Bush and Putin are geting together for a nice friendly sleepover in Connecticut. They get into their pajamas, have a pillow fight, and are sipping the hot chocolate that Barabara Bush brings them.
Bush: So, Putey. We have a problem here in the US. We don't have a rubber stamp Congress any more, but our milkies [that's what he calls the Military-Industrial Complex] need their allowance. We need some sort of way to make sure that they'll be getting their money even with a hostile Congress. A big threat of some sort, just like during the Cold War - you guys had everyone so scared nobody would challenge a vast military budget.
Putin: Da. The old days when I could get my GRU and KGB buddies everything they needed out of the huge military budget are long gone - it was bad for the economy, but great for us! These days, we have more resources but the people are scrambling over whatever crumbs organized crime leaves behind. We need a unifying opponent, who will let me get those citizens and mob bosses solidly back under my thumb. We too need a new Cold War - the Chechnyans just aren't doing it for us.
Bush: Great! Ma!
Putin and Bush together: More Ovaltine, please!
How do you know your privacy isn't violated? Whimsically tagging all your stuff with your ID could absolutely invade your privacy. Consider that sometimes people's stuff gets stolen
Uh. That's... a pretty far reach and you need much longer arms.
It's like saying it's violating your privacy to have your name on your credit cards, because your wallet might be stolen.
This geek obsession with Ron Paul is really worrisome - people really aren't understanding his true views and aren't being nearly skeptical enough. You can't really consider him a libertarian, nor a constitutionalist (as he claims):
(1) He opposes the separation of church and state and wants a Christian America, he says as he panders to the religious right.
(2) While he claims that abortion is not a federal matter and thus should be left to the states, he had absolutely no problem seizing the power to Federally outlaw D&X abortions. No matter how you feel about D&X, this is not intellectually honest - either this is a Federal realm or it isn't.
The man is a relgious zealot, masquerading as a friend of liberty. Don't be fooled.
If you're interested in Shek Exley's story, you can find it in the book Caverns Unknown to Man, by Steve Dalcher. The book is out of print, but can still be found in some tech diving shops, particularly those near the freshwater caves in northern Florida (where he grew up and cut his teeth).
The man really was a god among divers, and saved uncounted divers through his use of accident analysis to create a safe methodology for cave diving. The ones who die, do not follow his methods (and yes, that includes his final dives).
Frankly, so what? A bank can't stop you spending money you've alrady paid into your own account. That's not a financial risk for them. Credit is; they might be able to suspend it, but they've already lost what you've nabbed. Yet, the latter gets MORE protection? Doesn't that sound mad to you?
Of course it does. So what? "So what" is that it's the way it is (in the US), and thus important to understand when using or implement new payment methods. Arguing that it "really" is otherwise doesn't help you when you're left to try to recover from the theft of your wallet or other kinds of fraud.
Sure, away from the implementation details it doesn't make sense. Who cares?
Sorry about that, but you did have 17 years in which to see it first... don't read any messages containing the word "Rosebud," "Gazpacho," "Sixth Sense," "The Crying Game," or "Dead Again," either.
Not that I have much sympathy for someone who wants to get a copy of a movie (one that lost money, in fact, and dragged the studio down) without paying for it. Go buy or rent the DVD, you parasite.
I mean, I see a credit card account as fundamentally the same as a current account;
That's because the UI (as it were) has been designed that way. On the back end they're quite different and use very different financial and communications networks. There are very good reasons why they're legally very different - credit is a very different beast than assets are in the United States, because with credit you've got another party involved (the one extending you the credit) and a whole set of legal and practical conditions attach as a result (for a simple example, banks can't usually tell you that you can't withdraw your assets, but they can and do stop access to your credit at their discretion, for example if they detect a pattern of spending they don't like).
Which isn't to say that these things couldn't be made to appear more similar to the consumer through extending the legal protections, but I'd prefer to limit my comments to the facts as they stand, not as I wish them to be.
Bah. I think you're pointing the finger of blame at the messenger.
You're wrong. But...
