Your numbers are about optimization for some medium-sized business, and it may well be the right choice there, but that's just barely "enterprise".
Since most companies in this country aren't "Enterprise" that's not necessarily a problem. The "enterprises" I've rubbed against can barely tie their own shoelaces: In fact, one of my larger customers is actually a division of a Fortune 500 (complete with F500 "enterprise" IT methodologies.) Because of those "methodologies" the client has to maintain their own entire network of systems, virtual machines, and applications because the "enterprise" can't service their customer base (or them) in a timely fashion.
The problem with "Enterprise" is the bureaucracy: It precludes being really, instinctively good at anything. I don't see that as a weakness: As I see it, "enterprise IT" is the biggest competitive weakness of the Fortune 500, and in the cases where a smaller competitor rolls in and eats their lunch (as is the case of my client) its usually because of (not in spite of) "enterprise" mindsets.
That's the problem with free speech... Sometimes people say things that others don't like. Unfortunately, she's within her rights to do what she did--I wouldn't have handled it that way, but now I know one person I definitely won't hire. Hint: It's not the joke teller or listener, they've obviously learned a lesson about discretion when expressing non-PC opinions in the workplace. But the lady who creates a shit storm in public that, if this guy was anybody important to his organization, probably cost his employer a lot of money to extract her pound of flesh? I will avoid her with a ten-foot pole, and would advise anybody else who hires people to do the same. This lady is trolling for a lawsuits and publicity, and woe be unto anybody that puts her in a position of authority--she will exploit it to her own political ends.
It's only people who seem to have more money than sense who standardize on vmware.
Or perhaps they have different needs than you. Perhaps they have a budget for 1-2 personnel to manage their virtual machine environment, not 5-10. Perhaps they have a budget to spend about $70k for salary rather than the $120k linux virtualization guys go for. Or the extra few hundred grand for the five-times-as-many people required to carry it off.
Or perhaps they want to be able to easily replace those 1-2 people when they quit, retire, or die of old age with somebody else who already knows the product instead of finding somebody who knows Linux and "sort of" knows your distro and "Sort of" knows your VM solution and giving them a few months to "ramp up" and "figure it out."
"Free" is great, but you're the only guy in town who understands you can't be replaced--You instantly become the "key man" and are thus an instant liability to the company.
Windows Hyper-V Server is free, as in the dollar cost to you is zero. If you want to run Windows on top of it then obviously you have to pay for that
Oh, you mean Hyper-V Server, the bare-metal hypervisor, not the installable add-on? Then yes, it is free as in license cost--but its other main "Feature" is that its also shite. Its a classic example of "Getting what you pay for." In this case, what you're not paying for is a VMM that prevents a guest from crashing the host. So good luck with that.
But even if the price tag is "free" for their bare metal hypervisor--so what? What MS really fears from VMware isn't their hypervisor, its the seed of the idea they plant in their customers heads--that is: "Yes, Mr. SMB Network/Systems Admin, you really can have a stable, powerful, and easy to use unix/linux based commercial software system in your data center that is transparent to your users that your existing admins can understand." So there's still lock-in, but in this case, the lock-in is a mental lock-in to a mindset.
And, sure, you could run Linux on Hyper-V Hypervisor... You could also take a spork and shove it in your eye to prevent glaucoma--it works, but its a sub-optimal solution. I might even argue that the spoon in the eye is less painful than coping with Hyper-V Hypervisor all day.
Big business craves stability over saving a few hundred bucks per machine. However VMware are coming up with interesting new stuff and more interestingly the more advanced features are flowing down into more basic editions.
Just my 2 cents.
As somebody who has consulted on both you're 1000% correct, more than you think, even. The real structural advantage you get out of VMware over Hyper-V is that Hyper-V is another layer of lock-in--"free" is just to reel you in. The reality is that it isn't "free"--the cost is simply built into the license they've already sold you for Windows Server, however you've bought it. I went about 50 rounds with a guy who swore up and down Hyper-V really was "free!!!" I said "Great, how do you get it?"
