> For you as the card holder however, nothing has changed in that regard: The law in the US still stipulates that credit card holders can only be liable for up to $50 (which most banks waive these days.)

Nothing has changed yet. But why would you think the banks won't target consumers once they've made merchants bend over?

Even judges and politicians understand simple technology like the magnetic strip. The banks wouldn't get away with arguing that the consumer was at fault if someone steals his credit card or credit card number because it's obvious that signatures are easily faked and never checked anyway and cards can be copied just like those old floppy disks.

But now we have this "magic" chip/paywave/etc. Your Honor, the technology ensures that the card can only be use by the authorized user. Cryptography and all that. So the "technology" protects consumers. We don't need silly, job-killing things like laws and regulations. Let's repeal these unnecessary liability limits. It will bring prices down and "economic efficiency" and that's how the Gipper woulda' wanted it. (Anyone with common sense, and economists [mutually exclusive groups] know the price bit is bunk, but..)

We technology professionals know the technology protects nothing if the POS terminal (which tells the clerk the user really has paid), the card itself (where a private key is stored), and all the algorithms and algorithm implementations (which ensure approval can't be faked) are secure. All of which the consumer has zero control over (we may have the card, but we didn't design its tamer-resistant features that erase rather than reveal the private key).

Someone duplicated my card in Mexico one time. The bank said it was a card-present transaction, but I had my card and my airline record verified that I wasn't even in Mexico when the transactions occurred. So I paid nothing. But what happens when a chip-based card is duplicated. The bank says I must be lying because their technology makes that impossible. The judge believes the bank's pin-striped-suit-wearing IBM security consultant even though everyone knows that no one who wears a suit can possible be a technology expert. And consumers are stuck with the charges.

It happened with bankruptcy in 2005. Bankruptcy is no longer a fresh start. Student loans can't be discharged and your creditors can garnish your wages for the rest of your life (since the interest rate will ensure you never pay off the loan). And what happened? Student loan rates aren't much lower, tuition is MUCH higher, and the banks lent like gangbusters to anyone with a pulse (which, at the same time, drove up prices, draining the savings of anyone who didn't borrow from into their coffers in the form of stock dividends). They obviously never expected to make the money they loaned back on the original terms. They wanted guaranteed income from the wages of everyone who defaulted, a slow and steady trickle of cash from the poorest among us (an ever larger percent of the population). After all, why should government be the only entity allowed to levy taxes?

Credit card law will change the same way. In fact, the 2005 BAPCPA was a precursor to these changes. Without it, a shift of liability to consumers would just push consumers into bankruptcy, drying up the bank's revenue stream. But now all they lack is shifting the liability to consumers. They then have not only no incentive to prevent fraud (even though, since they control the technology, they're the only ones who could), but an incentive for it to happen (undischarged debt). And incentives work.

The 2005 BAPCPA ensures we have to pay whatever debts they say we owe.
Checks are already almost a thing of the past, not accepted at many stores, so you pay with your credit card.
The shift of credit card liability and further shift of debit card liability to consumers will happen next. When it does, start using cash. And start carrying a gun to protect you now cash-laden self.

Until, if course, the courts invalidate the 2nd amendment and stores stop accepting cash (too much crime or some junk) just as they already have for checks.

Its the return of slavery in no uncertain terms. I wish they'd just invalidate the 14th amendment already so we could get on with the inevitable revolution and save everyone time. All this waiting is killing me!

The economics prize is not a Nobel prize, it's a memorial prize to Nobel, instituted by the Swedish Riksbank (central bank). If economics as a science is even mature enough to have any serious prize is debtatable, considering the state of the field seems to be pretty much still arguing about whether the earth is flat or spherical (and awarding 'Nobel prizes' to members of both factions, plus the faction arguing that the earth is actually a dimension-traversing hypercube).

But then again, there's a Nobel prize for literature, so maybe they could merge the economics prize into that one.

I think the idea is to have a huge source of neutrons in physical proximity to increase the chances of one leaking into the other universe first so it can leak back on the other side of the shielding.

While I would like to agree with you, and while you're responding to an argument that makes no sense, I think you need to work on those arguments a bit.

