Some people forget that hyperlink active text defaults to blue on many browsers. They set the font color black, but not the active text font color. It's still the same mistake and still should be punished by 5 years in prison.
It's not just about motivation to upgrading. Every time I have upgraded in the past, thing did break. In the case of going from Netscape 3 to Netscape 4 a lot of things broke. I even had to back off from an attempt to upgrade to Mozilla because even more stuff broke. Maybe Mozilla is better now (but at this point I plan to wait for 1.0 before spending the time on it, as I have other things to do). Opera (not free) will be an option once they have a universal installer working.
Of course there should be a limit on how far back compatibility is extended. But one version set back is essential. That means today, support back to Netscape 4.5 or IE 5.5, unless the nature and theme of your web site really cannot be done without the new features (do try to give an alternate page... at least for lynx users, and those with visual challenges).
Charging obscene amounts for what can be usually be done with 10% to 20% more effort is like telling your customer "Go get your site done somewhere else, we only want leet work". Always test on every target web browser under every client platform (Mac, OS X, Windows, BSD, Linux, and Solaris, at least). And always test with various window sizes all the way up to at least 1152x864, if not more. Web sites that "scrunch up on the left or center" look like crap to people who paid big bucks for large high resolution monitors. And no teensy fonts.
However, a few critical things need to also be specified in the HTML in addition to the XHTML and/or CSS. Such things as background color are important. Don't assume that everyone has CSS. For those who don't the page might not look so pretty, but it should be at least readable. If everything works fine in any default color (most are either white or gray) then this isn't so important. But if you have a special background and special text color or images that really need the right background color, then be sure you cover all the bases and specify it completely.
No Javascript except for those things that can be done no other way. Everything that can be done in plain old HTML, must be done in plain old HTML. Where Javascript adds on some enhancement, such as consistency checking a form submission so the user doesn't have to wait for you underpowered server on your slow network to respond, OK. But make sure it is coded so that if Javascript is NOT enabled, or has been filtered out by a proxy run by the company BOFH, it still at least works, and sends the submission to your server. The server had damned well better not assume that it gets valid data. All validation must always be done by the server no matter what for security reasons.
If you make what should be just a hyperlink or a submit button be a Javascript invoking URL, then you better not come within bullet range of me.
Free Speech is illegal in China. Death penalty may be the result. If you speak bad about the Chinese government, no matter what country you are in, they might demand your extradition to China to stand trial and face the firing squad. This is what can happen if we set any precedent to allow foreign countries to dictate what is done beyond their own national territory. Unfortunately both the United States (Sklyarov) and France (Koogle) are setting just such precedents. And this is very serious business. Citizens of these countries need to inform their government representatives of the grave risk involved in such a precedent exposing them to the extraditions of other countries for what is perfectly legal at home.
The French government itself forgot all about the Nazi regime that invaded their country. And as a result, today they themselves are starting to act like Nazis.
The French government is acting very much like a Nazi regime. Or worse. It makes me think that these people actually picked this up from the German invaders during WW2 and passed the concepts on down to their children, and so on.
When the French citizen clicks on the Yahoo.COM site, they know they are going to the USA. This is the electronic online age equivalent to traveling, including overseas.
The real problem is that because people have access to both ends of a "black box" piece of software, it really won't be secure at all. Back to the hardware security (and really, it can be made to work, although I don't trust Valenti's "best brains" to do it right).
I recently received a communication from you and/or your organization or business regarding some matter. As is my usual procedure for all email and paper mail, I have performed initial machine scan. This machine scan reported with high confidence ranking that this communication fell under one or more of the following categories:
Unsolicited commercial advertisment.
Promotion of an illegal scheme.
Copyrighted material.
Terrorist threat.
Blackmail attempt.
Misdialed FAX.
