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Comment Re: Google finally realizes they aren't a startup (Score 1) 94

Companies need to return the money they make to their investors sometime. Dividends are how that happens. Unless you like the "tax efficiency" of liquidation.

It's funny. Loads of people are in the "OMG, not paying dividends is the root of all evil in the world!" Less frequently you run into your type, "OMG, dividends are stupid and awful!"

Neither is true.

Comment Re:I can't tell if you're joking (Score 1) 94

Stock transactions are free.

Lol, maybe for you.

Qualified dividends which is most ordinary companies like Apple, MS, etc., are federally taxed at
- 15% for up to 553,000 income (married joint)
- 0% for up to 89,000 income (married joint)

I assume this is in the US. I'm not American, many people are not. Many people are also not married. If you read carefully, you might have noticed phrases such as in many places and usually.

Comment Re: Google finally realizes they aren't a startup (Score 1) 94

If you're a company that's run out of ideas for new things to do with your income, giving it to investors isn't a bad idea. That's dividends. "Tax efficient" is between you and your government.

Companies have a natural lifetime. While they're growing, paying dividends is a bad idea. When they're mature, it's a good idea.

Comment Re:I can't tell if you're joking (Score 1) 94

Anybody can give themselves "dividends" from a non-dividend paying stock, no day trading or exceptional long-term planning required. Every year, or quarter, or whatever you like, just sell x%. In most respects it's the same thing that would happen if the company actually issued a dividend.

The disadvantage is that you'll probably have to pay a fee for the sale. The (big) advantage is that in many places sales are capital gains while dividends are income, and capital gains is usually taxed less.

Comment Re: Google finally realizes they aren't a startup (Score 0) 94

Google is an advertising company that occasionally develops some technology to support that. They've expanded to the point where they're dominant in pretty much all advertising except old fasioned print, TV and radio, and they're attracting a lot of anti-trust attention. Their growth is probably hitting its ceiling so dividends aren't necessarily a bad idea. Their actual payout is too small to be much more than symbolic though.

Even something that could be more accurately called a tech company is eventually going to saturate their market and stop growing. Growth doesn't mean you stop making, e.g. better processors, growth means you keep making better processors that you can sell more of for more money.

Comment Re:"sample code license"? (Score 2) 15

Apple's example code license:

https://developer.apple.com/su...

It appears there are basically two conditions:

1) if you distribute the thing unmodified you include the license text

2) you don't blame Apple for whatever happens, and if you're modifying it you don't stamp their name on it.

The fact that they're licensing the model weights themselves, and maybe some other stuff useful for training these things, means that you can fine tune, retrain, whatever the model (modify it to your purposes) and then it's yours, you can do whatever you want with it, just as if you'd written your own program based on some freely licensed example code.

Want to rebuild Tay the Nazi chatbot and sell it to white supremacist groups for massive profits? Have fun, just don't stamp Apple's logo on it or blame them for any consequences.

Comment Re:Or games are marked 'early access' for too long (Score 1) 26

It's rough for a developer, or more likely Steam, when they suddenly have to refund a bunch of money. If they're doing early access to fund development they've probably already spent that money. I think early access was intended to be only for the final stages of development, but it's turned into something more like kickstarter. You release what's sometimes little more than a tech demo, get a bunch of people to give you money, and use it to fund further development. Steam probably doesn't want to continue taking on the risk of projects like that.

Really they should leave early access alone but limit it to games that are almost done, and create a separate kickstarter program where you effectively donate money to the developer in exchange for some involvement in the process and a free copy of the game if it ever makes it.

Comment Re:Good (Score 2) 112

Moissanite is fairly easy to tell from diamond because it's dispersion is so much higher. Cubic zirconia is a closer match, although still considerably higher.

Moissanite is much prettier than diamond though, and since the patents expired in 2018 gemstone silicon carbide should be getting pretty cheap.

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