I think the GP was just explaining that there are other ways to "get paid for what you're doing now, even fifty years later", which most people accept as morally right. To "renting out property"[1], we can add "putting the money in a bank" and "buying stock" to name a few. My great-aunt (mother's aunt) was a lowly telephone operator who took advantage of a program to invest in AT&T. She recently passed away, and my mother inherited a lot of telco stock that resulted from that early investment. There was definitely more than fifty years between when my great-aunt bought the stock and the last dividend payment she received.
[1]Incidentally, this was one of the medieval ways to circumvent the usury laws. Buying property and renting it out has all the features of an interest-bearing account. Supposedly, the German word for interest, Zins comes from the Latin census, a term referring to the sum of one's wealth, usually land at the time.
1) Monsanto spends billions developing a pest-resistant crop. 2) Farmer discovers one day that some of his crop is pest-resistant, and concludes it must have been a combination of his extreme ingenuity as a farmer (!) and his faith in God. 3) Farmer saves seed, replants, and leeches off innovative Monsanto research. 4) Monsanto sues farmer, who resists because he refuses to accept that he wasn't really responsible for the better crop.
And it's not like the farmer is somehow innocent in all of this. Farmers in every country lobby for massive subsidies so they don't have to actually do the work in keeping their job skills relevant. He should have been forced to sell due to unprofitability years ago.
Here's what you have to believe to match ~70% of/.ers:
1. Copyright in general is a good thing, but has too long of a term and his horribly misused today. 2. Anyone who does anything whatsoever that would be necessary to catch and convict someone violating copyright over P2P is a horrible totalitarian Nazi. 3. Copyright really only benefits the record companies, who are parasites. 4. It's possible to make money as a musician without copyright or the evil record companies, and is therefore possible today. Ignore how, when given the choice, artists prefer to work with a record company. 5. If record companies were just nicer, people would buy more stuff from them even though they can get it for free on P2P. 6. From the fact that geeks know how to get music for free, it follows that everyone knows how to so we are seeing concrete evidence of copyright not being necessary.
Yet somehow PC games have managed to survive all of the doom and gloom. It's been 20 years already with rampant piracy the whole way and they're still around. Until you can advertise on TV, your site where people can download the cracked version of every PC cheaply, yes, copyright enforcement still significantly props up PC softare profits.
That just goes to show that if you put out a good product and don't abuse your customers too much, people will still pay for your stuff even if it is readily available for free. SMAC/SMACX are great. EA doesn't abuse me. I got them for free. KOTOR I and II were great. Lucasarts doesn't abuse me. I got them for free. Yes, I'm a jerk. But I'm a very typical counterexample to your claim.
That is the "business model shift" that both the RIAA and the MPAA need to make. They need to stop acting like they are entitled to success. They don't act like they are entitled to success. The fact that people want to get their products is proof that they made them of suffcient quality. It's just the pesky issue of getting people to actually pay for it, and for revenues to be proportional to popularity.
They have to act like they are willing to work for it. No, someone's right (or lack thereof!) to IP in their creations, whether in the moral or legal sense, is not a function is not a function of how much they can "act like they are willing to work for" success. No one should have to "look like they're working hard" to have a right, if they are otherwise entitled to it. A place where my rights are heavily dependent on much effort I can imitate, is not a place I want to live.
As I like to say: When it comes to ripping off artists, consumers really are amateurs compared to the labels. How much more would studios pay artists, if those artists had no copyright to sell in the first place? Or, perhaps they would cut out the studios altogether. What stops them from using a copyright-free business model today?
In reality, there are a lot of directors of IT and CIOs who believe that Linux is a science project, and not a suitable server platform for important tasks.
In reality, there are a lot of *Linux users* who think that Linux is a science project, not suitable for important tasks. I remember Ubuntu users lecturing me how I should have my Windows CD ready when installing Ubuntu, in case Ubuntu has problems installing. And it did. And they asked why I didn't "play it safe" by having my Windows CD... in anticipation of an Ubuntu problem.
I agree. If they want me to trust it, they had *better* damn well let me spend weeks aimlessly wandering the source code in the hope that I can understand it well enough to see if it does anything malicious.
Your statement represents an absolutely breathtaking ignorance.
