I would bet most of the people advocating assembly language programming to make your code go faster cannot write assembly better than today's optimizing compilers.
This is generally true, but not as much as you may think. For even an optimizing compiler to optimize to better-than-you-can-write-assembly, your code must be written in a way that lets the optimizer do the best it can do. You can have some amazingly poorly written 'C' code that doesn't even consider what's going on in assembly language and it's entirely possible that while the optimizer will do a good job considering what you gave it, you'd actually produce better assembly language code if you wrote it yourself because you'd actually have to spend some time and consider what you're really doing and look at the best way to do it.
For example, I work with 8-bit microcontrollers. It's very easy, in 'C', to throw in an int or a long when you really only need an unsigned char--"just for safe measure." But when you're coding it in assembly language, you really stop and think about what you need. And it makes a huge difference. The optimizer will never be able to read your mind and know that that long you defined will never have a value that exceeds 255. So it's very possible that a moderately good assembly language programmer can produce better code than an optimizer optimizing the code of an average HLL programmer. The char/int/long is an extreme example, but poorly designed algorithms don't become magically improved by an optimizer and, often, writing it in assembly language forces the developer to think things through.
One of the worst things you can do is take a 'C' programmer that is used to writing for Linux or Windows and have him write 'C' code for a real embedded processor. It's not the same thing and it's precisely because they don't know (or care) what's going on in assembly language. They just treat it as a magical black box and code away in 'C' as if they were writing code for a PC. I've cleaned up the mess developers like that made.
Of course, a lot of the same things can be achieved in 'C' if the developer thinks things through and writes good 'C' code. But what is "good" on one architecture can royally suck on another. The only way to know you're writing good 'C' code is to know the underlying assembly language.
In a normally-lit scene I would expect no things would be completely down on the 'floor' i.e. r=0 b= g=0 and so pure black could be keyable. True pure black would not exist on people or objects but would with this background material, allowing a new approach in lighting.
That's Slashdot for you... the parent gets +1 for making some snide remarks against the right but I make some against the left and am modded flamebait. Hey, it's Slashdot--news for socialist leftist geeks.
You'd be correct if you had exchanged "left" for "right" throughout your post. You have to have a very twisted view of reality to believe that the left has the "winning argument" on just about any issue. The left's position is based on flawed assumptions of economics and human behavior.
Bingo. And to think that there are those that think that taxes can be raised without hurting the economy. Amazing. I have nothing against the government wanting this information from eBay--if we're going to have an income tax and we're going to have banks and businesses reporting on money paid to other entities, then eBay should furnish that information, too. But this eBay/tax issue is a perfect easy-to-see example of what happens when the government raises taxes on anyone in the economy. Costs go up, profits go down, and prices are either increased to compensate or the seller stops selling.
Now if we could just get a few liberals to understand that.
The point is that Visa/Mastercard aren't just saying "Internet is dangerous, you're on your own." They're essentially doing it for all merchants. Whether the card is present or not, Visa/Mastercard will charge back the amount in question if it is determined it was fraud. What if the card is present, you ask for ID, and the thief has an ID that looks valid and which matches the card? Then it's your word against Visa/Mastercard's and guess who is going to lose 10 times out of 10?
The current policies of Visa/Mastercard are unacceptable across the board. Arbitrarily holding the merchant responsible for all fraud is not acceptable whether it's an Internet or card-present transaction. As I've said, the customer is in the business of buying, the merchant is in the business of selling, and Visa/Mastercard is in the business of making some money facilitating the transaction. A customer is at risk because he can buy bad goods that could go bad at any time, the merchant is at risk because he can get sued by a customer or, in the case of brick and mortar shops, they can be held up. There's risk all around. The only one that's completely insulated from risk is Visa/Mastercard when, ironically, they're the ones with the deepest pockets and yet they don't even share the risk for the part of the transaction that they are involved in.
Like I said, it's unacceptable. It's a monopoly that's abusing its power exactly as a monopoly or cartel usually does.
Your merchant processing agreement (MPA for those in the industry, the thing you sign to establish a cc processing acct) clearly states you take responsibility.
I'm not disputing that that's what the MPA says. That doesn't make it right or fair anymore than the fine print in Microsoft's EULA is right or fair just because they decided to make it so.
An authorization is saying that there is enough money on the card - NOT that the person in front of you is who they say they are.
