Even if space technically starts 62 miles up, that doesn't mean that you won't want to go higher. In fact, in order to reach the geosynchronous altitude (which is a very useful altitude indeed), you need to be up about 22,000 miles - and there are reasons to want to go higher, as well.
Only with an Intel. A64/Opterons have an embedded memory controller, so the hypertransport link out of there only needs to feed the AGP/PCI/PCI-E busses, and it's got gobs of bandwidth for that.
"Some of us need to be in the left lane so that we may make left turns"
You make left turns off of the highway? Wow. Your highways must suck.
OK, so even though we were talking about the highway, you brought up the city. You interject an argument that has nothing to do with what we were talking about, and say "oh, that's different, don't pick a fight with me over it?" What kind of an idiot are you?
To play along with you, yes, I drive in heavy city traffic every day. When traffic is heavy, I make sure to get over in plenty of time. If I can't get over, I don't blame other people, I blame myself for waiting too long and trying to get ahead of others. As soon as you whining idiots start taking responsibility for your own actions, then your lives will suddenly get a whole lot better. Instead of thinking "Wah-wah, boo-hoo, those people who got in the left lane three blocks ago to make sure that they wouldn't miss their turn didn't open up a spot to let my precious self in!", think "Wow. I couldn't get over. Maybe I should figure out a better way to go about that."
You don't want to drive over the speed limit? Fine. That doesn't bother me a bit, and I respect your right to do it. In fact, I applaud you. When you're on the highway, just stay in the right lanes, like you're supposed to. Slow->right, Fast-left. It's so easy that even a mentally deficient person can understand it. Oh wait, I guess not...
He didn't in the original post, but I had a feeling that he was the kind to poke along, holding up five or six cars behind him. Notice that in the next message, he *did* mention his annoyance at those pesky people that tailgate him while he's in the left lane.
As for his statements that the laws of physics apply, of course they do. It's a big game of chicken. The guy in the car behind him is counting on the fact that the fellow won't hit his brakes and cause an accident, and in virtually every case, they're right. Subcounsciously, they see virtually no potential detriment, and a possible payout in the form of them moving over. That makes the behaviour potentially beneficial to them (at least in their eyes), and just like pulling the lever on a slot machine in vegas, they take the gamble.
If he really wants them to stop, he needs to help them see that there is a potential detriment, and that there isn't a potential payout. People are actually extremely efficient at subconsciously evaluating those sorts of things. Their perspective on how likely a detriment or payout is may not reflect reality, but rest assured, if they see from their perspective that there is no potential benefit, they'll stop doing it.
One of the more fun ways to assist them in having that epiphany is not to hit your brakes, but to lightly apply your parking brake - your brake lights don't come on at all, and all of the sudden the fellow behind you realizes that he's about two inches off of your bumper. He'll hit his brakes like it was the end of the world, and you get to see his car sliding back and forth with all four tires locked up. Thinking back to the times I've done that almost brings a tear of joy to my eye.
For the record, if traffic in my lane is moving faster than me, I get over, plain and simple - and if someone is driving slow in the left lane, I don't tailgate them, because it is dangerous, and because it doesn't do any good. Just like I don't appreciate others bothering me, I try not to bother them. But sometimes, you get someone that just can't be bothered to pass you, even if you're all the way to the right. And every once in a while when that happens, I do get a very evil enjoyment out of things like that.
"Oh, that's so dangerous!", you say. Yes, it is. If that's not your style, I've seen people deter tailgaters quite effectively by just throwing a handful of dog kibble out of the window.
Are you 70 years old? Your attitude seems to reflect it. There's a reason you see signs that say "slower traffic stay right". If someone wants to pass you in the left lane, get your lazy, self-righteous behind out of the way.
You're just like the rest of the idiots who demand courtesy and favors for themselves, but give no thoughts about *other* people's interests. Believe it or not, the entire universe doesn't revolve around you, and the left lane was not made for your own personal use. Use it for what it was made for, or keep out of it. It's easy.
Easy. As Sun would say, it's the network. Very few of my friends use Verizon cell phones, because they're the most expensive. On the other hand, not a single one of my friends gets the reception and coverage that I do.
In fact, last year, I took a trip most of the way across the country with some family. A couple of them had specifically bought a new cell phone just for the point of travelling - one from AT&T, and I don't recall the other carrier. I can't count the number of times that they couldn't get service, couldn't place a call, or were on hold with customer service. Other than driving through deep, steep canyons, there wasn't a single time that I didn't get service or couldn't place a call.
