Are kid growing up too fast nowadays because of them new-fangled technologies?
No, they're growing up too fast (and often in unhealthy ways) because of poor parenting and poor education systems.
It is not rocket science that a child left unsupervised with an unrestricted TV, Internet-enabled computer and PlayStation n in their bedroom is likely to spend an unhealthy amount of time in front of a screen, and come into contact with less than suitable material for someone their age. The also-not-rocket-science solution to this problem is... not to give kids all the toys and the chance to use them unsupervised all the time.
Likewise, it's easy to let the kids buy junk food on the way to and from school, and to eat school meals with poor nutritional value and drink soda, and then to throw a quick microwave meal or frozen pizza in for dinner. And then we wonder why more of our kids are seriously overweight and developing health problems than any time in recent history. The revolutionary solution to this is... giving kids real food and drink at meal times.
Of course, it's much easier for parents to leave little Jonny and Suzy to play with their hi-tech toys and then cook them frozen pizza for dinner than it is to take an active part in their upbringing by, I dunno, talking to them, reading to them, having dinner with them, and taking them to see and do interetsing things. The work-life balance in many western countries is now so far left of stupid that many parents see the easy option as the only option, however.
Similarly, one has to wonder at "education" systems that spend more time worrying about whether 7-year-olds can pass formal examinations than worrying about 7-year-olds learning to interact with other 7-year-olds, make friends, and play together. And yet, this is exactly where we're headed.
Society needs a wake-up call, particularly if it thinks it's worked this one out. Hi-tech toys are just the symptom, not the cause of the problem.
Indeed, Fortran is one of the few other languages that's in the game. Whether it's still ahead of C++ on raw performance grounds is a bit of a moot point these days. Some class and template wizardry in C++ libraries now means heavily optimised data structures and basic algorithms are available, which negates a lot of Fortran's native array advantage. Also, things like the F2C conversion library now allow important Fortran-based libraries like BLAS and LAPACK to be built natively on C++ with all the optimised algorithms still available. I expect Fortran still has a significant edge on highly parallel architectures, where C++ isn't exactly geared up for powerful optimisations, but for anything more desktop-based, it's probably much closer.
I'd go for "identity theft", personally. It's pretty accurate, but also sounds like Something We Should Fear(TM), as opposed to "pretexting", which sounds Naughty But Only A Little Bit(TM).
You're absolutely right. Java and C++ are different tools, with different strengths and weaknesses. Attempting to compare them like-for-like is meaningless, as is making general statments about which language is "better".
If you want to do serious mathematical modelling, for example, you have a pretty limited selection of languages available. Most of them start with "C". Most of the others start with "M" and are written in languages starting with "C".
On the other hand, for CGI, most of the languages I use start with "P". I wouldn't dream of trying to write a database-backed web-page generator in C++, because I could have written the whole thing in Perl or PHP by the time I'd worked out how to link in the right libraries for C++.
Java seems to have found the (rather large) niche of developing back-end, "business" applications (i.e., database apps). Again, I probably wouldn't choose to use C++ there, since Java already has loads of pre-supplied functionality, and perhaps as importantly, a whole community of developers with experience in the field.
As the parent says, it's all about picking the right tool for the job. Most of us have succumbed to language holy wars in the past, and hopefully most of us have since outgrown them.
Interestingly, they have also all found the solution to the extensibility problem: modularization. Indeed, MS Office macros, Mozilla plugins, and Linux kernel modules are all popular ways to add functionality, and they work reasonably well.
Indeed they do, but I doubt modular design is the holy grail of software development. Right now, as you observe yourself, most of the extension is small-scale and built on large-scale foundations. In that context, it seems to work reasonably well. However, as we move to using more modular designs for even larger applications, I predict that this approach will exhibit problems of its own.
