I am afraid it seems to me as if you have a reality distortion field operating. No one ever clicks on a button that says "Ruin my computer". Many users will click a button if it says "MICROSOFT(tm): Your computer has encountered a problem. Press here to repair," perhaps with a pretty and authentic looking graphic. Malware gets installed by posing as something else, or via an exploit where it doesn't require any action on the user's part except visiting the wrong URL. Maybe there is an exploit his protection system hasn't caught up with yet. Maybe (gasp) his protection system isn't perfect.
The driver of a car shouldn't have to be an engineer with a PhD, an unusually high IQ, and a lot of luck. Neither should a personal computer owner/user.
Linux computers get hacked, rooted, and pwned all the time.
Please stop calling innocent victims "enablers." We all hate slobs who pay no attention whatsoever to protecting their computers, but I don't think you should label users who lose a battle in the war against the slimeballs, "enablers." You've essentially said "ideally you would like to nail the real sociopathic asshole perpetrator, but if you can't get him, just lash out and beat the shit out of anybody you can find who is innocently involved in the chain of events." If you really want to find the enablers, you can serve a summons to the fat pigs running Microsoft, for designing systems which make it all too easy for persons unknown, remote from you, are enabled to run any kind of sociopathically written code on your computer.
Corporations are (supposed to be!) held in check by government, but who holds the government in check? Ah, the government itself does, you say. In the U.S., the three co-equal branches are supposed to hold each other in check. Yeah, right. What you get is stupid, arrogant, self-righteous, pompous, hypocritical, contemptuous corruptocracy of which this law is evidence in France. It is to be assumed that no one will need me to provide evidence of the pinnacle of all corruptocracies which we see in the U.S.
Ah, but you say The People are ultimately supposed to hold the government in check by turning the corrupt bastards out at election time. But what do you do if virtually every nominee for election is corrupt going in? And those who are not, and who miraculously defeat the incumbent, with the incumbent's huge built-in electoral advantage... those not yet corrupt become sucked into the corruptocracy soon after their election.
Revolutions may clean things out for a time, but it always comes back. The U.S. has long since reached the point where the "revolutionary" home grown government has become far more tyrannical than the British Crown ever was.
This is just wrong. Optimizing for performance per watt is not minimizing performance. 2.1 times the performance for 2 times the watts is optimizing for performance per watt.
How nice for you not have a care in the world for energy consumption. As one who actually has utility bills to pay, my electric bill is around 20 cents per kwh, or $1752 per kw-year. If I can save 200 watts of continuous consumption, that's $350.40 less per year for me to pay. Also, I don't play games, so I don't give a flying fuck for graphics performance after the first couple of notches. The same goes for cars. I could drive a car that goes 200 mph and 0 to 60 in 3 seconds, but mpg is important to me. I get 44 mpg average.
Thank you. I understand. As many times as I read the sentence I kept interpreting it as "dropping OPENSTEP / Obj-C for [i.e. in favor of] Windows." Was that before or after M$ dropped a bunch of dollar bills on Apple?
Hitler was also a champion of workers' and farmers' rights and was democratically elected, undeniably influenced (negatively) by Marx, and a socialist to the core. The "S" in NSDAP stood for socialist, you know. Here's a pop quiz. Can you briefly state the difference between fascist and socialist (minus any hyperbolae)? Hint: it's a trick question.
As for "bane to American-style capitalist corporations", I simply think that Chavez simply favors his own corporations, state run or in cahoots with the state, as is the case with both socialism and fascism.
The 8th amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
OK, I'll bite. How much is an excessive fine in this case? Is $1.92 million excessive? Yes? How about $1.91 million? Yes?... How about $1? Somewhere on that scale you are going to draw the line, and so will everybody else - at a DIFFERENT point, absent collusion. Because there is no exact amount for the threshold that is "obviously right." The Constitution by its very nature HAS to be sweeping, and vague when it comes to pinpointing physical quantities.
The fact of the matter is that the plaintiff CANNOT prove ANY actual quantifiable dollar loss figure in any case similar to this one. He can postulate one, but he cannot prove any of a number of the steps(*). Adjudication is supposed to be based on PROOF, not supposition. Did the defendant cause any actual loss? Certainly not in the sense of a tangible asset being taken from an owner. Nothing physical changed hands. In the intangible sense of postulated lost revenues, no one can know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Lost revenues happen every day, anyway. Maybe I make and market something with better quality, or less cost than what you are peddling. Bingo, you have lost revenue traceable to my actions.
