I know this is going to generate a lot of disagreement, but I consider the Mac OS, and the user experience behind it, to be just a part of the Apple brand. There's nothing you can do with a Mac that is impossible with Windows, at least as far as I'm aware. The crux of the matter is that the Mac OS makes most things significantly easier and more pleasant. So it's really all about presentation. Marketing, if you will.
Like I said, I know this doesn't make much sense to anybody else, but it makes sense to me.
There's no argument that this is true. But I still don't see how it makes any more than an insignificant-- in the grand scheme-- difference in the lives of low-wage, unskilled or marginally skilled workers. Same with a computer. You can hand 'em out for free on the street corner, and it won't do a think to help people.
I think the whole "simputer" concept is distressingly close to a cargo-cult ritual. Rich people have computers, therefore we will build computers of our own, so we can also be rich! God you takem life bilong mi, and all that.
But we're talking about cellular phones in particular. We did a lot of business for a long time before cellular phones became available. I still don't think the argument is valid.
A switch to Apple requires a new computer purchase.
Most people don't upgrade their computers, apart from possibly adding RAM or a new graphics card. Most people buy new computers when they've outgrown their old ones. Apple's not saying, ``Throw away your four-month-old PC, with which you're pretty satisfied, and buy a new $1,700 computer!'' They're saying, ``When you've had enough of that crufty old PC and you're looking to buy something new, consider a Mac.''
The proprietary-hardware-is-a-barrier-to-sales argument gets blown way out of proportion, IMHO.
I think what's new is that Apple has been steadily improving their products for about four years now. A few times every year, Apple has announced some incremental upgrades to their product lines, with surprisingly few big announcements (like the G4 iMac, the iPod, and the xServe).
Apple's slow-and-steady approach is very effectively turning them from a has-been, brink-of-death company into a giant in the industry. They're not that impressive in terms of market share or annual revenues, but they're at the absolute top of the heap in terms of brand loyalty and customer satisfaction, and that's what scares Microsoft.
You're really reaching here. Having a cell phone, with only tiny exceptions, doesn't make anyone more employable. It's irrelevant to a person's overall social or financial standing.
If having a cell phone meant you were suddenly skilled at operating machine tools, or educated at a significantly higher level, that might mean something. But being able to make and receive phone calls doesn't make you more employable, or put you in a better job. It just helps you do your existing job better. That's not going to do anything to affect social or economic inequity.
There's absolutely no justification for that kind of business move. Apple is a luxury brand, and they spend millions cultivating and maintaining that brand. They even go after hobbyists who make Aqua-inspired UI themes, all to protect the Apple and the Mac brands.
Some people believe that Apple's computers are technically superior. In some ways, they are, but in some ways, they aren't. That's not the point. The point is that people buy Macs because of the Apple brand, not the guts of the computer.
A Dell-branded Apple-built computer running Mac OS X would be the worst of all possible worlds. A shit brand wrapped around a technically average and moderately expensive computer, running a niche OS? That's a going-out-of-business plan.
And, as long as computers are a privilege of the upper classes, the acute social distortions found in all Third World countries will continue to exist.
Aren't you confusing computers with opportunity? Personally I don't buy the ``social inequity is the root of all evil'' and ``the class system is inherently bad'' arguments, but let's set that aside for a minute. Giving a random person off the street a computer does not, in any way, enable him to improve his station in life. In order to do that, he's going to have to go out and get an education (if he lacks one) and a good job. Having a computer won't help him with those things.
In 1998 cheap cell phones became available from privatized companies; today any day laborer in Brazil has a cell phone. A perfect example of technology increasing the productivity of low-skill workers in the Third World.
You left out the part about how having a cell phone increases the productivity of a low-skill worker. If you're a salesman or something, and your job is based on talking to people on the phone, then having a cell phone might make you more productive. But if you work in a field or a factory or something, having a cell phone won't improve your productivity in any measurable way.
No, the sentence is not correct. Just in case anybody else out there needs an explanation, the sentence is incorrect because it's an example of a misplaced modifier.
Properly constructed sentences place modifying clauses or phrases adjacent to the word that they modify. In this case, the sentence is incorrect because ``being butchered by studios'' is not descriptive of ``Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega.'' If you parse the sentence correctly, it's funny.
After being butchered by studios, Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega have restored most of the scenes and score.