Obviously. This works great in card-present transactions. Over the Internet, though, the merchant is in even less of a position to know whether the transaction is valid than Visa/Mastercard. At least Visa/mastercard has access to the billing address, their computers can look at past history to see if the charge is unusual, etc. If they can't act as intermediary in card-not-present transactions, they shouldn't offer the service. Then all Internet merchants (and phone merchants, and those that bill credit cards automatically each month like cell phone companies) would look for a viable alternative REAL FAST. And there'd definitely be one real quick if Visa/Mastercard was no longer a monopoly.
Truth is, if that happened, Visa/Mastercard would be among the first to come up with an alternative because it'd be in their best interest to do so. The reason they don't know is because, like I said, they're a monopoly and are content to just screw the merchant. This is not sustainable and WILL eventually change.
You're talking about specific cases of negligence. If a merchant is negligent, he is at fault and obviously should be responsible for the chargeback. But, especially in the case of online transactions, if a merchant collects all the information Visa/Mastercard wants, passes that to Visa/Mastercard, and gets an authorization, the merchant has done everything he can. If Visa/Mastercard wants to subsequently steal the money out of the merchant's account, they should be required to go to court and sue the merchant and not just dip their dirty hands in the merchant's account and yank the money back.
Visa/Mastercard is the middle man. He takes money from buyer and gives it to seller. That's his whole reason to exist. If Visa/Mastercard can't do that without being sure he's taking money from the right buyer, maybe he has no place being in the friggin' business of being the middleman. I understand that's a difficult task, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't share some responsibility.
Nice. So why can't you extend that same logic to Visa/Mastercard? There's no reason to pass it off on the merchants instead of Visa/Mastercard. Like I said elsewhere, a business that takes a credit card has enough stuff going on in their own business to have to be held responsible for flaws in Visa/Mastercard's system.
The whole "if you don't like the risk, don't accept credit cards" is no longer valid. It might have been 20 years ago (and many places didn't accept them back then), but now you can't do business if you don't accept them. Visa/Mastercard/AMEX basically holds a monopoly on transaction processing and if you don't accept them, you often can't do business. So while the "if you don't like the risk, don't take the cards" is a nice, convenient cop-out, it really isn't a legitimate answer.
The fact is, Visa/Mastercard is now a scam. There is essentially zero cost to provide the Visa/Mastercard service now that we have Internet and if they aren't even going to guarantee the payment is valid, WTF am I paying 2-4% in discount fees for? Any decent developer could make a competing system in a few months--the problem is that no-one would use it because the market is dominated by the Visa/Mastercard monopoly. And therein lies the problem: Visa/Mastercard is an abusive monopoly and the merchant gets screwed.
To me it is annoying that 90%+ of the time the merchant never checks my signature line which says "See ID" and actually ask for an ID.
I'm actually talking more about card-not-present transactions which is where the real risk is. While I guess someone could steal your physical credit card and try to use it, that'd be pretty bold these days. Cards are canceled so fast that it might not even work and they'd get caught with a stolen card on their person. It'd make more sense to just silently collect credit card numbers and use them online where at least you're not right there to get caught. So I really don't think you increase your own security by asking someone to look at your ID; and if someone steals your card and some merchant accepts it, you get to charge back the whole thing anyway. So why are you concerned?
I understand your complaint, but when merchants blindly accept a card they should have to pay for it.
I somewhat agree on card-present transactions. If they don't ask for an ID, they haven't done due diligence. It's not unreasonable to ask for ID on card-present transactions. But I'm more concerned about card-not-present transactions. Visa/Mastercard has decided to allow these transactions for decades, whether it be by phone or Internet. They're more than happy to allow that even though the cards aren't present. If they're willing to accept the transaction and profit from it, they should be willing to vouch for the transaction. If I've provide Visa/Mastercard with every detail they ask for (credit card #, expiration, CSV, billing name/address and shipping name/address) and they authorize it, that's my due diligence. If they want more evidence to vouch for the transaction, they should ask for it. But for me to give them everything they ask for and then have them turn around and say it's my fault the transaction was fraudulent is bogus.
