They keep pushing back the date of conversion to all-digital in the US... don't be surprised if 2012 becomes 2014 down the road.
It's funny, I'm holding out on buying a huge-display HDTV until prices drop due to the increased production/sales volume from the forced conversion to digital.
Every time the year gets pushed back, I spend the money on something else instead... and my understanding is that the deadline is partly due to low penetration of digital sets in the US. Seems like a negative feedback mechanism to me... if they made a deadline and stuck to it, maybe people like me would actually buy a new TV set like the electronics companies want.
Another thing, pretty tangential, that occurs to me is that forced conversion to digital TV will probably cause more civic unrest than anything else the US government has done lately. Taxes (as always) and TV reception could be the biggest campaign issues of the 2014 midterm elections...
1. Your premise is wrong. The banks DO NOT assume the costs of fraud.
Your interpretation of his post is wrong. He DID NOT write that banks assume the costs of fraud.
He wrote that the credit companies pay a lot to make customers 'happy'. In essence, the cost of fixing credit report problems has become prohibitive to the credit companies, so they have begun lobbying for change. I don't agree with him, but that seems to be his point, so please don't refute something other than what he said.
2. The bill in question is the wrong way to address the issue. The card associations have a solution to the problem except they won't implement it because it cuts into their fraud revenue and the costs are much higher per-card than dumb plastic/mag-stripe. The standard is called EMV. It solves 98% of fraud issues
This is in re: identity theft, not simple fraud. EMV doesn't do a damn thing about identity theft, it just adds PIN verification for purchases and ensures that information is encrypted. Someone with access to a person's SSN etc could just as easily get an EMC card and set up their own PIN as get a regular credit card.
Contract has nothing to do with it. Obviously, you can't send someone a letter and form a contract just because they didn't bother to respond.
Except you are already involved in a contract with Verizon, it's the service agreement.
I think if you read the fine print in that agreement, you'll notice that Verizon is acting within the terms of that contract. By agreeing to do business with Verizon, you have already agreed to let them change the terms of the contract upon written notification.
Re:aroberts you totally missed the point
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People need to stop singing to the Choir and figure out how to make the average sheep pay attention
Sheep pay attention when there is a wolf or a sheepdog in their midst.
Most USians will start paying attention when their quality of life is affected by environmental concerns. This can be the wolf (toxins causing disease to a relation or friend) or it can be the sheepdog (government/NGO/grassroots action to force/encourage good environmental practices).
The problem with the 'wolf' approach is that the level of environmental devastation necessary to motivate sufficient people would be mind-boggling and, likely, past the point of no return.
This leaves us with the 'sheepdog' approach. I favor multiple avenues of 'herding' -- one of the most important being economic. Make environmentally irresponsible behavior expensive by attaching a tax surcharge to those behaviors. Since the environment is a public good that is damaged by bad behavior, we need to have the cost of that damage factored into the retail cost of goods and services. If we can better assess the value of that damage, we can tip the economic scale towards behavior that is more responsible and less damaging.
How can stock prioce be considered an independent variable when it depends upon other primary data? Stock price is not independent of financial results, why would you want to use it as an independent variable? This would serve to give extra weight to the variables that stock price depends on.
And as for 'typically', that word is there because as with any discussion of trends in market prices, there are always exceptions to the trend.
Of course I don't know what the tax ramifications of the initial high stock price were.
Zip. You pay taxes on gain from sale of assets. No sale == no gain.
Of course, I've always suspected that one reason for the precipitous drop in price of that stock was that people like ESR were unloading their shares for whatever they could get. I'm sure what he got for the shares he sold was much more than the price low, and much less than $300:)
An ideal free market, to economists, is one where prices are defined simply by supply and demand, and are free from external pressures. This means that all goods are commodity goods (i.e., one supplier is the same as any other), there are no barriers to entry (government-induced or otherwise), etc.
The reason this is important is that economic analysis either needs to assume those characteristics or account for the lack of them. I should have clarified in my earlier post that I was referring to an ideal free market.
What happens a lot of the time is that people try to apply economic theory to markets that are free-from-regulation, not realizing that this is not the same as an ideal free market.
Stock price is an indicator of investor perception
And you'd be naive if you think that analysts have no impact on stock price, and that financial reports have no effect on stock prices. Please explain the higher volume of trading of stocks (typically at decreasing prices) following release of poorer-than-expected financials, if the financials truly have no impact on stock price.
