What we need is a few trillion trillion tons of molten iron turning rapidly.. that oughtta do it. Just put that in your ship, and you'll be fine. Something a few thousand miles across should be adequate.
do I get better, more relevant stories, no dupes, and editors that actually EDIT?
Or is it just to get rid of a couple annoying ads and have the privelege of seeing what the slashdot gods decided is important before the rest of the unpaying masses..... no thanks.
Because if the GPL is held to be valid (which it of course, IS, to anyone with half the brain of an ant), SCO can't escape the fact that they distributed linux under the GPL for a LONG time, even after their lawsuit was filed. For charging licensing fees and whatnot for other works, and NOT following the GPL.. sco will either win this suit, or die.
MS licensing the use of FAT is for flash media devices.. like all the digital cameras and PDAs out there... they use FAT because everything recognizes it. Using XFS would be pointless, as only linux and irix would be able to read it. Further, for flash, xfs would be rediculous anyway.. there are better systems specifically designed for flash.
If you don't use a format windows recognizes... there is no point.
I'd count it as broadband.. you are using multiple frequencies of light to transmit signals... over a single medium.
"Multiple signals on the same fiber" color == wavelength. I realize it's different than what you think of as "broadband" in coaxial or radio sense.. but by most modern definitions of broadband data transmission, it counts.
"Encode information into a band". You use several different colors in the same fiber. Umm... that's encoding information into different bands.
Everyone remember... if you aren't used to the open source world.. there are some things you take for granted that need to be re-assessed when you go to open source.
Things like : forking.. when you see a project, and it forks.. you think of a company that just split in two, having developers leave, internal strife etc.... it will probably hurt the customer. Not necessarily so with open source.. the fork could be simply becaues a couple recent developers wanted to take things in a new direction. You don't lose, everyone wins.
Version numbers: Commercial ventures use versioning as a marketing tool.. but with many OSS projects, it's just a developer tool. Just because something is 0.xx or 1.xxBETA doesn't mean you can assume anything at all about it's stability or features, or worthiness. Sometimes it's 0.xxBETA simply because the developer always had one feature he wanted to add, and never got around to.. it could be rock-solid. The old adage about "never use a 1.0 release in production" comes about because commercial developers usually call their first release 1.0.. and the first commercial release is usually buggy as hell, as it came out early due to marketing pressure... and it's the first time it's hit a wide audience.
Support: One of those things that means differnet things to different people. Remember, many non-oss people just want individual applications, and somewhere to go for concise info about those applications.. they don't really picture everything as a big pile of tinkertoys to glue together like with unix/oss. In 10 years of OSS, I've never had problems finding answers to my questions.
GPL fud: Seriously, the zealotry about hte GPL has got to stop... everyone should read it and question their assumptions about it. A great many people still think that anything you write for Linux has to be GPL, and that you can''t practically write closed software for linux. They think the compiler requires you to publish your source, etc. I know it's obiviously not that way, but to many , it's not.
Dictators: People see one guy in charge of a project, Linus being a common example. They say "who's to say linus is going to do what business needs?". Well, true. Nobody can guarantee that. But for a decade he's done a good job.. and what they need to realize is that the projects are driven by those who contribute to them. The reason it's popular, and that you hear about it, is because it's good. These leaders aren't dictators... people follow them because they are doing a good job. If Linus went insane and started doing weird stuff, you can bet there would be a new leader or group emerge.
It's safe to say that a bunch of people who worked on either would not have all worked on one, if both had not existed.
The real problem with Gnome and KDE both existing is that, rather than one reasonably solid desktop (KDE was first), we ended up with a religious war and now a ton of K-apps and G-apps.. and it just leads to confusion, and wasted effort.
I seem to recall XFS has some issue with bad blocks.. if there is a bad block in the FS, it will unmount, and cannot remount. It has no facility to scan the FS and map around bad blocks, either.
