What good would that do? Their bank doesn't know if the customer's credit card is valid.

By their "bank" I mean their merchant processing account. And they absolutely can validate the card, and/or contact the customers bank themselves if necessary.

This is the proper documented process. Look it up.

The poster I was responding to got it right.

Bank calls the customer to advise them of the need to communicate, gives the customer a ticket number, and simply asks the customer them back.

The customer must call the bank back at a "trusted number" they have for the bank -- not a number the person calling them gives them, but the one on the back of the card the customer is carrying, or the one on their bank statements, etc.

If "GPLv2 only" is silly, then you might want to alert all the Linux kernel developers.

Your kidding right? Alert them of what? Something they all already know?

As the kernel has no centralized copyright authority; the license is stuck where it is regardless of what anyone contributing to it wants or doesn't want.

Linus has been quoted saying he doesn't care for GPLv3 himself, and has no plans to change the kernel over; which is fine...(especialyl as its would be a fuckton of work -- due to each contributor to the kernel ever all having to either agree to the change or have their contribution pulled out and recoded from scratch). However it doesn't really answer the question of whether Linus actually objects to "GPLv2 or later" -- since it doesn't put any additional constraints on him; or anyone else contributing to the kernel -- the only upshot is that someone somewhere downstream might at some point create a gplv3+ distro based on the kernel. I'm really not sure Linus cares about that; if he doesn't care about Tivoization, what does he care if RMS and the FSF put together a pure gplv3 distro?

To me, at least, the choice of GPLv2 for the kernel instead of GPLv2 or later seems like, an oversight at best, that really can't be fixed now. After all, the kernel was one of the earlier works to use the GPL; it was still pretty new at the time. And Linus was not making a statement about Tivoization or GPLv3 or anything else when he didn't include the "or later" clause.

I pay for everything cash, so I have a low credit score. How the fuck does that work?

Sure, you might be independantly wealthy and just buy everything with cash... or maybe you live day to day off the money you make turning in aluminum cans. In other words, your score is low because they can't tell you from hobo.

I paid for my car cash, I pay my rent cash, I pay the cable company cash.
I have over $30k in the bank and I have monthly paychecks.

None of which is reported to a credit scoring agency.

So I should have a much higher credit rating than someone who is constantly paying with credit cards in my opinion.

You are probably more credit worthy, and probably deserve a higher score, but you aren't playing the game to get one.

I wouldn't even mind so much, except that when renting a house they do a background check, and they expect to find a credit history, which I don't have.

So get one. Apply for a card, buy some stuff you were planning to buy anyway, pay it off... costs you NOTHING. And you get a higher score on the credit rating game, for when you need it.

Party A expressed their opinion about this scenario when they chose the license. GPL v2 Only means they don't want to prevent it.

Selecting GPLv2 or later ALSO allows for downstream Tivoization of your code. So choosing "GPLv2 only" OR "GPLv2 or later" makes no difference to Tivoization.

The only difference between "GPLv2 only" or "GPLv2 or later" is the or later can be mixed with GPLv3 or later, while GPLv2 only.

So the ONLY statement anyone picking "GPLv2 only" is making, is that they don't want their code mixed with GPLv3 which honestly... is pretty silly.

Tons of issues, mostly with very lacking library support, tooling.

Agreed -- not that I know about about Erlang in particular, but library availability, maturity, (and cost) while not a reflection of the language design itself are HUGE factors in whether or not a given project is practical in that language.

In one case, I had a guy tell me online "hire me as an Erlang consultant and then I will help you".

Pretty sure you can find an example of THAT guy in ANY community.

We rewrote this 9 months of Erlang development in 3 weeks (!) using one senior Java developer.

That can mean a lot of things really. For example, a rewrite hot off the tail of the original project benefits from the fact that all the requirements, data model, information flow, features etc are actually pinned down. You jump straight to the implementation phase, and can do it all in one programming iteration -- no meetings, no feature creep, no discovery of unspecified requirements, no backtracking...

Essentially its the perfect project, a good developer is effectively handed a complete and accurate spec.

Everything is immutable is beautiful for fairy tales, but not for real-life software (trying building a DOM in a language which is 100% immutable).

Yeah, its a paradigm shift... but I'm skeptical that its really that difficult. As I said, I don't know Erlang ... but I recall the first time I dipped my hand into lisp and it was like trying to make water run uphill until it just clicked and I was correctly thinking in terms of recursion and things that seemed mind bogglingly complicated to do in lisp suddenly became simple.

