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Submission + - MasterCard stings PayPal with payment fee hike (theregister.co.uk)

iComp writes: "PayPal, Google Wallet and other online payment systems face higher transaction fees from MasterCard in retaliation for their refusal to share data on what people are spending. Visa is likely to follow suit.

The amount that PayPal has to pay MasterCard for every transaction will go up as the latter introduces new charges for intermediated payment processors. This change is on the grounds that such processors don't share transaction details, which the card giants would love to get hold of as it can be used to research buying patterns and the like.

Companies such as PayPal allow payments between users, so the party (perhaps a merchant) receiving the money doesn't need to be registered with the credit-card company. PayPal collects the dosh from the payer's card, and deducts a processing fee before passing the cash on to the receiving party. MasterCard would prefer the receiver to be registered directly so will apply the new fee from June to any payment that is staged in this way.

The fee will only apply within the US, initially at least, and Visa hasn't said it will follow suit. But Reuters tells us that Visa's CEO described the new fee as "totally appropriate", and it is already impacting PayPal's owner eBay according to financial blogger Tom Noyes.

PayPal exploded in use because registering to receive credit-card payments was a tortuous process best left to large retailers. But companies such as Square and Sailpay have simplified that process enormously and MasterCard clearly feels the PayPal's raison d'etre has been largely eliminated — so the time has come for the killer punch."

Censorship

Italy Floats Official Permission Requirement for Web Video Uploads 131

An anonymous reader writes with some bad news from Italy, noting that new rules proposed there would "require people who upload videos onto the Internet to obtain authorization from the Communications Ministry similar to that required by television broadcasters, drastically reducing freedom to communicate over the Web." Understandably, some say such controls represent a conflict of interest for Silvio Berlusconi, "who exercises political control over the state broadcaster RAI in his role as prime minister and is also the owner of Italy's largest private broadcaster, Mediaset."

Comment Re:Wrong question (Score 1) 1100

Does anyone care that it can be proved that the changes in CO2 we are seeing and calling "global warming" is a cyclical event that has happened a lot longer than we've been around? Do some research into the ice core samples they've pulled from the artic that show different co2 levels throughout the years going many thousands of years ago. Also, if you watch the precious global warming community... things are starting to cool and they don't know how to deal with it. It's just part of the normal cycle. Everyone forgets that they were ready to seed the sky in the 70's because they were worried about a global cooling that was going on. How soon we forget!

Comment Re:How will removing LAN encourage more sales? (Score 1) 520

I will second this... I purchased both WarCraft II and StarCraft (+expansion) because of the Spawn function. After I purchased it and did the same with another group of friends, many of them went on to purchase the product. I would see this as free marketing! You could even add a feature to allow the person with the spawned copy to easily upgrade to the full version with ease. (A discount would help as well.) I would see this increasing your sales greatly.
Idle

Submission + - Swedish factory fined $3,000 for robot attack (theregister.co.uk)

rodrigoandrade writes: "Maintenance worker was attacked by a robot. The robo-assault reportedly took place in 2007, when a man attempted to repair a defective machine used to lift rocks without properly checking the power supply beforehand. And unfortunately, the human head isn't all that different than a big juicy rock to such a robot."

Comment Re:Oh boy (Score 0, Troll) 281

The funny part of the whole thing is that it can be completely 100% prevented and cured with the proper vitamins. Every person that has HPV that leads to cervical cancer is also vitamin B12 deficient. (I believe it is B12, its one of the B's anyway.) The same thing goes for most auto-ammune diseases as well. Check the vitamin D levels of someone with say MS... They will be very Vit D deficient. Unfortunately for big pharma, you can't patent something in nature.

Another good thing to look at is 5HTP. Almost all the "good" anti-depressants are derivatives of 5HTP. They all have more negative side effects and don't work as well...

Comment Re:Ahem, nonsensical sense much? (Score 3, Interesting) 166

I call BS... I was one of the kids that people cheated off of... None of them did it because they were bored. They did it because they were lazy and didn't care. The worst offenders were the ones who's parents paid them for receiving a good grade. At that point, they focused on the grade instead of learning.

I think we need to throw all the standardized tests out the window and start teaching kids how to learn and not how to pass a test.

Comment Re:I stopped buying CDs because of the RIAA (Score 1) 309

I feel the same way... I've purchased maybe 5 CD's in the last 6-8 years and they were almost all gifts for others. I've even stopped listening to music in general and see most of what comes out now as noise. It's really amazing to watch kids now... They spend so much of what they do listening to music instead of enjoying what is in front of them. You see them with their earphones in and just missing out on life. I've even seen some listen to music while watching TV. The one that really gets me are the ones that have music blasting in the background while they game and then think you're cheating because you can hear their footsteps and they can't hear yours...

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