In order to save my own valuable time and/or avoid legal risk accessing content I am not authorized to access, I have not attempted to read or otherwise use this communication. If you wish to repeat this communication, or communicate with me about any other matter in the future, be sure these communications do not fall into any of the above categories. Otherwise, remove me from your mailing list as I wish no further communications from you and/or your organization or business. The original communication you have sent has been dutifully destroyed or erased.
If the idea is to be able to finance the peak capacity of the congested roads, and otherwise discourage the peak time usage, then the simple, and probably cheaper, way is to just put tolls on the congested roads. GPS will be less popular and possibly easier to defeat. Instead, put ID sensors on just those congested toll roads, which also detect when a vehicle w/o ID passes by. Many toll roads already do this, especially in metropolitan areas where the users are regulars. Then add a peak time surcharge (with published and stable schedules). Give tax breaks to employers who schedule people to arrive and leave work at off-peak times or give them at least 3 hours variability flex time.
I just got done switching from one bank to another about 3 months ago. The previous bank was providing lousy service, but was far better than PayPal. At least I could talk to someone at that bank. At my new bank I can get a live person on the phone 24x7. I had to do that once 2 days before Christmas to report an ATM machine that was jammed. No trouble getting someone.
I got a phone number. 5 calls. One got a live person who only said hold on and put me in menu hell. The other 4 went straight to menus. This is the pattern of a dumb company.
Sun's pissed that they can't run multiple instances of an OS on their E15K systems. You might get Linux running on it, and Solaris is the champ OS on the big Sun machines... but they are not virtual machine systems. IBM's hardware design lets them run multiple operating systems in parallel on one machine, and even dynamically share processor between them. And then with the VM operating system loaded, you can create multiple virtual machines and run Linux in each one. And VM is very efficient at that. I once ran 6 instances of VM inside itself, nested all the way down. Surely you've heard of the case where IBM tested running 41,000 instances of Linux under VM. It can do that, though that many seems rather pointless. It does let you partition off the resources so you can give each service function you need to run with its own virtual machine, and thus it's own Linux. And on the larger S/390 and zSeries machines, you can even run OS/390 (of MVS legacy) in those virtual machines, and mix/migrate between them all one a single mainframe piece of hardware.
Now personally, I wouldn't do exactly that. That's an awfully big basket with an awful lot of eggs in it. IBM hardware is quite reliable, but not so reliable that you can depend on getting "five nines" on one single machine. Sometimes there are reasons to take the whole machine down. IBM comes from legacy enterprise worksystems and usually early morning Sunday can be scheduled for maintenance purposes. In these days of e-commerce, you don't have such luxury. If you want to be up all the time, you need redundancy, and that machine way back in the corner of the room where "all the servers are gone" isn't redundancy (virtual redundancy, maybe, but you need real redundancy). You need several machines.
That said, there are pluses to IBM's approach as well. If you need to add another class of service, or partition users apart from each other because one needs to do stuff that needs root access? Give them their own Linux virtual machine.
OTOH, well managed, rows and rows of racks with 40 1U servers in each one, running Linux or BSD or NT or W2K or whatever, can be just as effective, if not more so. You can put dual 1.X GHz CPUs in those 40 machines in one rack... that's 80 CPUs. That's quite a lot. The IBM zSeries can certainly compete, as can the Sun E15K. But those are going to be physically big, and power hungry, machines, too. Take your pick. There's no simple best answer; certainly not for everyone. All this is about is marketing, anyway.
You might LOOK like a spammer to RR simply because of the volume of mail arriving from your server to theirs. So much from one machine? That might be spam. I don't know your exact numbers, so maybe this isn't the case at all. I'm just speculating because of so little real information.
There might be a spammer running at the co-lo place, and they blocked it because of that. Many people block whole ISPs just because of hosting a spammer. Now if the spammer was changing IP address, then I can understand that (and the ISP certainly should have been notified). But if the spammer is at a fixed IP address, and especially if their netblock is registered with ARIN, then blocking should be done to that spammer, not the ISP.
