Things That Just Piss Me Off

I’ve used a lot of payment processors online in various business ventures. I have never seen a worse payment processor than Moneybookers. Some people really just do not have a clue about how to operate a business.

If someone sends you a payment request through moneybookers, it takes no less than 30 minutes to send them that payment. I can do it through paypal or google checkout in a click.

Moneybookers first sends you an email to let you know someone is requesting a payment. In that email, there is no clickable link. They tell you to copy and paste a url into your browser to get to their website. What is this? AOL of the 90s coming back to haunt us?

Then when you finally get to their website, you must register with them in order to fulfill the payment request.

Then you give moneybookers your credit card info so you can make the payment. Easy right? Wait! Now you have to go to your credit card statement and hope the transaction processed already because moneybookers has made a charge to your card and you need to verify the amount they charged you before you can make the original payment request you went to moneybookers to do in the first place.

Let’s just say the transaction does show up right away and you don’t have to call your credit card company to find out what the moneybookers deposit was.

Now you are ready to make that payment through moneybookers right? You need to verify your birthdate before you can complete the transaction. In the US we enter our birthdate by month, day, year. If you did this while setting up the account then you likely have the wrong birthdate entered because they like it day/month/year instead.

So to verify the transaction for “security” purposes you have to enter the wrong birthdate again.

To top it all off, moneybookers also asks your client if they want to put the money into escrow instead of sending the full payment. Let’s say you already sold the product or service and the payment is supposed to be in advance as discussed with the client. Moneybookers wants them to reconsider it again because they make more money if escrow is used. Thanks moneybookers.

I left a penny in my moneybookers account because they need it to help pay for someone that knows how to set up a system properly. I’m setting up the moneybookers rescue the idiots fund right now and ask that everyone reading this post send moneybookers a penny so they can hire someone to replace the idiots that built their system. I urge you all to send that penny and rescue these moneybooker idiots today!

I manage a lot of blogs for companies. Some of them come to me and their website is on godaddy hosting. I have to tell them that godaddy hosting is the worst place for their blog. Why?

One of the most important things to do for a blog that will help you with seo is to use a custom permalink structure. In order to do so, you write something like /%category%/%postname%/%monthnum%/%day%/%year%/

That means the exact url to a blog post will read like http://www.thingsthatjustpissmeoff.com/ categorynamewhichcontainskeywords/ blogposttitlewhichalsocontainskeywords/

It add a mod rewrite to the htaccess file on your server to make this happen.

However at godaddy hosting, this never works. I called their tech support to get their assistance. They tell me mod rewrite works fine but maybe it won’t work on their version of apache. After an hour back and forth on this, the final verdict was “There is a lot of documentation at apache.com about our version of apache and you could try to figure out how it all works there.”

Lets see. I can show initiative and go to apache.com and learn all about godaddy hosting’s version of apache or I can just tell all my clients to go to another hosting company. No skin off my back if it won’t work on godaddy hosting’s version of apache.

I just can’t believe that since millions of people use wordpress that godaddy would not be a little more helpful in trying to resolve this issue. They are the ones that will lose clients because of it. My clients will host somewhere else is I ask them to so it doesn’t hurt me either way. I’m just pissed off because I tried for over an hour to work with them rather than just tell my clients that godaddy hosting sucks and they were not willing to help find a fix for me.

So from now on I will just recommend that people who want to use a wordpress blog and rank well in the search engines that godaddy hosting is not the best place to be.

Ok, now this is just wrong and it pisses me off. All of the credit bureaus will accept any negative reports on your credit. Even if it is just one report. Yet, they will not accept positive reports to your credit unless the reporting agency or company submits the reports in large batches.

Experian only accepts batches of over 500 reports, while Equifax (ticker: EFX) and TransUnion accept batches of over 100.

“It will take us several years to reach that number of borrowers, and it seems unfair to those who have repaid fully and on time not to report, so we are baffled,” said Ms. Jacobs.

Yanki Tshering, the director of the Business Center for New Americans, echoes Ms. Jacobs’s sentiments. The Business Center for New Americans is a department of the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA) and provides financial education and assistance to refugees and émigrés.

“A few years ago, we worked with Equifax,” Ms. Tshering told SocialFunds.com. “‘If you don’t have 100 accounts, you cannot report electronically,’ they said. ‘You have to do it manually.’”

