not all customers have access to electronic funds transfer.
That's your problem, right there. Fix it.
The capability for electronic funds transfer should be automatically granted with any bank account - both via debit card and via internet. In the Nordic countries, cheques are essentially extinct. If you try to present one at a bank, it is treated as a truly exotic item, and may cause confusion. The only cheques deposited are invariably from countries with backward retail banking (UK, US, Canada, etc.), and the clearing time and fees can be significant. On the other hand, electronic transfer to or from other accounts (worldwide) is fast and cheap, and provides immediate confirmation of receipt of the payment.
I regularly pay vendors in Germany, Sweden, and Finland with direct electronic transfers via internet when making purchases or handling invoices. There is no risk of "delayed/lost in the mail" as happens to cheques with remarkable frequency. On-the-spot payments (small stores and large, petrol stations, vending machines, parking meters, etc.) are made using the debit card for the account. There is no need to carry wads of cash in your wallet, and shops do not have to handle or transport large amounts of cash.
Do you pay for a beta by itself?
Are you an imbecile?
Hint: both questions have the same answer. If you pay for a "beta", the price paid should include a subsequent upgrade to the released version, or a full refund if no release is forthcoming in a stated time (the expiry date of the beta, perhaps). Looking at it a different way, you have pre-paid for the released version, and the beta is given as a freebie.
...equal pieces, for a potentially amusing drunkard's challenge.
Cutting the pizza into 10 and combining slices is considered ungentlemanly behavior (i.e. cheating) in this particular sport.
The "none of the above" option is called turning up at a voting station, getting your name crossed off, and not voting; last I checked, this was legal.
And failing that, take your voting slip, leave it blank, and put it in the voting booth. You've fulfilled your obligation to vote, without voting for any candidate. While I think this is incredibly stupid, you can do it, so what are you complaining about?
What you describe is simply voting "present" instead of casting an actual vote or abstaining. It is not a vote for or against any of the candidates. This is not the same as voting for "none of the above". A vote for "none of the above" is explicitly a vote against all of the candidates listed on the ballot. If "none of the above" were to get sufficient votes to be elected, then either the seat should remain empty, or the election should be re-held with the proviso that none of the same candidates should be able to stand, having all been actively rejected.
Note the ambiguity between whether voters wish the position to remain unoccupied, or to be given a different slate of candidates to vote for. To eliminate this, it would be preferable to have a "nobody" vs "new slate" tickbox associated with the "none of the above" option. Alternatively, "nobody" could be listed as a separate option; this would be less confusing to those who are easily confused, but at the risk of splitting the vote against all candidates.
A simple abstention or its equivalent (spoiled or blank ballot) does not provide these options.
...and forget trying to censor the net - it's a Sisyphean task even for large powerful organizations.
The best option is just to brazen it out: laugh "The things we did as kids!" or something similar, and give the other guy[*] a pretend-punch on the shoulder. Act like a brash confident jock instead of a wimpy guilt-ridden nerd, dammit.
[*] If it's a gal, just pull the punch at the last millisecond, pause a moment, then exclaim "geez, now I'm treating you like one of the guys!". Women often claim to hate antics like that, but in my experience, they're likelier to get all wet as a result...
In Victoria (the state bordering NSW to the south) the bleeding heart animal wuvvers are trying to put through legislation to mandate walking a dog every day.
That's probably intended as cruelty to fat lazy humans. Which is both legally sanctioned and officially encouraged.
Of course, if the dog is fat and lazy and acclimatized to the air-conditioned indoors, then it might die of a heart attack or heat exhaustion when dragged out in the blazing sun for walkies. The fact that taking it for that fatal walk was legally mandated won't save your ass from the malevolence of the do-gooders.
For some reason many / most(?) of interesting new music bands choose to use Myspace as their homesite.
And where else will the bands (or their marketing managers) find such a large collection of malleable young airheads, all eager to be commanded what to think, what to buy, what to talk about, and what to do, so they'll appear all grown up and cool?
The actual survey (presumably with data, as they list a lot of tables and charts) is available for money. However, ABI won't even say how much money unless you register with them and log in. http://www.abiresearch.com/research/1003389
So I log into a chat room in the early evening, and tell my daughter to haul her ass home from the neighbour's house for dinner [*]. Presumably that would be considered inappropriate wording (although a common-enough phrasing), and I'm an adult while she's an under-age teenager. The neighbour might even witness this dialog and report it to the cops.
Could I then be arrested as a kiddie predator (or whatever) under Canadian law? If so, then I agree: ban kids from the net, at least in Canada.
[*] Actually, I use IM for communications like that, but no doubt the same laws would be misapplied.
"Ending is better than mending".