"Well, first you buy Windows..."
Clueless--It is incredible the marketing power of "free" and how much money it separates people from everyday. And this doesn't even include what a hyperactive piece of crap Hyper-V is to deal with if you're doing anything other than a completely vanilla implementation...
Anybody pushing Hyper-V has obviously never experienced vSphere Enterprise Plus. Me likey very much, thanks.
No matter what you trade, if it has value, the state will look to control it's function.
Everything that begins free and open inevitably evolves towards lame and bureaucratic as governments and big money corporations become involved. Or, rather, government gets involved at the request of big money corporations.
You can only have freedom and openness when you live as a hunter-gatherer with a small family unit around you.
You're welcome to try that for yourself if you like and see how much fun it is. In the meantime, the rest of us like the benefits of civilisation such as ready access to food and water, somewhere to sleep, transport, education, leisure, culture and so on.
Who said I disapproved? It's the way of things: Somebody has a new idea, sets it up, gets it running and people like it or don't. But if it really takes off and he sells the idea to somebody wealthier to capitalize on it, you can bet the quality will decline, the price will increase, and the customers of it will begin to long for something new that is less of a pain in the ass.
It is the basic motivation for innovation: To make something that sucks not as crappy by doing it a different way.
You can be as mad about it as you want, but recognizing it doesn't mean I'm advocating the end of civilization.
No matter what you trade, if it has value, the state will look to control it's function.
Everything that begins free and open inevitably evolves towards lame and bureaucratic as governments and big money corporations become involved. Or, rather, government gets involved at the request of big money corporations.
The Iraq war was not an unpopular idea at the time. It became unpopular in hindsight.
I suppose it depends on how you look at it. In the United States popular opinion "favored" the war, but mostly based on the lies presented about the Ay-rabs and whatnot and Hussein/9/11 WMD blah blah blah.
But worldwide, opinion was strongly against--billions of people in opposition to the war. Hardly "popular" beforehand,and less popular afterward.
IANAL, but I _think_ that I would need to move for and receive an order giving permission to file a motion in that case, since I am not a party to the action? Wouldn't that be an Amicus motion?.. although, I suppose that if you are one of the John Doe's listed in the case (and didn't mind to identify yourself) - and were currently pro se? then I think you could file that motion. Who knows. Maybe everybody should try it and we'll see what happens. Worst case, the court throws out a thousand motions.
Anybody with some time and money to burn can file an amicus brief. I mean, you're practically begging the trolls to sue you and use your amicus brief as "proof" you're a "pireate," but if a million people did it then...
I can't believe he didn't say anything about ManBearPig! It is the biggest threat to public safety since the 1990s when Billy Joel gave up his driver's license, and it deserves more attention than it gets.
...even if you've never visited those sites, contact WordPress and tell them you want them to refuse.
This times a million: Make sure the understand that this will affect your decision about where to host your blog. They're in the free speech business: Time to sack-up.
is not my friend. But damn if I'm not happy someone is asking these questions and putting up some serious opposition.
Yeah, you could have knocked me over with a feather earlier when I said, out loud, to no one in particular "Yeah, I agree with Rand Paul." That's as sensible as saying "Ronald McDonald is right!"
We've gone way too far with empowering the government. The time is now to roll back the "emergency" terrorism powers the government gave itself after 9/11. We are not "at war" with Al Qaeda in the United States. There are plenty of opportunities to catch terrorists without infringing on the rights of law-abiding Americans who have done nothing wrong.
These powers were voted into place in a panic and now we're living with the consequences.
Requesting someone to travel 1000 km just to fire him/her and leaving him/her in a difficult position without support 1000 km from home seems far more dickish than to fire him/her over the phone.