Sorry.. it's emphatically not bullshit. I"m not saying ALL sun sales are crap.. but my only two experiences with them were that they were a pain in the ass. Perhaps if my order had been larger, they would have not fucked around as much. I don't know..
I could give you a complete list of phone numbers, suppliers, names, dates, and a blow by blow of who screwed who, but that would probably be inappropriate, as I still work for the same employer.
Sun indeed fucked around, quashed supplier's sales, and acted like tards in general.
If you don't believe that, it's no skin off my nose. If they work well for you, that's fantastic. They fucked me around, and I'm not the only person I've met who can't stand dealing with them.
Unless the filtering logic is actually on the silicon, it's a software firewall...... I don't care how big it is.
It still runs an OS, and still does it's filtering in software, with a microprocessor.
A "hardware" firewall would be something that blew it's filtering logic into FPGAs or something, and filtered in silicon.
Sure a linux box is bloated compared to your little dlink box.. but then, your little dlink box has nowhere near the firewalling capabilities as the typical linux box, nor can it handle anywhere near the same load. It might be fine for your home office, but no way on earth would I use it in production.
I'm trying to figure out what the guy means by "hardware firewall".
It turns out what he means by "hardware" firewall is "dedicated" firewall... as opposed to host-level firewalling (like, say, using iptables on your webserver, or blackice defender on your windows box)
You aren't talking about software firewalls, youa re talking about running a firewalling layer on a host, -vs- a dedicated firewall box for a network.
This whole article is about a linux distribution used to build what you are referring to as "hardware firewalls".. not some software you load up onto an existing system.
But the term "broadband" has come to mean "fast" in the common language. Thank the media for that.
In the olden days, the highest speed things tended to be broadband, so the meaning just got twisted.
I'd say, considering speeds and waht is noramlly known as broadband in the US... 250kbps qualifies as "near broadband"... people usually think 1mbps is broadband.
If you call the store, you'll find that the Apple Online store charges the exact same price for most major items as every authorized apple reseller out there... down to the dollar. The parent post about giving free upgrades, but not messing with the base price is indeed correct.
The problem, I find, with Sun salespersons, is that they are generally of the opinion that Sun is the supreme god of everything, and that everything not sun is garbage.
I have called sun several times in the past, with a clear, precise list of what I need to buy from them. I explain to them what I want, that I am familiar with all of their services and equipment, and that I really only need what I am asking for. They still manage to waste DAYS worth of time trying to convince me to replace other stuff with sun gear... despite the fact that the sun gear can't come close to doing what I want. Example: Fileserver
I was about to purcahse a 50 gig NetApp NAS box... the sun guy tried to sell me on some sun fileserver.
The pros/cons
NetApp - Hardware raid on FC drives. Filesystem that takes snapshots. Netapp gave me performance stats for NFS ops/sec, etc.
Sun: Software raid on scsi drives. Smaller array. No snapshots. Could not give me any specs on throughput, etc.
Now.. come on. I can appreciate trying to push your company's products.. that's their job.. but you lose a lot of credibility when you try to convince me to use GARBAGE in place of what I want, just because it's not yours.
Example #2: I was about to purchase about $300,000 in sun gear for an E-commerce type setup... I called several vendors. I had my hardware list DECIDED, based on current offerings. Took the resellers almost 3 weeks to get back to me. They gave me some okay quotes... each,,of course, asked me again for all hte detials i had alreayd painstakingly sent them. Then.. I get a call from a guy actually at SUN who was supposedly in charge of ".com stuff". He asked if I had talked to anyone else. I said no. He said he knew I had, because all the resellers report to him. Then he a) quashed a deal with one reseller I was going to buy from, telling them the pricing they were giving me would end up getting them in shit with sun. b) Offerred to set up my whole system for me and guarantee it, on the condition that I let them purchase ALL SUN hardware, including swtiches, etc, and could not mess with it. c) Wanted me to say OKAY to this without showing me a quote. His point was that if he showed me the quote, I could just use that as my system specs and build it myself.
