Nothing personal, we know most of you are lovely fine folk. But you've sure got your share of idiots that we're happy are an ocean away from us.
You don't have idiots? What country are you in? I would very much like to live in this place without idiots. I fear that you are overstating the actual situation, since I've come to believe that there are idiots everywhere.
They will require massive increases on the paperwork that banks have to file. The cost of these new regulations will be more than small banks will be able to afford.
Cry me a river. Smaller banks have a certain advantage in that they can build a business process around the new paperwork (not paperwork really since it's all centrally located databases these days) while the lumbering giants migrate their existing business processes from the Shitty Old Way (TM) to the new way.
Let me tell you, starting from scratch is often easier than changing old ways that no longer work well.
If it really is a non-starter for a Small, Private Bank to setup the resources to get over the barriers-of-entry required for competing in the industry, then maybe a new group should use the Google-approach by leveraging the hell out of Non-private resources. Google took a Linux-backbone and has built an empire. Certainly the major barriers of entry into the banking industry are Information-related and those things can easily be handled by having the correct software tools.
Anyway, quit complaining that regulation is bad for small business because I don't think history will agree with you.
According to the RIAA, my hard drive is valued over $500 million.
I want to mod this "Sadly Funny". What's the market rate for about 10 gigs of music that I downloaded back when while I was in college and had an easier time justifying my copyright infringement? It's gotta be at least $50 million. I should *so* be planning to retire early.
I must admit, the editors of Slashdot have done a good job filtering the irrelevant Idle stories from the front page over the last few months. I think maybe 20% of the Idle stories on the front page are actually interesting enough to warrant a click. And I'll even say that it's nice to see "Idle" and know that I can let my brain go on vacation for 15 minutes when one of those stories that piques my interest does come up.
why fuck around implementing LAN play when that coder could be doing something else, and you can *already* play against someone on the same network as you.
I think it's a latency issue. When the game server is two network hops away through a router that everybody in the room is connected to the speeds are arguably faster than when the server is seven states or provinces away.
I've never played in LAN mode with more than two people, though. I suspect that a 15 Mbps modern ISP connection could handle at least a dozen co-located gamers playing in faux-LAN mode at a game party.
Seriously... who releases a version 13 of anything? I did this recently on a project as an internal release and within a week a showstopper bug revealed itself so we had to patch it and jump to version 14.
I still use Comcast. I'll be the first one on my block to be on the phone with Verizon when they finally decide to roll out their fiber optic service to my neighborhood.
I'm also in a seemingly rare area where Comcast has natural cable company competition. Trouble is... it's a company called RCN that (at least for my experiences) sucks worse than Comcast.
Any business who operates with the expectation that their customers will blindly make larger and larger deposits every month is forced to take this precaution to protect against unruly customers who might occasionally want to make a withdrawal when they find out that their money isn't available.
Any sufficiently advanced business is little more than a cash collection organization, especially when the government can be depended on to pay for critical infrastructures.
I think I've seen the bug your talking about with a system on a small local network with a misconfigured Domain Manager and/or router. At one point there was an infinite loop (or at least a really long timeout period) for systems to establish their network connection to the domain, so as long as an Ethernet cable was detected it would keep on trying to establish its connection. Bloody difficult to figure out exactly what was wrong, and yet so simple to fix (apply a specific patch and configure the network correctly) once things were correctly diagnosed.
And if past Oil disasters are any indication, there are probably fines coming along as well. Along with bills related to government operations that had to deal with the spill.
BP won't get off free here.
But if BP were to become bankrupt by this incident, who would pick up the tab then? Multi-billion dollars of sunk costs can take down entire businesses. It's a moral hazard that an oil company's carelessness can destroy the Gulf of Mexico and then treat the situation as a "Lessons Learned" for other businesses (or in the case of the California... other jurisdictions).
