To be a "prisoner of war" you need to be captured on a battle field and held by the enemy. In this case, the US is the enemy of the terrorists, so they would be our prisoners of war.
The fact is, everybody in Gitmo is a POW - that the government hasn't called them such is just a delaying tactic.
Looks like somebody never tried to catch flies with vinegar.
Vinegar is extremely effective at catching flies because it smells like rotting fruit (that's basically what it is, actually). Flies love rotting fruit a hell of a lot more than they like fresh fruit, in case you haven't noticed.
The classic trap is to fill a jar with vinegar and attach a funnel just large enough for the flies to get in but small enough to make it difficult to get out - the hole can be several times the size of the fly and still accomplish this. Once inside, the flies either drown trying to get the vinegar, or starve trying to escape. Either way it works very very well.
Honey works too, but you have to set the honey out on an open tray so the flies will land on it and stick, they aren't as attracted to it as vinegar so they won't chase it through a funnel like they will vinegar. If you try the funnel trick with sugar water you will probably come out empty handed.
Still, the point is to give them something they love and trap them with it, so your point about being nice to prisoners still works.
God that movie was hideous. The book is a Sci-Fi classic, and there is a mini-series that did it much much better. Please use either of those as your reference instead of the god-awful 80's movie. I love Patrick Stewart as much as anybody, but even he couldn't make up for that movie. It was just all wrong.
Wired money transfers and cashier's checks are essentially the same thing. Wired transfers are initiated by the payer at his bank, while cashier's checks are initiated by the payee at his bank.
In BOTH cases money is taken from the payer's account immediately. There is no way for a legitimate cashier's check to bounce, and there is no way for a legitimate wire transfer to bounce. You must have sufficient funds before the transaction can even be requested, and they are removed immediately.
In BOTH cases it takes time for the money to route from one bank to another bank. This can take up to 20 days. With wired transfers this process is initiated immediately after the payer requests the money be sent to the payee. With cashier's checks the transfer is delayed by however long it takes for the payer to send the payee the cashier's check so the payee can deposit it.
The disadvantage with wire transfers compared to cashier's checks is that funds from a cashier's check are released immediately while the banks deal with the actual money transfer (i.e. that potential 20 day wait), whereas with a wire transfer those funds are completely unavailable until the transfer is complete. The advantage with wire transfers is there is virtually no potential for fraud on the transfer itself, whereas the immediate release of funds does open a window for fraud with cashier's checks.
That's how this guy didn't lose any money, because it takes quite a while to wire funds to a bank in Hong-Kong - longer than it took for the lawyer's bank to realize the cashier's check was a fraud. So they canceled the transfer of $190,000, pulled back the $10,000, and nobody got screwed except out of their time. Had that 190,000 gone through, the lawyer would have been out $190,000 unless he had a very kind and understanding client in Hong-Kong who would be willing to send back that $190,000.
He did wait till it hit his account, that's where the scammer (almost) got him. Banks will release the funds for a cashier's check before the check clears, allowing to you go about your business as usual. This is generally a safe practice, but if the limbo period is a long time there is the potential to be scammed.
Cashier's checks are practically safer than cash. The bank teller will check to see if it is counterfeit, and if it is not (or if it is a very good counterfeit) the bank will release the funds immediately and then send the check (actually an image of the check) off to the issuing bank to complete the transfer. The only reason this fails is if the cashier's check itself was either stolen or a very good forgery. Insufficient funds is impossible unless the bank somehow went bankrupt in the time the check was issued to the time it was redeemed. The anti-counterfeit measures are as good or better than those used for cash, so counterfeiting is very hard to pull off.
If it is a large sum of money (and large is relative to your situation) and you haven't done business with the individual before, it's a good idea to put a hold on the check until it actually clears instead of assuming the money in your account is good. 99.99% of the time it will be, but that 0.01% could be a check large enough to bankrupt you. So put a hold on the check so the bank doesn't release the funds until the check clears, and you are completely safe.
If we change the law so this is the case, banks will be a lot more thorough about checking the validity of deposited checks. Trust me.:)
Since 99.99% of cashier's checks clear, you will end up harming the economy far more than you protect it, because banks will start withholding otherwise valid transfers for up to 30 days while the checks clear. Frankly, that would be devastating for the flow of business.
What you suggest is a naive over-reaction to a problem that can be correct with just a little care on the part of individuals receiving cashier's checks. The system in place already works great, and instead of shoving your opinion down everyone's through it gives businesses the option of taking a risk for a greater potential reward. Furthermore, if you've verified the person giving you the check, either by past business or other means, there is absolutely no reason not to trust the cashier's check. Period. Only initial, untrusted transactions should be held, and it should be the business's responsibility to protect themselves, not the bank's.
It's the same kind of naive over-reaction that has us taking off our shoes in airports because one guy tried and failed to bring down an airplane with a bomb in his shoes. The next guy just snuck the bomb in by hiding it in his underwear, what did taking off our shoes accomplish? Just heartache and humiliation for frequent fliers, that's all. Are we now going to have to start taking off our underwear and sending it through the airport scanner?
Banks will go ahead and transfer money into the depositor's account before the cashier's check clears if the check appears to be valid (i.e. is not obviously counterfeit), because 99.99% of the time they do clear and it's just efficient business.
You can, however, request a hold on the check and have the bank wait until the check actually clears before the bank transfers the money to your account. If you've never done business with an individual who is issuing you a $200k check, a hold is just plain smart.
All you have to do is say "And as soon as the check clears, we can wrap this up!" Your ass is now covered, and you are 100% guaranteed not to be screwed out of your money. That's what makes cashier's checks so great, as long as the check is legitimate it will not bounce. Only a counterfeit or stolen cashier's check will bounce. The same is not true for personal or business checks, which may have insufficient funds, or credit cards which may be stolen.
