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Ford Taurus
Ford Taurus Q1 regional sales up 88pc
The 2013 Ford Taurus, the US automaker's flagship sedan, posted an 88 per cent increase in regional sales during the first quarter of this year, while it registered an increase of more than 200 per cent in Qatar. "SincMore…
Ford Taurus voted Saudi car of the year
Ford's most innovative sedan, the all new Taurus, has been voted 'Car of the Year' by leading Arabic language automotive magazine Saudi Auto. According to the magazine, the award is given to the most outstanding new car sold in SaudiMore…


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Applications | Products | Parts & Service | Media | Careers | Contact | Company
For these applications, MTU engines provide the highest performance, reliability and availability as well as a maintenance-friendly construction. On top of that, long service intervals and an efficient use of fuel provide for exceptionally low operating costs.
MTU diesel engines are the standard in many mining applications around the globe. They reliably power vehicles for underground and opencast mining, including loading vehicles such as excavators and wheel loaders; transport vehicles such as haul trucks or blast hole drilling rigs; and other mining machines – diesel-mechanic, diesel-electric or diesel-hydraulic.
MTU ValueCare products and services offer comprehensive, customized support to optimize your engine's life and performance while helping to ensure predictable maintenance costs.

subset: commoncrawl


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Writer Rick Edgerton talks #MHFBeanie Round, the harrowing statistics behind Brain Cancer - and what...
27 hours ago
The Manly Sea Eagles have defeated the North Queensland Cowboys 14-12 in tonight's NRL trial match in Cairns.
On the back of an impressive defensive effort, the Sea Eagles held out the Cowboys while posting a 10-0 half-time lead.
Two second half tries in six minutes saw the Cowboys storm back into the contest
But Manly centre Steve Matai's second try of the night gave the visitors a narrow two-point lead to ultimately win the match.
NORTH QUEENSLAND COWBOYS 12 v MANLY SEA EAGLES 14 Scorers Cowboys: S Bolton, J Smith tries. J Thurston 2 goals Scorers Sea Eagles: S Matai 2m M Orford tries. J Lyon goal
Barlow Park, Cairns, QLD Kick off: 7.30pm HALF TIME: Sea Eagles 10-0 FULL TIME: Sea Eagles 14-12
Upcoming matches 16-19 MARCH 2007 Fri 7:30 (Qld) 8:30 (NSW) - BRONCOS v COWBOYS - Suncorp Stadium Fri 7:30 - STORM v TIGERS - Olympic Park Sat 7:30 (NZ) 5:30 (NZ) - WARRIORS v EELS - Mt Smart Stadium Sat 7:30 - SEA EAGLES v RAIDERS - Brookvale Oval Sat 7:30 - SHARKS v PANTHERS - Toyota Park Sun 2:00 - KNIGHTS v BULLDOGS - EnergyAustralia Stadium Sun 3:00 - TITANS v DRAGONS - Suncorp Stadium Mon 7:00 - ROOSTERS v RABBITOHS - Aussie Stadium


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Roy Eldridge Whidden
Born In: Onslow
Passed on: January 3rd, 2013
Roy Whidden, 83, passed away Thursday, Jan. 3, 2012, at Cedarstone Enhanced Care, Truro.
Born in Onslow, he was the son of the late Harry and Nettie (Deyrmond) Whidden.
Roy was a member of Sydney River United Church. He was a member of East Gate Lodge #127 AF and AM, 50-year member, Past Master, and secretary for 15 years. He was involved in the Scottish Rite, Rose Croix, Nova Scotia Consistory, 32 degree mason. Roy was an active volunteer for years with Meals on Wheels and Palliative Care. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 126, Westmount.
Roy is survived by sons, Roy, Halifax and Jeffrey (Katherine), St. Louis, USA; sister, Doris (Everill Goff), Truro; and brother, Foster, Truro; grandchildren, Chelsea (19), Lauren (16), Addison (5), Kylee (3) and Grayson (8 months) Whidden.
Roy was predeceased by his wife, Eva Joyce (MacIsaac).
Visitation will take place Saturday, Jan. 5 from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. at Sydney Memorial Chapel. Funeral service will be held Sunday, Jan. 6 at 2 p.m. at the United Protestant Church of Sydney River, with Rev. Dana Feltmate officiating. Interment in Alfred Smith Cemetery.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Alzheimer Society of Canada. The family wishes to thank the wonderful staff of Cedarstone Enhanced Care.
Condolences may be sent to the family at www.sydneymemorialchapel.ca or e-mail email@example.com.


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NEW BRITAIN, Conn. (AP) _ Gov. Dannel P. Malloy is holding out the possibility of establishing a grace period for gun owners who missed the Jan. 1 deadline for registering certain weapons and ammunition magazines under a new law.
Malloy said Monday his administration is saving the registration applications and envelopes postmarked Jan. 1, Jan. 2 and possibly Jan. 3. He said it's in case the General Assembly passes legislation allowing those applications to be counted as having arrived on time.
Malloy emphasized how said State Police staff remained until 8 p.m. at the Middletown headquarters to help people Dec. 31. The deadline was midnight that night.
Some gun owners have complained they dropped their applications in the mail on Dec. 31 but missed the deadline because their letters weren't postmarked until Jan. 1 or later.
(© Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)


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'northern california'
Tag Archive
Final Showdown ends the 2011-12 Season
Bakersfield plays host to the Season Finale & Historic Nor Cal vs. SoCal Showdown!
Great weekend ya'll! Congrats to our 22 Prestige Series Champions and everyone who came to be a part of the finale weekend @SoCalCross. The 2011-12 season has been presented by SPY Optic for which we are forever to help us get to the next level. [...]


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A Doncaster boy had to be rescued by firefighters after getting his leg trapped last night.
The boy, aged about 10, was walking along West Road, Woodlands, when he slipped and managed to wedge his leg between a lamp post and a wall.
Adwick fire crews attended and removed his trainer before manipulating the leg so it could be pulled free.
It took only a few minutes to get him out and he did not suffer any injuries, said a spokesman for South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue.


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Is there a future for the drive-through teller, once a symbol of banking convenience for a nation on the go?
Maybe not.
Bank of America Corp. says it is phasing out some of its drive-through teller services in Massachusetts and elsewhere across the country because of declining traffic.
The nation's second-largest bank has closed two of its teller windows in Dorchester and West Boylston since July and will eliminate two others in Worcester and Tewksbury on Sept. 9.
The bank will continue to evaluate its remaining 50 Massachusetts locations featuring drive-through tellers, said spokesman T.J. Crawford.
The drive-through teller, like many other services, is finding it harder than ever to compete with the conveniences of technology. At a time when customers can deposit a check by taking a photo of it on their mobile phone or visiting an automated teller machine 24 hours a day, the idea of stuffing checks and deposit slips into a cylinder, sending it through a vacuum tube, and communicating with the teller through a static-y intercom seems almost quaint.
In July, Bank of America had 13 million mobile banking customers who used their smartphones to deposit an average of 100,000 checks per day.
For many customers, computers and phones have replaced the drive-through teller, which was introduced in 1930, almost two decades after Ford Motor Co. rolled out the Model T.
Thirty years ago, drive-through teller service was a point of pride for banks, some of which built 10 to 15 bays at one branch, said Bob Hedges, managing director at AlixPartners, a Michigan business consultancy.
But the ability to directly deposit paychecks and the use of debit cards to withdraw cash at the grocery store started to chip away at the model. That decline has only accelerated in the past five years with mobile and online banking, he said.
Between the end of 2011 and June 2013, the consumer traffic to bank branches to deposit checks declined by 25 percent, Hedges said.
"It's akin to what's happened to the Blockbuster video and pay phones and even landlines to a house," he said of the drive-through teller.
Bank of America doesn't expect the move to create a substantial savings, as no tellers are expected to lose their jobs, Crawford said.
"This," he said, "is less about cost-cutting and more about being responsive to the changing behaviors of our customers."
But other banks aren't so anxious to eliminate drive-through service with real tellers. Officials at Citizens Bank and TD Bank said they have no plans to change their drive-through teller services.
And unless demand drops dramatically, it does not make sense to get rid of a service that some customers love, said Suzanne Moot, a Milton banking consultant.
"I don't see benefits to the bank, and all I see is an inconvenience to the customer," Moot said.
Still, the phasing out of drive-throughs is another sign of how banks are evaluating their branch networks and the services customers want at brick-and-mortar sites.
Bank of America is aggressively pruning its branches to cut costs and expects to have about 5,000 offices by the end of next year, almost 700 fewer than it operated in 2012.
"It's not that the branch will go away totally," said Jens Baumgarten, the lead partner for financial services at Simon-Kucher & Partners, a New York consulting company.
"But the branch will be a different animal from what it is today."
And Bank of America customers will still be able do business from their cars.
The four Massachusetts sites that are losing drive-through tellers all offer drive-up ATMs.Deirdre Fernandes
can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com. Follow her on Twitter @fernandesglobe.