I'm posting at the top because I've never seen such a unified response to an AskSlashdot in the decade I've spent reading this site. I want to inform readers... don't waste your time reading past this point because the rest of the discussion is redundant.
As far as I know local governments *do* have the rights to meddle with how commerce is conducted within their jurisdictions.
I'm pretty sure the in NY you can't buy alcohol on Sundays. My state voted to ban dog racing last year. That seems just as arbitrary as the Happy Meal Toy law, but as a local law there is nothing that the citizens can do about it except challenge it at the polls.
It's not Facebook's problem that your friends blow up your timeline with a bunch of crap....
Yes, I have "friends" who regularly post trivial garbage to their newsfeed. The same people also make noteworthy posts on occasion. If Facebook (or any other social network site) provided a clear set of configurable settings to quiet these people (perhaps hiding their chatter in a link called "Click here to expand [4] discussions started by John Smith in the last 24 hours".
I would like to apply this behavior towards all my friends who have posted at least three times a week for the last three weeks.
I'm as big a fan of social media as the next guy, but unless Facebook is planning to solve the "signal-to-noise" problem the future of their platform will be severely limited.
I think you're joking, but the open source video editing tools that I've used have all had extremely clunky interfaces. I'm no pro, but I've edited a 90 minute amateur film, so if I can't figure out how to import and splice clips in less than 30 minutes of picking up a copy of your video editing software, I conclude that the software is no good. It's been about two years since I've seriously looked for something, but in 2008 the state-of-the-art for open source video editing wasn't in good shape.
Thanks for pointing out the comments section of the article. Her allegations are that the boy has a long history of bad behavior and that she's monitoring him for his own good. Also, she claims (responsibly enough) that he left his account logged into her computer and her posts (in the comments section of the linked article) are filled with enough typos and grammar errors that I'd believe she's incapable of truly hacking into anything that's reasonably protected.
Leaving aside the issue that she wasn't the legal guardian, what's wrong with a parent who wants to try to know what her underaged kid is doing? Since the guardian is liable to the trouble the kid gets in, and there are allegations that grandma wasn't doing the job, shouldn't monitoring kids be a legal right of a parent?
Also, can we have a referendum on saying people "hacked" a system where the keys were left in the ignition with the windows rolled down and the engine running? People store their passwords in web browsers all the time. Firefox has a way of going in and turning all stored passwords into plain-text. IE probably has the same thing. Using these built-in features of the software is not a form of hacking. At worst, it's the equivalent of walking into a house you don't own through a wide open front door when you haven't received an invitation. Sure, it's "Entering" but it's not "Breaking and Entering". Frown on it, but calling it "hacking" implies some sort of "skill" that most people don't possess and we should acknowledge where that isn't the case.
First, I assume you're talking about a target worth $20 trillion (that's $20,000,000,000,000. That's a lot of zeroes). What substance exists that would have that value?
A rock with normal gravity (9.8m/s^2 at the surface), a large supply of both natural frozen and liquid H20 on the surface, and an atmosphere with a 20% mixture of Oxygen, 70% mixture of NO(2?), 3% mixture of CO2, and 7% mixture of trace amounts of other gases would be worth at least $20,000,000 Trillion dollars.
Assuming that gold has intrinsic value as anything more than a very stable yellowish metal compound with some useful properties is to succumb to a failure of epic proportions.
The situation you describe suggests that a sense of competition in America overwhelms the sense of collaboration present in Eastern Europe.
I think this is consistent with the political and economic models that form the basis of society in these two different parts of the world. If things really are as you say in Eastern Europe, maybe there are different factors that make the competitive model superior to the collaborative one?
How long until Americans figure out that it is much cheaper to pay the fines and pick up health insurance when you need it (now that insurers are required to sign people with preexisting conditions) than to pay premiums year-round?
NPR has done stories about how people do this in Massachusetts. The average cost to insurance companies for people who report receiving 6 months or less of coverage per year is north of $10k while average costs for the average person who has insurance for all 12 months is closer to $2.5k. (Note: Please don't quote these numbers, they are being pulled from the depths of my memory.)