If you are willing to wait for the check to clear, cashier's checks are the safest form of money transfer. They are like a slow version of bank-to-bank wire transfers.
That's a foolish teller, they are normally better trained than that.
There is no problem with cashier's checks, you just need to understand how the system works a little bit. You can put a hold on the deposit at the bank until the check clears, and simply not continue your transaction until it does. If you don't have a reason to completely trust the individual issuing the check, you should do this every time.
Cashier's checks are MUCH safer than personal checks, and are as safe or safer than credit. As long as the check itself is legitimate, you are 100% guaranteed to receive the value of the check because the issuing bank has already received the money for the check, and is simply waiting for another bank to complete the transfer. Really the only things safer than a cashier's check are a wire transfer and straight-up cash. The cashiers check must either be stolen from the bank or counterfeited, both of which are difficult to pull off (but obviously not impossible). That's why you see cashier's check scams for $200k and not $50 or something piddly like that.
Where you run into trouble is in seeing the cash in your account and assuming it is ok. Usually it is, but if that check is bogus and somehow made it past the initial screening by the tellers, then that money in your account isn't legitimately there, and the bank will take it back when the check doesn't clear.
Seriously, if you are receiving a cashier's check for something, you can protect yourself 100% by just waiting for it to clear (and tell the dumbass teller that you want to wait anyway if they say you don't need to) before continuing whatever the transaction may be. You can't get better protection from anything else but cash. In a way they are safer than cash, because if stolen they are worthless to the thief. You just have to go through the bank to get your money back.
That's not true, because money is actually transferred. The "bounce" happens when the recipient's bank contacts the issuer's bank and the issuer's bank says "Who'sajiggawhat? We never issued that check (or the account doesn't exist, or whatever else the scam may be), we aren't transferring the money." The check did not clear, it bounced.
It's a verification process - if it passes the process the money is transferred, if it does not the money is not transferred. If the money is not transferred to the receiving bank, then the check "bounced" and the bank pulls the money back out of the account of the guy who deposited the check.
Depending on where the banks are located in relation to each other, this process can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 23 days.
Checks most certainly do "clear", they clear when the bank to bank transfer is made, and not before. There is no such thing as "failing to bounce". You bounce, or you clear, one or the other, the only limbo state is in the time it takes to verify the check and transfer the money. In fact, the only correct way to say it would be "failing to clear" because the "bounce" is actually a failure to pass the verification process and a failure to transfer the money from bank to bank.
Now, the bank may not notify you that the check cleared, only that it bounced. That's an entirely different matter, and you can put a hold on the deposit with instructions for the bank to wait until the check clears before depositing the money.
That's what your friend should have done. The fraudster used a routing trick to delay the verification process as long as possible, letting the check go through bank after bank before the recipient's bank realizes the issuing bank is bogus, or the check itself is bogus. So you put a hold on the deposit and wait for the check to clear before handing over the keys to the car. When you do this, the fraudster will immediately get out of dodge ASAP, because they know they'll be caught red handed.
This is the way you should ALWAYS handle transactions with an individual or company you have no good reason to trust. Just because the money is in your account doesn't mean it's yours yet, if the check bounces the bank takes that money back. The same can be done with credit on expensive items, and you're actually at a bigger risk taking credit, because if that card is stolen you're screwed, and you don't get the option to wait for credit to clear after the initial acceptance.
The rest of the civilized world uses cashier's checks all the time, you're just a dumbass who has no idea what he's talking about.
Are you really going to put a 200,000 purchase on credit for someone you've never done business with? Seriously? Are you that stupid? Do you really think Visa is going to eat that much money?
Cashier's checks are safe provided you allow the check to clear before doing anything with the money. They are much harder to counterfeit (though certainly not impossible) than personal or business checks, and will ultimately always be proven true or fake. That's how the scammers get you though, it's not that the system didn't work flawlessly, it's that it worked slowly and people are impatient.
The classic con is to send the check, feign a crisis and have the seller cancel the order and send back the cash before the initial check clears. The seller sees the cash in his account, thinks he's safe, and when your bogus check bounces, the seller is out the entire (or at least most, you can sweeten the pot by offering to compensate for their wasted time and effort) value of the check because they've just legitimately transferred all that money back to you. Meanwhile the bank pulls the money out of your account and says "Sorry, that money was never really yours, you got scammed."
Cashier's checks are generally safer than personal checks because it must be either a fake check (chance of being caught by the teller) or a stolen check from the bank (gotta be in a position of trust at bank) in order to do the scam. That's because you pay the money up front for the check, instead of waiting for it to be pulled from your account when the recipient redeems it.
It still has to be transferred from the issuing bank though, and that can take up to a month, during which time the receiving bank will treat the money as though it has already been received.
The moral of the story is:
If you don't personally know the individual sending the check (cashier's or otherwise), or otherwise have a strong reason to trust the sender, always wait for the check to clear before assuming that money is yours.
I don't know if you understand how checks work, but they do take a little time to clear (i.e. for the money to be transferred from the issuer's bank to the receiver's bank). It's a hell of a lot faster than it used to be, but it still takes time.
If the check was generated in the same city then it will only take a few seconds to a few minutes to clear. Checks generated outside your region might take an hour or two, but it can take up to several days for these checks to clear. International checks and cashier's checks can take up to a month to clear. Do you realize the economic impact there would be if banks withheld cash for a month waiting for a check to clear? It would be insane, the damage done to the economy would be far worse than the damage done by fraudsters. Your response is a typical over-reaction to fraud. Because of the way checks work, if a check bounces the bank has the right to pull that money back - that way the fraudster screwed you over, not the bank.
