They're a cost of doing business, just like the credit card fees for most. If it was just the time to deposit, the overhead would be minimal and justifiable. But it's all the other factors that add up. There's the time to count up and reconcile the drawers, which can be anywhere from a few minutes by one employee to much longer if something's off and an investigation is required. Employee theft from the cash drawer, employee mistakes, and consumer scams take another bite.
BTW, that $15 can be a half to a full percentage point for a single store. A store doing a little over $1 million a year averages ~$3000 a day. One hour at $15 is a half-percent hit. Another hour doing accounting and reconciliation is another half-percent. We're already up to 40% of credit card fees, and that's without other losses. One $75 returned check is 2.5% of that day's sales, and that doesn't include collection costs. You can limit that through a TeleCheck or related subscription, but that's another fee that adds overhead.
As I said, it all adds up. Credit cards used to be additional overhead because they had to be accounted similar to checks, with the benefit that you just didn't have to worry about deposits when run electronically (carbons were different), but with integrated registers becoming so common, that's much less a factor.
I don't think the benefits are there. There's no, for lack of a better word, synergy, and huge antitrust issues. Apple offers some free data for iPads and a discount upgrade, but using it on other networks requires paying higher rates. Or maybe the network only works (or only fully works) with Samsung or Apple devices. There's already a lot of grumbling on both sides of the aisle in Congress over companies spilling into other silos. It's not enough to get the law changed yet, but it's enough that a company like Apple or Samsung (which also would have foreign ownership issues) would hesitate. It may even be the reason that Apple hasn't moved on the MVNO concept.
For general consumers, sure. But there were a lot of commercial applications where walkie-talkies didn't quite work. It also reduced the number of devices carried by construction workers, security guards, first responders, and a host of others.
It's not that weak. The law in question is 26 USC 6103(f) and it's pretty straightforward. In short, the chairs of three committees can request, and the Secretary of the Treasury "shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request." Returns with identifying information have to be reviewed in closed session unless the taxpayer agrees in writing otherwise. While the Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee provided a reason, there's nothing in the law stating that he had to.
The challenge the White House is bringing is one of separation of powers. They're fully aware that Chairman Neal can, under the Constitution, put the entire set of returns into the record and face no discipline other than whatever the House may choose to bring on him, which won't be much, if anything, under the current majority. It's an interesting approach, but I'm not sure it has the teeth necessary to get the courts (ultimately SCOTUS) to block the transfer. They may punt and not block the transfer but not force it, calling it a political question they're not willing to wade into. They may agree with the White House in part and say that Trump's returns while president must be turned over (since the stated reason is understanding how the IRS audits sitting presidents) but those previous are protected. They may go with the letter of the law and order the transfer. I expect a 5-4 decision with either Roberts or Cavanaugh (he's turning out to be less predictable than expected) casting the deciding vote if it goes against the president in some fashion.
That's an interesting viewpoint, and matches well with the FDIC account insurance limits. That's $250,000 per person per bank--anything over that is subject to loss if the bank fails completely and no buyer will take it over. That was one of the administrative wonders of the Great Recession, that the Fed managed to get so many failing banks to get bought by others with little (and I think actually no) loss of account value instead of failing outright and accounts being subject to FDIC coverage. I'm not sure if the Fed or FDIC buffered it at all with any form of direct cash infusion to offset asset differences of failed banks (ignoring quantitative easing, which was a related goal but different mechanism).
Subject to limits the bank itself sets. You're not going to be able to walk in and withdraw $100,000 in cash on a moment's notice just because you set the limit that high.
They don't cost you anything, but for the merchant, checks have overhead. Lots of people (including many on Slashdot) like to pretend there's no overhead to non-plastic transactions, but there are. Cash and checks require a secure place to hold them, cost to deposit them in employee time or a paid service like an armored car, and accounting time, and are subject to losses due to theft, mishandling, damage, counterfeiting, and NSF. This adds up to almost, if not more than, the processing cost for credit and debit cards. You get chargebacks occasionally on plastic, but there's a process to validate a transaction if it was real, and the advent of chipped cards has reduced fraud enough that the credit card companies themselves are letting stores do away with the (often unobserved anyway) practice of validating signatures. (Now, if we could just get chip-and-PIN...)
