We can safely assume that everyone wanting a Ubuntu Edge, knowing about it, and with the money for it already donated. There will be no geeks pledging for the phone at the last minute. So, either at the end someone with lots of funds (and possibly connected to Canonical) just orders around 30 thousand of these phones so that the goal is met, or this campaign will fail.
Well, I just tried to get in on this, but after arguing with the site for an hour I finally had to boot a special VM with no network security of any kind before it would even let me try to send money.
Then I am confronted with PayPal.
No toy, no matter how cool, is worth that. I wonder how much that has cost them?
Unfortunately, at some point the artist decided that his art was not colored well enough for the books he was publishing, so a number of strips have been re-colored, and you miss part of the evolution of his art because he has removed the originals and left only the re-done strips. (At least according to his plans, I never bothered to check if he carried through.) The early stuff was still original last I looked, but I can't tell you if there is any original art left as I haven't been bothering to check.
This sort of web revisionism is one of my annoyance triggers, with the result that I dropped the strip a while back. Apparently this sort of thing is generally acceptable, as I only remember reading one complaint on his blog, everyone else supported the move.
All in all, I just continue to use the system correctly, because base 10 does not make sense in the context. I have been known to use the suffix MKB (for Marketing) when the defenders of deception are on the prowl, to stress that the onus is on them to invent a new unit marker. We currently now have two unit markers for the same meaning and no marker exists for the way people wish to mis-state capacities.
Because that's over kill. There is no justification for requiring that the number be shown.
Exactly. As implemented, caller ID is not a legitimate function. Apart from reverse charge numbers and emergency service numbers, there is no reason, ever, to transmit the number of the calling line. If you look at how it is implemented, it becomes clear that Caller ID was created for the primary purpose of allowing business to capture phone numbers of callers without consent. For most large businesses, this is also an additional reason for reverse-charge numbers.
If privacy is a concern, require that caller information be accurate, with criminal penalties for failure, and send ONLY THE NAME of the person/organization as a text string. I would not have a problem with my name coming up, but my reasons for keeping my number secret trump your reasons for wanting it, period. If you don't want to talk to me, don't answer if my name shows.
Unless Caller ID is modified to operate this way, everyone complaining about blocked calls is out of order, and should simply drop phone service entirely.
You get your money back, like a regular credit card, but it may take some time. Happened to a friend of mine - had his bank account drained and it took about 3-4 weeks to get everything straigtened out and get his money back. Sucked for him - living for about a month with zero money in the bank...
This will likely get me groused at, but if you are stupid enough to have a debit card on the same account you write important checks on, you are not so much asking for trouble as kidnapping it. The indirect penalties for card compromise are so large that I can't comprehend why anyone would take the risk. My debit card is on a dedicated checking account that exists solely to support the card. I write a few small checks a year (the odd magazine subscription or such) to keep that function from inactivity issues. If scammed, the damage is limited to the balance in the account plus having to contact the 4 companies that I have card payment set up with. My regular account, and all the really important bills, are immune to this particular line of attack. I just make sure that I have my next few weeks planned debit card expenditures on deposit in the card account and I'm good to go.
(AFAIK, current DVD playing solutions for Linux don't play DVDs, they are just plumbing that pipes a video and audio stream into a decoder pair. Fine unless you actually want to use menus, special features, multi-angle, etc, etc.)
You're a VP of IT for a top 5 bank, and you're going around using your Visa Check Card online? And you still have a job? I would never, ever, ever use a debit card online!
I use a debit card on-line and FTF, but I have a seperate checking account that exists for the debit card. I use it for the odd small check transaction as well, but it is at a different bank than any of my other accounts so that it limits the damage if I get scammed.
I would never even *think* of getting a debit card against a 'live' checking account.
I remember protesting strongly that I didn't want that Visa/MC symbol on my ATM card for that very reason, but pretty much no bank offers an ATM card without it any more. (It's too big a profit center.)
I have had no problems getting an ATM-only card on those occasions when I needed one. I opened a new account about 6 months ago for buffering in property taxes (my mortage is just about up) and I was duly issued an ATM-only card when I asked for one.
I have a seperate account for the debit card, that is pretty much just for the card. I write the occasional small check on it, but nothing important. That way if the card is scammed, it won't cause bouncing checks on important bills.
Just make the point before signing up that you want an ATM-only card for an account, and make them give you that form first to verify. It can be done.
