I stopped reading the articles around 2002.

Uh, no. With a large established company like TW this is simply a drop in the bucket. My point stands.

LOL, here we go again. Of course you pass on the swipe fees, unless you have a special printing press in the back that prints money to be used to cover swipe fees.

What you're missing is that all customers pay the same amount, meaning if I pay with cash part of my cash is covering other people's swipe fees. I usually pay with cash so, yeah, bit of a bummer. However, you'll find at a lot of stores on large purchases they'll bargain way better when you wave a wad of cash under their nose.

I think you missed the point, so I'll bring it up again. TW - like most profitable companies - makes all of its money from sales to customers. Therefore, for any expense that TW has the statement "the customers are going to pay for it" is true. Therefore, it's meaningless.

Let me help you:

2 Shareholders pay (in the form of less profit)

<eyeroll> Yes, that'll happen either way. The money that the shareholders earn (in the form of dividends) still comes from customers. Again - they either have a printing press for money or it comes from customers.

3. Employees pay

Yeah, and where does employee pay come from? A magical printing press in the back room, of course, that prints the money that pays employees.

Oh, wait, no, this is reality, so the money COMES FROM CUSTOMERS. <facepalm>

4. The company spends less money on other things....

(Do I have to repeat this at this point?)

The *only* other options for "who pays for this?" would be if an outside investor approached them and, for whatever reason, says "Hey, you got screwed on that court case. Tell you what, for x% of your company I'll pay that judgement for you." Put another way, they could sell extra stock (and thus devalue all existing stock) to raise the money. For a company of their size it's probably not worth it.

Of course they will. It's either that or they own a money printing press, right? I see this all the time: "they'll just pass the cost on to consumers". I'm at a loss to determine what you think the alternative would be. Every business technically passes all their costs to their customers as the customers are how they make money. When you pay your TW bill (if you have TW) then part of that bill is covering legal expenses when they screw up. Same as when you buy a can of pop at Walmart, Kroger, etc.

It surprised me to find that they can deduct this. The IRS code doesn't allow deduction of penalties paid to governmental agencies, but apparently civil non-governmental judgements are deductable.

The few air spaces inside the machines are filled with helium. It actually weighs 5lbs. otherwise.

I can say that smoking and possibly drugs are a factor in at least some of the folks who aged more quickly. That's a good point.

Good question, but no, it's not just me. Admittedly I look young for my age, as does my wife. We're both commonly mistaken for being 10 years younger than we are. What stuck out in my facebook friends list isn't "me" vs. "other people", it's "some of my friends" vs. "some of my other friends". If you saw their pictures without knowing who they were you would have trouble believing they were all the same age. Some look to be my age and others look 20+ years older. I know one guy who's 50 who looks to be my mother's age (she's 72).

The point is that when you see all of these people side-by-side in photos those differences are really noticeable. I've noticed that those who age quickest don't tend to show up at the class reunions so I didn't notice before.

Another odd effect is that some of the girls who were babes in high school turned out to be average looking by age 30. I don't mean "fat" - I mean their beautiful face became average. At the same time some girls who weren't terribly pretty in high school are now very pretty.

It's strange how people change throughout life, and it's not something you notice until you've lived like 50 years.

But there's another aspect of this. Say my company downloads the Linux kernel and we internally make some changes to it and use it on our servers in its modified form. Jim is one of the coders. Linux is released under GPLv2. Does that mean that Jim can take our changes home with him?

No.

The GPLv2 kicks in only when the company redistributes the code along with the modifications, and those modifications are available to the recipients that we've specified.

People often mistake "GPLv2" for "public domain" - the idea being that if my company is distributing GPLv2'd software then it's a free-for-all and anybody can have it. That's not the case.

So, even if Goldman Sachs was using GPLv2'd code unless they specifically gave it to him he can't legally have it. And my guess is that they're not about to give away the kind of code that was mentioned there.

Getting back in touch with high-school classmates was a huge eye-opener for me. I'm 47 now, graduated in 1986. Many of my classmates look like they're in their 60s. I'm not exaggerating. It's just amazing to me how differently people age.

Yep. And drug laws totally eliminated illegal drugs, prostitution laws totally eliminated prostitution, etc.

Come on, people. This is the stupidest headline I've read in awhile. If laws actually had magical powers like that it would be irrelevant since there's already a law against using a gun to murder someone.

Not loaded. There wasn't a single item in there that wasn't absolutely irrefutably true. He's not accustomed to being exposed and, frankly, took it like a champ. Just ignored it and tried to claim that he had some major part in civil rights progresses that would have happened without him.

And they still don't handle html5 date fields like 5 years later. Seriously, this is just sad to see the once mighty firefox turn into IE6. Even worse: at least with IE6 Microsoft could credibly say "we're not developing that anymore". With Firefox they're still adding worthless features while ignoring standards.

Michael

Bluntly stated, such a question can't possibly be "loaded". It's fully legitimate given Jackson's background and current activities.

I was bemused that Reddit would put someone with Ellen Pao's background in to run the place, and I figured it would probably cause a lot of problems. I was correct. First she had the stupid "we're not going to negotiate your salary" stunt (whaddaya bet she negotiated *her* salary?) and now crap like this.

Sometimes I think people miss out on the fact that these companies are ephemeral. There's literally nothing there, just a bunch of people who come together and form a community. Those people will quickly go elsewhere - ask myspace. Someone mentioned Dig and it's a good lesson for those who would learn. You can lose 99% of the value of your company in the course of a few months by making a few stupid decisions.

I see that basic spelling and grammar skills aren't one of the job requirements for being GM of a nuclear power plan [sic].

That, or maybe you're a lying troll.

Hmm, now that I've thought about it for 3 seconds I'm going with "lying troll".