Actually. MS gives you a program that calls home, sends them information, and makes arbitrary changes to your system at their whim. In some of their latest work they actually are taking steps to hold your computer hostage with their WGA and new Vista protection crap. I know I like it when my computer decides that I may have done something its true owner doesn't like and shuts down on me. Oh, and they take your money to do it. It is like purchasing golden handcuffs and then saying "See, they are made out of gold, that means they are better".
On top of all of this there is that whole MS/Claria business since they are so keen on "fucking killing google" and getting into the ad business. At least Zango screws you for free.
I agree that M$ and Windoze may sound childish, but a chair throwing rant and "fucking kill google" by the CEO pretty much makes anything said by anyone in almost any community about the company in question seem highly educated comparatively.
Right, but GMT is basically gone. UTC replaced GMT 1 Jan 1972. GMT was solar time, UTC is atomic time, but GMT gets refered to as a time zone. The whole thing is very very screwy.
You are missing the "non obvious to anyone in the industry" part of the equation. I will concede that it could be possible to invent a non obvious fry container or cup, however, none of the ones that say patent pending have been "non obvious" by any stretch of the imagination. If my rival copies my fry container and my lawyers spend more than 15 seconds of my time trying to convince me to waste time and resources going after them for that I will have them shot. So no, they are still abusing the patent system. The fact that they are doing it over coffee cups and fry containers is unbelievably stupid. If they want to patent a design on the machines that produce their food exactly the same way every time...more power to them...that would be a legitimate use.
Actually we don't. We learn GMT, but GMT was basically replaced by UTC in 70 something. I know the whole 'leap second' and correcting for earths rotation as part of UTC was never covered. The worst part is that you can't compare the difference between two UTC times without the charts showing when leap seconds and whatnot happened. The "real" time passed between 8:05 and 8:06 today in UTC isn't the same as the "real" time passed between 8:05 and 8:06 on this date a few years ago. Now throw in the mess that is daylights savings time and how that recently was changed by legislation. Time zones, let alone the squiggly bordered ones we use, cause even further wierdness.
Damnit you asshole would you shut up?! At least make their lawyers come up with this shit on their own, no need to hand them more crap. I bet this won't be modded Funny when a patent describing that in obscure ways gets a stamp of approval. However a lawsuit against you for revealing trade secrets would be kind of amusing.
In all seriousness, it doesn't take fancy tech to show how totally fucked our patent system is. When fast food places started having "patent pending" on their fucking fry containers or coffee cups it should have been painfully obvious something was going very very wrong.
Now, I think you are 100% correct. I think your responses are rather funny as well. However, as much as it pains me to say as an American, I suggest you go ask a statistically significant group of Americans what UTC and GMT actually are. You could even go further and ask them to point out Greenwich on a map. This may explain the lack of outrage more than an enhanced sense of perspective on how pointless it would be to complain about UTC/GMT.
I agree with most of what you say about the hypocrasy of the user base claim. However, there is some truth to this. The small Vista user base is more related to time than it is to user base, where as the Linux/OSX user base is just that. MS will force hordes of people into unwanted Vista installs and I get calls at least once a week or so of someone asking me if I know where they can get a copy of XP because their new desktop/laptop shipped with Vista and they hate it. So if a user finds a few flaws and decides they hate the OS and they switch back to XP or switch Linux or switch OSX then the lack of user base finding said flaws is very valid. Linux and OSX on the other hand have both been around for quite some time. First year of "some linux disro" isn't exactly the same as first year of Vista. Their upgrade methodologies are FAR to different to begin a rational comparison.
With that, I think it may be incorrect to say its because of the small user base of Vista, more that the user base of Vista has a tendancy to run the hell away from that doomed OS like it was Windows ME version 2. I think the second part of it is that any time MS releases crap like this you can pretty much count on the exact opposite being true. Regardless of whether you like their products, their marketing is nothing less than deceptive and cutthroat. If MS says they have more users and fewer flaws you can almost be sure what they really mean is we have fewer users and more flaws and we have found a way to spin the reverse in our marketing. This is the same kind of reason they have psychologists write their stupid certification tests.
That is my point. This should be enforced through contract law, not regulation. If it is enforced through regulation you will see FOSS die a quick and bloody death as those "rogue programmers" get sued out of existence. To me it sounds like this book is simply using the very real problem of security and lack of liability as an argument for regulation that will give MS and crew exactly what they want, a playing field free from any competitor that can't just pony up the fines when things go wrong.
