This is exactly what Brin is talking about. A simple command line interpreted language that a young kid can deal with. Even VB is too heavy for that. GW-Basic and QBasic, if you can get them running on a "modern" machine, are about the closest you can get to the situation he was looking for. No worries about anything other than the pure code that executes the app you are interested in. No windows, or sockets, or API, or includes, or....
That only works AFTER they ignore the judgement. No other court, in the US or outside it, will enforce another court's direct ruling on the case. Not their case, not their problem.
However, practically every jurisdiction will enforce a bench warrant of arrest or contempt for another court, and force the persons involved to be extradicted to the governing jurisdiction, where they will answer for their actions. The courts are a sort of union unto themselves, and they definitely do back each other up in this way. It isn't over for Spamhaus. It is just that the battlefield shifted a bit.
That is just an argument to optimize the workload of the developer, while leaving the end-user floundering with some half-assed crap. Half-assed crap that was inflicted upon them by a software developer!
Long before there was a web, or software developers, there was a saying, "The Customer is always right". Give the end-user the good service they actually want, not the crap service you think they deserve just because it is easier for you to do it that way, or out of some weird sense of software justice.
Google, Yahoo, MS and others of the sort are businesses. In their model of the world, the first thing you must do is have contact. Any contact at all. The quality of tht contract will be reinfed over time as the business relationship develops. Remember, first and foremost, Google et alia are businesses selling a product. Typically the product is ad space, but it could easily be real content as well. In that world, a litte censorship up front is OK, because as business spreads its wings in China, it will throw off that censorship as best it can. Information is power and money, and we all know what a powerful motivator greed can be.
In the Wikipedia world, the whole enterprise revolves around information itself. Money is in there, but it isn't the obvious reason for being of Wikipedia. I assume Wales has some kind of income, but it isn't directly related to the number, kind, or availability of articles on Wikipedia, nor the number of pages hits and article click throughs. The people at Google can't say that as easily. Cut off Google ads, and you kill Google. Cut off Wikipedia ads and what happens? Not much, since Wikipedia doesn't advertise anything but itself on its own site. If anything, beinga free site, visitors that don't contribute information to Wikipedia or money to the WP fund are taking money away from Wales.
It does Wales no good to censor the Wikipedia, and would certainly injure the credibility of the information there. The workload alone would be staggering. He would have to recreate the Chinese censorship infrastructure. Worse, he'd have to network and cross-corelate it, to be sure no fact when unchecked and unapproved. The implications of verifying and authorizing a cross country bialthon sports fact with the People's Army, Trade Goods, Health and Medicine, and Nature Conservancy bureaus boggles the mind.
Google and Yahoo are following the path of "constructive engagement" (look it up in Wikipedia yourselves). It took decades for that to work in South Africa, and the jury is still out in Russia and Eastern Europe. China is huge and stuck in centuries (millenia?) of cultural inertia. "Follow the Leader" sticks real well there. But Greed has its adherents too. And it is a religion that anyone can join easily enough. Even the Communists have stopped trying to stomp it out, and they even encourage it in some places. Which will probably be seen as a strategic error in another hundred years. But it will be far too late by then.
I've been hearing about this for Cell Phones since 2000. It was supposed to be a Broadcast All channel, that would automatically ring every cell in the area in case of an emergency, like a tornado warning. Six years and counting, haven't seen it implemented yet.
The true distributed answer is that each node in the system needs to be capable of being a node, and a bridge, and a repeater. Maybe simultanelously.
A node, in that each cop, firefighter, rescuer, helicopter pilot, medic, etc. needs to be able to send an receive to do her job.
A bridge, in that sometimes the cop's network need to talk to the firefighter's network, of maybe the street cops need to talk to the SWAT subnet.
And a repeater, just in case the fixed infrastucture gets blown to hell and a lowly sanitation truck suddenly becomes elevated to be the lifeline between two isolated rescue efforts.
Just sitting here at my desk, I see that eash radio set should be at least 3 and maybe 5 transeivers. One for primary send and receive, and the others to monitor and possibly cross patch for the other jobs mentioned above. And the whole thing needs to be self-assembling. Smart enough in the BIOS/firmware to deal with infrasturture breakdowns without operator intervention. Like a cell phone, but with 3 - 5 channels, and with capability to be a cell site, not just a phone.
