The fact is that a PC sold in 1998 with Windows 98 installed would likely have a USB port and support a lot of USB hardware.
I have nor asserted otherwise.
But you were essentially saying that the iMac was using USB as a standard for many years before PC users were aware of USB.
Um, they were. They had to be. They went out and bought Apple's newest offering, and ended up having ports that only a tiny fraction of the computer world had heard about and was using, and no other way to add things to their computer. (Mac users, of course, have never really had the internal hardware available that PCs had, and certainly not in an iMac, which required case-cracking tools they didn't have.)
You can assert people actually had working USB ports, and maybe the newest people did. I assert the hardware support was poor, and the software support was poor, and put together mean that PCs USB support was a crap shot until 1999 or so, but that's not the point. It didn't matter, no PC owner was using them:
If you bought a PC in 1997, and went out and bought an printer a month later, you bought a parallel one or maybe serial. Period. You probably weren't even aware of USB, and if you were it was the fact that you didn't really know how it worked and those printers cost twice as much.
If you bought an iMac in 1997, and went out and bought a printer a month later, you bought a USB one, because you had to. Just like previously you'd buy a serial printer because you had to, because Macs lacked parallel ports. (Incidentally, the same thing applies there...without Macs, there probably would have not been serial printers to anywhere near the extent they existed.)
I honestly don't understand why you're having trouble grasping this. It wasn't that iMac had 'better' USB support. The iMac's USB support was essentially identical to Windows 95 OSR2.1, I have never implied it was any better.
It was that the iMac had just USB support, and that was it. You wanted a different keyboard and mouse? USB. (Everyone wanted a better mouse.) You wanted a floppy? USB. (Everyone wanted a floppy.) You wanted wifi? USB. You wanted a better sound card? USB. You wanted a CD-R drive? USB.
The problem appears to be is that the base driver for various USB protocols includes no way for the device to say 'I am a standard USB flash drive, except I'd like 500mA'.
Probably the flash drive spec does that, for USB floppies and hard drives, but my point is apparently a lot of drivers don't.
It seems rather idiotic it wasn't part of the USB spec, independent of what device is plugged in, or even if it has a driver at all. Random Futuristic Device, without a driver, should be able to, as long as it's USB, plug in and ask for 500mA, and get it, even if it's 'Unknown Device'.
Of course, devices can fake it. They could pretend to be single-port USB hubs, for example, and could get 500mA to the 'hub' regardless of what device is plugged into it. Actually, I think there's a 'multi USB device' they can use too, although for all I know that could be one that doesn't have the ability to ask for 500mA.
Me: Even after USB exploded, USB ports were still unlikely to be found on PC until 2000 or so. (Or they'd be on motherboards, but not actually hooked up to anything, or relegated to a slot in the back, etc.)
You: You were arguing the they weren't physically there, and if you're making a point about the chronological order, four years is well off.
I'm going to explain this one more time: Sometime in 1999, USB changed from 'likely not to be there' to 'likely to be there'. You are stupidly arguing that '200 million USB-equipped PCs' in 1998 proves me wrong, when that's just idiotic...there were about 200 million PCs in 1998, and a meaningful percentage of 'USB-equipped PC' did not come with 'USB-capable software', so if anything that demonstrates I'm pretty correct there...the topping point was in 1999.
As for 'four years off', I have no idea what you're saying. The amount of PCs with working USB ports in 1996 would be in the low millions. In fact, there's probably a point in time, after the release of the iMac, where Macs with working USB ports outnumbered PC. (And iMacs, of course, resulted in a lot more USB peripherals being sold, as they had only USB.)
And the simple fact is that Windows 98 PCs supported USB just like any iMac. The releases of the two products also happened to coincide, so it's a bit of a stretch to give all credit to Apple.
Oh, I see. You either think I'm a Apple fanboy, or you're a Windows fanboy, and you object to Apple 'taking credit' for USB. Well, I'm not an Apple fanboy, I've never even owned an Apple computer or even an iPod. They're extremely overpriced.
But Apple does get 'credit', although it's credit for something that would have happened anyway. And the 'simple fact' is that Windows 98 is not 'just like' the iMac because Windows 98 supported non-USB hardware, whereas the iMac did not. Duh.
USB hardware started selling when Apple released the iMac, a computer where there were no other ports. USB keyboard, mouse, and no serial or parallel. So iMac owners were forced to buy, at a hefty markup, USB peripherals. (Including a USB floppy, which Apple also did not include.)
At that point in time, plenty, essentially every, PC was still selling without working USB at all. Shortly afterward some of them did, then all of them, but it took quite some time before you could had a better than even chance of actually having USB on a random computer. And considering that PCs all had legacy ports, people would just buy for those.
You can quibble if that happened in 1998 or 1999 all you want, or if said computers actually had working USB and people just weren't buying USB devices, but it's not relevant, as the Mac USB explosion happened in 96 and 97, as iMac owners were forced to buy USB stuff.
Meanwhile, PC owners were happily buy parallel and serial and PS/2 devices until USB started impinged on their consciousness around 1999 and they'd try to use the ports on their computer. (And Windows 95 and NT owners discovered they didn't work.)
