But the onus is upon the account holder to point out fraud. By default, if the account holder does nothing, fraud or disputed transactions will be credited to the requesting party. You have to audit your statement every month to make sure it's correct.
I have this weird idea that fraudulent transactions should be denied by default.
Lastschrift is the same as direct debit, but most business seem to require it.
Sure it works most of the time or no one would do it. But when it goes wrong you're in a world of hurt. Suddenly some hacker empties your bank account...getting your money back once it's gone is a lot harder... And in any dispute, the business has the upper hand (and that's why they like it).
I just moved to Germany and had to solve the same problem... You have only one choice, O2. All the others require a long-term contract (usually 2 years) to obtain. They wave their hands about getting out of the contract if you have a "good enough" reason, but you have to grovel before them and provide documentation. The prepaid plans of all other companies do not offer data at all. A "subscription" requires a residence and a German bank account so they can automatically debit (Lastschrift) and don't worry, they never make mistakes when debiting your account! And organizations doing Lastschrift never get hacked because they employ magic warrior fairies.
O2 has several packs you can add to your prepaid, the most interesting being "InternetM" which is 10 euro for 200 MB/month. When you go over it still works but you're kicked down to about 6kb/s. The "InternetL" pack provides 5GB for 25 euro/month, but they refused to add it to my prepaid plan. Apparently it's only available with a subscription.
The O2 network is kind of a joke. It cuts out for ~minutes about once an hour, and ping times often exceed 30s. My ssh and IMAP connections are regularly broken, and my IP gets reassigned very frequently. I looked online at their accounting of my usage, and it's about 100 pages of crap. They record every stupid packet. (I suspect this is the reason it cuts out every hour -- they're running some program at the base station which sums your usage for the last hour)
Oh don't worry, there was a little fight over moderation between "insightful" and "overrated". I always thought slashdot needs a "-1 disagree" moderation...but "overrated" gets used instead. Someone even went so far as to go back and mod down my posts on other stories, they disagreed so much.
I refuse to expend my resources on things which do not benefit me. It is in no way my obligation to spend CPU cycles and bandwidth spinning flash ads. These things also may cause me tangible harm, in viruses, privacy violating tracking, etc. You see loading flash ads on my n900. It's sllooowww, and 3G is not that fast in the first place. You better believe I run an ad blocker there. The marginal cost to me on a desktop computer is lower, but the principal is the same.
P.S. I never, ever click on ads anyway. So I'm saving you money in bandwidth by not requesting your ads. Hmmm...are pages with un-clicked ads self-supporting in bandwidth costs? Then we can just load ads in a hidden div. Surely advertisers would catch on if people started doing that. But I'm still not going to burn CPU to animate your gif or run flash or java.
P.P.S. I seriously lament the death of journalism. I really wish there was a way I could pay for it. But in no way can I consider annoying me to be a form of payment. Best I do right now is buy the print Economist on a semi-regular basis. But I'm not spending $50 because I visited Ars once. (I'm not a regular reader there) I'd hardly call that "journalism" anyway...
Why don't there exist subscription "networks"? If you look at the sites slashdot links to, I bet you could list 20 sites that get 90% of the links. These guys should all get together and create a network such that a subscription on one site buys you no ads on the other sites. Most subscriptions would end up being with link farms like google news or discussion sites like slashdot, probably... Buying subscriptions for one-off sites that appear on a link farm is not worthwhile. This needs to be the regime of micro-payments. Of course very small payments are also impractical, so one solution is to aggregate.
Personally I'd put a voting meter too (kind of like stumbleupon), kind of a thumbs-up, thumbs-down meaning "I'm happy paying for this" or "Get this shite out of my face". That information that could be used for many purposes by the payment network admins...
Go ahead and implement RFC31783, the HTTP COMPENSATIONNEGOTIATION extension, and I will use it. Or block people who use ad blockers. It's your perogative.
You object to my moralistic argument but you clearly feel it's my moral obligation to view your annoying ads. I smell a double standard...
Remove morality from the argument. This is business. You want to make money, I don't begrudge you that. I don't want to be annoyed. Don't begrudge me that. Now get creative.
If you don't want to see adverts don't visit any websites that have adverts on them.
That's supposed to work how? I'll just reprogram my browser to send a HTTP DOESTHISSITEHAVEADS request before following every link...
Besides, without adverts the only way websites will be able to fund themselves is through fees. Would you rather pay a few dollars a month for every website you visit?
Yes. But I don't want to juggle 50 different subscriptions at $50/year each. Get creative folks.