And it might simply be a case that RR wants to be the host of not just the customer's mailboxes, but their domains as well (and charge them for it). So they are blocking you because you are helping them bypass RR's "right" to collect the revenue on the mailboxes. I wonder if setting up SPOP3 (POP3 over SSL) is something you could do and something your customers could handle. And I wonder if RR would be clever enough to block that.
Show me facts mis-represented. I'm just saying that there is some number of people out there (certainly smaller number of people than items, but counting the actual number of people isn't so easy) who are not trusting enough of PayPal to work with them. There could be more than list things like "check, cashiers check, or money order only" or the like. I didn't count those, either. But I will assume that percentage-wise, this represents about the proportion of people that don't want to use PayPal.
I do believe 1% to be significant in this case. 1% is an awfully high number if it represents people who mistrust an organization. Considering that a great many people won't have that mistrust until they actually lose money, that really makes 1% a serious number. Would you put your money in a bank which had statistics that said 1% of the people won't get all of it back with no recourse?
I just ran the search again today. The number is now 66824. Of course that could be because there are more auctions active today, too. So let's see. Trying "paypal only" I get 98565. That's an increase, but not as significant of one.
I've never lost any money through PayPal. Fortunately for me, I discovered what was going on before I let myself into a position where I could lose money.
Then I got spammed by PayPal. Well, since I had a "relationship" (e.g. an existing account), I can expect to get that spam. No point in complaining. I would just close my account (which was at 0.00 anyway). That's where the trouble began. I couldn't get logged in to do it. It's not because I had the wrong password; it's because of an error in their server programming (which I did later figure out what it was). The error message told me to send a report to a particular email address. So I sent one. I got back an automated reply that said I needed to send the report via a new web form. So I tried the URL it gave for that. But that didn't work because I needed to be logged in to do it. So I ended up doing a sequence of mailings to hopefully trigger some alarms there. That finally worked and a technical person I believe to be their lead tech guy sent mail which, while initially assuming all the wrong things, did include a real phone number. I called and explained the circumstances and was promised the account would be closed. At the time I did not know why I was getting the login error, but it was error code 3014 and had something to do with SSL, which works fine for me everywhere else. I have since figured out what I believe to be the cause of the problem, but I decided not to contact them any more to tell them what it is. At least I have not been getting any more spam, so the account there is probably really closed.
My own objections against this company is the poor attitude they take with problem resolution. I would rather see them go bankrupt and someone else with a better attitude come along and fill the void. I'm not part of the class action lawsuit because I have not lost any money. But I have been reading the reports, and I cannot conclude that all of them are cases of accounts being decremented because of a CC chargeback. Many might be, and people should better understand this. But when 2 accounts get frozen because someone was trying to send a little more money to someone else than their "pattern of activity" suggests, and then doing nothing about it when both parties complain, then I know there is a problem at the company. And when they intentionally cut back on service support people to try to discourage complaints... and I suspect so that they can report the lower complaint numbers in their S-1, then I know there is a problem at the company.
BTW, the employees at Enron that lost much or most of their life savings because they put such a high percentage of their 401K money into Enron are certainly in part to blame. But the bulk of the blame belongs to the company execs that carried out shady practices to hide the truth (surely, fewer people would have put so much money in the company if they knew the truth), and also froze those 401K accounts at the time the truth was coming out. Just because you can find a blame on the part of people who lost money does not mean they are 100% at fault.
Those were things other people have said in other forums after some time was spent waiting for people to read it. Maybe by now some/. readers have done the same. It's stuffy reading, but some people can figure it all out.
I do know these things are supposed to report all negative aspects of the business honestly. But there are many which they are not reporting at all. It may not be as big a thing as the debt hiding partnerships that Enron is accused of masterminding, but hiding the problems your business is having with the way they poorly handle the fraud situations (they only gave the fraud problems a standard "lip service" in the S-1), is itself a form of fraud. This is something investors need to know about.
And if you can't get logged in? They give you an email address to send to. The auto-responder suggests using a form to send the problem report instead. You have to be logged in to use the form and when that fails, you get the same email address again. These people are idiots.
