But your wages aren't keeping up with bills/inflation/whatever.
Um...the cost of living is (officially) down. Matter of fact, that's been the source of a minor political argument: people whining that they deserve an automatic raise in their SS cheques despite the fact that the cost of living has gone down since last year.
I'm glad to hear that.
I'll be sure to inform my bank, grocery store, electric company, oil company, and gas company. I'm sure they'll be happy to comply with the government order to reduce my cost of living.
Meanwhile, in the world I live in, I haven't received a raise in multiple years. My bills, however, have gone up. And, again, I'll point out that I'm not the only one in this situation.
Sure, whatever numbers the government crunches for its Social Security department show the cost of living has gone down on average - that's great. But that doesn't necessarily reflect the reality of the situation for many (most?) people.
You think these pilots are the only ones being squeezed to the point where people are in danger?
How many of those trucks on the highway are actually being driven by folks who've gotten enough sleep? How many of them are being driven by folks who are pushing through the night on caffeine so that they can deliver their load sooner and pick up the next one, for more money?
How many doctors and/or nurses are working extra shifts because there aren't enough warm bodies to go around?
How many food inspectors are saying "eh, it's good enough" just so they can get out the door and off to the next inspection?
There is a very real squeeze being put on pretty much anyone and everyone who works for a living. Maybe the guy down at GameStop is unlikely to have anyone's life in his hands... But I bet he's overworked and underpaid the same as the rest of us. And it does take a toll. Maybe the worst some Wal-Mart employee can do is ring something up the wrong way... But I bet a tired electrician can do some serious damage when he's wiring a light in your bathroom.
How many of those "human error" stories you see on the news can be attributed to overworked, tired, stressed-out people?
Sure, in theory it sounds good, just stand up to the management. Tell them you don't have time to do their training because they work you too hard. Tell them you won't do it in your free time. Tell them you expect to actually be paid for your work. Sounds great.
Except that you've got a wife, and a kid, and a mortgage... And the job market is looking pretty crappy right now... How quick do you think your boss could replace you with someone who is willing to do the training in their free time? How quick do you think you could replace your paycheck with something comparable?
This isn't an isolated problem. We're not talking about a single employer asking a single employee to squeeze in a little extra productivity. It is happening across-the-board.
When I first started working at Electronics Boutique years ago, I worked an 8-hour shift with 30 minutes break in there. I showed up at 9:00, worked 'til 5:00, and could take either a single 30-minute break or a couple 15-minute breaks. And I got paid for them.
After a couple years they changed their policies - had you clock out for your breaks. Which meant that you either worked 9-5 with no breaks... Or you worked 8:45-5:15 (or some variation on that) and took a couple breaks.
A little while later, they added a new start-of-shift procedure... You had a daily newsletter with promotions and notes and updates. You were required to know the information on this newsletter every day. There was a very real possibility that you'd get a call from management and be quizzed on it. You were not allowed to read this newsletter while you were clocked in and working, it was supposed to be done before your shift started. So then I was working 8:30-5:15 - a full 45 minutes extra taken out of my day that I was not paid for.
Sure, I could have told my boss to shove it. Could have quit or whatever. They would have replaced me within a day. I could probably have found a new job fairly quickly... Maybe... Depending on the season, and who was hiring... But I probably would have been starting over again at minimum wage. And that new boss would probably want me to clock out for my breaks too. So I would not have benefited in any way, except maybe by getting a bit of frustration out.
This all seems to be true, in general, of most industries these days.
Folks are generally expected to work longer than 40 hours, but not actually compensated for it. Your workload will virtually necessitate coming into the office early, or working through lunch, or staying late... They'll roll out new procedures or tools or toys, but there's no time allotted for training - you're expected to learn it before or after actual work hours. And the pay for those 40 hours that you are compensated for, is going down. Maybe not literally... Maybe you didn't actually take a pay cut (though plenty of people are)... But your wages aren't keeping up with bills/inflation/whatever.
This isn't only true in the airline industry. I'm seeing it in my own little corner of the IT world - not just my own job and work hours, but those of my co-workers as well.
Democracy fails because everyone gets to vote - including the lazy idiots who have absolutely no idea who or what they're voting for. Democracy requires an informed populace in order to work. Our populace doesn't care enough to be informed.
In a world without such authorities, the success of companies would be measured solely by their ability to provide the best service to their customers.
Wrong.
Governments are 100% necessary for the functioning of a healthy society. You ever read The Jungle? Ever hear the term snake oil? There's a reason the FDA exists.
Companies are not concerned about the well-being of society, they're concerned with making money. A business will do whatever it can to make money. Without restraints or regulations, a business can be downright harmful to a society.
Without artificial restrictions, such as patents or copyrights, there'd never be an opportunity for a company not to try to improve their services. A popular argument against removing patent and copyright laws is that a company has to invest significant amounts of time and money in inventing new products (such as medicine in this article's context) and that the patent would allow them to make profit out of their investment. I believe, that if a certain product really requires years of exclusive research it also isn't possible for competing companies to copy in a timeframe that wouldn't allow for the original inventor to gain reasonable profit. Nevertheless, if another company is able to provide better selling service regarding another company's invention, why not allow it? After all, we should be concerned about mankind's collective well-being and not the profit of select companies.
Patents and copyrights are a sticky subject, especially here on Slashdot. In some cases, they seem kind of silly - like patenting a new gene sequence you discovered in a critter, or patenting a software algorithm. In other cases, like drugs, they make more sense.
Developing a drug requires literally years research and costs literally millions of dollars. Then you've got a few more years and millions of dollars to get through FDA testing.
Once you've developed a drug, however, it's a very simple process to manufacture it. You're just combining chemicals and compounds in vats and then shaping it into pills or packaging it in bottles. Once someone's done all the work to develop a drug, anyone (with the right factory) can take that formula and easily mass-produce it.
If there was absolutely no patent protection for drug companies, there'd be absolutely no reason for them to do any R&D. Why would they spend multiple millions of dollars to develop a drug; only to have the competition take their formula and start manufacturing the same thing without all those dollars spent in R&D?
Do you go out of your way to find the way in which you can legally give the government the most possible tax revenue?
No... I don't make much money, and I've got a couple dependents... So I'm not really trying very hard to pay more than they ask me to... But I also don't put much time and effort into paying less than they ask me to either. I know most people try to find as many loopholes and deductions as they can, which is maybe what you're aiming for... But I don't think most people report their income in an entirely different state to avoid paying taxes.
It is absurd to suggest that any public company not do the maximum they can to minimize their tax liability.
Ehhh... I guess it is true that a public company's first responsibility is to maximize the investment of its stockholders... Which minimizing tax liability will help accomplish... But you really think it is absurd to be surprised that a company would go this far?
