You mean resolutions such as the one to use force against Iraq if they didn't comply with the UN?
Remember after the first Gulf War when Clinton won the Presidency? Iraqis were partying in the streets, Saddam was thumbing his nose and laughing at Bush. Not one week after taking the oath of office, Clinton unloaded tons of bombs on Iraq... for violating U.N. resolutions. Note that he did not invade the country, destabilize it, encourage the murder of innocent people through his actions like Bush did. Just because Bush used force does not mean it was warranted, nor does it mean that he was upholding U.N. resolutions. As far as I am concerned Bush used excessive force, committed war crimes, violated both U.N. resolutions AND the U.S. Constitution, and should be executed for said crimes.
Everyone knows this won't pass. Everyone knows that this will get tabled at the first opportunity. Everyone knows Bush will be gone in seven months. What's the point?
I am one of Kucinich's constituents and I must say that this man gets the short end of every stick. He's dumb, he's ugly, nobody pays attention to him, yet he actually does stick up for what the voters want, which is why we keep reelecting him. Anyway, the media hates him, the Democratic party hates him, and for the most part people just let him talk to the hand. That is why this will not go anywhere. You bet your ass that if any other Representative introduced these articles of impeachment then Congress and the media would take it seriously. For now, this is just the rambling of a madman (who the media is doing their best to bury in a mudslide come next election).
Even if this does go nowhere, I hope it gets just enough attention to make Bush sweat. He is a symbol of everything that is wrong with American government and while I would like to see him executed for his war crimes, I know it will never happen. I at least want him to have, in his eyes, a flawed Presidency.
As the UN is not particularly an US insitution, can you charge the US president for impeachment for not following the UN charter ?
Yes. Any treaty signed by the President and ratified by the Senate carries the full force of law. The U.S. is a member of the U.N., created by a multinational treaty signed by the President and ratified by the Senate. Any action the U.N. takes in accordance with that treaty carries the weight of U.S. law (but of course this is only relevant in the U.S.).
This does not stop our country from thumbing its nose at U.N. resolutions, however. Who is going to enforce it?
I'm sure we are returning the favor and have been for decades.
Returning the favor, but how? By shipping all of our jobs over there? By sending cash over by the boatload as we buy anything and everything they produce? We are handing China the keys to our kingdom, that is the best way (for them) for us to repay them.
Oh, don't forget the stimulus check everyone gets this year. Where do you think our government borrowed the money for that? Probably our number one creditor, China. That is okay though, China will never run out of money to lend to us (that we can never repay) because we keep shipping boatloads of money over their for cheap shitty products.
There has to be some code that goes out and checks the dongle, then returns "yes this is authorized" or "no let's not run". Just zap that bit and the dongle goes away.
No, there does not. What if there was a simple piece of software running on the dongle that talked with the client software on the computer, and they used cryptography to communicate. It could even use public key encryption, with a server certificate signed and stored on the computer... sort of like connecting to a web server with SSL. Sure, you could snoop on the communication or even decompile the program. However, the complexity could be prohibitive. Finally, just because at some level there is a boolean value saying "authorized" or "not authorized" does not mean you can simply flip a bit. If the output from the dongle were mixed with other outputs from the software itself, the value could drive algorithms in the software to break or not to break.
For example, what if you were working on a complex CAD diagram and the software needed a dongle. The software talked to the dongle, which performed a small part of the calculation on the dongle itself (something that would likely not need to be patched in software, say, the square root or cosine algorithms). The communication was secured with public key encryption, and the output was fed back into more calculations. Spoofing the dongle might actually make the software "work" but it might not work correctly. If this is enough to cause people to spend the money for the real software and the real dongles, then the software vendor succeeded at its goal.
Breaking copy protection does not need to be impossible, only difficult enough to discourage an alpha value worth of customers.
If your development cost was 10 million dollars, and you sold 10 million copies, you would have to charge at least $10 per disk to break even -- simple math.
$10 million / $10 million == $1. Simple math:-)
But seriously I get your point, this is an economics lesson, really. If people think your product is worth the price, regardless of the cost to make it, they will spend it. The key is finding that sweet spot and then lowering production costs to make a profit.