Ahh--here's the disconnect. Only a handful of these people lived more than 20-30 minutes from the office. They "telecommuted" because our sattellite office was too small to hold all the people they tried to stuff inside.
But yeah, 1000 mile trip to get fired does suck--that's the only scenario where I can see "on the phone" terminations being okay. Most of the people in my example lived within driving distance, so I'd say it would have been appropriate to deal with those people individually, at the office.
Our organization pays for training--tons of it. I'm going through a pile of high-level Citrix stuff this year after doing about half the VMware catalog last year... We're in a position to do this because we've taken on a large new multi-year project that required us to go way beyond our existing skills. But even without that project, I was still budgeted for 1-3 outside courses every year, and would sometimes get access to online opportunities too.
What they do not ever pay for is certification exams. For those you're on your own--which is fine with me. I've taken $40k in training in the last 2 years. I don't mind ponying up a few dollars to take an exam once in a while.
There is no need for evidence, it's pretty obvious that if you tell your employees who live 1,000 miles away to either come into the office or quit, a good number of those will quit.
If it was transparent that this was the intention, wouldn't that make it constructive dismissal? Or could they weasel out of that by pointing out that it wasn't aimed at any *specific* employee, or that it was in the contract, or whatever?
They are, however, potentially imposing these onerous terms on members of a protected class of employees. Think about the reasons somebody might choose to telecommute: Young children needing after school care, elderly parent living out of state... Single moms garner lots of sympathy in court and at the unemployment office. Ditto the angelic, devoted son or daughter working at home to be close to an ailing elderly parent.
If they're really doing this to avoid severance, unemployment, and wrongful termination lawsuits their interests would be better served by paying out some severance, because this stunt has the potential to get them sued nine ways from Sunday and be defending lawsuits in every jurisdiction from here to Timbuktu and back. A better use of their time, money and efforts would be paying some severance if they really need people in the office so they don't spend the next three years in court, and can instead focus on reviving one of the pioneers of search.
Agreed. Best Buy is circling the drain. I imagine the reason they are asking folks to come in to the corporate headquarters is because they have to see them in person to lay them off.
I thought the "in" thing these days was to lay people off by email or SMS. Right before Christmas.
I worked at a place where they laid off several dozen telecommuters in one day (but not every telecommuter) via conference call. The way it worked was this: The condemned got invited to a "mandatory team meeting" conference call at 9am the following day. All of the survivors got invited to another conference call to tell them who was getting fired to run concurrently with the termination call to the damned to prevent anybody from finding out via rumor or innuendo.
It mostly went okay (I mean, as well as firing somebody from their full-time-pay-a-mortgage quality job over a conference call can go) except a handful of "fired" people ended up getting sent the code for the "Survivors call" and got the false hope they'd survived because that call started with (I was on it) "Okay, we just want to let you know about some changes in our department, and specifically, some layoffs that happened earlier today. If you're on this call you have been retained by the company. We want to let you know who moved on..."
And then these temporary "Survivors" got to hear their own names on the list of the condemned. I mean, I don't know how it would have been any easier to be on the "correct" conference call and find out. But it sucks balls to hear "There's a layoff, and you've been spared!" and then it turns out no, actually, you're fired too.
Actually, somewhat dickish to fire a guy on the phone, too, I suppose.
Nope - that's the point of the exercise. You're not fired - you're quitting.
If this is truly what they're up to they'll be disappointed. A great many states unemployment laws explicitly take into account a fundamental change in the terms of a job as "involuntary termination." It is hard to imagine that a person being required to move thousands of miles as a condition of continued emplyment wouldn't be viewed as a "fundamental change of terms."
Since a lot of these people will likely be moms or people with family "situations" they're coping with lawsuits seem almost to be a given. They must really be short on cash if this is how they choose to conduct a layoff.
Google has been quite good so far about not abusing their (rather powerful) position with their users. Of course, it's reasonable to worry that someday that'll change, but it seems to me they have a strong business interest in keeping users happy.
