Yeah, he does exist and that is his real name. However, his association with home improvement is purely a creation of television.
He was a nobody until a PBS series called This Old House came along in 1979. He was hired as the host of that show. His job duties there were to read the opening and closing sequence lines, and to interview the experts who really did know what they were doing. He was not one of those experts, he was just asked questions to the experts.
In 1989, when he left This Old House, he created his own TV production company, and used his association with home improvement to get endorcement deals. His primary sponsor is Sears, and his Home Again series can more or less be seen as a Sears infomerical at times. (Sears has always been a title sponsor, and controls a large chunk of the ad space within the program. The content portion of the show might not hit you over the head as an ad, but notice the clear bias when it comes time to select which company's products to work with.)
His primary line of work these days isn't as a home improvement expert, it's in being the pitch man for Craftsman tools and other Sears brands. He'll endorse other products too, but that's really the only skill people pay him for. You never see him doing any of the work on his TV shows, and that's for good reason...
Yeah, but technically that game is played in a card room rather than the casino. (Although card rooms can very well be located within a casino.) The difference being that in all forms of poker you're winning chips from other players, so the casino has no interest in who wins and who loses... they take the same rake out of the pot no matter what happens.
If you think about it, this is testing a person's ability to operate as a tape drive rather than as a hard disk. How long of a sequence can you memorize, rather than how fast you can access small chunks of data after being prompted for them in a not-so-predictable order.
Ask one of these competitors for just the 87th number in their sequence, and they're going to have to give you the other 86 numbers first whether you need them or not...
Memory triggers on close-but-not-exact matches
on
The Memory Masters
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Working in trivia as much as I do, I find it interesting how easy it is to convince people that they know something that in fact isn't true. One example: They'll read a question too quickly, recall a question they've seen earlier, and then give the answer to the earlier question, not the one that's actually in front of them. They'll then be befuddled why they missed the new question for a while until the actually reread all the words slow enough to see the change.
Re:7 is the number, and the number is 7, not 8 nor
on
The Memory Masters
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· Score: 3, Funny
Where can I download the patch for the faulty entry in my long division tables?
The Vegas Casino Consortium. All winners will receive lifetime bans in every casino in the world.
Only at blackjack tables. That's the only common casino game where memory of what's happened before matters.
Some roulette tables actually have displays that show what has happened on previous spins, because any patern you might detect in that data only gives you a false confidence that might motivate you to play, in reality that information is totally useless in helping you predict what will happen on the next spin.
This case, however, goes one further. It doesn't require that "sucks" or any other negative word be part of the domain name of a complaining site. If Bally.com was unregistered, then somebody who wants to complain about them can grab that domain name first and use it for a complaint site about Bally... they can order that site down, and the offical site of the company would just have to pick another domain name.
That's a blow to those who think trademarks trump the I-registered-it-first system of domains. It's not typosquatting if you post a site that's on-topic to the name, even if it's a negative site.
Yes, but, under the DMCA, each ISP can dodge the lawsuit by filing with the copyright office the contact points at which they will take official DMCA takedown notices. So long as they actually take down what they're told to that way, they can't be held liable.
What happened here is that AOL got a notice to their registered e-mail address, and didn't do the takedown in time. They were 99% in compliance, but this went through the 1% hole in their lawsuit shield.
And we should not that even though the notice was sent by e-mail which isn't always reliable, we know that this e-mail worked because the plantiff was able to force AOL to admit their own logs showed that they got it into their systems, it just sat in an account nobody bothered to check anymore and they didn't forward or send bounces.
The reason you use registered mail is because you want legal vaild confirmation of delivery handed to you.
E-mail doesn't technically generate a good enough proof of delivery. However, if you can grab the server logs from whomever was being served and then show your message was mentioned in those laws... there's some proof that notice was served. That's a little harder to get, but in this case he got it, and he also got a phone record that shows that an AOL user called to point this out and AOL took no action. AOL was therefore legally deemed on notice...
If an ISP has registered an e-mail address for a copyright contact, then an e-mail to that address that doesn't bounce counts as putting them on notice. And, as the other poster point out, there's also an ignored phone call that's also on the record.
The DMCA usually protects the mega-ISP from being responsible for the copyright violations of its users when it posts user-submitted content without screening it.