Humanity can rest easy knowing these types of self-serving creeps are in a very small percentage of the minority. Still, I'd rather support people playing these types of insurance games because the costs to the hospitals get really high when people procrastinate seeking help until three years after the onset of symptoms.
And a funny thing... I've never heard people critical of the health insurance industry advocate for killing people who don't have the cash or the insurance to pay for an expensive, but necessary operation. It seems like making the argument, "I don't want to pay because I don't want to use it" is the same as "I would rather choose between dying miserably or paying for the procedure out of pocket and potentially ruining my family financially than 'assuring' that I receive necessary care in case something goes wrong with me."
I'm sorry if this comes as an insult to experts who think they are infallible.
It comes off as a statement that the term "expert" is often misapplied. True experts will tell you went they aren't sure about something or when they are sharing their own biased opinions that aren't specifically backed up by research.
I've never heard of this one. Could you describe how useful it is compared to MeetUp.com, Google Calendar, Facebook invites, or eVite.com?
Specifically, I want an online invitation system where I can set a "Max RSVP Number" so I can put a ceiling on the number of people who come to events that I host. Honestly, I *want* to be able to invite the whole world when I hold desirable events, but it's a matter of logistics that "poker night" can't accommodate more than 8 people and "homemade pizza/sushi night" tops out at 24 and 12 (respectively) based the amount of space needed for eating.
As a host... it's frustrating to only invite a dozen people to an event (like "poker night") where you want between 5 and 8 people to show-up. Too many times I've had 7 people confirm and then three of them drop-out 4 hours before the planned event (luckily, Wii has lots of 4 player games for when this happens). I've also had 9 people confirm and show-up (too many!). For the times where 4-5 people confirm, I like to invite an extra 6 people two days before the event get closer to the 7 to 8 sweetspot. But the point is, I'd just as soon have invited those people to begin with because I'm not the sort of person who likes playing favorites.
For people who don't RSVP by the time the "Max RSVP Number" is reached, they can join a waitlist. The optimal situation would be to have a system that automatically e-mailed all the waitlisters when somebody un-RSVPs so they could get a chance to add themselves to the list.
To my knowledge... no such sophisticated system exists and yet I think this would be a killer feature for lots of people besides me.
If you work for a software company you work for an IP company, which is a lot of slashdotters, but most people work in industries like construction or the service sector, which have nothing to do with IP.
I work in the software industry. As a software developer, I can assure you that it's feasible to program an embedded software controls system that can replace your construction workers.
And saying this revolution wouldn't benefit the worker is also misguided because *eventually* prices will catch-up so the guy who can no longer make a living installing toilets will be able to buy lower-priced toilets (because his services aren't inflating the cost of goods sold) while he pursues some other line of work enabled by an emerging (probably more desirable) industry which will owe its existence to the lack of manufacturing jobs in this country.
I've got my fingers crossed that the emerging industry will be Spa/Resorts in Space!
Hypothetically, couldn't you donate $2 to a charity that you or a close friend of yours owns and operates?
That leaves $2 for charity (which you have some control of), $2.4 for the government via taxes, and $5.6 in your pocket. But you really have $2 + 5.6 = $7.6 (which is greater than the no-charity quantity of $7.
Voila! Magical tax haven! You lowered your theoretical tax by 6%. The key is being in charge of how the charity spends the money!
Now - the question that I would pose would be whether the Bill/Melinda Foundation conforms to this type of charity and how illegal it would be if a regular Joe tried something like this. Obviously Gates' charity does do lots of good in the world... so my guess would be that as long as Joe Schmo also did lots of good work (through his theoretical charity), he could also skim 6% from the government's greedy hands.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing personal, we know most of you are lovely fine folk. But you've sure got your share of idiots that we're happy are an ocean away from us.
