And just *how* do you suggest getting on a plane, getting into a movie, or shipping a box "paperless"?

These are all applications where you can (or even must) print out something to take with you or attach to an item and receive a service, where in the "old days" you used to have to go somewhere to pick up a specialty-printed item.

I've been without a reliable printer for a few months, and it's HARD. Why? Because it's 2009, man, and there's a LOT of stuff available online now... like boarding passes, movie tickets, postage stamps, RMAs... that you can PRINT OUT and slap on a package or hand to the attendant at the door. In fact, sometimes, that's the only way to do something, like with shipping my broken Kindle back to Amazon.

Until we have ubiquitous e-ink paper, we're still going to have to print a lot of stuff out to make it available for uses that don't have a computer terminal.

Ditto, ditto, ditto... but the reliability with CUPS (under Ubuntu Happy Heron) has been only so-so. At this point, it generally won't print at all, and then every so often, a complete power cycle (which is accomplished through unplugging it or courtesy of a power company blip) will spark a few dozen sheets of unicode hearts or half a page of something I tried to print a month ago.

I keep planning to move it across the room and try to hook it up to the Win2k box, to find out if it's a Linux compatibility issue or the printer is just dying, but that requires a lot of shifting around I haven't had a chance to do yet.

WTF? Who uses crayons anymore when you can go down to Costco and get a set of 100 high-quality colored pencils for what the box of 64 Crayolas (with the built-in sharpener) used to cost? They're FAR more durable, give better image quality, and offer a much larger gamut. I've never seen a toddler eat a colored pencil, either.

Costco too, for those who refuse to shop at the Evil Emporium.

TANSTAAFL. If you take home cartridges purchased by the company that pays your paycheck, those losses will impact their ability to pay you and the other folks who do stuff like what you do... increasing your workload per dollar.

Actually, there is a project in progress right now to test out a token authentication system for e-prescribing of Schedule 2 drugs. A health center in... I think... Massachusetts? is working with the DEA on it. They've developed the system and are currently using it on a trial basis. The project is funded by AHRQ, and there was a presentation of the work-in-progress during an AHRQ-sponsored Webex on e-prescribing and medication management on August 27th. If you can find a recording of it, you might find it fascinating.

You are misinformed. US ATMs accept cash and check deposits, allow transfers between accounts, and sell stamps. Some may even let you pay bills or order cashier's checks.

Which is still a better outcome than that they DON'T tighten security so that they don't have to do any of that pesky explaining.

The market *won't* motivate banks to do it on their own, not for a very, very long time... because people don't actually understand the risks, so they don't see a value in protecting themselves against them. It's that tricky "perfect information" component of Adam Smith's triad.

And you, sir, have trouble with multiple nested negatives. He's NOT going to NOT move somewhere because they have a lot of spam... take out both negatives, he's perfectly fine living somewhere with a lot of spam. UNLESS (another negative) you are talking about the food variety... implying that he *would* avoid living somewhere that had an overrepresentation of food Spam (R). Such as Hawaii.

NO NO NO.

The bank should be able to escape liability if they prove that the damage was CAUSED BY customer's negligence. Otherwise, they might have let an employee capture all your "secure" information and sell it to the Russians, but they're not liable because it turns out you didn't download the latest WinXP patch.

Just as with a car accident, there has to be an investigation into who actually caused the problem. It's reasonable to share the blame, but I think in a case where reasonable actions on the part of the bank would have prevented the problem completely, it's also reasonable for them to be responsible. They're the professional service here. They *do* have a greater burden than their customers.

Show me the bank that's been demonstrated secure by a LACK of media coverage of their failures... and I'll show you a bank that's either (a) too small to do much of anything or (b) really, really good at shutting up media.

Inductive reasoning proves nothing. Just because there's no coverage of Bank A having customers' accounts get wiped out doesn't mean that it hasn't happened and won't happen. It just means you're now subject to the media's whim as far as information goes, rather than just the bank's. And since the media doesn't have any special rights WRT getting info from the banks about their practices, you're really not a whole lot better off at all... since all you're going to see is whatever sells ad spots. (Oh, Bank A wants a 30-second spot every half hour? All we have to do is drop that story... right. I'll get right on it.)

Talk to the bank you want to move it to about a Rollover account. You don't have to pay taxes if you roll it over properly.

Those types of breaches aren't limited to the world of online banking, though. Someone can walk up to me with a gun while I'm at the ATM and demand I take out ALL my money and hand it over. Someone could kidnap my child outside the bank during business hours and hold him hostage until I went in and emptied my account and handed it over.

But... the banks *have* implemented security measures to make these types of "attacks" more difficult. ATMs cap the amount you can withdraw during a single transaction, and also during the entire day across multiple transactions. They have security cameras installed to make catching and prosecuting offenders easier. They have silent alarms at the teller, which they can set off if they think something's iffy about a transaction. Accounts with multiple account holders may require multiple signatures for certain transactions.

They can't secure my body or my family, but they *do* do what they can to secure the transactions I make via their branch or resources. Why should I expect different from online banking?

And this is primarily due to online banking, rather than ATMs?

And the banks say "Sure thing! That'll be just $5 per transaction!"

As others have pointed out, they'd *also* lose customers if they actually made online banking secure.

Think about it: first, they have to make things less convenient, because frankly, convenience and security are inversely proportional. That will lose them customers right off the bat.

But as several posters have pointed out, that's not enough... because people don't know how to keep themselves secure. So for a bank to actually make their customers' transactions as secure as feasible and reasonable, they would have to require everyone to pass a test or take a class before signing up for online banking. How many banks would permanently lose a lot of business if they cut off online access to their customers until they'd been certified to use online banking?

For exactly the reasons you stated, it's unlikely that banks will make online banking reasonably secure unless regulators step in. (And this is why we can't have nice things in a free market.)

The above post is SFW.