In fact, one of those persons went with a different carrier recently, and it didn't take him long to memorize all of the intersections on his daily commute where a call would get dropped. I really don't get how people can live with service like that.
It's called a "crock pot". I throw thing in it in the evening, and stick it in the fridge. Before I leave for work, I plug it in, and turn it on low. When I get home, it's ready. C'est facil, no? And if I'm late getting home, it's alright - most things just get better. I once got *really* held up, and my roast ended up simmering on low for 16 hours. Boy, was it good.
I know, I know, everyone will whine that I wasted electricity. Well, at about 100 watts, if it's on for ten hours, it only uses about as much power as turning on my oven for just twenty minutes.
Making the vaccine is just the first step. Manufacturing ramp-ups and other time delays mean that it will still probably be at least two or three years before this vaccine is actually in use.
Of course, it will likely be in use where it's needed most - in Asia - sooner than it is here. That's not because of any altruistic motives on the part of the drug manufacturers (although they often claim that it is), it's because those countries have far fewer regulations, safeguards, and old-fashioned red-tape in place.
AMD is starting to kick Intel's pants in the most lucrative arena, small- and medium-sized servers. Instead of trying to compete technologically in that area (as opposed to just marketing), they're throwing good money after bad into a failing/failed architecture which only makes sense for a few highly-specialized applications. If it weren't for the fact that most holders of Intel stock know next to nothing about the industry, I would expect a cry for a change of leadership.
Sure, there are a few supercomputing-type applications where the Itanium really, really shines - but they're sufficienty specialized that Intel just doesn't move a very large number of CPUs.
Like I've said before, Intel is in a bind because of its own laziness and arrogance. Look at one of the primary advantages of the A64/Opteron architecture - the on-die memory controller. More memory bandwidth, lower latencies, and a memory subsystem that scales with the number of CPUs. Big-iron vendors proved that technology long before AMD decided to use it. Yet Intel has always enjoyed the superior manufacturing side of the business - if *anyone* could afford to have put those extra transistors on the die, it was Intel. Since they're almost always a step ahead of AMD in making smaller transistors, they had the *ability* to do something along those lines long before AMD did - but relied on the old tradition of more megahertz and lots of marketing. I don't think that this move is much different, they're putting their efforts in the wrong direction.
I have a number of 1+ terabyte arrays made from IDE and SATA drives, and my experience has been that failures come quick and often. Each of the machines has fans blowing large amounts of air over every drive, and the rest of the machines are top-notch quality. Whether the arrays were made from Maxtor, Seagate, or Western Digital, most have at least one drive die within the first six months.
In fact, about a week ago, a Western Digital RAID-edition drive died in one of my arrays - and that particular set of disks had only been in use for a week or two.
Of the SCSI arrays I've built and maintained, I've had three or maybe four drives fail in 5 or 6 years. It's a tough call, because it would be nice to build these arrays from SCSI drives - but when you're talking about 3 or 4 terabytes in an array, the number of zeroes on the cost of a SCSI solution makes you a bit dizzy. Because of that, I've continued to use SATA drives - but in RAID 6, with one hot spare, and two extra drives sitting on a shelf, waiting for another to fail. That might be overkill, but in two years if they don't make the same model of drive, you don't want to replace an entire array because one drive went out on you.
I don't know if it's good-faith or not. It could be just selfish. Instead of $X in cash, take $X in stocks, wait a year, and (if you're google), you could very well have doubled your money.
Not that I would be opposed to it, but I really don't. Their last decent architecture was the Pentium 3. After that, they fell into the "Longer pipeline, higher MHz" trap that they're still in. What did they try to do to pull themselves out of that? Hyperthreading. Well, that didn't turn out to be much use. So what did they try after that? Another P4 variant that did even *less* per clock cycle. That didn't help much, so what did they do? They added more cache.
All in all, once they fell into the MHz pit, they haven't been able to come up with anything really useful to pull themselves out with - all they're doing is trying the same clubs that they've tried over and over. But wait - the Itanium! Another idea that didn't go very well.
In fact, the only thing they've got that still makes their chips worthwhile is the fact that SSE1/2/3 instructions are pretty speedy on them - so if you're encoding video, chances are that Intel will be a better offering than AMD. For most other types of work, however, AMD gives you more performance for less money.
