So do I, but I don't get defensive over the stupidity of our fellow users on slashdot. Users suck everywhere, don't buy into the cult mentality and stick up for tards just because you own a few of the same products.

What's a "wimmin" and why would I empathize it?

Unless its a cool new lingo for swimmin', in that case I take offense to your remarks. I am in a boys club _dedicated_ to swimming. I still don't understand how to empathize with it though.

C:\>python
>>> import sys
>>> sys.version
'2.6.5 (r265:79096, Mar 19 2010, 21:48:26) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)]'
>>> sys.version_info
(2, 6, 5, 'final', 0)

You were saying?

I guess my problem with Thomas' line of thinking is that in general saying that parents are an absolute intermediary is pretty pathetic. I attacked a certain instance of it in my post, but there is no way to control the speech someone is exposed to for 17 whole years. Like you say, its not even a failing of a parent to control their children to such that extent.

Yeah, I don't really believe in the market failure thing either, I just threw it in for good measure.

Seeing as how when I was 8 is the only time a GTA game was ever any fun, yes.

Prepaid debit cards have age restrictions?

This was an interesting argument, but it kind of fell apart when I thought about the situation at hand.

Essentially: How can a child be at a game store, in position to buy a game, without the parent having relinquished (or be ineffective at) their roll as the intermediary?

If the parents want a store to drop their child off at confident that they will not be sold a violent game, it is a failing of the market to create such a store. Such stores could exist side by side with stores that do sell violent games to children (the situation we currently have). It is not the place of government to create that type of store at the cost of every store that would not follow the model.

Furthermore, legislation against the child buying that M-rated game isn't going to do anything to stop all the other forms of speech the child will potentially be subject to while in the store without supervision or on the way to/from the store.

As Scaila says in his opinion, such legislation does not enforce parental authority, but instead imposes government authority.

This is what I figured as well, just like google calculates a high pagerank for itself because its huge and popular, the popularity of google's other services probably lead credence to their coupon thing too. Maybe if groupon also ran a popular search engine, video site and online office productivity suite then their coupons would have been considered "priority" mail too.

It does capture the most important aspect of the Facebook like button, its a lightweight operation for the person doing the liking. As a facebook "advertiser", I got the email about the change from "become a fan" to "like", their entire justification to do so was that it would be easier for the user to commit to doing. Yes, love will feel awkward, but it will get significantly more use than actually going onto someones userpage to write some sort of thank-you.

What? You can't be serious. It will not bite them in the ass, it will bite you in the ass because you knowingly did something illegal. If my boss asks me to murder someone, I can't dodge the legal responsibility if I get it in writing that I am doing it under protest.

The purpose of the laws that hold the IT people responsible is so that they can't be coerced into doing it anyway, they're protected under the "employer can't fire you for not doing something illegal" protections.

But your post concludes with IT doing it anyway if thats what the user wants. Are you going to follow orders put yourself on the line like that instead of saying "no"? Or do you think quitting is the only acceptable way to say no to a superior?

Hey IT, go break HIPAA for me. I don't care that you're going to be held personally legally responsible. Its your job to do what I say!

The smartest crawlers out there don't just regex over the source any more, they have javascript engines baked in, some even rope in the rendering engines from an opensource browser so they can get a look at the finished product.

What guys? Are you implying that every malicious actor is part of one large homogenous blob of shared targets and interests?

Or they'll go for the low-hanging fruit, the payoff might be smaller, but they sure can hit a lot more targets.

You're advocating "lets fly under they radar, we'll be fine", that's terrible security. Besides, if they really are that small, they don't really need the robust kind of credit card processing you're talking about. It'd be cheaper for them to get some self-contained units and dedicated phonelines for them.

All these horror stories, what are you folks doing to your UPS drivers to make them that way?

Our driver knows us, is an awesome guy, and leaves packages in our garage when we're not around. We've never had a bad experience with this UPS driver. He even gets along with the german shpeard (the fedex driver is still afraid to leave his truck).