> The thing you've got to bear in mind is that China is developing.
Granted, they're *actually* developing, unlike most "developing countries" where the word "developing" is a sadly ironic euphemism. China is actually making tangible improvements, specific things we can point to and say with a straight face, "See, this is much better than ten years ago".
Nonetheless, China is developing at a very controlled (government-controlled) rate, and that rate is fairly slow. Deliberately slow, to all appearances.
China has a *lot* more developing to do if they ever want to be anything like a first-world country, and they don't appear to be in any hurry about it. This whole thing with Google is just one very small example of how the Chinese government is very much NOT ready to fully set communism to the side and allow the economy to grow freely. (And yes, the free flow of information *is* part and parcel of a proper market economy.)
Maybe that's okay, and they'll get there in time. Maybe too much change too fast would be traumatic, and "boiling the frog" is a valid way to minimize that. Maybe "slow and steady wins the race". Maybe.
But there is also a very real danger that the next finance minister or party leader or whoever will decide that China has had "enough reform" and things will start to gradually slide back toward where they were. China's future hangs in the balance. It would really only take one person in the wrong place at the wrong time to screw it up.
It's both of those things, and there are also some additional politics involved.
For one thing, the major Western nations (particularly the US) have made a number of significant diplomatic concessions to the PROC, with the *understanding* that military action must not become a factor in PROC/ROC relations. Concessions like officially not recognizing the ROC or having formal embassies and official diplomatic relations with them. Concessions like issuing formal statements in recognition of important Chinese philosophical positions (e.g., the One China Policy). If China so much as *looked* like it was going to move against Taiwan, those concessions, which despite having little material significance are nonetheless far more important to the PROC than most Westerners could possibly understand, would be in jeopardy. The Chinese government would lose face in the eyes of its own citizens.
For another, any move to attack Taiwan militarily would be viewed within China as a military action against Chinese citizens, with all the controversy that entails in the modern era. This by itself wouldn't be an effective deterrent, because the government would hope to spin and control the news. But in combination with the international politics, the potential for US military intervention, and the economic disincentive, it's just one more reason why China isn't planning to do anything military against Taiwan.
What they *are* planning is to keep repeating, loudly and often, that Taiwan always has been and always will be a part of China, and to censor (at least within their area of actual control) any suggestion to the contrary, and to continue browbeating and wheedling and cajoling and bribing (with concessions on other issues) other nations into officially agreeing with or at least not officially gainsaying this position. This will continue to work because Westerners generally just see it as so much posturing of the sort that it's best not to try to argue with, because there's nothing to be gained by arguing about it. And the Chinese will continue to see it as an important moral victory that nobody (well, nobody important) is officially disputing their nonsense^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H statement of historical fact.
No, what China will probably end up doing is blocking access to Google's Hong Kong site from mainland China. But blocking access to a site operated legally "within China" might be more controversial in China than making a foreign company leave if they refuse to play by the government's rules. It's a gambit: Google is forcing the Chinese government to decide exactly how stubborn they're willing to be.
> Chiang Kai-Shek's only virtue was that he wasn't Mao.
Okay, but that isn't exactly a small thing.
> The only reason the KMT (and, by association, Taiwan) hasn't > revoked its claim to the mainland is because doing so would > be interpreted by the PRC as a declaration of independence.
It would also be domestically very controversial in Taiwan.
Short-term, Google probably has more to lose (although, arguably, they also have more to *gain* by cutting ties with China; it certainly isn't going to do their reputation in the West any harm).
In the long term, however, I think China has more to lose. Google is not the first company to decide doing business in China is More Trouble Than It's Worth. As it stands, a lot of people deal with China not because they're a pleasure to do business with, but because it "seems important", because China's so big. That's not a good basis for a solid relationship. If they continue doing just about everything they can think of to alienate people, China may eventually find themselves screaming "we're important, come do business with us" to a world that has lost the willingness to put up with their nonsense.
Not so long ago, people were betting on Microsoft to do absolutely *nothing* to improve the mess that was IE6, and the people who were betting they'd do nothing were winning, for years.
Now I'm betting they release a new version of IE within the next year, and another update within a year or so after that.
So even if most people keep using IE, the competition HAS made a significant difference.
> For the statistics to mean anything, they should tell what percentage of > the people choose which browser on the ballot, otherwise it's meaningless.
Not entirely meaningless. If the ballot is causing a drop in IE market share, then that implies that the percentage of people choosing IE is lower than its current market share (generally estimated at around 60%). This isn't really surprising, but it's worth knowing. Microsoft, in particular, can benefit from being aware of this information (although I suspect the IE team already knew).
