I totally agree. I think the point most people are trying to make here is not that this _is_ illegal, but that it should be made illegal.
436 karma · joined February 19, 2013
For example:
1) If someone glances in your window as they walk by your house, that's fine. If they stand there all day, they're probably guilty of stalking, a crime.
2) If one person is holding a protest sign in front of city hall, that's legal. If a thousand people do it, that's a protest, which in most cities is a regulated activity requiring a permit.
3) If you pour your morning orange juice out in a storm drain, that's probably legal. If you pour thousands of gallons of OJ into a storm drain, you're breaking environmental laws.
4) If someone drives by a street, that's fine. If they go back and forth down it, they're cruising, which is a crime in many cities.
5) If you give a friend $100, it's an unregulated gift. If you give them $20k, then that's regulated by tax laws.
6) If someone sells a stock and buys it back, that's fine. If they do it tens of thousands of times in a minute, they may be breaking securities laws.
7) If you bring $1000 into the country, that's an unregulated event. If you bring $100k, it becomes regulated.
8) If you access a web site with an automatic tool, that's fine. If you access it a thousand times a second, that's a DDoS attack, which is a crime.
9) If you cut a tree down on your property to sell the wood, that's fine. If you cut hundreds down, then you're running an illegal logging operation.
and on and on.
I totally don't buy the argument that it's unreasonable to forbid or regulate the case of collecting license plate numbers based on it just being a different quantity of something that's permitted. Laws use quantity as the basis for drawing the line between legal/illegal or unregulated/regulated all the time.
If you read their FAQ (https://www.digitalocean.com/faq), they're pretty clear that their other datacenters are in 3rd party colos: "We have datacenters located in the NYC area (located in the Equinix and Telx datacenters), San Francisco (Telx), and in Amsterdam (TelecityGroup)."
While "datacenter" can refer to the physical building, it's also commonly used to refer to a set of server/storage/network resources physically cordoned off for your use in a colo.
Using this definition isn't just common with hundreds of other hosters, its well standardized in IT circles, and used as the official definition of the word "datacenter" by numerous industry groups, regulators, analysts, and the US Federal government.
For instance: http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/definition/data-cente... http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/ego...
The whitehouse.gov pdf above says: "under the FDCCI, a data center is now defined as a closet, room, floor, or building for the storage, management, and dissemination of data and information. Such a repository houses computer systems and associated components...<snip>... housed in leased (including by cloud providers), owned, collocated, or stand-alone facilities."
I could see a point where the rate in phone growth slows due to saturation and then the vendors focus on aggressively keeping the customers they have (whether with new games or more content for old games)-- which would tend to favor the largest app developers at the expense of the smaller ones.
I suspect most lawyers/regulators would consider changing bitcoin into gift cards is legally like transmitting to cash.
Cars are regulated also, for instance to post a license plate that can be used to identify the owner's name and address, in part because they can be used in crimes.
This isn't _just_ an issue of if the seller is being ethical; it's an issue of whether they're following the law.
While the CEO is not (absent other roles) a representative of the shareholders (as you pointed out), there is a legal duty of loyalty to act in the best interest of the shareholders.
So while not a representative of the shareholders, the CEO is always responsible for representing the interests of the shareholders.
As you stated, those goals aren't necessarily related to the stock price or maximizing revenue. However, if the interest of the shareholders is something other than those goals, the CEO still has a legal fiduciary responsibility to act as a representative of the shareholder interests that do exist.
Because the CEO represents the shareholders, legally his or her main job is to protect the interests of the shareholders. For a public company, the CEO is the one sweating the most about the stock price; for a private company, the CEO is usually responsible for raising investment and driving the financial structure of the company. If someone is a potential investor or acquirer, they will be working with the CEO. Because they're selling the vision of why the company is a good long-term investment, the CEO tends to be the voice of the long term strategy.
The president may still have some of those responsibilities, but in most cases is less directly involved in fund-raising and more focused on the day-to-day operations.
That said, there are a number of other responsibilities around direction, operations, hiring, etc that can be split between the president and CEO.
The TL;DR:
Because the density of the neutron star and the Red Giant are so different (average Red Giant density is about the same density as water), the neutron star can keep a distinct structure/orbit for 1000 years or so. When it gets to the core, fusion occurs in a halo around the neutron star instead of through the normal sort of fusion you'd get in a Red Giant core. This leads to a different ratio of nuclear isotopes, which is how you can determine these objects aren't typical Red Giants.
