To take on debt is not to spend money, they are very different. When you take on debt you are, well, in someone elses debt.
People are giving away their power. No questions asked: If it's the control of your life you're about to sign away, even a tiny fraction of it, the answer is "no."
I used to hate javascript. I'd disable it in my browsers up until a few years ago and avoid it like the plague in all of my web development tasks. A year and a half ago I became a full time web developer.
I had to shut up and learn to love javascript, and I really do. There's nothing wrong with it.
A language like PHP3 lacks enough features to make many common patterns possible. Progressing to PHP4, and PHP5, more and more patterns became possible. PHP can now house proper code, though it frequently doesn't because people still hack away like it's PHP3 or PHP4
To me, javascript feels much the same way. I never come across a pattern I can not implement, though I see a lot of coding that ignores standard patterns to it's own demise. linq.js, underscore.js, jquery, and some in-house libraries make classes, objects, collections, DOM work, etc, amazingly simple. The standard library is very poor, but that's ok because the 3rd party libraries are fantastic. Outside of IE8 and under, the speed is FAST too.
A lot of times there's a function that will be implemented by a library but can optionally wrap to a native function if available, making support for everything universal.
I too find the pricing to be appalling, but I suspect it's mostly because store clerks are designed to sell people everything they can, not what they need. I believe by doing your homework and wanting adequate, not just 'top of the line,' you can get away relatively cheap.
I paid $225 for a good quality used Nexus One (I'm aware it's not compatible with this service, but it's a smart phone regardless) and I pay t-mobile $15/mo for unlimited text, 10c/minute voice, and $1.50/day data that I never use because in general wifi is available.
This is expensive in comparison to my old phone which cost $14 shipped off of ebay, but for something so modern (just not bleeding edge) I would say it's an affordable luxury if you play your cards right.
Dell really wants BIOS updates to involve them fronting the $40-$120 min shop charge or paying for an onsite call.
I suspect it may have more to do with emission/dumping laws/costs, etc, though it's only a guess.
Strange... I have no problems closing those tabs w/o this plugin!
I used to run a 200~400+ user IRC channel on DALnet over a decade ago and we would get spammers in there.
So I made a bot that would rejoin the channel at a set interval and ban anyone who messaged it.
Then they made them detect that it was an op's ip, even though the bot wasn't op. So I started using a different host name.
Then they made it so that the bot used 2 connections, one to send the message and wasn't in the channel, and one to sit in the channel to tell the other connection who to spam. So I made my bot detect the identical hosts.
Then they started using different hosts. So I made it log who has and hasn't talked in the channel and notify me. I'd whois those people and join the other channels they were in waiting to find a common channel getting spammed. I'm assuming if they realized the weak link in the chain was me detecting who has and hasn't talked, they'd of made it say hurf durf randomly.
Once you require the spam bots to have friends, they'll have friends. Your solution is a temporary one.
>> i remember the days when we had a dozen cell carriers in the US. expensive service, crappy reception almost everywhere you went. as the competition dried up we've had prices drop and better phones come out.
My first computer ran Doom like a slide show and cost $3,000. I bought an iPod Video for $40 recently, with hacked firmware it runs Doom smoothly. This is the result of technology progressing, not with removal of competition.
I had Comcast cable internet for around 5 years because there was nothing else but even worse DSL in my area. They gave me 50kbytes/s upload and 750kbyte/s download. 2 months before Verizon installed FiOS lines in my area the upload jumped to 200kbyte/s and the download to 1.5mbyte/s.
Hotmail gave you 10mb disk space for eons. Gmail came out then Yahoo and Microsoft had to change.
As long as there is competition, even if it's just 2 mega-corps battling it out, companies can not sit still and must continue to innovate/advance.
Ask the clerk to swipe a store card. At the self checkouts, the chain I goto has 'forgot your card?' as the first item in the 'no barcode?' list.
There ya go, now you can save 25cents on each roll of tinfoil
Libertardians obviously hate it when they're presented with evidence that the invisible market fairy doesn't fix everything [google.com].
I find it more interesting to consider why it doesn't generally work that way. I have only one answer: we care a HELL of a lot more about immediate convenience and instant gratification than we have ever cared about being consistent with our principles. So we'll buy from abusive companies that deliver poor service before we'll do without their products/services. We'll patronize a company that is known to engage in extremely dishonorable business practices so long as their products are 5% cheaper than the competitors'. The market idea really could work, except that it requires a people who are both more noble and have a far stronger backbone than our general population. Such a people would individually and voluntarily refuse to ever support any business that takes actions which are not in their interests, at all costs. In turn, the corporations would understand this which would both raise the general standard and guarantee that actually proving this to them would be a relatively rare event. But we want our shiny and we want it now and we don't care what sort of behavior we are rewarding by voting with our wallets. That's the only reason it doesn't work. There is none other. Corporations cannot act against our interests except that we provide the funding by which they do it.
They don't have to be "noble" if they have another cable provider to choose from.
A lot of people are saying this -- why try not having cable? That's a valid option.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?
