Sad but true - some bright spark in the US decided that Philosopher was too big a word for the Dubya generation, so instead all US versions of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" are called "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone".
No wonder US children are regressing in their intellectual abilities compared to the rest of the world - they are being dumbed down by their elders!! Thanks George W "that's nucular" Bush.
BTW for all you Americans - it's nuclear, there's no middle U!
I have to say that the way it works here in Oz is great for the most part - the sender pays for the SMS message, not the receiver.
The only change to this is if you SMS someone who is overseas and who is using AutoRoam (GSM rest-of-world-only, sorry USA). Then I can SMS that person and only pay for a local SMS, the overseas portion is billed to the person overseas at the time.
I've never had any SMS spam (other than one or two SMSs from my phone provider which were borderline spam advertising new services but not overly disturbing).
Now imagine if the sender pays system were implemented in email in some fashion.... we'd kill spam virtually overnight!
The big issue with email is that, like P2P music trading, it's been free for so long that people don't want to go back to a paying system. So a solution to spam would need to involve return credits of some sort, so if I email my friend it costs me 1c but he can negate that automatically, so only those spammers whose emails aren't wanted don't get their money back. The devil's in the details though, but food for thought!
Hyped up prior to release, "Enter The Matrix" is the worst game I have played in a long time on the PC. It began with the HUGE bug of not working on a display with greater than 85Hz refresh rate (no patch for that). I mean come ON, it's 2003 for pete's sake! Talk about your sloppy programming! After finally changing my refresh rate down from 100Hz to play the damn thing, it then turned out to be a boring and bad looking third person shooter with the worst AI I have seen in a long time! If that is all the Matrix can muster, us humans won't have too much trouble when push comes to shove!
Now I know why there was such a veil of secrecy and no reviews permitted prior to launch - if there HAD been reviews then no one would have bought the damn thing! I learned one valuable lesson though - from now on, wait at least two weeks after a game has come out before buying it, unless there have been lots of favourable reviews PRIOR to release from reputable gaming sites.
Egypt was one of the founding technological empires in its day. It was what we now refer to as First World in the grand scheme of things back then. Their technology is STILL standing over 4000 years later!
Now you need to consider that they were not Muslims back then. There was no such religion as Islam. They believed in a different set of gods.
I'm sure that back then if you spoke out against their religion, or said it's a crock, you would have been punished (isn't that the whole basis of the Christian Bible that they DID speak out and were therefore cast out?).
And yet today, Egypt is a predominantly Muslim country. They would not hesitate in saying that the old religions were bunk. In fact, Christians would also say the same thing, along with Roman and Greek gods too. They were all bunk, they'd say. And yet all current religions are back at the same point all over again, saying that theirs is the one true religion and all others are false.
Makes you wonder what the picture will be in another thousand years, doesn't it?
Having lived in a country that has no copyright laws (PNG) I've seen the proliferation of imported pirated VCDs and recently DVDs sold openly in every shop.
What will happen in a country like Egypt is that pirates (the real, organised crime gang type) will simply supply the demand which will be there, because the more affluent Egyptians will have read about how the Matrix: Reloaded is a kick arse movie and wish to see it.
Furthermore, those with internet connections (there will be plenty) will download the inevitable DivX release and share it with their friends, thus spreading it through yet another channel.
This is why censors are becoming irrelevant in our technological society. In Australia censors have recently banned "Ken Park" from even screening at a film festival! No matter that it aired at Cannes etc, we're apparently not mature enough to form our own opinion on the matter. The same goes for Egypt, in this case though it's based on religion instead of sex, but it always sees to be the trinity of Sex, Politics and Religion that people feel they must suppress for the good of the populace. So when "Ken Park" is released on the net, it too will be downloaded and watched, regardless of what some censor in an office says we should or shouldn't watch.
"The premise of censorship is that offensive content contaminates the hearts and minds of people. But you can only have censorship if someone can judge content without himself being contaminated. This contradicts the premise of censorship, which alleges that these contaminating powers exist inherently in the offensive material. On the other hand, if a censor can censor without being contaminated, that implies that offensive content does not automatically contaminate the mind or heart of a person. In that case, you would be admitting that censorship is unnecessary. That is the contradiction of censorship." - don't have the name of the quoter sorry.
Australia is a classic case of why monopolies in any industry should be avoided.
