I have to say, my experience with these bogus charges supports t-mobiles claims. About 3-4 years back, my wife somehow got signed up for some bogus service that was charging $10 per month. I didn't notice it until the 3rd bill. I called up t-mobile and they refunded the entire amount with no hassle. Furthermore, since my wife never uses any of those subscription services at all, they even offered to put a block on her account so she couldn't be re-subscribed.

That was years ago, and we haven't had any more problems. I had even forgotten all about it, but a few weeks ago I found out that block is still in place. We tried to sign up for a free text message subscription with Target so that we could get a $5 coupon they were offering. Tmobile automatically rejected our signup attempt, indicating that the service is blocked.

That said, I do have to nitpick one thing in t-mobile's statement:

That sounds more reactive than proactive.

I think the problem with your argument is that you are in a different country (Austrailia) than most of us (US). The laws and processes there appear to be quite different. Here:

1) There is minimal difficulty in disputing charges. Most banks have the process pretty streamlined, so on the rare occasion it happens, it's relatively simple to deal with and causes you no disruption (at least with credit cards...debit cards can be a little more dicey with the potential for bounced payments and stuff, which is why I never used debit and don't suggest it for most people)
2) There is minimal risk in using credit. By law you are only liable for $50, but in practice, I've never seen or heard of a bank which holds you liable for even a penny.
3) There is little to no discount for using cash. Previously, merchants were prohibited from charging extra (either by an extra fee or by raising the price) for credit. They could instead offer a cash discount (ie: lower the price BELOW what was advertised) but very few did. Mostly just gas stations, who would charge up to 10 cents a gallon extra for credit (still worth it to pay credit though, since you can get 5% cash back on gas, thus saving 15-20 cents per gallon). Now the laws have changed to prohibit that restriction, but still pretty much nobody has started charging extra for credit. Merchants want to encourage credit because they believe people spend more with credit, thus they'd loose money by encouraging cash payments. Also, cash is not free. There are also costs with counting it and transporting it. You have to hire an armored truck to take it to the bank, there are more issues with employee theft, and the(probably small) risk of counterfeit money
4) Rewards are a benefit to those that use them. Yes in theory it would possibly be cheaper for everyone to use cash (assuming cost of card processing is more than the cost of cash handling). However, that's not going to happen. Even if I switch to cash, there's no way everyone else is going to do the same. Its sort of like the prisoners dilemma on a massive scale...even if a large number of people agreed to cooperate, there's still enough people to screw it up for everyone else. So all I am doing by not taking advantage of rewards is leaving money on the table. I'm still paying the cost of card processing (since it's built into the regular pricing, not a separate fee) but not getting the benefit of the cash back.

In summary, however things may be over in Australia, over here in the US the current system (ie: the way things are currently setup, not the ideal system that would theoretically materialize if everyone agreed to start using cash ) is setup such that credit cards have huge benefits with pretty much no downsides. The only real downside is for people who can't control their spending and thus would get themselves into trouble using credit cards.

Exactly. I don't get all of the talk about how this is a reward. He could have sold the team at any time of his choosing. The price he got isn't because of his racist remarks. It's because there are so few teams available, they don't often come up for sale, and as teams go, the Clippers is actually a pretty highly ranked team. If anything, forcing him to sell actually is a punishment, even at $2 billion. He bought the team for $12.5m 33 years ago. Now it's worth $2b. That works out to an average annual return of almost 17%. It's virtually impossible to find an investment that gives those sort of returns over the long term. When you actually do have one, you'd want to hold onto it as long as possible (unless you have reason to believe its value is about to tank). Forcing him to sell such a fast growing asset is indeed punishment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Despite its accessibility, many doctors say the medication wasn't a good option for patients.

Although the CFC ban is what eventually drove Primatene Mist from the market, Pulmonologist have argued for years that it was at the very least, not the best medication for asthma control, and at worst, dangerous. The active ingredient in Primatene Mist is Epinephrine (also known as adrenaline, adrenalin), which can cause a dangerous increase in heart rate.

"Primatene Mist does not treat asthma -- it treats symptoms that can come from asthma," said Dr. Kyle Hogarth, an assistant professor of medicine and the medical director of the pulmonary rehabilitation program at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

The danger in treating only symptoms, he said, is that repeated asthma attacks can permanently damage the lungs. Poorly controlled asthma can progress to a point where, "in their 40s and 50s, [patients] have the lungs of someone who is 80 or 90 who has smoked."

For that reason, the goal of asthma care isn't to react just to attacks -- it's to prevent attacks in the first place. That's generally done with daily medications, such as inhaled corticosteroids, which keep the airways from becoming inflamed. Ideally, Hogarth said, rescue inhalers shouldn't be used more than twice a week, at most.

Wow, again. I can't believe you didn't think this through. Generate a new key to sign each release? You've just totally missed the point of what a signing key is supposed to be for. You might as well just use an MD5 checksum, because that's all the per-release key is good for. What you've proposed is the equivalent of saying "I'm worried someone might forge my signature, so instead I'm going to sign my name differently every time, and then nobody can ever forge it". By changing it every time, nobody can authenticate that a signature was really YOUR signature. When the NSA comes along and says "oh hey, we're the Truecrypt guys, honest, and here's our latest release with our brand new signature", you have no way to know it's really the NSA.

