Some types of travel to Cuba are legal. The US has been granting so-called "people-to-people" licenses to allow people to legally visit Cuba for the purposes of cultural exchange. According to the NYTimes, the visas were created by Bill Clinton in 1999, stopped being issued by Bush in 2003, and resumed being handed out in 2011 by Obama. More info from a Forbes article:
The whole purpose, for the US government’s perspective, is to intimately experience the day-to-day lives of residents while learning about Cuban cultural, social and religious organizations firsthand. For this reason, all participants are required to adhere to the approved full-time schedule of activities – beg off to relax by the hotel pool and OFAC could pull the company’s license.
So there are restrictions: you have to travel with a tour guide, and your trip agenda has to be filled with culturally-relevant activities rather than just random tourist stuff. It wasn't clear from TFA if Schmidt's visit was under this particular license, but his trip agenda ("to get a tour of Cuba’s University of Information Sciences in Havana and discuss life within the country") certainly sounded like it would have qualified.
While your suggestions would certainly help align the incentives of the class action lawyers with those of the plaintiffs, they largely don't apply in this case. The Lucasfilm and Pixar settlements (which the latest settlement is considered likely to structured in a similar way to) was in cash and saw 45% of the settlement go to lawyers and legal fees, so your conditions above are met. However, many people are finding it strange that the legal team would have settled this case instead of fighting it out, given how much evidence was available. A New York Times article details the dollar amounts:
Four of the largest technology companies tentatively settled on Thursday a class action brought by 64,000 of their engineers, who accused them of agreeing not to solicit one another’s employees. The amount of the settlement was not released, but people with knowledge of the deal said it was in the neighborhood of $300 million.
[...]
As a result of all these machinations, the suit claimed, the mobility and income of the engineers suffered. A guilty verdict in a trial might have meant the defendants would have had to pay triple damages of as much as $9 billion.
The settlement resulted in an average payout (after fees) of ~$2300 per engineer, while fighting out the case and winning would have netted closer to $77k per engineer after fees. The engineers would have had to have just a 3% chance of winning the suit for it to be worthwhile to proceed with the case, and their odds of winning would almost certainly have been substantially higher. However, for the law firm, fighting out the case would have consumed many more billable hours than settling, so their payout (per billable hour) would not have been nearly as high if they won, and they faced a huge loss in terms of unpaid hours spent if the case was litigated and lost. That the lawyers decided to settle rather than continue to pursue the suit is a rational decision for them, but much less so for the plaintiffs they represented.
I've been following this since I heard of it happening- definitely interesting. I like the idea of a custom CMS to avoid an open one (more security).
Sadly the moral of the story is the exact opposite - the custom CMS HBGary commissioned was actually less secure, as it appears not to have been subjected to proper security audits, nor was it being updated to patch discovered bugs. Direct from TFA:
Rather than using an off-the-shelf CMS (of which there are many, used in the many blogs and news sites that exist on the Web), HBGary—for reasons best known to its staff—decided to commission a custom CMS system from a third-party developer.
Unfortunately for HBGary, this third-party CMS was poorly written. In fact, it had what can only be described as a pretty gaping bug in it. A standard, off-the-shelf CMS would be no panacea in this regard—security flaws crop up in all of them from time to time—but it would have the advantage of many thousands of users and regular bugfixes, resulting in a much lesser chance of extant security flaws.
The very thing you consider a disadvantage in an open software system - the fact that anyone can discover bugs in it - also helps ensure that such bugs are publicized and fixed. With HBGary's custom CMS, the bugs were still there, but the only people looking were the ones specifically trying to break into their system. There can be a case for code obscurity, but if that's all you're relying on to protect yourself, I'd say you're really just burying your head in the sand.
Most universities have *INSANE* endowment funds. I've heard both Harvard and Michigan mentioned as schools that could offer their incoming freshman classes free education from undergrad through PhD without making so much as a dent in these funds.
Wouldn't it be neat if we could do a bit of research to see if the above were true? Oh wait, we can.
