I do not have a 2% cash-back with cash or debit but I have it with my VISA, so why would I use anything other than my VISA to purchase something ?
I do the same.
You get all the rewards and bonuses they use to lure people in.. without the crippling debt. Not to mention the satisfaction of probably costing _them_ money.
I don't really consider this "using credit" as the credit card is actually more of a money transfer device at that point. If you have the money sitting in your bank account and pay it off immediately.. it's practically a debit card with benifits. Plus you build a credit rating.
Indeed.. I totally agree that this needs to be fixed.
Your history of _not_ being in debt and annual income should be more important.
I actually use my credit card on a regular basis when making online purchases.. I just pay it off immediately. I don't put anything on it unless I have the money actually sitting in my bank account. This practically turns my credit card into a debit card.
You also get all those benifits they use to suck people in.. while not making them a dime (and infact, probably costing them money).. which is very satisfying.
All my cards get paid off in full by direct debit. So basically they act as debit cards.
Yeah, I don't really consider that "using credit". I mean, technically you are, but if you have the money before you make the purchase "on credit" and never really carry a ballance, then the credit card just becomes a money transfer mechanism.
I do the same.. you get all the rewards and bonuses they use to lure people in.. without the crippling debt. For online purchases you also get the security.
I'm the worst possible customer for credit card companies as they'll never make a penny from me.
Indeed.. credit card companies _hate_ this. Not only are you not making them money, you are probably costing them money!
Here's a simple trick I use when I am tempted to spend money - I just buy stocks instead.
I actually do the same thing. Except instead of stocks I move it into my retirement savings. Once it's in there, it's a hassle to get it back out. I generally do this shortly after getting paid. If it's not there.. I'm not tempted to use it!
That said, I think it's important to spend money on stuff that brings you happiness _right now_. Those stocks or my savings are useless if I get hit by a ostritch or something. As long as it's within your means and you are putting away for later.. dropping some money on something you didn't really need is ok once in a while.
I almost think credit should only be allowed for specific items. You shouldn't be able to credit a stereo or the jacket you mentioned. If it's something you don't really _need_.. wait till you actually have the money.
I think there are exceptions though. Houses being the big one. No one wants to wait until they are 60 to buy a house. We want it now, and are willing to pay a rediculous amount of extra money over the long run. Personally I find it preferable to pay ever month to a mortgage than to rent.. because even though it's a tiny piece, some of that money is actually going towards you owning the house.. and it's an investment for retirement.
That said, I think there should be way more restrictions. I think a 20% down payment should be manditory. Lets face it.. if you can't get 20% in a reasonable time, you probably can't afford the payments. Billy working at his McJob making minimum wage shouldn't be able to walk into a bank and buy a 200k house.
I think all sides are a bit extreme in a lot of these debt situations.
Banks and creditors should do more to protect people from themselves (obviously this is counter to their goals.. they make money by keeping people in debt as long as possible).
Consumers should be more financially responsible. Yes, there are cases where it is unavoidable (illness for instance).. but I have little sympathy for people who simply live beyond their means because they can.
Debt collection needs to be much more regulated. A little gental harrassment and public shaming.. fine.. but these cases you hear where people are driven to suicide need to stop. Also you hear about people being mistakenly targetted.. this needs to stop as well.
My general belief is that one should never use credit to buy something that costs less than one paycheck. Just wait until you actually _have_ the money. Obviously stuff like houses, credit is (barely) worth it.. because we want a house now, not when we are 60, and are willing to fork out an obscene amount of extra money over the long term to get it sooner. I almost think this should become a law. There is _no reason_ to rack up debt to buy a stereo.
I think this style of approach should be perfectly allowable, but it should be regulated because one can obviously go too far. Not sure what form this regulation would take.. maybe some kind of government run website where people not paying their bills are listed.
Personally on the whole financial debt/credit issue.. I think both sides need a good dose of reality.
You have banks which specifically target and hope for people to get into crippling debt, because this is how they make their money.
You have consumers who go through credit cards like candy.. and even when the bills and creditors are calling, still think nothing of getting a new credit card and buying a new computer they don't really need.
You have bancruptcy as (or atleast percieved) an "easy out".
