So I was about to dispute the parent from knowledge of a class action lawsuit (settled circa 2012) against the big CC players, but it appears that that the settlement was thrown out in 2016. Prior to the 2012 settlement, I recall the "cash discount" angle being treated as against the terms prohibiting surcharges.
I remember following it closely at the time due to my personal interest while at a mom&pop store. A small bit I recall is Discover getting excused from the class by removing those terms from their merchant agreement. The blog WayTooHigh covered/followed it quite well, and appears to still be up, though not maintained.
I've found it still somewhat useful, in that a couple of those masking companies, like "Whois Guard" in particular on my system(1), are so bad that I can reject email for purely being from a domain that uses their services.
(1) My current stats have >2300 unique domains using their service that I've rejected email from.
As long as there's a mechanism where all domains from the same entity point to the same something so that I can find which domains have a common owner. I've found such _very_ handy in blocking/rejecting certain types of spammers.
I believe that you are absolutely incorrect about there being a _law_ about not surcharging CC usage.
This issue was very much on my radar a couple of decades ago. There was a class action lawsuit against the biggest CC player about this. There was a blog that followed it, and while they dumped the custom domain, it appears that the content from the blog is here: https://waytoohigh.wordpress.c...
What it actually was... there was a _contract_term_ from your credit card processing bank that stipulated that you could not surcharge for CC. Some got around it by the cash discount, but eventually enough did that that they caught on to it, and forbid it by contract. And this was essentially a contract of adhesion, and every processor carried through the same restrictive terms. Didn't like the terms? Don't accept any of the big [four] CCs.
I was working at a very small retail merchant during that period, not even 'mom and pop', just 'pop'; and was very attuned to what it cost us. I remember seeing cease and desist letters from the CC company over our policy of not allowing CC payments for transactions Since the conclusion of the law suit, I've observed many more merchants declaring either a minimum transaction for a CC, or a processing fee on transactions under a threshold amount.
IPv6 addresses are allegedly distributed in a way that reduces the routing table bloat seen in IPv4. With no central authority, how do you manage that?
I'm not sure that the problem is unsolvable, but I don't have any reason to believe that someone out there is sitting on a revolutionary global mesh routing algorithm, waiting for the right time to publish.
I have a project in the works where a future piece of it is intended to address this issue. I'm essentially waiting for the right time to publish. Since it's the current discussion here, here's the relevant part...
My intention is to use a piece of IPv6 space and encode a lat/long into it in a way that: A) you only have to make sure that no one near you is using the same lat/long, and B) for networks far away from you, you can represent many of them in a single entry line in your routing table. A network-slash-mask notation ends up encoding a rectangle laid onto the globe.
Specifically, I am intending to set up shop in 0x3FFF/16. The next 48 bits are the central lat/long (encoded in a special way) of the main control point you declare for you network. The last 64-bits are for you to spread across all the nodes in your network or managed group.
The lat/long is encoded as two 24-bit values, interleaved. With a lat or a long represented a 24-bit number, you have a granularity of about 8 feet on average. They are interleaved so that you can slice them with a netmask value and refer to large rectangle (granted it's warped by being laid onto a sphere) as a single entry. For networks far from you, most of the time all you really care about is that what direction are they (N-S-E-W), because you'll push them out a link headed that direction. For networks near you, you will store more entries.
My encoding of the lat/long is to take the -90 to +90 of lat, and -180 to +180 of long and map them across a 24-bit signed integer. The scaling of them becomes:
integer_lat_value = int(latitude / 90.0 * 2^23)
integer_long_value = int(longitude / 180 * 2^23)
The above values are then interlaced into a 48-bit value, most significant bits first, latitude first.
The way the phone switching network works; often, the a phone company cannot tell that a call coming in on a trunk line (from another regional operator) that the caller ID data is spoofed. They need to fix that problem first.
At least the first two, telephone service and postage, have cost/rates set by a government entity. And for at least one of those, phone service, some can get free (to you) access.
When the government sets the cost and license terms for the proprietary software necessary to interact with them, then I will accept the analogy.
They're not going for hydro-electric; they're going for where the power is cheap. Power just happens to be cheap in the middle of a major span of hydro-electric production.
Also... all the electricity they use there cannot be shipped elsewhere, even if there are transmission losses, to reduce the load on coal plants.
If any of my customers complained, or you hit any of my personal addresses, you'd likely by placed on my block lists. Can-spam compliance means next to nothing for my policy because of how it's been abused or used as an excuse by those who claim to technically be in compliance with it.
The only thing that would likely save you from wrath on my server was if the message contained a reasonable explanation of where you acquired the email address you were sending to and why you believed that the message was well targeted and would be welcomed.
