Get.
The.
Fuck.
Off.
Slashdot.

I haven't seen anything in the last 14 years to make me doubt any assertions in this article, which gives MANY reasons that micropayments won't work. Here's just one short section, but it's one of the key points.

http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.html

> Capitalist theory says that if an incumbent merchant/provider
> is too inefficient to provide a good service or if another potential
> merchant/provider thinks they can do a better job for a lower
> price, then that new provider will step in and provide said service.

If the barrier to entry is too high, no one else can step in. Once a company is making huge monopoly profits, it can save a bit for a rainy day and undercut competitors until they go under. McDonald's could start selling burgers for 5 cents apiece until Burger King was bankrupt if it weren't for anti-monopoly laws.

The natural result of pure capitalism is monopolies. Regulation is required, because monopolies always wind up being bad for consumers.

Even moderately benign monopolies suck. Craigslist is a great example. Even though they are relatively benevolently run -- almost everything is free; a few things like real estate listings in major cities cost a lot and pay for everything else on the site -- their listings suck in a lot of ways and they have no incentive to make them better. Why can't they have columns for things like cars and computer so I can search specifically by Manufacturer -> Model, and not just to text searches on the ads? That would help deal with the fact that almost every ad in "cars for sale" looks like this. http://imgur.com/yOngDsE But because Craigslist has a monopoly, no other "stuff for sale" site can gain traction, and Craigslist has no reason to improve. So you eat the shit sandwich that is Craigslist because there's nothing else on the menu.

> This week, I got a real WTF when dealing with Microsoft products and
> the amazing amount of redundancy that is possible in the company.

I work with SharePoint and see this DAILY. When editing, one kind of page has a button that says "save" (which also ends the editing session); another kind of page has a button that says "stop editing" (which also saves.)

I imagine the boss talking to employees: "Coder #1: put a button that stops editing and saves on this kind of page. Coder #2: put a button that stops editing and saves on that kind of page."

SharePoint lists are also fun. If you go past 10k rows, bad things happen. But you can have as many columns as you want.
List 1: 3 columns, 11,000 rows, 33,000 total "cells" (for lack of a better term): BAD.
List 2: 25 columns, 9,000 rows, 225,000 total cells -- almost 7 times more -- EVERYTHING IS FINE.
(I've made lists like this just to test. It really happens.)

Again, I imagine one guy in charge of how rows are handled, and another in charge of how columns are handled.

> How does this make Microsoft better?

You always here that competition in the marketplace makes all companies stronger. So, maybe that? Kind of indirect, but it might work. The losers who stay behind will have to up their game to compete with their now-stronger competition.

Never thought I'd find myself searching google images for "thor nude", but here we are.

> Loki, however, will remain low-key.

Nice one. :-)

> When the police called off the chase (for other
> reasons) and he kept going at 100+mph...

Just to play devil's advocate here, it's not like they informed the guy via their loudspeakers that they were calling off the chase.

Old joke:
A white guy is driving through the South. He drives into two black guys. One is knocked across the street, the other pinwheels and crashes through the windshield into the car. The white guy gets out of the car just as a sheriff drives around the corner. He sees the wreck and gets out. The driver says "Oh my God, sheriff, this is so horrible." The sheriff says "Don't worry about it, I'll arrest these two." The driver says "I hit them -- why would you arrest them?" The sheriff points and says "This one, for breaking and entering, and that one, for leaving the scene of an accident."

I know some PHP so I wrote a reader that lives on my own server. It's very simple but it does exactly what I want it to. It has a problem with character encodings -- lots of things (curly quotes, em- and en-dashes) come in as '?'s -- but other than that, it's fine. Works for me.

Because in my circles, it's the smart people who don't trust the Internet.

I wonder what reason they'll use to justify pulling it back out of Windows 10?

In just 48 minutes, you can become less ignorant.

There are a LOT of VERY FUCKING GOOD reasons that innocent people should not talk to police or consent to searches. Be sure to watch the second half, where an ACTUAL COP says "yes, everything he just said is correct."

> the solution isn't to be a dick to the guy
> out there in the papers-please guard hut.
> Keep voting against the idiots who make
> these things possible.

Why not do both? Especially since "b" doesn't seem to work?

Agree. I watched the "can your shell do this?" video and saw nothing that I would want a shell to do.

He built a shell that does cool things he wants? Great. I could build a shell that does neat things I want it to, but I don't think anyone else would want to download it.

The easiest way would be to just get an old machine. 15 years ago was the birth of the Pentium III, so with not much work you should be able to find a perfectly fine 10- to 12-year-old 1 GHz PIII with 512 MB RAM for next to nothing. (I'm personally a fan of Dell OptiPlex GX corporate desktops and HP Pavilions -- generally well-supported hardware and durable.) Otherwise, try VirtualBox on the modern computer of your choice.