I do have a couple subscriptions, but I'm not going to buy a subscription for a one-off site I visit because the link appeared on slashdot (or google news, or twitter...). The threshold for buying a subscription is very high. e.g. I had one for lwn.net because I loved their excellent kernel traffic summaries, and I found myself reading it weekly for that.
Ads are invasive, intrusive, annoying, and I don't want to see them. ever. There are laws against sending advertisements over the fax and cold-calling cell phones. The logic is that the recipient must pay for the unsolicited advertisement (in fax paper, toner, or cell phone minutes).
Internet ads are no different. I pay for bandwidth and connection time, so your ad directly costs me money, and it should be illegal for that reason. It costs me time too, making your page slower and more annoying. I don't want to have to hunt for the content among all the cleverly disguised ads. I don't want to have to examine the links to figure out which ones are ads and which ones are legitimate.
I will continue blocking ads until the end of time. If you can't figure out how to make money without annoying people, that's your problem. Get creative folks, and stop whining about how you wish people would just be more receptive to being annoyed.
Wouldn't it be nice if law enforcement successfully operated on the intertubes? Why does it take a lawsuit by Microsoft to perform this kind of action? Why does my mail server still have 95% of incoming mail criminal in nature?
But with a real tablet computer and a stylus (e.g. Lenovo x-series tablets), in addition to erasing you also get a pencil that can cut & paste, resize, move, add space in the middle of the page, highlight, color, change the color of already written text, and annotate pdfs (in case the lecturer hands out slides in pdf format), and undo.
It's called Xournal. I frakking love it. Completely changed the way I work. Now I don't have to carry a backpack full of printed articles.
I also use Zotero. It's a bibliographic database add-on for firefox, and it will store full-text pdf's. If you set up xournal as your default pdf viewer, you can annotate and store the annotations for papers. So I no longer carry any printed paper or notes anymore.
If you're in science or engineering and deal in diagrams, equations, and journal articles, this beats the crap out of paper & pencil.
I hope to see more real tablet computers this year. Everyone has decided to stop manufacturing tablets with high-resolution screens, and use wide screens too, which means in portrait mode your tablet is blocky (can't read subscripts of equations) and too tall (because it's 16:10 rather than 4:3). So while the iPad sucks on all the above points, I hope it spurs some new & interesting tablets this year. Pen input (wacom) also needs improvement, especially near the edges of the screens where precision is lost.
Yes. All my work you can find on arXiv.org. When you submit there, you have to choose the license under which the arXiv can distribute, and two of the options are Creative Commons licenses. We submit our articles to the arXiv first, and then to journals. This means that when the journals receive it, they know the content is already out, and they're not going to get an exclusive distribution deal in any case. There used to be a "preprint" system in which major labs would physically mail around recent articles. The WWW started at CERN and is an outgrowth of this idea.
Everyone should use the arXiv. There are sections for many scientific disciplines, but far from all of them (all it would take is a request to start a new one). In many other fields, the journals exercise draconian control over the scientists (Medicine, Computer Science) and that needs to stop. They work for us, not the other way around.
But, I'm talking about journal articles -- I haven't written any books, and don't really intend to. For scientific journals I agree copyright is a useless hindrance. It was a nice tool when distribution is expensive, but now that the marginal cost of distribution has gone to zero, it's better done with a central government grant, and open access. Now we're just missing a peer-review/referee system attached to the arXiv. When that happens, the journals will die for good.
Yeah you should see the gymnastics I go through trying to find concepts which may exist in other disciplines but are given different names. Can't search for equations at all. But even if I could, different disciplines generally don't give the same symbol to the same concept, or may express it in totally different ways, so it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to see they might be talking about the same thing. Someday search engines will be this smart. But by that time they'd be able to automatically generate some darn good papers too...
Apparently you aren't in an academic environment. You should see the USB sticks full of pdf and djvu textbooks that are being passed around. Convenient reading, maybe not. But search functionality? Hell yeah. Have you seen the indices of most technical (Ph.D. level) textbooks? They're usually shorter than the table of contents. I don't know about you, but I need to be able to search my textbooks. Most of these seem to be coming from library scanning operations in countries more relaxed about copyright, and can be found on some torrent sites if you know what to look for. If publishers were smart, they'd start distributing a CD/USB key with the pdf/djvu of the text as well. There's also a growing movement of free and open textbooks, and "print on demand" services. Authors don't usually make much money from the publishers anyway, and do the writing to further their own career, rather than for cash. So it makes a lot of sense to do free publishing.