It's kind of unfair to limit the company to original price 20 or 30 years later. At least allow for original price + inflation.
The purpose of copyright was to enrich the public domain, so inflation actually works to the public benefit if the restriction was as stated. At some point, it won't be worth it to the 'rightsholder' to continue to publish the work at the original price, so it goes to the public domain. It would be interesting to see just how badly Disney would want to keep thier mitts on Mickey Mouse.
The practical limits of distribution being what they are, I suspect that lots of stuff would go public domain simply because maintining the continuous availability of everything they ever made would be beyond even the largest of companies after a while.
Geordi: I'm sorry captain, but I'm having trouble with (tech department, please insert words here -Ed.)
I find this rather amusing, because the show Science Advisor, Kevin Grazier, gets scripts with comments from Baltar with notes like [tech] that he fills in with relevant technobabble. And as for his credentials, Kevin is also the red-headed guy from the JPL who has been explaining the various space probes on TV lately. Yes, he really is a rocket scientist.:-)
They also have little surprises in thier policies that get documented after you've been bitten by them. I lost a few hundred dollars to a then-undocumented policy against "third party" checks. A friend had sold some artwork he had crafted to a couple of organizations, but he has no bank account (at his level, bank fees represent a huge bite). A couple of deposits I sent in to my account never got processed or returned, it took several phone calls for them to find and return one of the checks, which was not submittible to another bank because of the endorsements restricting to one bank (a safety tactic, when dealing with sane banks). The organization for that check re-issued, but by then neither of us could remember the others and without the checks that were not found and returned. As this was not my friends fault I ate the difference. I closed my account with a very angry letter. My last statement arrived with the very first mention of third party check restrictions in a policy document that I had received. As you might guess, I don't regard them very highly. These days I make careful notes about where checks come from, despite never having had this sort of problem with any other bank or credit union.
I tried to buy a phone and service from AT&T Wireless last November, only to find that their store literally was incapable of selling me one because "their computers were down."
I bought my SE T62u in July from Cingular. Everything went well until they went to program the SIM. The remote computer was down. The store reaction? Use the local computer to feed my ID numbers to the SIM, slap it in the phone, turn the phone on and work with the next customer while I waited. 10 minutes later, the phone beeped and asked to be powered off. When it came back on, it went straight into operating mode and after some test calls, I left with my new plan working. OTA programming is not very fast, but it works, and gave them a minimal-delay fallback for programming the phone. The customer who had to wait 10 extra minutes is less annoyed than the one who is told to come back later.
Really? Then perhaps you can explain why I have an AT&T phone that is GSM? Whether or not it will work on Cingular is another question.
Just now, it won't. I was talking to a Cingular tech the other day and he said that Cingular customers can roam ATT, but not the other way. He also said that if Cingular won the bidding reciprocal roaming would probably be set up to give the ATT customers the extra coverage until the networks could be integrated. Give it a month or two and you might hit the Cingular system.
The best form of "electronic cash" I can think of works like the phone cards, the card is basicly a token linked to a special bank account into which you place limited amounts of money, this limits your risk to the amount in the account, if the card is lost or stolen. Debit cards linked to your personal back account have too high a risk.
Which is precisely why I have a seperate account just for the debit card. I write small checks on it, for the newspaper & such, but the debit card is the purpose of the account, to keep my primary account safe.
I'm concerned about the new trend toward forcing customers with debit cards to use debit mode. I'm paranoid about the ATMs, how's the bank going to react when I change my PIN several times a week because I have no trust whatever in POS PIN-pads? (This assumes cash gets hard to use.)
How does a modem accidentally dial a wrong number?
Most modems have two speeds at which to send DTMF. Modern modems may default to the fast speed, but for several years, all modems that could be dialed via the serial interface (AT commands for Hayes and such) used the lower speed. The reason? Phone companies had been upgrading switches here and there for a while, so there were some exchanges that could use a faster speed than the standard the old modems defaulted to. You could activate this if your system supported it.
One of the problems mentioned in one or two old manuals was if you used the higher speed on an older switch, you might miss a few digits. Hence a rapidly-dialed 9X1-X1XX could cause problems.
Mailing lists would be screwed. The Linux Kernel Mailing List would have to encrypt ~1.5 million messages per day, for example. Could kernel.org afford that?