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Results 1 to 3 of 3
#1 Today in History september 17 201209-17-2012, 06:52 PM
Today in History
September 17
1630 The town of Boston is founded by John Winthrop as an extension of the colony at Salem. It is named after the town of the same name in Lincolnshire, England.
1787 The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia approves the constitution for the United States of America.
1796 President George Washington delivers his "Farewell Address" to Congress before concluding his second term in office.
1862 The Battle of Antietam in Maryland, the bloodiest day in U.S. history, commences. Fighting in the corn field, Bloody Lane and Burnside's Bridge rages all day as the Union and Confederate armies suffer a combined 26,293 casualties.
1868 The Battle of Beecher's Island begins, in which Major George "Sandy" Forsyth and 50 volunteers hold off 500 Sioux and Cheyenne in eastern Colorado.
1902 U.S. troops are sent to Panama to keep train lines open over the isthmus as Panamanian nationals struggle for independence from Colombia.
1903 Turks destroy the town of Kastoria in Bulgaria, killing 10,000 civilians.
1917 The German Army recaptures the Russian Port of Riga from Russian forces.
1939 With the German army already attacking western Poland, the Soviet Union launches an invasion of eastern Poland.
1942 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill meets with Soviet Premier Josef Stalin in Moscow as the German Army rams into Stalingrad.
1944 British airborne troops parachute into Holland to capture the Arnhem bridge as part of Operation Market-Garden. The plan called for the airborne troops to be relieved by British troops, but they were left stranded and eventually surrendered to the Germans.
1947 James Forestall is sworn in as first the U.S. Secretary of Defense.
1957 The Thai army seizes power in Bangkok.
1959 The X-15 rocket plane makes its first flight.
1962 The first federal suit to end public school segregation is filed by the U.S. Justice Department.
1976 The Space Shuttle is unveiled to the public.
Born on September 17
1743 Marquis Marie Jean de Condorcet, French mathematician and philosopher, a leading thinker in the Enlightenment.
1879 Andrew "Rube" Foster, father of the Negro baseball leagues.
1883 William Carlos Williams, poet, playwright, essayist and writer who won a Pulitzer prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems.
1907 Warren E. Burger, chief justice of the Supreme Court.
1923 Hank Williams, Sr., singer, songwriter and guitarist known for Lonesome Blues and Your Cheatin' Heart.
1935 Ken Kesey, author (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion).
1947 Jeff MacNelly, political cartoonist, creator of the comic strip Shoe.
http://www.historynet.com/today-in-historyWoe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness;
Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
21 Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes
And clever in their own sight! Isaiah 5:20-21 NASB
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Supernatural (and/or paranormal) typically refers to phenomena which are not bound to natural laws or observability. Because of this, science cannot and does not attempt to explain these phenomena, as they are untestable and cannot be substantiated with empirical evidence. When asked for evidence to substantiate their claims, believers in supernatural phenomena usually offer hearsay or personal anecdotes.
Throughout human history, there have been many claims of supernatural events or supernatural abilities. None of these claims have ever been demonstrated to be true. Furthermore, many of these claims are mutually contradictory, and people who believe in one form of paranormal activity will usually not believe in others. Thus, a devoutly religious person may regard ESP or witchcraft as nonsense. It can be very useful to apply the outsider test when debating against a specific supernatural claim: if your opponent can understand why they don't believe competing supernatural claims with similar evidence, they can better question their own beliefs.
Often times, claims are hoaxes, and are debunked (James Randi exposing Uri Geller, for example[1]).
In other cases, claims are simply not falsifiable, and testing them has no purpose. For example, prayer. If one prays for X, and X happens, they can attribute this to whatever figure they prayed to. However, if X does not happen, it is often rationalized by stating "it wasn't ready to happen yet" or "this means I'm focused incorrectly, and don't need it." With these rationalizations, prayer is not falsifiable, and becomes indistinguishable from coincidence or chance. Often times, one can replace the figure they prayed to with any other thing (for example, a brick or carton of milk [2]), and the "argument" for prayer now "demonstrates" a completely different thing.


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I think that should be remembered, because the same is probably true in front offices in the MLB. You'll find some people who like him and thus should not be treated as a scrap trade piece, but there are probably some that totally don't value his skillset. He has trade value, as it really only takes a few bidders, but I do think that there are teams out there, and the Jays could very well be included where there would be very little interest in a player such as EE.
OBM reported (from Hal McCoy's blog) that the Jays were not interested in EE. Instead, they wanted prospects. I tried to make a point that for the money to work, the Jays needed to take EE's contract which will pay $4.75M next year. That would effectively reduce the cost of Rolen to around $4.5M for '09 and $6.25M for '10. I also argued that if the Jays did not take EE in the trade, the Reds would have no place to play him. The choices would be to carry him as a bench player, move him to LF, trade him, or eat his salary. Since the Jays want prospects, I suggested that the Reds include one with EE. That could make it work. There is no imperative to have someone take EE off our hands at any cost. Nor was it my intent to demean EE in the process. I was simply looking for a way to make the swap work from a financial standpoint, since that seems to be the big sticking point.
In my post I was agreeing with that point, but at the same time, I think there are a lot of front offices who would have absolutely no interest in acquiring him as a major trading return.
Yonder Alonso, Homer Bailey, Bronson Arroyo, Edwin Encarnacion, and either Stubbs or Heisey
Roy Halladay and Scott Rolen.
Who hangs up first?
Go BLUE!!!
"All I can tell them is pick a good one and sock it." --BABE RUTH
After that, you still have Frazier/Francisco to step in at 3B and Stewart/Wood/Leake to step into the rotation.
You also still have Cozart for SS and either Stubbs or Heisey for CF.
Not saying I would do it, just something interesting to think about...
Go BLUE!!!
Back to the Rolen rumor, ESPN has it listed as "debunked" but I cant read the details since it's Insider content.
I have a love-hate relationship with Albert Pujols. Mostly hate.
Board Moderators may, at their discretion and judgment, delete and/or edit any messages that violate any of the following guidelines: 1. Explicit references to alleged illegal or unlawful acts. 2. Graphic sexual descriptions. 3. Racial or ethnic slurs. 4. Use of edgy language (including masked profanity). 5. Direct personal attacks, flames, fights, trolling, baiting, name-calling, general nuisance, excessive player criticism or anything along those lines. 6. Posting spam. 7. Each person may have only one user account. It is fine to be critical here - that's what this board is for. But let's not beat a subject or a player to death, please.