However, in order to qualify for that protection, the ISP has to register a contact point with the Copyright Office for all complaints to be sent, and must respond to all properly formatted requests sent to that contact point. It turns out this request to kill a Usenet posting from AOL's servers got lost because the copyright owner sent it to the registered address, but it turns out nobody was reading it since they had established a new address and didn't change their registration.
Therefore, the plantiff followed the law correctly, and AOL missed their chance to escape punishment by letting the time run out. Therefore, the safe harbor clause of the DMCA doesn't apply here, and AOL's going to be open to liablity here.
Usenet is a global relay system, but that means every Usenet server ends up storing and relaying everything posted to it. So, to effectively get this e-book off of usenet the copyright owner would have to send a DMCA takedown notice to every Usenet server operator. However, hitting AOL's Usenet server to either cancel the offending post or drop the whole group takes the book out of view of the AOL-using population, and that's a pretty big chunk of people in one hit.
In order to get protection from being liable for the actions of users under the DMCA, any ISP must register contact information, and then inform their user that they either have to pull the allegedly offending content or the ISP will pull it for them.
Basically, the accusation is that AOL stopped checking the address they had on file at the copyright office, and therefore has lost its protections in any case that was submitted to that address during the unchecked timeframe.
Re:A card is more than just a magnetic strip...
on
The Universal Card
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· Score: 1
That idea won't work with present readers... they all assume in their physical designs that their strip will be in the same place that all the others put their strips. You might be able to get a second magnetic stripe to fit on, but not with the standard signature stripe or imprints where they belong too.
That's why I called it "a bit suspect"... it deserves a little further checking. I think I can find proof that NewsCorp actually has several media outlets on the air, and I've seen IBM products in existance for years. Therefore, those companies pass.
A company I've never heard of pitching investments, is always worrysome.
Re:A card is more than just a magnetic strip...
on
The Universal Card
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, but when a physical transaction goes fraudlent, the store is to blame for being fooled, and therefore the store eats the loss. When a non-physical transaction goes frauduent, the credit card companies have to eat it.
Re:A card is more than just a magnetic strip...
on
The Universal Card
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· Score: 3, Informative
That's not about the fee, that's for two other reasons:
1: Stores get the money credited for debit transactions immediately. They have to wait for credit card payments. That float is meaningful. 2: A credit card transaction is a lot easier to reverse... simply complain to the credit card company. Even if the complaint is invalid, the store's payment for the transaction is held in escrow until that is declared. (Reversed-by-complaint credit card transactions also carry steep penalty fees on the merchant side... the card issuing bank has to eat all fraudulently presented card cases.)
So, for $3 transactions, the debit card is better than the credit card mode because the store is just willing to eat the loss if the transaction goes fraudulent. For $300 transactions, not so much. Trust me, there's a dollar value somewhere at which point the default behavior will spin around... and you as a consumer never will want to use a debit card so long as you have a credit card in your wallet somewhere that can take the hit without incuring intrest.
Re:Credit cards are free, why pay $200?
on
The Universal Card
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· Score: 4, Insightful
1) Cumbersome Picture shows that it fits in a wallet Picture is clearly photoshopped. The real consumer product has yet to ship.
2) Breakable You can always use your real credit cards. What if a palm pilot breaks? You write things down on paper. . . That's nice, but you're still out the $200 device.
3) All eggs in one basket Agree with this.. would rather not have everything linked in one breakable / trackable / hackable system. Good, so there's no risk of you wasting $200 on this.
4) A lost/stolen card is replaced by the credit card company. Who replaces that lost/stolen $200 computer? You spill pasta sauce on your sweater, you buy a new one and are much more careful if it is expensive. My solution is to not wear $200 shirts very often, and definitely not to eat pasta while doing so. A $200 device had better be durable if it's going to live in my pocket.
5) What do you do when the batteries run out Considering the plethora or small handheld devices out there, why is this one so much harder to track charge for? Because having my MP3 player stop playing music isn't as embarassing as not being able to buy what I just took to the checkout.
6) What happens when the OS crashes and the information is wiped out? Well, you reload the data from either the credit cards again or the backup that was made You're most likely to discover such a failure while shopping... again, the embarassment situation.