Total cost for 1 year of undergraduates to get their undergraduate degree, assuming everyone graduates and takes 4 years to do so (as a ball-park approximation):
>>> 33696*2175*4/1e6
293.15519999999998
That's $293 million dollars, or 11.4% of the total endowment. And that's just for undergrads, excluding graduate school, so I'd call that a "dent". They could keep it up for about a decade before going from having the nation's largest endowment to being bankrupt.
Other posters have already said that legally it all depends on the license you work out with the customer, and they are correct.
Having said that, I find that the customer's expectations will depend on what the financing model for the product was. Typically when you get paid for software, it will have been developed under one of two models:
My company does the product development on with its own money, and then sells the finished product to multiple customers. Examples are products like Microsoft Office or Adobe CS4. Typically customers assume that they're paying for just a license of the product, since they weren't involved in the actual creation of the code itself at all.
The customer has a specific need it needs to address, and hires and pays my company to develop software to address it. Most of the consultant arms of major software vendors operate this way; for example, OPNET (which makes a product called Modeler popularly used in simulating communication networks) develops some protocol models for Modeler this way. As the customer is directly involved in directly funding the development (often billing will involve paying for actual developer-hours, and is typically much more expensive than licensing an existing product), they'll usually expect to get the rights to the code as well.
If you're using one of the above approaches but want your licensing to work differently, the key is to make this clear to the customer up-front (managing expectations isn't something techies typically enjoy spending time doing, but it's a very important part of having a successful business relationship with your customer) and make sure all your legal wording is done correctly as well. I've worked at companies before where product development was funded by customers, but the need the customer wanted addressed was sufficiently general that the company wanted to retain the copyright and IP to resell to others. In this case, the customer was granted cheap or free perpetual licenses to use the software that was developed, but the contract was written so that the company retained the copyright and the right to sell licenses to others as well.
Except that money from capital gains are not subject to either Social Security or Medicare. Taxes for those programs are deducted from employment income, not investment income. Furthermore, capital gains tax rates are significantly lower than those for ordinary income - currently the former is capped at 15%, while the latter is 39%. Not a knock on the Google founders specifically, but rather on the wealthy in general - as Warren Buffet has pointed out, our tax system is skewed so that wealthy folks like himself pay an effective tax rate of 17.7%, while his secretary is taxed at 30%.
One of these days, when I have enough time before a plane flight, I'm going to follow the letter of the rules while showing off (in a non-threatening manner) how easily they can be worked around
You don't even have to work around the list of things you can't carry on board; items on the list get missed all the time. Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic had an article from last year detailing all the things he's managed to sneak onto planes, including pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, bottles of Fiji Water, and box cutters. He's even brought two cans' worth of beer through security by wearing a Beerbelly under his clothes and walking it through the metal detector. And this in spite of the fact that he was selected for secondary inspection at the time he was wearing it.
He's also tried forging and printing out his own boarding pass (with help from Bruce Schneier) and getting through security with it, with similar results:
I would try to pass through security with no ID, a fake boarding pass, and an Osama bin Laden T-shirt under my coat. I splashed water on my face to mimic sweat, put on a coat (it was a summer day), hid my driver's license, and approached security with a bogus boarding pass that Schneier had made for me. I told the document checker at security that I had lost my identification but was hoping I would still be able to make my flight. He said I'd have to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor arrived; he looked smart, unfortunately. I was starting to get genuinely nervous, which I hoped would generate incriminating micro-expressions. "I can't find my driver's license," I said. I showed him my fake boarding pass. "I need to get to Washington quickly," I added. He asked me if I had any other identification. I showed him a credit card with my name on it, a library card, and a health-insurance card. "Nothing else?" he asked.
"No," I said.
"You should really travel with a second picture ID, you know."
"Yes, sir," I said.
"All right, you can go," he said, pointing me to the X-ray line. "But let this be a lesson for you."
While I know Google makes for good news, this story is in fact more about the exchanges loosening their grip on quote restrictions than it is a feel-good Google story.
Historically the exchanges have required anyone offering free quotes to delay them 15-20 minutes since a big part of their revenue stream derived from charging brokerages for real-time quotes. (Brokerages in turn only offered this service to their customers.) NASDAQ announced a deal to allow Google, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC to show real-time quotes for free. Yahoo Finance announced a similar deal with a different group (BATS Trading) to phase free real-time quotes throughout its site also.
