Yes.. I'm Canadian, I was there....
Yes, it's a pain. Sure, everyone whined about it. Sure people say 'Look at all this change'.
The reality, though.. is this.
Everyone gets by; it's not really an inconvenience, and it saves the country money.
It's mostly psychological.
Better for the government becuase of longevity? That means better for the taxpayer, as it costs less.
As for saying 'Poeple here have never had a prevalent $1 coin'.. well.. of course not. We never had one in Canada either, until the day we dropped the bill and used the Loonie.
Yes.. people would go out of their way to reqeust bills.. that's out of a neurotic compulsion to keep things the same. In the end, though, there are no more $1 bills. And lots of loonies.
As for pockets full of change.. I find I have no more or less change because of the loonie. If it's in my pocket after one transaction, it's gone at the next.
Re:Issues with the euro in day-to-day life
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
The change to Joe European's every day life is not that big a deal.
It's not different than the change one goes through spending a year travelling around Europe.
As for buying a car.. if someone buys a car without doing some *careful* calculations, he deserves to get stung. C'mon.. this is simple math.
No 25 cent coins... you are just used to having 25s.. that's all. PRices will adjust to whatver is easy for everyone.
As for coins.. here in Costa Rica, there are so many denominations.
The base unit is the Colone
340 colones = US$1
It devaluates at about 1.5%/month
the coins:
1(not too common), 2(not too common), 5(2 kinds), 10(2 kinds), 20(2 kinds), 25, 50, 100, 500(very uncommon)
The coins with 2 kinds, there are smaller, gold colored fat coins, and thinner, silver coins, with a larger diameter.
SO you end up with a rediculous amount of currency in your pocket.
Most people round to the nearest 5 or 10 colones for convenience.. 1 & 2 colone coins are not that common.
Technically, they have cents too (100 to the colone), but they only show up on paper.
Why do you think that? The 'issuance' is only a physical thing.. as far as money markets go, the Euro has been traded for 3 years already.
All that's happening now is that everyone will actually have Euro cash, instead of having to exchange money. Banks, it's not a problem; they've been using Euro internally for years.
This should not affect the value of the euro one way or the other.
Someone in an area where there is no work now has basically no barrier to entry into moving somewehre else and getting a good job.
Conversley, companies can now open up in other places because they may be able to get cheaper labor. All in all, the freedom of movement and unified currency should help balance things out.
Re:The Euro is here, i can feel it in my wallet.
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
Having just visited your wonderful country.. I can say that I will miss seeing your wonderful banknotes the next time I am in The Netherlands.
The cash in NL is definately the coolest I've seen anywhere. No politicians on it, cool abstract artwork, and just plain nice looking notes. Some of the coins lack... but I got a kick out of the 2.5fl coin:)
And I shudder to think of price in Amsterdam going up another %15, it's expensive enough already.
Good question. Simple answer.
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Your perception that some currencies are weak/strong is wrong.
THe member countries of the Euro have had their currencies locked together for at least a year now (I think more than that, but I don't know for sure). Their values relative to each other, do not flucuate at all. Money markets have been trading the Euro for a long time now; it's only the presence of the physical cash that is changing today.
The whole point is that the member countries move together, not separately. Due to the nature of the Euro, it CANNOT devaluate in one country and not another. As for goods/services, yes, of course... it's still supply/demand.
Withiin the EU, people can travel, work and live in other countries, etc... It's becoming a large customs zone, where once you are in, you are free to move about as you please. You'll notice your first stop in an EU country when going to europe, you will have to clear customs. After that, you are relatively free.. you may have to show a passport, but that's it.
Regarding the 'unsuccesful' attempt to release a coin in the US.
To release a $1 coin successfully, all you have to do is... drumrolll please... make coins, and stop making $1 bills. Period. Instant success.
Silver dollar? Golden dollar? What were these? Actually putting $1 worth of gold in the mix for the coin? Or are you referring to something else.
Re:Different versions of the Euro...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
How does it preserve autonomy? It lulls people into a perception that the currency is 'local' to their country; nothing more.
The euro means the economies of the member states are regulated as a whole, not individually.
I, for one, am thankful I got the opportunity to spend some Pesetas and Escudos, and Punts before the Euro was brought in. The different currencies really were one of the beautiful and wonderful things about travelling through europe.
Now, of course, the euro WILL make travelling easier.
I know everyone will get into a discussion about music quality... so here's another question.
We all know (I hope) that what you hear is also limited by your listening equipment.