To be honest all the laws exist already to fix this problem. MS advertises how stable they are and how you need their stuff for mission critical things, and then in their manual basically state you should not use it for anything important. False advertising at a bare minimum. Then any vendor that sells a solution built on faulty software should be held liable as well if they misrepresent its security/stability. You shouldn't be able to go after someone for selling you a broken product so long as they are clear up front what the problems are. Now if a hospital uses a broken product (that was not misrepresented) and someone dies, it should not be the maker of the product, but the hospital who gets the ass pain of that decision. If your surgeon decides to operate on you using a butter knife and chip clips instead of medical tools is that the chip clip and butter knife makers fault or your surgeon...
How did this get flagged as flamebait? This is exactly the kind of crap regulation does. Do you think for a minute that regulation in software is going to do squat against the giant coffers of corporate America that can afford to pay out fines and such? Now what happens when someone uses an Apache server for something critical, and it turns out an Apache error caused the failure...now who is going to get shafted? The regulation idea is a nightmare waiting to happen with a huge chilling effect. Let us also ponder who might be in charge of said regulation... I mean...government regulation would be managed by government right? Anyone remember Sen Internet Tubes Stevens take on technology?
I'm sorry but regulating something like this is almost criminally stupid. I agree with there needs to be better consumer protection, and I don't think companies should get away with "you can't blame us if you actually use the product you purchased from us and it doesn't work". No other industry can say "you can't sue us if the product you purchased from us does not do what it was intended to do". That doesn't take more regulation to fix.
I seriously hope you aren't a business major...manager...or really anyone in any position to make an decision of significance. The hitch here is that Intel joined the OLPC project, then joined up with MS to build a "competing" product against their own contract of agreement with OLPC. Then they tried to use insider information to break business deals with OLPC. This would all be non issue if they had not joined OLPC, there would be no story, and the OLPC folks would not be complaining. They talked dirty about a product that they signed on to help support in order to sell their own knockoff. No part of that is serving the shareholders and I hope they get raked over the coals for that crap. Think about this for just one tiny moment...had they NOT been total fuckwads about this, the next OLPC laptop would have had Intel! Then the shareholders would make MORE because not only are the sales of OLPC now sales for Intel...they are ALSO good PR. So if I was a shareholder I would have someone beaten or fired for this stunt. I fail to see what part of "Stop competing with the product you signed up to support or go away" is stifling competition. He didn't tell them that they couldn't sell their Classmate whatnot, he was telling them "If you want to be part of what we are doing, you can't compete with what we are doing" Which really is pretty much common sense. That you are somehow convinced this is stifling competition, or in Intel shareholder's best interests is frightening to say the least.
From what I have read the biggest killer of the Blu-ray/HDDVD thing is the fact that DVDs are enough for most people. People that don't want to spend a god damned fortune on a new TV, new player, and replace their entire movie collection. You know...basically the same thing that killed Betamax. It was technically a better format, but the cost of being proprietary murdered it. The "good enough" VHS murdered them on availability and price.
Blu-ray is only the dominating format when compared to HDDVD alone, throw in DVD and VHS and not so much domination.
Is anyone surprised at this? Let us examine the Sony portfolio of media...
Betamax - fucked themselves - now deal with VHS gear
Minidisc - fucked themselves - now deal with CDs
Memory Stick - fucking crap - everyone else deals with SD, waiting for them to realize they are fucking themselves
Blueray - nothing exciting - everyone is still basically on DVDs with no incentive to change
Now we can add
DRM digial music - fucked themselves - now drop DRM to sell more.
Go look up VI3 from VMware. I had wondered about the push for virtualization until this. This actually increases your durability. When one server physically crashes VI3 will restart all of the VMs living there on a different server in the farm. It is a WORLD easier in terms of drivers and backups because you aren't ever dealing with quirky bullshit driver issues because all of your servers are on standardized virtual hardware that doesn't "fail" without spares. There is a reason virtualization is a hot item. The power, cooling, space and cost requirements drop considerably compared to having a bunch of boxes sitting around.
Well the flip side of the coin is that most of the statistics I have seen regarding bankruptcy makes me think the new bankruptcy laws are more about trying to squeeze money out of people in a tough place. Many of them are due to outrageous medical costs. I just went through some medical stuff that would have cost me over $20,000 if I didn't have insurance, now it is only going to cost me about $1200. HUGE difference there.
