It sounds counterintuitive but the real solution is to just never use a debit card. Have a separate ATM card and credit card.
When you're using a credit card, you're protected automatically when things like this happen. If you claim that a charge is fraud, it is up to the merchant to actually prove that it is a legit charge. This means that your credit card company will remove the money from the merchants account immediately. If they fail to prove (usually by signature or some other means) that you made the charge, they take the hit.
The other thing that sucks about using a debit card is that they do absolutely nothing to help you build your credit. If you're looking to get lower APRs one of the best ways to do that is to use an actual credit card to buy things and then pay off most of the balance every month. When you use a debit card it doesn't register as a balance. If you bought tens of thousands of dollars on a credit card it could do wonders for your score if you pay it off and keep the balance low. Doing that same thing on a debit card does absolutely nothing.
Debit cards also suck because if you use them for things like Hotel Reservations, the Hotel will actually put an AUTH on your card for more than the price of your room. As long as that AUTH is there you don't have any access to those funds in your checking account. Hotels, etc will routinely AUTH you for more than the price of a room, in some cases 1/3-1/2 as much.
There's an even bigger problem w/the Android Marketplace when accessed from your phone. It's possible for developers to write applications that wont work on your particular phone model. With only a few Android models now that's not that big of an issue, but what happens when that Skyrockets to 50 devices in another year or so?
I have a Nexus One and while I love it I routinely download applications that don't work on my phone. They'll either frequently crash, or wont fully startup, or just hang when run. Now I refuse to download any app that doesn't have at least 100 comments and I scan the comments for people reporting that it doesn't work on my model of phone.
This is a terrible user experience. I'm probably not the typical Android user and can figure out why an application isn't working but your average user can't. They're just going to bitch and complain that apps they're downloading don't work and that the phone "sucks."
Google has got to fix this. What's the point of having a centralized marketplace if you're not going to even verify compatibility? I was able to download a "Droid" Flashlight app that doesn't work on my Nexus - how ridiculous is that?
In the same way that Walmart comes into a town and destroys local businesses, Google can enter into an industry/sector and destroy most of the competition overnight by giving an application away for free. Who is going to pay $100 for a Maps Application now (or more for a hardware device) when they can just download one for free.
Isn't this the same type of stuff we accused Microsoft of doing years ago? Yup, Walmart, I mean Google strikes again. Pray whatever industry you're in Google doesn't decide to suddenly release a free product.
> Well, there is one thing, Falcon compresses data while Postgresql doesn't. can't help wondering what this will do to performance.
This is actually not true. If you have a variable length column in Postgres and insert data that exceeds 2K in size, it will automatically be compressed by Postgres using a simple LZ compression algorithm. This has been the case since Postgres 8.0. You have to specifically disable this feature if you don't want to use it.
I've had Vonage for almost a year now and am having 0 problems with them. I can't actually believe that my situation is not the norm? Their service has been excellent. I use them along with cable service and QoS actually works, and works very well. I can literally watch myself downloading a large file, pick up the phone, and see my transfer rates drop. And I rarely get dropped calls.
I have a Vonage business account and use a fax line as well, and basically turning ECM off fixed all the problems I was having with it not wanting to talk to some fax machines.
Happy customer here. And no, I'm not buying into the IPO but I'm so happy with 'em I got my parents to switch to using them as well. VOIP is cheap now, take advantage of it while you can. And all the cool call routing features and voicemails in my Inbox are clutch.
>I take it back. Not even LOTR had sufficient plot to justify theatre popcorn costs.
The same technology that tells you how many tickets were sold and how much money was made opening weekend also ensures that most of the money from ticket sales goes right back to the studios.
Theater owners get little to nothing from actual ticket sales so the overpriced popcorn is the only way they make any money. When you realize that you'll spend as much on food as tickets sometimes this actually makes sense. We all know Hollywood is greedy as hell tho so it's not real surprising.
Why is this so hard to believe? It actually really did happen, you can read counts of it in decades old encyclopedias and find more information about it on probably thousands of web sites and of course Wikipedia.
