I'll agree with you that the post was too broad. I was using "Christians" as shorthand for "Hypocritical Christians". I know there are many, many Christians who are very actively helping the poor and sick.
But while it may have been unfair of me to suggest that "most Christians are anti-science" (which is not at all true), I believe that it's completely fair to claim that many (most?) Christians are not overly picky about actually applying the teachings of Christ. The majority of self-described Christians I've met happily engage in premarital sex, get divorced, use birth control (Catholics only, natch), cuss, accumulate excess wealth, don't go to church (much less tithe), check their horoscopes, play the slots, and would punch you in the nose before they would turn the other cheek. The complete lack of concern that most Christians have for usury is just one more sign of hypocrisy and/or ignorance.
Mind you I don't find any of these activities to be morally wrong, and therefore I'm not claiming that people who engage in them are bad people. I'm just pointing out that if you THINK you're a Christian you should at least learn what the rules are and make some attempt to follow them.
And then the other thing is that painting with broad strokes attracts mod points like flowers attract bees. I'm addicted to the +5 cookie.;-)
For the record, a post about how Christians should follow Christ's lead and focus more of their energy on defending the poor, in response to a post expressing surprise that Christians don't already do that, is actually ON-topic in a thread about how our government allows companies to deny jobs to the poor because they're poor. Not that I feel the need to defend myself, but you seem to have overlooked that. And you called a complete stranger a troll.:-(
May God grant you a long, joyous life full of every blessing and happiness.
You shouldn't be surprised. The Christians are too busy fighting to keep evolution out of schools and gays out of wedding chapels to actually focus on the poor, the sick, or any of the other people who Jesus spent his life helping.
A boycott generally starts "I'm not buying your product anymore; instead, I'm buying product X from vendor Y." But what PC game in the same genre as Mario Party series or Super Smash Bros. series do you recommend?
I keyed in on the word "but", as that would normally imply you would boycott the console makers, but you need to find a replacement item first. Which of course implies that if you can't find a replacement item, the boycott would be unrealistic.
It's entirely possible I read too much into your choice of conjunction, in which case there's no real disagreement.
On the other hand, if it was meant as written I will continue to argue that an economic boycott shouldn't be based on the availability of substitute goods. It's a war of attrition in which the two sides suffer until one of them caves. If you (generically, not YOU specifically) want to make a statement, then a boycott should happen even if there were no games available for the PC at all.
If people had refused to buy DVDs or videotapes unless the DVDs were non-region coded and unencrypted (despite having no ability to watch any new movies at home), then the studios would have been forced to give in. The fact that 95% of the population neither understands nor cares about the issue is why the remaining 5% of us have to put up with this shit.
And finally "another employer is giving me a better offer" is not a reasonable analogy. A boycott means "I won't do business with you even if you give me the best offer." Striking workers (a labor boycott) suffer in the expectation that their employer will suffer even more. It's a short-term sacrifice for (hopefully) a long-term gain. If going to work someplace better is an option, then you wouldn't need to strike; you would just need to resign.
You seem to think that a boycott is only possible if it's painless. "I can't get Super Smash Bros. on any other platform so how can I boycott the Wii?" That's like saying "We can't go on strike because we won't get paid." (Except more trivial.)
A boycott punishes a company by withholding funds. Doing without something you actually want is sort of the point. I don't buy scrapbooking things, but it's not because I'm "boycotting" the scrapbook industry -- I just don't want anything they make.
Just to distinguish myself from the typical anti-vegetarian crowd, I don't think you're an idiot for placing a high value on life. I think that the ability to torture or kill animals (at least vertebrates) without remorse is the sign of a psychopath.
But sacrificing rats to advance medicine is fine by me. I would draw the line at making rats extinct to help one person walk again, because I don't think eliminating a species is wise (we might need more rats!) But frankly I would happily kill 99.99999% of all the rats in the world if it could fix broken spinal cords, and I don't care if they're killed for research or as a sacrifice to the Nerve God, as long as it works.
