I used to live in Guelph, Ontario, the other Mondex test city. We had mondex in the parking meters, mondex on the buses, in the coffee shops, the pay phones, pretty much everwhere. Lots of people even got the free Mondex phones that let you transfer money out of your bank account on to your card at home.That was probably the best feature of them. As I recall you could do the same at payphones. If you used the ATM to do it it cost you a $0.25 fee, which I thought was just ridiculous. Why would I pay extra to put my money on this little card thing?
The biggest problem was speed. It was MUCH faster to pay with cash. But at that time Interac payments were only just starting to take hold and I suspect that Mondex was faster than Interac because there was no waiting around for the customer to key in a PIN. Getting on the bus was excruciating, waiting for the mondex card of the guy at the front of the line to do its magic while you shivered out in the snow.
Beyond that it was hard to explain to people why this was better than cash or interac. Unlike Interac (or cell phone payment) if you lost your Mondex card you lost your money. You could also lock the mondex cards with a code, but if you forgot that then I believe your money was gone. Cell phone payments might work better if they're fast and there's no stored value on the phone (so if you lose it you can just call in and block any purchases).
Mondex did have these cool little reader devices that looked sort of like calculators. You put your card in it and it told you how much was stored on the card. At least one model let you transfer money from one card to another. Of course, if you want to give five bucks to your friend it's faster and easier to just give him a five dollar bill... I still have mine. It says that my card still has $2 on it and it that every one of my last ten transactions was at Tim Hortons (the ubiquitous Canadian coffee shop).
No, seriously, you're kidding, right? Well paying jobs? In 2003 sales associates at Walmart averaged $8.23 an hour according to Business Week and earned an average annual income of $13,861, which is under the poverty line. Their health care plan covers less than half their workers. Doesn't sound like the Waltons are making any great sacrifices here. Maybe the stuff you buy is cheaper but the savings came from somewhere and it wasn't from the Waltons generosity.
Opera's generally faster than Firefox, and handles tabbed windows in a much more intelligent way. Though you can get most of the same functionality from FF with plugins Opera works properly from the get go.
If you use POP mail the M2 mail client is also great, though it takes some getting used to. Works on filters rather than folders, much like Gmail.
The Opera/FF war is always flamebait, so I won't say Opera's best for everyone, but if you haven't looked at it already it's worth trying.
Maybe Cogeco doesn't enforce it, but Bell Sympatico charges $6.95/GB for everything over ten gigs. The first bill I got from them after that was put in was huge!
I lived in a city where they tested electronic cash about five years ago. We had Mondex cards that worked at stores, in parking meters, on the bus, just about everywhere. Nobody used them. For parking meters they were great, but for anything else they were slower than cash because of the time it takes to write to the card. For larger purchases people prefered debit cards or credit cards. There just didn't seem to be any position that these filled in the market.
That said, they had a few very cool features. If you had the Mondex phone (free from the bank) you could dial up your bank account, stick the card in the side of your phone, and transfer money out of your account. Then if you wanted to send money to a friend you called him up and he stuck his card in the phone and that was it.
The card also came with a little reader (I've still got mine kicking around somewhere, with a card that has about three dollars on it) that could show you your past twenty transactions and allowed you to lock the card with a password, and a few other things. Of course, nobody was willing to lock the cards because once you forget the password any money on the card is gone forever.
Another issue with the program was the infrastructure cost. Each parking meter the city put that could use these things cost $1500. Then the phone company put in all new pay phones to allow you to use these and do banking if you wanted. All the buses had machines put in, and all the stores got the little machines too. The cost was huge, and the only reason anyone bothered was that the banks funding the project were giving them away. Even when they were free though, nobody really wanted to use them.
Cash is just too quick and easy to go away any tme soon.
You call Bell's DSL service a good deal? 1.2Mbit/128K DSL for $30, with a 5 gig limit... This is hardly a deal. Rogers in Saskatchewan provides me with 4 Mbit cable connection for $22/mo with no extra cost for the cable line or modem rental, and they even gave away free webcams for signing up. There's also no bandwidth cap or blocked ports.
This is, of course, all to compete with the government owned SaskTel which provides 1.5Mbit/256K DSL service for $25/mo.
Socialism may not give us good roads, but it gives us great Internet service.
