Did you lose anything because of this? Of course not - the merchant gets to eat the cost. But because the whole credit card spending industry is so lucrative the merchants really don't mind. If they did, they wouldn't accept credit cards.
If you lost something in this, maybe people would get together and make the police actually prosecute this. Fortunately for credit card thieves, they aren't prosecuted unless they do something really outrageous.
Besides, who do you think gave these guys your credit card number? It could be anyone in any organization where your credit card was used, including your bank that issued the card. There is no security, really. And because nobody gets prosecuted therre isn't any deterrent to "borrowing" a credit card.
Yup, just recently happened to me. Gosh, I lost a whole five minutes cancelling the card and having the charges removed. This is what we get for havng and using credit cards.
Sorry, but we are nearly there already. The problem is the wackiest, thuggiest (?), and voted-most-likely-to-die-in-prison folks already have guns. They don't care if it is illegal or not to carry one without the proper license and permit - they are packing heat.
If you live or work in an inner city area, chances are pretty good that the people around you have made a choice already - carry or hide. The folks hiding are moving to the suburbs when they can.
You have a choice. In the US it is going to be pretty simple soon. The police aren't going to preemptively arrest people because they haven't killed you yet. After they kill you they will arrest the guy that did it and there is at least a 20% chance he will be convicted. This doesn't bring you back from the dead.
You can either defend yourself or hope the police provide enough of a deterrent. Right now in the inner cities the police aren't able to do that job.
Why would it be illegal to decrypt traffic passing through their system? "Because it is my private data" doesn't cut it.
Neither does "Just because." I suspect you will find there are a few legal precedents that could be stretched if they were physically making a connection to your wire. And probably zero that would apply inside a facility which is paid to deliver the data.
If someone did come up with a legal basis for saying this wasn't allowed, there would likely be a new law passed in an hour that retroactively made it explicity legal. Sure, the Supreme Court could overturn it, but would they?
I suspect you will find that an ISP has the right to do whatever is necessary to provide legal services to its customers. Privacy on the Internet? Where is that spelled out? It isn't, it is just assumed that your ISP isn't doing something harmful.
This is like how it was around 1930 or so. The telephone company did listen in on conversations and did ban certain language or unauthorized activities. Was there a law against it? Not until 1934 I'd say, if even then.
We are clearly in the pre-1934 days with the Internet.
The problem with hardware is that it is mostly software these days. If they release the specifications for writing the hardware the only way they keep making hardware is to lock it down somehow.
The alternative is they release specifications and someone in China makes an exact copy of the chip. Completely illegal and violates lots of patents, but who ever heard of a patent in China. With our new-found world trade treaties and desire for cheap goods for all the US is certainly not going block import of these copies. So the original hardware company gets zero sales because they have the R&D to pay for. The Chinese company doesn't have any R&D so they can sell for nearly the cost of production.
Sure, that would bring them revenue. Why would someone not just clone it and resell it? It isn't as if it requires a great deal of support or anything else for that matter. The only reason anyone pays for Office is they don't want to be possibly raided by BSA - home users pretty much just pirate or buy it with a new computer.
What possibly would Microsoft gain from exposing the code base? It would certainly allow OpenOffice to incorporate all of the "features" of Microsoft Office into their product with (a) little work and (b) no risk. What else would it do? It would not make throngs of Open Source devotees rush out and buy something the could have for free. I can't see unpaid volunteers contributing to the rather rigorous build process Microsoft has to add fixes for obscure, unfixed bugs.
So the ISP doesn't block the email. Outlook does. Or some other email client the user is running.
The ISP is not the last word in mail filtering and the sender has no input into what the email client may be blocking or not. They are not informed in any manner. This prevents them from being able to tell the difference between a person ignoring them and blocked email.
If you rely on email you are relying on something that is fundamentally unreliable. You can never know if the recipient received your mail and intentionally ignored you or just didn't get your mail. And there are no so many ways to block email and so many indpendent parties doing so "on behalf of" the end user that you can't even assume the mail filtering is being done with the knowledge and consent of the user.
Yes, but you are assuming the sender is meaningful. I've yet to run into a mail system that allows you to restrict incoming mail such that =. Most people don't even have mail set up that way so the from address is just a comment that is meaningless. In spam it is worse than meaningless, it is used as a way to attack people.