I recently bought a pair of Sony MDR-V500 headphones.. they were about the same price as my old but trustworthy Sennheiser HD330s.
I was dissapointed when I actually had them side by side; the Sony headphones are basically, well, crap. Any listener could distinguish that they are severely lacking in several areas. The sennheisers sound oh so much better.. and that's on a computer, through a cheap desktop speaker headphone jack, listening to 160Kbps mp3.
So what's the point of arguing over compression formats, or whether something is *really* CD quality, or studio quality, when your equipment can't even come close to reproducing it?
Oh.. to the unitiated.. I highly recommend a good pair of $100 headphones (Sennheiser or Grado, and yes, that means towards the lower end of their product lineups..don't let that discourage you. A low-end Grado or Sennheiser sounds fantastic compared to anything else you'll find in the store.
And those $100 headphones will sound better than a $2000 stereo, anyday.
Will I convert my music collection to OGG? No. It provides no advantage for me, in fact, it's a disadvantage.
If I'm developing an audio app, or require audio compression for my own projects, will I use OGG? Absolutely. As far as I'm concerned, that's what it's all about. It's a codec, not encumbered by patents.. it's fantastic for OSS development.
But for playing music? Unfortunately, mp3 is just more portable. I can give it to my mom, use it in a portable, etcetera.
Also.. and I have no idea either way..
Does OGG have something akin to VBR? Can it compete with the size:quality of, say, lame's default VBR parameters?
Copyright expiring in a reasonable amount of time, yes, that would be good.
But that still doesn't compel anyone to release source.
Also, in the case of, say, Quake, and now Quake2, ID really has nothing to gain by keeping their game (which was *designed* to be hackable, remember) as source, so people can further hack it. It keeps them in everyone's good books. The tech is old enough not to matter.
This is *very* different than MS releasing the source to an older version of office, or Autodesk releasing the code for Autocad from a few years ago.. that codebase is still very active.
Regarding corporations, I think we should just go back to how it used to be before our time... corporations were *not* 'natural persons'. They were used for the sole purpose of limiting liability to the owners.. and their charter could (and would) be revoked if they stepped outside the lines of what that charter entailed.
The idea was a bunch of poeple could become a 'corporation' and say 'we're going to do x and y and z', and if it was agreeable, they would be granted a 'charter'.. this would protect them from personal liability if the company did certain things wrong.
Re:What are technical advantages of Hurd?
on
Hurd: H2 CD Images
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Because they want to work with something new.
Because they have some ideas as to how the hurd could be adapted to their purposes.
The list goes on.
A lot of people are saying things like 'this will take years to reach the popularity of linux' or 'until it has all the bells and whistles'. Hello....
Who ever said the hurd was supposed to be ready yet? I don't recall hearing it. The hurd is there for people to work on because they want to, period.
There was a time when Linux was just as much of an ugly duckling, you know.. where nobody would use it for anything serious. It was something to be tinkered with, nothing more.
Speaking strictly, the IT director won't tell you this to your face because it's not his job to do so. It's his job to deal with your boss (from the sounds of it). Period. And your bosses problem to deal with you.
Now, what should happen is your boss would shield you from the director. If your boss thinks his boss is out of line, it's up to your boss to do something about it.
If you were to go over your bosses head and complain somewhere over the Director's head, it may get your boss in shit.. because it's his job to sort this out.
Now.. strangely enough, I was in basically this exact same position a few years ago, if you can believe it.
The VP Tech (out of the blue) decided that I needed to be fired, and started basically blaming things on me, and to make it worse, he worked in our head office, not in the building I was in. Whenever I saw him in person, he was nice, joking, friendly. Whenever he was back in his office, he backstabbed.
Just before he moved to this new office and started trying to get rid of me, we hired an IT Director, whom I reported directly to (clarification, in my case, it's the VP who's bad and the director who's my boss) Now.. this guy barely knew me. I was young (24) compared to everyone else involved.. and he walked right into his new job to find that the VP Tech was trying to axe me. What did he do? He came to me in person, said so-and-so has it in for you, and flatly stated that he thought such behavior was unprofessional and that he had no intention of letting me go. This was after working with me for about 3 or 4 days.
Weeks later, at a meeting, with all senior management present, The VP brought up the topic of canning me again. My new boss stood up, said basically, and firmly, 'We are not letting him go, he stays. if you have a problem with what my department does, bring it up with me. It's not up to you to hire/fire my staff. That's why you hired me as the Director of IT'. This was in front of the CEO, etc. And that settled it. It never came up again.
but having been around, Canada still is the best place on earth. You have nothing to whine about.