Looks like the internet continues to bring down barriers to information.
Re: vonage: there's nothing weird about sueing someone who breaches a contract (even a verbal contract) with you.
Why would it matter that the contract is about share deals, or anything else?
Can you imagine how the prospective buyers would react if the shares had shot up, and Vonage management had said that they'd decided to sell them at the higher price?
If you want to become a stock market speculators, you have to learn to cope with the fact your going to be wrong sometimes, and suck up the loss you take.
A lot of the complaints have centered around the really poor execution of the sale. Shares were supposed to be issued to the buyers at the IPO price immediately, so that buyers could then trade them on the first day. Instead, the underwriters screwed up their purchasing system so that buyers couldn't put stop-loss orders or sell their shares on the way down and limit their losses; instead, the computer system refused to accept sells and forced them to sit there watching the share price fall. Even worse, some buyers were initially told they weren't allocated shares, only to find out at the end of that day that they actually were given shares. (To extend your analogy, how would you feel about initially being told you wouldn't get any shares, then the price tanked, and THEN you were told that whoops, we made a mistake, and we're going to be selling you shares at a 12% markup to the current market price anyhow?)
Note that IPO shares are typically priced slightly below what the company thinks the fair value is, in order to give the initial purchasers a good deal. The more paranoid (cynical?) have suggested that Vonage deliberately overpriced its shares and used its own customers to prop up its IPO price. Given that customer relations for the company weren't stellar to begin with (too many horror stories dealing with their staff), this is going to generate a lot more negative PR with both their current customer base and potential future customers.
I submitted a story on this yesterday morning. Vonage went on CNBC Wednesday morning and announced that it "is going to let some of its customers off the hook by buying their unwanted shares." The statement said that "While all avenues are available to us we cannot imagine alienating our customers in that way. If certain . . . customers don't pay we expect to repurchase shares from the underwriters if necessary."
People immediately started pointing out that it is illegal for a compnay to treat different shareholders in the same class differently -- Vonage was only offering to "make whole" (Wall Street speak for "absorb the losses of") investors that hadn't yet paid for their shares; people that had paid were SOL.
The whole IPO has basically been a mess, with snafus both in selling shares to their customers and delivering them. Some Vonage customers that they were led to believe that they "weren't allocated shares in the IPO when in fact they had received the shares. Others investors who purchased shares have complained that technical glitches on a Web site set up for Vonage customers prevented them from executing sales in a timely fashion."
I've had good experiences with the Vonage product as a customer, but there are many, many stories of how poorly Vonage customer service treats their customers. They're very slow in sorting out problems -- it took them 3 months to transfer my land-line phone number, and initially the temporary number they gave me was in a different area code than my city, putting me in a long-distance calling zone relative to my friends. It took hours before they fixed it (they kept claiming it wasn't "technically possible" to give me a new number). Analysts are worried that future propects for the company might not look so good, and that screwing over their own customers in the IPO might be the last straw.
The idiot article quoted in the summary got it wrong. See here or here. The original article also gets the correct number in british pounds.
Using software downloaded off the internet, McKinnon allegedly hacked his way into almost 100 networks operated by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defence and the US Air Force, with the US government estimating that his antics have cost around one million dollars (£570,000, 790,000) to track down and fix.
when they are exposed to "Cell phone like radiation", they get a higher dose to 'accelerate' (change the outcome of, whatever) the experiment. If they were given the dose that you recieve from standing a few hundred feet from a tower, or holding a cell phone an inch or so from your brain the rats would have jack.
Do some research, folks.
It sounds more like you're not familiar with the way radiation exposure testing is conducted. Obviously neither rats nor people are going to develop cancer after being exposed to micro levels of radiation over short periods of time. The question researchers are addressing is whether prolonged exposure over many years will cause a higher incidence of cancer in the long term.
Since it's impractical to simply expose animal subjects to continuous low-level radiation and check back on them 20 years later (by that time, it'll be too late for the results to be useful), controlled experiments are used to mimic the effects of long-term exposure. Common adjustments include increasing the radiation dose, as well as engineering the lab animals to be more susceptible to cancer development. This way, the duration of the experiments is shortened enough so that we get the results quickly enough for them to be useful.