Now.. tha'ts kind of messed up, but he sort of has a point. So I tell him "Look, there is no way in hell I'm committing to anything without full disclosure from you, sorry, what are you thinking". He sends me his specs.
They are MY specs, minus a few items, but it COSTS more.
So what the hell, he's accusing me of potentially stealing his plans when he already SAW mine, and they were just like his?
I started as a perfect customer. We were ready to wire the money immediately if they had just simply GIVEN us a quote for what we asked for. Instead, they fucked around for a month, and ended up losing the sale totally.
I diligently mailed him, his superious, and all the resellers to point out how this guy had totally fucked up for sun.
I also went to a SUN meeting one time.. they wanted to demonstrate the SunRAY stuff (which is cool) and also some windows file sharing stuff. They pointed out how it was way better than samba because it was based on real NT code that they had a license to. Now.. this was all fine and great. Except.. it also contained the NT bugs (for compatability). Okay.. I can understand that. I start asking about how I can integrate this with unix stuff.. are the ACLs in text files? Like, why would I actually want this over an NT server? His answer? Nope, you can't really do anything like that.. it's JUST like using windows, isnt' that great? Except it's on a SUN, so it won't crash. You mean the application won't crash? Oh yes, it will.. he means the computer won't crash.
Sun has made some cool stuff in the past.. and I used to really respect them.. but after trying to deal with them on multiple occassions, I feel they really need to get their heads out of their asses and start dealing with reality.
I remember, clearly, reading the kernel license, which was the GPL with an added clause: that binary-only kernel modules were permitted, as long as they use an interface that already exists in linus' kernel tree. So you could write a new binary only network driver, or scsi driver, or video driver, but not some totally new kernel functionality, and wrap it up as a module.
Now, I realize that this clause seems to have never existed, and I must have mentally mixed up some mailing list posts with the actual license... I can't find it anywhere in the kernel archives.. but I swear Linus' older kernel license was not just the stock GPL... it had some exceptions.
There is often confusion as different things have different meanings in different places.
In the US a "Debit Card" is usually a Visa or Mastercard, but instead of credit, it takes money out of your account directly. In Canada, these are called "Cheque cards". A "Debit Card" in Canada is an Interac card.
A "Charge card" refers usually to the original American Express card, or other cards where you do have to pay them off, in full, at the end of the month. They are not about credit, and carrying a balance.
A "Credit card" is about spending money you don't have.
For every vote cast, you print off a paper ballot, marked with only the machine ID, no identifying information. The voter is permitted to see this ballot through plexiglass, and decide if it indicates the correct choice. If they hit the "NO" button is it shredded, and they start over. If they hit "YES", it goes into a bin, and they can leave. You audit hte machine by comparing the tally in the machine with the tally in the bin.. you don't need to be able to check every individual vote and decide which.. just knowing you have discrepancies is all that matters.
First, the deal between NASDAQ and those licensed to trade on it is not in any way legally shaky... you can be sure thousands of lawyers have poured over it.
It has a rule, well known by all licensed traders, that a clearly erroneous transaction can be rescinded by nasdaq. It's not some "Loophole" or some stupid rule.. it's a cold, hard fact.
And as I said before, when you do trades... as an individual, you are mostly not a licensed nasdaq trader.. you are more likely someone trading through a brokerage.. adn what happens is set out in your contract with that brokerage, not a contract between you and nasdaq. THAT contract might be a bit more shaky.. and there might be room for manoevering if you got screwed... but it's not at all clear that nasdaq should eat the cost of this.
Yes, you can quote stuff about various laws that apply to totally differnet things and draw some parallels... but remmeber, if nadsaq had to eat costs like this, they could be bankrupt and the market would cease to exist in a day if a large mistake was made, and that benefits nobody.
