I tell people I will change jobs for a 30% increase in compensation. That results in a job change every seven years, and here's why. There is a difference between the reported and actual rates of inflation. And annual increases at an existing job more closely track reported inflation, whereas job offers from other companies more closely track actual inflation.

For example, if reported inflation is 3% and actual inflation is 7%, then after 7 years that's a 32% difference.

Is github just the canary for another SCO repeat? Will Qualcomm be demanding protection money from everyone who uses Linux?

As I replied below, my wife was on the PIll for 30 years. If there was a cheaper alternative I'd know about it.

...there is no danger of pregnancy when the cucumber loses its cool and rapes you.

Nearly everything is much cheaper to an insurance company than it is for you if you walk in the pharmacy and pay for it out of pocket. By not being able to get it on insurance, you lose that discount. Not that it should be that way, but that's how it is, and often that discount is 70% or more because of some foolishness called "differential pricing" instead of by its proper name, "theft."

My wife has been on the Pill for 30 years. Believe me, if there were a cheaper option I'd know about it.

The most common birth control pill in use in the US costs USD$50 a month not counting the mandatory prescriptions. Many countries do sell them cheaper -- but not in the US, and they are never OTC here. Although free clinics do sometimes hand out Plan B I have never heard of one that dispenses regular non-emergency contraception. And this is where the ruling in question applies.

Particularly a $12 movie, which is what they would have to cost to equal the cost of the Pill. (Not counting the mandatory biannual medical exams, without which you can't get a prescription.) Ginsberg noted in her dissent that the cost of an IUD is comparable to a month's salary for a person making minimum wage. Then again, I'm sure you'll also agree that the cost of your own vaccines and blood transfusions are also reasonable when those folks start claiming their exemption under this stupid ruling.

It's OK, this version will change all those commands to equally long but completely different commands. According to their internal surveys, that should help sales out by giving administrators a sense of accomplishment in learning a new command set. What could go wrong?

              -Charlie

Ha! I get the joke there, you made a funny. Windows in the datacenter, har har.

          -Charlie

P.S. For those who don't get my joke, you should look up the marketshare data of Windows in the datacenter. No not the BS "Sales of OSes on servers" that MS commissions from Gartner, Forrester, and all the others who know where the checks come from, but share by installed socket. If you have access, look at it over the last 6-7 years, it is brutal. Make sure you get installed rather than sales, MS keeps commissioning reports that somehow manage to not count Google, Facebook, Baidu, Tencent etc etc's servers. Not sure why though. :)

Is Windows relevant to anything anymore?

Many of the companies scrambling already have double-opt-in to get in and very thorough opt-out options (Reply, click in any one of three places, idle detection auto-culling, etc.). So why are they scrambling? Because being a decent business partner is not good enough for the law. And again, the people it won't affect are the Canadian Pharma spammers (as an excellent example, since I'm staring at one's email in my spam box right now) who operate outside the law and know it and don't care. Decent business partners screwed. Actual spam still there. Can of worms with people affected by one country. Part of the reason there are so many US-Only sellers. They won't sell anything to the rest of the world because there are so many countries that would suddenly try to extradite the owners of the site for eyeball removal or something*.

(*Eyeball removal is not common, but a rat's nest of laws, many of which contradict each other, is out there, making the cost of allowing people from other countries much more expensive than the margin allows for.)

Which brings the whole can of worms into things. Give your address and how do you verify it's accurate? Puts a major burden on companies and other legitimate places and doesn't discourage the actual abusers at all.

It's a matter of reasonable effort. How can a company determine that a given email destination is Canadian? It really can't. So Canada's laws are affecting the whole world as companies have to either give up on things that people likely actually want (security bulletins) or scramble to form opt-in databases on worldwide recipients just because of Canada.

Just like many of the laws in the US that people scorn, this Canadian law will only hurt the legitimate people who are trying to be respectful and operate as a good company with records and such. The spammers sending pharma spam and malware spam and such are operating from locations that don't support easy tracking for applying penalties. Thus millions of people worldwide are suddenly getting flooded with requests to keep sending mail (I opted in three years ago!) just in case they might be Canadian.

Therefore the obvious (but depressing) solution is to create borders on the internet and say "To prove you are a Canadian and protected by this Canadian law, you must have a .ca email address. Anybody who does not have a .ca email address cannot bring charges against a company sending email in violation of a Canadian law because they did not identify themselves as Canadian to be protected by the law." This is obviously not-good, but the alternative is a minefield of international laws that strangle the internet and any companies that operate on it.

Fictional but getting less farfetched example: Some Canadian posts a picture of their dog spinning in circles on a video site. The dog is not neutered and there is a flash of anatomy at 1:33 into the video (it's a long video of dog-spinning). Person gets in legal trouble in some country that: 1: Holds content posters liable for their posts. 2: Enacts a law that prohibits the depiction of any sexual anatomy online for the protection of the children/morality/whatever. Suddenly Canadian is subject to fines/imprisonment/death-for-insults-against-the-god because of this?

It seems like a ridiculous example now, but with the slippery slope we are heading down, it's becoming more and more possible.

Not my "meme." I rarely, if ever, refer to it.

But, it's true. Capitalism relies on private control and a free, competitive market. Crony capitalism is government control and a resulting non-free market by explicitly decreasing competition.

I mean, sure, you can call it whatever you want to, but when I say "capitalism works" and someone says "crony capitalism is proof it doesn't," that's just stupid, because crony capitalism flatly violates some of the primary tenets of capitalism.