Consider repositories like Perl's CPAN, TeX's CTAN, or the Mozilla extensions system, where in each case anyone can submit useful modules. CPAN offers many handy tools, but there is a huge amount of duplication in some areas. CTAN offers modules to do almost anything you want in LaTeX, but in reality, module authors take careful note of any other, potentially interacting modules, and make major allowances in their code to keep things compatible (most of the time). There are so many "web developer" extensions for Firefox that I imagine we'll have an extension to view them all before long, though only a handful provide solid, meaty functionality that isn't trivially available to most developers anyway.
This is the, perhaps inevitable, result of distributed development in a modular framework. Without any central leadership and oversight, duplication of effort is commonplace and compatibility concerns grow exponentially. Loopholes start to appear, and with them bugs, security flaws, usability issues....
Obviously there are pros and cons to both a centralised, monolithic project and a distributed, modular approach. The trick, as always, is in trying to maximise the benefits of a hybrid approach while minimising the weaknesses. There may be incremental improvements, as we see with some of the better OSS projects, but for the most part they're evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Now, if you want revolutionary change, I think we need qualitatively better tools to support the development process, and we're not very good at building those yet. And even when we are, other aspects of the development process will need work to catch up. As the man said, there are no silver bullets.
How can hackers, scattered across the globe, working for no pay, linked only by the net and shared values, apparently outperform the smartest software company on the planet?
In the same sentence, the author managed to confuse "richest" with "smartest" as well. I'm not very impressed with this article.
It's not like there's one absolute "smartest software company on the planet", but if there were, Microsoft would probably have a pretty good claim on the title. In terms of their developers, they have a lot of very smart people in the business working for them. In terms of business, they are one of the most successful companies on the planet. You might not like them, but I don't see how you can deny that they're smart by any relevant standard.
Well, I can't really speak for the US legislature, but as a practising web geek, I've been under the impression for a long time (and so have several of the more respectable discussion groups on-line) that this was expected, and it was just a matter of time before someone flagrantly broke the rules and got called on it.
No, the truly insidious thing is the lack of outrage from the muslims towards the terrorists. The silence is deafening.
That's strange, because I seem to recall prominent members of the UK's Islamic community condemning the various terrorist attacks publicly and in no uncertain terms, and of course some of those terrorist attacks claimed Muslim lives. Perhaps you simply prefer to believe that all Muslims are alike, because then it's easier to overlook the overt religious discrimination that's currently undermining our country?
As for the copyright violations - that is a tough one. The copyright to an email and a jpeg rests with the author. However this was published and in such a fashion that it might actually be public domain.
How on earth does sending a private mail constitute publication?
In the USA one must register the copyright prior to publishing and if this is not done the copyright becomes imperfect and as such enters limbo. (IANAL but I have researched this).
I'd like to see your research, then, because AFAIK that hasn't been the situation in the US for many years now, and never was the situation in some jurisdictions.
If you're in the UK, then unless something's changed fairly recently, the fact that you were turned down shouldn't appear on the report. It should only indicate that a check was made. You don't want to have a whole string of checks listed in rapid succession, for obvious reasons, but a single extra check could be anything and shouldn't count against you.
That said, the last time I checked my credit report (also after someone else's screw-up affected my ability to do something) it was a joke, with probably more inaccurate records than accurate ones, and the attitude of the credit agency when I called to get it fixed was similarly unimpressive.
Also, if your credit report has been damaged because O2 made a mistake, you should ask O2 to remove the relevant details from the report. Failing that, you can (yourself) add an explanatory note to the report. That's not ideal, because automated systems won't understand it, but again, unless things have changed fairly recently, you're allowed by law to compel any business that makes automated decisions based on your credit report to undertake a manual review of those decisions by a real person who can see the notes.
Isn't it odd how the usual data protection principles don't seem to apply to the credit reference agencies? (I'm not aware of any legal reason why they shouldn't, but they certainly seem to be violated with remarkable frequency and little consequence.)
I'm sorry you've been moderated as trolling, because I think your post was pretty much bang on target. In particular:
I'd rather have a 0.00000001% chance of being blown up by terrorist events organized by the government, than to live under the draconian restrictions on freedom the same government pushes allegedly in response to those said terrorist events.
