What planet are you from, AC? This is not at all what I have experienced as a merchant. If there is a dispute, it is up to the merchant to prove that the charge is legitimate. If the charge is not legitimate, as in cases of fraud, the merchant eats the charge and the chargeback fee. So if a fraudulent signature is given, the merchant eats the charges. I agree with you that the card holder is not liable for fraud - that is true. But when there is fraud, it is the merchant, not the issuing bank, that eats it. And this is true even if the issuing bank erroneously said that the address matched when it really didn't. Under the current system, the merchant assumes all the risk and always ends up paying for other people's negligence or malfeasance.
I can run transactions through with my credit cards and completely wrong addresses, and still have AVS tell me as a merchant that the address matches the card's billing address. How is this possible? It's up to the issuing bank to compare the addresses, and many issuing banks, rather than doing the (easy, automated, computer) work, just tell you that the address matched when it's nowhere even close. Yet who pays if someone makes a fraudulent charge, even if the bank erroneously (or lazily) says the address matches? Not the bank... the merchant pays.
... is pretty thick. He must have been a bigtime criminal to warrant so much scrutiny! Same goes for John Lennon. In my opinion, J. Edgar Hoover and his progeny are cut from the same cloth as Stalin's henchmen. I agree with your main point, that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. The problem comes in when "law enforcement" personnel use technology to go on fishing expeditions for any kind of "dirt" on public figures (as they did with King) when there is no probable cause to suspect that any crime has ever been committed. There needs to be a stricter definition of what constitutes "probable cause" and some negative consequences for those who abuse the criminal justice system for political purposes, because it's happened too many times in America's past for us to just trust anyone with a badge to be on their best behavior when no one is watching. Even requiring warrants ex post facto would shine a little judicial light on these activities and possibly prevent abuse.
I go to see the bands that play at the better venues in my city, and buy CD's directly from those bands that impress me. I have no need for major labels to tell me what to buy, and no need for payola-programmed radio stations that are puppets of those same labels. Support your local music scene and independent touring artists, and you can kiss the RIAA goodbye!
I've used a lot of Wyse winterms in the past, and I've found that their Achilles heel is often the power supply. It's nice that there is no fan noise, but the downside is that there is no fan to keep the PS running cool, meaning you end up buying a lot of expensive, proprietary, 5V 4A power supplies to keep your "maintenence-free" winterms running. Hopefully other brands don't have these issues. For me, it negated a lot of the savings involved with a thin-client architecture.
"Drinking moderately, and only during meals" which the study recommends, is linked in our culture to upper-class status, which in turn is linked to long life as a result of having money to pay for life-extending medical miracles.
Correlation is not causation, and any study of this type that does not check for other correlated factors (such as income) is likely to mislead the public.
Fine wine, Jaguars, genuine Rolexes, and nice golf clubs could easily be linked to long life and good health, but drinking moderately with meals while driving a Jaguar with a genuine Rolex on your wrist and some nice golf clubs in the trunk won't make you wealthy enough to live a long and healthy life. In fact, for many of us, it would lead to some nasty credit-card debt which could take years off our lives!
McFacts about the McDonalds Coffee Lawsuit
Everyone knows what you're talking about when you mention "the McDonald's lawsuit." Even though this case was decided in August of 1994, for many Americans it continues to represent the "problem" with our civil justice system.
The business community and insurance industry have done much to perpetuate this case. They don't want us to forget it. They know it helps them convince politicians that "tort reform" and other restrictions on juries is needed. And worse, they know it poisons the minds of citizens who sit on juries.
Unfortunately, not all the facts have been communicated - facts that put the case and the monetary award to the 81-year old plaintiff in a significantly different light.
According to the Wall Street journal, McDonald's callousness was the issue and even jurors who thought the case was just a tempest in a coffee pot were overwhelmed by the evidence against the Corporation.
The facts of the case, which caused a jury of six men and six women to find McDonald's coffee was unreasonably dangerous and had caused enough human misery and suffering that no one should be made to suffer exposure to such excessively hot coffee again, will shock and amaze you:
McFact No. 1: For years, McDonald's had known they had a problem with the way they make their coffee - that their coffee was served much hotter (at least 20 degrees more so) than at other restaurants.
McFact No. 2: McDonald's knew its coffee sometimes caused serious injuries - more than 700 incidents of scalding coffee burns in the past decade have been settled by the Corporation - and yet they never so much as consulted a burn expert regarding the issue.
McFact No. 3: The woman involved in this infamous case suffered very serious injuries - third degree burns on her groin, thighs and buttocks that required skin grafts and a seven-day hospital stay.
