Students Of Success

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act Was created on July 30th 2002, by Senator Paul Sarbanes and Representative Michael Oxley, who drafted the bill. It followed a series of high profile scandals. Its objective is to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made pursuant to the securities laws.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is mandatory every organization small and large must comply.

Sarbanes-Oxley is a direct result of Enron, WorldCom and various other accounting scandals of the 1990’s.

In essence, Sarbanes-Oxley gives corporate boards far less flexibility than they once had while simultaneously leaving executives with far fewer reasons to want to be a board member. If you are a successful executive late in your career, the benefits of lending your considerable expertise as a board member no longer outweigh the risks to your net worth.

Without a doubt, the intent of Sarbanes-Oxley is admirable, and sorely needed. However, the practical functioning of this legislation leaves much to be desired.

In far too many companies, the board of directors consists of “yes” men and woman who parrot the will of the Chairman and CEO. Most board members have been in their positions for considerable periods of time, and forums do not exist that encourage both an active participation in the business matters of the firm and the investigation and questioning of critical risk management processes.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is split in to a number of sections each highlighting the different rules and regulations each organization must implement.

John Parsons is founder of http://CorporateNarc.Com. The mission of http://www.CorporateNarc.Com is to educate the public in consumer affairs and to provide consumers with up-to-date business information. In addition we hope to ensure better services for the consumer by exposing business fraud and corruption, as well as unfair and deceptive business practices.

This article my be reproduced as long as the author’s name and url to http://www.Corporatenarc.com are present at the end of the article.

Yes, when done right, they do work. You were probably the 3424224th visitor to some website, or maybe you won a 64″ television, or maybe you could buy a web cam that spies on pretty women. Sure, we’ve all seen those pop-ups and more than likely we had closed them with out any consideration. Didn’t we all close them? Not everyone does. Those little pop-ups can actually grab inquiries for you. But I’m not saying to have big and flashy pop-up windows, I’m just suggesting that if don’t right you can tickle a visitor’s interest

You could make a small, unobtrusive popup that simply asks for your name and email and in return you can send them a free report, cheap camera, or even another e-book. Free is free! I’m all for free! I actually found out about a marketing company that purchased cheap imported digital cameras from Taiwan in bulk amounts. These little gems were purchased for 10 cents on the dollar.

The marketing campaign was simple: Give me some information and I’ll give you digital camera. It was all in the name of getting email prospects. How did the company make money on this deal? Well the fact was that you had to pay to have the camera shipped to you, which was about twelve dollars. Heck, the cameras probably cost the marketing company five dollars a piece. But did they really need to purchase many cameras? Well, let’s take a look at their process:
Enter the POPUP — YOU”VE WON A FREE DIGITAL CAMERA! Click here to continue.

CLICK

Enter the request of information screen:
“Simply give us your name, email address and your hobbies before we take you to the next step of getting your FREE digital camera then click the submit button”

CLICK

Thank you for your information (WOW! They got a lot of information from me…plus this step has a privacy policy that let’s the marketing company use my email address to send out any future “offers”)

You only have to pay $12 dollars for shipping and handling to receive your free camera. Please enter your payment informa….

CLICK

*#%!#!$%!$*

Heck, I wasn’t going to give them any money for a free camera. But wait, I gave them my information. I got nothing, but they sure got some useful targeted demographics. This seems deceptive, but it is a powerful approach. Yes, the cost of the camera was nothing, but the cost of shipping was something. This marketing company probably now has 100,000 new email leads and a bunch of cheap digital cameras in their possession…all of this stemming from a silly popup.

We can learn from this…the right words are powerful. If you have things that can cost you nothing but gain you powerful email leads, by all means, use them. But you MUST be careful. If you use a three-step process like the camera scenario, you must be forward in your privacy policy and why you are collecting data about your inquiries.

You may publish this article freely while you do not change it’s content and the resource box. ————————————————–

Tony Rocks is a full-service web development company that can tackle any project. From Enterprise-level applications to data integrity and storage and marketing solutions, Tony Rocks simply Rocks!

http://www.tonyrocks.com

When the founding fathers came to draw up a constitution, although all of them had been born and bred in what Thomas Jefferson described as the “orthodox doctrines of British liberties,” they necessarily found but scant guidance looking at the English model because that country had never found it necessary to write down a constitution.

