 24mb DSL.
I get thereabouts that speed with some speedtest sites and when downloading Ubuntu. And that's about it. I have hit ~16mb/s from Steam and iPlayer but only occasionally. By far the usual speed is something below 8mb/s, that's all the server will give me.
Sure I can download many things at once, but there's nothing causing me to actually do that in practice. Having the connection is nice and everything but in practical terms there's very little difference from an 8mb line.
If you do not want to accept the information sharing in Clause 1, you would fall under Clause 2 and have to live with normal product liability, just as manufacturers of cars, blenders, chainsaws, and hot coffee do. How dire the consequences and what constitutes "used normally" are for the legislature and courts to decide.
An example: A salesperson from one of your longtime vendors visits and delivers new product documentation on a USB key. You plug the USB key into your computer and copy the files onto the computer. This is "used normally" and should never cause your computer to become part of a botnet, transmit your credit card number to Elbonia, or send all your design documents to the vendor.
I was under the impression that manufacturers generally are not held responsible for the consequences of a third person cutting through the break cable of a parked car, soldering out the safety catches or adding arsenic to a hot coffee on a desk.
The authors fobs off the real meat of the topic - what constitutes "used normally" - to the legislature and courts, but my understanding is they already do that. If a product ships with code that itself will do damage surely they're liable. Whether there is liability resulting from the actions of others is rather a difficult subject. Even the maker of a safety helmet may only be liable for a injury the helmet could reasonably be expected to protect from; something highly unlikely to include scenarios that involve a third person intentionally trying to injure the person.
The "article" assumes Valve would otherwise pay to have the translations done.
This is a questionable assumption. The alternative assumption is that these translations would be uneconomic to do professionally therefore they have allowed the community to do translations instead of not having it at all. The latter assumption seems more probable given we're talking about the back catalogue.
It's difficult to judge since the "article" has no citations, not even a link for the quote cited "Steam forums". There's no basic information such as the languages being translated.
And... Oh forget it. The "article" isn't even of a standard worthy of criticising.
Executive directors run the day to day of the company. Running the company is their day job and they should have minimal other commitments.
Non-executive directors do not run the day-to-day, their remit is to constructively challenge the execs, proposals on strategy and so on. Their time commitment to the company *should* be relatively small, probably a day-long monthly board meeting and a few half-day meetings for some specific remit. More than that and they're not really non-executives, and they're not really independent.
The article makes reference to the The UK Corporate Governance Code, which sets out standards of good practice in relation to board leadership and effectiveness, remuneration, accountability and relations with shareholders - much of this relates to non-executive directors. Whilst it appears voluntary, the Directors' Report has to make a statement either that they have complied with the Code or explain how and why they have not. This statement is covered by the audit. It's a pretty good code; it might not satisfy the prevailing wisdom on Slashdot, largely because it accepts it's own limitations.
It is worth emphasising that while relevant experience and skills are useful for NEDs, the most important by far is personal integrity and character. This is the root to the points in the submitter's Economist article. The problem is, how can you devise a set of natural checks and balances that allows shareholders to evaluate the character of directors? Usually you only find out the board was a bunch of "yes men" from the post-mortem. The notion here is to shift diagnosis forward to a point where it is treatable. A worthwhile goal, but one very difficult to achieve when the only people who can really appoint the reviewer are the directors - good boards will likely do it effectively while bad boards will not.
A company listed on a stock exchange is duty-bound not to be misleading to shareholders, existing or potential. That includes both what is announced and what is omitted.
This is covered both by the management's fiduciary duties and specified rules (which really merely seek to clarify to an extent the over-riding fiduciary duties). So yes, if they knew with confidence a product was going to tank, they are obliged to report it. There are "class test" ratios which specifically trigger some announcements although really these are considered the upper limit, a public company listed on a main market is expected to be considerably more forthcoming than that.
As ever, commercial considerations can get in the way - announcing things can leave long term shareholders even worse off - but then if there's any notion that you're hiding things from shareholders then you're doing it wrong. It's THEIR company and they are the ultimate boss.
The traditional model towards profitability was to sell more product, grow your operation, hire more workers and build more factories, wash-rinse-repeat.
This was the bad idea. Or rather, it was once they took it beyond the point at which it ceased to be a good idea.
Note Cisco bought a company with the intention to sell more of it's product, grow the operation, etc etc. Evidently, they weren't very good at it. Those jobs might or might not have gone already had Cisco never bought the company, so it's hard to determine whether the net position is that Cisco's involvement shortened or lengthened those jobs.
