PayPal is great until it isn't.
I paid an eBay seller from my checking account, an e-Check.
A few days later eBay cancelled the sale and PayPal credited the amount withdrawn from my checking account to my PayPal account and then "permanently restricted" the account. No explanation why. Anything I can do? No. Can I have the money put back in my checking account? Nope, we are freezing it for 180 days.
180 days they redeposit the funds to the checking account.
So much for eBay and PayPal, 10 year history with both with zero issues. No communication, no explanation, no appeal, no nothing.
Money orders? Really? How does that easily prove you paid someone? You have a stub, you don't have a copy, you don't have proof it cleared, you have pretty much nothing.
A credit card is actually a pretty good way to pay, if you can find a mortgage lender that will take a credit card and not charge a surcharge please let me know ASAP.
With a credit card you get a statement that shows $x was paid to the Bank of ABC on a particular date. That's as good as a canceled check or a direct debit from your checking account. A direct debit from your checking account is also as good as a check and a better way of paying if you want to avoid late fees. With a check you are at the risk of the USPS and a late fee from your mortgage servicer and a ding on your credit report if the USPS doesn't come through or your mortgage servicer loses your check. Paying with a check via the mail is better than paying with a money order via the mail but not much.
If you have ever tried to get your money back from a lost money order you would understand the other risks of using money orders. It is time consuming and expensive.
Yeah, it is impossible to independently find a phone number for a bank. You would need something like a national phone directory or a way to search online and those haven't been invented yet.
You only read about the crooks that get caught so naturally you would conclude that crooks are stupid.
The smart ones go completely undetected, the slightly less smart ones are never identified but the crime is detected
The brilliant ones have enough money and lawyers to make their crime unprosecutable
I disagree
https://support.authorize.net/...
"When a brick and mortar merchant accepts a credit card, and the charge is authorized, and assuming the merchant conforms to regulation, the merchant will get paid, even if a stolen card is used."
http://creditcardforum.com/blo...
"Even if the millions of consumers burned in the most recent rash of breaches start clamoring for EMV cards, those cards will offer no extra defense unless retailers update their equipment. That will cost merchants money, but the card networks (Visa, MasterCard, AmEx and Discover) are giving both them and card-issuing banks an incentive to upgrade by October 2015. At that point, the networks will institute a “fraud liability shift.” That’s a fancy way of saying “adapt or pay.” If a consumer’s card is involved in fraud, whichever party involved in the transaction (the bank that issued the card or the merchant that accepted it) that didn’t upgrade to EMV will be held accountable."
Linked from the previous link a white paper titled Card Payments Roadmap in the United States: How Will EMV Impact the Future Payments Infrastructure?
http://www.smartcardalliance.o...
"The contact interface requires the issuance of contact chip cards and the installation of contact chip
readers at merchants and ATMs and is required if merchants wish to protect themselves from counterfeit
magnetic stripe liability shift. "
If merchants get protection from a liability shift if they convert to Chip and PIN then they must not currently have liability. Otherwise there is no shift.
When a clerk asks to check your ID they are likely not doing an address verification, they are looking at the ID and looking at the credit card and seeing if the names match. In California, the Song-Beverly Credit Card Act prevents a brick and mortar merchant from requesting your address under most circumstances.
With card present transactions, it isn't clear that merchants bear the loss on approved transactions where the merchant followed all the rules but the card was used fraudulently.
The banks do lose a lot of money due to fraudulent transactions and have much improved algorithms for detecting suspicious usage. They are pressing forward with a plan to force Chip and PIN on all merchants with merchants who don't install Chip and PIN terminal equipment no longer being protected from fraudulent transactions. The removal of this protection is pretty suggestive that merchants do not currently assume the burden from all fraudulent usage.
Did the people of Iraq become US citizens because we invaded Iraq, controlled their political process,...?
Israel in no way controls the day to day lives of residents of Gaza, Hamas does. Hamas makes the rules, Hamas enforced them, Hamas collects duties and taxes, Hamas spends them (on rockets, bombs and tunnels into Israel).