I don't believe they are required to ask for ID. In fact, Visa discourages it.. the idea is to make it as easy as possible for the customer. with a credit card, remember, you are protected form fraudulent use. IT's VISA that gets ripped off, not you. Look on your card, it even says "Property of the issuer". That's all.
I was asked for ID when I was at a gas station buying gas. I don't look dirty or shabby. I was 27 years old. I was simply buying $30 in gas... and the little fucker behind the counter was like "Hmm. I need to see some ID." "Why?" "Umm... you need to show ID!" "why?" "I'm not going to run this card through without ID sir" "I don't have any with me" (I live 2 blocks away) "well pay cash then" "I don't have any" "Well I'm going to call the police!" "And tell them what, exactly?" "Umm.. okay.. nevermind"
This was at a 7-11, in a mid-sized canadian town... not in a dodgy neighborhood, nothing like that.
The point is.. everyone is acting like credit cards are their personal property, and that clerks and merchants are the problem.. remember it's the credit card issuers that are providing a service for us... and we need THEM to make it a service we want to use.
Yes, clerks should check signatures more.... but that's between the merchant and Visa. Remember, the merchant is the one who doesn't get paid if the transaction was fraudulent.
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What we need is a few trillion trillion tons of molten iron turning rapidly.. that oughtta do it. Just put that in your ship, and you'll be fine. Something a few thousand miles across should be adequate.
do I get better, more relevant stories, no dupes, and editors that actually EDIT?
Or is it just to get rid of a couple annoying ads and have the privelege of seeing what the slashdot gods decided is important before the rest of the unpaying masses.....
no thanks.
Because if the GPL is held to be valid (which it of course, IS, to anyone with half the brain of an ant), SCO can't escape the fact that they distributed linux under the GPL for a LONG time, even after their lawsuit was filed.
For charging licensing fees and whatnot for other works, and NOT following the GPL.. sco will either win this suit, or die.
MS licensing the use of FAT is for flash media devices.. like all the digital cameras and PDAs out there... they use FAT because everything recognizes it. Using XFS would be pointless, as only linux and irix would be able to read it. Further, for flash, xfs would be rediculous anyway.. there are better systems specifically designed for flash.
If you don't use a format windows recognizes... there is no point.
I'd count it as broadband.. you are using multiple frequencies of light to transmit signals... over a single medium.
"Multiple signals on the same fiber"
color == wavelength. I realize it's different than what you think of as "broadband" in coaxial or radio sense.. but by most modern definitions of broadband data transmission, it counts.
"Encode information into a band". You use several different colors in the same fiber. Umm... that's encoding information into different bands.
Everyone remember... if you aren't used to the open source world.. there are some things you take for granted that need to be re-assessed when you go to open source.
Things like : forking.. when you see a project, and it forks.. you think of a company that just split in two, having developers leave, internal strife etc.... it will probably hurt the customer. Not necessarily so with open source.. the fork could be simply becaues a couple recent developers wanted to take things in a new direction. You don't lose, everyone wins.
Version numbers: Commercial ventures use versioning as a marketing tool.. but with many OSS projects, it's just a developer tool. Just because something is 0.xx or 1.xxBETA doesn't mean you can assume anything at all about it's stability or features, or worthiness. Sometimes it's 0.xxBETA simply because the developer always had one feature he wanted to add, and never got around to.. it could be rock-solid. The old adage about "never use a 1.0 release in production" comes about because commercial developers usually call their first release 1.0.. and the first commercial release is usually buggy as hell, as it came out early due to marketing pressure... and it's the first time it's hit a wide audience.
Support: One of those things that means differnet things to different people. Remember, many non-oss people just want individual applications, and somewhere to go for concise info about those applications.. they don't really picture everything as a big pile of tinkertoys to glue together like with unix/oss. In 10 years of OSS, I've never had problems finding answers to my questions.
GPL fud: Seriously, the zealotry about hte GPL has got to stop... everyone should read it and question their assumptions about it. A great many people still think that anything you write for Linux has to be GPL, and that you can''t practically write closed software for linux. They think the compiler requires you to publish your source, etc. I know it's obiviously not that way, but to many , it's not.
