Yeah, I agree it's pointless to engage in "special olympics" ping-pong conversations. You mentioned "rebroadcasting" and "building up your record collection". The way I see it is that these two are fundamentally different. I am sure we both agree that in most jurisdictions, it would be illegal to rebroadcast any recordings, but if you don't redistribute what you record and use it for personal use only - that constitutes what they try to protect here in the U.S. as "fair use".
There are not very clear demarkation lines between many issues. Like someone pointed out, copyright as a legal subject is kind of 'artificially created'. And I know that many of the issues are handled on a case-by-case basis.
In the end, it's probably good that things like this Russian site spur up a controversy and discussions because in the end, it will help the system evolve into (hopefully) what the customer wants and at the same time create a solid foundation that we can all use (as well as enforce) internationally.
Please don't insult me by pretending that I failed to understand a basic premise of applicability of law.
My follow up is not overrated (and not just because it wasn't rated at all at the time of your reply yet). The parent of my followup implied that it is illegal to record music off of radio for personal use. That's what I was disproving. In addition to all that, even you explained yourself, and it turs out it is actually legal even in the UK jurisdiction.
Also, please stop making assumptions that it is self-implied that every post containing references to regulations is talking about United Kingdom. Next time, state that explicitly to avoid confusion.
PS: There is no such thing as "more or less legal" in front of a judge or jury. It's a yes or no question based on series of considerations but with a binary result. That's why it's so tough to decide a case...
"Personal use also permits music fans to make "mix tapes" or compilations of their favorite songs from their own personal music collection or the radio for their own personal enjoyment in a more convenient format. [...] They do not have the right, however, to make their music collections available to others by uploading them onto the Internet for public downloading."
So as long as you're not sharing your recordings that you make off of public broadcasts, you are legal.
When I rip a stream, I do so with without any intention of sharing what I have ripped with other people. It is legal because I do it for 'personal use only'.
I do not have any motivation WHATESOEVER to share what I rip any more, because I could care less about other people's desires for songs in this case. In this case, I only care about makign sure that I am a RECIPIENT of a service that allows me to rip music.
This system potentially allows for consolidation of the distribution channel from the music companies to a tree-like structure: artists -> publishers -> radio stations -> listeners. In the current P2P model, there is no chain and thus no CONTROL.
From that perspective, I am being "a good boy" and it's only a matter of the happy-go-suing RIAA folks to figure out how to charge me for that music. They could charge radio stations for the license, which in turn the radio station would recoup by introducing advertising into their stream (which is rather inefficient and irrelevant, since I can skip commercials when ripping) or charge me a listener fee.
Therefore, I claim that from the perspective of artist and distributors compensation, it is more ethical to do stream ripping than P2P sharing and therefore IT IS NOT THE SAME.
As you can see, this type of a paradigm shift is already happening. It's called XM Radio and Sirius and what I am doing right now, I am doing for free, but only until that gap closes.
PS: In this case, I have omitted considering the fact that since P2P already exists, by the very definition of P2P, there is nothing technically that can be created to stop P2P for as long as there are more or less unobstructed communication links between people.
It's a pity they don't advertise it on their website, you can't even find out what "MBNA ShopSafe" is until you log in, which presumes you have an account with them. It's a pity they don't have more info publicly available on the webiste for potential customers, I think this could be a great sales pitch instead of those annoying "Get fraud protection for $99.99 a year" phone calls.
I was willing to sacrifice the "search" functionality and I happily wrote myself a program to monitor any set of Shoutcast stations and when metadata arrives that matches my search query, I split, rip, save. Free.
For those who can't write it themselves, here you go, you can buy it out of the box, it's called RipCast.
Use the "one-time disposable credit card number generation" service provided by your bank. Citi has it, MBNA has it, Discover has it, AmEx has it, almost everyone these days has it.
The way it works, you log in, specify the maximum amount to charge and set your own expiration date per your wish. A credit card number from a static pool is given to you and associated with the amount and your billing information for the period of time until expiration. After that, the number is useless. The number also becomes useless once you use it to charge up to the amount that you specified (i.e. exhaust your "quota" on that number). They typically even generate the CVV code for you, should you ever need it, so it works pretty well.
At one of the large investment banks that remains unnamed, they have a system by which you cannot talk with the outside world at all, except for web traffic, all passed through a proxy server.
The way I solved my upload problems is I set up a website (http://my_site_on_my_remote_server), extended it with SSL and password protected a secure area where I set up an upload facility for myself. This way, I was able to access a remote repository of files, upload, download and not worry about technical problems you describe.
In the end, under a set of given conditions, there is typically only one optimum solution to maximize returns on assets. Looks like your CPA analyzed your particular situation well and so by now I don't doubt your abilities at all.
Hm, as long as we all get to do what makes us happy in the end, things will stay okay.
What a rollercoaster discussion that was. What can I say, Slashdot indeed.