Of course, any commercial entity would be immediately blocked because many people believe there should be no such thing as commercial email. Solicited or not, the Internet is their playground and nobody should be making money there.
If it was just $2 to get a new key, then spammers would be able to pay $2 per daily load of spam. $2 a day is pretty reasonable if you are getting $20,000 a day in sales. So this wouldn't have a chance of working.
Email is utterly unreliable. It is a free service that has been horribly abused, mostly because it is free. Like all free things, it is worth exactly what you are paying for it - nothing.
If you need to get a message to a doctor or lawyer, you need to use some other means than email. Fax. FedEx. Postal mail is pretty good in some places, worse than email in others.
Slapping a fee on top of email to supposedly make it reliable is a joke. It is worse than a protection racket because it doesn't work. If the recipient chooses to white-list their email and forgets to include someone important there is no recourse and no notification. The message just gets lost and it is untracable. Ooops. Sorry. And there is nothing Goodmail or anyone else can do about this. They may be able to increase the probability of mail being received but they cannot guarantee it, dispite any claims they may be making.
Simple - you are missing the point. Why wouldn't the Federal Government simply require everyone to have a passport to fly anywhere? It would be a single, Federally-controlled ID that isn't given out like candy to children.
In Illinois you can get a driver's license by (a) going to the Mexican consulate and getting a form and then going to your nearby Illinois Secretary of State office and picking up your license. No further identification is required. You are also automatically registered to vote at the same time, regardless of your citizenship, legal or illegal immigration status or anything else. We've put all the controls at the Mexican consulate which really doesn't care who has a license or what it says on it.
This same situation exists in other states as well. In these states a "driver's license" is no more identification than the Man from U.N.C.L.E. identification card that came in a cereal box.
The problem is that States issue driver's licenses. It is their responsibility. Now we have the Federal Government saying they have to do it a certain way that costs more. Who should pay? Obviously, the Federal Government likes the idea that this is a State responsibility, therefore they pay.
The States have pretty much had it with "unfunded mandates" from the Federal Government and this is just one way they can indicate their displeasure at being mandated to do stuff without any money to support the activity.
Where does this go? Probably a stalemate for some time to come.
How long until "mandatory" recycling? You have an old computer without the latest hardware tracking and DRM assist devices in it. It is more than x years old and therefore qualifies for "mandatory" recycling.
This would be a great boon to Dell, HP, Gateway and Lenovo. It would force people to upgrade to new computers. The only question is how long qualifies? One year? Two? Certainly no more than three years.
The problem is that the same argument for piracy applies here. The people buying fake handbags aren't customers for the real thing so they aren't depriving anyone of anything. If you would pay $5 for the new Shrek 3 movie you might not pay $30 when it finally comes out through legitimate channels. Again, no reason to believe any real "customers" of the genuine merchandise are involved in these sales.
It is clear to just about everyone here that if you don't charge for pirated materials it hurts nobody. What about people without high speed Internet access? Don't they deserve access to pirated materials as well? Where is your sense of equality?
Yes, this thinking opens the world up to counterfeit and pirated goods at all levels. If there is nothing wrong with downloading everything in sight then there is nothing wrong with dealing pirate CDs and counterfeit CDs from the back of a van.
There are lots of ways of getting there that we already know about. The first thing is to get a probe launched to some system with something that appears to have strong possibilities for life. This would be potential water signatures, right distance from the star, etc. The first probe will be a difficult and long-term project but will spur many activities.
If you've read stuff by Larry Niven, what started everything was probes. And then hibernation ships that caught up to and passed some probes by.
How long until humans get there? With what we know today, it could be done with a multi-generational ship. But such a ship would likely be outmoded by the time it reached its destination. We're not quite there with hibernation yet, and it would suffer the same problems.
Yes, an faster-than-light drive isn't possible in ordinary space as we know it today. But there are several alternatives that could be explored. Today, we're not even thinking along those lines. Probes returning information in 20 or 30 years that showed extrasolar life would change many things on Earth.
WPA requires support in the device connecting which isn't always there. It also requires a lot more effort on the user's part to connect up. If routers came with RADIUS servers where you had to log in it would be much simpler and clearer for everyone... but no.