While your probability seems a little optimistic, your point seems fair enough to me.
I was supposed to be flying off on holiday for a long weekend next weekend, which would have been the first time I'd flown since I was a young child. I was looking forward to the experience, and my other half (a frequent traveller) had taken months to talk me into getting a passport and so on.
The problem is the restrictions and extra security recently introduced at UK airports to prevent us from yet another hypothetical attack based on "new" threat that had been known for years. These restrictions meant that I'd waste so much time hanging around in airports, and worrying about what I could and couldn't do without being accused of being a terrorist, that I just gave up and cancelled the holiday.
My time is precious to me, and I want a holiday to be a relaxing, stress-free experience. This weekend promised to be neither a good use of my time nor stress-free. And this is not because of terrorism, it's because of the government's over-dramatised response to a perceived terrorist threat.
Ahmed Salama was stunned when his HSBC account was frozen nine days ago. He received a letter informing him that HSBC wished to end their relationship after 11 years. The decision left Salama unable to pay 12 bills and his mortgage. Despite repeatedly asking for an explanation, HSBC has only told him it detected 'suspicious' payments in his account.
And here we see the consequences of a shoot-first, ask-questions-later policy to fighting crime/terrorism/whatever we're calling it today. The law should protect people from this kind of mistake, not encourage it.
The really insidious thing, of course, isn't that the mistake happened -- no-one's perfect, certainly not banks and government departments -- but that there is little the victim of such a mistake can do, since the system is designed to stonewall them on the basis that they're in the wrong. In other words, the system assumes it is perfect. This sort of situation, where the little guy is being screwed by the big guy with the government's blessing, is exactly why things like constitutional safeguards, civil liberties and due process are important.
And yes, I am bitter. I have had problems of a similar type, in my case by a random civil service staffer making a simple mistake in entering an ID number on their system, fluking my number instead of someone else's, and leaving me with several months of being out of pocket and wasting hours trying to get the problem fixed. That was not long after I started my first job, when I had precious little in the way of savings and a very tight budget, and it nearly left me unable to pay my rent.
Most people should never spend more on a credit card than they can pay off at the end of the month.
My point exactly. Credit sometimes provides a valuable facility, allowing people to benefit from something earlier than they otherwise could. The price they pay for that early benefit is the interest charged. For a long-term investment such as buying a home, that price may be worth paying. For short-term things where you could just save for a month or two and then buy something outright, credit cards are generally a con.
The thing is, accessibility rarely requires a complete makeover. Most of it is just about being considerate in the details, and those details can be changed rather easily.
The only reason it would require a complete makeover is if the original web site (presumably also costing a lot of money) was not designed with any consideration given to accessibility. Since the relevant legislation predates the modern web, I'm afraid I don't have much sympathy for anyone who opted to cut corners knowing their legal obligations and later got called on it.
That may be the most assanine thing I have ever heard. Did you take economics in college?
Hmmm... An AC who entirely misses the context of the discussion, resorts to personal insults and straw man attacks rather than logical arguments, and can't spell. Are you old enough to go to college?
Credit is the bridge between the working man and the rich.
No, it's not. Affordable credit at reasonable rates (as is usually the case with mortgages, for example) is a useful economic bridge. The kind of credit we're talking about here -- the kind of huge bills on high-percentage interest rates that get paid off a little each month because that's all the credit card holder can afford -- is simply the economic version of quicksand, and perpetuates or indeed increases the wealth gap. An immigrant with a few dollars in his pocket will never have more than a few dollars in his pocket if he spends all his income paying off interest on a purchase he couldn't yet afford.
Who's more likely to embezzle from you, the guy with a good debt-to-income ratio who makes his payments on time, or the guy who's deeply in debt an makes only the minimum payment every month?
You might want to look into how much money is lost to high-end, "good employee" types in major fraud cases, compared to petty thefts of the odd $10 from a cash register. You might be surprised by the results.
Let me clue you in, pal... if everyone abstained from credit cards whose income was highly vulnerable, the economy would tank and your comfortable, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps universe would collapse anyway. Our economy lives and dies by consumer credit card spending: it is that huge a factor.