The most recent broadband fiasco here in Oz concerns itself with Telstra (who handle ALL submissions for ADSL in Australia regardless of ISP) deliberately telling competitor signups that they don't meet broadband exchange requirements, then signing them up under Telstra where they suddenly just scrape in.
Then you have the woeful bandwidth limitations (imposed mostly because Telstra controls the phone lines and resells bandwidth to every other ISP by the MB).
The ONLY point I will concede to Telstra is that due to our huge, continent scale country, upgrading ALL exchanges can be cost prohibitive, however to not have broadband capability yet in large POPULATED regions is unforgiveable in 2003.
In short, Telstra as a RETAIL company should be split from Telstra the NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE company. Make the infrastructure company publically owned, then Telstra (Retail) can compete along with everyone else on a level playing field.
You can kill all sorts of nasty JavaScript, popups etc and lots of other crapware by running a small program called Proxomitron if you use Windows. It serves as a proxy for your browser and modifies pages before they ever get read by your browser.
I won't link directly for fear of the Slashdot Effect but you can go to proxo mitron.org (minus the space) if you are interested. jd5000.net (minus space) has a great set of filters that will stop anything!
One aspect that rarely seems to be covered is that of being falsely accused of possessing illicit materials such as child pornography or bomb making instructions or whatever your "cause-du-jour".
Sysadmins and techies are in an excellent position to plant pornography to "discover" during routine maintenance etc. If I as a sysadmin had some child pornography stored away for use in ruining a hated employee if I so chose (in an encrypted container file for example so it wouldn't come back and bite me), I could easily plant it in the employee's documents folder to be "found", by me or anyone else I anonymously tip off.
Now the employee who has just had these images found in his documents folder is in serious trouble. He or she will not only be liable under the law for possession of it, but worse still, their reputation will be forever ruined by even the accusation of having it, even if it is later thrown out of court.
Then, if it gets to court, the evidence will be, as previously posted, blown up to poster size and paraded in front of the jury, who will of course only see that the employee was obviously a sick individual to have these images, regardless of the fact they might have been planted. (Would YOU believe an employee who told you it was planted after it was discovered?)
I won't even cover the issue of juries, lawyers, judges etc not being "affected" by viewing these pictures. (Who censors the censors??)
After all, if you visit any of the free thumbnail galleries you invariably see (so I've heard:) text ads which link to other pr0n sites (as well as banners and popups which can be easily blocked).
Since they seem to be widely touted as being one of the few profitable web based industries, their click-thru rates must be quite good.
I would therefore surmise that text ads are probably THE best form of online advertising, since people would only click on them if it was deemd sufficiently interesting, kind of like clicking on hyperlinks to content you wish to view.
"We gave them a 4 1/2 year lifespan because we felt that after that time they might grow emotions and become uncontrollable" - unnamed HP employee.
As the printer cartridge would say to its maker: " I want more life, fvcker!"
If this is the case, then how can AMD prevent me using a non-stock AMD heatsink/fan combo with non-stock thermal paste and thus supposedly voiding my warranty?
Better remember this one for when you need to claim a dead chip back under warranty conditions and they tell you that you can't because you didn't use their tie-in HSF combo.
With all the advances made in Linux over the past couple of years, I still use Windows (2000 flavour) almost exclusively as my day to day OS environment.
Why? Because it is the ONLY viable PC gaming OS.
Nearly every other task involving computers on a day to day basis can be successfully done in Linux.
Sadly, Windows in all its flavours is still a huge resource hog compared to its cut down XBox OS, which is designed purely for gaming.
What I would love to see is an open source gaming OS devoid of anything not strictly associated with pumping out pixels and noise at the best framerates possible. The problem is proprietary standards. Right now Microsoft has sewn up the gaming community with its DirectX de-facto standard. This gaming standard is the reason I run Windows and not Linux. I'm a gamer and play most days, and for that I need Windows on my box.
I don't think that there are many games that could force a change to a new OS to play it. The only company I can think of is id Software.
What I (and no doubt others) would like to see is an open source, but most of all OPEN STANDARD, GameOS designed from the ground up for PC gaming. id Software could create such an OS I believe. Make it platform agnostic so it will run on x86s, Macs and others, and make it easily bootable from any other OS on those machines, and you could finally precipitate the shift away from Windows lock-in.
