But the worm/virus costs to ISPs are essentially zero, since it's just a different set of bytes on the wire.
They're real to ISPs if they infect the ISPs own servers, but that's not a transit cost and ISPs have always had to patch/maintain OSes (and are supposedly better at it, and wouldn't experience the direct costs of the worm themselves.
They're real costs to *clients* of the ISP, but that's not the ISPs fault, and its an opportunity for the ISPs to sell "security services" (filtered connection, managed firewall, etc).
Most people would like a filtered connection, but they should have to choose this and have to pay for it, too.:)
Filtering should cost more money, since it implies buying the filtering device, time spent maintaining the filter, maintaining the filtering equipment, modifying the filters when a new application everyone wants breaks, lots of technical support, etc.
Unfiltered IP costs less because there's less work to do.
If the unwashed are the vast majority, then there's not enough of me to charge more for IP service to pay for the cost of filtering. It makes more sense to charge those who want to be filtered more, since it will be a nominal amount distributed over a larger population.
MS code is inherently more insecure, and its installed in an inherently more insecure fashion (everything open, all services on, buggy demo code runnable) than most UNIX distributions. Popularity alone doesn't explain it.
Firewire800 would be a cool idea, and to eliminate the bulge, why not add a new "compact card" interface standard to firewire800?
You can then have your internal, PC-card-style card, except it connects internally to a firewire800 bus. No unsightly bulges.
You could make an external adapter to plug the cards into on machines that only had external firewire ports; such a system could even be used to bridge (albeit clumsily) new "firewire compact card" devices into a machine with standard PC cards: add firewire PC card, connect external firewire card adapter to firewire port, lather, rinse repeat.
Other than desktop-system bus (PCI-X or whatever the new PCI bus is called these days), its unfortunate we can't standardize on a good internal/external bus standard like Firewire.
I see that as a good thing. What possible reason is there to have file and printer sharing open to the internet?
It's good and bad and something of a slippery slope. When I sign up with an ISP, I want IP service -- the ability to send and receive any and all IP datagrams, regardless of their type or subtype. If my ISP starts filtering my IP service based on the overflowing basket of potential IP-based vulnerabilities, I lose that IP service. That's bad.
It's also something that "controllers" will want to see implemented based on whatever their agenda is (MSN blocks AIM, RIAA/MPAA wants Kazaa/Gnutella blocked, Ashcroft wants IPSec blocked, et al). That's the slippery slope, and it leads to what amounts to cable-TV internet service -- transparent proxied, web-only service. Yuck.
The good would be that the ignorant wouldn't be vulnerable, and many of us that manage networks professionally wouldn't have to put up with the amplification effect of millions of infested boxes with terrabytes of bandwidth. Some more obscure worms/viruses would die on the vine, but I highly doubt it will end all of them.
What ISPs should do is offer a "filtered" internet connection that limits vulnerabilities and charge extra for it. Although I'm sure it'd be a major headache to setup, and potentially a huge liability of the filtering was inadequate to stop a worm or a new vulnerability.
This would allow for the clueless to get something to help them, and protect people who want real IP service, and not some cable tv-like service.
Unfortunately, I think the real solution is more, bigger worms: this should shame MS into overhauling their networking security model.
More fine-grained rights are nice, but they're probably not necessary, since you can pretty easily roll Netware's WCEM into unix W.
What really makes the magic IMHO is inheritance and dynamic traversal rights (on-demand X right). You can make a sensible rights policy with RWX, but without traversal you end up doing some crazy stuff to make it work.
I was told by a recording engineer that a typical big-name album recorded at a high-end studio in NYC costs around $500k; tripling that cost to include overhead, marketing, etc would mean a break-even point at about 100k copies @ $15 each.
I'd wager that many big-name bands costs are much less, perhaps around $100k for recording costs; add on another $500k for overhead and you need to sell more like 40k copies.
I can't help but think there's a lot of money lost due to poor cost constraints. It would appear easy to make a ton of money without selling that many records. Or lose a ton of money if you put $1.5M into every screamer with a funny-spelled name who didn't sell any records.
Perhaps that's what God *is*, the last remaining being from a previous iteration of the Universe, reduced to an emphermal energy-based existence in order to pass into the 'new' Universe or survive its rebirth.
Netware ACLs were the best and simplest to work with. I still miss them. For those with no Netware experience, directories had the following attributes:
Read, Write, Create, Erase, Modify, File scan (see directory contents), Access control (ability to change attributes for these properties for yourself or others), and Supervisory which enabled turning any of these bits on or off regardless of their status.
