All of the things you list have specific laws, written by the legislative branch of your friendly neighborhood government, to back them up. For instance, there are laws providing for doctors to write prescriptions and administer drugs, while denying this right to other people.
There is no law, written by lawmakers, which provides for anyone to attach a GPS device (or any other foreign thing) to someone else's car without either judicial review or permission of the car's owner.
It's pretty plain: If it's my property, ye shant fuck with it -- no matter how innocuously -- without my permission, a court order, or bloody something saying that it's a legal thing to do.
Every DVD player I've ever owned, from a fancy and early Apex, to a pyrotechnic Toshiba, a moderately expensive JVC, a so-cheap-its-nearly-funny RCA player from Walmart, and now a PS3, has had such a "dynamics compression" option either buried in the menu, or right out on its own remote button.
Go look for it.
If you're using a digital feed to a surround receiver, then you'll instead need to find a similar option there. If it doesn't exist, you can always buy 5.1 channels worth of analog stereo compressors, and tie their sidechains together so they all can operate in unison, and call that your "dynamics compression" module.
Last I checked, every single WRT54G could run some incarnation of DD-WRT, including the newer and cut-down version that Wal-Mart sells. I installed it on one myself, a couple of months ago, on a brand new unit from there.
A WRT54GL would be a better choice, as it has more RAM and more flash, but it's not necessary.
Sure they will -- at least the hardware will. The rest is just software, and that part is free.
A Linksys WRT54G from Wal-Mart, running DD-WRT, can use multiple SSIDs, with different settings and routing for each. Even the cheesy 10/100 switch built into it supports VLAN.
Complaining that "off the shelf, consumer grade wireless routers" can't do these things is like complaining that a new computer can't play Quake: They're both a fallacy. The hardware in either case is perfectly able to do lots of neat stuff like fancy WiFi routing or FPS shooters, respectively, as long as appropriate software is installed.
(And in case you're thinking, "That's not software! DD-WRT is firmware!!!" remember this: Flash memory changes everything. The software installed on a WRT54G is no more firmware, than is a copy of Windows XP installed on a solid-state disk.)
In the US, 16x9 programming is often/usually broadcast letterboxed into a 4x3 frame; there's not even an attempt to tell the television what aspect ratio to use.
Hence, the root of the problem: The broadcasters and cable/satellite operators make it approximately impossible for this shit to work automatically. And we, fat lazy Americans, are far too lazy to learn which button it is which will change the aspect or zoom mode on the TV, so once we finally find the mode that looks biggest we just pick that and leave it alone forever. And so, thereafter, we get to watch ourselves in glorious 4x3 480i, stretched to 52" diagonal on a 16x9 1080p display, looking positively fatter than ever, in a vicious cycle I like to call Maximum Fat-Person Vision.
It's kind of gross, really, but what's worse is that displays of MFPV are slathered all over every bar and damned near every restaurant. So you're sitting there eating your spare ribs or your Big Mac or your lard-encrusted potato chips, drinking your corn syrup-filled Coke or some easily-metabolized rice beer, seeing moving pictures all over the walls of the fattest people on earth looking even fatter, all while complaining to those around you that the price of gasoline, while still cheaper than almost every other free country, is making it hard to buy groceries. (Which is obviously only a problem because if we can't buy groceries, we can't get any fatter.)
Yeah. It's that bad. Stay over there, friend. You don't want any of this shit to get on you, and it's better to watch TV on your side of the pond anyway.
There exist IR remote interfaces for the PS3, for the gee-whiz home theater nut. Allegedly, some of these will plug directly into a USB port on the unit, but the method I've actually seen working involved an IR receiver from the Playstation 2's DVD kit (!), plugged into a Radio Shack Playstation 2 -> USB adapter.
The PS3 is astoundingly flexible; for being closed source and totally tied down, there doesn't seem to be much that can't be done with it.
The trouble with your argument is that there doesn't seem to be anything particularly progressive about lead-free solders: Shit costing more and breaking sooner != forward progress.
I'm all for new technology that actually fucking works.
I'd read that the 360 had certain component(s) designed by Microsoft in-house (as a cost-saving measure), which had lousy thermal characteristics, and which they sought the help of nVidia to rectify. I'm unable to find a reference at this time, but I do believe my statement to be true, whether or not the GPU in the 360 is an ATI part.