If we were concerned about artists, you'd put all their music online--eliminating album profits to them and labels--and pay to see the live shows. That's where they make all their money anyway.
Sadly untrue. Tours typically only just break even. They are just giant live promotional campaigns for album sales. Airplane tickets, bus rental, hotel fees, meals and catering, wardrobe, stage, sound, and lights. Promotion and ticket handling, venue fees, security, insurance, etc. It all adds up. That is where $40+ tickets come from.
Depends on the artist and entourage of course. One guy with a guitar on a street corner that sleeps on a bedroll and travels by bicycle won't have most of these expenses. But then he won't have much of an online presence either.
Dear tiger4, would prefer the parent poster to go postal from SAD
Not only wrong, but rather the opposite. SAD is caused by insufficient light, both duration and intensity. As I CLEARLY STATED in my previous message, I advocate increasing the output of the new CFL over the bulbs that were originally there. But since this whole debate is just one of troglodyte resistance to change ("Ugh! Me like warm fuzzy glow"), I doubt an AC such as yourself would notice the subtlety involved.
I used to do the CFL bulb in every socket thing. But I later learned there is real scientific evidence that full-spectrum light will put you in a better mood.
The mistake you make here is replacing like-for-like wattage bulbs. I went through my home and replaced the high usage bulbs with CFLs. And as the low usage ones die I replace them. But I replace them with CFLs of a higher equivalent strength. 60w incandescents get replaced with 75w equivalent CFLs, 75w are replaced with 100w. They only draw about 1/4 the juice of incandescents, so I still save big. But now I have more light in the same area, and the picket fence spectrum problem is reduced. Plus, when I can, I mix Cool White, Warm White and Daylight color temperatures. Looks odd, but only if you look at the fixtures and not the room.
I think it is worth the cost to my pocket and the Earth.
Thank you for consuming more than your share. The rest of us apprciate it.
The complaint, among others, is that ICANN has been the tool of the US government for too long. That somehow it would be better if it were less US-centric. That may or may not be true. But that same alternative includes in it the risk that the US would just create another ICANN to do the work of the previous one. And any new agency would certainly be more US centric than the last one.
Especially any new agency formed by the Bush administration, which is responsible for me stubbing my toe this morning.
If ICANN wanted to be independent, they would be. They have a CONTRACT with the US government. They aren't slaves or government employees (or any mix in between!). ICANN could go its own separate way tomorrow if it chose to, subject to whatever termination clause the contract has. They don't do it because they don't want to.
And that is a good thing, because if ICANN did become independent, the US would be free to come up with something to replace it. National entitites are not forced to comply with ICANN. They do it for convienience and compatibility. And seeing as the US is a huge part of the IP traffic in the world, I don't think anyone wants it going off on its own. We definitely do not want W getting any more crazy ideas about "leadership" and "freedom".
You are off be a few orders of magnitude. The cost of one pund to orbit is around $10,000 - 20,000. So 12,000 pounds to orbit would cost about $120,000,000 - $240,000,000. That is assuming a simpler launcher, no special container provisons, and not throwing it out of orbit into the sun. Those things might double the cost, in the worst case. It is still under a billion dollars.
On the other hand, I think throwing the stuff away is foolish. We need to store it in case we come up with a way to reuse it.
Your vote is only worthless because you make it so.
You say you are a US citizen, age 18 or older, with no felony convictions. That means that besides the President, you can register to vote for:
Your city council, Your mayor, Your county supervisors, Your state legislators, Your governor, Your Congressman, and Your Senators
Plus your local school board, water board, city planners, hospital supervisors, parks commission, regional environmental council, dog catcher, civic improvement league, and who knows what all else.
Plus you can run for all those positions, if you think you have the time and money.
Or you can help the campaigns of those that do decide to run.
Or you can pick out your own issues and make noise about them in your community and let people know how you feel and what they can do.
Or you can dive into the backroom politics of the local political machinery and work your way up to BEING one of those Electors that you say takes away your vote. Then when the time comes, and you are one of the 535 that actually picks the President, you can say whatever the hell you please, and no one will stop you. At least not the first time.