A problem with giant corporations is they can get so much cash kicking about from their good operations that the bad ones are kept afloat for far too long. This partly explains some of the utterly shitty products/services offered by some companies, they really shouldn't be in the industry at all yet at the same time are just too powerful and established for smaller companies to move in and do the job properly. Sounds like Cisco intends to go back to doing what they know best.
Totally valid concern, and likely one only manageable through the threat of withdrawn funding.
One thing that does concern me is while the drive for open source is laudable and comes with a lot of (however fuzzy) wider economic benefits, universities develop patents and create new companies to spin off. This makes a lot of dough for the institution and births a lot of companies well worth having - they are good, well paid jobs and they drive significant applied science (all the key people involved taking a cut is a big motivator).
The significant university shareholding also often means surprisingly good governance for a small upstart. Partly from a longer-term mindset, partly the pool of non-exec directors and partly a university typically attaches vastly greater importance to any risk to it's reputation than, say, a venture capitalist.
The funding is clearly overall a good thing, but that is a significant caveat.
I'm really tired of the media knowingly and intentionally misleading their readers into assuming something. The use of absolute figures in the knowledge that most readers have no sense of scale is intentionally stating information out of context.
Jump down to paragraph 5 and the facts are made more relevant due to context:
when it calculates that average energy consumption on the level of a typical user the amount is small, about 180 watt-hours a month, or the equivalent of running a 60-watt light bulb for three hours.
The article subsequently seems to turn into praise about how green Google is.
I notice the Slashdot summary contains the worst of the article, thus explaining the root of the issue. It doesn't explain why to bother reading Slashdot if the summaries are going to offer no value beyond that of an RSS aggregator.
Slashdot Mirror
Optical drives are one of those things that people need very rarely, but that's not the same as never.
Sure I could probably make do with a single optical drive in the entire home. At work, we could probably share one external unit between 50 people. I'd view an optical drive in a laptop as a negative - wasted space and weight.
But no optical drive at all?
Right here.
On this new Guardian piece? Not that I can see yet. But having read the piece, why would they? There's nothing new in it. The Guardian now get to add some quotation marks to exact wording for things which were all described before.
Worse, they quote plain-English paragraphs then paraphrase it and tell you what you should interpret from it. All supposition, opinion and subjectivity.
DRM on BBC broadcasts is an arse, but so is this article.
Condolences for your loss.
Unfortunately many companies do not have good procedures in place to handle the death of a customer, adding frustration to an already unhappy time. However, it is the good ones who do require the death certificate.
You need to be executor in order to settle his affairs. These companies asking for death certificates aren't just doing it for their own security purposes. They are legally required to act only on instruction from your father or someone he has expressly authorised them to recognise as an agent (an executor is a form of agent that everyone is obliged to recognise).
There are many reasons for this. There are related frauds committed against people still alive, and frauds against the deceased. Families squabble a lot over these and related matters so the institutions rightfully want to ensure they deal with the appointed person. Even with the best of intentions, the deceased may have wanted someone specific to settle their affairs and the particular person might not be it.
As regards you personally, record passwords in an encrypted file, Keypass or whatever, and leave your lawyer with instructions and a sealed envelope containing the password to your encrypted file. Alternately use a safety deposit box, the bank is usually the first place anyone goes with the death certificates and they will advise of the box - however they charge an annual fee.
More importantly, arrange your will and set who will be executor while you're at your lawyer.
If an economist argues that good customer service is a consequence of pursuing profit, he is talking about macroeconomics.
If an economist argues that profit is a consequence of good customer service, he is talking about microeconomics.
If a manger confuses the two he has neither an understanding of economics nor any commercial sense.
For what it's worth, MBAs are usually obtained (here in UK anyway) by people who do not have business or management backgrounds. It's a second degree taken later in life, intended to assist moving into management. People who were hot shit at whatever specialism they had being given a rudimentary introduction to high-level business academic theory because they're trying to get on the Board. The result is a proportion of them think they're still hot shit at this management thing, or are too embarrassed to admit they're not and so are desperate to prove themselves. Sure you do get great managers with MBA's but most of them were just getting a bit of paper to back up the substantial management experience they already had.
What's the rationale that robots or software costs us jobs?
First we had one way of doing it, then we found a better way. You think it's right that we should keep doing it the wrong way? You think people are entitled to jobs even though it's not the best way of doing it?