I haven't read much on people who just have bad credit, but I have known plenty of them and almost every last one of them results from very poor impulse control and not making good financial choices. Sometimes they get hit with an emergency such as vehicle or medical that sends them out of control, but the problem at the core was still there just waiting to be made worse. They ignore debt and continue to purchase new stuff that they dont "need" to survive. If they get a windfall from something it will go to new shineys instead of paying off old debt. As far as the motivation for lenders taking a big risk...same reason people go all in playing poker or ask for another card in blackjack. Just a little bit more, just a little bit more, push a little bit farther...SHIT! BUST! The problem isn't that the borrower is a high risk, its that the borrower was allowed to continue to do high risk things that damage the economy. I mean really...adjustable APR on a house...I would tell my mortgage broker to fuck off and I would go somewhere else for them even attempting to offer me some bullshit like that. If your credit history is so bad that is all you can get offered, then you have other issues to fix before you attempt to purchase a house (that in all likelyhood is FAR more expensive than what price level they should be looking at in a house). I am going to be pissed if the lenders get a government bail out on my tax dollars...super pissed.
Well a good number of them did a few key things that I consider greedy or stupid. The only ones I really have much sympathy for are the renters getting screwed. Most states do not have any requirements that a renter be notified of foreclosure proceedings starting either by the bank or by the landlord. Of course the incentive for both the landlord and bank is to allow the renter to stay in place paying rent as long as possible so they get more money, and then they get their asses tossed out sometimes with as little as 3-5 days warning. The people signing for subprime loans are considered credit risks for a reason, presumably because they make bad financial choices like signing up for variable APR loans for amounts that they cannot afford. So I wouldn't really say "greedy" for them, but most of them were "keeping up with the Joneses" and attempting to purchase things well outside of their income range. Then there is the real estate get rich quick trend that fueled tons of this...by buying over priced places with poor credit trying to get rich renting them out...once again...my sympathy is with the renters getting tossed out, not the lender or the landlord.
The whole thing played on human greed. If it was just a few people with bad credit trying to get a house it wouldn't be a crisis. People providing the means for others to hang themselves in order to get rich on one end. The other end was people attempting to live well outside their means because the people who stood to get rich off of them told them that everything would be ok.
Like it or not...most of the bad credit problems come from "greed" of spending money you don't have. Now some people do go through bad times and wind up with bad credit just survive, but if those people are smart they don't sign up for more crap they can't afford while trying to recover.
Amway/Quixtar or whatever the hell they call it is barely outside of the realm of pyramid. Once upon a time, the creator, envisioned a wonderful door to door sales type system that involved selling stuff, most notably soap. (And by the way, that soap as sterotypical Amway as it may be, is fucking amazing) This all changed, and somewhere in Amway the "Diamonds" revolted against the creator, because they wanted to focus on Business Support Materials. This is the tapes, the conferences, the books, and all that other crap. The trick is the BSM profits go straight to the top skipping everyone inbetween. Originally the focus was supposed to be on the products and with their take over it became about BSM. This is also where the cult behavior started, all related to selling the BSM. So...really Amway is barely out of the clear, but because each "chain" has the capability of being pretty independant from the others and some actually DO uphold the original methods it isn't totally a scam.
That said, the plan of teaching this stuff is the stupid security idea called Enumerating Badness by Marcus Ranum. They need to just teach proper finance courses in high school and make them mandatory. Scammers and scumbags will always find new methods, the trick is teaching the correct methods so that people recognize when something seems askew. Thousands of people with easy credit have begun to cripple our economy. So while I don't feel too much sympathy for many of them for getting suckered it, it irritates the piss out of me that the price of damned near everything has skyrocketed because people are more willing to spend imaginary money and screws with the demand.
I have a real hard time feeling very sympathetic to most of these people being scammed. These types of scams typically rely on the victim allowing greed to shut down their brain. I am normally one to be pretty vicious towards the scammers in things like credit cards and predatory lending, because often enough it isn't exploiting greed and get rich quick schemes so much as it is a genuine fraud and manipulation. This subprime crap and scams like this are almost exclusively greed driven on the part of the victim. Listen to the radio and you will hear dozens of commercials per day on how to get rich quick in real estate, flipping houses, or whatever other genious plan being sold. I can't imagine why someone selling real estate would try to sell a system of how to get rich by buying real estate...