Sprint actually posted a profit for the last fiscal year, though I'm not sure how much that had to do with accounting tricks. They had a profitable mobile division before the Nextel purchase, but they never were able to take full advantage of the push-to-talk architecture that Nextel brought (and that was the entire reason for the $35 billion purchase). Then they made the extraordinarily bad decision to go with WiMax instead of LTE, blowing billions in the rollout and making them less desirable to customers because there would be no 4G roaming. It could have survived one or the other, but not both.
I'm not sure what DOJ's problem is, but I hope that the two companies are willing to address it. As you say, Sprint is effectively dead at this point (I say this as a 17-year customer of Sprint and Nextel), and will declare bankruptcy. They recently announced the sale of their HQ campus in Overland Park, KS, with a deal to lease it back. That's never a good sign. It's unclear how much more money Masayoshi Son is willing to pour into it, but it has to stop at some point. Then the remaining three companies will scramble to buy up parts of it at pennies on the dollar, and I doubt it will be as clean or have as even a result as the current merger could.
While it's true that many people begin their commute while it is still dark in the winter, a *vast* majority of them still get to experience at least some sunlight before heading indoors at the end of their commute.
I'm not sure where you're working that you get 15 minutes of time outside before work, but it seems to be fairly rare in my experience. Working at a large place might mean a sprawling parking lot but could also mean a parking structure. Even with the sprawling lots, it's rarely more than a few minutes to get inside. Before parking, you're in the car, which often means tinted glass so not much brighter than at home.
And in the winter, in those places with serious darkness issues, they're going to rush inside anyway to get out of the cold on most days, days that will also often be cloudy and rainy or snowy.
They're not going to change opening hours for one person, or even for a few people. Too much of the world works on expectations of business opening times of 9:00, not a shifting time throughout the year based on sunrise. It has these expectations because they work, otherwise you're back to cities 100 miles apart working on slightly different schedules based on their local sunrise and sunset. We got rid of that for a reason.
Hydrogen will never be a fuel for airliners. Compressed to 700 bar, it has a specific energy about 3.5 times greater than jet fuel but energy density one quarter that of jet fuel. The containment vessels will be too heavy to justify the increased specific energy, and it would require an increase in the volume (or a substantial reduction in maximum range) anyway.
GHIDRA is supposed to be released at RSA. They have a talk scheduled about it. I've seen some people eager (setting aside backdoor risks) for a strong competitor to IDA Pro and its ridiculously high prices.
Google was working on this a few years ago with the e2email project, but eventually canceled it--erm, I mean, moved it out to "community support." While I know that a lot of people think it was because it would get in the way of advertising, the project included a brutally honest threat assessment. I use it as an example of a thorough threat analysis as it's fairly lengthy but covers just one browser extension, not an entire browser, OS, or networking environment.
Thunderbird comes bundled with the Lightning calendar add-on and has since v38. IIRC, if you use an account that includes a calendar (Gmail, Yahoo, Exchange, etc.), it automatically syncs the calendar, though you can disable it.
Absent charges being brought and an extradition requested (which will result in Assange remaining in jail pending the outcome, which could take years), he'll be deported to either Australia (his native country) or Ecuador (where he was provided citizenship).
Whatever happens, no non-citizenship country will ever grant him entry and no judge will ever again grant bail.
If you find a piece of amazon property, and the system says "I don't recognize this as a property of amazon", what must you do?
That's not what the system says. It throws an error. Could be a problem with the barcode, could be a problem with the database entry, could be a problem with the scanner. The driver is expected to contact someone to determine how to handle it. There are procedures for it, and a driver that doesn't follow them probably shouldn't be delivering packages.
FedEx may have different rules, but Amazon contracts with a lot of small companies. Those are the type that normally don't want their vehicles going home with clients.
OTOH, FedEx always delivers my packages right to the door itself with a courtesy knock or doorbell. Same driver almost every time.
I don't have a problem with timing (maybe due to Prime), but I do have a problem with drivers literally throwing packages several feet. It hasn't happened on the last two deliveries, but my home office is right by the front door and I could hear packages hitting and tumbling, and they'd be scattered across the porch. Looking outside, the driver would be almost back to his truck. I once went to get some kind of ID so I could report it, but the driver completely ignored me. I got the plate number and reported it to the company and to Amazon. Didn't get a follow-up from either one, though.