And you have collections agencies literally driving some to suicide.
And yes, I know people get into debt for reasons beyond their control. Illness probably being the big one. But I think if you live beyond your means for no other reason than you can.. then you get what you've got coming when debt collectors pull this shit.
That's why we have government- to protect those who don't have the power to do so themselves (in this case, the handicapped).
This is so depressingly true.
Simply put.. it's not worth it financially to make your site accessible unless you are very large or sell certain niche products. For the vast majority of sites, the costs of making a site accessible (especially if you are required to rigidly follow some standard that you _know_ is gonna really suck and probably be counter to the purpose) are going to far outweigh any profits you reap from the handful of new visitors you bring in.
It doesn't help that most technologies designed to assist the disabled only work if your site is ultra simple and has all kinds of added "helpers".
Unfortunately you really do need a government to come in and say "ok, we know you're gonna take it in the shorts financially.. but you live in a civilized society and you have to suck it up and do what's right".
Totally agree, and infact I've argued before that Linux in the hands of someone less technically inclined can actually be _less_ secure than windows in some ways.
Linux provides a lot of flexibilty, has a powerful command line, and has pretty standard tools for remote administration.
To someone less technically inclined, a command that gets your video card working in ubuntu doesn't look much different than a command that used netcat to open up a call-back style back door.. giving someone dirrect shell access to your box.
And of _course_ you run the command as root.. because fixing a video card is an administrative task!
If linux was mainstream, I have no doubt you'd probably see a lot more of this sort of thing.
The "trick a user into doing something" style attack is definitely universal.
Yeah, the scams have gotten pretty sofisticated. I guess "you're infected yo!" dialogs don't cut it any more, which may actually show that there's hope afterall.
The sad thing is, this is really the best payload you can hope for.. because it's obvious!
You know you've been infected and can re-install (or try to fix if you enjoy pain).
The ones that scare me are those that are less obvious. Say if instead of turning his desktop into a billboard, the virus simply dropped in a trojan. You're now part of your favorite botnet with probably no clue you've been infected.
The problem with that is, all the ways to do this are probably _really_ bad.
I know! How about we designate microsoft, erm I mean some independant authority to decide what software is safe, and have some hardware built into all PC motherboards that verifies a piece of software has been signed before letting it run!
The _real_ problem with the trusted computing solution is that is sounds good.. which creates that deep seated fear that it might one day become a reality:(
Pre-emptive response to: "well.. it could be opt-in.. this would let people who want to run unsigned software like.. Linux.. do so at their own risk:"
It wouldn't be opt-in for long. Every justification from prevention of crime to prevention of spam would be used combined with a good amount of lobbying would eventually make it manditory.
Who would have thought that a large percentage of windows users are not technically inclined and easily tricked by scary looking windows!
Rumour has it that scissors can be fairly sharp, and fire is damn hot sometimes.
Also.. _really_ old news. This scam has been around for at least a decade. It followed closely on the success of the "YOU HAvE ONE URGENT MESSAGE" banner ad.
I would skip over hard and go right to expert. As you said, hard is really just a toned down version of expert, more so than a toned up version of medium.
Just find a song that you can barely make it through (and you like) and play it until it's like second nature.
Something interesting, I found for me playing on "ultra fast" mode was actually way easier. You still have the same number of notes at the same frequency, the difference is they move down the screen faster. The end effect is you see fewer notes on the screen at a time. For some reason I found this made the game way easier.
Learning guitar takes a lot of patience, especially early on.
I think that's why you don't see guitar a lot in school.. most instruments you can get people transitioning between a few notes pretty quickly, then can get everyone together and honk out "twinkle twinkle little star". With guitar this takes a little longer. There are a lot of fundamentals you need before you can progress to anything beyond very simple tunes.. and getting these fundamentals can be very tedious.
Wrapping up the hours and hours of scales and building muscle memory in a game might encourage some people to pick up music who otherwise wouldn't have the patience. Personally (as a non elitist type) I think this is a good thing.
There needs to be a custodian (or agency) which looks after the data.
I don't think coming up with some magical storage medium is the answer..
The current generation stores the data using whatever methods are used for insuring data integrity (multiple copies, raid, checksums, tape.. whatever).