IIRC, RF was the default permission. Subdirectories always inhereited the permissions of their parents, although the above permissions could be selectively blocked from inheritance.
My favorite feature (which if 2K had would make life lots easier), was directory traversal rights were automatic. If I as a user have RWCEMF rights to directory BAR located in directory tree/usr/local/foobar/foo/bar but am explicitely excluded from rights to foobar/ and foo/, I can still get to my directory and only see just the directories I need to navigate the file system.
Systems without traversal rights like this require some pretty convoluted logic to make them work, like home folders in Win2k. You need to make HOME readable to everyone so it can be mounted and people can find their home directories, but each user home directory needs inheritance blocked and specific user rights assigned. In Netware rights, you just grant the user rights to their directory, admin rights to HOME, and inheritance and directory traversal make it work.
I hope BSDs ACLs include automatic minimal traversal rights and inheritance.
If RIM software is so bad, why do they seem to be so popular?
Our executives, half of which can hardly send email on their computer, have been wetting their pants and frothing at the mouth over the idea of getting these, even when it means a $6-8k investment in a year where $250 needs written approval.
My feeling is that when they're out playing golf or drinking at the clubhouse, their executive pals and status rivals have them so they need them too.
I used one for a couple of weeks recently (a T-Mobile one) with the desktop software. I didn't have any crashes or hangups, but I didn't do much with it besides send a few emails. I found the device overall limited in its ability to intelligently route mail; I either got everything including spam or just emails from select people, which seems kind of pointless.
Wars end lots faster than they used to; it used to take 6-12 months *minimum* to raise an army of 50,000 men that consisted primarily of poorly equipped hand-to-hand infantry. But once the hacking and slashing finished a year or so later, everybody was done for good long while.
Now it seems that we (at least the US) can put an armored force of 200,000 anywhere it wants within a couple of months and win the war in 90 days..but the low-grade fighting just doesn't stop. The Israelis took the west bank in '67 (or was it '73? I forget), but have been essentially fighting the Palestinians for control since.
It's the same way everywhere; we don't fight wars for a few years anymore; we fight them in 2-3 months and then switch to low-grade guerilla tactics for the next year.
No, the Western Hemisphere is on one side, and the Eastern on the other. Digging to China is just faster this way, since you're not going through a sphere to get there.
Outlook may have a different code base than OE, but if you've ever tried to use them on the same computer at the same time, you'd wonder..
To this day "Reply via Email" to a newsgroup posting in OE brings up a reply in Outlook, which, since it's a seperate account/server/address, isn't what I wanted.
Insurance comapanies need to be divorced from the claims review process; they have a profit motive in rejecting claims. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't pressure on claims adjusters to increase their claim rejection rate or decrease payouts by small percentages when profits are threatened.
The best way to accomplish this would be to require a third party review claims, and if they find the claims to be valid, require the insurer to pay them. The third party claims reviewers would be held accountable for all insurer losses and costs associated with fraudulent claims, perhaps at 2x levels to increase their fraud scrutiny.
Although, given some of the complaining you hear ("Dear Ask Slashdot. My university network throttles Kazaa traffic. Don't they know the whole point of college is to provide faster warez downloads? Is this a violation of my civil rights?") I'm sure this will be met with outrage, too.
The "outrage" felt about throttled Kazaa is because most of them don't understand the basic economics of universities. They think that tuition + room and board greater than or equal to the cost of services delivered, therefore they're being deprived of something (mom and dad) paid for.
Universities are one of the most heavily *subsidized* insitutions around. Even as expensive as tuition is, it doesn't come close to covering the cost of delivering the services students get.
But won't it be hard to run a binary image without access to that platform's libraries? It almost smells easier to just to boot an entire OS than to shoehorn the OS into one main OS.
If that was the case, why not just revisit the old "dynamic recompiler" from the WinNT-on-Alpha days that could run x86 applications by dynamically recompiling the x86 binary into Alpha instructions? IIRC it got faster each time it ran them.
At least that way you wouldn't have to design a super exotic hardware platform.
Rather than picking an emulated CPU at bootup, why not emulate *all* of them simultaneously. Yes, it would be ridiculously resource intensive as you'd have to have nearly a gig of RAM just to host the entire operating system of each emulated processor.
I envision a small meta-OS that lets you assign resources and manage the emulated environments. Each environment could be spawned as often as resources were available.
