When credit reporting angencies have an open forum where anyone can freely read the transaction history, and where both sides have an opportunity to respond with thier viewpoint, then we can get back to this.
Right now, other people rate my credit - I have no option to counter that. I can't call up Equifax and say "Yeah, company blah dinged be for not paying on time, but the reason is that they failed to process my cancellation request on time, and I cancelled because the service sucks anyway". On top of that, the credit reports are used by automated tools and by regulated financial instiutions - if E-Bays feedback ever reaches that degree of importantance and automation, then it'll be time to re-think regulating it.
Thing's don't have to be black & white - you can think it's okay to regulate an industry that's so ingraned in our economy that they can literally ruin you for life, but still think that a similar industry that affects the users of a particular website, and then to a smaller degree, doesn't need regulation.
The coffee was being stored in a vacuum boiler, not in a normal urn, and was over 200 degrees. This was against McDonalds policy then, and they're better about enforcing it now. It would be simple to educate yourself about this case, rather than making assumptions.
I've split coffee on myself before. I've even spilt it in my lap. I've never needed a skin graft from it. That is because I don't use vacuum boiled coffee.
As for the unmerited lawsuits - this wasn't one. McDonalds was knowingly serving something unsuited for consumption form thier drive through - there had, in fact, been a history of complaints about the coffee, and they hadn't changed the policy. The plaitiff asked for a pretty reasonable amount of money - hospital bills + (I believe) a hundred thousand or so in personal injury. She had tried to settle out of court before going to trial. The jury, for whatever reason, decided to pump the award up to the multi-million dollar levels. The AWARD was certainly unmerited, and the judge reduced it to a much more reasonable level.
If you really want an unmerited lawsuit, look at the guy who sued the AMDA and Colgate for making toothbrushes, because you can injure your gums if you brush too much.
Re:Memory Stick Should Go the Way of Beta
on
Why VHS Was Better
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· Score: 1
You must be thinking of some other ipaq - mine supoprts it just fine. You do need an adapter, though - there's no port built in.
Re:Multiple Languages on DotNet not a Good Thing
on
The Future of Java?
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· Score: 1
It's hardly spin - it's true. And sure, you're locked in (sort of) to the class library you choose. That's true no matter what. I doubt that there was any evil chuckling and chortling at MS HQ while they planned to trick all the smalltalk developers into using the.NET compiler and then never being able to use smalltalk code again. The benefits are the ability to use syntatical constructs from different languages while still targeting the same runtime environment, and a language-neutral object interface, which is cool from a technical standpoint if nothing else.
You can't just run a java bytecode compiler on your typical C++ app, either.
I'll make a personal example - I know Delphi, but I don't like the syntax and I'm not truly comfortable with it. I'm more productive in C++ and other C style languages (even C#, which I've only messed with a little bit), because the syntax fits better with how I think. Another guy at work is a hardcode Delphi programmer - he finds it awkward to code in C++. Right now, if we want to interface components, each written in our preferred language, we'd have to do it all via DLLs, and a C api, and it's a big mess. So we don't do that. With.NET, we can each write our components however we want, and use them with no work or glue code or anything. I'd say that design is a signifigant technical improvment over Java, although switching to.NET for that alone would be silly.
If you read the article, you'll notice that the mouth making the statement admits that they don't tell the customer to change the password. I also checked the website, it's not in any of the setup docs there. Furthermore, it's Sprint's modem, not the customers (they lease it), which makes it Sprints responsibility to secure. Even furthermore, a good percentage of DSL installations are done by Sprint service reps, who should be helping the customer change the password as part of the installation.
So. We've got a group of users who a) aren't technically literate enough for it to be reasonable that they should assume thier modem has a password b) aren't informed of the existence of the password, much less given instructions on how to change it c) are actively discouraged from messing with the modem, since it's not thier property and d) are being told that they should be responsible for this?!
Musicians don't get salaries. They get an advance on the album, and then (after they've paid the production cost back), if there's anything left over from thier share of the profits off the CD, then they get that. The actual band is by far the cheapest part of making an album.