The other way I look at it is this. I am not only paying for the game, but future development as well. There is a reason established companies do not need venture capital to continue to develop products: they can fund their own R&D from the profits from existing products.
Of course, since your post refers to "tyres" you may be in a country with stricter standards and enforcement than the US.:)
I saw that and wondered why he was not talking about "lorries."
Re:Time for Railroads to make a comeback
on
Big Rigs Go High Tech
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I live a few miles from the Ford and Chevy plants here in Cleveland. They both have multiple tracks going directly into each factory, pumping out fully loaded trains full of parts, probably driving off to other plants for assembly or further production. I would hazard a guess that they have no problem with scheduling the logistics, and I bet it is far cheaper and more efficient than trucking it out there.
I gave three examples, all of which run on Windows, all of which are extensible. I would rather write a solid core of OS-independent code and leave a few choice functions to be OS-specific, localizing that code and leaving the core business logic OS-neutral. In reality most of the time there is little to no need for OS-specific code unless you are writing 3D games (even then it's debatable, there are cross-platform libraries such as OpenGL) or something closely tied to the operating system to begin with (think Windows sysinternals).
I am not blowing smoke out my ass. I develop cross-platform software for a living, and spend less than 1% of my time dealing with anything operating system specific. And my application looks very nice, despite being Java. Of course we also have a custom UI layer on top of Swing, but even that is OS-agnostic.
Now to address your main point: I an not a.net developer but from what I have seen it is nice. I do use Visual Studio 2008, and I like it. Sure it is not perfect, but it works well and has a debugger that blows anything else out of the water. Learning the.net architecture in general and C# specifically are on my todo list, but I do spend time honing my Java and C++ skills so it is only a matter of time. I think maybe slowing the Earth's rotation would help so I have more hours in the day. Maybe I need a doomsday device first...
If the application is explicitly Wine-aware, it shouldn't be that hard to get it Gtk+/Qt themed, use UNIX-styled file dialogs or call native libraries for Linux-specific functionality. Of course.Net/Mono may be a better solution for a lot of developers.
If I am going to make an application Wine-aware, why use the cruddy old Win32 API or (barf) MFC when I can use a true cross-platform API such as Qtk+/Qt as you mentioned but natively, not emulated? I see no reason to use OS-specific code for any newly-developed application anymore. All of my application coding is done in Java, or C++ with either Gtk+ or Qt. I want my crap to run natively everywhere, and with minimal effort.
This is partly what I was getting at. If a CD costs $12, and we break it down to a song costing $1, then whatever the RIAA lawyers suggest the damages are in a lawsuit should apply to the taxes on that original purchase. If they inflate its value such that a song is worth $10, then they need to cough up ten times the tax on the original CDs. Without charging at the music store. I say they give pay cuts and layoffs to the CEOs and other overpaid executives who work at the RIAA's member companies to afford this. We could fix two problems at one time.
Now once you figure that out, who will pay the tax on it and where?
Companies do pay taxes on Linux services for which they charge money. I am fairly certain Red Hat pays taxes, for example. However I think I know what you are trying to get me to say, but no, my Linux box is not worthless...
For all the years I've been following IP news, this is something I never really stopped to think about. If IP is worth so damn much, why is it that companies such as RIAA constituent companies trumpet claims about how much damages they suffered, yet basically pay no tax on the IP to the government? Sure, CDs are taxed, distribution is taxed, but if something is worth so much, why not tax it? Capital gains tax? Every year it seems like these lawsuits get bigger and bigger, so IP must be growing in value, and the government could tax that growth.
When I interviewed for my job, my soon to be boss discriminated by asking detailed technical questions that nobody without experience and a brain capable of some serious critical thinking ability would be able to answer. He did not need a gene test to tell him that I knew what I was doing.
We've had private insurance for a long time without genetic discrimination, because genetic discrimination wasn't possible. This legislation bans genetic discrimination, thus keeping the status quo on this issue.