We use debit cards extensively over here in the UK,
I am, however, posting only about the legal context in the United States, where transactions with debit cards do not enjoy the same legal protections that those with credit cards do. My bad for not being more specific.
Correct orbital mechanics (eg, thrust behind made the robot go up instead of ahead)
When the "good guys" says, "Wait! We don't need to fight! We can both walk away from this fight before we kill each other!" the "bad guy" thinks about it for a minute and then agrees. They walk away from it. The end.
You misunderstand me, I'm referring to the signature being a full substitute for an ID being a thing of the past, not that an ID is a substitute for a signature (it is not, as you point out) .
"See ID" is NOT supposed to be a substitute for the signature, but in addition to the signature. This is what is recommended by fraud-loss departments at banks, such as (from a quick Google, since I stopped doing this professionally a couple of years ago): referenced here (http://www.paymentsnews.com/2005/07/index.html):
A Visa USA spokesman said the company "does not accept 'see ID' as a valid substitute for a signature." Leaving it blank hinders the merchant's ability to compare signatures, he said.
Your best bet: Do both, said Melissa Wolff, loss-prevention and compliance manager for the Washington State Employees Credit Union. It is OK for cardholders to squeeze both their signatures and the "see photo ID" phrase onto the back of the card, she said.
If your card is unsigned, the clerk must reject it. If your card is signed with a variation of "See ID", the clerk must also reject it unless the official name of the card user really is "See ID".
While this may have been true years ago, now this is simply false - read your cardholder agreement. Many banks, including Wachovia (the one whose rep I've heard doing this), actually recommend writing the words "See ID" if you wish additional verification on charges.
And why wouldn't they? With credit cards, the risk is all theirs - they're the ones who lose the money if fraudulent charges are made on your account, not you! They benefit from extra verification.
(Some context: I founded a company that made credit card processing software for Linux (among others) more than ten years ago. My knowledge on the matter might be stale (as of about 2002), but as far as I know nothing about this has changed much.)
This is very bad.
When you use a credit card, you get fantastic levels of consumer protection. By law, you're liable for at most $50 of bad transactions on your credit card, and most of the major payment backbones (Visa, Mastercard, etc) have reduced that to $0 liability over the Internet. There's no burden to reporting the charges as bad - you report the charges and go on with your life and you get a bright shiny new card in the mail in a few days.
On the ACH network, it's very different - it's like you're writing checks (the ACH network is used to settle checks). In other words, you're limited to the laws protecting you from bad checks, which puts the burden on you to prove that the charges did not come from you. Recovery of the money can be a nightmare, which can only be mitigated by the policies of your bank. The law offers you very little protection. Some banks are very good about this, others won't lift a finger to help you unless it's required by law.
Debit cards are bad, but at least their widespread use have made banks familiar with the issues. This is much, much worse.
Say what you will about the Catholics, their religion is based in faith, not some second rate paperback and pseudoscience.
Uh, excuse me? How is believing in something with no evidence to support it, or in the face of evidence against it, a virtue? And how does a badly written collection of primitive fairly tales qualify as any better than a second rate paperback? Just because it's so old that generations have been told to believe its lies?
Faith is exactly the problem. A little more skepticism would make the world a much better place.
Why are wasting our time with a bunch of delusional cultists?
I'm guessing, because they're pretty ruthless in trying to destroy the lives of people who think that they can just laugh them off.
Ridiculous, yes... but have you seen the messes those crazies who believe in Transubstantiation have made over the last couple thousand years? Just as they're settling down, we've got some newer upstarts wanting to go all David Koresh and Osama bin Laden on the world. Where's Janet Reno when you need her?
In one big way, these people are worse than previous cults striving to be religions - ironically, our ability to detect mental illness helps the CoS get crazier. This cult specifically recruits and attracts those who modern science has said are mentally ill... and we're surprised when they pull particularly crazy-assed shit?
All I can say is, I've put 500 and 750 GB drives in Series 2 TiVos and not had the problems you're describing. Perhaps it matters which Series 2 TiVos we're talking about, there was a lot of variation in models and the ones I upgraded were the Pioneer CD-R units, the DVR-810H - I don't know how much RAM they sport.