I don't value rats lives as highly as human lives, period. If 100,000 gallons of rat blood was a magical elixir that could make paraplegics walk, then I would want many rats to die so we could bottle their blood.
(This should be the part where I say "I'm typing this from my wheelchair after a tragic diving accident", but I'm blessedly free from any ironic ailments.)
I agree with you that it's unfortunate that animals are sacrificed for medical research, and I hope and expect that the researchers are aware of their moral obligations to the animals under their care. But fixing spinal cord injuries so that people can walk again is worth the lives of millions of rats.
Volatility is essentially the "guessing what will happen" component of a price. The more the price is based on what people think will happen rather than on actual numbers, the more the price can whipsaw as people's opinions change.
Treasuries have low volatility because the prices are based on interest rates, inflation, and supply/demand. Those numbers change slowly and have a very predictable impact on prices.
Tech stocks have high volatility because the prices are based on things like market acceptance (will a new product be the next iPod or the next CueCat?), effectiveness (will the promising new drug work in people?), legal environment (will this new file-sharing service be made illegal to protect the RIAA?), and investor sentiment (will a lot of people want to jump on this bandwagon in a few months?). Since it's all based on guesses the prices can move as fast as people's opinions change, and the "plausible" range of prices becomes bigger, allowing for bigger swings.
Using housing prices as an example, it's easy to calculate mortgage interest, rent, taxes, insurance, etc. prior to buying a house. The market got crazy when we increased the demand for houses with lax lending policies, which pushed up prices, which attracted speculators, who started buying houses based on what they thought other people would pay for them rather than for what they were worth. The volatility (both the rise and the fall) was caused by lots of investors guessing everything would go up, followed by lots of investors guessing they would go down. The fundamental value of a house as a place to live or as rental property never changed much at all. (Which is why so many of the non-speculative fundamental home buyers just walked away from the market until the speculators went away, and are coming back into the market now.)
You're confusing volatility with market liquidity. A market that's very liquid has lots of trades, so the value of a security (i.e. the most recent sale price) is always known and up-to-date. It doesn't have to be a volatile market to be liquid. For example, the market for government securities is very liquid, but if interest rates are stable it's also very non-volatile. (And even when it's "volatile" it's not volatile like a tech stock.) Needless to say an asset in a liquid market is typically easy to sell and convert into cash, which is the other definition of liquid.
The housing market is non-liquid. There have been only a half-dozen houses sold in my neighborhood over the last three years, and none of those houses is quite like mine. So nobody knows exactly what my house is worth. "Appraisers" are just professional educated guessers, who try to use judgment and experience to replace the pricing information provided by a liquid market. And as we've seen, a non-liquid market can be very volatile. Also, a house is a non-liquid asset; even a simple house sale to a family member takes weeks and hundreds of dollars to arrange.
But there are some securities (private placements, for one example) that trade very rarely. There actually are appraisers for these types of securities, because with so little trading activity the market price can become stale. These are very non-liquid markets. But as long as you can find a buyer and are willing to accept the buyers price they're no less liquid than IBM stock. You sell them, the trade clears, you get cash the next day. So they're liquid assets (more liquid than a house, in any case). And it's not even meaningful to talk about volatility in these markets because there is so little trade activity.
Armstrong's first boot prints were most likely destroyed the minute Buzz Aldrin hopped off the ladder after him. It's the last bootprints that would have been obliterated by the ascent module.
I doubt that would work, because jerks are attracted to shock sites as moths are to flame. You're more likely to get your PC back with goatse and lemonparty replaced with things that will leave you balled up and crying in your bed for a week.
I don't think it's a coincidence that handguns are virtually illegal in Britain. It's a hell of a lot easier for a cop to maintain order over 1,000 people when the only way the civilians can "defend" their freedoms is by asking the government to give them a little more running room on their leashes.