I've little doubt that you're right, assuming you're talking about the US or other nations with similar current economic situations. I've also little desire to see the US economy tank even though I live elsewhere; I've reached the stage in my life where I've cleared my student debts and such and I now have some investments, and those investments tend to drop if major economies such as the US take a hit.
On the other hand, I think it's important to remember that it is not necessary to base an economy on credit, and it may well be better in the long run to move away from that model. It is precisely the availability of cheap credit, and the limited risks run by the big lenders, that leads to the situation where so many of the poor have to rely on taking credit they have little hope of honouring if things go wrong.
Suppose, in some perfect hypothetical world, that the law made it illegal to offer credit where there wasn't a near-100% probability that someone could repay it. What would happen? For one thing, a lot of people wouldn't be able to afford non-essential but everyday commodities any more at their current annual salaries/hourly rates. For popular commodities, that would most likely lead to cuts in prices at the expense of profit margin rather than drying up supplies. It would also mean fewer people would accept underpaid jobs, and the employee base would become more demanding. In both cases, this leads to more buying power in the long run for the less well-off, as they are forced to be self-sufficient. The big losers would be the big lenders, and the smaller losers would be those whose business investments no longer had such good returns because of the lower profit margins, i.e., those significantly further up the ladder.
So while of course we don't want a big bust and all the nasty knock-on effects, it is not in most of society's interests to perpetuate our current credit culture. Aiming for people to be as self-sufficient as possible in their finances, and realistic about borrowing for big, long-term loans like mortgages, is ultimately in everyone's best interests except those currently making a fortune out of the poor by keeping them poor through one-sided credit agreements.
Freedoms are generally a good default in society, but rarely are they (or should they be) absolutes. The usual counter-example for freedom of speech/expression is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, and a more subtle one is defamation. We curtail freedom of movement and association for convicted criminals who are sentenced to jail time. We have freedom of religion, yet you may not attempt to murder someone just because they don't follow the same religion.
So it goes here. Trying to look after the less fortunate in society can be one of humanity's better traits. History and experience show that a capitalist model abuses such people if left unattended, and thus we introduce laws like the ADA in the US, the DDA in the UK, and so on. This court case appears to be the law working exactly as intended.
The biggest problem with your approach is that we've established through history that the free market doesn't do enough to cater to minorities without a little encouragement.
However, your example is a work of fiction anyway. Generally, disability discrimination laws require that companies take reasonable steps to accommodate the disabled. Adding alt tags and using a colour scheme that doesn't inhibit colour-blind users is usually going to be reasonable. Redesigning an entire site based on eyewear, at vast cost, to accommodate blind users is (hopefully) not going to be considered a reasonable obligation in a court. I'm neither a lawyer nor based in the US, but I do maintain web sites and did scan the major accessibility legislation in a few jurisdictions when it first came out, and they all seemed to have safeguards to this effect.
Moreover, such legislation was passed in several countries well over a decade ago. I find it hard to believe that any small business has "a large, sprawling site that's been going for years", which wasn't designed after the relevant legislation was in place, yet which will cost years' worth of profits to redesign. Anyone who's in that position has bigger problems than accessibility, because it sounds like their management and/or marketing people suck.
Website designers that have a clue should see a nice increase in business next year.
It's funny how many people bitching about the ruling here have missed that rather important point.
If your web site is reasonably well-designed in the first place, then any extra steps required to make it fully accessible to disabled people will probably be trivial. For example, simply using reasonably correct semantic mark-up is enough for things like screen-readers to work well most of the time. Providing a fall-back for Flash or Javascript-based features has been good practice forever, since a significant proportion of users don't enable those features.
Irony point for the day: I wonder how many people who are complaining here about the small extra effort required to support the disabled community are themselves Firefox users who think everything should be written to W3C standards rather than to "work with IE and screw the rest if they're not compatible".
