PokerStars recommends that U.S. players use ePassporte for all their money transfer needs, as they are not accepting any transfers to or from NETeller or CentralCoin. I assume other poker sites are giving similar advice.
plus, there's always paper checks.
For the last year or so, I've been a professional online low-stakes poker player, and thanks to this asinine crusade launched by the Department of Justice, I'm soon to be out of a job. It simply blows me away that the horse-racing lobby was successful in exempting online horse tracks from the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, attached to the Port Security Bill of 2006 at the last possible moment), while games of skill like poker, operated by enormous legitimate corporations, are snatched from my fingers as though I was a child playing with matches.
This whole thing smacks of everything that is wrong with the US legal system. Although I can still play online and withdraw money, the casual players that were my bread and butter are either going to stop playing, or more likely, never start. The chilling effect will be what kills online poker.
In high school, I worked in the control room at the local television station. One of my duties was to type in all the graphics - names of people in stories, sports scores, that sort of thing.
The sports director could type faster than anyone in the building, and I can type pretty frickin' fast. I bet he was doing 70 words a minute, no errors... with only his index fingers.
"...we must answer whether we might also dislike it because we have been indoctrinated into tonality at an early age."
let me save the royal 'us' the trouble: no, you're thinking too hard.
people get into tonal music for the same reason that journalists use top-down writing style - it's easier to comprehend. it's not about indoctrination; it's about what is easier for our brains to chew on. if a writer presents his thesis and then elaborates on it, referencing it throughout the work, then it's easier for the reader to understand; if a musical composition is performed in a recognizable (to the ear, not necessarily the mind) key, and the main elements of the song are presented and referenced throughout, it's easier for us to recognize and tap our toes to it, because we know if we keep tapping our toes like we did at the start, it will most likely continue the same way. and that's very satisfying.
i am hardly an expert in linguistics, but i would imagine that there is, somewhere in the world, a linguistic analogue to atonal music, and that speakers of such an 'atonal language' would have a harder time learning a 'tonal language,' just as most people do not immediately understand the value of atonal music.
i think this is a fascinating study, insofar as it proposes a link between music and language... a link whose origins we can probe and explore, with (i suspect) great benefit to linguists everywhere.
sadly... neither my employers nor my professors care that i am at my best when i sleep until noon and work until 4 am. for that matter, neither does the rest of the american world, which prefers that i do all my business between 9am and 5pm... times which, as we would both agree, i am basically asleep.
i guess i've got a cosmic prescription for failure.
What, you mean watch/listen to total crap? I don't have time to wade through an Internet full of 10,000,000 19-year-old boys who think they're the best DJ since their hero Darude, just so I can find a couple of albums' worth of decent music. I don't have the patience to watch some turtleneck-wearing indie filmmaker mentally masturbating through his camera lens for an hour and a half just to see his own name scroll by 20 times in the credits at the end.
There are no small clubs around here. Oh, wait, yes there are... and they suck. I don't like rock music, and I don't like top 40... the answer is probably to live in a town that isn't in the geographical butthole of the continent, but that's not feasible right now. I could go to the local comedy club, but I can only hear comics make fun of how cold it is so many times, especially when this is one of the mildest winters so far I can remember.
What IS feasible is to watch Dennis Miller and Jerry Seinfeld when they come to town. Oops, I just supported Ticketmaster. I can go home and watch South Park, Home Movies, Inu-Yasha, Cowboy Bebop, and The Simpsons. Oops, shite, there's Viacom, FOX, and my local cable company. I can go to a film... oops, dammit, there's more money to Carmike Choke-The-Life-Out-Of-Cinema, and probably Sony while I'm at it. I could play Animal Crossing... wait, no I can't. Nintendo may be cuter than Sony, but they're still anticompetitive.