The court system is funded by tax dollars. Microsoft uses the court system in Washington. But they don't like the prices that Washington courts charge (their taxes) so they decide to pay the courts in Nevada instead. Fine, maybe you can find enough loopholes and technicalities to make that legal... But how does that make sense?
You know, I like Apple's OS upgrade pricing much better than Microsoft's... When I upgrade to Windows 7 I'm going to pay Apple instead.
You obviously have an ax to grind with MS, and that's fine, but digging up this kind of garbage is ridiculous.
I don't personally have an axe to grind with Microsoft. I use their products every day and am reasonably happy with them. They get the job done, at least. And their products keep me employed. So, no, no axe to grind.
The same statements that you have made about MS can probably be made about 95% of the Fortune 500.
And if your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?
Since when is everybody else does it an acceptable argument?
The problem is that the system is being abused - not that Microsoft is committing the abuse. Of course if Fisher Price were dodging taxes we probably wouldn't see the story here on Slashdot, but that wouldn't make it a non-story or an ok thing to do.
"Nobody needs more than 640kbps." What is the cap your cable provider places on you?
I'm not sure, to be honest.
I don't believe I've seen any mention of a cap in any of the promotional materials or on the bill we get. There may be no cap... Or at least no official cap...
However, the way our service is, a cap is unnecessary.
We're signed up for 5 Mbps, but I've never seen more than 2 Mbps on any speed test. At least once a week we'll have some kind of Internet connectivity issues. Maybe it'll just blip and I'll have to reboot the modem... Maybe it'll go down for a couple hours... We used to have tons of DNS issues, which were never really resolved - I just stopped using their DNS servers. Every couple of months there'll be a major outage here. You'll have half the town without Internet, but if you call the 1-800 number they'll claim everything is fine. And eventually things will start working a day later. Sometimes random websites will be unavailable. I'll be able to bring up Slashdot from work (not on cable Internet) for example, but not from home.
If there was a real alternative we'd switch in a heartbeat.
Since when is 10 Mbit considered fast? That's pretty minimum.
Not around here it isn't.
I've got 5 Mbps cable Internet. The most they're offering around here is 10 Mbps. If you go with fiber, which isn't available unless you live right in the city, you can get over 10 Mbps... But the pricing is aimed more at business users. Their cheap home user plan is only 10 Mbps.
Actually I meant the entire lamp stack and I had never heard of yum it's not documented very well and the application yum is not exactly named "install-missing-software" is it. I went with windows XP and the wampserver installation. Works like a charm it installs itself and was trouble free.
You obviously didn't try too hard.
I'm by no means a *nix guru... I spend most of my time working on Windows machines... And the first thing I do when I sit down at a new computer is look for the mouse.
But it only takes about 60 seconds with a web browser to give you a very complete, concise answer. Seriously. It is literally the first result that comes up in Google. Complete, step-by-step instructions. You don't even need to know what yum is.
Im not surprised. I think we're going to find that as people start taking Win7 apart that its not too much different from Vista because Vista itself was pretty efficient to begin with. The Vista bashing was really unjustified and after you got over issues like old drivers, old hardware, and pre-SP1 UAC, you pretty much have Win7.
Vista had issues, no matter how you look at it.
The lead-up to Vista was just plain stupid. Microsoft was advertising it like the second coming. It's a freaking OS! If you do it right, people don't even notice the OS because it gets out of their way and lets them do their work. With Vista, Microsoft seemed to forget that their job wasn't to produce the single flashiest piece of software on the computer, but rather to make that computer run all the other software better.
The GUI was an improvement over XP - I never did like XP's Fisher Price colors. But that's really about it.
The driver update was probably necessary, especially with everything moving towards 64-bit finally, but it was handled poorly. I don't think Microsoft pushed hardware manufacturers hard enough. And they didn't do enough to accommodate old hardware. The rend result was a lot of broken hardware that just plain was not going to work.
The same thing happened with software. Microsoft really didn't push developers to fix their code, and didn't do much to accommodate old code, so you wound up with a bunch of broken code.
UAC was a joke. Yes, it got better. And in Win7 it is genuinely useful. But UAC, as it was at Vista launch, was a joke.
Then you had all the new DRM-y stuff bolted on to the OS, slowing things down. Remember the file copy/NIC/sound playback issues?
And the "Vista Capable" stickers... That was fun. Advertising computers as being able to run software that they couldn't actually run - good idea!
It may very well be that Win7 is simply Vista done right... But that simply means that Vista was done wrong in the first place, and Win7 is what they should have released a couple years ago.
While actual performance may not be faster, perceived performance almost certianly is. It "feels" snappier, seems to respond better, due to some optimizations in locking and in the graphics subsystem that allows visual feedback in one app to not be blocked or held up by work going on in another app.
That was one of the first things I noticed when I installed Win7.
Vista always felt sluggish. Even when things were working properly and I wasn't experiencing any problems, the entire OS just felt like molasses. There were minute pauses everywhere. Not enough to actually say this is taking longer than it did on XP... But it always felt like the OS was struggling to keep up with me.
With Win7, that hesitation is gone. Everything feels far more responsive. I don't know that I'm actually getting anything done any quicker... I don't know that anything is actually working better... But those minute hesitations are all gone, and the OS feels faster.
The military may be looking for a smaller packet size then IPv6 can offer. Think IPv4 with all of the cruft taken out. They might be able to get away with an even smaller address size then IPv4 since they have a finite number of things they want to connect. Ports seem to be a waste of bits, since you only ever use a few of those at a time. Shaving 10 bits off of the address and 10 bits off of the port would allow them to add security, prioritization, etc.
Some of these military data streams will be unreliable and every bit helps.
I believe the actual article indicates that it still has to be able to carry traditional IPv4 and IPv6 data... So I doubt if they're going to completely re-invent the wheel.
Sounds more like they want a new protocol to sit on top of IP... Maybe something to replace TCP and/or UDP? Maybe just bolting on some QoS and IPSEC in some documented, standardized way? Maybe a new multipurpose communication protocol to roll SMTP/HTTP/FTP/VOIP/whatever into one?
Agreed, actual threats of physical violence SHOULD be unlawful,,, but if you are threatening to kill someone, it doesn't really matter whether or not you are doing it online, does it? Making a law that ONLY applies to online behavior is assinine -- could she have printed the same statements out on paper and gotten away with it? Why is publishing them online any different?
That's my big problem with these laws.
We already have harassment/stalking/whatever laws on the books. If I punch you in the face, it's assault. It doesn't matter if I do it at school, or at the local GameStop, or at a grocery store. We don't need special laws for each building in the nation - we just say "this is assault."
Likewise, if I track your every movement for a week, snap pictures of you, film video of you, peek in your windows - it's stalking. Doesn't much matter if I'm doing it with a 35mm or a digital camera. Doesn't much matter if you're living in a trailer park or a fancy apartment. It's stalking.
