With a telco, cable company, electricity company, insurance company etc, the number of people who pay bills each month is big so the cost for setting up to receive electronic transactions (as well as implementing a system to guarantee that every transaction made contains the info needed to match the transaction to the customer so the bill can be marked as "paid") can be spread out over a lot of people.
Whereas, with landlords (even the big ones with lots of properties) the cost to set this up may be prohibitive. Plus many landlords have systems in place to receive a cheque for a given property, record the cheque (e.g. photocopy it or record its details) and send it to the bank to be cashed along with all the other cheques and dont want to change such systems to benefit those customers who would switch to paying by bank transfer (many would stick to cheques I suspect)
In my case though I can pay my landlord (fairly large real estate agent here in Australia that manages the property on behalf of the owner) any money I need to via direct bank transfer.
I can log onto my internet banking and instantly transfer money to any other Australian bank account if I have the account details. And it doesn't cost me a cent to do it. (some of the big banks may charge a very small fee, I dont know since I no longer bank with a big bank)
Also we have EFTPOS that many merchants (everything from McDonalds to Shell to Medical Practitioners to Toyota Dealers) sign up to. With EFTPOS you can use your bank account card and pin into a machine and you can pay for whatever it is you want to pay for. Again, my bank changes no fees for using EFTPOS. I was even able to pay a tradesperson with EFTPOS thanks to the invention of portable mobile EFTPOS machines that work anywhere with a mobile signal.
And I was able to pay for petrol/gas at a gas station in the middle of nowhere with EFTPOS (presumably they had a sattelite link)
I havent written a cheque in my life and the only times I have cashed a cheque in years were a couple times when relatives sent me money as birthday or xmas gifts and also for some reason if the real estate agent needs to pay me money they will use a cheque (e.g. if I have to get emergency work done on the rental property and then get reimbursed for the work, they will send me a cheque for some reason instead of simply doing an electronic transfer)
The information posted to WikiLeaks is (as far as I have seen at least) not the kind of information that represents a threat to national security.
Its not like they are posting the nuclear launch codes or the encryption keys for the secure telephone system. Or operational details of ongoing military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere.
If someone can show me a single document that has been leaked by WikiLeaks or any other similar site that would have compromised national security at the time it was leaked, maybe I will listen to the anti-WikiLeaks brigade.
You need a system more like Australia where smaller parties can and DO get into parliament (especially the upper house) and can (and do) have influence on laws the government wants to pass.
It also helps that we have an opposition that is genuinely different from the government.
The answer is to make the kid-friendly domain a.kids.us domain Then anything that is considered "G rated" by the US (i.e. what would be G or safe for kids if rated by the MPAA, ESRB or TV ratings people) would be allowed.
UQM is different in that it was an actual open-sourcing of the code to Star Control 2.
The code is open source, the assets are free-as-in-beer (as in free to distribute with the game but not free to modify)
Only things they cant use are some music tracks and cinematics they dont own the rights to plus the actual "Star Control" name (which the publisher owns)
Not that I support Child Pornography but I have seen many filtering systems over the years and NONE of them (including the one proposed for Australia or the one that seems to be being used in New Zealand) are going to stop someone who wants to find Child Pornography.
No filtering system that I have seen even attempts to block the kinds of encrypted p2p networks used by many child pornographers.
The right solution to child porn is to go after the people who are taking these pornographic photographs of kids in the first place and lock them up in a Gulag, Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison, Jail, Camp or whatever the appropriate correctional institution may be. If you cant do that because its not illegal in the country they happen to reside in, extradite them to a country where it is illegal and pressure the government of the country where its not illegal to make it illegal.
if Symantec and Norton and Mcafee are so pathetic, why does anyone bother with them anymore?
I have both companies (and ALL the products they make) on my personal "list of software I refuse to install on any PC I own" and have been recommending alternatives like AVG to anyone else (especially people who's computer I am re-installing or degunkifying)
If this guy wants to do something about health, forget banning salt. They should ban the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup instead. There is a body of evidence that suggests that HFCS is worse for you (in terms of obesity) than sugar.
Banning it would also have the positive effect of making stuff taste better:)
There are shortenings that claim to be "virtually trans-fat free" with less than 1% trans-fats (Pilot TransEND is one brand name I have heard of making this claim)
This vote and resolution wasnt just "we want to see ACTA negotiations carried out in the open", there was also a fairly strong push against plans for mandatory 3-strikes laws and against the push by big media companies to make ISPs and network providers the "copyright cops" for the big media companies.