I used to live 1/2 mile from a TV station. Reception was crap because of the multipath due to being nestled in buildings. A stronger signal would have done no good at all. I was already getting an immensely strong signal; I was also getting an immensely strong amount of multipath. And worse, the local cable system was carrying that station "on-channel", meaning it went over the wire on almost the same frequency (offset by a few kHz). Within about a mile of the transmitter, even the cable signal was crap.
More power on HDTV won't get through the multi-path problem. More power only extends the signal out to the country-side. The problem is that the modulation standards tried to wrap as much data as they could into a narrow bandwidth (the FCC didn't want to go to a whole new channeling scheme). The noise and multipath immunity therefore went down. The noise level can be dealt with using more power, which the stations will eventually need to do to reach the grade B areas at full rollout. The multipath can only be dealt with through larger and/or taller antennas, or the use of cable, if/when cable decides to carry HDTV. Cable doesn't have the spare channels to carry duplication of the standard and high definition signals, so that won't happen until there is enough market saturation, or the HDTV-to-LDTV converters become cheap (and since they are already end-of-market products, there's no incentive for that, and I doubt there will even be a market for these).
Also, the quoted megawatt power levels are effective radiated power. That's the level of power required to get the signal level in all directions from a point-source (isotropic) antenna. In reality, broadcast antennas focus their signal into a relatively flat beam going around in a circle from the antenna to fill a disc shape with the signal. This is called "antenna gain". You don't think they're going to waste power straight up into the sky, or down into the ground, do you? At a UHF station I used to work at many years ago, their megawatt ERP signal was achieved with only 30 kilowatts coming out of the transmitter.
All the color standards could ride on top of existing transmissions. With the exception of the 405 line system in UK and the 819 line system in France (which ate up 14 MHz of b/w), color television coexisted with regular TV in the channeling. If you got a clean b&w signal, that was good enough to do color.
But the rollout of color took a long time. Color standards were adopted in the US in the late 1940's. Color transmissions started in the 50's. It wasn't even until the middle 60's that half the programming was in color.
There may well be thousands of people who have been ripped off. Perhaps it would not be so bad if PayPal actually communicated with people and tried to resolve the problem. Instead, they don't even list their phone number. Do you see it there on their web page? The company has a big attitude problem.
I went to the eBaySmart Search page and entered "no paypal" and checked the buttons to also search descriptions. It matched 61367 items. Interesting. I'm sure the number will change every minute.
Maybe they are below their interest quota, and need to hold your money to get the interest on it to make sure they can meet the payroll. You wouldn't want all those kind, charming, intelligent staff members to go without their paycheck, now would you?
Problems do happen in any business. And that's not an indicator that the business itself is a problem. But how they handle those problems can be. If they handle them well, that's good for them. Unfortunately for PayPal, they are in a business that has risks of fraud. Credit cards can be charged back for a few months (I've done so as much as 5 months after the fact). The situation can easily leave someone unhappy. But, there are also a lot of ways to handle things properly that PayPal simply does not do. For example, if incoming payment is suspected to be fraudulent, they should put THAT AMOUNT on hold, not the whole account (unless there is evidence that the whole account is somehow part of the fraud). PayPal needs to be able to answer the phone and deal with the problems that do exist, and deal with them in a timely manner. No doubt there are a lot of satisfied customers, or else they would have gone bankrupt by now. But the bad experiences that are being reported do show a serious pattern of problems with how the company is managed. If 1% of the customers are unhappy, then the company has some very serious problems and needs to be investigated. Yet, if 99% of the postings say "I'm happy with PayPal", people would really think nothing is wrong. You do have to emphasize the negative. Do you think if 50% of customers were ripped off that it would be neutralized by 50% of the customers being fully satisfied? I didn't think so.
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Some people forget that hyperlink active text defaults to blue on many browsers. They set the font color black, but not the active text font color. It's still the same mistake and still should be punished by 5 years in prison.
