> [With a debit card,] "Until the bank provides provisional credit, you could temporarily be out of pocket for the amount in dispute," said Richard Foley, an FDIC attorney who specializes in consumer issues. "This would not typically happen with a credit card because consumers can withhold payment of the amount in dispute."
> Also, as discussed on the next page, consumers have better federal protections when they purchase faulty goods with credit cards.
The same is possible with a credit card - you can have your card maxed, get nailed with overage charges, declined transactions, etc. It's still a headache, but when I've had it happen to me I think I had the money restored within a few minutes of making the call.
I know someone who got their debit card cloned. While the bank eventually repaid him, that did nothing to repay him the additional fees he owned his normal debtors (e.g. rent, utilities, etc).
With a credit card you aren't losing "actual" money. You are losing the bank's borrowed money which the bank pays back. With a debit card you're losing cash which you won't be able to replace yourself and which the bank might take days to weeks to replace.
Even if you NEED to borrow while your credit card is out of commission you can either use the overdraft facility on your debit card or other quick sources of credit. Hard to get quick cash without going to a pawn shop.
They are. Protections are exactly the same (in the US at least.) You have protection from the moment that you learn of the problem, not when it happens.
Not that having your account drained doesn't suck, but your worst case scenario there isn't terrible unless you fail to check stuff and be responsible.
Unfortunately that's something of the lifecycle of online communities. Once they reach a critical mass people that probably shouldn't belong start congregating, sooner or later there seems to be a tipping point where things start racing down to the LCD of humor and insight. People start leaving and form another community.
HackerNews is surprising for the length of time it's managed to exist without turning into that. I have noticed that the quality of submissions has decreased over the past year.
What a fascinating concept. Not only can this potentially revolutionize the lives of millions of people, but the implications past that are staggering. If this was a standard option how many lives would be saved from the moment distractions? How many sleepy drivers would be saved from hurting themselves or others?
The next iteration of highways and freeways requires technology like this to happen. There's no reason that we can't travel much, much more quickly than we do currently and adapting cars to help prevent accidents and avoid the situations that cause them is a necessary catalyst.
How nice would it be to commute to work every day and avoid the traffic jams that plague cities?
This quote is one of my favorite Linus quotes ever. Bashing on Microsoft is such an 'in' thing to do and honestly it's so pointless. Many IT folk are stuck using their products for any of a number of reasons. Many of their products simply are the best fit for specific applications. It's so irritating to hear the constant Microsoft Sucks(tm) from people that either honestly know little about it or that bash unnecessarily. Every OS sucks, none are perfect.
The biggest gripe I have with that attitude is that it destroys the FOSS, Apple, and Linux movements. People that are new to the IT world don't have years of backgrounds with projects and are going to be picking up on the attitudes of the people already there as well as struggling through technical problems. If they're instantly exposed to a very negative attitude (towards themselves, others, or really anything) it's going to be a huge turnoff to whatever project it is. The negative/hateful attitude that a lot of people have towards Microsoft actively hurts the same cause that they're trying to help.
The other part of that is that with any social interaction someone that is constantly putting something down is perceived (usually rightfully so) as being insecure about their own inadequacies. I don't know about others, but Linux and Apple have both matured to the point that I'm quite comfortable quietly evangelizing and building others up, regardless of the OS choice.
It's time to relax guys, we finally have an atmosphere with the freedom to pick your own OS and to be happy with it. This is a GOOD time to be a nerd, and a fantastic time to share that passion and excitement with people from whatever background.
Besides, if there's someone to demonize, it's the people that don't take the time to secure their boxes. Those come from all distros/OS's and I'll gladly pass the pitchfork around for them!
If one looks at a graph of MS stock from 1986-2000 and compares that to 2000-2009 it shows the stock has basically languished. MS is a cash cow, slowly dying. They were the first and perhaps only company ever able to successfully leverage large network effects and create a proprietary lock-in model that has enabled them to dominate the desktop for a long time. Moreover it's so dominant that the only thing now worse than Office is Google Docs :)
Their business practices, particularly with respect to extortionary illegal contracts with hardware manufacturers were only finally stopped with a government anti-trust suit against them.
Although it may be enticing to spend a few years with a slick point and click IDE such as VisualStudio and pretend you are programming, as anyone who has ever done so knows at some point you run into something broken and it's tough shit because you can't fix it.
But you can relax, you are correct. They were never able to "own" the net and they don't own the pipes (which I've read is the real reason Buffett never invested in MSFT, he's a very long investor).
Please don't think ill of those who lived through those years. About three years ago now I swore off windoze for good and my health has improved considerably. I truly hope others have that same opportunity.
I might be early, I often am, but if you have the stomach for it I'd say MSFT is a good short, even if you like the stock it can be just as profitable on the way down as it was for those on the way up :)
"Although it may be enticing to spend a few years with a slick point and click IDE such as VisualStudio and pretend you are programming, as anyone who has ever done so knows at some point you run into something broken and it's tough shit because you can't fix it."
Really? Pretend? Really? That's what you think? I hope what you mean is the potential for over-reliance on wizards, which is easily countered by, oh, I don't know, learning what they're doing so you can accomplish it on your own, just 20-100x slower. Then use the wizard.
