"So [outsourcing to the cloud is] like having the worldâ(TM)s best expert hired on to your team just managing your particular system. "

No, its more like having the cheapest possible person from the cheapest possible country, reading scripts and excerpts from manuals back to you while being oh so polite about it. And then after your 2 hour phone call, blaming any other vendor or technology you are using which *must* be the cause of all the problems.
Surely its not their flawless product, which even though they are in tech support and must listen to peoples issues all day, has absolutely zero flaws they are willing to admit.

Fact, no one cares more about your data than you do. That ain't never going to change.

This interview transcript (cant watch, get player error) is laughably sparse on any real strategy except "outsource to us!". I feel dumber for having read it.

So how do you explain canada then? I converted our business to chip and pin 3 or so years ago. It was either that or be on the hook for more fees from the credit card company.

Our payment processor issued us new pinpads, as all equipment is leased. Some older POS software had to be retrofitted. Took about 2 months of work for a medium business with about 15 tills and that includes all emails and vendors writing updates. The whole country did it pretty much at the same time a few years ago, so the vendors knew they would have to update or they would lose business.

Now here in canada, there is exactly 1 store that i frequent that does not have chip and pin. Sure it offloads the burden onto the customer, but generally if peoples cards are compromised, its because of some kind of skimming and camera going on, same as at ATMs. Based on the volume of fraud transactions, the bank generally knows about the fraud before you do and issues you another card.

Contrast that to my friend who got back from the states. He was on a 3 day trip, no one uses chip and pin down there and his card was almost immediately compromised (he thinks the cab company that he used). They called him on the second day asking him if he had made any large volume purchases in new york (he was in the south).

Looking backwards, it seems kind of ridiculous that a few scribbles were allowed to authenticate large financial transactions for so long. No one ever contests a signature. I have never seen it happen. A pin on the other hand is a pin. You either have it or you dont.

"Who pays the cost to fix old, out-of-date drivers and firmware? Is HP supposed to do it out of the goodness of their heart?"

Bullshit. A firmware update generally addresses some sort of bug or deficiency. By not patching it freely, HP is admitting that they sold you a flawed product. So I should be able to then demand my money back. It is their RESPONSIBILITY to fix it!!

As others have said, the worst company with this is cisco. The second worst is sonicwall. Fuck sonicwall and their paid updates!! I had to throw out a perfectly good VPN appliance whoes compact flash card had died because they would not let me download a firmware for the unit. Not because I didnt have a service contract with them, but because I didnt have a service contract for that one particular VPN appliance. I had another contract with another appliance which we purchased later.

If the fix is already made, then keeping it from former customers unless they pay up is spiteful ransom. A firmware update is addressing flaws in the vendors product. The vendor would do well to get them fixed, or you get a very bad reputation such as sonicwall has with me now.

If I had to maintain support contracts with every vendor i've ever done business with on the off chance that one day I will need an update, I would not be able to ever purchase anything new. Your old assets would become drags. This is similar to why I always try and find open source software alternatives for everything I possibly can. Specifically because in software world, it is very common to charge for every update. Result, I don't buy much paid for software when I have open source alternatives. With hardware, its a lot harder to change products when some bug is encountered.

All this is is a giant ad for dell servers, who I have never had a problem with getting drivers or updates for. If dell can do it, then sure as shit HP can. I was actually looking at HP servers for a friend, but I guess I will be recommending dell now. HP fails it. Short term profits trump everything and I am so sick of it.

"Never, ever pirate anything. It spurs their belief that people really want their product, but just aren't willing to pay for it."

I guess you are no fan of libraries then.

"So you've studied Han's perspective then? No? Waste of your time? You do get your logical fallacy here right?"

Isn't his "perspective" creationism? Wouldn't that require believing in a god or gods?

I don't think hes talking about panspermia. Wouldn't creationism dictate that there is 1) a creator 2) that he has input in human events? and 3) that this creator is "super natural". In that case, what is there to study? It's impossible to prove there is a god short of god herself coming down. And even then, I would most likely believe it to be an intelligent alien race rather than some supernatural being.

Why would anyone give that "argument" any serious merit? I would think you would have to be religious in which case your reason and logic faculties are already damaged and probably could not participate in a debate in the first place. I doubt any non religious people believe in creationism.

Well its america, and even worse, florida. The courts already said you can kill whomever you want, you just have to say "he's coming right for us".

If I was in america, and everyone around me was armed and with the above mentality, YOUR GOD DAMN RIGHT I WOULD BE ARMED!

If everyone around you is a violent psychopath (this did occur in america), I would want to be protected personally.

"Point is, there will be backlash to people wearing internet-connected face-recognizing cameras, and it won't matter what the excuse."

I agree with your sentiment, but no matter how much backlash there is, you can't stop the train. Just look at smartphones, tiwitter, facebook. People don't give a shit about privacy at all. 70% of people carry a smartphone now. Things I would have thought unbelievable 10 years ago regularly happen now. People are fucking around on their phones in meetings regularly, putting a real life person "on hold" to pick up a cel phone call, breaking up with people over text message or email, not paying attention walking down the street because you are twiddiling your phone, texting while driving... the list goes on. All of these things are bad judgement, if not outright rude, in my opinion, but smart phone adoption has become so widespread so fast, that the social mores haven't matured along with them.