No, yours does. I "get" that other jobs are bad. But the challenge I made in my previous post was, why is it "okay" for Indians to lose their farming jobs because of genuine market conditions (like if one day technological advances made American farmers genuinely competitive) but "not okay" if they lose their jobs because of foreign subsidies? "Farm unprofitability" is morally neutral. It can come about for good or for bad reasons. For someone to commit suicide in the face of their farm not being profitable says more about their whininess than about a fundamental injustice. Remember, many, many Indians are non-farmers in the first place. Would it be reasonable for them to commit suicide, too?
No, your reaction to them killing themselves because they couldn't get their dream job would be, "Get over it, dude", not "omg j00 r teh vitcim of teh fundimental injusticezor5".
The romance of farming is largely gone in the US. Personally, I believe that we would be better off as a culture if we knew who had grown or raised our food items, and the restoration of the local farmer to significance (and the near elimination of the food processor) would be a great benefit to all of us as a nation, a state, and a people.
Oh, never mind, I thought there was a reason to spend more time on you.
-I support abolution of farm subsidies and protective tariffs. -I think EU/US/Japan farmers are jerks for demanding them.
Nevertheless:
India has literally thousands of farmers committing suicide because they can't compeat with farmers who collect hugh subsidies Seriously, WTF? Committing suicide because you can't make a profit as a farmer? Sorry, that's just stupid. Get another job! Yes, it probably pays less. Yes, it's probably not as enjoyable. But remember, there are lots of non-evil reasons why it might not be profitable for you to work as a farmer. What then? Staking this much emotionally on whether or not you get to work as a farmer says more about your whininess than the wrongness of first-world tariffs.
Remember, American consumers also suffer from the "OMG I *must* be a farmer" mentality: it got us the blight known as HFCS and ethanol subsidies. How many of you have to constantly retrain to remain relevant to your job? And farmers are somehow entitled never to have to do something else? Sheesh...
Think about prices falling and farmers closing up shop and then there is only a few large commercial farms working. Then think about something like a drought in the mid west or west coast or some biological contaminate infecting all the eastern seaboard's crops. Or worse yet, think about what would happen if the entire world suffered some catastrophe like a volcano spewing enough dust to block the sun for most productive reasons. We might not have the ability to plant more crops or get food were it is needed.
While these are valid concerns, there is already a mechanism for dealing with it: the agricultural futures market. The futures prices reflect the general public's aggregate estimate of the probability of such events, and speculators are rewarded for setting up networks for distribution of food in the event that they correctly predict events like these. For the EU to say it needs to set up a mechanism to introduce redundancy in the food supply, is to say that the market has "mispriced" the risk of disruptions to the food supply and underinvested in them. And of course, these market estimates can be wrong. But is the severity of their wrongness worse than the opportunity cost of this vast redirection of productive capacity through farm subsidies? Regardless of your ideology, the answer to that question is much less obvious than the one about whether catastrophic disruptions to the food supply are bad.
why any of us enjoyed Twilight Princess as much as we did - the Wiimote was just a gimick, right??
I don't know if this was your point, but yes, for Z:TP, the Wiimote did seem bolted on. It simply replaced what would otherwise be button pushing, and really only checked for a "shake". It was a great game, of course, but didn't really exploit the Wiimote's abilities. (If they had made it so you have to "pull back" to load an arrow, then I might have swooned.)
Many games do seem to use the acceleromter stupidly, and in a way that looks artificial. But at the same time, I've seen some really good uses of it. Trauma Center uses it for a defibrilator and turning screws, which feels strangely realistic. Red Steel uses it for the blocking motion (which makes blocking more intuitive, since you instinctively raise your hands anyway) and for zooming in and slowing down time, which does feel like a genuine interface improvement. Rayman was also pretty creative in, for example, how you have to use the wiimote to "smack" bunnies or beat to a rhythm.
But even the pointer feature by itself tremendously expands the interface capabilities in games.
What Eddi3 said. Lipo can only salvage energy that would otherwise be wasted. But getting fat *for the purpose* of providing energy would be less efficient than applying the energy from whatever made the food, directly into the economy. It would almost be like Homer's plan to get rich by selling grease from the fatty foods he eats;-)
Hm, no mention of my idea to solve the obesity problem AND energy problem by streamlining the liposuction process so people can regularly have their body fat sucked out and used as energy...
