Holding your phone in your hand in a visible manner while driving is an obvious sign of your attention being diverted from the 1.5 tonnes of steel currently hurtling around under your supposed control.
No one said anything about making a call. No one said anything about texting. In the case in TFA, she had the Google Glass off.
We very much have the idea here of mere proximity to a possibly distracting object as the primary offense. Yeah, I have a problem with that. That lead me to complain about a human rights abuse - I don't give the least damn about some cheerleader who can't hang up for 30 seconds; I care about having a government that presumes guilt in situations where pesky things like "proof" would take too much work.
So no, holding a fork doesn't count as a strawman - It has exactly as much distracting power as an inactive cell phone.
but how do you know whether that person is holding their phone to text, check Facebook, on speakerphone, etc.
How do you know they don't plan to use that fork to murder someone? That cup of coffee doesn't contain illegal drugs? Their wallet doesn't contain leaked NSA secret documents?
Under conventional Western-style rule-of-Law, we have a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. I realize the UK has a slightly different take on that than the US, but I believe you still have the same general principle.
Make no mistake, you know when someone has their attention on their phone rather than the road. The little telltale signs give it away - Looking at their lap instead of forward, swerving all over the place, complete failure to pick a speed and stay there.
Defining a million and one "proxy" crimes only leads to less and less respect for the law as a whole.
No, but you'll quite rightly get one over here (UK) if you're holding it in your hand while driving.
"Quite rightly"? Seriously, WTF damage do you Brits have when it comes to pissing away your basic human rights without a second thought?
How about holding other dangerous objects, like a fork, a cup of coffee, or a wallet?
Don't put up with this shit, people. Demand your day in court for every single one of these abuses of power. Tie the courts up for years with minutiae, until they have no choice but to automatically dismiss 99% of these meritless cases.
I absolutely oppose texting while driving, and it pisses me off when I see kids doing it. "Holding a phone" does not present even the slightest danger to anyone.
Inquiring minds want to know: where exactly in the country do you live?
About 400 miles North of where Sandy obliterated. Within an hour of two cities. But my specific location by no means counts as unique.
Most of the US doesn't have the problems we hear about in the disaster-porn loving news reports. Just an hour inland from the coasts, not in the 100 year flood plain, and not living on the banks of an "engineered" river protects you from most "wet" damage - Except, that relatively tiny sliver of land framing the country contains 39% of the population (according to the 2010 census). Not in "tornado alley" doesn't mean you'll never see a tornado, but the rest of the country gets much smaller ones, and only rarely. Not in California (really, only a small fraction of it) means you laugh about "the big (3.5) one" around the water cooler rather than having a reinforced shelter-core in your house.
The US has a truly staggering amount of places with weather you would call "boring". People just seem to want to pack in to the places with the most volatile climates.
This is a hardware problem, from a phone that came out while jobs was still alive. Troll much?
A software update that came out this year counts as a hardware problem from before Steve killed someone by gaming the organ transplant system? You'll have to explain that logic to me...
No. No, I don't view disaster differently, because I choose to live in one of the majority of places in the US that don't tend to get life-threatening disasters.
No, because I don't live in a backfilled coastal flood plain and then cry to FEMA when my McMansion gets washed away.
I don't live in tornado alley. I don't live in earthquake central. I don't live on the downslope side of the Rockies.
Once a century a hurricane will come close enough to tear a few shingles off the roof. Once a decade a blizzard or ice storm will knock out power for a day or two. And... That about covers the serious local disasters.
If you can't say the same - Move. Simple as that, really.
...at which point they jack up the prices enough to make up for all those lost years.
...Except - They kinda don't.
Amazon crushes the local competition by offering a lower price, period.
TFA describes the situation as Amazon selling at a loss - Nothing more than cultural protectionist bullshit. Looking at the reality of the situation, Amazon has the buying power to make the publishers sell to them at a price where Amazon can sell below list and offer free shipping and still make a profit on the sale. Simple as that.
The sooner we get rid of all this regional protectionism, the better. If I can make the same product you can for less, you should go out of business. If some buyers irrationally choose to pay more solely for your name, hey, good for you, perhaps you can survive in the shadow of those doing your own job better than you. If not... Oh well, see ya.