Or... we could be reading about it because someone wanted to give us inspiration that we _can_ do this (report and comment on city council meetings) and not be silenced by the council members.
Ditto all the stuff about not using your ISPs email server.
Personally, I'd experienced a declining state of affairs in email hosting at a price that I thought was reasonable. I eventually got to the point where I hacked together my own (receiving only) email server in Python. (Also using pieces from Django to connect to an SQL backend.) My outgoing email is sent via a cheap hosting package I have that also doubles as a backup if I have a major incoming server problem... I can just point my MX records back to them.
https://github.com/marvinglenn/asnn-mda (Open Source licensed, free as in both speech and beer)
I'm getting a few false positives in blocking, but that's more due to incompetent configurations by legitimate companies. For example, US Cellulars SPF records don't clear their own sending servers. A few other business, my bank in particular, use a registrar that I find to be such a spam source that I reject email merely by being registered there.
This software is not for anyone that doesn't have at least a modicum of hacker spirit, but I've gotten it to the point where it's been extremely effective for me, hopefully not too hard to set up for others, and gives me the cathartic release of dropping F-bombs on spammers during the SMTP transaction.
Whomever you choose, I recommend against choosing eNom. I had a spam problem so bad on my personal email that I went to the ends of writing my own incoming server to handle the issue. I've found that blocking email from domains registered at eNom to be extremely effective in curbing my spam problem with only a very small number of domains that I needed to whitelist. Looking though my reject logs, eNom seems to be making a mint with spammers that register domains, spam immediately with them, and then abandom them.
Which is effectively taxation via inflation. We (USA) have particularly been doing this in recent times, with "Q.E." and the treasury buying their own bonds.
But this drives people to leave the American $ for holding on to the assets they've aquired. I'm seeing the purchasing of savings bonds being less in vogue than what I remember seeing from the generations before me. Real estate shoots up in price as a good way to store the value of your assets; which leads to people buying on speculation and other distortions in price less related to its actual value. Large foreign players are less likely to invest here, at least in methods that tie up their capitol in direct $ related assets, like China's purchasing of US Debt (which helped us get into this mess in the first place). All the talk of no longer trading oil on the global market in dollars. And the most recent development I've seen which I take as a significant crack in the dam, the move towards crypto currencies like Bitcoin.
(Slashdot's Keynesian group think shows through strong in the moderation here.)
Situations where the tax loss is smaller than the cost saving are rares. Most of the time, austerity just kills the economy without any benefit.
I challenge your assersion of that claim.
Additionally I submit that government spending causes the players in the economy to act in a way that benefits them the most in receiving that government spending while supressing their drive to be purely efficient and productive. In the end, we end up with a bunch of players chasing the freebies from the government just because they're free rather than being productive and sustainable.
But you probably won't believe this until this spending kills the host, as the GGP post called it.
Along with all the other fine comments taking a shot at the linked article "Cord Cutting Fantasies", I too have something small to add...
[...] to maintain their current revenues.
The tone I read in the argument contends that the content providers are necessarily entitled to have the revenues they do. I dispute that presumtion. I think the revenues of some of the content providers is higher than it rightfully should be because of collusion and other illegitimate market powers certain providers have.
I cancelled my cable TV some months ago when the "introductory rate" ran out. (I was no longer a new customer but rather just a loyal on, so apparently I didn't deserve to receive any special consideration anymore.) The expiration of the discounts put my bill at a level that I was not willing to pay.
Open letter to Charter Communications: When you can offer me a la carte on the channels I want, then you may call to solicit me about adding services. Until then, I'll pay my internet bill and stop f-ing calling, because I often work swing shift.
Sorry, but discrimination is discrimination. There is no direction. It either takes place or it doesn't. Using the term reverse gives advantage and power to one group over another.
The modifier reverse implies that it's discrimination that's purported to be done for the purpose of correcting discrimination. It does not give any more advantage to one group, at least anymore than the original discrimination.
So where's the IAU when I keep hearing this radio commercial for the bullshit "Internaltional Star Registry" from Rocky Mozell? Or did they already smack that one down, and all the suckers who keep giving him money to run commercials didn't get the memo?
Slashdot Mirror
So I was about to dispute the parent from knowledge of a class action lawsuit (settled circa 2012) against the big CC players, but it appears that that the settlement was thrown out in 2016. Prior to the 2012 settlement, I recall the "cash discount" angle being treated as against the terms prohibiting surcharges.
I remember following it closely at the time due to my personal interest while at a mom&pop store. A small bit I recall is Discover getting excused from the class by removing those terms from their merchant agreement. The blog WayTooHigh covered/followed it quite well, and appears to still be up, though not maintained.
http://www.waytohigh.com
2012 class action settlement: https://www.classaction.org/bl...
