Day: November 19, 2007

Is this a scam, or is Make Magazine a bunch of scumbags?

Today I got three identical notices saying that my “recent order/payment” for Make Magazine couldn’t be “completed because the credit card you supplied was not accepted by the credit card company”. Only one problem with that – I decided some time ago not to renew because I never read it. Well, if their business practice is to fraudulently charge credit cards, I’m pretty glad I didn’t renew. Fuckers.

Maybe it isn’t them. The customer support email is customerservice@espcomp.com, which is not an address that I immediately associate with the magazine. On the other hand, they did have a the credit card number of an old card, the one I probably did use for that subscription.

I wonder if the Attorney General’s Office is interested in fraudulent credit card charges?

My latest million dollar idea

Every now and then I have an idea that I think would probably be valuable, but rather than running with it I just chicken out and document it. Sometimes it turns out to be a decently good idea (such as when I thought that there might be money to be made going around to homes and offices and running anti-virus and anti-spyware software on a regular basis, since most people can’t seem to be bothered to do it for themselves), and other times it turns out that somebody is already doing it (like when I had the idea of combining small/fast/expensive disk storage with bigger/slower/cheaper disk storage with even bigger/slower/cheaper tape storage, and software to stage data between the different levels of storage depending on usage patterns).
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