This assumes, of course, that they've compared the rate at which IE's market share is dropping now versus the rate at which it was already dropping before the ballot thing started going out, and looked at the rate of change in that rate (acceleration if you will) over time, and made a good attempt to factor that out of the calculation. It also assumes that no other event coincidentally happening at the same time is responsible for the change, but in the circumstance I think that's basically reasonable, unless somebody can propose another cause. I mean, you never know absolutely for *certain* with such things, but with good analysis you can reach a reasonable degree of confidence, at least in terms of the generalities.
The Flash Player plug-in may use the ActiveX interface to communicate with IE, and vice versa, but it is not "installed using ActiveX" in the sense of being automatically installed whenever a website points it out and asks for it, like a custom ActiveX control would have been in IE5. That functionality has been disabled in IE for the better part of a decade.
The Flash plugin is installed in much the same way any other software is installed (Firefox, for instance) in Windows: by downloading the installer, saving it to the filesystem, and running it as Administrator. Plugins installed in this fashion are of course still usable with IE. Obviously.
But the other poster was talking about the automatic downloading and installation of custom per-site ActiveX controls whenever a site requests them, which is a relic of the Windows 98 era, when security just wasn't on Microsoft's radar.
If nothing else, the US power grid is vulnerable to normal wear and tear, because large parts of it are old and in poor repair. My uncle handles the financial books for [the power company for a significant amount of territory, which I will not name specifically so as to avoid obviously identifying him], and he indicates there are good reasons to be concerned that the grid might basically just break down from old age at pretty much any time.
> If you really want to try to read the disk it is probably UFS
I bet it's not.
Xenix is *old*. Older than System V.
Not only does it probably not have the Berkely FS, it probably doesn't have a straight-up unaltered version of the Berkely filesystem's predecessor either. The people who ported Xenix probably made modifications to the AT&T filesystem code to suit the hardware they were porting to. That was a common practice at the time. So it probably has something that can best be described as "Xenix filesystem".
The good news is, Xenix was actually pretty popular for a few years, so there's actually a chance you might be able to find something that can read the thing.
> The vulnerability is only in 3.6 series releases.
I should be fine, then. I downgraded to Firefox 2 after I got tired of losing data (specifically, open tabs) to two different bugs that were introduced in 3.0 and are still present in 3.6.
> I know of several dozen websites that [...] require > downloading active x controls onto the user's machine
Then they don't work with any currently-supported browser.
Security updates for IE6 disabled this catastrophically insane misfeature years ago. Microsoft *had* to disable this feature, because they were getting hammered really hard by the tech press as a result of the exploits that were coming out fifteen times a week. For a while they tried playing whack-a-mole blacklisting specific ActiveX controls, but they soon realized that wasn't a viable approach and, in a moment of sanity, finally turned off the whole "download ActiveX controls whenever a website says so" nonsense. And there was much rejoicing.
This was a long time ago, as web developers measure time. I'm not sure the exact date, but it was definitely before XP SP2 came out. (I think it my have even been before XP SP1, but I can't swear to that.) Firefox hadn't been released yet. I don't thing Gmail existed yet either.
> South Korean bank sites for instance require > activeX and as such have to be used with IE
Despite the fact that Microsoft has been systematically pushing ActiveX farther and farther into the "theoretically supported for corporate buzzword checkbox reasons but disabled in virtually all real-world situations" bin since around the time Windows XP came out?
Are Koreans mostly all still using Windows 98, or what?
> there are still many, many, many websites that DO NOT WORK > unless you are using MS-Windows with Internet Explorer
Yeah, but 99.9756% of them are ancient crusty pieces of dross that nobody cares about. The other 0.0243% are ancient crusty pieces of dross that some people *do* care about, but their maintainers can't be bothered to keep them up to date anyway because that would be too much like work, or something.
(There are also sites that work fine if you spoof your User Agent string, but they still do the sniffing and give people the error page anyway, probably for reasons to do with internal politics within the organization. See fafsa.ed.gov for an extreme example of this. I don't count these as sites that DO NOT WORK, because frobbing a UA-string box on the toolbar is not exactly brain surgery. Heck, it's easier than turning on Javascript support in IE on some versions of Windows.)
Of course there are web pages out there that still require IE6. Obviously. There are a few that require IE5. There always will be. There are even still web pages out there that use "layers" and don't display properly in anything but Netscape 4. So what? They haven't been updated since Methuselah was born, usually aren't well-indexed by search engines, and in most cases do not contain any information anyone wants to read in the first place. Most of them appear to have been created mainly for the purpose of showing off somebody's cool webmaster skills back in the nineties when knowing HTML would put them a step ahead of other job applicants. Who needs them? The web is inherently redundant. When the information you want is on a site like that, it is generally also on other websites that aren't like that and, in most cases, rank higher in Google search results.