It's not the particular dollar award (plainly egregious though it is) that is the problem here. The problem is making what the defendant did actionable at all. It's an attempt to legislate morality, which is in itself an evil act. The logic is relentless. There is no maybe. In this category of legislation, the law is an ass every day.
~~~~~~~~~~
(*) Did any single actor actually download an entire work from the defendant? Part of a work (that's the way P2P works)? Is a small part the same as the whole? If not, how do you apportion the loss? Would said downloader have purchased the work if he had not downloaded it? If not, there IS NO LOSS. Did the party who downloaded from the original sharer have no intention of ever using the work? If he did not make use of it directly, but allowed a third party to download from him, is he guilty in this specific matter, or am I guilty, or both of us? Wow, that's a profitable line of though, eh? You could make recovery thousands of times for a single case. Is preempting a purchase an act that is in itself actionable? If I give, gratis, an acquaintance or stranger one of my two TV's (or some of my CD's and DVD's that I am tired of, for that matter), that may or may not deprive you of revenue. If, based on eyewitness testimony or admissions of the principles involved, it did preempt a purchase from you, is that actionable? (Established precedent and business custom says no)
How to stop businesses storing SSN's indefinitely?
Well, you could, I don't know, work for passage of a law forbidding the practice and mandating a heavy penalty for breaking this law.
You could also pass a law forbidding the use of SSN's as general ID in the first place. That's not what they were created for, the government owns the SSN's, and they can forbid their misuse for any purpose by unauthorized groups such as huge faceless corporations and other assorted objectionable entites.
After all, it's not like the the entities people transacted business with before 1935 were unable to proceed without these magic numbers.
On the whole I follow you every step of the way and agree with you. Except on one point. In my opinion, C compilers like gcc that behave this way are broken. Just because ANSI C says null pointers cannot be dereferenced should not bloody mean that they should merrily removelogic that you have added. With its roots as a convenient standarized assembly language surrogate, C is the last language that should even think about doing stupid things like this. ANSI C says that the results of certain operations are undefined. That does not mean the fucking C compiler should merrily take advantage of every loophole to wreak havoc, gleefully cackling while it does it. What is my rationale? Simple. My rationale is stupid and needless bugs like this one. There is nothing in ANSI C that mandates reckless compile behavior. At most, the standard only allows it but does not require it. Nobody has to do things they know are wrong just because the law allows it.
The overhead of a null check is ridiculously insignificant.
I guess I'm old fashioned. If there is a line in the source code, it is there for a reason. The compiler should fucking do what the source says to do, or issue a diagnostic as to why it can't.
The places where I have shouted are not at you. They are at whoever as a group has conventionalized these imbecilic design decisions in the compiler community. Sorry about the veins standing out on my forehead.
I find your input thoughtful. I don't disagree. But as you point out, corruption is a given. There is a reason that one can't point to any place on earth where libertarians are in charge. They have no answer to power grabbing thuggery. It's not a weakness of their core beliefs, but it is a fatal weakness of their system. It is (literally and figuratively) defenseless.
I do draw a dramatic distinction between a true free market, and rampant capitalism.
"Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity. These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. His answer was, 'Yes, but we will call it anti-fascism.'"
"Under fascism, business enterprises were organized into state-mandated cartels. The cartels, under government supervision, specified what would be produced, how much each cartel member could produce, at what prices they might hire labor and resources, and for what prices they might sell their output on the market."
"A textbook definition explains that fascism embodied corporatism, which is an economic structure controlled by the government. Sowell said that's exactly what is happening in some sectors of the U.S. economy:
"Beck: So what route is that again?
"Sowell: That the private people still own the businesses but the politicians tell them what to do.
"Beck: Right, but isn't that, I'm trying to remember, that's uh...
"Sowell: That's fascism.
"Beck: Yes, I was going to say, I knew it was a bad one. And I was going to say, I think that's fascism.
Try not to fixate on whether the state controls business, or business controls the state. The easy tell of fascism is that the state and business are IN LEAGUE, and that they are conspiring off the books and for mutual benefit.