It really comes down to an antiquated system. Every bank should allow users to be able to login to their account and have master control over their card. We should be able to tell our bank that for any given card, only accept "card present" transactions. Or to "open" our card for non-present transactions for a specific period of time. Ideally, every merchant would have a public merchant ID that would be posted to websites and users would get that number and authorize a specific merchant for a specific period of time. Any transaction that didn't meet the customer's authorization specifications would be rejected. If that was done, credit card fraud would drop to almost zero and NO-ONE would lose. Except the crooks.
You have to look at it from the other perspective though - like any merchant I'm sure you receive your share of obvious frauds (the ones you delete without even turning on your brain - 400 units of $expensive_product to Lagos etc). Maybe you're honest enough to still decline them if you knew you'd get the money, but lets face it many aren't.
I have looked at it from their perspective and it still doesn't make sense. If someone has a history of lots of chargebacks, that merchant gets canned anyway. If I'm entering ship-to and bill-to addresses into the system and if there's something that makes them (or their computers) uncomfortable, have the merchant call in for verbal authorization where the risks are explained to the merchant and/or Visa/Mastercard can say that they won't take responsibility for the charge.
I'm not opposed to a merchant being expected to be honest enough to do due diligence. If I ship something to Nigeria and expect Visa/Mastercard to pay me, and it turns out to be fraudulent, they have a right to ask me what documentation or evidence I have that I made an honest effort to be reasonably sure the transaction was valid. If I failed to do that, they can expect me to pay for it. But if there's nothing Nigeria-like about the transaction, nothing raises my suspicion, I submit the card to Visa/Mastercard and they authorize it and confirm the zip code and CSV matches, I've done all I can. To then turn around and say, "Yeah, we know we told you the charge was authorized, we know you have the right address, zip code and CSV, but what do you know... our system sucks and even though you obviously have all the right data you could possibly provide, we're still holding you responsible."
If a merchant is fraudulently processing charges or is accepting credit cards that are obviously stolen, that's a crime that should be prosecuted in a court of law. Simply assuming all merchants are crooks and arbitrarily taking back money you already gave them is simply not acceptable.
A customer is in the "business" of buying. A merchant is in the "business" of selling. Visa/Mastercard is in the business of facilitating the transaction. That's their business and they need to make sure it works so the buyer and seller can do their business. It is not acceptable to hold either the customer or the merchant responsible for shortcomings in Visa/Mastercard's system. If a merchant gets an authorization number from Visa/Mastercard, that should be a done deal. If it's fraud, Visa/Mastercard needs to eat that charge. If that means raising the discount rate, fine, do it--and let merchants decide whether they're willing to accept credit cards given the real cost of accepting them; or the customers and/or merchants will demand real security.
As a merchant, this is very annoying. If I submit a charge to Visa/Mastercard and it's authorized, I should be able to count on that unless the valid cardmember has a legitimate complaint that I did not resolve and charges it back. If the use was fraudulent, as the merchant I have absolutely no way to know that--that's why I'm asking Visa/Mastercard for authorization. If they authorize the charge then they think it's legitimate, too, so why should the merchant somehow be expected to think otherwise or be held responsible for 100% of the chargeback?
To pay extortionate discount charges on every transaction and not even be able to trust that the charge is legitimate is abusive on the part of Visa/Mastercard. What's worse, a chargeback comes with a chargeback fee. So not only does Visa/Mastercard not get harmed by fraud, it profits from it. As long as that is the case, Visa/Mastercard has no motivation whatsoever to increase security and decrease fraud.
Why is it "evil" to comply with a court to catch someone who is breaking the law? I hate the RIAA attacks on individuals (I realize this is Fox, not the RIAA), but I certainly don't blame any ISP for complying with a subpoena for information. If I wrote a book and someone posted it to the Internet before I even had a chance to publish it, damn right I'd want to go after that person. It's not the ISP's/YouTube's/Google's job to run interference so someone else can break the law. In fact, I'd say that doing so would be evil.
It is actually possible for a paper to be rejected from a journal for legitimate reasons, you know.
Ok. Have you read the paper? Have you found anything in the paper that would suggest it was not up to snuff? And I'm not talking about a press release that is probably meant to stimulate funding in a very funding-unfriendly environment. What exactly was wrong with their paper that made it not worthy of publishing?
Me: 3) Contrary to what some people would like to believe, not all real scientists agree with the IPCC version of global warming.
You: That's true, but that also doesn't imply that the IPCC version is wrong.
