And yet.. this passenger successfully set his chemicals on fire. Sounds to me like it was luck and/or incompetence that prevented an explosion; passengers merely stopped him trying to rectify his initial fuck-up.
Explosives are FAST. Triggering them doesn't need a 48 second fuse that ticks down in full glare, causing terror and giving an opportunity to put it out.
9/11 may not happen again, but aircraft will be brought down by human borne IEDs. Expect it, accept it, or stop flying.
The platform isn't necessarily commercial-hostile, it just lacks the ease of access to commercial software and the install base to justify it.
Right now the n900 is crying out for better integration (google mail/contacts/calendar, push email, various online sharing services), better email software (it's a step backwards even from android), better text entry recognition (i miss Android's context sensitive capitalisation - such a simple thing, but on that form factor saves so much hassle), a suite of Office applications and a few other innovations that you take for granted with an Android device or iPhone.
So there's plenty of scope for selling superior software to a demanding userbase, and indeed providing that software would drive the userbase. It's a fantastic piece of hardware.
However, you're right, at the moment the application selection is inadequate. I just disagree that the platform is hostile to commercial software.
(Of course, I say that having never bought an app for my Android phone)
Opera Mobile, Opera Mini and Opera Desktop version are all unavailable for my phone. Opera 10 is not available for my handset. Which is running a linux distro with user access to root.
It's hard to get much more open than that.
Luckily the handset came with a Mozilla based browser that's better than Opera.
Luckily the n900 comes with a Mozilla browser that's completely stable and doesn't crash.
That's only my perception, and I've only had the phone a few days, so there's still plenty of time for it all to go wrong, but it does mean that n900 users can continue to use their desktop class browser until the new one is sufficiently stable.
no one bothers to get Opera Mobile even though it blows the shit out of your phone's standard browser
Wtf? I had Opera Mobile on my phone, bought an Android phone and the browser that came with that was significantly better.
I now have a Nokia n900 and all three of the browsers are better than Opera Mobile. FFS I'm running full scale web pages (with embedded flash and all that shite) and they're working fine and with no ads because I have adblock installed.
What I'm not sure is whether the Mozilla browser I'm using is Firefox Mobile or whether I need to download that too...
The bulk of merchants in the UK do use online card checks - that predates chip and pin. It is that subset of small transactions that would be handled offline, and the fraud risk is deemed less than the commercial benefits...
Didn't help you but there is rationale there. Or maybe they just hate antipodeans.
Clearly you're using terms (Cash Card, EFT-POS) in a different sense to those I'm used to.
That's fair enough, I've only worked for credit card companies and a bank in the UK so don't have familiarity with other countries' systems.
My understanding of a cash card is that it's like a debit card, except that it adds no benefits and removes the ability to use it in place of a credit card. For that reason they're just not popular and nobody issues them - why issue a crippled card when a capable one costs the same and is as easy to give out, and carries minimal risk overhead unless you have no credit rating.
My understanding of a key card (the first term you used, and that's NOT a cash card) is that it's used for ATM machines and not as a payment card. People in the UK don't want a card that they can't use as a payment card. There is negligible demand for non-payment card ATM cards, so you will struggle to find a bank that issues them. It's not impossible, but you have to look around.
Offline eft-pos is a contradictory term, which is causing me confusion and clearly I'm interpreting it incorrectly.
Electronic funds transfer mean it's online, or that it's collated and transferred subsequently through some form of store and delay mechanism (likely batch). You could describe the latter as batch, but either way you're back into the reasoning I gave as to why merchants don't want to do funds availability checks for all purchases.
A cashcard used for purchases has no difference for online/offline transactions to a debit card. An ATM card used for purchases wont work which is why nobody issues them.
Why solve a problem that doesn't exist, adding further cost to merchants, further cost to card issuers, and gaining no real benefits except to the one foreigner that turns up in 2002 asking for something that nobody else needs?
Hmm, interesting. I didn't know chip & pin cards tracked their own usage (although I still wouldn't describe that as a 'card balance').
Anyway... online EFT-POS is obviously trivial, and you'll find that every merchant able to take card transactions (electronically, which these days is all of them) can do so online.
In 2002 that was also the case. Hence my suspicion it was an inability to verify your identity and assess your risk that caused their refusal, rather than a specific issue with merchants.
As for cash cards.. most UK banks just don't issue them. People expect a debit card these days, the demand for non-payment card cash machine cards is so low that it's rarely cost effective to design, source, issue and service them. That was the case pre-chip and pin, no different now.
