With regard to point b, what I am getting at is, is it legal to take things from Cuba into the US if there is no profit involved, and no chance that some poor Cuban will get some money to pay for a bit of health care or food as a result of that product being shipped out?
Actually the embargo has nothing to do if a profit is made or not. An US citizen with a permit to travel to Cuba (and that's very, very rare) can bring back Cuban goods up to a value of 100.00 USD. Others are not permitted to import anything Cuban into the US.
There where rumours that non-USians are permitted to bring 50 Cuban cigars for personal consumption. Unfortunately this is bollocks.
If you do find Cuban cigars in the US the only advise I can give you is to stay clear. It's not so much the legal side, but your chances are in the 90-95% range that you just bought a fake Cohiba for 40 bucks. This applies also for Mexico, the entire Caribean and virtually any cruise ship originating from the US. The only exception are La Casa Del Habano franchises. It's incredible profitable business and your customers usually don't shoot you when they are not happy with the merchandise.
This is also the reason why a lot of US cigar smokers think that Cuban cigars are nothing special. They smoke the odd "Cuban" cigar (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), which in all likeliness was manufactured in Mexico. They are very easy marks, since they don't have a point of reference.
To cut to the cheese: No, you cannot import anything from Cuba except the 100$ limit if you where traveling on a permit.
... although it was a terrible unethical article (and I really felt for PJ yesterday), isn't getting rid of MOG a bit like sacking Ronald McDonald? Who are we all going to laugh at?
Not that I'd dispute that (alas it was humour for real men with an iron stomach). But she crossed the line when she personally attacked PJ.
This is sort of like Ronald Mc Donald pulling a SIG Sauer and starting to blast away in the playroom of a Manhattan McDonalds.
I hope for Ms. O'Garas sake that she's very well paid. Because as a journalist she's dead. And - in my opinion of course - her writings represent the equivalent of a crack whore in San Franciscos Tenderloin district offering a blowjob for $7.95 (incl. sales tax).
What is reprehensible and really hard to stomach is that she stooped to such lows as attacking Ms. Jones privacy.
Reminds me of the methods of a science fiction space opera nut cult.
this is business and all business cares about is the bottom line.
Isn't that what Mr. Gotti and Mr. Capone thought too?
So, Telewest shouldn't be held accountable for such a situation going completely haywire? If they just want to smoke their own servers that's fine with me, but when their users spew millions of messages per hour to the global mail infrastructure it's their damn responsibility to clean up their act.
Assume a chemical plant, which is a security hazard, but which the owners won't clean up, because it cut's into the profits. Well, that's about what Telewest has done and it seems obvious that they needed a good whopping and some public humiliation before cleaning up their act.
You will need a valid passport, but that's about it.
Can turn into an image problem though, if the name on the passport spells "Abacha" or the name of some other corrupt dictator creep.
BTW: What you can't do - as much as novelists like to slip that in - is open an anonymous account. You may want to try Austria (and that's changing) or some of those strange islands with funny fiduciary policies.
This is true, of course. But then again contractual rules are only valid to the participants of a contract.
Say American Express - with whom I never had a business relationship else then purchasing travellers cheques - suddenly demands $ 20'000.00 from me, since they claim I ordered and used one of their credit cards, they still can't apply their rules, because I never ordered a credit card. If somebody has fraudulently ordered one in my name, then it's their fucking problem. They'd be hard pushed to prove in court that we engaged into a contract, since we actually never did.
In addition, and if they do sue me, they pay all legal costs (including my attourney), which should give them some pause, before (ab)using the legal system to harrass me. This rule is applicable (to the best of my knowledge) in all European judical systems.
That said, you're right of course. If you do enter a contractual business with a credit card company then their rules are certainly not geared towards my interests as a customer. This is the reason why I refrain from doing my banking stuff electronically. That's probably one of the reasons why finance companies have an image somewhere between a used car dealer and a time share salesman.
And when all of my identity was stolen five years ago
Well, first of all: Sorry for that. From all I know it sucks and I hope you could rectify the situation.
Even though I believe your co-debator has a slightly simplified view of life, the universe and all, nevertheless I agree with what he says in spirit.
If a financial institution is so friggin' greedy to provide everybody presenting a valid SSN with actual money they deserve to be hit and hit hard!
There's such a thing called due diligence.