The U.S. is neither genuine socialist nor fascist, but a perverted development of what USED to be rampant free market. In both socialism and fascism, the state controls/directs the engine of production, either cooperatively (fascism) or by seizing it (socialism). In the U.S., the engine of production has run wild and seized control of the state, mostly through rampant corruption. To the extent the U.S. flirts with socialism, it is a distorted, perverted kind of socialism. In the real thing, the state operates with the welfare of the people at heart. In the U.S. form, the state has only the welfare of special interests at heart: narrow constituency blocks, filthy rich operators who have the goods on the pols and their appointees, and the like. Simply put, the hard working middle class is robbed to support an essentially valueless, parasitic bottom layer and top layer. All the real people get is a kick in the ass by a fat, smug, self satisfied system. And there is a similar perversion of the real thing when the U.S. flirts with fascism.
The U.S. is an inbred, self perpetuating corruptocracy, plain and simple. Uncontrolled free markets cannot exist stably. This is what they degenerate into.
All the games that matter ARE zero sum. Telecoms. There were only so many cell phone buyers. Once they all had phones, the cell phone business shrank to replacement only and the telecoms business collapsed. Computers. Pretty much every desktop that is going to have a PC has one now. That business has gone to replacement only. If it weren't for virus infections making people throw their PC's away every couple of years, the desktop PC business would have dwindled to a very low ebb. Notebooks. The same thing will happen.
And so on and so on. Of course IT will not GROW forever, any more than the economy it serves will grow forever. It will stagnate. The fresh mammal businesses will fluourish to an extent, and the dinosaur businesses will implode and die off.
Given a ridiculous continuing population explosion, capitalism cannot long continue in recognizable form either. Stripped of idealistic verbiage, capitalism is about greed, and as the pool of flesh outstrips any possibility of supplying enough STUFF, the stink is going to get bad as vast numbers die off in order to support a shrinking percentage having their luxuries. It doesn't take much insight to see that open source initiatives, tapping a vast pool of talent who contribute for no direct recompense, will bury the traditional capitalist software models.
As far as Microsoft being around in a generation, it's getting hard to visualize ANY of the existing capitalist entities lasting that long. I suppose the NAME could survive, in the form of a "Microsoft open source distro", or something, but it would be nothing like the present capitalist dynamo.
If you don't want templates, don't fucking use them. There, is that too hard? If you only want one way to do something, pick one way and don't use the other ways. Sheesh.
Funny, but I do use lens cleaning fluid and I do use something supposedly even worse than lens cloth - I use plain Kleenex tissue. And after some 10 years I don't have a single scratch or mark on my lenses.
Duh. Way to miss the point. The O.P. asked "where" as in location. You know, like when you walk out of the basement and drive somewhere. It's Friday night. You've got 48 hours, plenty of time to do what you need to do if you can get the stuff NOW, but not enough time to SEND for something. Because guess what? Even with an overnight order at enormous shipping cost, there's no Saturday delivery, dude!
And no, if I need a soldering iron, I'm NOT going to buy a 23 piece toolset to get one. Not even if the cost is the same. Because I don't need the other 22 tools, I know I won't throw them away or find someone to give them to, and I don't want the accumulated dreck gradually choking the life out of my living space.
That's port mode. Relatively few people use it. Passive mode is much more common. You're still right, though. Ftp is a crazy protocol in either mode. Scp is just so much more straightforward and capable, it's crazy to use ftp for most purposes (anonymous ftp aside).
Horse shit. chroot is a tool. Used properly, where applicable, it can greatly enhance security. Used improperly, it does little or no good. It doesn't matter what it was invented for; it doesn't matter how many times people make blanket statements about it; the fact is that it can be used as a useful security tool.
Some of the other commenters point you to sources detailing chroot's weaknesses and pitfalls, and how to avoid them.
There is no perfect, cure-all security measure. That doesn't mean you don't use available tools to enhance security as much as possible. The world is not black and white. It is shades of grey.
I'm not quite sure where you're aiming with the statement "FTP without a chroot is not really any different than ssh without a chroot.", but it strikes me as utter nonsense.
Pardon my French, but your sweeping statements are just out of control, beginning with where you call your parent's post silly.
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I am afraid it seems to me as if you have a reality distortion field operating. No one ever clicks on a button that says "Ruin my computer". Many users will click a button if it says "MICROSOFT(tm): Your computer has encountered a problem. Press here to repair," perhaps with a pretty and authentic looking graphic. Malware gets installed by posing as something else, or via an exploit where it doesn't require any action on the user's part except visiting the wrong URL. Maybe there is an exploit his protection system hasn't caught up with yet. Maybe (gasp) his protection system isn't perfect.
