Except that Amazon does not accept EBT cards for payment.

EBT cards are a special type of debit card that requires a different system than normal credit cards due to the fact that they are used for both SNAP (food stamps) as well as Cash Aid distribution of funds.

As far as I am aware, you cannot use them online anywhere, only at physical locations where the retailer has tied into the EBT system.

p.s. "Food stamps" for an individual in California are currently around $186 a month, so when people talk about people living the highlife on welfare's dime, try to keep that number in mind as what some people survive on. Cash Aid is another $198 per month per individual, which bring the total for ALL monthly expenses to just under $400 for a single person. Could you survive on $400 per month and be happy?

As far as I am aware, the only MTA that hasnt been hacked in a real-world situation is qmail, which is why it is still in use (and mostly unmodified - netqmail patches being the exception) since 1998.

Most people will think of the nefarious ways he plans on doing this, but wouldnt this be a rather elegant way of doing micro transactions? I am not sure why micro transactions are not done already on a large scale other than it being a nightmare for the creditcard companies and billing statements so no one has bothered creating the infrastructure to scale it out.

But, for example, a person could use their credit card to buy $20 worth of bitcoin and then use that little by little at news sites that charge a few cents worth of bitcoins to give access to an article. Or like the old quarter arcade machines where you plop in a bir of coin to play a game for awhile. Or a few cents to directly pay a musician to listen to their latest released song.

Content creators get paid for what something is actually worth (even if only fractions of a penny) and get their due and people can do that without a huge billing statement listing thousands of micro transactions at the end of each billing cycle.

The last time this was discussed on slashdot there was a very interesting series of comment posted by Rei that shed a lot of light on what the issues surrounding this are and how the situation (and redefining what a planet is) came to be.

I have a feeling that the vast majority of people still want to attract a mate and to do that usually requires doing something more than getting the barest minimum amount of money to survive.

Also, I cannot help but wonder how many more people would take a chance and start small businesses knowing that if they fail they would still have a UBI to feed and house themselves.

Option "A" is how it use to work pre-internet. Not hours before, but months before the event.

People would go line up at that various music stores that were authorized Ticketmaster resellers. You'd get a numbered wristband and wait (similar to how people line up for Black Friday Sales now). You were allowed to buy up to a certain amount (usually 4) tickets.

The pro scalpers would just pay young adults to stand in line for them and buy the maximum allowed ticket amount.

They would then post ads in news papers and the like for "Event Tickets" and people would call to get the 2nd hand price.

Not much different than how it works today except, surprise, it use to require more actual humans to do before automation.

Was there any attempt by the US Marshals Service to return the STOLEN items back to their rightful owners before selling them?

If the answer is no, then this ruling is just another example of how messed up forfeiture laws are in this country.

$600,000,000 / 325,000,000 US population estimate = $1.85 per person.

How did they come to $6 per?

Like the fact that you can find a USB port in planes, trains, bars, and various other places where you might need to charge up your phone?

Yup, not any more.

It really sucks that some people just like to watch the world burn.

You're right, they are the same in that they both include one party who acts in a negative way from a sense of hate.

I have done two upgrades from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and three fresh installs. Mostly for relatives who didn't want to pass up the free upgrade.

The telemetry stuff still irks me, but a lot of it can be turned off. And the "can't disable/skip updates part is scary because trusting Microsoft to get updates right all the time seems foolish given history.

Having said and accepted all of that though, I am absolutely amazed how smooth and responsive Windows 10 is, especially on older hardware.

I did a laptop that was running Vista (Dell Insperon 1525 with Intel Pentium Dual Core 1.86GHz, 2GB RAM, and 120GB HDD). Fresh install of Vista ran so sluggish it made it a miserable and frustrating experience to boot up and use.

Fresh install of Windows 7 was a little better but not by much. When I installed Windows 10 on it, it now boots to the desktop in under 30 seconds and apps launch and respond virtually instantly again.

It has its warts, for sure, but the performance so far has been remarkable and I haven't had any of the issues mentioned in the original post on any of the five systems I've put Windows 10 on.

My only problem with it was that Cortana stays running even when you turn it off and that process sucked up 35% of my memory until I renamed the Cortana folder to prevent the process from respawning...I am dreading the next update that respawns Cortana despite my fix. was not found on this server.

My bad - this was suppose to be attached to the comment below re: people still use yahoo???

Not sure if they still do this by default, but years ago when we signed up for AT&T DSL, the email boxes they gave used the various AT&T domain names but were (and are still) hosted by Yahoo and are accessable on mail.yahoo.com

Charging long-time customers more than they charge new customers has been a thing for cable companies for awhile now - so I guess they should understand too when it happens to them?

Actually ATT does offer something competitive with the other carrier's $40-50 semi-unlimited plans - its just that its part of their GoPhone (prepaid) section.

$45/month ($40 with auto refill)
Unlimited calling.
Unlimited texting (including to over 100 other countries).
2GB (they bumped me to 3GB) 4G data and then unlimited 3G after that.

This is better than any of their post-paid plans and the guy at the ATT store couldn't give me a reason why pre-paid had flat rate semi-unlimited when their regular plans did not.

The same thing from their family plan, minus unlimited 3G on their family plan, (last I checked) cost $10 more per month.