This applies to me as the owner of a small data management consultancy. For example: When I take on a new customer I look at the customer. I might even run a financial check on that customer. If my customer is - say - a global company or the national Postbank I wouldn't do that, since I consider them well known, reliable entities. If Joe Blows Cheap PC Support wants to engage me, I try to make sure that JB is not at the verge of bankrupcy. I might even ask for a part of my fees up-front. If I did my homework and are nevertheless stiffed, well that's the risk of running a business. But the point is: I try to mitigate that risk
This should not be different for a financial institution. If they provide every smooth talking Jasper presenting an SSN with actual credit, then it should be the responsibility of the finance bozos to clean up their act and recuperate their money.
Now - and this is probably what your fellow debator fails to grasp: In the real world you're the one with the mess, it can take years to clean up and it will fuck up your credit history left right and central.
In most of Europe laws seem to favour the consumer. A business that fails to check out a loan applicant would be laughed out of court and made aware in no uncertain words that they cannot tamper with the victims credit history at their discretion. There are pretty strong data protection laws in place which provide fairly stringent tools to fight offenders.
Unfortunately the US seems to take a directly opposite approach. Business must be efficient, cost effective, streamlined and if there's collatoral damage, well that's just tough shit.
Although it's undeniable that Mr. Spitzer seems a bit overzealous at times I venture that there where no indictments due to the fact that the wrongdoers settled for 100s Millions of $.
A major investment bank does not just through that kind of money away if they don't have a damn good reason to believe that they lose if it ever goes to court.
Mr. Spitzers motives might be of dubious nature, but it's undeniable that he's responsible that wrongdoers, frauds, cheats and other vermin on a very large corporate scale paid major money due to his efforts.
This will indeed be a problem for a lot of airports, which will have to adapt their infrastructure to cater for this monster, alas those will be the bigger hubs
When you look at the plane you see that there are doors on both levels. This means - provided you design the gates cleverly, that it shouldn't really take longer to load then a 747.
The only real advantage of trains over planes is that you can power an HST using a nuclear power plant while aircraft need oil.
From the perspective of a traveller I strongly disagree.
Train: I board it in first or second class, have space, can move around, the aircondition is not doing a half assed job on recycling 20% of the fresh air, the fat Russian guy using half of my seet usually doesn't drop his tomato juice on my white pants, I can enjoy a Cuban cigar in the smoking compartment (and even there the air is better then on a non smoking flight after a few hours) and - at least on most inter-European routes it takes about the same amount of time to get from city center to city center, depending on the route.
Plane: I have to be at the Airport two hours in advance due to some innane requirements, I have to sit around overprized, smelly snack bars, I get to deal with long lines and security staff which is not only incompetent, but about as dim as a 25 watt light bulb. When I finally get to sit on my designated seat, which is the middle seat of course, I get to sit near a fat, Russian gentleman who spills his Bloody Mary on my white pants shortly after take off. When I finally arrive as a nervous wreck in Bombay it turns out (after waiting another hour and 40 minutes in the lost and found line) that my luggage went to Baghdad, but we are not quite through yet.
I get the privelege to pay 20 quid or so for some ugly train, which claims to take me to the city, but dumps me on some strange train station with obnoxious cab drivers and a bunch of really creepy people 15 miles away from my hotel.
The only issue is whether the capacity will be taken advantage of effectively. While most flights now are booked solid, will the number of passengers be high enough to make the construction of these behemoths profitable?
That's exactly the question on which Airbus bet the farm.
Personally I think it will take off, due to anticipated demand by India and especially China to haul as many passengers as possible with one plane between cities. Airports can host a finite amount of flights only. So the more people you can squeeze into a plane the more you can transport in any given timeframe from one airport to another.
I'm curious, do you refuse to buy CSS-encrypted > DVDs and/or serialized software?
Actually, since I don't own a DVD player I never bought a DVD (honestly), but I get your point.
It might not be avoidable to buy DRM crippled crap in the not too distant future. I will try to avoid this as good as I can howerver and whenever possible seek out alternatives.
What do you mean by serialized software? (sorry, English is my 2nd language)
yes because we all know how expensive producing CDs is (*cough* AOL *cough*) whereas internet bandwidth is so cheap people never run out (*cough*/. effect *cough*).
You don't seem to have a clue what sales, transportation, warehousing and stockpiling costs. That's not even touching the whole distribution cycle (returns or defects, for example)
I suggest that you read a company report for just about any company dealing in tangible goods. Check out the costs they report to get their goods to their customers.