In addition, a cash card that works abroad is going to need to be a VISA or Mastercard payment card anyway.
Incidentally, some offline processing may happen where transaction values are deemed 'negligible' - many merchants do have a lower limit below which they wont do the full online funds availability check. That's a commercial decision driven by very real per-transaction costs and completely irrespective of the technical ease of EFT-POS.
That it may lead to a risk adverse card issuing strategy turned out unfortunate for you.
You can be reasonably sure that bank wouldn't forge paper check
You think they're going to forge electronic transfers?
You think having cheques available means that they don't have the electronic transfer capabilities available too, exposing you to all of the same risks anyway, and indeed widening your exposure because right now you have the electronic risks and the paper risks, rather than just the electronic risks.
Think it through...
Incidentally, if I deposit a cheque in the overnight bin, I have no paper receipt.
Regarding audit trail for electronic payments: If I get an email telling me someone's sent an electronic payment then either it arrives in my account or it doesn't. If it does, no problem. If not, still no problem: I tell them it didn't arrive.
If they money's left their account and not reached mine, trust me, their bank is going to be every bit as keen as they are to find out where that money ended up.
Banks in the UK are heavily regulated, and have a reputation of not losing customers' money.
(That is, not losing the accurate record of how much money the customer has deposited with them. They have a reputation of losing all their money, and some they don't have, by investing it in dodgy mortgage books from America that go toxic, leading to serious liquidity issues, the need for excessive short term borrowing at ursurious rates and thus requiring Government handouts to stay in business. But that's another matter entirely.)
You must have had a bad credit rating (where 'bad' may mean 'missing because they only looked at your UK history').
Children at 16 can open an account and get a debit card instantly. I had one in 1989, it took around 2 weeks for the card to reach me, and that was because of inefficient processes rather than security/fraud checking (although I suspect they did some of that at the same time).
Incidentally, chip & pin doesn't maintain the balance on the card - it can't, you don't use your card for all transactions.
Have you seen the cost of implementing the Faster Payments scheme? It's fucking expensive. I mean, 10 digits expensive.
Have you thought how difficult this is? If the money is transferred in 12 seconds (the FPS maximum timeframe) then that gives both banks (source and recipient) a 12 second window to - verify funds availability - fraud checks (at both ends) - AML checks (at both ends) - block list checks (at both ends) - sender detail validation/verification - recipient detail validation/verification - recipient bank lookup (find the bank to start with) - handshakes/negotiations - recipient lookup (at the bank - do they exist, is their account still open, does the account even allow funds to be transferred in) - funds transfer - confirmation of funds transfer - debit of one account, credit of the other - all the other steps I've omitted for brevity
Now to be fair, that's actually not dissimilar to what happens in ATM machines - except you now have twice as many accounts involved, and another major factor: Risk.
12 seconds after money leaves your account, it's never coming back. If you entered the wrong account details for the recipient, tough. With BACS you had a day or two to correct your error. With FPS, you're fucked.
Now consider a fraudulent transaction. You're just as fucked, and with just 12 seconds for fraud checking (so none of the overnight post-transactional checks that happen now) the automated mitigation isn't as effective.
Broadband lines? Barely fucking relevant. How about: - over a dozen clearing banks that have to agree protocols/mechanisms/processes - the need for a central authority (for routing, validation, cross-charging, etc) - the hundreds of agency banks that need to take part (but aren't members of the scheme) - the number of 40 year old mainframe banking systems that are built around updating account balances overnight and are still in use (hint: too fucking many)
Why did it take until 2009? Because the banks enjoyed the interest on the float and had no incentive to address those massive technical, political and business complexities at extremely high cost with potentially a worse overall service to their customers if they fucked it up and made it risky.
Hope that helps you understand why it wasn't quite as straightforward as plugging in a cable modem..
I think SEPA payments go via SWIFT rather than CHAPS (albeit CHAPS uses SWIFT as its transport mechanism), but they sure as shit don't go via BACS or FPS which are the 'free' transfers.
The AML/KYC requirements are pretty batshit insane for domestic transfers too. There's just a higher perceived (and to be fair, probably a higher actual) risk for foreign payments so institutions take greater precautions.
Since we (their customers) ultimately pay for any fraud losses, it's a mixed blessing really.
It's a per-transaction limit, at a guess, rather than a total, and it's to mitigate risk rather than being a hard and fast rule.
So set up multiple individual payments under the 3k limit (although that may flag up on their AML system) or get in touch with them and ask for a CHAPS payment.