The next generation should still have means to access data from one generation previous (just as I can still access stuff that was put on floppy disk/tape without too much difficulty.. I would have a hard time accessing stuff on punchcard or papertape). And it would be their responsibility to migrate it to the newest storage medium.
The problem of actually accessing and making sense of the data though, I agree, that is daunting. Older data it's not so bad, as most of it was plain text or very basic binary formats that could be boiled back down to text.. at least enough to get the raw content. With all the newfangled formats being used to store our data.. "what the hell is a.flac file" becomes a very real issue.
Not saying I could do any better, it's a pretty damn hard problem, and I think resources are a big issue for them.
And a lot of it isn't there fault. One big problem I see is a _lot_ of really good content is behind registration walls. Massive forums packed with loads of useful information vanishes.. and services like archive.org (and search engines) can't get at it.
I think a big issue comes with who gets to decide if you can keep data around. Archive.org will retroactively (or last I checked they did this) disable access to a domains snapshots if there is a robots.txt file on the live site restricting access. This makes sense in theory, letting a site owner prevent access to data retroactively, however it causes problems when the domain dies and an ad page gets put up (or someone else buys the domain and actually puts up a legitimate site).
For example when jumpedtheshark got bought... the new owners put a robots.txt file (and eliminated all old content from their site) preventing anyone from accessing the vast amount of user provided content.
And then there is the issue of a site who actually did want to block their own content for whatever reason. When the site goes down, so does the robots.txt file, and all the old content becomes accessible again!
I'm from Canada.. and I've never been in the situation, but as I understand it even if someone breaks into your living room, WHILE YOU ARE THERE, you can still get in trouble for using "excessive force" if you seriously injure the person. If you have a gun (for say, hunting).. even pointing it at the person will land _you_ in trouble. The laws are even murky is he has a gun (did you really think he was going to use it?). It's quite insane!
The criminal.. well he's just a missunderstood victim of society, we can rehabilitate him with your tax dollars!
Personally I think once someone decides to break into your home, you have every right to bludgeon him to death with a crow bar. Maybe if that was a potential outcome of breaking into someones house, people wouldn't do it so often....I'm not bitter or anything..
I'm no "languages" man, but I've never seen how one would implement the kind of const you describe without some massive pain.
Everything in Java is a reference. You can dictate that the reference does not change (i.e. using the final modifier) but somehow locking the state of the object you are referencing sounds like it would be very tricky[tm]. Especially when a lot of complex classes use internal temporary buffers created at construction to generate results (this is also really good for thread safety. You'd end up with weird situations like calling someObject.getBlehCalculations() and end up with a "CanNotModifyConstObject" exception.
I guess you could have some kind of annotation system to dictate which members of a class dictate state.. but that sounds very messy. Or you could just take the "live with it approach".
I do agree, being able to specify "this isn't modified" would be an awesome feature for readability though!
I guess, although best case scenario I can see the exact same thing happening as happened to netscape:
1) spend money developing something cool 2) watch it get really popular 3) profit??
Where 3 really is the big problem. How does one make money off a web browser?
I don't think the old method is gonna work any more.. that is majorly hyped IPO where companies hurl huge bags of money at you. So how do they plan to make a dime off this thing?
This seems like the classic programmer issue of not googling before you code.
This exists! Not only are there plugins to chrome and firefox for this very purpose, but I believe there are at least 2 actual browsers (which no one uses) built around this idea.
This does not appear to do anything revolutionary, and certainly does not justify a completely new browser. This could easily have been implemented as an extension to existing browsers.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not have a 2% cash-back with cash or debit but I have it with my VISA, so why would I use anything other than my VISA to purchase something ?
I do the same.
You get all the rewards and bonuses they use to lure people in.. without the crippling debt. Not to mention the satisfaction of probably costing _them_ money.
I don't really consider this "using credit" as the credit card is actually more of a money transfer device at that point. If you have the money sitting in your bank account and pay it off immediately.. it's practically a debit card with benifits. Plus you build a credit rating.
Indeed.. I totally agree that this needs to be fixed.
Your history of _not_ being in debt and annual income should be more important.
