These companies lose money because of these scams. Remember that Zero Liability clause in your credit card contract?? And, if the person being scammed was using a debit card, then the bank holding the account loses the money. This is not arbitrary, as you suggest. This is a company(s) protecting their bottom line, and the bottom line of their business partners.
Slippery, Smishppery... the line is clearly drawn in this case: "you cause us to make less of a profit, we'll cut you off."
Incorrect. Banks NEVER lose money on fraudulent transactions. EVER. All fraud is passed back to the merchant who accepted the card.
They're expensive because the cartel that makes them got them classified as medical devices decades ago. There are all kinds of legal and regulatory hoops you have to jump thru before you can call something a "hearing aid".
You can buy a bluetooth earpiece for $20-$80 that has the exact same parts - condenser mic, speaker element, battery, and opamp/EQ circuit - and has vastly more functionality, including the bluetooth radio system and spiffy LED indicator lights.
Hearing aids are configured with an equalization curve tailored the the wearer's specific hearing loss, but it's not like there are a million different kinds of loss. It's mostly "top down" according to age and environment. Only newborns can hear 20khz. We lose a few thousand before we hit puberty and pretty much everyone loses everything above 12k by their 30's. (by "lose" I mean response is down a considerable number of decibels from our factory abilities). Impact-type noise from construction, artillery, or rock bands can punch holes in what's left, especially in the voice frequencies, but it's not like it's DNA-complicated or something. A simple hearing test can identify your remaining response curve in a few minutes and it isn't going to be that much different from the guy on the next bulldozer on the left or the guitar player on the other side of the stage.
There's no reason an ear doctor or audiologist couldn't give you a "prescription" response curve when you go in for a hearing test that you could load into a device that costs two figures (three if you want it to be super tiny) yourself with an app of some kind. The 4-5-figure price tags are simple price gouging by a "medical" cartel.
As a former telephone contractor all over the continental US, I can say with certainty that the majority of aerial telephone cable is strung on power company poles on power company easements. Phone companies only put up pole leads when there is no other utility run present or when it's more cost-effective to roll their own rather than send lease payments to another utility. I don't know what it is these days, but a couple decades ago in many parts of the country, the standard lease was $1 per attachment. At that price it's rarely cheaper to set their own poles.
Direct-buried cable is mostly plowed along public roadways or railroad easements and then across customer land to the point of service. New underground (conduit runs) is generally part of a joint engineered project with other utilities and the local road department. Runs are usually under public roads with entrance ducts under customer property to provide service. A lot of old underground runs have been in place since the early part of the 20th century. In metropolitan areas, some were originally built by Western Union for their telegraph service. Western Union's aerial easements date back to the late 19th century.
You forgot the most important aspect - no port blocking. On a business line you can run your own mail server, DNS, web server, VPNs, etc. I don't think there's a consumer connection left in this country that allows outgoing port 25 connections by default. Most block 80, 443, 21, 22, etc too. On a business connection, you are expected to be running a business, with all the various services that entails.
On a few types of business connections (T-1 and some fiber, for example) you can negotiate a service level guarantee like four nines or better (99.99% uptime). On consumer connections, you're not guaranteed ANY service. If it's working at all, at any speed, count your blessings.
You know, that's pretty much the exact description of the trade groups the RIAA and the MPAA. People throw all their hatred at these mouthpiece organizations (which were essentially chartered as standards bodies - RIAA equalization curve anyone?) instead of the member corporations where all the actual dirty work is done. It's a very effective "disconnection of responsibility" technique, not unlike the redirection methods used by illusionists and sleight-of-hand experts.
The server is running II6 so the OS is probably Windows Server 2003. The site is built on ASP.NET. The IP address is registered to the company, so they're probably running their own in-house data center. My guess is they don't have anyone in IT that actually knows what the hell they are doing, which is typical of Windows shops thanks to bean counters and short-sighted management.
There's no possible way a guy this scummy was even remotely honest during his time in the senate. Everything he ever did there should be investigated for possible corruption and racketeering. If he EVER had an ounce of integrity, I'm sure he sold it to the highest bidder at the earliest opportunity.
I recently picked up some Canon XF100 video cameras that can generate 1920x1080 MXF (long-GOP mpeg2) @ 50mbps and 4:2:2 color sampling. As it turns out, my "classic" 1st-gen quad core workstations (XP 32-bit) are really struggling with all those extra bits and I plan on building at least one new machine for HD work, most likely an Ivy Bridge 4 or 8 core beast. I have always bought boxed copies of Windows so I can move the OS to a new machine whenever I feel like it. I could still theoretically slap 32-bit XP on the new workstation, but it would probably be nice to get rid of the memory limits and maybe move to one of the newer OSes. The main workload besides previewing & editing HD footage is rendering to MPEG2 and H.264. The Ivy Bridge family seems to really excel at that kind of work, so I think I'll see a big speed increase. My concern is the choice of OS.