In this case I'm guessing it only took a day or two at most, because the wire transfer was still in-progress to his Hong-Kong bank when the check bounced.
Go rent the movie "Catch Me If You Can", it's a very entertaining movie based on the life story of Frank Abignali - one of the most famous check fraudsters of all time. They do a very good job explaining how checks work and how a guy can run off with loads of cash if his fake check passes initial muster.
If there is a clear line of sight even a weak wireless signal can go for hundreds of yards, and potentially a hell of a lot farther. I believe the current record for an unamplified wireless link is over 55 miles.
A standard wireless AP broadcasting well within normal limits with a standard antenna that is mounted on top of an office building can have a very significant range. I wouldn't expect to see it out past a mile, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were accessible inside that range.
If you are getting collisions at all, you probably aren't using a switch.
That's the point of a switch - it separates the collision domains out to each individual device - the only thing a computer connected to a switch can have collision issues with is itself.
Oddly enough, that's not impossible. If the switch port and network card were not able to auto-negotiate their connection for some reason and the switch is running at say full duplex and the network card is running at half duplex you will see a hell of a lot of collisions. You may still get data through, but it will be occasional instead of perfect like a proper connection to a switch.
Haha, that's some serious marketing bullshit right there.
WEP is supposed to be equivalent to a wired connection - which takes physical access and a good deal of know-how to splice into. That's actually what WEP stands for - Wired-Equivalent Protocol, but it hasn't been equivalent to a wired connection in over a decade. It's still hard to physically hack a wire, but it's almost hard not to hack WEP. Seconds is all you need and it is done.
That's why WPA was created, but even it is slightly more vulnerable than a wire.
In all latin-based languages there is a phonetic alphabet only. This alphabet is made up of letters based on phonetic sounds. Using these phonetic letters and basic grammar rules you can correctly read any written word, whether you know what it means or not. You can then use a reference to find said words and look up their meaning.
In other words, the shape represents a specific sound (or set of sounds). Knowing the letters in the alphabet also means you know how to pronounce the words written in that alphabet.
Chinese, however, has no alphabet. It uses pictographs for the words, which are completely unrelated to its pronunciation and the only way to look them up in a reference is by searching for similarly constructed pictographs. They generally have base structures that all the pictographs are based on, and this is generally related in some way to the meaning of the word itself, but that can be so muddied that you would never figure it out. It also usually has nothing at all to do with how to pronounce the word. For example, I believe the word for Sunday involves rice patties. WTF? It's not pronounced the same as the word for rice patties, mind you, but it shares the base structure as rice patties. It's exactly the same kind of thing as Egyptian hieroglyphics - what the hell is "man facing left with palm face up at chest level" supposed to mean? How do you pronounce that? How do you look it up?
Japanese is a little easier, as they use both Chinese characters and their own alphabet, but learning the characters is rote memorization for every single word.
Completely off topic, but this is why the modern trend of teaching people to "read by sight" is such utter bullshit. The whole point of having an alphabet is so you can construct any word from a small number of symbols, making learning to write (and read) new words a breeze. If you can pronounce it you can probably spell it (grammar and spelling rules apply, of course), if you can spell it you can probably pronounce it. "Sight reading" completely breaks that because anybody who didn't pick up on the individual sounds each character makes (because the phonetic alphabet was not taught) is now stuck with a limited vocabulary that cannot be expanded upon without the same amount of training it would have taken to teach the alphabet phonetically in the first place!
That's why while they can technically read, with a vocabulary in the 1000-2000 word range about 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate. They can read those stupid sight-reading books like the dickens but heaven help them if they try to read the back of a food label.
That's bureaucracy for you, give a nobody a bit of power over someone else and half the time they'll turn into an asshole. This seems to be even more true if the person they are screwing has no recourse.
what he was found guilty of is that of obstructing the border guard from doing his job. and that part of the law is so vague, that simply asking what the problem is can be seen as obstruction.
You have every right to ask what the problem is when an officer tells you to do something. What you DON'T have a right to do is wait for an explanation before complying. Delayed compliance is non-compliance.
In the first case, he should have never gotten out of his car. Boarder patrol stops are fairly routine, generally the only reason a person will get out of their car in such a case is to be confrontational. That's going to set the patrol officers on edge immediately. Also, apparently Canadian police use the exact same procedure (keep the person in the car while they assess the situation), so saying "I didn't understand" is bullshit. He was being a confrontational asshole for some reason, and it bit him hard.
Cops don't fuck around - it's their life on the line, so if they have to decide whether you are a punk packing heat or just an asshole, they are going to assume you are packing heat and you'd better do exactly what they say in a timely fashion or expect to get some rough handling. If, after you've already set them on edge by getting out of the car in what would generally be considered a confrontational move, they tell you to get back in the car, and instead of moving you just stand there and ask "why?" you can expect things to go down hill fast. Just get in the fucking car and ask why on the way, don't be an ass.
The Jurors did say that the border guards over-reacted, but that does not change the fact that Watts was non-compliant until they got the cuffs out to arrest him. Like I said, this is potentially life or death for these guys, they don't have the luxury of being all polite and kind to every asshole out there because one of them could be a drug-runner willing to kill a couple cops to get away.
I don't know if you know this, but refusing to comply with a law enforcement official has a couple hundred years precedent stating that it amounts to criminal behavior.
As the juror said, two wrongs don't make a right. If you want to screw the cops, you behave like a model citizen and then sue the shit out of them when they abuse their position.
then the jury failed utterly to do its job.