The strict meaning of that sentence is that Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega were butchered by studios, and that they subsequently restored the film. This error is doubly egregious because the noun that the adverbial phrase modifies-- ``the film''-- isn't even in the sentence. It's just implied by the elliptic construction, ``restored most of the scenes and score (to the film).''
To be grammatically correct, the sentence could have been written this way. It's not great, but at least it's strictly correct.
After the film was butchered by studios, Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega restored most of the scenes and score.
The right thing to do in this case, of course, is to rephrase the idea so it can be expressed less awkwardly.
Exactly. As far as I'm concerned, 2001 is almost a silent film as it is. There are basically three expository passages of dialogue in the film (the briefing by Dr. Floyd, the televised BBC interview, and the final recorded message from Dr. Floyd to the crew), and the rest could be eliminated completely without too much editing.
Maybe in my spare time I'll do an artsy parody of 2001, re-editing the DVD as a silent film with just a musical soundtrack and some title cards for essential dialogue. Sounds like a fun little project.
In the case of electricity they actually send out a person every year to check my usage and carefully calculates my bills to match my usage every month according to this.
While that may be true where you live, they haven't done that in my town for years. In my neighborhood, the days of the meter-maid are long gone.
In the case of my ISP that would mean that bandwith would have to be monitored around the clock and reported in as often as every minute.
The technology to do that is in place already, at the router level. You wouldn't have to add meters to everybody's houses or anything absurd like that. It's very different from, but technically similar to, measuring how long I'm on the phone every month. All the data collection can be done at the switching points. Measuring the bit rate across a segment is a SMOP.
I guess what it all boils down to is this: if it costs the provider per unit of the service they're providing, then flat-rate pricing plans are inevitably going to be unfair, either for the consumer or for the producer.
Well, all we really have to go on here is the evidence of history. To date, only Mac OS Classic, Windows 95 and later, and Mac OS X have been accepted as general purpose desktop OSs. All three of those have been developed and refined by giant corporations with vast resources. All the other efforts have not succeeded in creating widely used desktop OSs.
So it's reasonable to conclude that creating a desktop OS that's suitable for widespread use is harder than most people realize, and does, in fact, require vast resources like rocket science. Any other conclusion can only come from theory and speculation, it seems to me.
And I've always had a bit of a problem with talking about this sort of thing in terms of ``almost there.'' I don't think it's possible to say that Ximian Gnome is almost there, because we have no good working definition of what ``there'' means. You could compare it feature-for-feature with Windows, if you like, but that doesn't tell you anything in the absolute sense.
The only way to evaluate whether a desktop OS is ready or not is to get thousands of people to use it, and see how many of them get frustrated and throw it out. If that's the criteria, I'm not sure how Gnome or KDE would compare.
These are the same people who misguidedly think that bandwidth is something that can be "stolen" (never mind the dictionary definition of the word) and would probably accuse you of "stealing" temperature if you went to a shopping mall to enjoy the warm air (in winter) or air conditioning (in summer) without buying anything.
That's a terrible analogy. And you absolutely can steal bandwidth: that's what happens when you use it without paying for it. In this situation, the cable internet provider has spelled out, carefully and in great detail, what you can and can't use your bandwidth to do. You can't set up a free wireless access point and give access to anybody who happens to be in range, for example.
If you're doing that, then you're taking something (that privilege) without paying for it. That's stealing.
Let's argue about whether the cable internet providers are right or wrong. Let's argue about whether what they're doing is justifiable, or even moral. But let's not argue about whether the customers are doing something wrong. That much, at least, should be obvious to anybody.
I, personally, would vote for a world in which internet access comes to your house the same way electricity does: it's metered, at a rate that's low enough not to make much difference. My electric bill varies every month, but not too much, and it's never too high. I'd be happy if my internet bill did the same thing.
That'd also give us a nice, strong case to object to internet ads and spam. If I download a 300K Flash animation, I had to pay for it! Bastards! Where can I send the bill?
All you have to do is buy one of their supported drives (from Sun/SGI/HP/IBM) and you're all set!
Well, if you're going to get into that level of detail, I can only speak about SGI. There's no such thing as an SGI-supported CDRW, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW, scanner, printer, or digital camera. So your choices are either support it yourself, or don't do it at all. I imagine, but won't promise, that the situation is the same for Sun's, HP's, and IBM's Unix systems.