Sorry, but this is not the status quo. You need two look at both sides of the equation. Yes, insurance companies have never been able to discriminate based on genetic testing. However, their clients, us, will have a priori knowledge. If I know I am genetically disposed for a specific condition, I can game the system to make sure I bear as little of the cost as possible. Insurance companies either will not know about the genetic predisposition or will not be legally allowed to act on it, but I will be able to.
The more I think about it, even being a libertarian, the more I think federalized medical care is best. Either private insurers fuck us, or the government fucks us. Either I pay lots of money out of my paycheck (including a lower salary just for participating in the plan), or the government taxes me. At the end of the day we would still have a bloated, expensive system, but if the government runs it, we have better accountability.
The amateur who says "vertical space matters" to developers, never ran a comparison diff on his code.
Side by side, my friend. Side by side.
I just bought a 22" widescreen flat panel and love it. Yes, vertical space matters, but I would rather be able to have the same amount of vertical space and cram more stuff in horizontally. Like you said, diffs are better with widescreen, and being able to cram in class hierarchies, toolbars, etc. without making the code window so narrow that I cannot fit in a single line is nice.
The other benefit is gaming, since the human eyes' field of vision is closer to 16:9 (or the 16:10 that most widescreen monitors are) than 4:3. I don't feel like my peripheral vision is cut off when gaming. And of course movies are better. I tell my wife that pan and scan DVDs are castrated, because you take a little off the left, a little off the right, and keep what's in the middle. Widescreen is more natural and includes the whole picture.
I will never buy another 4:3 aspect ratio monitor.
Sure, each type of university has strengths and weaknesses, but I think of it this way. Each time I have had a job interview the interviewer asked if I had a degree. Not how many years, or what subject, but if I had a degree. They then went on to ask my views on various software engineering principles (e.g. how do you unit test?) and general workplace crap (e.g. how do you get your job done when management is making life difficult?). Never once did anyone care where I went to college, what classes I took, my GPA, where I graduated in my class, whether I graduated with honors, etc.
Seriously, in computer science, 95% of the jobs out there just plain don't care about that stuff. For the other 5%, you are better off getting an "easy" bachelor's degree, getting a job, and earning an M.S. at night while you work full time. That is my plan, and it will work a whole hell of a lot better than stressing over finding the right university and pushing straight through.
Wikipedia is headquartered in the US. Do they have an Italian office? I see that a ping to "it.wikipedia.org" returns the same IP address (208.80.152.2) as "en.wikipedia.org". So I'm not sure that wikipedia actually has any sort of physical presence in Italy.
Of course, IANAL, but I'm pretty sure it can be difficult to sue someone in a different country, particularly if you aren't going to their country to file the suit. If they file suit against them in Italian court, I'd expect it would be difficult to enforce a judgement from across the pond.
This was my thought too. While Italian law is certainly different and this may be a valid argument in Italian court, the hurdle here is twofold. First, prove that Wikipedia is itself at fault for the contents. Given the open source documentation license they use, I am not sure they could prove that. Second, they would need to get someone who is legally able to represent Wikipedia into Italian court.
For this to work, I believe they would need to convince a U.S. Federal court to extradite people to Italy, and given the merits of this case, I doubt that would happen.
My company develops and supports retail point of sale software for a large number of retail chains. In the interest of ensuring my job security I will not identify my employer, but I can offer some insight.
The first thing to do is check out JPOS, an open source mini-framework for controlling POS peripherals such as MICRs, sigcaps, pole displays, barcode scanners, MSRs, receipt printers, etc. This will only help if you are using Java, but there may be similar libraries for other languages. Regardless, playing around with JPOS may help you understand the hardware and how all the pieces fit together.
Please realize that even a small inventory application is a major undertaking. The software I work on has an inventory module, and it is insanely complex to meet the requirements of retail inventory. Hardware abstraction can be a pain too, as you need to code at a high level in your application but deal with low level crap that most devices throw at you. For example, scanning a barcode sounds simple and may be relatively easy for UPCs, but what about SKU or inventory tags that are nonstandard? You can program the scanners to pad zeros, truncate to a specific length, strip or retain check digits, etc. and there are so many pieces of hardware out there that behave slightly differently it will give you a headache.