I'd buy such an OS, run it alongside Linux, and finally be free of Microsoft! (I already use OpenOffice.org so the only MS product I use is the OS itself)
This may be slightly off-topic, but I have often wondered if the reason the TV show Dark Angel was axed after its second season was because it was a little too close to portraying a possible future of America as a totalitarian state at a time when the government was trying to push pro-American sentiment post 9/11. I don't mean the more scifi storylines of genetic mutations and secret organisations, but the images of Seattle after the "pulse" with police shock troops, informants, citizens being taken away for speaking out, etc.
In classic Orwellian tradition, it is hard to show your children what a totalitarian state looks like if there is nothing to point to as an example, even if it is fictitious in nature. (Has the movie 1984 been released on DVD yet?)
With the media already acting as a surrogate education in the Western world, I hope there continues to be provocative TV shows which challenge you to think of the consequences of today's events on the future, and not just regurgitate the government's line that "everything is OK as long as you do as we say, not as we do". Have people already forgotten the post 9/11 story of the US government openly asking Hollywood to make pro-American movies and TV shows? What other shows may have been axed on the quiet for being "anti-American" at such a time?
Oh, and finally this point - Mike Hawash isn't an Arab-American, he's an AMERICAN.
A citizen, like any other in that country, with equal rights under the law (supposedly). The stereotyping of African-American, Native-American, Arab-American etc has no place in a country that gives all citizens EQUALITY. As others have pointed out, it's a slippery slope from saying nothing when they come to take away the "terrorist", to when they come to take away YOU because you didn't speak out when you still had a chance to.
This may be slightly off-topic, but I have often wondered if the reason the TV show Dark Angel was axed after its second season was because it was a little too close to portraying a possible future of America as a totalitarian state at a time when the government was trying to push pro-American sentiment post 9/11. I don't mean the more scifi storylines of genetic mutations and secret organisations, but the images of Seattle after the "pulse" with police shock troops, informants, citizens being taken away for speaking out, etc.
In classic Orwellian tradition, it is hard to show your children what a totalitarian state looks like if there is nothing to point to as an example, even if it is fictitious in nature. (Has the movie 1984 been released on DVD yet?)
With the media already acting as a surrogate education in the Western world, I hope there continues to be provocative TV shows which challenge you to think of the consequences of today's events on the future, and not just regurgitate the government's line that "everything is OK as long as you do as we say, not as we do". Have people already forgotten the post 9/11 story of the US government openly asking Hollywood to make pro-American movies and TV shows? What other shows may have been axed on the quiet for being "anti-American" at such a time?
Oh, and finally this point - Mike Hawash isn't an Arab-American, he's an AMERICAN.
A citizen, like any other in that country, with equal rights under the law (supposedly). The stereotyping of African-American, Native-American, Arab-American etc has no place in a country that gives all citizens EQUALITY. As others have pointed out, it's a slippery slope from saying nothing when they come to take away the "terrorist", to when they come to take away YOU because you didn't speak out when you still had a chance to.
Dragging the Ogg name thru the mud
on
Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 1
The name of this DRM scheme seems awfully suspect to say the least.
With all the headway Ogg Vorbis has been making, it seems that this could be a veiled attempt to get those not so knowledgeable to begin associating the Ogg name with "bad" DRM. Then you get the typical kneejerk reaction of "Don't use Ogg, they'll embed DRM in it then you will be locked in" etc.
I'd suggest that Xiph.org protect their name NOW before the wrong message gets pumped out by the media. Ogg is WAY too close to saying "Ogg-S is bad" and thereby making mental association of "Ogg is bad".
Whilst I don't have a PayPal account myself, I am aware of both good and bad experiences other people have had with them.
I think the deeper issue is the underhand way that the major world credit institutions like Visa and American Express have systematically trash-talked PayPal and undermined it, simply because it threatens the established way of paying for goods and services.
Yet have they come up with a better scheme for small online purchases which don't require 3% commissions to them? No, of course not. But, like our favourite nemesis Microsoft, they have the financial and political clout to make legislative innovation at the expense of technical innovation. That is why PayPal, the largest independent target on the credit institutions' radar, gets constantly hammered.
Don't be too surprised if PayPal goes under - just realise that it may be due in no small part to the unseen hand of the world's financial giants swatting that pesky mosquito in their midst that threatens to give them all a terminal case of malaria.
Slashdot Mirror
Sad but true - some bright spark in the US decided that Philosopher was too big a word for the Dubya generation, so instead all US versions of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" are called "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone".