Since the first day of Vista and all subsequent OS versions, the vast majority of reviews and discussions have centered around gamers, office products, and web-interface online applications. Very little discussion has taken place regarding the needs and preferences of the power users in the creative world (i.e. people with actual tech skills who don't care for the Mac environment). Personally, once I get past the initial setup, I have almost zero need to interact with the OS and Control Panel. Workstations do not have hundreds of applications on them and I never use the start menu. Every app I use daily or weekly (Vegas, Photoshop, Virtual Dub, Handbrake) has a desktop icon. The only thing in my QuickStart is the "Show Desktop" icon, which I use dozens of times per session, along with alt + tab. I have no need or tolerance for interface embellishments. I just want things clean, sparse, and FAST.
The main thing that kept me off Vista was the hundreds of reports that moving files around with Explorer was completely and utterly broken. There were a few claims that things had improved a little in 7, but there wasn't a lot of information or technical benchmarks that I could find. Aside from editing & rendering, moving very large files around on my local gigabit network is THE primary task I'm involved in regularly. I commonly have to move a terabyte or more at a time and I saw a lot of reports that Vista V1 would take literally weeks to complete the task due to some seriously bad back-end coding (or hidden DRM if you believed the tinfoil hat brigade).
I'd like to hear some opinions about the state of file transfers as well as the performance of graphics-heavy apps like audio and video editors and processors on 7 and 8 (vs the speed and reliability of XP). For my purposes, the OS has ONE primary function that I rely on - file IO. If that still sucks in 7 and 8, I may just stick with XP for another couple of years until MS finally decides to pull their heads out of their asses and fix the IO issues or Sony releases a Linux version of Vegas. (not likely, since it's built on.NET v4 and relies heavily on Direct-X)
ARIN needs to just take back the address space if someone isnt using it.
Arin had a booth at Interop a couple of years ago. We were discussing the impending IPV4 address shortage and I asked them why they didn't take back Haliburton's/8? They said "because we don't want to get shot"
This thread is not about federal taxes. It's about state-level taxes. Incorporating in a state allows principles in an enterprise to protect their own assets against litigation and other liabilities while still operating the business. If they have a good accountant, it can also be a way to legitimately reduce federal income taxes, however it can open up the company to considerably higher state and local tax liabilities in some jurisdictions.
Incorporating in a DIFFERENT state that does not have corporate income taxes, B&O taxes, or other impediments to business is a way to minimize the costs of running the enterprise by legally doing an end run around location-based taxes.
Incidentally, MS has physical facilities all over the state of WA, not just in Redmond. They pay more in property taxes ever year than most people here will ever see in a lifetime. Public Education in WA is primarily financed by property taxes and to a small extent, by the state lottery. The parent article is just alarmist election-year bullshit. There are a million legitimate reasons to be pissed at Microsoft. This isn't one of them.
In short, they are exploiting the rules in a way which allows them to play a game within a game, unavailable to "ordinary" players - but whose score carries into the original game.
And they are cheating while playing the game within the game.
A Nevada C corporation costs about $475 a year including renewal fee, resident agent, PO box, and business license. No extraordinary qualities required on the part of the player. Just a credit card.
This isn't solely a strategy of large corporations. Thousands of small businesses have also incorporated in Nevada or Delaware to get away from our idiotic state "Business and Occupations" tax, which can be as 1.8%. B&O is levied against your GROSS sales and there are NO deductions. That means if you have around a 5% margin (not uncommon in competitive markets), you can lose upwards of 40% of your net income to the state for the "privilege" of doing business here. But wait, it gets worse. A lot of cities have their own B&O taxes that get added on, so you can kiss even more of your meager profits goodbye.
I don't blame anyone for getting the hell out of here. It's a nice place to live (if you like 9-10 months of cold temperatures, rain, and grey skies) but it's a crappy place to operate a low-margin business. That's why you see so many high-priced art galleries and retailers specializing in hipster crap with a 500% markup. they're the only ones who can afford to pay the government vig.
2 - Get some roommates. Divide price by number of roommates
3 - Service plus wifi router with antenna on roof. Divide price by number of neighbors willing to split the cost. (the implication is that your neighbors are fairly close and not rich. Anyone on SSI is probably not living in Beverly Hills or Manhattan)
1: Basic stand-alone internet and all fees is generally under $50 in most civilized locations (I pay $130 for a 35/35 FIOS business line. Consumer accounts are many times cheaper)
2: Clear is $35 a month for no-contract service with user-owned equipment. (I have this as a backup) A 2 year contract is about $25 a month.
