With everyone singing the praises of Speakeasy, I filled out the "is it available for you" form on the speakeasy site, and they said that I'm 14K feet from a CO, but that my only option was 120$/mo for 384K SDSL.
Is it just me, or does that seem awfully high for a not very fast broadband connection? Considering that my cable provider (while they suck) only charge 50$/month.
Honestly, I don't have time to sit around and read three times to comprehend every EULA, TOS, Privacy Statement, etc. They're too long and there are too many of them. Might it be in my best interest to know before signing up or tossing the shrinkwrap, but I only get 24 hours in a day, and most of those are spent working or sleeping.
I have a very hard time believing that the SciFi channel cancelled Farscape because of the money or the ratings. They continue running the incredibly lame series Stargate SG-1. I liked Richard Dean Anderson as "MacGyver", but he should have stuck with that. If that wasn't bad enough, SciFi has been running ads for "Tremors - the series" - okay, the movie was bad enough. This is the kind of thing that you could easily see on MST3K - poor writing and cheap effects ("special" intentionally omitted.)
Farscape requires a bit more intelligent viewer to follow and understand the storyline and the depth of the character development. So yeah, it would be harder to get ratings than with a waste like "Friends."
As I understand it, the first three seasons of Farscape were designed to be able to be wrapped up in case SciFi cancelled the series. The producers left season four in a cliffhanger, which indicates how much of a surprise it was when the SciFi execs pulled the plug. Its really too bad. There is so little quality television programming anymore that I've taken to keeping FoxNews on most of the time.
Is this a deal where SCO couldn't find a way to sue Linus (and the entire assoicated parts of the OSS community), so now that they have someone they can sue (IBM), they are?
How do you deal with security in this environment? Do you run WEP or anything like it? Do you give everyone the same key, or have a way to distribute unique keys, perhaps automatically?
A friend who works at a local coffee shop is interested in having someone come in and set up a wireless network. I have an AP at home, but its only for me. Any good references or documentation on how to set something like this up well for public use?
they made the software and are allowed to make whatever demands that they wish in the EULA
With that logic, it also holds that:
- You can only use your microwave for this list of approved food manufacturing companies, who happen to have a large share in the company who makes your microwave.
- You can only drive you car on these roads, and only on these days. You are not allowed to sell your car, or listen to any radio stations except those on this approved list.
- On the chance that you might or have violated these conditions, then the BSA, et al. is authorized to audit, sieze, reposses, and press criminal charges with relation to any of the aforementioned items.
Seems absolutley ridiculous, right? Because it is. But thats the logic you've stated here. What's wrong is that I purchased the car, the microwave, and the software. Provided that I am not doing anything illegal with these products (running someone over, setting fire to something that isn't mine, or selling copies of software), then anything else is mine to do with it as I please.
Someone in another comment mentioned renting videos from the local Blockbuster. The agreement when I sign up as a member says that I am allowed to borrow this piece of media for a specific period of time, after which I will return it to its owner.
This shit about "you don't own the software, the company who made it does" is, well, bull shit. If I'm *renting* the software, then stop calling it a purchase, and call it a software rental. Not that this will ever happen, but give people the TRUTH and let them decide for themselves whether this EULA sucks and they want to burn off a copy of Redhat/etc instead.
EULAs are a corporate scam, and kudos to this woman for doing something about it. Some of us leave closed-source draconian EULAs behind for OSS, and some of us fight the corporate ogres.
From the old article, one of Microsoft's marketing directors should get his facts straight:
"We supported the latest W3C standards when developing the content and services delivered from MSN,"... He added that Microsoft wants users to visit the Web site "regardless of the browser they choose." But Visse recommended that for the best experience with MSN, customers should use a browser that tightly adheres to the W3C standard. "If customers choose to use a browser that does not tightly support W3C standards, then they may encounter a less then optimal experience on MSN," he said.
except, that if you ask the W3C validator, it doesn't work!