I don't see what Windows NT has to do with it at all, it's not a consumer OS.
And who the hell mentioned 'consumer'? Not me.
NT had a Workstation edition that plenty of businesses used on all their PCs. (Both NT 4 and NT 3.5) I'm sure you'll argue that shouldn't count for some reason in 'PCs'...but it really does. Business PCs get peripherals too.
And quite a few 'power users' were using it for their home computers, too. Especially NT 3.5, which predated 95 and was the best way to run 32-bit apps for a while, which had started coming out then. If they had that, and didn't need direct X, they were not likely to 'upgrade' to 95, which a lot of knowledgeable people, and most businesses, considered a downgrade. (And, of course, people that did upgrade ended up with OSR1, which also did not have USB.)
Well, they did say the scammers submitted purchase orders themselves.
So it's entirely possible that the business that was supposed to get paid hadn't actually submitted any purchase orders at all. Like a contractual landscaping company that hadn't actually done any work recently, but obviously would be still in the system. It could even be a company they had stopped using altogether.
By not expecting any money, the company was not surprised when they didn't get it.
And, heck, there could have been legit payments made during that time, it could just be really competent scammers that were monitoring the incoming money, and actually forwarding said legit payments to the original account.
Um, in what universe does '200 million or so USB-equipped PCs' mean 'most PCs'? Have you even slightly demonstrated there were less than 400 million PCs at that time? No.
In fact, when I said 'until 2000 or so' that was exactly what I was referring to. Somewhere around 1999 the proportions switched and you were more likely to find working USB than not.
And, as I stated a good deal of computers had unworking USB ports. For example, any computer sold with Windows NT might be 'USB-equipped', the USB certainly wouldn't operate. Same with any pre-OSR2.1 Windows 98 PC, OSR2.1 came out sometime in 1996, but they were still selling OSR1 and OSR2 PCs as later as 97.
Of the '200 million USB-equipped PCs' that existed by 1998, I'd be amazed if two-thirds of them actually had functioning USB to the point where you could plug in a device and it would work, and additionally there were all the computers without ports at all.
Unless they mean the insurance company's IT department, as a password sniffer apparently got past them.
What that story has to do with the 'change the account number for vendor and submit bogus invoices' story I don't know. At no point do they actually appear to explain the fraud.
Also, a 'Nigerian' scam traditionally refers to advance fee fraud, aka, 'I have X million here that you can get if you send me Y thousand.'. That does not appear to be what happened here.
There's a difference between being dumb and falling for that scam, and having someone break in and change the address your business (Or, in this case, government) are supposed to send money to.
I have no idea of the history of 'Standard Telephone'. It certainly sounds like a Bell-discard, although that was Bellsouth down here. I don't know if there were localer companies than that.
And you can select inter-LATA carriers, and you can select intra-LATA-between-area-code carriers.
You cannot select intra-LATA-within-same-area-code carriers. That is the way it has been explained to me.
All of north Georgia, down to and past Atlanta, is in the same LATA and in three different area codes, and I can select a long distance carrier to Atlanta (A different area code) but not to the next county over.(1)
The provider is fixed, usually to the same company that provides local service. I know people in Atlanta are stuck with Bellsouth, now AT&T. At least this is how it is in Georgia, for all I know the state government is in the pockets of said companies and blocking change. (Wouldn't be the first time. At least the phone companies aren't giving people salmonella.)
This strangely, if you know how long distance works, means that such calls are paid for the by the originating local phone company, which then pays the long distance carrier (The same company) and the terminating local phone company (Also the same company). I wonder how that actually works, accounting-wise.
Can you dial 1010XXX codes to get around that?
I believe so, but I don't use long distance on my phone.
You could always use a VoIP service to bypass them for phone.
They're not willing to provide bare DSL at this point, so I'd be paying for phone service anyway. 'Long distance' calls I just make on my cell. (Where, despite having no long distance deal, I get free calling to all of Georgia.)
Whats the terrain like out there? If its reasonably flat you might consider options for fixed wireless, if there are any providers out there.
Mountain foothills, so no.
1) At this point, you might be asking why the next county over is long distance. The government keeps proposing that we make it local. But our voters are morons, very old morons, and keep voting that change down, because basic rates would go up slightly. They have yet to realize this is self defeating because normal people, who not only interact with the next county over but also Gainesville and Atlanta (Big cities that are, respectively, 30 minutes and an hour away.), are switching to cell phone because of this stupidity, and as the number of subscribers drop, rates have already started to go up anyway.
Well, it really doesn't matter how you figure out the floor. Taking the population of the smallest state, which is 523k, vs. just randomly picking 500k, would yield essentially the same results right now.
It's just if you pick the population of the smallest state, you've got two problems. One, if we admit a microscopic state like Guam and suddenly it's 150k per Representative, quadrupling the house. The other is that the House would again stop growing, and possibly start shrinking the future, if the smallest state grew faster than the average.
No, working off the national population is a saner idea than the arbitrary selection of the smallest state.