Of course, they'll charge you for CHAPS where they wont charge you for BACS or FPS payments, but who said banking was meant to be free in the first place.
Incidentally, I cleared £5k off a credit card earlier this year (following an expensive purchase; the card removed risk for me) with a single online payment, and I make payments from one bank to another every month above the limit you've specified.
My MP received a telephone call followed up by an email from me 3-4 weeks ago on this matter.
The Open Rights Group (at http://www.openrightsgroup.org/) have promoted a campaign for their members and supporters to raise this not only to MPs but also to members of the House of Lords.
This is yet another draconian and easily abused piece of legislation that is declared as addressing something that isn't an issue, in a manner that allows its use for other purposes while failing to address the underlying issue in the first place.
I'm fucked off about it, but frankly there's not a whole lot more I can peacably do.
I remember when Ghost Master had rather good graphics.
The ladies are particularly unrepresentative of society though, I'll agree.
However, gameplay is king. Angband rocks, and it's got ASCII graphics. (Nethack likewise, for those of that perversion.)
Elite was popular long after everybody else switched away from wireframe graphics.
People play Wii games because they're fun, not because they're exercise or great graphics.
Graphics will continue to sell games, but people will continue to play the games that are fun to play, that have depth, that last more than 3 hours, and the graphics wont be a determining factor in much of that.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet.. this passenger successfully set his chemicals on fire. Sounds to me like it was luck and/or incompetence that prevented an explosion; passengers merely stopped him trying to rectify his initial fuck-up.
Explosives are FAST. Triggering them doesn't need a 48 second fuse that ticks down in full glare, causing terror and giving an opportunity to put it out.
9/11 may not happen again, but aircraft will be brought down by human borne IEDs. Expect it, accept it, or stop flying.
Sexist bastards.
Nice watches though.
The platform isn't necessarily commercial-hostile, it just lacks the ease of access to commercial software and the install base to justify it.
Right now the n900 is crying out for better integration (google mail/contacts/calendar, push email, various online sharing services), better email software (it's a step backwards even from android), better text entry recognition (i miss Android's context sensitive capitalisation - such a simple thing, but on that form factor saves so much hassle), a suite of Office applications and a few other innovations that you take for granted with an Android device or iPhone.
So there's plenty of scope for selling superior software to a demanding userbase, and indeed providing that software would drive the userbase. It's a fantastic piece of hardware.
However, you're right, at the moment the application selection is inadequate. I just disagree that the platform is hostile to commercial software.
(Of course, I say that having never bought an app for my Android phone)
It's a sad day when people are linking to Wikipedia for YAGNI instead of the original wiki :(
Opera Mobile, Opera Mini and Opera Desktop version are all unavailable for my phone. Opera 10 is not available for my handset. Which is running a linux distro with user access to root.
It's hard to get much more open than that.
Luckily the handset came with a Mozilla based browser that's better than Opera.
Luckily the n900 comes with a Mozilla browser that's completely stable and doesn't crash.
That's only my perception, and I've only had the phone a few days, so there's still plenty of time for it all to go wrong, but it does mean that n900 users can continue to use their desktop class browser until the new one is sufficiently stable.
no one bothers to get Opera Mobile even though it blows the shit out of your phone's standard browser
Wtf? I had Opera Mobile on my phone, bought an Android phone and the browser that came with that was significantly better.
I now have a Nokia n900 and all three of the browsers are better than Opera Mobile. FFS I'm running full scale web pages (with embedded flash and all that shite) and they're working fine and with no ads because I have adblock installed.
What I'm not sure is whether the Mozilla browser I'm using is Firefox Mobile or whether I need to download that too...
The bulk of merchants in the UK do use online card checks - that predates chip and pin. It is that subset of small transactions that would be handled offline, and the fraud risk is deemed less than the commercial benefits...
Didn't help you but there is rationale there. Or maybe they just hate antipodeans.
Clearly you're using terms (Cash Card, EFT-POS) in a different sense to those I'm used to.
That's fair enough, I've only worked for credit card companies and a bank in the UK so don't have familiarity with other countries' systems.
My understanding of a cash card is that it's like a debit card, except that it adds no benefits and removes the ability to use it in place of a credit card. For that reason they're just not popular and nobody issues them - why issue a crippled card when a capable one costs the same and is as easy to give out, and carries minimal risk overhead unless you have no credit rating.