Untrue. In fact, my CPA strongly discouraged me from paying off my mortgage (a suggestion that I made). He termed it "a common mistake". Don't ignore the tax write-off associated with a mortgage. Another mistake is to assume that one should liquidate their retirement investments, many of which are tax-deferred to pay off their home. Again, another big mistake. Perhaps you should hire a licensed CPA instead of a "financial advisor." I've found them to be far more helpful once one gets beyond thinking that CDs at a bank are an investment.
On the contrary, I still insist on what I said. But this time you have revealed more details. Regarding the tax write-off, I thought you were worth so much that a meazly monthly mortgage payment interest did not really matter as a worth-enough tax break.
Also, very importantly, to clarify why I was not wrong, I did not suggest liquidating your retirement investments, please!! I only suggested a transfer of your low-yield cash investments into the equity of your home. I was assuming that you have:
low-yield cash investments for the purpose of a personal/family cash reserve,
traditional high-yield or moderate-yield (depending on your risk appetite towards retirement funds) tax-deferred investments for the purpose of retirement,
"venture" investments (e.g. assets invested in running a business or some experimental, hobby, or other money-making venture, on which even if you burn out, you know you have not lowered your living standard). Based on the venture, appropriate liability shielding techniques must be exercised to ensure that in case of a problem, assets from group #1 & group #2 are NEVER affected.
I strongly disapprove of liquidating assets from group #2. It is group #1 of assets that I have suggested transitioning into the equity of your home, provided they are big enough to cover the outstanding balance.
I admit that I have made the mistake in assuming that the tax benefits from the mortgage interest in your case were negligible. Now you have clarified that this is not the case.
As it can be clearly seen, I did not have enough information about your situation and frankly speaking, I don't think Slashdot is a good place to talk about these things for numerous reasons. And also because understanding someone's situation takes a set of messages to exchange with questions and answers, which are much more productive if done in real time.
PS: For the purposes of invsetment consideration, I consider a primary home as more of a liability than an asset because even though it has monetary value, it doesn't make sense to liquidate it due to the fact that one has to live somewhere.
"The only debt I carry is on my home mortgage, and that's an investment that has almost doubled in value in five years." "What an idiot you are. I have investments, savings, and net worth that would let me retire long before you even move out of your parents' basement."
I think you should seriously consult your financial advisor because I am not the idiot here... If you carry a mortgage and at the same time you have investments and savings etc. in sizes that you claim to have, then you are a fool:
If your big "wealth portfolio" is as large as you claim, then part of it surely will be high-liquidity investments such as cash, government and/or certain corporate bonds. People tend to keep low-interest investments and call it "emergency cash", which is generally okay.
But say for example your cash investments earn you 2% interest yield and that your mortgage balance is charged at 6% interest rate. The interest rate difference between your cash assets and your mortgage is 4%. That means that if you instead used those assets to pay off your remaining mortgage balance, you would gain cost savings in the amount equivalent to 4% compound interest of the amount. Right now, you are basically loosing 4% in this instance.
"Paying it off" versus "not paying it off while keeping low-interest investments" is, in terms of risk, equivalent. Your assets will not be put in greater jeopardy by paying off that mortgage. If you ever need the above mentioned cash back (because maybe you originally kept it as "emergency cash"), all of it is still there. Only it's been converted into equity of your home. Depending on the amount of the oustanding balance on your mortgage, 4% in benefits is quite significant.
Of course, if you are not dumb or do not have a dumb financial advisor, the true reason why you haven't paid it off yet is because you know you should do it, but you simply don't have enough money to do it, which means you lied about how big your assets are in your previous bolstering post. But I wouldn't accuse you of lying, would I...?
"You love to throw around idiotic terms like "value creator", but the only way that you will "create value" is if you use some of your bullshit as fertilizer."
If you don't know what "value" means in an economy, then I have no more finance-related topics to talk to you about because we would not be productive in the discussion.
"Do you own a home outright? If not, STFU, loser."
I keep assets in such a way that the yield on them is maximized at a chosen risk level. E.g. I held on to the cash and invested it elsewhere at better returns until I had enough assets to achieve even higher yield on my money, but this time from the cashflow on an investment property. I purchased only at that point and let me tell you, I had a hell lot of fun learning about real estate even though that's not what my university degree is related to.
When I didn't have money, I used to practice "use other people's money" but that came at a cost in form of interest that I had to pay to others, obviously. Those tough times are long gone luckily. I carried debt, and worked my way based on the trust I have slowly built between my business partners. They always got what they asked from me and in return, they never doubted me so much that they would refuse my business offers, even though I am not "perfect" in many ways.
Now that I think of it, it's funny you called me a loser, it's amusing how edgy you got and started throwing all that profanity immediately after someone touched you in a sensitive spot such as your "success". Are you like insecure about yourself, or what??
"Do you own a home outright? If not, STFU, loser." "I've probably saved up more for retirement than you'll ever earn."
I really doubt that, but I think this is pretty immature of you to try to claim. Even if you by any remote chance truly do, that's very good for you, so enjoy it while it lasts before you get a heart attack.
Morality can and should be objective, and should be based on facts and logic, in short, reason.
