Echelon bikes mainly sold through physical retail locations. Considering it's a $800+ item.. It is very unlikely they will let you get away with simply charging it back. Particularly since they can verify you received the correct item and it is in working condition at the time of sale. The store will definitely have the signed receipts and possibly video footage of the person physically checking out with the items.

You chargeback half a grand worth from a Walmart, and you're liable to find police at your door the next morning.

Release very specific directions instead of a tool.

The DMCA addresses circumvention tools. It does not address speech.

Well, they put these new requirements and restrictions AFTER people bought the equipment.

There ought to be a lawsuit against the manufacturer over this. Similar to as there was against Sony when they tried to remove OtherOS support from the Playstation 3.

Stablecoins should be regulated in the same way that the likes of Paypal is regulated.

I don't know that that makes any sense whatsoever.

Paypal is an entirely different kind of thing. You go to Paypal because you want to send a friend $25. Paypal provides processing which gets the payment transferred from point A to point B.

With Stablecoins: the stablecoin has nothing to do directly with that process. Stablecoins don't deploy payment processing infrastructure. Stablecoin operators create the define the subject that you are using the crypto network to transfer. And write the script that defines the technical code regarding how that value is transferred and redeemed. From that point on its hand off -- their only active role is to issue and/or redeem Stablecoins: If it is a type of Stablecoin that has those sorts of operations.

That means there are things which need to be fundamentally regulated for Stablecoins which Paypal does not even have to worry about.

Mainly regulation should make sure Stablecoins are protecting the integrity of the backing of their coins AND the Integrity of any smart contracts themselves. Some of the greatest dangers will Stablecoins -- is whoever is managing the assets backing that stablecoin may simply steal them. Or they may create ways that more stablecoins can be issued at some point or released than there are assets for. They may create strange policies on the Stablecoins which are unacceptable for the application -- for example Smart contracts where a burn or automatic expiration date is introduced into someone's coins.

They are subject to risks that whoever is running the stablecoin would issue Spurious tokens to themself, steal, or render tokens worthless. A nefarious Stablecoin introducer might write backdoors or other undesirable behaviors into the Smart contracts that define the tokens, or write a Smart contract that has vulnerabilities, or abuse their position.

A badly-written smart contract, vulnerabilities, or other instabilities in the underlying Ethereum or other network can cause unexpected loss or interruptions to the Stablecoin holders' capability to transact, etc.

For all the benefits there are enormous risks in Stablecoin at a technological level that has no real equivalent for services like Paypal. For a company like Paypal they don't define what the US dollar is. A company like Paypal don't define rules that execute on a decentralized network on others' computers. Their servers are in their control and can directly manage everything involved in managing accounts and transfers. They just have to worry about hackers and attacks that can be detected and monitored on their own infrastructure. So there's a narrower field of technical risks

We already have banks, we already have currency,

Because banks suck and do NOT provide a good solution for all use cases where you want to hold and exchange value online. Consider stablecoins and crypto as a type of competitor to some banking services for some uses.

Banks take 24 hours to settle your transfer and charge you a 5% fee for the privilege. Instead of the minutes or at most an hour you would possibly want your transfers to complete in.

Banks will create waiting periods and holding periods to abuse the float at their profit and your expense.

Banks will randomly hold or freeze funds or transactions for review.

Banks cancel your transfer, because they saw something in the Memo field that tripped an alert. The next day police are at your door grilling you about your typo'd Memo line that auto-corrected to hookers when you meant to type hooks.

Banks take back the money from the digital thing you sold online AND charge you an exorbitant fee per transaction for the privilege, because the buyer was a scammer who decided report to Paypal or the Credit card as never delivered long after they received AND used up the item.

Banks won't open a new account for you, because the teller racially profiled you at the gate.

Banks when presented with your paycheck to simply deposit will stare and the back of the check for minutes and reply with "Now how did you get that? This signature must be fake.". "I'm going to shred this, and call the police to take this guy away."

Banks refuse your transaction and will not tell you why, because they saw you walking in wearing orange socks, and orange socks are deemed high risk on Wednesdays. Tomorrow the high risk colors are pink and blue.

Banks decline your request to withdraw $1k of your own money at the teller window in cash, because they Insist on knowing exactly from whom and what you are buying with $1k, and are not adequately satisfied with your explanation.