I can come to the computer lab and bitch about how hard it is to boycott things without subjecting myself to a life full of lousy entertainment... uh-oh. now I'm using Windows XP. I could go to a hockey game, and watch the top-rated college hockey team in the nation beat your team... but then my five bucks is going to support the arena staff, who have little regard for the students (after all, we don't pay full price).
So, screw it. I'm an American; my life has become softer and easier as time goes by, and I don't want to give it up. I'm accustomed to the perks that massive funding and corporate support can provide, and at this point, there's not that much I'm willing to do otherwise. I'll give my share to the EFF and ACLU, and wave signs when it's appropriate, but a boycott? this isn't the 60s, and these aren't buses.
Re:Does anyone remember the Fourth Ammendment?
on
HomeSec In the News
·
· Score: 1
Our government now has unlimited powers.
You don't think you're being just a little reactionary?
First of all, reading the articles attached to the story, there are an awful lot of "if"" and "it is likely" statements... meaning, lots of Chicken Little conjecture and very little fact. That, and Safire doesn't seem to like this John Poindexter fellow very much.
This law hasn't been passed, and if it really, to quote again,
won't require *any* government agency to have "probable cause" to read/acquire anyone's personal information anymore
then the Supreme Court will most likely declare it un-Constitutional... because it is.
Nobody is going to wake up tomorrow and find the Gestapo marching in the streets, and invisible eyes watching them everywhere they go. And if they should, the people would rise up next election cycle and boot the whole sordid lot out of office. As nice as it is to whine about how your vote doesn't count and your representatives don't care about you, all this pork legislation gets tacked onto popular bills because that is exactly how people get re-elected in their home states - by giving their consitituents money to build things. If Congressman Pomeroy hadn't been returning $1.95 in federal farm bail-outs and disaster recovery funding (among other things) for every $1 North Dakotans paid in federal income tax, he probably wouldn't have gotten re-elected.
These articles seem like politics as usual (pork-barrel federal spending? stop the presses!) combined with a healthy dose of death-and-destruction forecasting. Too bad it's kick-started us all into rant mode.
However, I see some problems. As one poster already noted, how do you enforce this if an admission has to be made voluntarily?
wait a second. If I read the article correctly, if company X does not declare themselves h4x0r3d, they will be fair game for civil penalty.
I ph33r 1337 14wy3rz. I would imagine that most business entities do as well. This might even give victims of identity theft some sort of recourse when their lives are still being ruined four years after they tried to clean up the mess that resulted from bungled security.
There is no excuse for a person's vital records to be "accidentally" spilled out like so much sugar from a sugar-filled semi truck. Any legislation that would keep things like what happened to the state of CA from happening again is fine in my book; even if it doesn't pass the judiciary, it will at least stimulate discussion.
on a side note, why do we even have the FOIA? so the bushies can make exceptions for the things that the act was supposed to let us see?
Sure, quashing MS bugs is a tremendously successful make-work project that helps stimulate the economy and provides thousands and thousands of people with essentially meaningless jobs that will never really be completed...
Parents, would you prefer your kid to murder someone or play doctor?
In the context of the question, I would prefer them to do neither, and would let them play video games that let them take out their aggression/satisfy their curiosity instead of playing games with their lives/bodies.
There's an excellent book entitled Killing Monsters that discusses the real impact of media/entertainment violence on children. One of the many reasons author Gerard Jones feels that violent entertainment is beneficial is that it allows children, who have next to no control over the world around them, to take events and people and situations and put them in a context that they can control - shoot the bad guy and he's dead. Send a platoon of plastic soldiers in to kill the terrorists. Have Barbie and Ken duke it out in place of Mom and Dad. Instead of making kids bottle up their natural aggression, violent play encourages them to explore their feelings and become more comfortable with situations that they cannot improve or eliminate.
I suppose I'm replying to the wrong post here, but I think your argument is a red herring - sex is not ignored by the media or by entertainment. (Hel-lo? Zippergate?) At the end of your post, you imply a connection between violent games and actual violence (and sexual games and sex play); a connection, yes, but much different than the one you describe.