If I won't leave you alone, call you constantly, send you annoying letters, leave notes on your car - it's harassment. Doesn't much matter if I type those notes on a typewriter, or if they're handwritten, or if I use recycle paper. Doesn't matter if I'm calling you from my cell phone or a pay phone. It's still harassment.
If I print lies about you in the local paper or run some ads or put up some signs it is libel. Again, it doesn't much matter if the sign is an 8.5x11 piece of paper I printed, or some nice cardboard thing the local printshop put together. It doesn't much matter if it's a free local paper, or a widely circulated periodical. It's still libel.
Why do we need special laws for the Internet? If I call you using Skype or some sort of VOIP is it no longer harassment? Does it magically become some other kind of criminal mischief because my voice is being transmitted over the Internet?
If I post lies about you on a message board is it no longer libel? Does the act of encoding those characters and transmitting them over a wire somehow change the nature of the offense? Are those no longer, technically, printed lies?
Why do we need special laws for forums and social networking sites? Why can't our existing laws be applied?
I think you're overstating your point. Unless you are saving your data in a truly useless format, having a practiced procedure for getting that data back into production only lets you get the data back up faster. We have one backup system in particular at my office - although we have never built a production machine from it, we do (manually and automatically) test the data to ensure that everything from production made it in. Will restoring that data be slow and sketchy? Sure. Is it fair to say that nobody will care if we have the data backed up? No.
The point isn't to have a practiced procedure that your technicians can run through with their eyes closed... The point is to actually test your backups and know whether they are working, whether the data is usable, and whether it is possible to get a production server up and running from that backup.
Most backups aren't going to be as easy as insert tape, walk away, come back to a working production server an hour later. Most backups will involve some kind of re-pointing or importing or configuration or whatever. That's kind of expected.
But if you never test your data, you don't know if there's anything being written to the tape (disk, cloud, whatever). Sure, the backup program (script, monkey, whatever) claims the task was completed successfully... But you don't know. The data could all be corrupt. Or you could have skipped some innocent-looking database that turns out to be truly essential. Or you might have re-named a directory since the backup was configured, and now you aren't getting something that you need.
The point is that you need to test your backups periodically.
For a/. geek, what does Windows 7 have that's *really* useful/desired/cool vs. Windows XP? Not trolling, just haven't had the time to install it/play with it yet.
I don't know that there's a whole lot of genuinely new stuff in Win7... It seems to me that Win7 is basically Vista done right. So, a lot of what Win7 does looks pretty similar to what Vista does... Except that Win7 works.
Compared to Vista, I've got better framerates in pretty much all my games. The system seems more stable and more responsive. Fewer weird issues/freezes/crashes. UAC is actually useful now - it isn't quite as blunt an instrument. It prompts for fewer things, and the things it prompts for actually make sense.
Compared to XP you've got a new GUI, which looks less like a Fisher Price toy and more like a piece of office furniture. You've got new hardware support, new driver architecture, new DirectX... You've got very uniform and mainstream 64-bit support.
Interesting... so its the natural scarcity of wood that makes books so valuable, not the content? Could have fooled me, given that a book of blank pages is siginifcantly cheaper that one already filled with content.
I would suggest that having an actual physical object - a book - is more valuable than a digital copy of the content. Largely because it is something that you can personally carry around and do with as you please. You don't have to worry about anyone revoking your license or anything like that.
I hate to break it to you, but physical items are already out as a way to make money. Yes, there are some niche things that don't follow the rule... but look at most anything... corn, building materials, fast food, computers. Face it, our economy is based on SERVICES. You don't grow your own food, you pay others to do it. You don't build your own house, you hire others to do it. You don't even cook your own food at least some of the time.
True... But once they've built my house I own a physical object. One that keeps the rain off of my head for years to come. One that I can eventually sell to another person. I may very well be paying another human being to build the house for me - but what I want is the house, not the building service. Those construction workers aren't going to keep me warm and dry - the house they build is.
Content (which you dismiss as IP) is what matters... not the medium. People value the story, not the form of expression. Nobody buys a computer without software because it would be useless without software... but the fact that you can do your accounting on computers doesn't mean you'd not have accounting without computers.
Again, I'm going to have to disagree.
People pay $20 for a CD, and $100 for a live performance of the same music. Yet that live performance only lasts a couple hours, and the CD can be played over and over again. By your logic the CD should be more valuable, but that simply isn't true.
Similarly, people will pay millions of dollars for an original painting, when they could have the exact same image digitally reproduced for pennies.
With ubiquitous cellular broadband practically everywhere (that matters) and phones with good web browsers in them, this is a solution looking for a problem.
Are you kidding me?
I saw this and thought hey, that could be handy!
I don't have cellular broadband. I can afford neither a subscription nor a device to use it.
Further, around here, cell coverage is spotty at best. There are large areas around here where I can't even make a phone call.
Not to mention some of the wiring closets I wind up in - in a basement, underground, with thick cement walls, and plenty of RF interference all around. Again, I'm lucky if I can make a phone call.
Granted, WikiPedia is unlikely to have any genuinely life-saving information on it... But it might be very handy to be able to look up reference materials in a basement, or out in one of the cell-less regions. Or, hell, just not to have to pay for a broadband plan to read WikiPedia on the go.
I hypothesized losing a minimum-wage job. I've had minimum-wage jobs. You're lucky if a minimum-wage job is enough to pay the bills.
And what about the people who did save... But just didn't save enough? Maybe they stashed away enough cash to last them six months or so... But with the economic downturn they suddenly find themselves unemployed for eight, nine, ten months or longer.
Or what if you thought you'd be clever and invested your savings. Yeah, I know, savings are supposed to be just that - savings. Not a source of income. But plenty of people fudge things a bit and put their savings to work in the market. But when the market tanks, your savings disappear as well.
Just saying you are supposed to save sounds great in theory... It's not so simple in practice.
"What do ya mean you can't give me a colon exam?" "You're only 25 - come back when you're 40." "But my dad died of colon cancer when he was only 24, and my brother got it when he was only in his thirties." "Too bad. The government has to cut costs."
Later I develop colon cancer at age 26. (This is based on an actual story from the UK where the "NICE" organization routinely denies preventative medicine, and a citizen developed cancer at a young age which could have been prevented.)
BTW -
- when I asked my HMO for a colon exam age 30, the doctor said it's not necessary but gave it to me anyway - only cost me $20. Who says HMOs are not customer friendly?
That's all well and good... But it doesn't really mean anything.
I'm sorry the anecdotal cancer victim didn't get his colonoscopy when he needed it. And I'm glad you did get one when you asked for it.
But here in the US we've got plenty of people of all ages who can't get any kind of medical treatment - regardless of whether they just want it or if they genuinely need it.