They weren't all running in one memory space -- they were all running on one common set of files. For example, you might have a system that accepts 15 files from various other systems, processes those files against a set of master VSAM files and/or against a database, and then creates a set of 15 files that get sent out to other systems. The system itself consists of a series of JCL jobs. Each job consists of multiple COBOL programs and utilities. It's just like bash, except in a way that's nothing at all like bash....
But because any program which opens a file can change any data contained in the file, it's tempting to make tweaks wherever it's handy. Nobody claims it's good practice, but these systems have been under constant tweaking for 30 or 40 years by dozens of programmers. After the first decade nobody even knows what the programs were supposed to do in the first place. (Especially since they have names like AB1243A, where 3 of the 7 characters identify the application, leaving only 4 characters to describe what the program does.)
So the typical bug-hunt consists of noticing that a field has the wrong value, and then checking each individual intermediate file from start to finish to see which job changed it. And if you're on a system that doesn't save its intermediate files it means running all the jobs one step at a time to see where the field gets modified. And THEN you have to open the program and find out what it's doing and why.
It's not all that different from any other system that has data which is shared between various components, but somehow solving the problem using TSO makes it all seem so primitive.
(XEDIT is one of the best text editors I've ever used, though.)
And don't forget that in COBOL, not only is all of your data global to your program, in a typical batch cycle all of the data is global to ALL of the programs.
I used to hate discovering that field XYZ was being modified in jobs that were completely unrelated to XYZ, because the programmer was too lazy to check the appropriate code out of the repository. "Why bother? I can make the change right here and it'll work just fine!"
My favorite line was "Being on a COBOL dev team is like living in a dorm."
It looks like an excellent website. Thanks for the tips!
I'm not blaming XP for being insecure. I'm blaming all the jackasses in the world who try to hoodwink the unsophisticated. XP is merely the victim of its own popularity in this regard.
The other pisser is that I have sixteen years' experience as a programmer. I've been paid real US dollars to program in COBOL, C++, VB, bash, and Apple Script (ugh). I'm comfortable with TSO, Windows, OS X, Linux, OS/2, and Solaris. I can do CLI or GUI. I have a heterogeneous home network (XP, OS X, and 2 Linux boxen) that's usually mostly working (even with two precocious boys who like to test it).
And I STILL sometimes struggle with the administrative tasks. How is Joe Six-Pack expected to cope?
He isn't a corporate user. It's a friend of mine, and his wife asked me to lock down the box as much as possible because she needs it for work and her husband and kids had blown it up twice in a two-month period. I told her that NoScript was a PITA, but she was willing to try it to protect her PC from her family.
So while I agree with you in a general sense (that NoScript is not for novices), this was a special request. But I was sure to emphasize how important it was, and to try to pre-whitelist the sites they used frequently, and to encourage them to try unlocking one domain at a time, and I defaulted it to "temporarily allow target domain".
AND I told them to lay off the goat porn, but she has a husband and three adolescent boys.:-)
I still haven't discovered a way to protect XP from the user. People who's computers I've tried to secure have:
1. Found IE after I deleted all but one IE shortcut and moved the last one into Windows/System32 so he wouldn't find it.
2. Disabled NoScript so the web would "work".
3. Canceled SpyBot every time the scan started (at 2:00 AM!) because it was taking too long.
4. Bypassed the router because he thought it was causing problems with his Internet access.
5. Disabled the firewall because it kept notifying him that various applications were trying to contact the Internet.
6. Turned off WOT because it was preventing him from getting to sites marked as "Unsafe".
WTF? Short of installing a proxy server in my house and routing all of their traffic through it, there's nothing I can do except rebuild the box every six weeks. When the only REAL solution is to educate people and make them care, you can't possibly win.
I don't think we actually disagree on this at all, but to clarify...
