Posts by Tom 13

Re: BBC Trust

Well that all depends on which meaning of "Trust" one is using. If the meaning is the one for the context or The Railroad Barons, then it makes perfect sense.

Re: remove things at your whims and break functionality

I agree with you, but you do need to remember this is LARRY ELLISON we're talking about.

Re: they should start looking for new a vendor.

Yes, but I'm the lowly helpdesk dude at the bottom of the food chain. And somewhere up the food chain is somebody with what is effectively the force of law behind him saying we have to keep using the crap from that vendor. And no, it's not a minor program off in a basement office somewhere. Almost all the folks in the executive suite (or it would be the executive suite if it weren't government) have it (probably hate it too) and use it on a regular basis (at least once a week, with a fair number (more than 50%) living in the app).

Re: several minutes warning

Given the temps involved, I don't know that it would have been even that long in real time, but I'm quite sure it felt like hours in perceived time.

It was a truly sad day.

Re: HOWMUCH!?

Actually $110/month is about what I was paying for my Sprint phone a while back. Minimal talk minutes, unlimited data, and hot spot so I could use the data connection on my laptop, which was where I really wanted the wireless. And it was one of the cheaper phones/plans available from the retailer at that level of Smart Phone. Verizon and AT&T would both have been at least another $30 on top of that.

Re: why so many people forego the cheaper American unlimited

Because even the more expensive "unlimited" deals turn out to be far more limited and cost more than advertised.

I had a Sprint phone for a while that was purchased with an "unlimited" data plan because I don't actually make many phone calls. About 6 months from the end of my contract the "unlimited" data plan was canceled. Soon thereafter I also canceled my phone contact and paid the fee to get out of rather than continue to part with more than a $100/month for something from which I was not getting enough use.

Some of it is truly higher costs. Some of it is limited competition. Most of it is the corruption of government granted monopolies, either back when AT&T ruled the US, or from the local fiefdoms from which the phone companies have to purchase land use rights to place their masts. Oh according to the laws on the books they are open for competition, but try running the paperwork if you aren't the current incumbent...

Re: shoe horn workarounds just to attach multiple emails to one email

I'd give you 20 up-votes for that statement alone if I could. The most bizarre part of that to me is that I have the distinct recollection I was able to do that a few years ago, but it is now nearly impossible. Most of the time we work around it with GASMO and Outlook, but yeah, as a corporate solution, I think GMail sucks.

Re: contract between the parties is sufficient to protect the data

I'm not aware that any private contact can ever contradict national law. So it seems to me that if you need to comply with British/EU regs, you pretty much need to stay in that geographical region.

And I say that as a US citizen who isn't quite as concerned about complying with that law as someone in the EU needs to be.

Re: dividend versus capital growth

So long as dividends and capital growth have equal tax treatment that is true. If the tax environment is such that dividends net a lower profit than capital growth, companies will prefer capital growth over dividends. Also on a practical level dividends tend to be paid by companies in mature markets whereas growing markets tend to attract capital growth companies (for obvious reasons).

Re: If Tim Worstall were here

It is a clear case of taxation distorting the market. In this case it isn't harming growth, it actually promotes it; but at the cost of clear market signals on the health of the company. At least that was the case pre-Obama. In the current environment of government confiscation of wealth I would say it is stifling growth and job creation because instead of opening new lines of business, companies are hoarding cash just like Apple is.

Re: Cashflow != ignore

You are conflating revenue with profit. Profit only occurs AFTER investment expenditures are accounted for. An executive can argue that cash on hand should be invested instead of being held in reserve or distributed as profit, and an investor can agree with that strategy. But it is a risk, and it explicitly forgoes profit.

Yes, there are some businesses that have stable long term potential profits against short term volatile costs. They are all highly regulated: banks, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas production companies. In fact they are so regulated I don't regard them as businesses, but quasi-governmental agencies.

Re: back in the day HP produced some good kit

Agreed. I didn't work with their servers, but their printers and science lab equipment were killer. I worked for a company that pretended to compete with them in some of the science lab market, and privately our execs would admit we couldn't go head to head with them. On the couple of occasions when we DID come out with something better, HP were quick to ink a deal with us to either put their Brand on our equipment, or work with us to develop the product and sell a varient to which they had the exclusive license.

Re: HP

I don't see the HP-Sun synergy you do. From my perspective both were essentially hardware vendors who haven't got a good handle on service, which is where the cash is these days. I do see the Oracle-Sun synergy since Oracle was a service and software company. I concur with the poster above that this is bad for customers because Ellison basically rapes his customers (and I think if I had been on the government committee reviewing the deal I would have killed it based on the db segment overlap), but I do see the business synergy from the Oracle and Sun standpoint.

But then I'm in the commodity end of the business, not the big iron.