This concerns me somewhat, because I had been expecting that the kid would eventually run out his line of credit and 4chan would finally die its much-deserved death. If the site is breaking even now, there's a chance he will be able to keep it going for decades yet, and maybe even pass it along to someone who will keep it going thereafter.
That leaves me with the scant hope that eventually everyone will spontaneously realize stupidity isn't great, and then they'll stop propagating stupid 4chan memes. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
I already builded teh next-generation 4chan, but it sucked almost as bad as the current one, so I eated it. Now go to YouTube and watch a video you hate.
Glass is good for some things (e.g., baking), but it isn't nearly as good for most of the things Tupperware is mostly used for, e.g., putting leftovers in the fridge.
And believe me, I know all about Ball jars. We can about a hundred quarts of pasta sauce a year, plus fruits and jellies and applesauce and various other things. Things you can't buy at the store, because the level of quality would make you want to slit your wrists.
> However, spreadsheets have always been a tool that > can be used for everything, but does nothing _well_.
I think it does very well for what I use it for. Frankly, it would be extremely difficult to design another UI for finance management that simultaneously offers A) the flexibility to let me do everything I do and B) the ease of use that comes from an already-familiar standard interface. Basically all I have to do is type the numbers in in the appropriate column, and it does everything I want. What could be easier than that?
Yes, I did have to spend a few minutes setting up the formulae, several years ago. But it took a lot less time than it would have taken to learn Quicken. (Gnucash didn't exist yet at the time.)
By using a spreadsheet, which is a standard tool, I was able to easily migrate my finances from Lotus 123 for DOS to Microsoft Works for Windows 95 to StarOffice (which is now called OpenOffice.org) and take it from operating system to operating system (Windows 95 to RedHat to Mandrake to Windows Me to Gentoo to some other distro I'm forgetting at the moment to FreeBSD to Debian) without redoing everything or switching to a new kind of software with a new interface. I have never had to go back and start over from scratch and set up all my columns (funds) and formulae again.
All I do is just punch in the numbers. What could be easier?
(Okay, yeah, sometimes I add a column/fund to my list of budget categories. This also is very easy and takes almost no time.)
As far as I'm concerned, Quicken and Gnucash and so on are a solution in search of a problem. I fail to see the point of using a special software with a different interface to do something that is basically a textbook case of what the excellent software that I'm already using was designed for.
I mean, it's all well and good for people who aren't already comfortable using a spreadsheet. In that case, sure. But that doesn't apply to me.
> that is simply evidence that 20% of the population of North > America are incapable of managing their finances. This has > nothing to do with using a credit card not being "fiscally > responsible" and everything to do with *certain individuals* > not being fiscally responsible.
You seem to have missed the strong correlation between using credit cards on a regular basis and being one of those "certain individuals". Fiscally responsible people (at least around here) don't use credit cards much. The people who do can't pay their bills. The two phenomena go hand in hand.
> you can check a current bank statement at any time over the web.
Actually, I receive a bank statement in the mail, once a month, same as everybody else.
> That only works if a cheque book is the *only* way you withdraw money from your account.
We discussed that in another part of the thread. The short version is, it's a checking account, so obviously writing checks is how money goes out of the account.
> Sounds like the US banking system is utterly kerrayzee to me.
The banks are fine.
Well, most of them. You'll want to stay away from the large multi-national chain banks: they tend to do stupid stuff like lend all their money to irresponsible third-world governments (in the eighties) or treat aggregated risky sub-prime mortgages as a low-risk investment (more recently). But normal (locally owned and operated) banks are fine.
It's the *credit card* companies (which also are the outfits responsible for debit cards) that you don't want to have anything to do with. (Come to think of it, some of the credit card companies are also large multinational chain banks, which I already said you want to avoid.)
> 1. A chequebook is *really* bulky compared to a credit/debit card.
Oh, good grief. It's almost twice as long as a credit card and maybe three sixteenths of an inch thick. Woo. It fits in a standard shirt pocket. This is too much to carry? What are you, a smurf?
> 2. If I pay by credit card then I get 30-60 days credit for free. > This isn't actually very important to me, but it's a bonus.
Yeah, maybe it's just me, but I don't find that one compelling.
> 3. If I pay by credit card I get certain legal protections. > For example, if I buy a product which then breaks and I can't get > a refund/replacement (e.g. because the vendor is no longer in > business) then the credit card company will refund me.
Interesting. Americans (well, the ones with brains) tend not to do business in the first place with vendors who haven't been around very long ("fly by night", we call them), so this generally isn't an issue.
> 4. Paying by card is a lot faster than writing out a cheque - stick > the card in the terminal, bang in my PIN and the transaction is done.