If you decide to add credit card processing, my advice: don't. If you have to ask this question to Slashdot, you are not prepared to deal with PCI-DSS compliance. It costs a lot of time and money to process cards securely and to prove to the payment processors that you can do it securely.
The RIAA and the big four need to get their collective heads out of each others asses, look around, and realize that the world and market place is changing before their now shit covered eyes. If they don't find a new way to make money, they will simply cease to exist.
While this is a popular idea around here, I do not think it is quite that simple. The RIAA constituent companies own a very large pool of copyrights on a lot of popular (and in some cases, good) music. They do exist to serve an important purpose, finding new talent and giving them a shot at the big leagues. They are not the only gatekeeper, but definitely the largest.
In any free market economy, the various players shift positions over time as new technology changes how we perform business, consumers ask for new things, etc. In the past ten years the consumers have been asking for a new revolution that goes well beyond the CD revolution of the early 1980s: we want digital delivery, and without a lot of constraints. The RIAA companies like the cash cow they are milking, and are scared of change. However, they are the proverbial 800 pound gorilla. Saying that just because consumers want legal digital downloads and are changing the market does not mean that the cartel with a 95% market share is going to be obsolete. A decade after Linux became a viable mainstream alternative, two decades after Apple became a viable mainstream alternative, Microsoft Windows is still the most popular operating system in the world. Yet they failed to adapt, failed to deliver what consumers want. Sure, they are slowly losing ground, and people have options, but over twenty fucking years of having a better alternative and they are still dominant. Microsoft is still here, so why should I believe the RIAA is going away anytime soon?
Very true, yet you get a drug test but how many firms do a background or credit check on everyone who comes in contact with the data? Are your contractors liable?
Employees and contractors coming in contact with money, financial data (of which SSN is one piece), and any other customer data should be bonded. That is not a perfect solution, but a good first step. Try working in a bank branch without being bonded -- probably not going to happen. Banks know there's a lot at risk (and the government probably requires it anyway), and they want the employees to be accountable for their actions.
Your bank reports capital gains on your accounts to the IRS. They need your SSN. If you don't give it to them, they probably won't give you an account.
True. Wal-Mart is the ultimate symbol of what is wrong with the world today: TOO MANY MIDDLE MEN WHO DO NOTHING IN TERMS OF ORIGINAL PRODUCTION.
While I have issues with Wally World, this is not one of them. Wal-Mart performs a valuable service: they stock thousands of items on their shelves that I really don't want to have to buy straight from the manufacturer. They handle some of their own shipping and distributing, i.e. moving stuff around. Sure, I could drive to another state to buy something from the manufacturer directly. I could also pay a shipping company such as UPS to deliver it for me. Or, I could go to a store that stocks it on their shelves (e.g. Wal-Mart) and have the convenience of a short drive from my house 24 hours a day to buy it.
Middlemen definitely have advantages in a supply chain. True, too many will drive up prices and down quality in some cases (e.g. food items that spend too much time shuffling around and have a short shelf life by the time you purchase them). However, do you really want the inconvience of having to pursue the hundreds of items you need on a weekly basis yourself? Personally, I prefer to use stores.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember after the first Gulf War when Clinton won the Presidency? Iraqis were partying in the streets, Saddam was thumbing his nose and laughing at Bush. Not one week after taking the oath of office, Clinton unloaded tons of bombs on Iraq... for violating U.N. resolutions. Note that he did not invade the country, destabilize it, encourage the murder of innocent people through his actions like Bush did. Just because Bush used force does not mean it was warranted, nor does it mean that he was upholding U.N. resolutions. As far as I am concerned Bush used excessive force, committed war crimes, violated both U.N. resolutions AND the U.S. Constitution, and should be executed for said crimes.
I am one of Kucinich's constituents and I must say that this man gets the short end of every stick. He's dumb, he's ugly, nobody pays attention to him, yet he actually does stick up for what the voters want, which is why we keep reelecting him. Anyway, the media hates him, the Democratic party hates him, and for the most part people just let him talk to the hand. That is why this will not go anywhere. You bet your ass that if any other Representative introduced these articles of impeachment then Congress and the media would take it seriously. For now, this is just the rambling of a madman (who the media is doing their best to bury in a mudslide come next election).
