In which case send the cancellation in writing, along with the returned equipment, and send it signature required return receipt so they can't claim they never got it.

If you are going to be working with credit cards then read NOW and not later the PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry - Data Security Standard) standards and follow them, or the company could be liable to penalties from your financial institution. Firewalls are indeed mandatory, as is proper documentation, management and review of the firewall rules.

Download PCI-DSS v3.0 here: https://www.pcisecuritystandar...

I've nothing really to add, but why does the perpetrator in this case have a girl's name when it's quite clear he's a man? Is naming him Sharron a bit like the boy named Sue?

Unfortunately I've not had more time than enough to just dabble in Erlang and the related OTP, but it struck me that you could do a lot of things very elegantly with Erlang. In particular the very light weight share nothing threading model, years ago at university we used Jackson Structured Design where everything was designed as if it had its own process all to itself (no matter how trivial), and it seems that in Erlang you can actually implement it that way rather than flattening the design out.

I have a credit card but I don't pay a 7% or 30% fee on anything. The card is paid off in full each month. It costs me nothing but at the same time gets me buyer protection, I don't have to carry as much cash (so if I get robbed, less is lost and I can cancel the card). If someone gets hold of my credit card number and CVV, they can't drain my bank account with it and leave me with nothing to buy this week's food (and I get fraud protection and can dispute the charge).

Credit cards are stupid if you don't pay them off in full, then they become very expensive. But paid off in full they have benefits that paying in cash does not.

The thing is the way it works with mortgages in Europe (at least the bit I'm from) is my bank didn't look at my credit history because it turns out I don't have one.

They looked at my income and expenditure and the deposit I was putting down on the house, and decided whether the amount I had to pay would be affordable, and that was it. (The good thing is I got a standard variable rate mortgage, and with interest rates so low I'm paying something like 0.75% interest at the moment)

Sounds like you need to visit Mr Money Mustache.

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com...

Good ideas on how to reduce your spending and live frugally.

You don't have to be in expensive debt. Use a credit card for your normal living expenses (groceries, fuel etc) and pay it off in full every month. You'll pay no interest that way or other charges (unless the credit card has an annual fee). You'll have a record of repaying.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

Who are these people, that would give a damn about this change?

You don't need an intermediary not-you authority for this job. And in fact, using one can only possibly decrease the security, in the best case scenario. Even the worst most incompetent company in the world, would make a better CA for its internal servers, than the best, most trustworthy public CA.

Whoa there. This was no mere bad judgement call. Having him thrown off the plane was over-the-top malicious, totally beyond what I ever expect from anyone who is "having a bad day." I sincerely believe such a person really shouldn't be in any sort of position where they might have that amount of power over other people.

Put a hundred random people in the same sort of bad-day position, and I don't expect one of them to behave like this one did. This one is truly exceptional, and does not merely "have bad days." This is the kind of person whose news stories are usually headlined something like "gunman kills five then self."

I might be willing to excuse them, if say, their psychiatrist were to explain how this was anomalous for their character and that their medication was defective, or something like that. OTOH that can be handled in their lawsuit against the medication manufacturer, and then this psycho will never need a job where they exercise power over other people again.

I happen to be the executive who works at Southwest and made the decision, upon seeing the tweet, to call the gate and have him kicked off. Please allow me to explain my decision.

I work in the PR department, and managing publicity is my job. When I saw the tweet, I realized it was bad publicity. I don't like my company getting bad publicity, and I seek to avoid it, or replace it with good publicity.

So I threw our tweeting customer off, thereby solving the bad publicity problem! See? Now do you get it?

...

(Why is everyone looking at me like I'm a idiot?)