The resulting objects survive around 70 million years before the neutron star core absorbs enough mass to turn into a black hole (one of the other linked papers in this thread had some discussion on how long they might be stable). However, the predicted rate of birth/death of these objects indicates there may be a few of these in the galaxy at any given time.
After posting, I learned that argon fluorohydride has been synthesized in the lab and is stable up to 40 degrees Kelvin.
BitCoin's 1000% rise in 3 months would seem to put it well outside the traditional conception of stable. Keep in mind, since the benefit of currency stability is to protect both buyers/borrowers and sellers/lenders, a rise is as damaging to stability as a fall (just impacting a different segment of the transaction).
While there are a few examples of fiat currency experiencing hyperinflation, it's almost always been the result of extreme political uncertainty. In a normally functioning political environment, the change in currency value may still be significant, but tends to be fairly stable (even if it changes, it changes within a predictable range).
That's clearly not the case with bitcoin.
This seems like a pretty intractable problem with these sorts of plans to beam energy to earth.
--- showing my work...
Microwaves attenuate in the atmosphere at about 15 dB/km or 3%/km (see http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/4963/RLE-TR-08...). If the signal is losing power, its going somewhere: notably as energy (some converted to heat) into the atmosphere.
If you're sending 13 PetaWatts (as indicated in the original link) through 10+ km of atmosphere, that's 3.400 PetaWatts, or 26% of the power, "lost" on the way to earth. All the power that's "lost" is being absorbed by the atmosphere and contributing to atmospheric heating.
The earth gets 174 Petawatts of incoming radiation from the Sun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy), but 30% of that actually gets reflected back, so the Sun heats with 122 PW of incoming solar radiation and this plan would add 3.4 PW, 3% more.
Note that I didn't take into account the thinning of the atmosphere or the fact that not all the energy goes into heat (some of it could be absorbed in other ways). However, you still end up with some pretty significant additional heating and having microwaves absorbed by doing things like breaking chemical bonds in the atmosphere probably isn't a great thing either.
Modern word processors are getting “helpful” enough that at times I feel like a word processor operator rather than a writer. They have support for spell checking. MS Word can now tell you about grammar and synonyms. The behavior all these tools encourage is not “think deeply about your report and write it carefully”, but “just write a crappy first draft of your report, and then the tools will tell you not just what’s wrong with it, but also how to make it better.”
On the other hand there are probably cheaper ways to beat your competitors than crewing a boat, paying for fuel/electricity, havign a datacenter crew on board, dealing with the challenges of getting a high bandwidth signal hundred of miles off-shore, etc. Specifically you could invest in ever-faster custom processing in hardware or a lower latency connection will still make you faster than your competitors. You don't need to be as fast as possible, you only need to be a tiny bit faster than everyone else.
On the other hand, if someone can take advantage of economy of scale (by being a neutral provider to many brokers) and provide an advantage over everyone at a lower cost than the above options, then everyone would need to use it to compete effectively.
Due to speed-of-light delays, some of the ideal locations for hosting high-speed trading arbitrages are in the middle of the ocean. Being half way between two exchanges would allow you to notice a small difference in price of some commodity in two different exchanges and buy and sell microseconds before your competitors on the mainland know that there's an arbitrage opportunity. See http://www.physicscentral.com/explore/action/stocktrade.cfm
Only a small number of workers are skewed that high, but the overtime is significant for a large percent of workers.
They should have excluded other benefits by default, but I think you need to include the overtime to get a real picture.
One of the big points of confusion I've had in understanding the press around this has been trying to rationalize the differences between the (union) statements about low base salaries against the (management) statements about high total costs per employee. This provides some interesting context about how those numbers can be so different.
1) There's only one union employee with a base salary (graph union vs base pay) over $100k, and only 3 non-computer/telco union jobs with a salary above $90k.
2) There are a few folks with huge overtime (earning up to an additional 1.5x their salary in overtime). A quarter of the union employees are adding over 20% to their salary from overtime. Nearly 7% are adding over 50%. A total of 21 people are making more from OT than base pay. The big overtime users are mostly making between $50k and 65k a year in base salary, with a few making $80k+.
3) As a side-note: The biggest overtime payments go mostly to senior operations foreworkers (usually making $80k+) and train operators (usually making $60-75k). As a percentage of salary, those two titles are some of the leaders, but also joined by system service workers (described on several sites as basically a janitor and making $50-60k).
Other networks (I'm looking at you, Facebook), instead trap you in using their interfaces to communicate with someone.
I think Linked-in is actually really protecting privacy in this respect.
Also, if the user grants you permission, you can see their email address within linked-in and avoid sending any communication through linked-in itself.