The flip side is that the conditions obviously aren't exactly the same as the ones that humans are being exposed to anymore, which is why the arguments about whether cell phone radiation is harmful or not remains inconclusive. (For example, how similar are the new engineered animals to regular ones?) But to dismiss the results out of hand just because you don't understand the methodology is poor reasoning.
A key issue in the matter is the supposed opt-in nature of the list in question. Mumma's argument is that he never opted-in, so he shouldn't have to opt-out. Furthermore, he holds that opting-out only increases the chance of receiving more spam. This makes Mumma appear somewhat belligerent, and it doesn't help that his demands for a settlement for over $6,000 were accompanied by veiled threats regarding Google "caching" his complaint page. Furthermore, the fact that his site also suggested "setting a trap" to nail spammers (PDF of page at the time) make him looks lawsuit happy, although it isn't clear that this means anything other than documenting one's moves closely.
Of course, as the article points out, none of this is actually illegal, even if it does make the victim look a bit less like a white knight.
The strangest part of this whole affair is that spamming ultimately originates as a form of advertising. Here's someone who is patently not interested in the company's product, and has made a legal request under state law for them to stop sending him ads. Instead of complying, the company is now going to try to sue his pants off to show him who's boss. Supposing in some bizarro world they win, and are granted permission to keep sending him ads? I bet he's going to be really eager to buy things from them now...
think it was in part over-reaction by a bunch of hair-trigger pseudo-feminists who can't stomache historical accuracy if it portrays women as second-class, and in part the fact that the game developer is a first-rate asshole. There's really no doubt about the second, nor in my opinion the first.
Still, it's just a game, and it's HIS game. No matter how much of a dick the guy is he can do as pleases. If some people are upset by this they can always NOT PLAY. It's that simple. If they're motivated, they could get together and make their own game.
Exactly. It reminds me of how at the Luxor, it's perfectly understood that in the interest of historical accuracy, female residents are considered second-class citizens to the men, and the hotel owner can be as much of a dick as he pleases. If people don't like it, they can damn well go build their own hotel, it's that simple.
Oh, wait.
(Not to mention, legal ramifications aside, you've got to wonder about the business wisdom of pissing off your customer base...)
Its easy as hell to keep a poker face online. Why do you need to train for that?
I thought the same thing when I first read the summary. It seems like a poor choice of words, since obviously you don't have to worry about giving away information through your facial tics or whatever online.
The points they were probably trying to make come up later in the article:
"It's the discipline of not getting too emotional about your transactions, and also the mathematical ability to keep track of numbers, as in card counting," said Ms McDonnell.
"It helps to determine if people are bluffing, trying to make the market move one way or another," she said.
"Poker-playing managers will be used to asking, 'did I play that right?'"
Those three skills are probably the most important ones that would cross over. The last point is particularly often overlooked, since in poker (much like in the stock market) making the "right decision" doesn't always mean you win every time, because of the influence of random chance. Your opponent can play horribly and catch the one card left in the deck that gives him the win, but his strategy was still a losing one even though he "won" this particular time. Hence, unlike people without this background, poker players are already trained not to be results-oriented, but to be strategy-oriented (focusing on "given the information I had, did I make the right decision") instead.
Because there is a major advantage to switching to an open IM protocol.
For one, you can write your own client to work with the service(s).
Are you serious? How many people do you know who are running IM clients they've written themselves? This isn't going to be the selling point to get people to ditch their old networks. IM networks aren't like operating systems: it's not enough that YOU switch to your favorite open source alternative, if you want to have anyone to talk to you'd better convince all your friends to switch too.
Another post talked about the "good old days" before IM fragmentation when everyone just used ICQ. In my view, the golden opportunity for everyone else to get market share was when Mirabilis failed to update ICQ so that it would work through corporate firewalls. Before long, all the kids who were crazy about IM in college graduated, found out they couldn't run ICQ through their company's corporate firewall, and moved en mass to other networks like Yahoo that had workarounds. By the time ICQ caught up, it was too late, people had already switched.
If Google is going to get their IM network to take off, it's going to take something about existing IM networks that can similarly simultaneously annoy you and all your friends into switching. I'm not sure what it's going to be, but it'll probably have to be something stronger than the lure of having everyone code their own client.