Israel certainly does control their borders with Gaza, as the US does with its border with Mexico, though with far less success.
Israel also is engaging in a blockade of Gaza due to Gaza's occupation and control by Hamas who engages in warfare with Israel. Israel has had limited success keeping weapons out of Gaza.
The solution to Gaza is simple, disarm, stop attacking Israel and join the world community in building a peaceful country. Israel, in return, needs to stop engaging in settling the West Bank in return for guarantees of security on the part of the world community. Gaza needs to disarm now and that requires the removal of Hamas.
The United States has made military incursions into numerous other countries in the past 50 years, that does not imply that any of those countries are claimed as our territory and in fact we do not claim them as our territory.
Israel does not claim Gazas being a territory of Israel, that is fact. It is true that Egypt, up until the 1990's claimed Gaza as its territory and Jordan claimed the West Bank as its territory up until 1988. The last two parties who fought over who controlled Gaza were Hamas and Fatah.
Israel has had no walls, soldiers or checkpoints in Gaza since they moved out in 2005.
Other than some previous brief incursions into Gaza when Hamas couldn't leave Israel alone.
It is not a territory that Israel claims.
Israel freed the Gaza from Egyptian rule in 1967, Egypt didn't relinquish their claim to Gaza for several more decades. In 1993 Gaza was placed under the control of the PNA and in 2005 Israel completely disengaged from Gaza, granting Gaza full political autonomy and forcibly removed all Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2005
In 2007 Hamas engaged in what would reasonably be described as a civil war with Fatah over control of Gaza and has ruled the Gaza since.
The history of bloodshed over Gaza has preceded Israel by many centuries.
Did we not attack Iraq infrastructure, including the Iraq power grid and telecommunications network at the start of the Iraq war?
Are Israel and Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, not at war?
Civilians suffer in war, that is why it is best to not go to war against a superior force or support a government that does so on your behalf.
Why would you take the gas station to small claims court for accepting a stolen credit card that was yours?
You dispute the charges with your bank and get the money back.
It is never the merchant that overrides your overdraft protection and allows the transaction, it is your bank.
Yep, Apple was doing something wrong, they got social engineered into not making the call to the bank themselves.
The validation is calling the bank yourself and not letting some scam artist pretend to call the bank and then hand you the phone or read off an alleged authorization code.
Visa/MC and the banks have security measures in place, merchants who follow the process aren't liable for loss from fraudulent cards.
Asking for ID provides no additional protection to merchants and to the extent they rely on it instead of established Visa/MC processes it can lessen security.
But you are correct that making customers spend an extra 30 secs digging out their ID and having some clerk eyeball it and hand it back is not easy and in fact that 30 secs times all the legitimate transactions is more costly than the RARE case of credit card fraud that could be prevented by asking for ID (which is easily circumvented).
The problem here is not the authorization code but that Apple didn't follow the proper procedure of contacting the bank for an override code themselves. There is no need for a secure override code.
What would be fair would be everyone accessing that tower fairly sharing its capacity without regard to what a user did last week.
Your notion of fairness is like someone standing in line at McDonalds being asked to move to the back of the line because they already bought a dozen hamburgers last week and McDonalds is really busy right now.
Please, drop the notion of "fair" and "heavy user". This has nothing to do with that and everything to do with Verizon actively attempting to punish people who are NOT heavy users but simply at the top end of the scale, which always exists, in order for Verizon to continue to advertise a product, 4G LTE, that they can't adequately provide the bandwidth they advertise (mega bits/sec when on average they only want to deliver single digit kbps).
We don't let car manufacturers advertise MPG based on coasting downhill with a wind at your back but we allow bandwidth providers to advertise instantaneous bandwidth that they only permit you to download at that rate for less than an hour a month.
Verizon and other providers like to pretend that such users are somehow abusing the system or otherwise getting more than their "fair share".
Is that really the case?