If you've got a million people who die because the waiting list is too long or because the manual says no colonoscopy until 40... And I've got a million people who die because they can't get treatment at all... I don't see where you're any worse off than I am.
A lot of the opponents of the current attempt to "reform" healthcare in the US like to point out these horrible tragedies from other countries with government-run medicine... But I'm just not impressed. We've got plenty of tragedies here on our own soil.
Bottom line is, unemployment is to fill in while you don't have a job. If you get money selling Avon, the farmer's market, or work as a musician, then you sorta have a job, don't you?
Maybe?
If I get fired from a minimum-wage 40 hour/week job, I'm out roughly $300/week.
If I can make $100/week selling Avon, or veggies at the farmer's market, or as a musician - I'm still not even making minimum wage.
I guess I'm not sure what the laws are regarding unemployment... It is entirely possible that any income at all is considered employment... But that hardly makes it right or sensible.
Seems to me that if the government considers roughly $300/week to be the minimum wage... Then anything less than $300/week should be considered some kind of unemployment. Or underemployment, if you'd prefer.
Regardless, it isn't enough money to live off of.
If you want to cut off the unemployment check because they're technically employed, that's fine... But if that crappy Avon income is all they've got, they're going to wind up on some other government benefit before too long - food stamps, or HUD, or something. Because that's just not enough money to live off of.
Of course, if you're making $1,000/week from Avon then there's absolutely no reason you should be getting unemployment of any kind... But that doesn't seem to be the case in this particular instance.
Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace? Good luck with that.
From the "but-you-can-never-leave dept?" More like from the "no-shit-sherlock" dept... Why on earth would a company allow customers to automatically populate another company's website with your data? What I've found with social media sites is that if you invest so much time into inserting your data into their site, you are going to be much less inclined to go to the same thing again and again on other websites. Even if you don't like the interface as much as you may like some other site, you may feel a bit lazy and stick around. Whereas if the company said "here you go, click this button to transfer your profile to !" people would be jumping ship all over the place and it would be much more difficult to retain customers.
I'm having a hard time even understanding what would move from Facebook into MySpace.
Are they just talking about moving your friends over? Wouldn't that be as simple as doing a screendump of your friends on Facebook, and then inviting them all on MySpace? Are they complaining that there's no automated way to do this?
Are they talking about moving your wall/posts/whatever over? Isn't there an API that lets you view a lot of that stuff from a client? Couldn't you use that API to pull that information into a file on your computer and then just copy & paste it onto MySpace?
It isn't like Facebook is somehow holding your personal information hostage or anything... You typed it in there to start with.
There might not be much point in switching from Facebook to MySpace if your friends don't use it... You'd have to completely rebuild your social network... But that isn't really Facebook's fault, now is it?
Prolific blogger and open source enthusiast Matt Asay ponders whether cloud computing may be the Hotel California of tech. It seems that data repositories in the form of Googles and Facebooks are very easy to dump data into, but can be quite difficult to move data between.
Mentioning Google specifically may not be terribly helpful with their Data Liberation Front project...
And with the APIs available for Twitter and Facebook it probably wouldn't be too hard to dump most of the important information to some kind of file.
Or is he talking more about the Amazon-type cloud stuff? But isn't that already fairly portable? Amazon is just running a pile of VMs running Linux/Windows/Apache/MySQL/whatever...
Granted, there's all sorts of hickups and loopholes and oddities with various hosted/cloud services right now... But I haven't seen anything any worse than the vendor lock-in you get with a lot of software you run on your very own hardware.
I do a lot of book reviews, I don't see that slowing down. I can't imagine anyone thinks book reviewers buy all those books, especially the ones they review before the book is publicly available. I also never imagined that movie reviewers paid to see the films they review, even though they didn't say it explicitly. Adding in some boilerplate about being given a ticket of the film or a review copy of the book isn't a big deal, so I don't care, but I don't think it is really necessary.
Anybody who reviews anything professionally - whether it is for a magazine or newspaper or website or blog or whatever - isn't paying for the stuff they're reviewing.
If it's something that isn't publicly available yet, there'll typically be some mention that AcmeCorp was nice enough to send over a demo model... If it's something that is currently available to the public there may not be a mention of where they got their review copy from, but I don't think anybody out there honestly believes this stuff is being purchased retail.
These professional reviewers might have to add some boilerplate to their articles... Or maybe the website will just add a page detailing their review policies and where the merchandise comes from... But the review process is going to be completely unchanged.
What I don't see this stopping is the people who get paid to comment in the discussions of those reviews. Or anything talking about various companies products. Who's going to take the time to try and figure out who all those people are and then prove the link between them and their employer?
Astroturfing is where this could potentially be useful...
If I go to NewEgg looking for a motherboard, I'm not at a professional review site. There's an assumption that the customer reviews come from real customers - not paid reviewers. I'm kind of assuming that they actually purchased the product for their use. And this is where paid shills cause damage. It's downright misleading.
But, as you point out, there isn't a good way to police this. There will be hundreds of reviews for any given product on NewEgg or Amazon... From hundreds of different people... Who is going to check each of those comments? How will you ensure that people are actually honestly reporting their affiliations and who paid for their products?
And then there's the question of just how far they're going to try to extend this...
If I comment on my blog that the seats in theater X are far nicer than those in theater Y, do I need to mention that I got the ticket to that last movie for free with my reward card at theater X? And if I don't, is theater Y going to be able to make my ISP shut down my website?
What about a comment made on a forum like this? If I were to post my $0.02 about a game that I'd gotten for free, and didn't fully disclose how I got the game, is someone going to be able to get my comments removed?
Or, perhaps, in order to facilitate proper enforcement we'll soon see a new law that requires every blog/username/account be associated with a real human being - verified by SSN or phone number or something.
Usually I wind up slaving the infected HDD to a known-good machine... Some combination of Spyware Doctor, Malwarebytes, Combofix, and Panda will usually remove enough of the infection to render it more-or-less harmless.
Then I'll boot into Safe Mode on the infected machine and re-run most of those scans.
Then I'll boot into Windows normally on the infected machine and re-run most of those scans.
That normally takes care of the infection... And it's a simple enough procedure that anyone here can do it. But some of the nastier infections require an awful lot of work.
For our clients that use roaming profiles and/or folder redirection to keep all their user data on a network location, it just isn't wroth the hassle. We simply reformat and reload. For the folks who won't do that, though, it's a pain in the ass. We'll easily spend the better part of the day working on a single computer.
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But your wages aren't keeping up with bills/inflation/whatever.
Um...the cost of living is (officially) down. Matter of fact, that's been the source of a minor political argument: people whining that they deserve an automatic raise in their SS cheques despite the fact that the cost of living has gone down since last year.
I'm glad to hear that.