Microsoft has a long history of intentionally breaking compatibility with other products to promote their own, as early as (and maybe earlier) the Windows 3.1 -> 3.11 "upgrade" which conveniently broke the diagnostic and repair software PC Tools.
The BSA, AFAIK, is NOT a goverment-sponsered law enforcement agency. I see 'bsa.ORG' not 'bsa.gov' or 'bsa.fbi.gov' The BSA is a trade organization, a bunch of lawyers most likely.
Therefore, they have NO right to go searching through any of my stuff or your stuff. "EULA says they can" my ass.
I'm having a hard time find any case law regarding the BSA (if you find some, post it, I'd be interested)...tho I did find this quote from one of the BSA VPs last year:
"...the raids would have an immediate effect on the roughly $12 billion in lost revenue from which the Alliance claims its members suffer each year."
So they're LOSING that much, which means that to actually be staying in buisness at that rate, how much MORE do they actually have to be making? I'm not advocating piracy, but suppose they're losing 30% to piracy. That means that they are MAKING 40 BILLION dollars a year in revenue.
You make a very good point that I didn't see in the last round of comments when/. broke the story. There were, however, excessive numbers of comments along the lines of "those people are so stupid why didn't they just patch their systems".
Personally, I don't run M$ servers. When I did, it was a bitch. Patches that "fixed" one thing broke two other things, and that which was working properly stopped.
One specific example is in the NT service pack series: between SP3 and SP4 (I believe) the format/structure of the NT filesystem changed. If you formatted a partition in post SP3 (SP4 or greater), you could NOT access the partition when you had to rebuild the system (6-12 mo later) UNTIL you made it back up to SP4+.
Why do I want to apply a patch which will probably break my system? To close a security hole, yes. While I'm a bit of a security 'nazi', I wonder sometimes if the patch is worse than the risk of a security breach.
...so before you even think about heating up that leftover pizza, make sure you're compliant and have all your fees paid or your microwave might just set your pizza on fire to prevent you from circumventing any patent protections on eating a pizza while watching television.
bah, its all bullshit. I would move to Canada, but I hear its even worse up there. Anyone going to Mars anytime soon I could hitch a ride with?
Not sure how widespread this is, but our landlord, who manages hundreds (thousands?) of properties in the Columbus, OH area informed us when we were signing our lease that we did not have permission to sign up with any other cable providers except TimeWarner Columbus, something about a contract they had with TW/Cols.
It might be just me, but that seems like a backdoor way for the CATV companies to get a monopoly on properties that should be open to competition. If landlords telling renters, why not home-owners associations too?
Either my uplink is being stupid, or they've already been/.'d. Geez.
Maybe there needs to be some kind of delay built into stories being posted on/. where a hostmaster is notified 15 minutes before a link to their domain is posted. At least it would give the admins enough time to get to the bar and get a few drinks in before the boss starts wanting to know why the hell his game of "MS-Hearts" isn't working anymore.
Sure, but how many people are dumb enough to open the hood of their cars and rip out the distributor or pull on the spark plug wires really hard, just to see what happens? What about kitchen appliances, or the VCR? Most people claim they don't know how to set their clock (and admittedly, they're right they don't know.)
So what are these dopes doing cracking their computer case open, figuring they're smart enough to "repair" a very complicated and delicate piece of electronic equipment? More than likely, figuring that they can just blame it on lightning or play dumb. Whereas, its pretty obvious if you foobar'd your engine by putting coolant into where the oil should go.
Not knowing the difference between "it's" and "its" isn't going to cost the IT department 3000$US to replace a high-end workstation because some dope stuck a pencil into one of the fans trying to make it go faster. You're talking about apples and oranges.
Couple of days back US warplanes dropped a bomb on a marriage party in Afghanistan killing over 50.
A bomb dropped on a group of people who were firing weapons into the air, some reports also said there was anti-aircraft fire in the area. Self-defense not withstanding, those planes in the middle of a war or did you forget that sitting in your living room with a TV-remote instead of in the sand with an M-16 and bullets flying over your head? Bombs are going to get dropped in the wrong places in the middle of a war zone. We're not even sure that they were dropped in the "wrong" place this time.