. You can reasonably assume that the phone number you have on file for me is valid.

For what its worth, I would never say that is a reasonable assumption. Half the time I do anything major with the bank i have to update all sorts of outdated contact information. You can rightfully argue that I should be more on top of advising them when things change -- but the bank can't reasonably assume that I've done so.

They absolutely should verify they have reached who they intended to call.

That said, you, of course, are 100% correct in that you shouldn't ever hand over your SSN to some yarbo calling you claiming to be from your bank either. So everything about what you did was correct -- the only point I'm making is that your argument that the bank should reasonably assume they've reached the right person wasn't valid. They absolutely need to validate they are speaking to the right person too.

it is up to the cashier to hold the card, read the number and call it themselves

It is up to the cashier to call THEIR OWN BANK.
They are not supposed to call the number on the back of the customers card -- for reasons that should be pretty bleeding obvious.

Nobody is campaigning to keep the homosexuals unable to marry

Uh, yes, lots of people are campaigning for exactly that. Entire organizations exist for that sole purpose.

they are unable to do so already.

And people are campaigning to keep it that way.

Not because they have no right â" only because they have no ability.

I honestly can't parse this. Of course they have the "ability" to marry; they ONLY obstacle is policy, change the policy and they can get married.

Contrast with: No amount of policy change is going to help a paralyzed person do karate.

Not any more so, than a quadriplegic is deprived of the right to practice karate.

The guy in the wheelchair may be deprived of his ability to practice karate, but its not because his fellow citizens are campaigning and voting to keep him from doing it.

That's a pretty significant difference.

Tizen is the german word for dingleberry-- those pieces of crap that cling to the hairs of your butt. I think if they ever intended to ship they might have checked that.

No he failed to comprehend that people have found that particular method of calculating ratio of compression over time is proving to be *useful*.

selecting a sample of users, and conducting tests on them specifically to change their response.

How does changing something about your website to get them to spend more money not qualify as "selecting a sample of users, conduncting tests specifically to change their response"?

So what if the 'sample of users' is everyone, and the A/B test occurs over the same users in two non-overlapping timeframes? If I make the changes to my regionalized .CA website to test the impact on "Canada" before making it to the global site? Does that qualify? Because pretty much all sites do that sort of thing too.

You're definition is so loose it's useless.

That is PRECISELY my point. Getting in a huff about "experimenting on users" is absurd, because the definitions in play ARE uselessly broad. What did OKcupid or facebook do, SPECIFICALLY, that crossed a line that any other website wouldn't do to increase whatever metric they were looking at.

Because, to my view, they haven't done anything different from any other site, at all. So this all really is much ado about nothing.

No. It's what some unethical douche bags do. it has nothing to do with how websites work, asshole.

Anyone who has ever:
a) taken any metrics about there site
a) altered their website in any way
b) measured whether or not it made any difference

Change the font? Rewriting the sales pitch? Moving the photo to the left? Changing the checkout sequence? Showing more or fewer related products? Added bitcoin as a payment option? Offered a discount? Let you checkout without registering? Adjusted your online advertising budget or changed the keywords you were paying for or targeted a new demographic or region...

Do any or all of those one at a time, checking whether sales increased or not... congrats you effectively "experimented" on your users.

Whether or not it is insidious or unethical doesn't depend on "did you or did you not experiment" it depends on what EXACTLY you've been doing.

Me, I've noticed that people tend to click on articles that are finite lists of things. Hypothetically take an article called "Retirement Savings Strategies Everyone should know" gets fewer clicks than "7 retirement savings strategies everyone should know".

The only change is the addition of the number 7.

The internet has gradually been replaced by "X Y's" articles, because it gets more clicks, as this has become increasingly "discovered" by people "experimenting" on users with different headline styles.

The only upside is that I can safely ignore any "news" site with more than 1 article that starts with a count in the title, as containing nothing more than processed brain diarrhea.

Claiming that a score "works" has no meaning,

I could easily devise a cpu scoring methodology that scores CPU based on chip area / cost * clock speed / register width.

Such a score "works" in the sense that the function can be evaluated, but it wouldn't tell you anything about whether to buy an i7 vs a xeon vs a pentium 2.

The suggestion in the article is that the particular scoring methodology that was created for the show is useful for comparing compression algorithms, to the point that it may well be adopted by industry.

Therefore, the only interpretation of the hideously poor writing is that the submitter is claiming the algorithm works.

The writing was perfectly fine, your reading comprehension is what failed here.