First, I agree with the premise of the FP. Any publicly funded research should come with an absolutely unavoidable requirement to publish in a form open to everyone for free. I have no problem with dual-publishing, for example in both JAMA and PLoS Medicine - Though in that case, JAMA does have a problem with it and would refuse the submission - But people absolutely must have some way to get at your publicly funded research for free.
But more seriously, aside from the "public funding" angle of this, how does it happen that a doctor trying to use cutting-edge research on their patients doesn't have an institutional affiliation through which they could get access to journal articles basically for free? This alone makes me somewhat wary of Grove's legitimacy. Not an adjunct? No admission rights?
Hell, for a practical short-term solution - Sign up for a single class each semester at the local state university (you need to take CEs anyway to keep your license), and you'll have access to journals in languages you've never even heard of. Longer term solution? Publish, and tell anyone who will listen that you did it in an open access journal specifically to snub the likes of Elsevier.
The FBI really doesn't give a rats ass about corporate interest.
Perhaps you can explain their obsession with Aaron Swartz, then, at worst a two-bit hacker who trespassed on a college campus and made two well-known organizations look a bit silly (if not outright monstrously callous, though that part only came after)?
Given the current state of the US electrical grid, I'm not confident it would fare well against a sudden increase of large battery packs being plugged in at once.
Actually, having a large distributed storage capacity could (if the utilities had any will to take advantage of it rather than just do the absolute minimum necessary to keep the PUC from shutting them down) vastly improve the grid's overall resiliency. Each one of these cars stores roughly the same amount of electricity as a typical house uses in three or four days.
It actually surprises me that Tesla hasn't actively promoted the idea of using the car itself as a necessarily well-maintained whole-house UPS. "Does the thought of losing power overnight cost you precious sleep? Never again! With Tesla's patented bidirectional charging station and crossover inverter, Mother Nature will need to throw more than a few flakes or gusts of wind or downed trees your way to keep you from enjoying the big game!".
And that ignores the possibility of actually tapping into them to help smooth out the peak demand curve - Our baseline consumption would cost us around two cents per kWh, if not for the fact that normal residential rates average that against insane on-demand spikes of 30-60 cents for a few hours a day.
Electric cars still look quite unattractive to me.
I keep seeing this claim, and honestly can't quite figure it out - I mean sure, the Tesla S doesn't quite have the sexyness of a Bugatti, but y'know, when you have the Veyron in for detailing, you have to let the chauffeur drive something.
A corporate employee not liking how he's being used by law enforcement can, as a general matter, simply get up and walk away from the company if he wants.
In this case - Apparently, no, he cannot.
When a court can effectively order you not to close up shop or face contempt, we have slavery for the convenience of the police, in a very real, material sense.
So, your government arresting someone who allegedly tried to have two people executed isn't helping you?
Accidentally doing some good in the process of defending corporate interests doesn't redeem them as a whole, any more than a mob boss "keeping the peace" in his home neighborhood make him a net benefit to society.
Curious, that they would choose to do this just a few weeks before their annual Dreamforce trade-show. You'd think they'd wait just one more month to pull the plug...
Unless they plan to announce some shiny alternative at Dreamforce. A far more expensive alternative, of course. But Shiny.
Yes, it catches some innocents. And yes, eventually the "contagious" taint becomes too dilute to take seriously. But for a few layers of transactions, I for one wouldn't touch any BTC within a few generations of separation of this transactions if you offered to just give it to me for nothing.
By way of analogy - Would you, given the chance, choose to get it on with your favorite supermodel, if you knew that she had ridden the Magic Johnson bareback just a few months earlier?
Y'know, on reflection, that attitude (my own) really bothers me. I find it so utterly abhorrent that I consider the agents of my own government so untrustworthy that I don't even trust those they do business with... I remember, once upon a time, believing that the government existed to help us.
Then again, I suppose I believed in the Easter Bunny once upon a time, too.
This leads to an interesting problem for the FBI...
They can either keep them in that account forever, basically useless to anyone...
Convert them to US dollars, just about the single most Bitcoin-legitimizing action I can imagine...
Or they can actually use them as Bitcoins.
The last one gets interesting, because the FBI has accidentally revealed their own current address by this large transfer to themselves. Bam, we have one "known bad" address. Anyone they trade with, then, becomes tainted by association. Would you trust, for example, a VPN service that has accepted payments from the FBI?
Are we not allowed to think all of those are terrible, or do you just take exception to people thinking torture is a special kind of evil on par with rape?
