If you don't mind me asking, where is an SSL certificate available for $9 a year? I've only ever seen the ~$100 versions. The cheapest I've found is $65 a year from InstantSSL.com. This would still add about 50% onto the cost of a "$10 a month shared hosting/$15 a year domain name" setup.
If you are typing in the address as you drive, I'd count it.
If you typed in the address beforehand and are just looking at the screen (hopefully mounted somewhere) to see the directions, this is less of an issue.
If you typed in the address beforehand and the app is reading you the directions out loud so you don't need to even look at the device, that's even better.
There's a difference between setting up your smartphone's GPS before you start driving - listening to the directions given but not interacting with the screen - and trying to type in your destination as you go 60mph on a highway or trying to check your e-mail as you cruise down Main Street because you don't think your e-mails can wait 10 minutes.
Yes, the former is "accessing the Internet" but it isn't the driver actively interacting with the device. It's even better if you set the device (again, ahead of time) to read you the directions so you just need to listen to it occasionally instead of glancing down at the screen.
It's more a matter of a situation where the penalty doesn't always occur but when it does it can be deadly.
Suppose you make a trip in your car while surfing the web with your phone and don't have a problem. In your brain, it seems as if surfing the web while driving has no consequences so you keep doing it. Fifty trips later and still nothing happens and your brain has cemented this as a "truth." Unfortunately, on that fifty-first trip, you run over a pedestrian crossing the street because you were too busy loading Cute-Kitten-Photos.com to notice that your light was red or you smash into the car in front of you because you didn't notice that they braked since your eyes were on a news article loading on your screen.
Mix this in with young people's* view of "I'm indestructible! Nothing bad can ever happen to me!!!" and you have a dangerous concoction.
Processing is negligible, but cost is not. If you are an enterprise-level organization, you should definitely go HTTPS or at least offer that as an option. If you are a hobby site running on a shared server for $10 a month, you aren't going to be able to invest in a $150 SSL certificate.
In theory, yes. If tomorrow Chrome, Safari, IE, FireFox, etc all upgraded their browsers to require HTTP 2.0/HTTPS-Only, tons of websites would be faced with the prospect of paying hundreds of dollars for a SSL certificate. These hobby sites with no actual income wouldn't be able to afford it. Presently, to host a website I can pay for a $10 a month shared hosting plan and $15 a year for a domain name. (My registrar is a bit more expensive but I've had a lot of good experience with them so I'm not likely to flee to save $5 a year.) This means I can run a site for $135 a year. (Yes, if it becomes even remotely popular, I'll need to ditch the shared hosting for dedicated but let's assume this is a small-time site to start with.) If you add in an SSL certificate requirement, you're adding in about $149 more every year (based on GeoTrust pricing - other CAs might be more or less). That's doubling the cost.
In practice, of course, you'll get an IP6 type of situation. Tons of sites will cling to the old version (HTTP 1.0/HTTPS-Optional) and the browsers will need to support this. Any browser that makes HTTP 2.0/HTTPS-Only a requirement will be committing marketshare suicide. (Side note: Is it bad if I'm hoping IE does this?) So while the "official spec" will say that all websites should go HTTPS-Only, people will ignore this and keep on the old spec until either HTTP 3 comes out (which goes back to HTTPS-Optional) or until the SSL situation is sorted out to bring the price radically down.
Here's one result from a quick Google search: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decades-failed-promises-verizon-it-promises-fiber-to-get-tax-breaks-then-never-delivers.shtml
Basically, Verizon asked for massive tax breaks ($2.1 billion) in 1994. In exchange, they said they would wire all homes up with fiber by 2015. By 2004, they were supposed to have 50% of homes wired, but didn't have any. Now they have halted all FIOS expansion and are basically reneging on the promise entirely. Of course, they're claiming that wording in the contract allows them to do some of this. (Stuff like lines "passing" homes which they claim means they can run a line near a home and that home counts even if that home isn't hooked up to the fiber.)
