6/27    WCOM: they didnt just "lose" 4B, here is the idea - when running a
        business what is the only thing which matter, costs and revenue,
        profit is the difference between the 2 right. YES! Well not
        accouring to GAAP (generally acepted accounting principles). Most
        business use whats called amortization. Corporations needed some
        mechanism to account for large capital expenditure- For instance
        worldcom- they spent 10B on a network and equipment but didn't
        want to account for that as a loss even though technically it
        was, the complexity is that the revenue for that cost will come
        in over the period of lets say 20 years- So to try to give
        investors a better idea of whats going on the corporation
        amortizes the contruction costs over 20years so that the costs
        match up against the revenue. This is all perfectly legal exactly
        the way governmetn wants it; however, in reality it totally
        screws reality, reality is that costs are costs and revenue is
        revenue but due to the nature of busines that is wrong beacause
        it totally voids the incentive of R&D. Now it gets even more
        complex in that what happens when revenue related to a capital
        cost does not materialize but you don't want to have to continue
        taking loses fro the the remainder of the amortization cycle,
        well you take whats called a writeoff, but corporations don't
        like these one time charges because they skew profit numbers. So
        at the end of the day it is very difficult for investors to know
        how a company is really doing.