Over here, you generally also have to sign, using one of those stupid electronic screen-and-stylus touchscreen-like signing things that doesn't work very well. Granted, you don't have to fill out the date and amount, but now we're nitpicking. The difference isn't that big.
> 5. Most shops just plain won't take cheques any more.
Over here, more places take checks than take credit cards.
My employer, for example, takes cash or check. No plastic.
There are places that won't take a check, but we're talking like fast food restaurants and stuff, and you're never spending much, and you just pay cash.
> I wouldn't be at all surprised if the banks charged businesses more > to cash a cheque than take a card payment
I can tell you for sure that the reverse is true here. The vendor pays significant fees to the credit card company for every credit card payment, which they are expected to just swallow. In practice, places that take credit cards just build those fees into their prices for everyone. There are no such charges for checking from most banks, because if there wer
> I'm sure as hell not going to write a cheque and walk to the post box every few days to pay a bill.
I generally pay all my bills for the month at the same day, and drop them in the mailbox on my way to work.
> Your finances must be *really* simplistic if a spreadsheet is easier > than a financial management package. As soon as you have more than > one account, a real financial management package makes things a lot easier.
Actually, my spreadsheet tracks money in three places: my savings account, my checking account, and the cash I have on hand. It's not hard. I took me a couple of minutes to set up the formulas, but it wasn't *difficult*. I mean, I already know how to use a spreadsheet anyway, because it's a standard and generally useful piece of software.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but spreadsheets *used* to be considered one of the three basic computer applications everyone should know how to use. Word processing and database were the others, and by "database" here we're talking pre-SQL non-relational single-table database with about three data types. The first spreadsheet I ever used was running on an Apple//c. So like I said, I already know how to use a spreadsheet, and it does absolutely everything I need or could want for balancing my checkbook. I even have it automatically calculating my Ohio Use Tax. All I have to do is stick a 1 in a certain narrow column for transactions that are out-of-state no-sales-tax purchases, and the money for the tax is moved aside out of my general fund column into a "use tax savings" column. Other columns, designated for certain spending categories, automatically receive funds every time I put in a paycheck (I believe the technical term for this is "following a budget"). It's all very straightforward and very easy to use.
> We [...] invaded Iraq because Bush lied and said they were trying to gather up WMDs
Bush wasn't the only person making claims to the effect that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Hussein, for instance, was doing just about everything he could think of to convince the world that he had such things. (A lot of people fell for it, and a lot more weren't quite sure. Bush almost wanted it to be true, albeit perhaps subconsciously, because it would give him the chance to finish up what his father wanted to finish and couldn't, due to domestic political pressures.)
Why was Saddam actively trying to convince people he had big bad weapons? It's a long story. The short version is, he didn't understand the Western mindset very well. Japan made a similar mistake in 1941: they actually believed that bombing Pearl Harbor would make us *less* likely to enter the war. Yeah, they flunked "Understanding How Americans Think 101".
They were allied with one another (see: Axis Powers), and were together attacking nations (such as, England) that became our allies when we were attacked. So yeah. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the enemy of my friend is my enemy.
> Nobody in a pyramid scheme thinks they're going to be left holding the bag at the end.
That's because they're bad at math.
Fundamentally, the pyramidal-growth property that makes the money multiply (geometrically, in most schemes) *also* makes the number of people who get left holding the bag multiply with the same curve. So in any pyramid scheme, the probability that you will lose your investment and end up with nothing correlates *strongly* with the amount of money your optimistic side hopes you can make.
And that's not even taking into consideration the probability of getting caught.
Some of them sell products that are only *theoretically* worth buying. Like those special juices that are supposed to be awesomely high in antioxidants (and therefore good for what ails you) because they're made from fruit that doesn't grow in North America. These are healthy, in the sense that, being fruit juice, they're much better for you than (say) pop; but they're sold at absurdly out-of-proportion prices that no honest sales pitch would convince anyone to pay. So yeah, they set off a lot of people's scam radar, even though they're technically legal (as long as the sales people don't make *concrete* fraudulent claims).
But there are also multilevel-marketed products that are quite good and markedly *superior* to what you can buy at the store. Not very many, mind you. But they exist. Tupperware is perhaps the best example. Sure, it costs more than competing brands, but it's also higher quality stuff. The lids fit better, go on easier, and stay on better. Also, until about ten years ago, all the major competing products were made from decidedly inferior plastics. (Lately the competition has improved considerably in that regard.)
Slashdot Mirror
> The thing you've got to bear in mind is that China is developing.
Granted, they're *actually* developing, unlike most "developing countries" where the word "developing" is a sadly ironic euphemism. China is actually making tangible improvements, specific things we can point to and say with a straight face, "See, this is much better than ten years ago".