The problem is when your only ISP is $CABLE_COMPANY and they also sell on-demand cable TV packages which are being hurt by companies such as Netflix. You are thinking of canceling your cable TV package to go Online-Video-only, but notice that those videos buffer so much slower than $CABLE_COMPANY's offering so you stick with $CABLE_COMPANY. In reality, $CABLE_COMPANY is slowing down online video delivery to bolster their own video offerings. Of course, $CABLE_COMPANY won't admit to this and will just say they are "managing the bandwidth."
In addition, many of these networks were built thanks to an infusion of taxpayer dollars to the companies in question in exchange for some promises that the ISPs then "forgot" about when it came time to deliver (and used their lobbying muscle to prevent anyone holding them to their promises).
It's not so much a matter of improving the Congresscritter's productivity as it is keeping them from "being productive." All Congressfolk should be given iPhones/Android phones with Angry Birds and told that they can't vote on any legislation until they 3 star every level. Instant Government Improvement!
I was getting a better opinion about Bill Gates with his charitable efforts and then he went and created InBloom (along with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp). For those who don't know, InBloom was created to help school districts manage data. To that end, they are collecting hundreds of data points on students. Examples include home addresses, SSN, medial diagnoses (autism/deafness/emotional disturbance), whether they were disciplined and how much including any jail time, and whether the student gets pregnant. To make matters worse, they are storing it in the cloud. (We all know cloud storage is 100% secure, right?) Not only don't they need parental approval (the law governing schools protecting student information was amended to allow the schools to participate), but parents can't even opt out. Yes, if you have kids in Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Louisiana, or New York, your childs' information may already be in the cloud.
Thanks, Gates for seriously compromising my son's personal information and leaving me nearly powerless to stop it. (I can protest, but the politicians here have all drunk large amounts of InBloom Kool-Aid and think us parents are just annoying pests to be ignored.)
While I'll admit that Slashdot has a pro-atheist slant, I've posted things in the past mentioning my religious beliefs without getting modded down as a troll. The trick is not to toss your religion out there as "The One True Path That Everyone Should Convert To Now" or use your religion as the sole basis of your argument and expect that everyone else will fall in line (e.g. "my religion says X and that's why it should be a federal law").
However, if you are expressing a personal opinion that only affects you based on a religious belief, people won't automatically shout you down. Some will disagree with you, sure, but they tend to be calm and reasoned about it. Yes, some will feel the need to "disagree" by insulting you for having any sort of religious belief at all - as if this is better than the religious folks who insult people who don't follow "The Right Religion" - but they are the minority and easily ignored.
I'm in the market for a new external hard drive (my 1TB one is getting too small for my backups) and kept looking at Seagate. Unfortunately, my father-in-law had a Seagate which broke rather quickly and my wife is convinced that this means all Seagate drives are junk. The reality is that Seagate, Western Digital, and any other large hard drive manufacturer is going to have a lot of failed drives by the sheer fact that they produce a lot of drives. Since people who are happy with their products don't post comments as often as people who aren't happy, you're likely to get a higher percentage of complaints in the reviews than percentage of people who actually experienced problems.
I've got to agree with the New York one. First the site wouldn't recognize me as a "valid person." When I called support, they had me sign up on the DMV website which got me a login I could use on the New York Health Care site. Then, as I put that I had a wife and two kids, it began to ask for all of their social security numbers. Why? I'm a victim of identity theft so I get very leery about this sort of thing. (I was feeling sick about putting my own SSN into the sign up form but did it figuring they needed to verify that I was a NY resident somehow.) I stopped immediately and likely won't sign up via the health care exchange. (Thankfully, my company provides somewhat decent health care.)
I definitely remember lyrics.ch. I used it often to find the lyrics to that song I loved or to look up that song I heard on the radio but didn't know the name/singer of. In fact, with the latter case, a visit to Lyrics.ch would sometimes result in a sale for the recording industry. After all, if I loved that brand new song by that brand new band on the radio but didn't know either one by name, I'd be unable to purchase their works. After a visit to Lyrics.ch, I'd have been able to purchase their CD.