But if you really want to be the "customer" and not the "product", then pay them. $50/year is really quite reasonable. (http://www.google.com/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/)
Short of having to submit physical documentation to create an account, how do they know the real name I gave is really me? Or a fake alias?
A great question--the answer seems to be "They're Google and they're good at it."
Seriously: Almost every web-site you visit uses their analytics which are now globally mated to your gmail/youtube accounts. Even if you keep your cookies and backtrail clean enough that Google can't identify you when you connect in a session, the first thing they'll do is try to set a cookie to start learning about this new product (i.e. you.) And the first time you slip-up and log into something that knows your "real" name (think Amazon--your account is in your real name because most users are paying via credit/debit-card and have to legally have their actual legal name on the card.
Google knows your real name (or can make a pretty educated guess about what it is) for most users. For the others, there is an "Is 'Captain Mastadon Penis McAwesome' really Captain's name?" feature that prompts your friends to rat you out if you register a "Fake" name. It was a concerted effort that most people probably failed at.
I'd say "good luck!" trying to opt out of being tracked by Google. If you use the Internet for anything meaningful (even if you only use other random search engines) you can't escape from Google Analytics without hobbling your browser's functionality.
Glad that we're giving people who don't know how to use the ignition key to stop their cars driver's licenses. Seriously, they taught us that on like... the third day. Somebody asked "What if the gas gets stuck all the way on?"
Answer: "Turn off the key. Engine stops, car rolls to a stop. You lose power steering but you're slowing rapidly, so that's less important than it sounds.
Slashdot Mirror
Your numbers are about optimization for some medium-sized business, and it may well be the right choice there, but that's just barely "enterprise".
Since most companies in this country aren't "Enterprise" that's not necessarily a problem. The "enterprises" I've rubbed against can barely tie their own shoelaces: In fact, one of my larger customers is actually a division of a Fortune 500 (complete with F500 "enterprise" IT methodologies.) Because of those "methodologies" the client has to maintain their own entire network of systems, virtual machines, and applications because the "enterprise" can't service their customer base (or them) in a timely fashion.
The problem with "Enterprise" is the bureaucracy: It precludes being really, instinctively good at anything. I don't see that as a weakness: As I see it, "enterprise IT" is the biggest competitive weakness of the Fortune 500, and in the cases where a smaller competitor rolls in and eats their lunch (as is the case of my client) its usually because of (not in spite of) "enterprise" mindsets.
That's the problem with free speech... Sometimes people say things that others don't like. Unfortunately, she's within her rights to do what she did--I wouldn't have handled it that way, but now I know one person I definitely won't hire. Hint: It's not the joke teller or listener, they've obviously learned a lesson about discretion when expressing non-PC opinions in the workplace. But the lady who creates a shit storm in public that, if this guy was anybody important to his organization, probably cost his employer a lot of money to extract her pound of flesh? I will avoid her with a ten-foot pole, and would advise anybody else who hires people to do the same. This lady is trolling for a lawsuits and publicity, and woe be unto anybody that puts her in a position of authority--she will exploit it to her own political ends.
It's only people who seem to have more money than sense who standardize on vmware.
Or perhaps they have different needs than you. Perhaps they have a budget for 1-2 personnel to manage their virtual machine environment, not 5-10. Perhaps they have a budget to spend about $70k for salary rather than the $120k linux virtualization guys go for. Or the extra few hundred grand for the five-times-as-many people required to carry it off.
Or perhaps they want to be able to easily replace those 1-2 people when they quit, retire, or die of old age with somebody else who already knows the product instead of finding somebody who knows Linux and "sort of" knows your distro and "Sort of" knows your VM solution and giving them a few months to "ramp up" and "figure it out."
"Free" is great, but you're the only guy in town who understands you can't be replaced--You instantly become the "key man" and are thus an instant liability to the company.