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SPECULATION is rife that the country's biggest soft drink bottler, Coca-Cola Amatil, will have a new boss by the end of the year.
The talk is that Terry Davis, 54, who has been in the top job for more than 11 years - and is one of the country's longest serving chief executives - is close to calling time.
His most likely successor is tipped to be Warwick White, the head of the Australasian business, who has spent more than 28 years in the global Coca-Cola system.
Every November, Davis meets chairman David Gonski to discuss renewing his contract for another 12 months. A spokeswoman said on Tuesday: "They did that in 2012 and Terry will be group managing director at least until the end of 2013. However, he has said that after 11 years . . . he is nearer the end of his career here than at the beginning."
Other contenders are believed to include John Murphy, a former CEO of beer giant CUB, who joined Coca-Cola Amatil to help it develop its alcohol strategy. In July, he was appointed managing director of Australian beverages.
Davis has done a great job at CCA, including changing the culture to create a more innovative and performance-oriented approach, rather than a previous culture of promoting volume growth. To this end, he introduced new financial systems, overhauled management and lifted profit margins from 15.6 per cent to more than 20 per cent. In eight out of 11 years he has delivered double-digit profit growth.
In the process he has built an empire with strong earnings-per-share and dividend-per-share growth, which has translated into total shareholder returns of 373 per cent, outperforming the market by 2 times.
But the latest financial results show times will get more challenging as the Australian business matures. Its carbonated soft drink business grew 0.4 points by volume in the past year and its main growth platform, Indonesia, is still relatively small and holds a few risks.
Against this backdrop, CCA will have to contend with the rising power of the supermarkets, the high Australian dollar and its troubled SPC Ardmona business, which it bought in 2005 for $750 million, including debt, and which has cost it $250 million in write-downs after tax.
In its latest full-year results for the year to December 2012, CCA reported a 22 per cent fall in net profit to $460 million after a $98.5 million write-down in its SPC Ardmona business. While Davis blamed the write-downs on the weather, the high dollar and various other external factors, the business has been a disappointment from the beginning.
Putting the write-downs aside, CCA's profit for 2012 was up 5 per cent, but that was off a low base in 2011 when it suffered from a cool summer and a dispute with Woolworths that cost it millions of dollars in sales.
But the big challenge will be managing its relationship with CCA's major shareholder, The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC), which holds 30 per cent of the shares.
Despite the various protestations over the years that CCA is not a puppet of TCCC, it is still part of the Coca-Cola system and that means abiding by its rules. To put it into perspective, in non-alcoholic beverages CCA brands (Kirks, Mount Franklin and Deep Spring) deliver about 10 per cent of volume in Australia.
In CCA's growth market, Indonesia, the perception is that TCCC's objective is to maximise volume, while CCA is more focused on profit margins. This has prompted speculation that TCCC has a strong desire to acquire the Indonesian assets from CCA or find a more aligned partner.
Speculation intensified in December when TCCC sold 51 per cent of its Philippines bottler to Mexican bottler Coca-Cola FEMSA, which marks its first expansion beyond Latin America.
Interestingly, CCA sold the Philippines business back to TCCC and San Miguel in early 2001 after it suffered deteriorating earnings.
Under Davis, CCA has done an outstanding job with Indonesia, generating earnings before interest and tax of $102 million for 2012, up 16.8 per cent (including Papua New Guinea), and growing volume more than 10 per cent, but there is a threat that down the track FEMSA might end up with it.
Indonesia is a key growth strategy for CCA and, as this column has written before, CCA would fight tooth and nail to keep its deal with TCCC, which will have the bigger say.
The big question is whether Davis stays on to see his beer strategy rekindled when a non-compete clause expires in December, or leaves it for his successor. He has a $50 million joint venture brewery in place and has made it clear that premium beer will be a key focus.
Coca-Cola Amatil empire builder Terry Davis may call last drinks
SPECULATION is rife that the country's biggest soft drink bottler, Coca-Cola Amatil, will have a new boss by the end of the year.
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I'm in the high risk card not present industry and if it wasn't so painful it'd be funny how bad it is.
3DS solves problems for Visa and nobody else. It transfers the liability from the merchant to the customer. No more 'it wasn't me'.
Only problem is, it's crap.
Bit like the chip and pin problem in the UK which is a similar joke. If I can get your card and your pin I can go shopping as you and good luck trying to explain that to the bank.
If I can fool you into giving me your 3DS password somehow, I can shop online as you with great false trust, and the merchants don't care because they're protected. Kind of.
Most merchants refuse to deploy it anyhow unless forced. It causes a 5-8% immediate drop in throughput. I wouldn't use a site that used it either.
By claiming that it's more secure all they have done is made it that much harder for you, the customer, to be protected when you do get defrauded. I don't trust that its secure so I won't use it.
Pseudo-security => All Pain, No Gain.
My Visa card was declined constantly when I was over in the States (from the UK) on business. I phoned my bank and they said it was declined because a chip and pin device wasn't used. Of course it wasn't - they don't have chip and pin in the states. So my Visa card is useless abroad? No matter - I had a Mastercard, which worked perfectly. No prizes for guessing which I'll be using in future.
I wish we did. I've seen a few devices in the past year that were Chip and PIN (one was at a nearby CVS... can't remember the rest).
Still not sure how it's more secure than a normal magstripe. I guess you can't clone a chip so easily as a magstripe... but that's why I consider my plastic only slightly more "lose-able" than cash, and still keep it safe
1. Always carry more than one card (one each of Visa and MC for example).
2. Don't bother with AMEX or their Traveler's Checks, since neither is accepted as widely.
3. Make sure your PINs don't contain any 1's or 0's (some countries disallow those numbers).
4. When withdrawing money, use the ATMs of worldwide banks rather than local banks (BNP and HSBC work especially well).
5. Carry the overseas phone number of your cards' banks somewhere else besides your wallet or money belt.
3. Make sure your PINs don't contain any 1's or 0's (some countries disallow those numbers).
6. Make sure your credit card has a pin number on it. In some countries this is universal, in others it's not used at all.
Plane ticket: $350
Hotel room for 5 nights: $500
Rental car for 6 days: $200
Broadway show tickets for two: $300
Finding out your VISA card doesn't work but your Master Card does: priceless.
Chip cards have been in use for a very long time in France. They all have mag stripes, mainly because that's what most ATM use anyway, but also for use abroad. The mag stripe contains information as to whether the card also has a chip, so that even when an authorisation (the terminal phoning the acquirer) is not required, it can decide to deny the transaction preemptively if the card is supposed to have a pin and the terminal is supposed to be able to read it.
In that I case I guess the bank is just being in
As a customer, the worst part is when the merchant doesn't bother to tell you "oh hey we're going to redirect you to this other site now" and first anti-XSS blocks the page transfer, then the page fails to work anyway thanks to noscript blocking the JS.
Even after I added all the appropriate whitelists, when I buy from a site that uses it, all it does is flash the logo up on the screen then take me back to the merchant's site where I finish the transaction.
Sometimes it's called risk avoidance, sometimes risk sharing, sometimes risk transfer.
It isn't sharing believe me. Wherever possible, processors and issuers will try to palm the risk off on the merchant, or the customer.
While fraud prevention is a massive issue, there is no sure method to detect it. And online merchants suffer both more fraud and more penalties. They often pay higher fees to cover the inevitable fraud expenses.
Even address verification is not enough. I'm not signing up for this, it mean
As a buyer, I refuse to do business with any company that I haven't visited directly that doesn't take PayPal. I am not giving my credit card or bank account number directly to any establishment. While PayPal may get dinged for freezing money on sellers accounts, I'd say most of the freezes are put on scammy accounts rather than trustable accounts.
As a purchaser - it's PayPal or the Highway. It's not worth the risk to have to evaluate every single company for honesty. (And my neighbor works for PayPal, so i
The entire financial industry is about 2 things. First, skimming a few cents off of the top of any financial activity they can get their claws into and second, pushing any and all risks and costs onto the public.
Get wiped out by high risk loans? Get a bailout. Credit reporting systems so flimsy they can't even tell two people in the same apartment building apart? Spawn an entire industry for people to fix it at their own expense. Can't be bothered to implement a secure credit card system? Either make it the merchant's problem or the consumer's. Someone defrauds you out of some money? Demand it from the person they impersonated and tell them it's their problem (cost and obligation) to fix it (even though they're not the ones sending credit offers to dogs and toddlers).
In a just system, credit agencies munging data together based on practically nothing would be guilty of libel if they wrongly claim you're a deadbeat. Creditors would be obligated to show that you personally are the actual person they extended credit to before they could try to collect. There would be no such thing as "identity theft", only the usual run of the mill fraud.
In such a system, the banks would make sure credit card transactions were as secure as they could practically be because THEY would lose out when it fails.
There's a very easy solution to this problem. I'm sure they have similar system elsewhere but Interac (debit card) in Canada allows you to pay online. I use it for shopping at ncix.com for example.
You setup an account with the merchant.
You do your shopping... add to card... go to checkout... they give you a bill.
You then log into your online bank separately! and from your bank account you transfer money to the merchants account.
The merchant never sees your password and phishing is near impossible because you have to logon to your bank account separately. It's a bit inconvenient, but it's a much more secure system. You don't even have to trust the merchant as they never see your password info. They just wait for the money.
There's no other way to really do it. even if the showed a URL in the Verified by Visa scheme, you would still need to check it... a shady merchant could fake it...
About the only other way would be to have some trusted authorities built into the browser (like we do with certificates). The site can request the browser to 'bring up secure payment for visa'... and it handles it with a non-webpage login/payment system.
I am a long time credit card user (don't believe in cash). I ran into this a few months back with Walmart online. It actually looked like a scam. And you are right about the security aspect, just an offloading of (increased) risk. It pops out of no where and the new page's instructions clearly said it was optional and I can hit cancel. BUT, there was no cancel button, I even looked in the source code. So I closed the browser.
This was considered _fraudulent_activity_ and locked my card for a while (aut
It's called MasterCard SecureCode, and it's been around for ages.
for all sites that I visited that tried to make me jump through the dumb VbV hoops, I switched to American Express..