Nowadays, it would be even easier to generate sales. Just place a "Buy it on Amazon/Google Play/iTunes" button with a link to the song and these lyrics sites could drive profits to the record labels. They should view these sites as free advertising, not copyright violators. However, if they wanted some modicum of control, perhaps they should make a "lyrics site" license with some easy-to-follow requirements (e.g. no pop-up ads, no malware served, no links to "free downloads", links to Amazon/Google Play/iTunes, etc.) and a low cost of application. Then lyrics sites could "go legit" without too much fuss and the record labels would get the free publicity they generate.
Sadly, these DMCA abusers know the "risks." If they abuse the DMCA, they can be found guilty of perjury, except:
1) This would require the person being sued to counter-sue in court. Often, the people being sued are people or companies without the financial resources to take on a big legal powerhouse like the RIAA. Thy would need to invest time, money, and energy in their court case. All three of which they might not have enough of to effectively see the battle to completion and all three of which these legal powerhouses have in abundance.
2) They would need to win a court battle. The judge would need to actually find against the abuser and not let them off on a technicality. e.g. no "Well, sure they sued a hundred people for sharing songs they never even had, but it was a technical glitch and they apologized (after lengthy court battles and a dozen people settling). No harm done."
3) The penalty will need to be severe enough to act as a deterrent. If a DMCA abuse typically brings in $3,000 per person/company and the DMCA abuser sends out a hundred of these, fining them $50,000 is just going to be "cost of doing business", not "reason to stop and never do this again."
Sadly, I don't see these three lining up right on a constant basis for quite some time. Even more sadly, the DMCA abusers know this and feel they can act with impunity.
Interestingly, I can't stand the taste of alcohol. I'm not sure why, but beer, wine, and any other alcoholic beverage just tastes awful to me. I can stand some mixed drinks where the alcohol flavor is masked, but that's about it. I also can't stand anything carbonated - feels like it's burning my tongue.
Granted, I don't think I'd be the market for the alcohol substitute since I wouldn't be looking for the intoxicating effects of alcohol in the first place.
NSA Guy #1: "Slashdot posted a duplicate article on Slashdot again." NSA Guy #2: "Compare it against the last one. If we find out how they vary, we might be able to decrypt their code." NSA Guy #1: "Rats, they posted another dupe!" NSA Guy #2: "We need more computing power to crack this." NSA Guy #1: "I giving it all I've got, captain!" NSA Guy #2: "What?" NSA Guy #1: "Sorry. Too much Slashdot."
They are the ones who never had a date to the dance.
I didn't even go to any dances (partly thanks to not having a date).
They are the ones who excelled in class and failed in life.
I excelled in class and... wait a second. I'm actually pretty successful in life. (Not in the "rolling in dough" sense, but in the "have a job I enjoy and wife and kids who love me" sense.) Whew! Came so close to matching that "horrible administrator" type!
Just to add some information to your post, here's a Wikipedia article showing the top rates from 1913 on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_top_rates
From 1944 to 1963, people making $200,000 or more ($2.5 million in today's money) paid 90%+ in taxes. Then, from 1964 to 1981, the top rate was 70%. Now? 39.6%. If we made a new top rate of 50% for people earning $1 million or more, how much more money would we bring in?
Sadly, the military often doesn't request the pork it gets. They request X amount (which might be more than they need but let's leave that be for a second) and then some Senator cuts a deal for his approval on a bill that adds Y to the military budget to benefit some companies in the Senator's district. Then another Congressman cuts another deal to add Z to benefit his district. Eventually, the military budget balloons as Congressmen funnel military pork to their districts that the military doesn't actually want/need.
The best way to reduce pork? Ban riders on bills. Bills would need to stick to their topic. No pinning a "Award $X million to the defense contractor in Senator Porkington's district" to a bill on sending money to people suffering from a national disaster. Bills would need to survive or die on their own, not hitch a ride on something completely unrelated.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't mind me asking, where is an SSL certificate available for $9 a year? I've only ever seen the ~$100 versions. The cheapest I've found is $65 a year from InstantSSL.com. This would still add about 50% onto the cost of a "$10 a month shared hosting/$15 a year domain name" setup.