Windows Hyper-V Server is free, as in the dollar cost to you is zero. If you want to run Windows on top of it then obviously you have to pay for that
Oh, you mean Hyper-V Server, the bare-metal hypervisor, not the installable add-on? Then yes, it is free as in license cost--but its other main "Feature" is that its also shite. Its a classic example of "Getting what you pay for." In this case, what you're not paying for is a VMM that prevents a guest from crashing the host. So good luck with that.
But even if the price tag is "free" for their bare metal hypervisor--so what? What MS really fears from VMware isn't their hypervisor, its the seed of the idea they plant in their customers heads--that is: "Yes, Mr. SMB Network/Systems Admin, you really can have a stable, powerful, and easy to use unix/linux based commercial software system in your data center that is transparent to your users that your existing admins can understand." So there's still lock-in, but in this case, the lock-in is a mental lock-in to a mindset.
And, sure, you could run Linux on Hyper-V Hypervisor... You could also take a spork and shove it in your eye to prevent glaucoma--it works, but its a sub-optimal solution. I might even argue that the spoon in the eye is less painful than coping with Hyper-V Hypervisor all day.
Big business craves stability over saving a few hundred bucks per machine. However VMware are coming up with interesting new stuff and more interestingly the more advanced features are flowing down into more basic editions.
Just my 2 cents.
As somebody who has consulted on both you're 1000% correct, more than you think, even. The real structural advantage you get out of VMware over Hyper-V is that Hyper-V is another layer of lock-in--"free" is just to reel you in. The reality is that it isn't "free"--the cost is simply built into the license they've already sold you for Windows Server, however you've bought it. I went about 50 rounds with a guy who swore up and down Hyper-V really was "free!!!" I said "Great, how do you get it?"
"Well, first you buy Windows..."
Clueless--It is incredible the marketing power of "free" and how much money it separates people from everyday. And this doesn't even include what a hyperactive piece of crap Hyper-V is to deal with if you're doing anything other than a completely vanilla implementation...
Anybody pushing Hyper-V has obviously never experienced vSphere Enterprise Plus. Me likey very much, thanks.
No matter what you trade, if it has value, the state will look to control it's function.
Everything that begins free and open inevitably evolves towards lame and bureaucratic as governments and big money corporations become involved. Or, rather, government gets involved at the request of big money corporations.
You can only have freedom and openness when you live as a hunter-gatherer with a small family unit around you.
You're welcome to try that for yourself if you like and see how much fun it is. In the meantime, the rest of us like the benefits of civilisation such as ready access to food and water, somewhere to sleep, transport, education, leisure, culture and so on.
Who said I disapproved? It's the way of things: Somebody has a new idea, sets it up, gets it running and people like it or don't. But if it really takes off and he sells the idea to somebody wealthier to capitalize on it, you can bet the quality will decline, the price will increase, and the customers of it will begin to long for something new that is less of a pain in the ass.
It is the basic motivation for innovation: To make something that sucks not as crappy by doing it a different way.
You can be as mad about it as you want, but recognizing it doesn't mean I'm advocating the end of civilization.
Sheesh.
No matter what you trade, if it has value, the state will look to control it's function.
Everything that begins free and open inevitably evolves towards lame and bureaucratic as governments and big money corporations become involved. Or, rather, government gets involved at the request of big money corporations.
The Iraq war was not an unpopular idea at the time. It became unpopular in hindsight.
I suppose it depends on how you look at it. In the United States popular opinion "favored" the war, but mostly based on the lies presented about the Ay-rabs and whatnot and Hussein/9/11 WMD blah blah blah.
But worldwide, opinion was strongly against--billions of people in opposition to the war. Hardly "popular" beforehand,and less popular afterward.
IANAL, but I _think_ that I would need to move for and receive an order giving permission to file a motion in that case, since I am not a party to the action? .. although, I suppose that if you are one of the John Doe's listed in the case (and didn't mind to identify yourself) - and were currently pro se? then I think you could file that motion. Who knows. Maybe everybody should try it and we'll see what happens.