I actually use my credit card on a regular basis when making online purchases.. I just pay it off immediately. I don't put anything on it unless I have the money actually sitting in my bank account. This practically turns my credit card into a debit card.
You also get all those benifits they use to suck people in.. while not making them a dime (and infact, probably costing them money).. which is very satisfying.
All my cards get paid off in full by direct debit. So basically they act as debit cards.
Yeah, I don't really consider that "using credit". I mean, technically you are, but if you have the money before you make the purchase "on credit" and never really carry a ballance, then the credit card just becomes a money transfer mechanism.
I do the same .. you get all the rewards and bonuses they use to lure people in.. without the crippling debt. For online purchases you also get the security.
I'm the worst possible customer for credit card companies as they'll never make a penny from me.
Indeed.. credit card companies _hate_ this. Not only are you not making them money, you are probably costing them money!
Quick addendum:
Here's a simple trick I use when I am tempted to spend money - I just buy stocks instead.
I actually do the same thing. Except instead of stocks I move it into my retirement savings. Once it's in there, it's a hassle to get it back out. I generally do this shortly after getting paid. If it's not there.. I'm not tempted to use it!
That said, I think it's important to spend money on stuff that brings you happiness _right now_. Those stocks or my savings are useless if I get hit by a ostritch or something. As long as it's within your means and you are putting away for later.. dropping some money on something you didn't really need is ok once in a while.
I almost think credit should only be allowed for specific items. You shouldn't be able to credit a stereo or the jacket you mentioned. If it's something you don't really _need_.. wait till you actually have the money.
I think there are exceptions though. Houses being the big one. No one wants to wait until they are 60 to buy a house. We want it now, and are willing to pay a rediculous amount of extra money over the long run. Personally I find it preferable to pay ever month to a mortgage than to rent.. because even though it's a tiny piece, some of that money is actually going towards you owning the house.. and it's an investment for retirement.
That said, I think there should be way more restrictions. I think a 20% down payment should be manditory. Lets face it.. if you can't get 20% in a reasonable time, you probably can't afford the payments. Billy working at his McJob making minimum wage shouldn't be able to walk into a bank and buy a 200k house.
I generally agree.
I think all sides are a bit extreme in a lot of these debt situations.
Banks and creditors should do more to protect people from themselves (obviously this is counter to their goals.. they make money by keeping people in debt as long as possible).
Consumers should be more financially responsible. Yes, there are cases where it is unavoidable (illness for instance).. but I have little sympathy for people who simply live beyond their means because they can.
Debt collection needs to be much more regulated. A little gental harrassment and public shaming.. fine.. but these cases you hear where people are driven to suicide need to stop. Also you hear about people being mistakenly targetted.. this needs to stop as well.
My general belief is that one should never use credit to buy something that costs less than one paycheck. Just wait until you actually _have_ the money. Obviously stuff like houses, credit is (barely) worth it.. because we want a house now, not when we are 60, and are willing to fork out an obscene amount of extra money over the long term to get it sooner. I almost think this should become a law. There is _no reason_ to rack up debt to buy a stereo.
I think this style of approach should be perfectly allowable, but it should be regulated because one can obviously go too far. Not sure what form this regulation would take.. maybe some kind of government run website where people not paying their bills are listed.
Personally on the whole financial debt/credit issue.. I think both sides need a good dose of reality.
You have banks which specifically target and hope for people to get into crippling debt, because this is how they make their money.
You have consumers who go through credit cards like candy.. and even when the bills and creditors are calling, still think nothing of getting a new credit card and buying a new computer they don't really need.
You have bancruptcy as (or atleast percieved) an "easy out".
And you have collections agencies literally driving some to suicide.
And yes, I know people get into debt for reasons beyond their control. Illness probably being the big one. But I think if you live beyond your means for no other reason than you can.. then you get what you've got coming when debt collectors pull this shit.
There's always man in the middle.
Sounds insane, but I'm sure if encryption became ubiquitous enough, they'd find a way to justify it.
That's why we have government- to protect those who don't have the power to do so themselves (in this case, the handicapped).
This is so depressingly true.
Simply put.. it's not worth it financially to make your site accessible unless you are very large or sell certain niche products. For the vast majority of sites, the costs of making a site accessible (especially if you are required to rigidly follow some standard that you _know_ is gonna really suck and probably be counter to the purpose) are going to far outweigh any profits you reap from the handful of new visitors you bring in.
