Its pretty common for people in those countries to complain about price differences. "With the exchange rate, this thing should be 20 pounds! but they charge 25! We're getting ripped off!", not considering the price of doing business in the area.

After you hired people to deal with local laws, local marketing practices and culture, additional taxes and all the red tape...often you don't have a choice but to charge more. Even for digital goods!

Its not too surprising though. Its all fun and games to say people can do whatever the fuck they want when you don't see any effect.

I mean, why would I care what people do with their own body in the comfort of their own home?

Oh right, their own home is linked to another via the vents and heat loop, and your kids are getting contact highs in the city park.

I don't want the laws reversed, but do expect some knee jerk reactions as users become more and more visible and the downsides actually start affecting people.

Even if they're not, it could still help in other ways.

Right now a lot of multimedia content, like music, is complete garbage. But its still "popular", because its "free".

If people end up only consuming good stuff, and ignore all the bad stuff (because now they have to pay for 100% of the content they consume), it would force the industry to actually pump out content people want to pay for.

This is true of almost everything where people can just sidestep rules. It puts a lot of noise on the signal, for those responsible to actually do what people want. ie: as long as people cheat the food stamp systems, you don't really know how much you're helping those who really need it.

Same deal here. As long as people can just pirate music, you don't know how much stuff you pump out people actually want.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

These things aren't rare: we're just not allowed to talk about them as a society, because "white male privilege", is my point.

The reverse of all of those things SJW go after, happen every day. They're a tiny fractions of all discrimination, but what makes them worse IMO, is that not only they happen, but when talked about, even in the news, people will be like "Err...whats wrong with it?"

As of today, its really not that bad. But we're definately going in a direction where instead of having equality, we're just flipping the table. "Ha!, its your turn to suffer!" kind of deal. And again, its happening with a round of applause.

This case is ridiculous, no one sane will argue with that. However, the whole "white men can get and do anything" means the ones that don't fit in the over-generalization are fucked.

ie: the kids who are raped before age of consent (let say a teacher or something), the offender gets pregnant, and then can go and sue the kid for child support, and is almost garenteed to win. Those are uncommon, but because we're no in a cuture of "the majority is never right", we're VERY quickly flipping the table 180, and it won't take long until we're in a big mess all over again. Except this new mess is gonna come with a round of applause.

Did you even read? I said "there's a few things they're not allowed to discriminate against, such as gender and races".

So there are SOME categories of things that they're not allowed to discriminate against. Gender. Races. CERTAIN age groups. Etc.

There's a lot you CAN discriminate against, like other age groups as you mentioned. You probably could refuse to do business with anyone coming in with an orange t-shirt, or World of Warcraft players. They're not protected group.

Then you have the affirmative action mess, and shit like Lady's nights. Those...are just messed up.

To be fair, considering the amount of rich mainland chinese who come to the US to give birth...a lot of those "american citizens" are citizens in paper only.

Source: I'm white canadian, but half of my in-laws are "american citizens" even though they've never set foot in the US beyond the couple of weeks around the days of their birth, and have been in Taiwan or mainland China since then. They were born here purely for these reasons.

Private businesses can decide who do they do business with, but there's a few things they're not allowed to discriminate against, such as gender and races. Even if they weren't taking government funds (which they are), they wouldn't be able to.

Your local convenience store cannot refuse to sell to an asian.

The line is so thin between data warehouse and transactional dbs. Heck, in this case the only difference is how data is stored and which type of query is fast and which is slow. You can insert, run SQL (we use Postgres as a mock to run persistance layer tests, because its so close to Vertica), all in real time. Close enough.

And even the biggest of big data giants sometimes end up with issues where you need help. When you need to write a patch for your RDBMS, its nice to be able to have a vendor to do it, open source or not. Not many companies keep Postgres core developers in house (ironically, my wife has been a postgres contributor in the past, but not everyone has them handy =P).

Vertica says HELLO! Even though its -absurdly- expensive, it runs circle around anything open source.

Though in general, large (really large) databases is an area where you actually want commercial support, because things can go wrong in the most fucked up ways.

Open source dbs have companies doing that support, but few have the kind of manpower I'd want when things go very sour.

You know what it is. If you fight illegal immigration right now, you're instantly labeled racist and against "cultural diversity" (its not very diverse when it all comes from one part of a continent...)

Vaccines however are free game.

hard enough that IE11 will still be supported for a while in parallel.

Thats the whole point of Edge. So that Microsoft can have a real browser without leaving the big corps legacy shit behind.

I read somewhere that in the US, administration accounted for something silly like 40% of the expenses (Im making the number up from memory).

Mainly because its a constant fight between the hospitals and offices trying to milk the insurances for all they've got, and insurers trying to control costs without having to call bullshit on every single claim.

In a way, it works like the IRS.

That has been my issue with the US health care system.

Now, don't let anyone else fool you: the Canadian health care system sucks balls. And since not EVERYTHING is free, to get decent care (plus dentist!), you need private insurance. And on my pay checks, all that cost more out of my pocket than it does with half decent insurance in Boston. I'm fully aware its because my employer is paying more and shit, but that's a debate for another day.

Anyway, because of some ongoing health problems, I've been to the ER way more often than I'd like, and am constantly going to the clinic. The copays aren't bad, wait times are nearly inexistant, all is good.

The problem is, the paperwork. I get a stream of letters asking me to verify this or that, a single visit ends up in 8 distinct bills, all coming from different organizations and have to be paid separately. Half of them can't be paid online (even from hospitals like MGH. Wtf? _MGH_!!! Those that do end up needing to be paid on weird shady sites.

And then I'll get 3 bills, all 3 of different amounts, to be paid to 3 different offices, and they all say "office visit".

When I call, I'm told one is for the doctor, one is for the hospital facilities, and one is for the in-office labs (But I get ANOTHER bill for the labs).

In the end its pretty obvious whats happening. They're milking my insurance. Bill from 3 different entities for the same thing, and the insurance will pay all 3 for the same service. During that time, I'm caught in the cross fire paying the co-pay 3 times, and the bill is far too vague for me to do anything about it.

And what can I do? Refuse to pay it? They'll just send it to collection.

And thats when they get it right. The secretaries in charge of the paperwork are usually not the brightest bulbs... I have an out of state PPO insurance, and they always forget to enter the prefix part of my insurance (because its not necessary unless its out of state). Then bill me for not having insurance instead of calling to work it out.

Pain in the ass.

I don't mind the cost. At all. The paperwork though can go to hell.

IE at this point is arguably better than Firefox, the later having fallen from grace quite a bit.

Also, I know you said web devs don't count, but recently, IE11's devtools have been updated to be pretty good. They're not on par with Chrome's, but for some stuff (sourcemaps), they're better (and are leaps and bounds better than anything available on Firefox).