It's a very common law, both in the US and in Canada, and any semi-reputable company will have this money. It's not like when a company declares itself out of business, they are truly out of money.
The penalties of not being able to furnish this money are actually not soft. Speaking from experience.:)
Sounds like the boss is asking for about 30% more hours. Would you like it better if the boss announced a 30% layoff (in these tough times)?
That is a super shaky start-off point. Super false dichotomy.
I like that you knowledge that transparency is key in these situations. The number one thing that contributes towards my motivation is a clear picture of the financial state of my employer. Owners and management who are worried about inciting panic by hiding or clearly talking around the true state of the company only exacerbate that panic.
To wit, the people who jump ship are the same ones who will put it in their mind that things are far worse than they actually are. So put them at ease with the reality. Pay reduction is the most straight up shared plan. Deferred payouts mean nothing if theres no pay to defer, and quick-buck projects can often put the whole vision of your solution off course.
At some point, honest owners and management will just say, "Sorry, didn't work, we got 2 months left, keep working but look for another job" and call it a day. In 13 years of software development, the only folks who've pissed me off are the upper management types who just float to another place - ie, it was clear that they were never at risk to begin with, success or not. It's kinda reverse in the sense of motivation. For employees to be motivated, they have to know that their boss also needs things to work out. I've seen WAY too many "star hires" at companies with a golden handshake. Since failing isn't such a big deal to them, they are unable to motivate or "share the challenge" from day one.
Hehe, I know of a studio where usually there was beer on fridays provided. But somebody broke the build late friday just before a delivery, and the PM sent an email to the entire team saying, "No beer. You don't like it? It's [names] fault."
When it comes to programmers, the game industry is surely the one that is best at burning the bridges before they cross them. On one project I worked on, we worked in essentially 10-12 hour shifts, and near the end of the project, it got down to the snake eating its own tail. We'd come in, fix some bugs made the night before that were made while fixing our bugs that wed created the day before, etc.. hilarious stuff.
But yikes, I'd like to think I'd jump ship before I ruined a relationship.
That's like saying if we erased all books about basketball, basketball never would have been invented in the first place.
I'm pretty sure war, genocide, n shit you think shouldn't exist started existing *before* anybody wrote about them before they existed. Ideas come into being before we start talking about them, so why would not talking about them stop us from coming up with the idea?
This is why the notion that having human knowledge destroyed is often referred to as "setting us back" not "precluding the re-invention of the car for the rest of time."
If you are near a robot, a fridge with free beer, and have a phone.
I get it, the research is fun, but beer + robot is not as awesome as publishing how you did that. In the long term, it's all practical. In the short term, who the fuck cares?
Trust me, if you can say "Scientists are liars" to your girlfriend with a straight face and you can still get laid, you can keep her. There are plenty of non-retarded women for the rest of us. It's quite likely that very few people would take issue with this song (you take that line out, it's practically a Celine Dion song) if it didn't contain that line.
Spoken like somebody who has the freedom to not give a rat's ass about all fellow humans.
Essentially, some asshole effectively killed the party for everybody in that country, even those who are not Muslim or who are not that "hard ass" about this particular aspect of Muslim religious law.
To what end? What have they achieved? Nothing, and they messed it up for a whole bunch of people not involved and not in a position to change it.
Just because you are free in your country does not mean you have any right in fanning the conflict between the citizens of a country and it's ruling theocracy. If anything, it just proves you have little more important to do in your life than going around and stirring shit up in some other country's political/theological system.
You know what people take most unkindly to non-citizens sticking their noses into the political/economic/religious power structure? Quite often the same folks who do shit like this, and turn around and claim they're making any kind of contribution to society.
Except that there isn't really any benefit to using SI over Imperial measurements
At least the most commonly used SI units were created specifically because doing calculations with them is far less error prone within the same unit (ie, cm to km as opposed to inches to miles) and the units themselves are based on environmentally sensical points (ie, 0 is the temperature at which water freezes (at standard pressure))
I am glad as hell I didn't have use imperial measurements in engineering.
I would tend to imagine that the number of people who have never wasted some sperm in their lives is close to absolute 0.