Those (and their showy big brothers, the DVR-57H) are great units, by the way, if you can catch a videophile upgrading to the Series 3 and getting rid of the Pioneers.
Oh, come on. There have been some fall-down funny moments. IE:
[In Adama's quarters, Tigh is going over the list of people healthy enough, after the food shortages, to help harvest the algae. The algae isn't exactly what folks had imagined, though. The processing of the food will take some time and everyone is complaining about it.] Adama:I hear they're still eating paper. Is that true? Tigh: No.
(wait a beat)
Tigh:Paper shortage.
(Both of them totally lose it, RotFL.)
Dark, and conveying a lot of information about how stressed out they are, but also funny as hell.
I hope you understand that the stuttering is just what you see when you install a bad drive in a TiVo, or the drive is starting to go bad. I've installed at least a couple of dozen upsized TiVo drives for friends & family (in series 1 through 3 units) over the last 6 or so years, and that's my experience...
That said, most of my viewing has also moved to DVD rips (for old shows) & torrent downloads (of current series), transcoded for AppleTV use. It's nice having multiple seasons of multiple TV shows sitting there, waiting to be ingested. I keep the TiVos for now, the unavailabilitt of TiVoToGo for the Series 3 is a real deal killer. Fuck that noise, they broadcast these shows in the clear (*through my body*, I might add) and they won't let me move them between TiVos or to my Macs? Screw 'em, this is fair use.
Not at all. I don't expect the mehums in the mass media to pay any attention, that battle is truly lost. It was more of a rout than a battle, truthfully.
Slashdot editors on the other hand, should know better. There are enough of us here who actually are non-cracking hackers, after all.
How many times? I'm up for more, but I think my girlfriend isn't up for any more today.
(Don't believe the lies, hacker kids. Become successful and get your life together and everything else will fall into place. Except, fucktards who should know better think that hackers are crackers.)
Everybody else is focusing on his compensation, but I think it's a lot more - at his level of wealth, money is more an abstract way of keeping score than anything tangible. It's not like you can live in two homes, eat two meals, or sleep in two beds at once.
Instead, consider this. For decades, he's had to live with the internal certainty that he was right, that computers should be designed according to his philosophy, but that that dastardly Bill Gates stole the ideas that Jobs brought to market and proceeded to dominate the computing market. Meanwhile politics at Apple pushed him out, making him sit on the sidelines building NeXT. Years ran into decades of watching somebody who he thought committed the highest crime of having no taste eat the lunch that he believed should have been his.
Now, finally, he's on top of the world. He's brought his vision to the world of portable music, and the world has smiled and said that it is good - and that Microsoft's attempts to enter that market are, well, not so good. The innovative animation studio he nurtured through a vision of the highest quality instead of quantity, has been given the highest compliment possible (in being purchased at a very high price) by Disney, the keepers of the legacy of the oringal wave of animation innovation. On top of that, he's poised to bring that vision to an even larger market.
Love him or hate him, but he's got every reason in the world to be happy. Money's nice, but bringing your vision to fruition and having it succeed, and having the world sit up and take notice - that's priceless. And I think that there's every indication that this is what really drives the man.
Slashdot Mirror
Bush and Putin are geting together for a nice friendly sleepover in Connecticut. They get into their pajamas, have a pillow fight, and are sipping the hot chocolate that Barabara Bush brings them.
Bush: So, Putey. We have a problem here in the US. We don't have a rubber stamp Congress any more, but our milkies [that's what he calls the Military-Industrial Complex] need their allowance. We need some sort of way to make sure that they'll be getting their money even with a hostile Congress. A big threat of some sort, just like during the Cold War - you guys had everyone so scared nobody would challenge a vast military budget.
Putin: Da. The old days when I could get my GRU and KGB buddies everything they needed out of the huge military budget are long gone - it was bad for the economy, but great for us! These days, we have more resources but the people are scrambling over whatever crumbs organized crime leaves behind. We need a unifying opponent, who will let me get those citizens and mob bosses solidly back under my thumb. We too need a new Cold War - the Chechnyans just aren't doing it for us.