Second irony point for the day: I wonder how many people who are complaining here actually realise how many disabled people there are in web site terms, where even something as common as colour-blindness can be a serious handicap on a site with a poorly chosen colour scheme.
What this means, as the parent post pointed out, is that web developers who have a clue and think about how their site will be used and who their target audience is will probably start doing better now, at the expense of the hacks who undercut the good guys on price by taking short-cuts, possibly without even mentioning alternatives to their clients. Personally, I'm pretty much OK with that.
Wow, using single biggest financial scandal in American history as an example. Very scientific.
I never said it was a scientific study. It was simply a counterexample. Another of current interest would be Bernie Ebbers, formerly of Worldcom, who's about to go down for over 20 years as a minimum. So, of probably the two biggest financial scandals in recent American corporate history, both have resulted in pretty heavy sentences for the guys right at the top, contrary to your claim:
Seriously though -- suits don't go to jail. It's so fantastically rare as to border on mythical.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they're growing up too fast (and often in unhealthy ways) because of poor parenting and poor education systems.
It is not rocket science that a child left unsupervised with an unrestricted TV, Internet-enabled computer and PlayStation n in their bedroom is likely to spend an unhealthy amount of time in front of a screen, and come into contact with less than suitable material for someone their age. The also-not-rocket-science solution to this problem is... not to give kids all the toys and the chance to use them unsupervised all the time.
Likewise, it's easy to let the kids buy junk food on the way to and from school, and to eat school meals with poor nutritional value and drink soda, and then to throw a quick microwave meal or frozen pizza in for dinner. And then we wonder why more of our kids are seriously overweight and developing health problems than any time in recent history. The revolutionary solution to this is... giving kids real food and drink at meal times.
Of course, it's much easier for parents to leave little Jonny and Suzy to play with their hi-tech toys and then cook them frozen pizza for dinner than it is to take an active part in their upbringing by, I dunno, talking to them, reading to them, having dinner with them, and taking them to see and do interetsing things. The work-life balance in many western countries is now so far left of stupid that many parents see the easy option as the only option, however.
Similarly, one has to wonder at "education" systems that spend more time worrying about whether 7-year-olds can pass formal examinations than worrying about 7-year-olds learning to interact with other 7-year-olds, make friends, and play together. And yet, this is exactly where we're headed.
Society needs a wake-up call, particularly if it thinks it's worked this one out. Hi-tech toys are just the symptom, not the cause of the problem.
Indeed, Fortran is one of the few other languages that's in the game. Whether it's still ahead of C++ on raw performance grounds is a bit of a moot point these days. Some class and template wizardry in C++ libraries now means heavily optimised data structures and basic algorithms are available, which negates a lot of Fortran's native array advantage. Also, things like the F2C conversion library now allow important Fortran-based libraries like BLAS and LAPACK to be built natively on C++ with all the optimised algorithms still available. I expect Fortran still has a significant edge on highly parallel architectures, where C++ isn't exactly geared up for powerful optimisations, but for anything more desktop-based, it's probably much closer.
I'd go for "identity theft", personally. It's pretty accurate, but also sounds like Something We Should Fear(TM), as opposed to "pretexting", which sounds Naughty But Only A Little Bit(TM).
Damn, where are my mod points?
You're absolutely right. Java and C++ are different tools, with different strengths and weaknesses. Attempting to compare them like-for-like is meaningless, as is making general statments about which language is "better".
If you want to do serious mathematical modelling, for example, you have a pretty limited selection of languages available. Most of them start with "C". Most of the others start with "M" and are written in languages starting with "C".
On the other hand, for CGI, most of the languages I use start with "P". I wouldn't dream of trying to write a database-backed web-page generator in C++, because I could have written the whole thing in Perl or PHP by the time I'd worked out how to link in the right libraries for C++.
Java seems to have found the (rather large) niche of developing back-end, "business" applications (i.e., database apps). Again, I probably wouldn't choose to use C++ there, since Java already has loads of pre-supplied functionality, and perhaps as importantly, a whole community of developers with experience in the field.
