
Re: El Reg headline writers...
Truly, it was teh awesome!
187 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jun 2009
One way of doing that is to open an account with a foreign exchange service (UKForex, for example) that has an account in the same country as the bank account that you're moving funds from. Then you do a simple domestic online transfer to your intermediary, which then handles the international leg.
Incidentally, US banks don't use IBANs and most don't even have a SWIFT or BIC code either, meaning that "ordinary" international transfers often run through a chain of correspondent banks before reaching their destination. As I said, primitive.
I have no experience of DFS, but the poster makes a point that's worth expanding upon for British and other non-US readers.
The US banking system is a primitive mess, as are the customer-facing sides of the finance departments of most corporations - out of date and populated by morons.
"Mistakes" regularly happen, redress is limited or non-existent and there's no equivalent of the Direct Debit Guarantee over here. Further, it is impossible (in many, if not all cases) to do the equivalent of paying by phone with a debit card - that's where the intermediaries come in, with their "convenience fees".
For most people it's not a question of if but rather when they'll get screwed over due to somebody else's cockup. And that's before we come to some of the other tricks, like banks systematically rearranging the chronological order of withdrawals, so as to maximise penalty charges.
Not to labour the point, but bad as the UK retail banking industry is, what with PPI misselling and the like, if that's all that you have experience of you have a massive culture shock coming the first time you deal with the mess that is US retail banking.
Often, yes. In this case, however, it's being used as a signal to fellow travellers. As Steven Roper points out, below, the study is a pretext for further curtailing individual freedoms. The reference to "anthropogenic" tells another bunch of fascists that the authors are "on-side" and should be supported.
"There are no background checks if you buy from a gun show. There are places where background checks are weak"
Two problems here:
First, your statement displays ignorance of the facts. Most vendors at gun shows these days hold FFLs (Federal Firearms Licenses) and are required to conduct NICS checks on buyers, even at gun shows. The only transactions in which background checks are not carried out are private sales between individuals, where state law permits such. In those cases it is the nature of the transaction that eliminates the NICS check, not the venue.
Second, your implication that universal background checks, even for private party transactions, would be desirable displays ignorance of economics. Given that there is no practicable mechanism for an individual to obtain a NICS check on another individual (and, given privacy concerns, nor should there be) the imposition of such a rule would leverage existing gun dealers into the position of gatekeepers over all transactions. This would inevitably lead to rent seeking, with "transfer fees" increasing dramatically as happens whenever government grants one group a monopoly. This effective increase in the price of all used guns would, in turn, drive up the price of new guns, creating a spiral which would inevitably lead to the situation in which only the rich could afford guns, as mentioned above.
Mr Manning has hit the nail on the head. For those less well versed in US Realpolitik, here's a brief explanation.
Guns are what is known as a "wedge issue" (abortion is another). Both main parties, The Crips and The Bloods, use wedge issues to good effect.
The process is as follows:
1. Some incident leads to a wedge issue getting heavy rotation in the mainstream media.
2. Congresscritter mouths some empty bollocks related to said wedge issue. It doesn't have to be practical, sensible or even desirable - just related, even tangentially.
3. That portion of the electorate on one side of the issue puts what little critical thinking ability that it has on hold and unquestioningly supports said critter, regardless of any other evil that it may be doing. Simultaneously, said critter gets heavy rotation in the media on the back of the original incident.
4. ?
5. Profit!!!
As I say, they all do it and the electorate rewards them for it - so there's not much hope of any change any time soon.
"Yes i am suprised they have ditched Google Wallet..."
I think you may be confused. They are ditching Google Checkout but keeping Google Wallet.
FWIW, the migration has already started, internally. My last but one payment for Google Voice was processed via Google Checkout, but my last payment (a couple of weeks ago) was processed via Google Wallet.
"The big concern is COVERT recording, and that horse has already bolted."
I'm not sure that that's correct. It seems to me that the real concern is *ubiquitous* recording - as promytius points out, our society is built upon certain assumptions, which ubiquitous recording coupled with Internet dissemination would shatter.
How do you buy somebody a surprise present, when footage of you buying it is going to pop up in their rss (or whatever) feed? Now consider going to the clap clinic, the oncologist, the local nick to whistleblow on some criminal who knows where you live, or no end of other activities.
David Brin has published utopian visions of "the recorded life", see any amount of dystopian SF for a counterpoint.
... whenever we let government, at any level, spend money? They piss away a shed load on an ill conceived and pooply* implemented idea, then spend even more on giving whatever value they didn't destroy to some politically connected kleptocrat.
The only surprise is that we still let the fsckers have control of anything more valuable than the biscuit barrel.
* This was, of course, a typo made while attempting to type the word "poorly". I was about to correct it, but realised that the typo was more accurate and expressive than the intended word could ever be.
Statistically, is is though. Since almost everything that government does tends to enrich the politically connected few at the expense of everybody else, it follows that "science" which supports a government programme is more likely to be fabricated at the behest of vested interests and therefore false, while that which opposes it is more likely to be honest, since it has no bunch of crooks to please and therefore stands a better chance of being correct.
"The back of this here envelope suggests the PGMs would be a by-product of making structural metal alloys. You don't run a business for the by-products, but they can be nice to have."
That's a very good point. By way of an earth-bound analogy, copper refiners like Asarco currently make a tidy extra profit off Gold and Silver. Those metals are present in such small quantities that it wouldn't be worth processing the ore just for them alone, but when they fall out of the copper refining process they're almost free money.
^ This.
The solution to any given problem is rarely passing a new law. But we act like it always is, because that allows politicians to be seen to be "doing something". The new law usually turns out to be ineffective, or worse, but by then we're wetting our pants over the next manufactured "crisis" and don't care.
Presumably the difference is that the countries to which calls to mobiles can be made are "called party pays" countries (I know that the USA is) while the ones to which such calls can't be made are "calling party pays" countries (I know that the UK and much of Europe is).
Can't really blame them. They'd have no chance of staying in business if they had to eat unlimited UK mobile termination charges.
Whether it is, or is not, Blackmail is a very interesting question. Just this morning, I read a rather detailed blog on the subject, by Prof. Volokh, admittedly addressing US rather than German law.
http://www.volokh.com/2012/08/21/blackmail/
While I know little of German law, I can't help suspecting that the hints about prioritising "touchy cases" might prove to be their downfall.
"Unless the participants fly at least several times a year such a poll is just useless."
Agreed - experience is necessary for having an informed opinion.
The problem is, a survey of frequent fliers would likely return the opposite result to that wanted by whomever commissioned this survey. Just look at all the ranting on Flyertalk, for example.
It's "leeching" not "leaching", unless you're claiming that JP has a business extracting metals by converting them into soluble salts in an aqueous media contained in Niven's cellular membranes.
Which would be technologically impressive, I'll grant, but is probably not what you were trying to say..
Come back when you've gained a couple of PhDs (back when that was hard), been an advisor to a US president on SDI and other stuff, been Barry Goldwater's campaign manager, started the world's first blog (before the word "blog" existed and which is still going strong today), written a shed load of successful novels in your own right, edited Survivalist magazine, been a contributing editor/columnist for Byte (which you're probably too young to remember) and a shed load more that I can't be bothered to type and say that.
We'll still think that you're an idiot.