“When we submitted data on our borrowers manually, we noticed that the credit bureau accepted the negative data. But since we didn’t have 100 accounts to report on, they returned the rest of the forms with a small note saying, ‘We only accept negative data,’” said Ms. Tshering.

So, let’s say you have always paid your rent on time. Your landlord cannot add a postive credit report to your account. But if you fail to pay your rent on time, your landlord can report that.

It’s the same with smaller lending companies. They have to wait a long time to have more than 100 reports to submit. In the meantime, all those who paid their loans on time do not get the positive addition to their credit score.

Totally unfair system.

Never buy a samsung cell phone. They totally suck. You have to go through 3 buttons to do any task that usually only takes one button on any other cell phone. I paid over $200 for a samsung cellphone and i’m still throwing it in the trash so I can buy a phone that makes things easy to use. It seems that whoever designs the samsung cellphones also worked for microsoft at some point because of all the extra steps you have to go through to do simple tasks.

Samsung cellphones suck.

The government loves the phrase, “it’s for the children”. They know how to play on your emotions to get the laws passed that they want passed. They can now invade your privacy, because it’s to protect you from terrorism. They can collect your DNA now without even charging you with a crime to protect you against terrorists.

Now Joseph Biden believes the government should spend a billion dollars to monitor all file sharing traffic on the web. He says it’s because he wants to fight child pornography. And many people will all applaud him for it and say it’s a great idea because as we all know child porn is bad.

This law will also be used to find people who are illegally sharing movies and music. The RIAA and the movie industry lobby congress. They want to monitor all file sharing. And now people will let them do it because Joseph Biden says, “it’s for the children.”

A prominent Senate Democrat on Wednesday said federal and local police should use custom software to monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity, and he wants to spend $1 billion in tax dollars to help make that happen.

At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it’s “pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation” simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders.

Based on Waters’ statements to the committee, the system appears to work like this: Investigators log onto peer-to-peer file-sharing networks as any other person would and search for files containing certain keywords that are likely to indicate child pornography is involved. Then they download the files–frequently videos, sometimes as long as 20 to 30 minutes, with names like “children kiddy underage illegal.mpg” and much more obscene–to their own machines. They’re able to use the Fairplay software to obtain the IP address of the file’s sender and, in some cases, display its geographic location in map form.

Once armed with an IP address and date and time of the download, investigators can subpoena the Internet service provider for more information, such as name and address of the subscriber who was assigned it at that moment. “It’s not necessarily the suspect but it tells us the physical location to start,” Waters said. (He didn’t say whether any wiretaps were conducted to monitor ongoing file swapping.)

And since it is also illegal to share movies and music, as soon as this law is passed the movie and music industry will push and get it adopted for that as well. Watch and see.

Even 5 years ago, anyone who wrote about law enforcement collecting DNA on people to track them would have received comments from people saying it was just another conspiracy theory. Is even your DNA not your own?

Feds to collect DNA from every person they arrest

WASHINGTON - The government plans to begin collecting DNA samples from anyone arrested by a federal law enforcement agency — a move intended to prevent violent crime but which also is raising concerns about the privacy of innocent people.

I understand collecting DNA from people who have been convicted of a crime. I understand law enforcement needing the tools to do their job. If you commit a crime and are convicted, not accused, then they should collect your DNA. But not everyone who is arrested is automatically guilty of a crime. Innocent until proven guilty is one of the primary concepts this country was founded on.

So now, if the feds want your DNA, all they have to do is find SOME reason to arrest you. They get your DNA, then they can drop the ridiculous charge they came up with. Too much power given to the police equals the destruction of democracy. Hitler’s power was for the most part gained by giving the gestapo and other police the power to arrest anyone they wanted and detain them as long as they wanted.

Using authority granted by Congress, the government also plans to collect DNA samples from foreigners who are detained, whether they have been charged or not. The DNA would be collected through a cheek swab, Justice Department spokesman Erik Ablin said Wednesday. That would be a departure from current practice, which limits DNA collection to convicted felons.

Expanding the DNA database, known as CODIS, raises civil liberties questions about the potential for misuse of such personal information, such as family ties and genetic conditions.

