Entries in Life

Scammers easily fool people most of the time when it comes to financial sites. A few tips for “safe hex” that most people evidently don’t know about or don’t care about.

• Check the lock on your browser — if its busted, don’t trust the site.
• Check the link before you click it — if you see “http://www.paypal.com/” in the text of the email, but the status bar shows “http;//paypalrewards.com/”, then don’t click the link. The email is a scam.
• If you get a popup when going to a financial site, read it. Most likely its telling you something is wrong. If it asks you if you want to trust the site, say “no!” and get out of there.
• Don’t be an idiot. Just because your login works on the site doesn’t mean the site is legit. One woman in the study above typed her username and password into the site to see if it was real.
• Just because the site or email looks real doesn’t mean that it is.

Mandarin Chinese is already the most popular first language on the planet, beating out English by 500 million speakers. And it’s the second-most-common language on the Internet. Now, just as China requires students to learn English, Beijing wants to make Chinese the must-take language for English speakers – and everyone else.
— The Mandarin Offensive

Ten years ago, in college, I briefly got involved in a conversation with a hispanic woman about which language was the most valuble to learn. She insisted that Spanish was. I said Chinese. Of course, most of those sorts of conversations go nowhere and that one was no exception. But I thought at the time that it was obvious. China was flexing its muscles as an economic power and they had over a billion people. Further, the extant Spanish-speaking population doesn’t seem to have the economic power of China. Of course, I’m a poor one to talk about language. I got a C in Spanish and a matching grade in French. And I don’t speak a lick of Mandarin Chinese.