Nonetheless, China is developing at a very controlled (government-controlled) rate, and that rate is fairly slow. Deliberately slow, to all appearances.
China has a *lot* more developing to do if they ever want to be anything like a first-world country, and they don't appear to be in any hurry about it. This whole thing with Google is just one very small example of how the Chinese government is very much NOT ready to fully set communism to the side and allow the economy to grow freely. (And yes, the free flow of information *is* part and parcel of a proper market economy.)
Maybe that's okay, and they'll get there in time. Maybe too much change too fast would be traumatic, and "boiling the frog" is a valid way to minimize that. Maybe "slow and steady wins the race". Maybe.
But there is also a very real danger that the next finance minister or party leader or whoever will decide that China has had "enough reform" and things will start to gradually slide back toward where they were. China's future hangs in the balance. It would really only take one person in the wrong place at the wrong time to screw it up.
It's both of those things, and there are also some additional politics involved.
For one thing, the major Western nations (particularly the US) have made a number of significant diplomatic concessions to the PROC, with the *understanding* that military action must not become a factor in PROC/ROC relations. Concessions like officially not recognizing the ROC or having formal embassies and official diplomatic relations with them. Concessions like issuing formal statements in recognition of important Chinese philosophical positions (e.g., the One China Policy). If China so much as *looked* like it was going to move against Taiwan, those concessions, which despite having little material significance are nonetheless far more important to the PROC than most Westerners could possibly understand, would be in jeopardy. The Chinese government would lose face in the eyes of its own citizens.
For another, any move to attack Taiwan militarily would be viewed within China as a military action against Chinese citizens, with all the controversy that entails in the modern era. This by itself wouldn't be an effective deterrent, because the government would hope to spin and control the news. But in combination with the international politics, the potential for US military intervention, and the economic disincentive, it's just one more reason why China isn't planning to do anything military against Taiwan.
What they *are* planning is to keep repeating, loudly and often, that Taiwan always has been and always will be a part of China, and to censor (at least within their area of actual control) any suggestion to the contrary, and to continue browbeating and wheedling and cajoling and bribing (with concessions on other issues) other nations into officially agreeing with or at least not officially gainsaying this position. This will continue to work because Westerners generally just see it as so much posturing of the sort that it's best not to try to argue with, because there's nothing to be gained by arguing about it. And the Chinese will continue to see it as an important moral victory that nobody (well, nobody important) is officially disputing their nonsense^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H statement of historical fact.
No, what China will probably end up doing is blocking access to Google's Hong Kong site from mainland China. But blocking access to a site operated legally "within China" might be more controversial in China than making a foreign company leave if they refuse to play by the government's rules. It's a gambit: Google is forcing the Chinese government to decide exactly how stubborn they're willing to be.
> Chiang Kai-Shek's only virtue was that he wasn't Mao.
Okay, but that isn't exactly a small thing.
> The only reason the KMT (and, by association, Taiwan) hasn't
> revoked its claim to the mainland is because doing so would
> be interpreted by the PRC as a declaration of independence.
It would also be domestically very controversial in Taiwan.
Short-term, Google probably has more to lose (although, arguably, they also have more to *gain* by cutting ties with China; it certainly isn't going to do their reputation in the West any harm).
In the long term, however, I think China has more to lose.
Google is not the first company to decide doing business in China is More Trouble Than It's Worth. As it stands, a lot of people deal with China not because they're a pleasure to do business with, but because it "seems important", because China's so big. That's not a good basis for a solid relationship. If they continue doing just about everything they can think of to alienate people, China may eventually find themselves screaming "we're important, come do business with us" to a world that has lost the willingness to put up with their nonsense.
> Ok, I bet on Microsoft.
Yes, but bet on them to do _what_?
Not so long ago, people were betting on Microsoft to do absolutely *nothing* to improve the mess that was IE6, and the people who were betting they'd do nothing were winning, for years.
Now I'm betting they release a new version of IE within the next year, and another update within a year or so after that.
So even if most people keep using IE, the competition HAS made a significant difference.
> For the statistics to mean anything, they should tell what percentage of
> the people choose which browser on the ballot, otherwise it's meaningless.
Not entirely meaningless. If the ballot is causing a drop in IE market share, then that implies that the percentage of people choosing IE is lower than its current market share (generally estimated at around 60%). This isn't really surprising, but it's worth knowing. Microsoft, in particular, can benefit from being aware of this information (although I suspect the IE team already knew).
