gwright

151 ms·

1. 1501.▲
   by gwright 15y ago

   Was Katz right? Answering that question doesn't really get you very far. Katz could have politely disagreed without taking over the presentation. Katz could have taken the author aside afterwards and shared his perspective. Katz could hav
2. 1502.▲
   by gwright 15y ago

   I agree it is inappropriate. I also think that it is self defeating. People won't want to work for these companies. There needs to be a lot more evidence of a systemic problem before I would advocate federal legislation for this sort of t
3. 1503.▲
   by gwright 15y ago

   I was at a local event last night that was ostensibly a panel discusion regarding campaign finance reform. The primary speaker was Senator Blumenthal (CT). In his intro he made it a point to indicate that he was going to support legislatio
4. 1504.▲
   by gwright 15y ago

   This is exactly the problem that is solved by an extradition treaty. More often than not the alleged crime is a crime in both countries and so extradition is a reasonable approach to the problem. I do agree that the Internet has created j
5. 1505.▲
   by gwright 15y ago

   When I look at this graph: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=microsoft+market+cap+no... I see that the market cap for Microsoft dropped by about $30bn on the ex-dividend day.
6. 1506.▲
   by gwright 15y ago

   My understanding is that the stock price is actually adjusted downward by the per/share dividend on the ex-dividend date. For regular small dividends this change is not really noticible in the noise of regular trading but for large/special
7. 1507.▲
   by gwright 15y ago

   That is exactly my point. The people saying that a dividend is important seem to think that it is 'found money'. My point is that it is really just converting one asset into another (stock to cash). Another way to convert stock to cash is
8. 1508.▲
   by gwright 15y ago

   Yes. I was a bit ambiguous. I meant that the value of Apple stock that Fidelity owned would go down, not that Fidelity's own stock would drop in price.
9. 1509.▲
   by gwright 15y ago

   And the value of Fidelity's Apple stock would go down by $2.6 billion. The $100 billion in cash is currently factored into the share price. Dispurse the cash and the market will discount the share price to match. Personally I'm hoping for
10. 1510.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    And there are lots of people who want to work for $3.75/hour. In particular people who have no experience need to offset that fact by charging less for their labor. For them, getting the experience is much more important than getting
11. 1511.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    OK. I guess my description of voluntary contracts wasn't clear enough. I think freedom to contract is more important than some national standard regarding minimum wage, sick pay, hours worked per day/week/month, vacation time, etc. Regardle
12. 1512.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    And how would you compare the work in the factories to being a Chinese farm worker, for example? Why are millions choosing factories over farms? I think it is more important that there is a trend towards improved work environments and oppo
13. 1513.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    The definitions of exempt vs. non exempt in the FLSA have always seemed somewhat arbitrary to me. How about we just let employers offer what ever terms they want and employees decide to accept or reject them? As a bonus we can downsize gove
14. 1514.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    Apple is a publically held company. Disposing of profits by giving it all to employees would be a wonderful way to create an instant shareholder lawsuit. The cash held by Apple is built in to its share price. If a stock holder wants some o
15. 1515.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what actions are under suspicion. The actual price of the books isn't being established by either the agency or the wholesale model. A little googling at the DOJ indicates that the Sherman act p
16. 1516.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    I generally try to utilize address "tags" for this sort of tracking, for example username+tag@example.com ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Address_tags ). Unfortunately many websites seem to think that '+' is not a valid charact
17. 1517.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    I think you forgot the smiley face. Well, I hope you forgot the smiley face. Democratic principles shouldn't be blindly applied to every possible situtation in pursuit of an über-equality utopia.
18. 1518.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    Labor markets don't evolve via discontinuous jumps to higher levels of pay or better working conditions. It has to be an incremental process. I'm not sure how berating companies that are enabling those incremental improvements for not doing
19. 1519.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    How are you defining 'a significant cut'? Via morningstar.com, in 2010 Apple had 65,225,000,000 in revenue. Total operating expenses for 2010 were $7,299,000,000, just 11.2% of revenue. Executive compensation was $148,424,291. That is 2/10
20. 1520.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    > Translation of a domain name to a dotted quad is free speech activity. Really? It isn't necessary to force every square peg of an objection into the round hole of 1st amendment free speech rights. Even more generally, bad public polic
21. 1521.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    Thank you for pointing out the primary culprit here--Congress and its lame legislation in this area. The headline's use of 'legalize' only perpetuates the confusion surrounding Supreme Court decisions. It is the underlying legislation that
22. 1522.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    SQL is not relational algebra. I think the more mathematic ideas in the article should be viewed in the context of relational alebra and not in the context of SQL. So, the problems with NULLs is an SQL problem not a relational algebra pro
23. 1523.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    While I realize that there are defensible reasons to actively reject some government directives the benefits of a lawful society should not be underestimated. Bad laws should be fixed via legislative action. Sometimes this means complying
24. 1524.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    Yet another example of why generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are a bad idea. Country code domains align domain ownership with legal jurisdictions while gTLDs create jurisdictional conflicts.
25. 1525.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    I wonder if it is a side effect of the recent algorithm change that promotes more 'timely' matches. The fact that 'news' is in the search term list might exacerbate this effect.
26. 1526.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    I guess I wasn't clear. I realize that businesses need to survive in the eco-system created by crazy laws and ill-thought out regulations and contracts. I was trying to suggest that the legal and regulatory framework is what needs to be fi
27. 1527.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    I often wish there was some way to inject some order back into the real world systems. So many of the techniques and processes that developers take for granted seem entirely absent from our regulatory and administrative law systems: refact
28. 1528.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    You have to build this sort of think into the infrastructure. For example, TCP and Ethernet retransmission strategies and HTTP servers should have reasonable timeouts that result in error responses rather than just letting incomplete HTTP s
29. 1529.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    The author seems to think that 'welfare economics', 'the burdons of socialism', and 'socialized losses' are failures of capitalism. They are aberations and deviations from capitalism.
30. 1530.▲
    by gwright 15y ago

    Arguing about 'regulation' with no context or means to evaluate them doesn't get us very far. Regulations that enhance and encourage fair competition should be supported. Regulations that reduce competition or hinder commerce should not be