WiFi is on an unlicensed frequency, which pretty much means that as long as the power is low nobody can complain. I suspect there will be a licensed version of WiFi at some point where you buy a license for a geographic area and a channel. This would eliminate 90% of the problems with commercial use, such as the microwave oven kicking everyone off at Starbucks where you are paying for access. Companies would also have the same thing for "mobile workers" so nobody gets kicked off. On the free unllicensed frequency you are going to take your chances and it is going to get very, very crowded.
Leaving an AP open means you are providing a service for others to use. Your user agreement with them is going to control how they use it and who is responsible for materials being transferred. What? No user agreement? Well then, I guess you are going to be responsible unless you can convince the judge that just anyone might have been using it and you wouldn't have any idea. Sort of like leaving a gun laying around - if someone gets shot you aren't really responsible are you? It is going to depend on the prosecutor and the judge.
I don't know of any "free" (as in taxpayer-supported) municipal WiFi network that has gone anywhere at all. Lots of networks just joined up with T-Mobile, Boingo and others for billing. Yes, you have to log in so the know who you are and they do have a user agreement that you have to accept.
First off, every business values their customer list. It is people that have proven an interest in their products (old and new) and therefore an excellent source of sales. So when you buy your hardcopy book from some radical publisher they likely have your name on their customer list anyway. There is no getting away from that.
Cash sale? I suppose if you go and actually visit a book dealer that stocks the book and there is no "loyalty discount" program and nothing else that could possibly be used to connect you with the purchase. If you buy two items and one of them has any sort of registration this information can certainly connect you with your other purchases. In today's world you are going to get on a customer list if there is any way possible to do so. Don't like it? Don't buy stuff in first-world countries.
The customer list would seem far far worse than your name in the item itself. This is a zero-work precollected list of people to harass for "the authorities."
Of course, the best reason for not wanting any tracable information in the item itself is redistribution. If you want to share with the planet, you don't want your name in it. And of course you want to share with the planet - the geek view of how the world works makes redistribution essential. By preventing the original merchant from profiting further after that one sale you spread greater wealth further and faster. The harm it does the original merchant is irrelevant - they shouldn't have sold digital goods if they didn't want it shared.
It is today within the power of net-savvy people to remove any profit from digital goods transactions. All they have to do is exercise that power.
As long as you have "users" connecting unsecured devices to the Internet, they will be compromised. As long as there are people using the Internet to attempt to trick people into doing things which will compromise their computers, the Internet will not be safe for commerce, banking and other business activities.
The drive to use the Internet for these functions is going to mean that the script kiddies, organized crime gangs, botnet herders and hackers have to be stopped. One way or another. Today, it can be assumed that if you are not an expert and do not assume every email and IM is a potential trap your computer is going to be compromised. Such compromise will leak your banking and other business information to criminals. This is intolerable to banks and anyone else trying to do business on the Internet.
So it is going to get fixed, one way or another. Today there are no appliances that can be used for web and email without severe restrictions on the users. So everyone has a general-purpose computer that is wide open to compromise. All it takes is opening the wrong email attachment.
If there is a legal, regulated gambling site called gamble.com then I would expect an unregulated site called gambel.com that offers better odds and supposedly pays out more.
Except of course it doesn't. And no taxes, thank you. And the owners hidden behind some sham company in Eastern Europe of Indonesia.
Gambling on the Internet is always going to result in this because by the very nature of it you have no idea whom you are dealing with. And with the veil of secrecy there is no need to be fair and above-board because you can get away with anything.
You can forget about using email for commercial purposes - a good size fraction of the anti-spam community considers any use of email for commercial purposes to be SPAM. So commercial email gets blocked. If you send an email to someone using Outlook with the word "sale" in the email address, it gets trashed. Examples like this go on and on.
If you are using email to communicate with customers, a large number of your customers aren't getting their receipts, confirmations or even their purchases. And of course the customers don't know anything about it - their ISP or email provider is dumping the email before they even see it.
Guaranteed delivery? Yeah, sure. Pay a fee so your email isn't blocked for one reason and it will still be blocked by 37 more reasons. Nobody can stop this from happening and charging for such a service is a sucker move designed to take in the ignorant. And I bet it works for at least six months before it dies.
Don't use email for anything commercial or important. It doesn't work.
The problem (that a few people have realized) is that the technician tested the cards first. Because of this operation they were inseperably paired with the device used to test them.
