Parents have to do a cost/benefit estimate and ask themselves rhetorically: are they social climbing through the kids "keeping up with the Jones'" and investing (or wasting) a large fraction of disposable income creating spoiled kids or creating lasting benefit? Could also be helicopter parenting meets academic overpressure, however there may be some value if subsequent schools look at, or are biased by, pedigree. That monoculture of demonstrated rarity which is a function of self-reinforcing exclusivity, i.e., just look at ASW. The likelihood of schools and other communal gatherings devolve into picky cliques is no surprise: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-psychology-of-...
A service's customer data must persist somewhere. "On the cloud" is a marketing abstraction to fool customers into a false sense of integrity.
Just remember that most cloud services do not do backups, do not have a disaster recovery / BIA plan, do not use ECC memory in network, compute and storage systems. Users must take personal responsibility for ensuring their private data is safe, because wishing is not a winning strategy.
When you're an Orrick customer, most of their documents come from their standard internal library. If you need something custom or have to negotiate terms, that gets more expensive because legal drafting and review needs to happen with a human in the loop.
It is likely there is a master agreement with them that outlines use rights beyond customary client-attorney rights and responsibilities so custom and standard deliverables such that customers don't warez them to BitTorrent or sell them to friends. (The lawyer or law firm always retains copyright unless otherwise ageed.)
I wouldn't let them have any copies, period. They can just resell them to stock photo sites or do whatever else they like and it's nearly impossible to police them.
Artist arrogance must be cousin of designer ego: folks that overrate themselves with hubris believing that others will see that as a signal of quality.
The only reason for a photographer to retain copyright is to screw unsuspecting people and others that will bend to the manipulate nonsense. If it's your private event and they're any good, they don't need unlimited rights to your memories. That's offensive.
I, and I think most people, wouldn't want someone (nor the NSA) running around with license to do whatever they wish with my personal family photographs and then turn around and extort us either. Sure photographers have to make a living, but extortion and privacy violation is a bridge too far.
Might be cheaper to either have TaskRabbits with copyright assignment waivers or have family / friends do it at the expense of amateurishness for the peace-of-mind that you or your entourage doesn't end up on some stock photo site or kitsch choskey.
The currently served "old" version was probably disabled to redirects to the modern ordering website so the antique non/functionality from ever interfering with the modern website and not lose sales by attempting to convert customers into the new funnel.
Some open source startups fail because they are non-scalable service companies deluding themselves that they are product companies. Furthermore, they do not own enough of any durable advantage (IP, talent, mindshare), and so multiple "product" companies pretend to not compete while offering similar services in a niche that does not have that much demand. Furthermore with FOSS, most potential customers are often politically incentivized to poach upstream code and talent, give nothing back and eschew overpriced "consulting" services entirely. So it's almost always the wrong business model, unless you dominate it.
(I've plenty of enterprise FOSS consulting to realize there are easier ways to make much more $/time, like enterprise startups that are product companies. Also, PGs essays about "consultingish.")
Perhaps if the less wealthy were able to wrest power from the very wealthy whom have clearly gamed the US tax code with Enron-like complexity, personal taxes could be fairer and similar to Norway's dual model, where the govt computes taxes for persons in the majority of cases based on standard deductions and can be easily approved by the taxpayer by SMS if it is correct. This would end most of the unnecessary labor and drudgery that also happens to be extremely unfair.
The first point is the troubling one, because politicians in the US are drunk with money of the very same people whom pay the least taxes and amass large piles of cash to buy their interests, a behavior few people can do individually (but could collectively, if they were sufficiently organized and singularly aggressive on such an issue (crowdfunding-like model)).
GAE lost a lot of users in their price hike a few years back, so on the mid/higher end it makes sense. But, hiking on the low end may "save some headaches" but it puts off potentially moneyed ventures "with the bathwater" in a "no public restrooms" way. (Such "signs" are mostly pointless and just make the "shop" look discriminatory.)
The water restriction measures are mostly bikeshedding (yes, removing public lawns is probably a good thing) on low consumption behaviors on those consitutents viewed to be most accepting and least threatening to the political establishment. It's akin to allowing Diesel trucks older than 1998 in CA to continue spewing particulates into the air because regulation would be "too expensive," and instead highly regulate passenger vehicles. Both are needed, as holistic solutions to diffuse problems tend to be the best, but asking one group to shoulder a collective burden is horse baloney. Yet, the action of the governor is a signal of an ongoing issue but it's token as it doesn't start to address the quagmire of where legacy water rights meets gamification and usage with sensible limitations. If CA doesn't work on the larger structural water allocation issues, water will become more scarce and expensive because a few large, influential farmers will continue to make themselves rich at everyone else's expense. (Carbon emissions need to go down too.)
Maybe CA needs well-informed grassroots picketing against farmer water rights gluttony in Sacramento?
A reality-denying, industry shill politician espouses: "Sinkholes arising from rapidly plummeting aquifers will boost the economy as tourist attractions. Water will be affordably trucked in and desalination is getting cheaper all the time. Problem solved."
OpenStack tries to support too many different backends for most components and is a consultants' wet dream when it comes to custom work and patches required that can be readily milked into an expensive and lengthy deployment, as well as expensive post-deployment maintainence and upgrades. It's only that at a significant (Netflix) scale can the costs of DIY be cheaper than just paying the AWS tax. (Last I heard, Yahoo employed a team dedicated to maintaining OpenStack. Also, I hear from others that this is the norm, not the exception. We looked at OpenStack at Stanford, but there are other IaaS clouds that have better opinions about architectural choices (only supporting say Xen and Vmware because they're production proven) and less code.)
Mode X and related: programming VGA registers to do what int 10h mode 13h didn't offer. Bonus points for flipping video pages or cycling the palette as to not cause tearing.