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I used to live in Guelph, Ontario, the other Mondex test city. We had mondex in the parking meters, mondex on the buses, in the coffee shops, the pay phones, pretty much everwhere. Lots of people even got the free Mondex phones that let you transfer money out of your bank account on to your card at home.That was probably the best feature of them. As I recall you could do the same at payphones. If you used the ATM to do it it cost you a $0.25 fee, which I thought was just ridiculous. Why would I pay extra to put my money on this little card thing?
The biggest problem was speed. It was MUCH faster to pay with cash. But at that time Interac payments were only just starting to take hold and I suspect that Mondex was faster than Interac because there was no waiting around for the customer to key in a PIN. Getting on the bus was excruciating, waiting for the mondex card of the guy at the front of the line to do its magic while you shivered out in the snow.
Beyond that it was hard to explain to people why this was better than cash or interac. Unlike Interac (or cell phone payment) if you lost your Mondex card you lost your money. You could also lock the mondex cards with a code, but if you forgot that then I believe your money was gone. Cell phone payments might work better if they're fast and there's no stored value on the phone (so if you lose it you can just call in and block any purchases).
Mondex did have these cool little reader devices that looked sort of like calculators. You put your card in it and it told you how much was stored on the card. At least one model let you transfer money from one card to another. Of course, if you want to give five bucks to your friend it's faster and easier to just give him a five dollar bill... I still have mine. It says that my card still has $2 on it and it that every one of my last ten transactions was at Tim Hortons (the ubiquitous Canadian coffee shop).
No, seriously, you're kidding, right? Well paying jobs? In 2003 sales associates at Walmart averaged $8.23 an hour according to Business Week and earned an average annual income of $13,861, which is under the poverty line. Their health care plan covers less than half their workers. Doesn't sound like the Waltons are making any great sacrifices here. Maybe the stuff you buy is cheaper but the savings came from somewhere and it wasn't from the Waltons generosity.
Opera's generally faster than Firefox, and handles tabbed windows in a much more intelligent way. Though you can get most of the same functionality from FF with plugins Opera works properly from the get go.
If you use POP mail the M2 mail client is also great, though it takes some getting used to. Works on filters rather than folders, much like Gmail.
The Opera/FF war is always flamebait, so I won't say Opera's best for everyone, but if you haven't looked at it already it's worth trying.
Drugs are indeed made in the US, so perhaps US consumers should be asking why they pay the highest prices in the entire world for them.
Maybe Cogeco doesn't enforce it, but Bell Sympatico charges $6.95/GB for everything over ten gigs. The first bill I got from them after that was put in was huge!
I lived in a city where they tested electronic cash about five years ago. We had Mondex cards that worked at stores, in parking meters, on the bus, just about everywhere. Nobody used them. For parking meters they were great, but for anything else they were slower than cash because of the time it takes to write to the card. For larger purchases people prefered debit cards or credit cards. There just didn't seem to be any position that these filled in the market. That said, they had a few very cool features. If you had the Mondex phone (free from the bank) you could dial up your bank account, stick the card in the side of your phone, and transfer money out of your account. Then if you wanted to send money to a friend you called him up and he stuck his card in the phone and that was it. The card also came with a little reader (I've still got mine kicking around somewhere, with a card that has about three dollars on it) that could show you your past twenty transactions and allowed you to lock the card with a password, and a few other things. Of course, nobody was willing to lock the cards because once you forget the password any money on the card is gone forever. Another issue with the program was the infrastructure cost. Each parking meter the city put that could use these things cost $1500. Then the phone company put in all new pay phones to allow you to use these and do banking if you wanted. All the buses had machines put in, and all the stores got the little machines too. The cost was huge, and the only reason anyone bothered was that the banks funding the project were giving them away. Even when they were free though, nobody really wanted to use them. Cash is just too quick and easy to go away any tme soon.
You call Bell's DSL service a good deal? 1.2Mbit/128K DSL for $30, with a 5 gig limit... This is hardly a deal. Rogers in Saskatchewan provides me with 4 Mbit cable connection for $22/mo with no extra cost for the cable line or modem rental, and they even gave away free webcams for signing up. There's also no bandwidth cap or blocked ports. This is, of course, all to compete with the government owned SaskTel which provides 1.5Mbit/256K DSL service for $25/mo. Socialism may not give us good roads, but it gives us great Internet service.