Uh, no. Stock dilution happens because the number of outstanding shares changes. The earnings and growth numbers that are used to valuate shares are calculated per outstanding share, so any change in shares outstanding creates dilution. Look at any company's 10K or 10Q; they'll have two lines listing earnings per share (EPS) and diluted EPS separately for precisely this reason: diluted EPS is what the company would earn per share if all the options were suddenly exercised.
The REAL issue with whether options should be expensed or not is whether the diluted EPS captures the full effects of dilution through options issuance, or if there are hidden costs. There's a non-zero "option value" to the options (the choice not to exercise if the stock price drops), that is distinct from the "intrinsic value" (roughly equal to the strike price minus the current price). The argument is that this is presently not captured in the accounting regulations.
To make it worse you don't get paid to get papers published there. The money goes to the journal not the paper submitters.
The point of publishing academic papers is not to profit from the publication. The publication helps advance the state of the art, and is free advertising for you. The real benefit of publication is that once people start seeing a few good papers under your name, you'll be increasingly respected as a researcher. This leads to high-paying jobs, good consulting work, and other monetary compensation. In that sense, there's a strong parallel with the open source movement.
Perversely after I've had papers accepted in journals I can't leave the PDFs of the papers on my web site as I don't own them anymore, the journals do.
What journals are you publishing in? Many explicitly allow you to continue to hand out PDFs to colleagues and friends; I'm surprised that people in your field would stand for such restrictions.
The IEEE copyright forms explicitly allow the author to retain the right to redistribute. Taken from the link:
Authors/employers may reproduce or authorize others to reproduce the Work, material extracted verbatim from the Work, or derivative works for the author's personal use or for company use, provided that the source and the IEEE copyright notice are indicated, the copies are not used in any way that implies IEEE endorsement of a product or service of any employer, and the copies themselves are not offered for sale.
That's why many of the homepages for people in EE/CS will have a long list of publications, along with handy links to PDF copies of the papers in question.
Funny that you should mention Slashdot, because there's a second issue that is being overlooked in this discussion that I think is even more important than cost, and that's moderation. IMO, the cost of my subscriptions (which currently cost me a few hundred bucks a year) is pretty negligible compared to the benefit of keeping me up to date on the newest research in the field. What's more important is that the publications themselves contain high-quality, useful material.
The biggest challenge I find going through the technical literature today is information glut. If a publication or web site accepts just anyone's submissions, then it's going to be next to useless because it'll be so hard to dig out the gems from the chaff that it'll be totally useless. Imagine if you had to read through some of the bigger Slashdot discussions (1000+ comments) without the moderation system in place so that you at least have somewhere to start.
Today, paper reviews that decide whether your paper gets admitted or not are typically seen by only ~3 reviewers. This leads to pretty big variance on the quality of reviews -- some reviewers just couldn't care less and rush through the reviews with non-committal comments, while more rarely there are others who'd prefer to suppress competing research. Poor papers may get in if they hit a few indifferent reviewers, and good papers may be bounced for similar reasons.
I'd be curious about how well a public moderation system like Slashdot's would work in that context -- with more mods, review scores would be less vulnerable to manipulation by a small group of poor reviewers. That way, no one's work could be suppressed by negative reviewers, but the scoring system would help draw a reader's attention to the most popular articles.
The Phd: an exercise in self-aggrandizing behavior with little application to the real world.
That's such a sweeping generalization that it's awfully easy to take a few potshots at it. Since this is Slashdot, I assume that computers and the internet play a big role in your life. Well, the packet switching technology and ARPAnet that made it all possible owes a lot to a bunch of PhDs at UCLA led by Leonard Kleinrock. Like being able to chat with your friends on your cell phone? Ever heard of Andy Viterbi, who went off to found Qualcomm by hiring many of the top researchers (yes, lots of them were PhDs) and developing the CDMA technology now used in North America? And of course, there's Claude Shannon, the so-called "father of modern communications". Just a few of the more "practical" PhD guys you may have heard of.
In the event you actually research or do something worthwhile your expertise is basically a very tiny narrow slice of the pie in your discipline in which you possess astonishing depth, and you are likely no more knowledgeable about the rest of your field than a masters candidate.