Metallica was on Elektra when the Napster issue occurred. I'm sure that by 1999 their record deal was much more in their favor than your bog-standard "first recording contract". So I think it's fair to say that (details aside) they were receiving a fair percentage of their album sales, and thus anything that affected their sales affected their pocketbooks fairly directly.
There have also been cases (e.g. Jen Trynin) where artists manage to get enough clout or buzz to get better-than-normal terms on their first record deal. It's not common, but it happens.
But in a typical first record deal, the artist needs to sell 250,000-500,000 copies before they see a dime because the contract stipulates that most of the money spent producing and promoting the album needs to be recouped before the royalties start to flow to the artist. Which would be OK except that the artist has virtually no control over how this money is spent. So the label takes the band out for an expensive lunch and then charges the lunch to the band's recoupable expenses account. There's no question that the label is putting its money on the line and that on most releases they won't get their money back, but it's still hard for me to feel bad about it in the way that I would if the artist was scrimping and saving to get their music out and promote it on a shoestring budget.
I think the situation would be improved if the artist reigned absolutely supreme. Unfortunately the copyright owner reigns supreme, and that seems to be the root cause of a lot of the current unhappiness with the situation.
Frankly, Lars Ulrich may have been a dick, but it's hard to argue that he didn't have the moral right to complain that a recording that he had created got released without his consent. But when Sony argues that they're defending the "rights of the artists" whilst taking 100% of the artist's royalties until promotional bills are paid in full (thus forcing the artist to pay for the production and promotion of the recording, but without actually giving the artist control over the budget for production or promotion), it's hard to be sympathetic.
It doesn't matter where the company is operating from. What matters is where the company is doing business. Rhode Island can make demands on amazon for any business which amazon does in the state. Regardless of where they're located, insurance companies need to be licensed in every state in which they want to sell insurance. So too for financial advisors, lawyers, doctors, etc. You don't even need a physical presence; Geico can't offer insurance policies over the phone (the poor man's internet) without a state license to do so, regardless of whether any Geico facilities are located here.
Jurisdictions DO demand sales taxes from companies that operate within their borders, but it's called "income tax" when you assess it that way. Hell, RI charges companies property taxes for the inventory they hold within the state. If I spend $25 at CVS, the state charges tacks 7% onto my bill in sales tax, and then taxes CVS on whatever money they made off of me.
The store couldn't possibly, unless they were so big (Walmart?) that they could justify a staff devoted solely to that activity. On the other hand, this is exactly why third-party providers exist. Once you've developed the infrastructure to calculate sales tax based on an address, you can handle 5, 500, or 50,000 orders without much incremental cost. It would be natural to outsource that to gain the economies of scale.
In a lot of ways it's like hiring a PR or promotional firm. Most companies can't afford to keep one person on staff devoted to knowing and maintaining relationships with the people at all the major newspapers, television stations, radio stations, magazines, and web sites across the country. But there are firms who specialize in this (often by subcontracting THEIR work to local promotional people), and so companies outsource that work to them.
I do agree with you regarding the burden on small retailers, but I'm not sure it's as big a burden as it seems. Most smaller online companies seem to use third parties for their billing anyway, so they would be covered when their billing providers finally get their arms twisted. Most of the really small outfits seem to use a "call or email your order" model, and I doubt anyone would bother to chase them. And any small companies that have rolled their own systems will need to get help. (I suspect that Visa or MasterCard would be in a good position to offer some sort of solution, though.)
Slashdot Mirror
Find a local bar that has the DirectTV package. Hell, that's the best way to watch sports, anyway. Beer, wings, and no clean-up.
I'll agree with you that the post was too broad. I was using "Christians" as shorthand for "Hypocritical Christians". I know there are many, many Christians who are very actively helping the poor and sick.