Wouldn't that be an Amicus motion?
Worst case, the court throws out a thousand motions.
Anybody with some time and money to burn can file an amicus brief. I mean, you're practically begging the trolls to sue you and use your amicus brief as "proof" you're a "pireate," but if a million people did it then...
I can't believe he didn't say anything about ManBearPig! It is the biggest threat to public safety since the 1990s when Billy Joel gave up his driver's license, and it deserves more attention than it gets.
Outrageous!
...even if you've never visited those sites, contact WordPress and tell them you want them to refuse.
This times a million: Make sure the understand that this will affect your decision about where to host your blog. They're in the free speech business: Time to sack-up.
I always swallow my MicroSD card before I begin travel and retrieve it after I arrive at my destination.
A wise precaution!
"I swallowed my wedding ring when they came in... Get me some ipecac, I'd like to expunge it."
is not my friend. But damn if I'm not happy someone is asking these questions and putting up some serious opposition.
Yeah, you could have knocked me over with a feather earlier when I said, out loud, to no one in particular "Yeah, I agree with Rand Paul." That's as sensible as saying "Ronald McDonald is right!"
I need a drink.
We've gone way too far with empowering the government. The time is now to roll back the "emergency" terrorism powers the government gave itself after 9/11. We are not "at war" with Al Qaeda in the United States. There are plenty of opportunities to catch terrorists without infringing on the rights of law-abiding Americans who have done nothing wrong.
These powers were voted into place in a panic and now we're living with the consequences.
Somebody get me a shoulder-fired missile!
Requesting someone to travel 1000 km just to fire him/her and leaving him/her in a difficult position without support 1000 km from home seems far more dickish than to fire him/her over the phone.
Ahh--here's the disconnect. Only a handful of these people lived more than 20-30 minutes from the office. They "telecommuted" because our sattellite office was too small to hold all the people they tried to stuff inside.
But yeah, 1000 mile trip to get fired does suck--that's the only scenario where I can see "on the phone" terminations being okay. Most of the people in my example lived within driving distance, so I'd say it would have been appropriate to deal with those people individually, at the office.
R/C model planes are much harder to legislate against. So it's drone, dammit!
As long as it didn't have more than 3.4 ounces of liquid, or nail clippers mounted to it, I don't see the problem.
I think this misses the bigger point which is, obviously:
Our organization pays for training--tons of it. I'm going through a pile of high-level Citrix stuff this year after doing about half the VMware catalog last year... We're in a position to do this because we've taken on a large new multi-year project that required us to go way beyond our existing skills. But even without that project, I was still budgeted for 1-3 outside courses every year, and would sometimes get access to online opportunities too.
What they do not ever pay for is certification exams. For those you're on your own--which is fine with me. I've taken $40k in training in the last 2 years. I don't mind ponying up a few dollars to take an exam once in a while.
The only good policeman is a dead one
The only good laws aren't enforced
-- Big Black, "Steel Worker" - Songs About Fucking
There is no need for evidence, it's pretty obvious that if you tell your employees who live 1,000 miles away to either come into the office or quit, a good number of those will quit.
If it was transparent that this was the intention, wouldn't that make it constructive dismissal? Or could they weasel out of that by pointing out that it wasn't aimed at any *specific* employee, or that it was in the contract, or whatever?
They are, however, potentially imposing these onerous terms on members of a protected class of employees. Think about the reasons somebody might choose to telecommute: Young children needing after school care, elderly parent living out of state... Single moms garner lots of sympathy in court and at the unemployment office. Ditto the angelic, devoted son or daughter working at home to be close to an ailing elderly parent.
If they're really doing this to avoid severance, unemployment, and wrongful termination lawsuits their interests would be better served by paying out some severance, because this stunt has the potential to get them sued nine ways from Sunday and be defending lawsuits in every jurisdiction from here to Timbuktu and back. A better use of their time, money and efforts would be paying some severance if they really need people in the office so they don't spend the next three years in court, and can instead focus on reviving one of the pioneers of search.
