Sleazy banks and "computer problems..."
on
Stealth Inflation
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Household Bank, a major player in the screw-the-poor subprime market, has been caught for this kind of thing. But I've heard stories of even worse.
A friend of mine is a financial planner, and now whistleblower. She's brought several of these sleazy operators into court and won.
A couple of her clients with recent bankruptcies have Household Bank credit cards. They're always having problems with web payments or automatic debits going through, being assessed usurous late fees, and then overlimit fees when the late fees put them over their suddenly-lowered limit. My friend suspects these "problems" are carefully programmed into the system, and has been gathering evidence to support this. So if anyone from Household is reading, we're on to you!
One of the most egregious examples of this is the "destination charge" tacked on to the price of a new car. This was originally because a dealership further away from the factory had to pay much higher shipping fees to get their stock. But then they decided the low-cost-shipping places were getting an unfair advantage, and people were shopping across state lines. So a law was passed making the destination charge the same all over. They could have passed another law requiring it be rolled into MSRP, but those whores in Congress were down on their knees in front of the auto industry again.
FYI, it costs about $200,000 to train a doctor. That's like a median US home price mortgage, but without the house. Show me *just one* other profession requiring this kind of investment...
Well, maybe a fighter pilot, but for that the taxpayers pick up the tab.
...and they are indeed well educated, intelligent, and generally passionate about books and knowledge. But they're nerds to a T -- not the most creative, "with it" folks in the world -- and not the folks to whom one would look for innovation. When was the last time you heard of a librarian inventing anything, starting a successful new business, or actually *writing* one of those books they're so passionate about?
they are... voracious supporters of free speech and liberty.
Did I not say that? Librarians certainly contribute *lots* to society, but pioneers of business technology or early adopters of same they are not (and we are talking about librarians *finally* getting hip to eBay).
Seriously though, I would hope that organizations like Debian or Gentoo would have the brain power and tech resources to find a few leads that results in arrests. But why do I doubt that anyone will ever be arrested for any of these types of attacks?
Unfortunately, organizations like Debian or Gentoo are easy targets because they might not have the resources to track down the villains. Companies like Microsoft or Oracle could easily hire teams of security experts to do this. At non-profits or smaller companies, there's no money for it.
Your train of thought is typical of a cynical youth who has no idea of how libraries actually work. Nice try, though.
First of all, there is little or no commercial pressure to keep materials out of libraries because of fear of lost sales. That's too politically dangerous for any publisher -- of books, periodicals, or even music or film. No one would dare try it, because being caught would be PR suicide, as well as against the law. There are laws that protect libraries from this kind of pressure. The biggest hurdle to getting material is always cost, which has to be justified in terms of benefit to the library's membership.
Second, donated materials are a touchy issue as well. As you might imagine, there is great concern over who's doing the donating, and why. Political propaganda? Commmercial propaganda? Therefore all materials, donated, bought, or whatever, must fit into the librarian's preconceived master plan. Not only must propagandizing be prevented, but the appearance of it must be prevented too. So only a fraction of what is offered can be accepted. Libraries are important stewards of free speech. Part of that is playing umpire, and maintaining a healthy balance of viewpoints.
And with donated material, there's always a surplus of the most popular stuff. So most donated material gets sold, hopefully to the library's benefit. eBay and Amazon greatly facilitate this process, and can raise far more money than book sales ever did.
If there ever is commercial pressure, it will be against the selling of used materials competing with new book sales. Many a stink has been raised already with used CD and book stores, but as you've noted, there's nothing the bigcorps can do about it. Attacking libraries for this would be PR suicide too, so I wouldn't worry about it.
As it stands, people could probably make a pretty penny by going to the public library, buying up the books for a quarter a piece then selling them online. It would be a good way to turn a $50 investment into $500.. (I've been tempted, I've noticed several of the books I bought from Amazon marketplace have library marks on them. So there are people who've fallen for the temptation.)
I know people who have been doing this since eBay started. Library sales, garage sales, thrift stores, etc. Vinyl LPs have been a pretty hot item too.
Again, I don't know why it's taken libraries so long to figure this out, but then again they're not run by the snappiest people in the world either.
The reason site maps are useless on most sites is because if you have a web site with a good gui, it is actually mentally cheaper to click a few times and wait for pages to load, than be overwhelmed by hundreds of links at the same time.
Unfortunately, many site have such a bad GUI that I have to go to the site map to find what I'm looking for! It's unbelieveable how *bad* some sites are -- ones with big money behind them too. If they didn't have a site map (which is really a relic of the past) they'd be completely useless.