They suggest you create an online backup, but it's of little use. The proper thing to do is to go to your most recent statements to get the account number and the number you need to call to reach customer service.
Re:A card is more than just a magnetic strip...
on
The Universal Card
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If the machine doesn't prompt for the attendant to veryify the physical presense of the orignal card, then the card transaction slips from a card-present transaction to a card-not-present transaction, and a higher fee is due to the credit card issuers or the store has to eat the higher risk of fraud.
A debit card transaction can get by with just the pin and no physical verification... but that also means an even higher merchant fee. This is why Wal-Mart is no longer accepting MasterCard debit cards as debit cards when the card is capable of supporting a credit card transaction, because that's what's cheaper for the store to do.
Imprinting the card and verifying that the signature you captured is the signature on the back of the card are ways that a store can prove that it made a card-present transaction. Having just the numbers and expiration date is only good enough to make a card-not-present transaction.
Card-not-present transactions cost more in merchant fees because there is of course a higher risk of fraud when the physical properties of the card aren't being checked. Therefore, stores won't go for this.
Re:A card is more than just a magnetic strip...
on
The Universal Card
·
· Score: 1
Even if you swipe your card for yourself, the video screen will then show you a prompt to hand the card to the cashier, and the cashier will see a screen prompt take the card and verify the signature. If this thing ever comes out, cashiers will be told to look at the face of the card too, and accepting a magnetic card that doesn't have the proper markings for its network will be a firing offense.
This might be able to fool the ATM machine... but trust me, banks are going to warn consumers against doing it.
Re:A card is more than just a magnetic strip...
on
The Universal Card
·
· Score: 1
They are at least going to look for the big MasterCard or Visa or Novus or Amex logo that is in a standard position on every card in existance. If it doesn't have one of those four, the clerk is sure to bounce it because they won't know what button to hit on the reader.
Sure, a card reader should be able to know that all Visa cards start with a 4, and all Mastercards start with 5, but they still ask the clerk to declare what card it is as an idiot check...
If the Pocket Vault (should it ever make it to market) is ever lost, one should not use any backup to restore its values to another unit as the company suggests the consumer make. What they should to is to contact the issuer of every card stored on it and inform the issuer that the card has been compromised. The issuers will then instantly revoke the lost numbers making them worthless, and send out new cards right away.
That'd be the secure way to do things. Any computer backup of this device's contents is a really scary thing... it serves no useful function but is such a dangerous thing in the wrong hands.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, he does exist and that is his real name. However, his association with home improvement is purely a creation of television.
He was a nobody until a PBS series called This Old House came along in 1979. He was hired as the host of that show. His job duties there were to read the opening and closing sequence lines, and to interview the experts who really did know what they were doing. He was not one of those experts, he was just asked questions to the experts.
In 1989, when he left This Old House, he created his own TV production company, and used his association with home improvement to get endorcement deals. His primary sponsor is Sears, and his Home Again series can more or less be seen as a Sears infomerical at times. (Sears has always been a title sponsor, and controls a large chunk of the ad space within the program. The content portion of the show might not hit you over the head as an ad, but notice the clear bias when it comes time to select which company's products to work with.)
His primary line of work these days isn't as a home improvement expert, it's in being the pitch man for Craftsman tools and other Sears brands. He'll endorse other products too, but that's really the only skill people pay him for. You never see him doing any of the work on his TV shows, and that's for good reason...
Yeah, but technically that game is played in a card room rather than the casino. (Although card rooms can very well be located within a casino.) The difference being that in all forms of poker you're winning chips from other players, so the casino has no interest in who wins and who loses... they take the same rake out of the pot no matter what happens.
If you think about it, this is testing a person's ability to operate as a tape drive rather than as a hard disk. How long of a sequence can you memorize, rather than how fast you can access small chunks of data after being prompted for them in a not-so-predictable order.
Ask one of these competitors for just the 87th number in their sequence, and they're going to have to give you the other 86 numbers first whether you need them or not...
Working in trivia as much as I do, I find it interesting how easy it is to convince people that they know something that in fact isn't true.
One example: They'll read a question too quickly, recall a question they've seen earlier, and then give the answer to the earlier question, not the one that's actually in front of them. They'll then be befuddled why they missed the new question for a while until the actually reread all the words slow enough to see the change.
