This! It blows my mind every bank doesn't have a sort of scripting language of some sort that let's me automate whatever I want to happen. I've seen a few services that supposedly enable this but their prone to breakage, don't support one bank or another, or are simply way too expensive.
For every purchase you make as a gateway there's a vendor account on the other end receiving that money and required to do accounting with it (like issuing refunds) which requires keeping a balance. These are the people having big problems when their account gets locked and their funds are no longer available. The blow back does potentially effect you if you return an item and then the vendor can't issue the refund because the account is locked.
Can confirm. I live in a US city and the only 9 involved is maybe the very first number. I've lived here just over a year and we've had 1 full day without power and probably 8 to 10 short outages between a few seconds and several 10s of minutes. I'm adding batteries and solar permitting be damned.
Wild! I’ve lived in Chicago and San Francisco and have never lost power for more than an hour. And can’t remember the last time it went out at all, maybe 2 years ago?
I'm (not GP) in the Chicago burbs and expect to lose power 1-3 times a year. Usually it's for less than twelve hours but last year it was out for three days straight. Most recent outage was ~10 minutes long a couple weeks ago - I still haven't set the oven clock.
The cause around here is usually storm + trees + above ground power lines, plus a low enough population density that you're not top priority for the utility company.
>I've been running my own mail services for close to 30 years now...
There's the rub. 30 years ago this was true. Old systems have been grandfathered in.
A combination of rising spam and things like fraud via email have caused especially large services to be so much more aggressive in blocking. If your email has been around forever it's generally trusted.
The company I work for has been around for 15 years and we spent the first 5 or so getting yahoo and live/hotmail/outlook to accept our mail reliably despite proper dns/dkim/spf.
Self hosted on residential IP today is near impossible. Your only hope is pay to not be on a residential IP and even then strap in for years of struggle to get the biggest free providers to accept you as legitimate. Exacerbated by their thorough lack of actual support contacts.
> The company I work for has been around for 15 years and we spent the first 5 or so getting yahoo and live/hotmail/outlook to accept our mail reliably despite proper dns/dkim/spf
This matches my experience from roughly 10 years ago. Even with a non-residential IP address, correct SPF, etc, it took months to navigate the biggest providers' obstacle courses for whitelisting. After succeeding with those, plenty of smaller providers remained to identify and work through one by one. And then, every so often, an already-completed one would revert.
It was not impossible, but even for someone experienced in email system internals, it was a slog that seemed never to be 100% done. I don't expect it's any easier today.
Seems like a lot of comments here are US centric. As if Canonical and Suse don't exist and aren't Europe based/focused?
Also a lot of arguments that MS provides some total package which is irreplaceable which just isn't true. That argument seems to conflate software dominance in the US (is that even true? Linux runs most back end) with some kind of hardware dominance. MS doesn't provide hardware beyond some limited set of desktop hardware which most businesses don't even use. Most business lease from the likes of Dell, HP, and Lenovo both front and back end. This should probably be the real discussion.
The benefit to folks who flash devices frequently is obvious. However, joe user, the other 3 billion or so users couldn't care less. Poking holes in the sandbox for those folks is negligent at best.
Perhaps the solution is a separate tool, maybe just a separate browser, specifically for this use case?
Flash Browser, heck it could even come with additional tools to help do this. Preconfigured white or black lists, bookmarks to the most common flashing tools, reference material. Make it an even better experience than bolting webusb on to the browser raw.
Not a new concept. If you aren't paying you are the product. Increasingly capitalism demands the product also pay. Buckle up, late stage capitalism continues.
Sometimes you're the product, other times you're the raw material ready to be crushed up into a fine powder and mixed with 20 additives known only by numbers, and thoroughly homogenized to make the product.
"Late stage capitalism" doesn't exist. There are only consumers that exercise their rights as consumers (as in decades past) and those that don't (as now). If you don't do anything about companies treating you badly, then don't get surprised when they do.