I think in 10 years time, the printed textbook will be an anachronism, and getting paid by a publisher to write your textbook will be too.
Good question. I don't think anyone knows yet. People have gotten Android on the N800. So it's likely a similar recipe will work on the N900. Of course those "internet tablets" didn't have a GSM radio.
I'm liking this new approach of Nokia toward open source, with Maemo and Qt. It's a smart move. Python bindings will make for rapid app development. They should soon have armies of OSS developers making apps for their new phone (N900). I must be dreaming, to have both Google's Android and Maemo available on what is historically the most closed computing platform in recent history (cell phones). It seems it will be possible to install both on their new phones. I hope for lots of cross-pollenation, and an app list that puts the proprietary iCrap to shame.
ARM is a different instruction set entirely. x86_64 vs. x86_32 differ only in some memory layout, but the binary instructions are 99% the same. So it's easy to write a wrapper. linux32 would not work. You also need an instruction set emulator (e.g. bochs), which would be quite slow.
A three year old is perfectly capable of asking and answering her own questions. This is a fundamental aspect of science (as well as learning, growing up, and life). Therefore it should be taught as soon as the child is capable of understanding it.
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia," but only slightly less well known is this: "Never assume criminals are hyper aware and intelligent!" MUAAAAHAahaaaa!!!
Your punishment is to watch a few episodes of COPS.
I'm sure there are 1000 "password wallet" applications out there that will do all this for your grandmother. I haven't looked. (kwalletmanager?) And I'm too paranoid to use them anyway. And I configured vim to automatically decrypt/encrypt files when I edit them. While I'm at it, here's the perl script. This is a solution for me, not your grandmother. But the principle can transfer.
If there *isn't* some suitable password manager for your grandmother, why not write one? As Scheier says, passwords are dead.
My bank asks these stupid questions. I think it's the only instance where I actually recorded my gibberish answers to such questions.
Slashdot Mirror
Good thing you've never been hospitalized due to a serious illness, taken a long vacation, had the post misdirect your mail, etc.
Granting fraudulent transactions by default is a stupid idea.
But the onus is upon the account holder to point out fraud. By default, if the account holder does nothing, fraud or disputed transactions will be credited to the requesting party. You have to audit your statement every month to make sure it's correct.
I have this weird idea that fraudulent transactions should be denied by default.
Lastschrift is the same as direct debit, but most business seem to require it.
Sure it works most of the time or no one would do it. But when it goes wrong you're in a world of hurt. Suddenly some hacker empties your bank account...getting your money back once it's gone is a lot harder... And in any dispute, the business has the upper hand (and that's why they like it).
I just moved to Germany and had to solve the same problem... You have only one choice, O2. All the others require a long-term contract (usually 2 years) to obtain. They wave their hands about getting out of the contract if you have a "good enough" reason, but you have to grovel before them and provide documentation. The prepaid plans of all other companies do not offer data at all. A "subscription" requires a residence and a German bank account so they can automatically debit (Lastschrift) and don't worry, they never make mistakes when debiting your account! And organizations doing Lastschrift never get hacked because they employ magic warrior fairies.
O2 has several packs you can add to your prepaid, the most interesting being "InternetM" which is 10 euro for 200 MB/month. When you go over it still works but you're kicked down to about 6kb/s. The "InternetL" pack provides 5GB for 25 euro/month, but they refused to add it to my prepaid plan. Apparently it's only available with a subscription.
The O2 network is kind of a joke. It cuts out for ~minutes about once an hour, and ping times often exceed 30s. My ssh and IMAP connections are regularly broken, and my IP gets reassigned very frequently. I looked online at their accounting of my usage, and it's about 100 pages of crap. They record every stupid packet. (I suspect this is the reason it cuts out every hour -- they're running some program at the base station which sums your usage for the last hour)
Oh don't worry, there was a little fight over moderation between "insightful" and "overrated". I always thought slashdot needs a "-1 disagree" moderation...but "overrated" gets used instead. Someone even went so far as to go back and mod down my posts on other stories, they disagreed so much.
I refuse to expend my resources on things which do not benefit me. It is in no way my obligation to spend CPU cycles and bandwidth spinning flash ads. These things also may cause me tangible harm, in viruses, privacy violating tracking, etc. You see loading flash ads on my n900. It's sllooowww, and 3G is not that fast in the first place. You better believe I run an ad blocker there. The marginal cost to me on a desktop computer is lower, but the principal is the same.