Ouch! To say how morality "should" or should not be is in itself a conviction based on your subjective cultural beliefs. Just because you want it to be something doesn't make it so quite yet.
Stop pretending you are philosopher and/.-carma-whoring on that.
Truth is a proposition that consorts with reality.
And you know as much about reality as I do.
By the token of your very same logic, there is no way to evaluate existence of absolute truth. Conclusion that absolute truth exists is yet another relative observation.
Which is a worry I have about Googles IPO. There is nothing keeping Billy from insuing a hostile take over of Google once they go public, (though some would say anti-trust litigation would stop them, it really hasn't put a dent in there plans in the past;-) ).
This is the n-th time some paranoid/.-er is worried about Microsoft.
When Google goes public, it will most likely issue a number of shares that will represent less than 51%. Remember that there are employee stock options as well as the founders' shareholding and that one of the reasons why companies go public is to allow its initial founders to get their options/shares worth.
Going private would make sense, but I doubt that with employee benefits such as options, they can effectively reduce the number of shareholders to fewer than 300 to make going private viable.
You say "they don't need to raise money for expansion". How do you know?! Have you seen their financials or have you spoken to their strategic planning team while having them on a polygraph?
Raising cash via corporate bonds as you describe might be a very good alternative. I think that most likely, if they decide to not IPO, they will split the company to avoid SEC reporting, IPO doesn't happen, corporate bond offering is made if cash is needed and they will go ahead with their new email product.
Even though timing of the above events is questionable, I would definitely argue that splitting (to avoid reporting) + bonds is the way to go if they want to stay out of long-term trouble, especially in this business, where they are enjoying a reputation of not such an obvious customer-screwer.
On a completely unrelated side note: Do you know that Google tracks your browsing habits? (Imagine how much power that gives them to skew their services for profit!!!!) When you visit Google, assuming you have cookies enabled (just like the 80% of the public who uses IE whether you like it or not), you get a cookie with a unique ID (check if you don't believe). This means that whenever you visit a site that participates in AdWords, the script that displays the ads has access to that cookie and from the referer, it knows where you've been! So if nearly every more or less important site participates in AdWords, Google benefits greatly. Simple, but not so obvious to an average joe visitor...
Regarding your nice home. You most likely have a mortgage and call it "owning a home" even though it is nothing more than a tax break gained from "trying to own" instead of "renting from someone else". I would not even be surprised if you had taken out a home equity loan at least once in the past of your "career" to pay off higher-interest debt (such as credit cards).
You are the one who is scared. You are scared of loosing what you think you have gained. You are a ladder climber instead of a value creator. You apparently work for money, not for the passion of it.
Arguing that you are working for money because you have a family for which you are financially responsible is rendered as a pathetic situation you got yourself into. Not because you have family (that's your choice that deserves respsect) but because you have not been smart enough to work smart instead of hard to minimize risks that surround your family's dependence on you.
You were probably educated in the U.S. system, which means you can do only what you specialized on, who either spent time with his frat house buddies, "real friends" or working your ass off studying for that multiple-choice test and using methods that you learned without ever learning how those methods were derived and where they fundamentally come from.
As you said, someone in your situation will NEVER be able to get into a different career - because you are without horizons beyond common sense and your specialty field. (Not to mention your fixation on the assumption that you HAVE to go to college to get into a career.)
You are scared now because you were foolish to think that "it's going to all work out in the end" at the start of your career, forgetting that tomorrow is not certain and betting everything on one card. Now once you get laid off, your system will crumble down like a house of cards. (Hm.. did I mention that mortgage of yours...?)
You failed to plan with responsiblity. You are too narrow minded and think that careers are separate pieces in terms of skill-sets and you simply can't see any overlaps. These days, interdisciplinary fields are where the labor demand is. Because it is the people who can think out of the box and extract benefit from connecting what used to be separate who are in demand.
You perpetually argue on a stand that is based on your personal assumptions and your skewed perception of what is reality. I would not be surprised if your reality is the morning cofee, your office table, some newspapers, lunch break, more of your office table, a drivehome, news at 11 and a late-night tv show. You are a typical middle-class individual with commitments who is now not just fucked, but proper-fucked: for his narrow-mindedness practiced from the very beginning, for taking steps towards what was an illusion of a good professional life.
Why are you citing sources such as UPI when posting in Slashdot? I find it hard to believe that sources other than UPI didn't cover the topics covered in UPI's article.
UPI's integrity as a news covering agency has disintegrated years ago and noone buys news from them any more. Just because robots like Google go fetch their articles doesn't mean they are any good.
UPI's integrity and news covering reliability has diminished to zero when a cult bought it, which dates back as long as 2000 which was followed by Helen Thomas leavingleaving in protest (UPI's leading reporter for over 20 years).
Eat you own dogfood.
I see you jumped on my post in a low-esteem/. "special olympics" style.
Even when it is on the merchant's money when fraud occurs? Merchants have to protect themselves.