I'm guessing you've never been on a jury before, and so have absolutely no idea what a jury is there for. Juries don't know the law. They aren't expected to. That's what the Judge is for. Judge and Jury act as two sides of the same coin. The Judge knows the law, but does not have the right to decide whether or not the law has been followed - that right is reserved for a jury of the defendant's peers. This is for the defendant's protection, as no man should have the power to be judge and jury.
So the Judge explains the decision making elements of the trial to the Jury, these are always extremely specific. He also explains that the ONLY things the Jury is to consider are elements directly related to the charges being prosecuted. The Judge is then there to handle the procedural side of the trial while the Jury listens. The officers were not on trial, Peter Watts was. There was absolutely no way for the Jury to consider the officer's conduct, their conduct was not on trial. Extenuating circumstances only come into play at sentencing, but they won't let you off the hook for committing a crime.
As much as you may not like it, not complying with an officer of the law is a crime (get out of the car, get down on the ground, put your hands on your head, etc), and Peter Watts definitely committed a crime in refusing to obey the officers. Now, he should be able to press charges against the officers for assault, but then it's up to the Prosecutor to bring a case against the officers. If they don't, he is free to sue the Attorney General's office, the Border Patrol, and the State for justice.
That the police assaulted him does not mean he gets to break the law, it means both he and the police broke the law and should be tried separately.
In other words, if you think this should have ended in jury nullification, you are a buffoon.
DirectX support for the XP desktop is an add-on feature, not an integral feature. In other words, the XP desktop is not itself capable of acceleration via DirectX, but it provides the proper interface to run apps that ARE written to take advantage of DirectX.
The Windows Vista and 7 desktops, being very post-DirectX, ARE able to be accelerated. Because of this, IE9 can take advantage of the desktop acceleration instead of having to write a whole new layer for the acceleration. Note that this is the exact same reason the flashy desktop effects in Vista and Win7 aren't available for XP. It's not because they hate XP, it's because computers have changed since XP was designed and there is now a fundamental flaw in XP for this sort of thing.
This limitation of XP apparently also means that multi-process applications - i.e. all major web browsers - are unable to share graphics information among processes, which means you either have a massive amount of overhead as your acceleration engine (which you had to write because there is no desktop acceleration) has to be loaded for each tab in the browser, or you just nix acceleration altogether.
We're getting to the point where they would have to develop a completely separate version of IE9 to support XP. If the point is to avoid having to write new code for the new operating systems, why the fuck would they write an entirely different version for the OS they have stopped supporting?
They already did this - there are actually two different products available. The price is a little steeper than $20 though.
One is called Windows Vista and ranges from $70-$300, and the other is called Windows 7 and ranges from $100-$350.
Seriously, if they have to re-write the fucking desktop to make it work correctly for a product that is in end-of-life support, they aren't going to do it. Good night, the OS is almost 10 years old now, it's tired, upgrade if you want the cool new features. That's what makes it an upgrade.
You do realize that XP was just a prettied up consumerized version of Win2k right? They used the same kernel, and most of the same code base. XP saw a number of improvements with SP1, SP2, and SP3 that Win2k never got.
I find it extremely difficult to say Win2k is better than XP without completely ignoring Win2k first. You have to imagine something that never existed in the first place to make that statement, because if you took pre-sp1 XP and turned off the eye-candy you essentially had Win2k. XP-SP3 is vastly improved over the original XP, they are almost different OS's.
That said, I agree that Win7 is significantly better than XP; I use XP, Vista, and Win7 and Win7 is the best hands down. I'm actually thinking of paying for a copy of 7 to upgrade my Vista laptop - the first time I will have bought a retail copy of an OS since Win98 (that's over a decade ago, for those who suck at counting).
Try running some OSX 10.0 software on your OSX 10.6 OS and you'll find a shitload of stuff that does not work.
Apple routinely breaks backwards compatibility, and they do it on purpose. It's a big FU to Mac software developers so that Apple can maintain complete control over their environment.
Microsoft, with the exception of Vista, bends over backwards to ensure compatibility from release to release. There is even some old Win98 software that still works just fine in Windows 7, that's friggin 12 years old! Stuff does eventually lose compatibility, but that is mostly because a change broke a vendor's code and the vendor didn't request a workaround from MS for the new OS. If they don't know about it they can't fix it. Apple, on the other hand, tells the vendors to buzz off, that it's their problem not Apple's - even though it is Apple's change that is breaking the functionality.
That said, you're right that eventually there must be progress, and since XP is now two versions old and in end-of-life support you can't expect new software to work out of the box. It's going to be a crapshoot, just like it is for Win2000 and Win98. Microsoft just tends to not be so cruel about it as Apple. Linux is generally the nicest about it, but eventually things must break.
There is a specific case of a YouTube founder posting copyright-infringing videos to boost YouTube's popularity.
The other founders disagreed with the practice, but it was well known among them and by Google that this was going on.
Now, I could still see them going forward with the purchase given the fact that they'd have the ability to shut the guy down with ease, but it sounds like they were contemplating not purchasing YouTube at all because of this. In the end they did make the purchase, and now Viacom is trying to say Google knowingly assisted copyright infringement. No doubt they are trying to argue that Google was promoting an environment where such things could occur, and if they did not immediately shut down this founder who they knew was infringing, then Viacom may have a case. Otherwise, though, I think it's all bullshit and will be tossed by any reasonable judge.
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To be a "prisoner of war" you need to be captured on a battle field and held by the enemy. In this case, the US is the enemy of the terrorists, so they would be our prisoners of war.
The fact is, everybody in Gitmo is a POW - that the government hasn't called them such is just a delaying tactic.
sugar catches more flies than vinegar ever did.