So between that and no contraception, what's the difference?
If God gave us wet dreams, he gave us the right to waste sperm in little rubber containers. Or spray it all over the wall, for all he cares. I mean, it's a little hard to believe that God expects us to be chief financial officer for little dudes we create in the billions.
I would expect it is simply much more logical to assume those religious beliefs were codified in times where we really didn't have a clue how all the plumbing worked.
Between more effective methods of avoiding creating real world problems and assuming that those beliefs reflect the true will of God, I know which side I fall on. Pluck a person who's never been exposed to the teachings of the church, and they would have never ever even considered such a theological limitation. People get it from their churches, who got it from older folks, who got it from older folks... there are some notions that, even if I accept the possibility of a theology, are far more likely simply to be a spiritual case of broken telephone.
It's clear this is widely available - the devil is in the details. You can always abstract over a blocking system when you have threads/cores available. Those who work on fixed platforms like me kinda have to look to making the threading/locking more efficient. If you have the option of spending money on more potential parallel computing power for less, and can move up the chain, then solutions like this are more valuable.
It's interesting watching people talk about this kinda stuff, because ultimately the value of these kinds of approaches really either come down to what might be practical on the next game console that MS or Sony will release, or what is immediately valuable to you if you're pretty malloc bound and are in a position to replace your hardware anytime you like.
They mention word processors cause that's what turns heads. Ultimately, that's what R&D is.. its super specific, it's not immediately applicable to all, and in 20 years, it'll probably be standard.
As it pertains to this article.. it's handling the caching for new/free on a thread. As other posters have pointed out, it's not a new academic point of interest, and like all other things like this, it's value will go from specific to becoming an "ok, I have the hardware and or implementation bandwidth for that."
It looks like an RPG if you're wanting to see an RPG.
Just like they look like enemies if you want to see enemies.
Listen to these guys. They clearly *want* action. I understand that's what they're trained for, but when people sound like they're having fun while other people here defend how they're stressed and in a dangerous situation... I'm going to side with them. They sound like they havn't a worry in the world, save for the 'unfair' lack of targets to spray.
Yes, I'm sure you're fully qualified to say what you would do in a war zone. Your neighbours.. the ones you like, you would just drive away.
Do you know how incredibly pompous, presumptuous, and full of yourself you sound? Have you no capacity for the concept that maybe you don't have a clue what it is like to be in that situation? Not even the smallest smidgen?
Shooting one's self in the foot is an allegory borne of a device with one button. If enough people fuck that up that it becomes an allegory, then I don't know what language doesn't let you do that.
Let's be realistic here. Perl is great, but also for every unqualified PHP programmer, there is a much smarter Perl programmer who's made more unmaintainable code. I think too many programmers approach their languages of choice as if the clarity of the syntax isn't really an issue.
Yes, PHP is a saturday night special language. But it's easy to follow/teardown/refactor. My experience with Python and Perl contains a lot more situations where it's nearly impossible to spot the dependencies of code.
There's no perfect language. I work in C++ on game consoles, and everyone is capable of shooting themselves in the foot no matter if you're down deep in VMX assembly or up there with Visual Basic. PHP is fine for what is designed for, and I personally think it's rather capable, despite its 'amateur' language design, for large scale web applications. In other words, if you're capable of learning how to use Ruby properly, the same can be done with PHP.
It's rather telling that you finish off your post with a mini-rant of people abusing Ruby. Don't hate the game, hate the player.
Given that 60% of the people in post grad in the US come from other countries, you'd have to be a real homer to think that the American-born are the only ones creating their own software and inventing their own technologies.
Given the crazy downturn in foreign students coming into the states (26% to 21% from 2002 to 2008, in a span that saw an increase of 50% the number of students world wide studying abroad.. that's just a plain flat-line) due to the increasingly middling security and immigration hoops one must jump through to study there, you may be finding that those inventions will be steadily decreasing over the long haul.
This is a very dangerous game the US is playing here. It owes much of it's success to scientists, artists, etc who have come from other countries - it hardly produces a majority of it's value in an international vacuum.