Clearly the people in this study never went to a LAN party. I used to eat a whole large meat-lovers pizza and 6 cans or so of Coke (the good Australian stuff with REAL sugar) during the course of an afternoon/evening's gaming/file swapping/etc
The real question is, are you legally allowed to take off or land in either of these flying machines (the one in TFA or the Mosquito) from just anywhere? (such as your backyard, the parking lot at the shopping center, the flat space near your office building or whatever)
Instead of using crap like this to stop illegals, do this instead: 1.Do whatever is necessary to ensure legal American workers can get (and will try to get) the jobs that illegals are currently taking. Tie this work to unemployment benefits (i.e. if you are currently out of work and receiving any kind of government unemployment benefits you have to take these jobs. Possibly the government over there could do what the government here in Australia did and introduce "work for the dole" (which is where you work at the jobs like fruit picking that would otherwise be taken by illegals in the American system but instead of being paid by the employer out of their pockets, the government pays what they would have paid you in unemployment/dole payments)
2.Encourage American companies to build factories and other things in Central America where the illegals come from (if a Mexican has a good job in Mexico, they have a lot less reason to try to come to America and work for almost no pay because any job that pays anything decent wont take the risk of hiring people without proper paperwork)
Fact is, bandwidth ain't free. ISPs need to implement hard bandwidth caps (say, 100GB per month or whatever number makes sense depending on the plan you are on). If you exceed the usage caps, you have to pay extra (and/or your connection is dropped to slow speeds for the rest of the billing cycle)
Hard bandwidth caps combined with an easy to use usage meter to tell exactly how much you have left solve the problem. If someone wants to use their whole 100GB in the first few days sucking down globs of content from BitTorrent, so be it.
Properly implemented, bandwidth caps (especially if they are broken up into peak and off-peak to encourage large downloading to be done in the off-peak period when most users who want email, web etc are not using the net) eliminate the need for any kind of BitTorrent specific measures.
Any ISP that implemented bandwidth caps and found they still had problems with BitTorrent users would need to: A.Charge more for their service (and use that money to buy more upstream to solve the problem) B.Decrease the bandwidth caps (to reduce the amount of heavy downloading going on) or C.Implement better QoS to send BitTorrent packets to the "back of the queue" when another protocol wants to use the network links.
There is no technological or scientific reason why we couldn't have full scale commercial 4th generation nuclear reactors built and running by 2020.
The only reason it wont happen is that the US government doesn't have the balls to remove all the red tape and obstacles to building nuclear power plants (especially any design that isn't a carbon copy of an existing reactor)
The US needs to copy the regulations that exist in countries like Canada, Britain, France and Germany (all of which have been using nuclear power for decades without any serious incidents) and get these new reactors off the ground instead of building yet more clones of outdated 1960s era pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors.
Both Red Alert 3 and Command & Conquer 3 exist on OSX. But both games are just the PC version running in an emulator. And neither game supports custom maps or mods (even though there is no reason they couldn't support such maps/mods)
I dont know the specifics of this case but in some cases they may do the "freeze the account until a full ID check has been done" because they have detected activity that would require the filing of a US government "suspicious activity report". Because normal PayPal sign-up does not involve carrying out the ID check you get with regular banks, anytime transactions happen that would require a SAR (which requires disclosing full details of the account holder), PayPal has to freeze the account and conduct the ID check so they can file the SAR.
Any transaction over $10,000 requires a SAR, as does a series of transactions between A and B that total to more than $10,000. There are other triggers but I cant find any sources of info on those.
From Microsoft's point of view (and the point of view of most web designers), IE7 and IE8 ARE better than IE6. The only people who dont think that IE7 and IE8 are better are the idiot managers in large IT companies who refuse to authorize the work necessary to upgrade the ONE remaining corporate intranet website that doesn't work right in IE7 or IE8.
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With a telco, cable company, electricity company, insurance company etc, the number of people who pay bills each month is big so the cost for setting up to receive electronic transactions (as well as implementing a system to guarantee that every transaction made contains the info needed to match the transaction to the customer so the bill can be marked as "paid") can be spread out over a lot of people.