I thought and still think that it is dumb to encourage consumers to type confidential information into a random pop-up page from a different web site than the one they are visiting.
I thought and still think that it is dumb to encourage consumers to type confidential information into a random pop-up page from a different web site than the one they are visiting.
No kidding. What is worse is that every time I have been shown the verification page isn't wasn't even hosted at something obviously legitimate like verify.visa.com, but rather the domain was some other corporation related to Visa (can't remember the name right now).
In the UK, the server's domain name is securesuite.co.uk. How is the average user going to be aware that the domain is legit? Furthermore, most merchants seem to use iframes (seen some popups too) so you can't even see the domain unless you right-click->properties. Pretty stupid.
Single-use CC numbers. But my Visa (issued by my Credit Union) doesn't have one, and AMEX doesn't do them any more.
My credit card (Visa issued by my bank) doesn't have it either. I've been thinking about getting a second card that does have it solely for online use, but have been turned-off by the issuers I've seen with that feature. Is there anyone here that can recommend a credit card issuer that supports single-use numbers?
My requirements:
* No monthly/yearly fees
* Standard grace period
* Sane fraud protection (call me if you see something suspicion, but don't freeze my card)
* Can be paid using standard electronic tran
Discover passes all these, except for being Discover. I'm able to use mine for 99% of purchases.
http://www.discovercard.com/customer-service/security/create-soan.html [discovercard.com]
Interesting. When my parents had Discover it had maintenance fees, but supposedly made up for it with their cash-back rewards program. However, they could never find enough stores that actually took the card to earn enough cash back to cover the maintenance fees, so the eventually canceled it.
If they've changed that I may look into it.
Discover passes all these, except for being Discover.
Gotta disagree with you there. I had a Discover card since I started college (around 15 years ago) and finally ended up getting rid of it this past year, due to their failure on this point:
* Sane fraud protection (call me if you see something suspicion, but don't freeze my card)
Not only did they freeze my card when something suspicious popped up (and never actually ended up being a problem, BTW), but they never bothered to actually call me and inform me that they had frozen it. Every time it happened (and
The only issue I've ever had (in over 6 years with the card) was when my wife and I were out shopping separately and we both bought multiple hundred dollar items. I just got an automated call a couple hours later that spoke the 2 merchants, let me press a button to confirm and that was it. But I guess I couldn't tell you if they froze it at some point within that time.
MBNA'a (now owned by BofA) ShopSafe.
I'm not smart enough to figure out how many credit card numbers exist - except that I know that it's not 10^16 because many numbers are invalid. For anyone who wants to figure this out, credit cards need a merchant code and an account code. I think the account code can be pretty arbitrary, but there are only a dozen or so merchant codes. And the whole thing needs a checksum.
Are there enough credit cards to let everyone use single-use numbers all the time? Maybe we should get only one alternate card number,
They verified my Visa a long time ago - and its easier to remember my email address and a password than it is to try and find my card to enter the numbers online.
The "verified by visa" password is just another password that can be stolen. If you accidentally reveal information to the wrong person, your account is completely compromised. That's how it was before "verified by visa", and that's how it is now. The correct solution would be to use public key cryptography, where the credit card has an associated secret key, known only to the user (not even the credit card company). That way, the credit card user never has to reveal any secret information to anyone. The entire transaction can take place unencrypted, because any listening attacker (or malicious employee of the merchant) can't get the private key. They can only get the public key, and the digital signature of the transaction. There's no way to use that information to make fraudulent transactions.
Any system where you enter re-usable authentication credentials is a system that you have just enabled to pretend to be you.
so store the private key on the card, it'll still be more secure than a number & pin code. it could be made fairly seamless to the end user.
I had a credit card which could do that once (a Wachovia card administered through some "FIA Card Services"). Then Wachovia decided to end that and administer it themselves (which was mostly just annoying). What other card providers provide this capability?
On a related note: online bank security. WTF?
Can we get this right, once and for all? Something that is unsecured is vulnerable to a security breach. However, something that is insecure is in an emotionally anxious state.
I chuckle every time I read about an "insecure document." I imagine a document harbouring feelings of self-doubt and a lack of confidence. "Am I really a document? Will people like to read me? Does this file format make me look fat?"
I was going to mod this up, but while true I can't decide between insightful and funny - I kept chucking when I thought of a document going to see a shrink
And that shrink's name is ZIP.
I would understand "unsecured" to mean "no-one has attempted to secure it". If they've attempted and failed then it's badly secured and insecure.
We had it forced on us by our payment provider and it killed sales, we had so many customers asking what their password was and where do they find it. We opted out of it.
The researchers, and the article writers, completely fail to understand that 3-D Secure simply defines the interfaces between the three domains in the security model. The actual authentication model used is chosen and implemented by the card issuer. If the card issuer would decide it wants to use passphrase+OTP in a separate window (for URL validation), it could do so. In fact, outside of the US, many do. In Norway, for instance, online payments are usually verified through something akin to a "national ele
I've used the service 3 times...guess how many times I've set/reset my "Verified by Visa" password. Rather than allow for a secure password(8+ characters, alpha-numeric-symbol) I am limited to 6 digits and remember yet another non-standard password? Might as well throw a captcha AND a question to doubly verify I am not a bot, too.
I would like to see my credit card display a time sync'd rolling number instead of the lame 3 digit code on the back of the card. As I see it, the problem with credit card fraud is not stolen cards, but stolen numbers. If I lose my card, I will know fairly soon and can have the card canceled. However, it may take quite a while to determine my number has been compromised. When shopping online I would like to enter my card number and a second number generated by the card. Cards expire after 2 years, so this should be doable from a battery life point of view. It could even be introduced as an extra fee initially to those who want the extra online shopping security.
Now there's a good idea. I'd mod you up if I could.
The way I see it, the number one problem with credit cards is that all the verification steps do basically amount to nothing
What you propose completely changes that.
By adding a number that changes over time, you foil re-use. Someone can copy the other things on your card, but they will be useless without the card.
Add some sort
My GF's great-grandmother passed away in November. She was very close.
Weepy GF gets onto the web site of a regional Canadian carrier that prides itself on its customer service, selects her flight, and begins to fill out the VISA information. After filling out most of the information she clicks "continue" and *bam* up comes VISA's activation during shopping page (ADS) with a giant "I agree" button under inscrutable masses of legal fine print. She is in a fine state of mind for clicking her life away.
This happens right in the middle of the transaction, with no advance warning. Not on the page before she began filling out the details: to complete this transaction with your VISA card, you will be obligated to click "I agree" to the ADS terms of service, which shifts VISA's liability onto your shoulders and plays havoc with established web security practices and altogether makes the world a shittier place.
All of this under the commercial maxim that instant gratification == learned helplessness. Your average user will blindly click anything during gratification interruptus.
As it happens, my red-eyed GF muttered out loud "WTF is this?". It took me about 30s to get past "HF those sleezy MFs". Then I told her to slam down the virtual circuit on her half-completed web page transaction and start the transaction over again using an aging circuit-switched technology far less suited to rights erosion, and also more expensive for the airline to provide. Real human at the other end. What a PITA.
Brilliant lose-lose for everyone involved.
Two of the links I recorded checked this out:
Links More Banking Stupidity: Phished by Visa [links.org]
Verified by Visa: British banks phish their own customers - Boing Boing [boingboing.net]
Redacted portions of an online TOS from a large Canadian bank which has since gone 404.
You agree not to: modify, adapt, sub-license, translate, sell, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the Verified by Visa Website or service or the software used in connection with Verified by Visa.
You agree to immediately notify us by contacting us, as we require in our cardholder agreement with you for a lost or stolen card of any unauthorized use of your password or other verification information, or any other breach of security. You will be liable for any unauthorized activity involving use of your password or Activation Data, until we receive such notice.
Answer me this, Batman:
How is one supposed to notify the bank that you've lost control over the password, when you lose control to a phishing widget embedded in a concealed iFrame?
I wrote that riddle back in November, and I'm no closer now to coming up with the solution. FWIW, this agreement is probably less egregious than the one that came up under ADS, from a different major Canadian bank. Bonus marks for completing this task without first discovering how the service works which violates your TOS.
This whole thing makes me seriously limbic.
Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity [ted.com]
And on the other side, among our kids, there's a growing copyright abolitionism, a generation that rejects the very notion of what copyright is supposed to do, rejects copyright and believes that the law is nothing more than an ass to be ignored and to be fought at every opportunity possible. The extremism on one side begets extremism on the other, a fact we should have learned many, many times over, and both extremes in this debate are just wrong.
For the good of society, the law ought not to be an ass, and the VISA company ought to not be pushing the matter like a used car salesman at the helm of an invincible glass castle.
This is why I use a virtual card online (paypal offers them, and some banks do too) - generate a card, use it and then close it. It's also handy for sites that force you to subscribe when you only want a brief access (e.g. I'm only an occasional wow player, so I pay for a month, close the card, don't have to pay for the rest of the time when I don't have time to play).
I am a UI designer with an interest in security-related human factors.
3DS as deployed by MasterCard is also fundamentally insecure because its based on an anti-pattern: trust by proxy without offering any easy way to verify that trust. Visa's implementation is marginally better becuase it echoes a "secret phrase" to you on the screen before you input your pin, thereby allowing you to verify that it's them, and not some random phisher.
The trouble is most people just trust in the application of the anti-patte
"How many teamsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?" "FIFTEEN!! YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT?"