Does this have anything to do with the Xbox 360's Red Ring of Death? And do these problems, in turn, have something to do with RoHS certification, due to lead-free solders being less durable?
Nvidia has been said to have had a hand in the design of some parts of the 360, and the problem sounds like it is identical.
That said, on my own laptop (a Dell Inspiron 6000i) sees at least 8 hours a day of actual use, and is generally powered on at least 20 hours per day. The default fan control keeps the fan spinning all the time at smoothly varied speeds, with a heavy tendency to keep it spinning at high speed for long periods of time following heavy loads. This is very annoying to me.
Instead, I run i8kfangui, which lets me control (based on the temperature of the CPU, GPU, RAM, or hard drive) the fan's speed. It keeps dust accumulation and noise down, and works pretty well. The tradeoff is that it (by my choice) keeps the CPU in a constant and dramatic swing between 52 and 43 degrees Celcius: The fan is simply off below 43C, then turns at low speed once the CPU reaches 52C. If it gets to 68C (which almost never happens, and is quite hot for a CPU) it spins at high speed. I find this behavior to be very preferable.
But the point is that it is generally a slow climb to 52C, and a fast fall to 43C, over and over in an abusive thermal-stress scenario. This cycle repeats a dozen or so times per hour, 8-20 hours per day, and has done so for three years. It works fine,
The motherboard is not RoHS compliant, and so presumably was built with lead-based solder. However it seems that most new machines are built with lead-free solders, all of which seem to have various problems.
Are there any metallurgists in the house who might care to speculate on the relationship between lead-free solders and systemic failure of laptops due to heat cycling?
Does anybody know what the hold-up is on this front?
Windows and other boxed, retail software.
(In case you haven't heard, the war is not yet over. Your mother's new Dell laptop from Wal-Mart came with Vista, not Linux, and your income tax software won't run with an ARM CPU. Also: Photoshop.)
Cell phones generally transmit at 300 mW in normal cases, and can boost to 3 W (3000 mW) in bad reception cases.
In the US, the FCC limits power from hand-held cellular phones to an average of 600mW. Only non-handheld phones (which, practically, simply means old-school analog bag phones and permanently-installed car phones) are allowed to produce 3W.
In the US, the frequencies used are generally pretty far away from that. A meter made to show microwave oven leakage (which I suspect is the context here) is in no way applicable to a common cellular telephone.
Furthermore, such technologies as CDMA and TDMA are anything but steady in their output power. Neither a simple meter made to accurately read a steady signal nor one which is designed to read peaks will give a very good portrayal of what is really going on, as they lack the temporal resolution needed to show how these signals really behave.
So it's the wrong tool for the job. It as about as high of a bullshit factor as someone looking at a stone and saying, "This rock is too heavy for me to lift, therefore it must weigh more than 60 tons," all without ever actually trying to lift it.
Suppose someone subscribes to a open-source-related mailing list. They ask their question and get their answer, and are then done with it and wish to no longer receive it. Then, instead of unsubscribing, they start flagging all of the mail on the list as spam.
Gmail's spam filter is supposedly community-based, so if enough people do this it will start applying a spammier rank to all future mailing list postings. This, in turn, will cause some slightly-spammy (as determined by acronyms or poor English or whatever) messages on such lists to cross the line into being deemed outright spam. I'd like to think that unflagging a given mailing list over and over again would make a difference, but I'd also guess that the variation in headers on mailing lists (due to the variety of senders and their clients) might also make it more reluctant to be trained.
Just a thought. I don't do much with real discussion lists these days, but I do intentionally subscribe to a few advertising lists which Gmail initially thought were spam. Things like the Newegg mailer, pizza coupons, and cigar discounts, which I'd guess a lot of people would subscribe to on accident and flag as spam, took a good bit of training on my part to get past the filter on any consistent basis.
Your assertion assumes that a company like Linksys has one person working on WRT54G firmware, instead of one-half of a person. And, personally, I can't assume that they even have a quarter of a human working on firmware.
I'm quite certain that I, being just one person, could come up with a decent firmware given a place to start, and 8 hours per day to chase bugs and work on new features, and my skillset is pretty limited compared to a lot of people here.
I hope that's a typo: You do realize that running a 30-amp breaker with devices that are meant to plug into 15- or 20-amp outlets is completely and disastrously unsafe, yes?