As the parent says, it's all about picking the right tool for the job. Most of us have succumbed to language holy wars in the past, and hopefully most of us have since outgrown them.
Indeed they do, but I doubt modular design is the holy grail of software development. Right now, as you observe yourself, most of the extension is small-scale and built on large-scale foundations. In that context, it seems to work reasonably well. However, as we move to using more modular designs for even larger applications, I predict that this approach will exhibit problems of its own.
Consider repositories like Perl's CPAN, TeX's CTAN, or the Mozilla extensions system, where in each case anyone can submit useful modules. CPAN offers many handy tools, but there is a huge amount of duplication in some areas. CTAN offers modules to do almost anything you want in LaTeX, but in reality, module authors take careful note of any other, potentially interacting modules, and make major allowances in their code to keep things compatible (most of the time). There are so many "web developer" extensions for Firefox that I imagine we'll have an extension to view them all before long, though only a handful provide solid, meaty functionality that isn't trivially available to most developers anyway.
This is the, perhaps inevitable, result of distributed development in a modular framework. Without any central leadership and oversight, duplication of effort is commonplace and compatibility concerns grow exponentially. Loopholes start to appear, and with them bugs, security flaws, usability issues....
Obviously there are pros and cons to both a centralised, monolithic project and a distributed, modular approach. The trick, as always, is in trying to maximise the benefits of a hybrid approach while minimising the weaknesses. There may be incremental improvements, as we see with some of the better OSS projects, but for the most part they're evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Now, if you want revolutionary change, I think we need qualitatively better tools to support the development process, and we're not very good at building those yet. And even when we are, other aspects of the development process will need work to catch up. As the man said, there are no silver bullets.
It's not like there's one absolute "smartest software company on the planet", but if there were, Microsoft would probably have a pretty good claim on the title. In terms of their developers, they have a lot of very smart people in the business working for them. In terms of business, they are one of the most successful companies on the planet. You might not like them, but I don't see how you can deny that they're smart by any relevant standard.
Well, I can't really speak for the US legislature, but as a practising web geek, I've been under the impression for a long time (and so have several of the more respectable discussion groups on-line) that this was expected, and it was just a matter of time before someone flagrantly broke the rules and got called on it.
That's strange, because I seem to recall prominent members of the UK's Islamic community condemning the various terrorist attacks publicly and in no uncertain terms, and of course some of those terrorist attacks claimed Muslim lives. Perhaps you simply prefer to believe that all Muslims are alike, because then it's easier to overlook the overt religious discrimination that's currently undermining our country?
Indeed. It seems Pastor Niemoeller should be required reading at school these days.
How on earth does sending a private mail constitute publication?
I'd like to see your research, then, because AFAIK that hasn't been the situation in the US for many years now, and never was the situation in some jurisdictions.
If you're in the UK, then unless something's changed fairly recently, the fact that you were turned down shouldn't appear on the report. It should only indicate that a check was made. You don't want to have a whole string of checks listed in rapid succession, for obvious reasons, but a single extra check could be anything and shouldn't count against you.
That said, the last time I checked my credit report (also after someone else's screw-up affected my ability to do something) it was a joke, with probably more inaccurate records than accurate ones, and the attitude of the credit agency when I called to get it fixed was similarly unimpressive.
Also, if your credit report has been damaged because O2 made a mistake, you should ask O2 to remove the relevant details from the report. Failing that, you can (yourself) add an explanatory note to the report. That's not ideal, because automated systems won't understand it, but again, unless things have changed fairly recently, you're allowed by law to compel any business that makes automated decisions based on your credit report to undertake a manual review of those decisions by a real person who can see the notes.
Isn't it odd how the usual data protection principles don't seem to apply to the credit reference agencies? (I'm not aware of any legal reason why they shouldn't, but they certainly seem to be violated with remarkable frequency and little consequence.)
Why not?
Which is why laws are/should be in place specifically to protect necessary disclosures in the context of legitimate whistle-blowing.
