212 karma · joined March 3, 2011
The worst part of PayPal is undoubtedly the service, I've had experience where they locked the account and demanded social security no.s and registration information (via fax) for which there are no Australian equivalents. After months of them asking for things that don't exist, it took a complaint to the Financial industry ombudsman for them to de-restrict the account to allow us to withdraw the funds.
The fact that there are no names doesn't exactly instill trust or confidence.
Closest I could get to info would be that the Southern Payment Systems Pty Ltd resolves on a google search to: http://www.southernpaymentsystems.com/ which seems to share the street address of a Designer(http://speakinteractive.com/), a real estate agency(http://www.eftosestates.com.au/) and a ruby on rails developer(http://brownbeagle.com.au)
[update: never mind, found one of the co founders, http://dompym.com/ pretty impressive, he's ex SAP and ex Clear Interactive, acquired by the NZ exchange]
Out of the fortune 500, only 320 were there five years ago.
If you invest in the broad market with silly things like gross revenue, or current market cap deciding your portfolio make up, you'll loose money in real terms in the long run. I'm not saying you should pick stocks, but you can easily go through a list of the top 50, and exclude those who are either overvalued on a P/E basis with regards to their growth prospects, and invest on that basis.
This is the case in Australia
Its pretty surprising that Microsoft (who run a reasonably functional store on xbox) cant figure out how to run their own online store.
It doesn't sound too difficult to extend this and use a phone capable of mounting as mass storage and boot your desktop off of your phone. A Windows Windows Phone anyone?
or you could go with a collapsible column grid along the lines of http://fluidbaselinegrid.com/ where by you have the one code base for mobile and desktop browsers.
Why doesn't anyone just call bullshit on the whole concept of the US extending its law to apply to the rest of the world?
On this topic, does anyone know of any major manufacturers who dont do this with their consumer machines? I have had really bad experiences of late with Dell, Toshiba and HP, to the point where they come with what is essentially malware built in. As one example, our latest dell purchase redirects search queries, puts a link to ebay on the desktop which comes back once deleted, and prevents you from adding an alternative search provider to IE.
1) The web service storing usernames and passwords in an unencrypted or easily reversed encrypted format. (which it must be, since you are able to send an email with these details).(Hint: see the gawker media password leak)
2) Your email address being sent in plain text over an unencrypted mail service with untrusted intermediaries.
> "what about Ruby!"
Arguably one of the most powerful force multipliers inherent in ruby is the object order, which is definatively derived from the Japanese language subject-object-verb syntax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object%E2%80%93...).The key item thats left is some sort of standard interface to port programs to a FPGA style processor, i.e. a way of interfacing between a language compiler and HDL.
I like the look of the Reduceron (http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron/) which looks to be funded by Xilinx and Lava( by Satnam Singh, who works for Microsoft Research), purely because I think its easier to visualise a functional language translating into circuitry.
Although I do wonder whether it will take a start-up to be able to successfully merge both the software and the hardware components into a workable model.