It's not just about motivation to upgrading. Every time I have upgraded in the past, thing did break. In the case of going from Netscape 3 to Netscape 4 a lot of things broke. I even had to back off from an attempt to upgrade to Mozilla because even more stuff broke. Maybe Mozilla is better now (but at this point I plan to wait for 1.0 before spending the time on it, as I have other things to do). Opera (not free) will be an option once they have a universal installer working.
Of course there should be a limit on how far back compatibility is extended. But one version set back is essential. That means today, support back to Netscape 4.5 or IE 5.5, unless the nature and theme of your web site really cannot be done without the new features (do try to give an alternate page ... at least for lynx users, and those with visual challenges).
Charging obscene amounts for what can be usually be done with 10% to 20% more effort is like telling your customer "Go get your site done somewhere else, we only want leet work". Always test on every target web browser under every client platform (Mac, OS X, Windows, BSD, Linux, and Solaris, at least). And always test with various window sizes all the way up to at least 1152x864, if not more. Web sites that "scrunch up on the left or center" look like crap to people who paid big bucks for large high resolution monitors. And no teensy fonts.
However, a few critical things need to also be specified in the HTML in addition to the XHTML and/or CSS. Such things as background color are important. Don't assume that everyone has CSS. For those who don't the page might not look so pretty, but it should be at least readable. If everything works fine in any default color (most are either white or gray) then this isn't so important. But if you have a special background and special text color or images that really need the right background color, then be sure you cover all the bases and specify it completely.
No Javascript except for those things that can be done no other way. Everything that can be done in plain old HTML, must be done in plain old HTML. Where Javascript adds on some enhancement, such as consistency checking a form submission so the user doesn't have to wait for you underpowered server on your slow network to respond, OK. But make sure it is coded so that if Javascript is NOT enabled, or has been filtered out by a proxy run by the company BOFH, it still at least works, and sends the submission to your server. The server had damned well better not assume that it gets valid data. All validation must always be done by the server no matter what for security reasons.
If you make what should be just a hyperlink or a submit button be a Javascript invoking URL, then you better not come within bullet range of me.
Free Speech is illegal in China. Death penalty may be the result. If you speak bad about the Chinese government, no matter what country you are in, they might demand your extradition to China to stand trial and face the firing squad. This is what can happen if we set any precedent to allow foreign countries to dictate what is done beyond their own national territory. Unfortunately both the United States (Sklyarov) and France (Koogle) are setting just such precedents. And this is very serious business. Citizens of these countries need to inform their government representatives of the grave risk involved in such a precedent exposing them to the extraditions of other countries for what is perfectly legal at home.
The French government itself forgot all about the Nazi regime that invaded their country. And as a result, today they themselves are starting to act like Nazis.
The French government is acting very much like a Nazi regime. Or worse. It makes me think that these people actually picked this up from the German invaders during WW2 and passed the concepts on down to their children, and so on.
When the French citizen clicks on the Yahoo.COM site, they know they are going to the USA. This is the electronic online age equivalent to traveling, including overseas.
<img src="frenchflagwithswastica.jpg">
And it needs to be open source, too.
The real problem is that because people have access to both ends of a "black box" piece of software, it really won't be secure at all. Back to the hardware security (and really, it can be made to work, although I don't trust Valenti's "best brains" to do it right).
Dear Sirs or Madams:
I recently received a communication from you and/or your organization or business regarding some matter. As is my usual procedure for all email and paper mail, I have performed initial machine scan. This machine scan reported with high confidence ranking that this communication fell under one or more of the following categories:
- Unsolicited commercial advertisment.
- Promotion of an illegal scheme.
- Copyrighted material.
- Terrorist threat.
- Blackmail attempt.
- Misdialed FAX.