Even if this does go nowhere, I hope it gets just enough attention to make Bush sweat. He is a symbol of everything that is wrong with American government and while I would like to see him executed for his war crimes, I know it will never happen. I at least want him to have, in his eyes, a flawed Presidency.
Yes. Any treaty signed by the President and ratified by the Senate carries the full force of law. The U.S. is a member of the U.N., created by a multinational treaty signed by the President and ratified by the Senate. Any action the U.N. takes in accordance with that treaty carries the weight of U.S. law (but of course this is only relevant in the U.S.).
This does not stop our country from thumbing its nose at U.N. resolutions, however. Who is going to enforce it?
Returning the favor, but how? By shipping all of our jobs over there? By sending cash over by the boatload as we buy anything and everything they produce? We are handing China the keys to our kingdom, that is the best way (for them) for us to repay them.
Oh, don't forget the stimulus check everyone gets this year. Where do you think our government borrowed the money for that? Probably our number one creditor, China. That is okay though, China will never run out of money to lend to us (that we can never repay) because we keep shipping boatloads of money over their for cheap shitty products.
God bless America.
No, there does not. What if there was a simple piece of software running on the dongle that talked with the client software on the computer, and they used cryptography to communicate. It could even use public key encryption, with a server certificate signed and stored on the computer... sort of like connecting to a web server with SSL. Sure, you could snoop on the communication or even decompile the program. However, the complexity could be prohibitive. Finally, just because at some level there is a boolean value saying "authorized" or "not authorized" does not mean you can simply flip a bit. If the output from the dongle were mixed with other outputs from the software itself, the value could drive algorithms in the software to break or not to break.
For example, what if you were working on a complex CAD diagram and the software needed a dongle. The software talked to the dongle, which performed a small part of the calculation on the dongle itself (something that would likely not need to be patched in software, say, the square root or cosine algorithms). The communication was secured with public key encryption, and the output was fed back into more calculations. Spoofing the dongle might actually make the software "work" but it might not work correctly. If this is enough to cause people to spend the money for the real software and the real dongles, then the software vendor succeeded at its goal.
Breaking copy protection does not need to be impossible, only difficult enough to discourage an alpha value worth of customers.
...or for Microsoft
$10 million / $10 million == $1. Simple math :-)
But seriously I get your point, this is an economics lesson, really. If people think your product is worth the price, regardless of the cost to make it, they will spend it. The key is finding that sweet spot and then lowering production costs to make a profit.
The other way I look at it is this. I am not only paying for the game, but future development as well. There is a reason established companies do not need venture capital to continue to develop products: they can fund their own R&D from the profits from existing products.
I saw that and wondered why he was not talking about "lorries."
I live a few miles from the Ford and Chevy plants here in Cleveland. They both have multiple tracks going directly into each factory, pumping out fully loaded trains full of parts, probably driving off to other plants for assembly or further production. I would hazard a guess that they have no problem with scheduling the logistics, and I bet it is far cheaper and more efficient than trucking it out there.
I gave three examples, all of which run on Windows, all of which are extensible. I would rather write a solid core of OS-independent code and leave a few choice functions to be OS-specific, localizing that code and leaving the core business logic OS-neutral. In reality most of the time there is little to no need for OS-specific code unless you are writing 3D games (even then it's debatable, there are cross-platform libraries such as OpenGL) or something closely tied to the operating system to begin with (think Windows sysinternals).
I am not blowing smoke out my ass. I develop cross-platform software for a living, and spend less than 1% of my time dealing with anything operating system specific. And my application looks very nice, despite being Java. Of course we also have a custom UI layer on top of Swing, but even that is OS-agnostic.
Now to address your main point: I an not a .net developer but from what I have seen it is nice. I do use Visual Studio 2008, and I like it. Sure it is not perfect, but it works well and has a debugger that blows anything else out of the water. Learning the .net architecture in general and C# specifically are on my todo list, but I do spend time honing my Java and C++ skills so it is only a matter of time. I think maybe slowing the Earth's rotation would help so I have more hours in the day. Maybe I need a doomsday device first...
