Subject says it all:

Don't allow a once-five-star app to rest on its laurels forever. After six months if you haven't inspired anyone new to rate you, your rating should decay to zero. Not only would this tend to favor new apps over old ones, but it would also effectively punish those developers who "fire and forget" app after app after app with zero support or updates for old apps.

Money transfers are also a lot easier to manage [...] Why use this horribly complicated system

Horribly complicated?
Credit: Swipe card, sign the receipt, done.
Debit : Swipe card, enter your PIN, done.

I don't see how you can call the latter process "a lot easier", unless you have some sort of crippling hand disease that makes signing things difficult.


Why use this horribly complicated system if you can transfer money from your savings to the shop anywhere?

This likely varies by country, but in the US, you have a $50 maximum liability, period, for fraudulent credit card swipes (as in, someone physically has your card), and $0 for non-swiped transactions.

For debit cards, you have that $50 liability only if you notify the bank within two days of the fraudulent charges. That shoots up to $500 if you take more than two days but less than 60 days, and you have full liability if you take over 60 days to report it.

Thanks, but I'll go through all the trouble of signing a receipt in exchange for not paying out-of-pocket to redecorate some thief's apartment just because I had two busy days in two consecutive months and didn't have the time to go over my statement with a fine-toothed comb.

Per-orders, fair enough, but donations should go to good causes, not ã%^ã"$ã%^ing fancy PC heat-sinks.

You realize, of course, that Kickstarter exists to do nothing more than manage donations, a great many of which go to some variety of bleeping fancy PC toys?

It still is. The physics of oil cooling is good, but it's not practical in terms of the effort it takes to both administer and replace/upgrade hardware. If left in an enclosed system like power transformer, sure. But then again, those are mainly "set it and forget it" devices rarely touched once in place.

Pre-existing condition exclusions are required because of adverse selection. Flood insurance works the same way; you've got no coverage at all until the policy has been in effect for 30 days. If your house washes away on Day 29 you're SOL.

In any case, I didn't share my story to indict the insurance companies. It was more of an indictment of the healthcare system in general. There was one unavoidable expense: the $4,500 immunoglobulin shot. Why then did the total bill come to nearly $7,000? It came to that much because treatment was routed through the most expensive delivery system (the ER) available in our healthcare system. Why is that? The rabies series is not time sensitive, waiting a few days causes no ill effects. The taxpayers ostensibly pay for it anyway so why not just have it at the County Health Department Monday through Friday?

I try to route my healthcare through my PCP, because 1) I like him, 2) It's cheaper (both for me and society) than the alternatives. Of course, we're killing the PCP providers, they're barely paid cost as it is (less than cost for medicare patients) and there's no incentives for med students to pursue primary/family medicine as a specialty. The ACA didn't do anything to address this either, a fat lot of good having insurance for the first time is going to do you when you can't find an MD that's taking new patients.

Well, I have seen racism in dev shops before, to be sure, but not the sort that Reverend Jackson wants shakedown money for. I've worked for more than one place where "white men born in America" were about 2% of engineers. Normally, it's just not an issue, but at one place the racism was so bad that everyone not of the preferred race left over the course of 6 months after a shift of management. (Not saying what that race was, as the problem was just a couple of assholes, and not a more general problem).

I've also seen straight-up redneck racist at the first dev shop I ever worked at, back when we rode dinosaurs to work, but that company was so exploitive that racism only makes the middle of its list of abuses.

There are plenty of smart engineers working for Visa. How much would $CLEVER_IDEA cost? How much does this sort of fraud cost? You can bet someone did the math.

Reverse discrimination. Jesse Jackson is putting race, not skill level, as the priority imputes to employ more blacks. In his world view, society must bend over backwards to cater to the African American.

Hey Jesse!!! Yeah you. They don't want to be an Uncle Tom. The idea of "white" culture (a culture of being educated and the further pursuit thereof) is what may of the blacks are against. Those that you represent value ignorance over everything else. For them, they derive power through victimization; and the liberal society is all to willing to go along with the coddle-fication of victimization attitude!

I was SAC, and that statement is laughable.

I was USN SSBN missile systems and have talked with many SAC (Minuteman) launch crews over the years, and it's the dead simple truth. Your systems are much simpler than ours (even without figuring that we had sixteen tubes that we operated individually while you mostly just watched lights) and you didn't (couldn't) operate them or intervene in their operations to the level we did.

The examples of the complexities that you didn't have to deal with are legion (off the top of my head and in no particular order):

• You had no pressurization system. (And even if you did you didn't have to wait for the ship to come to launch depth.)
• Your optical alignment system was set by the loading crew rather than operating in sequence as ours did.
• You had no navigation system interface to deal with as your tubes were fixed in position. (And equally, you didn't have to coordinate your countdown with the ship coming to launch speed or wait for the ship to commence hovering.)
• You did not test the missiles in sequence the way we did. (And unlike us, you couldn't do anything about faults even if you did, the weapons were miles away and maintained by a different crew).

Etc... etc...
 
So yeah, the jobs of the prairie dogs waiting in their holes (which is the subject of this discussion) were (are) pretty dammed simple. You punch buttons and swap drawers. If a tube goes down, and it's not at your end, you're screwed because there's f all you can do about it except to wait for a repair crew to be dispatched. (The liquid fuel guys? Yeah, I'll agree they were the real deal. But they're long gone.)

A computer case that doubles as the heat-sink FTW!

http://www.quietpc.com/tnn500a...

The concept of merchants eating costs is a bit nonsensical anyhow: most of what we buy on a daily basis is sold on a very thin margin, so when an external cost is imposed across the market, it has to come from the customers.

The money in your bank account also continues to exist regardless of data connections where you go. And your ability to spend a given physical currency vary depending on where you go - dollars are special, but e.g. a rupee note isn't going to spend well in the US.

Specie-based currency has at least some value everywhere, but these days it's easier in most of the world to find a data connection than someone who trades in gold (plus a whole host of other problems).

No auditor I have dealt with in five years of PCI DSS has demanded software firewalls. They do require that systems be monitored for changes and only critical services be running.

Ironically, the software that most often makes it difficult to run a local firewall is AV software. Symantec is notorious. They need dozens of ports opened. And when you upgrade, suddenly they need a different set.

We gave up our freedom through the ACA, and yet this continues. It's not about being billed, it's about being billed incorrectly and not having any control over the process. The UK has fully socialized health care, yet people are denied care or left to die waiting... sometimes, literally waiting in the ER.

Clearly, giving up more freedom isn't the answer.