The latter - The GP stated as much bluntly - "whatever else is true, at least we're not fucking torturing people".
Y'know, maybe Barry O has managed to drag the intelligence community kicking and screaming up to 17th century level morality. I don't believe it, but okay, lets accept the possibility.
We still know that he has killed American citizens without a trial. We know that we still have people detained without a trial (and I can't decide if this counts as worse or not, we still have people detained whom a trial exonerated but we don't dare let them go!). We know that we have political dissidents, including domestic, foreign-but-Western, and foreign-and-Arab, all hiding out with known human rights abusers rather than risk falling into American custody.
So yeah, "at least we don't torture" strikes me as a pretty damned weak statement.
Killing (without a trial), sure. Indefinitely detaining (without a trial), sure. Stalking to the ends of the Earth and forcing them to seek political asylum with countries not really known for their own human rights records, sure.
But torturing? Goodness no! How barbaric!
BTW, I have a bridge for sale in San Francisco - Cheap! Only one previous owner, who treated it almost like a national landmark.
I am less certain than you seem to be that smartphone manufacturers will be unable to adequately address that problem.
I think that smartphones and tablets could address all of those problems except two: Unknown level of performance (unless they artificially limit their games to a "weakest link" baseline level, in which case that still leaves room for a high-performance dedicated gaming rig to steal the show); and screen resolution, which ranges all the way from HVGA (320x480) to FHD (1080p).
Will they set aside their differences to come up with a standard set of interfaces, however? Yeah, suuuuure - Let me know when I can use a USB mouse (not Bluetooth, actual USB) on an iPad.
That said, you do suggest more of a platform lock-in than I had originally taken the idea to mean. In that case, okay, I could see Apple (and only Apple) getting away with that. But then, you basically just have Apple's answer to the XBox, rather than a general purpose device.
Except for hardcore gamers, in my opinion there is no reason for "low-performing gaming consoles" when in 2-3 years a mid-priced smartphone with HDMI + bluetooth running Android will reach similar results.
You could have said the exact same thing about the PC vs consoles for the past 30 years, and yet, consoles keep on kicking.
The PC didn't kill consoles for the same reason that smartphones won't - People don't want to screw around with variable configurations and unknown levels of performance and controller compatibility. They want a known-working machine such that they can buy a game, put it in, turn it on, and have it work exactly the same way as it did last time, as it does for everyone else, as the manufacturer intended it to work.
Ironically, I see modern consoles as their own biggest enemy in that regard - Forced upgrades that break older features, forced online play even for simple single-player games, DRM that (especially for new releases) fails to authenticate the player as often as it works, for-pay premium content in games you've already bought... The console companies have done their damnedest to shift the experience as far as possible away from their one and only edge over general purpose devices: "it just works". Until... It doesn't.
What we put in these people is entirely arbitrary; put enough of something other than blood in a bloodstream and it will kill someone.
Why the fixation on putting something in? Whether drugs, or cyanide gas, or bullets, or a blade, or what-have-you, our methods of killing people all seem to involve the idea of adding something to their body that doesn't belong there.
As an alternative that the EU couldn't realistically deny selling to us, take something out, instead. As in, all their blood. As their last repayment to society, have them "donate" 8-10 pints of blood. Quick, easy, and absolutely 100% effective.
Of course, something like 90% of the death row population has either AIDS or hepatitis (or both), so we probably couldn't really use that blood for anything, but, oh well. No big loss.
So they trust nobody and in turn expect stores to trust them?
They haven't asked the store to trust them. They have offered a valid form of payment in exchange for goods or services. Whether or not the buyer has the right to use that particular form of payment has no bearing on the validity of the transaction as a whole.
More to the point - If I pay for delivery of a physical product with a credit card and have it sent to the card's billing address - Explain where the possibility of fraud comes into play there? I mean, okay, I suppose someone who really hates me could sign me up for a subscription to "dildos of the animal kingdom" or something stupid like that, but realistically people card for personal game, not to play expensive practical jokes on strangers.
Slashdot Mirror
Holding your phone in your hand in a visible manner while driving is an obvious sign of your attention being diverted from the 1.5 tonnes of steel currently hurtling around under your supposed control.
No one said anything about making a call. No one said anything about texting. In the case in TFA, she had the Google Glass off.