No, but it does mean that those that state that the entire scientific community agrees with the IPCC and the concept of human-induced global warming are either wrong or intentionally lying. Some people--especially on sites like this--would have you believe that only oil company stooges don't accept these two things and that all legitimate science supports it. Papers like this definitely throw those claims into serious doubt.
As much as we know about the climate, I bet there's far more that we don't know.
No reputible sources are disputing global warming and that humans are the cause.
RTFA. From the article:
After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005. In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.
Those 5 sentences say soooo much that so many people would like to ignore. 1) That there is a very major factor involved in cloud formation that, if anything, the IPCC is paying less attention to. 2) That the "peer reviewed" journals are indeed rejecting valid research that contradicts the herd mentality of human-induced global warming. 3) Contrary to what some people would like to believe, not all real scientists agree with the IPCC version of global warming. 4) These three things combined really DO undermine a heck of a lot of what the IPCC and their ilk is campaigning behind.
Well, I've been volunteering myself for the post of 'Benevolent Dictator'...a post to last about 2 years, in which I can start by throwing out all current members of both houses of congress...and start anew...and changing some laws to avoid letting money become the horrible necessity it is now to run....and to fix a few other things.
Hey, worked for Chavez... though he's looking to make it a permanent position rather than just two years.
I agree. After seeing the pictures, she looked fine before. I have a hard time imagining what she went into the doctor asking to do. Even her website says, "I really liked how I looked, but I started to notice small changes that probably no one else noticed. I never wanted to change my looks I just wanted to maintain what I had longer." Preventative plastic surgery? I'm not sure I'd call that a situation that merits surgery. If no-one else noticed something, that's a strong indicator that you really shouldn't get surgery and maybe you are over-reacting for other reasons.
Does she look worse now? Yeah. But that's the default assumption I'd make with most elective plastic surgeries. If you actually look better and not fake after plastic surgery, consider yourself lucky. It's kind of like a woman getting a boob job and then complaining it doesn't look or feel natural afterwards. Well, duh!
Having plastic surgery when a woman looks like she did is kind of like having a lung transplant because you have mild asthma: It's just not worth the risk. And that's just common sense.
They tried to get Clinton impeached and all he did as pork his intern. I guess the moral standards have been lowered somewhat.
Completely off-topic and this has been covered time and time again, but Clinton wasn't impeached for porking his intern. He was impeached for committing perjury which is essentially the most heinous thing anyone can do if we are to have any hopes of having a justice system that works.
Someone else: Once, someone suggested building in voice recognition for entering an SMS...My reply was, "why don't you just call them instead."
You: Because it's usually more expensive.
Don't know what you pay, but I get so many free minutes that I can't use them all. SMS, on the other hand, costs 10 cent per message (and I think it just went up to 15 cents, didn't it?). It's far cheaper for me to call than to SMS.
SMS are the biggest scam. 15 cents for 160 bytes of data... call it 200 after overhead. But if you have free minutes, you probably consume that much bandwidth in about 1/5th of a second or less. How the cell companies ever convinced people to pay more for a far less demanding system should be a study in modern marketing.
And very appropriate. Oh my gosh, someone's going to take a picture of my house. Now what?!
If you've ever bought a house, you know that for months (or longer) thereafter, people come by and snap pictures of your house. Why? Because appraisers take pictures of your house as "comparable" for the appraisal of some other house in the area. It's completely legal and nothing new. When I got my appraisal, it too included pictures of other recently sold houses in the neighborhood. Once I was working in my garage and an appraisal guy came up and actually asked if he could take a picture. I said, sure, and would he like me to close the garage door so he could get a better picture. He thanked me and that was that.
Not defending Windows security, but it's entirely possible that the graphical depiction is not "optimized" so that it intentionally looks like spaghetti. It's hard to see what's going on with the resolution given, but some of the call "bubbles" seem to be unnecessarily placed far away from whatever called them with a long strand of spaghetti between them. This isn't necessarily an indication of spaghetti or bad design, but a bad graphical depiction. Also, just because lots of places make a call to the same API (which causes the graph to look like spaghetti) does not mean bad design--to the contrary, it can be very good design.
I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure this is really a good case for why.
Slashdot Mirror
I would bet most of the people advocating assembly language programming to make your code go faster cannot write assembly better than today's optimizing compilers.