Again, I'd have to disagree here. A bachelors is great for giving you a good grounding in the background material you'll need in your field. A masters degree is primarily about teaching you how to do independent thinking, which is going to be important once you start moving beyond the basics and into new innovation. At this point, you'll have started developing the skill set, but won't have the experience. A PhD is where you really get to know your field well (much better than a masters student, by the time you're done), and understand what's been done and what's left to do. It's also about learning to develop relationships with other top people in the field, both in industry and academia, and learning about more than just the technical aspects of your area.
I've worked with a number of Phd candidates in computer science, chemical engineering, history, and life sciences, and then EXPECT (yes, I said expect) one of two things to happen when they graduate:
1. A company offers them quite a bit of money to do the research that *they* love
2. *poof* Tenure track faculty position
What's wrong with aiming high? I'd hate to think anyone would start any endeavor expecting not to do well.
in reality now, its usually
1. Teach as an adjunct
2. Try to convince private industry that you're okay taking that 60k a year position as a chemical engineer.. I'm not overqualified, HONEST!
You're generalizing again. Just like in every other line of work, whether you get a "good" job or not when you enter the real world depends largely on the individual. I've certainly known people who ended up in exactly the situations you describe. On the other hand, there are also many others who are doing very well. Our lab's also got a graduate this year who's starting tenure-track at USC, and another who's tenure-track at Stanford. One of my officemates just turned down a 100K EE job (a 2-body problem), and another had several offers in the 90-100k range as well.
If you're good at what you do, there'll be good jobs for you no matter what path in life you choose. If you're a lazy slackabout, then you're screwed no matter what. There's no "right" or "wrong" answer about whether a PhD is a good choice -- it's about whether it's a good choice for YOU. This is the real reason why people tell you to do something you love -- chances are, you'll be enthusiastic about it and do it well, and success will follow naturally.
Slashdot Mirror
So there are restrictions: you have to travel with a tour guide, and your trip agenda has to be filled with culturally-relevant activities rather than just random tourist stuff. It wasn't clear from TFA if Schmidt's visit was under this particular license, but his trip agenda ("to get a tour of Cuba’s University of Information Sciences in Havana and discuss life within the country") certainly sounded like it would have qualified.
The settlement resulted in an average payout (after fees) of ~$2300 per engineer, while fighting out the case and winning would have netted closer to $77k per engineer after fees. The engineers would have had to have just a 3% chance of winning the suit for it to be worthwhile to proceed with the case, and their odds of winning would almost certainly have been substantially higher. However, for the law firm, fighting out the case would have consumed many more billable hours than settling, so their payout (per billable hour) would not have been nearly as high if they won, and they faced a huge loss in terms of unpaid hours spent if the case was litigated and lost. That the lawyers decided to settle rather than continue to pursue the suit is a rational decision for them, but much less so for the plaintiffs they represented.
Sadly the moral of the story is the exact opposite - the custom CMS HBGary commissioned was actually less secure, as it appears not to have been subjected to proper security audits, nor was it being updated to patch discovered bugs. Direct from TFA:
The very thing you consider a disadvantage in an open software system - the fact that anyone can discover bugs in it - also helps ensure that such bugs are publicized and fixed. With HBGary's custom CMS, the bugs were still there, but the only people looking were the ones specifically trying to break into their system. There can be a case for code obscurity, but if that's all you're relying on to protect yourself, I'd say you're really just burying your head in the sand.
Wouldn't it be neat if we could do a bit of research to see if the above were true? Oh wait, we can.
Harvard endowment: $25.7 billion
Harvard 2009-2010 undergrad tuition (excluding various student fees): $33,696
Admitted undergrads per year: 2,175 students
Total cost for 1 year of undergraduates to get their undergraduate degree, assuming everyone graduates and takes 4 years to do so (as a ball-park approximation):
>>> 33696*2175*4/1e6
293.15519999999998
That's $293 million dollars, or 11.4% of the total endowment. And that's just for undergrads, excluding graduate school, so I'd call that a "dent". They could keep it up for about a decade before going from having the nation's largest endowment to being bankrupt.