Its ludicrious that you compare 4 hijacked aircraft being used willfully, intentionally as weapons against very specifically non-military/civilian targets. (The pentagon being a possible exception to the 'non-military' idea...)
Everyone seems to be so bent on stopping cellphones during movies. Hmm, 7$ for 2 hours. How about the classroom, where you're paying somewhere around 40$ hour to sit in a lecture? The people on the movie screen can't hear your phone ring, but it annoys the hell out of profs when they have to stop lecturing because some fool sorority girl just HAS to answer her boyfriend's phone call.
The people who are letting their phones ring loudly aren't the doctors, or others who are "on call" - they're the same kind of people I see driving down the road yapping on the phone while giving their dog a bath or some such nonsense - the kind of people who think that because they can afford the toy, everyone should know that they have it.
But the object itself is not the problem. Having wealth is not the problem. So, what is the problem? The problem is the mind desiring and clinging to wealth - that is the problem. Having a friend is not the problem; the mind clinging to the friend makes having a friend a problem.
Paul had this to say in his first century letter to Timothy...now part of the Bible:
For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.
But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.
People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
- 1 Timothy 6:7-10
Money itself does not lead to greed and the repo man coming to take your stuff away... but desiring money to the extent that it consumes you (or the objects that money can be exchanged for) is a downward spiral to destruction. All those guys who were so upset, and even embarrased to come and talk to the repo man? Did those guys control their money, or did the money control them?:/
We will desire things. That is our nature, to desire more. We cannot suddenly "stop" desiring. To do so is unhuman. However, do we desire investing in material gain, which the repo man can come and take away, or could be stolen by a thief, or in relationships with those around us? Hmm.
PDFLib is free in all cases (that I can tell) *UNTIL* you go to use it as a COM/ActiveX object within something like IIS/Coldfusion. Then its $500 for a license.
Go figure, no one wants to develop for winblows, so they have to charge for it.
This is mailstart's primary purpose... to let you check pop accounts. I don't use those third party things to get any of my pop accounts for this exact reason. I get fetchmail to check the pop servers that I can't encrypt to... meaning that the only people who are supposed to rec'v that password (the pop server itself) are the ones who do.
Might sound a little lame, but I actually keep a copy of PuTTY in a www directory that I can get to from anywhere... its about 200K, and supports ssh1 (the latest v also supports ssh2), so I can grab it really quick wherever I am (even on a slow dialup), shell in, use pine or whatever and never deal with sending a password in the clear. The only trouble with this method is if you hit a library/shop/lab that only has Macs... ssh clients for the mac are rare things, or were as of about a year ago...
I realize its not the "web-based" sol'n you were looking for, but there are places that will give you a shell account, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if several of them have fetchmail up and running. Toss a copy of putty into a yahoo! or geocities web directory that you can remember the location of, and your shell account is always accessible!:)
(that is, of course, unless the ISP you happen to be using firewalls outgoing stuff on 22...)
divx was kind of my question... isn't this the same idea that pretty much killed divx? You had to hook your player up to a phone line or something to get authorization to play those "no-return" divx rentals?
What kind of a shove toward linux/apple will companies feel when they/are/ forced to call M$FT and explain every time they need to move the OS to a "different" machine?
I'm in the middle of a pretty heated argument with Voicestream right now. I got my phone in July, they sent me my initial bill, and then nothing else. I went to their website, and paid what I owed, but couldn't see my call detail online (the FAQ says I need to complete an entire billing cycle). As of a few days ago, I still couldn't view my call detail online (big no-no in website development as we all know), and they've not sent me anything in the mail (a bill, a call detail) since that first bill. I've called their customer service department repeatedly and about 9 times out of 10 they've been terribly rude.
Three times I called and asked for a copy of my bill. The first of those three calls they asked to confirm my address. They had apparently dropped the 'west' in the name of my street - which makes a big difference. A few days later I got a message on my phone telling me to call customer service and give them my address or they were going to turn off my service. It didn't end there, apparently it was just beginning.