You might want to address this to somebody more appropriate, such as "Dear RIAA."
I'm waware of who calls the shots. Apple however sells the material. It's their logo representing the shop, the customer interacts with Apple, not with the RIAA (unless the customer is a dead grandmother, or an eight year old girl, who just got sued by the RIAA, but I digress).
I can agree that Apple really pulled something off here. They basically invented legal, downloadable music in a very scalable manner. It's just that I so frantically detest anything DRM that I would like to make them aware of that on an occasional basis. As a pathological optimist I'm sure they forward my concerns to the appropriate entites.
I've found AAC files as low as 192kb to be rather nice, qualitywise, however....320 just seems unneccesary to me.
In fact, 320kb seem inadequate to me personally. I would very much prefer and pay for flac. The reason is that I'm a sucker for uncompromised source material, which permits me to compile derivates from the material on hand. It's sort of like a compressed, digital image. As soon you have loss you can never reconstruct the original. You can polish it up and mask the unniceties, but you can never get the original material back. Call it a phobia of mine, if you will.
The quality of the sound though headphones is so bad
This is only true if you refer to the 99 cents ear killers, that they tuck in with portable audio devices. You are however free to toss them and get a set of Sennheiser, or Koss earphones. At least the more expensive models sound rather excellent to my ears.
Whilst you can want that, there's no reason for you to get it.
Of course not, they can charge whatever they damn well please. I on the other hand don't have to buy an overprized, crappy product and that's exactly what I will refrain to do.
Also, Apple only makes a tiny amount of money from music sales
I'm aware of that. But then again Apple may or may not feed the agitation of consumers back to the powers that be. In any case, it's the Apple brand representing the store and thus I feel legitimate to address my concerns to Apple.
But it's useful to remember, in the real world, we have real world economics.
Very useful indeed. Real world economics (in theory) give the consumer a very strong tool to voice dissatisfaction, by not buying. It would be nice to see more consumers leverage this power.
I read that you will also open an ITunes store in Scandinavia and in Switzerland as well this week; this is nice.
As long as you don't sell MP3 / Ogg files in 320kb - / very high quality however, I cordially invite you to go and bang yer heads; you won't sell me one damn song.
I can agree to not distribute downloaded material, but I'm hell bent not to buy anything that even faintly stinks of DRM.
Oh and while we're at it: 99c a song is acceptable, 9.99 per album is not, specifically for some crippled format, which may or may not play in three years. You cut out the middleman and a whole lot of manufacturing -, distribution and logistics in the process and I - as the consumer - want at least a part of that savings reflected on the price.
You might be right about the technical aspects. To me as a consumer hower Nikons behaviour illustrates brilliantly the mindset of this company and I refrain from ever entering into a customer/supplier relationship with such entities.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the embargo has nothing to do if a profit is made or not. An US citizen with a permit to travel to Cuba (and that's very, very rare) can bring back Cuban goods up to a value of 100.00 USD. Others are not permitted to import anything Cuban into the US.
There where rumours that non-USians are permitted to bring 50 Cuban cigars for personal consumption. Unfortunately this is bollocks.
If you do find Cuban cigars in the US the only advise I can give you is to stay clear. It's not so much the legal side, but your chances are in the 90-95% range that you just bought a fake Cohiba for 40 bucks. This applies also for Mexico, the entire Caribean and virtually any cruise ship originating from the US. The only exception are La Casa Del Habano franchises. It's incredible profitable business and your customers usually don't shoot you when they are not happy with the merchandise.
This is also the reason why a lot of US cigar smokers think that Cuban cigars are nothing special. They smoke the odd "Cuban" cigar (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), which in all likeliness was manufactured in Mexico. They are very easy marks, since they don't have a point of reference.
To cut to the cheese: No, you cannot import anything from Cuba except the 100$ limit if you where traveling on a permit.
So now, nearly 20 years later, why exactly is it that I should give a flying fuck about Mr. Dvoraks opinion?
That was in 1990 so things may have undergone some sanitation. It was really filthy around then.
That's probably also a consequence when you declare selling sex as illegal.
Some people should really refrain from sniffin' glue.
Upon consideration; you're right, AC.
I hereby apologise to all hard working San Francisco crack whores for my truely unfair statement. Girls, you shine in comparison with Ms. O'Gara!
Not that I'd dispute that (alas it was humour for real men with an iron stomach). But she crossed the line when she personally attacked PJ.