Dictators: People see one guy in charge of a project, Linus being a common example. They say "who's to say linus is going to do what business needs?". Well, true. Nobody can guarantee that. But for a decade he's done a good job.. and what they need to realize is that the projects are driven by those who contribute to them. The reason it's popular, and that you hear about it, is because it's good. These leaders aren't dictators... people follow them because they are doing a good job. If Linus went insane and started doing weird stuff, you can bet there would be a new leader or group emerge.
It's safe to say that a bunch of people who worked on either would not have all worked on one, if both had not existed.
The real problem with Gnome and KDE both existing is that, rather than one reasonably solid desktop (KDE was first), we ended up with a religious war and now a ton of K-apps and G-apps.. and it just leads to confusion, and wasted effort.
I seem to recall XFS has some issue with bad blocks.. if there is a bad block in the FS, it will unmount, and cannot remount. It has no facility to scan the FS and map around bad blocks, either.
Sorry.. it's emphatically not bullshit. I"m not saying ALL sun sales are crap.. but my only two experiences with them were that they were a pain in the ass. Perhaps if my order had been larger, they would have not fucked around as much. I don't know..
I could give you a complete list of phone numbers, suppliers, names, dates, and a blow by blow of who screwed who, but that would probably be inappropriate, as I still work for the same employer.
Sun indeed fucked around, quashed supplier's sales, and acted like tards in general.
If you don't believe that, it's no skin off my nose. If they work well for you, that's fantastic. They fucked me around, and I'm not the only person I've met who can't stand dealing with them.
Unless the filtering logic is actually on the silicon, it's a software firewall...... I don't care how big it is.
It still runs an OS, and still does it's filtering in software, with a microprocessor.
A "hardware" firewall would be something that blew it's filtering logic into FPGAs or something, and filtered in silicon.
Sure a linux box is bloated compared to your little dlink box.. but then, your little dlink box has nowhere near the firewalling capabilities as the typical linux box, nor can it handle anywhere near the same load. It might be fine for your home office, but no way on earth would I use it in production.
I'm not saying anything like that at all....
I'm trying to figure out what the guy means by "hardware firewall".
It turns out what he means by "hardware" firewall is "dedicated" firewall... as opposed to host-level firewalling (like, say, using iptables on your webserver, or blackice defender on your windows box)
Examples? And not stuff invented in the last couple years.
The fastest stuff I can think of offhand is multimode fiber, which is indeed broadband. (it has multiple, independent channels in the same medium)
You aren't talking about software firewalls, youa re talking about running a firewalling layer on a host, -vs- a dedicated firewall box for a network.
This whole article is about a linux distribution used to build what you are referring to as "hardware firewalls".. not some software you load up onto an existing system.
But the term "broadband" has come to mean "fast" in the common language. Thank the media for that.
In the olden days, the highest speed things tended to be broadband, so the meaning just got twisted.
I'd say, considering speeds and waht is noramlly known as broadband in the US... 250kbps qualifies as "near broadband"... people usually think 1mbps is broadband.
If you call the store, you'll find that the Apple Online store charges the exact same price for most major items as every authorized apple reseller out there... down to the dollar. The parent post about giving free upgrades, but not messing with the base price is indeed correct.
Like, give me an example?
Checkpoint? That runs on Linux/ Solaris / NT or whatever....
Checkpoint Nokia appliance? Just a rack-mount computer, running one of the above operating systems... they are not a "hardware" firewall.
Every firewall I"ve seen is just a fancy PC dressed up to look like some kind of hardware box.
Not sure what you mean by "your computer still has to do all the blcoking".. a firewall IS a computer that does blocking, by definition.
Smoothwall is not some add-on to your existing box.. it's for buildling hardware firewalls....
since they are hardly even business friendly.