In order to save my own valuable time and/or avoid legal risk accessing content I am not authorized to access, I have not attempted to read or otherwise use this communication. If you wish to repeat this communication, or communicate with me about any other matter in the future, be sure these communications do not fall into any of the above categories. Otherwise, remove me from your mailing list as I wish no further communications from you and/or your organization or business. The original communication you have sent has been dutifully destroyed or erased.If the idea is to be able to finance the peak capacity of the congested roads, and otherwise discourage the peak time usage, then the simple, and probably cheaper, way is to just put tolls on the congested roads. GPS will be less popular and possibly easier to defeat. Instead, put ID sensors on just those congested toll roads, which also detect when a vehicle w/o ID passes by. Many toll roads already do this, especially in metropolitan areas where the users are regulars. Then add a peak time surcharge (with published and stable schedules). Give tax breaks to employers who schedule people to arrive and leave work at off-peak times or give them at least 3 hours variability flex time.
I just got done switching from one bank to another about 3 months ago. The previous bank was providing lousy service, but was far better than PayPal. At least I could talk to someone at that bank. At my new bank I can get a live person on the phone 24x7. I had to do that once 2 days before Christmas to report an ATM machine that was jammed. No trouble getting someone.
I got a phone number. 5 calls. One got a live person who only said hold on and put me in menu hell. The other 4 went straight to menus. This is the pattern of a dumb company.
Sun's pissed that they can't run multiple instances of an OS on their E15K systems. You might get Linux running on it, and Solaris is the champ OS on the big Sun machines ... but they are not virtual machine systems. IBM's hardware design lets them run multiple operating systems in parallel on one machine, and even dynamically share processor between them. And then with the VM operating system loaded, you can create multiple virtual machines and run Linux in each one. And VM is very efficient at that. I once ran 6 instances of VM inside itself, nested all the way down. Surely you've heard of the case where IBM tested running 41,000 instances of Linux under VM. It can do that, though that many seems rather pointless. It does let you partition off the resources so you can give each service function you need to run with its own virtual machine, and thus it's own Linux. And on the larger S/390 and zSeries machines, you can even run OS/390 (of MVS legacy) in those virtual machines, and mix/migrate between them all one a single mainframe piece of hardware.
Now personally, I wouldn't do exactly that. That's an awfully big basket with an awful lot of eggs in it. IBM hardware is quite reliable, but not so reliable that you can depend on getting "five nines" on one single machine. Sometimes there are reasons to take the whole machine down. IBM comes from legacy enterprise worksystems and usually early morning Sunday can be scheduled for maintenance purposes. In these days of e-commerce, you don't have such luxury. If you want to be up all the time, you need redundancy, and that machine way back in the corner of the room where "all the servers are gone" isn't redundancy (virtual redundancy, maybe, but you need real redundancy). You need several machines.
That said, there are pluses to IBM's approach as well. If you need to add another class of service, or partition users apart from each other because one needs to do stuff that needs root access? Give them their own Linux virtual machine.
OTOH, well managed, rows and rows of racks with 40 1U servers in each one, running Linux or BSD or NT or W2K or whatever, can be just as effective, if not more so. You can put dual 1.X GHz CPUs in those 40 machines in one rack ... that's 80 CPUs. That's quite a lot. The IBM zSeries can certainly compete, as can the Sun E15K. But those are going to be physically big, and power hungry, machines, too. Take your pick. There's no simple best answer; certainly not for everyone. All this is about is marketing, anyway.
You might LOOK like a spammer to RR simply because of the volume of mail arriving from your server to theirs. So much from one machine? That might be spam. I don't know your exact numbers, so maybe this isn't the case at all. I'm just speculating because of so little real information.
There might be a spammer running at the co-lo place, and they blocked it because of that. Many people block whole ISPs just because of hosting a spammer. Now if the spammer was changing IP address, then I can understand that (and the ISP certainly should have been notified). But if the spammer is at a fixed IP address, and especially if their netblock is registered with ARIN, then blocking should be done to that spammer, not the ISP.