What is 4.7Gbytes of data monthly? It's about 100 kbytes a minute or about 1600 bytes per sec continuously. That's much slower than age old modem technology was capable of, not at all an excessive amount of data. Compare that rate with the data rates Verizon advertises for its 4G LTE plans, in excess of 2Mbyte/sec. So on an average basis they deliver less than 1/1000th of their advertised bandwidth on a continuous basis and Verizon wants to throttle. Or, to put it another way, they advertise speeds of 2Mbytes/sec but if you actually use that speed you'll be capped after 39 minutes.
Being able to use up your entire monthly cap in 39 minutes is absurd, even if Verizon is clearly noting the cap in its contracts and advertising.
Imagine what would happen if operators had to advertise allowed usage per sec instead of instantaneous data rates.
Verizon gets to advertise blazing fast 4G LTE service under Plan A that gives you 16 kbps.
Now that would be truth in advertising and give providers an incentive to both raise caps and increase capacity.
Love the blanket statement that "no current UAVs are safe enough to fly in populated areas", things like this must absolutely terrify you:
http://www.poweruptoys.com/
BTW, stay off the streets, where real danger exists.
Much less an expensive one that requires recharging frequently and doesn't do anything my phone doesn't already do and in fact requires my phone to do much of anything at all.
I took drone footage of my house for fun. If I decide to use it two years from now to sell my house that doesn't convert the legal-at-the-time drone usage to something illegal.
It isn't the chipset, it is the power coming into the computer.
To really open up the sound you need one of these $4500 babies:
http://www.lessloss.com/firewa...
So your issue with onboard audio is that you can't imagine how electronics can be designed to handle audio frequencies and signal levels in a PC environment?
The simple answer is it is simple to do so.
It's so many orders of magnitude easier than pulling a high frequency, extremely low amplitude cell phone signal out of the air where it is mixed up with a bazillion other RF signals. Yet your phone works.
What audio-whatever's need is a rigorous scientific test of their own ears. Those are the graphs I'd like to see next to each reviewer's glowing article about the increased fullness of sound they heard when they switched to oxygen free silver speaker cables. We build high quality audio equipment for humans with hearing that is similar to a cheap $2 set of headphones.
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PayPal is great until it isn't. I paid an eBay seller from my checking account, an e-Check. A few days later eBay cancelled the sale and PayPal credited the amount withdrawn from my checking account to my PayPal account and then "permanently restricted" the account. No explanation why. Anything I can do? No. Can I have the money put back in my checking account? Nope, we are freezing it for 180 days. 180 days they redeposit the funds to the checking account. So much for eBay and PayPal, 10 year history with both with zero issues. No communication, no explanation, no appeal, no nothing.
Money orders? Really? How does that easily prove you paid someone? You have a stub, you don't have a copy, you don't have proof it cleared, you have pretty much nothing. A credit card is actually a pretty good way to pay, if you can find a mortgage lender that will take a credit card and not charge a surcharge please let me know ASAP. With a credit card you get a statement that shows $x was paid to the Bank of ABC on a particular date. That's as good as a canceled check or a direct debit from your checking account. A direct debit from your checking account is also as good as a check and a better way of paying if you want to avoid late fees. With a check you are at the risk of the USPS and a late fee from your mortgage servicer and a ding on your credit report if the USPS doesn't come through or your mortgage servicer loses your check. Paying with a check via the mail is better than paying with a money order via the mail but not much. If you have ever tried to get your money back from a lost money order you would understand the other risks of using money orders. It is time consuming and expensive.
Yeah, it is impossible to independently find a phone number for a bank. You would need something like a national phone directory or a way to search online and those haven't been invented yet.