The reason that the picked-on kids are the ones who come back and shoot up their schools is because they are subject to large amounts of violent stress that they cannot control or deal with effectively - perhaps because their parents are God-fearing Mormons who heard that computer games teach kids to love Satan and subsequently installed filtering software for the Web while only letting their children watch the ABC Family Channel and PAX TV. Oversimplified, yes, but these kids are like any fluid-holding vessel - fill it up past its capacity, and you'll have a big mess on your hands. We passed our capacity with Zippergate, and as a result, 8-year-old children were asking their parents what oral sex was after they saw it on the front page of the paper.
The "monkey see, monkey do" argument is fundamentally flawed, and it is truly unfortunate to see it reincarnated in so many different ways, and considered fact by so many well-meaning people.
So, is the fact that she is married and goes to church makes her less or more guilty?
No, but it helps to establish a general willingness to believe things that are inconclusively proven and/or incorrect, and also to commit to a pretty outrageous situation for a long freakin' time. How many married, churchgoing skeptics do you know?
This, I think, is the argument behind ProComp's "hard to use" whine (yeah, it's a whine, and they would like a fine Muenster with it, tyvm). Everything about Windows 2000/XP, despite being very expensive and shiny-looking and supposedly Justice Department-compliant, still does not acknowledge the power of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.
Everything from the design of the windows to the phrasing of the options to the "Yes/No" in the buttons instead of an action verb ("Save/Cancel") makes every option in Windows less understandable to speakers of languages. Most people can't articulate why their computers are difficult to use, and this isn't the alpha and the omega, but I'm sure it's a part.
It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft was doing this on purpose so that people would click the most attractive (read: least possibly confusing) option available. I imagine that many users of Win2k/XP have had previous experience with Windows behaving like the Queen of the Harpies when they tried to modify a setting or fiddle with the middle (ware).
If this is the case, then Microsoft is guilty of the same thing they've been doing all along... "gently guiding" users towards the Evil Empire, while slowly picking apart their 3rd party options behind the users' back. I suspect this is the case, and I am equally suspicious that the Justice Department is now too busy looking for brown people to throw in the brig in order to care about a major campaign contributor breaking some "antitrust laws."
I have never been put into temptation by anything.
That aside, I love my m130. Sure, I was a little skeptical when Palm said 64,000 colors... and that made me less surprised when I turned it on and saw 12-bit color... but I never upgraded for the colors. I switched from my palm IIIc because I needed the expandability and liked the form factor of the m130 so much more. The m515 may be sexier, but it's also a bit more expensive, and I'm already pleased beyond pleased.
Even more so now that I get SimCity for free. Palm rules.
it's about time. especially in a place where people are as concentrated as they are in japan, there should be much more focus on next-gen wireless service and far fewer telephone poles and lines strung between buildings.
The whole idea of doublethink and the ability to hold 2 contradictory ideas at once as truth is a powerful tool of control. It requires zero technology. The MIT guys totally missed the boat. In the end if you remember Smith wished to die for his sins.
In other news, John Walker Lindh pleads guilty to aiding and abetting terrorists...
I think you're absolutely right wrt Windows; everyone who is anyone knows that it's total crap, and there is lots of beer and pizza to be consumed over many bizarre breakdowns/failures of hardware and software. Maybe he won't suffer a blow to his self-esteem because his computer is broken, but I would imagine he's still pissed that he can't just install a CD-RW and a scanner at the same time.
However, my experience dictates the inverse of your statement about MacOS. When someone's Mac has a problem, the same tactics will work for fixing most problems with OS 9 on down, because your list of software culprits is relatively short, and nearly all of them live in the system folder. Usually. Anyone who tells you, "Well, it shouldn't do that," or "Mine works fine" probably doesn't have any interest in helping you fix it, anyways.