As for IP being essential to education, clearly you're not familiar with the concept of academic research and development and its long and complicated relationship with patent law.
hey everybody! lets cut the last tree off of easter island!
I mean, I'm all down for hacks, but damn is that wasteful and I can't see how that is any more emotionally meaningful than a paper card.. some hacks are fun, this is just stupid and wasteful.
While in general I agree, please note that you can't employ somebody who is homeless because they couldn't pay for health care that makes them employable again.
This is one area the US voters have to get over - the more you prolong it, the more the health care industry just runs shit and makes things great for the citizens that meet the 30/70 profit rule but spoils the work pool for the greater good. As for the rest, I concur, but one could even argue that a healthier populace regardless of financial standing makes for less people who get caught up in crime. From what I've seen, the "revolution" won't be coming from lower-class to middle class folks sick of government oversight. It will come from the vast underclass who are essentially denied access to healthcare what almost every other first world nation has deemed to be a right. There's a story of a Canadian woman living on the border who was taken to hospital in the states when she was across the border. 4 nights in a hospital - no surgery, some drugs. Now she owes 16,000 bucks. That's 16,000 dollars that could have been skimmed over years from healthy, lower to middle class people who one person could have used to.. what.. buy a cheap extra car? Start a bakery?
How is it possible that such a minor use of a hospital bed (as in, she wasn't exactly conscious for most of it) to get back to work costs so much? Americans have to get over their "Tax is bad." mentality. Some taxes are very good - the ones that keep my neighbor or coworker or friend or family member from having to declare bankruptcy because he got hit by a car is one of them. Too many Americans seem to think that personal responsibility or charity are the more suitable avenues to solve the "shit happens" health problem.
No it's not. It's a credibility issue. (As an aside, to suggest that modern western governments arn't accused of denying equal treatment to gay people, which is what Turing's situation was all about, is whitewashing the issue altogether.)
All programmers have been faced with explaining how *that* programmer fucked up, but you're the *good* kinda programmer who will make things right.
Still, at the end of the day.. what would you prefer.. that *nobody* apologize to his descendants just because it *might* be construed as being done solely for political gain?
I mean, shit, in the grand scheme of pros and cons, who would honestly oppose such an apology supporting a still stigmatized sizable percentage of the population? I mean, what's next.. you only want politicians defending your shit because they "feel it in their heart", not because they're elected to represent the sentiment of the people?
I consider myself a cynic, but the kind of cynic that still knows its damn retarded want to cut off the nose to spite the face when it comes to government and politics.
hrm? i can log in at 5am and play with 12 other people easy. i dont think user base is a problem.
and the browser integration is just fine.. i hate in-game server browers with a passion - the fact that quake-live's server browser is a million times better than the best other in game server browser speaks volumes about how good of an idea it was to host the server browsing in a web browser plugin. (Not that it was the first browser-plugin-based server browser, mind you.)
dunno why people have a problem with quake live - q3 is a bajallion years old, and im playing ql every goddamned night with 5 or so recent 360 games sitting idly on the shelf. the game is fps at its distilled, pure, best. whine when Call of Duty is available on Linux.
No, there is precisely a distinction. Any responsible party who sends commercial email to your account will have gathered your permission at a prior date. It's not useless to point out that the act of opting out of marketing email is fairly safe (how could it ever be 100% safe? there isn't anybody on this planet you can trust with absolute implicit certainty) if you trust that the company practices responsible customer relationship practices (and I spit everytime I have to use that term, but hey, that's really what it boils down to.) To say can-spam is totally ineffective is pretty naive - do you think all cooperate vendors would always bother to ask your permission to send email, even if they *did* provide an opt-out mechanism, unless they were regulated to do so?
It's not perfect, just like seat belt laws, but to deny that both have improved quality of life is to simply hand-wave away the research that goes into determining whether such regulation provides a reasonable cost/reward ratio. You conveniently ignore the fact that we should criminalize those who email en masse without permission versus those that seek permission (even by possibly sneak means,) because it's easier for you to assume that 'common sense' is a good way to run a judicial system. The parent poster was simply pointing out that it IS can-spam that permits people to be charged for sending unsolicited commercial email.