No wonder US children are regressing in their intellectual abilities compared to the rest of the world - they are being dumbed down by their elders!! Thanks George W "that's nucular" Bush.
BTW for all you Americans - it's nuclear, there's no middle U!
Quizo69
I have to say that the way it works here in Oz is great for the most part - the sender pays for the SMS message, not the receiver.
The only change to this is if you SMS someone who is overseas and who is using AutoRoam (GSM rest-of-world-only, sorry USA). Then I can SMS that person and only pay for a local SMS, the overseas portion is billed to the person overseas at the time.
I've never had any SMS spam (other than one or two SMSs from my phone provider which were borderline spam advertising new services but not overly disturbing).
Now imagine if the sender pays system were implemented in email in some fashion.... we'd kill spam virtually overnight!
The big issue with email is that, like P2P music trading, it's been free for so long that people don't want to go back to a paying system. So a solution to spam would need to involve return credits of some sort, so if I email my friend it costs me 1c but he can negate that automatically, so only those spammers whose emails aren't wanted don't get their money back. The devil's in the details though, but food for thought!
Quizo69
Hyped up prior to release, "Enter The Matrix" is the worst game I have played in a long time on the PC. It began with the HUGE bug of not working on a display with greater than 85Hz refresh rate (no patch for that). I mean come ON, it's 2003 for pete's sake! Talk about your sloppy programming! After finally changing my refresh rate down from 100Hz to play the damn thing, it then turned out to be a boring and bad looking third person shooter with the worst AI I have seen in a long time! If that is all the Matrix can muster, us humans won't have too much trouble when push comes to shove!
Now I know why there was such a veil of secrecy and no reviews permitted prior to launch - if there HAD been reviews then no one would have bought the damn thing! I learned one valuable lesson though - from now on, wait at least two weeks after a game has come out before buying it, unless there have been lots of favourable reviews PRIOR to release from reputable gaming sites.
Quizo69
Egypt was one of the founding technological empires in its day. It was what we now refer to as First World in the grand scheme of things back then. Their technology is STILL standing over 4000 years later!
Now you need to consider that they were not Muslims back then. There was no such religion as Islam. They believed in a different set of gods.
I'm sure that back then if you spoke out against their religion, or said it's a crock, you would have been punished (isn't that the whole basis of the Christian Bible that they DID speak out and were therefore cast out?).
And yet today, Egypt is a predominantly Muslim country. They would not hesitate in saying that the old religions were bunk. In fact, Christians would also say the same thing, along with Roman and Greek gods too. They were all bunk, they'd say. And yet all current religions are back at the same point all over again, saying that theirs is the one true religion and all others are false.
Makes you wonder what the picture will be in another thousand years, doesn't it?
Quizo
Having lived in a country that has no copyright laws (PNG) I've seen the proliferation of imported pirated VCDs and recently DVDs sold openly in every shop.
What will happen in a country like Egypt is that pirates (the real, organised crime gang type) will simply supply the demand which will be there, because the more affluent Egyptians will have read about how the Matrix: Reloaded is a kick arse movie and wish to see it.
Furthermore, those with internet connections (there will be plenty) will download the inevitable DivX release and share it with their friends, thus spreading it through yet another channel.
This is why censors are becoming irrelevant in our technological society. In Australia censors have recently banned "Ken Park" from even screening at a film festival! No matter that it aired at Cannes etc, we're apparently not mature enough to form our own opinion on the matter. The same goes for Egypt, in this case though it's based on religion instead of sex, but it always sees to be the trinity of Sex, Politics and Religion that people feel they must suppress for the good of the populace. So when "Ken Park" is released on the net, it too will be downloaded and watched, regardless of what some censor in an office says we should or shouldn't watch.
"The premise of censorship is that offensive content contaminates the hearts and minds of people. But you can only have censorship if someone can judge content without himself being contaminated. This contradicts the premise of censorship, which alleges that these contaminating powers exist inherently in the offensive material. On the other hand, if a censor can censor without being contaminated, that implies that offensive content does not automatically contaminate the mind or heart of a person. In that case, you would be admitting that censorship is unnecessary. That is the contradiction of censorship." - don't have the name of the quoter sorry.
Quizo
Australia is a classic case of why monopolies in any industry should be avoided.