This is generally true, but not as much as you may think. For even an optimizing compiler to optimize to better-than-you-can-write-assembly, your code must be written in a way that lets the optimizer do the best it can do. You can have some amazingly poorly written 'C' code that doesn't even consider what's going on in assembly language and it's entirely possible that while the optimizer will do a good job considering what you gave it, you'd actually produce better assembly language code if you wrote it yourself because you'd actually have to spend some time and consider what you're really doing and look at the best way to do it.
For example, I work with 8-bit microcontrollers. It's very easy, in 'C', to throw in an int or a long when you really only need an unsigned char--"just for safe measure." But when you're coding it in assembly language, you really stop and think about what you need. And it makes a huge difference. The optimizer will never be able to read your mind and know that that long you defined will never have a value that exceeds 255. So it's very possible that a moderately good assembly language programmer can produce better code than an optimizer optimizing the code of an average HLL programmer. The char/int/long is an extreme example, but poorly designed algorithms don't become magically improved by an optimizer and, often, writing it in assembly language forces the developer to think things through.
One of the worst things you can do is take a 'C' programmer that is used to writing for Linux or Windows and have him write 'C' code for a real embedded processor. It's not the same thing and it's precisely because they don't know (or care) what's going on in assembly language. They just treat it as a magical black box and code away in 'C' as if they were writing code for a PC. I've cleaned up the mess developers like that made.
Of course, a lot of the same things can be achieved in 'C' if the developer thinks things through and writes good 'C' code. But what is "good" on one architecture can royally suck on another. The only way to know you're writing good 'C' code is to know the underlying assembly language.
That said, it was all for naught, because from day 1 of being sworn in this administration wanted to go into Iraq.
If Clinton had actually done his job (instead of getting one) in 1998, there would have been no need to go into Iraq in 2003.In a normally-lit scene I would expect no things would be completely down on the 'floor' i.e. r=0 b= g=0 and so pure black could be keyable. True pure black would not exist on people or objects but would with this background material, allowing a new approach in lighting.
But then how could you see the black holes?That's Slashdot for you... the parent gets +1 for making some snide remarks against the right but I make some against the left and am modded flamebait. Hey, it's Slashdot--news for socialist leftist geeks.
You'd be correct if you had exchanged "left" for "right" throughout your post. You have to have a very twisted view of reality to believe that the left has the "winning argument" on just about any issue. The left's position is based on flawed assumptions of economics and human behavior.
Bingo. And to think that there are those that think that taxes can be raised without hurting the economy. Amazing. I have nothing against the government wanting this information from eBay--if we're going to have an income tax and we're going to have banks and businesses reporting on money paid to other entities, then eBay should furnish that information, too. But this eBay/tax issue is a perfect easy-to-see example of what happens when the government raises taxes on anyone in the economy. Costs go up, profits go down, and prices are either increased to compensate or the seller stops selling.
Now if we could just get a few liberals to understand that.
The point is that Visa/Mastercard aren't just saying "Internet is dangerous, you're on your own." They're essentially doing it for all merchants. Whether the card is present or not, Visa/Mastercard will charge back the amount in question if it is determined it was fraud. What if the card is present, you ask for ID, and the thief has an ID that looks valid and which matches the card? Then it's your word against Visa/Mastercard's and guess who is going to lose 10 times out of 10?
The current policies of Visa/Mastercard are unacceptable across the board. Arbitrarily holding the merchant responsible for all fraud is not acceptable whether it's an Internet or card-present transaction. As I've said, the customer is in the business of buying, the merchant is in the business of selling, and Visa/Mastercard is in the business of making some money facilitating the transaction. A customer is at risk because he can buy bad goods that could go bad at any time, the merchant is at risk because he can get sued by a customer or, in the case of brick and mortar shops, they can be held up. There's risk all around. The only one that's completely insulated from risk is Visa/Mastercard when, ironically, they're the ones with the deepest pockets and yet they don't even share the risk for the part of the transaction that they are involved in.
Like I said, it's unacceptable. It's a monopoly that's abusing its power exactly as a monopoly or cartel usually does.
Your merchant processing agreement (MPA for those in the industry, the thing you sign to establish a cc processing acct) clearly states you take responsibility.
I'm not disputing that that's what the MPA says. That doesn't make it right or fair anymore than the fine print in Microsoft's EULA is right or fair just because they decided to make it so.
An authorization is saying that there is enough money on the card - NOT that the person in front of you is who they say they are.