The driver of a car shouldn't have to be an engineer with a PhD, an unusually high IQ, and a lot of luck. Neither should a personal computer owner/user.
Linux computers get hacked, rooted, and pwned all the time.
Please stop calling innocent victims "enablers." We all hate slobs who pay no attention whatsoever to protecting their computers, but I don't think you should label users who lose a battle in the war against the slimeballs, "enablers." You've essentially said "ideally you would like to nail the real sociopathic asshole perpetrator, but if you can't get him, just lash out and beat the shit out of anybody you can find who is innocently involved in the chain of events." If you really want to find the enablers, you can serve a summons to the fat pigs running Microsoft, for designing systems which make it all too easy for persons unknown, remote from you, are enabled to run any kind of sociopathically written code on your computer.
Corporations are (supposed to be!) held in check by government, but who holds the government in check? Ah, the government itself does, you say. In the U.S., the three co-equal branches are supposed to hold each other in check. Yeah, right. What you get is stupid, arrogant, self-righteous, pompous, hypocritical, contemptuous corruptocracy of which this law is evidence in France. It is to be assumed that no one will need me to provide evidence of the pinnacle of all corruptocracies which we see in the U.S.
Ah, but you say The People are ultimately supposed to hold the government in check by turning the corrupt bastards out at election time. But what do you do if virtually every nominee for election is corrupt going in? And those who are not, and who miraculously defeat the incumbent, with the incumbent's huge built-in electoral advantage ... those not yet corrupt become sucked into the corruptocracy soon after their election.
Revolutions may clean things out for a time, but it always comes back. The U.S. has long since reached the point where the "revolutionary" home grown government has become far more tyrannical than the British Crown ever was.
This is just wrong. Optimizing for performance per watt is not minimizing performance. 2.1 times the performance for 2 times the watts is optimizing for performance per watt.
Did you flunk basic math? Zero divided by zero is undefined, not infinity.
How nice for you not have a care in the world for energy consumption. As one who actually has utility bills to pay, my electric bill is around 20 cents per kwh, or $1752 per kw-year. If I can save 200 watts of continuous consumption, that's $350.40 less per year for me to pay. Also, I don't play games, so I don't give a flying fuck for graphics performance after the first couple of notches. The same goes for cars. I could drive a car that goes 200 mph and 0 to 60 in 3 seconds, but mpg is important to me. I get 44 mpg average.
Thank you. I understand. As many times as I read the sentence I kept interpreting it as "dropping OPENSTEP / Obj-C for [i.e. in favor of] Windows." Was that before or after M$ dropped a bunch of dollar bills on Apple?
But instead of saying "I have seen perfection," can't you come up with any cogent explanations of exactly what features make ObjC nso divine?
So in other words you can't think of any substantive arguments in favor of ObjC?
What in God's name are you talking about?
Please. Get the asshole's name right. Arlen Specter.
Hitler was also a champion of workers' and farmers' rights and was democratically elected, undeniably influenced (negatively) by Marx, and a socialist to the core. The "S" in NSDAP stood for socialist, you know. Here's a pop quiz. Can you briefly state the difference between fascist and socialist (minus any hyperbolae)? Hint: it's a trick question.
As for "bane to American-style capitalist corporations", I simply think that Chavez simply favors his own corporations, state run or in cahoots with the state, as is the case with both socialism and fascism.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini Quotes
OK, I'll bite. How much is an excessive fine in this case? Is $1.92 million excessive? Yes? How about $1.91 million? Yes? ... How about $1? Somewhere on that scale you are going to draw the line, and so will everybody else - at a DIFFERENT point, absent collusion. Because there is no exact amount for the threshold that is "obviously right." The Constitution by its very nature HAS to be sweeping, and vague when it comes to pinpointing physical quantities.
The fact of the matter is that the plaintiff CANNOT prove ANY actual quantifiable dollar loss figure in any case similar to this one. He can postulate one, but he cannot prove any of a number of the steps(*). Adjudication is supposed to be based on PROOF, not supposition. Did the defendant cause any actual loss? Certainly not in the sense of a tangible asset being taken from an owner. Nothing physical changed hands. In the intangible sense of postulated lost revenues, no one can know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Lost revenues happen every day, anyway. Maybe I make and market something with better quality, or less cost than what you are peddling. Bingo, you have lost revenue traceable to my actions.