But I was really just taking issue with the 'round the remainder up to the next whole number.', which, along with the method of picking the smallest size, is instantly unfair to the smallest state, because it become the sole state with one Representative, and any other state, no matter if it has one extra person, ends up with two.
No, you really need to round to the middle. With a minimum of one in case we get a state with less than 500k people. Or, alternately, always round up, although in that case we might want to raise the bar to 1 per 750k people.
The real issue, of course, is that the House is too small and they are unwilling to make it larger simply because of physical constraints. Until they get past that, discussing the size is pointless.
Oh, and incidentally, something needs to be in there to make sure it's an odd total, too. The House has no tie-breaking ability like the Senate, because it's supposed to have an odd number of people.
Sorry, I just get tired of people online debating the issue, like I'm some sort of lunatic and don't know what's going on. And I have to explain that really, truly, no, I'm not an idiot, that our telephone and cable company are the same people, and there are no other people.
But, anyway, before they were Windstream they were Alltel. Yes, the cell phone company, although ironically they don't sell cell coverage here. Try to figure that one out.
And before that they were called 'Standard Telephone' or "Standard Telephone Company' or something like that, which is when they bought the cable company that I can't recall the name of. This had to have been back in the early 90s, I don't really remember, I was just a kid. And I can't google 'Standard Telephone' and find out, it's too generic.
They are also, in case it's not scary enough, the local long distance provider, if you know what I mean. Not the big long distance company you can select, the regional one you can't change. For calls within the same area code. Often, of course, calling another Windstream prefix.
That method is stupid. It would result in the second smallest state, even if larger by 1%, getting two Representatives. It's hard to see why Vermont at 621k people would deserve two when Wyoming only gets one at 532k.
If you want to add more people to the House, the correct thing to do is to add more people to the House, perhaps based on national population so it will change over time, and then recalculate the seats based on it. Don't try to do it backwards.
I've always suggested we should have one per 500k people, which would give us about 620 when we reallocate them in 2010.
If we truly run out space on the floor, we can implement some sort of rotational system where only 10 people from a state (Or maybe, the first 10, and 50% of the rest.) are allowed on the floor at once, and the rest are in a antechamber where they can vote from and videoconference in from.
I don't see any ability in that law to estimate vote counts. Just because you can logically assume that the vote difference in Wyoming couldn't be larger than the number of voters doesn't mean you can legally assume that.
Also, they could withhold the number of voters, too, so you'd have to go off registered voters. And some states have open registration where you can register at the polls, so, in theory, you'd have to assume the entire legal population of the state voted.
And you're assuming a small state does this. What if Texas does?
Well, the interesting fact is, if anything, it tends to go the other way. Witness this last election. Moderately close popular vote, blowout Democratic electoral vote. Yes, McCain would have still lose, but would have actually be in the race. (Despite the media pretending otherwise, the presidential election was basically figured out by September.)
However, the reason they object to it is that there are large 'red' states where, if the Democrats showed up, they could get quite a lot more popular vote. Like Georgia. Big cities in medium-sized red states.
This is because Democrats cluster in cities, and are much easier to reach, so if we actually started carrying about the popular vote, a few personal appearances would do a lot.
Whereas that's not so true in reverse. Maybe New York, a little.
Heck, just knowing the popular vote mattered might get a lot more voters out, and more turnout has always been bad for Republicans. (As that almost always means youth and/or poor voters.)
They're still disenfranchising their own voters once it passes in enough states.
Seriously, this is incredibly stupid behavior. The only thing it can accomplish is that the state votes some other way than the voters of the state want.
And in the very one or two elections that this law is valid in, odds are it will change the results of the election, and it will do that by having half a dozen states vote for the 'wrong' candidate, the one they didn't want.
At which point we will have successfully proven that voters are morons as they storm their government's rampants looking for blood and quickly unpass said law.
Anytime anyone talks about the 'black vote' for Obama they simply weren't paying attention. Obama got maybe 3% more votes from black voters than Kerry did. Like 96% voted for him vs. 93% for Kerry, or something like that, I forget the exact numbers.
So, yes, black voters 'automatically' voted for him by an overwhelming majority. But they've being doing that for all Democrats since the 80s, when the Republicans adopted the 'Southern Strategy' and began speaking in racist code that black voters apparently have no problem deciphering.
And hence that wouldn't have affected the swing-state status of Indiana.
Now, it's possible that more black people who voted changed the status, I don't know about that offhand.
But considering the black population of Indiana is only 9%, though, which would be only 600k total people, which is only about 150k actual voters, I'm not sure the election could be 'un-swing-stated' as much by them. Won by them in the end, yes. But turnout is pretty hard to tell before an election.
I suspect what happened, though, is that McCain was in trouble in Indiana because of white voters shifting Democratic. And the youth vote.
The latest example is that Obama has moved census bureau under the power of the executive branch; it's quite plainly supposed to be under the authority of the legislative branch.
What the hell are you rambling? The census bureau has always been under the executive branch. The legislature doesn't have any 'bureaus' at all. Because it doesn't do anything except make laws.