Obviously. This works great in card-present transactions. Over the Internet, though, the merchant is in even less of a position to know whether the transaction is valid than Visa/Mastercard. At least Visa/mastercard has access to the billing address, their computers can look at past history to see if the charge is unusual, etc. If they can't act as intermediary in card-not-present transactions, they shouldn't offer the service. Then all Internet merchants (and phone merchants, and those that bill credit cards automatically each month like cell phone companies) would look for a viable alternative REAL FAST. And there'd definitely be one real quick if Visa/Mastercard was no longer a monopoly.
Truth is, if that happened, Visa/Mastercard would be among the first to come up with an alternative because it'd be in their best interest to do so. The reason they don't know is because, like I said, they're a monopoly and are content to just screw the merchant. This is not sustainable and WILL eventually change.
You're talking about specific cases of negligence. If a merchant is negligent, he is at fault and obviously should be responsible for the chargeback. But, especially in the case of online transactions, if a merchant collects all the information Visa/Mastercard wants, passes that to Visa/Mastercard, and gets an authorization, the merchant has done everything he can. If Visa/Mastercard wants to subsequently steal the money out of the merchant's account, they should be required to go to court and sue the merchant and not just dip their dirty hands in the merchant's account and yank the money back.
Visa/Mastercard is the middle man. He takes money from buyer and gives it to seller. That's his whole reason to exist. If Visa/Mastercard can't do that without being sure he's taking money from the right buyer, maybe he has no place being in the friggin' business of being the middleman. I understand that's a difficult task, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't share some responsibility.
Nice. So why can't you extend that same logic to Visa/Mastercard? There's no reason to pass it off on the merchants instead of Visa/Mastercard. Like I said elsewhere, a business that takes a credit card has enough stuff going on in their own business to have to be held responsible for flaws in Visa/Mastercard's system.
The whole "if you don't like the risk, don't accept credit cards" is no longer valid. It might have been 20 years ago (and many places didn't accept them back then), but now you can't do business if you don't accept them. Visa/Mastercard/AMEX basically holds a monopoly on transaction processing and if you don't accept them, you often can't do business. So while the "if you don't like the risk, don't take the cards" is a nice, convenient cop-out, it really isn't a legitimate answer.
The fact is, Visa/Mastercard is now a scam. There is essentially zero cost to provide the Visa/Mastercard service now that we have Internet and if they aren't even going to guarantee the payment is valid, WTF am I paying 2-4% in discount fees for? Any decent developer could make a competing system in a few months--the problem is that no-one would use it because the market is dominated by the Visa/Mastercard monopoly. And therein lies the problem: Visa/Mastercard is an abusive monopoly and the merchant gets screwed.
Gas stations in the U.S. used to do that.
To me it is annoying that 90%+ of the time the merchant never checks my signature line which says "See ID" and actually ask for an ID.
I'm actually talking more about card-not-present transactions which is where the real risk is. While I guess someone could steal your physical credit card and try to use it, that'd be pretty bold these days. Cards are canceled so fast that it might not even work and they'd get caught with a stolen card on their person. It'd make more sense to just silently collect credit card numbers and use them online where at least you're not right there to get caught. So I really don't think you increase your own security by asking someone to look at your ID; and if someone steals your card and some merchant accepts it, you get to charge back the whole thing anyway. So why are you concerned?
I understand your complaint, but when merchants blindly accept a card they should have to pay for it.
I somewhat agree on card-present transactions. If they don't ask for an ID, they haven't done due diligence. It's not unreasonable to ask for ID on card-present transactions. But I'm more concerned about card-not-present transactions. Visa/Mastercard has decided to allow these transactions for decades, whether it be by phone or Internet. They're more than happy to allow that even though the cards aren't present. If they're willing to accept the transaction and profit from it, they should be willing to vouch for the transaction. If I've provide Visa/Mastercard with every detail they ask for (credit card #, expiration, CSV, billing name/address and shipping name/address) and they authorize it, that's my due diligence. If they want more evidence to vouch for the transaction, they should ask for it. But for me to give them everything they ask for and then have them turn around and say it's my fault the transaction was fraudulent is bogus.