Oh noes they are doing something stupid again. People...listen to me very carefully. Murder is illegal right? Does that mean it is unenforceable because they can't stop you from murdering before hand? NO! It means that they can charge you with a crime if you do it. So...lets think for just a brief moment. For those who bothered to read the article, it applies to people who used the internet in their sex crime. So if Dirty Joe fondled Little Billy at the park...no internet was used...no internet ban applied. It also applies to the lifetime registration folks, which tend to be the really depraved sick fuck repeat offender types anyways. So...if you use the internet to commit sex crimes...they ban you from using the internet. Now...is this virtually impossible to prevent...well duh...but guess what...murder is virtually impossible to prevent. You can ban all the guns and knives in the world and I can still kill you with my shoe, my belt, or my bare fucking hands. What it does allow is if Dirty Joe trolled myspace for his catch...and they catch his ass even attempting to do that again...they don't have to wait for him to nail a kiddie to nail him...they just have to catch him logging on.
With that, I do see this as a problem if "Internet" is defined in the typical layperson terms. However I have long since learned that the media doesn't report shit correctly when it comes to "Internet" anything...and slashdot summaries are even worse. This is why it is so hard to get shit fixed. Stupid ass reporting, bad summaries, and a fucking clueless lynchmob screaming over bad information without thinking...the really trivial shit gets turned into crusades and the real issues get buried because they are "too hard" to understand. I imagine almost everyone in the thread screaming about this, didn't read the article, didn't research much at all, and probably can't explain the more complex issues like the Valarie Plame incident that is FAR more dangerous to our freedom.
Simple. This is America and that cannot happen. Well unless of course you read a history book, but don't believe that history nonsense, its all lies anyways right? The head in the sand mentality will stop anyone from looking at this with a critical eye the same way the evoting nonsense slid through. I just want to beat people senseless when they pull that "it can't happen here" card. I'm sure there are millions of people who would be more than willing to describe why "it can't happen here" is a really bad view...but most of them are buried in mass graves from Germany, to Poland, to Russia, to the SW Asia, to Africa, etc etc etc.
It pains me to listen to people tell me how much of a conspiracy theorist I am when I describe how criminal Diebold is and how hackable their machines are. I don't even claim that they HAVE been hacked, just that it is piss poor design and easy to hack. Other than "it can't happen here" I get a lot of "why would anyone do that". The truth is people are more likely to believe that someone cheated the voting system for American Idol than for an elected office, and they are more likely to know the contestants for American Idol than for any given public office.
Right, I mean by speeding up/slowing down to time the intersection so you don't have to stop and just zip on through as the light changes. You should be prepared to stop at EVERY intersection because you can be reasonably certain someone on the cross road is likely to do something stupid. Hitting the light mid cycle is typically done best by doing the speed limit between them as that is what all the timing is arranged for.
Yes, when drivers do it. When drivers try to speed up or slow down to catch lights it causes all kinds of accidents, frequently with people paying more attention to trying to adjust for the magical glowing thing that allows them to enter a busy intersection rather than the heavy metal things that will prevent them from doing the same. In that little battle of psychology vs physics...physics wins every time. I have watched with horror as people get caught in intersections, either by their own stupidity or stupidty of drivers ahead of them, and then seen the magical light change colors and drivers in cross traffic actually attempting to drive past/through the cars stuck in the intersection even from a dead stop. It is disturbingly stupid.
Unfortunately city engineers time all that stuff based on a simple flawed assumtion, that most drivers aren't dumbasses and that they will indeed follow the posted speed limits and following distances. We have some lights like that around here, if you hit them just right it is beutiful and you just glide right through the downtown mishmash of one way streets without issue. It only gets ugly when people get confused by the one way mishmash and jack up the traffic pattern.
Actually there has been research showing that attempting to time lights causes a huge number of accidents. You are far safer when you come to a complete stop at a red light, and then wait a moment before leaving when it turns green just so you can avoid the people trying to adjust their speed to time the lights.
You are right on the money with tailgating, I freaking hate that crap, it is dangerous and it causes all manner of traffic problems.
In their world remote code execution seems like it should be considered a feature. I can't imagine why they would ship so many of their products with that feature and then patch to "fix" it.