Where can I download the patch for the faulty entry in my long division tables?
The Vegas Casino Consortium. All winners will receive lifetime bans in every casino in the world.
Only at blackjack tables. That's the only common casino game where memory of what's happened before matters.
Some roulette tables actually have displays that show what has happened on previous spins, because any patern you might detect in that data only gives you a false confidence that might motivate you to play, in reality that information is totally useless in helping you predict what will happen on the next spin.
This case, however, goes one further. It doesn't require that "sucks" or any other negative word be part of the domain name of a complaining site. If Bally.com was unregistered, then somebody who wants to complain about them can grab that domain name first and use it for a complaint site about Bally... they can order that site down, and the offical site of the company would just have to pick another domain name.
That's a blow to those who think trademarks trump the I-registered-it-first system of domains. It's not typosquatting if you post a site that's on-topic to the name, even if it's a negative site.
Yes, but, under the DMCA, each ISP can dodge the lawsuit by filing with the copyright office the contact points at which they will take official DMCA takedown notices. So long as they actually take down what they're told to that way, they can't be held liable.
What happened here is that AOL got a notice to their registered e-mail address, and didn't do the takedown in time. They were 99% in compliance, but this went through the 1% hole in their lawsuit shield.
And we should not that even though the notice was sent by e-mail which isn't always reliable, we know that this e-mail worked because the plantiff was able to force AOL to admit their own logs showed that they got it into their systems, it just sat in an account nobody bothered to check anymore and they didn't forward or send bounces.
Sorry, AOL. You got served. You've got lawsuit.
The reason you use registered mail is because you want legal vaild confirmation of delivery handed to you.
E-mail doesn't technically generate a good enough proof of delivery. However, if you can grab the server logs from whomever was being served and then show your message was mentioned in those laws... there's some proof that notice was served. That's a little harder to get, but in this case he got it, and he also got a phone record that shows that an AOL user called to point this out and AOL took no action. AOL was therefore legally deemed on notice...
If an ISP has registered an e-mail address for a copyright contact, then an e-mail to that address that doesn't bounce counts as putting them on notice. And, as the other poster point out, there's also an ignored phone call that's also on the record.
AOL's got no hope of winning this case now.
The DMCA usually protects the mega-ISP from being responsible for the copyright violations of its users when it posts user-submitted content without screening it.
However, in order to qualify for that protection, the ISP has to register a contact point with the Copyright Office for all complaints to be sent, and must respond to all properly formatted requests sent to that contact point. It turns out this request to kill a Usenet posting from AOL's servers got lost because the copyright owner sent it to the registered address, but it turns out nobody was reading it since they had established a new address and didn't change their registration.
Therefore, the plantiff followed the law correctly, and AOL missed their chance to escape punishment by letting the time run out. Therefore, the safe harbor clause of the DMCA doesn't apply here, and AOL's going to be open to liablity here.
Usenet is a global relay system, but that means every Usenet server ends up storing and relaying everything posted to it. So, to effectively get this e-book off of usenet the copyright owner would have to send a DMCA takedown notice to every Usenet server operator. However, hitting AOL's Usenet server to either cancel the offending post or drop the whole group takes the book out of view of the AOL-using population, and that's a pretty big chunk of people in one hit.
In order to get protection from being liable for the actions of users under the DMCA, any ISP must register contact information, and then inform their user that they either have to pull the allegedly offending content or the ISP will pull it for them.
Basically, the accusation is that AOL stopped checking the address they had on file at the copyright office, and therefore has lost its protections in any case that was submitted to that address during the unchecked timeframe.
That idea won't work with present readers... they all assume in their physical designs that their strip will be in the same place that all the others put their strips. You might be able to get a second magnetic stripe to fit on, but not with the standard signature stripe or imprints where they belong too.
That's why I called it "a bit suspect"... it deserves a little further checking. I think I can find proof that NewsCorp actually has several media outlets on the air, and I've seen IBM products in existance for years. Therefore, those companies pass.
A company I've never heard of pitching investments, is always worrysome.
Yes, but when a physical transaction goes fraudlent, the store is to blame for being fooled, and therefore the store eats the loss. When a non-physical transaction goes frauduent, the credit card companies have to eat it.