All it takes is about a 2 second glance at any aerial footage of the levy breaks in New Orleans and you could easily see how turning a ship sideways and sinking it would plug a breach. By turning your ship sideways so that it runs flush with the levy you basically have made a huge steel wall.
I dunno about other states but in California, if you kill someone with your car, it is automatically manslaughter. You will most likely serve time over it, especially if the accident is your fault.
If anyone is ever killed on a freeway out here, the freeway gets shut down and turned into a crime scene. I once got stuck on a 2 mile stretch of the 405 while it was closed to ONE LANE (out of 5) for 6 hours because someone died.
It was determined that one of the guys was driving recklessly, hit someone and killed 'em, and he got 5 years.
You know why those folks have already decided that they're going to be failures? Because the education system already failed them!!!
If at an early age you get kids interested in learning and excelling, that lasts a lifetime. But so many inner-city schools are just glorified day care centers that the kids pick up on this. Why should they care when no one else does?
I too was in a pretty similiar situation. I grew up in the inner-city but my mom enrolled me in a Magnet school in Brentwood, CA (it doesn't get any whiter than that).
When I came home after school and kicked it with the kids in my neighborhood, the difference between what I'd learned at Brentwood and what they'd learned at Manuel Arts was staggering. We had a computer lab full of Apple ]['s and me and my little brother were programming games in basic and doing logo before we hit our teens. My friends in the neighborhood were going through metal detectors and getting randomly searched for guns and drugs and avoiding getting their asses kicked for being seen with books when they walked home.
It was and still is completely FUCKED UP. The reason why you don't have more minority developers is not because they're too stupid too do it, it's because they're so far behind in their level of education than it's almost impossible to catch up. How the hell are you going to code a game engine when you're leaving school with an Algebra I math level?
Know what Affirmitive Action really is? It's a patch. It's a patch designed to fix the fucked up unequal education problem. But instead of Affirmitive Action what really needs to happen is the problem needs to be fixed at its source, everyone should be educated at the same level from the very beginning and they're not.
With no affirmitive action this will only get worse as families have kids in poor areas that goto poor schools, learn nothing, stay poor, and then have poor kids.
My cable company already does this. They call it "On Demand." Basically, they automatically record movies on HBO, popular TV shows, etc and I can basically browse through a list whenever I want and select something to watch.
As soon as I select it, it streams from their central office down to my box. Works great. My cablebox came with a DVR and I actually use it less because of this. Makes alot more sense.
Well said. Ya know, this isn't complicated. When I first saw the headline, I figured multilink was something as simple as how you do selects and dropdown lists in HTML, e.g.
You could then basically extend the properties to be supported via JavaScript and CSS easily by using the same naming convention.
Once that's done, start by adding a plugin to one widely used browser and see if others like it and use it. If they do, then more and more people will jump onboard and help it spread.
But it doesn't have to be complicated! I can't stand that so many geeks have a tendency to over-engineer and overthink everything!
The icing on the cake though was RTFA and discovering that if you used IE you should switch to Firefox and while you're at it switch operating systems. Yes, I am going to throw away tons of my time just so that I can get multiple links in my browser.
Ahh, that last question was mostly rhetorical but I threw it out to at least get people to think about it.
Last I heard, the Overdraft/NSF fees equated 2 BILLION a year for banks. 2 billion dolllars, anyone would be a fool to want to get rid of that cash cow. But we all blindy accept it. We also accept Overdrafts fees now. Before, you had NSF and the check would just bounce. But now, you get charged a fee in proportion to how long and how overdrawn you are. That just popped up one day, and everyone went... "Great!"
That's why I'm (now) a big supporter of services like Paypal, Google wallet if it happens, and so on. Cause we are never going to change the current banking system. Most of it is still based on designs where transactions are batched and modems call the Fed Banks and yell messages at each other all night about who owes who what.
But I never see any trucks carrying money back and forth from bank to bank.:)
One great advantage of accepting cashiers checks is that they're very easy to verify (anytime you get one from an untrusted source, you should basically do this).