Other posters have already said that legally it all depends on the license you work out with the customer, and they are correct.
Having said that, I find that the customer's expectations will depend on what the financing model for the product was. Typically when you get paid for software, it will have been developed under one of two models:
If you're using one of the above approaches but want your licensing to work differently, the key is to make this clear to the customer up-front (managing expectations isn't something techies typically enjoy spending time doing, but it's a very important part of having a successful business relationship with your customer) and make sure all your legal wording is done correctly as well. I've worked at companies before where product development was funded by customers, but the need the customer wanted addressed was sufficiently general that the company wanted to retain the copyright and IP to resell to others. In this case, the customer was granted cheap or free perpetual licenses to use the software that was developed, but the contract was written so that the company retained the copyright and the right to sell licenses to others as well.
Except that money from capital gains are not subject to either Social Security or Medicare. Taxes for those programs are deducted from employment income, not investment income. Furthermore, capital gains tax rates are significantly lower than those for ordinary income - currently the former is capped at 15%, while the latter is 39%. Not a knock on the Google founders specifically, but rather on the wealthy in general - as Warren Buffet has pointed out, our tax system is skewed so that wealthy folks like himself pay an effective tax rate of 17.7%, while his secretary is taxed at 30%.
You don't even have to work around the list of things you can't carry on board; items on the list get missed all the time. Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic had an article from last year detailing all the things he's managed to sneak onto planes, including pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, bottles of Fiji Water, and box cutters. He's even brought two cans' worth of beer through security by wearing a Beerbelly under his clothes and walking it through the metal detector. And this in spite of the fact that he was selected for secondary inspection at the time he was wearing it.
He's also tried forging and printing out his own boarding pass (with help from Bruce Schneier) and getting through security with it, with similar results:
Except your extra vowels?
That's only because you haven't seen the size of his porn collection.
While I know Google makes for good news, this story is in fact more about the exchanges loosening their grip on quote restrictions than it is a feel-good Google story.
Historically the exchanges have required anyone offering free quotes to delay them 15-20 minutes since a big part of their revenue stream derived from charging brokerages for real-time quotes. (Brokerages in turn only offered this service to their customers.) NASDAQ announced a deal to allow Google, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC to show real-time quotes for free. Yahoo Finance announced a similar deal with a different group (BATS Trading) to phase free real-time quotes throughout its site also.
Looks like the internet continues to bring down barriers to information.
Note that IPO shares are typically priced slightly below what the company thinks the fair value is, in order to give the initial purchasers a good deal. The more paranoid (cynical?) have suggested that Vonage deliberately overpriced its shares and used its own customers to prop up its IPO price. Given that customer relations for the company weren't stellar to begin with (too many horror stories dealing with their staff), this is going to generate a lot more negative PR with both their current customer base and potential future customers.
I submitted a story on this yesterday morning. Vonage went on CNBC Wednesday morning and announced that it "is going to let some of its customers off the hook by buying their unwanted shares." The statement said that "While all avenues are available to us we cannot imagine alienating our customers in that way. If certain . . . customers don't pay we expect to repurchase shares from the underwriters if necessary."
People immediately started pointing out that it is illegal for a compnay to treat different shareholders in the same class differently -- Vonage was only offering to "make whole" (Wall Street speak for "absorb the losses of") investors that hadn't yet paid for their shares; people that had paid were SOL.
The whole IPO has basically been a mess, with snafus both in selling shares to their customers and delivering them. Some Vonage customers that they were led to believe that they "weren't allocated shares in the IPO when in fact they had received the shares. Others investors who purchased shares have complained that technical glitches on a Web site set up for Vonage customers prevented them from executing sales in a timely fashion."
I've had good experiences with the Vonage product as a customer, but there are many, many stories of how poorly Vonage customer service treats their customers. They're very slow in sorting out problems -- it took them 3 months to transfer my land-line phone number, and initially the temporary number they gave me was in a different area code than my city, putting me in a long-distance calling zone relative to my friends. It took hours before they fixed it (they kept claiming it wasn't "technically possible" to give me a new number). Analysts are worried that future propects for the company might not look so good, and that screwing over their own customers in the IPO might be the last straw.