It is microscopic compared to the executive. There are probably less than 1000 people working in it, minus elected officials and their staff. There's a few people hired to oversee scheduling of committees and stuff (Instead of working for a congressman, they work for a 'committee', or schedule access to various rooms, or whatever.), and there's some random IT, and that's it.(1)
It's basically the size of what would happen if you took all the heads of the various government agencies in the executive, and removed their agencies out from under them. Hell, the number of people working in the census bureau when they're not running a census probably outnumbers the entire legislative branch.
Meanwhile, the census bureau is still 'under the authority' of the legislature, just like the entire executive branch is, no matter what delusions Bush put into people's head. The legislature created all government agencies, and it regulates them. (Although census taking, being a Constitutional required duty, obviously has to be regulated within those boundaries.)
We really a moderation that says 'This guys is a moron' and have it show up on future posts. No 'bureau', or 'department', or whatever, is part of the legislative.
1) Now that I've said that, it's possible that the capitol police, who are under the legislature's direct control, are technically part of the legislative branch, which would probably add another thousand or so people.
Each of the thirteen colonies required voters either to own a certain amount of land or personal property, or to pay a specified amount in taxes. It was about the people who pay for things voting, Im not saying its right but this 'land owners meme' has to be stopped.
I.e, exactly what was said is entirely true, but I don't like it so I will pretend it is not.
News flash: 'Land owner' is correct.
Yes, if you didn't happen to own land at the specific moment you could point to a large amount of other property you owned, and if you didn't happen to own that you could pay a large fee. (Thus proving you were a man of means.)
But the fact there were exceptions does not mean 'only land owners could vote' isn't a fairly accurate discussion of the situation. 'Only people who could own land, even if they didn't happen to own any at the moment' is slightly more accurate, but idiotic quibbling.
The amount of people who used such exceptions, however, was near-zero, as there was no logical reason for the wealthy to not own land, unless, for example, they had just moved into town.
As I've always said, each state should switch over to proportional electoral voting based on the same system to elect Senators and Representatives.
Two electoral votes, (The 'Senate' votes) should be allocated based on the winner, and the other votes should be allocated either by state-wide proportion, or by house district.
This system would give 'red' and 'blue' states more variance in their vote, but not removing the large advantage of the actual winner. It means, in large enough states, there's an actual advantage to winning with 60% of the vote vs. 40%, or, to rephrase, a presidential candidate who is going to lose the popular vote in a state might just show up anyway to get one extra vote and deny it to his opponent.
Um, no it wouldn't. Just because you voting for electors doesn't mean the system has to be setup where you're voting for all of them.
I've always argued that the system should operate exactly how we operate the House and Senate. Two electoral votes should be winner-take-all, and the others should be proportional.
Either proportional for the whole state, or winner-take-all per house districts. There are arguments for and against both of those. The big one is that house districts are often absurdly gerrymandered. Without that problem, the house setup makes more sense, although it's worth pointing out that the other way actually allows third party candidates to get a vote or two.
This would mean that states couldn't be completely ignored during the election, as something like half of them are now. Spending a few hours in a state might get a candidate an electoral vote or two. A Democrat might show up in a seven-vote red state if it meant the difference between one electoral votes for him and two.
Sadly, this would pretty much require a constitutional amendment. It can't even be phased in slowly like the popular vote stupidity they're doing now, and there's absolutely no incentive for individual states to adopt it, as states tend to be run by the same party they give all their electoral votes to.
Yes, I am sure. I installed the DSL filters myself on the telephone box (To send it to the discontinued second line from dialup.) instead of at each outlet, and I bought the DSL router myself, I know how it's getting into the house. And I know how the cable is getting into the house, I can see the fucking cable where the dog chewed through it and I've been under the house running the cable myself. There are two goddamn wires on the poles going into the house, owned by the same company.
The company name, as I have said before, is Windstream.
And, frankly, I am tired of talking about this. I know the actual facts of what is going on, and I'm not going to sit here and discuss them anymore, or hypotheticals about what might 'really' be going on. The goddamn phone company, decades ago, bought the cable company, and they have remained that way since then, being sold in one piece.
I think you aren't understanding what is going on here.
There is one company in town.
It has coax cable wires strung to people's houses, and it has telephone wires strung to people's houses. It provides telephone service over the telephone wires, and cable television (Digital and otherwise) over the coax cables.
It additionally provides DSL over the telephone wires. Also it provides dialup over the telephone wires if you want that, or for the parts of the county that can't get DSL.
There is no 'TV over DSL or sat', and there is no 'VoIP over cable modem'. There's no weird anything...it's straight up standard cable (or digital cable) and straight up standard phone service, with optional DSL.
There are also no alternate DSL providers. While in theory the phone company provides such an ability, no company has bothered to take them up on it. And obviously, even if cable modem alternatives existed, there wouldn't be any here, as the cable/phone company has not bothered to install such an infrastructure.
The zip code is 30533, if you want to check. Be aware there are a very few parts of the county with a different cable provider, which is actually an overlap from another county...that is not available county-wide, it's maybe a three or four mile incursion from another county.
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The fact is that a PC sold in 1998 with Windows 98 installed would likely have a USB port and support a lot of USB hardware.
I have nor asserted otherwise.