I called last Monday around 18.00 EDT and was told that "their systems were upgrading" and that they couldn't do anything - including even looking at my bill. When I asked to speak to a supervisor, she told me that a supervisor would have to call me back, but assured me that I would get a call back within 24 hours.
I called Wednesday and asked immediatley to speak to a supervisor, and after some wrangling, she finally let me talk to a supervisor, who chose not to handle things very well. I don't have access to an incoming fax machine, so I asked that they overnight me a copy of my entire call detail. He said that couldn't be done, that he would be able to two day mail it. That two days expired on Friday. (Saturday was a nat'l holiday here in the states, so I'll give them Saturday.)
The customer service is ridiculously shoddy. Fortunatley, because I'm a "new" subscriber, I'm not bound to a contract, but unfortunatley, I need to find a provider who will let me keep my Nokia5190 that I bought. Any chance that if (when?!) I get a new provider that I can keep the phone number I have, or do cell proivders purchase blocks of phone numbers for their exclusive use?
And no, they don't have coverage in Cincy, OH or west about 15 minutes past I-270 outside of Columbus.
What will stop the companies from grabbing up all of the myname.new_tld addresses, and suing for the ones they don't get to before someone else does?:( I've grown weary of the corps that register all 4 (now 5 with.cc?) for themselves because of supposed "IP" rights.
I think we already have an example of what can happen when you try to hoard your technology, and not let others take the ideas and run with them - Apple. They have consistently lagged behind in the PC market, in no small part due to the fact that they refused to let anyone else build clones. MSFT and the closed-source area is another example. MSFT refuses to allow anyone to look at their code and we end up with lousy software. My refrigerator doesn't crash ever, but if it did, I wouldn't have to worry that Sears had patented the model of keeping food cold, I could just go buy a Maytag or something. One other example to consider for a second: electricity. Sounds a little ridiculous that anyone could patent electricity, but why not? Then you'd have exclusive rights to decide who could and couldn't use it, and how. *sigh* "The sincerest form of flattery is imitation..."
Slashdot Mirror
With everyone singing the praises of Speakeasy, I filled out the "is it available for you" form on the speakeasy site, and they said that I'm 14K feet from a CO, but that my only option was 120$/mo for 384K SDSL.
Is it just me, or does that seem awfully high for a not very fast broadband connection? Considering that my cable provider (while they suck) only charge 50$/month.
Honestly, I don't have time to sit around and read three times to comprehend every EULA, TOS, Privacy Statement, etc. They're too long and there are too many of them. Might it be in my best interest to know before signing up or tossing the shrinkwrap, but I only get 24 hours in a day, and most of those are spent working or sleeping.
I have a very hard time believing that the SciFi channel cancelled Farscape because of the money or the ratings. They continue running the incredibly lame series Stargate SG-1. I liked Richard Dean Anderson as "MacGyver", but he should have stuck with that. If that wasn't bad enough, SciFi has been running ads for "Tremors - the series" - okay, the movie was bad enough. This is the kind of thing that you could easily see on MST3K - poor writing and cheap effects ("special" intentionally omitted.)
Farscape requires a bit more intelligent viewer to follow and understand the storyline and the depth of the character development. So yeah, it would be harder to get ratings than with a waste like "Friends."
As I understand it, the first three seasons of Farscape were designed to be able to be wrapped up in case SciFi cancelled the series. The producers left season four in a cliffhanger, which indicates how much of a surprise it was when the SciFi execs pulled the plug. Its really too bad. There is so little quality television programming anymore that I've taken to keeping FoxNews on most of the time.
Is this a deal where SCO couldn't find a way to sue Linus (and the entire assoicated parts of the OSS community), so now that they have someone they can sue (IBM), they are?
How do you deal with security in this environment? Do you run WEP or anything like it? Do you give everyone the same key, or have a way to distribute unique keys, perhaps automatically?