2016 reversal: https://www.creditcards.com/cr...
[...] but the US wonâ(TM)t even lift a finger for people getting scammed out of thousands with telephone scams via spoofed numbers.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
Let's not be shrill and disingenuous here. The FCC _is_ doing something about it, but we are still beset with the problem.
It's the tax on blank CDRs all over again.
I often use the phrase "Classical Hacker" to distinguish from the contemporary adulterated use of the word.
I've found it still somewhat useful, in that a couple of those masking companies, like "Whois Guard" in particular on my system(1), are so bad that I can reject email for purely being from a domain that uses their services.
(1) My current stats have >2300 unique domains using their service that I've rejected email from.
As long as there's a mechanism where all domains from the same entity point to the same something so that I can find which domains have a common owner. I've found such _very_ handy in blocking/rejecting certain types of spammers.
I believe that you are absolutely incorrect about there being a _law_ about not surcharging CC usage.
This issue was very much on my radar a couple of decades ago. There was a class action lawsuit against the biggest CC player about this. There was a blog that followed it, and while they dumped the custom domain, it appears that the content from the blog is here: https://waytoohigh.wordpress.c...
What it actually was... there was a _contract_term_ from your credit card processing bank that stipulated that you could not surcharge for CC. Some got around it by the cash discount, but eventually enough did that that they caught on to it, and forbid it by contract. And this was essentially a contract of adhesion, and every processor carried through the same restrictive terms. Didn't like the terms? Don't accept any of the big [four] CCs.
I was working at a very small retail merchant during that period, not even 'mom and pop', just 'pop'; and was very attuned to what it cost us. I remember seeing cease and desist letters from the CC company over our policy of not allowing CC payments for transactions Since the conclusion of the law suit, I've observed many more merchants declaring either a minimum transaction for a CC, or a processing fee on transactions under a threshold amount.
IPv6 addresses are allegedly distributed in a way that reduces the routing table bloat seen in IPv4. With no central authority, how do you manage that?
I'm not sure that the problem is unsolvable, but I don't have any reason to believe that someone out there is sitting on a revolutionary global mesh routing algorithm, waiting for the right time to publish.
I have a project in the works where a future piece of it is intended to address this issue. I'm essentially waiting for the right time to publish. Since it's the current discussion here, here's the relevant part...
My intention is to use a piece of IPv6 space and encode a lat/long into it in a way that: A) you only have to make sure that no one near you is using the same lat/long, and B) for networks far away from you, you can represent many of them in a single entry line in your routing table. A network-slash-mask notation ends up encoding a rectangle laid onto the globe.
Specifically, I am intending to set up shop in 0x3FFF/16. The next 48 bits are the central lat/long (encoded in a special way) of the main control point you declare for you network. The last 64-bits are for you to spread across all the nodes in your network or managed group.
The lat/long is encoded as two 24-bit values, interleaved. With a lat or a long represented a 24-bit number, you have a granularity of about 8 feet on average. They are interleaved so that you can slice them with a netmask value and refer to large rectangle (granted it's warped by being laid onto a sphere) as a single entry. For networks far from you, most of the time all you really care about is that what direction are they (N-S-E-W), because you'll push them out a link headed that direction. For networks near you, you will store more entries.
My encoding of the lat/long is to take the -90 to +90 of lat, and -180 to +180 of long and map them across a 24-bit signed integer. The scaling of them becomes:
integer_lat_value = int(latitude / 90.0 * 2^23)
integer_long_value = int(longitude / 180 * 2^23)
The above values are then interlaced into a 48-bit value, most significant bits first, latitude first.
The way the phone switching network works; often, the a phone company cannot tell that a call coming in on a trunk line (from another regional operator) that the caller ID data is spoofed. They need to fix that problem first.
At least the first two, telephone service and postage, have cost/rates set by a government entity. And for at least one of those, phone service, some can get free (to you) access.
When the government sets the cost and license terms for the proprietary software necessary to interact with them, then I will accept the analogy.
They're not going for hydro-electric; they're going for where the power is cheap. Power just happens to be cheap in the middle of a major span of hydro-electric production.
Also... all the electricity they use there cannot be shipped elsewhere, even if there are transmission losses, to reduce the load on coal plants.
If any of my customers complained, or you hit any of my personal addresses, you'd likely by placed on my block lists. Can-spam compliance means next to nothing for my policy because of how it's been abused or used as an excuse by those who claim to technically be in compliance with it.
The only thing that would likely save you from wrath on my server was if the message contained a reasonable explanation of where you acquired the email address you were sending to and why you believed that the message was well targeted and would be welcomed.