But you were essentially saying that the iMac was using USB as a standard for many years before PC users were aware of USB.
Um, they were. They had to be. They went out and bought Apple's newest offering, and ended up having ports that only a tiny fraction of the computer world had heard about and was using, and no other way to add things to their computer. (Mac users, of course, have never really had the internal hardware available that PCs had, and certainly not in an iMac, which required case-cracking tools they didn't have.)
You can assert people actually had working USB ports, and maybe the newest people did. I assert the hardware support was poor, and the software support was poor, and put together mean that PCs USB support was a crap shot until 1999 or so, but that's not the point. It didn't matter, no PC owner was using them:
If you bought a PC in 1997, and went out and bought an printer a month later, you bought a parallel one or maybe serial. Period. You probably weren't even aware of USB, and if you were it was the fact that you didn't really know how it worked and those printers cost twice as much.
If you bought an iMac in 1997, and went out and bought a printer a month later, you bought a USB one, because you had to. Just like previously you'd buy a serial printer because you had to, because Macs lacked parallel ports. (Incidentally, the same thing applies there...without Macs, there probably would have not been serial printers to anywhere near the extent they existed.)
I honestly don't understand why you're having trouble grasping this. It wasn't that iMac had 'better' USB support. The iMac's USB support was essentially identical to Windows 95 OSR2.1, I have never implied it was any better.
It was that the iMac had just USB support, and that was it. You wanted a different keyboard and mouse? USB. (Everyone wanted a better mouse.) You wanted a floppy? USB. (Everyone wanted a floppy.) You wanted wifi? USB. You wanted a better sound card? USB. You wanted a CD-R drive? USB.
How would that even work anyway? Cables have no circuitry in them.
The problem appears to be is that the base driver for various USB protocols includes no way for the device to say 'I am a standard USB flash drive, except I'd like 500mA'.
Probably the flash drive spec does that, for USB floppies and hard drives, but my point is apparently a lot of drivers don't.
It seems rather idiotic it wasn't part of the USB spec, independent of what device is plugged in, or even if it has a driver at all. Random Futuristic Device, without a driver, should be able to, as long as it's USB, plug in and ask for 500mA, and get it, even if it's 'Unknown Device'.
Of course, devices can fake it. They could pretend to be single-port USB hubs, for example, and could get 500mA to the 'hub' regardless of what device is plugged into it. Actually, I think there's a 'multi USB device' they can use too, although for all I know that could be one that doesn't have the ability to ask for 500mA.
I meant 'there were 400 million PCs in 1998'.
You: You were arguing the they weren't physically there, and if you're making a point about the chronological order, four years is well off.
I'm going to explain this one more time: Sometime in 1999, USB changed from 'likely not to be there' to 'likely to be there'. You are stupidly arguing that '200 million USB-equipped PCs' in 1998 proves me wrong, when that's just idiotic...there were about 200 million PCs in 1998, and a meaningful percentage of 'USB-equipped PC' did not come with 'USB-capable software', so if anything that demonstrates I'm pretty correct there...the topping point was in 1999.
As for 'four years off', I have no idea what you're saying. The amount of PCs with working USB ports in 1996 would be in the low millions. In fact, there's probably a point in time, after the release of the iMac, where Macs with working USB ports outnumbered PC. (And iMacs, of course, resulted in a lot more USB peripherals being sold, as they had only USB.)
And the simple fact is that Windows 98 PCs supported USB just like any iMac. The releases of the two products also happened to coincide, so it's a bit of a stretch to give all credit to Apple.
Oh, I see. You either think I'm a Apple fanboy, or you're a Windows fanboy, and you object to Apple 'taking credit' for USB. Well, I'm not an Apple fanboy, I've never even owned an Apple computer or even an iPod. They're extremely overpriced.
But Apple does get 'credit', although it's credit for something that would have happened anyway. And the 'simple fact' is that Windows 98 is not 'just like' the iMac because Windows 98 supported non-USB hardware, whereas the iMac did not. Duh.
USB hardware started selling when Apple released the iMac, a computer where there were no other ports. USB keyboard, mouse, and no serial or parallel. So iMac owners were forced to buy, at a hefty markup, USB peripherals. (Including a USB floppy, which Apple also did not include.)
At that point in time, plenty, essentially every, PC was still selling without working USB at all. Shortly afterward some of them did, then all of them, but it took quite some time before you could had a better than even chance of actually having USB on a random computer. And considering that PCs all had legacy ports, people would just buy for those.
You can quibble if that happened in 1998 or 1999 all you want, or if said computers actually had working USB and people just weren't buying USB devices, but it's not relevant, as the Mac USB explosion happened in 96 and 97, as iMac owners were forced to buy USB stuff.
Meanwhile, PC owners were happily buy parallel and serial and PS/2 devices until USB started impinged on their consciousness around 1999 and they'd try to use the ports on their computer. (And Windows 95 and NT owners discovered they didn't work.)
I don't see what Windows NT has to do with it at all, it's not a consumer OS.
And who the hell mentioned 'consumer'? Not me.