A friend who works at a local coffee shop is interested in having someone come in and set up a wireless network. I have an AP at home, but its only for me. Any good references or documentation on how to set something like this up well for public use?
they made the software and are allowed to make whatever demands that they wish in the EULA
With that logic, it also holds that:
- You can only use your microwave for this list of approved food manufacturing companies, who happen to have a large share in the company who makes your microwave.
- You can only drive you car on these roads, and only on these days. You are not allowed to sell your car, or listen to any radio stations except those on this approved list.
- On the chance that you might or have violated these conditions, then the BSA, et al. is authorized to audit, sieze, reposses, and press criminal charges with relation to any of the aforementioned items.
Seems absolutley ridiculous, right? Because it is. But thats the logic you've stated here. What's wrong is that I purchased the car, the microwave, and the software. Provided that I am not doing anything illegal with these products (running someone over, setting fire to something that isn't mine, or selling copies of software), then anything else is mine to do with it as I please.
Someone in another comment mentioned renting videos from the local Blockbuster. The agreement when I sign up as a member says that I am allowed to borrow this piece of media for a specific period of time, after which I will return it to its owner.
This shit about "you don't own the software, the company who made it does" is, well, bull shit. If I'm *renting* the software, then stop calling it a purchase, and call it a software rental. Not that this will ever happen, but give people the TRUTH and let them decide for themselves whether this EULA sucks and they want to burn off a copy of Redhat/etc instead.
EULAs are a corporate scam, and kudos to this woman for doing something about it. Some of us leave closed-source draconian EULAs behind for OSS, and some of us fight the corporate ogres.
Just drop it on this guy's front lawn ... after all, finders keepers - his problem now.
Your logic, well, there is no logic to your argument. Thats how a six year old thinks.
From the old article, one of Microsoft's marketing directors should get his facts straight:
... He added that Microsoft wants users to visit the Web site "regardless of the browser they choose."
"We supported the latest W3C standards when developing the content and services delivered from MSN,"
But Visse recommended that for the best experience with MSN, customers should use a browser that tightly adheres to the W3C standard.
"If customers choose to use a browser that does not tightly support W3C standards, then they may encounter a less then optimal experience on MSN," he said.
except, that if you ask the W3C validator, it doesn't work!
www.microsoft.com
www.msn.com
Microsoft has a long history of intentionally breaking compatibility with other products to promote their own, as early as (and maybe earlier) the Windows 3.1 -> 3.11 "upgrade" which conveniently broke the diagnostic and repair software PC Tools.
The BSA, AFAIK, is NOT a goverment-sponsered law enforcement agency. I see 'bsa.ORG' not 'bsa.gov' or 'bsa.fbi.gov' The BSA is a trade organization, a bunch of lawyers most likely.
...tho I did find this quote from one of the BSA VPs last year:
Therefore, they have NO right to go searching through any of my stuff or your stuff. "EULA says they can" my ass.
I'm having a hard time find any case law regarding the BSA (if you find some, post it, I'd be interested)
"...the raids would have an immediate effect on the roughly $12 billion in lost revenue from which the Alliance claims its members suffer each year."
So they're LOSING that much, which means that to actually be staying in buisness at that rate, how much MORE do they actually have to be making? I'm not advocating piracy, but suppose they're losing 30% to piracy. That means that they are MAKING 40 BILLION dollars a year in revenue.
You make a very good point that I didn't see in the last round of comments when /. broke the story. There were, however, excessive numbers of comments along the lines of "those people are so stupid why didn't they just patch their systems".
Personally, I don't run M$ servers. When I did, it was a bitch. Patches that "fixed" one thing broke two other things, and that which was working properly stopped.
One specific example is in the NT service pack series: between SP3 and SP4 (I believe) the format/structure of the NT filesystem changed. If you formatted a partition in post SP3 (SP4 or greater), you could NOT access the partition when you had to rebuild the system (6-12 mo later) UNTIL you made it back up to SP4+.
Why do I want to apply a patch which will probably break my system? To close a security hole, yes. While I'm a bit of a security 'nazi', I wonder sometimes if the patch is worse than the risk of a security breach.