Clearly, the House of Representatives was modeled after the House of Commons, there being no other model to draw upon, since Europe at that time was for the most part absolutist and possessed no such traditions. Further drawing on their understanding of the English model, the founding fathers wanted a second chamber, but had to resolve upon some system other than the House of Lords, which at that time was composed of hereditary peers, which the Americans had decided would not do at all in the new Republic, along with the bishops of the Church of England, also entirely foreign to American way of thinking which was based upon non-conformism and a refusal to countenance an established church. They resolved upon a curious compromise reaching back to the old Roman tradition for the word “Senate,” but still looking to the English model for representatives from each state.

Oddly enough, the House of Lords has continued to evolve, while the Senate remains more or less fixed as it was set down in the Constitution of 1776, and has by now become in a sense quite anomalous. Hereditary peers have lost all right to exercise any vote in the House of Lords, but the British still have not entirely decided upon the best manner of composing the upper house, which though it has lost all power to the House of Commons nonetheless is preserved as a deliberative chamber with a certain power to delay legislation.

In the years before the great Reform Bill of 1832, many members of Parliament were returned by a mere handful of votes, being returned for what were then termed “Rotten Boroughs,” because of the clearly inequitable proportion of votes required to return such members, sometimes no more than a dozen. Today in a somewhat amazing reversal of history, one could view many of the states of the Union as rotten boroughs, because they return two Senators in spite of having a disproportionately tiny number of voters. The state of Delaware has far fewer residents than the San Fernando Valley, yet returns two Senators with exactly the same voting powers as the two California Senators who between them represent the fifth largest economy in the world and 30 million people.

At the time of the American Revolution, the House of Lords exercised great powers but those powers have gradually disappeared, whereas today each Senator is in effect a virtual fiefdom. Any Senator can stop any business from being transacted; that is to say, a single Senator from a state with few than one million people can prevent the passage of legislation, even if that legislation has been passed by the House of Representatives. What ever else this may be, it is certainly not anything resembling a true democracy because the Senate today, with incumbents nearly impossible to unseat, is far more like an aristocracy than today’s membership of the House of Lords.

When it came to constructing the judicial system, the founding fathers sought to retain the common law in its entirety, with the single exception of the Constitution, and it must be said that the Constitution is an exceedingly important difference. But as for form and procedure, the old tradition of the common law, already at that time more than 600 years old, prevailed almost without change. But when it came to deciding what should be the highest court, again the founding fathers were on their own, because they could derive nothing but mystery and obfuscation from looking at the English system.

Even today, although the current British government is seeking to change the system, the highest court in the land is said to be the House of Lords, but it is not really the House of Lords at all but a mere committee of the House of Lords composed of a number of senior judges, who collectively are referred to as the Law Lords. But whereas the Justices of the Supreme Court have a magnificent Greco-Roman style building of their own, and frequently appear in resplendent black robes as celebrities in their own right, most people in England would not be able to name of a single Law Lord. Indeed, the House of Lords is so informal that it is hardly a court at all; it meets in a committee room in the upstairs of the House of Lords, and the Law Lords wear no kind of robe but merely appear in lounge suits. The present English government, breaking with a tradition of more than half a millennium, says it intends to replace the House of Lords with a Supreme Court, so perhaps with wonderful irony the highest court of appeal in Britain will finally come to resemble the U.S. Supreme Court.

Charles B. Parselle is a mediator, arbitrator and attorney. He graduated from Oxford University’s Honor School of Jurisprudence and is a member of the English bar, then was admitted to the California Bar in 1983. A practicing attorney, he is a prolific author and sought-after mediator. For a free consultation, please contact him through his website: http://www.parsellemediation.com

Curiously enough, the word spam is a negative reference to that
pink, hulk of meat that comes in a can that, most people say,
has no nutritional value whatsoever.

In more common internet terms, spam is one or more messages sent
repeatedly and massively to countless e-mail address, often
resulting in flooded and crowded mailboxes all over the world.

What started out as another insistent branch of internet
advertising has now evolved into something that the U.S.
government is gravely concerned about.

Even without knowing the word “spam,” you are most probably
aware of an annoying circumstance when you opened your mailbox
to find countless of worthless messages, often linking you to
equally vague and suspicious websites and offers.

Internet experts have declared that spam costs money for both
consumers and internet providers. Why? Simply because the
consumers have to waste time in opening e-mail that is not
relevant to their lives, and therefore throw away precious
minutes that they have paid for through their for providers.

This may not seem to be of such great magnitude if we’re just
talking about spam that took 10 seconds to open, but think about
something like 5,000 people all over the country each opening 10
spammed e-mails and you’ve got an alarming number, and this is
already thinking very conservatively and small-scale.