Looks like somebody never tried to catch flies with vinegar.
Vinegar is extremely effective at catching flies because it smells like rotting fruit (that's basically what it is, actually). Flies love rotting fruit a hell of a lot more than they like fresh fruit, in case you haven't noticed.
The classic trap is to fill a jar with vinegar and attach a funnel just large enough for the flies to get in but small enough to make it difficult to get out - the hole can be several times the size of the fly and still accomplish this. Once inside, the flies either drown trying to get the vinegar, or starve trying to escape. Either way it works very very well.
Honey works too, but you have to set the honey out on an open tray so the flies will land on it and stick, they aren't as attracted to it as vinegar so they won't chase it through a funnel like they will vinegar. If you try the funnel trick with sugar water you will probably come out empty handed.
Still, the point is to give them something they love and trap them with it, so your point about being nice to prisoners still works.
God that movie was hideous. The book is a Sci-Fi classic, and there is a mini-series that did it much much better. Please use either of those as your reference instead of the god-awful 80's movie. I love Patrick Stewart as much as anybody, but even he couldn't make up for that movie. It was just all wrong.
Wired money transfers and cashier's checks are essentially the same thing. Wired transfers are initiated by the payer at his bank, while cashier's checks are initiated by the payee at his bank.
In BOTH cases money is taken from the payer's account immediately. There is no way for a legitimate cashier's check to bounce, and there is no way for a legitimate wire transfer to bounce. You must have sufficient funds before the transaction can even be requested, and they are removed immediately.
In BOTH cases it takes time for the money to route from one bank to another bank. This can take up to 20 days. With wired transfers this process is initiated immediately after the payer requests the money be sent to the payee. With cashier's checks the transfer is delayed by however long it takes for the payer to send the payee the cashier's check so the payee can deposit it.
The disadvantage with wire transfers compared to cashier's checks is that funds from a cashier's check are released immediately while the banks deal with the actual money transfer (i.e. that potential 20 day wait), whereas with a wire transfer those funds are completely unavailable until the transfer is complete. The advantage with wire transfers is there is virtually no potential for fraud on the transfer itself, whereas the immediate release of funds does open a window for fraud with cashier's checks.
That's how this guy didn't lose any money, because it takes quite a while to wire funds to a bank in Hong-Kong - longer than it took for the lawyer's bank to realize the cashier's check was a fraud. So they canceled the transfer of $190,000, pulled back the $10,000, and nobody got screwed except out of their time. Had that 190,000 gone through, the lawyer would have been out $190,000 unless he had a very kind and understanding client in Hong-Kong who would be willing to send back that $190,000.
He did wait till it hit his account, that's where the scammer (almost) got him. Banks will release the funds for a cashier's check before the check clears, allowing to you go about your business as usual. This is generally a safe practice, but if the limbo period is a long time there is the potential to be scammed.
Cashier's checks are practically safer than cash. The bank teller will check to see if it is counterfeit, and if it is not (or if it is a very good counterfeit) the bank will release the funds immediately and then send the check (actually an image of the check) off to the issuing bank to complete the transfer. The only reason this fails is if the cashier's check itself was either stolen or a very good forgery. Insufficient funds is impossible unless the bank somehow went bankrupt in the time the check was issued to the time it was redeemed. The anti-counterfeit measures are as good or better than those used for cash, so counterfeiting is very hard to pull off.
If it is a large sum of money (and large is relative to your situation) and you haven't done business with the individual before, it's a good idea to put a hold on the check until it actually clears instead of assuming the money in your account is good. 99.99% of the time it will be, but that 0.01% could be a check large enough to bankrupt you. So put a hold on the check so the bank doesn't release the funds until the check clears, and you are completely safe.
If we change the law so this is the case, banks will be a lot more thorough about checking the validity of deposited checks. Trust me. :)
Since 99.99% of cashier's checks clear, you will end up harming the economy far more than you protect it, because banks will start withholding otherwise valid transfers for up to 30 days while the checks clear. Frankly, that would be devastating for the flow of business.
What you suggest is a naive over-reaction to a problem that can be correct with just a little care on the part of individuals receiving cashier's checks. The system in place already works great, and instead of shoving your opinion down everyone's through it gives businesses the option of taking a risk for a greater potential reward. Furthermore, if you've verified the person giving you the check, either by past business or other means, there is absolutely no reason not to trust the cashier's check. Period. Only initial, untrusted transactions should be held, and it should be the business's responsibility to protect themselves, not the bank's.
It's the same kind of naive over-reaction that has us taking off our shoes in airports because one guy tried and failed to bring down an airplane with a bomb in his shoes. The next guy just snuck the bomb in by hiding it in his underwear, what did taking off our shoes accomplish? Just heartache and humiliation for frequent fliers, that's all. Are we now going to have to start taking off our underwear and sending it through the airport scanner?
No, he didn't wait.
Banks will go ahead and transfer money into the depositor's account before the cashier's check clears if the check appears to be valid (i.e. is not obviously counterfeit), because 99.99% of the time they do clear and it's just efficient business.
You can, however, request a hold on the check and have the bank wait until the check actually clears before the bank transfers the money to your account. If you've never done business with an individual who is issuing you a $200k check, a hold is just plain smart.
All you have to do is say "And as soon as the check clears, we can wrap this up!" Your ass is now covered, and you are 100% guaranteed not to be screwed out of your money. That's what makes cashier's checks so great, as long as the check is legitimate it will not bounce. Only a counterfeit or stolen cashier's check will bounce. The same is not true for personal or business checks, which may have insufficient funds, or credit cards which may be stolen.