Yes, but like with any polling, this only covers people a) they can reach (those with POTS) and b) who answer polls. I doubt such a sample is very representative anymore. (You'd think with most people getting their TV feed through a cable, they could just read it from that, but maybe there are privacy concerns.) In all my life, I've never known a family that did that, and yes, they would talk about it. Plus, I'm not sure how reliably people fill out their viewing histories...
If people are fleeing TV for myspace (or slashdot, or youtube, etc.), how would the mainstream media become aware of this? How do they collect their ratings? Do they still have people fill out cards indicating what they watched at various times? Doesn't the method of picking these people tend to exclude those who most likely do turn to the internet?
love is a two-way street,...It is possible to have people buy only things they were already interested in because commerce is usually a mostly one-way relationship.
And here we find your hidden faulty premise: Commerce is *not* a one-way street. When someone buys something, assuming they aren't being pressured at *that* moment, they prefer the good to the money, and the seller prefers the money to the good. BOTH benefit. Someone who seeks a romantic relationship is seeking a *mutually beneficial* event. Someone who seeks commerce is *also* seeking a mutually-beneficial event.
(As an aside, there are ways for strangers to hook up without spamming uninterested parties. Dating sites, speed dating, etc. are ways for people interested in hooking up to meet other people interested in hooking up and to do a little research before trying out a full date with them. That's more analogous to the sort of non-push advertising that I prefer.)
And it's precisely those kinds of places that women DON'T LIKE. Go look up the male/female ratio for those activities.
This is a large part of why I see the analogy you're making as a tad stretched.
I think that the extent that you call this an "analogy" is the extent to which you trivialize both my insight and my personal experience. I did not dream this up as a way to refute your argument and/or justify spam. I came to that realization after trying to live under your philosophy. I consider the two areas both implications of the same premise: do people have the right to pressure others to do things they did not ask to be pressured with, but which they may decide they like? (Not being female, I'm limited in the amount of insight I have access to from that perspective.)
If I go to the local singles bar and hit on girls, it's assumed they wanted to be hit on, otherwise they wouldn't be in the local singles bar.
Sorry, but that just doesn't follow. There are many reasons girls could be at such a bar. And even so, none of them voiced a desire for a relationship with any *one* of the men in the bar, which is what would be necessary to meet the OP's standard. "If I want what you're offering, I'll seek it out."
No, I'm most certainly not trolling. While I certainly could have made the point more diplomatically (and less succinctly), this is a very important issue for me. I don't see how it's possible to reconcile opposition to all push-type advertising with acceptance of attempts to initiate romantic relationshps. After a lot of personal introspection, I've come to accept that position on the former -- which used to be pretty much the same as yours -- has stunted me on the latter. (socially I mean)
1) Trying to start a real relationship is different from asking for money (or sex).
How? Be specific. ("I like one and don't like the other" doesn't count.)
Forcing your desperation on a stranger is different from asking to deepen a relationship with a friend.
Well, two of my own points:
1) If you're good, it doesn't look desparate. 2) Again, *how* is it different? Be specific.
(Also, having been hit on by strangers I had zero interest in before, I will say that it is a distinctly creepy experience, and I do oppose it in general. I wouldn't want to make someone else feel that way.)
Yes, but there are situations where someone has wanted to heighten a relationship, and you *have* wanted it. What kind of rule do you want people to adhere to, that eliminates the bad instances and keeps the good?
Without doing any research whatsoever, I'm going to guess that the reason for the balloon fetish is similar to the reason for the so-called "crush fetish" whereby guys enjoy watching women step on bugs. The latter is due to how, while growing up, their mother would scream and then step on bugs, exciting a lot of surprise and excitement in the child, which molded his psyche and eventually developed into arousal. Similarly, perhaps children got the same sort of panic from balloons popping.
Yeah, and I think we should ban forests. If you want to plant a bunch of trees together, though, that's fine. But none of this exploitative forest crap.
I have two credit cards. (Well three, let's start with the two.) Each of them I got from a different credit union. For online access to those cards' accounts, the CU sites send me to ezcardinfo.com. Even though both cards are stored at that site, I have to set up a different username for each site. Then ezcardinfo and my CUs phased in new security measures where I have to also know a picture and a description of that picture for each site. So that means four sites for which I have a username, password, picture, description of a picture, and security questions, even though they could be (and were previously) consolidated to two.