I'll be sure to inform my bank, grocery store, electric company, oil company, and gas company. I'm sure they'll be happy to comply with the government order to reduce my cost of living.
Meanwhile, in the world I live in, I haven't received a raise in multiple years. My bills, however, have gone up. And, again, I'll point out that I'm not the only one in this situation.
Sure, whatever numbers the government crunches for its Social Security department show the cost of living has gone down on average - that's great. But that doesn't necessarily reflect the reality of the situation for many (most?) people.
Isn't it awesome that we don't have unions any more?
Seriously.
What the hell happened to unions?
Yes, I know some of them still exist... And I know some of them have become too big and unwieldy to do anyone any good...
But what the hell?!
You think these pilots are the only ones being squeezed to the point where people are in danger?
How many of those trucks on the highway are actually being driven by folks who've gotten enough sleep? How many of them are being driven by folks who are pushing through the night on caffeine so that they can deliver their load sooner and pick up the next one, for more money?
How many doctors and/or nurses are working extra shifts because there aren't enough warm bodies to go around?
How many food inspectors are saying "eh, it's good enough" just so they can get out the door and off to the next inspection?
There is a very real squeeze being put on pretty much anyone and everyone who works for a living. Maybe the guy down at GameStop is unlikely to have anyone's life in his hands... But I bet he's overworked and underpaid the same as the rest of us. And it does take a toll. Maybe the worst some Wal-Mart employee can do is ring something up the wrong way... But I bet a tired electrician can do some serious damage when he's wiring a light in your bathroom.
How many of those "human error" stories you see on the news can be attributed to overworked, tired, stressed-out people?
Sure, in theory it sounds good, just stand up to the management. Tell them you don't have time to do their training because they work you too hard. Tell them you won't do it in your free time. Tell them you expect to actually be paid for your work. Sounds great.
Except that you've got a wife, and a kid, and a mortgage... And the job market is looking pretty crappy right now... How quick do you think your boss could replace you with someone who is willing to do the training in their free time? How quick do you think you could replace your paycheck with something comparable?
This isn't an isolated problem. We're not talking about a single employer asking a single employee to squeeze in a little extra productivity. It is happening across-the-board.
When I first started working at Electronics Boutique years ago, I worked an 8-hour shift with 30 minutes break in there. I showed up at 9:00, worked 'til 5:00, and could take either a single 30-minute break or a couple 15-minute breaks. And I got paid for them.
After a couple years they changed their policies - had you clock out for your breaks. Which meant that you either worked 9-5 with no breaks... Or you worked 8:45-5:15 (or some variation on that) and took a couple breaks.
A little while later, they added a new start-of-shift procedure... You had a daily newsletter with promotions and notes and updates. You were required to know the information on this newsletter every day. There was a very real possibility that you'd get a call from management and be quizzed on it. You were not allowed to read this newsletter while you were clocked in and working, it was supposed to be done before your shift started. So then I was working 8:30-5:15 - a full 45 minutes extra taken out of my day that I was not paid for.
Sure, I could have told my boss to shove it. Could have quit or whatever. They would have replaced me within a day. I could probably have found a new job fairly quickly... Maybe... Depending on the season, and who was hiring... But I probably would have been starting over again at minimum wage. And that new boss would probably want me to clock out for my breaks too. So I would not have benefited in any way, except maybe by getting a bit of frustration out.
This all seems to be true, in general, of most industries these days.
Folks are generally expected to work longer than 40 hours, but not actually compensated for it. Your workload will virtually necessitate coming into the office early, or working through lunch, or staying late... They'll roll out new procedures or tools or toys, but there's no time allotted for training - you're expected to learn it before or after actual work hours. And the pay for those 40 hours that you are compensated for, is going down. Maybe not literally... Maybe you didn't actually take a pay cut (though plenty of people are)... But your wages aren't keeping up with bills/inflation/whatever.
This isn't only true in the airline industry. I'm seeing it in my own little corner of the IT world - not just my own job and work hours, but those of my co-workers as well.
This is exactly the reason democracy fails.
Democracy fails because everyone gets to vote - including the lazy idiots who have absolutely no idea who or what they're voting for. Democracy requires an informed populace in order to work. Our populace doesn't care enough to be informed.
In a world without such authorities, the success of companies would be measured solely by their ability to provide the best service to their customers.
Wrong.
Governments are 100% necessary for the functioning of a healthy society. You ever read The Jungle? Ever hear the term snake oil? There's a reason the FDA exists.
Companies are not concerned about the well-being of society, they're concerned with making money. A business will do whatever it can to make money. Without restraints or regulations, a business can be downright harmful to a society.
Without artificial restrictions, such as patents or copyrights, there'd never be an opportunity for a company not to try to improve their services. A popular argument against removing patent and copyright laws is that a company has to invest significant amounts of time and money in inventing new products (such as medicine in this article's context) and that the patent would allow them to make profit out of their investment. I believe, that if a certain product really requires years of exclusive research it also isn't possible for competing companies to copy in a timeframe that wouldn't allow for the original inventor to gain reasonable profit. Nevertheless, if another company is able to provide better selling service regarding another company's invention, why not allow it? After all, we should be concerned about mankind's collective well-being and not the profit of select companies.
Patents and copyrights are a sticky subject, especially here on Slashdot. In some cases, they seem kind of silly - like patenting a new gene sequence you discovered in a critter, or patenting a software algorithm. In other cases, like drugs, they make more sense.
Developing a drug requires literally years research and costs literally millions of dollars. Then you've got a few more years and millions of dollars to get through FDA testing.
Once you've developed a drug, however, it's a very simple process to manufacture it. You're just combining chemicals and compounds in vats and then shaping it into pills or packaging it in bottles. Once someone's done all the work to develop a drug, anyone (with the right factory) can take that formula and easily mass-produce it.
If there was absolutely no patent protection for drug companies, there'd be absolutely no reason for them to do any R&D. Why would they spend multiple millions of dollars to develop a drug; only to have the competition take their formula and start manufacturing the same thing without all those dollars spent in R&D?
Do you go out of your way to find the way in which you can legally give the government the most possible tax revenue?
No... I don't make much money, and I've got a couple dependents... So I'm not really trying very hard to pay more than they ask me to... But I also don't put much time and effort into paying less than they ask me to either. I know most people try to find as many loopholes and deductions as they can, which is maybe what you're aiming for... But I don't think most people report their income in an entirely different state to avoid paying taxes.
It is absurd to suggest that any public company not do the maximum they can to minimize their tax liability.
Ehhh... I guess it is true that a public company's first responsibility is to maximize the investment of its stockholders... Which minimizing tax liability will help accomplish... But you really think it is absurd to be surprised that a company would go this far?