This is sort of like Ronald Mc Donald pulling a SIG Sauer and starting to blast away in the playroom of a Manhattan McDonalds.
What is reprehensible and really hard to stomach is that she stooped to such lows as attacking Ms. Jones privacy.
Reminds me of the methods of a science fiction space opera nut cult.
Isn't that what Mr. Gotti and Mr. Capone thought too?
So, Telewest shouldn't be held accountable for such a situation going completely haywire? If they just want to smoke their own servers that's fine with me, but when their users spew millions of messages per hour to the global mail infrastructure it's their damn responsibility to clean up their act.
Assume a chemical plant, which is a security hazard, but which the owners won't clean up, because it cut's into the profits. Well, that's about what Telewest has done and it seems obvious that they needed a good whopping and some public humiliation before cleaning up their act.
Can turn into an image problem though, if the name on the passport spells "Abacha" or the name of some other corrupt dictator creep.
BTW: What you can't do - as much as novelists like to slip that in - is open an anonymous account. You may want to try Austria (and that's changing) or some of those strange islands with funny fiduciary policies.
Why? Was it ever ended?
This is true, of course. But then again contractual rules are only valid to the participants of a contract.
Say American Express - with whom I never had a business relationship else then purchasing travellers cheques - suddenly demands $ 20'000.00 from me, since they claim I ordered and used one of their credit cards, they still can't apply their rules, because I never ordered a credit card. If somebody has fraudulently ordered one in my name, then it's their fucking problem. They'd be hard pushed to prove in court that we engaged into a contract, since we actually never did.
In addition, and if they do sue me, they pay all legal costs (including my attourney), which should give them some pause, before (ab)using the legal system to harrass me. This rule is applicable (to the best of my knowledge) in all European judical systems.
That said, you're right of course. If you do enter a contractual business with a credit card company then their rules are certainly not geared towards my interests as a customer. This is the reason why I refrain from doing my banking stuff electronically. That's probably one of the reasons why finance companies have an image somewhere between a used car dealer and a time share salesman.
Well, first of all: Sorry for that. From all I know it sucks and I hope you could rectify the situation.
Even though I believe your co-debator has a slightly simplified view of life, the universe and all, nevertheless I agree with what he says in spirit.
If a financial institution is so friggin' greedy to provide everybody presenting a valid SSN with actual money they deserve to be hit and hit hard!
There's such a thing called due diligence.
This applies to me as the owner of a small data management consultancy. For example: When I take on a new customer I look at the customer. I might even run a financial check on that customer. If my customer is - say - a global company or the national Postbank I wouldn't do that, since I consider them well known, reliable entities. If Joe Blows Cheap PC Support wants to engage me, I try to make sure that JB is not at the verge of bankrupcy. I might even ask for a part of my fees up-front. If I did my homework and are nevertheless stiffed, well that's the risk of running a business. But the point is: I try to mitigate that risk
This should not be different for a financial institution. If they provide every smooth talking Jasper presenting an SSN with actual credit, then it should be the responsibility of the finance bozos to clean up their act and recuperate their money.
Now - and this is probably what your fellow debator fails to grasp: In the real world you're the one with the mess, it can take years to clean up and it will fuck up your credit history left right and central.
In most of Europe laws seem to favour the consumer. A business that fails to check out a loan applicant would be laughed out of court and made aware in no uncertain words that they cannot tamper with the victims credit history at their discretion. There are pretty strong data protection laws in place which provide fairly stringent tools to fight offenders.
Unfortunately the US seems to take a directly opposite approach. Business must be efficient, cost effective, streamlined and if there's collatoral damage, well that's just tough shit.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Your analogy stinks. It's more like cleaning the shit away that some unauthorized entity dumped on my living room carpet.
A major investment bank does not just through that kind of money away if they don't have a damn good reason to believe that they lose if it ever goes to court.
Mr. Spitzers motives might be of dubious nature, but it's undeniable that he's responsible that wrongdoers, frauds, cheats and other vermin on a very large corporate scale paid major money due to his efforts.
When you look at the plane you see that there are doors on both levels. This means - provided you design the gates cleverly, that it shouldn't really take longer to load then a 747.
From the perspective of a traveller I strongly disagree.