You only read about the crooks that get caught so naturally you would conclude that crooks are stupid. The smart ones go completely undetected, the slightly less smart ones are never identified but the crime is detected The brilliant ones have enough money and lawyers to make their crime unprosecutable
I disagree https://support.authorize.net/... "When a brick and mortar merchant accepts a credit card, and the charge is authorized, and assuming the merchant conforms to regulation, the merchant will get paid, even if a stolen card is used." http://creditcardforum.com/blo... "Even if the millions of consumers burned in the most recent rash of breaches start clamoring for EMV cards, those cards will offer no extra defense unless retailers update their equipment. That will cost merchants money, but the card networks (Visa, MasterCard, AmEx and Discover) are giving both them and card-issuing banks an incentive to upgrade by October 2015. At that point, the networks will institute a “fraud liability shift.” That’s a fancy way of saying “adapt or pay.” If a consumer’s card is involved in fraud, whichever party involved in the transaction (the bank that issued the card or the merchant that accepted it) that didn’t upgrade to EMV will be held accountable." Linked from the previous link a white paper titled Card Payments Roadmap in the United States: How Will EMV Impact the Future Payments Infrastructure? http://www.smartcardalliance.o... "The contact interface requires the issuance of contact chip cards and the installation of contact chip readers at merchants and ATMs and is required if merchants wish to protect themselves from counterfeit magnetic stripe liability shift. " If merchants get protection from a liability shift if they convert to Chip and PIN then they must not currently have liability. Otherwise there is no shift.
When a clerk asks to check your ID they are likely not doing an address verification, they are looking at the ID and looking at the credit card and seeing if the names match. In California, the Song-Beverly Credit Card Act prevents a brick and mortar merchant from requesting your address under most circumstances. With card present transactions, it isn't clear that merchants bear the loss on approved transactions where the merchant followed all the rules but the card was used fraudulently. The banks do lose a lot of money due to fraudulent transactions and have much improved algorithms for detecting suspicious usage. They are pressing forward with a plan to force Chip and PIN on all merchants with merchants who don't install Chip and PIN terminal equipment no longer being protected from fraudulent transactions. The removal of this protection is pretty suggestive that merchants do not currently assume the burden from all fraudulent usage.
Did the people of Iraq become US citizens because we invaded Iraq, controlled their political process, ...?
Israel in no way controls the day to day lives of residents of Gaza, Hamas does. Hamas makes the rules, Hamas enforced them, Hamas collects duties and taxes, Hamas spends them (on rockets, bombs and tunnels into Israel).
Israel certainly does control their borders with Gaza, as the US does with its border with Mexico, though with far less success.
Israel also is engaging in a blockade of Gaza due to Gaza's occupation and control by Hamas who engages in warfare with Israel. Israel has had limited success keeping weapons out of Gaza.
The solution to Gaza is simple, disarm, stop attacking Israel and join the world community in building a peaceful country. Israel, in return, needs to stop engaging in settling the West Bank in return for guarantees of security on the part of the world community. Gaza needs to disarm now and that requires the removal of Hamas.
The United States has made military incursions into numerous other countries in the past 50 years, that does not imply that any of those countries are claimed as our territory and in fact we do not claim them as our territory. Israel does not claim Gazas being a territory of Israel, that is fact. It is true that Egypt, up until the 1990's claimed Gaza as its territory and Jordan claimed the West Bank as its territory up until 1988. The last two parties who fought over who controlled Gaza were Hamas and Fatah.
Israel has had no walls, soldiers or checkpoints in Gaza since they moved out in 2005. Other than some previous brief incursions into Gaza when Hamas couldn't leave Israel alone.
It is not a territory that Israel claims. Israel freed the Gaza from Egyptian rule in 1967, Egypt didn't relinquish their claim to Gaza for several more decades. In 1993 Gaza was placed under the control of the PNA and in 2005 Israel completely disengaged from Gaza, granting Gaza full political autonomy and forcibly removed all Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2005 In 2007 Hamas engaged in what would reasonably be described as a civil war with Fatah over control of Gaza and has ruled the Gaza since. The history of bloodshed over Gaza has preceded Israel by many centuries.
Did we not attack Iraq infrastructure, including the Iraq power grid and telecommunications network at the start of the Iraq war? Are Israel and Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, not at war? Civilians suffer in war, that is why it is best to not go to war against a superior force or support a government that does so on your behalf.
Why would you take the gas station to small claims court for accepting a stolen credit card that was yours? You dispute the charges with your bank and get the money back. It is never the merchant that overrides your overdraft protection and allows the transaction, it is your bank.