At that time, the "next major feature" he was hammering out was the ability to store your home directory and such on thumbdrives (Does Knoppix do this now?).
Yes! You can keep a persistent home directory anywhere you like, in a directory on a Windows system, or on an external drive. So you can carry "your own system" around with you, in the form of a Knoppix CD and a thumb drive, which you can put into any computer as needed. Very slick.
It's not just the short lifespan of a webpage... it's also the fact that the source isn't always reliable. Web publications are rarely given the same strict editorial process as most journal articles. The content might be just as good - or better - but they're also not given the same credibility.
The problem *is* the short lifespan of web pages. Even "reputable" publications move their pages around, or remove them entirely, breaking all links. I'm talking about major newspapers, scientific journals, etc. It's these people, the supposedly reputable ones, who need to do a better job. The way they're doing things now is indeed, "no way to run a culture."
They taught word processing, and how to use a spread sheet. It really didn't matter what system it was on because the schools never taught anything but the general concepts.
Well, word processing and spreadsheets are the same whether you're using Word or Excel, or OpenOffice, or Lotus, or Kwrite, or Gnumeric, or Abiword, or whatever. Almost anyone can sit down with any of these programs, and they all do the same things in about the same way. Once you understand the concepts, which takes about 10 minutes, it's just a matter of finding out which feature resides under which menu item, and even then they're all about the same.
I think most people simply don't realize this, so they don't bother to look at alternatives. I think if you handed them OpenOffice to use for a couple of weeks, they'd probably stick with it once they found out it was free (as in costs $0).
Personally, I won't use Word because it sucks -- too buggy, and tries to do too much automatically, which causes weird problems that are a pain to deal with. I prefer Framemaker, or DocBook, or TeX, and PDFs for printed pages.
I'd never buy a Lojack, or any other tracking scheme. If my car is stolen, I don't want it back! Who knows what they did to it? Even if cosmetic damage like dents, etc., can be repaired "good as new" (yeah, right), you never know what *else* happened to it -- motor overrevved, driven through a river, etc. So if my car disappears, I hope they never find it. I don't want it back. I'd rather have my insurance company buy me another one!
It's to scary to move to unfamiliar systems, and costs too much to make the switch. Oracle may be the devil, and an expensive one, but it's the devil most people know.
He's also a big fan of steel framed houses, since they're strong and easy to put up. And don't burn.
Oh yes they do -- not like you might think, but in fact a steel structure is more prone to collape in fire than a wood one. Steel will soften and fail at lower temperatures than it takes for wood to ignite. So steel structures can be very dangerous indeed when it comes to fire.
I always like the Qube, for its small size, quietness, and design. But one thing has always been missing -- backup. The Qube Pro had dual drives that could be used for RAID mirroring, but that's not real backup IMO. And an external drive kind of defeats the whole purpose. What I'd like to see is a Qube-type thing with a tape drive. I've been tempted to go into the business of building them for years -- hey, if Cobalt could get *$2B* for their little company, maybe I could be a couple hundred thou...
Try OpenACS. While there are many web publishing and collaboration toolkits out there, OpenACS comes closest to supporting this kind of thing already. It would be very easy to do exactly what you're describing. Go to the Q&A bboard on the OpenACS site, and post your question there. I'm sure you'll get several good ideas.
Try OpenACS. While there are many web publishing and collaboration toolkits out there, OpenACS comes closest to supporting this kind of thing already. It would be very easy to do exactly what you're describing. Go to the Q&A bboard on the OpenACS site, and post your question there. I'm sure you'll get several good ideas.
Here's more on what to do about Redhat on OpenACS. Some are definately leaning toward Debian, and more would if they could get Debian certified for Oracle.
one of the number one reasons i don't like debian is that packages in the stable branch are typically full point releases behind! have you seen the version of vi in their stable branch?
So use the "Testing" branch. The stuff there is as stable as the latest/greatest from Redhat, etc., anyway.
Not everyone needs the latest features, but they *do* need stable and reliable. Luckily Debian accomodates that.
Working in the enterprise world myself for about 4 years, it has been my experience that management is more willing to use Linux when it is backed by a well-known and "secure" name.
This is true. The idea is to make "Debian" that trusted name. Until now it's been Redhat, Sun, IBM, or whatever. There's no reason it can't be something else, including Debian.
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Household Bank, a major player in the screw-the-poor subprime market, has been caught for this kind of thing. But I've heard stories of even worse.
A friend of mine is a financial planner, and now whistleblower. She's brought several of these sleazy operators into court and won.