;-)
But while it may have been unfair of me to suggest that "most Christians are anti-science" (which is not at all true), I believe that it's completely fair to claim that many (most?) Christians are not overly picky about actually applying the teachings of Christ. The majority of self-described Christians I've met happily engage in premarital sex, get divorced, use birth control (Catholics only, natch), cuss, accumulate excess wealth, don't go to church (much less tithe), check their horoscopes, play the slots, and would punch you in the nose before they would turn the other cheek. The complete lack of concern that most Christians have for usury is just one more sign of hypocrisy and/or ignorance.
Mind you I don't find any of these activities to be morally wrong, and therefore I'm not claiming that people who engage in them are bad people. I'm just pointing out that if you THINK you're a Christian you should at least learn what the rules are and make some attempt to follow them.
And then the other thing is that painting with broad strokes attracts mod points like flowers attract bees. I'm addicted to the +5 cookie.
Don't you hate reading /. with no mod points?
:-(
For the record, a post about how Christians should follow Christ's lead and focus more of their energy on defending the poor, in response to a post expressing surprise that Christians don't already do that, is actually ON-topic in a thread about how our government allows companies to deny jobs to the poor because they're poor. Not that I feel the need to defend myself, but you seem to have overlooked that. And you called a complete stranger a troll.
May God grant you a long, joyous life full of every blessing and happiness.
You shouldn't be surprised. The Christians are too busy fighting to keep evolution out of schools and gays out of wedding chapels to actually focus on the poor, the sick, or any of the other people who Jesus spent his life helping.
You originally wrote:
A boycott generally starts "I'm not buying your product anymore; instead, I'm buying product X from vendor Y." But what PC game in the same genre as Mario Party series or Super Smash Bros. series do you recommend?
I keyed in on the word "but", as that would normally imply you would boycott the console makers, but you need to find a replacement item first. Which of course implies that if you can't find a replacement item, the boycott would be unrealistic.
It's entirely possible I read too much into your choice of conjunction, in which case there's no real disagreement.
On the other hand, if it was meant as written I will continue to argue that an economic boycott shouldn't be based on the availability of substitute goods. It's a war of attrition in which the two sides suffer until one of them caves. If you (generically, not YOU specifically) want to make a statement, then a boycott should happen even if there were no games available for the PC at all.
If people had refused to buy DVDs or videotapes unless the DVDs were non-region coded and unencrypted (despite having no ability to watch any new movies at home), then the studios would have been forced to give in. The fact that 95% of the population neither understands nor cares about the issue is why the remaining 5% of us have to put up with this shit.
And finally "another employer is giving me a better offer" is not a reasonable analogy. A boycott means "I won't do business with you even if you give me the best offer." Striking workers (a labor boycott) suffer in the expectation that their employer will suffer even more. It's a short-term sacrifice for (hopefully) a long-term gain. If going to work someplace better is an option, then you wouldn't need to strike; you would just need to resign.
You seem to think that a boycott is only possible if it's painless. "I can't get Super Smash Bros. on any other platform so how can I boycott the Wii?" That's like saying "We can't go on strike because we won't get paid." (Except more trivial.)
A boycott punishes a company by withholding funds. Doing without something you actually want is sort of the point. I don't buy scrapbooking things, but it's not because I'm "boycotting" the scrapbook industry -- I just don't want anything they make.
Just to distinguish myself from the typical anti-vegetarian crowd, I don't think you're an idiot for placing a high value on life. I think that the ability to torture or kill animals (at least vertebrates) without remorse is the sign of a psychopath.
But sacrificing rats to advance medicine is fine by me. I would draw the line at making rats extinct to help one person walk again, because I don't think eliminating a species is wise (we might need more rats!) But frankly I would happily kill 99.99999% of all the rats in the world if it could fix broken spinal cords, and I don't care if they're killed for research or as a sacrifice to the Nerve God, as long as it works.
I don't value rats lives as highly as human lives, period. If 100,000 gallons of rat blood was a magical elixir that could make paraplegics walk, then I would want many rats to die so we could bottle their blood.
(This should be the part where I say "I'm typing this from my wheelchair after a tragic diving accident", but I'm blessedly free from any ironic ailments.)
