You may be interested to know that Sam Yagan, who was the founder of OkCupid and now the CEO of match.com(?), at one point wrote a super-detailed blog post (including graphs and all) titled "why you should never pay for online dating", where he basically eviscerated the idea of paid dating sites.
All shares of Google will automatically convert into corresponding shares of Alphabet, which will continue to trade under the stock ticker symbols GOOG and GOOGL. Shares in Google soared 5% in after hours trading. The new structure is said to be similar to Warren Buffettâ(TM)s Berkshire Hathaway, which wholly owns a number of diverse holdings and has stakes in several others.
Hear, hear. I'm in the same boat as you. For what it's worth, a couple of years ago there was word that the BBC was considering offering their iPlayer (online live programming and catch-up service) to other countries (the US being one of them) for a subscription fee. I don't know if that idea died though, as I haven't heard anything about it in a while.
Yeah, I hope that those breaches lit a fire under some people's asses. I was hit by both of them, and more (like 3 or 4) in the span of a year or less.
That's funny, I just linked the same article above and had not noticed this point because I was looking for something else! Anyway, thanks - it's encouraging to hear that they seem to be planning to go all the way to chip and pin, and that some banks are already issuing cards for both signature/pin.
I hope that they won't eventually try to push fraud liability to the consumer, as apparently they do in Europe! I definitely wouldn't put it past the financial industry though.
Some banks do have some better facilities for this. Someone replied above me about Chase Quickpay (I'm not familiar with it), and I use the P2P transfer at Capital One 360 all the time. It does still use ACH so it's a two-business day wait for the money to become available at the other end, but it's very easy to use from the bank's website.
That's interesting. I would like to learn more, if you have any references you can provide. I vaguely recall reading something to that effect, but I think I wrote it off as being either subtly implied, or just conjecture on someone's part, or it being dependent on some onerous pre-conditions. In other words, it seemed to me to be something that was not very likely to happen. I would love to get some confirmation otherwise.
That's not always the case. Regarding the actual exchange rate, I had read before that the exchange rate on card transactions are more favorable to the traveler than doing a cash exchange (likely because of the volume that the banks do).
Regarding the extra fees that some banks charge on foreign transactions (many charge 3%), thankfully not all banks charge that! For instance, Capital One is one of the few that does not charge a foreign transaction fee to their cardholders.
While I kind of agree with your sentiment, the signature in chip and signature refers to the signature you have to make on the terminal, not the signature on the back of the card.
Thanks for the confirmation, and additional info about the bike rental stations. I don't think the Target breach had anything to do with the move to chip cards. There was a deadline established years ago for everyone to move to the new system by October 2015 (in most cases). This article has some pretty good information on this shift, and current progress.
Let us know which banks you've found so far that are issuing chip and pin cards. I've been following this for a while and looked a few months ago and they were very rare. However, someone commented further down that Wells Fargo cards are both signature and pin, which is pretty cool.
Good point, I think I remember reading this justification as well. Oh well, give the customer a substandard product that doesn't cause them any inconvenience.
From that page, it sounds like Wells Fargo did the right thing and enabled PIN as well as signature. Good to know for the future if I need a US credit card with chip and pin. Thanks!
In case you didn't know, the cards that most banks are now issuing in the US are chip and signature, not chip and pin like in Europe, and I understand that there are some spots that DO NOT accept chip and signature, like unattended tolls, unattended gas stations, and possibly some unattended transportation ticket purchases (trains, etc).
Pretty frustrating that credit card issuers decided to go this route in the US with some bullshit justification that people wouldn't know how to use the cards (WTF?).
While the chip and signature is more resistant to skimming and duplication, it is no more secure than the old magnetic stripe cards if your physical card is stolen. I think they did this to prevent an increase in support costs instead (people requesting to reset PIN numbers, etc).
The same could be said of pretty much every advancement. Guys with clubs are cowards because the barehanded guys don't have a chance. Guys with swords are cowards because the guys with clubs don't stand a chance. Guys with arrows are cowards because the guys with swords across the field don't stand a chance. So on and so forth.
You have to admit that drones are on an entirely different scale of inequality than your examples though. Unlike your examples, the person receiving a drone attack had absolutely zero chance to inflict any physical harm on the person executing the attack. That is not the case for pretty much any other scenario, even something as far fetched as tanks vs clubs.
Remember that open source licenses (as well as creative commons) are actually made possible by copyright laws. If there were no copyright laws, the GPL, for instance, would be completely unenforceable because anyone would be able to do whatever they wanted to do with their copy.