Consumers should welcome file corruption; it's a chance to throw away those old files and buy some brand new ones instead:)
Actually, I would not be surprised if the media companies were busily trying to invent a self-corrupting DRM format to replace DVDs and suchlike.
or even the 1990s, where there were no search engines
Humph, not exactly. I was using Alta Vista and Lycos in the late 1990s, and they were not the first web search engines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine. And before any on that list there was Gopher, which was a hypertext prelude to the web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol), and I was using non-web internet search engines such as WAIS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server in the 1980s, before the web existed. Earlier, it was a pain finding information on internet - somebody had to tell you where to look, and which access method to use (telnet/ftp/etc.).
But you are right in that search engines are now major portals to internet information, predominantly through web URIs, and that a few such engines dominate search (and hence access to information).
A true Chinese proverb: "I don't care if it is black cat or white cat. You can still pass it off as Kung Pao Chicken"
FYI, cat meat does not taste at all like chicken (light or dark meat). The texture and flavor of cat meat is quite different, and even a liberal dose of spices cannot mask this difference.
Ho ho, all together.
Hoist the colors high!
Heave ho, thieves and beggers
Never shall we die!
The pirates of the Mediterranean probably sang a similar tune in 67BC, even as the Lex Gabinia was being passed in Rome. After all, their power had grown unopposed for centuries and they looted trading ships at will and plundered coastal cities with impunity. Piracy was a large, profitable, and enduring enterprise which was endemic over the entire Mediterranean, with ships attacked and ports raided even close to Rome itself.
The Lex Gabinia gave Pompey adequate forces and authority for 2 years to tackle the pirates. He needed only six months to eliminate them completely. According to Cicero: "Pompey made his preparations for the war at the end of the winter, entered upon it at the commencement of spring, and finished it in the middle of the summer." Piracy in the Mediterranean essentially vanished for several centuries, and only started to return during the break-up of Rome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Gabinia
With the rapid increase in Wifi + Internet enabled phones and devices, it could be possible to actually have an entirely distributed network just by linking together devices in range.
And just imagine the legal complexities if someone actually ran a torrent over it, with unapproved content...
The USA has restrictive laws against showing nipples.
Just against showing female human nipples.
No problem showing female monkey nipples, for instance, and male human nipples can be freely shown on prime time family shows. Actually, with the obesity trends in the US, there must be a few D-cup manboobs jiggling across the TV sets, and visible on public beaches.
Kudos to the the US, with species-ist and sexist nipple laws!
We have a SMC2804WBRP-G router for our home net, with a 100/10 WAN connection through a fiber switch. It handles our traffic smoothly using NAT and firewall with both wired and 11g wireless LAN connections. We've had it for almost 6 years now, and upgraded our WAN connection during that time. The SMC2804 was not particularly expensive, but cost about 50% more than the Netgear and Buffalo trash of the time. Typically, there are 3-4 PCs, a multifunction printer, and a headless server on our wired LAN, and there may be another PC or two on wireless from time to time. The firewall rules prevent the headless server and printer from calling home, among other things.
a Man in the Middle can still proxy the key negotiation and access the plaintext.
But wouldn't this be illegal?
Let's leave aside P2P, in which you may or may not have the right to transfer particular copyright material (depending on the material, of course). If you protect your personal communications - in which copyright belongs to you - with a DRM scheme such as a non-trivial encryption, then decrypting it would be an unauthorized circumvention of that DRM. The mechanism used, whether brute-force or Man in the Middle, is merely a technical detail.
It would be an outrage if ISP conditions included signing over your copyright privileges over your own communications, or restricting your ability to use encryption on communication. It would have many repercussions for legally-privileged communications which are often encrypted today. For example, legally privileged communication includes: attorney-client dialog relevant to a trial or investigation; negotiation of proposed terms for a commercial contract; discussion of trade secrets among a group privy to such secrets; exchange of material related to an invention prior to filing a patent.
Legally-privileged communications are not confined to email with attachments. I occasionally have to send fairly large files (up to about 100MB) to my patent attorney; they are sent by ftp and are always encrypted using pre-arranged keys. There is a legal duty to maintain secrecy of an invention prior to filing a patent application. Having an unknown third party who is likely to read all of one's secret communications would grievously undermine this duty.
Slashdot Mirror
Name one thing I can't do on Ubuntu that you can on your "un-dumbed down" Linux?
He can generate a kernel panic...
It would be nice to have cloned her.
Probably a guy working on the next best alternative...
Seriously, HD porn video isn't exactly a huge draw, but imagine 3D.
Ain't got nothing on full tactile sensurround, giving a new meaning to First Person Shooter games.
Movies will be killed by Feelies.
not all customers have access to electronic funds transfer.
That's your problem, right there. Fix it.