You don't have idiots? What country are you in? I would very much like to live in this place without idiots. I fear that you are overstating the actual situation, since I've come to believe that there are idiots everywhere.
They will require massive increases on the paperwork that banks have to file. The cost of these new regulations will be more than small banks will be able to afford.
Cry me a river. Smaller banks have a certain advantage in that they can build a business process around the new paperwork (not paperwork really since it's all centrally located databases these days) while the lumbering giants migrate their existing business processes from the Shitty Old Way (TM) to the new way.
Let me tell you, starting from scratch is often easier than changing old ways that no longer work well.
If it really is a non-starter for a Small, Private Bank to setup the resources to get over the barriers-of-entry required for competing in the industry, then maybe a new group should use the Google-approach by leveraging the hell out of Non-private resources. Google took a Linux-backbone and has built an empire. Certainly the major barriers of entry into the banking industry are Information-related and those things can easily be handled by having the correct software tools.
Anyway, quit complaining that regulation is bad for small business because I don't think history will agree with you.
According to the RIAA, my hard drive is valued over $500 million.
I want to mod this "Sadly Funny". What's the market rate for about 10 gigs of music that I downloaded back when while I was in college and had an easier time justifying my copyright infringement? It's gotta be at least $50 million. I should *so* be planning to retire early.
I must admit, the editors of Slashdot have done a good job filtering the irrelevant Idle stories from the front page over the last few months. I think maybe 20% of the Idle stories on the front page are actually interesting enough to warrant a click. And I'll even say that it's nice to see "Idle" and know that I can let my brain go on vacation for 15 minutes when one of those stories that piques my interest does come up.
And this is the worst Slashdot story that has be posted to the front page in a long time.
why fuck around implementing LAN play when that coder could be doing something else, and you can *already* play against someone on the same network as you.
I think it's a latency issue. When the game server is two network hops away through a router that everybody in the room is connected to the speeds are arguably faster than when the server is seven states or provinces away.
I've never played in LAN mode with more than two people, though. I suspect that a 15 Mbps modern ISP connection could handle at least a dozen co-located gamers playing in faux-LAN mode at a game party.
Seriously... who releases a version 13 of anything? I did this recently on a project as an internal release and within a week a showstopper bug revealed itself so we had to patch it and jump to version 14.
I still use Comcast. I'll be the first one on my block to be on the phone with Verizon when they finally decide to roll out their fiber optic service to my neighborhood.
I'm also in a seemingly rare area where Comcast has natural cable company competition. Trouble is... it's a company called RCN that (at least for my experiences) sucks worse than Comcast.
customer service reps behind bulletproof glass
Any business who operates with the expectation that their customers will blindly make larger and larger deposits every month is forced to take this precaution to protect against unruly customers who might occasionally want to make a withdrawal when they find out that their money isn't available.
Any sufficiently advanced business is little more than a cash collection organization, especially when the government can be depended on to pay for critical infrastructures.
I think I've seen the bug your talking about with a system on a small local network with a misconfigured Domain Manager and/or router. At one point there was an infinite loop (or at least a really long timeout period) for systems to establish their network connection to the domain, so as long as an Ethernet cable was detected it would keep on trying to establish its connection. Bloody difficult to figure out exactly what was wrong, and yet so simple to fix (apply a specific patch and configure the network correctly) once things were correctly diagnosed.
And if past Oil disasters are any indication, there are probably fines coming along as well. Along with bills related to government operations that had to deal with the spill.
BP won't get off free here.
But if BP were to become bankrupt by this incident, who would pick up the tab then? Multi-billion dollars of sunk costs can take down entire businesses. It's a moral hazard that an oil company's carelessness can destroy the Gulf of Mexico and then treat the situation as a "Lessons Learned" for other businesses (or in the case of the California... other jurisdictions).
I'm posting at the top because I've never seen such a unified response to an AskSlashdot in the decade I've spent reading this site. I want to inform readers... don't waste your time reading past this point because the rest of the discussion is redundant.