Without knowing that and resetting this pairing nothing that could be done would force the cards to work in the PC. It has nothing to do with the new hardware, the operating system or anything else. Simple matter is these are complex devices interfacing with even more complex systems. And the supposedly knowledgeable technician didn't understand this restriction.
Unfortunately, the article makes it appear that the technician was knowlegeable and should have been able to solve the problem. In reality the inexperienced technican created the problem and insured the installation would fail by testing the cards.
The first assumption any right-thinking person should make with a software product interfacing with a new hardware product is that the software product is always at fault when it comes from Microsoft.
As associated axiom is that when ever anything fails, it is Microsoft's fault. For example, when a PC fails to respond to user input it is due to a problem with Microsoft software. When the secretary plugs the computer back in and the problem disappears, it must have been Microsoft that unplugged it. Obvious to all but the Microsoft-indoctrinated losers.
Could it be that this product was pushed out the door without sufficient testing with different cable cards, cable systems and all the silly things that cable companies are doing just to be different? Naa. Has to be Microsoft.
Chernobyl isn't the radioactive wasteland that people seem to have the idea it is. Mostly this is a fantasy put over by a lot of raving anti-nuclear folks and a whole lot more uninformed but well-meaning people.
No, the girl on the motorcycle is a hoax and her supposed ideas about how radioactive the ground is are utterly false.
There were a total of 46 people that died as a result of Cherynobyl. Somewhere in the low thousands have been treated for thyroid problems and some may in fact die from cancer due to exposure to the materials that were in the immediate area from the reactor fire. Nobody else is expected to die with a cause attributed to the reactor fire.
People that have taken measuring instruments into the exclusion zone have reported a slightly elevated background radiation and that is all. It is like the difference between living in Italy vs. Norway where Norway gets more cosmic radiation as compared to Italy.
If Chernobyl was anywhere near as bad as people here seem to think it was, Sweden would be a wasteland as well. It is where a lot of the fallout from the fire settled.
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Did you lose anything because of this? Of course not - the merchant gets to eat the cost. But because the whole credit card spending industry is so lucrative the merchants really don't mind. If they did, they wouldn't accept credit cards.
If you lost something in this, maybe people would get together and make the police actually prosecute this. Fortunately for credit card thieves, they aren't prosecuted unless they do something really outrageous.
Besides, who do you think gave these guys your credit card number? It could be anyone in any organization where your credit card was used, including your bank that issued the card. There is no security, really. And because nobody gets prosecuted therre isn't any deterrent to "borrowing" a credit card.
Yup, just recently happened to me. Gosh, I lost a whole five minutes cancelling the card and having the charges removed. This is what we get for havng and using credit cards.
Sorry, but we are nearly there already. The problem is the wackiest, thuggiest (?), and voted-most-likely-to-die-in-prison folks already have guns. They don't care if it is illegal or not to carry one without the proper license and permit - they are packing heat.
If you live or work in an inner city area, chances are pretty good that the people around you have made a choice already - carry or hide. The folks hiding are moving to the suburbs when they can.
You have a choice. In the US it is going to be pretty simple soon. The police aren't going to preemptively arrest people because they haven't killed you yet. After they kill you they will arrest the guy that did it and there is at least a 20% chance he will be convicted. This doesn't bring you back from the dead.
You can either defend yourself or hope the police provide enough of a deterrent. Right now in the inner cities the police aren't able to do that job.
Why would it be illegal to decrypt traffic passing through their system? "Because it is my private data" doesn't cut it.
Neither does "Just because." I suspect you will find there are a few legal precedents that could be stretched if they were physically making a connection to your wire. And probably zero that would apply inside a facility which is paid to deliver the data.
If someone did come up with a legal basis for saying this wasn't allowed, there would likely be a new law passed in an hour that retroactively made it explicity legal. Sure, the Supreme Court could overturn it, but would they?
I suspect you will find that an ISP has the right to do whatever is necessary to provide legal services to its customers. Privacy on the Internet? Where is that spelled out? It isn't, it is just assumed that your ISP isn't doing something harmful.
This is like how it was around 1930 or so. The telephone company did listen in on conversations and did ban certain language or unauthorized activities. Was there a law against it? Not until 1934 I'd say, if even then.
We are clearly in the pre-1934 days with the Internet.