A couple of her clients with recent bankruptcies have Household Bank credit cards. They're always having problems with web payments or automatic debits going through, being assessed usurous late fees, and then overlimit fees when the late fees put them over their suddenly-lowered limit. My friend suspects these "problems" are carefully programmed into the system, and has been gathering evidence to support this. So if anyone from Household is reading, we're on to you!
One of the most egregious examples of this is the "destination charge" tacked on to the price of a new car. This was originally because a dealership further away from the factory had to pay much higher shipping fees to get their stock. But then they decided the low-cost-shipping places were getting an unfair advantage, and people were shopping across state lines. So a law was passed making the destination charge the same all over. They could have passed another law requiring it be rolled into MSRP, but those whores in Congress were down on their knees in front of the auto industry again.
FYI, it costs about $200,000 to train a doctor. That's like a median US home price mortgage, but without the house. Show me *just one* other profession requiring this kind of investment...
Well, maybe a fighter pilot, but for that the taxpayers pick up the tab.
...now, how about DEBTORS ANONYMOUS! Get that guy to rehab (again), before he ruins us all!
...and they are indeed well educated, intelligent, and generally passionate about books and knowledge. But they're nerds to a T -- not the most creative, "with it" folks in the world -- and not the folks to whom one would look for innovation. When was the last time you heard of a librarian inventing anything, starting a successful new business, or actually *writing* one of those books they're so passionate about?
they are... voracious supporters of free speech and liberty.
Did I not say that? Librarians certainly contribute *lots* to society, but pioneers of business technology or early adopters of same they are not (and we are talking about librarians *finally* getting hip to eBay).
Seriously though, I would hope that organizations like Debian or Gentoo would have the brain power and tech resources to find a few leads that results in arrests. But why do I doubt that anyone will ever be arrested for any of these types of attacks?
Unfortunately, organizations like Debian or Gentoo are easy targets because they might not have the resources to track down the villains. Companies like Microsoft or Oracle could easily hire teams of security experts to do this. At non-profits or smaller companies, there's no money for it.
To crack something that big would be a major black-hat ego trip, don't you think?
Only if you're some kind of anti-social fuckhead malcontent. Oh yeah, most of these guys are, at least the ones that I've met...
Your train of thought is typical of a cynical youth who has no idea of how libraries actually work. Nice try, though.
First of all, there is little or no commercial pressure to keep materials out of libraries because of fear of lost sales. That's too politically dangerous for any publisher -- of books, periodicals, or even music or film. No one would dare try it, because being caught would be PR suicide, as well as against the law. There are laws that protect libraries from this kind of pressure. The biggest hurdle to getting material is always cost, which has to be justified in terms of benefit to the library's membership.
Second, donated materials are a touchy issue as well. As you might imagine, there is great concern over who's doing the donating, and why. Political propaganda? Commmercial propaganda? Therefore all materials, donated, bought, or whatever, must fit into the librarian's preconceived master plan. Not only must propagandizing be prevented, but the appearance of it must be prevented too. So only a fraction of what is offered can be accepted. Libraries are important stewards of free speech. Part of that is playing umpire, and maintaining a healthy balance of viewpoints.
And with donated material, there's always a surplus of the most popular stuff. So most donated material gets sold, hopefully to the library's benefit. eBay and Amazon greatly facilitate this process, and can raise far more money than book sales ever did.
If there ever is commercial pressure, it will be against the selling of used materials competing with new book sales. Many a stink has been raised already with used CD and book stores, but as you've noted, there's nothing the bigcorps can do about it. Attacking libraries for this would be PR suicide too, so I wouldn't worry about it.
It is a good idea. So good, in fact, that I'm personally a little disappointed that the libraries are figuring it out so soon.
I'm pretty disappointed it's taken them so long. Unload the old, and free up some resources to bring in the new!
As it stands, people could probably make a pretty penny by going to the public library, buying up the books for a quarter a piece then selling them online. It would be a good way to turn a $50 investment into $500.. (I've been tempted, I've noticed several of the books I bought from Amazon marketplace have library marks on them. So there are people who've fallen for the temptation.)
I know people who have been doing this since eBay started. Library sales, garage sales, thrift stores, etc. Vinyl LPs have been a pretty hot item too.
Again, I don't know why it's taken libraries so long to figure this out, but then again they're not run by the snappiest people in the world either.
The reason site maps are useless on most sites is because if you have a web site with a good gui, it is actually mentally cheaper to click a few times and wait for pages to load, than be overwhelmed by hundreds of links at the same time.