I say an orgasm of prevention is worth more than a pound of cancer.
Mod: Pedantic...
40 years of ejaculating 5 times per week is 10,400 orgasms.
As far as I know local governments *do* have the rights to meddle with how commerce is conducted within their jurisdictions.
I'm pretty sure the in NY you can't buy alcohol on Sundays. My state voted to ban dog racing last year. That seems just as arbitrary as the Happy Meal Toy law, but as a local law there is nothing that the citizens can do about it except challenge it at the polls.
It's not Facebook's problem that your friends blow up your timeline with a bunch of crap....
Yes, I have "friends" who regularly post trivial garbage to their newsfeed. The same people also make noteworthy posts on occasion. If Facebook (or any other social network site) provided a clear set of configurable settings to quiet these people (perhaps hiding their chatter in a link called "Click here to expand [4] discussions started by John Smith in the last 24 hours".
I would like to apply this behavior towards all my friends who have posted at least three times a week for the last three weeks.
I'm as big a fan of social media as the next guy, but unless Facebook is planning to solve the "signal-to-noise" problem the future of their platform will be severely limited.
I think you're joking, but the open source video editing tools that I've used have all had extremely clunky interfaces. I'm no pro, but I've edited a 90 minute amateur film, so if I can't figure out how to import and splice clips in less than 30 minutes of picking up a copy of your video editing software, I conclude that the software is no good. It's been about two years since I've seriously looked for something, but in 2008 the state-of-the-art for open source video editing wasn't in good shape.
Thanks for pointing out the comments section of the article. Her allegations are that the boy has a long history of bad behavior and that she's monitoring him for his own good. Also, she claims (responsibly enough) that he left his account logged into her computer and her posts (in the comments section of the linked article) are filled with enough typos and grammar errors that I'd believe she's incapable of truly hacking into anything that's reasonably protected.
Leaving aside the issue that she wasn't the legal guardian, what's wrong with a parent who wants to try to know what her underaged kid is doing? Since the guardian is liable to the trouble the kid gets in, and there are allegations that grandma wasn't doing the job, shouldn't monitoring kids be a legal right of a parent?
Also, can we have a referendum on saying people "hacked" a system where the keys were left in the ignition with the windows rolled down and the engine running? People store their passwords in web browsers all the time. Firefox has a way of going in and turning all stored passwords into plain-text. IE probably has the same thing. Using these built-in features of the software is not a form of hacking. At worst, it's the equivalent of walking into a house you don't own through a wide open front door when you haven't received an invitation. Sure, it's "Entering" but it's not "Breaking and Entering". Frown on it, but calling it "hacking" implies some sort of "skill" that most people don't possess and we should acknowledge where that isn't the case.
First, I assume you're talking about a target worth $20 trillion (that's $20,000,000,000,000. That's a lot of zeroes). What substance exists that would have that value?
A rock with normal gravity (9.8m/s^2 at the surface), a large supply of both natural frozen and liquid H20 on the surface, and an atmosphere with a 20% mixture of Oxygen, 70% mixture of NO(2?), 3% mixture of CO2, and 7% mixture of trace amounts of other gases would be worth at least $20,000,000 Trillion dollars.
Assuming that gold has intrinsic value as anything more than a very stable yellowish metal compound with some useful properties is to succumb to a failure of epic proportions.
Could it be the culture here?
The situation you describe suggests that a sense of competition in America overwhelms the sense of collaboration present in Eastern Europe.
I think this is consistent with the political and economic models that form the basis of society in these two different parts of the world. If things really are as you say in Eastern Europe, maybe there are different factors that make the competitive model superior to the collaborative one?
How long until Americans figure out that it is much cheaper to pay the fines and pick up health insurance when you need it (now that insurers are required to sign people with preexisting conditions) than to pay premiums year-round?