McFact No. 4: The woman, an 81-year old former department store clerk who had never before filed suit against anyone, said she wouldn't have brought the lawsuit against McDonald's had the Corporation not dismissed her request for compensation for medical bills.
McFact No. 5: A McDonald's quality assurance manager testified in the case that the Corporation was aware of the risk of serving dangerously hot coffee and had no plans to either turn down the heat or to post warning about the possibility of severe burns, even though most customers wouldn't think it was possible.
McFact No. 6: After careful deliberation, the jury found McDonald's was liable because the facts were overwhelmingly against the company. When it came to the punitive damages, the jury found that McDonald's had engaged in willful, reckless, malicious, or wanton conduct, and rendered a punitive damage award of 2.7 million dollars. (The equivalent of just two days of coffee sales, McDonalds Corporation generates revenues in excess of 1.3 million dollars daily from the sale of its coffee, selling 1 billion cups each year.)
McFact No. 7: On appeal, a judge lowered the award to $480,000, a fact not widely publicized in the media.
McFact No. 8: A report in Liability Week, September 29, 1997, indicated that Kathleen Gilliam, 73, suffered first degree burns when a cup of coffee spilled onto her lap. Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants. Third degree burns occur at this temperature in just two to seven seconds, requiring skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability to the victims for many months, and in some cases, years.
The most important message this case has for you, the consumer, is to be aware of the potential danger posed by your early morning pick-me-up. Take extra care to make sure children do not come into contact with scalding liquid, and always look to the facts before rendering your decision about any publicized case.
Courtesy of Legal News and Views, Ohio Academy of Trial Lawyers
Field rats most likely get more exercise and most likely are happier than lab rats. This alone could account for differences in their immune systems and general level of health. Only a study comparing lab rats in a clean environment vs. lab rats in a dirty environment could tell if the dirt was really helpful in improving their health.
My own personal experience with rebates (particularly from TigerDirect and OfficeMax) is that a certain percentage of the time, the check never arrives, or sometimes you get a BS letter saying that the wrong UPC code was sent, etc. This leads me to ask why the "expert" quoted in TFA states that everyone receives their rebate checks 100% of the time, and that rebates aren't that much of a hassle.
The "expert" works for a marketing research company, and rebate forms are a great source of data for marketing research. So it's in the interest of the "expert" to want to keep rebate forms alive in order to keep the data coming in so his company can keep on making money writing marketing reports based on the data. I don't see this "expert" as a credible, unbiased source of information on this topic. If the writer of TFA was a real journalist, he would have interviewed an attourney general for another perspective.
In the present economy, there are already too many people and not enough jobs... the last thing we need is people working until they are 75. Sociologists point out that one of the benefits of requiring x number of years of education before one starts work in our society is that it keeps people out of the workforce for x years, and thus cuts down on the competition for jobs. Of course, by the time I'm 75, I imagine that this will only be an issue in India, since that's where all the jobs will be:-)
There are seven happy, healthy vegan cats in my house, from 1 to 19 years old. They eat Evolution vegan cat food, which is the best cat food available. Slaughterhouse waste adds nothing to your cat's diet. Evolution, like most other cat foods, contains synthetic taurine; it's that lack of taurine that would make a purely vegetable diet unhealthy for cats. Taurine supplement powder is also available (as "vegecat") for those who make their own cat food. I get Evolution from www.petfoodshop.com or www.vegancats.com, which also carries Vegecat.
BTW, until nanomachines change the game (if they do,) a healthy vegan diet and exercise will still help humans such as yourself live longer and happier... Heart disease and cancer are both linked to eating animal products. www.pcrm.org has more info on this. I'm betting my health on proven science, not science fiction.
Bob's slogan, "Yes, We Can!" (or "Si Se Puede!" in Spanish) was/is the slogan of Cesar Chaves' United Farm Workers union. Plus, Bob has a hammer in his hand. Just add a sickle in his other hand, and he's ready for revolution. Your bosses are telling you to rise up and throw off the shackles of capitalist oppression.
Open Office works quite well for me on normal work computers, but my main production environment is a 40-person Windows 2000 Terminal Server. I had some users test it out, and we found that non-Admin users couldn't launch the apps, as it was looking for configuration files within the profile of the administrator who installed it. That, and lack of a replacement for Outlook as an Exchange email client killed the experiment. I look forward to trying again with a future version.