Whereas, with landlords (even the big ones with lots of properties) the cost to set this up may be prohibitive. Plus many landlords have systems in place to receive a cheque for a given property, record the cheque (e.g. photocopy it or record its details) and send it to the bank to be cashed along with all the other cheques and dont want to change such systems to benefit those customers who would switch to paying by bank transfer (many would stick to cheques I suspect)
In my case though I can pay my landlord (fairly large real estate agent here in Australia that manages the property on behalf of the owner) any money I need to via direct bank transfer.
We have this idea in Australia.
I can log onto my internet banking and instantly transfer money to any other Australian bank account if I have the account details. And it doesn't cost me a cent to do it. (some of the big banks may charge a very small fee, I dont know since I no longer bank with a big bank)
Also we have EFTPOS that many merchants (everything from McDonalds to Shell to Medical Practitioners to Toyota Dealers) sign up to. With EFTPOS you can use your bank account card and pin into a machine and you can pay for whatever it is you want to pay for. Again, my bank changes no fees for using EFTPOS. I was even able to pay a tradesperson with EFTPOS thanks to the invention of portable mobile EFTPOS machines that work anywhere with a mobile signal.
And I was able to pay for petrol/gas at a gas station in the middle of nowhere with EFTPOS (presumably they had a sattelite link)
I havent written a cheque in my life and the only times I have cashed a cheque in years were a couple times when relatives sent me money as birthday or xmas gifts and also for some reason if the real estate agent needs to pay me money they will use a cheque (e.g. if I have to get emergency work done on the rental property and then get reimbursed for the work, they will send me a cheque for some reason instead of simply doing an electronic transfer)
The information posted to WikiLeaks is (as far as I have seen at least) not the kind of information that represents a threat to national security.
Its not like they are posting the nuclear launch codes or the encryption keys for the secure telephone system. Or operational details of ongoing military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere.
If someone can show me a single document that has been leaked by WikiLeaks or any other similar site that would have compromised national security at the time it was leaked, maybe I will listen to the anti-WikiLeaks brigade.
You need a system more like Australia where smaller parties can and DO get into parliament (especially the upper house) and can (and do) have influence on laws the government wants to pass.
It also helps that we have an opposition that is genuinely different from the government.
If this company said no, it wouldn't stop the filter, all it would do is to lead to the contract going to someone else.
Its Sun CDDL, a totally different license.
The answer is to make the kid-friendly domain a .kids.us domain
Then anything that is considered "G rated" by the US (i.e. what would be G or safe for kids if rated by the MPAA, ESRB or TV ratings people) would be allowed.
UQM is different in that it was an actual open-sourcing of the code to Star Control 2.
The code is open source, the assets are free-as-in-beer (as in free to distribute with the game but not free to modify)
Only things they cant use are some music tracks and cinematics they dont own the rights to plus the actual "Star Control" name (which the publisher owns)
Not that I support Child Pornography but I have seen many filtering systems over the years and NONE of them (including the one proposed for Australia or the one that seems to be being used in New Zealand) are going to stop someone who wants to find Child Pornography.
No filtering system that I have seen even attempts to block the kinds of encrypted p2p networks used by many child pornographers.
The right solution to child porn is to go after the people who are taking these pornographic photographs of kids in the first place and lock them up in a Gulag, Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison, Jail, Camp or whatever the appropriate correctional institution may be. If you cant do that because its not illegal in the country they happen to reside in, extradite them to a country where it is illegal and pressure the government of the country where its not illegal to make it illegal.
if Symantec and Norton and Mcafee are so pathetic, why does anyone bother with them anymore?
I have both companies (and ALL the products they make) on my personal "list of software I refuse to install on any PC I own" and have been recommending alternatives like AVG to anyone else (especially people who's computer I am re-installing or degunkifying)
If this guy wants to do something about health, forget banning salt. They should ban the use of High Fructose Corn Syrup instead. There is a body of evidence that suggests that HFCS is worse for you (in terms of obesity) than sugar.
Banning it would also have the positive effect of making stuff taste better :)
There are shortenings that claim to be "virtually trans-fat free" with less than 1% trans-fats (Pilot TransEND is one brand name I have heard of making this claim)
What they use to make this product I dont know.
This vote and resolution wasnt just "we want to see ACTA negotiations carried out in the open", there was also a fairly strong push against plans for mandatory 3-strikes laws and against the push by big media companies to make ISPs and network providers the "copyright cops" for the big media companies.