The capability for electronic funds transfer should be automatically granted with any bank account - both via debit card and via internet. In the Nordic countries, cheques are essentially extinct. If you try to present one at a bank, it is treated as a truly exotic item, and may cause confusion. The only cheques deposited are invariably from countries with backward retail banking (UK, US, Canada, etc.), and the clearing time and fees can be significant. On the other hand, electronic transfer to or from other accounts (worldwide) is fast and cheap, and provides immediate confirmation of receipt of the payment.
I regularly pay vendors in Germany, Sweden, and Finland with direct electronic transfers via internet when making purchases or handling invoices. There is no risk of "delayed/lost in the mail" as happens to cheques with remarkable frequency. On-the-spot payments (small stores and large, petrol stations, vending machines, parking meters, etc.) are made using the debit card for the account. There is no need to carry wads of cash in your wallet, and shops do not have to handle or transport large amounts of cash.
The UK used to be cool?
When was this, when it was occupied by the Romans?
Much more recently than that. During the Little Ice Age, when the Thames froze over. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/The_Frozen_Thames_1677.jpg Since then, it's been a progressive loss of cool and loss of reason, reaching to today's hideous macchiavelian antics.
Do you pay for a beta by itself?
Are you an imbecile?
Hint: both questions have the same answer. If you pay for a "beta", the price paid should include a subsequent upgrade to the released version, or a full refund if no release is forthcoming in a stated time (the expiry date of the beta, perhaps). Looking at it a different way, you have pre-paid for the released version, and the beta is given as a freebie.
...equal pieces, for a potentially amusing drunkard's challenge.
Cutting the pizza into 10 and combining slices is considered ungentlemanly behavior (i.e. cheating) in this particular sport.
The "none of the above" option is called turning up at a voting station, getting your name crossed off, and not voting; last I checked, this was legal.
And failing that, take your voting slip, leave it blank, and put it in the voting booth. You've fulfilled your obligation to vote, without voting for any candidate. While I think this is incredibly stupid, you can do it, so what are you complaining about?
What you describe is simply voting "present" instead of casting an actual vote or abstaining. It is not a vote for or against any of the candidates. This is not the same as voting for "none of the above". A vote for "none of the above" is explicitly a vote against all of the candidates listed on the ballot. If "none of the above" were to get sufficient votes to be elected, then either the seat should remain empty, or the election should be re-held with the proviso that none of the same candidates should be able to stand, having all been actively rejected.
Note the ambiguity between whether voters wish the position to remain unoccupied, or to be given a different slate of candidates to vote for. To eliminate this, it would be preferable to have a "nobody" vs "new slate" tickbox associated with the "none of the above" option. Alternatively, "nobody" could be listed as a separate option; this would be less confusing to those who are easily confused, but at the risk of splitting the vote against all candidates.
A simple abstention or its equivalent (spoiled or blank ballot) does not provide these options.
A quick search of the wordpress plugins directory shows over 500 twitter related plugins so this is news because?
Because they needed a press release with embedded hype-terms?
...and forget trying to censor the net - it's a Sisyphean task even for large powerful organizations.
The best option is just to brazen it out: laugh "The things we did as kids!" or something similar, and give the other guy[*] a pretend-punch on the shoulder. Act like a brash confident jock instead of a wimpy guilt-ridden nerd, dammit.
[*] If it's a gal, just pull the punch at the last millisecond, pause a moment, then exclaim "geez, now I'm treating you like one of the guys!". Women often claim to hate antics like that, but in my experience, they're likelier to get all wet as a result...
In Victoria (the state bordering NSW to the south) the bleeding heart animal wuvvers are trying to put through legislation to mandate walking a dog every day.
That's probably intended as cruelty to fat lazy humans. Which is both legally sanctioned and officially encouraged.
Of course, if the dog is fat and lazy and acclimatized to the air-conditioned indoors, then it might die of a heart attack or heat exhaustion when dragged out in the blazing sun for walkies. The fact that taking it for that fatal walk was legally mandated won't save your ass from the malevolence of the do-gooders.
For some reason many / most(?) of interesting new music bands choose to use Myspace as their homesite.
And where else will the bands (or their marketing managers) find such a large collection of malleable young airheads, all eager to be commanded what to think, what to buy, what to talk about, and what to do, so they'll appear all grown up and cool?
The actual survey (presumably with data, as they list a lot of tables and charts) is available for money. However, ABI won't even say how much money unless you register with them and log in.
http://www.abiresearch.com/research/1003389
So I log into a chat room in the early evening, and tell my daughter to haul her ass home from the neighbour's house for dinner [*]. Presumably that would be considered inappropriate wording (although a common-enough phrasing), and I'm an adult while she's an under-age teenager. The neighbour might even witness this dialog and report it to the cops.
Could I then be arrested as a kiddie predator (or whatever) under Canadian law? If so, then I agree: ban kids from the net, at least in Canada.