And it might simply be a case that RR wants to be the host of not just the customer's mailboxes, but their domains as well (and charge them for it). So they are blocking you because you are helping them bypass RR's "right" to collect the revenue on the mailboxes. I wonder if setting up SPOP3 (POP3 over SSL) is something you could do and something your customers could handle. And I wonder if RR would be clever enough to block that.
Show me facts mis-represented. I'm just saying that there is some number of people out there (certainly smaller number of people than items, but counting the actual number of people isn't so easy) who are not trusting enough of PayPal to work with them. There could be more than list things like "check, cashiers check, or money order only" or the like. I didn't count those, either. But I will assume that percentage-wise, this represents about the proportion of people that don't want to use PayPal.
I do believe 1% to be significant in this case. 1% is an awfully high number if it represents people who mistrust an organization. Considering that a great many people won't have that mistrust until they actually lose money, that really makes 1% a serious number. Would you put your money in a bank which had statistics that said 1% of the people won't get all of it back with no recourse?
I just ran the search again today. The number is now 66824. Of course that could be because there are more auctions active today, too. So let's see. Trying "paypal only" I get 98565. That's an increase, but not as significant of one.
I've never lost any money through PayPal. Fortunately for me, I discovered what was going on before I let myself into a position where I could lose money.
Then I got spammed by PayPal. Well, since I had a "relationship" (e.g. an existing account), I can expect to get that spam. No point in complaining. I would just close my account (which was at 0.00 anyway). That's where the trouble began. I couldn't get logged in to do it. It's not because I had the wrong password; it's because of an error in their server programming (which I did later figure out what it was). The error message told me to send a report to a particular email address. So I sent one. I got back an automated reply that said I needed to send the report via a new web form. So I tried the URL it gave for that. But that didn't work because I needed to be logged in to do it. So I ended up doing a sequence of mailings to hopefully trigger some alarms there. That finally worked and a technical person I believe to be their lead tech guy sent mail which, while initially assuming all the wrong things, did include a real phone number. I called and explained the circumstances and was promised the account would be closed. At the time I did not know why I was getting the login error, but it was error code 3014 and had something to do with SSL, which works fine for me everywhere else. I have since figured out what I believe to be the cause of the problem, but I decided not to contact them any more to tell them what it is. At least I have not been getting any more spam, so the account there is probably really closed.
My own objections against this company is the poor attitude they take with problem resolution. I would rather see them go bankrupt and someone else with a better attitude come along and fill the void. I'm not part of the class action lawsuit because I have not lost any money. But I have been reading the reports, and I cannot conclude that all of them are cases of accounts being decremented because of a CC chargeback. Many might be, and people should better understand this. But when 2 accounts get frozen because someone was trying to send a little more money to someone else than their "pattern of activity" suggests, and then doing nothing about it when both parties complain, then I know there is a problem at the company. And when they intentionally cut back on service support people to try to discourage complaints ... and I suspect so that they can report the lower complaint numbers in their S-1, then I know there is a problem at the company.
BTW, the employees at Enron that lost much or most of their life savings because they put such a high percentage of their 401K money into Enron are certainly in part to blame. But the bulk of the blame belongs to the company execs that carried out shady practices to hide the truth (surely, fewer people would have put so much money in the company if they knew the truth), and also froze those 401K accounts at the time the truth was coming out. Just because you can find a blame on the part of people who lost money does not mean they are 100% at fault.
Those were things other people have said in other forums after some time was spent waiting for people to read it. Maybe by now some /. readers have done the same. It's stuffy reading, but some people can figure it all out.
I do know these things are supposed to report all negative aspects of the business honestly. But there are many which they are not reporting at all. It may not be as big a thing as the debt hiding partnerships that Enron is accused of masterminding, but hiding the problems your business is having with the way they poorly handle the fraud situations (they only gave the fraud problems a standard "lip service" in the S-1), is itself a form of fraud. This is something investors need to know about.
And if you can't get logged in? They give you an email address to send to. The auto-responder suggests using a form to send the problem report instead. You have to be logged in to use the form and when that fails, you get the same email address again. These people are idiots.