What this decision affects is the new idea that APIs are copyrightable, which could have many yet unknown effects throughout the software industry, open and closed source.
Are the moderators out of their minds today? Some awfully silly comments are getting modded up in this story.
The reason that you don't make minimum wage $100 an hour is because the objective is not to close businesses, but instead to just give employees a chance to survive on a basic level out from their full-time wages. Government (as an expression of larger society) does well to ensure that business owners don't get rich by making their employees poor and by making them have to go on government assistance. $15 an hour is a good and reasonable minimum wage for an area with such a high cost of living.
The Waltons wealth did not come from their employees payroll. The Waltons wealth is in shares of the company. The company is worth a lot of money and because the Waltons own a lot of the company that makes them very wealthy.
Um, what? Of course the money that they don't pay their employees is a large part of their wealth. Every dollar that they don't pay their employees is a dollar that goes into their pockets, in the form of profit/loss and stock valuation. Oh, it's also a dollar that comes out of taxpayers' pockets too, in the form of food stamps, medicaid, welfare, etc. In other words, taxpayers are partially subsidizing the Waltons' (and many other business owners and stockholders) wealth.
Not really. Sometimes you have to give people a chance to come around to the good ideas if they're not popular or notable at first.
Think about it this way: if Al Franken had been on the Republican side and had spoken up in the same way, he would have been shouted under the table by his own party members and would have become a pariah, perhaps even losing the very next primary election to a more party-line candidate or a tea party challenger.
As much as I feel disappointed and disgusted by things that Obama and other Democrats have done over the last several years, I still don't buy the whole line that some people here on Slashdot trot out all the time: that Democrats and Republicans are the same thing.
You know that this deal would have sailed through and there's no way the FCC would have pushed for Title 2 regulation, if a Republican were in the White House right now.
So remember, as dumb and crappy as some parties' actions have been lately, who you vote for still matters, even if only in limited ways. Yes, some large scale issues are pretty much a wash between the two, but there are still some issues that you can have an influence in with your vote. Pick the party and candidates who you feel are more likely to be on the same side of the issues you care about, regardless of what the naysayers say.
Also, a shout out to Al Franken for being one of, if not the only top politicians to have questioned and criticized this merger from the beginning.
They should only allow reviews from people who actually purchased that product. Their reviews are already a mess, with tons of one star reviews for products that are really meant for the seller.
They just need to purge all the other reviews. There's so many scams and agendas both for positive and negative reviews, that nowadays I only trust verified purchase reviews anyway.
I agree with you about time, and would add that it's too precious to spend much of it on Facebook. However, it's nice to at least be aware of the events that are taking place and have the ability to make the choice to go or not.
I also agree with most of what you say - I'm even of the same generation of letters being cheaper than calls, no email, etc. I was just presenting the facts as I perceive them currently. I'm sure that each person will react and respond to those facts differently. Some people may not want to miss out on anything, while others may actively want to miss out on most things.
Regarding email, perhaps I didn't express my idea very clearly. The root of what I was trying to express is that, like it or not, email and the various types of facebook communication all have a different perceived value and importance to recipients. I would think that most people feel that an email is more deserving or demanding for a reply than a mass facebook invitation or post (I could be way off on this, though). And if one sends out a mass facebook message, but only sends an email to a couple of friends that are not on facebook, that puts even more pressure on the email recipients to reply than the facebook friends, just because of the difference in numbers making the email friends not be able to hide among the crowd. Because of this, a facebook user may choose not to contact the email only friends, to not place pressure on them to respond. I hope this makes my perspective a bit more clear.
True, you're probably not going to miss your best friend's birthday party invitation because of not having facebook. What I found seems to happen though is that you may miss something more low-key from someone who you're not necessarily super close friends with.
Think of it from the other side. You want to invite everyone in your friends list (or perhaps a group of 30 friends you've created) to do something, say, go to a local amusement park. It's an added inconvenience to track down the handful of people who don't have facebook. It may be worth the effort, or it may not. You may just forget to invite those people if you're not prompted by the list. Sending an email or calling seems a lot more formal, and may send the wrong message about the importance of this invitation.
Does that make more sense? Now, some people may just not care to get those types of invitations, and prefer to just get the important ones from important people. I would say it's still possible to get missed in the shuffle...
Slashdot Mirror
You may be interested to know that Sam Yagan, who was the founder of OkCupid and now the CEO of match.com(?), at one point wrote a super-detailed blog post (including graphs and all) titled "why you should never pay for online dating", where he basically eviscerated the idea of paid dating sites.