You guess it's better than testing it on humans?
I agree with you that it's unfortunate that animals are sacrificed for medical research, and I hope and expect that the researchers are aware of their moral obligations to the animals under their care. But fixing spinal cord injuries so that people can walk again is worth the lives of millions of rats.
Volatility is essentially the "guessing what will happen" component of a price. The more the price is based on what people think will happen rather than on actual numbers, the more the price can whipsaw as people's opinions change.
Treasuries have low volatility because the prices are based on interest rates, inflation, and supply/demand. Those numbers change slowly and have a very predictable impact on prices.
Tech stocks have high volatility because the prices are based on things like market acceptance (will a new product be the next iPod or the next CueCat?), effectiveness (will the promising new drug work in people?), legal environment (will this new file-sharing service be made illegal to protect the RIAA?), and investor sentiment (will a lot of people want to jump on this bandwagon in a few months?). Since it's all based on guesses the prices can move as fast as people's opinions change, and the "plausible" range of prices becomes bigger, allowing for bigger swings.
Using housing prices as an example, it's easy to calculate mortgage interest, rent, taxes, insurance, etc. prior to buying a house. The market got crazy when we increased the demand for houses with lax lending policies, which pushed up prices, which attracted speculators, who started buying houses based on what they thought other people would pay for them rather than for what they were worth. The volatility (both the rise and the fall) was caused by lots of investors guessing everything would go up, followed by lots of investors guessing they would go down. The fundamental value of a house as a place to live or as rental property never changed much at all. (Which is why so many of the non-speculative fundamental home buyers just walked away from the market until the speculators went away, and are coming back into the market now.)
You misspelled "miss spelled", too. You'd think you'd have learned your lesson by now....
You know, I just re-read your post and got the actual joke. It was very subtle.
(I was 14 when I learned that the "b" in "subtle" is silent. I thought "SUB-till" and "suttle" were synonyms. I've never lived that down, either.)
You're confusing volatility with market liquidity. A market that's very liquid has lots of trades, so the value of a security (i.e. the most recent sale price) is always known and up-to-date. It doesn't have to be a volatile market to be liquid. For example, the market for government securities is very liquid, but if interest rates are stable it's also very non-volatile. (And even when it's "volatile" it's not volatile like a tech stock.) Needless to say an asset in a liquid market is typically easy to sell and convert into cash, which is the other definition of liquid.
The housing market is non-liquid. There have been only a half-dozen houses sold in my neighborhood over the last three years, and none of those houses is quite like mine. So nobody knows exactly what my house is worth. "Appraisers" are just professional educated guessers, who try to use judgment and experience to replace the pricing information provided by a liquid market. And as we've seen, a non-liquid market can be very volatile. Also, a house is a non-liquid asset; even a simple house sale to a family member takes weeks and hundreds of dollars to arrange.
But there are some securities (private placements, for one example) that trade very rarely. There actually are appraisers for these types of securities, because with so little trading activity the market price can become stale. These are very non-liquid markets. But as long as you can find a buyer and are willing to accept the buyers price they're no less liquid than IBM stock. You sell them, the trade clears, you get cash the next day. So they're liquid assets (more liquid than a house, in any case). And it's not even meaningful to talk about volatility in these markets because there is so little trade activity.
Armstrong's first boot prints were most likely destroyed the minute Buzz Aldrin hopped off the ladder after him. It's the last bootprints that would have been obliterated by the ascent module.
I doubt that would work, because jerks are attracted to shock sites as moths are to flame. You're more likely to get your PC back with goatse and lemonparty replaced with things that will leave you balled up and crying in your bed for a week.
I don't think it's a coincidence that handguns are virtually illegal in Britain. It's a hell of a lot easier for a cop to maintain order over 1,000 people when the only way the civilians can "defend" their freedoms is by asking the government to give them a little more running room on their leashes.