I'm sorry you've been moderated as trolling, because I think your post was pretty much bang on target. In particular:
While your probability seems a little optimistic, your point seems fair enough to me.
I was supposed to be flying off on holiday for a long weekend next weekend, which would have been the first time I'd flown since I was a young child. I was looking forward to the experience, and my other half (a frequent traveller) had taken months to talk me into getting a passport and so on.
The problem is the restrictions and extra security recently introduced at UK airports to prevent us from yet another hypothetical attack based on "new" threat that had been known for years. These restrictions meant that I'd waste so much time hanging around in airports, and worrying about what I could and couldn't do without being accused of being a terrorist, that I just gave up and cancelled the holiday.
My time is precious to me, and I want a holiday to be a relaxing, stress-free experience. This weekend promised to be neither a good use of my time nor stress-free. And this is not because of terrorism, it's because of the government's over-dramatised response to a perceived terrorist threat.
And here we see the consequences of a shoot-first, ask-questions-later policy to fighting crime/terrorism/whatever we're calling it today. The law should protect people from this kind of mistake, not encourage it.
The really insidious thing, of course, isn't that the mistake happened -- no-one's perfect, certainly not banks and government departments -- but that there is little the victim of such a mistake can do, since the system is designed to stonewall them on the basis that they're in the wrong. In other words, the system assumes it is perfect. This sort of situation, where the little guy is being screwed by the big guy with the government's blessing, is exactly why things like constitutional safeguards, civil liberties and due process are important.
And yes, I am bitter. I have had problems of a similar type, in my case by a random civil service staffer making a simple mistake in entering an ID number on their system, fluking my number instead of someone else's, and leaving me with several months of being out of pocket and wasting hours trying to get the problem fixed. That was not long after I started my first job, when I had precious little in the way of savings and a very tight budget, and it nearly left me unable to pay my rent.
My point exactly. Credit sometimes provides a valuable facility, allowing people to benefit from something earlier than they otherwise could. The price they pay for that early benefit is the interest charged. For a long-term investment such as buying a home, that price may be worth paying. For short-term things where you could just save for a month or two and then buy something outright, credit cards are generally a con.
The thing is, accessibility rarely requires a complete makeover. Most of it is just about being considerate in the details, and those details can be changed rather easily.
The only reason it would require a complete makeover is if the original web site (presumably also costing a lot of money) was not designed with any consideration given to accessibility. Since the relevant legislation predates the modern web, I'm afraid I don't have much sympathy for anyone who opted to cut corners knowing their legal obligations and later got called on it.
Hmmm... An AC who entirely misses the context of the discussion, resorts to personal insults and straw man attacks rather than logical arguments, and can't spell. Are you old enough to go to college?
No, it's not. Affordable credit at reasonable rates (as is usually the case with mortgages, for example) is a useful economic bridge. The kind of credit we're talking about here -- the kind of huge bills on high-percentage interest rates that get paid off a little each month because that's all the credit card holder can afford -- is simply the economic version of quicksand, and perpetuates or indeed increases the wealth gap. An immigrant with a few dollars in his pocket will never have more than a few dollars in his pocket if he spends all his income paying off interest on a purchase he couldn't yet afford.
You might want to look into how much money is lost to high-end, "good employee" types in major fraud cases, compared to petty thefts of the odd $10 from a cash register. You might be surprised by the results.
I've little doubt that you're right, assuming you're talking about the US or other nations with similar current economic situations. I've also little desire to see the US economy tank even though I live elsewhere; I've reached the stage in my life where I've cleared my student debts and such and I now have some investments, and those investments tend to drop if major economies such as the US take a hit.
On the other hand, I think it's important to remember that it is not necessary to base an economy on credit, and it may well be better in the long run to move away from that model. It is precisely the availability of cheap credit, and the limited risks run by the big lenders, that leads to the situation where so many of the poor have to rely on taking credit they have little hope of honouring if things go wrong.