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Actually. MS gives you a program that calls home, sends them information, and makes arbitrary changes to your system at their whim. In some of their latest work they actually are taking steps to hold your computer hostage with their WGA and new Vista protection crap. I know I like it when my computer decides that I may have done something its true owner doesn't like and shuts down on me. Oh, and they take your money to do it. It is like purchasing golden handcuffs and then saying "See, they are made out of gold, that means they are better".
On top of all of this there is that whole MS/Claria business since they are so keen on "fucking killing google" and getting into the ad business. At least Zango screws you for free.
I agree that M$ and Windoze may sound childish, but a chair throwing rant and "fucking kill google" by the CEO pretty much makes anything said by anyone in almost any community about the company in question seem highly educated comparatively.
Right, but GMT is basically gone. UTC replaced GMT 1 Jan 1972. GMT was solar time, UTC is atomic time, but GMT gets refered to as a time zone. The whole thing is very very screwy.
You are missing the "non obvious to anyone in the industry" part of the equation. I will concede that it could be possible to invent a non obvious fry container or cup, however, none of the ones that say patent pending have been "non obvious" by any stretch of the imagination. If my rival copies my fry container and my lawyers spend more than 15 seconds of my time trying to convince me to waste time and resources going after them for that I will have them shot. So no, they are still abusing the patent system. The fact that they are doing it over coffee cups and fry containers is unbelievably stupid. If they want to patent a design on the machines that produce their food exactly the same way every time...more power to them...that would be a legitimate use.
Actually we don't. We learn GMT, but GMT was basically replaced by UTC in 70 something. I know the whole 'leap second' and correcting for earths rotation as part of UTC was never covered. The worst part is that you can't compare the difference between two UTC times without the charts showing when leap seconds and whatnot happened. The "real" time passed between 8:05 and 8:06 today in UTC isn't the same as the "real" time passed between 8:05 and 8:06 on this date a few years ago. Now throw in the mess that is daylights savings time and how that recently was changed by legislation. Time zones, let alone the squiggly bordered ones we use, cause even further wierdness.
Damnit you asshole would you shut up?! At least make their lawyers come up with this shit on their own, no need to hand them more crap. I bet this won't be modded Funny when a patent describing that in obscure ways gets a stamp of approval. However a lawsuit against you for revealing trade secrets would be kind of amusing.
In all seriousness, it doesn't take fancy tech to show how totally fucked our patent system is. When fast food places started having "patent pending" on their fucking fry containers or coffee cups it should have been painfully obvious something was going very very wrong.
Now, I think you are 100% correct. I think your responses are rather funny as well. However, as much as it pains me to say as an American, I suggest you go ask a statistically significant group of Americans what UTC and GMT actually are. You could even go further and ask them to point out Greenwich on a map. This may explain the lack of outrage more than an enhanced sense of perspective on how pointless it would be to complain about UTC/GMT.
I agree with most of what you say about the hypocrasy of the user base claim. However, there is some truth to this. The small Vista user base is more related to time than it is to user base, where as the Linux/OSX user base is just that. MS will force hordes of people into unwanted Vista installs and I get calls at least once a week or so of someone asking me if I know where they can get a copy of XP because their new desktop/laptop shipped with Vista and they hate it. So if a user finds a few flaws and decides they hate the OS and they switch back to XP or switch Linux or switch OSX then the lack of user base finding said flaws is very valid. Linux and OSX on the other hand have both been around for quite some time. First year of "some linux disro" isn't exactly the same as first year of Vista. Their upgrade methodologies are FAR to different to begin a rational comparison.
With that, I think it may be incorrect to say its because of the small user base of Vista, more that the user base of Vista has a tendancy to run the hell away from that doomed OS like it was Windows ME version 2. I think the second part of it is that any time MS releases crap like this you can pretty much count on the exact opposite being true. Regardless of whether you like their products, their marketing is nothing less than deceptive and cutthroat. If MS says they have more users and fewer flaws you can almost be sure what they really mean is we have fewer users and more flaws and we have found a way to spin the reverse in our marketing. This is the same kind of reason they have psychologists write their stupid certification tests.
That is my point. This should be enforced through contract law, not regulation. If it is enforced through regulation you will see FOSS die a quick and bloody death as those "rogue programmers" get sued out of existence. To me it sounds like this book is simply using the very real problem of security and lack of liability as an argument for regulation that will give MS and crew exactly what they want, a playing field free from any competitor that can't just pony up the fines when things go wrong.