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When I first started reading this board there were some really good posters that I have always wondered what happened. Since we are on the subject, if anyone could induldge me.
RutgersJetFan(RJF) was always a favorite of mine. And then he up and vanished, what was the story there? EY was another favorite, and the same thing, just up and disappeared. What about JStokes, he's a lot more recent, but I haven't seen him in a good while it seems.


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FLORENCE, Italy (AP) >> More than two years after Amanda Knox returned to the U.S. apparently home free, an Italian court Thursday reinstated her murder conviction in the stabbing of her roommate and increased her sentence to 281/2 years in prison, raising the specter of a long extradition fight.
Knox, 26, received word in her hometown of Seattle. The former American exchange student said she was "frightened and saddened by the unjust verdict" and blamed "overzealous and intransigent prosecution," "narrow-minded investigation" and coercive interrogation techniques.
"This has gotten out of hand," Knox said in a statement. "Having been found innocent before, I expected better from the Italian justice system."
Lawyers for Knox and 29-year-old ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, who was also found guilty, vowed to appeal to Italy's highest court, a process that will take at least another year and drag out a seesaw legal battle that has fascinated court-watchers on both sides of the Atlantic and led to lurid tabloid headlines about "Foxy Knoxy" and her sex life.
It was the third trial for Knox and Sollecito, whose first two trials produced flip-flop verdicts of guilty, then innocent. After the acquittal in 2011, Knox returned to the U.S., where she evidently hoped to put herself beyond the reach of Italian law. But Italy's supreme court soon ordered a third trial.
On Thursday, the panel of two judges and six lay jury members deliberated 111/2 hours before issuing its decision, stiffening Knox's original 26-year sentence, which took into account an additional conviction for slander, while confirming Sollecito's 25-year term.
Legal experts said it is unlikely Italy will request Knox's extradition before the verdict is final. In Italy, verdicts are not considered final until they are confirmed, usually by the supreme Court of Cassation.
The final decision on whether to hand Knox over to the Italians would rest with the U.S. State Department, and the issue is likely to stir debate over whether she is a victim of double jeopardy, because she was retried after an acquittal.
"Many Americans are quite astonished by the ups and downs in this case," said Mary Fan, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at the University of Washington Law School in Seattle.
Nevertheless, Fan said U.S. courts have previously held that being acquitted and then convicted of a crime in another country is not a legal bar to extradition.
U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Knox's home state of Washington, said she was "very concerned and disappointed" by the verdict and confident the appeal would re-examine the decision.
"It is very troubling that Amanda and her family have had to endure this process for so many years," she said in a statement. "I will continue to closely monitor this case as it moves forward through the Italian legal system."
Kercher, 21, was found dead Nov. 2, 2007, in a pool of blood in the bedroom of the apartment she and Knox shared in the central Italian town of Perugia, where both were studying. She had been sexually assaulted and her throat slashed.
Knox and Sollecito denied any involvement in the killing. After initially giving confused alibis, they insisted they were at Sollecito's apartment that night, smoking marijuana, watching a movie and making love.
Prosecutors originally argued that Kercher was killed in a drug-fueled sex game gone awry — an accusation that made the case a tabloid sensation.
But at the third trial, a new prosecutor argued instead that the violence stemmed from arguments between roommates Knox and Kercher about cleanliness and was triggered by a toilet left unflushed by a third defendant, Rudy Hermann Guede.
Guede, who is from the Ivory Coast, was convicted in a separate trial in a verdict that specified he did not commit the crime alone, and is serving a 16-year sentence.
Kercher's sister Stephanie and brother Lyle were in the courtroom for the verdict Thursday.
"It's hard to feel anything at the moment because we know it will go to a further appeal," Lyle Kercher said. "No matter what the verdict was, it never was going to be a case of celebrating anything."
Their attorney, Francesco Maresca, called the verdict "justice for Meredith and the family."
Sollecito's lawyers said they were stunned by the conviction. "There isn't a shred of proof," attorney Luca Maori said.
In his final rebuttals, Knox's lawyer, Dalla Vedova, told the court he was "serene" about the verdict because he believed the only conclusion from the files was "the innocence of Amanda Knox." He later called the verdict "a big surprise."
The first trial court found Knox and Sollecito guilty of murder and sexual assault based on evidence that included DNA. But the DNA evidence was later deemed unreliable by new experts.