That's news to me, and I'm not 100% sure it's accurate. Can you post a source or something? It's not that I don't believe you; it just doesn't sound like what I read at the Apple Store web site.
Last I checked Apple doesnt have a try before you buy program.
Check again. You can buy hardware from an Apple Store, or from The Apple Store, and return it for any reason within 10 business days. (I believe there's a restocking fee, but that's not unusual.) As I've said before, that's not the best return policy in the world, but in my opinion two weeks is plenty of time to find out if you're going to just hate OS X or not.
Don't underestimate how hard it is to build computers that are easy to use. I'd say the problem is even harder than rocket science. The basic principles behind rocket science are well established, but the basic principles behind human-computer interaction are still being discovered. Building desktop systems is very hard, and the job will have to be taken seriously if it's to be done well.
He has a few points, sure. A lot of them he obviously didn't try hard enough, despite what he says.
That's just another way of saying, ``a lot of them are obviously too hard to do, despite what some Slashdot posters say.''
The author's point is that he shouldn't have to try that hard to do simple things. The fact that he could have done it if he'd tried harder isn't really relevant. The point is that he tried as hard as he wanted-- harder than most people would have, it seems-- and couldn't get it right. So he gave up.
That means that Linux makes it too hard to do simple things.
Generic PC -- spend a few hundred dollars and you can try Mandrake, RedHat, SUSE, Windows XP, Windows 2000...
And hate them all.
Macintosh -- spend over a grand and you can try os x. Tough luck if you don't like it.
Well, in all fairness, you can return any purchase to the Apple Store for any reason at all within ten business days. That's not the best return policy in the world, admittedly, but I've found when I buy things that I know well within two weeks whether I'm going to be unhappy with them or not.
Instead of a shitty vampire-OS that just pimps off of Unix, one could even pick a real Unix box. The stuff from Sun Microsystems comes to mind.
You think it's easy to hook up a CDRW or a scanner to a Sun? Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, they all suck when you try to do things like that. Windows and OS 9/OS X have it pretty well figured out, and OS X has it (mostly) figured out on top of a Unix kernel. I really don't care if you like Macs or hate them, or if you like OS X or hate it. You have to give credit where it's due.
Then again, you're an AC, so who the hell cares what you think?
You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).
A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don't initiate a recall.
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.
The math behind security or safety is depressingly simple.
Additional security is good but you need to balance it with ease-of-use. If you can add security, without hurting ease-of-use, then you're golden.
Not quite. This is a commercial system. You have to balance security against cost to deploy. If the cost to deploy new security measures is more than the cost of fraud, then it makes more sense to just absorb the fraud. At that point it becomes a cost of doing business. This is true both for the banks and for the merchants.
I don't think we're clear on the definition of ``necessary.'' Your point seems to be that we can apply more security. My point is that we don't really need to. I could encrypt everything on my laptop, if I wanted to. The tools are, as you say, freely available. But doing so would give me no benefit, or benefit so minor that it's not worth the effort.
The worldwide credit card system is pretty much the same. Right now, it's convenient, easy to use, and cheap, and when fraud or error happens, it all gets sorted out properly. Additional security would not improve the system in any meaningful way.
I've experienced credit card fraud twice. Once, I left my card at a restaurant, and somebody picked it up and used to to buy gas at a service station. One call to the bank made that problem go away. Another occasion, years later, was more interesting. A kid working at a rent-a-car counter was using stolen credit card numbers to call phone sex lines. The bank actually called me on that one, because I hadn't seen a statement with those charges on it yet. In both cases, the problem disappeared with only minor inconveniece to me. The system, secure or insecure, works really well.
In any case, this is also about allowing one unrustworthy company, that has been found guilty of antitrust violations, to extend its dirty hands into another area of commerce....
You're assuming that I agree with everything the parent of my post said. I don't. I hold on to my assertion that the worldwide credit card system is only as secure as it has to be, and no moreso.
People use credit cards because the massive lapses in security are never properly publicised and also, whenever someone steals from their card, they get the money refunded.
Another way of saying this is to say that credit cards are secure enough just as they are. Of the millions of credit card transactions processed every day, only the slightest fraction are fraudulent, and in those cases, the customer is taken care of appropriately practically every time. In other words, most of the time it's secure, and when it isn't, there's no real harm done.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for ultra-secure military grade encryption on everything. But is it really necessary?