[*] Actually, I use IM for communications like that, but no doubt the same laws would be misapplied.
"Ending is better than mending". :)
Consumers should welcome file corruption; it's a chance to throw away those old files and buy some brand new ones instead
Actually, I would not be surprised if the media companies were busily trying to invent a self-corrupting DRM format to replace DVDs and suchlike.
or even the 1990s, where there were no search engines
Humph, not exactly. I was using Alta Vista and Lycos in the late 1990s, and they were not the first web search engines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine. And before any on that list there was Gopher, which was a hypertext prelude to the web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol), and I was using non-web internet search engines such as WAIS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server in the 1980s, before the web existed. Earlier, it was a pain finding information on internet - somebody had to tell you where to look, and which access method to use (telnet/ftp/etc.).
But you are right in that search engines are now major portals to internet information, predominantly through web URIs, and that a few such engines dominate search (and hence access to information).
A true Chinese proverb: "I don't care if it is black cat or white cat. You can still pass it off as Kung Pao Chicken"
FYI, cat meat does not taste at all like chicken (light or dark meat). The texture and flavor of cat meat is quite different, and even a liberal dose of spices cannot mask this difference.
opus dei (a chatolic sect wholly approved by pope ratzinger)
"Characteristic of or pertaining to being boring or flat"? Well, you nailed that one all right!
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chato
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-lic
Ho ho, all together.
Hoist the colors high!
Heave ho, thieves and beggers
Never shall we die!
The pirates of the Mediterranean probably sang a similar tune in 67BC, even as the Lex Gabinia was being passed in Rome. After all, their power had grown unopposed for centuries and they looted trading ships at will and plundered coastal cities with impunity. Piracy was a large, profitable, and enduring enterprise which was endemic over the entire Mediterranean, with ships attacked and ports raided even close to Rome itself.
The Lex Gabinia gave Pompey adequate forces and authority for 2 years to tackle the pirates. He needed only six months to eliminate them completely. According to Cicero: "Pompey made his preparations for the war at the end of the winter, entered upon it at the commencement of spring, and finished it in the middle of the summer." Piracy in the Mediterranean essentially vanished for several centuries, and only started to return during the break-up of Rome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Gabinia
With the rapid increase in Wifi + Internet enabled phones and devices, it could be possible to actually have an entirely distributed network just by linking together devices in range.
And just imagine the legal complexities if someone actually ran a torrent over it, with unapproved content...
If he's so fond of probes, let him go visit area 51, and bend over in front of some aliens...
The USA has restrictive laws against showing nipples.
Just against showing female human nipples.
No problem showing female monkey nipples, for instance, and male human nipples can be freely shown on prime time family shows. Actually, with the obesity trends in the US, there must be a few D-cup manboobs jiggling across the TV sets, and visible on public beaches.
Kudos to the the US, with species-ist and sexist nipple laws!
We have a SMC2804WBRP-G router for our home net, with a 100/10 WAN connection through a fiber switch. It handles our traffic smoothly using NAT and firewall with both wired and 11g wireless LAN connections. We've had it for almost 6 years now, and upgraded our WAN connection during that time. The SMC2804 was not particularly expensive, but cost about 50% more than the Netgear and Buffalo trash of the time. Typically, there are 3-4 PCs, a multifunction printer, and a headless server on our wired LAN, and there may be another PC or two on wireless from time to time. The firewall rules prevent the headless server and printer from calling home, among other things.
The overlords of spying welcome you now as one of the "advanced" countries of the world.
a Man in the Middle can still proxy the key negotiation and access the plaintext.
But wouldn't this be illegal?
Let's leave aside P2P, in which you may or may not have the right to transfer particular copyright material (depending on the material, of course). If you protect your personal communications - in which copyright belongs to you - with a DRM scheme such as a non-trivial encryption, then decrypting it would be an unauthorized circumvention of that DRM. The mechanism used, whether brute-force or Man in the Middle, is merely a technical detail.
It would be an outrage if ISP conditions included signing over your copyright privileges over your own communications, or restricting your ability to use encryption on communication. It would have many repercussions for legally-privileged communications which are often encrypted today. For example, legally privileged communication includes: attorney-client dialog relevant to a trial or investigation; negotiation of proposed terms for a commercial contract; discussion of trade secrets among a group privy to such secrets; exchange of material related to an invention prior to filing a patent.
Legally-privileged communications are not confined to email with attachments. I occasionally have to send fairly large files (up to about 100MB) to my patent attorney; they are sent by ftp and are always encrypted using pre-arranged keys. There is a legal duty to maintain secrecy of an invention prior to filing a patent application. Having an unknown third party who is likely to read all of one's secret communications would grievously undermine this duty.