I find it strange you say that expedia is a "bad" spammer when I thought it was pretty well implied that Expedia was collecting your permission to send you email. Because if they wern't, um.. can-spam? Compliance with regulatory laws are petty much the definition of "good" spammers. Maybe some folks will feel like they're getting spammed, but caveat emptor - unless Expedia violated the law, you've granted permission to them to send you email by leaving a checkbox checked. (I rather wish the law stated that all commercial email should be opt-out by default, but at least it specifies that you have to provide the choice.)
Maybe what you're referring to is the nebulous term of "partners" or "affiliates" that shows up in so many permission strings in forms. I'd argue that if you don't feel comfortable assuming the "partners" or "partners" of a company in question are legitimate, or don't interest you, then don't hit the checkbox. But companies like Expedia are not buying random mailing lists from companies they are not affiliated with, and I'd even be surprised if they're sending mail to signees of even fairly tight corperate partnerships or subsidiaries. Large companies are extremely sensitive to this issue.
Last, can-spam has resulted in numerous convictions, and countless other settlements that have drastically reduced the amount of domestic spam coming from cooperate operations. Going after the chinese viagra vendors is obviously not going to be solved by can-spam, but gain some perspective. There is no such thing as unambiguous when it comes to the law. It's why we create complicated regulation, it's why we have judges and juries, and it's why western civilization has succeeded so well.
I guess it's the affiliates part that really bothers you. Well, if you don't want the email, then don't give permission.. or if you want only the company in question you think you're giving permission to, than just opt out of the emails from the affiliates.
I got your back buddy. I love how the responses are always, "Why didn't you try the most obvious thing that would have come into anybody's mind trying to solve that problem?"
I kind of wish they'd phrase it more like, "So what was it about the problem that was not reproducible under more a more controlled environment?"
Slashdot Mirror
It's a very common law, both in the US and in Canada, and any semi-reputable company will have this money. It's not like when a company declares itself out of business, they are truly out of money.
The penalties of not being able to furnish this money are actually not soft. Speaking from experience. :)
Sounds like the boss is asking for about 30% more hours. Would you like it better if the boss announced a 30% layoff (in these tough times)?
That is a super shaky start-off point. Super false dichotomy.
I like that you knowledge that transparency is key in these situations. The number one thing that contributes towards my motivation is a clear picture of the financial state of my employer. Owners and management who are worried about inciting panic by hiding or clearly talking around the true state of the company only exacerbate that panic.
To wit, the people who jump ship are the same ones who will put it in their mind that things are far worse than they actually are. So put them at ease with the reality. Pay reduction is the most straight up shared plan. Deferred payouts mean nothing if theres no pay to defer, and quick-buck projects can often put the whole vision of your solution off course.
At some point, honest owners and management will just say, "Sorry, didn't work, we got 2 months left, keep working but look for another job" and call it a day. In 13 years of software development, the only folks who've pissed me off are the upper management types who just float to another place - ie, it was clear that they were never at risk to begin with, success or not. It's kinda reverse in the sense of motivation. For employees to be motivated, they have to know that their boss also needs things to work out. I've seen WAY too many "star hires" at companies with a golden handshake. Since failing isn't such a big deal to them, they are unable to motivate or "share the challenge" from day one.
Hehe, I know of a studio where usually there was beer on fridays provided. But somebody broke the build late friday just before a delivery, and the PM sent an email to the entire team saying, "No beer. You don't like it? It's [names] fault."
Talk about motivation!
When it comes to programmers, the game industry is surely the one that is best at burning the bridges before they cross them. On one project I worked on, we worked in essentially 10-12 hour shifts, and near the end of the project, it got down to the snake eating its own tail. We'd come in, fix some bugs made the night before that were made while fixing our bugs that wed created the day before, etc .. hilarious stuff.
But yikes, I'd like to think I'd jump ship before I ruined a relationship.
That's like saying if we erased all books about basketball, basketball never would have been invented in the first place.
