They may not be afraid of the nations of the world when it comes to diplomatic and economic sanctions, but they'll cry uncle once the RIAA starts serving them with lawsuits.
That may be offset by cash not being subject to chargebacks when someone goes on a shopping spree on a stolen card.
True, but for diligent retailers a chargeback is extremely rare. We lose more each year in cash shortages and counterfeit bills than we do in chargebacks. The best for a retailer is PIN debit transactions as they are like cash and can't be disputed or charged back. We use a feature called "debit steering" at our POS stations so that any transaction over $25 will default to debit if a customer swipes a debit Visa/MC. I love seeing a $500 or higher sale go through as debit, saved me on the credit card percentage based fee and also no chance for a dispute.
Believe it or not, in addition to the internal handling costs for a retailer to count cash there are bank fees. Most commercial banks actually charge businesses a fee to accept cash deposits. Yes, when I make a deposit of cash to the bank they charge my business a fee to count that cash and put it into their vault. In addition I must pay for change (rolled coin, singles, fives, and tens) and keep a stock of change in my business safe. We really love it when a customer pays by debit and gets cash back at the same time...less cash for us to handle at the end of the day.
Cash also attracts thieves, hence the traditional targets for holdups are convenience stores and smaller businesses that don't do much (if any) credit card business. Years ago liquor stores didn't accept credit cards (might have been a law prohibiting it in NY, not sure) and they were always targets for late night armed robberies.
We use a loyalty program to track customers, not their bankcards, so cash or credit card makes no difference from that aspect. I'd say most retailers do very little tracking via the bankcard numbers since they would be exposed to PCI issues if they stored the data and it was hacked. However, at the Mastercard/Visa level they definitely are tracking consumer buying patterns and even selling that aggregate data back to retailers.
The Onion skewered the "sponsored content" concept nicely yesterday. Even sponsored content needs to meet editorial standards, maybe even more so since you are accepting compensation for allowing them to use your brand name to promote theirs.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is a well known conservative medical association. Considering they only have about 3,000 members it's kind of silly to even seek their opinion. They certainly have a right to lobby for changes to government health care policy decisions but when they cross the line and contradict verified and tested scientific and medical research they should be ignored. They were one of the groups on the anti-vaccine bandwagon back in 2003.
My dad is 82, and he won't print out more than a page or two because he's too cheap.:)
But the guy writing the article talked about DDOS and redundancy for the servers so he probably is familiar with the ability to view a PDF (though for some reason he was surprised that he could not print b&w documents with just an HP magenta cartridge).
The author of the linked story at Business Insider sounds quasi-tech and was a volunteer for the phone calls. He received an email late Monday night with a 60 page PDF of instructions and lists of names to call, and complained that he had to print it at home. Who prints PDF's when they can just view the document on their PC and make the calls, especially on a home inkjet printer?
It sounds like not only was the development of this tool a disaster but so was implementation at the user end point. If this tech-savvy guy tried to print at home with limited success just imagine what the "regular" Romney supporters were doing (or not doing) when they got the 60 page PDF.
but if it was private individuals reselling items at a market price then I don't see a real case here for prosecution
So "Bob's hardware" sells a few dozen generators to "Bob" at regular price, who then sells them as a private individual at the currently inflated market-price...
Seems a bit easy to abuse.
I don't know about "easy". Bob's Hardware would need to collect sales tax from Bob, and Bob would be limited in the payment methods he could accept (i.e. cash). If he took other payment methods (Paypal, bankcard, check) it would leave a paper trail with big numbers of the size that catch the eye of tax auditors. Even cash is tougher to hide now thanks to the anti-terrorism laws.
And of course the scenario itself is clearly not even an arms-length transaction so I believe your example would fall under the jurisdiction of the AG.
I am not actually familiar with the laws that apply in this case. I know there were news reports of people buying out the stock at Home Depot and then selling from their trucks a few miles away. They may not have been illegally price gouging, but they likely were violating laws about commercial activity on public streets, failure to collect sales tax, zoning restrictions against commercial activity in a residential zone, etc.
If these were ads from storefront businesses then the AG should get involved, but if it was private individuals reselling items at a market price then I don't see a real case here for prosecution. I own a hardware store and we have been crazy busy these past two weeks trying to keep up with demand for batteries, gas cans, generators, extension cords, and other storm goods. Our prices are the same today as they were a month ago, and in fact some of our batteries are on sale and we kept them on sale. I know of a few stores that did raise their prices on generators and some other goods, seems like a poor decision as the customer will likely find out later (or already knew) and will remember that price gouge when choosing where to shop during "normal" times.
The UK government has already stated that they will not let Assange leave the country, so he's stuck in that embassy anyway. There have been rumors of smuggling him to the airport in a diplomatic limo, or hiring him as a diplomat, but those are not practical and the UK could detain him once he left the embassy grounds. So why bother storming the embassy?
