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Fundamentally, this is what underwrites the US dollar as well. If you don't pay your taxes you (eventually, provided you aren't connected enough to avoid it) get arrested. You can generate your wealth in corn or software or boat building, but you have to pay your taxes in US dollars. You can't barter your boats for corn and pay your taxes in corn. Thus, (almost) everyone in the US needs some US dollars to avoid being jailed. This is the foundation upon which the value of the US dollar is built.
Of course, making sure it doesn't blow up in the councils face in a few months/years time due to lax issuing controls is a different matter.
I would say your post is reality-denial.
His experience was shit, total shit. Knowing his experience, I would avoid the site he chose like the plague. But now, let me ask you this, should I test each and every ebook retailer to try to find one that isn't shit, paying every time?
Should customers start maintaining their own index of which ebook providers are shit? Who pays to have someone go back and check them all once a week to see if they've changed their behavior since the last $7 purchase to check their DRM practices? Should customers pay a monthly subscription to some kind of digital mystery shopper service to find out who's webstores are just the fucking worst?
Your customers have _no_ reasonable path to control over shitty DRM practices. The only person in this entire conversation who has influence is Turukawa, because Turukawa is an author, and gets to choose who sells his books.
Bad news everyone: piracy exists, and provides a pretty great user flow. If authors want people to not pirate ebooks, they need to demand a not shit ebook option that /has a strong brand of being not shit/. Yeah, short term that might be really hard. Maybe authors need to form some kind of union and demand better from their publishers.
Because customers don't care. You can rant and rave about how they're immoral subhumans stealing from the mouths of authors children all you want, but piracy still exists and it's a much easier way of getting high quality ebooks that work on all platforms and devices. It's not the customers fault that zlib has a better reputation than your ebook retail partners, nor is it zlibs.
Businesses are in the game of enticing customers. If your homeware store is so bad that double-digit percentages of the population choose to steal glasses and cutlery from local bars rather than shop at your store, you need to take a long hard look at your business and figure out what the fuck you're doing so wrong.
You can bitch and moan about how it's wrong for people to steal from the bars if you want, but that's reality denial. It will not get you more customers.
>or you're an ordinary person of color, not sure which.
Yeah, and that's fine, right? We shouldn't go out of our way to tell the TSA that's not acceptable or anything /s
1. There's no substitute for not being a horrible person. Good people don't need codes of conduct, and jerks aren't changed by codes of conduct.
2. Codes of conduct are a political tool, not a technical one. It is very hard to define human behavior, which means by their nature codes of conduct are relatively general and then get interpreted to fit specific cases.
3. Jerks like politics, because they're a great smokescreen.
Codes of conduct cannot possibly help organizations. No one changes their behavior to meet a code of conduct. Instead, it becomes a reason to exile users. That in itself is fine, but unnecessary. Most organizations have either a formal or defacto leader that can unilaterally excommunicate offensive members, either with a ban button or simply through social pressure.
When a leader does this, their decision can be questioned. The question revolves around "did the leader do the right thing for the community?". Once you introduce a code of conduct, the question becomes "did the leader make a decision in line with the code of conduct?", and that's a really shitty question to use as the guiding star for a community.
Once a community is in a position where it's making decisions based on an arbitrary piece of paper, it's easy for the very people the code is trying to protect against to use that code to solidify political power. The interpretations are pushed to be broader, and people start rules-lawyering their political adversaries with the CoC. This is not a healthy place for a community to be in. Jerks can no longer be excluded for being unhelpful and obstructionist, as long as they do it in a way that doesn't violate the CoC. Codifying your community behind a CoC reduces your flexibility because it gives people ammunition to argue against the statement "you're being horrible and we don't want you, goodbye".
I've seen this cause the ultimate heat-death of multiple formerly delightful internet communities. The pillars of the community get slowly weeded out because they refuse to bow down to the precise wording of the almighty CoC, the nazi moderators set in, the baseload members migrate to wherever the pillars went, and the community withers.
I've done it before and I'm bored of the cycle. I'll happily work with a team of enthusiastic people run by a benevolent dictator for life who isn't afraid to convo me and tell me I'm being a wanker. Tell me I've got to abide by the 37 point grand thesis to not triggering people and I'm out.
Thanks for the advice, but surprisingly I have actually tried just not having ADD. This simple advice doesn't work very well for me, which is why I'm attempting to pursue medication again. The calendar entry goes off, I try to contact the doctor, maybe they're not in today, it's half way through the work day, I go to set another, I spot an email while I'm doing it and start following up on that, and then 4 months later it never happened.
This is actually a major problem. I was diagnosed with ADD as a child but gave up the medication in my late teens because it had side-effects I didn't enjoy.
Late last year, I thought it might be worth trying it again, maybe with a milder dose. I booked an appointment with a doctor, who referred me to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist told me there was a two week waiting period and that they'd call me back in a few weeks, and never did. It was two months before I remembered to follow it up.
I don't bore you with the rest of the details, but the short version is every medical professional I spoke to (and I spoke to about 5 during this saga) told me to wait and that they would organize something for me, and then didn't. Turns out if you lie to someone with ADD and leave the organization ball in their court like that, they'll never get treatment, because they struggle with the very thing you're asking them to do. It's pretty much the worst thing you can do for them.
Anyway, I've just realized I was planning to talk to the doctor about it again 4 months ago to try to get the ball rolling again. It's Christmas now, they won't be back at work until mid January. I'd better send myself an email, wish me luck.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/4/11362928/google-nest-revol...
That's the future. The dude with the 80's hifi setup knows what's up, in my opinion.
I have no need for this service, and would never register a business address to it for all the legal reasons being discussed in another thread on this topic, but I would have registered a private domain or two there anyway, just for the sake of supporting something I believe in.
But that sentence sunk it for me. If you're gonna offer an anonymous service to help promote freedom of speech, it can't be just the kind of speech you like. It's reasonable to say "nothing so illegal that we're gonna end up talking to three letter agencies about it", but beyond that you're either promoting freedom of expression or not, it's very much a binary thing.
Your police forces robs your citizenry in broad daylight with the support of your judiciary[1].
What kind of country did you think you were living in?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
On a fundamental technical level, windows 10 is a pretty finely tuned os.
On any other benchmark you might choose (privacy, invasiveness and advertising, user control, user experience, active user deception) windows has been going downhill for years.
I can only think of plans that range from annoying to malicious. None that are good.
Don't normalize rude behavior. Conditionally free is not free.
How many people have worked at a location that has blocked stack overflow?
Because I have worked with an organization of about 2500 people, not all of which were IT. One day, management went on a mad whitelisting crusade and blocked about 98% of the internet, including the stack exchange network.
IT ground totally to a halt, across all our branches. No programming, no sys-admining, no help desk.
Stack overflow is not a programmer social network, and it is not a Q&A site.
It's the new textbook. Developers and sysadmins used to keep hundreds of kilos of dead tree libraries with them because only the textbooks contained the arcane knowledge like "component X was actually not implemented properly, and will crash under Y circumstances". Languages and libraries never advertise that on their website.
Post-stack-overflow developers and admins use stack-overflow as their source of kooky corner cases and badly explained concepts documentation. They don't have or need the dead tree books.
So considered harmful? In my experience any IT staff who say they don't rely on stack overflow are lying.