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is going to generate a lot of disagreement, but I consider the Mac OS, and the user experience behind it, to be just a part of the Apple brand. There's nothing you can do with a Mac that is impossible with Windows, at least as far as I'm aware. The crux of the matter is that the Mac OS makes most things significantly easier and more pleasant. So it's really all about presentation. Marketing, if you will.
Like I said, I know this doesn't make much sense to anybody else, but it makes sense to me.
There's no argument that this is true. But I still don't see how it makes any more than an insignificant-- in the grand scheme-- difference in the lives of low-wage, unskilled or marginally skilled workers. Same with a computer. You can hand 'em out for free on the street corner, and it won't do a think to help people.
I think the whole "simputer" concept is distressingly close to a cargo-cult ritual. Rich people have computers, therefore we will build computers of our own, so we can also be rich! God you takem life bilong mi, and all that.
But we're talking about cellular phones in particular. We did a lot of business for a long time before cellular phones became available. I still don't think the argument is valid.
A switch to Apple requires a new computer purchase.
Most people don't upgrade their computers, apart from possibly adding RAM or a new graphics card. Most people buy new computers when they've outgrown their old ones. Apple's not saying, ``Throw away your four-month-old PC, with which you're pretty satisfied, and buy a new $1,700 computer!'' They're saying, ``When you've had enough of that crufty old PC and you're looking to buy something new, consider a Mac.''
The proprietary-hardware-is-a-barrier-to-sales argument gets blown way out of proportion, IMHO.
I think what's new is that Apple has been steadily improving their products for about four years now. A few times every year, Apple has announced some incremental upgrades to their product lines, with surprisingly few big announcements (like the G4 iMac, the iPod, and the xServe).
Apple's slow-and-steady approach is very effectively turning them from a has-been, brink-of-death company into a giant in the industry. They're not that impressive in terms of market share or annual revenues, but they're at the absolute top of the heap in terms of brand loyalty and customer satisfaction, and that's what scares Microsoft.
You're really reaching here. Having a cell phone, with only tiny exceptions, doesn't make anyone more employable. It's irrelevant to a person's overall social or financial standing.
If having a cell phone meant you were suddenly skilled at operating machine tools, or educated at a significantly higher level, that might mean something. But being able to make and receive phone calls doesn't make you more employable, or put you in a better job. It just helps you do your existing job better. That's not going to do anything to affect social or economic inequity.
There's absolutely no justification for that kind of business move. Apple is a luxury brand, and they spend millions cultivating and maintaining that brand. They even go after hobbyists who make Aqua-inspired UI themes, all to protect the Apple and the Mac brands.
Some people believe that Apple's computers are technically superior. In some ways, they are, but in some ways, they aren't. That's not the point. The point is that people buy Macs because of the Apple brand, not the guts of the computer.
A Dell-branded Apple-built computer running Mac OS X would be the worst of all possible worlds. A shit brand wrapped around a technically average and moderately expensive computer, running a niche OS? That's a going-out-of-business plan.
And, as long as computers are a privilege of the upper classes, the acute social distortions found in all Third World countries will continue to exist.
Aren't you confusing computers with opportunity? Personally I don't buy the ``social inequity is the root of all evil'' and ``the class system is inherently bad'' arguments, but let's set that aside for a minute. Giving a random person off the street a computer does not, in any way, enable him to improve his station in life. In order to do that, he's going to have to go out and get an education (if he lacks one) and a good job. Having a computer won't help him with those things.
In 1998 cheap cell phones became available from privatized companies; today any day laborer in Brazil has a cell phone. A perfect example of technology increasing the productivity of low-skill workers in the Third World.
You left out the part about how having a cell phone increases the productivity of a low-skill worker. If you're a salesman or something, and your job is based on talking to people on the phone, then having a cell phone might make you more productive. But if you work in a field or a factory or something, having a cell phone won't improve your productivity in any measurable way.
Your argument is really specious.
No, the sentence is not correct. Just in case anybody else out there needs an explanation, the sentence is incorrect because it's an example of a misplaced modifier.
Properly constructed sentences place modifying clauses or phrases adjacent to the word that they modify. In this case, the sentence is incorrect because ``being butchered by studios'' is not descriptive of ``Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega.'' If you parse the sentence correctly, it's funny.
After being butchered by studios, Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega have restored most of the scenes and score.