Suppose, in some perfect hypothetical world, that the law made it illegal to offer credit where there wasn't a near-100% probability that someone could repay it. What would happen? For one thing, a lot of people wouldn't be able to afford non-essential but everyday commodities any more at their current annual salaries/hourly rates. For popular commodities, that would most likely lead to cuts in prices at the expense of profit margin rather than drying up supplies. It would also mean fewer people would accept underpaid jobs, and the employee base would become more demanding. In both cases, this leads to more buying power in the long run for the less well-off, as they are forced to be self-sufficient. The big losers would be the big lenders, and the smaller losers would be those whose business investments no longer had such good returns because of the lower profit margins, i.e., those significantly further up the ladder.
So while of course we don't want a big bust and all the nasty knock-on effects, it is not in most of society's interests to perpetuate our current credit culture. Aiming for people to be as self-sufficient as possible in their finances, and realistic about borrowing for big, long-term loans like mortgages, is ultimately in everyone's best interests except those currently making a fortune out of the poor by keeping them poor through one-sided credit agreements.
Freedoms are generally a good default in society, but rarely are they (or should they be) absolutes. The usual counter-example for freedom of speech/expression is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, and a more subtle one is defamation. We curtail freedom of movement and association for convicted criminals who are sentenced to jail time. We have freedom of religion, yet you may not attempt to murder someone just because they don't follow the same religion.
So it goes here. Trying to look after the less fortunate in society can be one of humanity's better traits. History and experience show that a capitalist model abuses such people if left unattended, and thus we introduce laws like the ADA in the US, the DDA in the UK, and so on. This court case appears to be the law working exactly as intended.
I'm not sure most web designers have got as far as making sites look pretty, yet!
The biggest problem with your approach is that we've established through history that the free market doesn't do enough to cater to minorities without a little encouragement.
However, your example is a work of fiction anyway. Generally, disability discrimination laws require that companies take reasonable steps to accommodate the disabled. Adding alt tags and using a colour scheme that doesn't inhibit colour-blind users is usually going to be reasonable. Redesigning an entire site based on eyewear, at vast cost, to accommodate blind users is (hopefully) not going to be considered a reasonable obligation in a court. I'm neither a lawyer nor based in the US, but I do maintain web sites and did scan the major accessibility legislation in a few jurisdictions when it first came out, and they all seemed to have safeguards to this effect.
Moreover, such legislation was passed in several countries well over a decade ago. I find it hard to believe that any small business has "a large, sprawling site that's been going for years", which wasn't designed after the relevant legislation was in place, yet which will cost years' worth of profits to redesign. Anyone who's in that position has bigger problems than accessibility, because it sounds like their management and/or marketing people suck.
It's funny how many people bitching about the ruling here have missed that rather important point.
If your web site is reasonably well-designed in the first place, then any extra steps required to make it fully accessible to disabled people will probably be trivial. For example, simply using reasonably correct semantic mark-up is enough for things like screen-readers to work well most of the time. Providing a fall-back for Flash or Javascript-based features has been good practice forever, since a significant proportion of users don't enable those features.
Irony point for the day: I wonder how many people who are complaining here about the small extra effort required to support the disabled community are themselves Firefox users who think everything should be written to W3C standards rather than to "work with IE and screw the rest if they're not compatible".
Second irony point for the day: I wonder how many people who are complaining here actually realise how many disabled people there are in web site terms, where even something as common as colour-blindness can be a serious handicap on a site with a poorly chosen colour scheme.
What this means, as the parent post pointed out, is that web developers who have a clue and think about how their site will be used and who their target audience is will probably start doing better now, at the expense of the hacks who undercut the good guys on price by taking short-cuts, possibly without even mentioning alternatives to their clients. Personally, I'm pretty much OK with that.
I never said it was a scientific study. It was simply a counterexample. Another of current interest would be Bernie Ebbers, formerly of Worldcom, who's about to go down for over 20 years as a minimum. So, of probably the two biggest financial scandals in recent American corporate history, both have resulted in pretty heavy sentences for the guys right at the top, contrary to your claim:
Hey, we're doing that quite successfully in the UK without any help from Microsoft...