'In my entire life, I've never paid for something by check and been told I couldn't take my purchase until the check cleared'

Your life experience does not match mine. Vehicle purchases especially, unless I used a cashier's check, I would wait for delivery and title. I've mailed checks for merchandise and been told I will not see shipment until the check clears.

And a classic check purchase fraud is to overpay, request a refund, on a bad check. You left holding the bag for a bad check, out the refund money you made good.

In fact, look for online car dealer experiences, and you find this exact fraud is common. Most dealers know better.

Just not my experience. You are fortunate.

We need to push for CEOs to be replaced with AI. They'd do a better job and would cost a LOT less.

Start repeating this everywhere and get the meme-makers on it. It will be wonderful to watch them squirm as they suddenly find reasons why AI shouldn't replace a company's most valuable assets: its most highly-paid executives.

I buy CDs I want (and do not already have) anywhere, yard sales, Goodwill, etc., because I prefer to *own* the music I want. I use streaming services for convenience, since Google mangled my online libraries, but if I wanted to I could stream off of a self-hosted gadget.

I've kept a portable CD player just in case, and my portable Minidisc recorder is still important to me, along with a stock of blanks.

Owning is underrated.

I'll find out in mid January, lol - it's en route on the Ever Acme, with a transfer at Rotterdam. ;) But given our high local prices, it's the same cost to me of like 60kg of local filament, so so long as the odds of it being good are better than 1 in 8, I come out ahead, and I like those odds ;)

That said, I have no reason to think that it won't be. Yasin isn't a well known brand, but a lot of other brands (for example Hatchbox) often use white-label Yasin as their own. And everything I've seen about their op looks quite professional.

This does in fact concern both 911 and cayenne.

>This includes popular models like the Cayenne, Macan, Panamera, Taycan, 911, and the 718 Cayman and Boxster.

Also methods of fixing it suggest that there's just something borked with servers or the modules themselves:

>Some drivers reported success after disconnecting their car batteries for up to 10 hours, while others managed to restore function by disabling or rebooting the VTS module entirely. Rolf dealerships have been instructing technicians to manually reset the alarm units, which often requires partially dismantling the vehicle. Some cars spring back to life immediately, while others remain stubbornly offline despite multiple attempts.

Bad coding/expectation of update that never arrived due to cancellation of service after Russia started the war and Porche officially pulled support as it pulled out?

I suspect this is something of a "takes a while to kick in".

Still makes little sense. Porches aren't really daily driver cars, they're leisure cars. So you put one in a garage for winter, and it won't start in the spring until you tow it outside?

If you buy a car with a credit card( and I know someone who did and they used their Amex and it works) you're probably going to walk out to the parking lot. Put your key in the car and go. If you buy a car with a check, I just suspect you're coming back tomorrow and maybe even 3 days later, as ACH does not clear instantly. It's all it's worth to you. If it's convenient to just walk out the door, you use a card. If you can wait just a couple of days and let the check clear. Obviously you saved yourself 800 bucks. You pay for convenience. That's one of the features of payment processing.

So, buy the DVD.

With Netflix, I'm afraid we'll have to pause the movie to put the kids to bed. Then come back and discover that Netflix has dropped it from their catalog.

As far as I can tell, the Netflix business plan has been about erasing the archives so people will have to watch their new stuff. And if you aren't fast, even their new stuff becomes archival. Then, "Poof!"

Pssst! Hey kid. Wanna buy some vacuum tubes?

Your conditions warrant medical (mental health) treatment and education. Which should be aimed at enabling you to handle the university, employment and the world with the tools that enable you to deal with life. From that point on, a university should treat you as any other student. You either can or can not handle the work given you. Either with the abilities you were born with or those tools our health care system should provide you with.

It is unreaonable for every institution to have to maintain (at their expense) duplicated programs to handle every case that comes along. Where I went to public school, the district had excellent, off campus programs for special needs students. Where they could concentrate the care resources to efficiently handle cases. Instead of expecting the general school faculty to dedicate any extra time to handle them. With the hit or miss skill set that would result. The problem with this approach is that parents of little Beavis would be appaled by the neighbors noticing him loading onto the short bus every morning. Other school districts, unable to deal with this parental pressure just mainstreamed everyone. To the disadvantage of those in need of special help.