It would be difficult for police to set up a network to do this throughout neighborhoods (cost, potential constitutional issues), but it's perfectly legal for a group of private civilians to collect images of the public, tag it almost however they want (as long as it's opinion-based), and upload it wherever they're allowed. They can label as suspicious a minority in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood, a teen in a beater car, or a child without his or her parents as long as they're stating an opinion about it being suspicious, completely ignoring (or oblivious) that the person recently moved in, the teen lives there and just bought their first car with their own money, or the kid is ten and playing just a couple of doors down from home. Having police respond to these wastes resources and contributes to the further deterioration of neighborhood relations.
Crafting laws to cover this without blocking legitimate reports would be difficult, if not impossible. This can only change through social pressure. If a group like this forms in your neighborhood, it could be helpful to join even if you don't want to if only to talk some sense into those who read too much into perfectly innocent activities.
This is exactly my thought. If Sprint were in a better position, I'd be happier seeing them stay apart. Sprint will go away at some point, and the merger allows this to happen in a controlled fashion with the remains going to the smallest of the remaining three instead of potentially getting parceled out among all three. If the merger fails for whatever reason, Sprint is likely to wind up in bankruptcy in the next few years unless there's a very large breakup fee, as happened with the AT&T/T-mobile attempt. If there is, that might allow Sprint room to pull off a miracle, but I doubt T-mobile and its parent are that certain of the outcome.
North Korea has played all the sides over the decades. Stalin wasn't actually all that keen on the North invading the South (the USSR still hadn't rebuilt its forces and was critically short on men, something it was desperate to hide), but Kim Il-Sung managed to convince him that China had his back though Kim was also convincing China that Stalin had his back. Ultimately, the Soviets sent minimal ground forces but numerous pilots who were ordered to never risk getting shot down over the South for fear of revealing Russian presence.
While I agree that this is a potentially important moment, the North has backtracked on agreements many times in the past. Unless an actual peace treaty is signed, I'm not convinced of anything. Kim Jong-Il knows that the North can't win a war, but it can go down fighting with anywhere from tens of thousands to potentially a million or more casualties, and the separate cost of bringing North Korea up to the modern age is likely north of a trillion dollars. I see this as an attempt to play the US by using direct meetings with the South without the US present. Even if Trump did meet with Kim, Kim could easily back out claiming that Trump made promises that he didn't keep. At that point, whom do you believe?
Slashdot Mirror
They're a cost of doing business, just like the credit card fees for most. If it was just the time to deposit, the overhead would be minimal and justifiable. But it's all the other factors that add up. There's the time to count up and reconcile the drawers, which can be anywhere from a few minutes by one employee to much longer if something's off and an investigation is required. Employee theft from the cash drawer, employee mistakes, and consumer scams take another bite.
BTW, that $15 can be a half to a full percentage point for a single store. A store doing a little over $1 million a year averages ~$3000 a day. One hour at $15 is a half-percent hit. Another hour doing accounting and reconciliation is another half-percent. We're already up to 40% of credit card fees, and that's without other losses. One $75 returned check is 2.5% of that day's sales, and that doesn't include collection costs. You can limit that through a TeleCheck or related subscription, but that's another fee that adds overhead.
As I said, it all adds up. Credit cards used to be additional overhead because they had to be accounted similar to checks, with the benefit that you just didn't have to worry about deposits when run electronically (carbons were different), but with integrated registers becoming so common, that's much less a factor.
I don't think the benefits are there. There's no, for lack of a better word, synergy, and huge antitrust issues. Apple offers some free data for iPads and a discount upgrade, but using it on other networks requires paying higher rates. Or maybe the network only works (or only fully works) with Samsung or Apple devices. There's already a lot of grumbling on both sides of the aisle in Congress over companies spilling into other silos. It's not enough to get the law changed yet, but it's enough that a company like Apple or Samsung (which also would have foreign ownership issues) would hesitate. It may even be the reason that Apple hasn't moved on the MVNO concept.
For general consumers, sure. But there were a lot of commercial applications where walkie-talkies didn't quite work. It also reduced the number of devices carried by construction workers, security guards, first responders, and a host of others.
It's not that weak. The law in question is 26 USC 6103(f) and it's pretty straightforward. In short, the chairs of three committees can request, and the Secretary of the Treasury "shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request." Returns with identifying information have to be reviewed in closed session unless the taxpayer agrees in writing otherwise. While the Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee provided a reason, there's nothing in the law stating that he had to.