On all cashiers checks there should be a number that you can call. Probably not toll-free, it will take you to the "Official Checks" division of that persons bank. It's very easy to look at this number, and then verify that it actually is really connected to this bank (and not someones home number).
Then, just call the number. After going through tons of prompts and entering in all the check information, you'll be told in seconds if it's valid or not. This is not from your perspective but rather the banks. If you had deposited the check and it later bounced, it would have been bounced by the bank that you're now talking on the phone too.
What I just can't understand though, is that if you can basically do this in a matter of minutes, why does it take the banks weeks to actually clear the damn thing?!?
And that's where we differ. You seem to believe than stopping oil shipments to a country isn't an act of war. I believe differently.
If that happened to the U.S. today, while we wouldn't outright declare war, we would respond with a whole lot of gunpower almost immediately. We'd shoot first and ask questions later. Hell we've launched Carrier Battle Groups to the Middle East on mere rumors... We wouldn't wait half the time the Japenese did before attacking Pearl Harbor.
The problem is that the Japenese and U.S. viewed the U.S.'s entrance to the war a bit differently. The Japenese knew it was inevitable, and in the same way that Bush now wants to use pre-emptive war, so did they. They attacked us first and inflicted (or tried anyways) as much damage as possible before the inevitable outright decleration that they believe was unavoidable if they were going to have a shot at winning the war.
And as long as that embargo was in place - they didn't have a chance in hell. That's because the embargo was working!
Hardly a justifiable reason? Are you kidding? Your country is in the middle of a war. Oil shipments have ground to an almost halt. You have no way to move troops, you have no way to move ammo. You have no way to move metals. You have no way to move any type of supplies anywhere.
Production for every war related and unrelated material grounds to a stop as the supply-chain is halted because no one can move anything cause there is no damn oil to do it with. Shipments for every concievable thing stop as well.
Do you:
A) Realize that the gig is up and surrender to the allies (at this point minus the US)
OR
B) Continue using military force, which you already have deployed around half the globe, to get the oil flowing again?
Use your brain. By blocking Japans oil shipments we basically ensured our entrance into the war. It was only a matter of time, that's why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and why they were actually surprised as the ease at which they did it.
If oil shipments to the US suddenly dried up one day, what do you think we'd do?
Are you serious? The entire reason the US wants democracy in the middle east is to stabilize trade and oil prices!!!
If an Oil Embargo was launched against the US and 90 percent of our incoming oil dried up overnight, would we not respond by sending 2 or 3 carrier battle groups and all the military force we could muster?
Answer your own damn question - would we be justified in that scenario?!? Go check-up on your history before you answer.... sheesh.
One could say the same thing of what we did to the Native Americans, or the slaves, or even the damn US Eugenics movement. We can and are just as brutal as the best of them.
I still believe our actions in WWII were both necessary and justified, I just do so with my blinders off.
Japan did not start the war "entirely unprovoked." The US had an embargo in place against Japan that stopped some 90 percent of incoming oil shipments to Japan.
We were knee-deep in the war, without actually being in the war (or so we tell ourselves). But we basically forced the hand of the Japanese. Our embargo crippled them. They would have been unable to keep fighting the war had they not attacked Pearl Harbor, cause they would have run out of oil.
Our hands were not entirely clean at all before we jumped into WWII. Many more anecdotes like this detail why the Japanese actually believed that we expected and knew that they were going to attack and were actually surprised at the ease at which they bombed Pearl Harbor.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds counterintuitive but the real solution is to just never use a debit card. Have a separate ATM card and credit card.
When you're using a credit card, you're protected automatically when things like this happen. If you claim that a charge is fraud, it is up to the merchant to actually prove that it is a legit charge. This means that your credit card company will remove the money from the merchants account immediately. If they fail to prove (usually by signature or some other means) that you made the charge, they take the hit.