Portscans are probably against your AUP. It's against mine, not that that stops anyone. The log in my hardware firewall fills up withing minutes of me rebooting it. Most of it is netBIOS traffic, about half of which are spoofed scans and half of which are unsecured machines broadcasting themselves.
My SMC router came with remote admin disabled by default, and even when you enable it, you have to specify an IP mask. In fact, I'm not even certain you can use a mask, it might have to be a specific IP address. Not that I use it, I just ssh into my linux machine and use lynx:P
They might not get away 100% on this one - I don't have Sprint, but my experience with broadband ISPs and Telco's in general leads me to think that they, like most of the others, think of the modem as belonging to them (which, in some cases it probably does, since they lease them), and they insist on retaining control over it - many of them even get very grumpy if you reset the password on it, to the point of cancelling your service.
Ah ha. From the Sprint DSL website: "Modem remains the property of Sprint and must be returned to Sprint if FastConnect DSL service is discontinued."
I can't find a copy of thier user agreement on the website (I really hate companies that don't let you see that until AFTER you're mostly commited to buying. How am I supposed to make a decision if they won't tell me thier policies?) but I suspect that (unless they changed it right before this became public) that it's standard boilerplate, which wouldn't include anything about the customer having to maintain those modems.
Re:Multiple Languages on DotNet not a Good Thing
on
The Future of Java?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't see why that's a problem - the.NET class libraries are very extensive. And if you ported the class libraries for smalltalk or whatever to.NET, then you could use those, too. But one of the big features in.NET is language neutral objects (assemblies). Kinda like COM, but better. You write an assembly in whatever language you prefer, and it can be called from any other.NET language. Since the.NET class libraries are all assemblies, you naturally can call them from any.NET language.
Our mainframe sucks ass. And it's really (really!) expensive. It would be cheaper to just throw dozens of PC servers at the problem, and we'd get better performance.
If the obvious way (and thus, the way most programmers will do something) is slow and inefficent, then your API is flawed. And anyway, since Swing (of neccesity) will use the native API to draw it's widgets, you're very dependent on the Swing implementation in your JVM. The Windows one has always sucked. In the future, this may change, of course. If you want Java GUI apps to get a better reputation, the the Swing API needs to improve so that it's standard usage is at some level better than "total ass".
On my laptop, as with most laptops, the power button IS the reset button - press it once, and it's a reset, hold it down for [3,5] seconds and it's a hard power off. The simple reset uses whatever that power control standard is (ASCAPI? Whatever.) to send a message to the OS, which decides whether or not to shut down, hibernate, or reboot.
Well, the dead code detected by the program in the article is not an opinion - it's something that is provably unreachable. If you've got well documented functions, it should still be possible to either generate a test case or prove that certain code branches are unreachable. In fact, if you were working on REALLY mission critical stuff, one of the audits is to trace each and every possible branch of execution. Yes, thats an enormous amount of work. However, it's also (largely) possible to automate it.
Dead code is code that is either unreachable or should be unreachable (like an error handler that checks for an impossible case). It's not an "opinion", it's a provable, testable case. If you can't figure out how it's invoked, then you can't test it, and thats a bug. If you remove it and somethign breaks, then you just found out where your bug is.
I'd have to do some Googling to get you a refrence, but I'm lazy. Thomas Jefferson wrote some on the subject.
As for my assertion about the top 1%, I'll expand: It's impossible to make that much wealth through your own productivity. You can make it only by gaining from the work of others (such as by owning a successful company), or, much more likely, through stock in a successfull company, where, again, you're gaining from the work of many other people. I'm not saying thats neccesarily bad, but when the best route to great wealth is not to create on your own, but to take a portion of (many) others wealth, I think it detracts alot from the righteousness inherent in claiming that you shouldn't need to pay taxes.
Looking at the IRS website, the best stats I can find for breakdowns on income are from 1992, which are almost certainly heavily skewed by.com millionares, but for what it's worth, you'd have to have a net worth of over 10 million to be in the top 1%. Just for comparision, that's about 15 times the total, gross income that the "median" worker ($23,000) will produce over his total working lifetime (30 years).