The challenge the White House is bringing is one of separation of powers. They're fully aware that Chairman Neal can, under the Constitution, put the entire set of returns into the record and face no discipline other than whatever the House may choose to bring on him, which won't be much, if anything, under the current majority. It's an interesting approach, but I'm not sure it has the teeth necessary to get the courts (ultimately SCOTUS) to block the transfer. They may punt and not block the transfer but not force it, calling it a political question they're not willing to wade into. They may agree with the White House in part and say that Trump's returns while president must be turned over (since the stated reason is understanding how the IRS audits sitting presidents) but those previous are protected. They may go with the letter of the law and order the transfer. I expect a 5-4 decision with either Roberts or Cavanaugh (he's turning out to be less predictable than expected) casting the deciding vote if it goes against the president in some fashion.
That's an interesting viewpoint, and matches well with the FDIC account insurance limits. That's $250,000 per person per bank--anything over that is subject to loss if the bank fails completely and no buyer will take it over. That was one of the administrative wonders of the Great Recession, that the Fed managed to get so many failing banks to get bought by others with little (and I think actually no) loss of account value instead of failing outright and accounts being subject to FDIC coverage. I'm not sure if the Fed or FDIC buffered it at all with any form of direct cash infusion to offset asset differences of failed banks (ignoring quantitative easing, which was a related goal but different mechanism).
Subject to limits the bank itself sets. You're not going to be able to walk in and withdraw $100,000 in cash on a moment's notice just because you set the limit that high.
They don't cost you anything, but for the merchant, checks have overhead. Lots of people (including many on Slashdot) like to pretend there's no overhead to non-plastic transactions, but there are. Cash and checks require a secure place to hold them, cost to deposit them in employee time or a paid service like an armored car, and accounting time, and are subject to losses due to theft, mishandling, damage, counterfeiting, and NSF. This adds up to almost, if not more than, the processing cost for credit and debit cards. You get chargebacks occasionally on plastic, but there's a process to validate a transaction if it was real, and the advent of chipped cards has reduced fraud enough that the credit card companies themselves are letting stores do away with the (often unobserved anyway) practice of validating signatures. (Now, if we could just get chip-and-PIN...)
Sprint actually posted a profit for the last fiscal year, though I'm not sure how much that had to do with accounting tricks. They had a profitable mobile division before the Nextel purchase, but they never were able to take full advantage of the push-to-talk architecture that Nextel brought (and that was the entire reason for the $35 billion purchase). Then they made the extraordinarily bad decision to go with WiMax instead of LTE, blowing billions in the rollout and making them less desirable to customers because there would be no 4G roaming. It could have survived one or the other, but not both.
I'm not sure what DOJ's problem is, but I hope that the two companies are willing to address it. As you say, Sprint is effectively dead at this point (I say this as a 17-year customer of Sprint and Nextel), and will declare bankruptcy. They recently announced the sale of their HQ campus in Overland Park, KS, with a deal to lease it back. That's never a good sign. It's unclear how much more money Masayoshi Son is willing to pour into it, but it has to stop at some point. Then the remaining three companies will scramble to buy up parts of it at pennies on the dollar, and I doubt it will be as clean or have as even a result as the current merger could.
I'm not sure where you're working that you get 15 minutes of time outside before work, but it seems to be fairly rare in my experience. Working at a large place might mean a sprawling parking lot but could also mean a parking structure. Even with the sprawling lots, it's rarely more than a few minutes to get inside. Before parking, you're in the car, which often means tinted glass so not much brighter than at home.
And in the winter, in those places with serious darkness issues, they're going to rush inside anyway to get out of the cold on most days, days that will also often be cloudy and rainy or snowy.
They're not going to change opening hours for one person, or even for a few people. Too much of the world works on expectations of business opening times of 9:00, not a shifting time throughout the year based on sunrise. It has these expectations because they work, otherwise you're back to cities 100 miles apart working on slightly different schedules based on their local sunrise and sunset. We got rid of that for a reason.
Hydrogen will never be a fuel for airliners. Compressed to 700 bar, it has a specific energy about 3.5 times greater than jet fuel but energy density one quarter that of jet fuel. The containment vessels will be too heavy to justify the increased specific energy, and it would require an increase in the volume (or a substantial reduction in maximum range) anyway.
If you clicked on the link in the reply, it doesn't work (epine may have cut it off unintentionally), but the original link does.
https://groups.google.com/a/ch...
GHIDRA is supposed to be released at RSA. They have a talk scheduled about it. I've seen some people eager (setting aside backdoor risks) for a strong competitor to IDA Pro and its ridiculously high prices.