Intel sure hasn't come up with anything good for quite some time. There's still a chance that they could come up with something decent, but they're really going to have to change their mindset if they want to turn themselves around.
... I was just thinking earlier today about how I wish that all of the telecommuters at our office could be forced to use dial-up. You see, there was one security feature with dial-up that was somewhat useful: The "callback" option.
When you wanted to connect to such a system, your system would dial in and authenticate, and then would be disconnected. Then the system to which you wanted to connect would call you back on a pre-coded telephone number, and you would authenticate again.
That meant that even if someone had sniffed your password, unless they could be reached on your telephone number, it did them little good.
... if you pre-cooled the office, the early-arrivers would just whine that the building was too cold, and switch the thermostats over to heat. An hour later, the rest of the crowd would be sweating, and they'd turn the A/C back on.
Yes, in the middle of summer, people in our office have felt a little too chilly under an A/C vent and actually turned the HEATER on - when it's almost 100 outside.
"check out how many lights are on during the day when the sun is shining? "
In my living room, I have 360 watts of lighting. during the summer, my blinds stay down and the lights stay on. Why? Well, you see, when I open the blinds, I get several kilowatts of energy coming in from the sun, which heats my house up much more than the lights do.
With the blinds open and the lights off, my 2-kilowatt air conditioner has to work about three more hours per day if left at the same setting. Hence, in opposition to what would seem the obvious, I waste more electricity by opening the blinds.
Yeah. Americans must be the only people in the world to do anything stupid...
Once you live outside of the United States, one of the things that will surprise you is just how much of an infatuation many countries have with the US. It's not uncommon to watch the nightly news and have at least a quarter of the news dedicated just to events in the United States. And it's also not uncommon to have only the very worst of events on the news, either.
Honestly, after watching news reports from other countries, I don't blame much of the world for their opinion of the United States. Honestly, after seeing their news reports, people would ask me if we really lived in houses without bars over our doors and windows, and how we could be safe like that. All they saw was the very worst that could be picked from our nation each day.
When you consider that their opinion of Americans is that we think that we *are* the entire world, and that we're not aware of what life is like outside of our nation, it's pretty funny. That's not to say that their opinion is entirely unfounded, but it's still pretty funny.
I once took a Spanish class that was designed for persons already fluent in the language - you passed the class, your entire language requirements at the University were waived. Our first week's writing assignment was on out favorite memory.
Needless to say, most of the essays included the phrase "When I was (x) years old", which in Spanish is written as "When I had (x) years". So far, so good. Well, if you don't put the accent on the word for "year", it becomes the word "anus".
The day after our papers were turned in, the teacher walked into the room screaming at us and threw the entire stack of papers at the class. It turned out that because they weren't aware of how to use different character sets, fully 2/3 of the class had typed up papers without accents, so that they contained the phrase "When I had (x) anuses..."
Yeah. You'd expect one or two people to forget, but when you're in a class of people who have supposedly spent enough time in foreign countries to become fluent in the language, you can see why having 2/3 of the class miss that mistake would make the teacher a little upset.
It's not that people don't learn to read, it's that they never learn to think about what they're reading, and approach it from an analytical perspective. They're used to sitting down, reading something straight-forward in a textbook, and repeating it to get a passing grade on an exam.
It's not much different than sports - some people don't really like to exert themselves physically, others don't really care to exert themselves mentally.
... it's nearly everyone. Last year, our management had some disputes with the building owners, and there was a lot of wrangling back and forth about terms of the contract. I asked one of the managers to let me look over the contract, I sat down with it for about fifteen minutes, and then explained everything to him. He had a hard time accepting that just some random joe (actually, a college dropout) could understand the contract, so he paid a lawyer to go over it, and the lawyer told him that I was correct.
To be fair, I think that quite a bit of that came from a certain physics professor that I had. He was the head of the department, and I ended up getting him for about 8 of the physics classes that I took. He expected you to understand every nuance of what you had studied, and to understand it *completely*. Often he would ask questions that were seemingly impossible to solve, but if you looked at what he gave you and gave it enough thought, you would find that in every case he had given you everything you needed to know - even if it wasn't obvious that he had.
As an online retailer other than eBay or Amazon, try calling them up and saying "We have some information on people that are attempting to use fraudulent credit cards through us." See how quickly you're told to buzz off.