This assumes, of course, that they've compared the rate at which IE's market share is dropping now versus the rate at which it was already dropping before the ballot thing started going out, and looked at the rate of change in that rate (acceleration if you will) over time, and made a good attempt to factor that out of the calculation. It also assumes that no other event coincidentally happening at the same time is responsible for the change, but in the circumstance I think that's basically reasonable, unless somebody can propose another cause. I mean, you never know absolutely for *certain* with such things, but with good analysis you can reach a reasonable degree of confidence, at least in terms of the generalities.
The Flash Player plug-in may use the ActiveX interface to communicate with IE, and vice versa, but it is not "installed using ActiveX" in the sense of being automatically installed whenever a website points it out and asks for it, like a custom ActiveX control would have been in IE5. That functionality has been disabled in IE for the better part of a decade.
The Flash plugin is installed in much the same way any other software is installed (Firefox, for instance) in Windows: by downloading the installer, saving it to the filesystem, and running it as Administrator. Plugins installed in this fashion are of course still usable with IE. Obviously.
But the other poster was talking about the automatic downloading and installation of custom per-site ActiveX controls whenever a site requests them, which is a relic of the Windows 98 era, when security just wasn't on Microsoft's radar.
If nothing else, the US power grid is vulnerable to normal wear and tear, because large parts of it are old and in poor repair. My uncle handles the financial books for [the power company for a significant amount of territory, which I will not name specifically so as to avoid obviously identifying him], and he indicates there are good reasons to be concerned that the grid might basically just break down from old age at pretty much any time.
Heartwarming, that.
> If you really want to try to read the disk it is probably UFS
I bet it's not.
Xenix is *old*. Older than System V.
Not only does it probably not have the Berkely FS, it probably doesn't have a straight-up unaltered version of the Berkely filesystem's predecessor either. The people who ported Xenix probably made modifications to the AT&T filesystem code to suit the hardware they were porting to. That was a common practice at the time. So it probably has something that can best be described as "Xenix filesystem".
The good news is, Xenix was actually pretty popular for a few years, so there's actually a chance you might be able to find something that can read the thing.
But if it has UUCP, that's going to be easier.
> The vulnerability is only in 3.6 series releases.
I should be fine, then. I downgraded to Firefox 2 after I got tired of losing data (specifically, open tabs) to two different bugs that were introduced in 3.0 and are still present in 3.6.
Maybe Firefox 4 will be better...
> I know of several dozen websites that [...] require
> downloading active x controls onto the user's machine
Then they don't work with any currently-supported browser.
Security updates for IE6 disabled this catastrophically insane misfeature years ago. Microsoft *had* to disable this feature, because they were getting hammered really hard by the tech press as a result of the exploits that were coming out fifteen times a week. For a while they tried playing whack-a-mole blacklisting specific ActiveX controls, but they soon realized that wasn't a viable approach and, in a moment of sanity, finally turned off the whole "download ActiveX controls whenever a website says so" nonsense. And there was much rejoicing.
This was a long time ago, as web developers measure time. I'm not sure the exact date, but it was definitely before XP SP2 came out. (I think it my have even been before XP SP1, but I can't swear to that.) Firefox hadn't been released yet. I don't thing Gmail existed yet either.
> South Korean bank sites for instance require
> activeX and as such have to be used with IE
Despite the fact that Microsoft has been systematically pushing ActiveX farther and farther into the "theoretically supported for corporate buzzword checkbox reasons but disabled in virtually all real-world situations" bin since around the time Windows XP came out?
Are Koreans mostly all still using Windows 98, or what?
> there are still many, many, many websites that DO NOT WORK
> unless you are using MS-Windows with Internet Explorer
Yeah, but 99.9756% of them are ancient crusty pieces of dross that nobody cares about. The other 0.0243% are ancient crusty pieces of dross that some people *do* care about, but their maintainers can't be bothered to keep them up to date anyway because that would be too much like work, or something.
(There are also sites that work fine if you spoof your User Agent string, but they still do the sniffing and give people the error page anyway, probably for reasons to do with internal politics within the organization. See fafsa.ed.gov for an extreme example of this. I don't count these as sites that DO NOT WORK, because frobbing a UA-string box on the toolbar is not exactly brain surgery. Heck, it's easier than turning on Javascript support in IE on some versions of Windows.)
Of course there are web pages out there that still require IE6. Obviously. There are a few that require IE5. There always will be. There are even still web pages out there that use "layers" and don't display properly in anything but Netscape 4. So what? They haven't been updated since Methuselah was born, usually aren't well-indexed by search engines, and in most cases do not contain any information anyone wants to read in the first place. Most of them appear to have been created mainly for the purpose of showing off somebody's cool webmaster skills back in the nineties when knowing HTML would put them a step ahead of other job applicants. Who needs them? The web is inherently redundant. When the information you want is on a site like that, it is generally also on other websites that aren't like that and, in most cases, rank higher in Google search results.
When and how did 4chan start breaking even?