Ablin said the DNA collection would be subject to the same privacy laws applied to current DNA sampling. That means none of it would be used for identifying genetic traits, diseases or disorders.

For now that is. The government always passes laws like this and initially they contain limits. Then slowly but surely over time they eliminate those limits one by one. Soon insurance companies will be able to get your DNA so they can decide whether or not to insure you.

This is typical of an administration that is friendly to big business and uncaring about the general public. Consumers are supposed to trust the government agencies in charge of prosecuting crime, whether the crime is perpetrated by individuals or corporations.

After Enron, the oversight and enforcement of corporate fraud should have tightened up. But instead, big business got george bush elected and the reverse has happened.

In Justice Shift, Corporate Deals Replace Trials
In Justice Shift, Corporate Deals Replace Trials
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: April 9, 2008

In 2005, federal authorities concluded that a Monsanto consultant had visited the home of an Indonesian official and, with the approval of a senior company executive, handed over an envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. The money was meant as a bribe to win looser environmental regulations for Monsanto’s cotton crops, according to a court document. Monsanto was also caught concealing the bribe with fake invoices.

A few years earlier, in the age of Enron, these kinds of charges would probably have resulted in a criminal indictment. Instead, Monsanto was allowed to pay $1 million and avoid criminal prosecution by entering into a monitoring agreement with the Justice Department.

In a major shift of policy, the Justice Department, once known for taking down giant corporations, including the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, has put off prosecuting more than 50 companies suspected of wrongdoing over the last three years.

Instead, many companies, from boutique outfits to immense corporations like American Express, have avoided the cost and stigma of defending themselves against criminal charges with a so-called deferred prosecution agreement, which allows the government to collect fines and appoint an outside monitor to impose internal reforms without going through a trial. In many cases, the name of the monitor and the details of the agreement are kept secret.

Letting crimes committed by corporations go on with a slap on the wrist and a fine is just wrong. Anyone should be able to see that. These corporations can pay the million-dollar fine easily when they just made millions by committing fraud. This just insures that the government also profits from their crime.

That makes our government their partner in crime. The motto seems to be, “Go ahead, commit fraud, steal money, just make sure we get our cut.

I advise clients on getting their new web business started and how to improve their existing web business. ICANN, (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which is in charge of the Domain Name System makes my job more difficult and makes it more difficult for the businesses I work with to be successful.

They hurt all new businessess and existing businesses by creating a false shortage of commerically viable domain names.

When I have to use ccTLDs for clients to get them a relevant domain name rather than having dot coms available for them then I know that there is a serious problem. The problem is created by ICANN in more ways than one.

1. Domain tasting is holding thousands, if not millions of domain names off the market and unavailable for clients to register. ICANN could solve this by eliminating the AGP, (the 5 day grace period in which anyone can return a domain name to the registrar without having to pay for it), but ICANN chooses not to solve the problem.

This is collusion with the domain tasting and domain kiting industry. And yes it is an industry. Companies are in the “business” of domain kiting and domain tasting. This is not a few speculators using a loophole in the system. This is a business that is being helped by registrars, registries and ultimately ICANN.

Part of it is actually illegal when tasters and kiters are registering trademarked names. That ICANN, registrars and registries are facilitating this illegal activity may not be provable as racketeering, but it is.

Again, it is not likely to result in racketeering charges because the facilitation would be difficult to prove, but everyone knows that there are registries and registrars who profit from this and that want it to continue and ICANN does not wish to stop the practice even though it is their job to do so.

2. Limiting the number of TLDs that are created. ICANN helps registrars like Network Solutions to create a false shortage of domain names by not approving more TLDs. They say that internet stability could be compromised by the creation of more TLDs which is total BS. The creation of more TLDs will in no way threaten the stability of the Internet. This has been proven.

ICANN has purposely complicated the process of someone managing a new TLD to make sure that Verisign, NetSol and others continue to maintain this false shortage of domain names.

ICANN wants to approve your business plan before alloowing you to create a new TLD. It is none of ICANN’s business what my business plan is for the new TLD I want to create no more than it is the city’s business why I want a business license. The city does not ask me for my business plan. I pay the fee and they give me the license.