The problem with hardware is that it is mostly software these days. If they release the specifications for writing the hardware the only way they keep making hardware is to lock it down somehow.
The alternative is they release specifications and someone in China makes an exact copy of the chip. Completely illegal and violates lots of patents, but who ever heard of a patent in China. With our new-found world trade treaties and desire for cheap goods for all the US is certainly not going block import of these copies. So the original hardware company gets zero sales because they have the R&D to pay for. The Chinese company doesn't have any R&D so they can sell for nearly the cost of production.
Sure, that would bring them revenue. Why would someone not just clone it and resell it? It isn't as if it requires a great deal of support or anything else for that matter. The only reason anyone pays for Office is they don't want to be possibly raided by BSA - home users pretty much just pirate or buy it with a new computer.
What possibly would Microsoft gain from exposing the code base? It would certainly allow OpenOffice to incorporate all of the "features" of Microsoft Office into their product with (a) little work and (b) no risk. What else would it do? It would not make throngs of Open Source devotees rush out and buy something the could have for free. I can't see unpaid volunteers contributing to the rather rigorous build process Microsoft has to add fixes for obscure, unfixed bugs.
And why does Microsoft have to sue anyone?
So the ISP doesn't block the email. Outlook does. Or some other email client the user is running.
The ISP is not the last word in mail filtering and the sender has no input into what the email client may be blocking or not. They are not informed in any manner. This prevents them from being able to tell the difference between a person ignoring them and blocked email.
If you rely on email you are relying on something that is fundamentally unreliable. You can never know if the recipient received your mail and intentionally ignored you or just didn't get your mail. And there are no so many ways to block email and so many indpendent parties doing so "on behalf of" the end user that you can't even assume the mail filtering is being done with the knowledge and consent of the user.
Yes, but you are assuming the sender is meaningful. I've yet to run into a mail system that allows you to restrict incoming mail such that =. Most people don't even have mail set up that way so the from address is just a comment that is meaningless. In spam it is worse than meaningless, it is used as a way to attack people.
Of course, any commercial entity would be immediately blocked because many people believe there should be no such thing as commercial email. Solicited or not, the Internet is their playground and nobody should be making money there.
If it was just $2 to get a new key, then spammers would be able to pay $2 per daily load of spam. $2 a day is pretty reasonable if you are getting $20,000 a day in sales. So this wouldn't have a chance of working.
Email is utterly unreliable. It is a free service that has been horribly abused, mostly because it is free. Like all free things, it is worth exactly what you are paying for it - nothing.
If you need to get a message to a doctor or lawyer, you need to use some other means than email. Fax. FedEx. Postal mail is pretty good in some places, worse than email in others.
Slapping a fee on top of email to supposedly make it reliable is a joke. It is worse than a protection racket because it doesn't work. If the recipient chooses to white-list their email and forgets to include someone important there is no recourse and no notification. The message just gets lost and it is untracable. Ooops. Sorry. And there is nothing Goodmail or anyone else can do about this. They may be able to increase the probability of mail being received but they cannot guarantee it, dispite any claims they may be making.
Trying to put an economic disincentive on foreign oil would be a good idea, if it wasn't for that pesky WTC. Too bad, really.
Yeah, and my friend recently declared pot to be a legal euphoric to be consumed in quantity in his house.
Both declarations carry about the same weight with the Federal Government.
Simple - you are missing the point. Why wouldn't the Federal Government simply require everyone to have a passport to fly anywhere? It would be a single, Federally-controlled ID that isn't given out like candy to children.
In Illinois you can get a driver's license by (a) going to the Mexican consulate and getting a form and then going to your nearby Illinois Secretary of State office and picking up your license. No further identification is required. You are also automatically registered to vote at the same time, regardless of your citizenship, legal or illegal immigration status or anything else. We've put all the controls at the Mexican consulate which really doesn't care who has a license or what it says on it.
This same situation exists in other states as well. In these states a "driver's license" is no more identification than the Man from U.N.C.L.E. identification card that came in a cereal box.
The problem is that States issue driver's licenses. It is their responsibility. Now we have the Federal Government saying they have to do it a certain way that costs more. Who should pay? Obviously, the Federal Government likes the idea that this is a State responsibility, therefore they pay.
The States have pretty much had it with "unfunded mandates" from the Federal Government and this is just one way they can indicate their displeasure at being mandated to do stuff without any money to support the activity.