We very much have the idea here of mere proximity to a possibly distracting object as the primary offense. Yeah, I have a problem with that. That lead me to complain about a human rights abuse - I don't give the least damn about some cheerleader who can't hang up for 30 seconds; I care about having a government that presumes guilt in situations where pesky things like "proof" would take too much work.
So no, holding a fork doesn't count as a strawman - It has exactly as much distracting power as an inactive cell phone.
but how do you know whether that person is holding their phone to text, check Facebook, on speakerphone, etc.
How do you know they don't plan to use that fork to murder someone? That cup of coffee doesn't contain illegal drugs? Their wallet doesn't contain leaked NSA secret documents?
Under conventional Western-style rule-of-Law, we have a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. I realize the UK has a slightly different take on that than the US, but I believe you still have the same general principle.
Make no mistake, you know when someone has their attention on their phone rather than the road. The little telltale signs give it away - Looking at their lap instead of forward, swerving all over the place, complete failure to pick a speed and stay there.
Defining a million and one "proxy" crimes only leads to less and less respect for the law as a whole.
Someone doesn't know the law. This is an anti-cellphone/anti-texting/anti-distracted driver law, not an ant-HUD law. And, see point 2 above.
And someone didn't RTFA. She got a ticket for "Driving with Monitor visible to Driver", not for distracted driving or texting.
Which makes me wonder how California handles every new car having a nav console in the dash.
No, but you'll quite rightly get one over here (UK) if you're holding it in your hand while driving.
"Quite rightly"? Seriously, WTF damage do you Brits have when it comes to pissing away your basic human rights without a second thought?
How about holding other dangerous objects, like a fork, a cup of coffee, or a wallet?
Don't put up with this shit, people. Demand your day in court for every single one of these abuses of power. Tie the courts up for years with minutiae, until they have no choice but to automatically dismiss 99% of these meritless cases.
I absolutely oppose texting while driving, and it pisses me off when I see kids doing it. "Holding a phone" does not present even the slightest danger to anyone.
Inquiring minds want to know: where exactly in the country do you live?
About 400 miles North of where Sandy obliterated. Within an hour of two cities. But my specific location by no means counts as unique.
Most of the US doesn't have the problems we hear about in the disaster-porn loving news reports. Just an hour inland from the coasts, not in the 100 year flood plain, and not living on the banks of an "engineered" river protects you from most "wet" damage - Except, that relatively tiny sliver of land framing the country contains 39% of the population (according to the 2010 census). Not in "tornado alley" doesn't mean you'll never see a tornado, but the rest of the country gets much smaller ones, and only rarely. Not in California (really, only a small fraction of it) means you laugh about "the big (3.5) one" around the water cooler rather than having a reinforced shelter-core in your house.
The US has a truly staggering amount of places with weather you would call "boring". People just seem to want to pack in to the places with the most volatile climates.
This is a hardware problem, from a phone that came out while jobs was still alive. Troll much?
A software update that came out this year counts as a hardware problem from before Steve killed someone by gaming the organ transplant system? You'll have to explain that logic to me...
No. No, I don't view disaster differently, because I choose to live in one of the majority of places in the US that don't tend to get life-threatening disasters.
No, because I don't live in a backfilled coastal flood plain and then cry to FEMA when my McMansion gets washed away.
I don't live in tornado alley. I don't live in earthquake central. I don't live on the downslope side of the Rockies.
Once a century a hurricane will come close enough to tear a few shingles off the roof. Once a decade a blizzard or ice storm will knock out power for a day or two. And... That about covers the serious local disasters.
If you can't say the same - Move. Simple as that, really.
...at which point they jack up the prices enough to make up for all those lost years.
...Except - They kinda don't.
Amazon crushes the local competition by offering a lower price, period.
TFA describes the situation as Amazon selling at a loss - Nothing more than cultural protectionist bullshit. Looking at the reality of the situation, Amazon has the buying power to make the publishers sell to them at a price where Amazon can sell below list and offer free shipping and still make a profit on the sale. Simple as that.
The sooner we get rid of all this regional protectionism, the better. If I can make the same product you can for less, you should go out of business. If some buyers irrationally choose to pay more solely for your name, hey, good for you, perhaps you can survive in the shadow of those doing your own job better than you. If not... Oh well, see ya.
First, I agree with the premise of the FP. Any publicly funded research should come with an absolutely unavoidable requirement to publish in a form open to everyone for free. I have no problem with dual-publishing, for example in both JAMA and PLoS Medicine - Though in that case, JAMA does have a problem with it and would refuse the submission - But people absolutely must have some way to get at your publicly funded research for free.