On top of that, I have a third credit card (before you ask, yes I pay the balance on each bill, no interest accrued) that has a different namespace requirement, requiring a different username and password. Add to that my 401k site, my non-work mutual fund site, and my discount brokerage site. (The 401k provider, Fidelity, sucks for mutual funds, and the mutual fund site, Vanguard, sucks for stock purchase.) All with their own security measures.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the GP was just explaining that there are other ways to "get paid for what you're doing now, even fifty years later", which most people accept as morally right. To "renting out property"[1], we can add "putting the money in a bank" and "buying stock" to name a few. My great-aunt (mother's aunt) was a lowly telephone operator who took advantage of a program to invest in AT&T. She recently passed away, and my mother inherited a lot of telco stock that resulted from that early investment. There was definitely more than fifty years between when my great-aunt bought the stock and the last dividend payment she received.
[1]Incidentally, this was one of the medieval ways to circumvent the usury laws. Buying property and renting it out has all the features of an interest-bearing account. Supposedly, the German word for interest, Zins comes from the Latin census, a term referring to the sum of one's wealth, usually land at the time.
You wish that you could put your wages in an interest-bearing account? Huh?
It's more like:
1) Monsanto spends billions developing a pest-resistant crop.
2) Farmer discovers one day that some of his crop is pest-resistant, and concludes it must have been a combination of his extreme ingenuity as a farmer (!) and his faith in God.
3) Farmer saves seed, replants, and leeches off innovative Monsanto research.
4) Monsanto sues farmer, who resists because he refuses to accept that he wasn't really responsible for the better crop.
And it's not like the farmer is somehow innocent in all of this. Farmers in every country lobby for massive subsidies so they don't have to actually do the work in keeping their job skills relevant. He should have been forced to sell due to unprofitability years ago.
Boo, hoo.
Here's what you have to believe to match ~70% of /.ers:
1. Copyright in general is a good thing, but has too long of a term and his horribly misused today.
2. Anyone who does anything whatsoever that would be necessary to catch and convict someone violating copyright over P2P is a horrible totalitarian Nazi.
3. Copyright really only benefits the record companies, who are parasites.
4. It's possible to make money as a musician without copyright or the evil record companies, and is therefore possible today. Ignore how, when given the choice, artists prefer to work with a record company.
5. If record companies were just nicer, people would buy more stuff from them even though they can get it for free on P2P.
6. From the fact that geeks know how to get music for free, it follows that everyone knows how to so we are seeing concrete evidence of copyright not being necessary.
I think that about covers it.
In reality, there are a lot of directors of IT and CIOs who believe that Linux is a science project, and not a suitable server platform for important tasks.
... in anticipation of an Ubuntu problem.
In reality, there are a lot of *Linux users* who think that Linux is a science project, not suitable for important tasks. I remember Ubuntu users lecturing me how I should have my Windows CD ready when installing Ubuntu, in case Ubuntu has problems installing. And it did. And they asked why I didn't "play it safe" by having my Windows CD
I agree. If they want me to trust it, they had *better* damn well let me spend weeks aimlessly wandering the source code in the hope that I can understand it well enough to see if it does anything malicious.
Your statement represents an absolutely breathtaking ignorance.
No, yours does. I "get" that other jobs are bad. But the challenge I made in my previous post was, why is it "okay" for Indians to lose their farming jobs because of genuine market conditions (like if one day technological advances made American farmers genuinely competitive) but "not okay" if they lose their jobs because of foreign subsidies? "Farm unprofitability" is morally neutral. It can come about for good or for bad reasons. For someone to commit suicide in the face of their farm not being profitable says more about their whininess than about a fundamental injustice. Remember, many, many Indians are non-farmers in the first place. Would it be reasonable for them to commit suicide, too?
No, your reaction to them killing themselves because they couldn't get their dream job would be, "Get over it, dude", not "omg j00 r teh vitcim of teh fundimental injusticezor5".
The romance of farming is largely gone in the US. Personally, I believe that we would be better off as a culture if we knew who had grown or raised our food items, and the restoration of the local farmer to significance (and the near elimination of the food processor) would be a great benefit to all of us as a nation, a state, and a people.
Oh, never mind, I thought there was a reason to spend more time on you.
-I support abolution of farm subsidies and protective tariffs.
-I think EU/US/Japan farmers are jerks for demanding them.