I'm pretty sure war, genocide, n shit you think shouldn't exist started existing *before* anybody wrote about them before they existed. Ideas come into being before we start talking about them, so why would not talking about them stop us from coming up with the idea?
This is why the notion that having human knowledge destroyed is often referred to as "setting us back" not "precluding the re-invention of the car for the rest of time."
+5 insightful for a complete lack of reading comprehension skills? Neato.
If you are near a robot, a fridge with free beer, and have a phone.
I get it, the research is fun, but beer + robot is not as awesome as publishing how you did that. In the long term, it's all practical. In the short term, who the fuck cares?
Trust me, if you can say "Scientists are liars" to your girlfriend with a straight face and you can still get laid, you can keep her. There are plenty of non-retarded women for the rest of us. It's quite likely that very few people would take issue with this song (you take that line out, it's practically a Celine Dion song) if it didn't contain that line.
Do go ahead and keep digging though.
Spoken like somebody who has the freedom to not give a rat's ass about all fellow humans.
Essentially, some asshole effectively killed the party for everybody in that country, even those who are not Muslim or who are not that "hard ass" about this particular aspect of Muslim religious law.
To what end? What have they achieved? Nothing, and they messed it up for a whole bunch of people not involved and not in a position to change it.
Just because you are free in your country does not mean you have any right in fanning the conflict between the citizens of a country and it's ruling theocracy. If anything, it just proves you have little more important to do in your life than going around and stirring shit up in some other country's political/theological system.
You know what people take most unkindly to non-citizens sticking their noses into the political/economic/religious power structure? Quite often the same folks who do shit like this, and turn around and claim they're making any kind of contribution to society.
Except that there isn't really any benefit to using SI over Imperial measurements
At least the most commonly used SI units were created specifically because doing calculations with them is far less error prone within the same unit (ie, cm to km as opposed to inches to miles) and the units themselves are based on environmentally sensical points (ie, 0 is the temperature at which water freezes (at standard pressure))
I am glad as hell I didn't have use imperial measurements in engineering.
I would tend to imagine that the number of people who have never wasted some sperm in their lives is close to absolute 0.
So between that and no contraception, what's the difference?
If God gave us wet dreams, he gave us the right to waste sperm in little rubber containers. Or spray it all over the wall, for all he cares. I mean, it's a little hard to believe that God expects us to be chief financial officer for little dudes we create in the billions.
I would expect it is simply much more logical to assume those religious beliefs were codified in times where we really didn't have a clue how all the plumbing worked.
Between more effective methods of avoiding creating real world problems and assuming that those beliefs reflect the true will of God, I know which side I fall on. Pluck a person who's never been exposed to the teachings of the church, and they would have never ever even considered such a theological limitation. People get it from their churches, who got it from older folks, who got it from older folks ... there are some notions that, even if I accept the possibility of a theology, are far more likely simply to be a spiritual case of broken telephone.
It's clear this is widely available - the devil is in the details. You can always abstract over a blocking system when you have threads/cores available. Those who work on fixed platforms like me kinda have to look to making the threading/locking more efficient. If you have the option of spending money on more potential parallel computing power for less, and can move up the chain, then solutions like this are more valuable.
It's interesting watching people talk about this kinda stuff, because ultimately the value of these kinds of approaches really either come down to what might be practical on the next game console that MS or Sony will release, or what is immediately valuable to you if you're pretty malloc bound and are in a position to replace your hardware anytime you like.
They mention word processors cause that's what turns heads. Ultimately, that's what R&D is .. its super specific, it's not immediately applicable to all, and in 20 years, it'll probably be standard.
As it pertains to this article .. it's handling the caching for new/free on a thread. As other posters have pointed out, it's not a new academic point of interest, and like all other things like this, it's value will go from specific to becoming an "ok, I have the hardware and or implementation bandwidth for that."
So far as I know
You are naive.
Martial law?
It looks like an RPG if you're wanting to see an RPG.
Just like they look like enemies if you want to see enemies.
Listen to these guys. They clearly *want* action. I understand that's what they're trained for, but when people sound like they're having fun while other people here defend how they're stressed and in a dangerous situation ... I'm going to side with them. They sound like they havn't a worry in the world, save for the 'unfair' lack of targets to spray.