As for the providers, they are the ones who get a barrage of
complaints whenever their clients get flooded with spam.

The cost of providing free minutes to placate these customers,
plus dispatching staff to work round the clock, plus the added
stress of assuring their clients that they are not in league
with the spammers, all make up a very difficult and costly
business.

Concerned U.S. officials have been fighting spam for almost a
decde now. And while there are now several software that can
detect and filter spam, hackers have also become better at
grabbing mailing lists and developing their own software to
bypass all these filters.

Suddenly, you can’t just tell if an e-mail is spam by simply
looking at the subject line where garbled characters often
appear. You’ll find that not only will they address you with
your first name, you’ll also see that the sender has a name that
seems vaguely familiar to you.

It seems that spam is everywhere. You can’t join mailing lists,
internet newletter subscriptions, or even go into online gaming
without expecting to get spammed along the way.

People nowadays are cautioned to be careful whenever they are
prompted for their e-mail addresses.

It would also not do to trust a spam’s content. Oftentimes,
these e-mails contain invitations to vague and shady businesses
such as pornography, multi-level marketing companies, miracle
cures, and obscure products, products that are so totally
worthless that it’s proprietors would certainly not invest in
good money to have them advertised the normal way.

In truth, using spam as an advertising tool costs less on the
advertisers, and more, much more, on the consumers.

What To Do About Spam

Most spammed e-mails give you the option to be removed from
their mailing lists -all you have to do is click “remove” or
“unsubscribe.” Experts, however, warn that this is just
misleading information.

The truth is, all you would actually get out of doing this is
validating your e-mail address as a working one, therefore
giving these hackers more reason to include you in more mailing
lists to eventually sell to more and more clients who will
surely send you more spam.

Even as the concerned officials battle it out with hackers and
spammers, there are also ways that you can participate, even
indirectly:

1. Make sure that you wade through your e-mail to actually find
out if an innocent message got lost in the sea of spam

2. Notify anti-spam groups of new tactics that you observe,
either firsthand or through your close friends and family

3. Don’t fight spam with spam. If you are angry at having been
spammed, don’t threaten the spammers or worse, send them your
own spam. This would be really wrong, not to mention ironic

4. Be patient with your provider. Chances are, they are doing
the best they can to fight spam.

5. Don’t hit that “remove” or “unsubscribe” button. You now know
that it doesn’t work. Tell other people about it.

So you have heard the success stories of
people making money online and now you want to
start making money online yourself. But what
businesses are good bets for making money
online? A simple Internet search will leave
you inundated with making money online
strategies. There isn’t time to try them all
and you wouldn’t want to anyway. You want to
find the making money online strategy that is
going to work for you. Here are a few
strategies that, if followed, should get you
headed in the right direction.

The first and foremost rule for finding
success making money online is to meet a need.
Offering a product or service that no one
wants is not going to help in making money. Do
your homework. Find out what people are
clamoring for and you will be well on your way
to making money online. How does this help
with making money? Well a great way of tapping
into the hot things that are already making
money for people online is to do an Internet
search. There are a number of search term
suggestion tools that can guide you in your
making money online search by helping you find
out the kinds of things that people are
looking for. These tools will give you
comprehensive lists of what people are
searching the Internet for. Armed with these
lists you will be much further ahead in your
making money online decision process.

Once you have your search term suggestion
lists you may feel a little overwhelmed in
your making money online search. The lists are
bound to be huge and you may feel like a
victim of making money online overload. So the
next important step in your making money
online search is to pare these lists down. One
great way to make these making money online
lists more manageable is to eliminate all the
things that you have absolutely no interest
in. The last thing you want is to be stuck
doing something you have no interest in.

You’re interested in making money but you have
to find something that interests you. Either
go through the lists and scratch out anything
that doesn’t interest you or make a list of
the things that you would enjoy making money
doing and use it as a check list against your
big lists. Either way, by the time you’re done
you should have your making money choices
narrowed down to a manageable level.

Finally, let me give you a word of warning.
Many people looking for ways of making money
online fall into the trap of companies that
provide you lists of other companies that they
say are looking for people interested in
making money online. They say you will have a
vast amount of options for making money from
the lists they send you. Don’t believe it for
a second. The only people making money from
these lists are the people selling you the
lists.

So to recap, search for the things that are
already making money for people, then dig
through until you find the making money
opportunity that’s right for you. Put your
making money idea to work and enjoy yourself
while making money.

About the author:

To find the best home based business ideas and
opportunities so you can work at home visit:
http://www.MakeItBigForLife.com