I used to live 1/2 mile from a TV station. Reception was crap because of the multipath due to being nestled in buildings. A stronger signal would have done no good at all. I was already getting an immensely strong signal; I was also getting an immensely strong amount of multipath. And worse, the local cable system was carrying that station "on-channel", meaning it went over the wire on almost the same frequency (offset by a few kHz). Within about a mile of the transmitter, even the cable signal was crap.
More power on HDTV won't get through the multi-path problem. More power only extends the signal out to the country-side. The problem is that the modulation standards tried to wrap as much data as they could into a narrow bandwidth (the FCC didn't want to go to a whole new channeling scheme). The noise and multipath immunity therefore went down. The noise level can be dealt with using more power, which the stations will eventually need to do to reach the grade B areas at full rollout. The multipath can only be dealt with through larger and/or taller antennas, or the use of cable, if/when cable decides to carry HDTV. Cable doesn't have the spare channels to carry duplication of the standard and high definition signals, so that won't happen until there is enough market saturation, or the HDTV-to-LDTV converters become cheap (and since they are already end-of-market products, there's no incentive for that, and I doubt there will even be a market for these).
Also, the quoted megawatt power levels are effective radiated power. That's the level of power required to get the signal level in all directions from a point-source (isotropic) antenna. In reality, broadcast antennas focus their signal into a relatively flat beam going around in a circle from the antenna to fill a disc shape with the signal. This is called "antenna gain". You don't think they're going to waste power straight up into the sky, or down into the ground, do you? At a UHF station I used to work at many years ago, their megawatt ERP signal was achieved with only 30 kilowatts coming out of the transmitter.
All the color standards could ride on top of existing transmissions. With the exception of the 405 line system in UK and the 819 line system in France (which ate up 14 MHz of b/w), color television coexisted with regular TV in the channeling. If you got a clean b&w signal, that was good enough to do color.
But the rollout of color took a long time. Color standards were adopted in the US in the late 1940's. Color transmissions started in the 50's. It wasn't even until the middle 60's that half the programming was in color.
There may well be thousands of people who have been ripped off. Perhaps it would not be so bad if PayPal actually communicated with people and tried to resolve the problem. Instead, they don't even list their phone number. Do you see it there on their web page? The company has a big attitude problem.
Let's see if you keep singing the same tune if they end up ripping you off. Maybe we should just take the money out of your account.
I went to the eBay Smart Search page and entered "no paypal" and checked the buttons to also search descriptions. It matched 61367 items. Interesting. I'm sure the number will change every minute.
Maybe they are below their interest quota, and need to hold your money to get the interest on it to make sure they can meet the payroll. You wouldn't want all those kind, charming, intelligent staff members to go without their paycheck, now would you?
Problems do happen in any business. And that's not an indicator that the business itself is a problem. But how they handle those problems can be. If they handle them well, that's good for them. Unfortunately for PayPal, they are in a business that has risks of fraud. Credit cards can be charged back for a few months (I've done so as much as 5 months after the fact). The situation can easily leave someone unhappy. But, there are also a lot of ways to handle things properly that PayPal simply does not do. For example, if incoming payment is suspected to be fraudulent, they should put THAT AMOUNT on hold, not the whole account (unless there is evidence that the whole account is somehow part of the fraud). PayPal needs to be able to answer the phone and deal with the problems that do exist, and deal with them in a timely manner. No doubt there are a lot of satisfied customers, or else they would have gone bankrupt by now. But the bad experiences that are being reported do show a serious pattern of problems with how the company is managed. If 1% of the customers are unhappy, then the company has some very serious problems and needs to be investigated. Yet, if 99% of the postings say "I'm happy with PayPal", people would really think nothing is wrong. You do have to emphasize the negative. Do you think if 50% of customers were ripped off that it would be neutralized by 50% of the customers being fully satisfied? I didn't think so.