Why? Free enterprise. I can implement any business plan I want. I not only have the freedom to succeed at business, I also have the freedom to fail. ICANN’s staff or BoD is not qualified to speculate about my business plan and whether it is viable or not. They have no crystal ball.

Furthermore, I believe that since approving the business plan is part of the process, if one of these companies managing a TLD does fail, ICANN is liable right along with them because they approved the business plan.

ICANN threatens the stability of the Internet by making the organization that is supposed to be focused on running the DNS liable by making themselves appear to be business experts and approving or disapproving business plans.

ICANN wants to review your financial records before letting you manage a new TLD. It is not ICANN’s job to review my financial capablities before granting me a TLD to manage. They are not business finance experts and ICANN is not in the business of advising on such matters.

Again, ICANN is there to manage the DNS, not to be a financial advisor or a consumer protection agency. They should be focused on making sure that enough domain names, viable domain names, are available to users who want one.

What about Free Enterprise and Free Trade? This practice of not allowing more TLDs to be created is anti-competitve.

ICANN has helped to ensure that Verisign and others do not have more competition which is in DIRECT violation of their bylaws and mission statement. By keeping this false shortage alive they ensure these companies no viable competition will make it into the marketplace.

They know they can approve a few like dot aero, dot museum and dot mobi and appear to be creating new TLDs when they also know these are not TLDs that will ever compete with dot com for commercial use.

They refuse to consider commercially viable TLDs like dot lawyer, dot medical, dot cpa, dot cars, etc. because they know that many businesses would much prefer these TLDs over dot com. And if ICANN is ever pushed to create these, they will attempt to find a way to give them to the same companies that already manage dot com, net, org, biz, etc., again assuring these companies they will have no competition.

ICANN violates free trade and the tenets of Free Enterprise by refusing to allow me or anyone else to manage a TLD. It is not their right to tell me I cannot start a new TLD in the main root.

It is only their right to be sure that I am technically capable of doing so. Give me dot lawyer and I can go to a bank and get the financing once assured I have the contract to manage that TLD, so they have no need to review my finances beforehand.

As far as business plan, I could have a business plan to give the domain names away and make no money from them at all. That may still be a viable business plan for me. They do not have the right to determine whether THEY think my business plan is viable or not.

When you couple the fact that ICANN purposely holds up the creation of new commercially viable TLDs with the fact that they also facilitate domain tasting and domain kiting that further the false shortage of domain names, even in the TLDs that do exist, then you get the picture of what ICANN is truly doing here.

Your insurance company can cancel your policy at any time. They don’t even need a reason. Thyey may give you some bs reason just to hide what they are really doing, but it is you who gets the shaft.

In insurance, rescission is the termination of a contract from the beginning (as if it never existed). The insurer has the right to rescind a policy due to concealment, material misrepresentation, or material breach of warranty.

That can be anything at all that was omitted from your application, even if it’s an ommission that was not asked for by the person who sold you the insurance policy. Their lawyers have all kinds of ways to rescind your contract and they can get away with it by law.

So let’s say that an insurance company has statistics that prove that most people do not make a claim on a specific thing until about 10 years into the policy.

They can start finding ways to rescind all 98 year old policies or as many as possible, knowing that during those first 9 years they collect a lot more than they pay out. Also knowing that they do not make as much after that 10 years.

So, you as a consumer pays into that policy for 9 years faithfully, then they drop you. They got their money. Now you are on your own.

Insurance companies are all about theiur bottom line and are not here to help you. Anyone that has had to file a claim and learned how the insurance companies try to deny or hold up payment of the claim knows this.

It is way past time for insurance reform in this country. Insurance companies are no longer the beneficial giants that help us in a crisis. They are mega corporations only concerned with how much money they can make and how they can profit from fear and misery.

Blue Cross Blue Shield wants you to believe they are going to stop doing this;

Blue Cross of California Responds to Recent Media Coverage of Rescission

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif., Feb 23, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ — Blue Cross of California is committed to being the industry leader when it comes to protecting those seeking health insurance. That’s why in September of 2006, Blue Cross was the first health care insurer in California to implement a series of steps to strengthen and make more transparent our process for rescinding policies in order to further minimize the possibility of errors.