It really comes down to an antiquated system. Every bank should allow users to be able to login to their account and have master control over their card. We should be able to tell our bank that for any given card, only accept "card present" transactions. Or to "open" our card for non-present transactions for a specific period of time. Ideally, every merchant would have a public merchant ID that would be posted to websites and users would get that number and authorize a specific merchant for a specific period of time. Any transaction that didn't meet the customer's authorization specifications would be rejected. If that was done, credit card fraud would drop to almost zero and NO-ONE would lose. Except the crooks.
You have to look at it from the other perspective though - like any merchant I'm sure you receive your share of obvious frauds (the ones you delete without even turning on your brain - 400 units of $expensive_product to Lagos etc). Maybe you're honest enough to still decline them if you knew you'd get the money, but lets face it many aren't.
I have looked at it from their perspective and it still doesn't make sense. If someone has a history of lots of chargebacks, that merchant gets canned anyway. If I'm entering ship-to and bill-to addresses into the system and if there's something that makes them (or their computers) uncomfortable, have the merchant call in for verbal authorization where the risks are explained to the merchant and/or Visa/Mastercard can say that they won't take responsibility for the charge.
I'm not opposed to a merchant being expected to be honest enough to do due diligence. If I ship something to Nigeria and expect Visa/Mastercard to pay me, and it turns out to be fraudulent, they have a right to ask me what documentation or evidence I have that I made an honest effort to be reasonably sure the transaction was valid. If I failed to do that, they can expect me to pay for it. But if there's nothing Nigeria-like about the transaction, nothing raises my suspicion, I submit the card to Visa/Mastercard and they authorize it and confirm the zip code and CSV matches, I've done all I can. To then turn around and say, "Yeah, we know we told you the charge was authorized, we know you have the right address, zip code and CSV, but what do you know... our system sucks and even though you obviously have all the right data you could possibly provide, we're still holding you responsible."
If a merchant is fraudulently processing charges or is accepting credit cards that are obviously stolen, that's a crime that should be prosecuted in a court of law. Simply assuming all merchants are crooks and arbitrarily taking back money you already gave them is simply not acceptable.
A customer is in the "business" of buying. A merchant is in the "business" of selling. Visa/Mastercard is in the business of facilitating the transaction. That's their business and they need to make sure it works so the buyer and seller can do their business. It is not acceptable to hold either the customer or the merchant responsible for shortcomings in Visa/Mastercard's system. If a merchant gets an authorization number from Visa/Mastercard, that should be a done deal. If it's fraud, Visa/Mastercard needs to eat that charge. If that means raising the discount rate, fine, do it--and let merchants decide whether they're willing to accept credit cards given the real cost of accepting them; or the customers and/or merchants will demand real security.
As a merchant, this is very annoying. If I submit a charge to Visa/Mastercard and it's authorized, I should be able to count on that unless the valid cardmember has a legitimate complaint that I did not resolve and charges it back. If the use was fraudulent, as the merchant I have absolutely no way to know that--that's why I'm asking Visa/Mastercard for authorization. If they authorize the charge then they think it's legitimate, too, so why should the merchant somehow be expected to think otherwise or be held responsible for 100% of the chargeback?
To pay extortionate discount charges on every transaction and not even be able to trust that the charge is legitimate is abusive on the part of Visa/Mastercard. What's worse, a chargeback comes with a chargeback fee. So not only does Visa/Mastercard not get harmed by fraud, it profits from it. As long as that is the case, Visa/Mastercard has no motivation whatsoever to increase security and decrease fraud.
Do not evil unless a lawyer subpoenas you.
Why is it "evil" to comply with a court to catch someone who is breaking the law? I hate the RIAA attacks on individuals (I realize this is Fox, not the RIAA), but I certainly don't blame any ISP for complying with a subpoena for information. If I wrote a book and someone posted it to the Internet before I even had a chance to publish it, damn right I'd want to go after that person. It's not the ISP's/YouTube's/Google's job to run interference so someone else can break the law. In fact, I'd say that doing so would be evil.
It is actually possible for a paper to be rejected from a journal for legitimate reasons, you know.
Ok. Have you read the paper? Have you found anything in the paper that would suggest it was not up to snuff? And I'm not talking about a press release that is probably meant to stimulate funding in a very funding-unfriendly environment. What exactly was wrong with their paper that made it not worthy of publishing?
Me: 3) Contrary to what some people would like to believe, not all real scientists agree with the IPCC version of global warming.
You: That's true, but that also doesn't imply that the IPCC version is wrong.