Yes, I'm sure you're fully qualified to say what you would do in a war zone. Your neighbours .. the ones you like, you would just drive away.
Do you know how incredibly pompous, presumptuous, and full of yourself you sound? Have you no capacity for the concept that maybe you don't have a clue what it is like to be in that situation? Not even the smallest smidgen?
Shooting one's self in the foot is an allegory borne of a device with one button. If enough people fuck that up that it becomes an allegory, then I don't know what language doesn't let you do that.
Let's be realistic here. Perl is great, but also for every unqualified PHP programmer, there is a much smarter Perl programmer who's made more unmaintainable code. I think too many programmers approach their languages of choice as if the clarity of the syntax isn't really an issue.
Yes, PHP is a saturday night special language. But it's easy to follow/teardown/refactor. My experience with Python and Perl contains a lot more situations where it's nearly impossible to spot the dependencies of code.
There's no perfect language. I work in C++ on game consoles, and everyone is capable of shooting themselves in the foot no matter if you're down deep in VMX assembly or up there with Visual Basic. PHP is fine for what is designed for, and I personally think it's rather capable, despite its 'amateur' language design, for large scale web applications. In other words, if you're capable of learning how to use Ruby properly, the same can be done with PHP.
It's rather telling that you finish off your post with a mini-rant of people abusing Ruby. Don't hate the game, hate the player.
Given that 60% of the people in post grad in the US come from other countries, you'd have to be a real homer to think that the American-born are the only ones creating their own software and inventing their own technologies.
Given the crazy downturn in foreign students coming into the states (26% to 21% from 2002 to 2008, in a span that saw an increase of 50% the number of students world wide studying abroad .. that's just a plain flat-line) due to the increasingly middling security and immigration hoops one must jump through to study there, you may be finding that those inventions will be steadily decreasing over the long haul.
This is a very dangerous game the US is playing here. It owes much of it's success to scientists, artists, etc who have come from other countries - it hardly produces a majority of it's value in an international vacuum.
As for IP being essential to education, clearly you're not familiar with the concept of academic research and development and its long and complicated relationship with patent law.
hey everybody! lets cut the last tree off of easter island!
I mean, I'm all down for hacks, but damn is that wasteful and I can't see how that is any more emotionally meaningful than a paper card .. some hacks are fun, this is just stupid and wasteful.
While in general I agree, please note that you can't employ somebody who is homeless because they couldn't pay for health care that makes them employable again.
This is one area the US voters have to get over - the more you prolong it, the more the health care industry just runs shit and makes things great for the citizens that meet the 30/70 profit rule but spoils the work pool for the greater good. As for the rest, I concur, but one could even argue that a healthier populace regardless of financial standing makes for less people who get caught up in crime. From what I've seen, the "revolution" won't be coming from lower-class to middle class folks sick of government oversight. It will come from the vast underclass who are essentially denied access to healthcare what almost every other first world nation has deemed to be a right. There's a story of a Canadian woman living on the border who was taken to hospital in the states when she was across the border. 4 nights in a hospital - no surgery, some drugs. Now she owes 16,000 bucks. That's 16,000 dollars that could have been skimmed over years from healthy, lower to middle class people who one person could have used to .. what .. buy a cheap extra car? Start a bakery?
How is it possible that such a minor use of a hospital bed (as in, she wasn't exactly conscious for most of it) to get back to work costs so much? Americans have to get over their "Tax is bad." mentality. Some taxes are very good - the ones that keep my neighbor or coworker or friend or family member from having to declare bankruptcy because he got hit by a car is one of them. Too many Americans seem to think that personal responsibility or charity are the more suitable avenues to solve the "shit happens" health problem.
No it's not. It's a credibility issue. (As an aside, to suggest that modern western governments arn't accused of denying equal treatment to gay people, which is what Turing's situation was all about, is whitewashing the issue altogether.)
All programmers have been faced with explaining how *that* programmer fucked up, but you're the *good* kinda programmer who will make things right.