If you are willing to wait for the check to clear, cashier's checks are the safest form of money transfer. They are like a slow version of bank-to-bank wire transfers.
That's a foolish teller, they are normally better trained than that.
There is no problem with cashier's checks, you just need to understand how the system works a little bit. You can put a hold on the deposit at the bank until the check clears, and simply not continue your transaction until it does. If you don't have a reason to completely trust the individual issuing the check, you should do this every time.
Cashier's checks are MUCH safer than personal checks, and are as safe or safer than credit. As long as the check itself is legitimate, you are 100% guaranteed to receive the value of the check because the issuing bank has already received the money for the check, and is simply waiting for another bank to complete the transfer. Really the only things safer than a cashier's check are a wire transfer and straight-up cash. The cashiers check must either be stolen from the bank or counterfeited, both of which are difficult to pull off (but obviously not impossible). That's why you see cashier's check scams for $200k and not $50 or something piddly like that.
Where you run into trouble is in seeing the cash in your account and assuming it is ok. Usually it is, but if that check is bogus and somehow made it past the initial screening by the tellers, then that money in your account isn't legitimately there, and the bank will take it back when the check doesn't clear.
Seriously, if you are receiving a cashier's check for something, you can protect yourself 100% by just waiting for it to clear (and tell the dumbass teller that you want to wait anyway if they say you don't need to) before continuing whatever the transaction may be. You can't get better protection from anything else but cash. In a way they are safer than cash, because if stolen they are worthless to the thief. You just have to go through the bank to get your money back.
That's not true, because money is actually transferred. The "bounce" happens when the recipient's bank contacts the issuer's bank and the issuer's bank says "Who'sajiggawhat? We never issued that check (or the account doesn't exist, or whatever else the scam may be), we aren't transferring the money." The check did not clear, it bounced.
It's a verification process - if it passes the process the money is transferred, if it does not the money is not transferred. If the money is not transferred to the receiving bank, then the check "bounced" and the bank pulls the money back out of the account of the guy who deposited the check.
Depending on where the banks are located in relation to each other, this process can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 23 days.
Checks most certainly do "clear", they clear when the bank to bank transfer is made, and not before. There is no such thing as "failing to bounce". You bounce, or you clear, one or the other, the only limbo state is in the time it takes to verify the check and transfer the money. In fact, the only correct way to say it would be "failing to clear" because the "bounce" is actually a failure to pass the verification process and a failure to transfer the money from bank to bank.
Now, the bank may not notify you that the check cleared, only that it bounced. That's an entirely different matter, and you can put a hold on the deposit with instructions for the bank to wait until the check clears before depositing the money.
That's what your friend should have done. The fraudster used a routing trick to delay the verification process as long as possible, letting the check go through bank after bank before the recipient's bank realizes the issuing bank is bogus, or the check itself is bogus. So you put a hold on the deposit and wait for the check to clear before handing over the keys to the car. When you do this, the fraudster will immediately get out of dodge ASAP, because they know they'll be caught red handed.
This is the way you should ALWAYS handle transactions with an individual or company you have no good reason to trust. Just because the money is in your account doesn't mean it's yours yet, if the check bounces the bank takes that money back. The same can be done with credit on expensive items, and you're actually at a bigger risk taking credit, because if that card is stolen you're screwed, and you don't get the option to wait for credit to clear after the initial acceptance.
The rest of the civilized world uses cashier's checks all the time, you're just a dumbass who has no idea what he's talking about.
Are you really going to put a 200,000 purchase on credit for someone you've never done business with? Seriously? Are you that stupid? Do you really think Visa is going to eat that much money?
Cashier's checks are safe provided you allow the check to clear before doing anything with the money. They are much harder to counterfeit (though certainly not impossible) than personal or business checks, and will ultimately always be proven true or fake. That's how the scammers get you though, it's not that the system didn't work flawlessly, it's that it worked slowly and people are impatient.
The classic con is to send the check, feign a crisis and have the seller cancel the order and send back the cash before the initial check clears. The seller sees the cash in his account, thinks he's safe, and when your bogus check bounces, the seller is out the entire (or at least most, you can sweeten the pot by offering to compensate for their wasted time and effort) value of the check because they've just legitimately transferred all that money back to you. Meanwhile the bank pulls the money out of your account and says "Sorry, that money was never really yours, you got scammed."
Cashier's checks are generally safer than personal checks because it must be either a fake check (chance of being caught by the teller) or a stolen check from the bank (gotta be in a position of trust at bank) in order to do the scam. That's because you pay the money up front for the check, instead of waiting for it to be pulled from your account when the recipient redeems it.
It still has to be transferred from the issuing bank though, and that can take up to a month, during which time the receiving bank will treat the money as though it has already been received.
The moral of the story is:
If you don't personally know the individual sending the check (cashier's or otherwise), or otherwise have a strong reason to trust the sender, always wait for the check to clear before assuming that money is yours.
I don't know if you understand how checks work, but they do take a little time to clear (i.e. for the money to be transferred from the issuer's bank to the receiver's bank). It's a hell of a lot faster than it used to be, but it still takes time.
If the check was generated in the same city then it will only take a few seconds to a few minutes to clear. Checks generated outside your region might take an hour or two, but it can take up to several days for these checks to clear. International checks and cashier's checks can take up to a month to clear. Do you realize the economic impact there would be if banks withheld cash for a month waiting for a check to clear? It would be insane, the damage done to the economy would be far worse than the damage done by fraudsters. Your response is a typical over-reaction to fraud. Because of the way checks work, if a check bounces the bank has the right to pull that money back - that way the fraudster screwed you over, not the bank.
