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Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

nytimes.com

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Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#81

Post by xaqfox »

ethbro wrote: post #62
CaptSpify wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large financial institutions still dont play nicely with internet porn, which really isnt that ambiguous legally. I think a lot of it is PR as well. They dont want to be associated with moraly ambiguous industries

A lot of this is a consequence of the George W Bush presidency, where the DoJ was encouraged to crack down on pornography using obscenity laws. From the histories I've read, one of the levers they used was informal pressure on financing institutions that served the distributors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_Prosecution_Task_For...

I place the blame squarely on the Obama Justice Department's Operation Choke Point. The previous task force was at least targeted towards specific, named, businesses and brought them before a court--not a blanket, de-facto ban caused by threatening financial institutions, directly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#83

Post by bertil »

pritam2020 wrote: post #78

So we will have a new metric like the ballmer peak?

You are not the only one asking. https://www.reddit.com/r/trees/comments/3nhybk/ballmer_peak_...

I have a name for that, but that’s because I did all my university course work with a guy who could not compute statistics without burning a very big one. He had 12 minutes of brain left after he was done smoking, and what I said stopped making sense to him passed that limit, like clock-work. “Sorry, gotta smoke for that conversation” was his signal he was happy to talk about improving our latest model, but… he needed psychotropic help for that.

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#84

Post by lightbritefight »

eitally wrote: post #59
eunoia wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A combination of federal illegality (which affects banking heavily) and special compliance requirements necessitates custom industry solutions AFAIK.

But that's really no different from discrete manufacturing, where you have to track precious metals, hazardous materials, import/export regulations, etc. I wonder why the major players don't just make the minor adaptations so they can serve this market, too.

Likely federal law. Its not settled legally if providing services to recreational dispensaries can implicate your company in felony drug distribution. Its unlikely, but a risk. It may even cause issues with the bushiness main product. Things like insurance liability shifts and the like.

No "big name" company has wanted to test the waters.

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#85

Post by Zelphyr »

spinlock wrote: post #44
ethbro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally! I thought about this the other day. Given that it's been about 15 years, is there anyone in the HN community / internet that's spoken about the design decisions with IE 6? Specifically, was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management?

As an observer I always assumed it was purposeful. MS was _not_ a company that conformed to other people's standards. After all, they're just now putting a POSIX compliant shell in their OS. They were playing a monopoly game not trying to offer an alternative.

Agreed. One of their first tag lines was, "We Set The Standrd." It's in their DNA to avoid conforming to standards they didn't define.

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#86

Post by [deleted] »

tacos wrote: post #54
colemickens wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? This? Again? There's a reason tech companies don't drug test and I'd argue that flies in the face of the tired stereotype you're offering up. edit: It's funny to watch HN's reactions to anything related to cannabis. You'd think people here watched Reefer Madness and haven't bothered to inform themselves about any actual facts or know any actual consumers of cannabis since then. The implication that someone sm…

I personally told these numbskulls multiple times that width = x2 - x1 PLUS one. Maybe it was the weed, maybe they just sucked at coding, maybe you didn't notice that FAXes were blurry in Windows for 20 years either. The real problem at late 90s Microsoft was cocaine. Didn't see much of that among the engineers though.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#87

Post by [deleted] »

Vexs wrote: post #72
hackuser wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know: Do you think it is and will be effective? Could illegal vendors, such as Mexican organized crime, find a way into the industry? Let's not forget that organized crime has been involved in many legitimate industries.

Probably is- but if the RFID tag says a box weighs 50 pounds, and it comes in weighing 45 pounds, then you can throw up flags. Of course, there's always going to be ways around this sort of stuff, but you just have to raise the cost of getting around them just enough for it to be unprofitable. Also, I've heard that cartel-grade MJ is terrible quality- local cultivation is probably pretty different then whatever shit…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#88

Post by tamana »

bdisraeli wrote: post #68
xiaoma wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also depends on the judiciary.

This is totally wrong. Previous Supreme Court decisions, especially Gonzales v. Raich, have set a pretty clear precedent that the Federal Government has the authority to criminalize drugs even when their use is legal in a particular state.

Right, it depends on the judiciary.

Re: Microsoft is the first big company to say it's serving the legal marijuana trade

#90

Post by manigandham »

ethbro wrote: post #23
PeCaN wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of old IE things were pretty nice¹. The only real problem was the abysmal support for actual standards, along with a myriad of weird bugs. ¹ See: XMLHttpRequest, innerHTML, box model, CSS filters, CSS behaviors², VML, etc ² Well, behavior: was probably a terrible idea, but it did allow hacking oldIE to support an awful lot of CSS3.

Incidentally! I thought about this the other day. Given that it's been about 15 years, is there anyone in the HN community / internet that's spoken about the design decisions with IE 6? Specifically, was it incompatible by design or simply by incompetent management?

There's a question on Quora with some great answers from the original team members that shows what happened with IE:

https://www.quora.com/How-did-Internet-Explorer-up-until-ver...

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