It doesn't help that most technologies designed to assist the disabled only work if your site is ultra simple and has all kinds of added "helpers".
Unfortunately you really do need a government to come in and say "ok, we know you're gonna take it in the shorts financially.. but you live in a civilized society and you have to suck it up and do what's right".
Totally agree, and infact I've argued before that Linux in the hands of someone less technically inclined can actually be _less_ secure than windows in some ways.
Linux provides a lot of flexibilty, has a powerful command line, and has pretty standard tools for remote administration.
To someone less technically inclined, a command that gets your video card working in ubuntu doesn't look much different than a command that used netcat to open up a call-back style back door.. giving someone dirrect shell access to your box.
And of _course_ you run the command as root.. because fixing a video card is an administrative task!
If linux was mainstream, I have no doubt you'd probably see a lot more of this sort of thing.
The "trick a user into doing something" style attack is definitely universal.
Yeah, the scams have gotten pretty sofisticated. I guess "you're infected yo!" dialogs don't cut it any more, which may actually show that there's hope afterall.
The sad thing is, this is really the best payload you can hope for.. because it's obvious!
You know you've been infected and can re-install (or try to fix if you enjoy pain).
The ones that scare me are those that are less obvious. Say if instead of turning his desktop into a billboard, the virus simply dropped in a trojan. You're now part of your favorite botnet with probably no clue you've been infected.
Wow.. thats some bad typo action, even for me!
* Most scams are pretty good about educating you on the threat.. it's part of the scare tactic:
Dunno if I agree with that argument.
Most scams are pretty good about educating you on the product .. it's part of the scar tactic:
There may be a VIRUS on your computer.. RIGHT NOW!
A VIRUS can DELETE YOUR WORK or STEAL YOUR PRIVATE INFORMATION!
Here.. let me check if you have any..
Yup.. found a whole bunch... the following files are currently infected AT THIS MOMENT:
C:\My Documents\
C:\System\
C:\Windows\
Don't worry though.. download MakeThisGoAwaySoICanGetBackToFarmville.exe to fix the problem. You'll probably see this security warning:
[image of the dialog that is supposed to warn the user of stuff like this]
Just click "run" and we'll fix things right up for you!
The problem with that is, all the ways to do this are probably _really_ bad.
I know! How about we designate microsoft, erm I mean some independant authority to decide what software is safe, and have some hardware built into all PC motherboards that verifies a piece of software has been signed before letting it run!
The _real_ problem with the trusted computing solution is that is sounds good.. which creates that deep seated fear that it might one day become a reality :(
Pre-emptive response to: "well.. it could be opt-in.. this would let people who want to run unsigned software like.. Linux.. do so at their own risk:"
It wouldn't be opt-in for long. Every justification from prevention of crime to prevention of spam would be used combined with a good amount of lobbying would eventually make it manditory.
This article really was an eye opener!
Who would have thought that a large percentage of windows users are not technically inclined and easily tricked by scary looking windows!
Rumour has it that scissors can be fairly sharp, and fire is damn hot sometimes.
Also.. _really_ old news. This scam has been around for at least a decade. It followed closely on the success of the "YOU HAvE ONE URGENT MESSAGE" banner ad.
I would skip over hard and go right to expert. As you said, hard is really just a toned down version of expert, more so than a toned up version of medium.
Just find a song that you can barely make it through (and you like) and play it until it's like second nature.
Something interesting, I found for me playing on "ultra fast" mode was actually way easier. You still have the same number of notes at the same frequency, the difference is they move down the screen faster. The end effect is you see fewer notes on the screen at a time. For some reason I found this made the game way easier.
Learning guitar takes a lot of patience, especially early on.
I think that's why you don't see guitar a lot in school.. most instruments you can get people transitioning between a few notes pretty quickly, then can get everyone together and honk out "twinkle twinkle little star". With guitar this takes a little longer. There are a lot of fundamentals you need before you can progress to anything beyond very simple tunes.. and getting these fundamentals can be very tedious.
