The liquidation is pro-rata for the common shareholders. So once Preferred gets paid, the common splits the remaining pro-rata. With the actual docs (Shareholders rights agreement that goes with the purchase, it would be clear).
8% of the amount invested. This is a standard term to allow investors to get paid if the company is in business a long time is cash flow positive, but not likely to have a liquidation event. VC funds typically have a 10 year life and need are way to return money to their LPs.
I can't speak to Oregon, but in California the voters also specify the things the government has to spend on. We have legislature must spend on. For instance we require that some 60% of the budget go to education. The legislature only have control over something like 20%. Additionally, while this is probably only a small problem now, we will have pension / retiree health care issues.
Much has been written about the dysfunction of California's government. I would summarize it as we have a direct participation system, in the form of propositions, that has limited what the government can do. Specifically, the voters have limited the amount of property taxes that can be raised, required a super majority of the legislature to raise any other taxes, and then gone ahead and proscribed what the legislature has to spend money on, either directly on things like education or indirectly on things like prisons when we pass laws like 3 strikes. Even when we raise additional taxes, as we just did with Prop 30, we specifically earmarked that money for education. All this leads to terrible roads.
Those in CA thinking about implementing such a policy will need to be careful. IANAL, but having been CFO of two CA start ups now, you will need to give CA employees at least 1 day per month worked that will need to be paid upon termination. You can cap the amount of accrued vacation a 10 or more days, but once they've earned a day they can never loose it.
Since they are debt, they accrue interest and the note is due and payable in full at some point down the road (say 18 months). If the company successfully bootstraps, they need to be in a position to pay back the note + the accrued interest by the end of the 18 month period.
If the company can't pay back the note, they need to negotiate with the investors to either extend it or to convert it at some mutually agreed upon valuation
I am not a lawyer - so don't take this as legal advice. But if I read your post correctly, you said you were never properly served. Since it sounds like you have access to all the court documents, if you search through them some where in the documents you will probably find a place where the plaintiffs swear under penalty of perjury, that you were served with notice. If you were truly never served (make sure to check with a lawyer to see what constitutes service) and they claimed you were - you may have grounds for a counter suit. Check into Small Claims Court as well - you can sue for up to $10,000 and abuse of process is a valid claim there. Forms are available online, your opponent can't bring a lawyer and there is only one appeal allowed.
But if you do nothing and if they choose to press this, they will go to court to ask the judge to put liens on any assets they can and to garnish your wages.
In any event contact a lawyer to see if I am correct about this.
This move fits with HBO's (and really every content provider's) anti-piracy strategy. Namely, content needs to be encrypted from the time it leaves their server's to the time it is decoded by the screen. The reason for this is simple, if they achieve this goal, they can argue that anyone who provides an unencrypted copy of content must have violated the DMCA (which has provision against tampering with encryption). Whether the technologies have cracked (the article points out the HDCP has been) or whether the provider ever prosecutes isn't the point, the content providers feel they need to reserve their rights at any cost.
Many folks (techdirt included) argue that piracy is just marketing. For instance, it allows HBO to reach an audience they wouldn't reach otherwise. They even speculate that the Game of Thrones ratings bump was due to piracy. While that may (or may not) be true, in most industries, companies control when, where and much to spend on marketing.
For HBO (or any content provider) all these decisions come down to economics and how they can maximize their profits. In this new case (adding HDCP to their streams) they probably judged that the number of customer's they'd loose was pretty small and making the change would allow them to further their strategic goals.
My first job out of collage was with a Big 6 accounting firm as a IT consultant. As part of training, we took the Myers-Briggs test (which places you on the Introvert/Extravert spectrum) and spent an entire day discussing the results. The message of the day was any of the different personality types can thrive and people should be aware of other's personality styles and taylor their interactions given what they know about themselves and what they know about the people they are interacting with. This was/is an important lesson and has been helpful in my career.
They ended the day with a set of two slides that broke down the population of the firm as a whole and the population of the partners in the firm. 80% of the firm were extraverts and >95% of the partners where extraverts. So the other lesson I learned that day, was that if you want to be in a sales-y leadership position, you better learn to behave like an extravert.
It's unclear whether there will be any breakage. Most states have escheat laws that apply to gift certificates. Basically merchants are required to remit to the state any unused gift certificates after a certain period of time.
While the coupon part of the Groupon might be allowed to expire, the merchants will have to eventually pay the states for all unused groupons.
At my company we've used Jaspersoft and Pentaho and at various times paid for commercial licenses in JasperSoft's case to get support and some consulting (which we only used once) and in Pentaho's case to get a bug fix patch faster.
Both tools are relatively cheap, you can expect to pay around $10K per year if you want the commercial version of the full suite and are very developer friendly. They both use Java extensively, so you have to be willing to have that in your environment.
I would add one more tool to mix - MSFT SQLServer 2008. The standard edition (about $2K, I think) comes with a the full suite minus the data mining tools. The reporting tools are on par with what Jasper and Pentaho offer and the Analysis tools are very simple to use and allow one to use Excel as a front end interface (which is what you end users want anyway).
A few large consulting companies in the 90's, Cambridge Technology Partners and Viant, for example, were very successful with this model. They were selling against the $100-200/hr Big 6 type consulting firm so there was plenty of room budget for the "risk" associated with going over the time estimate. The other key to their success was getting the client to agree to pay for an upfront 'spec'ing' phase before bidding on the development work. If you do the spec'ing phase correctly you can give a fairly good bid on development and truly assess what is in scope and what is a change order.
Should 50 people be allowed to create magazines titled "Entrepreneur", regardless of whether the word is commonly used. If you are the first to think of something, shouldn't you have some limited right to protect whatever investment you are making in developing the idea. It is certainly fair to ask if someone else's magazine title is sufficiently similar as to be confusing, but that isn't a question for a judge and/or jury to adjudicate.
As technologists, we may instinctively view most attempts to use the law to protect intellectual property as abusive, but at least there is a transparent, although expensive, way to solve conflicts.
Think for a moment about how brands, like Entrepreneur Magazine, are built on the internet. The authors work very hard to develop interesting content and then try to get Google to rank the content. Unless you get very large, or spend a lot of money in traditional brand advertising, it is unlikely that anyone will find your content without Google's help. If someone comes along and steals your content, and puts it on a more "trusted" site it may well be seen by more people than the original (there have been plenty of Hacker News articles pointing this out). In this case, the only redress is to try to get Google to listen - certainly an uphill battle. Again, as technologists, we may feel that Google system is fairer because its an algorithm, but when a spammer abuses the system there is rarely any redress.
The terminal hasn't changed much in 40 years because it very good at what it does, that is, allowing experts to get stuff done. One of the usability lessons of modern computing is that the mouse is a productivity killer. Having transitioned back to vi from TextMate, I have certainly found it to be true.
The author talks about how its a shame to give 2MM pixels to an 80 column terminal, but from what I've seen, developers are perfectly capable opening multiple terminal windows to view things like log files and running quick commands. Try that on a WYSE.
While I don't think I'd ever use this as a replacement for my terminal, I do think the "server" part of the architecture is interesting. What if you built a native OSX app to replace finder. That is something I'd use.