They weren't all running in one memory space -- they were all running on one common set of files. For example, you might have a system that accepts 15 files from various other systems, processes those files against a set of master VSAM files and/or against a database, and then creates a set of 15 files that get sent out to other systems. The system itself consists of a series of JCL jobs. Each job consists of multiple COBOL programs and utilities. It's just like bash, except in a way that's nothing at all like bash....
But because any program which opens a file can change any data contained in the file, it's tempting to make tweaks wherever it's handy. Nobody claims it's good practice, but these systems have been under constant tweaking for 30 or 40 years by dozens of programmers. After the first decade nobody even knows what the programs were supposed to do in the first place. (Especially since they have names like AB1243A, where 3 of the 7 characters identify the application, leaving only 4 characters to describe what the program does.)
So the typical bug-hunt consists of noticing that a field has the wrong value, and then checking each individual intermediate file from start to finish to see which job changed it. And if you're on a system that doesn't save its intermediate files it means running all the jobs one step at a time to see where the field gets modified. And THEN you have to open the program and find out what it's doing and why.
It's not all that different from any other system that has data which is shared between various components, but somehow solving the problem using TSO makes it all seem so primitive.
(XEDIT is one of the best text editors I've ever used, though.)
And don't forget that in COBOL, not only is all of your data global to your program, in a typical batch cycle all of the data is global to ALL of the programs.
I used to hate discovering that field XYZ was being modified in jobs that were completely unrelated to XYZ, because the programmer was too lazy to check the appropriate code out of the repository. "Why bother? I can make the change right here and it'll work just fine!"
My favorite line was "Being on a COBOL dev team is like living in a dorm."
It looks like an excellent website. Thanks for the tips!
I'm not blaming XP for being insecure. I'm blaming all the jackasses in the world who try to hoodwink the unsophisticated. XP is merely the victim of its own popularity in this regard.
The other pisser is that I have sixteen years' experience as a programmer. I've been paid real US dollars to program in COBOL, C++, VB, bash, and Apple Script (ugh). I'm comfortable with TSO, Windows, OS X, Linux, OS/2, and Solaris. I can do CLI or GUI. I have a heterogeneous home network (XP, OS X, and 2 Linux boxen) that's usually mostly working (even with two precocious boys who like to test it).
And I STILL sometimes struggle with the administrative tasks. How is Joe Six-Pack expected to cope?
1. Kids yes, hubby no. (Although last week his wife got fed up and so he lost admin privs, too.)
:-)
2. a. It's XP Home
b. I'm a programmer, not a sys admin
c. I use Linux, so Windows isn't my strength
d. It never occurred to me
3. Over my head. Isn't that domain-related stuff? Can it apply to XP Home?
4. I told them to stop using IE and use Firefox, instead.
And although I'm tempted to retaliate for the "shit for chocolate" remark, I'll be a gentleman and assume you weren't being malicious.
He isn't a corporate user. It's a friend of mine, and his wife asked me to lock down the box as much as possible because she needs it for work and her husband and kids had blown it up twice in a two-month period. I told her that NoScript was a PITA, but she was willing to try it to protect her PC from her family.
:-)
So while I agree with you in a general sense (that NoScript is not for novices), this was a special request. But I was sure to emphasize how important it was, and to try to pre-whitelist the sites they used frequently, and to encourage them to try unlocking one domain at a time, and I defaulted it to "temporarily allow target domain".
AND I told them to lay off the goat porn, but she has a husband and three adolescent boys.
I still haven't discovered a way to protect XP from the user. People who's computers I've tried to secure have:
1. Found IE after I deleted all but one IE shortcut and moved the last one into Windows/System32 so he wouldn't find it.
2. Disabled NoScript so the web would "work".
3. Canceled SpyBot every time the scan started (at 2:00 AM!) because it was taking too long.
4. Bypassed the router because he thought it was causing problems with his Internet access.
5. Disabled the firewall because it kept notifying him that various applications were trying to contact the Internet.
6. Turned off WOT because it was preventing him from getting to sites marked as "Unsafe".
WTF? Short of installing a proxy server in my house and routing all of their traffic through it, there's nothing I can do except rebuild the box every six weeks. When the only REAL solution is to educate people and make them care, you can't possibly win.