But no one is going to hand any of that to you. You have to make the effort to exercise it for yourself.
I think developing a new project is the fun part. So people focus on how to maximize the enjoyment of doing the activity they like, rather than minimizing the drudgery of the activity they don't. We'd all be better off if more maintenance lessons learned made their way into the software design phase. But people are creatures of habit. They figure if they just push their pet method harder on the next project, it won't be a disaster like it was on the last project. Learning from reality never enters into it.
AOL is incentivizing people to leave their paid network. AOL subscribers would in effect be subsidizing people that use access through other providers. AOL lowers its own hardware usage and maintenance costs, all those modem banks out there, while still getting some eyeballs to come see the paid ads etc. on their services, which cost little per viewer to maintain.
A weird business plan. So weird, it just might work!
I didn't mean uninformed with respect to the specific workings of a given company. I meant uninformed on what Sarbox is and what it costs to implement.
Companies are already spending money on internal reporting. Or at least they should be. Sarbanes imposes greater requirements on what must be collected and reported. So the cost isn't in collection, unless we're talking about companies that are serious cowboys and flouting both old AND new law.
The additional cost will be in the new reporting in new ways. Is it more? Yes. But again, was the previous system adequate? If it wasn't, and that seems to be the evidence, then reporting costs would, and properly should, go up You were already spending money on a system that wasn't working, so now you'll be spending somewhat more on a system that will. It just becomes a question of how much more, and are we (the compnay and investors) getting good value from the information reporting systems we create. That is exactly the same problem every MIS in every enterprise anywhere has. Completely independent of Sarbanes-Oxley, the management should have a feel for where the money and effort come from and go to.
If Sarbanes-Oxley is forcing the collection and reporting of useless information, that is a flaw. But just saying that if costs go up it must be bad is seriously shortsighted analysis. Especially considering the opacity investors were facing. And if Lay was to be believed, he wasn't being served by his internal information systems either.
"No, but people go to jail if they don't comply with SOX. People ARE people."
Yes they are people. People working on a job, in a publicly traded company, with OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY, and they should be able to prove they did it correctly. Legally. Nothing is missing, nothing was fudged or shaded or twsted, turned, swapped or hidden. If those same people want to go home and do those things with their own money in their privately held business, fine. That is between them and their spouses (and the IRS, in a different way). But what they do on the job as a trustee of other people's money should be provably correct and legal.
This isn't a case of "Prove to me you aren't a drug dealer". This is "I gave you $100 and you said you would invest it. Show me the money, account for where it went, or go to jail."
Or to jump on another old trop, faceless corporations do have faces. The people with the no kidding dirty hands. If you hold them accountable, the "faceless corporation" becoems more accountable too. No more diluting the blame into insignificance. You can't hide behind "just following orders".
Re:Whats so bad about Peace, Love and Sarbanes-Oxl
on
Enron's Kenneth Lay Dies
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Most venture investors and entreprenuers feel that Sarbox goes too far. You seem to be speaking strictly from the perspective of a (rather uninformed) public shareholder, and frankly you seem to lack the necessary insight into the costs of Sarbox compliance to form a balanced viewpoint. Increasing penalties for (and actually enforcing) SEC rules would have gone a long way without having to add new requirements."
I'm going to go with "Wrong" on two counts here.
First, so what even if I am an uninformed public shareholder? Does that suddenly mean I really don't need to know, should not be informed of, or have a way to find out the internal workings of how the compnay I own a piece of is operated? Is the company intentionally structured so that only a few insiders with good personal connections can have a clue as to what is going to happen to their investment? Even if I can't tell a balance sheet from a chart of accounts or a budget, the structure and contents of the reports have to be understandable, so the underlying management philosophy can be understandable, so the intent of the managers and Board and prospects for the company can be inferred. We'd all like to think they have one, and hopefully it is in accord with our investemtn goals.