In this case I'm guessing it only took a day or two at most, because the wire transfer was still in-progress to his Hong-Kong bank when the check bounced.
Go rent the movie "Catch Me If You Can", it's a very entertaining movie based on the life story of Frank Abignali - one of the most famous check fraudsters of all time. They do a very good job explaining how checks work and how a guy can run off with loads of cash if his fake check passes initial muster.
If there is a clear line of sight even a weak wireless signal can go for hundreds of yards, and potentially a hell of a lot farther. I believe the current record for an unamplified wireless link is over 55 miles.
A standard wireless AP broadcasting well within normal limits with a standard antenna that is mounted on top of an office building can have a very significant range. I wouldn't expect to see it out past a mile, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were accessible inside that range.
If you are getting collisions at all, you probably aren't using a switch.
That's the point of a switch - it separates the collision domains out to each individual device - the only thing a computer connected to a switch can have collision issues with is itself.
Oddly enough, that's not impossible. If the switch port and network card were not able to auto-negotiate their connection for some reason and the switch is running at say full duplex and the network card is running at half duplex you will see a hell of a lot of collisions. You may still get data through, but it will be occasional instead of perfect like a proper connection to a switch.
Haha, that's some serious marketing bullshit right there.
WEP is supposed to be equivalent to a wired connection - which takes physical access and a good deal of know-how to splice into. That's actually what WEP stands for - Wired-Equivalent Protocol, but it hasn't been equivalent to a wired connection in over a decade. It's still hard to physically hack a wire, but it's almost hard not to hack WEP. Seconds is all you need and it is done.
That's why WPA was created, but even it is slightly more vulnerable than a wire.
In all latin-based languages there is a phonetic alphabet only. This alphabet is made up of letters based on phonetic sounds. Using these phonetic letters and basic grammar rules you can correctly read any written word, whether you know what it means or not. You can then use a reference to find said words and look up their meaning.
In other words, the shape represents a specific sound (or set of sounds). Knowing the letters in the alphabet also means you know how to pronounce the words written in that alphabet.
Chinese, however, has no alphabet. It uses pictographs for the words, which are completely unrelated to its pronunciation and the only way to look them up in a reference is by searching for similarly constructed pictographs. They generally have base structures that all the pictographs are based on, and this is generally related in some way to the meaning of the word itself, but that can be so muddied that you would never figure it out. It also usually has nothing at all to do with how to pronounce the word. For example, I believe the word for Sunday involves rice patties. WTF? It's not pronounced the same as the word for rice patties, mind you, but it shares the base structure as rice patties. It's exactly the same kind of thing as Egyptian hieroglyphics - what the hell is "man facing left with palm face up at chest level" supposed to mean? How do you pronounce that? How do you look it up?
Japanese is a little easier, as they use both Chinese characters and their own alphabet, but learning the characters is rote memorization for every single word.
Completely off topic, but this is why the modern trend of teaching people to "read by sight" is such utter bullshit. The whole point of having an alphabet is so you can construct any word from a small number of symbols, making learning to write (and read) new words a breeze. If you can pronounce it you can probably spell it (grammar and spelling rules apply, of course), if you can spell it you can probably pronounce it. "Sight reading" completely breaks that because anybody who didn't pick up on the individual sounds each character makes (because the phonetic alphabet was not taught) is now stuck with a limited vocabulary that cannot be expanded upon without the same amount of training it would have taken to teach the alphabet phonetically in the first place!
That's why while they can technically read, with a vocabulary in the 1000-2000 word range about 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate. They can read those stupid sight-reading books like the dickens but heaven help them if they try to read the back of a food label.
That's bureaucracy for you, give a nobody a bit of power over someone else and half the time they'll turn into an asshole. This seems to be even more true if the person they are screwing has no recourse.
what he was found guilty of is that of obstructing the border guard from doing his job. and that part of the law is so vague, that simply asking what the problem is can be seen as obstruction.
You have every right to ask what the problem is when an officer tells you to do something. What you DON'T have a right to do is wait for an explanation before complying. Delayed compliance is non-compliance.
In the first case, he should have never gotten out of his car. Boarder patrol stops are fairly routine, generally the only reason a person will get out of their car in such a case is to be confrontational. That's going to set the patrol officers on edge immediately. Also, apparently Canadian police use the exact same procedure (keep the person in the car while they assess the situation), so saying "I didn't understand" is bullshit. He was being a confrontational asshole for some reason, and it bit him hard.
Cops don't fuck around - it's their life on the line, so if they have to decide whether you are a punk packing heat or just an asshole, they are going to assume you are packing heat and you'd better do exactly what they say in a timely fashion or expect to get some rough handling. If, after you've already set them on edge by getting out of the car in what would generally be considered a confrontational move, they tell you to get back in the car, and instead of moving you just stand there and ask "why?" you can expect things to go down hill fast. Just get in the fucking car and ask why on the way, don't be an ass.
The Jurors did say that the border guards over-reacted, but that does not change the fact that Watts was non-compliant until they got the cuffs out to arrest him. Like I said, this is potentially life or death for these guys, they don't have the luxury of being all polite and kind to every asshole out there because one of them could be a drug-runner willing to kill a couple cops to get away.
I don't know if you know this, but refusing to comply with a law enforcement official has a couple hundred years precedent stating that it amounts to criminal behavior.
As the juror said, two wrongs don't make a right. If you want to screw the cops, you behave like a model citizen and then sue the shit out of them when they abuse their position.
then the jury failed utterly to do its job.