Hardware resources might get tricky, especially when dealing with expansion slots that were platform specific, but it'd one cool computer.
I'm already kind of bored/sick of my field (no budgets and bad management doesn't help). I'm having a hard time imagining working the same field for 40 years, let alone 200 years.
I suppose one advantage would be that it would be totally viable to start over from scratch -- go to college, get a degree and enter a completely new profession at age 70 without feeling like you wouldn't have enough time to "make it" in your field.
That assumes, of course, that "20 years" is still considered relatively seasoned in a profession, and that number doesn't get bumped to 40 or 60 years, in which case the whole mess becomes like inflation -- just multiple the usual timelines in a profession by 2 or 3.
One of the hidden assumptions (beyond "your health will be like being 35 for 150 years") is that human psychology will stand up to the beating it will take and people will have the *yearning* to keep living. Is it possible that people of normal financial means will just run out of interesting stuff to do?
I thought of this issue somewhat similarly after reading an article about a new anti-narcolepsy drug that apparently allows for days of waking with none of the psychosis common with staying awake on amphetamines. If you could take this drug and stay awake for an extra 4 nights a week, you could nearly double your available free time. But would you *want* to?
It's broadcasting on the rf spectrum, but wouldn't it be *unicasting* on the actual data layer? Unless of course you were multicasting on the data layer, but that functionality likely wouldn't be built in.
The greater the gap between state law and federal law on marijuana, the harsher the spotlight on the bad federal laws.
Plus, it serves as a an easy out for federal lawmakers. If even 1/3 of the states (which would probably more than 1/3 by population) decided to legalize marijuana, it'd be a "no-lose" proposition for federal lawmakers; they could say that they were just following the trend set by state lawmakers. Besides, there would likely be pressure on them to do so anyway.
Marijuana legalization is inevitable, IMHO. It's too widespread and too many generations simply have accepted its use and can't be made to fear it anymore. I suspect that by the time the current 18-24 generation is in their 40s, we'll see significant headway; that will put 2-3 generations with direct (mostly) positive experience with it in the voting majority. Couple that with broadening law enforcement priorities on shrinking budgets, and you see even the cops knowing that cracking down on pot is a waste of resources.
Account for people with misshapen bodies?
on
Chimera Twins Story
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You know the people I'm talking about, the ones whose bodies are somehow demented and just don't seem to fit together. Torso too big for the legs,legs too long for the torso, head too big, and so on.
Probably not, but there's got to be an explanation for this phenomena.
Fraud and deceptive sales practices are already illegal, why not use those tools to diminish the spam problem?
Most spam that I get is for the sale of products that don't work (eg, penis enlargers), probably don't work (get rich quick), are part of an ongoing swindle operation (stock spam, which is likely pump-n-dump), or may violate other laws (cable descramblers, online pharmacies).
The people collecting the money for these products are the ones paying the spammers; if you can put a significant dent in these fraudulent enterprises, the spammers will lose business and some may move along to something else, and more power to you if you can implicate the spammers as accessories to the fraud; with a fraudulent businessman facing 5-10 in a Federal prison, they might easily roll over on their spammer friends for a reduction in jail time.
Focusing energy and legislative action to "ban" spam is fruitless if you don't eliminate the source of the spam. Deceptive selling is the problem, spam is just a tool for this.
The only problem with this that I can see is that deceptive selling is often considered a legitimate business practice in the US, and there's a lot of people that lie and cheat customers and only get rich. If we could have a little more stringent interpretation of fraud (ie, you have to tell the truth as the common person understands it), then we could easily go after these people and probably put a significant dent in fraud.
Microcenter is as good as it gets in Minneapolis, and I think it's pretty good. Before Microcenter your choices were CompUSA and BestBuy, and neither one of those was very good.
Microcenter actually sold motherboards and other build it yourself components, while CompUSA and BB, IMHO, have become appliance stores.
I've gotten burned doing work in our remote offices and have been saved by Microcenter -- how many places can I find a toner, cat 5 jacks, a CD jacket and a 68 pin to VHD SCSI cable in one store?
I went to the Fry's in Orange County. It was amusing, but I'll trade their weird pricing, weird return policy and even weirder staff for slightly higher prices at Microcenter any day.
Most people that I know aren't techies and most of them are so technically illiterate it's a miracle they can do what they do do with their computers and other gizmos.
Software and technology are often unreliable, but I can't imagine what it's like to be taking calls from untechnical morons, pissed that they can't burn DVDs or something.