Hey, maybe we should adopt the same policy to everything. Make code buggy so we can employ more people in IT support. Make cars less reliable so more people are needed to fix them and build replacements.
And you realise that makes everything more expensive, right? So everything costs more. This isn't some economics shenanigans either; absolutely more resources are required for the same level of production. There's three fundamental ways to improve quality of life: find more resources, make things in a way that requires less resources and manage resources better. Sure, there's arguments within the economy for the distribution of resources (or money, anyway) but when you're asking that we make the same thing with more resources you're always losing and still not addressing your distribution issue.
The /. summary can easily be confused for ad hominem arguments, TFA cannot. It's one of those rare quality pieces of journalism.
The porn background is absolutely core to the notion that the organisation is being set up with the intention to issue legal letters encouraging people to pay a fee to avoid humiliation of being taken to court for pirating porn. Or, as the House of Lords succinctly described it: ''straightforward legal blackmail".
The secretive, murky background to the individuals and their organisations is also highly relevant to the above.
More notably perhaps, Maj. Richard D. Winters (Damian Lewis).
None of this disproves the AC's point however. British actors act American when playing an American hero and American actors act American when playing a British hero.
I find the villain side slightly different. I suspect much of this stems from British plays where it is more common for villains to be complex and charismatic characters. Notably, American Shakespearian actors such as Walken play such roles.
Hmmm, maybe I'll just transfer all my profits to Bermuda ... oh, right, I'm poor. We pay taxes. Corporations and people rich enough to afford shifty accountants don't.
Without wanting to disagree with the broader point and certainly not trying to defend it, it's not just "rich" people scamming taxes.
It's more about activities providing the opportunity. Big companies and many rich people have international operations so mucking around with where the income falls taxable becomes possible. Annoyed about cruise lines not paying tax? Well neither do the waiters working on the ships.
Many small business owners are "at it" to some extent, whether they're inflating expenses or taking cash out the till instead of recording the sale. The smaller they are, the more likely it is, in my experience - it's remarkable how many people seem to live off fresh air alone. Admittedly much of that is again due to opportunity: it's less convenient to hide income when you have an employee processing invoices and doing the books. Instead a medium sized company is more likely to be underestimating the value of stocks or saying some of their debts are bad.
Not just companies either. I'd bet money that a salaried plumber doing a wee job for his neighbour at the weekend isn't declaring it on a tax return. Of course that's "just a bit cheeky", a small time guy getting by right? Tax evasion is tax evasion.
Wouldn't it be better if the networks agreed that phones can use each other's networks under specified circumstances?
They supposedly already do it here (UK), though I have never noticed any evidence of it bar a couple of operators who have a strategy of sharing towers. I do recall reading that there are phone settings, which the operators set so that it basically never happens except for 999 (911) calls, but some people claim to have been able to convince the operator to allow them to change it.
Something I try to always keep in mind is that whenever anyone, including myself, says words implying "everyone else is bad" (or wrong), it's probably naive or arrogant. "Some _______ ________ are suppressed, while others are manipulated or distorted beyond recognition."
The main problem is common to any doctrine: people. Particularly people with some kind of vested interest, whether it be financial, political, ideological, power...
I'm wondering how many of the protesters and their supporters vote.
Strange, I thought the US code was broadly similar to the UK's employed vs. self employed + IR35 rules, which are quite easy to satisfy if you're genuinely self employed.
Simply having more than one customer puts it your way. If you don't have more than one customer, frankly it's hard not to see their point.
For what it's worth, the core purpose of the legislation (UK anyway) is anti-tax avoidance with a side line in preventing companies bypassing employment rights. Being self-employed has tax advantages for the individual and (in the UK...) especially the employer. Done through a company:
* The effective tax rate comes down to 25% instead of 33% for the individual;
* The employer's tax rate comes down to 0% from 14% for the employer;
* The tax regime is more generous (expenses, allowances and reliefs);
* You can control the timing of income to manage the tax bands;
* The "employee" loses all employment rights.
In the UK, it's difficult to see the legislation providing any kind of advantage to corporations.
The BBC cannot make a profit, due to the not-for-profit charter of the organisation it can only make periodic surpluses or deficits - over the long term they can only net off to nil. Any surplus generated on popular programmes is used to subsidise either/both the licence fee and/or unpopular but "culturally significant" or whatever programmes.