The most recent broadband fiasco here in Oz concerns itself with Telstra (who handle ALL submissions for ADSL in Australia regardless of ISP) deliberately telling competitor signups that they don't meet broadband exchange requirements, then signing them up under Telstra where they suddenly just scrape in.
Then you have the woeful bandwidth limitations (imposed mostly because Telstra controls the phone lines and resells bandwidth to every other ISP by the MB).
The ONLY point I will concede to Telstra is that due to our huge, continent scale country, upgrading ALL exchanges can be cost prohibitive, however to not have broadband capability yet in large POPULATED regions is unforgiveable in 2003.
In short, Telstra as a RETAIL company should be split from Telstra the NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE company. Make the infrastructure company publically owned, then Telstra (Retail) can compete along with everyone else on a level playing field.
Quizo
You can kill all sorts of nasty JavaScript, popups etc and lots of other crapware by running a small program called Proxomitron if you use Windows. It serves as a proxy for your browser and modifies pages before they ever get read by your browser.
.net (minus space) has a great set of filters that will stop anything!
I won't link directly for fear of the Slashdot Effect but you can go to proxo mitron.org (minus the space) if you are interested. jd5000
Highly recommended.
Quizo
One aspect that rarely seems to be covered is that of being falsely accused of possessing illicit materials such as child pornography or bomb making instructions or whatever your "cause-du-jour".
Sysadmins and techies are in an excellent position to plant pornography to "discover" during routine maintenance etc. If I as a sysadmin had some child pornography stored away for use in ruining a hated employee if I so chose (in an encrypted container file for example so it wouldn't come back and bite me), I could easily plant it in the employee's documents folder to be "found", by me or anyone else I anonymously tip off.
Now the employee who has just had these images found in his documents folder is in serious trouble. He or she will not only be liable under the law for possession of it, but worse still, their reputation will be forever ruined by even the accusation of having it, even if it is later thrown out of court.
Then, if it gets to court, the evidence will be, as previously posted, blown up to poster size and paraded in front of the jury, who will of course only see that the employee was obviously a sick individual to have these images, regardless of the fact they might have been planted. (Would YOU believe an employee who told you it was planted after it was discovered?)
I won't even cover the issue of juries, lawyers, judges etc not being "affected" by viewing these pictures. (Who censors the censors??)
What would YOU do if you were so accused?
After all, if you visit any of the free thumbnail galleries you invariably see (so I've heard :) text ads which link to other pr0n sites (as well as banners and popups which can be easily blocked).
Since they seem to be widely touted as being one of the few profitable web based industries, their click-thru rates must be quite good.
I would therefore surmise that text ads are probably THE best form of online advertising, since people would only click on them if it was deemd sufficiently interesting, kind of like clicking on hyperlinks to content you wish to view.
"We gave them a 4 1/2 year lifespan because we felt that after that time they might grow emotions and become uncontrollable" - unnamed HP employee. As the printer cartridge would say to its maker: " I want more life, fvcker!"
Slightly off topic but...
If this is the case, then how can AMD prevent me using a non-stock AMD heatsink/fan combo with non-stock thermal paste and thus supposedly voiding my warranty?
Better remember this one for when you need to claim a dead chip back under warranty conditions and they tell you that you can't because you didn't use their tie-in HSF combo.
With all the advances made in Linux over the past couple of years, I still use Windows (2000 flavour) almost exclusively as my day to day OS environment.
Why? Because it is the ONLY viable PC gaming OS.
Nearly every other task involving computers on a day to day basis can be successfully done in Linux.
Sadly, Windows in all its flavours is still a huge resource hog compared to its cut down XBox OS, which is designed purely for gaming.
What I would love to see is an open source gaming OS devoid of anything not strictly associated with pumping out pixels and noise at the best framerates possible. The problem is proprietary standards. Right now Microsoft has sewn up the gaming community with its DirectX de-facto standard. This gaming standard is the reason I run Windows and not Linux. I'm a gamer and play most days, and for that I need Windows on my box.
I don't think that there are many games that could force a change to a new OS to play it. The only company I can think of is id Software.
What I (and no doubt others) would like to see is an open source, but most of all OPEN STANDARD, GameOS designed from the ground up for PC gaming. id Software could create such an OS I believe. Make it platform agnostic so it will run on x86s, Macs and others, and make it easily bootable from any other OS on those machines, and you could finally precipitate the shift away from Windows lock-in.