NPR has done stories about how people do this in Massachusetts. The average cost to insurance companies for people who report receiving 6 months or less of coverage per year is north of $10k while average costs for the average person who has insurance for all 12 months is closer to $2.5k. (Note: Please don't quote these numbers, they are being pulled from the depths of my memory.)
Humanity can rest easy knowing these types of self-serving creeps are in a very small percentage of the minority. Still, I'd rather support people playing these types of insurance games because the costs to the hospitals get really high when people procrastinate seeking help until three years after the onset of symptoms.
And a funny thing... I've never heard people critical of the health insurance industry advocate for killing people who don't have the cash or the insurance to pay for an expensive, but necessary operation. It seems like making the argument, "I don't want to pay because I don't want to use it" is the same as "I would rather choose between dying miserably or paying for the procedure out of pocket and potentially ruining my family financially than 'assuring' that I receive necessary care in case something goes wrong with me."
I'm sorry if this comes as an insult to experts who think they are infallible.
It comes off as a statement that the term "expert" is often misapplied. True experts will tell you went they aren't sure about something or when they are sharing their own biased opinions that aren't specifically backed up by research.
upcoming for the events
I've never heard of this one. Could you describe how useful it is compared to MeetUp.com, Google Calendar, Facebook invites, or eVite.com?
Specifically, I want an online invitation system where I can set a "Max RSVP Number" so I can put a ceiling on the number of people who come to events that I host. Honestly, I *want* to be able to invite the whole world when I hold desirable events, but it's a matter of logistics that "poker night" can't accommodate more than 8 people and "homemade pizza/sushi night" tops out at 24 and 12 (respectively) based the amount of space needed for eating.
As a host... it's frustrating to only invite a dozen people to an event (like "poker night") where you want between 5 and 8 people to show-up. Too many times I've had 7 people confirm and then three of them drop-out 4 hours before the planned event (luckily, Wii has lots of 4 player games for when this happens). I've also had 9 people confirm and show-up (too many!). For the times where 4-5 people confirm, I like to invite an extra 6 people two days before the event get closer to the 7 to 8 sweetspot. But the point is, I'd just as soon have invited those people to begin with because I'm not the sort of person who likes playing favorites.
For people who don't RSVP by the time the "Max RSVP Number" is reached, they can join a waitlist. The optimal situation would be to have a system that automatically e-mailed all the waitlisters when somebody un-RSVPs so they could get a chance to add themselves to the list.
To my knowledge... no such sophisticated system exists and yet I think this would be a killer feature for lots of people besides me.
If you work for a software company you work for an IP company, which is a lot of slashdotters, but most people work in industries like construction or the service sector, which have nothing to do with IP.
I work in the software industry. As a software developer, I can assure you that it's feasible to program an embedded software controls system that can replace your construction workers.
And saying this revolution wouldn't benefit the worker is also misguided because *eventually* prices will catch-up so the guy who can no longer make a living installing toilets will be able to buy lower-priced toilets (because his services aren't inflating the cost of goods sold) while he pursues some other line of work enabled by an emerging (probably more desirable) industry which will owe its existence to the lack of manufacturing jobs in this country.
I've got my fingers crossed that the emerging industry will be Spa/Resorts in Space!
Hypothetically, couldn't you donate $2 to a charity that you or a close friend of yours owns and operates?
That leaves $2 for charity (which you have some control of), $2.4 for the government via taxes, and $5.6 in your pocket. But you really have $2 + 5.6 = $7.6 (which is greater than the no-charity quantity of $7.
Voila! Magical tax haven! You lowered your theoretical tax by 6%. The key is being in charge of how the charity spends the money!
Now - the question that I would pose would be whether the Bill/Melinda Foundation conforms to this type of charity and how illegal it would be if a regular Joe tried something like this. Obviously Gates' charity does do lots of good in the world... so my guess would be that as long as Joe Schmo also did lots of good work (through his theoretical charity), he could also skim 6% from the government's greedy hands.