I'm not really sure you have a solid grasp of the way media or any other duplicable asset is sold. Making a sale in many different ways is not the same as "being paid at least twice". Let's say a commercially successful programme like Planet Earth costs £10m to produce, maybe it makes £3m from DVD sales, £1m from BBC America and £3m from deals with other broadcasters. The remaining £3m then comes from the licence fee pot. Maybe another series is so widely successful that it made £20m from those other sources: £10m would go into the licence fee pot, subsidising the licence fee and/or other programmes.
"They can get paid at least twice" just doesn't have any meaning. I watched Inception at the cinema with 5 friends. Did Warner get paid 6 times? Another friend bought the DVD, still another bought the Bluray. Are Warner getting paid 8 times over just between my social circle? Or is it 3? What if myself and 2 of my cinema-going friends also bought the Bluray? What if the BBC then pays to broadcast the movie? Does it matter that all of us pay the licence fee, but some of us live in shared housing and split the bill? Is it relevant that Warner arguably financed the movie from the proceeds of The Dark Knight? Many of my circle bought that in various ways too. Pretty sure the sum total of all our expenditure never covers the $160m cost, though admittedly one friend is quite well off and might have bought a special edition.
To clarify, the BBC did not have their budget cut by government as some sort of punishment for making international sales, or any reason connected with international sales. They were not allowed to increase the licence fee (allowing for inflation this is a cut) in order to cut costs for the licence-paying public. This is set out in the BBC's proposal Delivering Quality First, and many BBC and government announcements widely covered by various media. Some people argue the Tory government not liking the BBC played it's part, or the lobbying from competitors such as Murdoch, but that's conjecture and regardless still has nothing to do with international sales. Cutting the licence fee serves to increase the motivation to make international sales, in order to offset the reduction in the licence fee pot.
The 2,000 staff cut is out of a total of 18,000. Although "a very small percentage" is subjective, 11% can be in your very small opinion, but personally I'm not convinced it is an appropriate turn of phrase when describing people losing their jobs. For the avoidance of doubt I note that the 18,000 figure excludes contractors, which is appropriate because the 2,000 also excludes people losing their contracts.
You are not required to pay the TV licence to own a TV, only to watch broadcast TV (which does include recorded TV on VCR or computer, more info if required).
Blessed with 20/20 hindsight, any failure such as this people react like it's something that was glaringly obvious. Controls can be very difficult to design, implement and monitor effectively. They have to be sensitive enough that they trip when something goes wrong, yet rare enough that they're taken seriously. When they do trip, the response has to be appropriate. They have to be effective yet also not be an endless cycle of bureaucratic red tape.
Generally the best controls are ones that almost prevent and detect fraud as a by-product of helping people do their job properly. The bank reconciliation isn't just a check for missing money, it helps ensure all the sales ledger receipts have been recorded and thus the sales ledger clerk keeps on track. The comptroller doesn't just authorise the bank reconciliation to catch the cashier stealing, the cashier is the one first in line to demand the comptroller reviews and authorises the bank rec because otherwise people are looking at him if there is a problem that he missed.
Most of all, controls are about culture. You can design all the effective controls you want, if the day-to-day mentality is that "detect[ed] unauthorised or unexplained activity... was not sufficiently investigated" then you might as well not have any. Again, take 100 people nodding their heads in hindsight and find 99 who were moaning about red tape and cutting corners the day before.
I'm a stone's throw from a large exchange in a (UK) city centre with 24mb DSL.
I get thereabouts that speed with some speedtest sites and when downloading Ubuntu. And that's about it. I have hit ~16mb/s from Steam and iPlayer but only occasionally. By far the usual speed is something below 8mb/s, that's all the server will give me.
Sure I can download many things at once, but there's nothing causing me to actually do that in practice. Having the connection is nice and everything but in practical terms there's very little difference from an 8mb line.
I was under the impression that manufacturers generally are not held responsible for the consequences of a third person cutting through the break cable of a parked car, soldering out the safety catches or adding arsenic to a hot coffee on a desk.
The authors fobs off the real meat of the topic - what constitutes "used normally" - to the legislature and courts, but my understanding is they already do that. If a product ships with code that itself will do damage surely they're liable. Whether there is liability resulting from the actions of others is rather a difficult subject. Even the maker of a safety helmet may only be liable for a injury the helmet could reasonably be expected to protect from; something highly unlikely to include scenarios that involve a third person intentionally trying to injure the person.
Only foreign subcontractors cut corners?
The "article" assumes Valve would otherwise pay to have the translations done.
This is a questionable assumption. The alternative assumption is that these translations would be uneconomic to do professionally therefore they have allowed the community to do translations instead of not having it at all. The latter assumption seems more probable given we're talking about the back catalogue.