It's not the particular dollar award (plainly egregious though it is) that is the problem here. The problem is making what the defendant did actionable at all. It's an attempt to legislate morality, which is in itself an evil act. The logic is relentless. There is no maybe. In this category of legislation, the law is an ass every day.
~~~~~~~~~~
(*) Did any single actor actually download an entire work from the defendant? Part of a work (that's the way P2P works)? Is a small part the same as the whole? If not, how do you apportion the loss? Would said downloader have purchased the work if he had not downloaded it? If not, there IS NO LOSS. Did the party who downloaded from the original sharer have no intention of ever using the work? If he did not make use of it directly, but allowed a third party to download from him, is he guilty in this specific matter, or am I guilty, or both of us? Wow, that's a profitable line of though, eh? You could make recovery thousands of times for a single case. Is preempting a purchase an act that is in itself actionable? If I give, gratis, an acquaintance or stranger one of my two TV's (or some of my CD's and DVD's that I am tired of, for that matter), that may or may not deprive you of revenue. If, based on eyewitness testimony or admissions of the principles involved, it did preempt a purchase from you, is that actionable? (Established precedent and business custom says no)
How to stop businesses storing SSN's indefinitely?
Well, you could, I don't know, work for passage of a law forbidding the practice and mandating a heavy penalty for breaking this law.
You could also pass a law forbidding the use of SSN's as general ID in the first place. That's not what they were created for, the government owns the SSN's, and they can forbid their misuse for any purpose by unauthorized groups such as huge faceless corporations and other assorted objectionable entites.
After all, it's not like the the entities people transacted business with before 1935 were unable to proceed without these magic numbers.
On the whole I follow you every step of the way and agree with you. Except on one point. In my opinion, C compilers like gcc that behave this way are broken . Just because ANSI C says null pointers cannot be dereferenced should not bloody mean that they should merrily remove logic that you have added. With its roots as a convenient standarized assembly language surrogate, C is the last language that should even think about doing stupid things like this. ANSI C says that the results of certain operations are undefined. That does not mean the fucking C compiler should merrily take advantage of every loophole to wreak havoc, gleefully cackling while it does it. What is my rationale? Simple. My rationale is stupid and needless bugs like this one. There is nothing in ANSI C that mandates reckless compile behavior. At most, the standard only allows it but does not require it. Nobody has to do things they know are wrong just because the law allows it.
The overhead of a null check is ridiculously insignificant.
I guess I'm old fashioned. If there is a line in the source code, it is there for a reason. The compiler should fucking do what the source says to do , or issue a diagnostic as to why it can't.
The places where I have shouted are not at you. They are at whoever as a group has conventionalized these imbecilic design decisions in the compiler community. Sorry about the veins standing out on my forehead.
I find your input thoughtful. I don't disagree. But as you point out, corruption is a given. There is a reason that one can't point to any place on earth where libertarians are in charge. They have no answer to power grabbing thuggery. It's not a weakness of their core beliefs, but it is a fatal weakness of their system. It is (literally and figuratively) defenseless.
I do draw a dramatic distinction between a true free market, and rampant capitalism.
Perhaps, Mr. Coward, O Knowledgeable One, you would be so kind to enlighten us. I doubt very much you have any idea what fascism is about.
This just might possibly enlighten you if you give it a chance: The Real Threat of Fascism
"Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity. These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. His answer was, 'Yes, but we will call it anti-fascism.'"
And this: From the New Mercantilism to Economic Fascism
"Under fascism, business enterprises were organized into state-mandated cartels. The cartels, under government supervision, specified what would be produced, how much each cartel member could produce, at what prices they might hire labor and resources, and for what prices they might sell their output on the market."
And this: Government's Current Role in Business the 'Route' to Fascism
"A textbook definition explains that fascism embodied corporatism, which is an economic structure controlled by the government. Sowell said that's exactly what is happening in some sectors of the U.S. economy:
"Beck: So what route is that again?
"Sowell: That the private people still own the businesses but the politicians tell them what to do.
"Beck: Right, but isn't that, I'm trying to remember, that's uh...
"Sowell: That's fascism.
"Beck: Yes, I was going to say, I knew it was a bad one. And I was going to say, I think that's fascism.
Try not to fixate on whether the state controls business, or business controls the state. The easy tell of fascism is that the state and business are IN LEAGUE, and that they are conspiring off the books and for mutual benefit.
