Europe doesn't have the broadcast flag (as of yet), right?
They barely even have HDTV, just one channel called Euro1080.
And HDTV is HDTV, right? A common standard, unlike NTSC and PAL, right?
Nope, the USA uses 8-VSB for the frequency encoding which is generally better suited to the wide-open spaces of rural America while Europe uses COFDM which is generally better suited for the tightly-packed urban centers of Europe.
Plus, because of historical reasons (aka PAL), they tend to use 25FPS frame rate which I'm pretty sure is not part of the ATSC standard.
As the self-titled "father of fascim" Mussolini is entirely appropriate to reference whenever discussing businesses that exist solely because of government help.
In case you haven't heard it before, Mussolini had this to say about fascism: "Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"
At a minimum, you'll get your mechanical royalties
I call bullshit. If you really knew what you were talking about, you would be aware of controlled composition clauses. These are yet another scheme by the RIAA labels to screw the artists. Since you clearly aren't aware of this practice, I'll spell it out for you - it is now entirely too common for an artist to be paid only 75% of their mechanical royalties as a standard contractual clause, particularly for new artists but even established ones get presented with the shaft on this.
Of course these clauses are negotiable, but as with all contracts, it comes down to who needs who more and you, little penniless artist are a dime a dozen as far as the RIAA is concerned so you can take your 75% and suck it up, or take 0% and suck that up.
PS, you know what they said about Mussolini right? "At least he made the trains run on time" - that doesn't excuse all the other abusive things he did and getting even a portion of your mechanical royalties certainly does not excuse the RIAA from all the other terrible things they have done just because they were (and remain) in a position to get away with it.
Even the most lax sources of information that purport to call themselves "news" exercise sufficient respect for their readers not to report the same thing twice within as many hours.
You don't build 1024-way systems unless you're going to make it run a 1024-way OS.
Not true. Plenty of big n-way boxen are configured as clusters of smaller m-way systems. Benefits include redundancy and easy reconfigurability (moving cpus and memory from one "system" to another requires no physical changes to the hardware and may not even require a reboot) plus the NUMA interconnect can be used as a high-speed message passing bus between the individual instances.
There is even a term for it, "cluster in a box." Although 1024 cpus probably aren't all going to fit in one cabinet.
But, I will agree that if you have an n-way system, the "holy grail" is to be able to run it as an n-way single system image. It just isn't always the most desirable configuration.
Combine this with the fact that Cat Stevens just fell under the eye of the Homeland Security Watch List, had his plane diverted to Maine and was kicked out of the United States. As far as I can tell, his main crime was criticizing US involvement in Iraq.
According to the article, he was identified by the "Advanced Passenger Information System." In other words, Bush just took a piss on Cat Stevens.
I fail to see why everyone gets so pissy about publishing whois info, and yet doesn't seem to care about having their phone number publish in the phone book. In both cases, you can pay to have it unlisted.
We do get pissy. The defaults should be for privacy and if you want it to be public you need to take action to make it so.
Just because the current system is fucked up doesn't mean we should quietly accept it when things get worse. I want my domain info to be private by default and I want my telephone and address info to be private by default too. Just like some states have figured out that our driver's license info should be private by default too - of course it took the murder of an actress to change that law in California. I sure hope it doesn't take the murder of a domain owner for congress to pull their collective head out of their collective ass.
Krumholtz says that commercial software alone spurs economic growth and creates jobs.
Yeah, in the same way that shooting yourself in the foot creates jobs for doctors.
PS, why do some many people insist on framing the debate in terms of commercial softwre versus free software? It really is proprietary versus Free. Redhat is commercial, SuSE is commercial, the list of Free and commercial software is quite extensive.
He's a clue for you, they are talking about a themepark, private property were people volunterially pay for the privilege of enjoying the park. Access to privately run amusement parks is not a constitutional issue. No one forces anyone to go in there, if you don't like RFID tags don't go there.
If this was being done by a county, town, or city, to its citizens you would have a point. But since it isn't, you don't.