First, comparing artificially scarce goods to any kind of real scarce goods is something you should avoid doing at all. Arguments like spoilage aren't particularly relevant, and spoilage is usually (throughout the history of mankind) fought as much as possible. With the advent of preserves and freezing we can do a lot, but you still don't see the world overflowing with century old preserves; instead, variety increases and everyone can afford more fruit. Preventing spoilage means scarcity decreases.

With media it's the other way around. The more you prevent 'spoilage' in the form of piracy, the more scarcity you get. Fewer people can afford what they wish, and artificially scarce goods aren't as fungible as apples.

A more valid comparison would be to compare it to a non-scarce physical commodity like air; theoretically an industry could be constructed by forbidding everyone to breathe without a measuring mask. We could hand money paid for every breath to owners of oxygen producing woodland or other means of production. That would create a huge industry wherein people would feel the right to get paid, yet it's quite obvious that such an artificial scarcity would probably be harmful to humanity as a whole. Much like copyright can be considered harmful and arguments can be made that incremental improvements of art would be as productive even in its absence, although focus might be somewhat different.

And yes, economically piracy is a good thing, but not because of the somewhat flawed broken window fallacy, but because it is responsible for a large pareto improvement (the economic value of the gain made by those who obtain the product who would otherwise not have bought the product (ie, zero-loss for the producer)). Basically it reduces the deadweight loss damage caused by monopoly pricing and restores a modicum of competition when competition is illegal.

About the ethics; I consider monopoly rights inherently unethical and any upstanding citizen should ignore them if they can. There are a multitude of ways that we could promote work in the production of arts that would result in higher rates of production, better pay to (most, and in particularly to the specifically deserving, ie, artists and creators rather than lawyers or financiers) involved parties and without the damaging artificial scarcity.

Anyone labelled 'videophile' is expected to be blown away by new video equipment. Or gold-plated optical connectors. So.

Do an actual blind-study where you downsample the same original material and then run through 20 random samples, half with the lower-res material and half with the higher, guess what you're seeing and have the computer tally the results. At a viewing distance of 10 feet, with a 50 inch screen, I don't do much better than chance on 720 vs 1080 and I've got 20/20 as long as I'm wearing glasses. Nor should I, as that barely even touches 1080 perceivable territory.

Here's a helpful chart to assist with appropriate placement distance for that display: http://s3.carltonbale.com/reso...

About 3-4 feet and you'll get your money's worth.

Now, on the other hand, if they could improve contrast ratios to the point I can get sunburn from watching Dune, then I'll start getting excited about improved display quality.

This is privacy advocates' worst nightmare. Okay, nazi-style mass murder of people with certain thoughts and opinions enabled by the scarlet letter that is all the data Google keeps on all of us is privacy advocates' worst nightmare. But this is how it starts.

When Google eliminates the middle men, do you think prices go down? Only for some, and then only for a very short while until the competition is out of business. And this process is accelerated by high rates for high risk individuals. High risk for payouts that is, which is not always the same as high risk for society. For example:
* Visit a lawyer's website recently. You're more likely to sue when we underpay your claim. Let the competition have you.
* Liked something by Ron Paul on Google+? Some Google analyst thinks he found a correlation between that and higher claims. Your rates go up.

Big Data makes insurance rates in the best case arbitrary (when they misidentify factors that supposedly relate to insurance risk) and in the worst case discriminatory and a method for punishing people financially for behavior we all supposed was constitutionally protected (when they accurately identify behavior, like advocating for tax reform that actually benefits the middle-class, that those who control the few big companies with the big data don't like). Hopefully the ACA will prevent this in the health insurance market by mandating a rate based only on geography, age and smoker status. But I'm sure they can easily marginalize people who oppose their ideas using just auto, homeowners and liability insurance.

They say we should vote with our dollars. But we're obviously far outnumbered in such a battle. And the very wealthy don't so much vote with their dollars as they wage outright war with them. Imagine your homeowners and auto insurance rates quadrupling because of the places you go, websites you visit and company you keep (online and otherwise). While less explicit, the end result isn't much different than the Nazi's Nuremberg Laws or or laws limiting property ownership to white males with family histories.