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Even if it hadn't, oil companies would limit supply in order to keep prices high, anyway. Duh.
Even if space technically starts 62 miles up, that doesn't mean that you won't want to go higher. In fact, in order to reach the geosynchronous altitude (which is a very useful altitude indeed), you need to be up about 22,000 miles - and there are reasons to want to go higher, as well.
Only with an Intel. A64/Opterons have an embedded memory controller, so the hypertransport link out of there only needs to feed the AGP/PCI/PCI-E busses, and it's got gobs of bandwidth for that.
"Some of us need to be in the left lane so that we may make left turns"
You make left turns off of the highway? Wow. Your highways must suck.
OK, so even though we were talking about the highway, you brought up the city. You interject an argument that has nothing to do with what we were talking about, and say "oh, that's different, don't pick a fight with me over it?" What kind of an idiot are you?
To play along with you, yes, I drive in heavy city traffic every day. When traffic is heavy, I make sure to get over in plenty of time. If I can't get over, I don't blame other people, I blame myself for waiting too long and trying to get ahead of others. As soon as you whining idiots start taking responsibility for your own actions, then your lives will suddenly get a whole lot better. Instead of thinking "Wah-wah, boo-hoo, those people who got in the left lane three blocks ago to make sure that they wouldn't miss their turn didn't open up a spot to let my precious self in!", think "Wow. I couldn't get over. Maybe I should figure out a better way to go about that."
You don't want to drive over the speed limit? Fine. That doesn't bother me a bit, and I respect your right to do it. In fact, I applaud you. When you're on the highway, just stay in the right lanes, like you're supposed to. Slow->right, Fast-left. It's so easy that even a mentally deficient person can understand it. Oh wait, I guess not...
steve
A decent-sized A/C unit draws around 2 kilowatts, so right there you're only at 500 homes - not even accounting for the stove or oven.
He didn't in the original post, but I had a feeling that he was the kind to poke along, holding up five or six cars behind him. Notice that in the next message, he *did* mention his annoyance at those pesky people that tailgate him while he's in the left lane.
As for his statements that the laws of physics apply, of course they do. It's a big game of chicken. The guy in the car behind him is counting on the fact that the fellow won't hit his brakes and cause an accident, and in virtually every case, they're right. Subcounsciously, they see virtually no potential detriment, and a possible payout in the form of them moving over. That makes the behaviour potentially beneficial to them (at least in their eyes), and just like pulling the lever on a slot machine in vegas, they take the gamble.
If he really wants them to stop, he needs to help them see that there is a potential detriment, and that there isn't a potential payout. People are actually extremely efficient at subconsciously evaluating those sorts of things. Their perspective on how likely a detriment or payout is may not reflect reality, but rest assured, if they see from their perspective that there is no potential benefit, they'll stop doing it.
One of the more fun ways to assist them in having that epiphany is not to hit your brakes, but to lightly apply your parking brake - your brake lights don't come on at all, and all of the sudden the fellow behind you realizes that he's about two inches off of your bumper. He'll hit his brakes like it was the end of the world, and you get to see his car sliding back and forth with all four tires locked up. Thinking back to the times I've done that almost brings a tear of joy to my eye.
For the record, if traffic in my lane is moving faster than me, I get over, plain and simple - and if someone is driving slow in the left lane, I don't tailgate them, because it is dangerous, and because it doesn't do any good. Just like I don't appreciate others bothering me, I try not to bother them. But sometimes, you get someone that just can't be bothered to pass you, even if you're all the way to the right. And every once in a while when that happens, I do get a very evil enjoyment out of things like that.
"Oh, that's so dangerous!", you say. Yes, it is. If that's not your style, I've seen people deter tailgaters quite effectively by just throwing a handful of dog kibble out of the window.
steve
Are you 70 years old? Your attitude seems to reflect it. There's a reason you see signs that say "slower traffic stay right". If someone wants to pass you in the left lane, get your lazy, self-righteous behind out of the way.
You're just like the rest of the idiots who demand courtesy and favors for themselves, but give no thoughts about *other* people's interests. Believe it or not, the entire universe doesn't revolve around you, and the left lane was not made for your own personal use. Use it for what it was made for, or keep out of it. It's easy.
steve
There's an easy answer for the tailgating problem... GET OUT OF THE LEFT LANE!