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|2006-10-14, 10:36
|Link #1
Monarch Programmer
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Liverpool
Age: 36
For people like me who have not read the manga nor know any spoilers. People who be new to this great story.
Light, has the advantage that; for the moment he is in no way connected to any of his victims. He also has a "companion" Yes, Ruyk's motives for hanging around are a little vague but he could still well play a valuable role in Light's endeavours. Time will tell. Also, Light is still young, surely far from suspicion, or is he? Could being such a commendable student be a shortcoming? Over-confidence is often an Achilles' heel!
L, from the little we have seen, seems a most worthy adversary to say the least! In a matter of minutes, albeit on a hunch, he was able to determine that the murders could be done from afar, and narrow it down to one guy from one region. Also he has concluded that for a murder of this calibre to take place certain conditions must be met. I have to admit I like his style.
So on first impressions, who do you think has the upper hand in this game of wits?
Last edited by Catgirls; 2006-10-14 at 10:51. Reason: Good idea. Thanks for the suggestion. Meow! =^.^=
|2006-10-14, 10:56
|Link #2
Senior Member
Join Date: Nov 2003
As of episode 2, I'd say both of them are equal. Neither one can really harm the other at this point, though this first round went to L in a huge way due to Light's ego.
L might have a slight advantage at this point, as he at least knows Light's general location, whereas Light doesn't even have an idea of where L is.
|2006-10-14, 13:21
|Link #3
Junior Member
Join Date: May 2006
More or less equal I'd say; L knows where to look but not who to look for while Light can kill anyone as long as he knows their name.
But from that, L would have the upper hand at the moment since "no one" knows what he actually looks like. And or name.
|2006-10-14, 13:28
|Link #4
~ You're dead ^__^* ~
Graphic Designer
up to ep 2 s far it an equal playing field...
L doesnt know wht kira looks like and visa versa...L can point out the area where kira is but i can also argue that kira would know where to pin point L (generally) as he would be thinking about the police force...
and they both know that each other arent stupid so its game on at this moment
|2006-10-14, 14:03
|Link #5
Animesuki's Janitor
Well its kinda unfair, since L had the first move and yet Light knew nothing of how he acts. Probably in the future episodes Light might get the upper hand... but both ways, can't wait for their battle!
Last edited by Itachikun; 2011-02-15 at 08:37.
|2006-10-14, 15:43
|Link #6
cho~ kakkoii
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: 3rd Planet
I believe L has the upperhand at the moment. He has pretty much put Light on the defensive in this one "meeting". One thing is for sure that they both have no qualm about killing for their own ideals. Good thread Shay! +
|2006-10-14, 16:22
|Link #7
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2006
Light was a bit too self-righteous and he messed up by killing 'Lind L. Tailor.' This allowed L to confirm a good number of his suspicions. Light gave away a bit too much information with one act.
...however, neither seems better posed to defeat the other. Because of the Death Note's supernatural powers, Light can kill while leaving essentially zero evidence of the perpetrator--this leaves L seriously disadvantaged when it comes to tracking down 'Kira'. On the other hand, L is anonymous and as long as he stays the role of a 'shadowy puppet master' Light has no way of killing L.
When we are weighing who is better poised to identify (and thereby defeat) the other, they are presently on equal ground because both may maintain anonymity with ease. However, Light is in a winning position because as long as he stays free he may continue to shape the world into his utopia, so this standoff actually benefits Light.
Mutual Goal - identifying each other: equal ground
L's Goal - catching Kira: disadvantage
Light's Goal - reducing crime: advantage
|2006-10-14, 19:30
|Link #8
~Night of Gales~
Join Date: Dec 2005
I would akin to Light having the lead at this point of the anime, even if his lead which was originally so far ahead was cut short by his own egoistic attempt of self-recognition and rejection of negativity.
The main point lies in the concept that Light has full workings of how the Death Note works and he knows his own weapons and capabilities to see himself what he can do at a particular moment and what he cannot do, (( Someone else may assume an empty-handed Light is capable of just killing a criminal with the face and name, even when in reality he can't because the Death Note or a pen isn't in his hand )), while L only has little ground to work upon and half of his hypothesis statements regarding how Kira kills and the limitations behind the murder patterns would be limited to mere 'what ifs'.
Spoiler for manga:
|2006-10-15, 10:04
|Link #10
Senior Member
Give me a break, L never is on equal ground with Kira.
L is someone who can only kill when that person is proven to be Kira - which means he needs solid prove and not only convince himself that Light is Kira, but also everyone else.
Kira can kill anyone as long as he thinks that person is a threat.
|2006-10-15, 10:20
|Link #11
L has the upper hand.
Light makes a harsh mistake by jumping to conclusions and killing Lind Taylor. He fell entirely into L's trap. L has been paying attention and is already on his tail, and Light never even realized it.
For now, Light needs to prove himself and really step up his game to keep from being destroyed by L. L isn't an idiot.
note:I've read the manga, this is a first impression.
|2006-10-15, 14:05
|Link #13
Beautiful fighter.
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: England, UK
Age: 31
Right now after episode two, its easy to say that L has. He's the guy who's known about this for a few days now.. so of course he's had time to plan it all out. Light had no idea about L, so he's going to be shocked.
Anyway, a great idea for a thread. Can see some good talk coming from here in the future~
|2006-10-15, 14:16
|Link #14
Not here anymore!
Join Date: Dec 2005
Age: 26
|2006-10-15, 14:22
|Link #15
Beautiful fighter.
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: England, UK
Age: 31
|2006-10-16, 00:32
|Link #16
stuck-up feminist
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: California, the supposedly sunny land
Age: 31
That's a tough choice. I am tempted to vote for L, simply because Light was caught by surprise. If nothing else this was a blow to his ego, and Light strikes me as a person who might make a mistake in a situation where his anger gets the better of him. So I'd think that L is probably a little better off since if Light act on an impulse he could mess up some more, but if he doesn't do anything rash then L is probably in a weaker position, simply because he has nothing to counter Light's powers with.
|2006-10-16, 11:44
|Link #17
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2006
Age: 28
I voted for Kira, although it was a very tough decision.. cant really explain why i chose what I chose.
I hope that they like walk past eachother on the street without knowing it, that would be pretty cool :P havent read the manga so i have no clue about anything -.-
|2006-10-16, 12:08
|Link #18
The Terror of Death
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Land of igloos
It's hard to give a completely unbiased view of this when you've read the entire manga series...but I'll give it a shot. It's not a huge spoiler since you can kind of deduce this from what's been said, but just in case...
Spoiler for Minor spoiler...not even a spoiler really....:
|Thread Tools