The other thing that sucks about using a debit card is that they do absolutely nothing to help you build your credit. If you're looking to get lower APRs one of the best ways to do that is to use an actual credit card to buy things and then pay off most of the balance every month. When you use a debit card it doesn't register as a balance. If you bought tens of thousands of dollars on a credit card it could do wonders for your score if you pay it off and keep the balance low. Doing that same thing on a debit card does absolutely nothing.
Debit cards also suck because if you use them for things like Hotel Reservations, the Hotel will actually put an AUTH on your card for more than the price of your room. As long as that AUTH is there you don't have any access to those funds in your checking account. Hotels, etc will routinely AUTH you for more than the price of a room, in some cases 1/3-1/2 as much.
There's an even bigger problem w/the Android Marketplace when accessed from your phone. It's possible for developers to write applications that wont work on your particular phone model. With only a few Android models now that's not that big of an issue, but what happens when that Skyrockets to 50 devices in another year or so?
I have a Nexus One and while I love it I routinely download applications that don't work on my phone. They'll either frequently crash, or wont fully startup, or just hang when run. Now I refuse to download any app that doesn't have at least 100 comments and I scan the comments for people reporting that it doesn't work on my model of phone.
This is a terrible user experience. I'm probably not the typical Android user and can figure out why an application isn't working but your average user can't. They're just going to bitch and complain that apps they're downloading don't work and that the phone "sucks."
Google has got to fix this. What's the point of having a centralized marketplace if you're not going to even verify compatibility? I was able to download a "Droid" Flashlight app that doesn't work on my Nexus - how ridiculous is that?
In the same way that Walmart comes into a town and destroys local businesses, Google can enter into an industry/sector and destroy most of the competition overnight by giving an application away for free. Who is going to pay $100 for a Maps Application now (or more for a hardware device) when they can just download one for free.
Isn't this the same type of stuff we accused Microsoft of doing years ago? Yup, Walmart, I mean Google strikes again. Pray whatever industry you're in Google doesn't decide to suddenly release a free product.
> Well, there is one thing, Falcon compresses data while Postgresql doesn't. can't help wondering what this will do to performance.
- toast.html
This is actually not true. If you have a variable length column in Postgres and insert data that exceeds 2K in size, it will automatically be compressed by Postgres using a simple LZ compression algorithm. This has been the case since Postgres 8.0. You have to specifically disable this feature if you don't want to use it.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/static/storage
the movement isn't a top-down organization, but, well, a diverse movement, so its not all that much something that is "led" by "leaders"
OMG - we're terrorists!
I've had Vonage for almost a year now and am having 0 problems with them. I can't actually believe that my situation is not the norm? Their service has been excellent. I use them along with cable service and QoS actually works, and works very well. I can literally watch myself downloading a large file, pick up the phone, and see my transfer rates drop. And I rarely get dropped calls.
I have a Vonage business account and use a fax line as well, and basically turning ECM off fixed all the problems I was having with it not wanting to talk to some fax machines.
Happy customer here. And no, I'm not buying into the IPO but I'm so happy with 'em I got my parents to switch to using them as well. VOIP is cheap now, take advantage of it while you can. And all the cool call routing features and voicemails in my Inbox are clutch.
if this guy is on it, i'll watch.
(anyone that can do DDR on one leg deserves my 30 mins)
>I take it back. Not even LOTR had sufficient plot to justify theatre popcorn costs.
The same technology that tells you how many tickets were sold and how much money was made opening weekend also ensures that most of the money from ticket sales goes right back to the studios.
Theater owners get little to nothing from actual ticket sales so the overpriced popcorn is the only way they make any money. When you realize that you'll spend as much on food as tickets sometimes this actually makes sense. We all know Hollywood is greedy as hell tho so it's not real surprising.
Why is this so hard to believe? It actually really did happen, you can read counts of it in decades old encyclopedias and find more information about it on probably thousands of web sites and of course Wikipedia.
All it takes is about a 2 second glance at any aerial footage of the levy breaks in New Orleans and you could easily see how turning a ship sideways and sinking it would plug a breach. By turning your ship sideways so that it runs flush with the levy you basically have made a huge steel wall.