This concerns me somewhat, because I had been expecting that the kid would eventually run out his line of credit and 4chan would finally die its much-deserved death. If the site is breaking even now, there's a chance he will be able to keep it going for decades yet, and maybe even pass it along to someone who will keep it going thereafter.
That leaves me with the scant hope that eventually everyone will spontaneously realize stupidity isn't great, and then they'll stop propagating stupid 4chan memes. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
I already builded teh next-generation 4chan, but it sucked almost as bad as the current one, so I eated it. Now go to YouTube and watch a video you hate.
> I hope you have vibrate on too or you're going to miss a lot of calls.
It's a zen phone. It vibrates by not vibrating, and I answer by not answering.
Glass is good for some things (e.g., baking), but it isn't nearly as good for most of the things Tupperware is mostly used for, e.g., putting leftovers in the fridge.
And believe me, I know all about Ball jars. We can about a hundred quarts of pasta sauce a year, plus fruits and jellies and applesauce and various other things. Things you can't buy at the store, because the level of quality would make you want to slit your wrists.
> However, spreadsheets have always been a tool that
> can be used for everything, but does nothing _well_.
I think it does very well for what I use it for. Frankly, it would be extremely difficult to design another UI for finance management that simultaneously offers A) the flexibility to let me do everything I do and B) the ease of use that comes from an already-familiar standard interface. Basically all I have to do is type the numbers in in the appropriate column, and it does everything I want. What could be easier than that?
Yes, I did have to spend a few minutes setting up the formulae, several years ago. But it took a lot less time than it would have taken to learn Quicken. (Gnucash didn't exist yet at the time.)
By using a spreadsheet, which is a standard tool, I was able to easily migrate my finances from Lotus 123 for DOS to Microsoft Works for Windows 95 to StarOffice (which is now called OpenOffice.org) and take it from operating system to operating system (Windows 95 to RedHat to Mandrake to Windows Me to Gentoo to some other distro I'm forgetting at the moment to FreeBSD to Debian) without redoing everything or switching to a new kind of software with a new interface. I have never had to go back and start over from scratch and set up all my columns (funds) and formulae again.
All I do is just punch in the numbers. What could be easier?
(Okay, yeah, sometimes I add a column/fund to my list of budget categories. This also is very easy and takes almost no time.)
As far as I'm concerned, Quicken and Gnucash and so on are a solution in search of a problem. I fail to see the point of using a special software with a different interface to do something that is basically a textbook case of what the excellent software that I'm already using was designed for.
I mean, it's all well and good for people who aren't already comfortable using a spreadsheet. In that case, sure. But that doesn't apply to me.
> that is simply evidence that 20% of the population of North
> America are incapable of managing their finances. This has
> nothing to do with using a credit card not being "fiscally
> responsible" and everything to do with *certain individuals*
> not being fiscally responsible.
You seem to have missed the strong correlation between using credit cards on a regular basis and being one of those "certain individuals". Fiscally responsible people (at least around here) don't use credit cards much. The people who do can't pay their bills. The two phenomena go hand in hand.
> you can check a current bank statement at any time over the web.
Actually, I receive a bank statement in the mail, once a month, same as everybody else.
> That only works if a cheque book is the *only* way you withdraw money from your account.
We discussed that in another part of the thread. The short version is, it's a checking account, so obviously writing checks is how money goes out of the account.
> Sounds like the US banking system is utterly kerrayzee to me.
The banks are fine.
Well, most of them. You'll want to stay away from the large multi-national chain banks: they tend to do stupid stuff like lend all their money to irresponsible third-world governments (in the eighties) or treat aggregated risky sub-prime mortgages as a low-risk investment (more recently). But normal (locally owned and operated) banks are fine.
It's the *credit card* companies (which also are the outfits responsible for debit cards) that you don't want to have anything to do with. (Come to think of it, some of the credit card companies are also large multinational chain banks, which I already said you want to avoid.)
> 1. A chequebook is *really* bulky compared to a credit/debit card.
Oh, good grief. It's almost twice as long as a credit card and maybe three sixteenths of an inch thick. Woo. It fits in a standard shirt pocket. This is too much to carry? What are you, a smurf?
> 2. If I pay by credit card then I get 30-60 days credit for free.
> This isn't actually very important to me, but it's a bonus.
Yeah, maybe it's just me, but I don't find that one compelling.
> 3. If I pay by credit card I get certain legal protections.
> For example, if I buy a product which then breaks and I can't get
> a refund/replacement (e.g. because the vendor is no longer in
> business) then the credit card company will refund me.
Interesting. Americans (well, the ones with brains) tend not to do business in the first place with vendors who haven't been around very long ("fly by night", we call them), so this generally isn't an issue.
