No one in their right mind has faith in the US trial system or respects anything its government does.

Who wants to linger in jail, possibly for years, awaiting "trial"? You still get "punished" either way.

You can also do smart things you can't do with ICE, like putting the motors right in the wheels. IIRC Goodyear's patent on that, which has been holding back the industry for at least a decade, is due to expire next year.

There are transmission losses in electrics, transport losses in fuels, and transfer losses in transmissions. Certainly many trade-offs that need to be weighed and it's all going to depend on the specific implementations.

This has got be the third dumbest idea Microsoft has had in the last decade

Hey, as someone who competes against proprietary solutions (including Microsoft) with Free Software solutions, I wholeheartedly endorse this change!

What I frequently see is businesses that hire a developer to code a solution, and that developer has Technet, so he chooses whatever technology he thinks is best on there, and then when the customer gets ready to deploy it, they find a chain of Microsoft dependencies that all need licensing and CAL's, and often get roped into a software maintenance agreement for 5+digits over their initial cost estimate. Often it gets big enough to require new hardware and a virtualization solution too.

I get "second-opinion" work from them, but it's often too late to do anything else. I've heard of some (that I don't work with) who 'just get Technet' too.

If there's a silver lining, it's that I often get first-crack at the next project. But either way, this is a great decision on Microsoft's part as far as I'm concerned!

Pirating will happen anyway, and MSFT of all software companies knows (or knew) how to benefit from "market chumming".

Seems they forgot how Office 97 slaughtered the competition by being so convenient to copy from the CDs borrowed from work.

I want to see MSFT screw users good and hard because I don't care for the company. Large hardware dongles keyed to each application would be just dandy.

And, here we have yet another example why FLOSS falls behind. People want software with specific features but they want it for free.

I was going to say he could probably pay xTuple to add the feature, but it appears somebody else already did.

It's called money management. You don't go and burn it all as soon as you get paid.

The current statistic is that 70% of the people in the US do. Wages are flat, taxes continue to increase, and prices are skyrocketing (despite the phoney numbers from BLS).

The check cashing services are also closely allied with the pay day loan services that charge interests that work out to something like 240% on annualized basis.

Except they're not intended to be used on an annualized basis. If a loan of $100 is made for 30 days, what is the proper fee to charge? 240% would be $20.

It costs money to process these transactions.

Correct. What is the proper fee on a $100 30-day loan? Count teller time, paperwork processing costs, non-repayment losses, and a profit that can keep the business open.

It is not as much as the banks charge as fees and the fees can be unreasonably high.

A bounced check can easily be $30 overdraft + $40 returned check fee at a bank.

But still that is not as bad as what these check cashing services charge.

oh?

Please educate yourself about the plight of the poor at the hands of check cashing services on one hand, checking account with fees on the other hand

Agreed. See your wise subject line.

You are not paid by your employer, that's an economic fallacy.

*Of course* employees who work for a company are paid by the company.

You, as an employee, add some amount of value to the goods and services provided by the company, and *that* is where your pay comes from.

If this perverse theory were true, then employees who add no value could never be on the payroll. Companies in the red for the year could never pay their employees, etc. I guess you never worked in a large company, eh?

You seem to be confusing source of funds with expenses, or perhaps applying all-cash day labor transactions to corporate accounting. Try a basic accounting text.

There's no economic theory that treats a company as a zero-value entity. Not even Marxism - even though it assumes that all things that need to be invented and built are extant, it still assigns value to those things.

since property is itself an artificial creation

A given implementation of property rights has some artificial trappings, but even insects implement property rights by defending marked territories. Every animal has this idea hard-wired in. Heck, one could stretch the argument to walnut trees.

Georgists tend to ignore Nature in their search for an abstract ideal.

If your'e not happy being a worker bee in a union shop, you might be in a field where your aspirations will not be met. That's more or less my take on unions. They're good for certain fields, but not others.

There are seventeen million sole proprietors in the US. Many of those are on-call.

Fortunately if you can run a business, you're smart enough to figure out how to use an app like Shush! and mute your phone.

I don't think these are the people who are causing trouble though. If you have a couple of free hours and cash to enjoy a movie, you're going to do that.

All Your i.+ Are Belong To Us.

...I don't go to theatres because the audience can't shut up.

Many if not most people where I live who go to theaters are nasty, loud, backward trash who babble on their phones and yell at the screen. If James Holmes lived where I do he'd have snapped sooner!

If you live where the social experience at theaters is actually FUN, for fucks sake support those establishments. Small and specialty theaters need audience support to survive being overwhelmed by commercial suckage.

. After all, it's in many businesses interests to have accurate information

agreed.

and in individual consumer's interests to correct their own info.

Maybe, maybe not. Depends on their goals. Being obscured would suit some (many?) people just fine. It depends what value people assign to different things.

Libertarian theory says that the free market should have a lot of incentive to correct for bad info.

In a free market environment without corporations (government-granted exemptions from liability) and courts that respected property rights this might very well be true. Are you willing to allow that theory to be tested?

and the invisible hand crew will be saying that the market will correct eventually, and stop trying to hurry it along

I can't name a single libertarian who thinks that the government-corporate collusion that's going on to invade the privacy of US residents (and others) is likely to subside voluntarily. Ask Joseph Nacchio how well it works out if you put the interests of your customers over those of the State. And before you say, "but he did something wrong," realize that the entire purpose of PRISM and its ilk is to make a retrospectable list of crimes and prohibition violations that every American commits. You too.

"The invisible hand" is Smith's market-god but Austrian price-information theory and its compliment, game theory, do provide a testable framework for information dispersal in free markets. That requires investigation of mid-to-late 20th century scholarship, though, not ideas that came two centuries before. And also markets that aren't artificially manipulated, for best effect, though the theory does work when such intrusions are counted as costs and losses.

hey, productive procrastination, man. No, really, I only do Slashdot when I'm waiting for something else to finish but it will be not enough time to do anything else. There are several such slots during a typical workday. I get lots of ideas here, so it's only fair to contribute back too. Having a well-structured friends/foes list (buy the subscription!) and score modifiers setup makes it much more valuable use of time. Lots of tabs and decent typing speed helps too.

Oops, job I was waiting for just beeped - c'ya.