Slashdot Mirror
But the worm/virus costs to ISPs are essentially zero, since it's just a different set of bytes on the wire.
:)
They're real to ISPs if they infect the ISPs own servers, but that's not a transit cost and ISPs have always had to patch/maintain OSes (and are supposedly better at it, and wouldn't experience the direct costs of the worm themselves.
They're real costs to *clients* of the ISP, but that's not the ISPs fault, and its an opportunity for the ISPs to sell "security services" (filtered connection, managed firewall, etc).
Most people would like a filtered connection, but they should have to choose this and have to pay for it, too.
Filtering should cost more money, since it implies buying the filtering device, time spent maintaining the filter, maintaining the filtering equipment, modifying the filters when a new application everyone wants breaks, lots of technical support, etc.
Unfiltered IP costs less because there's less work to do.
If the unwashed are the vast majority, then there's not enough of me to charge more for IP service to pay for the cost of filtering. It makes more sense to charge those who want to be filtered more, since it will be a nominal amount distributed over a larger population.
MS code is inherently more insecure, and its installed in an inherently more insecure fashion (everything open, all services on, buggy demo code runnable) than most UNIX distributions. Popularity alone doesn't explain it.
Firewire800 would be a cool idea, and to eliminate the bulge, why not add a new "compact card" interface standard to firewire800?
You can then have your internal, PC-card-style card, except it connects internally to a firewire800 bus. No unsightly bulges.
You could make an external adapter to plug the cards into on machines that only had external firewire ports; such a system could even be used to bridge (albeit clumsily) new "firewire compact card" devices into a machine with standard PC cards: add firewire PC card, connect external firewire card adapter to firewire port, lather, rinse repeat.
Other than desktop-system bus (PCI-X or whatever the new PCI bus is called these days), its unfortunate we can't standardize on a good internal/external bus standard like Firewire.
I see that as a good thing. What possible reason is there to have file and printer sharing open to the internet?
It's good and bad and something of a slippery slope. When I sign up with an ISP, I want IP service -- the ability to send and receive any and all IP datagrams, regardless of their type or subtype. If my ISP starts filtering my IP service based on the overflowing basket of potential IP-based vulnerabilities, I lose that IP service. That's bad.
It's also something that "controllers" will want to see implemented based on whatever their agenda is (MSN blocks AIM, RIAA/MPAA wants Kazaa/Gnutella blocked, Ashcroft wants IPSec blocked, et al). That's the slippery slope, and it leads to what amounts to cable-TV internet service -- transparent proxied, web-only service. Yuck.
The good would be that the ignorant wouldn't be vulnerable, and many of us that manage networks professionally wouldn't have to put up with the amplification effect of millions of infested boxes with terrabytes of bandwidth. Some more obscure worms/viruses would die on the vine, but I highly doubt it will end all of them.
What ISPs should do is offer a "filtered" internet connection that limits vulnerabilities and charge extra for it. Although I'm sure it'd be a major headache to setup, and potentially a huge liability of the filtering was inadequate to stop a worm or a new vulnerability.
This would allow for the clueless to get something to help them, and protect people who want real IP service, and not some cable tv-like service.
Unfortunately, I think the real solution is more, bigger worms: this should shame MS into overhauling their networking security model.
More fine-grained rights are nice, but they're probably not necessary, since you can pretty easily roll Netware's WCEM into unix W.
What really makes the magic IMHO is inheritance and dynamic traversal rights (on-demand X right). You can make a sensible rights policy with RWX, but without traversal you end up doing some crazy stuff to make it work.
I was told by a recording engineer that a typical big-name album recorded at a high-end studio in NYC costs around $500k; tripling that cost to include overhead, marketing, etc would mean a break-even point at about 100k copies @ $15 each.
I'd wager that many big-name bands costs are much less, perhaps around $100k for recording costs; add on another $500k for overhead and you need to sell more like 40k copies.
I can't help but think there's a lot of money lost due to poor cost constraints. It would appear easy to make a ton of money without selling that many records. Or lose a ton of money if you put $1.5M into every screamer with a funny-spelled name who didn't sell any records.
Perhaps that's what God *is*, the last remaining being from a previous iteration of the Universe, reduced to an emphermal energy-based existence in order to pass into the 'new' Universe or survive its rebirth.
I could swear I read someplace about a telco charging *for* pulse dial.
Netware ACLs were the best and simplest to work with. I still miss them. For those with no Netware experience, directories had the following attributes:
/usr/local/foobar/foo/bar but am explicitely excluded from rights to foobar/ and foo/, I can still get to my directory and only see just the directories I need to navigate the file system.