Merchants do not HAVE to "protect" themselves against anything. There is no reason why merchants should settle for tolerating the risk of cc chargebacks on an order for which they accepted a payment and fulfilled their contractual sales obligations. It is only because the credit card products are so prevalent on the market, a merchant is being forced to pay for the vulnerability of credit cards to fraud - as decided by the banks and merchant account providers who HOLD in their hands the momentum that would places every merchant who does not accept Visa/Mastercard credit cards out of business.
[...] it has to be something right: Yes, if you suspect of fraud, delay the delivery.
No, it is wrong to delay. For a merchant, it is not rational to place customer retention rate in jeopardy by introducing their judgement of fraud decetion (merchant is in the business of selling and not being a skilled fraud detector). It also adds to labor cost, because the order process can no longer be well-automated, human interaction will either decrease the sales volume or decrease the profit margin due to labor cost.
"If the banks transferred the responsibility for fraud from merchants to the customers, the use of such features would skyrocket."
no use of credit cards would be zero in a week.
No, the use of credit card would not be zero in a week. You are not realizing that how valuable the CONVENIENCE of credit cards is to a modern customer. The customers would be willing to get pushed, but only so much... That's why the banks will never volunteer to incur cost (or loose customers) just to "do good" on the fraud issue. Instead, they found a solution that is an easy way out for them. Banks are NOT fighting the fraud, they are TRANSFERRING COST of fraud to the merchants. So today, the banks will do NOTHING.
You don't know me, do you?
I don't know you, but you seem to be very unnecessarily (read: immaturely) emotional. But hey, that's only an opinion. And an opinion of a person whose nick you find offensive shouldn't matter to you, should it?
You need to think before you write. I still insist that you have probably NEVER run a real business and have no clue what "customer satsifaction" means beyond being a slogan in many tv commercials. The moment that you have to say to your customer "sorry, there was an error, here's your merchandise [or a refund if you wish]", you would slowly be put out of business. No one would ever come back to shop with you again. No one wants to shop at a place where you can't order the same way as you can order elsewhere (real-time, immediately, product gets shipped same day afternoon or next day morning).
Think before you write and get some more business experience first.
PS: It is my freedom to choose the nick that I want and if you are unable to tolerate that, you can complain at the Federal Fascist Bureau of Offensive Nickname Prevention...
The problem is that the merchant does not have a way to detect which purchase is fraud and which is legitimate. To delay shipping erases merchant's own competitive advantage. Would you buy from a merchant who waits for a week "just to make sure" before shipping??
Get real. Introducing a delay is too artificial and it is as much useless as it is simple. It should not be the merchant's task to be the anti-fraud police. You have obviously never run a business before, so the term "customer satsfaction" probably seems like an overused cliche to you.
There is one solution that is already in place: one-time disposable cc numbers. When you make a purchase online, you log on to your cc account, your bank generates a combination of a cc number (taken from a pool), together with the expiration date (e.g. a month from now) and an amount up to which that number can be used, and you supply that to the merchant. This means the customer never has to reveal his "real" cc number and even if the number gets stolen, it's absolutely useless. But the customers are too dumb right now to use this feature. Or I should say, noone pressures them to use it. If the banks transferred the responsibility for fraud from merchants to the customers, the use of such features would skyrocket. But the banks won't do that, because it would make their services relatively tougher to use, which means they could potentially loose customers for their cc products.
I mean, I could take my brother's card and leave the country, hit the limit, he could say it was stolen, he doesn't lose the money, I get to keep my stuff, the store would love the business, and the CC company would be bankrupt in two hours...
Hm... I hope it would work like this instead: you could take your brother's card, leave the country, hit the limit, he could say it was stolen, you get to keep your stuff, the store would love the business, the CC company doesn't go bankrupt, your brother is held responsible for the charges, he finds the perpetrator (i.e. you), sue the criminal for damages, win and be more careful with using his card next time to prevent theft.
The problem with that, though, is obviously that the cc companies would never be able to convince the customers to use a credit card product if it's implemented so poorly (in such a fraud-prone way as nowadays).
It appears the credit card companies can stay in business only thanks to the momentum that was created in the pre-ecommerce era, when fraud was not so prevalent. So today, they decide to screw the merchants, which is the safest way for them not to loose that momentum and "solve" the fraud problem.
I would strongly discourage you from seeking a place where merchants can swap info about fraudulent cards. You as a merchant are not an authoritative body to make a decision whose personal credit card information is a source of fraud. Plus, I suspect that participating in such an exchange of information would not only present an ethical issue, but it it would also place you in immediate and direct violation of your merchant agreement.
Now let me ask you a question, since I always wanted to know and you seem to be able to answer this: When you authorize AND capture, the funds are sent over to your account and that's it, no? How can you as a merchant be charged back for the amount if the purchase is a legitimate purchase (even though someone else used someone's card). I understand someone has to bear the cost of fraud, but I never expected the merchants to be the ones. You can't be blamed and held responsible for not being a cop to sniff for suspicious activity and crime. Please shed some light on this for me.