If you read my original post, I specifically said for all new development work.
If I am going to make an application Wine-aware, why use the cruddy old Win32 API or (barf) MFC when I can use a true cross-platform API such as Qtk+/Qt as you mentioned but natively, not emulated? I see no reason to use OS-specific code for any newly-developed application anymore. All of my application coding is done in Java, or C++ with either Gtk+ or Qt. I want my crap to run natively everywhere, and with minimal effort.
This is partly what I was getting at. If a CD costs $12, and we break it down to a song costing $1, then whatever the RIAA lawyers suggest the damages are in a lawsuit should apply to the taxes on that original purchase. If they inflate its value such that a song is worth $10, then they need to cough up ten times the tax on the original CDs. Without charging at the music store. I say they give pay cuts and layoffs to the CEOs and other overpaid executives who work at the RIAA's member companies to afford this. We could fix two problems at one time.
Companies do pay taxes on Linux services for which they charge money. I am fairly certain Red Hat pays taxes, for example. However I think I know what you are trying to get me to say, but no, my Linux box is not worthless...
For all the years I've been following IP news, this is something I never really stopped to think about. If IP is worth so damn much, why is it that companies such as RIAA constituent companies trumpet claims about how much damages they suffered, yet basically pay no tax on the IP to the government? Sure, CDs are taxed, distribution is taxed, but if something is worth so much, why not tax it? Capital gains tax? Every year it seems like these lawsuits get bigger and bigger, so IP must be growing in value, and the government could tax that growth.
When I interviewed for my job, my soon to be boss discriminated by asking detailed technical questions that nobody without experience and a brain capable of some serious critical thinking ability would be able to answer. He did not need a gene test to tell him that I knew what I was doing.
Sorry, but this is not the status quo. You need two look at both sides of the equation. Yes, insurance companies have never been able to discriminate based on genetic testing. However, their clients, us, will have a priori knowledge. If I know I am genetically disposed for a specific condition, I can game the system to make sure I bear as little of the cost as possible. Insurance companies either will not know about the genetic predisposition or will not be legally allowed to act on it, but I will be able to.
The more I think about it, even being a libertarian, the more I think federalized medical care is best. Either private insurers fuck us, or the government fucks us. Either I pay lots of money out of my paycheck (including a lower salary just for participating in the plan), or the government taxes me. At the end of the day we would still have a bloated, expensive system, but if the government runs it, we have better accountability.
I just bought a 22" widescreen flat panel and love it. Yes, vertical space matters, but I would rather be able to have the same amount of vertical space and cram more stuff in horizontally. Like you said, diffs are better with widescreen, and being able to cram in class hierarchies, toolbars, etc. without making the code window so narrow that I cannot fit in a single line is nice.
The other benefit is gaming, since the human eyes' field of vision is closer to 16:9 (or the 16:10 that most widescreen monitors are) than 4:3. I don't feel like my peripheral vision is cut off when gaming. And of course movies are better. I tell my wife that pan and scan DVDs are castrated, because you take a little off the left, a little off the right, and keep what's in the middle. Widescreen is more natural and includes the whole picture.
I will never buy another 4:3 aspect ratio monitor.
Sure, each type of university has strengths and weaknesses, but I think of it this way. Each time I have had a job interview the interviewer asked if I had a degree. Not how many years, or what subject, but if I had a degree. They then went on to ask my views on various software engineering principles (e.g. how do you unit test?) and general workplace crap (e.g. how do you get your job done when management is making life difficult?). Never once did anyone care where I went to college, what classes I took, my GPA, where I graduated in my class, whether I graduated with honors, etc.
Seriously, in computer science, 95% of the jobs out there just plain don't care about that stuff. For the other 5%, you are better off getting an "easy" bachelor's degree, getting a job, and earning an M.S. at night while you work full time. That is my plan, and it will work a whole hell of a lot better than stressing over finding the right university and pushing straight through.