Yes, if only this existed before Snowden, then people would have felt compelled to blow the whistle and the problem would have been taken care of before the whole Snowden incedent. Right?

Oh yeah, that's right. There were already people trying to blow the whistle on this stuff. PBS had a pretty good couple of episodes a few weeks back called United States of Secrets. They covered the whole background of these NSA programs. And they covered the story of someone who tried to blow the whistle on one of the programs. Want to know what happened from it? Let me just repost what I posted in another forum a few days ago:

So do you think that sort of thing is going to encourage people to come forward? And do you think the few that do are likely to have any actual results?

So the NSA compelled you to hand over your old keys. Now you've generated new one. Gee, if only the NSA had some way to compel you to hand over those new signing keys, too.

I seriously can't believe you didn't think that one through

A few weeks ago I want to Costco. I wasn't yet aware that they even carried 4K TVs. I wasn't even paying particular attention to the TV section. As I was walking by, I just glanced over at one of the 4K TVs without knowing what it is, and I was like "Holy crap, thats amazing! What is it?". My wife looked over and had the same reaction. I looked at the tag and realized it was a 4K. I've never had a reaction quite like that to any TV I've ever seen. I believe it was a 55" model (they caried 2 sizes, and it was the smaller of the two), and I was probably about 10 feet away.

Follow the first link in the article. It includes a slide of words/phrases you should use instead. So, instead of "problem", you should say "issue", "condition", or "matter". Instead of "defect" you should say "does not perform to design". OK, I suppose those make sense.

And what about the word "safety"? Well, it says that instead, you should use the phrase "has potential safety implications".

In theory, yes your super secure system should not leak any info. On the other hand, it's nice when you also make this stuff user friendly.

because some systems allow any username, some require email addresses instead, some require username but have some sort of odd limitation on it (must be 10 chars, or must have a number, or 2 numbers, etc), it's actually quite useful to know if I've even got the right username before attempting all of the passwords it might be (which again may be various, because you've imposed stupid limitations on what the password can or cannot be).

Furthermore, if you are going to lock me out of the account, please let me know how many attempts I have. This is especially important on systems which do a permanent lockout (rather than a 20 minute lockout or whatever), which requires a phone call to unlock (a few banks are guilty of this). If I've got 5 tries and can't remember it after 4 tries, then I'll just give in and use the password reset option rather than lock myself out and have to waste time on the phone with customer service.

And then in light of the above two points, if you've got a captcha and you don't tell me what the problem is with my login attempts, I'm going to have to kill you. Captchas these days are so convoluted, it's actually pretty routine to get them wrong. So when my login attempt fails, I'm going to assume over and over that it's the captcha that I'm just not reading correctly (is that distorted Y character an uppercase or lowercase?). When I try that 10 times, only to later discover that the problem was that I couldn't use one of my usual login names because your website required me to use 2 numbers in my login name, blood will be spilled.

Also, in reply to your previous post:

Error, on your part. You just proceeded to tell us about the vulnerabilities in your login system, therefore you too are in error when you say your product is a secure login system. :-)

Really? Stock ownership has nothing to do with production? Let me ask you a series of questions:

Why does the stock exist in the first place? Did the actual owners/producers just decide that they wanted to be kind and give away a share of their potential future profits? No, the reason is that the owners decided they wanted to give up a portion of their ownership equity in exchange for money that they could use to help grow the company. So the person who bought the stock gave them money to grow the company. Sure seems like they produced something.

So now you might say that only applies to the original stock purchaser, who gave the money directly to the company, and that it doesn't apply to secondary purchasers shift money-for-stock back and forth. Well, that ALMOST makes sense. Except that in most circumstances, the original purchaser wouldn't have purchased had they not known there was a secondary-sale market for them to sell off their stock to either cash in on the success of their investment (if the business succeeds) or cash out their remaining value (if the business stays flat or fails).

Now, in some cases, the company itself might offer to buy back the stock directly (eliminating the need for a secondary-sale market), but usually that's not the case. The company usually wants to keep their hands on that money so they can continue to grow the business.

So I would contend that stock ownership enables business growth, which grows production.

I love that logic. By your reasoning, we had been using asbestos for 4500 years, so surely if there was something inherently unsafe about it, we would have known about it 4400 years ago.

One? Just one plant? Even if you are just talking about Detroit itself, ignoring the suburbs, there is a GM plant and 2 Chrysler plants in Detroit. But when people talk about Detroit and auto companies, they mean the entire metro detroit area. And in that area, there is:

Ford: (Wayne, Flat Rock)
GM: (Detroit, Orion)
Chrysler: (Detroit x 2, Sterling Heights, Warren)

So that's 8 auto assembly plants in metro Detroit. Yep, just one plant here.

If Costco never planned to sell it, that would be one thing. However, Costco was initially going to sell it and then rejected it after the first several loads were leaking oil. That certainly wouldn't help their case.

Not at Costco, they don't. Costco sells thing in only 1 size: fucking huge.

But more seriously, if this happens to be the Kirkland brand natural peanut butter that Costco sells, it comes in a 2-pack of 40oz jars.