Thanks for nothing, first amendment. Soon we'll have to exercise #2 instead.

> simply by dint of their genetic makeup

"dint of their genetic makup". Really?

There you go again making broad and discriminatory assumptions about huge groups of people. And you even attribute a wild and unsubstantiated guess as to the root cause. Worse of all, you continue to propose an unsustainable with the hope that if we force people to hire based on the opposite incorrect criteria (gender=female) enough long enough, the original incorrect criteria (male=good at STEM) will loose favor.

But how about we just encourage and train women to work in STEM fields and let them get hired if they turn out to be the best candidates? I'm not opposed to gender-specific STEM programs. I'm not even opposed to my tax dollars subsidizing them. The worst case scenario there is that we waste a bit of money on ineffective programs.

In your proposal, we risk torpedoing all sorts of businesses, large and small, that make our best-in-known-history lifestyles possible.

Have a little faith in the markets. If women turn out to be as or more capable at STEM stuff, either the big guys will see it and hire women or upstart companies (some of which will be run and owned by women) will hire women cheaper, out-compete the big guys and eventually equalize both salaries and workforce gender participation rates.

If you start at the bottom (education at a young age) and make sure we have qualified female STEM labor supply, the problem will solve itself. Start at the other end and you're just spitting into the wind.

Patent and copyright laws have never been about compensating inventors or creators. If they had been, they would be mandating actual payment to them.

Their construction as monopoly rights in a market where few individual creators or inventors will be scarce resources ensures that the negotiating power will be entirely on those in control of markets and distribution networks. The middle man can easily just pick up another provider of materials, while the originator is forced to take whatever deal is offered or face being unable to reach customers at all. Modern technology has slightly improved the situation with better opportunities, but ultimately, the deck is stacked solidly against the creators.

But that's working as it's designed. The purpose of monopoly rights has always been to provide stable market power and protection from free market competition for the friends of the crown. Creators are merely the convenient, powerless and easily replaceable excuse.

Most managers manage less than a couple of dozen individuals personally. They can afford to spend some time to shape employees into appropriate productive parts of the team.

If you're at a higher level and in one way or another in charge of thousands of individuals most people on lower levels will have the sense not to waste your time unless absolutely necessary, they're completely sure of what they're doing and their communication is highly relevant. Mail your 5k+ employee corp CEO with budget suggestions based on random numbers taken out of your ass? Best case you'll get ignored. Expecting a polite reply after he's personally taken time to run your numbers and realized you haven't even actually looked at the current budget, checked with someone else or know anything about accounting? I... don't think that's what's going to happen.

The purpose of such communication back isn't to encourage more such waste of time. It's to ensure it doesn't happen, ever, again. And preferably make sure nobody _else_ wastes time that way either. In a company with a normal hierarchy and a reasonably accepting management culture, that would most likely be handled by the employees manager being tasked with making sure that the employee understands that while input is welcome, pure waste of time is not.

Now, I suspect this is rather academic, as I don't think that many patches causing obvious bunches of compile errors actually reach Linus these days, but would go through possibly multiple layers of reviewers and maintainers before he'd even see it.

But it's an interesting topic. I mean, if you're intellectually honest, you'll admit that in the absense of an actual hierarchy that can manage problems, there is a certain percentage of people without sufficient social awareness and self-control that would eventually take up so much time when you scale up a project that you'd get stuck with all your time being spent on those individuals. Polite and friendly replies do not work; these are not people with normal social awareness who can read between the lines in your reply (or anyone over the age of 10 wouldn't have sent the unchecked work in the first place to someone most people understand is fairly busy, but would rather carefully ensure they know the proper procedure and have more senior but less busy persons help them to ensure they do nothing wrong).

Can you come up with an _effective_ way to manage the problem? Personally I'd probably simply put such people on ignore and lock them out, I don't like insulting people. Alternatively, not reading anything by default and ensuring anything I see is already vetted would be an option if I had others I could rely on but then their time would have to be cheap enough that I thought it reasonable to waste or I'd ask them to ignore such people as well.