HeRE's a clue for you: I didn't say ANYTHING about the constitution nor the government in the post you responded to. Megalocorps like Disney are powerful enough to be a significant detrimant to personal freedoms without involving the government at all.
But, since you mentioned it, when the government is so easily swayed to align with the interests of such megalocorps anyway, at what point does a corporate policy start to become a government policy?
I say that by exerting undue influence over our country's governance, the megalocorps are begging to be placed at least partially under the jurisdiction of the constitution. After all, if you are going to mix your business with politics, isn't it fair that politics then be mixed with your business? A little reciprocation to keep things in balance.
Better yet: if the park has wild animals (the dangerous kind of animal) throw the tag in the cage.
If you've paid cash, now they won't even be able to find you to bust you for fucking with the system either since you've just discarded your RFID. Make sure everybody in your party does it at about the same time, else they will find you by tracking your girlfriend.
Re:Before you post: Hands up who has kids!
on
RFID Not Just for Kids
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the article. If I have to wear some tag to help protect thousands of kids from getting lost or being kidnapped then by all means. This is about child safety, not tracking people to help the gestapo.
Yeah! Who cares about freedom, saving the life of even just one child trumps all of that stupid stuff. Who needs freedom anyway when our children are being slaughtered in theme parks all across this great country, home of the free, land of the brave?
My only concern is if a child is abducted, the abductor can just remove the wristband and throw the police off for a while and buy some time.
Yeah! If it makes abducting even just one child easier then that trumps all that stupid freedom stuff!
Can the park individually track where you are? probably, but it's their right to do so - you've voluntarily entered their private property after all...
if their database links your RFID tag to the visa card number you paid with, THEN we're talking problems
So what? You've voluntarily entered their private property and voluntarily given them your VISA number and paid for the privilege after all.
You should just shut up and enjoy yourself since, if they want to stick a a popsicle with an RFID up your ass, it is their private property after all and you did pay for the privilege of that popsicle.
Seriously though, I fail to see how you can justify one boundry and not another -- their tracking of CC usage is just as potentially invasive as their tracking of when you ate lunch and when you went to the bathroom. Ultimately, it may be their private property but they have opened it to the public, at which point the space loses a lot of the privileges of ownership that it would have it were kept locked up with a "no trespassing" sign.
The movie/music industry is big, but it doesn't hold a candle to the tech/consumer electronics industries in CA.
I suspect that part of the problem is that the copyright cartel controls 90+% of the 'official' information flow - television, radio, print even billboards. This puts them in a position to have a huge effect on public and private opinion, something that few other industries are able to do and the copyright cartel gets gets it effectively for free.
The new technology is fine with me. As long as its presence is clearly marked on the DVD box, so that I don't accidentally purchase such a protected DVD.
Is it really fine with you?
Do you really think individual buyers have anywhere near as strong a position in the purchase negotiation as the corps do? Will you still think that if all units from all manufacturers contain the unwanted "feature?"
nor free as in Free Software. There never can be any of those as long as the DMCA is on the books.
All the world is not the USA, at least not yet. It may be illegal in the land of the free, but there are still plenty of other countries where it is legal and can even be Free.
But what does this have to do with anyone paying a license fee for a DVD-ROM?
You bet your bippy we do, look up "3c licensing" and "6c licensing" -- the fees are surprisingly high. Even for DVD-ROM rather than DVD-Video equipment.
We don't pay that either, at least not directly.
If anything, that makes the fees even higher since each middle-man between you and the manufacturer tacks on a percentage. The higher the base price, the larger the absolute value each middleman adds to the price.
One key thing to remember about the Korean peninsula is that they are still at war. At the "end" of the Korean war they signed what is effectively a cease fire agreement. But that's it.
Sure, effectively the war is over. But, combine the fact that it isn't officially over with a paranoia of a state with problems like NK has and what you end up with this a mindset that fighting could resume at any time and that they had better be F'ing prepared.
I don't know enough about Korea to say why they haven't just officially ended the war and started to work things out -- my guess is that enough of the people in power in the Koreas and elsewhere like the status quo enough to stifle any real progress.