It's just a big ass pyramid scheme with the U.S. on top.
This was a month ago. All over the news.
Are you serious? I bought a diagnostic code reader for sale for $80.
I hooked that thing up to my car, my friends cars, and was blown away at the shit it could tell you and what you could change.
Even came with a disclaimer saying we aren't responsible if you change something that fucks up your car.
Anyways, $80 was a fair deal IMHO. I'm no longer complaining about not knowing wtf check engine means anymore.
I dunno about other states but in California, if you kill someone with your car, it is automatically manslaughter. You will most likely serve time over it, especially if the accident is your fault.
If anyone is ever killed on a freeway out here, the freeway gets shut down and turned into a crime scene. I once got stuck on a 2 mile stretch of the 405 while it was closed to ONE LANE (out of 5) for 6 hours because someone died.
It was determined that one of the guys was driving recklessly, hit someone and killed 'em, and he got 5 years.
You know why those folks have already decided that they're going to be failures? Because the education system already failed them!!!
If at an early age you get kids interested in learning and excelling, that lasts a lifetime. But so many inner-city schools are just glorified day care centers that the kids pick up on this. Why should they care when no one else does?
I too was in a pretty similiar situation. I grew up in the inner-city but my mom enrolled me in a Magnet school in Brentwood, CA (it doesn't get any whiter than that).
When I came home after school and kicked it with the kids in my neighborhood, the difference between what I'd learned at Brentwood and what they'd learned at Manuel Arts was staggering. We had a computer lab full of Apple ]['s and me and my little brother were programming games in basic and doing logo before we hit our teens. My friends in the neighborhood were going through metal detectors and getting randomly searched for guns and drugs and avoiding getting their asses kicked for being seen with books when they walked home.
It was and still is completely FUCKED UP. The reason why you don't have more minority developers is not because they're too stupid too do it, it's because they're so far behind in their level of education than it's almost impossible to catch up. How the hell are you going to code a game engine when you're leaving school with an Algebra I math level?
Know what Affirmitive Action really is? It's a patch. It's a patch designed to fix the fucked up unequal education problem. But instead of Affirmitive Action what really needs to happen is the problem needs to be fixed at its source, everyone should be educated at the same level from the very beginning and they're not.
With no affirmitive action this will only get worse as families have kids in poor areas that goto poor schools, learn nothing, stay poor, and then have poor kids.
My cable company already does this. They call it "On Demand." Basically, they automatically record movies on HBO, popular TV shows, etc and I can basically browse through a list whenever I want and select something to watch.
As soon as I select it, it streams from their central office down to my box. Works great. My cablebox came with a DVR and I actually use it less because of this. Makes alot more sense.
Well said. Ya know, this isn't complicated. When I first saw the headline, I figured multilink was something as simple as how you do selects and dropdown lists in HTML, e.g.
/MLINK
MLINK
OPTION="Site 1" VALUE="http://site1.com"
OPTION="Site 2" VALUE="http://site2.com"
You could then basically extend the properties to be supported via JavaScript and CSS easily by using the same naming convention.
Once that's done, start by adding a plugin to one widely used browser and see if others like it and use it. If they do, then more and more people will jump onboard and help it spread.
But it doesn't have to be complicated! I can't stand that so many geeks have a tendency to over-engineer and overthink everything!
The icing on the cake though was RTFA and discovering that if you used IE you should switch to Firefox and while you're at it switch operating systems. Yes, I am going to throw away tons of my time just so that I can get multiple links in my browser.
Ahh, that last question was mostly rhetorical but I threw it out to at least get people to think about it.
:)
Last I heard, the Overdraft/NSF fees equated 2 BILLION a year for banks. 2 billion dolllars, anyone would be a fool to want to get rid of that cash cow. But we all blindy accept it. We also accept Overdrafts fees now. Before, you had NSF and the check would just bounce. But now, you get charged a fee in proportion to how long and how overdrawn you are. That just popped up one day, and everyone went... "Great!"