I've learned that using economic terms on slashdot is pretty useless, since most people here have an incomplete or incorrect understanding of the terms. If discussing with someone with an economics background, I'd use terms like opportunity cost... but most of the time I try to use laymans terms here, so that the discussion doesn't get bogged down in corrections of terms usage.
Prime example of this is how some people on slashdot believe a free market == a market that is free from regulation.
The first is that there is a concept of 'best-use'. That is, there are some projects (such as SETI) that some people feel are less worthwhile than other projects. Some people believe that the man-hours and capital used on SETI is wasted because nothing of value is produced by SETI (in their opinion) -- so yes, the money flows through the economy, but on a more worthwhile project, that money would flow through the economy while producing something of value. The money is in effect hoarded, which means that the opportunity to use it for growth is wasted.
The second point has to do with your remark about taxes.
When the economy is flowing actively, more of those people downstream will be willing to donate their time and money to what you'd probably classify as "good things". When it slows down, or the Government is taking a big chunk at every step as taxes, then they'll be less inclined to do so.
Money paid as taxes also flows through the economy, for the same reason that money put into erstwhile "wasteful" projects flows through the economy. It's a bit of a double-standard to say that money that goes to taxes inhibits downstream spending, since that money is, in a very real way, redistributed to others, whether by government contract, to government employees, or otherwise. The exceptions would be foreign spending, which generally has benefit to the US as well, if less tangible.
If anything, with today's government, money taken out as taxes actually produces more money in circulation, since the US government runs a deficit budget with a cap on borrowing based loosely on government receipts. Every $1.00 given to the federal government returns $1.00 * [1 + (annual debt)/(annual receipts) -- of course, that's financed at an as-yet-undetermined final cost, since who knows what interest rate we'll have to pay on it when we refinance through new debt offerings...
Reduction in stock price is seen not just as Bill or Steve losing some value in their personal portfolios, but the company performance, ability to borrow, perception of other businesses, etc
Again I think you're missing my point. People doing real evaluations and analysis aren't looking at stock price, they are looking at the source data. Stock price is an indicator of investor perception, and as such is a lot less useful than looking at the primary data.
I think a little of this is semantics, but impact on stock price is not a useful business decision metric -- impact on the bottom line is useful, however. As I pointed out (which you might have notice if you'd bothered reading my post), the bottom line impact of those decisions does affect stock price. It's absolutely a mistake, however, to believe that stock price is the motivation for those business decisions.
I don't know how much clearer I can make this to someone without a finance background... what's important are the indicators that stock price is partly based upon, since those indicators also affect the business's ability to borrow, etc (the examples that you point out). The people actually making those decisions, though, aren't looking at stock price... they are looking at income statements, balance sheets, etc. It's no surprise that stock price will mirror analyst opinion. But again, it's those indicators that drive business decisions, not the stock price.
Clearly, Sen. Yee (and the supporters of his proposed legislation) believes that the ESRB does not do an acceptable job in their role of regulating the availability of violent video games to minors, and that therefore the government should get involved.
You're missing a big piece of the picture, which is that the ESRB was created specifically because the govnerment was going to get involved unless they industry did something to self-regulate.
GOVERNMENT: There is a problem. Fix it or we fix it for you. GAME INDUSTRY: Uh, here's the ESRB. We'll label games so parents can make their own decisions about what games their kids play, so only kids whose parents are OK with it will have access to mature content. ... [Game industry fails to accurately label games, but it doesn't matter anyway, since it is the retailers, not the producers, who are the last step in extra-parental control] GOVERNMENT: The ESRB has failed its purpose. Sorry it didn't work out, but we're going to have to do this the hard way.
I think what you've missed (as have most of the people who weren't around or old enough when the ESRB as created) is that the ESRB was an experiment to avoid government action. It has failed miserably, largely because the ultimate controls on who purchases games are the retailers, not the game producers. What Leland supports is forcing retailers to do their part[1].
The context of the debate of government controls on content has somehow been lost, and while a lot of us disagree with those controls, it helps to remember that the original intent of the ESRB was to self-regulate enough to prevent intervention, which was imminent.
[1] I believe it's silly to force producers to label their content if we don't also force retailers to enforce age restrictions. I also believe that it would be best if the industry were totally unregulated, but since we're going down the regulation route anyway...
Hey, I don't have any problems with "translating" what was said, it can be a very useful and entertaining exercise. On the other hand, what you have posted shouldn't be listed as translation -- there is far more interpretation and conjecture there, I think you go a bit far.
for example:
"We are in, from... a corporate and enterprise side, an early adoption cycle," said Ballmer.