NT had a Workstation edition that plenty of businesses used on all their PCs. (Both NT 4 and NT 3.5) I'm sure you'll argue that shouldn't count for some reason in 'PCs'...but it really does. Business PCs get peripherals too.
And quite a few 'power users' were using it for their home computers, too. Especially NT 3.5, which predated 95 and was the best way to run 32-bit apps for a while, which had started coming out then. If they had that, and didn't need direct X, they were not likely to 'upgrade' to 95, which a lot of knowledgeable people, and most businesses, considered a downgrade. (And, of course, people that did upgrade ended up with OSR1, which also did not have USB.)
Well, they did say the scammers submitted purchase orders themselves.
So it's entirely possible that the business that was supposed to get paid hadn't actually submitted any purchase orders at all. Like a contractual landscaping company that hadn't actually done any work recently, but obviously would be still in the system. It could even be a company they had stopped using altogether.
By not expecting any money, the company was not surprised when they didn't get it.
And, heck, there could have been legit payments made during that time, it could just be really competent scammers that were monitoring the incoming money, and actually forwarding said legit payments to the original account.
Um, in what universe does '200 million or so USB-equipped PCs' mean 'most PCs'? Have you even slightly demonstrated there were less than 400 million PCs at that time? No.
In fact, when I said 'until 2000 or so' that was exactly what I was referring to. Somewhere around 1999 the proportions switched and you were more likely to find working USB than not.
And, as I stated a good deal of computers had unworking USB ports. For example, any computer sold with Windows NT might be 'USB-equipped', the USB certainly wouldn't operate. Same with any pre-OSR2.1 Windows 98 PC, OSR2.1 came out sometime in 1996, but they were still selling OSR1 and OSR2 PCs as later as 97.
Of the '200 million USB-equipped PCs' that existed by 1998, I'd be amazed if two-thirds of them actually had functioning USB to the point where you could plug in a device and it would work, and additionally there were all the computers without ports at all.
Unless they mean the insurance company's IT department, as a password sniffer apparently got past them.
What that story has to do with the 'change the account number for vendor and submit bogus invoices' story I don't know. At no point do they actually appear to explain the fraud.
Also, a 'Nigerian' scam traditionally refers to advance fee fraud, aka, 'I have X million here that you can get if you send me Y thousand.'. That does not appear to be what happened here.
There's a difference between being dumb and falling for that scam, and having someone break in and change the address your business (Or, in this case, government) are supposed to send money to.
I have no idea of the history of 'Standard Telephone'. It certainly sounds like a Bell-discard, although that was Bellsouth down here. I don't know if there were localer companies than that.
And you can select inter-LATA carriers, and you can select intra-LATA-between-area-code carriers. You cannot select intra-LATA-within-same-area-code carriers. That is the way it has been explained to me.
All of north Georgia, down to and past Atlanta, is in the same LATA and in three different area codes, and I can select a long distance carrier to Atlanta (A different area code) but not to the next county over.(1)
The provider is fixed, usually to the same company that provides local service. I know people in Atlanta are stuck with Bellsouth, now AT&T. At least this is how it is in Georgia, for all I know the state government is in the pockets of said companies and blocking change. (Wouldn't be the first time. At least the phone companies aren't giving people salmonella.)
This strangely, if you know how long distance works, means that such calls are paid for the by the originating local phone company, which then pays the long distance carrier (The same company) and the terminating local phone company (Also the same company). I wonder how that actually works, accounting-wise.
Can you dial 1010XXX codes to get around that?
I believe so, but I don't use long distance on my phone.
You could always use a VoIP service to bypass them for phone.
They're not willing to provide bare DSL at this point, so I'd be paying for phone service anyway. 'Long distance' calls I just make on my cell. (Where, despite having no long distance deal, I get free calling to all of Georgia.)
Whats the terrain like out there? If its reasonably flat you might consider options for fixed wireless, if there are any providers out there.
Mountain foothills, so no.
1) At this point, you might be asking why the next county over is long distance. The government keeps proposing that we make it local. But our voters are morons, very old morons, and keep voting that change down, because basic rates would go up slightly. They have yet to realize this is self defeating because normal people, who not only interact with the next county over but also Gainesville and Atlanta (Big cities that are, respectively, 30 minutes and an hour away.), are switching to cell phone because of this stupidity, and as the number of subscribers drop, rates have already started to go up anyway.
Well, it really doesn't matter how you figure out the floor. Taking the population of the smallest state, which is 523k, vs. just randomly picking 500k, would yield essentially the same results right now.
It's just if you pick the population of the smallest state, you've got two problems. One, if we admit a microscopic state like Guam and suddenly it's 150k per Representative, quadrupling the house. The other is that the House would again stop growing, and possibly start shrinking the future, if the smallest state grew faster than the average.
No, working off the national population is a saner idea than the arbitrary selection of the smallest state.
But I was really just taking issue with the 'round the remainder up to the next whole number.', which, along with the method of picking the smallest size, is instantly unfair to the smallest state, because it become the sole state with one Representative, and any other state, no matter if it has one extra person, ends up with two.
No, you really need to round to the middle. With a minimum of one in case we get a state with less than 500k people. Or, alternately, always round up, although in that case we might want to raise the bar to 1 per 750k people.