Wrapping up the hours and hours of scales and building muscle memory in a game might encourage some people to pick up music who otherwise wouldn't have the patience. Personally (as a non elitist type) I think this is a good thing.
Sure, but it's useless in that format.
The idea behind having an archive is it can be browsed periodically. If you can't easily access the data, what is the point.
There needs to be a custodian (or agency) which looks after the data.
I don't think coming up with some magical storage medium is the answer..
The current generation stores the data using whatever methods are used for insuring data integrity (multiple copies, raid, checksums, tape.. whatever).
The next generation should still have means to access data from one generation previous (just as I can still access stuff that was put on floppy disk/tape without too much difficulty.. I would have a hard time accessing stuff on punchcard or papertape). And it would be their responsibility to migrate it to the newest storage medium.
The problem of actually accessing and making sense of the data though, I agree, that is daunting. Older data it's not so bad, as most of it was plain text or very basic binary formats that could be boiled back down to text.. at least enough to get the raw content. With all the newfangled formats being used to store our data.. "what the hell is a .flac file" becomes a very real issue.
We have archive.org .. but it's not great.
Not saying I could do any better, it's a pretty damn hard problem, and I think resources are a big issue for them.
And a lot of it isn't there fault. One big problem I see is a _lot_ of really good content is behind registration walls. Massive forums packed with loads of useful information vanishes.. and services like archive.org (and search engines) can't get at it.
I think a big issue comes with who gets to decide if you can keep data around. Archive.org will retroactively (or last I checked they did this) disable access to a domains snapshots if there is a robots.txt file on the live site restricting access. This makes sense in theory, letting a site owner prevent access to data retroactively, however it causes problems when the domain dies and an ad page gets put up (or someone else buys the domain and actually puts up a legitimate site).
For example when jumpedtheshark got bought... the new owners put a robots.txt file (and eliminated all old content from their site) preventing anyone from accessing the vast amount of user provided content.
And then there is the issue of a site who actually did want to block their own content for whatever reason. When the site goes down, so does the robots.txt file, and all the old content becomes accessible again!
It really does!
I'm from Canada.. and I've never been in the situation, but as I understand it even if someone breaks into your living room, WHILE YOU ARE THERE, you can still get in trouble for using "excessive force" if you seriously injure the person. If you have a gun (for say, hunting).. even pointing it at the person will land _you_ in trouble. The laws are even murky is he has a gun (did you really think he was going to use it?). It's quite insane!
The criminal.. well he's just a missunderstood victim of society, we can rehabilitate him with your tax dollars!
Personally I think once someone decides to break into your home, you have every right to bludgeon him to death with a crow bar. Maybe if that was a potential outcome of breaking into someones house, people wouldn't do it so often.. ..I'm not bitter or anything..
I'm no "languages" man, but I've never seen how one would implement the kind of const you describe without some massive pain.
Everything in Java is a reference. You can dictate that the reference does not change (i.e. using the final modifier) but somehow locking the state of the object you are referencing sounds like it would be very tricky[tm]. Especially when a lot of complex classes use internal temporary buffers created at construction to generate results (this is also really good for thread safety. You'd end up with weird situations like calling someObject.getBlehCalculations() and end up with a "CanNotModifyConstObject" exception.
I guess you could have some kind of annotation system to dictate which members of a class dictate state.. but that sounds very messy. Or you could just take the "live with it approach".
I do agree, being able to specify "this isn't modified" would be an awesome feature for readability though!
I guess, although best case scenario I can see the exact same thing happening as happened to netscape:
1) spend money developing something cool
2) watch it get really popular
3) profit??
Where 3 really is the big problem. How does one make money off a web browser?
I don't think the old method is gonna work any more.. that is majorly hyped IPO where companies hurl huge bags of money at you. So how do they plan to make a dime off this thing?
Its foundation is built on Chromium, the same open-source coding that spawned Google Inc.'s Chrome browser two years ago.
.. it can't be that old.
This seems like the classic programmer issue of not googling before you code.
This exists! Not only are there plugins to chrome and firefox for this very purpose, but I believe there are at least 2 actual browsers (which no one uses) built around this idea.
This does not appear to do anything revolutionary, and certainly does not justify a completely new browser. This could easily have been implemented as an extension to existing browsers.