A valid concern. This could be addressed by mailing lists working backward. Subscribe to a mailing list and get the lists public key. Add that key to your mail client as an approved key, the list encrypts once with its private key and sends, the client can decrypt with the public key. Spammers can only get recipient public keys and are limited to individually encrypting each message. A bit more overhead of having to check incoming messages against a list of keys, tossing or quarantining anything that doesn't match one of the keys.
Alternatively this could be used for lists to sign a cleartext message, but either way the recipient would need a reliable way to get the public key of the list. I prefer the encryption method but that is due to my opinion that there should be no unencrypted traffic on the net.
That much is true, but the stong sender authentication most plans seem to call for would be counterproductive for a number of things.
In the end, the concept of unencrypted connections needs to go away. All transmissions need to be encrypted at the endpoints. In the case of e-mail, a new system involving public/private key pairs and a cpu-crushing encryption algorithm is advisable. Make mass-mailers of any sort pay in sheer cpu (and to a degree, real) time. The delays would make spamming unprofitable if each message had to be individually encrypted to the recipient using a public key.
For most individuals, this would add a few seconds of time to sending an e-mail, and most mail clients could hide the whole encryption process from the user. De-crypting would be less transparent, but a system could continue to decrypt mail as a background process while the first message is being read.
Legitimate mass-mailers (there are very few of these, relatively speaking) would just have to bite the bullet and expend the time. This would add enough overhead to e-mail to make profitable volumes for spammers extremely difficult, without raising other problems in the process. A convention of making it easy to find a public key for an e-mail address would be needed, but it shouldn't be all that hard.
I have an account at TCF that I use for a Visa debit card and the odd small check. (I'm not suicidal enough to run a debit card against a live checking account.) I find the interesting thing there that holds can take my balance into a theoretical negative state, charges will not be assessed until the actual (paid out) balance goes negative. I've had -200 balances a few times due to hotels buffering space into the authorization, but it all cleared out with no NSF charges.
Anybody know which root servers Verisign doesn't control, and therefore doesn't use this stupid wildcard?
I don't know if there are any. I point my resolv.conf at the Pacific Root servers, and even they are resolving garbage names to Verisigns magic address sometimes.
I've been lucky on this subject. I've only had one genuine attempt at fraud attempted on me, and I was saved by using a Commercial Mail Receiving Agent (CRMA). Think The UPS Store (formerly Mail Boxes, Etc.) I get all my mail of any importance there, even the state is willing to send stuff there now.
One day I received a letter in the mail thanking me for changing my address to somewhere in Colorado, and by the way if you didn't do this CALL NOW! Well, I did, the account was regenerated with new numbers, and all was well. While the Post Office tries to portray CMRAs as one step up from a fraud shop, they are an answer to many postal deficiencies and have thier uses. One thing is that the Post Office will not process change of address orders for a CMRA customer. This removes mail intercept as an option unless the thief somehow scams your agent. Without diversion, security letters can alert you to the problem.
This also makes delivery interception difficult if they try to scam places that only deliver to the credit card address. Also, the card companies are getting better about checking. I applied for a card to shift to a lower APR, and the card company called back with questions about my credit report and my use of a CMRA.
But hey, no matter what, thier batteries have to run out sometime, right?;p
I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but here goes: These device are passive. They absorb energy from a radio field and when they get enough power they transmit a radio pulse with the ID number.
They aren't. They're more expensive in fact -- they usually have a per transaction fee on top of the exact same percentage that the credit card takes. At the very least they're the exact same cost as credit cards with less consumer protection.
That is up to the bank. I have a checking account at a bank just for use with a debit card (I'm not suicidal enough to use a debit card on a "live" account) and this bank gives the same guarantees as a credit card.
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Well, I just tried to get in on this, but after arguing with the site for an hour I finally had to boot a special VM with no network security of any kind before it would even let me try to send money.
Then I am confronted with PayPal.
No toy, no matter how cool, is worth that. I wonder how much that has cost them?
Unfortunately, at some point the artist decided that his art was not colored well enough for the books he was publishing, so a number of strips have been re-colored, and you miss part of the evolution of his art because he has removed the originals and left only the re-done strips. (At least according to his plans, I never bothered to check if he carried through.) The early stuff was still original last I looked, but I can't tell you if there is any original art left as I haven't been bothering to check. This sort of web revisionism is one of my annoyance triggers, with the result that I dropped the strip a while back. Apparently this sort of thing is generally acceptable, as I only remember reading one complaint on his blog, everyone else supported the move.