And regarding what you mention as 'merchant rating'. What is that? It's not like a 'credit' rating, is it? Does it mean that if Visa-issued cards have a large proportion of fraud, you will eventually be denied accepting Visa cards due to accepting of payments via Visa?
This seems outright wrong, so I am wondering why do you need to worry about whether the person who is ordering is legitimately using the card. Card can be charged, order can be processed, you get paid, you ship, done deal, tough luck for the guy whose card was stolen (he should've used a disposable credit card number generation service from his bank, just like Citi, MBNA, Discover and others have). Then we would see how quickly the consumers would become "educated" about their privacy.
Fine, but a national application solely in NZ is no good. I was mostly angered by your claim of cheapness, which in no way implies cheap in a competitive sense. If you want to truly utilize the "exclude others from use..." protection that a patent gives you, you file a WIPO PCT application or several applications in the most important high-GDP or otherwise chosen target markets. And THAT is unfortunately NOT cheap...
This will be my last post in this thread, I am not good at/. special olympics, but sometimes when I read stuff like what you wrote, I just can't hold myself....
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I agree it's pointless to engage in "special olympics" ping-pong conversations. You mentioned "rebroadcasting" and "building up your record collection". The way I see it is that these two are fundamentally different. I am sure we both agree that in most jurisdictions, it would be illegal to rebroadcast any recordings, but if you don't redistribute what you record and use it for personal use only - that constitutes what they try to protect here in the U.S. as "fair use".
There are not very clear demarkation lines between many issues. Like someone pointed out, copyright as a legal subject is kind of 'artificially created'. And I know that many of the issues are handled on a case-by-case basis.
In the end, it's probably good that things like this Russian site spur up a controversy and discussions because in the end, it will help the system evolve into (hopefully) what the customer wants and at the same time create a solid foundation that we can all use (as well as enforce) internationally.
Please don't insult me by pretending that I failed to understand a basic premise of applicability of law.
My follow up is not overrated (and not just because it wasn't rated at all at the time of your reply yet). The parent of my followup implied that it is illegal to record music off of radio for personal use. That's what I was disproving. In addition to all that, even you explained yourself, and it turs out it is actually legal even in the UK jurisdiction.
Also, please stop making assumptions that it is self-implied that every post containing references to regulations is talking about United Kingdom. Next time, state that explicitly to avoid confusion.
PS: There is no such thing as "more or less legal" in front of a judge or jury. It's a yes or no question based on series of considerations but with a binary result. That's why it's so tough to decide a case...
Of course it is legal. The guy is clueless and talking shit and gets rated +5, typical for Slashdot.
My comment explaining why it is legal is here.
Broadcasting is "we broadcast it and you listen", and there's no automatic right to tape records off the radio.
There IS.
It's part of the 'fair use' concept:
"Personal use also permits music fans to make "mix tapes" or compilations of their favorite songs from their own personal music collection or the radio for their own personal enjoyment in a more convenient format. [...] They do not have the right, however, to make their music collections available to others by uploading them onto the Internet for public downloading."
So as long as you're not sharing your recordings that you make off of public broadcasts, you are legal.
More info: http://fairuse.stanford.edu
When I rip a stream, I do so with without any intention of sharing what I have ripped with other people. It is legal because I do it for 'personal use only'.
I do not have any motivation WHATESOEVER to share what I rip any more, because I could care less about other people's desires for songs in this case. In this case, I only care about makign sure that I am a RECIPIENT of a service that allows me to rip music.
This system potentially allows for consolidation of the distribution channel from the music companies to a tree-like structure: artists -> publishers -> radio stations -> listeners. In the current P2P model, there is no chain and thus no CONTROL.
From that perspective, I am being "a good boy" and it's only a matter of the happy-go-suing RIAA folks to figure out how to charge me for that music. They could charge radio stations for the license, which in turn the radio station would recoup by introducing advertising into their stream (which is rather inefficient and irrelevant, since I can skip commercials when ripping) or charge me a listener fee.
Therefore, I claim that from the perspective of artist and distributors compensation, it is more ethical to do stream ripping than P2P sharing and therefore IT IS NOT THE SAME.
As you can see, this type of a paradigm shift is already happening. It's called XM Radio and Sirius and what I am doing right now, I am doing for free, but only until that gap closes.
PS: In this case, I have omitted considering the fact that since P2P already exists, by the very definition of P2P, there is nothing technically that can be created to stop P2P for as long as there are more or less unobstructed communication links between people.
Alright, I see you found it - "MBNA ShopSafe".
It's a pity they don't advertise it on their website, you can't even find out what "MBNA ShopSafe" is until you log in, which presumes you have an account with them. It's a pity they don't have more info publicly available on the webiste for potential customers, I think this could be a great sales pitch instead of those annoying "Get fraud protection for $99.99 a year" phone calls.
You haven't discovered that what I am doing is 100% legal as opposed to p2p filesharing, have you?
Didn't know that. Thanks.
They charge.
I was willing to sacrifice the "search" functionality and I happily wrote myself a program to monitor any set of Shoutcast stations and when metadata arrives that matches my search query, I split, rip, save. Free.