I have watched a bunch of south Korean movies recently (bittorrents rock, and hollywood can't make anything worth stealing anyway). Judging from that microcosm it seems like the situation with the north hovers over everything they do and often intrudes into daily life in ways that we Americans would never imagine.
PS, if anyone should happen to be looking for a great korean date movie (no, seriously!), check out "SpyGirl!" it's about a babelicious NK operative who goes to Seoul to retrieve a defector but ends up working at mcdonalds as her cover, doing some ass-kicking and hooking up with a lovable-doofus type guy from the local college and their misadventures together. Fairly light and pretty funny love story, the humor translates well and it really shows just how much like the west south korean is now, but they still have this huge dichotomy involving the North.
And, if you aren't looking for a date movie, check out "Tale of Two Sisters" that is one fucking creepy movie. I didn't notice any NK symbolism in there - just an excellent psychological ghost story, but for all I know it could have been filled with NK references but they just didn't translate too well.
By calling 911, aren't you granting them permission? Problem solved.
The infrastructure being developed can track you even when you DON'T call 911. If that infrastructure is there you can bet that sooner or later the government will abuse it and probably it will be compromised and abused by non-government entities too.
And yes, being in a burning building or danger is a great time to be typing your address into the phone.
You would put the info into the phone only once after each time you've physically relocated it. If you are really more worried that you'll end up in a situation where you can't talk and you forgot to put the info into the phone, then buy a model with the GPS built in (and cross you fingers that if you need to obscure your location, turning off the GPS will really turn it off and not just pretend to).
Considering that most of the money made on the internet is via porn and gambling
Prove it.
Furthermore, "making money" and "e-commerce" are not the same. If you meant monetary transactions, then prove that. If you didn't mean that, then your point is irrelevant.
Furthermore, how does paypal go from being "the industry leader" -- your own words -- to not even being present in the market? My point here is that you are changing your argument from disagreeing with my original statement to something else that is so narrowly defined as to be essentially unrelated to the original premise.
First, Paypal is not a monopoly. There are alternative facilities in existence that can do the same thing. Paypal simply has the luxury of being the industry leader, but they are by no means a monopoly.
Do you understand the definition of a monopoly? It is not "mono." It is the ownership of at least 90% of a market -- that's how microsoft can be a monopoly in the PC market while Apple still exists. So, industry leader with 90% marketshare? MONOPOLY.
Does paypal have 90% of the market? I dunno. But I think neither of us would be surprised if that were the case.
Secondly, Paypal has just as much right to fine a customer for violating its terms of service as your nearest video store has a right to impose a charge on your CC for $2.50 because you returned a video one day late. It's all part of the terms of service.
They may have that right, but that still doesn't mean it isn't abusive as all hell. Furthermore, if the fact that they are charging such fines is hidden in the fine-print legalese of some modified user-agreement that less than 1% of their customer base can understand without spending half an hour deciphering, then that is probably criminally abusive.
Finally, if they are able to get away with imposing such abusive, then that is one clear indication of monopoly power. In a competitive market, pulling that kind of shit would cause a mass exodus to another services provider -- mostly by customers who had never been fined but didn't want to take the chance.
With paypal, yeah there are other providers without that restriction, but their marketshare is so tiny that the only reason you would use one is for a service you know paypal won't do and for all the rest of your regular transcations, you'd still stick with paypal. I myself thought about cancelling my very long-standing paypal account in outrage, until I realized that 99% of the stuff I use paypal for there are no alternatives. I'm sure that I am far from alone in that reaction and subsequent realization.
This privacy freak is really pissed off that so many people take 911 locator service for VOIP and cell-phones so seriously. It is all just a red-herring to distract us from the fact that they are building location tracking into systems that don't need it.