The 18 gauge wire which is common in IEC power leads in America fuses (ie: melts, burns) at just 82 amps. And make no mistake: It's completely possible to get that much current past a HACR-rated 30-amp circuit breaker, since those are designed to deal with short-term high-current situations like starting AC compressor motors.
Therefore, if your power supply dead shorts its 18-guage power lead, you WILL almost certainly have a lovely plastic-fueled electrical fire in your computer room -- the wire will become the fuse instead of the circuit breaker. Chaos ensues.
Again, I really hope it's a typo. If it is not a typo, please replace that 30-amp circuit breaker with a 20-amp breaker. You'll still have enough current available to run a shit-ton of consumer electronics, and you'll avoid burning your house down.
We use cheap Linux-based Linksys routers (old versions of WRT54G, or newer WRT54GL) where I work, for about 20 people over 5 locations.
Things are, generally, fine. Other than an old copy of Alchemy being used on one of them for some basic QoS, they're all running Linksys firmware, and all have been fine.
There was an issue with some of these, whereby the hardware would deadlock every now and then due to an obscure timing issue between the CPU and memory clocks, but that was fixed with by Linksys with firmware update (which slightly increased the CPU clock).
Nobody has needed to mess with these guys since then. They are squarely in the category of things which Just Work(tm).
At home, I've got a pair of them. One of them plugs into the cable modem, and runs X-WRT off of a 256MB SD card that I hacked into it one drunken night - it's perfectly stable aside from some recently-resolved issues with UPNP (and I can hardly blame Linksys for my custom firmware woes). The other runs DD-WRT, and is currently serving as a wireless client for a couple of Ethernet-connected devices. It works so well I might as well forget that it's there.
I also have a few no-moving-parts machines running with various cheap Chinese CF-to-IDE adapters, some of which are a few years old. They are all, unilaterally, quite slow. For what they're doing (a web browser for Thottbot, a processor for audio, and an antique 386 laptop running antique Slackware), speed isn't important -- and the 386 will obviously not work with DMA anyway -- but it'd be nice if they booted faster.
Which pin should I be investigating at to see if this might be part of the problem? Looking at a CF pinout doesn't show me anything obvious.
CID is easy to "spoof," so that everything from PBX systems (with direct extensions and/or call transfers), and companies like Vonage (or, more importantly, the large slew of random VOIP providers out there), can work.
It's not about making money, per se, but about making these services simply work. If CID were automatic, as so many ignorant people here seem to suggest that it ought to be, our telecom service choices would probably still consist of the RBOCs, or silence.
It sounds like you've never seen high-definition content on your new-fangled TV.
Speaking as the owner of a recently-procured 52" 550 Samsung LCD, let me tell you: Yes, upscaled DVDs look great, in the grand scheme of things. But they look look like complete, blurry trash compared to well-produced HD content. And I'm not just talking about Blu-Ray (which can be quite good) -- even the Tonight Show, received with a (nearly) free UHF antenna looks amazing in 1080i.
That said, I'm not about to go out and re-purchase my DVD library on Blu-Ray in compensation for this. But it's a big enough difference that I generally do consider buying new movies on Blu-Ray instead of DVD, and depending on the nature of the film, I'm very happy to spend the extra cash. Having seen the difference, it was totally a no-brainer to pick up a basic HD package when we decided to get cable TV.
YMMV, but you don't have much to lose by putting that antenna together and having a go at seeing what you've been missing. It worked fine for me, 40 miles from the broadcast towers, just sitting on a table in my living room a few feet above ground level.
When you grow up and have young kids, you'll want to wipe down the keyboard/mice of the family box all the time anyway, specially during flu season...thus ensuring that when little Sally and Micheal ever grow old, moving away from the family bunker and into the world of germs, they'll be as susceptible as possible to all manner of illness.
(Yes, I have kids. We keep things looking clean around the house, but by no means do we partake of any sort of antimicrobial war plan.)
Though (as you say) there's no law in place to enforce good behavior on the bank's part, I've always had decent luck with my bank when it came to sorting out weirdness with debit cards.
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Thank you.
All of the things you list have specific laws, written by the legislative branch of your friendly neighborhood government, to back them up. For instance, there are laws providing for doctors to write prescriptions and administer drugs, while denying this right to other people.
There is no law, written by lawmakers, which provides for anyone to attach a GPS device (or any other foreign thing) to someone else's car without either judicial review or permission of the car's owner.