...so before you even think about heating up that leftover pizza, make sure you're compliant and have all your fees paid or your microwave might just set your pizza on fire to prevent you from circumventing any patent protections on eating a pizza while watching television.
bah, its all bullshit. I would move to Canada, but I hear its even worse up there. Anyone going to Mars anytime soon I could hitch a ride with?
Not sure how widespread this is, but our landlord, who manages hundreds (thousands?) of properties in the Columbus, OH area informed us when we were signing our lease that we did not have permission to sign up with any other cable providers except TimeWarner Columbus, something about a contract they had with TW/Cols.
It might be just me, but that seems like a backdoor way for the CATV companies to get a monopoly on properties that should be open to competition. If landlords telling renters, why not home-owners associations too?
Either my uplink is being stupid, or they've already been /.'d. Geez.
/. where a hostmaster is notified 15 minutes before a link to their domain is posted. At least it would give the admins enough time to get to the bar and get a few drinks in before the boss starts wanting to know why the hell his game of "MS-Hearts" isn't working anymore.
Maybe there needs to be some kind of delay built into stories being posted on
Sure, but how many people are dumb enough to open the hood of their cars and rip out the distributor or pull on the spark plug wires really hard, just to see what happens? What about kitchen appliances, or the VCR? Most people claim they don't know how to set their clock (and admittedly, they're right they don't know.)
So what are these dopes doing cracking their computer case open, figuring they're smart enough to "repair" a very complicated and delicate piece of electronic equipment? More than likely, figuring that they can just blame it on lightning or play dumb. Whereas, its pretty obvious if you foobar'd your engine by putting coolant into where the oil should go.
Not knowing the difference between "it's" and "its" isn't going to cost the IT department 3000$US to replace a high-end workstation because some dope stuck a pencil into one of the fans trying to make it go faster. You're talking about apples and oranges.
Couple of days back US warplanes dropped a bomb on a marriage party in Afghanistan killing over 50.
A bomb dropped on a group of people who were firing weapons into the air, some reports also said there was anti-aircraft fire in the area. Self-defense not withstanding, those planes in the middle of a war or did you forget that sitting in your living room with a TV-remote instead of in the sand with an M-16 and bullets flying over your head? Bombs are going to get dropped in the wrong places in the middle of a war zone. We're not even sure that they were dropped in the "wrong" place this time.
Its ludicrious that you compare 4 hijacked aircraft being used willfully, intentionally as weapons against very specifically non-military/civilian targets. (The pentagon being a possible exception to the 'non-military' idea...)
nmap will tell you what the OS is, and give you a rough idea of how hard it would be to use the target's ISN against it.
Uptime 0.811 days (since Sat Jun 29 22:04:58 2002)
TCP Sequence Prediction: Class=random positive increments
Difficulty=2918407 (Good luck!)
IPID Sequence Generation: All zeros
Everyone seems to be so bent on stopping cellphones during movies. Hmm, 7$ for 2 hours. How about the classroom, where you're paying somewhere around 40$ hour to sit in a lecture? The people on the movie screen can't hear your phone ring, but it annoys the hell out of profs when they have to stop lecturing because some fool sorority girl just HAS to answer her boyfriend's phone call.
The people who are letting their phones ring loudly aren't the doctors, or others who are "on call" - they're the same kind of people I see driving down the road yapping on the phone while giving their dog a bath or some such nonsense - the kind of people who think that because they can afford the toy, everyone should know that they have it.
Paul had this to say in his first century letter to Timothy...now part of the Bible:
Money itself does not lead to greed and the repo man coming to take your stuff awayWe will desire things. That is our nature, to desire more. We cannot suddenly "stop" desiring. To do so is unhuman. However, do we desire investing in material gain, which the repo man can come and take away, or could be stolen by a thief, or in relationships with those around us? Hmm.
Go figure, no one wants to develop for winblows, so they have to charge for it.
The NYTimes is running this (free reg req'd)article about how Disney is shutting down their portal, go.com.