Why?

Odds are that, if I'm building a flat pack on my system, I've built the application from source. So the dependency issue doesn't exist. Because they were checked by the build scripts (in any competent source distribution I've ever seen). Or the binary was downloaded through a package manager which also handles dependencies.

For some small s/w house or within a company for enterprise apps, maybe. But there are already tools for this.

Many businesses have a check endorsement printer that also reads the MICR code and performs an electronic transfer on the spot. I can't even get home and log on to my bank account before the withdrawl is made.

"The 2.5% processing fees more than cover their losses."

Are you implying this is the only real cost for payment processors?

MasterCard and Visa both employ an internetwork that links banks (issuers) and merchants (acquirers) so that data is exchanged and payments are processed.

Issuers maintain the data necessary to identify their account holders, keep records, pay out the transactions presented by acquirers, and arrange to be paid for the transactions they facilitate. The float between payment to acquirers and receiving payment from their account holders binds capital, which sometimes is actually borrowed from sources, at interest. Even if it is held as working capital, it is not earing interest elsewhere. Along with all this, issuers have a fiduciary responsibility to protect their account holders from fraud and misuse, as much as is practically possible. All this I mention not to excuse fees, just to point out the reasons. And all of this requires complex information systems, which must be sufficiently accurate to avoid penalties for failure, even from regulatory agencies that are predicated on nothing more than a desire to impose their judgement on the process.

Acquirers also have a responsibility to eliminate fraud as much as practical. They also have a responsibility to ensure their customers, merchants, receive payment for goods and services provided on the promise of payment, and within reasonable time frames. And since the agencies purporting to protect consumers from bad behavior demand reporting, acquirers maintain these records. Not to mention tax receipts, etc.

Payment processing is not cheap. It most certainly is not free. Is 2.5% fair? I dunno. But it is a competitive business, despite the outsider not discerning that, but competitive in two directions. First, under the hood, processors do compete on fees or services. Stripe used to charge a LOT more than others, for the convenience of an easy signup. Amex used to charge more for the convenience of lesser fraud and customer loyalty (It was factual, look it up, or ask CVS and Walgreens). MasterCard and Visa discounted fees to attract the business that other brands enjoyed. Now convenience is a feature that has value. Loyalty programs increase fees because, well, if you're getting 2% cashback on your card, that came from somewhere. The equation should be obvious, but go look that up also.

Whining about processing fees can be about the absolute value, but if you don't understand the process, you will not believe that fees are fair, ever. You're wrong.

As we consider the premise that ACH checking is 'free'...

Most banks charge business customers for cash deposits. That includes checks.

Which sort of challenges the concept that payment processing fees are somehow excessive, when these fees are levied even for aper.

ACH can be used entirely electronically, but there are fees. Inconvenient, because ACH has rules.

Many payment processors charge fees almost invisibly.

And business customers find that depositing cash is a unique nuisance, so they might very much like this.

Eliminating paper checking is the gateway drug to eliminating cash. And that is the stepping stone to eliminating personal privacy.

(Off-topic rant here, eliminate the 702 provision. Please.)

Yes, this.

The unbanked in the US suffer many insults and damages. Eliminating paper checks will add to that, forcing them to use some service to convert cash into a form acceptable to the banking industry,

As it is, unbanked often pay to cash the checks they get for payroll etc. They convert direct deposit debit cards into cash, often with a fee. And then they enjoy the scorn of others who wait impatiently as they pay in cash, wait for the cashier to miscount change, and further complain.

SO eliminating paper checks will slap the unbanked twice - their sources of funds will be forced into some method, and they will be denied even the paper checking some use to avoid electronics.

And we should enjoy the discussion on the topic of 'We should eliminate cash'. Right in with 'We should eliminate printed material'.

Eliminating paper checks is not so good an idea as it might appear at first glance. As it is, those paper checks are negotiated and virtually immediately converted to electronic image data. From there, it's conventional for today.

I'll leave the discussion of personal privacy, freedom, and the Surveillance State to others. But you have been prompted.