The whole 911 "problem" could be solved in a very simple way - voluntarily. Just add a dohickey to the protocol so that when calling 911 (or any other number you want to send location info to) the phone sends a chunk of data as part of the call. It is up to the phone's owner to program the phone with whatever geographic location information they want transmitted in such cases. For the safety-freaks and soccer moms some phones would come with a GPS that would automagically fill in that chunk with the most recently recorded GPS coordinates. For the privacy-freaks other phones without GPS would require that the current street address be manually typed in, at which point you could easily LIE or just leave it blank if that's what you wanted. Whatever option you choose, the owner of the phone, not the FCC nor the FBI nor the DHS should have control over what is repoted when.
Do that, and all this infrastructure, overhead and complication just goes away, poof! But then so does the ability of the government to use the phone system as a mass-tracking device.
Anyone who has said something like that is a mindless slashdot troll who doesn't know anything about 3rd party processing or merchant accounts. Most merchant account providers have banned adult sites and gambling for years because they are High Risk Industries
Ah, so they want the easy part of the business but not the hard part. I can understand that.
But in turn, I think we need to ask if Paypal is a monopoly. Just how much of all e-commerce passes through paypal? How much of the under $100 market? How much of the person-to-person market? I wouldn't be suprised if paypal had acheived monopoly status in at least one of those markets.
If they are a monopoly, having successfully squeezed out competition, only to begin with-holding sevices, they need a kick in the ass from the FTC because that's abusive.
By the way, it has already been pointed out once so far, and that post got a +5 rating, but the point really needs a +11 rating.
PAYPAL IS FINING THE CUSTOMERS TOO!!
So, if there ever was a time make sure that you had a dummy, empty bank account linked to your paypal account, now is it. All you need is for paypal to arbitrarily decide that you are the kind of customer that they don't want, and poof! there goes $500 from your bank account that you will probably never see again. Maybe even multiples of $500 depending on just how much customer abuse paypal thinks they can get away with since they are unregulated.
Slashdot Mirror
Europe doesn't have the broadcast flag (as of yet), right?
They barely even have HDTV, just one channel called Euro1080.
And HDTV is HDTV, right? A common standard, unlike NTSC and PAL, right?
Nope, the USA uses 8-VSB for the frequency encoding which is generally better suited to the wide-open spaces of rural America while Europe uses COFDM which is generally better suited for the tightly-packed urban centers of Europe.
Plus, because of historical reasons (aka PAL), they tend to use 25FPS frame rate which I'm pretty sure is not part of the ATSC standard.
As the self-titled "father of fascim" Mussolini is entirely appropriate to reference whenever discussing businesses that exist solely because of government help.
In case you haven't heard it before, Mussolini had this to say about fascism:
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"
Whats different is that CNN or Fox News is not an interactive forum like slashdot ... yada yada yada
Never read a joke before, have you?
At a minimum, you'll get your mechanical royalties
I call bullshit. If you really knew what you were talking about, you would be aware of controlled composition clauses. These are yet another scheme by the RIAA labels to screw the artists. Since you clearly aren't aware of this practice, I'll spell it out for you - it is now entirely too common for an artist to be paid only 75% of their mechanical royalties as a standard contractual clause, particularly for new artists but even established ones get presented with the shaft on this.
Of course these clauses are negotiable, but as with all contracts, it comes down to who needs who more and you, little penniless artist are a dime a dozen as far as the RIAA is concerned so you can take your 75% and suck it up, or take 0% and suck that up.
PS, you know what they said about Mussolini right? "At least he made the trains run on time" - that doesn't excuse all the other abusive things he did and getting even a portion of your mechanical royalties certainly does not excuse the RIAA from all the other terrible things they have done just because they were (and remain) in a position to get away with it.
Even the most lax sources of information that purport to call themselves "news" exercise sufficient respect for their readers not to report the same thing twice within as many hours.
Never watched CNN, or Fox News have you?
You don't build 1024-way systems unless you're going to make it run a 1024-way OS.
Not true. Plenty of big n-way boxen are configured as clusters of smaller m-way systems. Benefits include redundancy and easy reconfigurability (moving cpus and memory from one "system" to another requires no physical changes to the hardware and may not even require a reboot) plus the NUMA interconnect can be used as a high-speed message passing bus between the individual instances.