I'd buy such an OS, run it alongside Linux, and finally be free of Microsoft! (I already use OpenOffice.org so the only MS product I use is the OS itself)
How about it, id?
As they say:
"Sh|t in, sh|t out!"
Gives new meaning to the word "newbie"!
This may be slightly off-topic, but I have often wondered if the reason the TV show Dark Angel was axed after its second season was because it was a little too close to portraying a possible future of America as a totalitarian state at a time when the government was trying to push pro-American sentiment post 9/11. I don't mean the more scifi storylines of genetic mutations and secret organisations, but the images of Seattle after the "pulse" with police shock troops, informants, citizens being taken away for speaking out, etc.
In classic Orwellian tradition, it is hard to show your children what a totalitarian state looks like if there is nothing to point to as an example, even if it is fictitious in nature. (Has the movie 1984 been released on DVD yet?)
With the media already acting as a surrogate education in the Western world, I hope there continues to be provocative TV shows which challenge you to think of the consequences of today's events on the future, and not just regurgitate the government's line that "everything is OK as long as you do as we say, not as we do". Have people already forgotten the post 9/11 story of the US government openly asking Hollywood to make pro-American movies and TV shows? What other shows may have been axed on the quiet for being "anti-American" at such a time?
Oh, and finally this point - Mike Hawash isn't an Arab-American, he's an AMERICAN.
A citizen, like any other in that country, with equal rights under the law (supposedly). The stereotyping of African-American, Native-American, Arab-American etc has no place in a country that gives all citizens EQUALITY. As others have pointed out, it's a slippery slope from saying nothing when they come to take away the "terrorist", to when they come to take away YOU because you didn't speak out when you still had a chance to.
(Reposted as new topic this time hopefully!)
This may be slightly off-topic, but I have often wondered if the reason the TV show Dark Angel was axed after its second season was because it was a little too close to portraying a possible future of America as a totalitarian state at a time when the government was trying to push pro-American sentiment post 9/11. I don't mean the more scifi storylines of genetic mutations and secret organisations, but the images of Seattle after the "pulse" with police shock troops, informants, citizens being taken away for speaking out, etc.
In classic Orwellian tradition, it is hard to show your children what a totalitarian state looks like if there is nothing to point to as an example, even if it is fictitious in nature. (Has the movie 1984 been released on DVD yet?)
With the media already acting as a surrogate education in the Western world, I hope there continues to be provocative TV shows which challenge you to think of the consequences of today's events on the future, and not just regurgitate the government's line that "everything is OK as long as you do as we say, not as we do". Have people already forgotten the post 9/11 story of the US government openly asking Hollywood to make pro-American movies and TV shows? What other shows may have been axed on the quiet for being "anti-American" at such a time?
Oh, and finally this point - Mike Hawash isn't an Arab-American, he's an AMERICAN.
A citizen, like any other in that country, with equal rights under the law (supposedly). The stereotyping of African-American, Native-American, Arab-American etc has no place in a country that gives all citizens EQUALITY. As others have pointed out, it's a slippery slope from saying nothing when they come to take away the "terrorist", to when they come to take away YOU because you didn't speak out when you still had a chance to.
The name of this DRM scheme seems awfully suspect to say the least.
With all the headway Ogg Vorbis has been making, it seems that this could be a veiled attempt to get those not so knowledgeable to begin associating the Ogg name with "bad" DRM. Then you get the typical kneejerk reaction of "Don't use Ogg, they'll embed DRM in it then you will be locked in" etc.
I'd suggest that Xiph.org protect their name NOW before the wrong message gets pumped out by the media. Ogg is WAY too close to saying "Ogg-S is bad" and thereby making mental association of "Ogg is bad".
Whilst I don't have a PayPal account myself, I am aware of both good and bad experiences other people have had with them.
I think the deeper issue is the underhand way that the major world credit institutions like Visa and American Express have systematically trash-talked PayPal and undermined it, simply because it threatens the established way of paying for goods and services.
Yet have they come up with a better scheme for small online purchases which don't require 3% commissions to them? No, of course not. But, like our favourite nemesis Microsoft, they have the financial and political clout to make legislative innovation at the expense of technical innovation. That is why PayPal, the largest independent target on the credit institutions' radar, gets constantly hammered.
Don't be too surprised if PayPal goes under - just realise that it may be due in no small part to the unseen hand of the world's financial giants swatting that pesky mosquito in their midst that threatens to give them all a terminal case of malaria.