To be honest all the laws exist already to fix this problem. MS advertises how stable they are and how you need their stuff for mission critical things, and then in their manual basically state you should not use it for anything important. False advertising at a bare minimum. Then any vendor that sells a solution built on faulty software should be held liable as well if they misrepresent its security/stability. You shouldn't be able to go after someone for selling you a broken product so long as they are clear up front what the problems are. Now if a hospital uses a broken product (that was not misrepresented) and someone dies, it should not be the maker of the product, but the hospital who gets the ass pain of that decision. If your surgeon decides to operate on you using a butter knife and chip clips instead of medical tools is that the chip clip and butter knife makers fault or your surgeon...
How did this get flagged as flamebait? This is exactly the kind of crap regulation does. Do you think for a minute that regulation in software is going to do squat against the giant coffers of corporate America that can afford to pay out fines and such? Now what happens when someone uses an Apache server for something critical, and it turns out an Apache error caused the failure...now who is going to get shafted? The regulation idea is a nightmare waiting to happen with a huge chilling effect. Let us also ponder who might be in charge of said regulation... I mean...government regulation would be managed by government right? Anyone remember Sen Internet Tubes Stevens take on technology?
I'm sorry but regulating something like this is almost criminally stupid. I agree with there needs to be better consumer protection, and I don't think companies should get away with "you can't blame us if you actually use the product you purchased from us and it doesn't work". No other industry can say "you can't sue us if the product you purchased from us does not do what it was intended to do". That doesn't take more regulation to fix.
I seriously hope you aren't a business major...manager...or really anyone in any position to make an decision of significance. The hitch here is that Intel joined the OLPC project, then joined up with MS to build a "competing" product against their own contract of agreement with OLPC. Then they tried to use insider information to break business deals with OLPC. This would all be non issue if they had not joined OLPC, there would be no story, and the OLPC folks would not be complaining. They talked dirty about a product that they signed on to help support in order to sell their own knockoff. No part of that is serving the shareholders and I hope they get raked over the coals for that crap. Think about this for just one tiny moment...had they NOT been total fuckwads about this, the next OLPC laptop would have had Intel! Then the shareholders would make MORE because not only are the sales of OLPC now sales for Intel...they are ALSO good PR. So if I was a shareholder I would have someone beaten or fired for this stunt. I fail to see what part of "Stop competing with the product you signed up to support or go away" is stifling competition. He didn't tell them that they couldn't sell their Classmate whatnot, he was telling them "If you want to be part of what we are doing, you can't compete with what we are doing" Which really is pretty much common sense. That you are somehow convinced this is stifling competition, or in Intel shareholder's best interests is frightening to say the least.
From what I have read the biggest killer of the Blu-ray/HDDVD thing is the fact that DVDs are enough for most people. People that don't want to spend a god damned fortune on a new TV, new player, and replace their entire movie collection. You know...basically the same thing that killed Betamax. It was technically a better format, but the cost of being proprietary murdered it. The "good enough" VHS murdered them on availability and price.
Blu-ray is only the dominating format when compared to HDDVD alone, throw in DVD and VHS and not so much domination.
Is anyone surprised at this? Let us examine the Sony portfolio of media...
Betamax - fucked themselves - now deal with VHS gear
Minidisc - fucked themselves - now deal with CDs
Memory Stick - fucking crap - everyone else deals with SD, waiting for them to realize they are fucking themselves
Blueray - nothing exciting - everyone is still basically on DVDs with no incentive to change
Now we can add
DRM digial music - fucked themselves - now drop DRM to sell more.
Something tells me that a ban on 1984 would actually be a move towards freedom rather than against it. Someone needs to quit giving them ideas...
Go look up VI3 from VMware. I had wondered about the push for virtualization until this. This actually increases your durability. When one server physically crashes VI3 will restart all of the VMs living there on a different server in the farm. It is a WORLD easier in terms of drivers and backups because you aren't ever dealing with quirky bullshit driver issues because all of your servers are on standardized virtual hardware that doesn't "fail" without spares. There is a reason virtualization is a hot item. The power, cooling, space and cost requirements drop considerably compared to having a bunch of boxes sitting around.
Well the flip side of the coin is that most of the statistics I have seen regarding bankruptcy makes me think the new bankruptcy laws are more about trying to squeeze money out of people in a tough place. Many of them are due to outrageous medical costs. I just went through some medical stuff that would have cost me over $20,000 if I didn't have insurance, now it is only going to cost me about $1200. HUGE difference there.