Meanwhile, I am rendered helpless at the myriad ways Windows finds to screw its users, and its total unwillingness to explain to you why it died. When people ask me why the blue screen o' death appears, I have no other answer than, "It just does that sometimes. Heck, maybe someone else did it to you... there's no way to know." And so I fear that Microsoft is directly responsible for the distrust many people have for computers - they simply don't know that there are ways you can have a computer that isn't frustrating. And that's too bad.
What happens to your "choice" when all the bank[s] use Passport?
Banks in America are not that stupid. I would venture that somebody, somewhere heard about Passport getting hacked, and also knows about Microsoft's dismal track record with matters of security. (MS people acknowledge that even Longhorn will most likely be released with bugs, and many service packs will follow, and the peasants will cry out in distress.) Anyways, that person will probably tell as many people that he or she can that making such a deal-with-the-devil would open them up to the possibility of serious liability, and I would imagine that Microsoft wouldn't be too keen on settling lawsuits brought against them for letting 14-year-old kids steal large numbers of credit cards.
Perhaps a few companies will go along with the deal for a while until it falls apart, but I doubt it'll become popular... banks may or may not play fast and loose with your money, but they are absolutely ridiculous about theirs - I can't get a bank account anywhere in town, and all I did was bounce a couple of checks.
ATMs DO save the bank money. They, in fact, earn tons of money for banks everywhere... no pesky tellers to pay or provide benefits for, even shorter office hours, and FREE MONEY whenever their hapless customers do business!
Slashdot Mirror
After all, US law enforcement has never found a way to illegally abuse newly-granted surveillance powers.
Looks like China isn't cool with the USA cornering the market on endless, unwinnable wars.
PokerStars recommends that U.S. players use ePassporte for all their money transfer needs, as they are not accepting any transfers to or from NETeller or CentralCoin. I assume other poker sites are giving similar advice.
plus, there's always paper checks.
For the last year or so, I've been a professional online low-stakes poker player, and thanks to this asinine crusade launched by the Department of Justice, I'm soon to be out of a job. It simply blows me away that the horse-racing lobby was successful in exempting online horse tracks from the UIGEA (Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, attached to the Port Security Bill of 2006 at the last possible moment), while games of skill like poker, operated by enormous legitimate corporations, are snatched from my fingers as though I was a child playing with matches.
This whole thing smacks of everything that is wrong with the US legal system. Although I can still play online and withdraw money, the casual players that were my bread and butter are either going to stop playing, or more likely, never start. The chilling effect will be what kills online poker.
Perhaps, but...
you *can't* move along.
After updating on my g3/400 iMac, the only thing I've really noticed is that the Dashboard opens much, much faster.
Sweeeeet.
In high school, I worked in the control room at the local television station. One of my duties was to type in all the graphics - names of people in stories, sports scores, that sort of thing.
The sports director could type faster than anyone in the building, and I can type pretty frickin' fast. I bet he was doing 70 words a minute, no errors... with only his index fingers.
uh... that's three words.
"...we must answer whether we might also dislike it because we have been indoctrinated into tonality at an early age."
let me save the royal 'us' the trouble: no, you're thinking too hard.
people get into tonal music for the same reason that journalists use top-down writing style - it's easier to comprehend. it's not about indoctrination; it's about what is easier for our brains to chew on. if a writer presents his thesis and then elaborates on it, referencing it throughout the work, then it's easier for the reader to understand; if a musical composition is performed in a recognizable (to the ear, not necessarily the mind) key, and the main elements of the song are presented and referenced throughout, it's easier for us to recognize and tap our toes to it, because we know if we keep tapping our toes like we did at the start, it will most likely continue the same way. and that's very satisfying.
i am hardly an expert in linguistics, but i would imagine that there is, somewhere in the world, a linguistic analogue to atonal music, and that speakers of such an 'atonal language' would have a harder time learning a 'tonal language,' just as most people do not immediately understand the value of atonal music.
i think this is a fascinating study, insofar as it proposes a link between music and language... a link whose origins we can probe and explore, with (i suspect) great benefit to linguists everywhere.
thank you for that.
sadly... neither my employers nor my professors care that i am at my best when i sleep until noon and work until 4 am. for that matter, neither does the rest of the american world, which prefers that i do all my business between 9am and 5pm... times which, as we would both agree, i am basically asleep.
i guess i've got a cosmic prescription for failure.