> 4. Paying by card is a lot faster than writing out a cheque - stick
> the card in the terminal, bang in my PIN and the transaction is done.
Over here, you generally also have to sign, using one of those stupid electronic screen-and-stylus touchscreen-like signing things that doesn't work very well. Granted, you don't have to fill out the date and amount, but now we're nitpicking. The difference isn't that big.
> 5. Most shops just plain won't take cheques any more.
Over here, more places take checks than take credit cards.
My employer, for example, takes cash or check. No plastic.
There are places that won't take a check, but we're talking like fast food restaurants and stuff, and you're never spending much, and you just pay cash.
> I wouldn't be at all surprised if the banks charged businesses more
> to cash a cheque than take a card payment
I can tell you for sure that the reverse is true here. The vendor pays significant fees to the credit card company for every credit card payment, which they are expected to just swallow. In practice, places that take credit cards just build those fees into their prices for everyone. There are no such charges for checking from most banks, because if there wer
> I'm sure as hell not going to write a cheque and walk to the post box every few days to pay a bill.
//c. So like I said, I already know how to use a spreadsheet, and it does absolutely everything I need or could want for balancing my checkbook. I even have it automatically calculating my Ohio Use Tax. All I have to do is stick a 1 in a certain narrow column for transactions that are out-of-state no-sales-tax purchases, and the money for the tax is moved aside out of my general fund column into a "use tax savings" column. Other columns, designated for certain spending categories, automatically receive funds every time I put in a paycheck (I believe the technical term for this is "following a budget"). It's all very straightforward and very easy to use.
I generally pay all my bills for the month at the same day, and drop them in the mailbox on my way to work.
> Your finances must be *really* simplistic if a spreadsheet is easier
> than a financial management package. As soon as you have more than
> one account, a real financial management package makes things a lot easier.
Actually, my spreadsheet tracks money in three places: my savings account, my checking account, and the cash I have on hand. It's not hard. I took me a couple of minutes to set up the formulas, but it wasn't *difficult*. I mean, I already know how to use a spreadsheet anyway, because it's a standard and generally useful piece of software.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but spreadsheets *used* to be considered one of the three basic computer applications everyone should know how to use. Word processing and database were the others, and by "database" here we're talking pre-SQL non-relational single-table database with about three data types. The first spreadsheet I ever used was running on an Apple
> We [...] invaded Iraq because Bush lied and said they were trying to gather up WMDs
Bush wasn't the only person making claims to the effect that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Hussein, for instance, was doing just about everything he could think of to convince the world that he had such things. (A lot of people fell for it, and a lot more weren't quite sure. Bush almost wanted it to be true, albeit perhaps subconsciously, because it would give him the chance to finish up what his father wanted to finish and couldn't, due to domestic political pressures.)
Why was Saddam actively trying to convince people he had big bad weapons? It's a long story. The short version is, he didn't understand the Western mindset very well. Japan made a similar mistake in 1941: they actually believed that bombing Pearl Harbor would make us *less* likely to enter the war. Yeah, they flunked "Understanding How Americans Think 101".
> you got hit by the Japanese and invaded Germany
They were allied with one another (see: Axis Powers), and were together attacking nations (such as, England) that became our allies when we were attacked. So yeah. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the enemy of my friend is my enemy.
> Nobody in a pyramid scheme thinks they're going to be left holding the bag at the end.
That's because they're bad at math.
Fundamentally, the pyramidal-growth property that makes the money multiply (geometrically, in most schemes) *also* makes the number of people who get left holding the bag multiply with the same curve. So in any pyramid scheme, the probability that you will lose your investment and end up with nothing correlates *strongly* with the amount of money your optimistic side hopes you can make.
And that's not even taking into consideration the probability of getting caught.
> Even real MLMs are only just barely not scams
Depends.
Some of them sell products that are only *theoretically* worth buying. Like those special juices that are supposed to be awesomely high in antioxidants (and therefore good for what ails you) because they're made from fruit that doesn't grow in North America. These are healthy, in the sense that, being fruit juice, they're much better for you than (say) pop; but they're sold at absurdly out-of-proportion prices that no honest sales pitch would convince anyone to pay. So yeah, they set off a lot of people's scam radar, even though they're technically legal (as long as the sales people don't make *concrete* fraudulent claims).
But there are also multilevel-marketed products that are quite good and markedly *superior* to what you can buy at the store. Not very many, mind you. But they exist. Tupperware is perhaps the best example. Sure, it costs more than competing brands, but it's also higher quality stuff. The lids fit better, go on easier, and stay on better. Also, until about ten years ago, all the major competing products were made from decidedly inferior plastics. (Lately the competition has improved considerably in that regard.)