It's pretty plain: If it's my property, ye shant fuck with it -- no matter how innocuously -- without my permission, a court order, or bloody something saying that it's a legal thing to do.
Every DVD player I've ever owned, from a fancy and early Apex, to a pyrotechnic Toshiba, a moderately expensive JVC, a so-cheap-its-nearly-funny RCA player from Walmart, and now a PS3, has had such a "dynamics compression" option either buried in the menu, or right out on its own remote button.
Go look for it.
If you're using a digital feed to a surround receiver, then you'll instead need to find a similar option there. If it doesn't exist, you can always buy 5.1 channels worth of analog stereo compressors, and tie their sidechains together so they all can operate in unison, and call that your "dynamics compression" module.
There's no reason to wish.
Nope, I meant exactly what I said.
Last I checked, every single WRT54G could run some incarnation of DD-WRT, including the newer and cut-down version that Wal-Mart sells. I installed it on one myself, a couple of months ago, on a brand new unit from there.
A WRT54GL would be a better choice, as it has more RAM and more flash, but it's not necessary.
Sure they will -- at least the hardware will. The rest is just software, and that part is free.
A Linksys WRT54G from Wal-Mart, running DD-WRT, can use multiple SSIDs, with different settings and routing for each. Even the cheesy 10/100 switch built into it supports VLAN.
Complaining that "off the shelf, consumer grade wireless routers" can't do these things is like complaining that a new computer can't play Quake: They're both a fallacy. The hardware in either case is perfectly able to do lots of neat stuff like fancy WiFi routing or FPS shooters, respectively, as long as appropriate software is installed.
(And in case you're thinking, "That's not software! DD-WRT is firmware!!!" remember this: Flash memory changes everything. The software installed on a WRT54G is no more firmware, than is a copy of Windows XP installed on a solid-state disk.)
In the US, 16x9 programming is often/usually broadcast letterboxed into a 4x3 frame; there's not even an attempt to tell the television what aspect ratio to use.
Hence, the root of the problem: The broadcasters and cable/satellite operators make it approximately impossible for this shit to work automatically. And we, fat lazy Americans, are far too lazy to learn which button it is which will change the aspect or zoom mode on the TV, so once we finally find the mode that looks biggest we just pick that and leave it alone forever. And so, thereafter, we get to watch ourselves in glorious 4x3 480i, stretched to 52" diagonal on a 16x9 1080p display, looking positively fatter than ever, in a vicious cycle I like to call Maximum Fat-Person Vision.
It's kind of gross, really, but what's worse is that displays of MFPV are slathered all over every bar and damned near every restaurant. So you're sitting there eating your spare ribs or your Big Mac or your lard-encrusted potato chips, drinking your corn syrup-filled Coke or some easily-metabolized rice beer, seeing moving pictures all over the walls of the fattest people on earth looking even fatter, all while complaining to those around you that the price of gasoline, while still cheaper than almost every other free country, is making it hard to buy groceries. (Which is obviously only a problem because if we can't buy groceries, we can't get any fatter.)
Yeah. It's that bad. Stay over there, friend. You don't want any of this shit to get on you, and it's better to watch TV on your side of the pond anyway.
There exist IR remote interfaces for the PS3, for the gee-whiz home theater nut. Allegedly, some of these will plug directly into a USB port on the unit, but the method I've actually seen working involved an IR receiver from the Playstation 2's DVD kit (!), plugged into a Radio Shack Playstation 2 -> USB adapter.
The PS3 is astoundingly flexible; for being closed source and totally tied down, there doesn't seem to be much that can't be done with it.
Forward progress is progress indeed.
The trouble with your argument is that there doesn't seem to be anything particularly progressive about lead-free solders: Shit costing more and breaking sooner != forward progress.
I'm all for new technology that actually fucking works.
I'd read that the 360 had certain component(s) designed by Microsoft in-house (as a cost-saving measure), which had lousy thermal characteristics, and which they sought the help of nVidia to rectify. I'm unable to find a reference at this time, but I do believe my statement to be true, whether or not the GPU in the 360 is an ATI part.
Does this have anything to do with the Xbox 360's Red Ring of Death? And do these problems, in turn, have something to do with RoHS certification, due to lead-free solders being less durable?
Nvidia has been said to have had a hand in the design of some parts of the 360, and the problem sounds like it is identical.