Insulting someone? Well, while I wouldn't chose that option, such words do, as you say, have an impact. If that impact is what is needed to prevent the waste of time, while still allowing the possibility of them changing and contributing in the future then it might be less unappreciative than my own likely method of simply permanently ignoring them.

>> ..and the opener to your third paragraph:

> Presuming that there is no fundamental gender-based inequality in skill is unwise.

> If one presumes that there is, in fact, fundamental gender-based inequality in skill,

My objection to the presumption of equality does not imply we should presume the opposite. We shouldn't presume anything about the relationship between gender and medical/legal/technical skills. We should let those skills themselves (and nothing else) determine who gets to practice them.

Hiring managers (and HR idiots) who assume men are better at something need training on how to evaluate the skills their hiring for rather than relying on poor proxy measurements like gender. (Or, more likely, that company needs a new Hiring Manager. Maybe it will be a Woman). Women who think men are better at something they truly enjoy need to be encouraged to develop their skills anyway and trained not to get in their own way.

But hiring managers shouldn't be forced to hire bad candidates due to quotas. And women who decide they genuinely prefer some traditional female occupation (yes, both Homemaker and Mother are incredibly important occupations and always have been, and I know a "legal secretary" who makes 6 figures) shouldn't be made to feel inadequate because of "women's lib".

Your proposal begs the question that more women in those fields is beneficial.

I have no idea what doctors or lawyers were like in the 70s, but in my experience both doctors and lawyers of either gender are incompetent idiots with minimal ability to help me with anything**. Is an artificial increase in the number of women in those fields a negative contributing factor? I have no idea, but that's the risk of your strategy. Just about every other post is acknowledging that we should focus on technical skill, not gender. If that means encouraging girls to go into technical fields at a young age or even subsidizing technical education base /partially/ on gender in addition to demonstrated technical ability, let's do that.

Presuming that there is no fundamental gender-based inequality in skill is unwise. I'm not saying there is. Just that, like the example of the firewoman who wasn't strong enough to lift the fire hose example, we should work to address the societal perception bias problem without working against whatever natural factors may or may not exist. Men and women are different. And we should take advantage of those differences to most efficiently organize society, not try to pretend they don't exist.

** Granted, the human body and the mess that is the legal system are way more complicated than computers (my field of choice), so it's a bit unreasonable of me to expect the same consistent and useful results I can provide in my line of work. But still...

If you're talking about the people who use VPN, what part of they're using VPN did you misunderstand?

If the VPN option goes away they'll simply stop paying the price. They can just download it for free from somewhere else instead.

I would agree, and frankly I don't think it's the pay-per-review that's driving the gamergaters, as that issue is hardly new. I think they're getting triggered by these largely corrupt journalists attacking games, content and gamers, and the well known corruption is simply an easy and legitimate target in a two-sided shit flinging contest.

I don't think the allegations of sex really were that important, the only extent to which they seem to have mattered at all was through the Streisand effect. Getting a private matter like that shut down is probably entirely possible if there aren't a host of high-profile and relevant tangential matters that will quickly start surfacing, and once you try shutting those down there's not going to be any tacit 'private matter, take it elsewhere' support from 99% of somewhat decent people.

Oh, and careful with the hustling suggestions, that's gonna get the SJW's on your ass for being a redpiller.

Giving sex or blow jobs for preferential treatment is not a problem. However, a journalist not disclosing that he was receiving a blow job from the subject of his review while writing it could be considered an ethical breach.

Of course, the same goes for any other more common methods of obtaining promotional preferential treatment, such as donating copies of games, travel or hardware. The producer of the product has rarely made any commitment to limit how they encourage promotion of their products, but the journalist does implicitly make a commitment towards their readers to perform their job with a certain level of professionalism and adherence to good journalistic practices, which is where the ethical problem appears.

Whether anyones genitals are involved in any step in those chains is frankly irrelevant.

Well, the practice of swatting would be one of those kinds of harassment where 'ignoring it' literally wouldn't work. Of course a cursory googling seems to show more gamergaters actually subjected to that than their purported victims.