If you are typing in the address as you drive, I'd count it.
If you typed in the address beforehand and are just looking at the screen (hopefully mounted somewhere) to see the directions, this is less of an issue.
If you typed in the address beforehand and the app is reading you the directions out loud so you don't need to even look at the device, that's even better.
There's a difference between setting up your smartphone's GPS before you start driving - listening to the directions given but not interacting with the screen - and trying to type in your destination as you go 60mph on a highway or trying to check your e-mail as you cruise down Main Street because you don't think your e-mails can wait 10 minutes.
Yes, the former is "accessing the Internet" but it isn't the driver actively interacting with the device. It's even better if you set the device (again, ahead of time) to read you the directions so you just need to listen to it occasionally instead of glancing down at the screen.
It's more a matter of a situation where the penalty doesn't always occur but when it does it can be deadly.
Suppose you make a trip in your car while surfing the web with your phone and don't have a problem. In your brain, it seems as if surfing the web while driving has no consequences so you keep doing it. Fifty trips later and still nothing happens and your brain has cemented this as a "truth." Unfortunately, on that fifty-first trip, you run over a pedestrian crossing the street because you were too busy loading Cute-Kitten-Photos.com to notice that your light was red or you smash into the car in front of you because you didn't notice that they braked since your eyes were on a news article loading on your screen.
Mix this in with young people's* view of "I'm indestructible! Nothing bad can ever happen to me!!!" and you have a dangerous concoction.
* Typing that out made me feel old.
Processing is negligible, but cost is not. If you are an enterprise-level organization, you should definitely go HTTPS or at least offer that as an option. If you are a hobby site running on a shared server for $10 a month, you aren't going to be able to invest in a $150 SSL certificate.
In theory, yes. If tomorrow Chrome, Safari, IE, FireFox, etc all upgraded their browsers to require HTTP 2.0/HTTPS-Only, tons of websites would be faced with the prospect of paying hundreds of dollars for a SSL certificate. These hobby sites with no actual income wouldn't be able to afford it. Presently, to host a website I can pay for a $10 a month shared hosting plan and $15 a year for a domain name. (My registrar is a bit more expensive but I've had a lot of good experience with them so I'm not likely to flee to save $5 a year.) This means I can run a site for $135 a year. (Yes, if it becomes even remotely popular, I'll need to ditch the shared hosting for dedicated but let's assume this is a small-time site to start with.) If you add in an SSL certificate requirement, you're adding in about $149 more every year (based on GeoTrust pricing - other CAs might be more or less). That's doubling the cost.
In practice, of course, you'll get an IP6 type of situation. Tons of sites will cling to the old version (HTTP 1.0/HTTPS-Optional) and the browsers will need to support this. Any browser that makes HTTP 2.0/HTTPS-Only a requirement will be committing marketshare suicide. (Side note: Is it bad if I'm hoping IE does this?) So while the "official spec" will say that all websites should go HTTPS-Only, people will ignore this and keep on the old spec until either HTTP 3 comes out (which goes back to HTTPS-Optional) or until the SSL situation is sorted out to bring the price radically down.
Here's one result from a quick Google search: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decades-failed-promises-verizon-it-promises-fiber-to-get-tax-breaks-then-never-delivers.shtml
Basically, Verizon asked for massive tax breaks ($2.1 billion) in 1994. In exchange, they said they would wire all homes up with fiber by 2015. By 2004, they were supposed to have 50% of homes wired, but didn't have any. Now they have halted all FIOS expansion and are basically reneging on the promise entirely. Of course, they're claiming that wording in the contract allows them to do some of this. (Stuff like lines "passing" homes which they claim means they can run a line near a home and that home counts even if that home isn't hooked up to the fiber.)