Translation: Revenue generating cycle - Bleeding edge, counting the casualties.
Better translation: We are in post-beta-testing, but we'll call it "early adoption cycle" since we don't want to admit we released a product not yet ready for market.
As for the comments about MS beig in it purely for the money... sheesh. What do you expect? They are a business that exists to make money. If they choose to alienate some customers by their business practices and poor management and design decisions, they are more than welcome to.
In short, don't fault MS for being driven by profit motive.
One other note -- you seem to feel that stock price is the be-all and end-all of MS's business decisions, but it's not. The P&L is what drives those decisions, and sure, stock price reflects P&L results -- but no management team of a company as large as MS uses the stock price as a metric for performance of the company. Instead it's a measure of what the company is worth to ownership, which is driven by other metrics.
But maybe I'm confused here -- is there a reason why investors in a company wouldn't want it to make money? Why they wouldn't want to increase the value of their investment?
Don't get mad at MS. Get mad at all the people who own MS stock (including all the people with MS in their 401k), they are the people demanding this kind of behavior.
the auctioned price could give an indication what people perceive the value of Vista to be
Not really, since it's not a commodity good. What's more likely is that the final price will be just under what someone would need to pay directly to MS. That is if there is no perceived value added by the specific situation (such as the good feeling of 'sticking it to the man' by supporting Linux when buying a MS product, or the possible good publicity for a company choosing to bid high).
If we really wanted to find the value of Vista, we'd have multiple suppliers of potentially infinite copies of Vista all competing for buyers. This is where IP gets involved, since copies of Vista are essentially free to produce.
The real "value" of Vista is equal to the [risk]*[negative impact] of getting caught using a pirated copy. This is why MS expends so much effort both on authentication and to make sure that global legal network has stringent IP laws.
They are under legal obligation to maintain their firmware so that the phones can't be used on other networks for another 5 years.
Not quite -- they are under contractual obligation, which is something quite different.
Would AT&T have legal recourse if Apple didn't fulfill its obligation? Yes.
Would Apple face prosecution for violating the law if it didn't fulfill the obligation? No.
And as a matter of fact, legal obligations supercede contractual obligations. For example, in some countries, it is debated whether Apple is legally allowed to exclude other service providers.
or that they should break their contract with AT&T which could make every iPhone out there useless overnight unless it is hacked?
Oh, right... like AT&T would actually stop providing hugely profitable service to iPhones. They'd continue to provide service to iPhone owners, they'd just also sue Apple.
Sorry for the lack of a link. I am sure you can google it though.:)
Aww, come on... this is Slashdot.
Most of us can be barely bothered to read the summary, let alone TFA... and you want us to google for a link?
Might as well ask for a never-ending supply of beer*, and 12 nekkid virgins to be awaiting your return home after work tonight to satisfy your every whim.
*or Mountain Dew, depending on your age/preference.
Or is their some country where they do have sharp-edged coins.
Well, I always file down the edges of my dimes so that they are razor-sharp.
This is to "reward" the shoddy customer service I sometimes get at the checkout lane.
It has the added benefit of putting the offending cashier on disability for a while, so that I don't have to deal with them again for a few weeks until they heal.
Ah, you're using Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination (QUID).
Those of us from more civilized galaxies use Quasi Universal Intergalactic Money (QUIM).
IIRC, last time I was on Eroticon III, Eccentrica Gallumbits was charging around 10,000 QUID per 'session', so it'll cost you around 62,500 quid to get a piece of triple-breated QUIM.
Slashdot Mirror
They keep pushing back the date of conversion to all-digital in the US... don't be surprised if 2012 becomes 2014 down the road.
It's funny, I'm holding out on buying a huge-display HDTV until prices drop due to the increased production/sales volume from the forced conversion to digital.
Every time the year gets pushed back, I spend the money on something else instead... and my understanding is that the deadline is partly due to low penetration of digital sets in the US. Seems like a negative feedback mechanism to me... if they made a deadline and stuck to it, maybe people like me would actually buy a new TV set like the electronics companies want.
Another thing, pretty tangential, that occurs to me is that forced conversion to digital TV will probably cause more civic unrest than anything else the US government has done lately. Taxes (as always) and TV reception could be the biggest campaign issues of the 2014 midterm elections...
He wrote that the credit companies pay a lot to make customers 'happy'. In essence, the cost of fixing credit report problems has become prohibitive to the credit companies, so they have begun lobbying for change. I don't agree with him, but that seems to be his point, so please don't refute something other than what he said.