The court system is funded by tax dollars. Microsoft uses the court system in Washington. But they don't like the prices that Washington courts charge (their taxes) so they decide to pay the courts in Nevada instead. Fine, maybe you can find enough loopholes and technicalities to make that legal... But how does that make sense?
You know, I like Apple's OS upgrade pricing much better than Microsoft's... When I upgrade to Windows 7 I'm going to pay Apple instead.
You obviously have an ax to grind with MS, and that's fine, but digging up this kind of garbage is ridiculous.
I don't personally have an axe to grind with Microsoft. I use their products every day and am reasonably happy with them. They get the job done, at least. And their products keep me employed. So, no, no axe to grind.
The same statements that you have made about MS can probably be made about 95% of the Fortune 500.
And if your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?
Since when is everybody else does it an acceptable argument?
The problem is that the system is being abused - not that Microsoft is committing the abuse. Of course if Fisher Price were dodging taxes we probably wouldn't see the story here on Slashdot, but that wouldn't make it a non-story or an ok thing to do.
>>>I've got 5 Mbps cable Internet.
"Nobody needs more than 640kbps." What is the cap your cable provider places on you?
I'm not sure, to be honest.
I don't believe I've seen any mention of a cap in any of the promotional materials or on the bill we get. There may be no cap... Or at least no official cap...
However, the way our service is, a cap is unnecessary.
We're signed up for 5 Mbps, but I've never seen more than 2 Mbps on any speed test. At least once a week we'll have some kind of Internet connectivity issues. Maybe it'll just blip and I'll have to reboot the modem... Maybe it'll go down for a couple hours... We used to have tons of DNS issues, which were never really resolved - I just stopped using their DNS servers. Every couple of months there'll be a major outage here. You'll have half the town without Internet, but if you call the 1-800 number they'll claim everything is fine. And eventually things will start working a day later. Sometimes random websites will be unavailable. I'll be able to bring up Slashdot from work (not on cable Internet) for example, but not from home.
If there was a real alternative we'd switch in a heartbeat.
Since when is 10 Mbit considered fast? That's pretty minimum.
Not around here it isn't.
I've got 5 Mbps cable Internet. The most they're offering around here is 10 Mbps. If you go with fiber, which isn't available unless you live right in the city, you can get over 10 Mbps... But the pricing is aimed more at business users. Their cheap home user plan is only 10 Mbps.
what exactly did you google, I couldn't even guess.
"redhat LAMP install"
Actually I meant the entire lamp stack and I had never heard of yum it's not documented very well and the application yum is not exactly named "install-missing-software" is it. I went with windows XP and the wampserver installation. Works like a charm it installs itself and was trouble free.
You obviously didn't try too hard.
I'm by no means a *nix guru... I spend most of my time working on Windows machines... And the first thing I do when I sit down at a new computer is look for the mouse.
But it only takes about 60 seconds with a web browser to give you a very complete, concise answer. Seriously. It is literally the first result that comes up in Google. Complete, step-by-step instructions. You don't even need to know what yum is.
Im not surprised. I think we're going to find that as people start taking Win7 apart that its not too much different from Vista because Vista itself was pretty efficient to begin with. The Vista bashing was really unjustified and after you got over issues like old drivers, old hardware, and pre-SP1 UAC, you pretty much have Win7.
Vista had issues, no matter how you look at it.
The lead-up to Vista was just plain stupid. Microsoft was advertising it like the second coming. It's a freaking OS! If you do it right, people don't even notice the OS because it gets out of their way and lets them do their work. With Vista, Microsoft seemed to forget that their job wasn't to produce the single flashiest piece of software on the computer, but rather to make that computer run all the other software better.
The GUI was an improvement over XP - I never did like XP's Fisher Price colors. But that's really about it.
The driver update was probably necessary, especially with everything moving towards 64-bit finally, but it was handled poorly. I don't think Microsoft pushed hardware manufacturers hard enough. And they didn't do enough to accommodate old hardware. The rend result was a lot of broken hardware that just plain was not going to work.
The same thing happened with software. Microsoft really didn't push developers to fix their code, and didn't do much to accommodate old code, so you wound up with a bunch of broken code.
UAC was a joke. Yes, it got better. And in Win7 it is genuinely useful. But UAC, as it was at Vista launch, was a joke.
Then you had all the new DRM-y stuff bolted on to the OS, slowing things down. Remember the file copy/NIC/sound playback issues?
And the "Vista Capable" stickers... That was fun. Advertising computers as being able to run software that they couldn't actually run - good idea!
It may very well be that Win7 is simply Vista done right... But that simply means that Vista was done wrong in the first place, and Win7 is what they should have released a couple years ago.
While actual performance may not be faster, perceived performance almost certianly is. It "feels" snappier, seems to respond better, due to some optimizations in locking and in the graphics subsystem that allows visual feedback in one app to not be blocked or held up by work going on in another app.
That was one of the first things I noticed when I installed Win7.
Vista always felt sluggish. Even when things were working properly and I wasn't experiencing any problems, the entire OS just felt like molasses. There were minute pauses everywhere. Not enough to actually say this is taking longer than it did on XP... But it always felt like the OS was struggling to keep up with me.
With Win7, that hesitation is gone. Everything feels far more responsive. I don't know that I'm actually getting anything done any quicker... I don't know that anything is actually working better... But those minute hesitations are all gone, and the OS feels faster.
The military may be looking for a smaller packet size then IPv6 can offer. Think IPv4 with all of the cruft taken out. They might be able to get away with an even smaller address size then IPv4 since they have a finite number of things they want to connect. Ports seem to be a waste of bits, since you only ever use a few of those at a time. Shaving 10 bits off of the address and 10 bits off of the port would allow them to add security, prioritization, etc.
Some of these military data streams will be unreliable and every bit helps.
I believe the actual article indicates that it still has to be able to carry traditional IPv4 and IPv6 data... So I doubt if they're going to completely re-invent the wheel.
Sounds more like they want a new protocol to sit on top of IP... Maybe something to replace TCP and/or UDP? Maybe just bolting on some QoS and IPSEC in some documented, standardized way? Maybe a new multipurpose communication protocol to roll SMTP/HTTP/FTP/VOIP/whatever into one?
Agreed, actual threats of physical violence SHOULD be unlawful,,, but if you are threatening to kill someone, it doesn't really matter whether or not you are doing it online, does it? Making a law that ONLY applies to online behavior is assinine -- could she have printed the same statements out on paper and gotten away with it? Why is publishing them online any different?
That's my big problem with these laws.
We already have harassment/stalking/whatever laws on the books. If I punch you in the face, it's assault. It doesn't matter if I do it at school, or at the local GameStop, or at a grocery store. We don't need special laws for each building in the nation - we just say "this is assault."
