I can't tell if you mean 'because I find it difficult too', or if you mean 'because it means I have less/easier competition'. Of course, this could have been your intention all along, but if it wasn't could you clarify?
Because I find it difficult too. :) Been using CSS for 7 years and still have some trouble with it, compared to typical programming which tends to be quite easy.
Anyone know of any good tutorials? Everything seems either really basic, or really advanced. I know csszengarden has loads of examples, but I would prefer something that explains it (I can't find anywhere that explains the nesting and the relationship to the syntax / structure of the css file. I always feel like I am just trying random things until something works).
CSS does feel a lot more complex than it ought to be, but it's dominated in every variable of badness by XSLT. That's the one language that defeated my efforts to learn it (mainly by killing all desire to do so).
haha. I actually love XSLT. It's closer to a language like Haskell than it is to any common language, which is probably part of the difficulty people might have in learning it. It also uses structural pattern matching, which doesn't exist in any common language at all. That's unfortunate considering pattern matching is almost as powerful a feature as first-class functions are.
> So, what conditions will best help PayPal continue to grow its user base, increase revenues, and bolster its profit margins on a consistent and ongoing basis?
Well, on the last two: freeze all user accounts, confiscate the funds contained within, make charges of $5000 to each credit card holder, and justify it by linking to your terms of use.
It's depressing how many Conservative conspiracy theory websites are out there. It's even more depressing when people link to them as if they are real news websites.
Only in America is a tax increase equated (without any further investigation) to depressing the economy, and a tax break (once again without investigation) equated with letting the peacock that is the economy fly free.
> Only in America is a tax increase equated (without any further investigation) to depressing the economy
That's not strictly true. There are other countries who harbor economists possessed of half a brain and theory describing the basic principles of how quasi-rational actors behave in various situations. They just usually don't get listened to. :)
Promising free lunches for everyone is much more popular and gets you elected! :D
Theory is dumb when all empirical data disagrees with it. Good thing the Austrian's figured this problem out by ignoring data. It's the true hacker's way.
You have to afford the Austrians some sympathy. They know, just know, that their economic theories are correct and just. However, they kept running into a problem: there's so much troublesome data that proves the opposite of their beliefs. One day, Ludwig von Mises discovered that the scientific method itself was flawed. So he created a new system to replace it by fiat: "praxeology." Problem solved - now science confirms everything Austrians believe. No need for data.
I'm sure you have multiple studies with mountains of data which clearly demonstrate that the economy is at its most prosperous at a marginal tax rate of 100%. Oh, man, you guys are so cute. :)
That's right. The main problem is deflation. Monetary policy has been effective in the last year, but increasing sales taxes could wipe all of that progress out.
Why do you think their economy has been depressed for over a decade? Every time they show a glimmer of growth, they yank out the rug from underneath by raising taxes.
Why do you think their economy has been depressed for over a decade?
While it is incredibly complex, the fact that their population has been static, trending towards declining, has played a significant part of it.
In many countries, economic growth is just a side effect of population growth -- every number gets bigger, but the actual wealth of each individual person is static or in decline.
What they have in common: they deal in Bitcoins, they're not banks, they have a "o" and an "x" in their name.
Now if you're trying to bash PHP (or Ubuntu?) for banking software that does not take an exclusive lock on rows it reads then modifies and a daemon that does not check balances on withdrawal, try again.
It's a strawman, though. The problem isn't PHP developers per se, it seems to be a lack of awareness that dealing with money is in any different than dealing with, say, any other CRUD operation (see - Mt.Gox just casting things to floats, it's just numbers, right?.)
Just wait until people start announcing their exchanges and business written in Rails or Python, or "anything but PHP" but still turning out to have been written by webapp developers with no idea how to actually deal with currency transactions or basic security.
What they have in common is a bunch of keen individuals rushing in to cash in on the hype but in the process releasing some of the worst financial systems (if you can call them that) which I've ever seen because they don't follow the same strict regulations and testing processes that the rest of the financial industry have to go through.