Or they can become "The Lawsuit Company!"
Agreed. Best Buy is circling the drain. I imagine the reason they are asking folks to come in to the corporate headquarters is because they have to see them in person to lay them off.
I thought the "in" thing these days was to lay people off by email or SMS. Right before Christmas.
I worked at a place where they laid off several dozen telecommuters in one day (but not every telecommuter) via conference call. The way it worked was this: The condemned got invited to a "mandatory team meeting" conference call at 9am the following day. All of the survivors got invited to another conference call to tell them who was getting fired to run concurrently with the termination call to the damned to prevent anybody from finding out via rumor or innuendo.
It mostly went okay (I mean, as well as firing somebody from their full-time-pay-a-mortgage quality job over a conference call can go) except a handful of "fired" people ended up getting sent the code for the "Survivors call" and got the false hope they'd survived because that call started with (I was on it) "Okay, we just want to let you know about some changes in our department, and specifically, some layoffs that happened earlier today. If you're on this call you have been retained by the company. We want to let you know who moved on..."
And then these temporary "Survivors" got to hear their own names on the list of the condemned. I mean, I don't know how it would have been any easier to be on the "correct" conference call and find out. But it sucks balls to hear "There's a layoff, and you've been spared!" and then it turns out no, actually, you're fired too.
Actually, somewhat dickish to fire a guy on the phone, too, I suppose.
Nope - that's the point of the exercise. You're not fired - you're quitting.
If this is truly what they're up to they'll be disappointed. A great many states unemployment laws explicitly take into account a fundamental change in the terms of a job as "involuntary termination." It is hard to imagine that a person being required to move thousands of miles as a condition of continued emplyment wouldn't be viewed as a "fundamental change of terms."
Since a lot of these people will likely be moms or people with family "situations" they're coping with lawsuits seem almost to be a given. They must really be short on cash if this is how they choose to conduct a layoff.
I like being the customer, not the product.
Google has been quite good so far about not abusing their (rather powerful) position with their users. Of course, it's reasonable to worry that someday that'll change, but it seems to me they have a strong business interest in keeping users happy.
But if you really want to be the "customer" and not the "product", then pay them. $50/year is really quite reasonable. (http://www.google.com/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/)
Oh, to have mod points.
Cigar! Touchdown!
Short of having to submit physical documentation to create an account, how do they know the real name I gave is really me? Or a fake alias?
A great question--the answer seems to be "They're Google and they're good at it."
Seriously: Almost every web-site you visit uses their analytics which are now globally mated to your gmail/youtube accounts. Even if you keep your cookies and backtrail clean enough that Google can't identify you when you connect in a session, the first thing they'll do is try to set a cookie to start learning about this new product (i.e. you.) And the first time you slip-up and log into something that knows your "real" name (think Amazon--your account is in your real name because most users are paying via credit/debit-card and have to legally have their actual legal name on the card.
Google knows your real name (or can make a pretty educated guess about what it is) for most users. For the others, there is an "Is 'Captain Mastadon Penis McAwesome' really Captain's name?" feature that prompts your friends to rat you out if you register a "Fake" name. It was a concerted effort that most people probably failed at.
I'd say "good luck!" trying to opt out of being tracked by Google. If you use the Internet for anything meaningful (even if you only use other random search engines) you can't escape from Google Analytics without hobbling your browser's functionality.
Glad nobody got hurt.
Glad that we're giving people who don't know how to use the ignition key to stop their cars driver's licenses. Seriously, they taught us that on like... the third day. Somebody asked "What if the gas gets stuck all the way on?"
Answer: "Turn off the key. Engine stops, car rolls to a stop. You lose power steering but you're slowing rapidly, so that's less important than it sounds.