The 95 stats are about the same, although the sample size is only a third of the 92 stats.
I'd be alot more interested in your arguments if you didn't toss off crap about leftists not believing in personal responsibility all the time. It makes you sound stupid.
That said, it's a matter of what you consider to be important - for example, it's a valid position that providing "for the general welfare of the United States" extends to guaranting a minimum standard of living.
I think the issue with 50% of income earners paying 96% of the income tax is not "why do they pay so much" but "why are they making so much more than the bottom 50%".
As for telling people that if they need to make more money, they should just get more skills, open thier own buisness or whatever - that's valid, to a point. But keep in mind that we NEED that lower level of society - if everyone in the US had a PhD in whatever, how easy do you think it would be to get people to pick fruit?
Our social infrastructure and economy demands a social stata, and someone has to be at the bottom - in fact, a fairly large someone. And it demands that migration upward can't be widespread, because if it were we wouldn't have that strata. It's enormously difficult for someone starting in poverty to make it out. It's my belief that this means, as a member of a society that requires this thing, that we, as a society, have an obligation to provide for that lower level, through things like affordable housing and welfare programs. When I say make minumum wage a livable wage, I don't neccesarily mean just make it more money, but make the neccesities of life more affordable - things like housing, and food, and education.
Well, he did say deployment, implying that this would be after testing. That's still a hell of a figure, and I'd assume that things like feature requests and cosmetic changes (often filed as bugs for ease of tracking) weren't counted.
One of the projects I worked on used an UNUSED macro for this sort of thing. Having the macro there shut the compiler up, and it's alot more obvious and self-documenting than a=a.
I don't see whats so wrong with a wealth tax. Nobody in the top 1% income bracket got there by actually producing anything of value anyway.
Everything is interconnected - if we didn't have such a rapidly shrinking middle class, and if the disparity between the income of the upper 1% and the lower 50% wasn't so large, and if we had a minumum wage you could actually live on, then we could spread the tax burden out a bit more. As it stands, yes, the wealthy end up paying for services for the poor. There's nothing wrong with that! That's how the system was designed! If you're wealthy, then you can afford pay more, and even a higher percentage of your income, and still maintain a higher standard of living. Therefore, (the argument goes) you have a responsibility to give more back to society.
There's lots of other factors involved, of course, like how the state distributes the money thats supposed to be benefiting society, but thats not really an issue with the underlying philosophy.
Of course, for a grand you often don't get very much either. I can't count how many times in the last year I've wanted to source to something we bought from a third party because of a trivial bug that they aren't interested in fixing. Or how many times I've had to talk my company into paying for support fees because the documentation shipped was incomplete or wrong. And yet, we STILL keep going for ridiculously overpriced commercial software over open-source alternatives. Sigh.
Major companies, too. Like Oracle. Who I am growing to hate more and more every day, because of a ridiculously overpriced product, poorly indexed documentation (although vast quantities of it), and loads of trivial, crappy little bugs in thier damn database drivers.
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Right now, other people rate my credit - I have no option to counter that. I can't call up Equifax and say "Yeah, company blah dinged be for not paying on time, but the reason is that they failed to process my cancellation request on time, and I cancelled because the service sucks anyway". On top of that, the credit reports are used by automated tools and by regulated financial instiutions - if E-Bays feedback ever reaches that degree of importantance and automation, then it'll be time to re-think regulating it.
Thing's don't have to be black & white - you can think it's okay to regulate an industry that's so ingraned in our economy that they can literally ruin you for life, but still think that a similar industry that affects the users of a particular website, and then to a smaller degree, doesn't need regulation.
I've split coffee on myself before. I've even spilt it in my lap. I've never needed a skin graft from it. That is because I don't use vacuum boiled coffee.
