In October 2011, I signed up for Texoil Sligo’s direct debit payment plan for oil. Before I placed any order for oil, my bank account was debited, for €50, on November 28.
In the first week of December 2011, I had a change of circumstances and as a result I decided to cancel my order and seek a refund. I called the Texoil Sligo office and spoke to their worker there, who assured me that 1. my cancellation was understood, 2. my direct debit plan would be cancelled and 3. I would receive a complete refund of the €50 drafted.
On December 29 my account was again debited €50, but between school exams, and Christmas and new year’s travel I did not have an opportunity to follow up on the matter.
On Monday of this week (January 24), I contacted the Texoil Sligo office and spoke to their office worker who assured me that 1. my cancellation had been processed, 2. a refund had been issued. I was promised another callback from their manager/owner, X, which I duly received on the following day, Wednesday 25. X promised me that the direct debit would be cancelled and either a refund would be issued, or I would receive oil to the amount so-far debit.
This morning, January 27, Texoil again debited my account €50.
At this point in time, I have been promised a cancellation and refund on three occasions by the Sligo office, promises that completely fell through. I no longer have faith in their promises, and I no longer wish to deal with them.
I do not want credit in oil. I want the immediate and full refund of the €150 debited from my account. I understand that the amount is small in the grand scale of things, but I am a full-time college student supporting a family; the €50 debited from my account last night was my bus fare and food budget for the week coming.
At no point in time have I received any invoice or receipt in writing from Texoil, so I am happy to furnish original bank and phone records in order to confirm my claim.
My bank account details and a summary of facts:
Name: Mark Grealish
Bank: Bank of Ireland
Account #: ########
Holding branch: ##-##-## (##### branch, Galway)
My account was debited on:
28/11/2011 TEXOIL SLIGO DD 50
29/12/2011 TEXOIL SLIGO DD 50
27/01/2012 TEXOIL SLIGO DD 50
I expect a prompt reply to this email. I can be reached by phone on 086 190 8088, or by email to this address (mark@bhalash.com).
Yes, this conversation again. I came away feeling like I didn’t get my point across really well so I am picking at this again like the obsessive scab-picker that I am. I was six hundred words into a frothy spiel before I impulsively deleted it and decided to make a few assertions/bullet points instead:
None of these up and coming copyright treaties and laws will in any way slake the desire for cheap, high-quality copyrighted material.
None of these up and coming copyright treaties will do more than have a cosmetic effect the rate of dissemination on copyrighted material. In the short-term it will drop, but in the long-term both recover to it’s current levels and grow, as users and technologies adapt.
Even as old avenues of search and distribution close, new ones will open. The Darknet paper is a great bit of reading on this.
Developers and users will treat the treaties and their restrictions as damage and accordingly route around them. Distribution technologies will evolve – nay, flourish! If I had to give an example of what might arise from this, I would say maybe a high-capacity TOR network.
The arms race will continue with advances and setbacks on either side. To come back to Megaupload, it’s worth noting that the shutdown has had chilling effects on other file-locker services. That’s a bigger victory.
Anonymous. I do support the sentiment behind their activism, even if I think their activities are misguided. Whoop-de-doo, they can DDOS a website for a few hours at a time: A legal takedown is permanent.
However, Anonymous is still here is spite of probably quite intense probing by a plethora of public and private investigating agencies. It shows (to me) that Anonymous have some real know-how and a desire to succeed.
Today, Anonymous tear down posters and piss on lawns. Tomorrow, they will be physically or electronically attacking on backbone infrastructure and specifically targeted criminal or (domestic) terrorist acts. I’m not trying to fear-monger like some fuddy-duddy idiot who hasn’t a fucking clue about the Internet.
Older, monied, people and groups have said “fuck you” to Internet openness and expression time and time again. The latest round of insidious treaties copy-pasted from one country to another shows this in stark clarity. Anonymous and other groups have the potential to act as a polarizing call to arms for the disenfranchised.
In the end, the more you oppress people (whether it is actual or perceived), the more you foster extreme views and robust workarounds. I mean, fuck, take the Fremen of Arrakis: Ten thousand years of unyielding oppression on one of the most inhospitable planets in the Imperium, and we all know how badly that debacle ended.
The SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/whatever treaties undoubtedly will change the Internet, but they will not change the Internet’s status quo. This whole fucked up cycle is going to rinse and repeat and around until something breaks.
I’m currently halfway through the third book of Karl Schroeder’s Virga pentalogy. This is a fantastically fun series if you make sure you switch your brain off before reading. There’s swashbuckling derring-do, ships of the line clashing, pirates, knaves and heroes, chivalry, conspiracies, secrets, betrayals and the odd, outright “fuck yeah!” moment.
All that said, I am going to take the time to poke some silly fun at the gaping plot holes. There will be massive spoilers. Proceed at your peril!
But why not…?
The overarching storyline that is starting to emerge at this point in my reading is that a posthuman conglom…entit…organizati…thing named Artificial Nature is trying to gain control of Virga, the titular location. There have only been a few hints given as to why AN wants Virga, but a best guess is that it wants to schlorp down all of the information and experiences of everyone in the airsphere and disseminate it as light entertainment elsewhere. That is my best guess, and I expect to be proven wrong when I further catch up on my reading. Why, however, is secondary. I want to pick at its how:
Givens:
Virga is an airsphere orbiting the star Vega. An airsphere is a B.D.O., a giant balloon pumped full of atmosphere and populated with all manner of people, plants and animals. Iain Banks, Peter Hamilton and Dan Simmons have all used them at different sizes in their stories. Virga, at about 9000km in diameter, is probably the smallest. To help visualize Virga’s size, you should imagine a giant balloon about halfway between Mars and Venus in size.
Artificial Nature wants to take over Virga.
Artificial Nature is not afraid to use force.
Artificial Nature is implied to have boundless energy and material resources.
Artificial Nature, as the product of post-Singularity technologies is as unto a god for all practical purposes.
As a scale comparison, Virga was seemingly created by a ragged refugee group. This refugee group possessed resources that would beggar the entire technological and industrial infrastructure of our entire planet.
Either relativistic or FTL travel is both common and cheap: Virga has a “tourist station” in its skin where posthuman entities can come and gawp at the locals, enjoy the food and wine, take pictures and buy trinkets before they go home. This, to me, implies that the effort involved in visiting Virga from any point in civilized space is no more than the effort involved in going on a package holiday to South America.
The skin of Virga is in some way intelligent and can respond to and seal punctures without any independent instruction.
Artificial Nature is prevented from entering Virga by a kind of forcefield generated by the fusion engine complex at the centre of the airsphere. This forcefield subtly alters local spacetime in a manner that disrupts the function of electronic technologies.
In short: AN wants to conquer Virga. AN cannot conquer Virga because of a big machine in the middle of Virga. Therefore, AN’s goal is to destroy or disable the big machine in Virga.
Why not, I ask, just lob a relatavistic kill vehicle at the complex from a safe distance? It’s a kinetic weapon, a dumb piece of metal, travelling at x% of the speed of light. Simple answer: It would be a very short story indeed if anyone starts lobbing around munitions that are travelling at any percentage of the speed of light.
Ignore the “so-called” simple answer. A relativistic penetrater would breach the skin, cross the 4,500km in 0.00001501 of a second and destroy the complex. The side-effects would be devastating for the inhabitants, but Artificial Nature has shown that it could subsume the whole of Virga in a matter of hours – less time than it would take for anything really horrible to happen.
Yes there would be a megaton-yield release of energy and yes there would be high-velocity spall opposite the point of impact, but the job would be done!