Google was working on this a few years ago with the e2email project, but eventually canceled it--erm, I mean, moved it out to "community support." While I know that a lot of people think it was because it would get in the way of advertising, the project included a brutally honest threat assessment. I use it as an example of a thorough threat analysis as it's fairly lengthy but covers just one browser extension, not an entire browser, OS, or networking environment.
Thunderbird comes bundled with the Lightning calendar add-on and has since v38. IIRC, if you use an account that includes a calendar (Gmail, Yahoo, Exchange, etc.), it automatically syncs the calendar, though you can disable it.
One used to be able to swipe away stories already viewed or not cared about. That seems to have changed in the last few months.
Absent charges being brought and an extradition requested (which will result in Assange remaining in jail pending the outcome, which could take years), he'll be deported to either Australia (his native country) or Ecuador (where he was provided citizenship).
Whatever happens, no non-citizenship country will ever grant him entry and no judge will ever again grant bail.
That's not what the system says. It throws an error. Could be a problem with the barcode, could be a problem with the database entry, could be a problem with the scanner. The driver is expected to contact someone to determine how to handle it. There are procedures for it, and a driver that doesn't follow them probably shouldn't be delivering packages.
The box doesn't belong to the driver.
They're not doing this to file charges. They're doing this to fire dishonest drivers.
FedEx may have different rules, but Amazon contracts with a lot of small companies. Those are the type that normally don't want their vehicles going home with clients.
OTOH, FedEx always delivers my packages right to the door itself with a courtesy knock or doorbell. Same driver almost every time.
They use company vehicles, so almost certainly have to drive back to the depot.
I don't have a problem with timing (maybe due to Prime), but I do have a problem with drivers literally throwing packages several feet. It hasn't happened on the last two deliveries, but my home office is right by the front door and I could hear packages hitting and tumbling, and they'd be scattered across the porch. Looking outside, the driver would be almost back to his truck. I once went to get some kind of ID so I could report it, but the driver completely ignored me. I got the plate number and reported it to the company and to Amazon. Didn't get a follow-up from either one, though.
It would be difficult for police to set up a network to do this throughout neighborhoods (cost, potential constitutional issues), but it's perfectly legal for a group of private civilians to collect images of the public, tag it almost however they want (as long as it's opinion-based), and upload it wherever they're allowed. They can label as suspicious a minority in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood, a teen in a beater car, or a child without his or her parents as long as they're stating an opinion about it being suspicious, completely ignoring (or oblivious) that the person recently moved in, the teen lives there and just bought their first car with their own money, or the kid is ten and playing just a couple of doors down from home. Having police respond to these wastes resources and contributes to the further deterioration of neighborhood relations.
Crafting laws to cover this without blocking legitimate reports would be difficult, if not impossible. This can only change through social pressure. If a group like this forms in your neighborhood, it could be helpful to join even if you don't want to if only to talk some sense into those who read too much into perfectly innocent activities.
This is exactly my thought. If Sprint were in a better position, I'd be happier seeing them stay apart. Sprint will go away at some point, and the merger allows this to happen in a controlled fashion with the remains going to the smallest of the remaining three instead of potentially getting parceled out among all three. If the merger fails for whatever reason, Sprint is likely to wind up in bankruptcy in the next few years unless there's a very large breakup fee, as happened with the AT&T/T-mobile attempt. If there is, that might allow Sprint room to pull off a miracle, but I doubt T-mobile and its parent are that certain of the outcome.
North Korea has played all the sides over the decades. Stalin wasn't actually all that keen on the North invading the South (the USSR still hadn't rebuilt its forces and was critically short on men, something it was desperate to hide), but Kim Il-Sung managed to convince him that China had his back though Kim was also convincing China that Stalin had his back. Ultimately, the Soviets sent minimal ground forces but numerous pilots who were ordered to never risk getting shot down over the South for fear of revealing Russian presence.
While I agree that this is a potentially important moment, the North has backtracked on agreements many times in the past. Unless an actual peace treaty is signed, I'm not convinced of anything. Kim Jong-Il knows that the North can't win a war, but it can go down fighting with anywhere from tens of thousands to potentially a million or more casualties, and the separate cost of bringing North Korea up to the modern age is likely north of a trillion dollars. I see this as an attempt to play the US by using direct meetings with the South without the US present. Even if Trump did meet with Kim, Kim could easily back out claiming that Trump made promises that he didn't keep. At that point, whom do you believe?