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What planet are you from, AC? This is not at all what I have experienced as a merchant. If there is a dispute, it is up to the merchant to prove that the charge is legitimate. If the charge is not legitimate, as in cases of fraud, the merchant eats the charge and the chargeback fee. So if a fraudulent signature is given, the merchant eats the charges. I agree with you that the card holder is not liable for fraud - that is true. But when there is fraud, it is the merchant, not the issuing bank, that eats it. And this is true even if the issuing bank erroneously said that the address matched when it really didn't. Under the current system, the merchant assumes all the risk and always ends up paying for other people's negligence or malfeasance.
I can run transactions through with my credit cards and completely wrong addresses, and still have AVS tell me as a merchant that the address matches the card's billing address. How is this possible? It's up to the issuing bank to compare the addresses, and many issuing banks, rather than doing the (easy, automated, computer) work, just tell you that the address matched when it's nowhere even close. Yet who pays if someone makes a fraudulent charge, even if the bank erroneously (or lazily) says the address matches? Not the bank... the merchant pays.
... is pretty thick. He must have been a bigtime criminal to warrant so much scrutiny! Same goes for John Lennon. In my opinion, J. Edgar Hoover and his progeny are cut from the same cloth as Stalin's henchmen. I agree with your main point, that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. The problem comes in when "law enforcement" personnel use technology to go on fishing expeditions for any kind of "dirt" on public figures (as they did with King) when there is no probable cause to suspect that any crime has ever been committed. There needs to be a stricter definition of what constitutes "probable cause" and some negative consequences for those who abuse the criminal justice system for political purposes, because it's happened too many times in America's past for us to just trust anyone with a badge to be on their best behavior when no one is watching. Even requiring warrants ex post facto would shine a little judicial light on these activities and possibly prevent abuse.
A perfect example of this is Chicken Run - the American actors and horrible script made this one unwatchable to this Wallace and Grommit fan.
I go to see the bands that play at the better venues in my city, and buy CD's directly from those bands that impress me. I have no need for major labels to tell me what to buy, and no need for payola-programmed radio stations that are puppets of those same labels. Support your local music scene and independent touring artists, and you can kiss the RIAA goodbye!
I've used a lot of Wyse winterms in the past, and I've found that their Achilles heel is often the power supply. It's nice that there is no fan noise, but the downside is that there is no fan to keep the PS running cool, meaning you end up buying a lot of expensive, proprietary, 5V 4A power supplies to keep your "maintenence-free" winterms running. Hopefully other brands don't have these issues. For me, it negated a lot of the savings involved with a thin-client architecture.
"Drinking moderately, and only during meals" which the study recommends, is linked in our culture to upper-class status, which in turn is linked to long life as a result of having money to pay for life-extending medical miracles. Correlation is not causation, and any study of this type that does not check for other correlated factors (such as income) is likely to mislead the public. Fine wine, Jaguars, genuine Rolexes, and nice golf clubs could easily be linked to long life and good health, but drinking moderately with meals while driving a Jaguar with a genuine Rolex on your wrist and some nice golf clubs in the trunk won't make you wealthy enough to live a long and healthy life. In fact, for many of us, it would lead to some nasty credit-card debt which could take years off our lives!
McFacts about the McDonalds Coffee Lawsuit Everyone knows what you're talking about when you mention "the McDonald's lawsuit." Even though this case was decided in August of 1994, for many Americans it continues to represent the "problem" with our civil justice system. The business community and insurance industry have done much to perpetuate this case. They don't want us to forget it. They know it helps them convince politicians that "tort reform" and other restrictions on juries is needed. And worse, they know it poisons the minds of citizens who sit on juries. Unfortunately, not all the facts have been communicated - facts that put the case and the monetary award to the 81-year old plaintiff in a significantly different light. According to the Wall Street journal, McDonald's callousness was the issue and even jurors who thought the case was just a tempest in a coffee pot were overwhelmed by the evidence against the Corporation. The facts of the case, which caused a jury of six men and six women to find McDonald's coffee was unreasonably dangerous and had caused enough human misery and suffering that no one should be made to suffer exposure to such excessively hot coffee again, will shock and amaze you: McFact No. 1: For years, McDonald's had known they had a problem with the way they make their coffee - that their coffee was served much hotter (at least 20 degrees more so) than at other restaurants. McFact No. 2: McDonald's knew its coffee sometimes caused serious injuries - more than 700 incidents of scalding coffee burns in the past decade have been settled by the Corporation - and yet they never so much as consulted a burn expert regarding the issue. McFact