Then match.com bought OkCupid and the post was taken down: http://observer.com/2011/02/ok...
Fortunately, as well all know, anything posted online is likely to never go away: http://static.izs.me/why-you-s...
Really a very interesting read.
The article where I first read this news said the same thing:
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
All shares of Google will automatically convert into corresponding shares of Alphabet, which will continue to trade under the stock ticker symbols GOOG and GOOGL. Shares in Google soared 5% in after hours trading. The new structure is said to be similar to Warren Buffettâ(TM)s Berkshire Hathaway, which wholly owns a number of diverse holdings and has stakes in several others.
Hear, hear. I'm in the same boat as you. For what it's worth, a couple of years ago there was word that the BBC was considering offering their iPlayer (online live programming and catch-up service) to other countries (the US being one of them) for a subscription fee. I don't know if that idea died though, as I haven't heard anything about it in a while.
This story may have something to do with the discovery you have described.
Yeah, I hope that those breaches lit a fire under some people's asses. I was hit by both of them, and more (like 3 or 4) in the span of a year or less.
Cool, thanks for this FAQ too!
Super informative post - thank you very much! I think you pretty much answered all my questions. I appreciate it.
That's funny, I just linked the same article above and had not noticed this point because I was looking for something else! Anyway, thanks - it's encouraging to hear that they seem to be planning to go all the way to chip and pin, and that some banks are already issuing cards for both signature/pin.
I hope that they won't eventually try to push fraud liability to the consumer, as apparently they do in Europe! I definitely wouldn't put it past the financial industry though.
Some banks do have some better facilities for this. Someone replied above me about Chase Quickpay (I'm not familiar with it), and I use the P2P transfer at Capital One 360 all the time. It does still use ACH so it's a two-business day wait for the money to become available at the other end, but it's very easy to use from the bank's website.
That's interesting. I would like to learn more, if you have any references you can provide. I vaguely recall reading something to that effect, but I think I wrote it off as being either subtly implied, or just conjecture on someone's part, or it being dependent on some onerous pre-conditions. In other words, it seemed to me to be something that was not very likely to happen. I would love to get some confirmation otherwise.
That's not always the case. Regarding the actual exchange rate, I had read before that the exchange rate on card transactions are more favorable to the traveler than doing a cash exchange (likely because of the volume that the banks do).
Regarding the extra fees that some banks charge on foreign transactions (many charge 3%), thankfully not all banks charge that! For instance, Capital One is one of the few that does not charge a foreign transaction fee to their cardholders.
While I kind of agree with your sentiment, the signature in chip and signature refers to the signature you have to make on the terminal, not the signature on the back of the card.
Thanks for the confirmation, and additional info about the bike rental stations. I don't think the Target breach had anything to do with the move to chip cards. There was a deadline established years ago for everyone to move to the new system by October 2015 (in most cases). This article has some pretty good information on this shift, and current progress.
Let us know which banks you've found so far that are issuing chip and pin cards. I've been following this for a while and looked a few months ago and they were very rare. However, someone commented further down that Wells Fargo cards are both signature and pin, which is pretty cool.
Good point, I think I remember reading this justification as well. Oh well, give the customer a substandard product that doesn't cause them any inconvenience.
From that page, it sounds like Wells Fargo did the right thing and enabled PIN as well as signature. Good to know for the future if I need a US credit card with chip and pin. Thanks!
In case you didn't know, the cards that most banks are now issuing in the US are chip and signature, not chip and pin like in Europe, and I understand that there are some spots that DO NOT accept chip and signature, like unattended tolls, unattended gas stations, and possibly some unattended transportation ticket purchases (trains, etc).
Pretty frustrating that credit card issuers decided to go this route in the US with some bullshit justification that people wouldn't know how to use the cards (WTF?).
While the chip and signature is more resistant to skimming and duplication, it is no more secure than the old magnetic stripe cards if your physical card is stolen. I think they did this to prevent an increase in support costs instead (people requesting to reset PIN numbers, etc).
The same could be said of pretty much every advancement. Guys with clubs are cowards because the barehanded guys don't have a chance. Guys with swords are cowards because the guys with clubs don't stand a chance. Guys with arrows are cowards because the guys with swords across the field don't stand a chance. So on and so forth.
You have to admit that drones are on an entirely different scale of inequality than your examples though. Unlike your examples, the person receiving a drone attack had absolutely zero chance to inflict any physical harm on the person executing the attack. That is not the case for pretty much any other scenario, even something as far fetched as tanks vs clubs.
