Um, I worked for a Fortune 200 (telecommunications industry) and my team alone would generate over 5 petabytes of data every month and a half, give or take a few weeks. Mind you, my 'team' consisted of several hundred people, but we were a huge organization with over 40,000 direct workers and 39,000 contract workers. This type of organization is what this plan is aimed for....

The $250k limit is a pa limit. It's actually $21k a month, and any transaction after that goes to 2.75%. Same for any transaction over $400. Running a drink place (coffee shop, etc) - sure, costs are a lot lower. But to that Chinese take out, or the small hole in the wall breakfast joint that is only open from 7am-2:30pm yet manages to employ 13 people... that's a huge blow to the owner who doesn't get much profit (if any) out of the business to begin with. In my small example, switching to Square and using monthly pricing started giving her (the owner) a profit of around $400 a month which she put aside each month to try and expand so she could hire more people.

Actually, any single transaction over $400 was processed at 2.75%. All transactions over a monthly limit of $21,000 was processed at 2.75%, which equals a p.a. amount of around $250,000 a year. So this is essentially a huge blow to the small businesses (restaurants, food carts/trucks, pedicabs, etc etc). And they're selling it as a way for businesses to save money, by keeping the same 2.75% they've always charged per swipe. Oh, and the restaurant I managed (a small hole-in-the-wall) switched to Square's monthly plan because it saved us around $500 a month in processing fees vs phone or broadband based machines. Now I'm going to have to go back to that restaurant, I guess, and help them find a new solution - restaurants are low margin and our owner barely makes a hundred bucks a month of the restaurant, after paying food costs, rent and employing 11 people.

Damn straight!

I bike you insensitive clod!

As incredibly fast moving this story is, another Boston Marathon "miss-identification" situation occurred. Is this to be the new norm for every major news story relating to mass violence?

I've been swindled! Curse you all!

The text of the treaty itself does not limit the treaty to international armed conflicts. Just war, and a civil war is a war. English text of the treaty from the UN

I forwarded this comment to timothy and I didn't get a dollar. What gives?!

I support a strike regardless of who is responsible for the deployment, although the likely culprit is undoubtedly Assad's government - the rebels just don't have the means of deploying such weapons, even if they did get their hands on them. From what we know, the Syrian government has the bulk of their stockpiles in two facilities - drop a thermobaric weapon on both facilities and be done with it, destroying the bulk of the stockpiles completely.

While Syria is not a signatory of the CWC, they are a signatory of the Geneva Protocol (Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare). So they're prohibited from using chemical and biological agents, but not prohibited from producing, storing or transferring. So yes, they are breaking international law by using such weapons.

I just don't understand why people don't like the touchscreen interfaces of new laptops. I can move around so much faster on the screen using hand gestures than I can using my mouse (if I even have my mouse connected).