Banks close your merchant account because Mastercard received a complaint and found digital art on your website they decided is not brand-friendly.

Why? Stablecoins I believe plan on using treasuries to back them. You can buy Treasuries easily. You can sell treasuries easily. So why would you want to put a middleman in there who is going to take a cut

Because your treasuries require you have a centralized account and can only be sold for USD.
If that entity who holds your centralized account does not contemplate a transaction, then it is not possible.

The value in your Stablecoins is tokenized and can be traded directly in exchange for goods and services or in exchange for other coins. Your stablecoins can be stored in a wallet and taken offline. Individual transfer of some stablecoins can be made in a sign transaction and submitted to a centralized network. They are not bound directly to you in an account. There is not some centralized bank who can approve or reject your transfer of X stablecoins because they don't like the color of your socks; or the type of shirt you are wearing is deemed as high risk today.

You can treat the stablecoin units as cash, so long as the token is not hacked or have a badly written contract and the underlying fund does not become insolvent, etc. It is those things regulation should address.

go bellyup I can't wait to hear the screaming about bail them out. Part of the deal with putting money in a bank is it is FDIC insured.

The government could create FDIC insurance for a stablecoin. The whole point of a stablecoin is it's supposed to be backed by a specific hard asset or by a mix of hard assets. JMO - The government should be working on setting regulatory standards Stablecoins have to meet Including.

1. Registration similar to stock and bond issuers
2. Declared reserves.
3. Proof of stable reserves.
4. Proof of regulator audits of quarterly and annual audits those reserves by independent unrelated parties who have appropriate licensing and certification. Which include at the minimum a physical inventory of any hard reserves, a forensic book examination, confirmation of all balance sheets and statements for the preceding 6 months, and a complete review of all assets and liabilities.
5. Requirements that a subsequent independent audit cannot be performed by the same accounting firm, person, group, team, or contractor during the same year as a previous independent audit.

Why would the police bother seizing vacation videos when looking for tax records?

Because they would bother. The real problem here is the Plain view doctrine may lead to an unjust result if applied to digital data. Because once you are in somebody's system with a ticket that says to look for accounting files All files may have to be analyzed to a certain degree - and as a result, even the respondent's most sensitive files completely unrelated to the subject matter of the search can be in plain view.

It is possible from the point of view of the officers searching: The person that they believe to be an evil accountant in their mind, they will suspect could have preplanned all of this and concealed incriminating records in a file named "My Vacation 2014.mp4" as a deliberately incorrect filename or Description on the VHS tape in order to misdirect authorities.

Once they have access to a device or an account, they have access to all of it.

That is true, but the same is true when they have access to search a home for X, for example a search for a certain gun. In theory nothing physically stops them searching through everything and looking at items that aren't on the warrant - they got physical access to the whole building.

I'd say it is still a good finding that warrants need to be more specific than to say seize and search all the potential data on a phone, And that they need to specify the type and subject or nature of records they are searching for.

I also would think they should go a step farther and say the warrants for electronic records on an electronic device should only allow extracting the actual records as a copy on site, and not anyone's personal communications device itself . Just like if you got a warrant to search a house -- you don't get to seize the whole house and return what you don't need later.

Due to the unreasonable hardship that seizing someone's telephone causes --- presuming the subjects owning the devices will provide access to take the records, unless obviously the physical state of the device's exterior or components are expected to contain important relevant evidence. The pulling of a copy of records off the device should be something required to be done on site and within a reasonable length of time. Just like the execution of a search warrant does not generally allow cordoning off a home and locking the owner out for an extended period of time.

I wouldn't call the practices "deceptive"

The deceptive part is how people are induced to sign up for service. At the time of advertising or at the time of signup they are presented as this monthly service / service for only $5 a month, for example.

But at the time of the customer calling to cancel the companies want to treat it as a Forever commitment or an Annual commitment with a monthly payment plan.

They create artificial costly barriers to cancelling which amount to an additional fee. The "only" $5 is no longer the truth. As a customer Your time is worth money. Requiring you to spend 20 minutes on hold to cancel a service and then giving you the runaround for half an hour amounts to an additional fee -- that time actually has a cost that is worth more than the $5. Therefore it is a deception that the cancellation has undisclosed costs to the consumer, And it is deceptive they don't mention about you being forced to continue service until you can incur that cost and overcome their bullying call center reps.