Canada is not *drowning* in debt. We are very well off. We could settle debt very quickly, just by dipping into our *vast* natural resources.
Why don't we? Because we can weather it out.. we don't because we can always do it later.
I think your negative outlook on how 'bad' Canada is would change quickly if you did a wee bit of traveling.
Believe me, if you didn't pay the taxes you pay, you'd be living 100 years in the past. Canada does not have the population base to support low taxation and still maintain the status quo.
So.. if you are willing to give up medical, the social safety net, good roads, relatively honest police, and our good name the world over, keep pushing for lower taxes and less immigration.
I think you completely misunderstood what I meant.
Why do you think blue isn't picked up by your eyes as well? DUH! WAVELENGTH!
Blue does not focus at the same distance as the other colors, by enough of a margin to make excess blue make images seem fuzzy.
"Technically, this begins to seem a little bit like using one's market share in the applications business to protect one's market share in the OS business, which would, on the face of it, seem to be an anti-trust no-no."
No shit.. everyone knows that. It's not necessarily illegal, though. The courts have been over this. You cannot *force* them to develop their product for another platform....at least, the courts have not chosen to try to do so.
Where is the financial sense for microsoft to put money towards developing office for unix? There isn't one.
No, it won't.
Have you observed the effects of MS ClearType sub-pixel rendering on font smoothing on an LCD? It's fantastic. This thing would be even better.
It's not so much that we are less sensitive to blue.. that would seem to suggest you need MORE blue..
It's that we percieve blue at a lower resolution than the other colors, due to wavelength. (Ever seen blueblocker sunglasses? There is truth to that). So there is no reason to have the same resolution of R, G, and B, the extra resolution on B is wasted (not brightness, just resolution)
As with all slashdot posts, the posting is inaccurate.
The human eye is *least* sensitive to blue... that's what this thing is about, sort of.
It's also not a new method of sub-pixel rendering.. it's a new method of sub-pixel layout.
The theory is that in a conventional LCD, there is too much blue.. it's wasted space, resources, etc.
This thing both changes the color proportion, and the way the thing is wired up. adjacent subpixels of the same color are driven by the same driver.
Starting your own company is an exception. Gates was not *hired* by microsoft to be the CEO/President/Chariman/Whatever.
As for why I mention dotcoms.. it's because, the only place I've seen companies of any size with non-degreed corporate officers is when they are new, uprising dotcoms who aren't viable.
Look, I'm not debating that there are some copmanies out there with officers who are not degreed; there most certainly are. And some of those may be large, successful companies.. but they are the exception to the rule.
Though you *can* get a job now with a big company without a degree, to insist that it doens't matter is rubbish. You will get much farther, much easier with a degree.
CEO's and CTO's of failing dotcoms don't count.. sorry.
Go read the surveys and studies done about the IT sector. you will find upper management, as well as higher paying jobs all have one thing in commong: a degree in *something*
I don't want a job with some failing dotcom, run by some kid with no degree! sorry.
Every single CEO/CTO I've met of a company that makes money has a degree. Period.
If you want to counter that, please give examples.
So what if he doesn't have a bank account? Is it mandatory? No. it's not.
As for 'fees'... let me tell you a few things.
1) You can walk into the branch of the bank that the cheque is written against, and provide ID, and take ALL your money, they cannot charge you fees. You do not need an account. By law, they are bound to honor the cheque (which is simply an insturment instructing the bank to pay you the money)
2) He has a legit complaint against paypal. They should NOT need to know who they are doing business with; that is not a requirement of business.
3) How can you operate a money trasnfer operation? Through security. How do you think anonymous swiss numbered accounts work? Same thing here. The account belongs to whoever has that paypal ID and password... get it?
4) It's not a basic request. Paypal has screwed up before; Why should paypal require either his credit card number or my bank account number if I never plan to use either with them? WHat he's saying is that they do not NEED either of these things to provide him with the service he wants. He doesn't use them. Furthermore, if paypal merely wants to verify who he is, there are other ways to do this other than requesting his bank account/credit card.
Companies will not generally promote you to management positions, (ie: CIO, Director of IT, etc) if you don't have a degree in *something*.
It's not at all about what you learned in the degree; it's the perception by the rest of the world.
CCIE is great, it will get you fantastic work, but it won't get you respect from venture capitalists and a board of directors who want to put someone in charge, unfortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.. I'm Canadian, I was there....