Re: Can't really do much worse...

Agree about EP1.

Not sure it's even worth a look at the trailers for the new one.

I heard from a friend that Lucas feels that no matter what he would have done, he would have pissed somebody off so he's washed his hands of it. If true, I'd tell him the one thing that was GUARANTEED to piss people off royally was to make an obviously derivative movie based on the first (episode IV) movie for the launch of the prequel. Yes there were bits of the movie that were fun, but too few and not worked well into the plot. I've been of the opinion he should have farmed out 1 to 3 because the defined story arc is something heroic writers are bad at: heart breaking tragedy. We knew it was supposed to be the fall of a Jedi into the dark side. And at the end of the 3 movies, I still didn't believe the character would have moved to the dark side if he were real. He only wound up there because the script said he had to. Sort of a reverse Deus Ex Machina plot failure.

Re: So Star Trek is fact now

One of the big problems with Trek has always been that the capabilities of the underlying technology changes depending on the needs of the writers. That violates the fundamental rules of both sf AND fantasy writing. You get to break the rules of the normal universe ONCE and work out the plot from there. For really good sf books and shows a fair bit of theoretical thinking goes into exactly how you are circumventing physics. And one of the more basic rules is that while you can play with alien psychologies, humans are pretty much humans no matter how long we've been around. So for example, if a typical human, upon finding a technology 100 years in advance of what he's got, would try to copy/understand/use that technology, then even in the future they'd do the same thing.

Re: a much bigger WTF moment

picking apart old Trek was a fun pastime for fans.

Picking apart the reboot isn't. It's more like dynamiting fish in a barrel. It leaves you wet and smelling of dead fish.

Re: we are also having issues with food

The 18th Century called, they want their Malthusian FUD returned to them.

We don't have food production problems, we have food distribution problems. Get rid of the green despots posing as saviors of the children and we can get things fixed up fairly quickly.

Re: Good FUD

Nova or supernova it doesn't matter. At 1AU we're all still dead.

Unless of course you get raptured before that.

Re: And your kneecaps?

At last the inner thug is revealed! All set to break James's kneecaps and none to subtle about it either.

Re: Google didn't employ a single person in the Netherlands.

At a minimum they employed a lawyer to write their incorporation papers, paid the legal fees for the same, and paid some sort of taxes for monies passing through the country. That tax money employed government employees. If Google move their shell company, that work will disappear.

@Arild the economic illiterate: Re: Who pays the tax?

A company that has a reduced tax bill has a choice. They can pass along the savings to preserve market share or they can temporarily increase profits to shareholders. If they temporarily increase profits to shareholders, other companies will see and seize the opportunity to provide the same service at a lower cost, which either forces the first company to lower prices to match them, or to go out of business (particularly if customers perceive they were being gouged and will therefore no longer do business with them).

@Velv: an easy fix to this situation

Actually, there is an easy fix, but most governments are unwilling to adopt it because it puts them on a rather short leash: All tax revenues should be derived from the taxes on the sales of goods within that country. Problem is, that naturally limits governments to tax rates of at most 12% of GDP, and they are unwilling to live within those bounds.

Re: Tax pays for our public services.

The problem is that thugs like you have perverted the meaning of public services to the point that taxing is now stealing from working people. If taxes are truly allocated to public services instead of Marxist redistribution schemes, then yes we owe taxes. But the duty of charity is a personal one not a public one, and cannot be conducted by governments which are at best inherently amoral, and all too frequently provably immoral.

Re: Where does it say in the bible

I believe the relevant quote would be when Jesus was asked what is effectively the same question:

"Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" (Ἀπόδοτε οὖν τὰ Καίσαρος Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ τῷ Θεῷ Matthew 22:21).

The problem of course is that Ceasar is nothing more than a thug posing as a moral man while usurping that which is God's.

Re: We looking at the same charts?

Sure, sure follow the illusionist's misdirect.

The relevant numbers aren't total sales, they are profit per sale, which is falling. And given that Apple is a high margin/non-commodity player that means they are either moving into a market segment where they've never competed well, or they have to switch horses to a new high margin product. When Jobs was still alive that was a 7:3 prospect. With him out of the picture it's maybe a 3:7 prospect.

Re: selling more phones and making more profit

Markets don't exactly operate on current data, they operate on expectations which are informed by current data. The expectation was that Apple would make more money than it actually did. Therefore future expectations have to decrease, which means the stock price has to decrease. This is all independent of whether ANY of those expectations were grounded in reality.

This is one of the reasons there is a segment of economists who strongly favor not taxing dividends, which would allow stocks to start paying them as a means of benefiting shareholders instead of driving them to stock value appreciation. Not sure how badly this distorts the British and EU economies, but it is a major factor for the US.