Yep, Apple was doing something wrong, they got social engineered into not making the call to the bank themselves. The validation is calling the bank yourself and not letting some scam artist pretend to call the bank and then hand you the phone or read off an alleged authorization code.
Visa/MC and the banks have security measures in place, merchants who follow the process aren't liable for loss from fraudulent cards. Asking for ID provides no additional protection to merchants and to the extent they rely on it instead of established Visa/MC processes it can lessen security. But you are correct that making customers spend an extra 30 secs digging out their ID and having some clerk eyeball it and hand it back is not easy and in fact that 30 secs times all the legitimate transactions is more costly than the RARE case of credit card fraud that could be prevented by asking for ID (which is easily circumvented). The problem here is not the authorization code but that Apple didn't follow the proper procedure of contacting the bank for an override code themselves. There is no need for a secure override code.
Gaza is not "in their territorial boundaries"
What would be fair would be everyone accessing that tower fairly sharing its capacity without regard to what a user did last week. Your notion of fairness is like someone standing in line at McDonalds being asked to move to the back of the line because they already bought a dozen hamburgers last week and McDonalds is really busy right now. Please, drop the notion of "fair" and "heavy user". This has nothing to do with that and everything to do with Verizon actively attempting to punish people who are NOT heavy users but simply at the top end of the scale, which always exists, in order for Verizon to continue to advertise a product, 4G LTE, that they can't adequately provide the bandwidth they advertise (mega bits/sec when on average they only want to deliver single digit kbps). We don't let car manufacturers advertise MPG based on coasting downhill with a wind at your back but we allow bandwidth providers to advertise instantaneous bandwidth that they only permit you to download at that rate for less than an hour a month.
Verizon and other providers like to pretend that such users are somehow abusing the system or otherwise getting more than their "fair share". Is that really the case? What is 4.7Gbytes of data monthly? It's about 100 kbytes a minute or about 1600 bytes per sec continuously. That's much slower than age old modem technology was capable of, not at all an excessive amount of data. Compare that rate with the data rates Verizon advertises for its 4G LTE plans, in excess of 2Mbyte/sec. So on an average basis they deliver less than 1/1000th of their advertised bandwidth on a continuous basis and Verizon wants to throttle. Or, to put it another way, they advertise speeds of 2Mbytes/sec but if you actually use that speed you'll be capped after 39 minutes. Being able to use up your entire monthly cap in 39 minutes is absurd, even if Verizon is clearly noting the cap in its contracts and advertising. Imagine what would happen if operators had to advertise allowed usage per sec instead of instantaneous data rates. Verizon gets to advertise blazing fast 4G LTE service under Plan A that gives you 16 kbps. Now that would be truth in advertising and give providers an incentive to both raise caps and increase capacity.
Love the blanket statement that "no current UAVs are safe enough to fly in populated areas", things like this must absolutely terrify you: http://www.poweruptoys.com/ BTW, stay off the streets, where real danger exists.
There, shortened up Bennett's Blathering
Should make for some great YouTube videos. Maybe with a flat speaker under it with someone yelling for help.
Much less an expensive one that requires recharging frequently and doesn't do anything my phone doesn't already do and in fact requires my phone to do much of anything at all.
I took drone footage of my house for fun. If I decide to use it two years from now to sell my house that doesn't convert the legal-at-the-time drone usage to something illegal.
It isn't the chipset, it is the power coming into the computer. To really open up the sound you need one of these $4500 babies: http://www.lessloss.com/firewa...
So your issue with onboard audio is that you can't imagine how electronics can be designed to handle audio frequencies and signal levels in a PC environment? The simple answer is it is simple to do so. It's so many orders of magnitude easier than pulling a high frequency, extremely low amplitude cell phone signal out of the air where it is mixed up with a bazillion other RF signals. Yet your phone works.
What audio-whatever's need is a rigorous scientific test of their own ears. Those are the graphs I'd like to see next to each reviewer's glowing article about the increased fullness of sound they heard when they switched to oxygen free silver speaker cables. We build high quality audio equipment for humans with hearing that is similar to a cheap $2 set of headphones.