Bush: Great! Ma!
Putin and Bush together: More Ovaltine, please!
It's like saying it's violating your privacy to have your name on your credit cards, because your wallet might be stolen.
- (1) He opposes the separation of church and state and wants a Christian America, he says as he panders to the religious right.
- (2) While he claims that abortion is not a federal matter and thus should be left to the states, he had absolutely no problem seizing the power to Federally outlaw D&X abortions. No matter how you feel about D&X, this is not intellectually honest - either this is a Federal realm or it isn't.
The man is a relgious zealot, masquerading as a friend of liberty. Don't be fooled.If you're interested in Shek Exley's story, you can find it in the book Caverns Unknown to Man, by Steve Dalcher. The book is out of print, but can still be found in some tech diving shops, particularly those near the freshwater caves in northern Florida (where he grew up and cut his teeth).
The man really was a god among divers, and saved uncounted divers through his use of accident analysis to create a safe methodology for cave diving. The ones who die, do not follow his methods (and yes, that includes his final dives).
Sure, away from the implementation details it doesn't make sense. Who cares?
Sorry about that, but you did have 17 years in which to see it first... don't read any messages containing the word "Rosebud," "Gazpacho," "Sixth Sense," "The Crying Game," or "Dead Again," either.
Not that I have much sympathy for someone who wants to get a copy of a movie (one that lost money, in fact, and dragged the studio down) without paying for it. Go buy or rent the DVD, you parasite.
Which isn't to say that these things couldn't be made to appear more similar to the consumer through extending the legal protections, but I'd prefer to limit my comments to the facts as they stand, not as I wish them to be.
- No sound in space.
- Correct orbital mechanics (eg, thrust behind made the robot go up instead of ahead)
- When the "good guys" says, "Wait! We don't need to fight! We can both walk away from this fight before we kill each other!" the "bad guy" thinks about it for a minute and then agrees. They walk away from it. The end.
Best. B-Movie. Ever."See ID" is NOT supposed to be a substitute for the signature, but in addition to the signature. This is what is recommended by fraud-loss departments at banks, such as (from a quick Google, since I stopped doing this professionally a couple of years ago): referenced here (http://www.paymentsnews.com/2005/07/index.html):
And why wouldn't they? With credit cards, the risk is all theirs - they're the ones who lose the money if fraudulent charges are made on your account, not you! They benefit from extra verification.
(Some context: I founded a company that made credit card processing software for Linux (among others) more than ten years ago. My knowledge on the matter might be stale (as of about 2002), but as far as I know nothing about this has changed much.)
This is very bad.
When you use a credit card, you get fantastic levels of consumer protection. By law, you're liable for at most $50 of bad transactions on your credit card, and most of the major payment backbones (Visa, Mastercard, etc) have reduced that to $0 liability over the Internet. There's no burden to reporting the charges as bad - you report the charges and go on with your life and you get a bright shiny new card in the mail in a few days.
On the ACH network, it's very different - it's like you're writing checks (the ACH network is used to settle checks). In other words, you're limited to the laws protecting you from bad checks, which puts the burden on you to prove that the charges did not come from you. Recovery of the money can be a nightmare, which can only be mitigated by the policies of your bank. The law offers you very little protection. Some banks are very good about this, others won't lift a finger to help you unless it's required by law.
Debit cards are bad, but at least their widespread use have made banks familiar with the issues. This is much, much worse.
"I'm not a big fan of facts. The facts have a well-known liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert.
Oh. Well.
That's just crazy talk.
Faith is exactly the problem. A little more skepticism would make the world a much better place.
Ridiculous, yes... but have you seen the messes those crazies who believe in Transubstantiation have made over the last couple thousand years? Just as they're settling down, we've got some newer upstarts wanting to go all David Koresh and Osama bin Laden on the world. Where's Janet Reno when you need her?