For those who can't write it themselves, here you go, you can buy it out of the box, it's called RipCast.
Use the "one-time disposable credit card number generation" service provided by your bank. Citi has it, MBNA has it, Discover has it, AmEx has it, almost everyone these days has it.
The way it works, you log in, specify the maximum amount to charge and set your own expiration date per your wish. A credit card number from a static pool is given to you and associated with the amount and your billing information for the period of time until expiration. After that, the number is useless. The number also becomes useless once you use it to charge up to the amount that you specified (i.e. exhaust your "quota" on that number). They typically even generate the CVV code for you, should you ever need it, so it works pretty well.
At one of the large investment banks that remains unnamed, they have a system by which you cannot talk with the outside world at all, except for web traffic, all passed through a proxy server.
The way I solved my upload problems is I set up a website (http://my_site_on_my_remote_server), extended it with SSL and password protected a secure area where I set up an upload facility for myself. This way, I was able to access a remote repository of files, upload, download and not worry about technical problems you describe.
I agree with you on all three points.
In the end, under a set of given conditions, there is typically only one optimum solution to maximize returns on assets. Looks like your CPA analyzed your particular situation well and so by now I don't doubt your abilities at all.
Hm, as long as we all get to do what makes us happy in the end, things will stay okay.
What a rollercoaster discussion that was. What can I say, Slashdot indeed.
Untrue. In fact, my CPA strongly discouraged me from paying off my mortgage (a suggestion that I made). He termed it "a common mistake". Don't ignore the tax write-off associated with a mortgage. Another mistake is to assume that one should liquidate their retirement investments, many of which are tax-deferred to pay off their home. Again, another big mistake. Perhaps you should hire a licensed CPA instead of a "financial advisor." I've found them to be far more helpful once one gets beyond thinking that CDs at a bank are an investment.
On the contrary, I still insist on what I said. But this time you have revealed more details. Regarding the tax write-off, I thought you were worth so much that a meazly monthly mortgage payment interest did not really matter as a worth-enough tax break.
Also, very importantly, to clarify why I was not wrong, I did not suggest liquidating your retirement investments, please!! I only suggested a transfer of your low-yield cash investments into the equity of your home. I was assuming that you have:
I strongly disapprove of liquidating assets from group #2. It is group #1 of assets that I have suggested transitioning into the equity of your home, provided they are big enough to cover the outstanding balance.
I admit that I have made the mistake in assuming that the tax benefits from the mortgage interest in your case were negligible. Now you have clarified that this is not the case.
As it can be clearly seen, I did not have enough information about your situation and frankly speaking, I don't think Slashdot is a good place to talk about these things for numerous reasons. And also because understanding someone's situation takes a set of messages to exchange with questions and answers, which are much more productive if done in real time.
PS: For the purposes of invsetment consideration, I consider a primary home as more of a liability than an asset because even though it has monetary value, it doesn't make sense to liquidate it due to the fact that one has to live somewhere.
"The only debt I carry is on my home mortgage, and that's an investment that has almost doubled in value in five years."
"What an idiot you are. I have investments, savings, and net worth that would let me retire long before you even move out of your parents' basement."
I think you should seriously consult your financial advisor because I am not the idiot here... If you carry a mortgage and at the same time you have investments and savings etc. in sizes that you claim to have, then you are a fool:
If your big "wealth portfolio" is as large as you claim, then part of it surely will be high-liquidity investments such as cash, government and/or certain corporate bonds. People tend to keep low-interest investments and call it "emergency cash", which is generally okay.
But say for example your cash investments earn you 2% interest yield and that your mortgage balance is charged at 6% interest rate. The interest rate difference between your cash assets and your mortgage is 4%. That means that if you instead used those assets to pay off your remaining mortgage balance, you would gain cost savings in the amount equivalent to 4% compound interest of the amount. Right now, you are basically loosing 4% in this instance.
"Paying it off" versus "not paying it off while keeping low-interest investments" is, in terms of risk, equivalent. Your assets will not be put in greater jeopardy by paying off that mortgage. If you ever need the above mentioned cash back (because maybe you originally kept it as "emergency cash"), all of it is still there. Only it's been converted into equity of your home. Depending on the amount of the oustanding balance on your mortgage, 4% in benefits is quite significant.
Of course, if you are not dumb or do not have a dumb financial advisor, the true reason why you haven't paid it off yet is because you know you should do it, but you simply don't have enough money to do it, which means you lied about how big your assets are in your previous bolstering post. But I wouldn't accuse you of lying, would I...?
"You love to throw around idiotic terms like "value creator", but the only way that you will "create value" is if you use some of your bullshit as fertilizer."
If you don't know what "value" means in an economy, then I have no more finance-related topics to talk to you about because we would not be productive in the discussion.
"Do you own a home outright? If not, STFU, loser."
I keep assets in such a way that the yield on them is maximized at a chosen risk level. E.g. I held on to the cash and invested it elsewhere at better returns until I had enough assets to achieve even higher yield on my money, but this time from the cashflow on an investment property. I purchased only at that point and let me tell you, I had a hell lot of fun learning about real estate even though that's not what my university degree is related to.