There is even a term for it, "cluster in a box." Although 1024 cpus probably aren't all going to fit in one cabinet.
But, I will agree that if you have an n-way system, the "holy grail" is to be able to run it as an n-way single system image. It just isn't always the most desirable configuration.
I love the use of the plural "unices" in that quote. It caused me to look up on google for the plural of unix, and sure enough, it's correct.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by ye of newly birthed slashdot id.
Combine this with the fact that Cat Stevens just fell under the eye of the Homeland Security Watch List, had his plane diverted to Maine and was kicked out of the United States. As far as I can tell, his main crime was criticizing US involvement in Iraq.
According to the article, he was identified by the "Advanced Passenger Information System." In other words, Bush just took a piss on Cat Stevens.
I fail to see why everyone gets so pissy about publishing whois info, and yet doesn't seem to care about having their phone number publish in the phone book. In both cases, you can pay to have it unlisted.
We do get pissy. The defaults should be for privacy and if you want it to be public you need to take action to make it so.
Just because the current system is fucked up doesn't mean we should quietly accept it when things get worse. I want my domain info to be private by default and I want my telephone and address info to be private by default too. Just like some states have figured out that our driver's license info should be private by default too - of course it took the murder of an actress to change that law in California. I sure hope it doesn't take the murder of a domain owner for congress to pull their collective head out of their collective ass.
-you're on private property. When you entered said property, you agreed to abide by the terms and conditions set forth by the property owners
Just like there is no such right to freedom of speech on private property. Eh?
Krumholtz says that commercial software alone spurs economic growth and creates jobs.
Yeah, in the same way that shooting yourself in the foot creates jobs for doctors.
PS, why do some many people insist on framing the debate in terms of commercial softwre versus free software?
It really is proprietary versus Free. Redhat is commercial, SuSE is commercial, the list of Free and commercial software is quite extensive.
He's a clue for you, they are talking about a themepark, private property were people volunterially pay for the privilege of enjoying the park. Access to privately run amusement parks is not a constitutional issue. No one forces anyone to go in there, if you don't like RFID tags don't go there.
If this was being done by a county, town, or city, to its citizens you would have a point. But since it isn't, you don't.
HeRE's a clue for you: I didn't say ANYTHING about the constitution nor the government in the post you responded to. Megalocorps like Disney are powerful enough to be a significant detrimant to personal freedoms without involving the government at all.
But, since you mentioned it, when the government is so easily swayed to align with the interests of such megalocorps anyway, at what point does a corporate policy start to become a government policy?
I say that by exerting undue influence over our country's governance, the megalocorps are begging to be placed at least partially under the jurisdiction of the constitution. After all, if you are going to mix your business with politics, isn't it fair that politics then be mixed with your business? A little reciprocation to keep things in balance.
Better yet: if the park has wild animals (the dangerous kind of animal) throw the tag in the cage.
If you've paid cash, now they won't even be able to find you to bust you for fucking with the system either since you've just discarded your RFID. Make sure everybody in your party does it at about the same time, else they will find you by tracking your girlfriend.
This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the article. If I have to wear some tag to help protect thousands of kids from getting lost or being kidnapped then by all means. This is about child safety, not tracking people to help the gestapo.
Yeah! Who cares about freedom, saving the life of even just one child trumps all of that stupid stuff. Who needs freedom anyway when our children are being slaughtered in theme parks all across this great country, home of the free, land of the brave?
My only concern is if a child is abducted, the abductor can just remove the wristband and throw the police off for a while and buy some time.
Yeah! If it makes abducting even just one child easier then that trumps all that stupid freedom stuff!
Can the park individually track where you are? probably, but it's their right to do so - you've voluntarily entered their private property after all ...
if their database links your RFID tag to the visa card number you paid with, THEN we're talking problems
So what? You've voluntarily entered their private property and voluntarily given them your VISA number and paid for the privilege after all.
You should just shut up and enjoy yourself since, if they want to stick a a popsicle with an RFID up your ass, it is their private property after all and you did pay for the privilege of that popsicle.