The problem is when your only ISP is $CABLE_COMPANY and they also sell on-demand cable TV packages which are being hurt by companies such as Netflix. You are thinking of canceling your cable TV package to go Online-Video-only, but notice that those videos buffer so much slower than $CABLE_COMPANY's offering so you stick with $CABLE_COMPANY. In reality, $CABLE_COMPANY is slowing down online video delivery to bolster their own video offerings. Of course, $CABLE_COMPANY won't admit to this and will just say they are "managing the bandwidth."
In addition, many of these networks were built thanks to an infusion of taxpayer dollars to the companies in question in exchange for some promises that the ISPs then "forgot" about when it came time to deliver (and used their lobbying muscle to prevent anyone holding them to their promises).
It's not so much a matter of improving the Congresscritter's productivity as it is keeping them from "being productive." All Congressfolk should be given iPhones/Android phones with Angry Birds and told that they can't vote on any legislation until they 3 star every level. Instant Government Improvement!
I was getting a better opinion about Bill Gates with his charitable efforts and then he went and created InBloom (along with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp). For those who don't know, InBloom was created to help school districts manage data. To that end, they are collecting hundreds of data points on students. Examples include home addresses, SSN, medial diagnoses (autism/deafness/emotional disturbance), whether they were disciplined and how much including any jail time, and whether the student gets pregnant. To make matters worse, they are storing it in the cloud. (We all know cloud storage is 100% secure, right?) Not only don't they need parental approval (the law governing schools protecting student information was amended to allow the schools to participate), but parents can't even opt out. Yes, if you have kids in Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Louisiana, or New York, your childs' information may already be in the cloud.
Thanks, Gates for seriously compromising my son's personal information and leaving me nearly powerless to stop it. (I can protest, but the politicians here have all drunk large amounts of InBloom Kool-Aid and think us parents are just annoying pests to be ignored.)
While I'll admit that Slashdot has a pro-atheist slant, I've posted things in the past mentioning my religious beliefs without getting modded down as a troll. The trick is not to toss your religion out there as "The One True Path That Everyone Should Convert To Now" or use your religion as the sole basis of your argument and expect that everyone else will fall in line (e.g. "my religion says X and that's why it should be a federal law").
However, if you are expressing a personal opinion that only affects you based on a religious belief, people won't automatically shout you down. Some will disagree with you, sure, but they tend to be calm and reasoned about it. Yes, some will feel the need to "disagree" by insulting you for having any sort of religious belief at all - as if this is better than the religious folks who insult people who don't follow "The Right Religion" - but they are the minority and easily ignored.
I'm in the market for a new external hard drive (my 1TB one is getting too small for my backups) and kept looking at Seagate. Unfortunately, my father-in-law had a Seagate which broke rather quickly and my wife is convinced that this means all Seagate drives are junk. The reality is that Seagate, Western Digital, and any other large hard drive manufacturer is going to have a lot of failed drives by the sheer fact that they produce a lot of drives. Since people who are happy with their products don't post comments as often as people who aren't happy, you're likely to get a higher percentage of complaints in the reviews than percentage of people who actually experienced problems.
I've got to agree with the New York one. First the site wouldn't recognize me as a "valid person." When I called support, they had me sign up on the DMV website which got me a login I could use on the New York Health Care site. Then, as I put that I had a wife and two kids, it began to ask for all of their social security numbers. Why? I'm a victim of identity theft so I get very leery about this sort of thing. (I was feeling sick about putting my own SSN into the sign up form but did it figuring they needed to verify that I was a NY resident somehow.) I stopped immediately and likely won't sign up via the health care exchange. (Thankfully, my company provides somewhat decent health care.)
The fact that I consider 20 young makes me feel old.
I definitely remember lyrics.ch. I used it often to find the lyrics to that song I loved or to look up that song I heard on the radio but didn't know the name/singer of. In fact, with the latter case, a visit to Lyrics.ch would sometimes result in a sale for the recording industry. After all, if I loved that brand new song by that brand new band on the radio but didn't know either one by name, I'd be unable to purchase their works. After a visit to Lyrics.ch, I'd have been able to purchase their CD.