I'm guessing you've never been on a jury before, and so have absolutely no idea what a jury is there for. Juries don't know the law. They aren't expected to. That's what the Judge is for. Judge and Jury act as two sides of the same coin. The Judge knows the law, but does not have the right to decide whether or not the law has been followed - that right is reserved for a jury of the defendant's peers. This is for the defendant's protection, as no man should have the power to be judge and jury.
So the Judge explains the decision making elements of the trial to the Jury, these are always extremely specific. He also explains that the ONLY things the Jury is to consider are elements directly related to the charges being prosecuted. The Judge is then there to handle the procedural side of the trial while the Jury listens. The officers were not on trial, Peter Watts was. There was absolutely no way for the Jury to consider the officer's conduct, their conduct was not on trial. Extenuating circumstances only come into play at sentencing, but they won't let you off the hook for committing a crime.
As much as you may not like it, not complying with an officer of the law is a crime (get out of the car, get down on the ground, put your hands on your head, etc), and Peter Watts definitely committed a crime in refusing to obey the officers. Now, he should be able to press charges against the officers for assault, but then it's up to the Prosecutor to bring a case against the officers. If they don't, he is free to sue the Attorney General's office, the Border Patrol, and the State for justice.
That the police assaulted him does not mean he gets to break the law, it means both he and the police broke the law and should be tried separately.
In other words, if you think this should have ended in jury nullification, you are a buffoon.
DirectX support for the XP desktop is an add-on feature, not an integral feature. In other words, the XP desktop is not itself capable of acceleration via DirectX, but it provides the proper interface to run apps that ARE written to take advantage of DirectX.
The Windows Vista and 7 desktops, being very post-DirectX, ARE able to be accelerated. Because of this, IE9 can take advantage of the desktop acceleration instead of having to write a whole new layer for the acceleration. Note that this is the exact same reason the flashy desktop effects in Vista and Win7 aren't available for XP. It's not because they hate XP, it's because computers have changed since XP was designed and there is now a fundamental flaw in XP for this sort of thing.
This limitation of XP apparently also means that multi-process applications - i.e. all major web browsers - are unable to share graphics information among processes, which means you either have a massive amount of overhead as your acceleration engine (which you had to write because there is no desktop acceleration) has to be loaded for each tab in the browser, or you just nix acceleration altogether.
We're getting to the point where they would have to develop a completely separate version of IE9 to support XP. If the point is to avoid having to write new code for the new operating systems, why the fuck would they write an entirely different version for the OS they have stopped supporting?
They already did this - there are actually two different products available. The price is a little steeper than $20 though.
One is called Windows Vista and ranges from $70-$300, and the other is called Windows 7 and ranges from $100-$350.
Seriously, if they have to re-write the fucking desktop to make it work correctly for a product that is in end-of-life support, they aren't going to do it. Good night, the OS is almost 10 years old now, it's tired, upgrade if you want the cool new features. That's what makes it an upgrade.
Windows 2000 was far better than XP
You do realize that XP was just a prettied up consumerized version of Win2k right? They used the same kernel, and most of the same code base. XP saw a number of improvements with SP1, SP2, and SP3 that Win2k never got.
I find it extremely difficult to say Win2k is better than XP without completely ignoring Win2k first. You have to imagine something that never existed in the first place to make that statement, because if you took pre-sp1 XP and turned off the eye-candy you essentially had Win2k. XP-SP3 is vastly improved over the original XP, they are almost different OS's.
That said, I agree that Win7 is significantly better than XP; I use XP, Vista, and Win7 and Win7 is the best hands down. I'm actually thinking of paying for a copy of 7 to upgrade my Vista laptop - the first time I will have bought a retail copy of an OS since Win98 (that's over a decade ago, for those who suck at counting).
I don't know if you know this, but Netbooks are coming out with Windows 7 on them now because it runs smoother than both XP and Vista.
So they can get their web to work AND 720p performance. :)
Try running some OSX 10.0 software on your OSX 10.6 OS and you'll find a shitload of stuff that does not work.
Apple routinely breaks backwards compatibility, and they do it on purpose. It's a big FU to Mac software developers so that Apple can maintain complete control over their environment.
Microsoft, with the exception of Vista, bends over backwards to ensure compatibility from release to release. There is even some old Win98 software that still works just fine in Windows 7, that's friggin 12 years old! Stuff does eventually lose compatibility, but that is mostly because a change broke a vendor's code and the vendor didn't request a workaround from MS for the new OS. If they don't know about it they can't fix it. Apple, on the other hand, tells the vendors to buzz off, that it's their problem not Apple's - even though it is Apple's change that is breaking the functionality.
That said, you're right that eventually there must be progress, and since XP is now two versions old and in end-of-life support you can't expect new software to work out of the box. It's going to be a crapshoot, just like it is for Win2000 and Win98. Microsoft just tends to not be so cruel about it as Apple. Linux is generally the nicest about it, but eventually things must break.
Copyright Infringement has equaled piracy for the last 400 years, get over it.
Hit up wikipedia for "Copyright Infringement" if you don't believe me, the two terms have been related since 1603.
In other words:
copyright infringement = piracy
There is a specific case of a YouTube founder posting copyright-infringing videos to boost YouTube's popularity.
The other founders disagreed with the practice, but it was well known among them and by Google that this was going on.
Now, I could still see them going forward with the purchase given the fact that they'd have the ability to shut the guy down with ease, but it sounds like they were contemplating not purchasing YouTube at all because of this. In the end they did make the purchase, and now Viacom is trying to say Google knowingly assisted copyright infringement. No doubt they are trying to argue that Google was promoting an environment where such things could occur, and if they did not immediately shut down this founder who they knew was infringing, then Viacom may have a case. Otherwise, though, I think it's all bullshit and will be tossed by any reasonable judge.