Russell McMahon wrote:

>> This poor guy just wanted to know if someone was interested in doing a 
>> job for him and look what it turned in to!
> 
> Indeed.
> And I don't think there was a single comment that was actually pertinent 
> to his requirement.
> Hopefully SOMEBODY replied offlist as requested.

Hopefully not. Unless they know EXACTLY what the application is,
how illegal application of the technology will be prevented,
and if they don't mind gambling on whether they'll be paid.

> Andre has been a list member for years.
> The trouble began when someone 

It's hardly 'trouble' to question the ethics of a site
promoting the sale of a product which does not YET exist.

 >(you know who you are :-) )

So do the archives <G>.

> "helpfully" 
> looked up his website, which wasn't mentioned in his post AFAIK,

It was easily derived from his email address.

> and 
> started drawing conclusions which were not necessarily well founded. 

It' is called doing "due diligence".

If I am going to consider doing work for someone I know nothing about,
it is my responsibly to find out as much as I can about them
before entering into a contract with them.
What I found disturbed me, and I said as much.
Having worked on card reader and data logging applications
in my past, it looked like an easy project to help with, but what
I found warned me off.
Given the other thread on what royalty rates to charge
for work already done, it seemed like a good idea
to provoke some discussion on the list.
Forewarned is forearmed, etc.

> Andre then made comments about people ripping off his IP (not his words) 

That's the nature of life on the web. Live with it.
The other posts on the thread were most informative and
will probably help others, INCLUDING Andre.

> and others "helpfully" (again) leaped in to point out ways that this 
> could be done. While (some of) the comments were informative and 
> hopefully useful, they probably didn't do much to help Andre feel good.

Well, the quality of his web pages, and the short leap from
task description to possible application as a credit card skimmer
didn't make me feel good either.

Given that debit card & identity theft is a rapidly growing
crime, and given that there doesn't seem to be any good reason
to have a portable THREE track card reader/storage device
(most uses require only need ONE track) I expressed my OPINION on
the project. Someone else did as much as suggest that
the application looked like a card skimmer.

My apologies to Andre if I offended him, but the project
itself looked offensive since nearly all applications I
could think of would be 'real time'.

Andre Abelian wrote:
 > I Like to know if any one who worked on magnetic stripe card
 > reader or has experience with it like to work on this project.
...
 > 3. the propose of the code is to read each track and save data in
 > registers
 >    that later we can move them to EEPROM if needed.

Robert

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