This was my thought too. While Italian law is certainly different and this may be a valid argument in Italian court, the hurdle here is twofold. First, prove that Wikipedia is itself at fault for the contents. Given the open source documentation license they use, I am not sure they could prove that. Second, they would need to get someone who is legally able to represent Wikipedia into Italian court.
For this to work, I believe they would need to convince a U.S. Federal court to extradite people to Italy, and given the merits of this case, I doubt that would happen.
My company develops and supports retail point of sale software for a large number of retail chains. In the interest of ensuring my job security I will not identify my employer, but I can offer some insight.
The first thing to do is check out JPOS, an open source mini-framework for controlling POS peripherals such as MICRs, sigcaps, pole displays, barcode scanners, MSRs, receipt printers, etc. This will only help if you are using Java, but there may be similar libraries for other languages. Regardless, playing around with JPOS may help you understand the hardware and how all the pieces fit together.
Please realize that even a small inventory application is a major undertaking. The software I work on has an inventory module, and it is insanely complex to meet the requirements of retail inventory. Hardware abstraction can be a pain too, as you need to code at a high level in your application but deal with low level crap that most devices throw at you. For example, scanning a barcode sounds simple and may be relatively easy for UPCs, but what about SKU or inventory tags that are nonstandard? You can program the scanners to pad zeros, truncate to a specific length, strip or retain check digits, etc. and there are so many pieces of hardware out there that behave slightly differently it will give you a headache.
If you decide to add credit card processing, my advice: don't. If you have to ask this question to Slashdot, you are not prepared to deal with PCI-DSS compliance. It costs a lot of time and money to process cards securely and to prove to the payment processors that you can do it securely.
While this is a popular idea around here, I do not think it is quite that simple. The RIAA constituent companies own a very large pool of copyrights on a lot of popular (and in some cases, good) music. They do exist to serve an important purpose, finding new talent and giving them a shot at the big leagues. They are not the only gatekeeper, but definitely the largest.
In any free market economy, the various players shift positions over time as new technology changes how we perform business, consumers ask for new things, etc. In the past ten years the consumers have been asking for a new revolution that goes well beyond the CD revolution of the early 1980s: we want digital delivery, and without a lot of constraints. The RIAA companies like the cash cow they are milking, and are scared of change. However, they are the proverbial 800 pound gorilla. Saying that just because consumers want legal digital downloads and are changing the market does not mean that the cartel with a 95% market share is going to be obsolete. A decade after Linux became a viable mainstream alternative, two decades after Apple became a viable mainstream alternative, Microsoft Windows is still the most popular operating system in the world. Yet they failed to adapt, failed to deliver what consumers want. Sure, they are slowly losing ground, and people have options, but over twenty fucking years of having a better alternative and they are still dominant. Microsoft is still here, so why should I believe the RIAA is going away anytime soon?
Employees and contractors coming in contact with money, financial data (of which SSN is one piece), and any other customer data should be bonded. That is not a perfect solution, but a good first step. Try working in a bank branch without being bonded -- probably not going to happen. Banks know there's a lot at risk (and the government probably requires it anyway), and they want the employees to be accountable for their actions.
Your bank reports capital gains on your accounts to the IRS. They need your SSN. If you don't give it to them, they probably won't give you an account.
While I have issues with Wally World, this is not one of them. Wal-Mart performs a valuable service: they stock thousands of items on their shelves that I really don't want to have to buy straight from the manufacturer. They handle some of their own shipping and distributing, i.e. moving stuff around. Sure, I could drive to another state to buy something from the manufacturer directly. I could also pay a shipping company such as UPS to deliver it for me. Or, I could go to a store that stocks it on their shelves (e.g. Wal-Mart) and have the convenience of a short drive from my house 24 hours a day to buy it.
Middlemen definitely have advantages in a supply chain. True, too many will drive up prices and down quality in some cases (e.g. food items that spend too much time shuffling around and have a short shelf life by the time you purchase them). However, do you really want the inconvience of having to pursue the hundreds of items you need on a weekly basis yourself? Personally, I prefer to use stores.