Read, Write, Create, Erase, Modify, File scan (see directory contents), Access control (ability to change attributes for these properties for yourself or others), and Supervisory which enabled turning any of these bits on or off regardless of their status.
IIRC, RF was the default permission. Subdirectories always inhereited the permissions of their parents, although the above permissions could be selectively blocked from inheritance.
My favorite feature (which if 2K had would make life lots easier), was directory traversal rights were automatic. If I as a user have RWCEMF rights to directory BAR located in directory tree
Systems without traversal rights like this require some pretty convoluted logic to make them work, like home folders in Win2k. You need to make HOME readable to everyone so it can be mounted and people can find their home directories, but each user home directory needs inheritance blocked and specific user rights assigned. In Netware rights, you just grant the user rights to their directory, admin rights to HOME, and inheritance and directory traversal make it work.
I hope BSDs ACLs include automatic minimal traversal rights and inheritance.
If RIM software is so bad, why do they seem to be so popular?
Our executives, half of which can hardly send email on their computer, have been wetting their pants and frothing at the mouth over the idea of getting these, even when it means a $6-8k investment in a year where $250 needs written approval.
My feeling is that when they're out playing golf or drinking at the clubhouse, their executive pals and status rivals have them so they need them too.
I used one for a couple of weeks recently (a T-Mobile one) with the desktop software. I didn't have any crashes or hangups, but I didn't do much with it besides send a few emails. I found the device overall limited in its ability to intelligently route mail; I either got everything including spam or just emails from select people, which seems kind of pointless.
Wars end lots faster than they used to; it used to take 6-12 months *minimum* to raise an army of 50,000 men that consisted primarily of poorly equipped hand-to-hand infantry. But once the hacking and slashing finished a year or so later, everybody was done for good long while.
Now it seems that we (at least the US) can put an armored force of 200,000 anywhere it wants within a couple of months and win the war in 90 days..but the low-grade fighting just doesn't stop. The Israelis took the west bank in '67 (or was it '73? I forget), but have been essentially fighting the Palestinians for control since.
It's the same way everywhere; we don't fight wars for a few years anymore; we fight them in 2-3 months and then switch to low-grade guerilla tactics for the next year.
No, the Western Hemisphere is on one side, and the Eastern on the other. Digging to China is just faster this way, since you're not going through a sphere to get there.
Outlook may have a different code base than OE, but if you've ever tried to use them on the same computer at the same time, you'd wonder..
To this day "Reply via Email" to a newsgroup posting in OE brings up a reply in Outlook, which, since it's a seperate account/server/address, isn't what I wanted.
Insurance comapanies need to be divorced from the claims review process; they have a profit motive in rejecting claims. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't pressure on claims adjusters to increase their claim rejection rate or decrease payouts by small percentages when profits are threatened.
The best way to accomplish this would be to require a third party review claims, and if they find the claims to be valid, require the insurer to pay them. The third party claims reviewers would be held accountable for all insurer losses and costs associated with fraudulent claims, perhaps at 2x levels to increase their fraud scrutiny.
Although, given some of the complaining you hear ("Dear Ask Slashdot. My university network throttles Kazaa traffic. Don't they know the whole point of college is to provide faster warez downloads? Is this a violation of my civil rights?") I'm sure this will be met with outrage, too.
The "outrage" felt about throttled Kazaa is because most of them don't understand the basic economics of universities. They think that tuition + room and board greater than or equal to the cost of services delivered, therefore they're being deprived of something (mom and dad) paid for.
Universities are one of the most heavily *subsidized* insitutions around. Even as expensive as tuition is, it doesn't come close to covering the cost of delivering the services students get.
But won't it be hard to run a binary image without access to that platform's libraries? It almost smells easier to just to boot an entire OS than to shoehorn the OS into one main OS.
If that was the case, why not just revisit the old "dynamic recompiler" from the WinNT-on-Alpha days that could run x86 applications by dynamically recompiling the x86 binary into Alpha instructions? IIRC it got faster each time it ran them.
At least that way you wouldn't have to design a super exotic hardware platform.
I'll go one (or many) steps further:
Rather than picking an emulated CPU at bootup, why not emulate *all* of them simultaneously. Yes, it would be ridiculously resource intensive as you'd have to have nearly a gig of RAM just to host the entire operating system of each emulated processor.
I envision a small meta-OS that lets you assign resources and manage the emulated environments. Each environment could be spawned as often as resources were available.