3: Anyone on Slashdot should be geeky enough to know that most cellular towers and their backhaul are ridiculously inadequate and will never be a reasonable option for modern internet access until towers are 100 yards apart and each one has a 10gigabit fiber backhaul. Cellular internet service is for shelling into your network in an emergency and for stupid low-traffic crap like twitter. For anything else, see option 4
4: You don't need to sign up for anything to use library computers.
5: How dare you complain about the valiant information freedom fighters! Why do you hate America?
6: Step1 - register "bumsfapping.com", step 2 - video tape bums fapping in public library, step 3 - profit. (the unspoken step 4 - Google buyout = insane profit)
I have 3 of the early Asus models. They all still work just fine and since they do not have hard drives to generate extra heat and vibration, there's a high probability that they will still be working just fine a decade from now. I have a 1998 Thinkpad laptop upgraded to Win 2k that I use for a print server on my LAN. Surprisingly, it still has the original hard drive. My caching DNS machine is a 1999 Penguin Computing pizza box, again with the original drive (currently showing about 90,000 hours).
Yes, it's absolutely different. MS was not still selling those other OSes 10 years after they were introduced. OEM copies of XP were still available in 2009 and it was still being loaded on brand new netbooks in 2010. They'll be cutting off support just 4 years after the last official copy was sold. Those early netbooks CANNOT run Vista or 7 because they don't have the resources. Since they were specifically designed for internet use, the only way to keep using them for their intended purpose will be to load them with Linux, unless ReactOS gets a lot farther along by then.
If it takes the hypothetical you a lifetime (or even more than a decade) to pay off this hypothetical $30k debt, you're probably an unemployable parasite anyway and society would be better served if the ER tossed your broken and bleeding carcass into the dumpster out back instead of treating you.
Slashdot Mirror
False.
These companies lose money because of these scams. Remember that Zero Liability clause in your credit card contract?? And, if the person being scammed was using a debit card, then the bank holding the account loses the money. This is not arbitrary, as you suggest. This is a company(s) protecting their bottom line, and the bottom line of their business partners.
Slippery, Smishppery... the line is clearly drawn in this case: "you cause us to make less of a profit, we'll cut you off."
Incorrect. Banks NEVER lose money on fraudulent transactions. EVER. All fraud is passed back to the merchant who accepted the card.
They're expensive because the cartel that makes them got them classified as medical devices decades ago. There are all kinds of legal and regulatory hoops you have to jump thru before you can call something a "hearing aid".
You can buy a bluetooth earpiece for $20-$80 that has the exact same parts - condenser mic, speaker element, battery, and opamp/EQ circuit - and has vastly more functionality, including the bluetooth radio system and spiffy LED indicator lights.
Hearing aids are configured with an equalization curve tailored the the wearer's specific hearing loss, but it's not like there are a million different kinds of loss. It's mostly "top down" according to age and environment. Only newborns can hear 20khz. We lose a few thousand before we hit puberty and pretty much everyone loses everything above 12k by their 30's. (by "lose" I mean response is down a considerable number of decibels from our factory abilities). Impact-type noise from construction, artillery, or rock bands can punch holes in what's left, especially in the voice frequencies, but it's not like it's DNA-complicated or something. A simple hearing test can identify your remaining response curve in a few minutes and it isn't going to be that much different from the guy on the next bulldozer on the left or the guitar player on the other side of the stage.
There's no reason an ear doctor or audiologist couldn't give you a "prescription" response curve when you go in for a hearing test that you could load into a device that costs two figures (three if you want it to be super tiny) yourself with an app of some kind. The 4-5-figure price tags are simple price gouging by a "medical" cartel.
As a former telephone contractor all over the continental US, I can say with certainty that the majority of aerial telephone cable is strung on power company poles on power company easements. Phone companies only put up pole leads when there is no other utility run present or when it's more cost-effective to roll their own rather than send lease payments to another utility. I don't know what it is these days, but a couple decades ago in many parts of the country, the standard lease was $1 per attachment. At that price it's rarely cheaper to set their own poles.
Direct-buried cable is mostly plowed along public roadways or railroad easements and then across customer land to the point of service. New underground (conduit runs) is generally part of a joint engineered project with other utilities and the local road department. Runs are usually under public roads with entrance ducts under customer property to provide service. A lot of old underground runs have been in place since the early part of the 20th century. In metropolitan areas, some were originally built by Western Union for their telegraph service. Western Union's aerial easements date back to the late 19th century.