No, but it does mean that those that state that the entire scientific community agrees with the IPCC and the concept of human-induced global warming are either wrong or intentionally lying. Some people--especially on sites like this--would have you believe that only oil company stooges don't accept these two things and that all legitimate science supports it. Papers like this definitely throw those claims into serious doubt.
As much as we know about the climate, I bet there's far more that we don't know.
No reputible sources are disputing global warming and that humans are the cause.
RTFA. From the article:
After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005. In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.
Those 5 sentences say soooo much that so many people would like to ignore. 1) That there is a very major factor involved in cloud formation that, if anything, the IPCC is paying less attention to. 2) That the "peer reviewed" journals are indeed rejecting valid research that contradicts the herd mentality of human-induced global warming. 3) Contrary to what some people would like to believe, not all real scientists agree with the IPCC version of global warming. 4) These three things combined really DO undermine a heck of a lot of what the IPCC and their ilk is campaigning behind.
Well, I've been volunteering myself for the post of 'Benevolent Dictator'...a post to last about 2 years, in which I can start by throwing out all current members of both houses of congress...and start anew...and changing some laws to avoid letting money become the horrible necessity it is now to run....and to fix a few other things.
Hey, worked for Chavez... though he's looking to make it a permanent position rather than just two years.I agree. After seeing the pictures, she looked fine before. I have a hard time imagining what she went into the doctor asking to do. Even her website says, "I really liked how I looked, but I started to notice small changes that probably no one else noticed. I never wanted to change my looks I just wanted to maintain what I had longer." Preventative plastic surgery? I'm not sure I'd call that a situation that merits surgery. If no-one else noticed something, that's a strong indicator that you really shouldn't get surgery and maybe you are over-reacting for other reasons.
Does she look worse now? Yeah. But that's the default assumption I'd make with most elective plastic surgeries. If you actually look better and not fake after plastic surgery, consider yourself lucky. It's kind of like a woman getting a boob job and then complaining it doesn't look or feel natural afterwards. Well, duh!
Having plastic surgery when a woman looks like she did is kind of like having a lung transplant because you have mild asthma: It's just not worth the risk. And that's just common sense.
They tried to get Clinton impeached and all he did as pork his intern. I guess the moral standards have been lowered somewhat.
Completely off-topic and this has been covered time and time again, but Clinton wasn't impeached for porking his intern. He was impeached for committing perjury which is essentially the most heinous thing anyone can do if we are to have any hopes of having a justice system that works.Oh come on, the brake pad industry thanks him for it... as do ambulance-chasing attorneys.
Someone else: Once, someone suggested building in voice recognition for entering an SMS...My reply was, "why don't you just call them instead."
You: Because it's usually more expensive.
Don't know what you pay, but I get so many free minutes that I can't use them all. SMS, on the other hand, costs 10 cent per message (and I think it just went up to 15 cents, didn't it?). It's far cheaper for me to call than to SMS.
SMS are the biggest scam. 15 cents for 160 bytes of data... call it 200 after overhead. But if you have free minutes, you probably consume that much bandwidth in about 1/5th of a second or less. How the cell companies ever convinced people to pay more for a far less demanding system should be a study in modern marketing.
And very appropriate. Oh my gosh, someone's going to take a picture of my house. Now what?!
If you've ever bought a house, you know that for months (or longer) thereafter, people come by and snap pictures of your house. Why? Because appraisers take pictures of your house as "comparable" for the appraisal of some other house in the area. It's completely legal and nothing new. When I got my appraisal, it too included pictures of other recently sold houses in the neighborhood. Once I was working in my garage and an appraisal guy came up and actually asked if he could take a picture. I said, sure, and would he like me to close the garage door so he could get a better picture. He thanked me and that was that.
Seriously, this is the height of "So what!?!?!?"
Not defending Windows security, but it's entirely possible that the graphical depiction is not "optimized" so that it intentionally looks like spaghetti. It's hard to see what's going on with the resolution given, but some of the call "bubbles" seem to be unnecessarily placed far away from whatever called them with a long strand of spaghetti between them. This isn't necessarily an indication of spaghetti or bad design, but a bad graphical depiction. Also, just because lots of places make a call to the same API (which causes the graph to look like spaghetti) does not mean bad design--to the contrary, it can be very good design.
I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure this is really a good case for why.
Yep, it's all Bush's fault. Even corporate espionage.