P.S. I never, ever click on ads anyway. So I'm saving you money in bandwidth by not requesting your ads. Hmmm...are pages with un-clicked ads self-supporting in bandwidth costs? Then we can just load ads in a hidden div. Surely advertisers would catch on if people started doing that. But I'm still not going to burn CPU to animate your gif or run flash or java.
P.P.S. I seriously lament the death of journalism. I really wish there was a way I could pay for it. But in no way can I consider annoying me to be a form of payment. Best I do right now is buy the print Economist on a semi-regular basis. But I'm not spending $50 because I visited Ars once. (I'm not a regular reader there) I'd hardly call that "journalism" anyway...
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
I never said "don't charge me". I'm unwilling to be annoyed and have my time/attention wasted. I'm not unwilling to pay for content.
ERROR 3734: Logic fault. Terminating conversation...
Actually slashdot allows high-karma moderators to disable ads. So my ad blocker is still running, but slashdot doesn't show me ads. ;)
For a concrete suggestion:
Why don't there exist subscription "networks"? If you look at the sites slashdot links to, I bet you could list 20 sites that get 90% of the links. These guys should all get together and create a network such that a subscription on one site buys you no ads on the other sites. Most subscriptions would end up being with link farms like google news or discussion sites like slashdot, probably... Buying subscriptions for one-off sites that appear on a link farm is not worthwhile. This needs to be the regime of micro-payments. Of course very small payments are also impractical, so one solution is to aggregate.
Personally I'd put a voting meter too (kind of like stumbleupon), kind of a thumbs-up, thumbs-down meaning "I'm happy paying for this" or "Get this shite out of my face". That information that could be used for many purposes by the payment network admins...
Go ahead and implement RFC31783, the HTTP COMPENSATIONNEGOTIATION extension, and I will use it. Or block people who use ad blockers. It's your perogative.
You object to my moralistic argument but you clearly feel it's my moral obligation to view your annoying ads. I smell a double standard...
Remove morality from the argument. This is business. You want to make money, I don't begrudge you that. I don't want to be annoyed. Don't begrudge me that. Now get creative.
If you don't want to see adverts don't visit any websites that have adverts on them.
That's supposed to work how? I'll just reprogram my browser to send a HTTP DOESTHISSITEHAVEADS request before following every link...
Besides, without adverts the only way websites will be able to fund themselves is through fees. Would you rather pay a few dollars a month for every website you visit?
Yes. But I don't want to juggle 50 different subscriptions at $50/year each. Get creative folks.
I do have a couple subscriptions, but I'm not going to buy a subscription for a one-off site I visit because the link appeared on slashdot (or google news, or twitter...). The threshold for buying a subscription is very high. e.g. I had one for lwn.net because I loved their excellent kernel traffic summaries, and I found myself reading it weekly for that.
Get creative.
Ads are invasive, intrusive, annoying, and I don't want to see them. ever. There are laws against sending advertisements over the fax and cold-calling cell phones. The logic is that the recipient must pay for the unsolicited advertisement (in fax paper, toner, or cell phone minutes).
Internet ads are no different. I pay for bandwidth and connection time, so your ad directly costs me money, and it should be illegal for that reason. It costs me time too, making your page slower and more annoying. I don't want to have to hunt for the content among all the cleverly disguised ads. I don't want to have to examine the links to figure out which ones are ads and which ones are legitimate.
I will continue blocking ads until the end of time. If you can't figure out how to make money without annoying people, that's your problem. Get creative folks, and stop whining about how you wish people would just be more receptive to being annoyed.
Wouldn't it be nice if law enforcement successfully operated on the intertubes? Why does it take a lawsuit by Microsoft to perform this kind of action? Why does my mail server still have 95% of incoming mail criminal in nature?
A man can dream...
But with a real tablet computer and a stylus (e.g. Lenovo x-series tablets), in addition to erasing you also get a pencil that can cut & paste, resize, move, add space in the middle of the page, highlight, color, change the color of already written text, and annotate pdfs (in case the lecturer hands out slides in pdf format), and undo.
It's called Xournal. I frakking love it. Completely changed the way I work. Now I don't have to carry a backpack full of printed articles.
I also use Zotero. It's a bibliographic database add-on for firefox, and it will store full-text pdf's. If you set up xournal as your default pdf viewer, you can annotate and store the annotations for papers. So I no longer carry any printed paper or notes anymore.
If you're in science or engineering and deal in diagrams, equations, and journal articles, this beats the crap out of paper & pencil.