Unfair != illegal, unfortunately.

In fact Unfair trade practice == Ilegal per the text of the law passed by congress. It literally states: " Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful. " (US Code Title 15 U.S. Code 45.)

"(2)The Commission is hereby empowered and directed to prevent persons, partnerships, or corporations, except banks, savings and loan institutions described in section 57a(f)(3) of this title, Federal credit unions described in section 57a(f)(4) of this title, common carriers subject to the Acts to regulate commerce, air carriers and foreign air carriers subject to part A of subtitle VII of title 49, and persons, partnerships, or corporations insofar as they are subject to the Packers and Stockyards Act, 1921, as amended [7 U.S.C. 181 et seq.], except as provided in section 406(b) of said Act [7 U.S.C. 227(b)], from using unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.

I'm still pissed about Adobe using a kill switch to ruin Flash,

This caused an extremely serious issue back in the day. It is actually one of the rare cases where I had to backup some DLL files on a live production system and use a Hex editor to tamper with the executable (In order to disable the "Kill" logic in the Flash binary).

Just my opinion.. Adobe should be liable for this. In a fair and just society they would be due to pay for all the time necessary to workaround the issue they deliberately caused for all mission critical deployments.

because We had to deal with a bunch of multi-vCenter vSphere 6.0 deployment that also had 5.5 servers -- which don't become Irrelevent just because a vendor that mate it no longer likes a certain technology that's already deployed. In case you weren't aware the Web client required to manage the appliances, authentication configuration for single sign-on, and many VMware configuration features of 6.0 has functioning Adobe Flash player as an absolute requirement.

That version of VMware is new enough that the older Standalone client/App cannot perform many critical operations, But also old enough that the new non-Flash Web Interface was still in a Technical preview status, and only the Flash-based administration interface is fully functional.

It's $20/year not per month. Microsoft isn't do this to cover costs of infrastructure.

No.. not at all. There is no way you can get whole year of service for $20. Even the absolute bare minimum plan is $150 per user license per year. The monthly rate most businesses have to pay is more than $20 a month actually and the lowest end plan is at least $12.

If your "business" is sending out emails as user@business.onmicrosoft.com instead of user@busness.com then you should take your business more seriously.

It's absolutely fine, though. If you're paying that $20 a month for your 1000 employees or whatever... Your money should be as good to Microsoft as anyone else's -- it should not matter whether you opt for a custom domain or their in-place domain.

What I really mean is a 100 message limit sucks for any legitimate user affected by it, And it is NOT a legitimate solution to the problem.
Because even 1 malicious spam or phishing message is still spam or phishing, and useful to the spammers.

If you take out trial and test/dev tenants...

Clearly test/dev tenants should be limited. I mean; switching to a custom domain on a trial tenant should Not get you the freedom to send hundreds or thousands of emails per day. If you are not having to have paid for service -- the spammers will happily sign up for thousands of bogus trials a day in order to circumvent whatever spam limits are imposed. The spammers don't even originate their spam from a single IP address - when an email account gets compromised on a mail server; I've seen it before -- the spammers hit the account from more than 100 IP addresses the second their dumb scanner breaks into a user account. They sweep entire domains, and they're not phased whether the send limit per account is 1000 messages or 100.. the outgoing message limits don't actually stop anything; they make it more insidious.

The word ``tenant'' when spoken by the owner of a service or building/facility such as Microsoft is as a counterpart to their role as landlord, and a euphamism for the words peasant or rent-payer.

I'd disagree. Government should include stocks in their reserves just as anyone would, although government officials should not be involved in making equity deals with companies or making the call to buy a specific company -- it begin to look like some form of favoritism, and the manner is totally improper.

Within the specific context of trust funds I mean - the government's funds retained for future spending should be invested appropriately just like any corporation would invest their cash - which should be administered by a custodian under strict confidentiality requirements for the management. In other words, the government itself and government officials do not get to know what the individual stocks are and cannot make those decisions other than the decision to place some funds in a trust, and the understanding that the fate of their invested funds and the average of performance they can expect is tied to the economy.

They should not be holding a 10% stake or controlling interest in a business.