Only certain types of transfers cost money. Generally to the same banks they're free, and to pay bills and whatsnot, they're also free (at least to the payer).

I pay my rent via transfer, and it doesn't cost anything (and I doubt the owners are paying the fee for me, because they charge a stupid fee for credit card payments).

International transfers are another story.

Absolutely. My main point was that people just seem to like arbitrary limits for no reason, even in other scenarios and apply that logic to passwords which is even worse

People just seem to like putting data limits for the sake of limiting. Like in databases. How many times do you see a company that has a small-ish data set (a few hundred mb to a few gb tops), running on a machine with several terrabytes of discs, then the people designing the database stop and argue for 15 minutes about if some data field or another should allow 20 or 22 characters.

Just put variable 500 (or whatever) and call it a day. Now of course Microsoft's systems are much bigger in scale, but I'd think if you have so many users that the length of the password of a select VERY FEW is causing you performance/storage problem, you're in good shape business wise to tackle it =P

As many have stated, the point of the patch fee isn't to make money (though it doesn't hurt on that front). Its to make sure the consoles don't end up like PCs where games are often nowhere close to being in a "releasable state" at launch. Its a "tax/penalty" for releasing shitty code and to force devs to test their stuff.

I guess its because at the time Microsoft got slapped with anti-thrust, the world was very different. Keep in mind their sanctions and stuff are for misbehaving a LONG time ago, not for doing so today.

If you erased Microsoft's past, and they started bundling IE today, nothing would happen (which is probably why they will get away with doing bundling on Windows RT with office and stuff...they don't have a monopoly in that space).

The functional (ish) programming model, the better handling of events, the abstraction of bug and workaround...

and the plain fact that as much as browsers are converging, they still simply aren't the same. They use different javascript engine, so stuff like Safari and Chrome have quite a few differences.

Jquery's not my favorite javascript library, but it beats vanilla javascript anytime (and thats speaking as someone who spent quite a bit of time in the last few years submitting major patches to more than one of the major javascript libraries out there.)

The only common one wh en i tcomes ot pay discrepancy is companies failing to promote employees quickly enough, or adjust after recessions or crashes.

I graduated in the middle of the dotcom crash. I was pretty happy to make 36k/year out of college (It wasn't in the US though, thus why the number's pretty low), when most of my friends ended up working at retail stores working the registers.

Then the effects of the bubble pop went away...and I was still getting silly 2-3% raises, even though the years of experience were piling up.

I switched job, got a 50% (!!!) salary increase. 1-2 year later (which would kick me in the next "bracket" as far as silly recruiting goes), still 2-3% dumb raises at the new place. Switch job, BAM! another 40%~ increase.

Fastfoward a few years, it seriously starts making a big difference. You can't give raises equivalent to inflation rate to people in a market that's changing so fast and where the perceived value of seniority is at a premium, else all you're doing is paying to train employees for your competitor.

Its not all lost though. Its definitely a net negative (I would assume), but a LOT of retailers only exist because of online now. I work for an online-only retailer, and while we do have our own website that accounts for 95%++ of our sales, we do sell products on the amazon market and that does increase our sales quite a bit. A lot of small time shops sell ONLY on the amazon marketplace.

And there needs to be people to ship those things (Fedex and UPS aren't complaining about the increase in online shopping, thats for sure), staff those warehouses... And Amazon itself is expanding a fair bit. They just opened an engineer office in Cambridge, MA, just this year, and the average salary of a developer there is quite high.

So a lot of places closes, but a few new businesses popup to take their places. Not nearly enough, for sure, but its not a TOTAL loss.

Right now take a transformer prime, plug it with a 3 bucks HDMI cable to your TV, and use any xbox 360 controller that would work with a PC (wifi or wired, both will work, but for wifi you need that PC adapter thing), load up Sonic 4, Showgun or whatever and you're there, albeit at a vastly higher price point than even a normal console because, well, its a full feature tablet.

Not surprised someone would cut cost by removing the screen/battery/etc and call it a day.

Chrome prefetching and Safari's home page sku results like crazy. Safari is especially annoying since you need to look at an http header to filter out hits from it, and if your pages are made up of static content cached by an edge caching service (let say Akamai), it becomes non-trivial to deal with it with Google Analytics (other analytic solutions will work though). On popular websites that can account for 20-25% of hits.

Now thats not whats happening here, but a lot of ecommerce site owners start thinking Mac owners are 40%+ of their customers or some such and make marketing decisions accordingly. What a mess.

I'm confused. On one side you tell people to go where the jobs are and on the other side you say that the only way to get over 100k is to go in specific roles. You do realize that in the big zones (California, Massachusetts and new york come to mind) , if you have over 5 or 6 year experience, don't completely suck and make under 100k you are getting screwed even if you're a code monkey, right?

Some drugs for very rare conditions cost a fortune because they take just as much research as any other drug, but only apply to a few hundred people, if that. If it cost 1 billion to research, but 100 bucks to apply the treatment...you're never making the money back if your competitor just looks at what you did, sell it for $100 * 300 treatments, and call it a day.

Just an example among many.

There's confusion and historical reasons to it. The US is near Canada, which is a totally terrible health care system (oh look, its FREE! Except for all the things that aren't free, which is everything where your life doesn't depend on it, and seeing a family doctor if you don't have one already will take 6 months... Lets not get started about the ER).

Then you have the fact that its already a private-ish system, and prices are sky high, as opposed to a private/regulated system like what is in Germany (if what I've been told is correct), so doing the transition would be problematic: the prices are so high and out of control, socializing part of it is absurdly expensive.

So in the end, the US is between a rock and a hard place because they didn't do this sooner. A private but heavily regulated system is what seems to be working best in hindsight from countries that have it, but its too late to put that in place easily...thus the problem.

The one thing i'm scared of is that the content that is similar-ish to what more typical MMOs in the last few years offered (the dungeons) are designed for specific levels. You can overlevel them and get scaled down, but you don't get scaled up and can't really participate until you are of that level. And when you hear that the big bad Elder Dragon boss that will be available at launch is in the highest level dungeon, that will require you to be 70+, a lot of people will get the wrong idea, rush to max level, do the dungeon, and whine "Ok now what?", having missed all the earlier content.

And while the game is designed so you can just go back, they won't, and the forums will be filled with whiners. Hopefully Arenanet doesn't cave in after that.

GW1 is much closer to WoW (not saying its close. Nowhere close, but "closer") than GW2. GW1 has the party mechanic with healers/support, the guy in front taking the hits, and the constant running of areas for loot.

GW2, aside for a select few dungeons, is all open, all the classes can do all of the roles to most extent (just with totally unique skills), the classes are different to a fundamental level (often with totally different engine mechanics, as opposed to just different numbers and variations of summon/heal/nuke/attack).

Generally so far, diehard stereotypical WoW players -hate- the way GW2 is going.