My understanding of a key card (the first term you used, and that's NOT a cash card) is that it's used for ATM machines and not as a payment card. People in the UK don't want a card that they can't use as a payment card. There is negligible demand for non-payment card ATM cards, so you will struggle to find a bank that issues them. It's not impossible, but you have to look around.
Offline eft-pos is a contradictory term, which is causing me confusion and clearly I'm interpreting it incorrectly.
Electronic funds transfer mean it's online, or that it's collated and transferred subsequently through some form of store and delay mechanism (likely batch). You could describe the latter as batch, but either way you're back into the reasoning I gave as to why merchants don't want to do funds availability checks for all purchases.
A cashcard used for purchases has no difference for online/offline transactions to a debit card. An ATM card used for purchases wont work which is why nobody issues them.
Why solve a problem that doesn't exist, adding further cost to merchants, further cost to card issuers, and gaining no real benefits except to the one foreigner that turns up in 2002 asking for something that nobody else needs?
Hmm, interesting. I didn't know chip & pin cards tracked their own usage (although I still wouldn't describe that as a 'card balance').
Anyway... online EFT-POS is obviously trivial, and you'll find that every merchant able to take card transactions (electronically, which these days is all of them) can do so online.
In 2002 that was also the case. Hence my suspicion it was an inability to verify your identity and assess your risk that caused their refusal, rather than a specific issue with merchants.
As for cash cards.. most UK banks just don't issue them. People expect a debit card these days, the demand for non-payment card cash machine cards is so low that it's rarely cost effective to design, source, issue and service them. That was the case pre-chip and pin, no different now.
In addition, a cash card that works abroad is going to need to be a VISA or Mastercard payment card anyway.
Incidentally, some offline processing may happen where transaction values are deemed 'negligible' - many merchants do have a lower limit below which they wont do the full online funds availability check. That's a commercial decision driven by very real per-transaction costs and completely irrespective of the technical ease of EFT-POS.
That it may lead to a risk adverse card issuing strategy turned out unfortunate for you.
My phone has no IR receiver. I think.
Most phones couldn't encrypt SMS (without significant firmware upgrades). Without encryption (and digital signing) you'd be wide open to fraud.
Many consumers don't want their bank account linked to their phone; you'd struggle for acceptance of this scheme.
Mobile phones are not reliable. They break, get lost, get stolen, get loaned out and have limited battery life.
So aside from the reasons your scheme wont work, would you recommend Tandoori or Balti for the curried phone?
You can be reasonably sure that bank wouldn't forge paper check
You think they're going to forge electronic transfers?
You think having cheques available means that they don't have the electronic transfer capabilities available too, exposing you to all of the same risks anyway, and indeed widening your exposure because right now you have the electronic risks and the paper risks, rather than just the electronic risks.
Think it through...
Incidentally, if I deposit a cheque in the overnight bin, I have no paper receipt.
Regarding audit trail for electronic payments: If I get an email telling me someone's sent an electronic payment then either it arrives in my account or it doesn't. If it does, no problem. If not, still no problem: I tell them it didn't arrive.
If they money's left their account and not reached mine, trust me, their bank is going to be every bit as keen as they are to find out where that money ended up.
Banks in the UK are heavily regulated, and have a reputation of not losing customers' money.
(That is, not losing the accurate record of how much money the customer has deposited with them. They have a reputation of losing all their money, and some they don't have, by investing it in dodgy mortgage books from America that go toxic, leading to serious liquidity issues, the need for excessive short term borrowing at ursurious rates and thus requiring Government handouts to stay in business. But that's another matter entirely.)
You must have had a bad credit rating (where 'bad' may mean 'missing because they only looked at your UK history').
Children at 16 can open an account and get a debit card instantly. I had one in 1989, it took around 2 weeks for the card to reach me, and that was because of inefficient processes rather than security/fraud checking (although I suspect they did some of that at the same time).
Incidentally, chip & pin doesn't maintain the balance on the card - it can't, you don't use your card for all transactions.
Following the 'source' links on wikipedia, the data is:
American British Canadian Australian Other Total
Percentage 67.2 16.9 5.8 4.5 5.5 100.0
Absolute (000s) 226,710 56,990 19,700 15,316 18,581 337,297
(and no, I can't be arsed to format that)
So 226m Americans vs 56m Brits out of 337m overall: It's native language speakers, so excludes India.
I think it's fairly safe to say that mister_playboy is fundamentally and thoroughly wrong. :)
Have you seen the cost of implementing the Faster Payments scheme? It's fucking expensive. I mean, 10 digits expensive.