,of course, asked me again for all hte detials i had alreayd painstakingly sent them. Then.. I get a call from a guy actually at SUN who was supposedly in charge of ".com stuff". He asked if I had talked to anyone else. I said no. He said he knew I had, because all the resellers report to him. Then he a) quashed a deal with one reseller I was going to buy from, telling them the pricing they were giving me would end up getting them in shit with sun.
The problem, I find, with Sun salespersons, is that they are generally of the opinion that Sun is the supreme god of everything, and that everything not sun is garbage.
I have called sun several times in the past, with a clear, precise list of what I need to buy from them. I explain to them what I want, that I am familiar with all of their services and equipment, and that I really only need what I am asking for. They still manage to waste DAYS worth of time trying to convince me to replace other stuff with sun gear... despite the fact that the sun gear can't come close to doing what I want. Example: Fileserver
I was about to purcahse a 50 gig NetApp NAS box... the sun guy tried to sell me on some sun fileserver.
The pros/cons
NetApp - Hardware raid on FC drives. Filesystem that takes snapshots. Netapp gave me performance stats for NFS ops/sec, etc.
Sun: Software raid on scsi drives. Smaller array. No snapshots. Could not give me any specs on throughput, etc.
Now.. come on. I can appreciate trying to push your company's products.. that's their job.. but you lose a lot of credibility when you try to convince me to use GARBAGE in place of what I want, just because it's not yours.
Example #2: I was about to purchase about $300,000 in sun gear for an E-commerce type setup... I called several vendors. I had my hardware list DECIDED, based on current offerings. Took the resellers almost 3 weeks to get back to me. They gave me some okay quotes... each,
b) Offerred to set up my whole system for me and guarantee it, on the condition that I let them purchase ALL SUN hardware, including swtiches, etc, and could not mess with it.
c) Wanted me to say OKAY to this without showing me a quote. His point was that if he showed me the quote, I could just use that as my system specs and build it myself.
Now.. tha'ts kind of messed up, but he sort of has a point. So I tell him "Look, there is no way in hell I'm committing to anything without full disclosure from you, sorry, what are you thinking". He sends me his specs.
They are MY specs, minus a few items, but it COSTS more.
So what the hell, he's accusing me of potentially stealing his plans when he already SAW mine, and they were just like his?
I started as a perfect customer. We were ready to wire the money immediately if they had just simply GIVEN us a quote for what we asked for. Instead, they fucked around for a month, and ended up losing the sale totally.
I diligently mailed him, his superious, and all the resellers to point out how this guy had totally fucked up for sun.
I also went to a SUN meeting one time.. they wanted to demonstrate the SunRAY stuff (which is cool) and also some windows file sharing stuff. They pointed out how it was way better than samba because it was based on real NT code that they had a license to. Now.. this was all fine and great. Except.. it also contained the NT bugs (for compatability). Okay.. I can understand that. I start asking about how I can integrate this with unix stuff.. are the ACLs in text files? Like, why would I actually want this over an NT server? His answer? Nope, you can't really do anything like that.. it's JUST like using windows, isnt' that great? Except it's on a SUN, so it won't crash. You mean the application won't crash? Oh yes, it will.. he means the computer won't crash.
Sun has made some cool stuff in the past.. and I used to really respect them.. but after trying to deal with them on multiple occassions, I feel they really need to get their heads out of their asses and start dealing with reality.
See, I've used linux since around version .95
I remember, clearly, reading the kernel license, which was the GPL with an added clause: that binary-only kernel modules were permitted, as long as they use an interface that already exists in linus' kernel tree. So you could write a new binary only network driver, or scsi driver, or video driver, but not some totally new kernel functionality, and wrap it up as a module.
Now, I realize that this clause seems to have never existed, and I must have mentally mixed up some mailing list posts with the actual license... I can't find it anywhere in the kernel archives.. but I swear Linus' older kernel license was not just the stock GPL... it had some exceptions.