Hardware resources might get tricky, especially when dealing with expansion slots that were platform specific, but it'd one cool computer.
I'm already kind of bored/sick of my field (no budgets and bad management doesn't help). I'm having a hard time imagining working the same field for 40 years, let alone 200 years.
I suppose one advantage would be that it would be totally viable to start over from scratch -- go to college, get a degree and enter a completely new profession at age 70 without feeling like you wouldn't have enough time to "make it" in your field.
That assumes, of course, that "20 years" is still considered relatively seasoned in a profession, and that number doesn't get bumped to 40 or 60 years, in which case the whole mess becomes like inflation -- just multiple the usual timelines in a profession by 2 or 3.
One of the hidden assumptions (beyond "your health will be like being 35 for 150 years") is that human psychology will stand up to the beating it will take and people will have the *yearning* to keep living. Is it possible that people of normal financial means will just run out of interesting stuff to do?
I thought of this issue somewhat similarly after reading an article about a new anti-narcolepsy drug that apparently allows for days of waking with none of the psychosis common with staying awake on amphetamines. If you could take this drug and stay awake for an extra 4 nights a week, you could nearly double your available free time. But would you *want* to?
8k, 16k or 32k?
It's broadcasting on the rf spectrum, but wouldn't it be *unicasting* on the actual data layer? Unless of course you were multicasting on the data layer, but that functionality likely wouldn't be built in.
The greater the gap between state law and federal law on marijuana, the harsher the spotlight on the bad federal laws.
Plus, it serves as a an easy out for federal lawmakers. If even 1/3 of the states (which would probably more than 1/3 by population) decided to legalize marijuana, it'd be a "no-lose" proposition for federal lawmakers; they could say that they were just following the trend set by state lawmakers. Besides, there would likely be pressure on them to do so anyway.
Marijuana legalization is inevitable, IMHO. It's too widespread and too many generations simply have accepted its use and can't be made to fear it anymore. I suspect that by the time the current 18-24 generation is in their 40s, we'll see significant headway; that will put 2-3 generations with direct (mostly) positive experience with it in the voting majority. Couple that with broadening law enforcement priorities on shrinking budgets, and you see even the cops knowing that cracking down on pot is a waste of resources.
You know the people I'm talking about, the ones whose bodies are somehow demented and just don't seem to fit together. Torso too big for the legs,legs too long for the torso, head too big, and so on.
Probably not, but there's got to be an explanation for this phenomena.
Fraud and deceptive sales practices are already illegal, why not use those tools to diminish the spam problem?
Most spam that I get is for the sale of products that don't work (eg, penis enlargers), probably don't work (get rich quick), are part of an ongoing swindle operation (stock spam, which is likely pump-n-dump), or may violate other laws (cable descramblers, online pharmacies).
The people collecting the money for these products are the ones paying the spammers; if you can put a significant dent in these fraudulent enterprises, the spammers will lose business and some may move along to something else, and more power to you if you can implicate the spammers as accessories to the fraud; with a fraudulent businessman facing 5-10 in a Federal prison, they might easily roll over on their spammer friends for a reduction in jail time.
Focusing energy and legislative action to "ban" spam is fruitless if you don't eliminate the source of the spam. Deceptive selling is the problem, spam is just a tool for this.
The only problem with this that I can see is that deceptive selling is often considered a legitimate business practice in the US, and there's a lot of people that lie and cheat customers and only get rich. If we could have a little more stringent interpretation of fraud (ie, you have to tell the truth as the common person understands it), then we could easily go after these people and probably put a significant dent in fraud.
Microcenter is as good as it gets in Minneapolis, and I think it's pretty good. Before Microcenter your choices were CompUSA and BestBuy, and neither one of those was very good.
Microcenter actually sold motherboards and other build it yourself components, while CompUSA and BB, IMHO, have become appliance stores.
I've gotten burned doing work in our remote offices and have been saved by Microcenter -- how many places can I find a toner, cat 5 jacks, a CD jacket and a 68 pin to VHD SCSI cable in one store?
I went to the Fry's in Orange County. It was amusing, but I'll trade their weird pricing, weird return policy and even weirder staff for slightly higher prices at Microcenter any day.
Most people that I know aren't techies and most of them are so technically illiterate it's a miracle they can do what they do do with their computers and other gizmos.
Software and technology are often unreliable, but I can't imagine what it's like to be taking calls from untechnical morons, pissed that they can't burn DVDs or something.