Yes, it's a pain. Sure, everyone whined about it. Sure people say 'Look at all this change'.
The reality, though.. is this.
Everyone gets by; it's not really an inconvenience, and it saves the country money.
It's mostly psychological.
Better for the government becuase of longevity? That means better for the taxpayer, as it costs less.
As for saying 'Poeple here have never had a prevalent $1 coin'.. well.. of course not. We never had one in Canada either, until the day we dropped the bill and used the Loonie.
Yes.. people would go out of their way to reqeust bills.. that's out of a neurotic compulsion to keep things the same. In the end, though, there are no more $1 bills. And lots of loonies.
As for pockets full of change.. I find I have no more or less change because of the loonie. If it's in my pocket after one transaction, it's gone at the next.
The change to Joe European's every day life is not that big a deal.
It's not different than the change one goes through spending a year travelling around Europe.
As for buying a car.. if someone buys a car without doing some *careful* calculations, he deserves to get stung. C'mon.. this is simple math.
No 25 cent coins... you are just used to having 25s.. that's all. PRices will adjust to whatver is easy for everyone.
As for coins.. here in Costa Rica, there are so many denominations.
The base unit is the Colone
340 colones = US$1
It devaluates at about 1.5%/month
the coins:
1(not too common), 2(not too common), 5(2 kinds), 10(2 kinds), 20(2 kinds), 25, 50, 100, 500(very uncommon)
The coins with 2 kinds, there are smaller, gold colored fat coins, and thinner, silver coins, with a larger diameter.
SO you end up with a rediculous amount of currency in your pocket.
Most people round to the nearest 5 or 10 colones for convenience.. 1 & 2 colone coins are not that common.
Technically, they have cents too (100 to the colone), but they only show up on paper.
Why do you think that? The 'issuance' is only a physical thing.. as far as money markets go, the Euro has been traded for 3 years already.
All that's happening now is that everyone will actually have Euro cash, instead of having to exchange money. Banks, it's not a problem; they've been using Euro internally for years.
This should not affect the value of the euro one way or the other.
Someone in an area where there is no work now has basically no barrier to entry into moving somewehre else and getting a good job.
Conversley, companies can now open up in other places because they may be able to get cheaper labor. All in all, the freedom of movement and unified currency should help balance things out.
Having just visited your wonderful country.. I can say that I will miss seeing your wonderful banknotes the next time I am in The Netherlands.
:)
The cash in NL is definately the coolest I've seen anywhere. No politicians on it, cool abstract artwork, and just plain nice looking notes. Some of the coins lack... but I got a kick out of the 2.5fl coin
And I shudder to think of price in Amsterdam going up another %15, it's expensive enough already.
Your perception that some currencies are weak/strong is wrong.
THe member countries of the Euro have had their currencies locked together for at least a year now (I think more than that, but I don't know for sure). Their values relative to each other, do not flucuate at all. Money markets have been trading the Euro for a long time now; it's only the presence of the physical cash that is changing today.
The whole point is that the member countries move together, not separately. Due to the nature of the Euro, it CANNOT devaluate in one country and not another. As for goods/services, yes, of course... it's still supply/demand.
Withiin the EU, people can travel, work and live in other countries, etc... It's becoming a large customs zone, where once you are in, you are free to move about as you please. You'll notice your first stop in an EU country when going to europe, you will have to clear customs. After that, you are relatively free.. you may have to show a passport, but that's it.
Regarding the 'unsuccesful' attempt to release a coin in the US.
To release a $1 coin successfully, all you have to do is... drumrolll please... make coins, and stop making $1 bills. Period. Instant success.
Silver dollar? Golden dollar? What were these? Actually putting $1 worth of gold in the mix for the coin? Or are you referring to something else.
How does it preserve autonomy? It lulls people into a perception that the currency is 'local' to their country; nothing more.
The euro means the economies of the member states are regulated as a whole, not individually.
I, for one, am thankful I got the opportunity to spend some Pesetas and Escudos, and Punts before the Euro was brought in. The different currencies really were one of the beautiful and wonderful things about travelling through europe.
Now, of course, the euro WILL make travelling easier.
And I'm not bashing it.. it was an honest question.
Again, my main reason for not using ogg to encode my music is the fact that mp3 is currently much more portable.
I know everyone will get into a discussion about music quality... so here's another question.
.. they were about the same price as my old but trustworthy Sennheiser HD330s.
We all know (I hope) that what you hear is also limited by your listening equipment.
