Not a problem, Sricetx. It had seemed odd to me at the time to only be referencing 48 states, but it was the word "contiguous" that had stuck in my mind.
Actually I do have access to amazon.com from the UK - I just can't access this particular service.
You're quite right about my error, however - I did miss out the extra note about these other states. I'd been trying to quote it from memory.
The exact message that's displayed to me is as below:
We have detected that you are not located within the US. Due to licensing restrictions Amazon Video On Demand customers must located be in the United States (the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia) when viewing videos online.
$2 for a TV show? I'd pay that if the quality is as good as you'd be able to download from TPB (ie. hidef - ~1GB for 45 minutes of video).
However, like most of these useful ideas, I can't get it in the UK. I can see no mention of this service on Amazon.co.uk. and the.com site blocks access outside of the 48 contiguous states.
Cheques in the UK are guaranteed by their banks (on the most part) for up to 100GBP. However they're so open to fraud that many retailers just won't accept them as payment.
Even the larger retail chains are stopping taking cheques.
I say 'discount', of course it's really an extra fee for doing the work yourself.
I'd have to disagree. The reason for the extra charge is because non-DD customers are a higher liability. A tiny minority of DD customers will go overdue on a payment, whereas it's considerably more likely for a non-DD customer to miss a payment. The charges for not paying by DD are typically to offset the subsequent costs to the company to pursue and collect late payments.
As for damage to your credit rating, or getting charges from your bank if you become overdrawn due to a charging error, the Direct Debit Guarantee protects you against all that.
You're notified in advance of changes to your usual charge (ie. you're invoice, which tells you when and how much money will be taken), and you can cancel the arrangement before the money is taken if you so desire. The company charging you are liable for overcharges to your account, including associated banking charges where applicable.
Even if you later discover incorrect or fraudulent charges being made to your account via DD, your bank can reverse every single direct debit payment ever charged to your account by a company, given sufficient cause.
While the system, like any other, is not perfect and open to some abuse, UK legislation and Banking Codes ultimately protect you.
If nothing else, it's certainly more geeky than archaic and outdated forms of payment like cheques and paper money.
Or perhaps more so that his genius is such that he is quickly understand simple and archaic technologies. As I recall he didn't type properly, and had a good look at the keyboard before starting to type.
Perhaps my point relates more to discussions on AI, but we shouldn't forget that in our endeavours to have computers match our abilities in fields such as voice recognition, we ourselves are far from having the 100% proficiency at performing these tasks that we expect computers to achieve.
I consider myself to be a good English speaker but I've had plenty of conversations - especially when I cannot see a person's face (such as on the telephone, or over Teamspeak and the like) - where I've been quite unable to understand what someone has said to me, even when they themselves are also native speakers of English.
So perhaps we are setting ourselves a goal, to teach computers to understand spoken languages, that we can never achieve as we don't have the means to do this ourselves.
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What a shame that my computer is "broken" and sends a 240V blast through its USB ports...
Ahhh, so we finally found that pesky God particle? :P
Not a problem, Sricetx. It had seemed odd to me at the time to only be referencing 48 states, but it was the word "contiguous" that had stuck in my mind.
Actually I do have access to amazon.com from the UK - I just can't access this particular service.
You're quite right about my error, however - I did miss out the extra note about these other states. I'd been trying to quote it from memory.
The exact message that's displayed to me is as below:
We have detected that you are not located within the US. Due to licensing restrictions Amazon Video On Demand customers must located be in the United States (the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia) when viewing videos online.
$2 for a TV show? I'd pay that if the quality is as good as you'd be able to download from TPB (ie. hidef - ~1GB for 45 minutes of video).
However, like most of these useful ideas, I can't get it in the UK. I can see no mention of this service on Amazon.co.uk. and the .com site blocks access outside of the 48 contiguous states.
Ah well, free wins!
I can't imagine anything more annoying.
Cheques in the UK are guaranteed by their banks (on the most part) for up to 100GBP. However they're so open to fraud that many retailers just won't accept them as payment.
Even the larger retail chains are stopping taking cheques.
I say 'discount', of course it's really an extra fee for doing the work yourself.
I'd have to disagree. The reason for the extra charge is because non-DD customers are a higher liability. A tiny minority of DD customers will go overdue on a payment, whereas it's considerably more likely for a non-DD customer to miss a payment. The charges for not paying by DD are typically to offset the subsequent costs to the company to pursue and collect late payments.
As for damage to your credit rating, or getting charges from your bank if you become overdrawn due to a charging error, the Direct Debit Guarantee protects you against all that.
You're notified in advance of changes to your usual charge (ie. you're invoice, which tells you when and how much money will be taken), and you can cancel the arrangement before the money is taken if you so desire. The company charging you are liable for overcharges to your account, including associated banking charges where applicable.
Even if you later discover incorrect or fraudulent charges being made to your account via DD, your bank can reverse every single direct debit payment ever charged to your account by a company, given sufficient cause.
While the system, like any other, is not perfect and open to some abuse, UK legislation and Banking Codes ultimately protect you.
If nothing else, it's certainly more geeky than archaic and outdated forms of payment like cheques and paper money.
At last, something to protect me against those bastards that keep ganking me!
Or perhaps more so that his genius is such that he is quickly understand simple and archaic technologies. As I recall he didn't type properly, and had a good look at the keyboard before starting to type.
Perhaps my point relates more to discussions on AI, but we shouldn't forget that in our endeavours to have computers match our abilities in fields such as voice recognition, we ourselves are far from having the 100% proficiency at performing these tasks that we expect computers to achieve.
I consider myself to be a good English speaker but I've had plenty of conversations - especially when I cannot see a person's face (such as on the telephone, or over Teamspeak and the like) - where I've been quite unable to understand what someone has said to me, even when they themselves are also native speakers of English.
So perhaps we are setting ourselves a goal, to teach computers to understand spoken languages, that we can never achieve as we don't have the means to do this ourselves.