It's difficult to judge since the "article" has no citations, not even a link for the quote cited "Steam forums". There's no basic information such as the languages being translated.
And... Oh forget it. The "article" isn't even of a standard worthy of criticising.
Executive directors run the day to day of the company. Running the company is their day job and they should have minimal other commitments.
Non-executive directors do not run the day-to-day, their remit is to constructively challenge the execs, proposals on strategy and so on. Their time commitment to the company *should* be relatively small, probably a day-long monthly board meeting and a few half-day meetings for some specific remit. More than that and they're not really non-executives, and they're not really independent.
The article makes reference to the The UK Corporate Governance Code, which sets out standards of good practice in relation to board leadership and effectiveness, remuneration, accountability and relations with shareholders - much of this relates to non-executive directors. Whilst it appears voluntary, the Directors' Report has to make a statement either that they have complied with the Code or explain how and why they have not. This statement is covered by the audit. It's a pretty good code; it might not satisfy the prevailing wisdom on Slashdot, largely because it accepts it's own limitations.
It is worth emphasising that while relevant experience and skills are useful for NEDs, the most important by far is personal integrity and character. This is the root to the points in the submitter's Economist article. The problem is, how can you devise a set of natural checks and balances that allows shareholders to evaluate the character of directors? Usually you only find out the board was a bunch of "yes men" from the post-mortem. The notion here is to shift diagnosis forward to a point where it is treatable. A worthwhile goal, but one very difficult to achieve when the only people who can really appoint the reviewer are the directors - good boards will likely do it effectively while bad boards will not.
A company listed on a stock exchange is duty-bound not to be misleading to shareholders, existing or potential. That includes both what is announced and what is omitted.
This is covered both by the management's fiduciary duties and specified rules (which really merely seek to clarify to an extent the over-riding fiduciary duties). So yes, if they knew with confidence a product was going to tank, they are obliged to report it. There are "class test" ratios which specifically trigger some announcements although really these are considered the upper limit, a public company listed on a main market is expected to be considerably more forthcoming than that.
As ever, commercial considerations can get in the way - announcing things can leave long term shareholders even worse off - but then if there's any notion that you're hiding things from shareholders then you're doing it wrong. It's THEIR company and they are the ultimate boss.
The traditional model towards profitability was to sell more product, grow your operation, hire more workers and build more factories, wash-rinse-repeat.
This was the bad idea. Or rather, it was once they took it beyond the point at which it ceased to be a good idea.
Note Cisco bought a company with the intention to sell more of it's product, grow the operation, etc etc. Evidently, they weren't very good at it. Those jobs might or might not have gone already had Cisco never bought the company, so it's hard to determine whether the net position is that Cisco's involvement shortened or lengthened those jobs.
A problem with giant corporations is they can get so much cash kicking about from their good operations that the bad ones are kept afloat for far too long. This partly explains some of the utterly shitty products/services offered by some companies, they really shouldn't be in the industry at all yet at the same time are just too powerful and established for smaller companies to move in and do the job properly. Sounds like Cisco intends to go back to doing what they know best.
Totally valid concern, and likely one only manageable through the threat of withdrawn funding.
One thing that does concern me is while the drive for open source is laudable and comes with a lot of (however fuzzy) wider economic benefits, universities develop patents and create new companies to spin off. This makes a lot of dough for the institution and births a lot of companies well worth having - they are good, well paid jobs and they drive significant applied science (all the key people involved taking a cut is a big motivator).
The significant university shareholding also often means surprisingly good governance for a small upstart. Partly from a longer-term mindset, partly the pool of non-exec directors and partly a university typically attaches vastly greater importance to any risk to it's reputation than, say, a venture capitalist.
The funding is clearly overall a good thing, but that is a significant caveat.
Which implies either that they don't, or that they are better at secrecy.
Where did it all go wrong for the beer they call 'wife beater'? (The Daily Fail had a win for a change)
I'm really tired of the media knowingly and intentionally misleading their readers into assuming something. The use of absolute figures in the knowledge that most readers have no sense of scale is intentionally stating information out of context.
Jump down to paragraph 5 and the facts are made more relevant due to context:
The article subsequently seems to turn into praise about how green Google is.
I notice the Slashdot summary contains the worst of the article, thus explaining the root of the issue. It doesn't explain why to bother reading Slashdot if the summaries are going to offer no value beyond that of an RSS aggregator.