All in all, I just continue to use the system correctly, because base 10 does not make sense in the context. I have been known to use the suffix MKB (for Marketing) when the defenders of deception are on the prowl, to stress that the onus is on them to invent a new unit marker. We currently now have two unit markers for the same meaning and no marker exists for the way people wish to mis-state capacities.
If you want a term that means something different from the accepted definition, create a new term, don't try to hijack an existing one.
So I take it that you also do not support the powers-of-ten redefinition of KB, MB, GB and so forth?
Because that's over kill. There is no justification for requiring that the number be shown.
Exactly. As implemented, caller ID is not a legitimate function. Apart from reverse charge numbers and emergency service numbers, there is no reason, ever, to transmit the number of the calling line. If you look at how it is implemented, it becomes clear that Caller ID was created for the primary purpose of allowing business to capture phone numbers of callers without consent. For most large businesses, this is also an additional reason for reverse-charge numbers.
If privacy is a concern, require that caller information be accurate, with criminal penalties for failure, and send ONLY THE NAME of the person/organization as a text string. I would not have a problem with my name coming up, but my reasons for keeping my number secret trump your reasons for wanting it, period. If you don't want to talk to me, don't answer if my name shows.
Unless Caller ID is modified to operate this way, everyone complaining about blocked calls is out of order, and should simply drop phone service entirely.
This will likely get me groused at, but if you are stupid enough to have a debit card on the same account you write important checks on, you are not so much asking for trouble as kidnapping it. The indirect penalties for card compromise are so large that I can't comprehend why anyone would take the risk. My debit card is on a dedicated checking account that exists solely to support the card. I write a few small checks a year (the odd magazine subscription or such) to keep that function from inactivity issues. If scammed, the damage is limited to the balance in the account plus having to contact the 4 companies that I have card payment set up with. My regular account, and all the really important bills, are immune to this particular line of attack. I just make sure that I have my next few weeks planned debit card expenditures on deposit in the card account and I'm good to go.
I would never even *think* of getting a debit card against a 'live' checking account.
I have had no problems getting an ATM-only card on those occasions when I needed one. I opened a new account about 6 months ago for buffering in property taxes (my mortage is just about up) and I was duly issued an ATM-only card when I asked for one.
I have a seperate account for the debit card, that is pretty much just for the card. I write the occasional small check on it, but nothing important. That way if the card is scammed, it won't cause bouncing checks on important bills.
Just make the point before signing up that you want an ATM-only card for an account, and make them give you that form first to verify. It can be done.
The purpose of copyright was to enrich the public domain, so inflation actually works to the public benefit if the restriction was as stated. At some point, it won't be worth it to the 'rightsholder' to continue to publish the work at the original price, so it goes to the public domain. It would be interesting to see just how badly Disney would want to keep thier mitts on Mickey Mouse.
The practical limits of distribution being what they are, I suspect that lots of stuff would go public domain simply because maintining the continuous availability of everything they ever made would be beyond even the largest of companies after a while.
I find this rather amusing, because the show Science Advisor, Kevin Grazier, gets scripts with comments from Baltar with notes like [tech] that he fills in with relevant technobabble. And as for his credentials, Kevin is also the red-headed guy from the JPL who has been explaining the various space probes on TV lately. Yes, he really is a rocket scientist.
Could this be the long-awaited Spaceballs III: The Search for Spaceballs II that was rumored all those years ago?
They also have little surprises in thier policies that get documented after you've been bitten by them. I lost a few hundred dollars to a then-undocumented policy against "third party" checks. A friend had sold some artwork he had crafted to a couple of organizations, but he has no bank account (at his level, bank fees represent a huge bite). A couple of deposits I sent in to my account never got processed or returned, it took several phone calls for them to find and return one of the checks, which was not submittible to another bank because of the endorsements restricting to one bank (a safety tactic, when dealing with sane banks). The organization for that check re-issued, but by then neither of us could remember the others and without the checks that were not found and returned. As this was not my friends fault I ate the difference. I closed my account with a very angry letter. My last statement arrived with the very first mention of third party check restrictions in a policy document that I had received. As you might guess, I don't regard them very highly. These days I make careful notes about where checks come from, despite never having had this sort of problem with any other bank or credit union.