You forgot the most important aspect - no port blocking. On a business line you can run your own mail server, DNS, web server, VPNs, etc. I don't think there's a consumer connection left in this country that allows outgoing port 25 connections by default. Most block 80, 443, 21, 22, etc too. On a business connection, you are expected to be running a business, with all the various services that entails.
On a few types of business connections (T-1 and some fiber, for example) you can negotiate a service level guarantee like four nines or better (99.99% uptime). On consumer connections, you're not guaranteed ANY service. If it's working at all, at any speed, count your blessings.
Unless you live in a flat, treeless desert, a chain saw is another must-have post-storm survival tool
You can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit.
You clearly don't work in marketing. Anything is possible with the right ad agency.
BFD. I've been heating my house with computers for a couple of decades.
You know, that's pretty much the exact description of the trade groups the RIAA and the MPAA. People throw all their hatred at these mouthpiece organizations (which were essentially chartered as standards bodies - RIAA equalization curve anyone?) instead of the member corporations where all the actual dirty work is done. It's a very effective "disconnection of responsibility" technique, not unlike the redirection methods used by illusionists and sleight-of-hand experts.
Make that IIS 6. Stupid keyboard battery is dying.
The server is running II6 so the OS is probably Windows Server 2003. The site is built on ASP.NET. The IP address is registered to the company, so they're probably running their own in-house data center. My guess is they don't have anyone in IT that actually knows what the hell they are doing, which is typical of Windows shops thanks to bean counters and short-sighted management.
There's no possible way a guy this scummy was even remotely honest during his time in the senate. Everything he ever did there should be investigated for possible corruption and racketeering. If he EVER had an ounce of integrity, I'm sure he sold it to the highest bidder at the earliest opportunity.
I recently picked up some Canon XF100 video cameras that can generate 1920x1080 MXF (long-GOP mpeg2) @ 50mbps and 4:2:2 color sampling. As it turns out, my "classic" 1st-gen quad core workstations (XP 32-bit) are really struggling with all those extra bits and I plan on building at least one new machine for HD work, most likely an Ivy Bridge 4 or 8 core beast. I have always bought boxed copies of Windows so I can move the OS to a new machine whenever I feel like it. I could still theoretically slap 32-bit XP on the new workstation, but it would probably be nice to get rid of the memory limits and maybe move to one of the newer OSes. The main workload besides previewing & editing HD footage is rendering to MPEG2 and H.264. The Ivy Bridge family seems to really excel at that kind of work, so I think I'll see a big speed increase. My concern is the choice of OS.
Since the first day of Vista and all subsequent OS versions, the vast majority of reviews and discussions have centered around gamers, office products, and web-interface online applications. Very little discussion has taken place regarding the needs and preferences of the power users in the creative world (i.e. people with actual tech skills who don't care for the Mac environment). Personally, once I get past the initial setup, I have almost zero need to interact with the OS and Control Panel. Workstations do not have hundreds of applications on them and I never use the start menu. Every app I use daily or weekly (Vegas, Photoshop, Virtual Dub, Handbrake) has a desktop icon. The only thing in my QuickStart is the "Show Desktop" icon, which I use dozens of times per session, along with alt + tab. I have no need or tolerance for interface embellishments. I just want things clean, sparse, and FAST.
The main thing that kept me off Vista was the hundreds of reports that moving files around with Explorer was completely and utterly broken. There were a few claims that things had improved a little in 7, but there wasn't a lot of information or technical benchmarks that I could find. Aside from editing & rendering, moving very large files around on my local gigabit network is THE primary task I'm involved in regularly. I commonly have to move a terabyte or more at a time and I saw a lot of reports that Vista V1 would take literally weeks to complete the task due to some seriously bad back-end coding (or hidden DRM if you believed the tinfoil hat brigade).
I'd like to hear some opinions about the state of file transfers as well as the performance of graphics-heavy apps like audio and video editors and processors on 7 and 8 (vs the speed and reliability of XP). For my purposes, the OS has ONE primary function that I rely on - file IO. If that still sucks in 7 and 8, I may just stick with XP for another couple of years until MS finally decides to pull their heads out of their asses and fix the IO issues or Sony releases a Linux version of Vegas. (not likely, since it's built on .NET v4 and relies heavily on Direct-X)
ARIN needs to just take back the address space if someone isnt using it.
Arin had a booth at Interop a couple of years ago. We were discussing the impending IPV4 address shortage and I asked them why they didn't take back Haliburton's /8? They said "because we don't want to get shot"
Like THIS ?
