OR as well - I mailed my vote over a week ago, and then had to take my ROOMMATE'S ballot in today to drop it off, 'cause she's too lazy to vote in a reasonable amount of time ;). Took about 15 minutes to get through the line in my car.

It sounds like maybe a lot of people know your wife...

It seems odd to pick the ones by "spending" at this point in the campaign. After all - the spending done so far for the GOP has mainly been to fight the GOP primaries. The democrat's PACs have JUST started spending, to nail Romney.

What are the biggest PACs in terms of how much money they have? Don't you think that matter more? If we want to talk money spent, we probably won't be able to compare fairly until the campaigns are done, correct?

When people REPEATEDLY claim that disagreeing over the origin of the human species means that people "outright reject the scientific thought process", I'd say we've got some serious concerns going on here, yes. Did you even READ the frickin' question in the poll? Your conclusion is not based on the evidence.

Actually, Amazon WAS selling below costs on certain books. See, they were willing to eat the loss in order to own the market - probably setting themselves up as a monopoly - who knows? But yeah, the publishers still got the amount they wanted - it wasn't hurting the authors (at that point). http://www.portfolio.com/companies-executives/2012/04/12/amazon-lowers-ebook-prices-in-wake-of-price-fixing-lawsuit-against-rivals

More importantly, if the CEO listens to Tim Berners-Lee, who is to say he won't be replaced, now or in the future, with someone else that will listen to the shareholders instead?

Fact is, we live in a world that is becoming increasingly more hostile to those who want their information to remain their own. And so far, I have yet to hear a good solution. Perhaps a lot of different things will work together to safeguard privacy, but I don't see it yet. This suggestion isn't worth the paper it wasn't printed on.

Are the TV networks, magazines and newspapers required to vet their ads to this degree as well? It seems that the medium for which an ad is being transmitted is being required to authenticate those ads as being valid under the laws of that country. While I think that's rather ridiculous, as long as it is not being applied randomly, but instead in a systematic, widespread fashion, the law will at least not unfairly advantage certain types of advertisement mediums. And that's important, IMHO.

On the other hand, the opposite is very often true as well.

Perhaps they mean that the connection to the CRL/OCSP server fails for some reason? Fact is, there are a LOT of reasons why getting a response might fail, that has absolutely no relation to whether the server is up or not. There are Internet routing issues for the ISP of the servers (that should be able to be handled). There are routing issues for the users of the browser. There are hacks on the users' system that prevent hitting that site. There are intermittent issues with connectivity due to communication stacks on the client that has nothing to do with the browser, but might be due to driver or software issues - or even hardware issues. Bottom line - problems connecting to a given server cannot be solved by the server administrators alone.

I've got a 2004 Prius. Only problem I've had is that I have to replace the tires more often than usual, supposedly due to the heavy body of the car compared to the wheel size. I've replaced them twice since I bought the car in 2004. Not too bad, but I was surprised.

I am confused. When did the concept of a product "winning" mean that it's stomped out its competitors to the point where they no longer exist? It seems to me that Chrome just inched past Firefox in user share. That's a "win" - but Firefox is still in the game, and so is Internet Explorer (and Safari, and Opera, etc.). I guess if Firefox loses its funding, it'll be gone - but that isn't the WIN of the free market - the WIN of the free market is when the better product gets more market share (and hopefully profits) then its competitors. Both the supplier and consumer are better served when that happens - and thus, a "free market win."

Good points! I was thinking less in terms of the carriers (and by the way - good chance they outsource the storage of that information - so they may NOT need to be PCI compliant - their processors might be handling that for them - my company does this for many other companies) - and more in terms of the software company that created the crapware.

I think you are missing something important (and very basic) about costs: there are fixed costs, and there are variable costs.

Automation is a fixed cost. This cost gets spread out by every unit you can produce. If you are CONSISTENTLY producing a huge amount of product, then having your costs be fixed is great - the cost per unit can really be pushed down to a low level.

Labor is a variable cost (basically). That means that if you have to change the amount of product you are producing, your unit costs don't change. This can be a very good thing.

Think about how those two things work for a minute or ten. Think about how manufacturing tends to work. Now, try to understand that this can actually be a difficult decision - and that's it is a lot more complicated then you made it out to be. To the point where I actually question the likelihood that you "actually costed one product line that had been largely automated and discovered that hand assembly in China cost almost exactly the same."

While I agree, as far as I can tell, with all of your other points, PCI compliance is not an issue for this company. These rules apply only to companies that are processing credit cards. It's quite legal for anyone to store as much plaintext credit card information as they want - they will just not be allowed to actually process data through PCI compliant processors. I bring this up because many other posts on this thread mention the same issue. And it's important, in my opinion, to focus your efforts on things based in real facts. So, point is, these companies are not in compliance with PCI, but they are also not required to be in compliance with PCI, based on what I've seen posted about them.