The strict meaning of that sentence is that Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega were butchered by studios, and that they subsequently restored the film. This error is doubly egregious because the noun that the adverbial phrase modifies-- ``the film''-- isn't even in the sentence. It's just implied by the elliptic construction, ``restored most of the scenes and score (to the film).''
To be grammatically correct, the sentence could have been written this way. It's not great, but at least it's strictly correct.
After the film was butchered by studios, Martin Koerber and Alpha-Omega restored most of the scenes and score.
The right thing to do in this case, of course, is to rephrase the idea so it can be expressed less awkwardly.
``To read makes our speaking English good.''
Exactly. As far as I'm concerned, 2001 is almost a silent film as it is. There are basically three expository passages of dialogue in the film (the briefing by Dr. Floyd, the televised BBC interview, and the final recorded message from Dr. Floyd to the crew), and the rest could be eliminated completely without too much editing.
Maybe in my spare time I'll do an artsy parody of 2001, re-editing the DVD as a silent film with just a musical soundtrack and some title cards for essential dialogue. Sounds like a fun little project.
You heard it here first.
In the case of electricity they actually send out a person every year to check my usage and carefully calculates my bills to match my usage every month according to this.
While that may be true where you live, they haven't done that in my town for years. In my neighborhood, the days of the meter-maid are long gone.
In the case of my ISP that would mean that bandwith would have to be monitored around the clock and reported in as often as every minute.
The technology to do that is in place already, at the router level. You wouldn't have to add meters to everybody's houses or anything absurd like that. It's very different from, but technically similar to, measuring how long I'm on the phone every month. All the data collection can be done at the switching points. Measuring the bit rate across a segment is a SMOP.
I guess what it all boils down to is this: if it costs the provider per unit of the service they're providing, then flat-rate pricing plans are inevitably going to be unfair, either for the consumer or for the producer.
Well, all we really have to go on here is the evidence of history. To date, only Mac OS Classic, Windows 95 and later, and Mac OS X have been accepted as general purpose desktop OSs. All three of those have been developed and refined by giant corporations with vast resources. All the other efforts have not succeeded in creating widely used desktop OSs.
So it's reasonable to conclude that creating a desktop OS that's suitable for widespread use is harder than most people realize, and does, in fact, require vast resources like rocket science. Any other conclusion can only come from theory and speculation, it seems to me.
And I've always had a bit of a problem with talking about this sort of thing in terms of ``almost there.'' I don't think it's possible to say that Ximian Gnome is almost there, because we have no good working definition of what ``there'' means. You could compare it feature-for-feature with Windows, if you like, but that doesn't tell you anything in the absolute sense.
The only way to evaluate whether a desktop OS is ready or not is to get thousands of people to use it, and see how many of them get frustrated and throw it out. If that's the criteria, I'm not sure how Gnome or KDE would compare.
These are the same people who misguidedly think that bandwidth is something that can be "stolen" (never mind the dictionary definition of the word) and would probably accuse you of "stealing" temperature if you went to a shopping mall to enjoy the warm air (in winter) or air conditioning (in summer) without buying anything.
That's a terrible analogy. And you absolutely can steal bandwidth: that's what happens when you use it without paying for it. In this situation, the cable internet provider has spelled out, carefully and in great detail, what you can and can't use your bandwidth to do. You can't set up a free wireless access point and give access to anybody who happens to be in range, for example.
If you're doing that, then you're taking something (that privilege) without paying for it. That's stealing.
Let's argue about whether the cable internet providers are right or wrong. Let's argue about whether what they're doing is justifiable, or even moral. But let's not argue about whether the customers are doing something wrong. That much, at least, should be obvious to anybody.
I, personally, would vote for a world in which internet access comes to your house the same way electricity does: it's metered, at a rate that's low enough not to make much difference. My electric bill varies every month, but not too much, and it's never too high. I'd be happy if my internet bill did the same thing.
That'd also give us a nice, strong case to object to internet ads and spam. If I download a 300K Flash animation, I had to pay for it! Bastards! Where can I send the bill?
All you have to do is buy one of their supported drives (from Sun/SGI/HP/IBM) and you're all set!
Well, if you're going to get into that level of detail, I can only speak about SGI. There's no such thing as an SGI-supported CDRW, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW, scanner, printer, or digital camera. So your choices are either support it yourself, or don't do it at all. I imagine, but won't promise, that the situation is the same for Sun's, HP's, and IBM's Unix systems.