The real issue, of course, is that the House is too small and they are unwilling to make it larger simply because of physical constraints. Until they get past that, discussing the size is pointless.
Oh, and incidentally, something needs to be in there to make sure it's an odd total, too. The House has no tie-breaking ability like the Senate, because it's supposed to have an odd number of people.
Sorry, I just get tired of people online debating the issue, like I'm some sort of lunatic and don't know what's going on. And I have to explain that really, truly, no, I'm not an idiot, that our telephone and cable company are the same people, and there are no other people.
But, anyway, before they were Windstream they were Alltel. Yes, the cell phone company, although ironically they don't sell cell coverage here. Try to figure that one out.
And before that they were called 'Standard Telephone' or "Standard Telephone Company' or something like that, which is when they bought the cable company that I can't recall the name of. This had to have been back in the early 90s, I don't really remember, I was just a kid. And I can't google 'Standard Telephone' and find out, it's too generic.
They are also, in case it's not scary enough, the local long distance provider, if you know what I mean. Not the big long distance company you can select, the regional one you can't change. For calls within the same area code. Often, of course, calling another Windstream prefix.
That method is stupid. It would result in the second smallest state, even if larger by 1%, getting two Representatives. It's hard to see why Vermont at 621k people would deserve two when Wyoming only gets one at 532k.
If you want to add more people to the House, the correct thing to do is to add more people to the House, perhaps based on national population so it will change over time, and then recalculate the seats based on it. Don't try to do it backwards.
I've always suggested we should have one per 500k people, which would give us about 620 when we reallocate them in 2010.
If we truly run out space on the floor, we can implement some sort of rotational system where only 10 people from a state (Or maybe, the first 10, and 50% of the rest.) are allowed on the floor at once, and the rest are in a antechamber where they can vote from and videoconference in from.
I don't see any ability in that law to estimate vote counts. Just because you can logically assume that the vote difference in Wyoming couldn't be larger than the number of voters doesn't mean you can legally assume that.
Also, they could withhold the number of voters, too, so you'd have to go off registered voters. And some states have open registration where you can register at the polls, so, in theory, you'd have to assume the entire legal population of the state voted.
And you're assuming a small state does this. What if Texas does?
Well, the interesting fact is, if anything, it tends to go the other way. Witness this last election. Moderately close popular vote, blowout Democratic electoral vote. Yes, McCain would have still lose, but would have actually be in the race. (Despite the media pretending otherwise, the presidential election was basically figured out by September.)
However, the reason they object to it is that there are large 'red' states where, if the Democrats showed up, they could get quite a lot more popular vote. Like Georgia. Big cities in medium-sized red states.
This is because Democrats cluster in cities, and are much easier to reach, so if we actually started carrying about the popular vote, a few personal appearances would do a lot.
Whereas that's not so true in reverse. Maybe New York, a little.
Heck, just knowing the popular vote mattered might get a lot more voters out, and more turnout has always been bad for Republicans. (As that almost always means youth and/or poor voters.)
They're still disenfranchising their own voters once it passes in enough states.
Seriously, this is incredibly stupid behavior. The only thing it can accomplish is that the state votes some other way than the voters of the state want.
And in the very one or two elections that this law is valid in, odds are it will change the results of the election, and it will do that by having half a dozen states vote for the 'wrong' candidate, the one they didn't want.
At which point we will have successfully proven that voters are morons as they storm their government's rampants looking for blood and quickly unpass said law.
Anytime anyone talks about the 'black vote' for Obama they simply weren't paying attention. Obama got maybe 3% more votes from black voters than Kerry did. Like 96% voted for him vs. 93% for Kerry, or something like that, I forget the exact numbers.
So, yes, black voters 'automatically' voted for him by an overwhelming majority. But they've being doing that for all Democrats since the 80s, when the Republicans adopted the 'Southern Strategy' and began speaking in racist code that black voters apparently have no problem deciphering.
And hence that wouldn't have affected the swing-state status of Indiana.
Now, it's possible that more black people who voted changed the status, I don't know about that offhand.
But considering the black population of Indiana is only 9%, though, which would be only 600k total people, which is only about 150k actual voters, I'm not sure the election could be 'un-swing-stated' as much by them. Won by them in the end, yes. But turnout is pretty hard to tell before an election.
I suspect what happened, though, is that McCain was in trouble in Indiana because of white voters shifting Democratic. And the youth vote.
The latest example is that Obama has moved census bureau under the power of the executive branch; it's quite plainly supposed to be under the authority of the legislative branch.
What the hell are you rambling? The census bureau has always been under the executive branch. The legislature doesn't have any 'bureaus' at all. Because it doesn't do anything except make laws.
It is microscopic compared to the executive. There are probably less than 1000 people working in it, minus elected officials and their staff. There's a few people hired to oversee scheduling of committees and stuff (Instead of working for a congressman, they work for a 'committee', or schedule access to various rooms, or whatever.), and there's some random IT, and that's it.(1)
It's basically the size of what would happen if you took all the heads of the various government agencies in the executive, and removed their agencies out from under them. Hell, the number of people working in the census bureau when they're not running a census probably outnumbers the entire legislative branch.