(Linux FTW)
I don't think we actually disagree on this at all, but to clarify...
Metallica was on Elektra when the Napster issue occurred. I'm sure that by 1999 their record deal was much more in their favor than your bog-standard "first recording contract". So I think it's fair to say that (details aside) they were receiving a fair percentage of their album sales, and thus anything that affected their sales affected their pocketbooks fairly directly.
There have also been cases (e.g. Jen Trynin) where artists manage to get enough clout or buzz to get better-than-normal terms on their first record deal. It's not common, but it happens.
But in a typical first record deal, the artist needs to sell 250,000-500,000 copies before they see a dime because the contract stipulates that most of the money spent producing and promoting the album needs to be recouped before the royalties start to flow to the artist. Which would be OK except that the artist has virtually no control over how this money is spent. So the label takes the band out for an expensive lunch and then charges the lunch to the band's recoupable expenses account. There's no question that the label is putting its money on the line and that on most releases they won't get their money back, but it's still hard for me to feel bad about it in the way that I would if the artist was scrimping and saving to get their music out and promote it on a shoestring budget.
I think the situation would be improved if the artist reigned absolutely supreme. Unfortunately the copyright owner reigns supreme, and that seems to be the root cause of a lot of the current unhappiness with the situation. Frankly, Lars Ulrich may have been a dick, but it's hard to argue that he didn't have the moral right to complain that a recording that he had created got released without his consent. But when Sony argues that they're defending the "rights of the artists" whilst taking 100% of the artist's royalties until promotional bills are paid in full (thus forcing the artist to pay for the production and promotion of the recording, but without actually giving the artist control over the budget for production or promotion), it's hard to be sympathetic.
It doesn't matter where the company is operating from. What matters is where the company is doing business. Rhode Island can make demands on amazon for any business which amazon does in the state. Regardless of where they're located, insurance companies need to be licensed in every state in which they want to sell insurance. So too for financial advisors, lawyers, doctors, etc. You don't even need a physical presence; Geico can't offer insurance policies over the phone (the poor man's internet) without a state license to do so, regardless of whether any Geico facilities are located here.
Jurisdictions DO demand sales taxes from companies that operate within their borders, but it's called "income tax" when you assess it that way. Hell, RI charges companies property taxes for the inventory they hold within the state. If I spend $25 at CVS, the state charges tacks 7% onto my bill in sales tax, and then taxes CVS on whatever money they made off of me.
The store couldn't possibly, unless they were so big (Walmart?) that they could justify a staff devoted solely to that activity. On the other hand, this is exactly why third-party providers exist. Once you've developed the infrastructure to calculate sales tax based on an address, you can handle 5, 500, or 50,000 orders without much incremental cost. It would be natural to outsource that to gain the economies of scale.
In a lot of ways it's like hiring a PR or promotional firm. Most companies can't afford to keep one person on staff devoted to knowing and maintaining relationships with the people at all the major newspapers, television stations, radio stations, magazines, and web sites across the country. But there are firms who specialize in this (often by subcontracting THEIR work to local promotional people), and so companies outsource that work to them.
I do agree with you regarding the burden on small retailers, but I'm not sure it's as big a burden as it seems. Most smaller online companies seem to use third parties for their billing anyway, so they would be covered when their billing providers finally get their arms twisted. Most of the really small outfits seem to use a "call or email your order" model, and I doubt anyone would bother to chase them. And any small companies that have rolled their own systems will need to get help. (I suspect that Visa or MasterCard would be in a good position to offer some sort of solution, though.)
I believe it's known as the "thin end of the wedge." :-)