Nevertheless: India has literally thousands of farmers committing suicide because they can't compeat with farmers who collect hugh subsidies Seriously, WTF? Committing suicide because you can't make a profit as a farmer? Sorry, that's just stupid. Get another job! Yes, it probably pays less. Yes, it's probably not as enjoyable. But remember, there are lots of non-evil reasons why it might not be profitable for you to work as a farmer. What then? Staking this much emotionally on whether or not you get to work as a farmer says more about your whininess than the wrongness of first-world tariffs.
Remember, American consumers also suffer from the "OMG I *must* be a farmer" mentality: it got us the blight known as HFCS and ethanol subsidies. How many of you have to constantly retrain to remain relevant to your job? And farmers are somehow entitled never to have to do something else? Sheesh...
Think about prices falling and farmers closing up shop and then there is only a few large commercial farms working. Then think about something like a drought in the mid west or west coast or some biological contaminate infecting all the eastern seaboard's crops. Or worse yet, think about what would happen if the entire world suffered some catastrophe like a volcano spewing enough dust to block the sun for most productive reasons. We might not have the ability to plant more crops or get food were it is needed.
While these are valid concerns, there is already a mechanism for dealing with it: the agricultural futures market. The futures prices reflect the general public's aggregate estimate of the probability of such events, and speculators are rewarded for setting up networks for distribution of food in the event that they correctly predict events like these. For the EU to say it needs to set up a mechanism to introduce redundancy in the food supply, is to say that the market has "mispriced" the risk of disruptions to the food supply and underinvested in them. And of course, these market estimates can be wrong. But is the severity of their wrongness worse than the opportunity cost of this vast redirection of productive capacity through farm subsidies? Regardless of your ideology, the answer to that question is much less obvious than the one about whether catastrophic disruptions to the food supply are bad.
why any of us enjoyed Twilight Princess as much as we did - the Wiimote was just a gimick, right??
I don't know if this was your point, but yes, for Z:TP, the Wiimote did seem bolted on. It simply replaced what would otherwise be button pushing, and really only checked for a "shake". It was a great game, of course, but didn't really exploit the Wiimote's abilities. (If they had made it so you have to "pull back" to load an arrow, then I might have swooned.)
Many games do seem to use the acceleromter stupidly, and in a way that looks artificial. But at the same time, I've seen some really good uses of it. Trauma Center uses it for a defibrilator and turning screws, which feels strangely realistic. Red Steel uses it for the blocking motion (which makes blocking more intuitive, since you instinctively raise your hands anyway) and for zooming in and slowing down time, which does feel like a genuine interface improvement. Rayman was also pretty creative in, for example, how you have to use the wiimote to "smack" bunnies or beat to a rhythm.
But even the pointer feature by itself tremendously expands the interface capabilities in games.
What Eddi3 said. Lipo can only salvage energy that would otherwise be wasted. But getting fat *for the purpose* of providing energy would be less efficient than applying the energy from whatever made the food, directly into the economy. It would almost be like Homer's plan to get rich by selling grease from the fatty foods he eats ;-)
Hm, no mention of my idea to solve the obesity problem AND energy problem by streamlining the liposuction process so people can regularly have their body fat sucked out and used as energy...
Yes, but like with any polling, this only covers people a) they can reach (those with POTS) and b) who answer polls. I doubt such a sample is very representative anymore. (You'd think with most people getting their TV feed through a cable, they could just read it from that, but maybe there are privacy concerns.) In all my life, I've never known a family that did that, and yes, they would talk about it. Plus, I'm not sure how reliably people fill out their viewing histories...
If people are fleeing TV for myspace (or slashdot, or youtube, etc.), how would the mainstream media become aware of this? How do they collect their ratings? Do they still have people fill out cards indicating what they watched at various times? Doesn't the method of picking these people tend to exclude those who most likely do turn to the internet?
Theseus makes people think of "Thesaurus" and c'mon! Who wants to use that?
Yeah good point. But then how would you go about finding a better word for the same thing?
(sorry, couldn't resist...)
love is a two-way street, ...It is possible to have people buy only things they were already interested in because commerce is usually a mostly one-way relationship.
And here we find your hidden faulty premise: Commerce is *not* a one-way street. When someone buys something, assuming they aren't being pressured at *that* moment, they prefer the good to the money, and the seller prefers the money to the good. BOTH benefit. Someone who seeks a romantic relationship is seeking a *mutually beneficial* event. Someone who seeks commerce is *also* seeking a mutually-beneficial event.