I'm sorry to respond to flamebait but I use visualStudio and emacs, compile by pressing a button and using make. As long as you understand what's going on it's all good.
I also think it's strange that in the Linux community there seems to be such a negative vibe around anything that even slightly raises the level of abstraction on the "tooling" side, yet on the languages side it's mostly a good thing, in my eyes they're both just tools, as long as understanding is sound then bring on the productivity boosts, again IMHO.
"I'm sorry to respond to flamebait but I use visualStudio and emacs, compile by pressing a button and using make. As long as you understand what's going on it's all good."
While I don't "hate" Microsoft, as a professional programmer who has worked in both Microsoft's world and the open source world, I am very glad to be able to work entirely in the open source ecosystem precisely because there is a limit to how much you can understand. You hit it when you hit the closed source components.
I grant you that having source for everything may not be everyone's cup of tea, but being able to dive into the source of everything has saved me so often that it results in a qualitative difference in the experience of developing. I haven't spent two weeks trying disparately to figure out how to get around some bug since I used a closed-source PDF generation library three years ago, but this was a routine experience in the Microsoft world. (Not always two weeks, granted, but it can be!)
We've fixed the kernel, read the source of glib and other fundamental libraries to figure out why our things weren't working, hacked up other things in ways that are two-line fixes in what would be closed source in the Microsoft world but would be huge masses of unreliable code to work around at a different layer.
(It should be pointed out that this is simply an effect of having source and the right to build it and use the built result, which some permissive commercial licenses do permit, but my understanding is that this remains the exception and not the rule, with most people still working under the idea that opening your source is tantamount to handing out the family jewels.)
Actually I used all of these tools also but what I meant was if you build a tool any idiot can use then rest assured every idiot will use one. It's all good if the goal is leveraging the skills sets of the folks you hire. For programmers who really love to know things all the way down these tools are at best boring, and many hackers avoid them because when you really need them for something and hit a bug you're dead. There's nothing worse than going to upper management and saying I got stuck because VisualStudio won't let me do X.
" if you build a tool any idiot can use then rest assured every idiot will use one"
True, but not making something because idiots would misuse it isn't a good road to go down either.
"For programmers who really love to know things all the way down these tools are at best boring"
Do you mean boring in the sense that they just work and once you understand them they do exactly what you want, or boring as in you don't care it exists and you'd rather write it yourself, boilerplate included?
For me something that helps speed up a 20 minute job into a 20 second job is pretty cool, speed increase is one of the fundamental advantages of using computers.
"There's nothing worse than going to upper management and saying I got stuck because VisualStudio won't let me do X."
I haven't been hit by that, though I can imagine it leaves a mark.
"This wasn't meant as flamebait."
Roger, remark retracted ^_^
But now I'm curious about ya, When I only knew c++ I would sit and smugly think about how what the java people were doing wasn't real programming because they weren't managing their own memory, they were letting some program do that work. I now consider this a completely silly opinion.
I think control/productivity tradeoffs like garbage collectors are a much harder decision than, say, using a code generator and tweaking the output, as you the programmer have a lot more control over the generated code than you do a VM. What say you?
"True, but not making something because idiots would misuse it isn't a good road to go down either."
Erm... I am not sure about that one. Idiots cause a lot of harm.
The speed increase you get when using a wizard that makes code you don't understand you pay back with time and headaches when you have to fix the code you didn't write that no longer runs against the current runtime you are using.
As for Java and C++, they both make writing programs hard. The edge Java has is that it makes writing the bugs much harder.
agreed. I mean boring in the sense that I don't care how my car works.
control/productivity tradeoffs like GC are indeed a tougher decision. For a real-time trading system I would think a JVM might be a disaster, though Erlang/OTP also uses GC so it largely depends on the app and where the GC enters into it. Code generation is interesting. Statically typed languages like Java, enable IDEs that can generate a lot of the boilerplate, through annotations, etc.. but there is also the issue of control/productivity and the economics of programming teams that enters into it. I haven't looked closely but I think GWT is a good example of where folks can leverage their Java assets by generating javascript, for which rich toolsets seems to be lacking.
For what it's worth, having been raised on CLOS and Lisp on a Symbolics, C++ was a step backward and I considered working with it for 3 years a net loss. As I understand it C++ was an attempt to codify what folks were already doing in C with macros. As some famous programmer whose name I forget said, "Java took us about half way back to Lisp".
Slowly Dying? Please. I can't remember which blog these numbers came for, but this "MSFT is Dying" meme has been circulating for a while and there's a post out there with a fantastic treatment of the notion..
The gist is that Microsoft, as it's supposedly "dying," has gross revenue growing by BILLIONS each year. Yes, their stock has underperformed their sector. But their revenue hasn't. And a company can fudge profits 7 ways from sunday. But you can't fudge topline numbers without out and out fraud.
The author put it in an interesting way: Microsoft revenues grow the size of 1 Adobe or 1 Yahoo!, each year.
There's not a single American (nay GLOBAL) company that wouldn't love for a "death" like that.