In one big way, these people are worse than previous cults striving to be religions - ironically, our ability to detect mental illness helps the CoS get crazier. This cult specifically recruits and attracts those who modern science has said are mentally ill... and we're surprised when they pull particularly crazy-assed shit?
Hm.
All I can say is, I've put 500 and 750 GB drives in Series 2 TiVos and not had the problems you're describing. Perhaps it matters which Series 2 TiVos we're talking about, there was a lot of variation in models and the ones I upgraded were the Pioneer CD-R units, the DVR-810H - I don't know how much RAM they sport.
Those (and their showy big brothers, the DVR-57H) are great units, by the way, if you can catch a videophile upgrading to the Series 3 and getting rid of the Pioneers.
Oh, come on. There have been some fall-down funny moments. IE:
[In Adama's quarters, Tigh is going over the list of people healthy enough, after the food shortages, to help harvest the algae. The algae isn't exactly what folks had imagined, though. The processing of the food will take some time and everyone is complaining about it.]
Adama: I hear they're still eating paper. Is that true?
Tigh: No.
(wait a beat)
Tigh: Paper shortage.
(Both of them totally lose it, RotFL.)
Dark, and conveying a lot of information about how stressed out they are, but also funny as hell.
Ignore the naysayers, who equate "character development" with "filler." As far as they're concerned, you only have drama if you have big explosions.
Watch them all. They all rock in their own ways.
I hope you understand that the stuttering is just what you see when you install a bad drive in a TiVo, or the drive is starting to go bad. I've installed at least a couple of dozen upsized TiVo drives for friends & family (in series 1 through 3 units) over the last 6 or so years, and that's my experience...
That said, most of my viewing has also moved to DVD rips (for old shows) & torrent downloads (of current series), transcoded for AppleTV use. It's nice having multiple seasons of multiple TV shows sitting there, waiting to be ingested. I keep the TiVos for now, the unavailabilitt of TiVoToGo for the Series 3 is a real deal killer. Fuck that noise, they broadcast these shows in the clear (*through my body*, I might add) and they won't let me move them between TiVos or to my Macs? Screw 'em, this is fair use.
Who needs Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons? Sick your Jackie Chans, Jet Lis, and Bruce Lees on their asses. Let your John Woos record the encounter...
They'll die messily, in slow motion, in a flock of white doves scattering...
Not to mention that Boutros Boutros Ghali Ghali was replaced by Kiki-Moon Moon nearly half a year ago...
Not at all. I don't expect the mehums in the mass media to pay any attention, that battle is truly lost. It was more of a rout than a battle, truthfully.
Slashdot editors on the other hand, should know better. There are enough of us here who actually are non-cracking hackers, after all.
How many times? I'm up for more, but I think my girlfriend isn't up for any more today.
(Don't believe the lies, hacker kids. Become successful and get your life together and everything else will fall into place. Except, fucktards who should know better think that hackers are crackers.)
Everybody else is focusing on his compensation, but I think it's a lot more - at his level of wealth, money is more an abstract way of keeping score than anything tangible. It's not like you can live in two homes, eat two meals, or sleep in two beds at once.
Instead, consider this. For decades, he's had to live with the internal certainty that he was right, that computers should be designed according to his philosophy, but that that dastardly Bill Gates stole the ideas that Jobs brought to market and proceeded to dominate the computing market. Meanwhile politics at Apple pushed him out, making him sit on the sidelines building NeXT. Years ran into decades of watching somebody who he thought committed the highest crime of having no taste eat the lunch that he believed should have been his.
Now, finally, he's on top of the world. He's brought his vision to the world of portable music, and the world has smiled and said that it is good - and that Microsoft's attempts to enter that market are, well, not so good. The innovative animation studio he nurtured through a vision of the highest quality instead of quantity, has been given the highest compliment possible (in being purchased at a very high price) by Disney, the keepers of the legacy of the oringal wave of animation innovation. On top of that, he's poised to bring that vision to an even larger market.
Love him or hate him, but he's got every reason in the world to be happy. Money's nice, but bringing your vision to fruition and having it succeed, and having the world sit up and take notice - that's priceless. And I think that there's every indication that this is what really drives the man.