But more seriously, aside from the "public funding" angle of this, how does it happen that a doctor trying to use cutting-edge research on their patients doesn't have an institutional affiliation through which they could get access to journal articles basically for free? This alone makes me somewhat wary of Grove's legitimacy. Not an adjunct? No admission rights?
Hell, for a practical short-term solution - Sign up for a single class each semester at the local state university (you need to take CEs anyway to keep your license), and you'll have access to journals in languages you've never even heard of. Longer term solution? Publish, and tell anyone who will listen that you did it in an open access journal specifically to snub the likes of Elsevier.
The FBI really doesn't give a rats ass about corporate interest.
Perhaps you can explain their obsession with Aaron Swartz, then, at worst a two-bit hacker who trespassed on a college campus and made two well-known organizations look a bit silly (if not outright monstrously callous, though that part only came after)?
Given the current state of the US electrical grid, I'm not confident it would fare well against a sudden increase of large battery packs being plugged in at once.
Actually, having a large distributed storage capacity could (if the utilities had any will to take advantage of it rather than just do the absolute minimum necessary to keep the PUC from shutting them down) vastly improve the grid's overall resiliency. Each one of these cars stores roughly the same amount of electricity as a typical house uses in three or four days.
It actually surprises me that Tesla hasn't actively promoted the idea of using the car itself as a necessarily well-maintained whole-house UPS. "Does the thought of losing power overnight cost you precious sleep? Never again! With Tesla's patented bidirectional charging station and crossover inverter, Mother Nature will need to throw more than a few flakes or gusts of wind or downed trees your way to keep you from enjoying the big game!".
And that ignores the possibility of actually tapping into them to help smooth out the peak demand curve - Our baseline consumption would cost us around two cents per kWh, if not for the fact that normal residential rates average that against insane on-demand spikes of 30-60 cents for a few hours a day.
Electric cars still look quite unattractive to me.
I keep seeing this claim, and honestly can't quite figure it out - I mean sure, the Tesla S doesn't quite have the sexyness of a Bugatti, but y'know, when you have the Veyron in for detailing, you have to let the chauffeur drive something.
A corporate employee not liking how he's being used by law enforcement can, as a general matter, simply get up and walk away from the company if he wants.
In this case - Apparently, no, he cannot.
When a court can effectively order you not to close up shop or face contempt, we have slavery for the convenience of the police, in a very real, material sense.
And y'know? I don't feel okay with that.
So, your government arresting someone who allegedly tried to have two people executed isn't helping you?
Accidentally doing some good in the process of defending corporate interests doesn't redeem them as a whole, any more than a mob boss "keeping the peace" in his home neighborhood make him a net benefit to society.
Keeping them in that account will mean that Ross is still able to use them.
By "that account", I mean the one they transferred them into immediately after taking possession of RU's wallet.
You have a very strange idea of how the bitcoin protocol works.
You clearly didn't RTFA.
I've written my own miner.
I'll take that definition of "strange, if you like.
Curious, that they would choose to do this just a few weeks before their annual Dreamforce trade-show. You'd think they'd wait just one more month to pull the plug...
Unless they plan to announce some shiny alternative at Dreamforce. A far more expensive alternative, of course. But Shiny.
Hmm...
Tainted by association makes no sense at all.
It works well enough for them to use against us.
Yes, it catches some innocents. And yes, eventually the "contagious" taint becomes too dilute to take seriously. But for a few layers of transactions, I for one wouldn't touch any BTC within a few generations of separation of this transactions if you offered to just give it to me for nothing.
By way of analogy - Would you, given the chance, choose to get it on with your favorite supermodel, if you knew that she had ridden the Magic Johnson bareback just a few months earlier?
Y'know, on reflection, that attitude (my own) really bothers me. I find it so utterly abhorrent that I consider the agents of my own government so untrustworthy that I don't even trust those they do business with... I remember, once upon a time, believing that the government existed to help us.
Then again, I suppose I believed in the Easter Bunny once upon a time, too.
This leads to an interesting problem for the FBI...
They can either keep them in that account forever, basically useless to anyone...
Convert them to US dollars, just about the single most Bitcoin-legitimizing action I can imagine...
Or they can actually use them as Bitcoins.