Unfortunately, many site have such a bad GUI that I have to go to the site map to find what I'm looking for! It's unbelieveable how *bad* some sites are -- ones with big money behind them too. If they didn't have a site map (which is really a relic of the past) they'd be completely useless.
At that time, the "next major feature" he was hammering out was the ability to store your home directory and such on thumbdrives (Does Knoppix do this now?).
Yes! You can keep a persistent home directory anywhere you like, in a directory on a Windows system, or on an external drive. So you can carry "your own system" around with you, in the form of a Knoppix CD and a thumb drive, which you can put into any computer as needed. Very slick.
It's not just the short lifespan of a webpage... it's also the fact that the source isn't always reliable. Web publications are rarely given the same strict editorial process as most journal articles. The content might be just as good - or better - but they're also not given the same credibility.
The problem *is* the short lifespan of web pages. Even "reputable" publications move their pages around, or remove them entirely, breaking all links. I'm talking about major newspapers, scientific journals, etc. It's these people, the supposedly reputable ones, who need to do a better job. The way they're doing things now is indeed, "no way to run a culture."
They taught word processing, and how to use a spread sheet. It really didn't matter what system it was on because the schools never taught anything but the general concepts.
Well, word processing and spreadsheets are the same whether you're using Word or Excel, or OpenOffice, or Lotus, or Kwrite, or Gnumeric, or Abiword, or whatever. Almost anyone can sit down with any of these programs, and they all do the same things in about the same way. Once you understand the concepts, which takes about 10 minutes, it's just a matter of finding out which feature resides under which menu item, and even then they're all about the same.
I think most people simply don't realize this, so they don't bother to look at alternatives. I think if you handed them OpenOffice to use for a couple of weeks, they'd probably stick with it once they found out it was free (as in costs $0).
Personally, I won't use Word because it sucks -- too buggy, and tries to do too much automatically, which causes weird problems that are a pain to deal with. I prefer Framemaker, or DocBook, or TeX, and PDFs for printed pages.
I'd never buy a Lojack, or any other tracking scheme. If my car is stolen, I don't want it back! Who knows what they did to it? Even if cosmetic damage like dents, etc., can be repaired "good as new" (yeah, right), you never know what *else* happened to it -- motor overrevved, driven through a river, etc. So if my car disappears, I hope they never find it. I don't want it back. I'd rather have my insurance company buy me another one!
It's to scary to move to unfamiliar systems, and costs too much to make the switch. Oracle may be the devil, and an expensive one, but it's the devil most people know.
He's also a big fan of steel framed houses, since they're strong and easy to put up. And don't burn.
Oh yes they do -- not like you might think, but in fact a steel structure is more prone to collape in fire than a wood one. Steel will soften and fail at lower temperatures than it takes for wood to ignite. So steel structures can be very dangerous indeed when it comes to fire.
I always like the Qube, for its small size, quietness, and design. But one thing has always been missing -- backup. The Qube Pro had dual drives that could be used for RAID mirroring, but that's not real backup IMO. And an external drive kind of defeats the whole purpose. What I'd like to see is a Qube-type thing with a tape drive. I've been tempted to go into the business of building them for years -- hey, if Cobalt could get *$2B* for their little company, maybe I could be a couple hundred thou...
Even the government puts the official poverty line at $50k!
Try OpenACS. While there are many web publishing and collaboration toolkits out there, OpenACS comes closest to supporting this kind of thing already. It would be very easy to do exactly what you're describing. Go to the Q&A bboard on the OpenACS site, and post your question there. I'm sure you'll get several good ideas.
Try OpenACS. While there are many web publishing and collaboration toolkits out there, OpenACS comes closest to supporting this kind of thing already. It would be very easy to do exactly what you're describing. Go to the Q&A bboard on the OpenACS site, and post your question there. I'm sure you'll get several good ideas.
Here's more on what to do about Redhat on OpenACS. Some are definately leaning toward Debian, and more would if they could get Debian certified for Oracle.
one of the number one reasons i don't like debian is that packages in the stable branch are typically full point releases behind! have you seen the version of vi in their stable branch?
So use the "Testing" branch. The stuff there is as stable as the latest/greatest from Redhat, etc., anyway.
Not everyone needs the latest features, but they *do* need stable and reliable. Luckily Debian accomodates that.
Working in the enterprise world myself for about 4 years, it has been my experience that management is more willing to use Linux when it is backed by a well-known and "secure" name.
This is true. The idea is to make "Debian" that trusted name. Until now it's been Redhat, Sun, IBM, or whatever. There's no reason it can't be something else, including Debian.
...and now they're essentially closing (Cobalt's) shop. No wonder they're in trouble.