;)
Perhaps in response to the slashdot suggestion that they take over yahoo?
This is mailstart's primary purpose ... to let you check pop accounts. I don't use those third party things to get any of my pop accounts for this exact reason. I get fetchmail to check the pop servers that I can't encrypt to ... meaning that the only people who are supposed to rec'v that password (the pop server itself) are the ones who do.
Might sound a little lame, but I actually keep a copy of PuTTY in a www directory that I can get to from anywhere ... its about 200K, and supports ssh1 (the latest v also supports ssh2), so I can grab it really quick wherever I am (even on a slow dialup), shell in, use pine or whatever and never deal with sending a password in the clear. The only trouble with this method is if you hit a library/shop/lab that only has Macs ... ssh clients for the mac are rare things, or were as of about a year ago...
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
I realize its not the "web-based" sol'n you were looking for, but there are places that will give you a shell account, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if several of them have fetchmail up and running. Toss a copy of putty into a yahoo! or geocities web directory that you can remember the location of, and your shell account is always accessible! :)
(that is, of course, unless the ISP you happen to be using firewalls outgoing stuff on 22 ...)
What kind of a shove toward linux/apple will companies feel when they /are/ forced to call M$FT and explain every time they need to move the OS to a "different" machine?
I'm in the middle of a pretty heated argument with Voicestream right now. I got my phone in July, they sent me my initial bill, and then nothing else. I went to their website, and paid what I owed, but couldn't see my call detail online (the FAQ says I need to complete an entire billing cycle). As of a few days ago, I still couldn't view my call detail online (big no-no in website development as we all know), and they've not sent me anything in the mail (a bill, a call detail) since that first bill. I've called their customer service department repeatedly and about 9 times out of 10 they've been terribly rude.
Three times I called and asked for a copy of my bill. The first of those three calls they asked to confirm my address. They had apparently dropped the 'west' in the name of my street - which makes a big difference. A few days later I got a message on my phone telling me to call customer service and give them my address or they were going to turn off my service. It didn't end there, apparently it was just beginning.
I called last Monday around 18.00 EDT and was told that "their systems were upgrading" and that they couldn't do anything - including even looking at my bill. When I asked to speak to a supervisor, she told me that a supervisor would have to call me back, but assured me that I would get a call back within 24 hours.
I called Wednesday and asked immediatley to speak to a supervisor, and after some wrangling, she finally let me talk to a supervisor, who chose not to handle things very well. I don't have access to an incoming fax machine, so I asked that they overnight me a copy of my entire call detail. He said that couldn't be done, that he would be able to two day mail it. That two days expired on Friday. (Saturday was a nat'l holiday here in the states, so I'll give them Saturday.)
The customer service is ridiculously shoddy. Fortunatley, because I'm a "new" subscriber, I'm not bound to a contract, but unfortunatley, I need to find a provider who will let me keep my Nokia5190 that I bought. Any chance that if (when?!) I get a new provider that I can keep the phone number I have, or do cell proivders purchase blocks of phone numbers for their exclusive use?
And no, they don't have coverage in Cincy, OH or west about 15 minutes past I-270 outside of Columbus.
What will stop the companies from grabbing up all of the myname.new_tld addresses, and suing for the ones they don't get to before someone else does? :( I've grown weary of the corps that register all 4 (now 5 with .cc?) for themselves because of supposed "IP" rights.
I think we already have an example of what can happen when you try to hoard your technology, and not let others take the ideas and run with them - Apple. They have consistently lagged behind in the PC market, in no small part due to the fact that they refused to let anyone else build clones. MSFT and the closed-source area is another example. MSFT refuses to allow anyone to look at their code and we end up with lousy software. My refrigerator doesn't crash ever, but if it did, I wouldn't have to worry that Sears had patented the model of keeping food cold, I could just go buy a Maytag or something. One other example to consider for a second: electricity. Sounds a little ridiculous that anyone could patent electricity, but why not? Then you'd have exclusive rights to decide who could and couldn't use it, and how. *sigh* "The sincerest form of flattery is imitation..."