Easy. As Sun would say, it's the network. Very few of my friends use Verizon cell phones, because they're the most expensive. On the other hand, not a single one of my friends gets the reception and coverage that I do.
In fact, last year, I took a trip most of the way across the country with some family. A couple of them had specifically bought a new cell phone just for the point of travelling - one from AT&T, and I don't recall the other carrier. I can't count the number of times that they couldn't get service, couldn't place a call, or were on hold with customer service. Other than driving through deep, steep canyons, there wasn't a single time that I didn't get service or couldn't place a call.
In fact, one of those persons went with a different carrier recently, and it didn't take him long to memorize all of the intersections on his daily commute where a call would get dropped. I really don't get how people can live with service like that.
steve
I've always wished that I could get a full-screen DVD to play back on my second monitor while I played on the first...
steve
It's called a "crock pot". I throw thing in it in the evening, and stick it in the fridge. Before I leave for work, I plug it in, and turn it on low. When I get home, it's ready. C'est facil, no? And if I'm late getting home, it's alright - most things just get better. I once got *really* held up, and my roast ended up simmering on low for 16 hours. Boy, was it good.
I know, I know, everyone will whine that I wasted electricity. Well, at about 100 watts, if it's on for ten hours, it only uses about as much power as turning on my oven for just twenty minutes.
steve
Making the vaccine is just the first step. Manufacturing ramp-ups and other time delays mean that it will still probably be at least two or three years before this vaccine is actually in use.
Of course, it will likely be in use where it's needed most - in Asia - sooner than it is here. That's not because of any altruistic motives on the part of the drug manufacturers (although they often claim that it is), it's because those countries have far fewer regulations, safeguards, and old-fashioned red-tape in place.
steve
AMD is starting to kick Intel's pants in the most lucrative arena, small- and medium-sized servers. Instead of trying to compete technologically in that area (as opposed to just marketing), they're throwing good money after bad into a failing/failed architecture which only makes sense for a few highly-specialized applications. If it weren't for the fact that most holders of Intel stock know next to nothing about the industry, I would expect a cry for a change of leadership.
Sure, there are a few supercomputing-type applications where the Itanium really, really shines - but they're sufficienty specialized that Intel just doesn't move a very large number of CPUs.
Like I've said before, Intel is in a bind because of its own laziness and arrogance. Look at one of the primary advantages of the A64/Opteron architecture - the on-die memory controller. More memory bandwidth, lower latencies, and a memory subsystem that scales with the number of CPUs. Big-iron vendors proved that technology long before AMD decided to use it. Yet Intel has always enjoyed the superior manufacturing side of the business - if *anyone* could afford to have put those extra transistors on the die, it was Intel. Since they're almost always a step ahead of AMD in making smaller transistors, they had the *ability* to do something along those lines long before AMD did - but relied on the old tradition of more megahertz and lots of marketing. I don't think that this move is much different, they're putting their efforts in the wrong direction.
steve
I have a number of 1+ terabyte arrays made from IDE and SATA drives, and my experience has been that failures come quick and often. Each of the machines has fans blowing large amounts of air over every drive, and the rest of the machines are top-notch quality. Whether the arrays were made from Maxtor, Seagate, or Western Digital, most have at least one drive die within the first six months.
In fact, about a week ago, a Western Digital RAID-edition drive died in one of my arrays - and that particular set of disks had only been in use for a week or two.
Of the SCSI arrays I've built and maintained, I've had three or maybe four drives fail in 5 or 6 years. It's a tough call, because it would be nice to build these arrays from SCSI drives - but when you're talking about 3 or 4 terabytes in an array, the number of zeroes on the cost of a SCSI solution makes you a bit dizzy. Because of that, I've continued to use SATA drives - but in RAID 6, with one hot spare, and two extra drives sitting on a shelf, waiting for another to fail. That might be overkill, but in two years if they don't make the same model of drive, you don't want to replace an entire array because one drive went out on you.
steve
I don't know if it's good-faith or not. It could be just selfish. Instead of $X in cash, take $X in stocks, wait a year, and (if you're google), you could very well have doubled your money.
steve
Not that I would be opposed to it, but I really don't. Their last decent architecture was the Pentium 3. After that, they fell into the "Longer pipeline, higher MHz" trap that they're still in. What did they try to do to pull themselves out of that? Hyperthreading. Well, that didn't turn out to be much use. So what did they try after that? Another P4 variant that did even *less* per clock cycle. That didn't help much, so what did they do? They added more cache.