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In other news, the sun is bright.
The thing is, the universe naturally moves toward equillibrium. Gas supplies dwindle, gas prices go up, people buy less gas, and equillibrium occurs.
Gas costs make it too expensive to ship food across the world, we start growing food locally, an equillibrium occurs.
Gas costs make it impossible to get to work for less than you make? You get a job closer to home, or telecommute, or any number of other things. No jobs close to home, you move closer to the jobs. An Equillibrium occurs.
From the original source of garbage in garbage out.
It's amazing how few people understand that Club of Rome's predictions were never disproved in principle. Sure the timing was off, but it's impossible to predict the oil peak accurately given uncertainty of reserve data and technological progress. BTW, if you put your money on the latter, please know that it cannot outrun the laws of nature. The economic growth will have to stop (or, at least, become less than exponential, which is anathema just the same to most modern economists) before the humankind will boil itself with the amount of energy it will need to use to continue it. As things stand, we may not even be able to tech our way out of the oil crunch.
"Sure the timing was off, but it's impossible to predict the oil peak accurately given uncertainty of reserve data and technological progress."
So you are saying their prediction was right even though it was wrong?
As energy use increases, energy will get more expensive, providing pressure to use less energy or find more efficient ways to use energy. It's a self-correcting system, as long as there are no market distortions like, say, massive oil subsidies, or ridiculous regulations preventing new energy generation methods from being adopted.
So you are saying their prediction was right even though it was wrong?
As energy use increases, energy will get more expensive, providing pressure to use less energy or find more efficient ways to use energy. It's a self-correcting system, as long as there are no market distortions like, say, massive oil subsidies, or ridiculous regulations preventing new energy generation methods from being adopted.
It's a self-correcting system
This is the sort of happy talk that underlies so much simplistic thinking. You are 100 percent correct - the system will indeed "self correct". And a collapse is a self correction.
A more extreme example is one that a co-worker once made to me. We were talking about toxic waste. He argued that ther was no reason to regulate or otherwise control it. His exact words were "Regulation of waste is a socialist money grab and a waste of money, because we will adapt to it, just like
In terms of home power, nuclear power is insanely cheap. Specifically Thorium power. There is not much reason we could not power cars with miniature nuclear generators if we put enough research into it so that crashing into them doesn't leak radiation everywhere, but right now that is not feasible, so mobile power would still be an issue.
The biggest reason it isn't used internationally is mainly because every government is scared of a meltdown even though any modern Nuclear engineer would build a reactor which has a non reactive default state, that even if catastrophic failure happens it can not melt down.
Very few of those reactor designs have ever been put in practice (I don't know of any that have) because of the perpetual banning of new reactors in many parts of the world.
The other reason is the massive up front costs, mainly because we have had this international armistice against it for two decades, nobody has the manfacturing tech to make these reactors in a rigorous patterned way.
So it is a perpetual failure, but if we had sustainable nuclear power with the modern safe reactors, specifically Thorium power, energy costs would probably drop in the long run because a single reactor can last a hundred years and the fuel costs nothing compared to the costs of maintaining the plant or building it in the first place or staffing it properly. But modern designs would not require as much oversight if their failure state is to power down.
Idiot Malthusians have predicted the imminent end of the world due to overpopulation for hundreds of years. Every time they go out on a limb and say the end will be by a given date, they are outed for the charlatans that they are.
It turns out the original study said "Everything will be great! Just like the previous 500 years technology will continue to do more with less and everyone in the world will be substantially better off. A true golden age is upon us". Then when no one cared they decided to change it to gloom and doom so they could garner a little press.
From the AnnRand tea party point of view? yes.
But they were right if you look at the true disparity in rich and poor. The poor in the rest of the world live in fricking dirt holes. The poorest in the USA live like the rich in many 3rd world countries.
The gap between the worlds poor and rich is growing exponentially. right now the top 1% of the united states could buy real homes for 100% of the worlds poor and still be the top 1% rich. Yes it's that bad. And it will get worse. The rich have no problem with $6.00 a gallon gas. The poor have to decide is it worth paying 50% of their weekly income to pay for gas to get to work. Why? well the poor cant afford a nice shiny new Hybrid. they have to drive what they can afford to buy for $500-$2000 junker from 12 years ago. That means a 8-18mpg gas hog that is falling apart.
They also cant live near work or take public transportation in many places because of rich assholes refusing to pay for trains and buses. Large cities have it like NYC and Chicago, but then the poor cant afford to live there unless they are in the slums where it's dangerous to live and, suprise, bus serivce has been cancelled. so they get to walk 2 miles to the nearest bus stop.
It self perpetuates. The rich will not pay for things for the evil PARASITES to use. Walk to work you prole! a lot of things can be done to turn it all around. problem is it gives things to the poor, and that just can not be allowed to happen.
You have to understand that you can't just pick a hypothesis and refuse to refine it with the coming of new data. When you continue to make wrong prediction after wrong prediction, you have to consider the possibility that your hypothesis is FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED, and start from scratch. Let the DATA guide you, not your own dumb ideas that are based on nothing but your own destrudo.
Recent data tell that the global oil production has been on a plateau since 2005, despite the rollercoasting prices. It's hard to tell without hindsight, but the peak of the oil-fueled civilization may be happening now. And there has never been a time in history when people had to change their primary fuel source on the global scale, when the previous best option was becoming scarce. But let this not upset your cozy, self-assured, technologically optimistic worldview.
No. Monetary manipulation is destroying the economy, which has lead to declining demand. Real costs of production in dollar terms are rising because the world is being flooded with dollars. Price oil in gold, and you will see what I mean. If oil really was becoming scarce, its real price would be rising. http://pricedingold.com/crude-oil/ [pricedingold.com]
I see what you've done there. Gold, as other commodities, has been priced through the roof lately, just like oil.
Further, think about what you are saying here. You are denying the fact of technological progress. This flies in the face of every decade of the past 400 years. You think technological progress has peaked too?
No, but there never has been a challenge like this: effect a radical technological change when a resource needed to do pretty much anything is becoming scarce. Actually, I'm wrong: there was this challenge for such advanced societies of their day as Maya or Easter Island Polynesians, and they lost.
This is like saying that my prediction that the world was going to end today at 7am was never disproved in principle, it was just my timing that was off.
Malthusians have been wrong for 200 years, and they will continue to be wrong for the next 200.
I'm sure that the Good Brothers of the St. Leibowitz Priory can help here. They just need enough novices to keep the threadmill running.
On the one hand, people have been predicting the imminent collapse of civilization for quite a while now with nothing to show for it. On the other hand, our high-tech society is basically a house of cards and it has to collapse sooner or later.
Forrester's group, btw, are the same folks who produced the Club of Rome-funded "Limits to Growth" study in the early '70s, which also predicted serious trouble around 2030. You can choose to read this as consistency, good initial assumptions, or simply a pig-headed insistence on sticking to his original premises rather than admit error, as you wish.
Sure, but the Joint Forces Command (aka the US millitary) even said that we hit peak oil in 2010.
No, really. Click this link and skip ahead to page 24
http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf [jfcom.mil]
Err sorry, jumped the gun. It's been a while since I looked at the document. It's on page 29:
By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD.
P.S. "shortfall in supply" == skyrocketing prices as consumers compete with their dollars to fuel their farm tractors and war tanks
Completely unrelated to oil, but while skimming over the report, figure on page 30 struck me as odd. Anyone doing such an extrapolation without providing a thorough basis justifying is doing something questionable.
On the graph showing grain demand, you see a fairly linear progression between 1960 and 1990 with a slight regression 1990 onwards. There seem to be a local increase in demand just before 2010, but it seems non significant considering earlier trend deviations. But suddenly, after 2010, the extrapolation shows a strong increase in the rate, contradicting a 20 year regression trend. Added to that local variations on the extrapolated data that can hardly be attributed to any model...
I'll restrain myself to extrapolate the credibility of the whole report based on this single figure though.
>>>"a population and economic crash."
Which is why I think the EU and US should institute a 1-child-per-couple policy* to control population. Otherwise come 2050 Mother Nature will be downsizing our population through starvation and suffering. Better we do it ourselves.
*Maybe a 2 child/couple policy would meet less resistance.
Maybe a 2 child/couple policy would meet less resistance.
Er, have you looked at the numbers? US fertility rate among native-born US citizens tends to be at below the replacement rate of 2.1. Immigration tends to drive US population growth rates.
Europe is already below replacement rates in their fertility levels. 1.59.
Numbers and sources can be found at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
If you want to downsize the US or EU's population, you could do it through preventing immigration, and the population would drop naturally. But there are some pretty severe downsides to closing off immigration, and it only pushes the problem to somewhere else.
Didn't they learn anything from the Prophets of Old? Now if this doesn't happen then the people who made this prophecy will be beheaded and their other work entirely discredited. Here let me fix this for them.
I predict Global economics collapse by 2113
Now in a century or so there will be crazies doing all sorts of nuts stuff based upon my ancient and wise prediction. Now just imagine if I made a calendar system and decided to stop at the year 2113 instead.
As 99.999% of the people that has power just focus on his own profit.
The same frauds are making the same claims in the same ways for 50 years. They are physical scientists who don't understand economics, with new technology and substitutes leading to ever-increasing quality and length of life -- sans goverment intervention.
Theodore Roosevelt decried the coming "timber crisis" because rotting railroad ties would soon consume all lumber production at current replacement rates. Then someone invented using creosote coatings.
Yes, you can predict this will happen. That is Julian Simon's theory, used to make predictions which come true over and over and over again. Said computer models don't include millions of scientists and engineers in a free society working to satisfy mass wants for profits, which call into existence new tech all the time. This is just the latest in sub-sentient drooling idiocy, disproven again and again and again.