That's why I'm (now) a big supporter of services like Paypal, Google wallet if it happens, and so on. Cause we are never going to change the current banking system. Most of it is still based on designs where transactions are batched and modems call the Fed Banks and yell messages at each other all night about who owes who what.
But I never see any trucks carrying money back and forth from bank to bank.
One great advantage of accepting cashiers checks is that they're very easy to verify (anytime you get one from an untrusted source, you should basically do this).
On all cashiers checks there should be a number that you can call. Probably not toll-free, it will take you to the "Official Checks" division of that persons bank. It's very easy to look at this number, and then verify that it actually is really connected to this bank (and not someones home number).
Then, just call the number. After going through tons of prompts and entering in all the check information, you'll be told in seconds if it's valid or not. This is not from your perspective but rather the banks. If you had deposited the check and it later bounced, it would have been bounced by the bank that you're now talking on the phone too.
What I just can't understand though, is that if you can basically do this in a matter of minutes, why does it take the banks weeks to actually clear the damn thing?!?
And that's where we differ. You seem to believe than stopping oil shipments to a country isn't an act of war. I believe differently.
If that happened to the U.S. today, while we wouldn't outright declare war, we would respond with a whole lot of gunpower almost immediately. We'd shoot first and ask questions later. Hell we've launched Carrier Battle Groups to the Middle East on mere rumors... We wouldn't wait half the time the Japenese did before attacking Pearl Harbor.
The problem is that the Japenese and U.S. viewed the U.S.'s entrance to the war a bit differently. The Japenese knew it was inevitable, and in the same way that Bush now wants to use pre-emptive war, so did they. They attacked us first and inflicted (or tried anyways) as much damage as possible before the inevitable outright decleration that they believe was unavoidable if they were going to have a shot at winning the war.
And as long as that embargo was in place - they didn't have a chance in hell. That's because the embargo was working!
Go back and read the parent. I never said it was. I was however responding to the original posters belief that Japan attacked us out of the blue.
They didn't.
We tried to be involved in the war without actually getting our hands dirty. It didn't work.
Hardly a justifiable reason? Are you kidding? Your country is in the middle of a war. Oil shipments have ground to an almost halt. You have no way to move troops, you have no way to move ammo. You have no way to move metals. You have no way to move any type of supplies anywhere.
Production for every war related and unrelated material grounds to a stop as the supply-chain is halted because no one can move anything cause there is no damn oil to do it with. Shipments for every concievable thing stop as well.
Do you:
A) Realize that the gig is up and surrender to the allies (at this point minus the US)
OR
B) Continue using military force, which you already have deployed around half the globe, to get the oil flowing again?
Use your brain. By blocking Japans oil shipments we basically ensured our entrance into the war. It was only a matter of time, that's why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and why they were actually surprised as the ease at which they did it.
If oil shipments to the US suddenly dried up one day, what do you think we'd do?
Are you serious? The entire reason the US wants democracy in the middle east is to stabilize trade and oil prices!!!
If an Oil Embargo was launched against the US and 90 percent of our incoming oil dried up overnight, would we not respond by sending 2 or 3 carrier battle groups and all the military force we could muster?
Answer your own damn question - would we be justified in that scenario?!? Go check-up on your history before you answer.... sheesh.
One could say the same thing of what we did to the Native Americans, or the slaves, or even the damn US Eugenics movement. We can and are just as brutal as the best of them.
I still believe our actions in WWII were both necessary and justified, I just do so with my blinders off.
Japan did not start the war "entirely unprovoked." The US had an embargo in place against Japan that stopped some 90 percent of incoming oil shipments to Japan.
We were knee-deep in the war, without actually being in the war (or so we tell ourselves). But we basically forced the hand of the Japanese. Our embargo crippled them. They would have been unable to keep fighting the war had they not attacked Pearl Harbor, cause they would have run out of oil.
Our hands were not entirely clean at all before we jumped into WWII. Many more anecdotes like this detail why the Japanese actually believed that we expected and knew that they were going to attack and were actually surprised at the ease at which they bombed Pearl Harbor.