That said, on my own laptop (a Dell Inspiron 6000i) sees at least 8 hours a day of actual use, and is generally powered on at least 20 hours per day. The default fan control keeps the fan spinning all the time at smoothly varied speeds, with a heavy tendency to keep it spinning at high speed for long periods of time following heavy loads. This is very annoying to me.
Instead, I run i8kfangui, which lets me control (based on the temperature of the CPU, GPU, RAM, or hard drive) the fan's speed. It keeps dust accumulation and noise down, and works pretty well. The tradeoff is that it (by my choice) keeps the CPU in a constant and dramatic swing between 52 and 43 degrees Celcius:
The fan is simply off below 43C, then turns at low speed once the CPU reaches 52C. If it gets to 68C (which almost never happens, and is quite hot for a CPU) it spins at high speed. I find this behavior to be very preferable.
But the point is that it is generally a slow climb to 52C, and a fast fall to 43C, over and over in an abusive thermal-stress scenario. This cycle repeats a dozen or so times per hour, 8-20 hours per day, and has done so for three years. It works fine,
The motherboard is not RoHS compliant, and so presumably was built with lead-based solder. However it seems that most new machines are built with lead-free solders, all of which seem to have various problems.
Are there any metallurgists in the house who might care to speculate on the relationship between lead-free solders and systemic failure of laptops due to heat cycling?
Not to be Captain Obvious here, but:
Does anybody know what the hold-up is on this front?
Windows and other boxed, retail software.
(In case you haven't heard, the war is not yet over. Your mother's new Dell laptop from Wal-Mart came with Vista, not Linux, and your income tax software won't run with an ARM CPU. Also: Photoshop.)
My garage sale is called "thepiratebay."
Hope this helps.
Cell phones generally transmit at 300 mW in normal cases, and can boost to 3 W (3000 mW) in bad reception cases.
In the US, the FCC limits power from hand-held cellular phones to an average of 600mW. Only non-handheld phones (which, practically, simply means old-school analog bag phones and permanently-installed car phones) are allowed to produce 3W.
Them's the rules.
Microwave ovens typically work at 2.45GHz.
In the US, the frequencies used are generally pretty far away from that. A meter made to show microwave oven leakage (which I suspect is the context here) is in no way applicable to a common cellular telephone.
Furthermore, such technologies as CDMA and TDMA are anything but steady in their output power. Neither a simple meter made to accurately read a steady signal nor one which is designed to read peaks will give a very good portrayal of what is really going on, as they lack the temporal resolution needed to show how these signals really behave.
So it's the wrong tool for the job. It as about as high of a bullshit factor as someone looking at a stone and saying, "This rock is too heavy for me to lift, therefore it must weigh more than 60 tons," all without ever actually trying to lift it.
One theory:
Suppose someone subscribes to a open-source-related mailing list. They ask their question and get their answer, and are then done with it and wish to no longer receive it. Then, instead of unsubscribing, they start flagging all of the mail on the list as spam.
Gmail's spam filter is supposedly community-based, so if enough people do this it will start applying a spammier rank to all future mailing list postings. This, in turn, will cause some slightly-spammy (as determined by acronyms or poor English or whatever) messages on such lists to cross the line into being deemed outright spam. I'd like to think that unflagging a given mailing list over and over again would make a difference, but I'd also guess that the variation in headers on mailing lists (due to the variety of senders and their clients) might also make it more reluctant to be trained.
Just a thought. I don't do much with real discussion lists these days, but I do intentionally subscribe to a few advertising lists which Gmail initially thought were spam. Things like the Newegg mailer, pizza coupons, and cigar discounts, which I'd guess a lot of people would subscribe to on accident and flag as spam, took a good bit of training on my part to get past the filter on any consistent basis.
Your assertion assumes that a company like Linksys has one person working on WRT54G firmware, instead of one-half of a person. And, personally, I can't assume that they even have a quarter of a human working on firmware.
I'm quite certain that I, being just one person, could come up with a decent firmware given a place to start, and 8 hours per day to chase bugs and work on new features, and my skillset is pretty limited compared to a lot of people here.
I hope that's a typo: You do realize that running a 30-amp breaker with devices that are meant to plug into 15- or 20-amp outlets is completely and disastrously unsafe, yes?