When I didn't have money, I used to practice "use other people's money" but that came at a cost in form of interest that I had to pay to others, obviously. Those tough times are long gone luckily. I carried debt, and worked my way based on the trust I have slowly built between my business partners. They always got what they asked from me and in return, they never doubted me so much that they would refuse my business offers, even though I am not "perfect" in many ways.
Now that I think of it, it's funny you called me a loser, it's amusing how edgy you got and started throwing all that profanity immediately after someone touched you in a sensitive spot such as your "success". Are you like insecure about yourself, or what??
"Do you own a home outright? If not, STFU, loser."
"I've probably saved up more for retirement than you'll ever earn."
I really doubt that, but I think this is pretty immature of you to try to claim. Even if you by any remote chance truly do, that's very good for you, so enjoy it while it lasts before you get a heart attack.
Morality can and should be objective, and should be based on facts and logic, in short, reason.
Ouch! To say how morality "should" or should not be is in itself a conviction based on your subjective cultural beliefs. Just because you want it to be something doesn't make it so quite yet.
Stop pretending you are philosopher and /.-carma-whoring on that.
Truth is a proposition that consorts with reality.
And you know as much about reality as I do.
By the token of your very same logic, there is no way to evaluate existence of absolute truth. Conclusion that absolute truth exists is yet another relative observation.
Which is a worry I have about Googles IPO. There is nothing keeping Billy from insuing a hostile take over of Google once they go public, (though some would say anti-trust litigation would stop them, it really hasn't put a dent in there plans in the past ;-) ).
This is the n-th time some paranoid /.-er is worried about Microsoft.
When Google goes public, it will most likely issue a number of shares that will represent less than 51%. Remember that there are employee stock options as well as the founders' shareholding and that one of the reasons why companies go public is to allow its initial founders to get their options/shares worth.
Going private would make sense, but I doubt that with employee benefits such as options, they can effectively reduce the number of shareholders to fewer than 300 to make going private viable.
You say "they don't need to raise money for expansion". How do you know?! Have you seen their financials or have you spoken to their strategic planning team while having them on a polygraph?
Raising cash via corporate bonds as you describe might be a very good alternative. I think that most likely, if they decide to not IPO, they will split the company to avoid SEC reporting, IPO doesn't happen, corporate bond offering is made if cash is needed and they will go ahead with their new email product.
Even though timing of the above events is questionable, I would definitely argue that splitting (to avoid reporting) + bonds is the way to go if they want to stay out of long-term trouble, especially in this business, where they are enjoying a reputation of not such an obvious customer-screwer.
On a completely unrelated side note: Do you know that Google tracks your browsing habits? (Imagine how much power that gives them to skew their services for profit!!!!) When you visit Google, assuming you have cookies enabled (just like the 80% of the public who uses IE whether you like it or not), you get a cookie with a unique ID (check if you don't believe). This means that whenever you visit a site that participates in AdWords, the script that displays the ads has access to that cookie and from the referer, it knows where you've been! So if nearly every more or less important site participates in AdWords, Google benefits greatly. Simple, but not so obvious to an average joe visitor...
Why are you citing sources such as UPI when posting in Slashdot? I find it hard to believe that sources other than UPI didn't cover the topics covered in UPI's article.
UPI's integrity as a news covering agency has disintegrated years ago and noone buys news from them any more. Just because robots like Google go fetch their articles doesn't mean they are any good.
UPI's integrity and news covering reliability has diminished to zero when a cult bought it, which dates back as long as 2000 which was followed by Helen Thomas leavingleaving in protest (UPI's leading reporter for over 20 years).
Eat you own dogfood. /. "special olympics" style.
I see you jumped on my post in a low-esteem
Even when it is on the merchant's money when fraud occurs? Merchants have to protect themselves.
Merchants do not HAVE to "protect" themselves against anything. There is no reason why merchants should settle for tolerating the risk of cc chargebacks on an order for which they accepted a payment and fulfilled their contractual sales obligations. It is only because the credit card products are so prevalent on the market, a merchant is being forced to pay for the vulnerability of credit cards to fraud - as decided by the banks and merchant account providers who HOLD in their hands the momentum that would places every merchant who does not accept Visa/Mastercard credit cards out of business.
[...] it has to be something right: Yes, if you suspect of fraud, delay the delivery.
No, it is wrong to delay. For a merchant, it is not rational to place customer retention rate in jeopardy by introducing their judgement of fraud decetion (merchant is in the business of selling and not being a skilled fraud detector). It also adds to labor cost, because the order process can no longer be well-automated, human interaction will either decrease the sales volume or decrease the profit margin due to labor cost.
"If the banks transferred the responsibility for fraud from merchants to the customers, the use of such features would skyrocket."
no use of credit cards would be zero in a week.