Meanwhile, the census bureau is still 'under the authority' of the legislature, just like the entire executive branch is, no matter what delusions Bush put into people's head. The legislature created all government agencies, and it regulates them. (Although census taking, being a Constitutional required duty, obviously has to be regulated within those boundaries.)
We really a moderation that says 'This guys is a moron' and have it show up on future posts. No 'bureau', or 'department', or whatever, is part of the legislative.
1) Now that I've said that, it's possible that the capitol police, who are under the legislature's direct control, are technically part of the legislative branch, which would probably add another thousand or so people.
Each of the thirteen colonies required voters either to own a certain amount of land or personal property, or to pay a specified amount in taxes. It was about the people who pay for things voting, Im not saying its right but this 'land owners meme' has to be stopped.
I.e, exactly what was said is entirely true, but I don't like it so I will pretend it is not.
News flash: 'Land owner' is correct.
Yes, if you didn't happen to own land at the specific moment you could point to a large amount of other property you owned, and if you didn't happen to own that you could pay a large fee. (Thus proving you were a man of means.)
But the fact there were exceptions does not mean 'only land owners could vote' isn't a fairly accurate discussion of the situation. 'Only people who could own land, even if they didn't happen to own any at the moment' is slightly more accurate, but idiotic quibbling.
The amount of people who used such exceptions, however, was near-zero, as there was no logical reason for the wealthy to not own land, unless, for example, they had just moved into town.
As I've always said, each state should switch over to proportional electoral voting based on the same system to elect Senators and Representatives.
Two electoral votes, (The 'Senate' votes) should be allocated based on the winner, and the other votes should be allocated either by state-wide proportion, or by house district.
This system would give 'red' and 'blue' states more variance in their vote, but not removing the large advantage of the actual winner. It means, in large enough states, there's an actual advantage to winning with 60% of the vote vs. 40%, or, to rephrase, a presidential candidate who is going to lose the popular vote in a state might just show up anyway to get one extra vote and deny it to his opponent.
Um, no it wouldn't. Just because you voting for electors doesn't mean the system has to be setup where you're voting for all of them.
I've always argued that the system should operate exactly how we operate the House and Senate. Two electoral votes should be winner-take-all, and the others should be proportional.
Either proportional for the whole state, or winner-take-all per house districts. There are arguments for and against both of those. The big one is that house districts are often absurdly gerrymandered. Without that problem, the house setup makes more sense, although it's worth pointing out that the other way actually allows third party candidates to get a vote or two.
This would mean that states couldn't be completely ignored during the election, as something like half of them are now. Spending a few hours in a state might get a candidate an electoral vote or two. A Democrat might show up in a seven-vote red state if it meant the difference between one electoral votes for him and two.
Sadly, this would pretty much require a constitutional amendment. It can't even be phased in slowly like the popular vote stupidity they're doing now, and there's absolutely no incentive for individual states to adopt it, as states tend to be run by the same party they give all their electoral votes to.
Yes, I am sure. I installed the DSL filters myself on the telephone box (To send it to the discontinued second line from dialup.) instead of at each outlet, and I bought the DSL router myself, I know how it's getting into the house. And I know how the cable is getting into the house, I can see the fucking cable where the dog chewed through it and I've been under the house running the cable myself. There are two goddamn wires on the poles going into the house, owned by the same company.
The company name, as I have said before, is Windstream.
And, frankly, I am tired of talking about this. I know the actual facts of what is going on, and I'm not going to sit here and discuss them anymore, or hypotheticals about what might 'really' be going on. The goddamn phone company, decades ago, bought the cable company, and they have remained that way since then, being sold in one piece.
I think you aren't understanding what is going on here.
There is one company in town.
It has coax cable wires strung to people's houses, and it has telephone wires strung to people's houses. It provides telephone service over the telephone wires, and cable television (Digital and otherwise) over the coax cables.
It additionally provides DSL over the telephone wires. Also it provides dialup over the telephone wires if you want that, or for the parts of the county that can't get DSL.
There is no 'TV over DSL or sat', and there is no 'VoIP over cable modem'. There's no weird anything...it's straight up standard cable (or digital cable) and straight up standard phone service, with optional DSL.
There are also no alternate DSL providers. While in theory the phone company provides such an ability, no company has bothered to take them up on it. And obviously, even if cable modem alternatives existed, there wouldn't be any here, as the cable/phone company has not bothered to install such an infrastructure.
The zip code is 30533, if you want to check. Be aware there are a very few parts of the county with a different cable provider, which is actually an overlap from another county...that is not available county-wide, it's maybe a three or four mile incursion from another county.
I did not mean to imply that the sole company (Windstream) providing both phone and cable actually had cable internet.
There is no cable internet service, because it would be illogical for said company to compete with its DSL.
Man, that would be so awesome, to have a separate phone and cable company. I would have two places I could get internet service from, instead of one!
Hey, dumbass, czars regulate and oversee entire areas of executive branch policy, not 'industry'.
Congress is the one that regulates and oversees 'industry'.