I bought my SE T62u in July from Cingular. Everything went well until they went to program the SIM. The remote computer was down. The store reaction? Use the local computer to feed my ID numbers to the SIM, slap it in the phone, turn the phone on and work with the next customer while I waited. 10 minutes later, the phone beeped and asked to be powered off. When it came back on, it went straight into operating mode and after some test calls, I left with my new plan working. OTA programming is not very fast, but it works, and gave them a minimal-delay fallback for programming the phone. The customer who had to wait 10 extra minutes is less annoyed than the one who is told to come back later.
Just now, it won't. I was talking to a Cingular tech the other day and he said that Cingular customers can roam ATT, but not the other way. He also said that if Cingular won the bidding reciprocal roaming would probably be set up to give the ATT customers the extra coverage until the networks could be integrated. Give it a month or two and you might hit the Cingular system.
Which is precisely why I have a seperate account just for the debit card. I write small checks on it, for the newspaper & such, but the debit card is the purpose of the account, to keep my primary account safe.
I'm concerned about the new trend toward forcing customers with debit cards to use debit mode. I'm paranoid about the ATMs, how's the bank going to react when I change my PIN several times a week because I have no trust whatever in POS PIN-pads? (This assumes cash gets hard to use.)
One of the problems mentioned in one or two old manuals was if you used the higher speed on an older switch, you might miss a few digits. Hence a rapidly-dialed 9X1-X1XX could cause problems.
A valid concern. This could be addressed by mailing lists working backward. Subscribe to a mailing list and get the lists public key. Add that key to your mail client as an approved key, the list encrypts once with its private key and sends, the client can decrypt with the public key. Spammers can only get recipient public keys and are limited to individually encrypting each message. A bit more overhead of having to check incoming messages against a list of keys, tossing or quarantining anything that doesn't match one of the keys.
Alternatively this could be used for lists to sign a cleartext message, but either way the recipient would need a reliable way to get the public key of the list. I prefer the encryption method but that is due to my opinion that there should be no unencrypted traffic on the net.
That much is true, but the stong sender authentication most plans seem to call for would be counterproductive for a number of things.
In the end, the concept of unencrypted connections needs to go away. All transmissions need to be encrypted at the endpoints. In the case of e-mail, a new system involving public/private key pairs and a cpu-crushing encryption algorithm is advisable. Make mass-mailers of any sort pay in sheer cpu (and to a degree, real) time. The delays would make spamming unprofitable if each message had to be individually encrypted to the recipient using a public key.
For most individuals, this would add a few seconds of time to sending an e-mail, and most mail clients could hide the whole encryption process from the user. De-crypting would be less transparent, but a system could continue to decrypt mail as a background process while the first message is being read.
Legitimate mass-mailers (there are very few of these, relatively speaking) would just have to bite the bullet and expend the time. This would add enough overhead to e-mail to make profitable volumes for spammers extremely difficult, without raising other problems in the process. A convention of making it easy to find a public key for an e-mail address would be needed, but it shouldn't be all that hard.
I submitted this, but not soon enough.
I have an account at TCF that I use for a Visa debit card and the odd small check. (I'm not suicidal enough to run a debit card against a live checking account.) I find the interesting thing there that holds can take my balance into a theoretical negative state, charges will not be assessed until the actual (paid out) balance goes negative. I've had -200 balances a few times due to hotels buffering space into the authorization, but it all cleared out with no NSF charges.
I've been lucky on this subject. I've only had one genuine attempt at fraud attempted on me, and I was saved by using a Commercial Mail Receiving Agent (CRMA). Think The UPS Store (formerly Mail Boxes, Etc.) I get all my mail of any importance there, even the state is willing to send stuff there now.
One day I received a letter in the mail thanking me for changing my address to somewhere in Colorado, and by the way if you didn't do this CALL NOW! Well, I did, the account was regenerated with new numbers, and all was well. While the Post Office tries to portray CMRAs as one step up from a fraud shop, they are an answer to many postal deficiencies and have thier uses. One thing is that the Post Office will not process change of address orders for a CMRA customer. This removes mail intercept as an option unless the thief somehow scams your agent. Without diversion, security letters can alert you to the problem.
This also makes delivery interception difficult if they try to scam places that only deliver to the credit card address. Also, the card companies are getting better about checking. I applied for a card to shift to a lower APR, and the card company called back with questions about my credit report and my use of a CMRA.