Where does this go? Probably a stalemate for some time to come.
How long until "mandatory" recycling? You have an old computer without the latest hardware tracking and DRM assist devices in it. It is more than x years old and therefore qualifies for "mandatory" recycling.
This would be a great boon to Dell, HP, Gateway and Lenovo. It would force people to upgrade to new computers. The only question is how long qualifies? One year? Two? Certainly no more than three years.
The problem is that the same argument for piracy applies here. The people buying fake handbags aren't customers for the real thing so they aren't depriving anyone of anything. If you would pay $5 for the new Shrek 3 movie you might not pay $30 when it finally comes out through legitimate channels. Again, no reason to believe any real "customers" of the genuine merchandise are involved in these sales.
It is clear to just about everyone here that if you don't charge for pirated materials it hurts nobody. What about people without high speed Internet access? Don't they deserve access to pirated materials as well? Where is your sense of equality?
Yes, this thinking opens the world up to counterfeit and pirated goods at all levels. If there is nothing wrong with downloading everything in sight then there is nothing wrong with dealing pirate CDs and counterfeit CDs from the back of a van.
There are lots of ways of getting there that we already know about. The first thing is to get a probe launched to some system with something that appears to have strong possibilities for life. This would be potential water signatures, right distance from the star, etc. The first probe will be a difficult and long-term project but will spur many activities.
If you've read stuff by Larry Niven, what started everything was probes. And then hibernation ships that caught up to and passed some probes by.
How long until humans get there? With what we know today, it could be done with a multi-generational ship. But such a ship would likely be outmoded by the time it reached its destination. We're not quite there with hibernation yet, and it would suffer the same problems.
Yes, an faster-than-light drive isn't possible in ordinary space as we know it today. But there are several alternatives that could be explored. Today, we're not even thinking along those lines. Probes returning information in 20 or 30 years that showed extrasolar life would change many things on Earth.
WPA requires support in the device connecting which isn't always there. It also requires a lot more effort on the user's part to connect up. If routers came with RADIUS servers where you had to log in it would be much simpler and clearer for everyone... but no.
WiFi is on an unlicensed frequency, which pretty much means that as long as the power is low nobody can complain. I suspect there will be a licensed version of WiFi at some point where you buy a license for a geographic area and a channel. This would eliminate 90% of the problems with commercial use, such as the microwave oven kicking everyone off at Starbucks where you are paying for access. Companies would also have the same thing for "mobile workers" so nobody gets kicked off. On the free unllicensed frequency you are going to take your chances and it is going to get very, very crowded.
Leaving an AP open means you are providing a service for others to use. Your user agreement with them is going to control how they use it and who is responsible for materials being transferred. What? No user agreement? Well then, I guess you are going to be responsible unless you can convince the judge that just anyone might have been using it and you wouldn't have any idea. Sort of like leaving a gun laying around - if someone gets shot you aren't really responsible are you? It is going to depend on the prosecutor and the judge.
I don't know of any "free" (as in taxpayer-supported) municipal WiFi network that has gone anywhere at all. Lots of networks just joined up with T-Mobile, Boingo and others for billing. Yes, you have to log in so the know who you are and they do have a user agreement that you have to accept.
First off, every business values their customer list. It is people that have proven an interest in their products (old and new) and therefore an excellent source of sales. So when you buy your hardcopy book from some radical publisher they likely have your name on their customer list anyway. There is no getting away from that.
Cash sale? I suppose if you go and actually visit a book dealer that stocks the book and there is no "loyalty discount" program and nothing else that could possibly be used to connect you with the purchase. If you buy two items and one of them has any sort of registration this information can certainly connect you with your other purchases. In today's world you are going to get on a customer list if there is any way possible to do so. Don't like it? Don't buy stuff in first-world countries.
The customer list would seem far far worse than your name in the item itself. This is a zero-work precollected list of people to harass for "the authorities."
Of course, the best reason for not wanting any tracable information in the item itself is redistribution. If you want to share with the planet, you don't want your name in it. And of course you want to share with the planet - the geek view of how the world works makes redistribution essential. By preventing the original merchant from profiting further after that one sale you spread greater wealth further and faster. The harm it does the original merchant is irrelevant - they shouldn't have sold digital goods if they didn't want it shared.