Wait a second.
3)refrain from excessive use of alcohol or drugs; 5) substance abuse testing and treatment as dir(ected) by PTS
He pleads guilty to selling mod chips, and now he's subject to substance abuse evaluation?
WTF?
And refine your tastes.
What, you mean watch/listen to total crap? I don't have time to wade through an Internet full of 10,000,000 19-year-old boys who think they're the best DJ since their hero Darude, just so I can find a couple of albums' worth of decent music. I don't have the patience to watch some turtleneck-wearing indie filmmaker mentally masturbating through his camera lens for an hour and a half just to see his own name scroll by 20 times in the credits at the end.
There are no small clubs around here. Oh, wait, yes there are... and they suck. I don't like rock music, and I don't like top 40... the answer is probably to live in a town that isn't in the geographical butthole of the continent, but that's not feasible right now. I could go to the local comedy club, but I can only hear comics make fun of how cold it is so many times, especially when this is one of the mildest winters so far I can remember.
What IS feasible is to watch Dennis Miller and Jerry Seinfeld when they come to town. Oops, I just supported Ticketmaster. I can go home and watch South Park, Home Movies, Inu-Yasha, Cowboy Bebop, and The Simpsons. Oops, shite, there's Viacom, FOX, and my local cable company. I can go to a film... oops, dammit, there's more money to Carmike Choke-The-Life-Out-Of-Cinema, and probably Sony while I'm at it. I could play Animal Crossing... wait, no I can't. Nintendo may be cuter than Sony, but they're still anticompetitive.
I can come to the computer lab and bitch about how hard it is to boycott things without subjecting myself to a life full of lousy entertainment... uh-oh. now I'm using Windows XP. I could go to a hockey game, and watch the top-rated college hockey team in the nation beat your team... but then my five bucks is going to support the arena staff, who have little regard for the students (after all, we don't pay full price).
So, screw it. I'm an American; my life has become softer and easier as time goes by, and I don't want to give it up. I'm accustomed to the perks that massive funding and corporate support can provide, and at this point, there's not that much I'm willing to do otherwise. I'll give my share to the EFF and ACLU, and wave signs when it's appropriate, but a boycott? this isn't the 60s, and these aren't buses.
Our government now has unlimited powers.
You don't think you're being just a little reactionary?
First of all, reading the articles attached to the story, there are an awful lot of "if"" and "it is likely" statements... meaning, lots of Chicken Little conjecture and very little fact. That, and Safire doesn't seem to like this John Poindexter fellow very much.
This law hasn't been passed, and if it really, to quote again,
won't require *any* government agency to have "probable cause" to read/acquire anyone's personal information anymore
then the Supreme Court will most likely declare it un-Constitutional... because it is.
Nobody is going to wake up tomorrow and find the Gestapo marching in the streets, and invisible eyes watching them everywhere they go. And if they should, the people would rise up next election cycle and boot the whole sordid lot out of office. As nice as it is to whine about how your vote doesn't count and your representatives don't care about you, all this pork legislation gets tacked onto popular bills because that is exactly how people get re-elected in their home states - by giving their consitituents money to build things. If Congressman Pomeroy hadn't been returning $1.95 in federal farm bail-outs and disaster recovery funding (among other things) for every $1 North Dakotans paid in federal income tax, he probably wouldn't have gotten re-elected.
These articles seem like politics as usual (pork-barrel federal spending? stop the presses!) combined with a healthy dose of death-and-destruction forecasting. Too bad it's kick-started us all into rant mode.