Likewise, if I track your every movement for a week, snap pictures of you, film video of you, peek in your windows - it's stalking. Doesn't much matter if I'm doing it with a 35mm or a digital camera. Doesn't much matter if you're living in a trailer park or a fancy apartment. It's stalking.
If I won't leave you alone, call you constantly, send you annoying letters, leave notes on your car - it's harassment. Doesn't much matter if I type those notes on a typewriter, or if they're handwritten, or if I use recycle paper. Doesn't matter if I'm calling you from my cell phone or a pay phone. It's still harassment.
If I print lies about you in the local paper or run some ads or put up some signs it is libel. Again, it doesn't much matter if the sign is an 8.5x11 piece of paper I printed, or some nice cardboard thing the local printshop put together. It doesn't much matter if it's a free local paper, or a widely circulated periodical. It's still libel.
Why do we need special laws for the Internet? If I call you using Skype or some sort of VOIP is it no longer harassment? Does it magically become some other kind of criminal mischief because my voice is being transmitted over the Internet?
If I post lies about you on a message board is it no longer libel? Does the act of encoding those characters and transmitting them over a wire somehow change the nature of the offense? Are those no longer, technically, printed lies?
Why do we need special laws for forums and social networking sites? Why can't our existing laws be applied?
I think you're overstating your point. Unless you are saving your data in a truly useless format, having a practiced procedure for getting that data back into production only lets you get the data back up faster. We have one backup system in particular at my office - although we have never built a production machine from it, we do (manually and automatically) test the data to ensure that everything from production made it in. Will restoring that data be slow and sketchy? Sure. Is it fair to say that nobody will care if we have the data backed up? No.
The point isn't to have a practiced procedure that your technicians can run through with their eyes closed... The point is to actually test your backups and know whether they are working, whether the data is usable, and whether it is possible to get a production server up and running from that backup.
Most backups aren't going to be as easy as insert tape, walk away, come back to a working production server an hour later. Most backups will involve some kind of re-pointing or importing or configuration or whatever. That's kind of expected.
But if you never test your data, you don't know if there's anything being written to the tape (disk, cloud, whatever). Sure, the backup program (script, monkey, whatever) claims the task was completed successfully... But you don't know. The data could all be corrupt. Or you could have skipped some innocent-looking database that turns out to be truly essential. Or you might have re-named a directory since the backup was configured, and now you aren't getting something that you need.
The point is that you need to test your backups periodically.
For a /. geek, what does Windows 7 have that's *really* useful/desired/cool vs. Windows XP? Not trolling, just haven't had the time to install it/play with it yet.
I don't know that there's a whole lot of genuinely new stuff in Win7... It seems to me that Win7 is basically Vista done right. So, a lot of what Win7 does looks pretty similar to what Vista does... Except that Win7 works.
Compared to Vista, I've got better framerates in pretty much all my games. The system seems more stable and more responsive. Fewer weird issues/freezes/crashes. UAC is actually useful now - it isn't quite as blunt an instrument. It prompts for fewer things, and the things it prompts for actually make sense.
Compared to XP you've got a new GUI, which looks less like a Fisher Price toy and more like a piece of office furniture. You've got new hardware support, new driver architecture, new DirectX... You've got very uniform and mainstream 64-bit support.
Interesting... so its the natural scarcity of wood that makes books so valuable, not the content? Could have fooled me, given that a book of blank pages is siginifcantly cheaper that one already filled with content.
I would suggest that having an actual physical object - a book - is more valuable than a digital copy of the content. Largely because it is something that you can personally carry around and do with as you please. You don't have to worry about anyone revoking your license or anything like that.
I hate to break it to you, but physical items are already out as a way to make money. Yes, there are some niche things that don't follow the rule... but look at most anything... corn, building materials, fast food, computers. Face it, our economy is based on SERVICES. You don't grow your own food, you pay others to do it. You don't build your own house, you hire others to do it. You don't even cook your own food at least some of the time.
True... But once they've built my house I own a physical object. One that keeps the rain off of my head for years to come. One that I can eventually sell to another person. I may very well be paying another human being to build the house for me - but what I want is the house, not the building service. Those construction workers aren't going to keep me warm and dry - the house they build is.
Content (which you dismiss as IP) is what matters... not the medium. People value the story, not the form of expression. Nobody buys a computer without software because it would be useless without software... but the fact that you can do your accounting on computers doesn't mean you'd not have accounting without computers.
Again, I'm going to have to disagree.
People pay $20 for a CD, and $100 for a live performance of the same music. Yet that live performance only lasts a couple hours, and the CD can be played over and over again. By your logic the CD should be more valuable, but that simply isn't true.
Similarly, people will pay millions of dollars for an original painting, when they could have the exact same image digitally reproduced for pennies.
The medium is very important.
With ubiquitous cellular broadband practically everywhere (that matters) and phones with good web browsers in them, this is a solution looking for a problem.
Are you kidding me?
I saw this and thought hey, that could be handy!
I don't have cellular broadband. I can afford neither a subscription nor a device to use it.
Further, around here, cell coverage is spotty at best. There are large areas around here where I can't even make a phone call.
Not to mention some of the wiring closets I wind up in - in a basement, underground, with thick cement walls, and plenty of RF interference all around. Again, I'm lucky if I can make a phone call.
Granted, WikiPedia is unlikely to have any genuinely life-saving information on it... But it might be very handy to be able to look up reference materials in a basement, or out in one of the cell-less regions. Or, hell, just not to have to pay for a broadband plan to read WikiPedia on the go.
Regardless, it isn't enough money to live off of.
That is why you are supposed to save.
I hypothesized losing a minimum-wage job. I've had minimum-wage jobs. You're lucky if a minimum-wage job is enough to pay the bills.
And what about the people who did save... But just didn't save enough? Maybe they stashed away enough cash to last them six months or so... But with the economic downturn they suddenly find themselves unemployed for eight, nine, ten months or longer.
Or what if you thought you'd be clever and invested your savings. Yeah, I know, savings are supposed to be just that - savings. Not a source of income. But plenty of people fudge things a bit and put their savings to work in the market. But when the market tanks, your savings disappear as well.
Just saying you are supposed to save sounds great in theory... It's not so simple in practice.
"What do ya mean you can't give me a colon exam?"
"You're only 25 - come back when you're 40."
"But my dad died of colon cancer when he was only 24, and my brother got it when he was only in his thirties."
"Too bad. The government has to cut costs."
Later I develop colon cancer at age 26. (This is based on an actual story from the UK where the "NICE" organization routinely denies preventative medicine, and a citizen developed cancer at a young age which could have been prevented.)
BTW -
- when I asked my HMO for a colon exam age 30, the doctor said it's not necessary but gave it to me anyway - only cost me $20. Who says HMOs are not customer friendly?
That's all well and good... But it doesn't really mean anything.