This is in re: identity theft, not simple fraud. EMV doesn't do a damn thing about identity theft, it just adds PIN verification for purchases and ensures that information is encrypted. Someone with access to a person's SSN etc could just as easily get an EMC card and set up their own PIN as get a regular credit card.
I left the case as "Jovian" because the grandparent would also need a correction then (Saturnian != Saturnine or Saturnalian).
It's a joke. No need to fix what isn't broken.
If they were Jovian overlords, then we could celebrate.
I think if you read the fine print in that agreement, you'll notice that Verizon is acting within the terms of that contract. By agreeing to do business with Verizon, you have already agreed to let them change the terms of the contract upon written notification.
Most USians will start paying attention when their quality of life is affected by environmental concerns. This can be the wolf (toxins causing disease to a relation or friend) or it can be the sheepdog (government/NGO/grassroots action to force/encourage good environmental practices).
The problem with the 'wolf' approach is that the level of environmental devastation necessary to motivate sufficient people would be mind-boggling and, likely, past the point of no return.
This leaves us with the 'sheepdog' approach. I favor multiple avenues of 'herding' -- one of the most important being economic. Make environmentally irresponsible behavior expensive by attaching a tax surcharge to those behaviors. Since the environment is a public good that is damaged by bad behavior, we need to have the cost of that damage factored into the retail cost of goods and services. If we can better assess the value of that damage, we can tip the economic scale towards behavior that is more responsible and less damaging.
How can stock prioce be considered an independent variable when it depends upon other primary data? Stock price is not independent of financial results, why would you want to use it as an independent variable? This would serve to give extra weight to the variables that stock price depends on.
And as for 'typically', that word is there because as with any discussion of trends in market prices, there are always exceptions to the trend.
Of course, I've always suspected that one reason for the precipitous drop in price of that stock was that people like ESR were unloading their shares for whatever they could get. I'm sure what he got for the shares he sold was much more than the price low, and much less than $300
An ideal free market, to economists, is one where prices are defined simply by supply and demand, and are free from external pressures. This means that all goods are commodity goods (i.e., one supplier is the same as any other), there are no barriers to entry (government-induced or otherwise), etc.
The reason this is important is that economic analysis either needs to assume those characteristics or account for the lack of them. I should have clarified in my earlier post that I was referring to an ideal free market.
What happens a lot of the time is that people try to apply economic theory to markets that are free-from-regulation, not realizing that this is not the same as an ideal free market.
I've learned that using economic terms on slashdot is pretty useless, since most people here have an incomplete or incorrect understanding of the terms. If discussing with someone with an economics background, I'd use terms like opportunity cost... but most of the time I try to use laymans terms here, so that the discussion doesn't get bogged down in corrections of terms usage.
Prime example of this is how some people on slashdot believe a free market == a market that is free from regulation.
The first is that there is a concept of 'best-use'. That is, there are some projects (such as SETI) that some people feel are less worthwhile than other projects. Some people believe that the man-hours and capital used on SETI is wasted because nothing of value is produced by SETI (in their opinion) -- so yes, the money flows through the economy, but on a more worthwhile project, that money would flow through the economy while producing something of value. The money is in effect hoarded, which means that the opportunity to use it for growth is wasted.
The second point has to do with your remark about taxes.
Money paid as taxes also flows through the economy, for the same reason that money put into erstwhile "wasteful" projects flows through the economy. It's a bit of a double-standard to say that money that goes to taxes inhibits downstream spending, since that money is, in a very real way, redistributed to others, whether by government contract, to government employees, or otherwise. The exceptions would be foreign spending, which generally has benefit to the US as well, if less tangible.
If anything, with today's government, money taken out as taxes actually produces more money in circulation, since the US government runs a deficit budget with a cap on borrowing based loosely on government receipts. Every $1.00 given to the federal government returns $1.00 * [1 + (annual debt)/(annual receipts) -- of course, that's financed at an as-yet-undetermined final cost, since who knows what interest rate we'll have to pay on it when we refinance through new debt offerings...
Have you tried giving her back?
This might keep her from complaining to you about her computer.
As we all know, hippopotamos means river whores.
Or at least, that's what I recall from 4th grade biology class.
That is, if you know a guy named Mac, otherwise you may need to give her to Mike or John.