Second, If SEC enforcement had been doing its job, then maybe we wouldn't need more law. OK, maybe true, but clearly it wasn't doing its job so we did need new law and a new approach. It costs nothing to just put it out there and let people see what's up. But that wasn't happening. The backroom wizards found it more convienient to just let slip what was the legally required minimum and hold back stuff "you don't need to know". Ok, thanks for watching out for my interests. But in this case, I as shareholder am supposed to be watching over you. You don't get to decide what is the best way for me to do that. You don't get to play with my money and tell me to shut up and be happy. That is as true for the $100 investor as the $100 million investor. So now the cost of reporting and compliance goes up over what it had been in the past. That is seen as a bad thing, but since the reporting in the past was inadequate under the old regime, I have to wonder if the cost was just artificially low all along.
Whats so bad about Peace, Love and Sarbanes-Oxley?
on
Enron's Kenneth Lay Dies
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
OK, everybody knows they can do anything better than anyone else, and there is no real point to following rules created by others. But, in order to end the fighting and constant bickering, we put up with these little annoyances called rules, regulations, and laws. Given that they are silly and pointless, what Other Reasons could there be to not increase corporate financial accountability?
Seems to me anything that puts the CEO, COO, CFO and every other cheif of a company right in the line of fire for criminal and civil liability is a good thing. The Board Officers should be there too of course. To me, the CEO and Chairman are like the Captain of a ship or a Genereal on the battlefield. You Are in Charge and You Are Responsible. If you say the company is in XYZ condition, it damn well ought to be and if we can prove you lied about it, you go to prison. Youd don't get to hide by saying, "the underlings run the company and I don't have a clue". Nothing should be hidden from "conventional interpretation" by some warped usage of accounting and bookkeeping practices. If you want to create a high risk, closed box operation, there are legal ways to do that without hiding it from your investors.
Sunlight and visibility in all the operations should be normal operating procedure, not an inconvienience to be endured.
What if I improperly tag a document with a Creative Commons license? For example, say I am an employee in a large office. Lets make it a government office just for spice. I create some document of some importance to my boss. I have done it as a work for hire. I have done it in a government office, but it is not intended for publication. Somehow, I manage to tag this document with a CC license. I send it around for review, and the information in it is rolled up into a document that IS intended for publication. It wasn't my document to license out, but the license is now bundled up in there. What, if anything, happens next?
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly what Brin is talking about. A simple command line interpreted language that a young kid can deal with. Even VB is too heavy for that. GW-Basic and QBasic, if you can get them running on a "modern" machine, are about the closest you can get to the situation he was looking for. No worries about anything other than the pure code that executes the app you are interested in. No windows, or sockets, or API, or includes, or ....
That only works AFTER they ignore the judgement. No other court, in the US or outside it, will enforce another court's direct ruling on the case. Not their case, not their problem.
However, practically every jurisdiction will enforce a bench warrant of arrest or contempt for another court, and force the persons involved to be extradicted to the governing jurisdiction, where they will answer for their actions. The courts are a sort of union unto themselves, and they definitely do back each other up in this way. It isn't over for Spamhaus. It is just that the battlefield shifted a bit.
That is just an argument to optimize the workload of the developer, while leaving the end-user floundering with some half-assed crap. Half-assed crap that was inflicted upon them by a software developer!
Long before there was a web, or software developers, there was a saying, "The Customer is always right". Give the end-user the good service they actually want, not the crap service you think they deserve just because it is easier for you to do it that way, or out of some weird sense of software justice.
Its a good analogy, but a tad flawed.
Google, Yahoo, MS and others of the sort are businesses. In their model of the world, the first thing you must do is have contact. Any contact at all. The quality of tht contract will be reinfed over time as the business relationship develops. Remember, first and foremost, Google et alia are businesses selling a product. Typically the product is ad space, but it could easily be real content as well. In that world, a litte censorship up front is OK, because as business spreads its wings in China, it will throw off that censorship as best it can. Information is power and money, and we all know what a powerful motivator greed can be.
In the Wikipedia world, the whole enterprise revolves around information itself. Money is in there, but it isn't the obvious reason for being of Wikipedia. I assume Wales has some kind of income, but it isn't directly related to the number, kind, or availability of articles on Wikipedia, nor the number of pages hits and article click throughs. The people at Google can't say that as easily. Cut off Google ads, and you kill Google. Cut off Wikipedia ads and what happens? Not much, since Wikipedia doesn't advertise anything but itself on its own site. If anything, beinga free site, visitors that don't contribute information to Wikipedia or money to the WP fund are taking money away from Wales.