Aren't the MEPs directly elected in elections?
I thought it was the council that was picked by the national governments.
Clearly the people in this study never went to a LAN party.
I used to eat a whole large meat-lovers pizza and 6 cans or so of Coke (the good Australian stuff with REAL sugar) during the course of an afternoon/evening's gaming/file swapping/etc
Unless you have a lab that can produce film quality CGI at film frame rates in a reasonable space of time, good luck...
If the new Power Gig is as good as it appears to be (and can get enough good guitar songs) it will blow away Rock Band and Guitar Hero :)
The real question is, are you legally allowed to take off or land in either of these flying machines (the one in TFA or the Mosquito) from just anywhere? (such as your backyard, the parking lot at the shopping center, the flat space near your office building or whatever)
Let me know when you can make a movie as good as Avatar with a couple friends, a video camera and a home PC then maybe I will care.
Instead of using crap like this to stop illegals, do this instead:
1.Do whatever is necessary to ensure legal American workers can get (and will try to get) the jobs that illegals are currently taking. Tie this work to unemployment benefits (i.e. if you are currently out of work and receiving any kind of government unemployment benefits you have to take these jobs. Possibly the government over there could do what the government here in Australia did and introduce "work for the dole" (which is where you work at the jobs like fruit picking that would otherwise be taken by illegals in the American system but instead of being paid by the employer out of their pockets, the government pays what they would have paid you in unemployment/dole payments)
2.Encourage American companies to build factories and other things in Central America where the illegals come from (if a Mexican has a good job in Mexico, they have a lot less reason to try to come to America and work for almost no pay because any job that pays anything decent wont take the risk of hiring people without proper paperwork)
Fact is, bandwidth ain't free.
ISPs need to implement hard bandwidth caps (say, 100GB per month or whatever number makes sense depending on the plan you are on). If you exceed the usage caps, you have to pay extra (and/or your connection is dropped to slow speeds for the rest of the billing cycle)
Hard bandwidth caps combined with an easy to use usage meter to tell exactly how much you have left solve the problem. If someone wants to use their whole 100GB in the first few days sucking down globs of content from BitTorrent, so be it.
Properly implemented, bandwidth caps (especially if they are broken up into peak and off-peak to encourage large downloading to be done in the off-peak period when most users who want email, web etc are not using the net) eliminate the need for any kind of BitTorrent specific measures.
Any ISP that implemented bandwidth caps and found they still had problems with BitTorrent users would need to:
A.Charge more for their service (and use that money to buy more upstream to solve the problem)
B.Decrease the bandwidth caps (to reduce the amount of heavy downloading going on)
or C.Implement better QoS to send BitTorrent packets to the "back of the queue" when another protocol wants to use the network links.
There is no technological or scientific reason why we couldn't have full scale commercial 4th generation nuclear reactors built and running by 2020.
The only reason it wont happen is that the US government doesn't have the balls to remove all the red tape and obstacles to building nuclear power plants (especially any design that isn't a carbon copy of an existing reactor)
The US needs to copy the regulations that exist in countries like Canada, Britain, France and Germany (all of which have been using nuclear power for decades without any serious incidents) and get these new reactors off the ground instead of building yet more clones of outdated 1960s era pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors.
Both Red Alert 3 and Command & Conquer 3 exist on OSX. But both games are just the PC version running in an emulator. And neither game supports custom maps or mods (even though there is no reason they couldn't support such maps/mods)
I dont know the specifics of this case but in some cases they may do the "freeze the account until a full ID check has been done" because they have detected activity that would require the filing of a US government "suspicious activity report". Because normal PayPal sign-up does not involve carrying out the ID check you get with regular banks, anytime transactions happen that would require a SAR (which requires disclosing full details of the account holder), PayPal has to freeze the account and conduct the ID check so they can file the SAR.
Any transaction over $10,000 requires a SAR, as does a series of transactions between A and B that total to more than $10,000. There are other triggers but I cant find any sources of info on those.
From Microsoft's point of view (and the point of view of most web designers), IE7 and IE8 ARE better than IE6. The only people who dont think that IE7 and IE8 are better are the idiot managers in large IT companies who refuse to authorize the work necessary to upgrade the ONE remaining corporate intranet website that doesn't work right in IE7 or IE8.