I haven't read much on people who just have bad credit, but I have known plenty of them and almost every last one of them results from very poor impulse control and not making good financial choices. Sometimes they get hit with an emergency such as vehicle or medical that sends them out of control, but the problem at the core was still there just waiting to be made worse. They ignore debt and continue to purchase new stuff that they dont "need" to survive. If they get a windfall from something it will go to new shineys instead of paying off old debt. As far as the motivation for lenders taking a big risk...same reason people go all in playing poker or ask for another card in blackjack. Just a little bit more, just a little bit more, push a little bit farther...SHIT! BUST! The problem isn't that the borrower is a high risk, its that the borrower was allowed to continue to do high risk things that damage the economy. I mean really...adjustable APR on a house...I would tell my mortgage broker to fuck off and I would go somewhere else for them even attempting to offer me some bullshit like that. If your credit history is so bad that is all you can get offered, then you have other issues to fix before you attempt to purchase a house (that in all likelyhood is FAR more expensive than what price level they should be looking at in a house). I am going to be pissed if the lenders get a government bail out on my tax dollars...super pissed.
Well a good number of them did a few key things that I consider greedy or stupid. The only ones I really have much sympathy for are the renters getting screwed. Most states do not have any requirements that a renter be notified of foreclosure proceedings starting either by the bank or by the landlord. Of course the incentive for both the landlord and bank is to allow the renter to stay in place paying rent as long as possible so they get more money, and then they get their asses tossed out sometimes with as little as 3-5 days warning. The people signing for subprime loans are considered credit risks for a reason, presumably because they make bad financial choices like signing up for variable APR loans for amounts that they cannot afford. So I wouldn't really say "greedy" for them, but most of them were "keeping up with the Joneses" and attempting to purchase things well outside of their income range. Then there is the real estate get rich quick trend that fueled tons of this...by buying over priced places with poor credit trying to get rich renting them out...once again...my sympathy is with the renters getting tossed out, not the lender or the landlord.
The whole thing played on human greed. If it was just a few people with bad credit trying to get a house it wouldn't be a crisis. People providing the means for others to hang themselves in order to get rich on one end. The other end was people attempting to live well outside their means because the people who stood to get rich off of them told them that everything would be ok.
Like it or not...most of the bad credit problems come from "greed" of spending money you don't have. Now some people do go through bad times and wind up with bad credit just survive, but if those people are smart they don't sign up for more crap they can't afford while trying to recover.
Amway/Quixtar or whatever the hell they call it is barely outside of the realm of pyramid. Once upon a time, the creator, envisioned a wonderful door to door sales type system that involved selling stuff, most notably soap. (And by the way, that soap as sterotypical Amway as it may be, is fucking amazing) This all changed, and somewhere in Amway the "Diamonds" revolted against the creator, because they wanted to focus on Business Support Materials. This is the tapes, the conferences, the books, and all that other crap. The trick is the BSM profits go straight to the top skipping everyone inbetween. Originally the focus was supposed to be on the products and with their take over it became about BSM. This is also where the cult behavior started, all related to selling the BSM. So...really Amway is barely out of the clear, but because each "chain" has the capability of being pretty independant from the others and some actually DO uphold the original methods it isn't totally a scam.
That said, the plan of teaching this stuff is the stupid security idea called Enumerating Badness by Marcus Ranum. They need to just teach proper finance courses in high school and make them mandatory. Scammers and scumbags will always find new methods, the trick is teaching the correct methods so that people recognize when something seems askew. Thousands of people with easy credit have begun to cripple our economy. So while I don't feel too much sympathy for many of them for getting suckered it, it irritates the piss out of me that the price of damned near everything has skyrocketed because people are more willing to spend imaginary money and screws with the demand.
I have a real hard time feeling very sympathetic to most of these people being scammed. These types of scams typically rely on the victim allowing greed to shut down their brain. I am normally one to be pretty vicious towards the scammers in things like credit cards and predatory lending, because often enough it isn't exploiting greed and get rich quick schemes so much as it is a genuine fraud and manipulation. This subprime crap and scams like this are almost exclusively greed driven on the part of the victim. Listen to the radio and you will hear dozens of commercials per day on how to get rich quick in real estate, flipping houses, or whatever other genious plan being sold. I can't imagine why someone selling real estate would try to sell a system of how to get rich by buying real estate...