If by chance they do storm the embassy then it will be obvious that the US government stepped up the pressure and got impatient. Get the popcorn out, this could get interesting.
I've been using Cloudflare for my DNS hosting since the beta days and they are an outstanding group of individuals. Their free DNS hosting is top-notch, with no pressure to upgrade to the paid option. They are some of the same people behind Project Honeypot. It's good to see firms like Cloudflare stand up and be counted when free and open access to information is threatened.
Moving to the cloud, whether Apple or Microsoft or any of the other players, has two main purposes:
- Guarantee ongoing profits through subscriptions and micro-payments to the providers for storage, use of cloud-based applications, or viewing or listening to cloud-based media.
- Control of digital media, making DRM easy to enforce since your audio and video files will all be on their servers to be scanned, audited, and confiscated.
Even with the fluctuating prices for hard drives the cost to store media locally is lower than ever, and there are plenty of options for sharing your media over the web yourself due to the low cost of high speed Internet access.
Alphagrip was also going to replace keyboards. I use the controller on occasion, it does function nicely as a game controller/keyboard but just like most people I am sticking with my QWERTY keyboard.
There is a follow-up blog post where Zink backtracks a bit and admits the headers could be forged.
"In comments of various blogs a lot of people have suggested that these headers are spoofed, or there was a botnet connecting to Yahoo Mail from a Windows PC and sent mail that way. Yes, it’s entirely possible that bot on a compromised PC connected to Yahoo Mail, inserted the the message-ID thus overriding Yahoo’s own Message-IDs and added the “Yahoo Mail for Android” tagline at the bottom of the message all in an elaborate deception to make it look like the spam was coming from Android devices."
I had forgotten about Yahoo Groups, so just went to explore them. And thanks for the feedback about Mailman. It sounds like it's not much of a change from Listmanager in terms of functionality. My users are really looking for the threaded web discussion interface and both Yahoo and Google seem to have that in a reasonable format.
Slashdot Mirror
Macau's Banco Delta Asia, the new HSBC for hiding your money.
They may not be afraid of the nations of the world when it comes to diplomatic and economic sanctions, but they'll cry uncle once the RIAA starts serving them with lawsuits.
That may be offset by cash not being subject to chargebacks when someone goes on a shopping spree on a stolen card.
True, but for diligent retailers a chargeback is extremely rare. We lose more each year in cash shortages and counterfeit bills than we do in chargebacks. The best for a retailer is PIN debit transactions as they are like cash and can't be disputed or charged back. We use a feature called "debit steering" at our POS stations so that any transaction over $25 will default to debit if a customer swipes a debit Visa/MC. I love seeing a $500 or higher sale go through as debit, saved me on the credit card percentage based fee and also no chance for a dispute.
Believe it or not, in addition to the internal handling costs for a retailer to count cash there are bank fees. Most commercial banks actually charge businesses a fee to accept cash deposits. Yes, when I make a deposit of cash to the bank they charge my business a fee to count that cash and put it into their vault. In addition I must pay for change (rolled coin, singles, fives, and tens) and keep a stock of change in my business safe. We really love it when a customer pays by debit and gets cash back at the same time...less cash for us to handle at the end of the day.
Cash also attracts thieves, hence the traditional targets for holdups are convenience stores and smaller businesses that don't do much (if any) credit card business. Years ago liquor stores didn't accept credit cards (might have been a law prohibiting it in NY, not sure) and they were always targets for late night armed robberies.
We use a loyalty program to track customers, not their bankcards, so cash or credit card makes no difference from that aspect. I'd say most retailers do very little tracking via the bankcard numbers since they would be exposed to PCI issues if they stored the data and it was hacked. However, at the Mastercard/Visa level they definitely are tracking consumer buying patterns and even selling that aggregate data back to retailers.
John
Very amusing, thanks for pointing this one out.
The Onion skewered the "sponsored content" concept nicely yesterday. Even sponsored content needs to meet editorial standards, maybe even more so since you are accepting compensation for allowing them to use your brand name to promote theirs.
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/01/flu_deaths_influenza_cases.html
The most common strain this year is H3N2 and it's one of the strains covered in this year's flu shot.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is a well known conservative medical association. Considering they only have about 3,000 members it's kind of silly to even seek their opinion. They certainly have a right to lobby for changes to government health care policy decisions but when they cross the line and contradict verified and tested scientific and medical research they should be ignored. They were one of the groups on the anti-vaccine bandwagon back in 2003.
to welcome our new healthy, upstream swimming overlords.
What could possible go wrong?
If she finds out about this she will demand that we dine out at the local lobster restaurant until the fish/lobster balance is restored.