Nowadays, it would be even easier to generate sales. Just place a "Buy it on Amazon/Google Play/iTunes" button with a link to the song and these lyrics sites could drive profits to the record labels. They should view these sites as free advertising, not copyright violators. However, if they wanted some modicum of control, perhaps they should make a "lyrics site" license with some easy-to-follow requirements (e.g. no pop-up ads, no malware served, no links to "free downloads", links to Amazon/Google Play/iTunes, etc.) and a low cost of application. Then lyrics sites could "go legit" without too much fuss and the record labels would get the free publicity they generate.
Sadly, these DMCA abusers know the "risks." If they abuse the DMCA, they can be found guilty of perjury, except:
1) This would require the person being sued to counter-sue in court. Often, the people being sued are people or companies without the financial resources to take on a big legal powerhouse like the RIAA. Thy would need to invest time, money, and energy in their court case. All three of which they might not have enough of to effectively see the battle to completion and all three of which these legal powerhouses have in abundance.
2) They would need to win a court battle. The judge would need to actually find against the abuser and not let them off on a technicality. e.g. no "Well, sure they sued a hundred people for sharing songs they never even had, but it was a technical glitch and they apologized (after lengthy court battles and a dozen people settling). No harm done."
3) The penalty will need to be severe enough to act as a deterrent. If a DMCA abuse typically brings in $3,000 per person/company and the DMCA abuser sends out a hundred of these, fining them $50,000 is just going to be "cost of doing business", not "reason to stop and never do this again."
Sadly, I don't see these three lining up right on a constant basis for quite some time. Even more sadly, the DMCA abusers know this and feel they can act with impunity.
Interestingly, I can't stand the taste of alcohol. I'm not sure why, but beer, wine, and any other alcoholic beverage just tastes awful to me. I can stand some mixed drinks where the alcohol flavor is masked, but that's about it. I also can't stand anything carbonated - feels like it's burning my tongue.
Granted, I don't think I'd be the market for the alcohol substitute since I wouldn't be looking for the intoxicating effects of alcohol in the first place.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1221/
"You're both confused. He's just 'The Doctor.'"
Maybe they wanted the secrets of psychohistory with which they could crush those pinko commies once and for all.
NSA Guy #1: "Slashdot posted a duplicate article on Slashdot again."
NSA Guy #2: "Compare it against the last one. If we find out how they vary, we might be able to decrypt their code."
NSA Guy #1: "Rats, they posted another dupe!"
NSA Guy #2: "We need more computing power to crack this."
NSA Guy #1: "I giving it all I've got, captain!"
NSA Guy #2: "What?"
NSA Guy #1: "Sorry. Too much Slashdot."
Hey, stop mixing Actual Information into other people's Jumping To Conclusions Based On A Summary Of A Sensationalist New Story!
I was never picked in PE.
I didn't even go to any dances (partly thanks to not having a date).
I excelled in class and... wait a second. I'm actually pretty successful in life. (Not in the "rolling in dough" sense, but in the "have a job I enjoy and wife and kids who love me" sense.) Whew! Came so close to matching that "horrible administrator" type!
Just to add some information to your post, here's a Wikipedia article showing the top rates from 1913 on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_top_rates
From 1944 to 1963, people making $200,000 or more ($2.5 million in today's money) paid 90%+ in taxes. Then, from 1964 to 1981, the top rate was 70%. Now? 39.6%. If we made a new top rate of 50% for people earning $1 million or more, how much more money would we bring in?
Sadly, the military often doesn't request the pork it gets. They request X amount (which might be more than they need but let's leave that be for a second) and then some Senator cuts a deal for his approval on a bill that adds Y to the military budget to benefit some companies in the Senator's district. Then another Congressman cuts another deal to add Z to benefit his district. Eventually, the military budget balloons as Congressmen funnel military pork to their districts that the military doesn't actually want/need.
The best way to reduce pork? Ban riders on bills. Bills would need to stick to their topic. No pinning a "Award $X million to the defense contractor in Senator Porkington's district" to a bill on sending money to people suffering from a national disaster. Bills would need to survive or die on their own, not hitch a ride on something completely unrelated.