It does Wales no good to censor the Wikipedia, and would certainly injure the credibility of the information there. The workload alone would be staggering. He would have to recreate the Chinese censorship infrastructure. Worse, he'd have to network and cross-corelate it, to be sure no fact when unchecked and unapproved. The implications of verifying and authorizing a cross country bialthon sports fact with the People's Army, Trade Goods, Health and Medicine, and Nature Conservancy bureaus boggles the mind.
Google and Yahoo are following the path of "constructive engagement" (look it up in Wikipedia yourselves). It took decades for that to work in South Africa, and the jury is still out in Russia and Eastern Europe. China is huge and stuck in centuries (millenia?) of cultural inertia. "Follow the Leader" sticks real well there. But Greed has its adherents too. And it is a religion that anyone can join easily enough. Even the Communists have stopped trying to stomp it out, and they even encourage it in some places. Which will probably be seen as a strategic error in another hundred years. But it will be far too late by then.
I've been hearing about this for Cell Phones since 2000. It was supposed to be a Broadcast All channel, that would automatically ring every cell in the area in case of an emergency, like a tornado warning. Six years and counting, haven't seen it implemented yet.
The true distributed answer is that each node in the system needs to be capable of being a node, and a bridge, and a repeater. Maybe simultanelously.
A node, in that each cop, firefighter, rescuer, helicopter pilot, medic, etc. needs to be able to send an receive to do her job.
A bridge, in that sometimes the cop's network need to talk to the firefighter's network, of maybe the street cops need to talk to the SWAT subnet.
And a repeater, just in case the fixed infrastucture gets blown to hell and a lowly sanitation truck suddenly becomes elevated to be the lifeline between two isolated rescue efforts.
Just sitting here at my desk, I see that eash radio set should be at least 3 and maybe 5 transeivers. One for primary send and receive, and the others to monitor and possibly cross patch for the other jobs mentioned above. And the whole thing needs to be self-assembling. Smart enough in the BIOS/firmware to deal with infrasturture breakdowns without operator intervention. Like a cell phone, but with 3 - 5 channels, and with capability to be a cell site, not just a phone.
Sadly untrue. Tours typically only just break even. They are just giant live promotional campaigns for album sales. Airplane tickets, bus rental, hotel fees, meals and catering, wardrobe, stage, sound, and lights. Promotion and ticket handling, venue fees, security, insurance, etc. It all adds up. That is where $40+ tickets come from.
Depends on the artist and entourage of course. One guy with a guitar on a street corner that sleeps on a bedroll and travels by bicycle won't have most of these expenses. But then he won't have much of an online presence either.
Not only wrong, but rather the opposite. SAD is caused by insufficient light, both duration and intensity. As I CLEARLY STATED in my previous message, I advocate increasing the output of the new CFL over the bulbs that were originally there. But since this whole debate is just one of troglodyte resistance to change ("Ugh! Me like warm fuzzy glow"), I doubt an AC such as yourself would notice the subtlety involved.
The mistake you make here is replacing like-for-like wattage bulbs. I went through my home and replaced the high usage bulbs with CFLs. And as the low usage ones die I replace them. But I replace them with CFLs of a higher equivalent strength. 60w incandescents get replaced with 75w equivalent CFLs, 75w are replaced with 100w. They only draw about 1/4 the juice of incandescents, so I still save big. But now I have more light in the same area, and the picket fence spectrum problem is reduced. Plus, when I can, I mix Cool White, Warm White and Daylight color temperatures. Looks odd, but only if you look at the fixtures and not the room.
I think it is worth the cost to my pocket and the Earth.
Thank you for consuming more than your share. The rest of us apprciate it.
You insensitive clod! He did to work for NASA, but after the Mars incident he's been unemployed.
Other than the fact that ICANN was more or less created by the US government*, No I can't. I think they are slow and dilatory, but basically OK.
People seem to really dislike the "taint" of the US on anything. But it doesn't always make those things bad.
*(through several intermediate steps, yes I know)
The complaint, among others, is that ICANN has been the tool of the US government for too long. That somehow it would be better if it were less US-centric. That may or may not be true. But that same alternative includes in it the risk that the US would just create another ICANN to do the work of the previous one. And any new agency would certainly be more US centric than the last one.