I recently bought a pair of Sony MDR-V500 headphones
I was dissapointed when I actually had them side by side; the Sony headphones are basically, well, crap. Any listener could distinguish that they are severely lacking in several areas. The sennheisers sound oh so much better.. and that's on a computer, through a cheap desktop speaker headphone jack, listening to 160Kbps mp3.
So what's the point of arguing over compression formats, or whether something is *really* CD quality, or studio quality, when your equipment can't even come close to reproducing it?
Oh.. to the unitiated.. I highly recommend a good pair of $100 headphones (Sennheiser or Grado, and yes, that means towards the lower end of their product lineups..don't let that discourage you. A low-end Grado or Sennheiser sounds fantastic compared to anything else you'll find in the store.
And those $100 headphones will sound better than a $2000 stereo, anyday.
So what do you guys/gals use?
It's good to hear that OGG is progressing.
Will I convert my music collection to OGG? No. It provides no advantage for me, in fact, it's a disadvantage.
If I'm developing an audio app, or require audio compression for my own projects, will I use OGG? Absolutely. As far as I'm concerned, that's what it's all about. It's a codec, not encumbered by patents.. it's fantastic for OSS development.
But for playing music? Unfortunately, mp3 is just more portable. I can give it to my mom, use it in a portable, etcetera.
Also.. and I have no idea either way..
Does OGG have something akin to VBR? Can it compete with the size:quality of, say, lame's default VBR parameters?
Copyright expiring in a reasonable amount of time, yes, that would be good.
But that still doesn't compel anyone to release source.
Also, in the case of, say, Quake, and now Quake2, ID really has nothing to gain by keeping their game (which was *designed* to be hackable, remember) as source, so people can further hack it. It keeps them in everyone's good books. The tech is old enough not to matter.
This is *very* different than MS releasing the source to an older version of office, or Autodesk releasing the code for Autocad from a few years ago.. that codebase is still very active.
Regarding corporations, I think we should just go back to how it used to be before our time... corporations were *not* 'natural persons'. They were used for the sole purpose of limiting liability to the owners.. and their charter could (and would) be revoked if they stepped outside the lines of what that charter entailed.
The idea was a bunch of poeple could become a 'corporation' and say 'we're going to do x and y and z', and if it was agreeable, they would be granted a 'charter'.. this would protect them from personal liability if the company did certain things wrong.
Because they want to work with something new.
Because they have some ideas as to how the hurd could be adapted to their purposes.
The list goes on.
A lot of people are saying things like 'this will take years to reach the popularity of linux' or 'until it has all the bells and whistles'. Hello....
Who ever said the hurd was supposed to be ready yet? I don't recall hearing it. The hurd is there for people to work on because they want to, period.
There was a time when Linux was just as much of an ugly duckling, you know.. where nobody would use it for anything serious. It was something to be tinkered with, nothing more.
Speaking strictly, the IT director won't tell you this to your face because it's not his job to do so. It's his job to deal with your boss (from the sounds of it). Period. And your bosses problem to deal with you.
Now, what should happen is your boss would shield you from the director. If your boss thinks his boss is out of line, it's up to your boss to do something about it.
If you were to go over your bosses head and complain somewhere over the Director's head, it may get your boss in shit.. because it's his job to sort this out.
Now.. strangely enough, I was in basically this exact same position a few years ago, if you can believe it.
The VP Tech (out of the blue) decided that I needed to be fired, and started basically blaming things on me, and to make it worse, he worked in our head office, not in the building I was in. Whenever I saw him in person, he was nice, joking, friendly. Whenever he was back in his office, he backstabbed.
Just before he moved to this new office and started trying to get rid of me, we hired an IT Director, whom I reported directly to (clarification, in my case, it's the VP who's bad and the director who's my boss) Now.. this guy barely knew me. I was young (24) compared to everyone else involved.. and he walked right into his new job to find that the VP Tech was trying to axe me. What did he do? He came to me in person, said so-and-so has it in for you, and flatly stated that he thought such behavior was unprofessional and that he had no intention of letting me go. This was after working with me for about 3 or 4 days.
Weeks later, at a meeting, with all senior management present, The VP brought up the topic of canning me again. My new boss stood up, said basically, and firmly, 'We are not letting him go, he stays. if you have a problem with what my department does, bring it up with me. It's not up to you to hire/fire my staff. That's why you hired me as the Director of IT'. This was in front of the CEO, etc. And that settled it. It never came up again.
but having been around, Canada still is the best place on earth. You have nothing to whine about.