As for the unmerited lawsuits - this wasn't one. McDonalds was knowingly serving something unsuited for consumption form thier drive through - there had, in fact, been a history of complaints about the coffee, and they hadn't changed the policy. The plaitiff asked for a pretty reasonable amount of money - hospital bills + (I believe) a hundred thousand or so in personal injury. She had tried to settle out of court before going to trial. The jury, for whatever reason, decided to pump the award up to the multi-million dollar levels. The AWARD was certainly unmerited, and the judge reduced it to a much more reasonable level.
If you really want an unmerited lawsuit, look at the guy who sued the AMDA and Colgate for making toothbrushes, because you can injure your gums if you brush too much.
You must be thinking of some other ipaq - mine supoprts it just fine. You do need an adapter, though - there's no port built in.
You can't just run a java bytecode compiler on your typical C++ app, either.
I'll make a personal example - I know Delphi, but I don't like the syntax and I'm not truly comfortable with it. I'm more productive in C++ and other C style languages (even C#, which I've only messed with a little bit), because the syntax fits better with how I think. Another guy at work is a hardcode Delphi programmer - he finds it awkward to code in C++. Right now, if we want to interface components, each written in our preferred language, we'd have to do it all via DLLs, and a C api, and it's a big mess. So we don't do that. With .NET, we can each write our components however we want, and use them with no work or glue code or anything. I'd say that design is a signifigant technical improvment over Java, although switching to .NET for that alone would be silly.
So. We've got a group of users who a) aren't technically literate enough for it to be reasonable that they should assume thier modem has a password b) aren't informed of the existence of the password, much less given instructions on how to change it c) are actively discouraged from messing with the modem, since it's not thier property and d) are being told that they should be responsible for this?!
Musicians don't get salaries. They get an advance on the album, and then (after they've paid the production cost back), if there's anything left over from thier share of the profits off the CD, then they get that. The actual band is by far the cheapest part of making an album.
Portscans are probably against your AUP. It's against mine, not that that stops anyone. The log in my hardware firewall fills up withing minutes of me rebooting it. Most of it is netBIOS traffic, about half of which are spoofed scans and half of which are unsecured machines broadcasting themselves.
My SMC router came with remote admin disabled by default, and even when you enable it, you have to specify an IP mask. In fact, I'm not even certain you can use a mask, it might have to be a specific IP address. Not that I use it, I just ssh into my linux machine and use lynx :P
I thought the Oracle one was scott/tiger. At least, thats what the Net8 tools try when you attempt to verify a connection...
It is when your ISP retains ownership of the hardware and will deny you support if you change the password.
Ah ha. From the Sprint DSL website: "Modem remains the property of Sprint and must be returned to Sprint if FastConnect DSL service is discontinued."
I can't find a copy of thier user agreement on the website (I really hate companies that don't let you see that until AFTER you're mostly commited to buying. How am I supposed to make a decision if they won't tell me thier policies?) but I suspect that (unless they changed it right before this became public) that it's standard boilerplate, which wouldn't include anything about the customer having to maintain those modems.
I don't see why that's a problem - the .NET class libraries are very extensive. And if you ported the class libraries for smalltalk or whatever to .NET, then you could use those, too. But one of the big features in .NET is language neutral objects (assemblies). Kinda like COM, but better. You write an assembly in whatever language you prefer, and it can be called from any other .NET language. Since the .NET class libraries are all assemblies, you naturally can call them from any .NET language.
Our mainframe sucks ass. And it's really (really!) expensive. It would be cheaper to just throw dozens of PC servers at the problem, and we'd get better performance.
If the obvious way (and thus, the way most programmers will do something) is slow and inefficent, then your API is flawed. And anyway, since Swing (of neccesity) will use the native API to draw it's widgets, you're very dependent on the Swing implementation in your JVM. The Windows one has always sucked. In the future, this may change, of course. If you want Java GUI apps to get a better reputation, the the Swing API needs to improve so that it's standard usage is at some level better than "total ass".
On my laptop, as with most laptops, the power button IS the reset button - press it once, and it's a reset, hold it down for [3,5] seconds and it's a hard power off. The simple reset uses whatever that power control standard is (ASCAPI? Whatever.) to send a message to the OS, which decides whether or not to shut down, hibernate, or reboot.