Or... we could be reading about it because someone wanted to give us inspiration that we _can_ do this (report and comment on city council meetings) and not be silenced by the council members.
What if it's not?
Then it will be a velocity slower than terminal (falling) velocity.
Ditto all the stuff about not using your ISPs email server.
Personally, I'd experienced a declining state of affairs in email hosting at a price that I thought was reasonable. I eventually got to the point where I hacked together my own (receiving only) email server in Python. (Also using pieces from Django to connect to an SQL backend.) My outgoing email is sent via a cheap hosting package I have that also doubles as a backup if I have a major incoming server problem... I can just point my MX records back to them.
https://github.com/marvinglenn/asnn-mda (Open Source licensed, free as in both speech and beer)
I'm getting a few false positives in blocking, but that's more due to incompetent configurations by legitimate companies. For example, US Cellulars SPF records don't clear their own sending servers. A few other business, my bank in particular, use a registrar that I find to be such a spam source that I reject email merely by being registered there.
This software is not for anyone that doesn't have at least a modicum of hacker spirit, but I've gotten it to the point where it's been extremely effective for me, hopefully not too hard to set up for others, and gives me the cathartic release of dropping F-bombs on spammers during the SMTP transaction.
Whomever you choose, I recommend against choosing eNom. I had a spam problem so bad on my personal email that I went to the ends of writing my own incoming server to handle the issue. I've found that blocking email from domains registered at eNom to be extremely effective in curbing my spam problem with only a very small number of domains that I needed to whitelist. Looking though my reject logs, eNom seems to be making a mint with spammers that register domains, spam immediately with them, and then abandom them.
Think about someone who has a 100 IQ... and then realize that half the country is dumber than that.
Only if 100 is the median, not just the average.
Fund it with money creation.
Which is effectively taxation via inflation. We (USA) have particularly been doing this in recent times, with "Q.E." and the treasury buying their own bonds.
But this drives people to leave the American $ for holding on to the assets they've aquired. I'm seeing the purchasing of savings bonds being less in vogue than what I remember seeing from the generations before me. Real estate shoots up in price as a good way to store the value of your assets; which leads to people buying on speculation and other distortions in price less related to its actual value. Large foreign players are less likely to invest here, at least in methods that tie up their capitol in direct $ related assets, like China's purchasing of US Debt (which helped us get into this mess in the first place). All the talk of no longer trading oil on the global market in dollars. And the most recent development I've seen which I take as a significant crack in the dam, the move towards crypto currencies like Bitcoin.
Situations where the tax loss is smaller than the cost saving are rares. Most of the time, austerity just kills the economy without any benefit.
I challenge your assersion of that claim.
Additionally I submit that government spending causes the players in the economy to act in a way that benefits them the most in receiving that government spending while supressing their drive to be purely efficient and productive. In the end, we end up with a bunch of players chasing the freebies from the government just because they're free rather than being productive and sustainable.
But you probably won't believe this until this spending kills the host, as the GGP post called it.
Along with all the other fine comments taking a shot at the linked article "Cord Cutting Fantasies", I too have something small to add...
[...] to maintain their current revenues.
The tone I read in the argument contends that the content providers are necessarily entitled to have the revenues they do. I dispute that presumtion. I think the revenues of some of the content providers is higher than it rightfully should be because of collusion and other illegitimate market powers certain providers have.
I cancelled my cable TV some months ago when the "introductory rate" ran out. (I was no longer a new customer but rather just a loyal on, so apparently I didn't deserve to receive any special consideration anymore.) The expiration of the discounts put my bill at a level that I was not willing to pay.
Open letter to Charter Communications: When you can offer me a la carte on the channels I want, then you may call to solicit me about adding services. Until then, I'll pay my internet bill and stop f-ing calling, because I often work swing shift.
Reverse discrimination.
Sorry, but discrimination is discrimination. There is no direction. It either takes place or it doesn't. Using the term reverse gives advantage and power to one group over another.
The modifier reverse implies that it's discrimination that's purported to be done for the purpose of correcting discrimination. It does not give any more advantage to one group, at least anymore than the original discrimination.
the only really free speech is private speech
No, the only real free speech is anonymous speech. (Ask Donald Sterling how that "private" speech worked out for him.)
21:9... this is not a 7:3 aspect ratio? Well, I'm holding out for the 42:18's.
And Windoze 95 is an ancestory of yours.
So where's the IAU when I keep hearing this radio commercial for the bullshit "Internaltional Star Registry" from Rocky Mozell? Or did they already smack that one down, and all the suckers who keep giving him money to run commercials didn't get the memo?