No. 3: The woman involved in this infamous case suffered very serious injuries - third degree burns on her groin, thighs and buttocks that required skin grafts and a seven-day hospital stay. McFact No. 4: The woman, an 81-year old former department store clerk who had never before filed suit against anyone, said she wouldn't have brought the lawsuit against McDonald's had the Corporation not dismissed her request for compensation for medical bills. McFact No. 5: A McDonald's quality assurance manager testified in the case that the Corporation was aware of the risk of serving dangerously hot coffee and had no plans to either turn down the heat or to post warning about the possibility of severe burns, even though most customers wouldn't think it was possible. McFact No. 6: After careful deliberation, the jury found McDonald's was liable because the facts were overwhelmingly against the company. When it came to the punitive damages, the jury found that McDonald's had engaged in willful, reckless, malicious, or wanton conduct, and rendered a punitive damage award of 2.7 million dollars. (The equivalent of just two days of coffee sales, McDonalds Corporation generates revenues in excess of 1.3 million dollars daily from the sale of its coffee, selling 1 billion cups each year.) McFact No. 7: On appeal, a judge lowered the award to $480,000, a fact not widely publicized in the media. McFact No. 8: A report in Liability Week, September 29, 1997, indicated that Kathleen Gilliam, 73, suffered first degree burns when a cup of coffee spilled onto her lap. Reports also indicate that McDonald's consistently keeps its coffee at 185 degrees, still approximately 20 degrees hotter than at other restaurants. Third degree burns occur at this temperature in just two to seven seconds, requiring skin grafting, debridement and whirlpool treatments that cost tens of thousands of dollars and result in permanent disfigurement, extreme pain and disability to the victims for many months, and in some cases, years. The most important message this case has for you, the consumer, is to be aware of the potential danger posed by your early morning pick-me-up. Take extra care to make sure children do not come into contact with scalding liquid, and always look to the facts before rendering your decision about any publicized case. Courtesy of Legal News and Views, Ohio Academy of Trial Lawyers
Field rats most likely get more exercise and most likely are happier than lab rats. This alone could account for differences in their immune systems and general level of health. Only a study comparing lab rats in a clean environment vs. lab rats in a dirty environment could tell if the dirt was really helpful in improving their health.
My own personal experience with rebates (particularly from TigerDirect and OfficeMax) is that a certain percentage of the time, the check never arrives, or sometimes you get a BS letter saying that the wrong UPC code was sent, etc. This leads me to ask why the "expert" quoted in TFA states that everyone receives their rebate checks 100% of the time, and that rebates aren't that much of a hassle. The "expert" works for a marketing research company, and rebate forms are a great source of data for marketing research. So it's in the interest of the "expert" to want to keep rebate forms alive in order to keep the data coming in so his company can keep on making money writing marketing reports based on the data. I don't see this "expert" as a credible, unbiased source of information on this topic. If the writer of TFA was a real journalist, he would have interviewed an attourney general for another perspective.
In the present economy, there are already too many people and not enough jobs... the last thing we need is people working until they are 75. Sociologists point out that one of the benefits of requiring x number of years of education before one starts work in our society is that it keeps people out of the workforce for x years, and thus cuts down on the competition for jobs. Of course, by the time I'm 75, I imagine that this will only be an issue in India, since that's where all the jobs will be :-)
There are seven happy, healthy vegan cats in my house, from 1 to 19 years old. They eat Evolution vegan cat food, which is the best cat food available. Slaughterhouse waste adds nothing to your cat's diet. Evolution, like most other cat foods, contains synthetic taurine; it's that lack of taurine that would make a purely vegetable diet unhealthy for cats. Taurine supplement powder is also available (as "vegecat") for those who make their own cat food. I get Evolution from www.petfoodshop.com or www.vegancats.com, which also carries Vegecat. BTW, until nanomachines change the game (if they do,) a healthy vegan diet and exercise will still help humans such as yourself live longer and happier... Heart disease and cancer are both linked to eating animal products. www.pcrm.org has more info on this. I'm betting my health on proven science, not science fiction.
Bob's slogan, "Yes, We Can!" (or "Si Se Puede!" in Spanish) was/is the slogan of Cesar Chaves' United Farm Workers union. Plus, Bob has a hammer in his hand. Just add a sickle in his other hand, and he's ready for revolution. Your bosses are telling you to rise up and throw off the shackles of capitalist oppression.
Open Office works quite well for me on normal work computers, but my main production environment is a 40-person Windows 2000 Terminal Server. I had some users test it out, and we found that non-Admin users couldn't launch the apps, as it was looking for configuration files within the profile of the administrator who installed it. That, and lack of a replacement for Outlook as an Exchange email client killed the experiment. I look forward to trying again with a future version.