Remember that open source licenses (as well as creative commons) are actually made possible by copyright laws. If there were no copyright laws, the GPL, for instance, would be completely unenforceable because anyone would be able to do whatever they wanted to do with their copy.
What this decision affects is the new idea that APIs are copyrightable, which could have many yet unknown effects throughout the software industry, open and closed source.
Are the moderators out of their minds today? Some awfully silly comments are getting modded up in this story.
The reason that you don't make minimum wage $100 an hour is because the objective is not to close businesses, but instead to just give employees a chance to survive on a basic level out from their full-time wages. Government (as an expression of larger society) does well to ensure that business owners don't get rich by making their employees poor and by making them have to go on government assistance. $15 an hour is a good and reasonable minimum wage for an area with such a high cost of living.
The Waltons wealth did not come from their employees payroll. The Waltons wealth is in shares of the company. The company is worth a lot of money and because the Waltons own a lot of the company that makes them very wealthy.
Um, what? Of course the money that they don't pay their employees is a large part of their wealth. Every dollar that they don't pay their employees is a dollar that goes into their pockets, in the form of profit/loss and stock valuation. Oh, it's also a dollar that comes out of taxpayers' pockets too, in the form of food stamps, medicaid, welfare, etc. In other words, taxpayers are partially subsidizing the Waltons' (and many other business owners and stockholders) wealth.
Not really. Sometimes you have to give people a chance to come around to the good ideas if they're not popular or notable at first.
Think about it this way: if Al Franken had been on the Republican side and had spoken up in the same way, he would have been shouted under the table by his own party members and would have become a pariah, perhaps even losing the very next primary election to a more party-line candidate or a tea party challenger.
As much as I feel disappointed and disgusted by things that Obama and other Democrats have done over the last several years, I still don't buy the whole line that some people here on Slashdot trot out all the time: that Democrats and Republicans are the same thing.
You know that this deal would have sailed through and there's no way the FCC would have pushed for Title 2 regulation, if a Republican were in the White House right now.
So remember, as dumb and crappy as some parties' actions have been lately, who you vote for still matters, even if only in limited ways. Yes, some large scale issues are pretty much a wash between the two, but there are still some issues that you can have an influence in with your vote. Pick the party and candidates who you feel are more likely to be on the same side of the issues you care about, regardless of what the naysayers say.
Also, a shout out to Al Franken for being one of, if not the only top politicians to have questioned and criticized this merger from the beginning.
They should only allow reviews from people who actually purchased that product. Their reviews are already a mess, with tons of one star reviews for products that are really meant for the seller.
They already have a mechanism for this too: http://www.amazon.com/gp/commu...
They just need to purge all the other reviews. There's so many scams and agendas both for positive and negative reviews, that nowadays I only trust verified purchase reviews anyway.
I agree with you about time, and would add that it's too precious to spend much of it on Facebook. However, it's nice to at least be aware of the events that are taking place and have the ability to make the choice to go or not.
I also agree with most of what you say - I'm even of the same generation of letters being cheaper than calls, no email, etc. I was just presenting the facts as I perceive them currently. I'm sure that each person will react and respond to those facts differently. Some people may not want to miss out on anything, while others may actively want to miss out on most things.
Regarding email, perhaps I didn't express my idea very clearly. The root of what I was trying to express is that, like it or not, email and the various types of facebook communication all have a different perceived value and importance to recipients. I would think that most people feel that an email is more deserving or demanding for a reply than a mass facebook invitation or post (I could be way off on this, though). And if one sends out a mass facebook message, but only sends an email to a couple of friends that are not on facebook, that puts even more pressure on the email recipients to reply than the facebook friends, just because of the difference in numbers making the email friends not be able to hide among the crowd. Because of this, a facebook user may choose not to contact the email only friends, to not place pressure on them to respond. I hope this makes my perspective a bit more clear.
True, you're probably not going to miss your best friend's birthday party invitation because of not having facebook. What I found seems to happen though is that you may miss something more low-key from someone who you're not necessarily super close friends with.
Think of it from the other side. You want to invite everyone in your friends list (or perhaps a group of 30 friends you've created) to do something, say, go to a local amusement park. It's an added inconvenience to track down the handful of people who don't have facebook. It may be worth the effort, or it may not. You may just forget to invite those people if you're not prompted by the list. Sending an email or calling seems a lot more formal, and may send the wrong message about the importance of this invitation.
Does that make more sense? Now, some people may just not care to get those types of invitations, and prefer to just get the important ones from important people. I would say it's still possible to get missed in the shuffle...