I think a little of this is semantics, but impact on stock price is not a useful business decision metric -- impact on the bottom line is useful, however. As I pointed out (which you might have notice if you'd bothered reading my post), the bottom line impact of those decisions does affect stock price. It's absolutely a mistake, however, to believe that stock price is the motivation for those business decisions.
I don't know how much clearer I can make this to someone without a finance background... what's important are the indicators that stock price is partly based upon, since those indicators also affect the business's ability to borrow, etc (the examples that you point out). The people actually making those decisions, though, aren't looking at stock price... they are looking at income statements, balance sheets, etc. It's no surprise that stock price will mirror analyst opinion. But again, it's those indicators that drive business decisions, not the stock price.
GOVERNMENT: There is a problem. Fix it or we fix it for you.
GAME INDUSTRY: Uh, here's the ESRB. We'll label games so parents can make their own decisions about what games their kids play, so only kids whose parents are OK with it will have access to mature content.
...
[Game industry fails to accurately label games, but it doesn't matter anyway, since it is the retailers, not the producers, who are the last step in extra-parental control]
GOVERNMENT: The ESRB has failed its purpose. Sorry it didn't work out, but we're going to have to do this the hard way.
I think what you've missed (as have most of the people who weren't around or old enough when the ESRB as created) is that the ESRB was an experiment to avoid government action. It has failed miserably, largely because the ultimate controls on who purchases games are the retailers, not the game producers. What Leland supports is forcing retailers to do their part[1].
The context of the debate of government controls on content has somehow been lost, and while a lot of us disagree with those controls, it helps to remember that the original intent of the ESRB was to self-regulate enough to prevent intervention, which was imminent.
[1] I believe it's silly to force producers to label their content if we don't also force retailers to enforce age restrictions. I also believe that it would be best if the industry were totally unregulated, but since we're going down the regulation route anyway...
for example: Better translation: We are in post-beta-testing, but we'll call it "early adoption cycle" since we don't want to admit we released a product not yet ready for market.
As for the comments about MS beig in it purely for the money... sheesh. What do you expect? They are a business that exists to make money. If they choose to alienate some customers by their business practices and poor management and design decisions, they are more than welcome to.
In short, don't fault MS for being driven by profit motive.
One other note -- you seem to feel that stock price is the be-all and end-all of MS's business decisions, but it's not. The P&L is what drives those decisions, and sure, stock price reflects P&L results -- but no management team of a company as large as MS uses the stock price as a metric for performance of the company. Instead it's a measure of what the company is worth to ownership, which is driven by other metrics.
But maybe I'm confused here -- is there a reason why investors in a company wouldn't want it to make money? Why they wouldn't want to increase the value of their investment?
Don't get mad at MS. Get mad at all the people who own MS stock (including all the people with MS in their 401k), they are the people demanding this kind of behavior.
If we really wanted to find the value of Vista, we'd have multiple suppliers of potentially infinite copies of Vista all competing for buyers. This is where IP gets involved, since copies of Vista are essentially free to produce.
The real "value" of Vista is equal to the [risk]*[negative impact] of getting caught using a pirated copy. This is why MS expends so much effort both on authentication and to make sure that global legal network has stringent IP laws.
Would AT&T have legal recourse if Apple didn't fulfill its obligation? Yes.
Would Apple face prosecution for violating the law if it didn't fulfill the obligation? No.
And as a matter of fact, legal obligations supercede contractual obligations. For example, in some countries, it is debated whether Apple is legally allowed to exclude other service providers.Oh, right... like AT&T would actually stop providing hugely profitable service to iPhones. They'd continue to provide service to iPhone owners, they'd just also sue Apple.
Nowhere.
[Girl who uses accelerant to set me on fire] >>> [absence of girl].
Duh.
Most of us can be barely bothered to read the summary, let alone TFA... and you want us to google for a link?
Might as well ask for a never-ending supply of beer*, and 12 nekkid virgins to be awaiting your return home after work tonight to satisfy your every whim.
*or Mountain Dew, depending on your age/preference.
This is to "reward" the shoddy customer service I sometimes get at the checkout lane.
It has the added benefit of putting the offending cashier on disability for a while, so that I don't have to deal with them again for a few weeks until they heal.
Ah, you're using Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination (QUID).
Those of us from more civilized galaxies use Quasi Universal Intergalactic Money (QUIM).
IIRC, last time I was on Eroticon III, Eccentrica Gallumbits was charging around 10,000 QUID per 'session', so it'll cost you around 62,500 quid to get a piece of triple-breated QUIM.