This thread is not about federal taxes. It's about state-level taxes. Incorporating in a state allows principles in an enterprise to protect their own assets against litigation and other liabilities while still operating the business. If they have a good accountant, it can also be a way to legitimately reduce federal income taxes, however it can open up the company to considerably higher state and local tax liabilities in some jurisdictions.
Incorporating in a DIFFERENT state that does not have corporate income taxes, B&O taxes, or other impediments to business is a way to minimize the costs of running the enterprise by legally doing an end run around location-based taxes.
Incidentally, MS has physical facilities all over the state of WA, not just in Redmond. They pay more in property taxes ever year than most people here will ever see in a lifetime. Public Education in WA is primarily financed by property taxes and to a small extent, by the state lottery. The parent article is just alarmist election-year bullshit. There are a million legitimate reasons to be pissed at Microsoft. This isn't one of them.
In short, they are exploiting the rules in a way which allows them to play a game within a game, unavailable to "ordinary" players - but whose score carries into the original game. And they are cheating while playing the game within the game.
A Nevada C corporation costs about $475 a year including renewal fee, resident agent, PO box, and business license. No extraordinary qualities required on the part of the player. Just a credit card.
This isn't solely a strategy of large corporations. Thousands of small businesses have also incorporated in Nevada or Delaware to get away from our idiotic state "Business and Occupations" tax, which can be as 1.8%. B&O is levied against your GROSS sales and there are NO deductions. That means if you have around a 5% margin (not uncommon in competitive markets), you can lose upwards of 40% of your net income to the state for the "privilege" of doing business here. But wait, it gets worse. A lot of cities have their own B&O taxes that get added on, so you can kiss even more of your meager profits goodbye.
I don't blame anyone for getting the hell out of here. It's a nice place to live (if you like 9-10 months of cold temperatures, rain, and grey skies) but it's a crappy place to operate a low-margin business. That's why you see so many high-priced art galleries and retailers specializing in hipster crap with a 500% markup. they're the only ones who can afford to pay the government vig.
1 - Use the library.
2 - Get some roommates. Divide price by number of roommates
3 - Service plus wifi router with antenna on roof. Divide price by number of neighbors willing to split the cost. (the implication is that your neighbors are fairly close and not rich. Anyone on SSI is probably not living in Beverly Hills or Manhattan)
1: Basic stand-alone internet and all fees is generally under $50 in most civilized locations (I pay $130 for a 35/35 FIOS business line. Consumer accounts are many times cheaper)
2: Clear is $35 a month for no-contract service with user-owned equipment. (I have this as a backup) A 2 year contract is about $25 a month.
3: Anyone on Slashdot should be geeky enough to know that most cellular towers and their backhaul are ridiculously inadequate and will never be a reasonable option for modern internet access until towers are 100 yards apart and each one has a 10gigabit fiber backhaul. Cellular internet service is for shelling into your network in an emergency and for stupid low-traffic crap like twitter. For anything else, see option 4
4: You don't need to sign up for anything to use library computers.
5: How dare you complain about the valiant information freedom fighters! Why do you hate America?
6: Step1 - register "bumsfapping.com", step 2 - video tape bums fapping in public library, step 3 - profit. (the unspoken step 4 - Google buyout = insane profit)
I know I know, we have are precise language,
Well, some of us do...
/snert
No, the real reason is because Castro confiscated all of Meyer Lansky's Cuban casino interests.
I have 3 of the early Asus models. They all still work just fine and since they do not have hard drives to generate extra heat and vibration, there's a high probability that they will still be working just fine a decade from now. I have a 1998 Thinkpad laptop upgraded to Win 2k that I use for a print server on my LAN. Surprisingly, it still has the original hard drive. My caching DNS machine is a 1999 Penguin Computing pizza box, again with the original drive (currently showing about 90,000 hours).
What part of "still authorizing new licenses for their obsolete OS 10 years after introduction" do you not understand?
Yes, it's absolutely different. MS was not still selling those other OSes 10 years after they were introduced. OEM copies of XP were still available in 2009 and it was still being loaded on brand new netbooks in 2010. They'll be cutting off support just 4 years after the last official copy was sold. Those early netbooks CANNOT run Vista or 7 because they don't have the resources. Since they were specifically designed for internet use, the only way to keep using them for their intended purpose will be to load them with Linux, unless ReactOS gets a lot farther along by then.
If it takes the hypothetical you a lifetime (or even more than a decade) to pay off this hypothetical $30k debt, you're probably an unemployable parasite anyway and society would be better served if the ER tossed your broken and bleeding carcass into the dumpster out back instead of treating you.
Hypothetically speaking, of course.