Canada is not *drowning* in debt. We are very well off. We could settle debt very quickly, just by dipping into our *vast* natural resources.
Why don't we? Because we can weather it out.. we don't because we can always do it later.
I think your negative outlook on how 'bad' Canada is would change quickly if you did a wee bit of traveling.
Believe me, if you didn't pay the taxes you pay, you'd be living 100 years in the past. Canada does not have the population base to support low taxation and still maintain the status quo.
So.. if you are willing to give up medical, the social safety net, good roads, relatively honest police, and our good name the world over, keep pushing for lower taxes and less immigration.
I think you completely misunderstood what I meant.
Why do you think blue isn't picked up by your eyes as well? DUH! WAVELENGTH!
Blue does not focus at the same distance as the other colors, by enough of a margin to make excess blue make images seem fuzzy.
Sheesh.
"Technically, this begins to seem a little bit like using one's market share in the applications business to protect one's market share in the OS business, which would, on the face of it, seem to be an anti-trust no-no."
No shit.. everyone knows that. It's not necessarily illegal, though. The courts have been over this. You cannot *force* them to develop their product for another platform....at least, the courts have not chosen to try to do so.
Where is the financial sense for microsoft to put money towards developing office for unix? There isn't one.
No, it won't.
Have you observed the effects of MS ClearType sub-pixel rendering on font smoothing on an LCD? It's fantastic. This thing would be even better.
It's not so much that we are less sensitive to blue.. that would seem to suggest you need MORE blue..
It's that we percieve blue at a lower resolution than the other colors, due to wavelength. (Ever seen blueblocker sunglasses? There is truth to that). So there is no reason to have the same resolution of R, G, and B, the extra resolution on B is wasted (not brightness, just resolution)
As with all slashdot posts, the posting is inaccurate.
The human eye is *least* sensitive to blue... that's what this thing is about, sort of.
It's also not a new method of sub-pixel rendering.. it's a new method of sub-pixel layout.
The theory is that in a conventional LCD, there is too much blue.. it's wasted space, resources, etc.
This thing both changes the color proportion, and the way the thing is wired up. adjacent subpixels of the same color are driven by the same driver.
Starting your own company is an exception. Gates was not *hired* by microsoft to be the CEO/President/Chariman/Whatever.
As for why I mention dotcoms.. it's because, the only place I've seen companies of any size with non-degreed corporate officers is when they are new, uprising dotcoms who aren't viable.
Look, I'm not debating that there are some copmanies out there with officers who are not degreed; there most certainly are. And some of those may be large, successful companies.. but they are the exception to the rule.
Though you *can* get a job now with a big company without a degree, to insist that it doens't matter is rubbish. You will get much farther, much easier with a degree.
CEO's and CTO's of failing dotcoms don't count.. sorry.
Go read the surveys and studies done about the IT sector. you will find upper management, as well as higher paying jobs all have one thing in commong: a degree in *something*
I don't want a job with some failing dotcom, run by some kid with no degree! sorry.
Every single CEO/CTO I've met of a company that makes money has a degree. Period.
If you want to counter that, please give examples.
So what if he doesn't have a bank account? Is it mandatory? No. it's not.
As for 'fees'... let me tell you a few things.
1) You can walk into the branch of the bank that the cheque is written against, and provide ID, and take ALL your money, they cannot charge you fees. You do not need an account. By law, they are bound to honor the cheque (which is simply an insturment instructing the bank to pay you the money)
2) He has a legit complaint against paypal. They should NOT need to know who they are doing business with; that is not a requirement of business.
3) How can you operate a money trasnfer operation? Through security. How do you think anonymous swiss numbered accounts work? Same thing here. The account belongs to whoever has that paypal ID and password... get it?
4) It's not a basic request. Paypal has screwed up before; Why should paypal require either his credit card number or my bank account number if I never plan to use either with them? WHat he's saying is that they do not NEED either of these things to provide him with the service he wants. He doesn't use them. Furthermore, if paypal merely wants to verify who he is, there are other ways to do this other than requesting his bank account/credit card.
You, sir, are the perfect consumer.
You say 'the old myth is not true'.
Last year's usenix survey shows it to be VERY true.
Companies will not put you into upper management positions if you do not have a degree. period.
Companies will not generally promote you to management positions, (ie: CIO, Director of IT, etc) if you don't have a degree in *something*.
It's not at all about what you learned in the degree; it's the perception by the rest of the world.
CCIE is great, it will get you fantastic work, but it won't get you respect from venture capitalists and a board of directors who want to put someone in charge, unfortunately.