I hope to see more real tablet computers this year. Everyone has decided to stop manufacturing tablets with high-resolution screens, and use wide screens too, which means in portrait mode your tablet is blocky (can't read subscripts of equations) and too tall (because it's 16:10 rather than 4:3). So while the iPad sucks on all the above points, I hope it spurs some new & interesting tablets this year. Pen input (wacom) also needs improvement, especially near the edges of the screens where precision is lost.
Yes. All my work you can find on arXiv.org. When you submit there, you have to choose the license under which the arXiv can distribute, and two of the options are Creative Commons licenses. We submit our articles to the arXiv first, and then to journals. This means that when the journals receive it, they know the content is already out, and they're not going to get an exclusive distribution deal in any case. There used to be a "preprint" system in which major labs would physically mail around recent articles. The WWW started at CERN and is an outgrowth of this idea.
Everyone should use the arXiv. There are sections for many scientific disciplines, but far from all of them (all it would take is a request to start a new one). In many other fields, the journals exercise draconian control over the scientists (Medicine, Computer Science) and that needs to stop. They work for us, not the other way around.
But, I'm talking about journal articles -- I haven't written any books, and don't really intend to. For scientific journals I agree copyright is a useless hindrance. It was a nice tool when distribution is expensive, but now that the marginal cost of distribution has gone to zero, it's better done with a central government grant, and open access. Now we're just missing a peer-review/referee system attached to the arXiv. When that happens, the journals will die for good.
Yeah you should see the gymnastics I go through trying to find concepts which may exist in other disciplines but are given different names. Can't search for equations at all. But even if I could, different disciplines generally don't give the same symbol to the same concept, or may express it in totally different ways, so it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to see they might be talking about the same thing. Someday search engines will be this smart. But by that time they'd be able to automatically generate some darn good papers too...
Apparently you aren't in an academic environment. You should see the USB sticks full of pdf and djvu textbooks that are being passed around. Convenient reading, maybe not. But search functionality? Hell yeah. Have you seen the indices of most technical (Ph.D. level) textbooks? They're usually shorter than the table of contents. I don't know about you, but I need to be able to search my textbooks. Most of these seem to be coming from library scanning operations in countries more relaxed about copyright, and can be found on some torrent sites if you know what to look for. If publishers were smart, they'd start distributing a CD/USB key with the pdf/djvu of the text as well. There's also a growing movement of free and open textbooks, and "print on demand" services. Authors don't usually make much money from the publishers anyway, and do the writing to further their own career, rather than for cash. So it makes a lot of sense to do free publishing.
I think in 10 years time, the printed textbook will be an anachronism, and getting paid by a publisher to write your textbook will be too.
Good question. I don't think anyone knows yet. People have gotten Android on the N800. So it's likely a similar recipe will work on the N900. Of course those "internet tablets" didn't have a GSM radio.
I'm liking this new approach of Nokia toward open source, with Maemo and Qt. It's a smart move. Python bindings will make for rapid app development. They should soon have armies of OSS developers making apps for their new phone (N900). I must be dreaming, to have both Google's Android and Maemo available on what is historically the most closed computing platform in recent history (cell phones). It seems it will be possible to install both on their new phones. I hope for lots of cross-pollenation, and an app list that puts the proprietary iCrap to shame.
ARM is a different instruction set entirely. x86_64 vs. x86_32 differ only in some memory layout, but the binary instructions are 99% the same. So it's easy to write a wrapper. linux32 would not work. You also need an instruction set emulator (e.g. bochs), which would be quite slow.
If you liked BSG and Wing Commander, then check out Beyond the Red Line, based on the FreeSpace2 engine: http://www.beyondtheredline.net/demo.html
A three year old is perfectly capable of asking and answering her own questions. This is a fundamental aspect of science (as well as learning, growing up, and life). Therefore it should be taught as soon as the child is capable of understanding it.
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia," but only slightly less well known is this: "Never assume criminals are hyper aware and intelligent!" MUAAAAHAahaaaa!!!
Your punishment is to watch a few episodes of COPS.
I'm sure there are 1000 "password wallet" applications out there that will do all this for your grandmother. I haven't looked. (kwalletmanager?) And I'm too paranoid to use them anyway. And I configured vim to automatically decrypt/encrypt files when I edit them. While I'm at it, here's the perl script. This is a solution for me, not your grandmother. But the principle can transfer.
If there *isn't* some suitable password manager for your grandmother, why not write one? As Scheier says, passwords are dead.
My bank asks these stupid questions. I think it's the only instance where I actually recorded my gibberish answers to such questions.