However, I see some problems. As one poster already noted, how do you enforce this if an admission has to be made voluntarily?
wait a second. If I read the article correctly, if company X does not declare themselves h4x0r3d, they will be fair game for civil penalty.
I ph33r 1337 14wy3rz. I would imagine that most business entities do as well. This might even give victims of identity theft some sort of recourse when their lives are still being ruined four years after they tried to clean up the mess that resulted from bungled security.
There is no excuse for a person's vital records to be "accidentally" spilled out like so much sugar from a sugar-filled semi truck. Any legislation that would keep things like what happened to the state of CA from happening again is fine in my book; even if it doesn't pass the judiciary, it will at least stimulate discussion.
on a side note, why do we even have the FOIA? so the bushies can make exceptions for the things that the act was supposed to let us see?
YES!!!
...ahem.
I told the world that we could be the next Silicon Valley... but nobody listened...
(maniacal laugh)
Sure, quashing MS bugs is a tremendously successful make-work project that helps stimulate the economy and provides thousands and thousands of people with essentially meaningless jobs that will never really be completed...
but then again, so is the War on Drugs.
Parents, would you prefer your kid to murder someone or play doctor?
In the context of the question, I would prefer them to do neither, and would let them play video games that let them take out their aggression/satisfy their curiosity instead of playing games with their lives/bodies.
There's an excellent book entitled Killing Monsters that discusses the real impact of media/entertainment violence on children. One of the many reasons author Gerard Jones feels that violent entertainment is beneficial is that it allows children, who have next to no control over the world around them, to take events and people and situations and put them in a context that they can control - shoot the bad guy and he's dead. Send a platoon of plastic soldiers in to kill the terrorists. Have Barbie and Ken duke it out in place of Mom and Dad. Instead of making kids bottle up their natural aggression, violent play encourages them to explore their feelings and become more comfortable with situations that they cannot improve or eliminate.
I suppose I'm replying to the wrong post here, but I think your argument is a red herring - sex is not ignored by the media or by entertainment. (Hel-lo? Zippergate?) At the end of your post, you imply a connection between violent games and actual violence (and sexual games and sex play); a connection, yes, but much different than the one you describe.
The reason that the picked-on kids are the ones who come back and shoot up their schools is because they are subject to large amounts of violent stress that they cannot control or deal with effectively - perhaps because their parents are God-fearing Mormons who heard that computer games teach kids to love Satan and subsequently installed filtering software for the Web while only letting their children watch the ABC Family Channel and PAX TV. Oversimplified, yes, but these kids are like any fluid-holding vessel - fill it up past its capacity, and you'll have a big mess on your hands. We passed our capacity with Zippergate, and as a result, 8-year-old children were asking their parents what oral sex was after they saw it on the front page of the paper.
The "monkey see, monkey do" argument is fundamentally flawed, and it is truly unfortunate to see it reincarnated in so many different ways, and considered fact by so many well-meaning people.
(/rant)
So, is the fact that she is married and goes to church makes her less or more guilty?
No, but it helps to establish a general willingness to believe things that are inconclusively proven and/or incorrect, and also to commit to a pretty outrageous situation for a long freakin' time. How many married, churchgoing skeptics do you know?
This, I think, is the argument behind ProComp's "hard to use" whine (yeah, it's a whine, and they would like a fine Muenster with it, tyvm). Everything about Windows 2000/XP, despite being very expensive and shiny-looking and supposedly Justice Department-compliant, still does not acknowledge the power of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.
Everything from the design of the windows to the phrasing of the options to the "Yes/No" in the buttons instead of an action verb ("Save/Cancel") makes every option in Windows less understandable to speakers of languages. Most people can't articulate why their computers are difficult to use, and this isn't the alpha and the omega, but I'm sure it's a part.
It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft was doing this on purpose so that people would click the most attractive (read: least possibly confusing) option available. I imagine that many users of Win2k/XP have had previous experience with Windows behaving like the Queen of the Harpies when they tried to modify a setting or fiddle with the middle (ware).