Especially any new agency formed by the Bush administration, which is responsible for me stubbing my toe this morning.
Does that explain it a little better?
If ICANN wanted to be independent, they would be. They have a CONTRACT with the US government. They aren't slaves or government employees (or any mix in between!). ICANN could go its own separate way tomorrow if it chose to, subject to whatever termination clause the contract has. They don't do it because they don't want to.
And that is a good thing, because if ICANN did become independent, the US would be free to come up with something to replace it. National entitites are not forced to comply with ICANN. They do it for convienience and compatibility. And seeing as the US is a huge part of the IP traffic in the world, I don't think anyone wants it going off on its own. We definitely do not want W getting any more crazy ideas about "leadership" and "freedom".
The first commentary I ever heard on Reuters still holds true today - "Reuters - always first with the wrong story"
You are off be a few orders of magnitude. The cost of one pund to orbit is around $10,000 - 20,000. So 12,000 pounds to orbit would cost about $120,000,000 - $240,000,000. That is assuming a simpler launcher, no special container provisons, and not throwing it out of orbit into the sun. Those things might double the cost, in the worst case. It is still under a billion dollars.
On the other hand, I think throwing the stuff away is foolish. We need to store it in case we come up with a way to reuse it.
Ah, then the cure is simple. Either stop being a Negro, or stop driving. Either will be acceptable to the police.
Your vote is only worthless because you make it so.
You say you are a US citizen, age 18 or older, with no felony convictions. That means that besides the President, you can register to vote for:
Your city council,
Your mayor,
Your county supervisors,
Your state legislators,
Your governor,
Your Congressman, and
Your Senators
Plus your local school board, water board, city planners, hospital supervisors, parks commission, regional environmental council, dog catcher, civic improvement league, and who knows what all else.
Plus you can run for all those positions, if you think you have the time and money.
Or you can help the campaigns of those that do decide to run.
Or you can pick out your own issues and make noise about them in your community and let people know how you feel and what they can do.
Or you can dive into the backroom politics of the local political machinery and work your way up to BEING one of those Electors that you say takes away your vote. Then when the time comes, and you are one of the 535 that actually picks the President, you can say whatever the hell you please, and no one will stop you. At least not the first time.
But no one is going to hand any of that to you. You have to make the effort to exercise it for yourself.
I think developing a new project is the fun part. So people focus on how to maximize the enjoyment of doing the activity they like, rather than minimizing the drudgery of the activity they don't. We'd all be better off if more maintenance lessons learned made their way into the software design phase. But people are creatures of habit. They figure if they just push their pet method harder on the next project, it won't be a disaster like it was on the last project. Learning from reality never enters into it.
AOL is incentivizing people to leave their paid network. AOL subscribers would in effect be subsidizing people that use access through other providers. AOL lowers its own hardware usage and maintenance costs, all those modem banks out there, while still getting some eyeballs to come see the paid ads etc. on their services, which cost little per viewer to maintain.
A weird business plan. So weird, it just might work!
But is it still AOL.
Companies are already spending money on internal reporting. Or at least they should be. Sarbanes imposes greater requirements on what must be collected and reported. So the cost isn't in collection, unless we're talking about companies that are serious cowboys and flouting both old AND new law.
The additional cost will be in the new reporting in new ways. Is it more? Yes. But again, was the previous system adequate? If it wasn't, and that seems to be the evidence, then reporting costs would, and properly should, go up You were already spending money on a system that wasn't working, so now you'll be spending somewhat more on a system that will. It just becomes a question of how much more, and are we (the compnay and investors) getting good value from the information reporting systems we create. That is exactly the same problem every MIS in every enterprise anywhere has. Completely independent of Sarbanes-Oxley, the management should have a feel for where the money and effort come from and go to.
If Sarbanes-Oxley is forcing the collection and reporting of useless information, that is a flaw. But just saying that if costs go up it must be bad is seriously shortsighted analysis. Especially considering the opacity investors were facing. And if Lay was to be believed, he wasn't being served by his internal information systems either.
"No, but people go to jail if they don't comply with SOX. People ARE people."