And about Buffett... he's often written that he doesn't invest in a company he doesn't fully and completely understand.
The issue was not exclusion, nor bashing. The code has been accepted by a driver maintainer, and there were surprisingly few critical undertone mails on lkml, however legitimate (namely, adherence to the Linux coding conventions).
What is not pointless is honesty, and not even Linus[1] can say, that the code drop was honest. Microsoft should have said: somebody found us in violation of the license we think is important [the licensing legalese itself, not the GPL], and this is how we fixed it. Sorry for our mistake, we do our best. This is not what happened: instead it was sold as an act of benevolence. Voleurs.
You cannot blame people for hating dishonest legal persons.
[1] should take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves why they are being so hypocritical.
Except that's not what happened. MS didn't "get caught" for a GPL violation -- there was no license requiring them to submit the code.
They didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, correct, because MS is a corporation -- not a person. MS did this out of business sense -- increased interoperability with Linux just makes Windows/Microsoft all the more valuable.
Despite not being natural persons, corporations are recognized by the law to have rights and responsibilities like actual people. Corporations can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state
Yeager said Stanford's lawyers asked him to review a copy of Cisco's
software. He found his own work in it.
Stanford officials in charge of licensing debated what to do. ``Cisco
mess'' was the heading of one e-mail discussing the issue.
Earnest urged a lawsuit and even raised the idea of criminal charges
against Bosack. He e-mailed colleagues: ``The fundamental problem is: how
do you negotiate an equitable agreement with crooks?''
Your response in no way addresses what I said -- MS didn't act out of empathy, b/c corporations have none -- they don't have a "heart" b/c they are persons only by law.
As to the Cisco cite -- how is that relevant to MS? Moreover, copying software code is not a criminal offense -- it's a civil tort. Finally, equitable estoppel is not a matter of negotiation, it's a matter of one party's unilateral acts.
they don't have a "heart" b/c they are persons only by law.
This is a well-known phenomenon [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation ]. Organizations acting without moral, conscience, responsibility and ethically towards real humans/natural persons can certainly happen, but it goes without saying, that it also does have consequences. This is what I pointed out: You cannot blame people for hating dishonest legal persons.
Acting such and expecting loyalty and gratitude in the same time is hard to achieve.
History is littered with examples, and I am inclined to think the recurrence of such attitude is partially responsible for the self-inflicted trouble we face.
"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." -- George Bernard Shaw
Cisco is relevant, because History is relevant, from my point of view.
"When Americans say "that is history", they often mean it is no longer relevant. When Europeans say "that is history", they usually mean the opposite." -- Javier Solana, 2006
Except that's not what happened. MS didn't "get caught" for a GPL violation
Just as a record in the Memory Hole, a paste from a separate thread, now buried:
-8<---------------------
MJF: Hemminger is claiming Microsoft put the LIC code under the GPL because it was in violation of the GPL. Is this true? Did you have to suggest to (Microsoft Platform Strategy Chief Sam) Ramji & Co. that they were in violation in order to get them to agree to release the code under GPLv2?
GKH: I didn’t have to “suggest” anything, I only had to merely point out the obviousness of the situation :)
MJF: If this isn’t accurate, could you let me know how to interpret (Hemminger’s) comments on his blog.
GKH: No, that sounds accurate.
[...]
Ramji didn’t come right out and deny the GPL violations claim, but I guess that’s as much as we’re going to get.
I'm so glad to see other companies actually picking up the slack on space exploration. Hopefully they'll continue to pick up steam since it's looking like government funded exploration is more and more dead.
There's no reason that anyone under 30 today can't at least visit space cheaply in the future, unless we just give up.
SpaceX already got a large contract with NASA to haul cargo up to the International Space Station when the shuttles retire in 2010. So it seems that even the government admits that these guys can do it better for cheaper:
Slight correction: the government admits that SpaceX can do it better and cheaper if they can deliver on their predictions. NASA is paying for a series of test flights to determine whether or not that's actually the case.
Remember, the Falcon 9 hasn't actually launched yet (although much of the design is shared with the Falcon 1). I'm really looking forward to its first test launch, which should be coming up before just too long. Their ground crew overhead is impressively low.
And unless government regulations unduly restrict space travel. I don't know why they would, given that it's essentially just like airplanes, yet much higher.
Valid reasons for government regulation of space travel 101:
1. We have a technical term for a simple, rapid-to-launch vehicle (like Falcon 1) that can deliver c. 400Kg into LEO: we call it an ICBM.
2. Even in the absence of a CBW payload, a well-targeted RV can do a hell of a lot of damage. KE at orbital velocity is an order of magnitude higher than the equivalent chemical energy stored in the same mass of TNT, so even if that hypothetical 400Kg payload is cement, it's going to do one hell of a lot of damage to anything it hits.
3. Accurate targeting of RVs was considered to be a very hard problem ... in the 1940s and 1950s. Let us recall who the initial cash cow customers for Fairchild Semi and (subsequently) Intel were, and consider the implications.
Anyway, upshot: no government in their right mind is going to allow orbital launches (or even sub-orbital) without at least some oversight, if only to ensure that the customer isn't Dr Evil.