The U.S. is neither genuine socialist nor fascist, but a perverted development of what USED to be rampant free market. In both socialism and fascism, the state controls/directs the engine of production, either cooperatively (fascism) or by seizing it (socialism). In the U.S., the engine of production has run wild and seized control of the state, mostly through rampant corruption. To the extent the U.S. flirts with socialism, it is a distorted, perverted kind of socialism. In the real thing, the state operates with the welfare of the people at heart. In the U.S. form, the state has only the welfare of special interests at heart: narrow constituency blocks, filthy rich operators who have the goods on the pols and their appointees, and the like. Simply put, the hard working middle class is robbed to support an essentially valueless, parasitic bottom layer and top layer. All the real people get is a kick in the ass by a fat, smug, self satisfied system. And there is a similar perversion of the real thing when the U.S. flirts with fascism.
The U.S. is an inbred, self perpetuating corruptocracy, plain and simple. Uncontrolled free markets cannot exist stably. This is what they degenerate into.
All the games that matter ARE zero sum. Telecoms. There were only so many cell phone buyers. Once they all had phones, the cell phone business shrank to replacement only and the telecoms business collapsed. Computers. Pretty much every desktop that is going to have a PC has one now. That business has gone to replacement only. If it weren't for virus infections making people throw their PC's away every couple of years, the desktop PC business would have dwindled to a very low ebb. Notebooks. The same thing will happen.
And so on and so on. Of course IT will not GROW forever, any more than the economy it serves will grow forever. It will stagnate. The fresh mammal businesses will fluourish to an extent, and the dinosaur businesses will implode and die off.
Given a ridiculous continuing population explosion, capitalism cannot long continue in recognizable form either. Stripped of idealistic verbiage, capitalism is about greed, and as the pool of flesh outstrips any possibility of supplying enough STUFF, the stink is going to get bad as vast numbers die off in order to support a shrinking percentage having their luxuries. It doesn't take much insight to see that open source initiatives, tapping a vast pool of talent who contribute for no direct recompense, will bury the traditional capitalist software models.
As far as Microsoft being around in a generation, it's getting hard to visualize ANY of the existing capitalist entities lasting that long. I suppose the NAME could survive, in the form of a "Microsoft open source distro", or something, but it would be nothing like the present capitalist dynamo.
If you don't want templates, don't fucking use them. There, is that too hard? If you only want one way to do something, pick one way and don't use the other ways. Sheesh.
Let's see ... less ... hmmm, that works fine with Project Gutenberg.
Send kindle to Hell where its capitalist ass belongs.
Funny, but I do use lens cleaning fluid and I do use something supposedly even worse than lens cloth - I use plain Kleenex tissue. And after some 10 years I don't have a single scratch or mark on my lenses.
Duh. Way to miss the point. The O.P. asked "where" as in location. You know, like when you walk out of the basement and drive somewhere. It's Friday night. You've got 48 hours, plenty of time to do what you need to do if you can get the stuff NOW, but not enough time to SEND for something. Because guess what? Even with an overnight order at enormous shipping cost, there's no Saturday delivery, dude!
And no, if I need a soldering iron, I'm NOT going to buy a 23 piece toolset to get one. Not even if the cost is the same. Because I don't need the other 22 tools, I know I won't throw them away or find someone to give them to, and I don't want the accumulated dreck gradually choking the life out of my living space.
That's port mode. Relatively few people use it. Passive mode is much more common. You're still right, though. Ftp is a crazy protocol in either mode. Scp is just so much more straightforward and capable, it's crazy to use ftp for most purposes (anonymous ftp aside).
Horse shit. chroot is a tool. Used properly, where applicable, it can greatly enhance security. Used improperly, it does little or no good. It doesn't matter what it was invented for; it doesn't matter how many times people make blanket statements about it; the fact is that it can be used as a useful security tool.
Some of the other commenters point you to sources detailing chroot's weaknesses and pitfalls, and how to avoid them.
There is no perfect, cure-all security measure. That doesn't mean you don't use available tools to enhance security as much as possible. The world is not black and white. It is shades of grey.
I'm not quite sure where you're aiming with the statement "FTP without a chroot is not really any different than ssh without a chroot.", but it strikes me as utter nonsense.
Pardon my French, but your sweeping statements are just out of control, beginning with where you call your parent's post silly.