These initiatives included:
— Creating a new simplified application for individual benefits policies
— Revising policies to clarify the initial underwriting process
— Forming a new committee structure for the rescission review process
— Adding dedicated liaisons for members undergoing retrospective review
or who have had their policies rescinded
— Revising documentation to improve the accuracy and consistency of
review processes
— Enhancing training programs for the underwriting and the retrospective
review processIn addition to these steps, for the past several weeks Blue Cross has been in the process of developing an outside third-party review process for all rescission cases. This means an independent, outside agent will help us validate whether rescission of a member’s benefits is warranted. Blue Cross will be bound by the decision of the third-party reviewer. As the market leader in California, this practice is intended to further our efforts to protect all health care consumers.

Rescission, a tool designed to protect the system from abuse, affects a very small percentage of new enrollments — roughly one-half of one-percent out of 300,000 new applicants a year. Blue Cross takes the issue of rescission very seriously, and we are leading the industry in working with legislators, regulators, providers and our members to help improve the access to health care for all Californians.

Leslie Margolin

President

Blue Cross of California

SOURCE Blue Cross of California

Copyright © 2008 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

Anyone who still says that Bush is not one-sided in favor of big business is just lying to themselves. Once again, he gets his way and big business benefits while people suffer.

Justices Shield Medical Devices From Lawsuits
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

Makers of medical devices like implantable defibrillators or breast implants are immune from liability for personal injuries as long as the Food and Drug Administration approved the device before it was marketed and it meets the agency’s specifications, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.

The 8-to-1 decision was a victory for the Bush administration, which for years has sought broad authority to pre-empt tougher state regulation.

In 2004, the administration reversed longstanding federal policy and began arguing that “premarket approval” of a new medical device by the F.D.A. overrides most claims for damages under state law. Because federal law makes no provision for damage suits against device makers, injured patients have turned to state law and have won substantial awards.

The Bush administration will continue its push for pre-emption in another F.D.A. case that the court has accepted for its next term, on whether the agency’s approval of a drug, as opposed to a device, pre-empts personal injury suits. Drugs and medical devices are regulated under separate laws.

There have been numerous cases where these manufacturers have put shoddy workmanship into their devices and caused people to die. They put their bottom line against the health of the people who have to use them.

These people do not get to choose which brand of device goes into them. That means free market principles, which cause manufacturers to make better products in order to make more sales, does not apply.

All they have to do is pay doctors and hospitals to use their products. They pay these doctors by hiring them as consultants. In return the doctors use their products in their patients. The patient is not asked, “Which brand of defibrillator do you want us to use in case you have a heart attack?

So this law shields the manufacturers from any liability if the FDA approved them before marketing the product. So after the approval, the manufacturer can downgrade how they manufacture the product or how they do quality control and they cannot be sued.

Another victory for Bush. Another victory for Big Business. Another loss for the people that live in this country and have no choice what medical device is implanted into them.

Justices Add Legal Complications to Debate on F.D.A.’s Competence By GARDINER HARRIS

The Institute of Medicine, the Government Accountability Office and the F.D.A.’s own science board have all issued reports concluding that poor management and scientific inadequacies have made the agency incapable of protecting the country against unsafe drugs, medical devices and food. Randall Lutter, the F.D.A.’s deputy commissioner for policy, said that the agency was responding to reports of its deficiencies and improving.

Before President Bush took office, F.D.A. officials said that courts provided patients additional protection. In a 1997 brief, the agency’s chief lawyer wrote that “even the most thorough regulation of a product such as a critical medical device may fail to identify potential problems.”

With Wednesday’s ruling, those efforts proved successful for device makers. Two more cases, one to be argued Monday and the other in October, will determine whether drug makers will benefit as well. In his majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the F.D.A.’s interpretation of its rules deserves “substantial deference.” Since the administration now interprets those rules to provide similar liability protection to drug makers, Justice Scalia’s opinion suggests that the court may soon provide a liability shield to pharmaceutical companies, too.

Now Bush wants this to apply to drugs that pharmacuetical companies push on us through doctors that they also hire as consultants and give trips and bonuses to for prescibing them.

Bush got congress to approve a law that said that senior citizens cannot negotiate on the price they pay for drugs, now he wants to make sure that when bad drugs are sold by the pharmaceutical companies that kill people, no one can sue them.

I can’t wait to see Bush get out of the white house. it will take years to repair the damage he has done to all of us and to this country.