http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0213-lost-or-stolen-credit-atm-and-debit-cards disagrees with you on the amount of fraud liability on debit cards. Most telling is this statement: "For unauthorized transactions involving only your debit card number (but not the loss of your card), you have 60 days after you get your statement to report the unauthorized transaction."

The credit card fraud protections are similar. I realize that debit cards used to have no legal fraud protection unless your bank offered such. It appears to be different now and has been I'm told for around fifteen years.

Well, yes. Telecom vendors are not exactly celebrated for their competence, especially in security.

A more accurate statement might be that if I see a product from any major telecom vendor, I go in assuming that it will be riddled with security holes that were well documented ten years ago. Usually I can't even meet those low expectations and am disappointed -- again.

I've seen this happen so many times it's not even funny. OpenOffice/LibreOffice weren't brought in for any part of it until people couldn't open it and in desperation they agreed to try the suggestion to try opening the file in LibreOffice. File opens fine, is saved in the MS format, and the result is openable in MS Word again.

Two other examples I can think of include SELinux and the hardening of what became DES against differential cryptanalysis, twenty years before the attack was widely known.

Scary implies I'm not numbed to the state of affairs by years of apathy by management.

My experience is that teachers tend to be the bullies, not the bullied. If teachers pointed out that many of them were carrying lethal weapons, it would create an atmosphere where many students were bullied just by being in the class. They may be much more afraid to disagree with a teacher (necessary when so many textbooks contain factual errors the teacher doesn't catch and teaches anyway).

I'm reminded of the Man-Kzin War saga and the ARM.

Got moved to the annex. I'm told it was too controversial in the main smithsonian, hence the move. That's been turned into a decent size museum on its own.

I want to *choose* my sort and list criteria. If I want to listen to Brahms, I shouldn't have to remember that the conductor of my most of my Brahms is Bernstein, but I have other Brahms conducted by someone else. Or they may choose to list the featured soloist as the artist, especially on concertos. I look for composer long before I look at performer.

In the new album view, I see no way to change the secondary criteria displayed from artist (confusing, useless to me) to a more useful field, such as composer.

The URL http://getsongbird.com/desktop/ disagrees with you. Download link for OS X.

Even better, checking each smart playlist, making sure I was in list view, all but one, column browser was disabled, menu option grayed out, key shortcut does nothing. One playlist, the column browser was forced on, couldn't turn it off.

This is now pointing to a bug I suspect.

After going through it, some where it was forced off are now forced on. Yes, I'll be reporting this as a bug based on what you've told me.

Take an album. Have two different featured soloists. The album is now split into two separate "albums" in album based view, one with the pieces with one soloist, the other with those with the other soloist. If you listen to concertos, this is a problem since they so often have a featured soloist.

The view you're referring to is more about some of the basic views I ended up using. I wanted to use the other views in older iTunes. I did. But it insisted on emphasizing artist rather than composer, even though that was deselected.

Odd, completely grayed out for me. Might be the difference that I'm using smart playlists, not regular ones. I create playlists based on combinations of genres or comments put in the comments field (Moody is a nice tool for me).

I know many people have suggested songbird in the past. I was able to pretty well ignore the functions I didn't want, so it didn't bother me. "Mac alternatives to iTunes" turns up lots of sites that suggest a few other options.

Too many of the same old flaws are still there. For example, it insists on sorting artist rather than composer in many views. If I have an album where two different pieces have different featured soloist artists, it insists in some views as treating it as two separate albums, while other views may not. For larger works, this can be a problem, like the complete symphonies of Haydn.

Groupings remain the red-headed stepchild, poorly used, despite being the only way to logically group together movements of a larger work within an album.

It introduced a few new flaws. In playlist view, it appears trivial to turn on shuffle and start playing a random piece. In library/songs view, that no longer appears possible. Multiple testing shows it always plays the first piece of the playlist, then shuffles.

The column browser is gone, just gone inside a playlist. I have some very large playlists. I want to be able to use the column browser within that playlist. I now have to go outside the playlist to the library view and use that, hoping I remember correctly the criteria that form the smart playlists.

I never had much of a performance issue, so I can't speak to that, but the first thing I turned off was album art based views. If I wanted an album, I'd pick it from the column browser.