Seriously though, I fail to see how you can justify one boundry and not another -- their tracking of CC usage is just as potentially invasive as their tracking of when you ate lunch and when you went to the bathroom. Ultimately, it may be their private property but they have opened it to the public, at which point the space loses a lot of the privileges of ownership that it would have it were kept locked up with a "no trespassing" sign.
The movie/music industry is big, but it doesn't hold a candle to the tech/consumer electronics industries in CA.
I suspect that part of the problem is that the copyright cartel controls 90+% of the 'official' information flow - television, radio, print even billboards. This puts them in a position to have a huge effect on public and private opinion, something that few other industries are able to do and the copyright cartel gets gets it effectively for free.
The new technology is fine with me. As long as its presence is clearly marked on the DVD box, so that I don't accidentally purchase such a protected DVD.
Is it really fine with you?
Do you really think individual buyers have anywhere near as strong a position in the purchase negotiation as the corps do? Will you still think that if all units from all manufacturers contain the unwanted "feature?"
nor free as in Free Software. There never can be any of those as long as the DMCA is on the books.
All the world is not the USA, at least not yet. It may be illegal in the land of the free, but there are still plenty of other countries where it is legal and can even be Free.
But what does this have to do with anyone paying a license fee for a DVD-ROM?
You bet your bippy we do, look up "3c licensing" and "6c licensing" -- the fees are surprisingly high. Even for DVD-ROM rather than DVD-Video equipment.
We don't pay that either, at least not directly.
If anything, that makes the fees even higher since each middle-man between you and the manufacturer tacks on a percentage. The higher the base price, the larger the absolute value each middleman adds to the price.
One key thing to remember about the Korean peninsula is that they are still at war. At the "end" of the Korean war they signed what is effectively a cease fire agreement. But that's it.
Sure, effectively the war is over. But, combine the fact that it isn't officially over with a paranoia of a state with problems like NK has and what you end up with this a mindset that fighting could resume at any time and that they had better be F'ing prepared.
I don't know enough about Korea to say why they haven't just officially ended the war and started to work things out -- my guess is that enough of the people in power in the Koreas and elsewhere like the status quo enough to stifle any real progress.
I have watched a bunch of south Korean movies recently (bittorrents rock, and hollywood can't make anything worth stealing anyway). Judging from that microcosm it seems like the situation with the north hovers over everything they do and often intrudes into daily life in ways that we Americans would never imagine.
PS, if anyone should happen to be looking for a great korean date movie (no, seriously!), check out "SpyGirl!" it's about a babelicious NK operative who goes to Seoul to retrieve a defector but ends up working at mcdonalds as her cover, doing some ass-kicking and hooking up with a lovable-doofus type guy from the local college and their misadventures together. Fairly light and pretty funny love story, the humor translates well and it really shows just how much like the west south korean is now, but they still have this huge dichotomy involving the North.
And, if you aren't looking for a date movie, check out "Tale of Two Sisters" that is one fucking creepy movie. I didn't notice any NK symbolism in there - just an excellent psychological ghost story, but for all I know it could have been filled with NK references but they just didn't translate too well.
Or... The cloud could be the result of everyone eating too much kimchee during the festivities.
Hey, it's just as plausible as a forest fire!
By calling 911, aren't you granting them permission? Problem solved.
The infrastructure being developed can track you even when you DON'T call 911. If that infrastructure is there you can bet that sooner or later the government will abuse it and probably it will be compromised and abused by non-government entities too.
And yes, being in a burning building or danger is a great time to be typing your address into the phone.
You would put the info into the phone only once after each time you've physically relocated it. If you are really more worried that you'll end up in a situation where you can't talk and you forgot to put the info into the phone, then buy a model with the GPS built in (and cross you fingers that if you need to obscure your location, turning off the GPS will really turn it off and not just pretend to).
Considering that most of the money made on the internet is via porn and gambling
Prove it.