Yes they are people. People working on a job, in a publicly traded company, with OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY, and they should be able to prove they did it correctly. Legally. Nothing is missing, nothing was fudged or shaded or twsted, turned, swapped or hidden. If those same people want to go home and do those things with their own money in their privately held business, fine. That is between them and their spouses (and the IRS, in a different way). But what they do on the job as a trustee of other people's money should be provably correct and legal.
This isn't a case of "Prove to me you aren't a drug dealer". This is "I gave you $100 and you said you would invest it. Show me the money, account for where it went, or go to jail."
Or to jump on another old trop, faceless corporations do have faces. The people with the no kidding dirty hands. If you hold them accountable, the "faceless corporation" becoems more accountable too. No more diluting the blame into insignificance. You can't hide behind "just following orders".
"Most venture investors and entreprenuers feel that Sarbox goes too far. You seem to be speaking strictly from the perspective of a (rather uninformed) public shareholder, and frankly you seem to lack the necessary insight into the costs of Sarbox compliance to form a balanced viewpoint. Increasing penalties for (and actually enforcing) SEC rules would have gone a long way without having to add new requirements."
I'm going to go with "Wrong" on two counts here.
First, so what even if I am an uninformed public shareholder? Does that suddenly mean I really don't need to know, should not be informed of, or have a way to find out the internal workings of how the compnay I own a piece of is operated? Is the company intentionally structured so that only a few insiders with good personal connections can have a clue as to what is going to happen to their investment? Even if I can't tell a balance sheet from a chart of accounts or a budget, the structure and contents of the reports have to be understandable, so the underlying management philosophy can be understandable, so the intent of the managers and Board and prospects for the company can be inferred. We'd all like to think they have one, and hopefully it is in accord with our investemtn goals.
Second, If SEC enforcement had been doing its job, then maybe we wouldn't need more law. OK, maybe true, but clearly it wasn't doing its job so we did need new law and a new approach. It costs nothing to just put it out there and let people see what's up. But that wasn't happening. The backroom wizards found it more convienient to just let slip what was the legally required minimum and hold back stuff "you don't need to know". Ok, thanks for watching out for my interests. But in this case, I as shareholder am supposed to be watching over you. You don't get to decide what is the best way for me to do that. You don't get to play with my money and tell me to shut up and be happy. That is as true for the $100 investor as the $100 million investor. So now the cost of reporting and compliance goes up over what it had been in the past. That is seen as a bad thing, but since the reporting in the past was inadequate under the old regime, I have to wonder if the cost was just artificially low all along.
OK, everybody knows they can do anything better than anyone else, and there is no real point to following rules created by others. But, in order to end the fighting and constant bickering, we put up with these little annoyances called rules, regulations, and laws. Given that they are silly and pointless, what Other Reasons could there be to not increase corporate financial accountability?
Seems to me anything that puts the CEO, COO, CFO and every other cheif of a company right in the line of fire for criminal and civil liability is a good thing. The Board Officers should be there too of course. To me, the CEO and Chairman are like the Captain of a ship or a Genereal on the battlefield. You Are in Charge and You Are Responsible. If you say the company is in XYZ condition, it damn well ought to be and if we can prove you lied about it, you go to prison. Youd don't get to hide by saying, "the underlings run the company and I don't have a clue". Nothing should be hidden from "conventional interpretation" by some warped usage of accounting and bookkeeping practices. If you want to create a high risk, closed box operation, there are legal ways to do that without hiding it from your investors.
Sunlight and visibility in all the operations should be normal operating procedure, not an inconvienience to be endured.
"count the percentage of open/closed source drivers that are vulnerable"
You mean count the number of good versus crappy drivers that are vulnerable, and report who they are, no matter the source or process, don't you?
Just because OS is a good development method doesn't mean it cranks out great code every time.
What if I improperly tag a document with a Creative Commons license? For example, say I am an employee in a large office. Lets make it a government office just for spice. I create some document of some importance to my boss. I have done it as a work for hire. I have done it in a government office, but it is not intended for publication. Somehow, I manage to tag this document with a CC license. I send it around for review, and the information in it is rolled up into a document that IS intended for publication. It wasn't my document to license out, but the license is now bundled up in there. What, if anything, happens next?