I'm sorry the anecdotal cancer victim didn't get his colonoscopy when he needed it. And I'm glad you did get one when you asked for it.
But here in the US we've got plenty of people of all ages who can't get any kind of medical treatment - regardless of whether they just want it or if they genuinely need it.
If you've got a million people who die because the waiting list is too long or because the manual says no colonoscopy until 40... And I've got a million people who die because they can't get treatment at all... I don't see where you're any worse off than I am.
A lot of the opponents of the current attempt to "reform" healthcare in the US like to point out these horrible tragedies from other countries with government-run medicine... But I'm just not impressed. We've got plenty of tragedies here on our own soil.
Bottom line is, unemployment is to fill in while you don't have a job. If you get money selling Avon, the farmer's market, or work as a musician, then you sorta have a job, don't you?
Maybe?
If I get fired from a minimum-wage 40 hour/week job, I'm out roughly $300/week.
If I can make $100/week selling Avon, or veggies at the farmer's market, or as a musician - I'm still not even making minimum wage.
I guess I'm not sure what the laws are regarding unemployment... It is entirely possible that any income at all is considered employment... But that hardly makes it right or sensible.
Seems to me that if the government considers roughly $300/week to be the minimum wage... Then anything less than $300/week should be considered some kind of unemployment. Or underemployment, if you'd prefer.
Regardless, it isn't enough money to live off of.
If you want to cut off the unemployment check because they're technically employed, that's fine... But if that crappy Avon income is all they've got, they're going to wind up on some other government benefit before too long - food stamps, or HUD, or something. Because that's just not enough money to live off of.
Of course, if you're making $1,000/week from Avon then there's absolutely no reason you should be getting unemployment of any kind... But that doesn't seem to be the case in this particular instance.
Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace? Good luck with that.
From the "but-you-can-never-leave dept?" More like from the "no-shit-sherlock" dept... Why on earth would a company allow customers to automatically populate another company's website with your data? What I've found with social media sites is that if you invest so much time into inserting your data into their site, you are going to be much less inclined to go to the same thing again and again on other websites. Even if you don't like the interface as much as you may like some other site, you may feel a bit lazy and stick around. Whereas if the company said "here you go, click this button to transfer your profile to !" people would be jumping ship all over the place and it would be much more difficult to retain customers.
I'm having a hard time even understanding what would move from Facebook into MySpace.
Are they just talking about moving your friends over? Wouldn't that be as simple as doing a screendump of your friends on Facebook, and then inviting them all on MySpace? Are they complaining that there's no automated way to do this?
Are they talking about moving your wall/posts/whatever over? Isn't there an API that lets you view a lot of that stuff from a client? Couldn't you use that API to pull that information into a file on your computer and then just copy & paste it onto MySpace?
It isn't like Facebook is somehow holding your personal information hostage or anything... You typed it in there to start with.
There might not be much point in switching from Facebook to MySpace if your friends don't use it... You'd have to completely rebuild your social network... But that isn't really Facebook's fault, now is it?
I guess I'm just not seeing the lock-in here.
Prolific blogger and open source enthusiast Matt Asay ponders whether cloud computing may be the Hotel California of tech. It seems that data repositories in the form of Googles and Facebooks are very easy to dump data into, but can be quite difficult to move data between.
Mentioning Google specifically may not be terribly helpful with their Data Liberation Front project...
And with the APIs available for Twitter and Facebook it probably wouldn't be too hard to dump most of the important information to some kind of file.
Or is he talking more about the Amazon-type cloud stuff? But isn't that already fairly portable? Amazon is just running a pile of VMs running Linux/Windows/Apache/MySQL/whatever...
Granted, there's all sorts of hickups and loopholes and oddities with various hosted/cloud services right now... But I haven't seen anything any worse than the vendor lock-in you get with a lot of software you run on your very own hardware.
I don't see this solving any problems at all.
I do a lot of book reviews, I don't see that slowing down. I can't imagine anyone thinks book reviewers buy all those books, especially the ones they review before the book is publicly available. I also never imagined that movie reviewers paid to see the films they review, even though they didn't say it explicitly. Adding in some boilerplate about being given a ticket of the film or a review copy of the book isn't a big deal, so I don't care, but I don't think it is really necessary.
Anybody who reviews anything professionally - whether it is for a magazine or newspaper or website or blog or whatever - isn't paying for the stuff they're reviewing.
If it's something that isn't publicly available yet, there'll typically be some mention that AcmeCorp was nice enough to send over a demo model... If it's something that is currently available to the public there may not be a mention of where they got their review copy from, but I don't think anybody out there honestly believes this stuff is being purchased retail.
These professional reviewers might have to add some boilerplate to their articles... Or maybe the website will just add a page detailing their review policies and where the merchandise comes from... But the review process is going to be completely unchanged.
What I don't see this stopping is the people who get paid to comment in the discussions of those reviews. Or anything talking about various companies products. Who's going to take the time to try and figure out who all those people are and then prove the link between them and their employer?
Astroturfing is where this could potentially be useful...
If I go to NewEgg looking for a motherboard, I'm not at a professional review site. There's an assumption that the customer reviews come from real customers - not paid reviewers. I'm kind of assuming that they actually purchased the product for their use. And this is where paid shills cause damage. It's downright misleading.
But, as you point out, there isn't a good way to police this. There will be hundreds of reviews for any given product on NewEgg or Amazon... From hundreds of different people... Who is going to check each of those comments? How will you ensure that people are actually honestly reporting their affiliations and who paid for their products?
And then there's the question of just how far they're going to try to extend this...
If I comment on my blog that the seats in theater X are far nicer than those in theater Y, do I need to mention that I got the ticket to that last movie for free with my reward card at theater X? And if I don't, is theater Y going to be able to make my ISP shut down my website?
What about a comment made on a forum like this? If I were to post my $0.02 about a game that I'd gotten for free, and didn't fully disclose how I got the game, is someone going to be able to get my comments removed?
Or, perhaps, in order to facilitate proper enforcement we'll soon see a new law that requires every blog/username/account be associated with a real human being - verified by SSN or phone number or something.
Usually I wind up slaving the infected HDD to a known-good machine... Some combination of Spyware Doctor, Malwarebytes, Combofix, and Panda will usually remove enough of the infection to render it more-or-less harmless.
Then I'll boot into Safe Mode on the infected machine and re-run most of those scans.
Then I'll boot into Windows normally on the infected machine and re-run most of those scans.
That normally takes care of the infection... And it's a simple enough procedure that anyone here can do it. But some of the nastier infections require an awful lot of work.
For our clients that use roaming profiles and/or folder redirection to keep all their user data on a network location, it just isn't wroth the hassle. We simply reformat and reload. For the folks who won't do that, though, it's a pain in the ass. We'll easily spend the better part of the day working on a single computer.