The last one gets interesting, because the FBI has accidentally revealed their own current address by this large transfer to themselves. Bam, we have one "known bad" address. Anyone they trade with, then, becomes tainted by association. Would you trust, for example, a VPN service that has accepted payments from the FBI?
Are we not allowed to think all of those are terrible, or do you just take exception to people thinking torture is a special kind of evil on par with rape?
The latter - The GP stated as much bluntly - "whatever else is true, at least we're not fucking torturing people".
Y'know, maybe Barry O has managed to drag the intelligence community kicking and screaming up to 17th century level morality. I don't believe it, but okay, lets accept the possibility.
We still know that he has killed American citizens without a trial. We know that we still have people detained without a trial (and I can't decide if this counts as worse or not, we still have people detained whom a trial exonerated but we don't dare let them go!). We know that we have political dissidents, including domestic, foreign-but-Western, and foreign-and-Arab, all hiding out with known human rights abusers rather than risk falling into American custody.
So yeah, "at least we don't torture" strikes me as a pretty damned weak statement.
Killing (without a trial), sure. Indefinitely detaining (without a trial), sure. Stalking to the ends of the Earth and forcing them to seek political asylum with countries not really known for their own human rights records, sure.
But torturing? Goodness no! How barbaric!
BTW, I have a bridge for sale in San Francisco - Cheap! Only one previous owner, who treated it almost like a national landmark.
I am less certain than you seem to be that smartphone manufacturers will be unable to adequately address that problem.
I think that smartphones and tablets could address all of those problems except two: Unknown level of performance (unless they artificially limit their games to a "weakest link" baseline level, in which case that still leaves room for a high-performance dedicated gaming rig to steal the show); and screen resolution, which ranges all the way from HVGA (320x480) to FHD (1080p).
Will they set aside their differences to come up with a standard set of interfaces, however? Yeah, suuuuure - Let me know when I can use a USB mouse (not Bluetooth, actual USB) on an iPad.
That said, you do suggest more of a platform lock-in than I had originally taken the idea to mean. In that case, okay, I could see Apple (and only Apple) getting away with that. But then, you basically just have Apple's answer to the XBox, rather than a general purpose device.
Ah, thus the subject line. My bad, we agree. :)
Except for hardcore gamers, in my opinion there is no reason for "low-performing gaming consoles" when in 2-3 years a mid-priced smartphone with HDMI + bluetooth running Android will reach similar results.
You could have said the exact same thing about the PC vs consoles for the past 30 years, and yet, consoles keep on kicking.
The PC didn't kill consoles for the same reason that smartphones won't - People don't want to screw around with variable configurations and unknown levels of performance and controller compatibility. They want a known-working machine such that they can buy a game, put it in, turn it on, and have it work exactly the same way as it did last time, as it does for everyone else, as the manufacturer intended it to work.
Ironically, I see modern consoles as their own biggest enemy in that regard - Forced upgrades that break older features, forced online play even for simple single-player games, DRM that (especially for new releases) fails to authenticate the player as often as it works, for-pay premium content in games you've already bought... The console companies have done their damnedest to shift the experience as far as possible away from their one and only edge over general purpose devices: "it just works". Until... It doesn't.
What we put in these people is entirely arbitrary; put enough of something other than blood in a bloodstream and it will kill someone.
Why the fixation on putting something in? Whether drugs, or cyanide gas, or bullets, or a blade, or what-have-you, our methods of killing people all seem to involve the idea of adding something to their body that doesn't belong there.
As an alternative that the EU couldn't realistically deny selling to us, take something out, instead. As in, all their blood. As their last repayment to society, have them "donate" 8-10 pints of blood. Quick, easy, and absolutely 100% effective.
Of course, something like 90% of the death row population has either AIDS or hepatitis (or both), so we probably couldn't really use that blood for anything, but, oh well. No big loss.
So they trust nobody and in turn expect stores to trust them?
They haven't asked the store to trust them. They have offered a valid form of payment in exchange for goods or services. Whether or not the buyer has the right to use that particular form of payment has no bearing on the validity of the transaction as a whole.
More to the point - If I pay for delivery of a physical product with a credit card and have it sent to the card's billing address - Explain where the possibility of fraud comes into play there? I mean, okay, I suppose someone who really hates me could sign me up for a subscription to "dildos of the animal kingdom" or something stupid like that, but realistically people card for personal game, not to play expensive practical jokes on strangers.