Google glass will be the exact same. It will have so big of an adoption rate, one day you will wake up and everyone will have one. Same as smart phones. Make them cheap enough and they will become ubiquitous.

Disclaimer, i dont have a smart phone, but would really love a google glass type chinese knockoff headset. Why? because I would be in control of the information. So many situations occur where a customer or acquaintance mis remembers a situation. It would pay for itself ten times over to have video recall. Once again, that I and I alone, controlled. None of this big brother cloud BS.

its also default blocked by ghostery.

I have noticed more and more sites using it though. Maintaining comments is hard I guess, and people are all outsourcing it. I looked into them because ghostery was blocking them all the time. Seems like a horrible company.

"You might be willing to take the risk of not having anti-lock braking, but why should the other people on the roads have to put up with the unnecessarily increased risk that you'll crash into them?"

Excuse me, but those of us who drive older cars (manufactured before the 90s) do not have ABS and have no problem keeping from running into people. Maybe they don't teach threshold breaking anymore, but that is not my problem. I learned to drive on a non abs car.

The problem is that these days, people follow too closely and rely on their ABS to save them. 8 car lengths on the highway at 100 km/h, or about 4 car lengths at 60 km/h. Give or take, I dont go out and measure.

What the hell reason would it not be enabled by default? I dropped an SSD in my webserver at home a year ago. I just assumed, since osx and windows both support it for YEARS, that forward thinking linux did. Wow.

Now i have to go check tonight when I get home with this article as a reference
http://askubuntu.com/questions/18903/how-to-enable-trim

I am shocked and appalled. We all laughed 10 years ago when M$ said installing linux may damage your hard drive, but in this case its true! What a sad state of affairs.

Enterprise drives are a scam. Don't believe me? ok, cite one study not done by hard drive manufacturers which says there is any difference whatsoever between so called enterprise drives and so called consumer drives.

Google proved years ago that all hard drives fail after roughly the same amount of time, in the same conditions. The reason why enterprise drives may be perceived to be better is because they are almost always located in chilled data centres where the temp is probably never over 15*c.

Anyone who has worked in the industry knows the 5 year rule. Most drives will last between 3-5 years in a normal operating environment. These numbers do not disprove that at all. I will wait for the 10 year study in a further 5 years. I bet they get 90% failure rate in 10 years, with a steep curve downward in reliability after year 5, which matches my experience. 3-5 years is the most you can expect from ANY hard drive. That said, I have some 500gbs that are beyond that and they are running fine, because I keep them cool.

" all police claim to be "trained in visual speed observation", and will back up the radar evidence with their professional judgement of how fast you were going."

Its more than that. In canada, they cant just sit there speed gunning everyone (dragnet style). They have to say they made a sight check first, and judged you to be speeding, before they deployed their gun as a confirmation. The law is written in such a way as the police must visually estimate your speed before deploying the gun.

I am not sure how exactly the AC would defeat a radar gun, as the way I understand that they work, they take several distance measurements milliseconds apart and then deduce what speed you are going based on the change.

You know you can set those to any value you like right, with a set of tweezers? And there are always new gauge clusters to be had at the auto wreckers.

If the government did that with me, id simply have two gauge clusters and swap them out (takes maybe 20 minutes) every time before I had to go in for my evaluation.

"Its alabaster wall is a prison in which the inmates scrawl their wishes and dreams, announce their likes and disklikes, and pass the time with games and witty reparte while a recumbent warden looks on intently."

It's called a "timeline" now. Get it right.

No no, I think he just described slashdot!

"Highly misleading. Rates on the "super wealthy" are far from historically low. The only people currently benefiting from historically low taxes are the poor. Taxes on everybody else are around "average" historical values: http://www.factcheck.org/2012/07/tax-facts-lowest-rates-in-30-years/ (and that article was before the December tax hike)"

You have cherry picked your timeline there my friend. I know for a fact, that corporate taxes were much higher in the 50s and this site agrees with me http://personal.psu.edu/sjh11/TCTaxBits/OtherTaxBits/TaxRates.shtml (to the tune of 90% corporate taxes, in what some white people call the golden age of american life). Taxing the rich, but especially corporations, is the way forward. Fix the loopholes in corporate tax, and make companies pay their fair share. We need to get out from under the market society, where wealth can buy anything and there is rampant inequality. (see http://blog.ted.com/2013/06/14/the-real-price-of-market-values-michael-sandel-at-tedglobal-2013/ for a newish highly topical ted talk about it)

Certain things like healthcare are a human right in most developed countries. As i understand it, the better solution of single payer healthcare was already shot down by american republicans, and obama and his right wing democrats. So this ACA is the best that the obstructionist republicans and not really leftist democrats could do to please their corporate masters.

Another good reason to up corporate taxes, take control away from the lobbyist's and corporate interests in washington. Hopefully you can agree that money should absolutely not be a part of political campaigns.