I didn't RTFA article carefully enough...thanks for posting this. If I had mod points I'd mod it up, but then they'd remove my post anyway. :)
Doh...I need to read more carefully.
Actually in situations like this the internet has a way to shut that whole thing down.
My dad is 82, and he won't print out more than a page or two because he's too cheap. :)
But the guy writing the article talked about DDOS and redundancy for the servers so he probably is familiar with the ability to view a PDF (though for some reason he was surprised that he could not print b&w documents with just an HP magenta cartridge).
The author of the linked story at Business Insider sounds quasi-tech and was a volunteer for the phone calls. He received an email late Monday night with a 60 page PDF of instructions and lists of names to call, and complained that he had to print it at home. Who prints PDF's when they can just view the document on their PC and make the calls, especially on a home inkjet printer?
It sounds like not only was the development of this tool a disaster but so was implementation at the user end point. If this tech-savvy guy tried to print at home with limited success just imagine what the "regular" Romney supporters were doing (or not doing) when they got the 60 page PDF.
but if it was private individuals reselling items at a market price then I don't see a real case here for prosecution
So "Bob's hardware" sells a few dozen generators to "Bob" at regular price, who then sells them as a private individual at the currently inflated market-price...
Seems a bit easy to abuse.
I don't know about "easy". Bob's Hardware would need to collect sales tax from Bob, and Bob would be limited in the payment methods he could accept (i.e. cash). If he took other payment methods (Paypal, bankcard, check) it would leave a paper trail with big numbers of the size that catch the eye of tax auditors. Even cash is tougher to hide now thanks to the anti-terrorism laws.
And of course the scenario itself is clearly not even an arms-length transaction so I believe your example would fall under the jurisdiction of the AG.
I am not actually familiar with the laws that apply in this case. I know there were news reports of people buying out the stock at Home Depot and then selling from their trucks a few miles away. They may not have been illegally price gouging, but they likely were violating laws about commercial activity on public streets, failure to collect sales tax, zoning restrictions against commercial activity in a residential zone, etc.
If these were ads from storefront businesses then the AG should get involved, but if it was private individuals reselling items at a market price then I don't see a real case here for prosecution. I own a hardware store and we have been crazy busy these past two weeks trying to keep up with demand for batteries, gas cans, generators, extension cords, and other storm goods. Our prices are the same today as they were a month ago, and in fact some of our batteries are on sale and we kept them on sale. I know of a few stores that did raise their prices on generators and some other goods, seems like a poor decision as the customer will likely find out later (or already knew) and will remember that price gouge when choosing where to shop during "normal" times.
The UK government has already stated that they will not let Assange leave the country, so he's stuck in that embassy anyway. There have been rumors of smuggling him to the airport in a diplomatic limo, or hiring him as a diplomat, but those are not practical and the UK could detain him once he left the embassy grounds. So why bother storming the embassy?
If by chance they do storm the embassy then it will be obvious that the US government stepped up the pressure and got impatient. Get the popcorn out, this could get interesting.
I've been using Cloudflare for my DNS hosting since the beta days and they are an outstanding group of individuals. Their free DNS hosting is top-notch, with no pressure to upgrade to the paid option. They are some of the same people behind Project Honeypot. It's good to see firms like Cloudflare stand up and be counted when free and open access to information is threatened.
Moving to the cloud, whether Apple or Microsoft or any of the other players, has two main purposes:
- Guarantee ongoing profits through subscriptions and micro-payments to the providers for storage, use of cloud-based applications, or viewing or listening to cloud-based media.
- Control of digital media, making DRM easy to enforce since your audio and video files will all be on their servers to be scanned, audited, and confiscated.
Even with the fluctuating prices for hard drives the cost to store media locally is lower than ever, and there are plenty of options for sharing your media over the web yourself due to the low cost of high speed Internet access.
Alphagrip was also going to replace keyboards. I use the controller on occasion, it does function nicely as a game controller/keyboard but just like most people I am sticking with my QWERTY keyboard.
Here's the original blog entry.
There is a follow-up blog post where Zink backtracks a bit and admits the headers could be forged.
"In comments of various blogs a lot of people have suggested that these headers are spoofed, or there was a botnet connecting to Yahoo Mail from a Windows PC and sent mail that way. Yes, it’s entirely possible that bot on a compromised PC connected to Yahoo Mail, inserted the the message-ID thus overriding Yahoo’s own Message-IDs and added the “Yahoo Mail for Android” tagline at the bottom of the message all in an elaborate deception to make it look like the spam was coming from Android devices."
I had forgotten about Yahoo Groups, so just went to explore them. And thanks for the feedback about Mailman. It sounds like it's not much of a change from Listmanager in terms of functionality. My users are really looking for the threaded web discussion interface and both Yahoo and Google seem to have that in a reasonable format.