If this is the case, then Microsoft is guilty of the same thing they've been doing all along... "gently guiding" users towards the Evil Empire, while slowly picking apart their 3rd party options behind the users' back. I suspect this is the case, and I am equally suspicious that the Justice Department is now too busy looking for brown people to throw in the brig in order to care about a major campaign contributor breaking some "antitrust laws."
Whatever those are. Here's your crown, Microsoft.
urrrghhh...
-1, trollbait.
..."Well, Slashdot has given us some nice moments. But in between all those nice moments has been a high-volume sewer hose of cultural sludge."
Hey, you're right! It works for everything!
Hmm... the obvious solution, then, is to watch television at +3.
I have never been put into temptation by anything.
That aside, I love my m130. Sure, I was a little skeptical when Palm said 64,000 colors... and that made me less surprised when I turned it on and saw 12-bit color... but I never upgraded for the colors. I switched from my palm IIIc because I needed the expandability and liked the form factor of the m130 so much more. The m515 may be sexier, but it's also a bit more expensive, and I'm already pleased beyond pleased.
Even more so now that I get SimCity for free. Palm rules.
it's about time. especially in a place where people are as concentrated as they are in japan, there should be much more focus on next-gen wireless service and far fewer telephone poles and lines strung between buildings.
welcome to the 21st century.
The whole idea of doublethink and the ability to hold 2 contradictory ideas at once as truth is a powerful tool of control. It requires zero technology. The MIT guys totally missed the boat. In the end if you remember Smith wished to die for his sins.
In other news, John Walker Lindh pleads guilty to aiding and abetting terrorists...
I think you're absolutely right wrt Windows; everyone who is anyone knows that it's total crap, and there is lots of beer and pizza to be consumed over many bizarre breakdowns/failures of hardware and software. Maybe he won't suffer a blow to his self-esteem because his computer is broken, but I would imagine he's still pissed that he can't just install a CD-RW and a scanner at the same time.
However, my experience dictates the inverse of your statement about MacOS. When someone's Mac has a problem, the same tactics will work for fixing most problems with OS 9 on down, because your list of software culprits is relatively short, and nearly all of them live in the system folder. Usually. Anyone who tells you, "Well, it shouldn't do that," or "Mine works fine" probably doesn't have any interest in helping you fix it, anyways.
Meanwhile, I am rendered helpless at the myriad ways Windows finds to screw its users, and its total unwillingness to explain to you why it died. When people ask me why the blue screen o' death appears, I have no other answer than, "It just does that sometimes. Heck, maybe someone else did it to you... there's no way to know." And so I fear that Microsoft is directly responsible for the distrust many people have for computers - they simply don't know that there are ways you can have a computer that isn't frustrating.
And that's too bad.
What happens to your "choice" when all the bank[s] use Passport?
Banks in America are not that stupid. I would venture that somebody, somewhere heard about Passport getting hacked, and also knows about Microsoft's dismal track record with matters of security. (MS people acknowledge that even Longhorn will most likely be released with bugs, and many service packs will follow, and the peasants will cry out in distress.) Anyways, that person will probably tell as many people that he or she can that making such a deal-with-the-devil would open them up to the possibility of serious liability, and I would imagine that Microsoft wouldn't be too keen on settling lawsuits brought against them for letting 14-year-old kids steal large numbers of credit cards.
Perhaps a few companies will go along with the deal for a while until it falls apart, but I doubt it'll become popular... banks may or may not play fast and loose with your money, but they are absolutely ridiculous about theirs - I can't get a bank account anywhere in town, and all I did was bounce a couple of checks.
ATMs DO save the bank money. They, in fact, earn tons of money for banks everywhere... no pesky tellers to pay or provide benefits for, even shorter office hours, and FREE MONEY whenever their hapless customers do business!