It is today within the power of net-savvy people to remove any profit from digital goods transactions. All they have to do is exercise that power.
As long as you have "users" connecting unsecured devices to the Internet, they will be compromised. As long as there are people using the Internet to attempt to trick people into doing things which will compromise their computers, the Internet will not be safe for commerce, banking and other business activities.
The drive to use the Internet for these functions is going to mean that the script kiddies, organized crime gangs, botnet herders and hackers have to be stopped. One way or another. Today, it can be assumed that if you are not an expert and do not assume every email and IM is a potential trap your computer is going to be compromised. Such compromise will leak your banking and other business information to criminals. This is intolerable to banks and anyone else trying to do business on the Internet.
So it is going to get fixed, one way or another. Today there are no appliances that can be used for web and email without severe restrictions on the users. So everyone has a general-purpose computer that is wide open to compromise. All it takes is opening the wrong email attachment.
If there is a legal, regulated gambling site called gamble.com then I would expect an unregulated site called gambel.com that offers better odds and supposedly pays out more.
Except of course it doesn't. And no taxes, thank you. And the owners hidden behind some sham company in Eastern Europe of Indonesia.
Gambling on the Internet is always going to result in this because by the very nature of it you have no idea whom you are dealing with. And with the veil of secrecy there is no need to be fair and above-board because you can get away with anything.
You can forget about using email for commercial purposes - a good size fraction of the anti-spam community considers any use of email for commercial purposes to be SPAM. So commercial email gets blocked. If you send an email to someone using Outlook with the word "sale" in the email address, it gets trashed. Examples like this go on and on.
If you are using email to communicate with customers, a large number of your customers aren't getting their receipts, confirmations or even their purchases. And of course the customers don't know anything about it - their ISP or email provider is dumping the email before they even see it.
Guaranteed delivery? Yeah, sure. Pay a fee so your email isn't blocked for one reason and it will still be blocked by 37 more reasons. Nobody can stop this from happening and charging for such a service is a sucker move designed to take in the ignorant. And I bet it works for at least six months before it dies.
Don't use email for anything commercial or important. It doesn't work.
The problem (that a few people have realized) is that the technician tested the cards first. Because of this operation they were inseperably paired with the device used to test them.
Without knowing that and resetting this pairing nothing that could be done would force the cards to work in the PC. It has nothing to do with the new hardware, the operating system or anything else. Simple matter is these are complex devices interfacing with even more complex systems. And the supposedly knowledgeable technician didn't understand this restriction.
Unfortunately, the article makes it appear that the technician was knowlegeable and should have been able to solve the problem. In reality the inexperienced technican created the problem and insured the installation would fail by testing the cards.
The first assumption any right-thinking person should make with a software product interfacing with a new hardware product is that the software product is always at fault when it comes from Microsoft.
As associated axiom is that when ever anything fails, it is Microsoft's fault. For example, when a PC fails to respond to user input it is due to a problem with Microsoft software. When the secretary plugs the computer back in and the problem disappears, it must have been Microsoft that unplugged it. Obvious to all but the Microsoft-indoctrinated losers.
Could it be that this product was pushed out the door without sufficient testing with different cable cards, cable systems and all the silly things that cable companies are doing just to be different? Naa. Has to be Microsoft.
Chernobyl isn't the radioactive wasteland that people seem to have the idea it is. Mostly this is a fantasy put over by a lot of raving anti-nuclear folks and a whole lot more uninformed but well-meaning people.
No, the girl on the motorcycle is a hoax and her supposed ideas about how radioactive the ground is are utterly false.
Please take a look at http://www.chernobyllegacy.com/index.php?cat=1 and other sources before being taken in by the fearmongering.
There were a total of 46 people that died as a result of Cherynobyl. Somewhere in the low thousands have been treated for thyroid problems and some may in fact die from cancer due to exposure to the materials that were in the immediate area from the reactor fire. Nobody else is expected to die with a cause attributed to the reactor fire.
People that have taken measuring instruments into the exclusion zone have reported a slightly elevated background radiation and that is all. It is like the difference between living in Italy vs. Norway where Norway gets more cosmic radiation as compared to Italy.
If Chernobyl was anywhere near as bad as people here seem to think it was, Sweden would be a wasteland as well. It is where a lot of the fallout from the fire settled.