The 18 gauge wire which is common in IEC power leads in America fuses (ie: melts, burns) at just 82 amps. And make no mistake: It's completely possible to get that much current past a HACR-rated 30-amp circuit breaker, since those are designed to deal with short-term high-current situations like starting AC compressor motors.
Therefore, if your power supply dead shorts its 18-guage power lead, you WILL almost certainly have a lovely plastic-fueled electrical fire in your computer room -- the wire will become the fuse instead of the circuit breaker. Chaos ensues.
Again, I really hope it's a typo. If it is not a typo, please replace that 30-amp circuit breaker with a 20-amp breaker. You'll still have enough current available to run a shit-ton of consumer electronics, and you'll avoid burning your house down.
We use cheap Linux-based Linksys routers (old versions of WRT54G, or newer WRT54GL) where I work, for about 20 people over 5 locations.
Things are, generally, fine. Other than an old copy of Alchemy being used on one of them for some basic QoS, they're all running Linksys firmware, and all have been fine.
There was an issue with some of these, whereby the hardware would deadlock every now and then due to an obscure timing issue between the CPU and memory clocks, but that was fixed with by Linksys with firmware update (which slightly increased the CPU clock).
Nobody has needed to mess with these guys since then. They are squarely in the category of things which Just Work(tm).
At home, I've got a pair of them. One of them plugs into the cable modem, and runs X-WRT off of a 256MB SD card that I hacked into it one drunken night - it's perfectly stable aside from some recently-resolved issues with UPNP (and I can hardly blame Linksys for my custom firmware woes). The other runs DD-WRT, and is currently serving as a wireless client for a couple of Ethernet-connected devices. It works so well I might as well forget that it's there.
Sorry about your luck. :)
I also have a few no-moving-parts machines running with various cheap Chinese CF-to-IDE adapters, some of which are a few years old. They are all, unilaterally, quite slow. For what they're doing (a web browser for Thottbot, a processor for audio, and an antique 386 laptop running antique Slackware), speed isn't important -- and the 386 will obviously not work with DMA anyway -- but it'd be nice if they booted faster.
Which pin should I be investigating at to see if this might be part of the problem? Looking at a CF pinout doesn't show me anything obvious.
No.
CID is easy to "spoof," so that everything from PBX systems (with direct extensions and/or call transfers), and companies like Vonage (or, more importantly, the large slew of random VOIP providers out there), can work.
It's not about making money, per se, but about making these services simply work. If CID were automatic, as so many ignorant people here seem to suggest that it ought to be, our telecom service choices would probably still consist of the RBOCs, or silence.
It sounds like you've never seen high-definition content on your new-fangled TV.
Speaking as the owner of a recently-procured 52" 550 Samsung LCD, let me tell you: Yes, upscaled DVDs look great, in the grand scheme of things. But they look look like complete, blurry trash compared to well-produced HD content. And I'm not just talking about Blu-Ray (which can be quite good) -- even the Tonight Show, received with a (nearly) free UHF antenna looks amazing in 1080i.
That said, I'm not about to go out and re-purchase my DVD library on Blu-Ray in compensation for this. But it's a big enough difference that I generally do consider buying new movies on Blu-Ray instead of DVD, and depending on the nature of the film, I'm very happy to spend the extra cash. Having seen the difference, it was totally a no-brainer to pick up a basic HD package when we decided to get cable TV.
YMMV, but you don't have much to lose by putting that antenna together and having a go at seeing what you've been missing. It worked fine for me, 40 miles from the broadcast towers, just sitting on a table in my living room a few feet above ground level.
You're in the wrong place for making such claims: I still have an 8-bit ISA MFM controller, circa 1988, originally used with an ST-225.
Let me know if you'd like to rent it.
When you grow up and have young kids, you'll want to wipe down the keyboard/mice of the family box all the time anyway, specially during flu season ...thus ensuring that when little Sally and Micheal ever grow old, moving away from the family bunker and into the world of germs, they'll be as susceptible as possible to all manner of illness.
(Yes, I have kids. We keep things looking clean around the house, but by no means do we partake of any sort of antimicrobial war plan.)
Perhaps.
Though (as you say) there's no law in place to enforce good behavior on the bank's part, I've always had decent luck with my bank when it came to sorting out weirdness with debit cards.
Then the owner will actually notice that his/her card is stolen, and finally go over the bill with a fine-toothed comb, disputing charges as they go.
Nothing is lost.