Oh noes they are doing something stupid again. People...listen to me very carefully. Murder is illegal right? Does that mean it is unenforceable because they can't stop you from murdering before hand? NO! It means that they can charge you with a crime if you do it. So...lets think for just a brief moment. For those who bothered to read the article, it applies to people who used the internet in their sex crime. So if Dirty Joe fondled Little Billy at the park...no internet was used...no internet ban applied. It also applies to the lifetime registration folks, which tend to be the really depraved sick fuck repeat offender types anyways. So...if you use the internet to commit sex crimes...they ban you from using the internet. Now...is this virtually impossible to prevent...well duh...but guess what...murder is virtually impossible to prevent. You can ban all the guns and knives in the world and I can still kill you with my shoe, my belt, or my bare fucking hands. What it does allow is if Dirty Joe trolled myspace for his catch...and they catch his ass even attempting to do that again...they don't have to wait for him to nail a kiddie to nail him...they just have to catch him logging on.
With that, I do see this as a problem if "Internet" is defined in the typical layperson terms. However I have long since learned that the media doesn't report shit correctly when it comes to "Internet" anything...and slashdot summaries are even worse. This is why it is so hard to get shit fixed. Stupid ass reporting, bad summaries, and a fucking clueless lynchmob screaming over bad information without thinking...the really trivial shit gets turned into crusades and the real issues get buried because they are "too hard" to understand. I imagine almost everyone in the thread screaming about this, didn't read the article, didn't research much at all, and probably can't explain the more complex issues like the Valarie Plame incident that is FAR more dangerous to our freedom.
Simple. This is America and that cannot happen. Well unless of course you read a history book, but don't believe that history nonsense, its all lies anyways right? The head in the sand mentality will stop anyone from looking at this with a critical eye the same way the evoting nonsense slid through. I just want to beat people senseless when they pull that "it can't happen here" card. I'm sure there are millions of people who would be more than willing to describe why "it can't happen here" is a really bad view...but most of them are buried in mass graves from Germany, to Poland, to Russia, to the SW Asia, to Africa, etc etc etc.
It pains me to listen to people tell me how much of a conspiracy theorist I am when I describe how criminal Diebold is and how hackable their machines are. I don't even claim that they HAVE been hacked, just that it is piss poor design and easy to hack. Other than "it can't happen here" I get a lot of "why would anyone do that". The truth is people are more likely to believe that someone cheated the voting system for American Idol than for an elected office, and they are more likely to know the contestants for American Idol than for any given public office.
Right, I mean by speeding up/slowing down to time the intersection so you don't have to stop and just zip on through as the light changes. You should be prepared to stop at EVERY intersection because you can be reasonably certain someone on the cross road is likely to do something stupid. Hitting the light mid cycle is typically done best by doing the speed limit between them as that is what all the timing is arranged for.
Yes, when drivers do it. When drivers try to speed up or slow down to catch lights it causes all kinds of accidents, frequently with people paying more attention to trying to adjust for the magical glowing thing that allows them to enter a busy intersection rather than the heavy metal things that will prevent them from doing the same. In that little battle of psychology vs physics...physics wins every time. I have watched with horror as people get caught in intersections, either by their own stupidity or stupidty of drivers ahead of them, and then seen the magical light change colors and drivers in cross traffic actually attempting to drive past/through the cars stuck in the intersection even from a dead stop. It is disturbingly stupid.
Unfortunately city engineers time all that stuff based on a simple flawed assumtion, that most drivers aren't dumbasses and that they will indeed follow the posted speed limits and following distances. We have some lights like that around here, if you hit them just right it is beutiful and you just glide right through the downtown mishmash of one way streets without issue. It only gets ugly when people get confused by the one way mishmash and jack up the traffic pattern.
Actually there has been research showing that attempting to time lights causes a huge number of accidents. You are far safer when you come to a complete stop at a red light, and then wait a moment before leaving when it turns green just so you can avoid the people trying to adjust their speed to time the lights.
You are right on the money with tailgating, I freaking hate that crap, it is dangerous and it causes all manner of traffic problems.
It seems to me that "not Amazon" is about an equal push so we are back to which one.
In their world remote code execution seems like it should be considered a feature. I can't imagine why they would ship so many of their products with that feature and then patch to "fix" it.