That's news to me, and I'm not 100% sure it's accurate. Can you post a source or something? It's not that I don't believe you; it just doesn't sound like what I read at the Apple Store web site.
Last I checked Apple doesnt have a try before you buy program.
Check again. You can buy hardware from an Apple Store, or from The Apple Store, and return it for any reason within 10 business days. (I believe there's a restocking fee, but that's not unusual.) As I've said before, that's not the best return policy in the world, but in my opinion two weeks is plenty of time to find out if you're going to just hate OS X or not.
The Desktop ain't rocket science...
Don't underestimate how hard it is to build computers that are easy to use. I'd say the problem is even harder than rocket science. The basic principles behind rocket science are well established, but the basic principles behind human-computer interaction are still being discovered. Building desktop systems is very hard, and the job will have to be taken seriously if it's to be done well.
He has a few points, sure. A lot of them he obviously didn't try hard enough, despite what he says.
That's just another way of saying, ``a lot of them are obviously too hard to do, despite what some Slashdot posters say.''
The author's point is that he shouldn't have to try that hard to do simple things. The fact that he could have done it if he'd tried harder isn't really relevant. The point is that he tried as hard as he wanted-- harder than most people would have, it seems-- and couldn't get it right. So he gave up.
That means that Linux makes it too hard to do simple things.
Generic PC -- spend a few hundred dollars and you can try Mandrake, RedHat, SUSE, Windows XP, Windows 2000...
And hate them all.
Macintosh -- spend over a grand and you can try os x. Tough luck if you don't like it.
Well, in all fairness, you can return any purchase to the Apple Store for any reason at all within ten business days. That's not the best return policy in the world, admittedly, but I've found when I buy things that I know well within two weeks whether I'm going to be unhappy with them or not.
Instead of a shitty vampire-OS that just pimps off of Unix, one could even pick a real Unix box. The stuff from Sun Microsystems comes to mind.
You think it's easy to hook up a CDRW or a scanner to a Sun? Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, they all suck when you try to do things like that. Windows and OS 9/OS X have it pretty well figured out, and OS X has it (mostly) figured out on top of a Unix kernel. I really don't care if you like Macs or hate them, or if you like OS X or hate it. You have to give credit where it's due.
Then again, you're an AC, so who the hell cares what you think?
Additional security is good but you need to balance it with ease-of-use. If you can add security, without hurting ease-of-use, then you're golden.
Not quite. This is a commercial system. You have to balance security against cost to deploy. If the cost to deploy new security measures is more than the cost of fraud, then it makes more sense to just absorb the fraud. At that point it becomes a cost of doing business. This is true both for the banks and for the merchants.
Only a fool would not take that precaution.
I don't think we're clear on the definition of ``necessary.'' Your point seems to be that we can apply more security. My point is that we don't really need to. I could encrypt everything on my laptop, if I wanted to. The tools are, as you say, freely available. But doing so would give me no benefit, or benefit so minor that it's not worth the effort.
The worldwide credit card system is pretty much the same. Right now, it's convenient, easy to use, and cheap, and when fraud or error happens, it all gets sorted out properly. Additional security would not improve the system in any meaningful way.
I've experienced credit card fraud twice. Once, I left my card at a restaurant, and somebody picked it up and used to to buy gas at a service station. One call to the bank made that problem go away. Another occasion, years later, was more interesting. A kid working at a rent-a-car counter was using stolen credit card numbers to call phone sex lines. The bank actually called me on that one, because I hadn't seen a statement with those charges on it yet. In both cases, the problem disappeared with only minor inconveniece to me. The system, secure or insecure, works really well.
In any case, this is also about allowing one unrustworthy company, that has been found guilty of antitrust violations, to extend its dirty hands into another area of commerce....
Oh, I get it. You're a zealot. My mistake.
You're assuming that I agree with everything the parent of my post said. I don't. I hold on to my assertion that the worldwide credit card system is only as secure as it has to be, and no moreso.
People use credit cards because the massive lapses in security are never properly publicised and also, whenever someone steals from their card, they get the money refunded.
Another way of saying this is to say that credit cards are secure enough just as they are. Of the millions of credit card transactions processed every day, only the slightest fraction are fraudulent, and in those cases, the customer is taken care of appropriately practically every time. In other words, most of the time it's secure, and when it isn't, there's no real harm done.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for ultra-secure military grade encryption on everything. But is it really necessary?