All in all, once they fell into the MHz pit, they haven't been able to come up with anything really useful to pull themselves out with - all they're doing is trying the same clubs that they've tried over and over. But wait - the Itanium! Another idea that didn't go very well.
In fact, the only thing they've got that still makes their chips worthwhile is the fact that SSE1/2/3 instructions are pretty speedy on them - so if you're encoding video, chances are that Intel will be a better offering than AMD. For most other types of work, however, AMD gives you more performance for less money.
Intel sure hasn't come up with anything good for quite some time. There's still a chance that they could come up with something decent, but they're really going to have to change their mindset if they want to turn themselves around.
When you wanted to connect to such a system, your system would dial in and authenticate, and then would be disconnected. Then the system to which you wanted to connect would call you back on a pre-coded telephone number, and you would authenticate again.
That meant that even if someone had sniffed your password, unless they could be reached on your telephone number, it did them little good.
steve
Yes, in the middle of summer, people in our office have felt a little too chilly under an A/C vent and actually turned the HEATER on - when it's almost 100 outside.
steve
"check out how many lights are on during the day when the sun is shining? "
In my living room, I have 360 watts of lighting. during the summer, my blinds stay down and the lights stay on. Why? Well, you see, when I open the blinds, I get several kilowatts of energy coming in from the sun, which heats my house up much more than the lights do.
With the blinds open and the lights off, my 2-kilowatt air conditioner has to work about three more hours per day if left at the same setting. Hence, in opposition to what would seem the obvious, I waste more electricity by opening the blinds.
steve
Yeah. Americans must be the only people in the world to do anything stupid...
Once you live outside of the United States, one of the things that will surprise you is just how much of an infatuation many countries have with the US. It's not uncommon to watch the nightly news and have at least a quarter of the news dedicated just to events in the United States. And it's also not uncommon to have only the very worst of events on the news, either.
Honestly, after watching news reports from other countries, I don't blame much of the world for their opinion of the United States. Honestly, after seeing their news reports, people would ask me if we really lived in houses without bars over our doors and windows, and how we could be safe like that. All they saw was the very worst that could be picked from our nation each day.
When you consider that their opinion of Americans is that we think that we *are* the entire world, and that we're not aware of what life is like outside of our nation, it's pretty funny. That's not to say that their opinion is entirely unfounded, but it's still pretty funny.
I once took a Spanish class that was designed for persons already fluent in the language - you passed the class, your entire language requirements at the University were waived. Our first week's writing assignment was on out favorite memory.
Needless to say, most of the essays included the phrase "When I was (x) years old", which in Spanish is written as "When I had (x) years". So far, so good. Well, if you don't put the accent on the word for "year", it becomes the word "anus".
The day after our papers were turned in, the teacher walked into the room screaming at us and threw the entire stack of papers at the class. It turned out that because they weren't aware of how to use different character sets, fully 2/3 of the class had typed up papers without accents, so that they contained the phrase "When I had (x) anuses..."
Yeah. You'd expect one or two people to forget, but when you're in a class of people who have supposedly spent enough time in foreign countries to become fluent in the language, you can see why having 2/3 of the class miss that mistake would make the teacher a little upset.
It's not that people don't learn to read, it's that they never learn to think about what they're reading, and approach it from an analytical perspective. They're used to sitting down, reading something straight-forward in a textbook, and repeating it to get a passing grade on an exam.
It's not much different than sports - some people don't really like to exert themselves physically, others don't really care to exert themselves mentally.
steve
To be fair, I think that quite a bit of that came from a certain physics professor that I had. He was the head of the department, and I ended up getting him for about 8 of the physics classes that I took. He expected you to understand every nuance of what you had studied, and to understand it *completely*. Often he would ask questions that were seemingly impossible to solve, but if you looked at what he gave you and gave it enough thought, you would find that in every case he had given you everything you needed to know - even if it wasn't obvious that he had.
steve
"That is good, but somewhat disturbing. Is US economy so money-centric despite its capitalistic nature?"
What do you mean by "despite"? The capitalistic nature is exactly what would (and does) make it so money-centric.
As an online retailer other than eBay or Amazon, try calling them up and saying "We have some information on people that are attempting to use fraudulent credit cards through us." See how quickly you're told to buzz off.