This! People aren't realizing that in a lot of countries, english classes in the normal school system are a joke. And there are many people that don't have the resources to go to college or private classes to learn this. I have some young friends in Mexico that don't even have assurance of their next meal and would like to learn some skills to help land a better job than washing cars, but they're stuck. It's a catch-22 and having programming information and curriculum in their native language would remove one more barrier to them getting out of that situation. It'd also help me teach them since I wouldn't have to translate so much.
I decided to check the prices on those cables and was surprised to find that some are even more expensive. For example, an AudioQuest "Diamond" USB to iPod cable runs $1,495! Here's the link: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/audioquest-diamond-16-4-usb-a-to...
15 years?! I didn't know moderators could set arbitrary dates for a "temporary suspension". A month would be reasonable for a first offense I would think.
It was an automatically created "session" user (http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/44557/why-should-i-r...), an anonymous user given an ad hoc account which they can later convert into a normal account. I don't know that issuing this ban in itself blocks that person from signing up for another account tomorrow. Places like Wikipedia get more sophisticated to prevent so-called "sock puppetry", I'm not sure if SO does the same automatically when an account is banned.
Accounts are cheap. Free, in fact. Length of suspension should be related to the severity of the offenses (in this case, vandalism and abusive/offensive speech) and the likelihood to commit additional offenses (in this case, high because the user vandalized the question many times).
Keep in mind though, this transaction was nearly instantaneous. Bank Wire transfers take 3-4 days to complete (at least, as far as I know with normal-person quantities of money). Instant international money transfer is amazing!
Fedwire and other real time gross settlement services (RTGS) are almost instantaneous.
SWIFT transfers usually are not: SWIFT is a way to communicate messages about transfers between banks, but they would still need a way to do the actual settlement. This could be very fast in the case of two large banks in different countries: if you are a customer in bank A, which has a correspondent account with B, and the recipient is also a customer with bank B. Then bank A can use SWIFT to say “please transfer $1 trillion from our account to the recipient’s account”, and that could happen instantly. (It usually doesn’t.)
But if the final recipient is actually a customer at bank C, then the money needs to get from B to C somehow. That could happen in the recipient country’s RTGS—Fedwire if it’s the United States—but it might also be slower, through ACH or an equivalent.
One problem with fast transfers is that many banks don’t have straight through processing for RTGS. This means that the money can get instantly from bank A to bank B, but may not get posted to the recipient’s account with bank B until a clerk gets around to verifying and booking the transaction.
My guess is the previous commenter is in US. There's an excellent episode of the podcast "planet money" which addresses exactly this question, and which also explains why the system in the UK is much faster.
Not exactly. To be sure it isn't a double spend it needs to be part of the block chain at least six down from the most recent block generated. Each extra block on top of the block where your transaction exists is a confirmation. For smaller purchases, ie not $150 million worth it's near instantaneous.
Yeah, I would bet that credit card fraud with chargebacks is probably more likely than the double spend scenario so it would make sense for a company just not care about verifying.
Awesome. I've never been to Malibu, but I can definitely see this as a useful app if I ever do decide to go. If the locals have trouble finding the public beaches, I can't imagine I'd be able to do it without some help.