Still, at the end of the day .. what would you prefer .. that *nobody* apologize to his descendants just because it *might* be construed as being done solely for political gain?
I mean, shit, in the grand scheme of pros and cons, who would honestly oppose such an apology supporting a still stigmatized sizable percentage of the population? I mean, what's next .. you only want politicians defending your shit because they "feel it in their heart", not because they're elected to represent the sentiment of the people?
I consider myself a cynic, but the kind of cynic that still knows its damn retarded want to cut off the nose to spite the face when it comes to government and politics.
I have a dog, his name is Segway.
Anyways, speaking of dogs ...
hrm? i can log in at 5am and play with 12 other people easy. i dont think user base is a problem.
and the browser integration is just fine .. i hate in-game server browers with a passion - the fact that quake-live's server browser is a million times better than the best other in game server browser speaks volumes about how good of an idea it was to host the server browsing in a web browser plugin. (Not that it was the first browser-plugin-based server browser, mind you.)
dunno why people have a problem with quake live - q3 is a bajallion years old, and im playing ql every goddamned night with 5 or so recent 360 games sitting idly on the shelf. the game is fps at its distilled, pure, best. whine when Call of Duty is available on Linux.
No, there is precisely a distinction. Any responsible party who sends commercial email to your account will have gathered your permission at a prior date. It's not useless to point out that the act of opting out of marketing email is fairly safe (how could it ever be 100% safe? there isn't anybody on this planet you can trust with absolute implicit certainty) if you trust that the company practices responsible customer relationship practices (and I spit everytime I have to use that term, but hey, that's really what it boils down to.) To say can-spam is totally ineffective is pretty naive - do you think all cooperate vendors would always bother to ask your permission to send email, even if they *did* provide an opt-out mechanism, unless they were regulated to do so?
It's not perfect, just like seat belt laws, but to deny that both have improved quality of life is to simply hand-wave away the research that goes into determining whether such regulation provides a reasonable cost/reward ratio. You conveniently ignore the fact that we should criminalize those who email en masse without permission versus those that seek permission (even by possibly sneak means,) because it's easier for you to assume that 'common sense' is a good way to run a judicial system. The parent poster was simply pointing out that it IS can-spam that permits people to be charged for sending unsolicited commercial email.
I find it strange you say that expedia is a "bad" spammer when I thought it was pretty well implied that Expedia was collecting your permission to send you email. Because if they wern't, um .. can-spam? Compliance with regulatory laws are petty much the definition of "good" spammers. Maybe some folks will feel like they're getting spammed, but caveat emptor - unless Expedia violated the law, you've granted permission to them to send you email by leaving a checkbox checked. (I rather wish the law stated that all commercial email should be opt-out by default, but at least it specifies that you have to provide the choice.)
Maybe what you're referring to is the nebulous term of "partners" or "affiliates" that shows up in so many permission strings in forms. I'd argue that if you don't feel comfortable assuming the "partners" or "partners" of a company in question are legitimate, or don't interest you, then don't hit the checkbox. But companies like Expedia are not buying random mailing lists from companies they are not affiliated with, and I'd even be surprised if they're sending mail to signees of even fairly tight corperate partnerships or subsidiaries. Large companies are extremely sensitive to this issue.
Last, can-spam has resulted in numerous convictions, and countless other settlements that have drastically reduced the amount of domestic spam coming from cooperate operations. Going after the chinese viagra vendors is obviously not going to be solved by can-spam, but gain some perspective. There is no such thing as unambiguous when it comes to the law. It's why we create complicated regulation, it's why we have judges and juries, and it's why western civilization has succeeded so well.
I guess it's the affiliates part that really bothers you. Well, if you don't want the email, then don't give permission .. or if you want only the company in question you think you're giving permission to, than just opt out of the emails from the affiliates.
I got your back buddy. I love how the responses are always, "Why didn't you try the most obvious thing that would have come into anybody's mind trying to solve that problem?"
I kind of wish they'd phrase it more like, "So what was it about the problem that was not reproducible under more a more controlled environment?"
Ah you kids. Everything is just an oceanic optic fiber cable away.