(As an aside, there are ways for strangers to hook up without spamming uninterested parties. Dating sites, speed dating, etc. are ways for people interested in hooking up to meet other people interested in hooking up and to do a little research before trying out a full date with them. That's more analogous to the sort of non-push advertising that I prefer.)
And it's precisely those kinds of places that women DON'T LIKE. Go look up the male/female ratio for those activities.
This is a large part of why I see the analogy you're making as a tad stretched.
I think that the extent that you call this an "analogy" is the extent to which you trivialize both my insight and my personal experience. I did not dream this up as a way to refute your argument and/or justify spam. I came to that realization after trying to live under your philosophy. I consider the two areas both implications of the same premise: do people have the right to pressure others to do things they did not ask to be pressured with, but which they may decide they like? (Not being female, I'm limited in the amount of insight I have access to from that perspective.)
If I go to the local singles bar and hit on girls, it's assumed they wanted to be hit on, otherwise they wouldn't be in the local singles bar.
Sorry, but that just doesn't follow. There are many reasons girls could be at such a bar. And even so, none of them voiced a desire for a relationship with any *one* of the men in the bar, which is what would be necessary to meet the OP's standard. "If I want what you're offering, I'll seek it out."
I know you're just trolling,
No, I'm most certainly not trolling. While I certainly could have made the point more diplomatically (and less succinctly), this is a very important issue for me. I don't see how it's possible to reconcile opposition to all push-type advertising with acceptance of attempts to initiate romantic relationshps. After a lot of personal introspection, I've come to accept that position on the former -- which used to be pretty much the same as yours -- has stunted me on the latter. (socially I mean)
1) Trying to start a real relationship is different from asking for money (or sex).
How? Be specific. ("I like one and don't like the other" doesn't count.)
Forcing your desperation on a stranger is different from asking to deepen a relationship with a friend.
Well, two of my own points:
1) If you're good, it doesn't look desparate.
2) Again, *how* is it different? Be specific.
(Also, having been hit on by strangers I had zero interest in before, I will say that it is a distinctly creepy experience, and I do oppose it in general. I wouldn't want to make someone else feel that way.)
Yes, but there are situations where someone has wanted to heighten a relationship, and you *have* wanted it. What kind of rule do you want people to adhere to, that eliminates the bad instances and keeps the good?
OTHER than mind-reading, I mean.
My explanation, which did not originate from me:
... it's because over half the posters here are wondering why it would arouse someone.
1) does not involve "killing/having sex with mother" desires, and
2) does not attempt to morally condemn the fetishist
so I'm not sure what you were responding to.
As for why we'd bother finding the root cause
If you've ever hit on a girl before, you're a hypocrite.
If you're female, are you against being hit on?
(I have the sneaking suspicion you're neither female nor a hypocrite...)
Without doing any research whatsoever, I'm going to guess that the reason for the balloon fetish is similar to the reason for the so-called "crush fetish" whereby guys enjoy watching women step on bugs. The latter is due to how, while growing up, their mother would scream and then step on bugs, exciting a lot of surprise and excitement in the child, which molded his psyche and eventually developed into arousal. Similarly, perhaps children got the same sort of panic from balloons popping.
That wasn't a typo; that's what Steve Ballmer wants people to call developers now. He's really big on the role of the developer, I hear.
Yeah, and I think we should ban forests. If you want to plant a bunch of trees together, though, that's fine. But none of this exploitative forest crap.
How the hell did you get modded up?
I have two credit cards. (Well three, let's start with the two.) Each of them I got from a different credit union. For online access to those cards' accounts, the CU sites send me to ezcardinfo.com. Even though both cards are stored at that site, I have to set up a different username for each site. Then ezcardinfo and my CUs phased in new security measures where I have to also know a picture and a description of that picture for each site. So that means four sites for which I have a username, password, picture, description of a picture, and security questions, even though they could be (and were previously) consolidated to two.
On top of that, I have a third credit card (before you ask, yes I pay the balance on each bill, no interest accrued) that has a different namespace requirement, requiring a different username and password. Add to that my 401k site, my non-work mutual fund site, and my discount brokerage site. (The 401k provider, Fidelity, sucks for mutual funds, and the mutual fund site, Vanguard, sucks for stock purchase.) All with their own security measures.