Train: I board it in first or second class, have space, can move around, the aircondition is not doing a half assed job on recycling 20% of the fresh air, the fat Russian guy using half of my seet usually doesn't drop his tomato juice on my white pants, I can enjoy a Cuban cigar in the smoking compartment (and even there the air is better then on a non smoking flight after a few hours) and - at least on most inter-European routes it takes about the same amount of time to get from city center to city center, depending on the route.
Plane: I have to be at the Airport two hours in advance due to some innane requirements, I have to sit around overprized, smelly snack bars, I get to deal with long lines and security staff which is not only incompetent, but about as dim as a 25 watt light bulb. When I finally get to sit on my designated seat, which is the middle seat of course, I get to sit near a fat, Russian gentleman who spills his Bloody Mary on my white pants shortly after take off. When I finally arrive as a nervous wreck in Bombay it turns out (after waiting another hour and 40 minutes in the lost and found line) that my luggage went to Baghdad, but we are not quite through yet.
I get the privelege to pay 20 quid or so for some ugly train, which claims to take me to the city, but dumps me on some strange train station with obnoxious cab drivers and a bunch of really creepy people 15 miles away from my hotel.
Ah, the joys of flying...
That's exactly the question on which Airbus bet the farm.
Personally I think it will take off, due to anticipated demand by India and especially China to haul as many passengers as possible with one plane between cities. Airports can host a finite amount of flights only. So the more people you can squeeze into a plane the more you can transport in any given timeframe from one airport to another.
Actually, since I don't own a DVD player I never bought a DVD (honestly), but I get your point.
It might not be avoidable to buy DRM crippled crap in the not too distant future. I will try to avoid this as good as I can howerver and whenever possible seek out alternatives.
What do you mean by serialized software? (sorry, English is my 2nd language)
You don't seem to have a clue what sales, transportation, warehousing and stockpiling costs. That's not even touching the whole distribution cycle (returns or defects, for example)
I suggest that you read a company report for just about any company dealing in tangible goods. Check out the costs they report to get their goods to their customers.
I'm waware of who calls the shots. Apple however sells the material. It's their logo representing the shop, the customer interacts with Apple, not with the RIAA (unless the customer is a dead grandmother, or an eight year old girl, who just got sued by the RIAA, but I digress).
I can agree that Apple really pulled something off here. They basically invented legal, downloadable music in a very scalable manner. It's just that I so frantically detest anything DRM that I would like to make them aware of that on an occasional basis. As a pathological optimist I'm sure they forward my concerns to the appropriate entites.
I've found AAC files as low as 192kb to be rather nice, qualitywise, however....320 just seems unneccesary to me.
In fact, 320kb seem inadequate to me personally. I would very much prefer and pay for flac. The reason is that I'm a sucker for uncompromised source material, which permits me to compile derivates from the material on hand. It's sort of like a compressed, digital image. As soon you have loss you can never reconstruct the original. You can polish it up and mask the unniceties, but you can never get the original material back. Call it a phobia of mine, if you will.
This is only true if you refer to the 99 cents ear killers, that they tuck in with portable audio devices. You are however free to toss them and get a set of Sennheiser, or Koss earphones. At least the more expensive models sound rather excellent to my ears.
Of course not, they can charge whatever they damn well please. I on the other hand don't have to buy an overprized, crappy product and that's exactly what I will refrain to do.
Also, Apple only makes a tiny amount of money from music sales
I'm aware of that. But then again Apple may or may not feed the agitation of consumers back to the powers that be. In any case, it's the Apple brand representing the store and thus I feel legitimate to address my concerns to Apple.
But it's useful to remember, in the real world, we have real world economics.
Very useful indeed. Real world economics (in theory) give the consumer a very strong tool to voice dissatisfaction, by not buying. It would be nice to see more consumers leverage this power.
As long as you don't sell MP3 / Ogg files in 320kb - / very high quality however, I cordially invite you to go and bang yer heads; you won't sell me one damn song.
I can agree to not distribute downloaded material, but I'm hell bent not to buy anything that even faintly stinks of DRM.
Oh and while we're at it: 99c a song is acceptable, 9.99 per album is not, specifically for some crippled format, which may or may not play in three years. You cut out the middleman and a whole lot of manufacturing -, distribution and logistics in the process and I - as the consumer - want at least a part of that savings reflected on the price.
There is no need to thank me.
You might be right about the technical aspects. To me as a consumer hower Nikons behaviour illustrates brilliantly the mindset of this company and I refrain from ever entering into a customer/supplier relationship with such entities.