Furthermore, "making money" and "e-commerce" are not the same. If you meant monetary transactions, then prove that. If you didn't mean that, then your point is irrelevant.
Furthermore, how does paypal go from being "the industry leader" -- your own words -- to not even being present in the market? My point here is that you are changing your argument from disagreeing with my original statement to something else that is so narrowly defined as to be essentially unrelated to the original premise.
First, Paypal is not a monopoly. There are alternative facilities in existence that can do the same thing. Paypal simply has the luxury of being the industry leader, but they are by no means a monopoly.
Do you understand the definition of a monopoly? It is not "mono." It is the ownership of at least 90% of a market -- that's how microsoft can be a monopoly in the PC market while Apple still exists. So, industry leader with 90% marketshare?
MONOPOLY.
Does paypal have 90% of the market? I dunno. But I think neither of us would be surprised if that were the case.
Secondly, Paypal has just as much right to fine a customer for violating its terms of service as your nearest video store has a right to impose a charge on your CC for $2.50 because you returned a video one day late. It's all part of the terms of service.
They may have that right, but that still doesn't mean it isn't abusive as all hell. Furthermore, if the fact that they are charging such fines is hidden in the fine-print legalese of some modified user-agreement that less than 1% of their customer base can understand without spending half an hour deciphering, then that is probably criminally abusive.
Finally, if they are able to get away with imposing such abusive, then that is one clear indication of monopoly power. In a competitive market, pulling that kind of shit would cause a mass exodus to another services provider -- mostly by customers who had never been fined but didn't want to take the chance.
With paypal, yeah there are other providers without that restriction, but their marketshare is so tiny that the only reason you would use one is for a service you know paypal won't do and for all the rest of your regular transcations, you'd still stick with paypal. I myself thought about cancelling my very long-standing paypal account in outrage, until I realized that 99% of the stuff I use paypal for there are no alternatives. I'm sure that I am far from alone in that reaction and subsequent realization.
This privacy freak is really pissed off that so many people take 911 locator service for VOIP and cell-phones so seriously. It is all just a red-herring to distract us from the fact that they are building location tracking into systems that don't need it.
The whole 911 "problem" could be solved in a very simple way - voluntarily. Just add a dohickey to the protocol so that when calling 911 (or any other number you want to send location info to) the phone sends a chunk of data as part of the call. It is up to the phone's owner to program the phone with whatever geographic location information they want transmitted in such cases. For the safety-freaks and soccer moms some phones would come with a GPS that would automagically fill in that chunk with the most recently recorded GPS coordinates. For the privacy-freaks other phones without GPS would require that the current street address be manually typed in, at which point you could easily LIE or just leave it blank if that's what you wanted. Whatever option you choose, the owner of the phone, not the FCC nor the FBI nor the DHS should have control over what is repoted when.
Do that, and all this infrastructure, overhead and complication just goes away, poof! But then so does the ability of the government to use the phone system as a mass-tracking device.
Anyone who has said something like that is a mindless slashdot troll who doesn't know anything about 3rd party processing or merchant accounts. Most merchant account providers have banned adult sites and gambling for years because they are High Risk Industries
Ah, so they want the easy part of the business but not the hard part. I can understand that.
But in turn, I think we need to ask if Paypal is a monopoly. Just how much of all e-commerce passes through paypal? How much of the under $100 market? How much of the person-to-person market? I wouldn't be suprised if paypal had acheived monopoly status in at least one of those markets.
If they are a monopoly, having successfully squeezed out competition, only to begin with-holding sevices, they need a kick in the ass from the FTC because that's abusive.
By the way, it has already been pointed out once so far, and that post got a +5 rating, but the point really needs a +11 rating.
PAYPAL IS FINING THE CUSTOMERS TOO!!
So, if there ever was a time make sure that you had a dummy, empty bank account linked to your paypal account, now is it. All you need is for paypal to arbitrarily decide that you are the kind of customer that they don't want, and poof! there goes $500 from your bank account that you will probably never see again. Maybe even multiples of $500 depending on just how much customer abuse paypal thinks they can get away with since they are unregulated.