Anyone else remember this, or am I off my rocker?
There is often confusion as different things have different meanings in different places.
In the US a "Debit Card" is usually a Visa or Mastercard, but instead of credit, it takes money out of your account directly. In Canada, these are called "Cheque cards". A "Debit Card" in Canada is an Interac card.
A "Charge card" refers usually to the original American Express card, or other cards where you do have to pay them off, in full, at the end of the month. They are not about credit, and carrying a balance.
A "Credit card" is about spending money you don't have.
I knew that, too, dammit... living out of the country is making me lose my roots.
I knew something looked wrong.
For every vote cast, you print off a paper ballot, marked with only the machine ID, no identifying information. The voter is permitted to see this ballot through plexiglass, and decide if it indicates the correct choice. If they hit the "NO" button is it shredded, and they start over. If they hit "YES", it goes into a bin, and they can leave.
You audit hte machine by comparing the tally in the machine with the tally in the bin.. you don't need to be able to check every individual vote and decide which.. just knowing you have discrepancies is all that matters.
First, the deal between NASDAQ and those licensed to trade on it is not in any way legally shaky... you can be sure thousands of lawyers have poured over it.
It has a rule, well known by all licensed traders, that a clearly erroneous transaction can be rescinded by nasdaq. It's not some "Loophole" or some stupid rule.. it's a cold, hard fact.
And as I said before, when you do trades... as an individual, you are mostly not a licensed nasdaq trader.. you are more likely someone trading through a brokerage.. adn what happens is set out in your contract with that brokerage, not a contract between you and nasdaq. THAT contract might be a bit more shaky.. and there might be room for manoevering if you got screwed... but it's not at all clear that nasdaq should eat the cost of this.
Yes, you can quote stuff about various laws that apply to totally differnet things and draw some parallels... but remmeber, if nadsaq had to eat costs like this, they could be bankrupt and the market would cease to exist in a day if a large mistake was made, and that benefits nobody.
I don't believe they are required to ask for ID. In fact, Visa discourages it.. the idea is to make it as easy as possible for the customer. with a credit card, remember, you are protected form fraudulent use. IT's VISA that gets ripped off, not you. Look on your card, it even says "Property of the issuer". That's all.
I was asked for ID when I was at a gas station buying gas. I don't look dirty or shabby. I was 27 years old. I was simply buying $30 in gas... and the little fucker behind the counter was like "Hmm. I need to see some ID." "Why?"
"Umm... you need to show ID!"
"why?"
"I'm not going to run this card through without ID sir"
"I don't have any with me" (I live 2 blocks away)
"well pay cash then"
"I don't have any"
"Well I'm going to call the police!"
"And tell them what, exactly?"
"Umm.. okay.. nevermind"
This was at a 7-11, in a mid-sized canadian town... not in a dodgy neighborhood, nothing like that.
The point is.. everyone is acting like credit cards are their personal property, and that clerks and merchants are the problem.. remember it's the credit card issuers that are providing a service for us... and we need THEM to make it a service we want to use.
Yes, clerks should check signatures more.... but that's between the merchant and Visa. Remember, the merchant is the one who doesn't get paid if the transaction was fraudulent.
And it's probably just Urban Legend but..
At a mall in Calgary, Alberta (that's Canada, eh?)
I heard it was Shinook Center, but who knows...
There is, of course, a bank in the mall. This bank is, of course, used by most merchants in the mall to drop off their nightly deposits.
Some intelligent person brought a few things to the mall: A heavy cardboard box with a hole in the top, a couple of paper signs, and some tape.
The "out of order" sign was placed on the night deposit door (you know, heavy metal thing that works like a mail drop box, but for money).
The "Deposits here" sign was put on the cardboard box.
Guess where lots and lots of people put bags of cash that night?
Does that refer to a "debit card" like.. a visa/mc that debits directly, or to an ATM card, used to withdraw money? Two differnet functions.