No, the use of credit card would not be zero in a week. You are not realizing that how valuable the CONVENIENCE of credit cards is to a modern customer. The customers would be willing to get pushed, but only so much... That's why the banks will never volunteer to incur cost (or loose customers) just to "do good" on the fraud issue. Instead, they found a solution that is an easy way out for them. Banks are NOT fighting the fraud, they are TRANSFERRING COST of fraud to the merchants. So today, the banks will do NOTHING.
You don't know me, do you?
I don't know you, but you seem to be very unnecessarily (read: immaturely) emotional. But hey, that's only an opinion. And an opinion of a person whose nick you find offensive shouldn't matter to you, should it?
You need to think before you write.
I still insist that you have probably NEVER run a real business and have no clue what "customer satsifaction" means beyond being a slogan in many tv commercials. The moment that you have to say to your customer "sorry, there was an error, here's your merchandise [or a refund if you wish]", you would slowly be put out of business. No one would ever come back to shop with you again. No one wants to shop at a place where you can't order the same way as you can order elsewhere (real-time, immediately, product gets shipped same day afternoon or next day morning).
Think before you write and get some more business experience first.
PS: It is my freedom to choose the nick that I want and if you are unable to tolerate that, you can complain at the Federal Fascist Bureau of Offensive Nickname Prevention...
Not really.
The problem is that the merchant does not have a way to detect which purchase is fraud and which is legitimate. To delay shipping erases merchant's own competitive advantage. Would you buy from a merchant who waits for a week "just to make sure" before shipping??
Get real. Introducing a delay is too artificial and it is as much useless as it is simple. It should not be the merchant's task to be the anti-fraud police. You have obviously never run a business before, so the term "customer satsfaction" probably seems like an overused cliche to you.
There is one solution that is already in place: one-time disposable cc numbers. When you make a purchase online, you log on to your cc account, your bank generates a combination of a cc number (taken from a pool), together with the expiration date (e.g. a month from now) and an amount up to which that number can be used, and you supply that to the merchant. This means the customer never has to reveal his "real" cc number and even if the number gets stolen, it's absolutely useless. But the customers are too dumb right now to use this feature. Or I should say, noone pressures them to use it. If the banks transferred the responsibility for fraud from merchants to the customers, the use of such features would skyrocket. But the banks won't do that, because it would make their services relatively tougher to use, which means they could potentially loose customers for their cc products.
Think before you write.
I mean, I could take my brother's card and leave the country, hit the limit, he could say it was stolen, he doesn't lose the money, I get to keep my stuff, the store would love the business, and the CC company would be bankrupt in two hours...
Hm... I hope it would work like this instead: you could take your brother's card, leave the country, hit the limit, he could say it was stolen, you get to keep your stuff, the store would love the business, the CC company doesn't go bankrupt, your brother is held responsible for the charges, he finds the perpetrator (i.e. you), sue the criminal for damages, win and be more careful with using his card next time to prevent theft.
The problem with that, though, is obviously that the cc companies would never be able to convince the customers to use a credit card product if it's implemented so poorly (in such a fraud-prone way as nowadays).
It appears the credit card companies can stay in business only thanks to the momentum that was created in the pre-ecommerce era, when fraud was not so prevalent. So today, they decide to screw the merchants, which is the safest way for them not to loose that momentum and "solve" the fraud problem.
I would strongly discourage you from seeking a place where merchants can swap info about fraudulent cards. You as a merchant are not an authoritative body to make a decision whose personal credit card information is a source of fraud. Plus, I suspect that participating in such an exchange of information would not only present an ethical issue, but it it would also place you in immediate and direct violation of your merchant agreement.
Now let me ask you a question, since I always wanted to know and you seem to be able to answer this: When you authorize AND capture, the funds are sent over to your account and that's it, no? How can you as a merchant be charged back for the amount if the purchase is a legitimate purchase (even though someone else used someone's card). I understand someone has to bear the cost of fraud, but I never expected the merchants to be the ones. You can't be blamed and held responsible for not being a cop to sniff for suspicious activity and crime. Please shed some light on this for me.
And regarding what you mention as 'merchant rating'. What is that? It's not like a 'credit' rating, is it? Does it mean that if Visa-issued cards have a large proportion of fraud, you will eventually be denied accepting Visa cards due to accepting of payments via Visa?
This seems outright wrong, so I am wondering why do you need to worry about whether the person who is ordering is legitimately using the card. Card can be charged, order can be processed, you get paid, you ship, done deal, tough luck for the guy whose card was stolen (he should've used a disposable credit card number generation service from his bank, just like Citi, MBNA, Discover and others have). Then we would see how quickly the consumers would become "educated" about their privacy.
Thanks for your response.
Fine, but a national application solely in NZ is no good. I was mostly angered by your claim of cheapness, which in no way implies cheap in a competitive sense. If you want to truly utilize the "exclude others from use..." protection that a patent gives you, you file a WIPO PCT application or several applications in the most important high-GDP or otherwise chosen target markets. And THAT is unfortunately NOT cheap...
This will be my last post in this thread, I am not good at /. special olympics, but sometimes when I read stuff like what you wrote, I just can't hold myself....