Have you thought how difficult this is? If the money is transferred in 12 seconds (the FPS maximum timeframe) then that gives both banks (source and recipient) a 12 second window to
- verify funds availability
- fraud checks (at both ends)
- AML checks (at both ends)
- block list checks (at both ends)
- sender detail validation/verification
- recipient detail validation/verification
- recipient bank lookup (find the bank to start with)
- handshakes/negotiations
- recipient lookup (at the bank - do they exist, is their account still open, does the account even allow funds to be transferred in)
- funds transfer
- confirmation of funds transfer
- debit of one account, credit of the other
- all the other steps I've omitted for brevity
Now to be fair, that's actually not dissimilar to what happens in ATM machines - except you now have twice as many accounts involved, and another major factor: Risk.
12 seconds after money leaves your account, it's never coming back. If you entered the wrong account details for the recipient, tough. With BACS you had a day or two to correct your error. With FPS, you're fucked.
Now consider a fraudulent transaction. You're just as fucked, and with just 12 seconds for fraud checking (so none of the overnight post-transactional checks that happen now) the automated mitigation isn't as effective.
Broadband lines? Barely fucking relevant. How about:
- over a dozen clearing banks that have to agree protocols/mechanisms/processes
- the need for a central authority (for routing, validation, cross-charging, etc)
- the hundreds of agency banks that need to take part (but aren't members of the scheme)
- the number of 40 year old mainframe banking systems that are built around updating account balances overnight and are still in use (hint: too fucking many)
Why did it take until 2009? Because the banks enjoyed the interest on the float and had no incentive to address those massive technical, political and business complexities at extremely high cost with potentially a worse overall service to their customers if they fucked it up and made it risky.
Hope that helps you understand why it wasn't quite as straightforward as plugging in a cable modem..
I think SEPA payments go via SWIFT rather than CHAPS (albeit CHAPS uses SWIFT as its transport mechanism), but they sure as shit don't go via BACS or FPS which are the 'free' transfers.
The AML/KYC requirements are pretty batshit insane for domestic transfers too. There's just a higher perceived (and to be fair, probably a higher actual) risk for foreign payments so institutions take greater precautions.
Since we (their customers) ultimately pay for any fraud losses, it's a mixed blessing really.
It's a per-transaction limit, at a guess, rather than a total, and it's to mitigate risk rather than being a hard and fast rule.
So set up multiple individual payments under the 3k limit (although that may flag up on their AML system) or get in touch with them and ask for a CHAPS payment.
Of course, they'll charge you for CHAPS where they wont charge you for BACS or FPS payments, but who said banking was meant to be free in the first place.
Incidentally, I cleared £5k off a credit card earlier this year (following an expensive purchase; the card removed risk for me) with a single online payment, and I make payments from one bank to another every month above the limit you've specified.
But I'm not with Abbey..
2002 is before 'chip and pin' became a standard.
It now takes 5 seconds just to enter your pin number, let alone the connection, validation, funds availability check, etc.
Find a bank that's implemented Faster Payments properly, you wont even have to allow for the 3 day BACS clearing cycle.
Some ATMs do charge access fees. That some do not is incidental - can you find one that does not when you need it? Every time?
Good luck buying a house with a cheque.
My £50 cheque guarantee card's going to wear out before I've finished writing the cheques to cover that one..
My MP received a telephone call followed up by an email from me 3-4 weeks ago on this matter.
The Open Rights Group (at http://www.openrightsgroup.org/) have promoted a campaign for their members and supporters to raise this not only to MPs but also to members of the House of Lords.
This is yet another draconian and easily abused piece of legislation that is declared as addressing something that isn't an issue, in a manner that allows its use for other purposes while failing to address the underlying issue in the first place.
I'm fucked off about it, but frankly there's not a whole lot more I can peacably do.
Imaging if you were watching a movie, and all the whispers were louder and the explosions quieter.
I'm deaf, it'd be bloody fantastic. I could hear the quiet bits without the loud bits making my neighbours blow a blood vessel.
I remember when Ghost Master had rather good graphics.
The ladies are particularly unrepresentative of society though, I'll agree.
However, gameplay is king. Angband rocks, and it's got ASCII graphics. (Nethack likewise, for those of that perversion.)
Elite was popular long after everybody else switched away from wireframe graphics.
People play Wii games because they're fun, not because they're exercise or great graphics.
Graphics will continue to sell games, but people will continue to play the games that are fun to play, that have depth, that last more than 3 hours, and the graphics wont be a determining factor in much of that.
Some of my best programming has been done at the coffee machine..