Since it's impractical to simply expose animal subjects to continuous low-level radiation and check back on them 20 years later (by that time, it'll be too late for the results to be useful), controlled experiments are used to mimic the effects of long-term exposure. Common adjustments include increasing the radiation dose, as well as engineering the lab animals to be more susceptible to cancer development. This way, the duration of the experiments is shortened enough so that we get the results quickly enough for them to be useful.
The flip side is that the conditions obviously aren't exactly the same as the ones that humans are being exposed to anymore, which is why the arguments about whether cell phone radiation is harmful or not remains inconclusive. (For example, how similar are the new engineered animals to regular ones?) But to dismiss the results out of hand just because you don't understand the methodology is poor reasoning.
Have you by any chance been taking language lessons from Donald Rumsfeld?
Oh, wait.
(Not to mention, legal ramifications aside, you've got to wonder about the business wisdom of pissing off your customer base...)
The points they were probably trying to make come up later in the article:
Those three skills are probably the most important ones that would cross over. The last point is particularly often overlooked, since in poker (much like in the stock market) making the "right decision" doesn't always mean you win every time, because of the influence of random chance. Your opponent can play horribly and catch the one card left in the deck that gives him the win, but his strategy was still a losing one even though he "won" this particular time. Hence, unlike people without this background, poker players are already trained not to be results-oriented, but to be strategy-oriented (focusing on "given the information I had, did I make the right decision") instead.Having just returned from the gym, I can't help but think of the clustering possibilities of a long row of treadmills and elliptical skiers ...
Another post talked about the "good old days" before IM fragmentation when everyone just used ICQ. In my view, the golden opportunity for everyone else to get market share was when Mirabilis failed to update ICQ so that it would work through corporate firewalls. Before long, all the kids who were crazy about IM in college graduated, found out they couldn't run ICQ through their company's corporate firewall, and moved en mass to other networks like Yahoo that had workarounds. By the time ICQ caught up, it was too late, people had already switched.
If Google is going to get their IM network to take off, it's going to take something about existing IM networks that can similarly simultaneously annoy you and all your friends into switching. I'm not sure what it's going to be, but it'll probably have to be something stronger than the lure of having everyone code their own client.
The REAL issue with whether options should be expensed or not is whether the diluted EPS captures the full effects of dilution through options issuance, or if there are hidden costs. There's a non-zero "option value" to the options (the choice not to exercise if the stock price drops), that is distinct from the "intrinsic value" (roughly equal to the strike price minus the current price). The argument is that this is presently not captured in the accounting regulations.
For more info on share dilution, check about.com's primer. There's also a section in there on common tricks companies use to hide dilution effects.
The IEEE copyright forms explicitly allow the author to retain the right to redistribute. Taken from the link:
That's why many of the homepages for people in EE/CS will have a long list of publications, along with handy links to PDF copies of the papers in question.The biggest challenge I find going through the technical literature today is information glut. If a publication or web site accepts just anyone's submissions, then it's going to be next to useless because it'll be so hard to dig out the gems from the chaff that it'll be totally useless. Imagine if you had to read through some of the bigger Slashdot discussions (1000+ comments) without the moderation system in place so that you at least have somewhere to start.
Today, paper reviews that decide whether your paper gets admitted or not are typically seen by only ~3 reviewers. This leads to pretty big variance on the quality of reviews -- some reviewers just couldn't care less and rush through the reviews with non-committal comments, while more rarely there are others who'd prefer to suppress competing research. Poor papers may get in if they hit a few indifferent reviewers, and good papers may be bounced for similar reasons.
I'd be curious about how well a public moderation system like Slashdot's would work in that context -- with more mods, review scores would be less vulnerable to manipulation by a small group of poor reviewers. That way, no one's work could be suppressed by negative reviewers, but the scoring system would help draw a reader's attention to the most popular articles.
If you're good at what you do, there'll be good jobs for you no matter what path in life you choose. If you're a lazy slackabout, then you're screwed no matter what. There's no "right" or "wrong" answer about whether a PhD is a good choice -- it's about whether it's a good choice for YOU. This is the real reason why people tell you to do something you love -- chances are, you'll be enthusiastic about it and do it well, and success will follow naturally.