Then you have concluded incorrectly.

Porn is harmless. Just because you may choose to get obsessed with porn and choose it over your wife does not make porn harmful.

I'm not sure why you are trying to use AT&T cellular as a guage for the US internet? From the article

A very low percentage of this plan has anythiing to do with wireless. The rest is wired, so your silly "2kbps from AT&T" comment is both ridiculous and irrelevant.

Now from someone else's comment

So the private industry failed them, thus the government stepped in. Now onto the US.. how exactly has the private industries failed to provide fast & affordable internet? Where is only "slow, horrifically overpriced ADSL" available?

You attempting to twist this into a free market vs socialism rant is simply laughable.

I don't think most people understand the concept of dividends.

The main criticism is that company profits are much better used when re-invested back into the company. Why would you be excited that a company is giving away it's money instead of re-investing in itself to make itself more profitable in the future? Now, if you personally don't want to see your "gains" re-invested, then you have the choice to just sell a portion of your investment and take the profit without affecting the company (assuming you don't have some massive position where a sell would affect the stock price, which is the normal case).

Dividends are usually also taxed twice. The company has paid taxes on it's profits, and the shareholder pays income tax on the dividend payment. Whereas taking your gain from selling the stock is independent of any tax the company has paid.

Dividends also give this false impression of extra profit. When a company pays a dividend, the stock reduces by virtually the same amount of the dividend that was paid. Thus you aren't theoretically getting anything extra. If your share was worth $30 and the dividend is $3, you receive $3 in cash and now your stock is worth $27. So, paying the dividend is not giving anything extra to shareholders. If anything, it forces you to manually rebalance your portfolio to account for the dividend. Now this may not be a big deal on a normal basis, but it's still something to consider. i.e., you put $100 in dividend paying stocks and $100 in nondividend paying stocks. If the dividend paying stocks have paid out $10, you now have $10 in cash, $90 in dividend paying stocks, $100 in non-dividend paying stocks. Your portfolio has changed balance simply because of dividends.

Some practical uses of dividends are receiving cash from your investment that is taxed at a more favourable rate than short-term capital gains and not having to act (i.e., sell shares) to receive income. So that can be a convenient point.

Now sure, you can argue that Apple is an extreme case.. after all who the hell has $100b in cash just sitting around. So I'm not really trying to apply the normal aspects of dividends to this situation. But these are facts worth noting in general. Dividends should not, in theory, be a "good thing". Thus even though you can argue dividend paying stocks do tend to perform better than non-dividend stocks, the reason is not the dividend itself. It may just be the company was in good enough shape to pay dividends, whereas a company losing value is probably not in a position to pay dividends.

How insightful. I'd never have imagined to see a comment like this on Slashdot, thanks for contributing to the discussion!

It's not.. and that's not what the article or summary was about. That was YOU trying to turn the discussion into tinfoil-hat-no-privacy world.

But I guess you accomplished your goal, enjoy eating your mod points tonight.

1) perhaps because you are still using an ancient hard drive from 1995, try these new things called SSD's for your boot drive...
2) it's interesting that out of all the performance measures of a computer you chose "boot speed" to be the end-all performance factor.... nice job mom

Wow I've never seen that posted in every single thread on Slashdot before, good thing you've been modded insightful.

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It really doesn't surprise me what gets modded "insightful" here these days.

Liquidity has no place in an investment system you say? So you mean, if you have some shares of Apple and you want to sell them, you should have to try to shop around to sell them and pay a large transaction cost just to get rid of something that has a market value? And how is that market value determined if there are not people actively trading the product? You can say a widget is worth $100 million, but until someone actually buys it for that price it's just imaginary.

And speculative investing is not good you say because it's gambling. Hmm, so what is buying shares of a new start-up company then, this would be investing, but not gambling?? I don't think you understand that both are in many ways the same thing. Investing IS gambling in every single way.

Not in the UK. All tax is included in the price, but it's still £9.99 instead of £10.00 to attract people to a one digit price instead of two (ignoring the cents).

I will never thank "Religion".

Oh piss the fuck off, that is all.

If you think I'm making this up, here is a quote from Seinfeld:

"As millions of fans sit glued to their sets next Sunday"

It's this Sunday not next Sunday! =) Grammatically correct or not I don't know, but "this Sunday" is so much clearer.