That's not about the fee, that's for two other reasons:
1: Stores get the money credited for debit transactions immediately. They have to wait for credit card payments. That float is meaningful.
2: A credit card transaction is a lot easier to reverse... simply complain to the credit card company. Even if the complaint is invalid, the store's payment for the transaction is held in escrow until that is declared. (Reversed-by-complaint credit card transactions also carry steep penalty fees on the merchant side... the card issuing bank has to eat all fraudulently presented card cases.)
So, for $3 transactions, the debit card is better than the credit card mode because the store is just willing to eat the loss if the transaction goes fraudulent. For $300 transactions, not so much. Trust me, there's a dollar value somewhere at which point the default behavior will spin around... and you as a consumer never will want to use a debit card so long as you have a credit card in your wallet somewhere that can take the hit without incuring intrest.
1) Cumbersome
Picture shows that it fits in a wallet
Picture is clearly photoshopped. The real consumer product has yet to ship.
2) Breakable
You can always use your real credit cards. What if a palm pilot breaks? You write things down on paper. . .
That's nice, but you're still out the $200 device.
3) All eggs in one basket
Agree with this.. would rather not have everything linked in one breakable / trackable / hackable system.
Good, so there's no risk of you wasting $200 on this.
4) A lost/stolen card is replaced by the credit card company. Who replaces that lost/stolen $200 computer?
You spill pasta sauce on your sweater, you buy a new one and are much more careful if it is expensive.
My solution is to not wear $200 shirts very often, and definitely not to eat pasta while doing so. A $200 device had better be durable if it's going to live in my pocket.
5) What do you do when the batteries run out
Considering the plethora or small handheld devices out there, why is this one so much harder to track charge for?
Because having my MP3 player stop playing music isn't as embarassing as not being able to buy what I just took to the checkout.
6) What happens when the OS crashes and the information is wiped out?
Well, you reload the data from either the credit cards again or the backup that was made
You're most likely to discover such a failure while shopping... again, the embarassment situation.
They suggest you create an online backup, but it's of little use. The proper thing to do is to go to your most recent statements to get the account number and the number you need to call to reach customer service.
If the machine doesn't prompt for the attendant to veryify the physical presense of the orignal card, then the card transaction slips from a card-present transaction to a card-not-present transaction, and a higher fee is due to the credit card issuers or the store has to eat the higher risk of fraud.
A debit card transaction can get by with just the pin and no physical verification... but that also means an even higher merchant fee. This is why Wal-Mart is no longer accepting MasterCard debit cards as debit cards when the card is capable of supporting a credit card transaction, because that's what's cheaper for the store to do.
Imprinting the card and verifying that the signature you captured is the signature on the back of the card are ways that a store can prove that it made a card-present transaction. Having just the numbers and expiration date is only good enough to make a card-not-present transaction.
Card-not-present transactions cost more in merchant fees because there is of course a higher risk of fraud when the physical properties of the card aren't being checked. Therefore, stores won't go for this.
Even if you swipe your card for yourself, the video screen will then show you a prompt to hand the card to the cashier, and the cashier will see a screen prompt take the card and verify the signature. If this thing ever comes out, cashiers will be told to look at the face of the card too, and accepting a magnetic card that doesn't have the proper markings for its network will be a firing offense.
This might be able to fool the ATM machine... but trust me, banks are going to warn consumers against doing it.
They are at least going to look for the big MasterCard or Visa or Novus or Amex logo that is in a standard position on every card in existance. If it doesn't have one of those four, the clerk is sure to bounce it because they won't know what button to hit on the reader.
Sure, a card reader should be able to know that all Visa cards start with a 4, and all Mastercards start with 5, but they still ask the clerk to declare what card it is as an idiot check...
If the Pocket Vault (should it ever make it to market) is ever lost, one should not use any backup to restore its values to another unit as the company suggests the consumer make. What they should to is to contact the issuer of every card stored on it and inform the issuer that the card has been compromised. The issuers will then instantly revoke the lost numbers making them worthless, and send out new cards right away.
That'd be the secure way to do things. Any computer backup of this device's contents is a really scary thing... it serves no useful function but is such a dangerous thing in the wrong hands.