You may mock Roosevelt, but perhaps he was aware, as you seemingly aren't, of how many past civilisations have collapsed due to timber crises... Easter Island being one of the most dramatic. What if someone hadn't invented creosote coatings? Sure, technology provided a solution that time, and many other times in recent history, but there are plenty of other times it hasn't.
Our modern global/western civilisation is big and impressive, I'll give it that. But if you take the historical perspective, the number of civilisations that have collapsed is quite a long list, and some of them were quite big and impressive, too.
So yeah, we've got lots of scientists. You think we're the first civilisation to have lots of scientists? Sure, we're more advanced than our predecessors, but do you really think that our civilisation's size, or even technology like the internet makes us so different from all other civilisations to come before us, that we're immune to collapse? On the contrary, our current civilisation is so big that most efforts to make significant changes seem almost completely ineffectual. And that oil is going to run out.
I've certainly not abandoned hope, but I'd like to think I've got beyond the mindset of thinking that people in history were so radically different from us. Technology may well provide a solution to all our problems, but it also might not. Isn't it wise to prepare, at least slightly, for that eventuality? Isn't believing otherwise just placing blind faith in a deus ex machina?
Our societies are now based on rampant consumerism and the freedom of the individual to do whatever they want, so long as it's not illegal and they can pay for it. As a result, we have gone from a few hundred million to seven billion people within a century. If we value our natural world, we will find some way to check this growth sooner rather than later.
Is they assume that we will go on like business is usual. As soon as scarcity of a resource gets past a point we go and find alternatives.
Since your post was certified insightful, maybe you could help me with a question that I have: what should they have assumed instead if what they wanted to do is predict what would happen if we go on like this? Eh?
We tend not to deplete a resource if possible, but when it gets scarce enough we go for alternatives. If pork or cattle get to expensive we go with less resource needed chickens or turkeys.
The problem here is oil, not pork. There is at the moment no viable substitute for oil. People would like to believe that there is, but it is not true. The Prius, and all these other things are just a distraction. They only work in the current environment because they are the exception, and not the rule. It is simply not realistically possible to replace all internal combustion cars with battery-powered ones.
I do not think it is impossible to solve the problems humanity is facing. I just think humanity will not do it.
Most of the computer scenarios found population and economic growth continuing at a steady rate until about 2030.
Well then, they're bullshit. Every single country in the world that has ever industrialized has experienced steep declines in population growth as its citizens become wealthier and more educated. This trend is already very noticeable in the up-and-coming Asian and BRIC countries. There is no reason, none whatsoever, to assume that the trend will not apply (gradually) to every other country as they find their way to productive governments and growth--in fact, really, only Africa and the Middle East are left at this point, and thing there are starting to change.
There can be only one reason to base models on such a startlingly unlikely assumption...
Every single country in the world that has ever industrialized has experienced steep declines in population growth as its citizens become wealthier and more educated. This trend is already very noticeable in the up-and-coming Asian and BRIC countries.
Indeed, but it is unclear when this will happen to populous African countries such as Nigeria and Tanzania. [economist.com] Nigeria could rise from 150 million today to 425 million by 2050, Tanzania could rise from 50 million today to 300 million by 2050, pushed by fertility
Some times you just need to start over. I'm well stocked with solver coins, shotgun shells, peanut butter, and tampons. I'll be able to trade for whatever I need in the collapse.
Land Area of the Earth: 148,940,000 km^2
Population of the Earth 7,000,000,000
Land Area Per Person: 0.02127 km2 -> 21270m^2
So approx 200m x 100m (americans read yds per person)
But then there are mountains, desert, barren lands, asphalt to take into account.
Lets say 100m x 100m per person (roughly 2 football fields). That is the source of your food, your clothes,
This is ignoring all other life as that is likely part of the food chain that feeds us.
And that land is used year after year, getting less fertile, limited resources disappearing, getting smaller and smaller as more people appear.
So, the data started to decouple from predictions, circa year 2000. It seems rather convenient to say that 1970-2000 matches the model, and then simply ignore 2000-onward.
And could we maybe narrow down that prediction a bit, too? Anything between economic collapse (zero) and "unlimited economic growth" is pretty open-ended. (And what the fuck does the term "unlimited economic growth" actually mean, anyway? Money growing on trees?)
Reading predictions of economic doom always brings to mind a quote from "The West Wing" about how economists and futurologists almost always fail to account for technological progress:
BARTLET: You ever read Paul Erlich's book?
TOBY: "The Population Bomb"?
BARTLET: Yeah. He wrote it in 1968. Erlich said it was a fantasy that India would ever feed itself. Then Norman Borlaug comes along. See the problem was wheat is top-heavy. It was falling over on itself and it took up too much space. The dwarf wheat... it was an agricultural revolution that was credited with saving one billion lives.
Yet people still remember who Erlich is, but no one knows who Borlaug was.
This is a gross injustice, that the whiner is so much more popular than the achiever.
As soon as I read this I stopped reading.
"However, the study said "unlimited economic growth" is still possible if world governments enact policies and invest in green technologies that help limit the expansion of our ecological footprint."
Firstly, "unlimited economic growth" isn't possible unless we get off this rock (difficult), and even that just opens the timescale up quite a bit. Here is a great (if depressing) discussion prompted by the same book mentioned in the article. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/ [ucsd.edu]
Second, the statement turns what seemed an interesting research conclusion into "the sky is falling, but give us enough money and you'll all be fine." It could be that this wording is different than what is in the actual report, but I can't find a link to it.
A focus on increasing the efficiency with which we use our resources is important, but this sounds like an unrealistic promise in order to obtain funding. This close to the wall we should be focused on how to make a transition to the steady state economy more orderly and less disruptive so that we can keep chugging towards the next breakthrough technology that will get us back into growth for a while, and perhaps eventually off earth so that we can delay the inevitable even more. Allocating large amounts of resources to finding that next breakthrough only gets us relatively little time if it succeeds, and it neglects the risk that if we fail we could have a sudden transition to steady state which would cause a great deal more suffering than is necessary.
How to Survive the Coming Apocalypse?
I'm rather surprised their predictions are not for an earlier date. I have been keeping in the back of my mind the idea of joining a permaculture farm in some tropical locale (I'm in Costa Rica, so it wouldn't be too much of a change), hopefully one with solar power, but I would hate to say goodbye in any permanent sense to the global internet and the benefits of a developed manufacturing society. So, if the world does come to an end, what electronics would be possible to construct? Hand wire-wrapped 8-bit processors? [slashdot.org] What could be done for a screen? Is it possible to manufacture DIY LEDs? What data storage might be possible? Archival "100 year" CDs exist, but what about an archival 100-year CD reader? Is an "Encyclopedia Galactica" [wikipedia.org] possible?
Lastly, is it overly cynical to believe that these goals are more possible than the change necessary to avert this catastrophe?
P.S. It strikes me that there are few things humanity is worse at than predicting the future. However, in a world where the economy can barely survive normal human activities, but which is subject to a multitude of natural disasters, I imagine that the only question concerning a collapse of human society is when we may expect it.
20 year predictions are generally little more than glorified guessing.
Think back 20 years. That's 1992. That means no Facebook, no Google, no Slashdot either. You'd run Windows 3.1 or if you are amongst the geekiest of the geeks, Linux 0.1 or so. But you had to roll it on your own because there are no distributions (Slackware started in '93).
Yugoslavia had just started breaking apart. The war in Afghanistan just ended. I'm talking about the soviet invasion.
That's for context. Now on the long-term "visions". We had the Earth Summit [wikipedia.org], so climate change was already on the agenda.
Economically, there was no Euro. The economical collapse of Russia was yet to come, as was the economic crisis of the Asian nations. Had you asked people what the future would bring, they would have likely extrapolated from Black Wednesday [wikipedia.org] the way we would extrapolate from the current financial crisis. Chinas rise to power was just beginning and most people, including experts, wouldn't have predicted it, because it was in late 1992 that the government turned towards even a bit of capitalism.
In healthcare, we didn't yet have bird-flu and pandemics, AIDS was the scare of the day. We also didn't have LASIK, stem cells or any of the other recent advantages. Antibiotics were considered undefeatable by many.
And so on and so forth. There's a lot of big events that a prediction made in 1992 would've missed completely. Yes, we can extrapolate population growth somewhat, but we can't account for inventions in agriculture, for example.
What everybody seems to be missing is the simple fact that unsustainable lifestyles are unsustainable, and increasing consumption of finite reserves is unsustainable. It really doesn't matter if it's in 2030, or if the model precisely matches reality (it is only a model after all) the fact that remains is that if you continue on an unsustainable course you will not be able to sustain it!
Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it. Every civilization has collapsed because of some form of unsustainability and then been reduced to a simpler more sustainable way of living. We either design and engineer this 'collapse' into a simpler way of living or we'll have to accept the period of anarchy that will ensue.
Don't worry, the second foundation will take care of it! (that's a joke!)
Economics, that is why.
Lets take one resource we heavily depend on: Oil. Suppose we deplete a significant amount of oil wells, what will happen? well laws of supply and demand kick in: as supply becomes shorter, the price of oil goes up. As the price of oil goes up, it will be used progressively less and less since alternatives become more and more attractive in comparison. The whole point of a prices in markets is that there the amount of buyers match the amount of suppliers. Through pricing, the market has a way to ration ALL resources efficiently. This effectively means that we WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF OIL, that we will simply use less of it as it becomes more scarce, but there will always be some available for those willing to pay the price. In fact, we use oil today not because it is the only way to power our cars, but only because it is the cheapest (most efficient).
Another thing they ignore is advances in technology. Take fracking for example, we can extract oil and natural gas from places we never could before. As technology improves, so does our ability to get more and more resources. All these models completely ignore the fact that we will come up with better and more efficient ways to get more resources.
The only thing that can and does stop this natural and efficient rationing of resources are governments.
They put a caviat and say: "if we continue consuming resources at the current pace". Completely overlooking the fact that markets would not allow the current pace to continue when scarcity increases. That is like saying: "If I continue climbing up this mountain at the current pace, I will get to space in a month"
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."