Well, the dead code detected by the program in the article is not an opinion - it's something that is provably unreachable. If you've got well documented functions, it should still be possible to either generate a test case or prove that certain code branches are unreachable. In fact, if you were working on REALLY mission critical stuff, one of the audits is to trace each and every possible branch of execution. Yes, thats an enormous amount of work. However, it's also (largely) possible to automate it.
Dead code is code that is either unreachable or should be unreachable (like an error handler that checks for an impossible case). It's not an "opinion", it's a provable, testable case. If you can't figure out how it's invoked, then you can't test it, and thats a bug. If you remove it and somethign breaks, then you just found out where your bug is.
As for my assertion about the top 1%, I'll expand: It's impossible to make that much wealth through your own productivity. You can make it only by gaining from the work of others (such as by owning a successful company), or, much more likely, through stock in a successfull company, where, again, you're gaining from the work of many other people. I'm not saying thats neccesarily bad, but when the best route to great wealth is not to create on your own, but to take a portion of (many) others wealth, I think it detracts alot from the righteousness inherent in claiming that you shouldn't need to pay taxes.
Looking at the IRS website, the best stats I can find for breakdowns on income are from 1992, which are almost certainly heavily skewed by .com millionares, but for what it's worth, you'd have to have a net worth of over 10 million to be in the top 1%. Just for comparision, that's about 15 times the total, gross income that the "median" worker ($23,000) will produce over his total working lifetime (30 years).
The 95 stats are about the same, although the sample size is only a third of the 92 stats.
That said, it's a matter of what you consider to be important - for example, it's a valid position that providing "for the general welfare of the United States" extends to guaranting a minimum standard of living.
I think the issue with 50% of income earners paying 96% of the income tax is not "why do they pay so much" but "why are they making so much more than the bottom 50%".
As for telling people that if they need to make more money, they should just get more skills, open thier own buisness or whatever - that's valid, to a point. But keep in mind that we NEED that lower level of society - if everyone in the US had a PhD in whatever, how easy do you think it would be to get people to pick fruit?
Our social infrastructure and economy demands a social stata, and someone has to be at the bottom - in fact, a fairly large someone. And it demands that migration upward can't be widespread, because if it were we wouldn't have that strata. It's enormously difficult for someone starting in poverty to make it out. It's my belief that this means, as a member of a society that requires this thing, that we, as a society, have an obligation to provide for that lower level, through things like affordable housing and welfare programs. When I say make minumum wage a livable wage, I don't neccesarily mean just make it more money, but make the neccesities of life more affordable - things like housing, and food, and education.
Well, he did say deployment, implying that this would be after testing. That's still a hell of a figure, and I'd assume that things like feature requests and cosmetic changes (often filed as bugs for ease of tracking) weren't counted.
One of the projects I worked on used an UNUSED macro for this sort of thing. Having the macro there shut the compiler up, and it's alot more obvious and self-documenting than a=a.
Because doing something like a.Serialize() or a.Save() is so much less clear, right?
Everything is interconnected - if we didn't have such a rapidly shrinking middle class, and if the disparity between the income of the upper 1% and the lower 50% wasn't so large, and if we had a minumum wage you could actually live on, then we could spread the tax burden out a bit more. As it stands, yes, the wealthy end up paying for services for the poor. There's nothing wrong with that! That's how the system was designed! If you're wealthy, then you can afford pay more, and even a higher percentage of your income, and still maintain a higher standard of living. Therefore, (the argument goes) you have a responsibility to give more back to society.
There's lots of other factors involved, of course, like how the state distributes the money thats supposed to be benefiting society, but thats not really an issue with the underlying philosophy.
Major companies, too. Like Oracle. Who I am growing to hate more and more every day, because of a ridiculously overpriced product, poorly indexed documentation (although vast quantities of it), and loads of trivial, crappy little bugs in thier damn database drivers.
It does come included with a bunch of OEM installs, however.