Yeah the authentication thing is annoying. You can call customer service and have them do it though; in fact, I recently swapped cable modems (my old one got brain damaged during a power outage), and after going through the trouble of setting up a windows machine connected right to the cable modem the INSTALLATION SOFTWARE DIDN'T WORK. At first it just kept timing out during the final step, and then it started throwing back HTTP errors from their installation server and told me to call customer service to get configured. I vaguely recall that when I originally had the service installed about a year and a half ago the installer had the exact same problem and had to call in to get my service turned up. A self-service installation system that (apparently) never actually works and requires a call to a customer service rep anyway. Brilliant.
I sympathize with those stuck with Comcast. Even if I wanted DSL (and I hate SBC about as much as i hate Comcast) the infrastructure in the city is absolutely horrible. Before I had the cable I had a T1 to my employer (an ISP), and that damn thing was down almost EVERY month. If it rained, it went down because their cables are about as water tight as paper towel, and I was told by more than one repair person that they were having trouble locating working cable pairs (I'm pretty sure we're still using copper strung by Alexander Graham Bell himself...). Even more annoying was that on more than one occasion it went down because someone nearby got a new phone line and they decided to reuse one my T1's cable pairs for that. So you can see why I don't consider DSL a viable option. At least the cable has only gone down a couple of times and never because of bad or loose wires.
Except if they gave us the boxes that means they'd have to buy them, which means they'd end up paying $1000 each for them to Haliburton or some company owned by them.
Sure they both use a single 6 MHz channel, but if you look at HDTV stations they're all assigned channels in the UHF band. The VHF band will be completely empty and can be repurposed once the old analog signals go dark. Now as to whether or not that will go down as originally planned remains to be seen, but it IS the plan, at least.
At least the UK gets it in high def. No way to get that here in the States except to download it, because there is no SCIFI-HD.
Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis are handled similarly. Both are on hiatus in the US until April, but there are already 3-4 new eps of each show available for download because they're showing on SkyOne...again, in HD. Wish I could get SkyOne.
It really bothers me to see someone complain about someone else using non-free software without offering a workable alternative. It especially bothers me when the target happens to be the binary Nvidia drivers. I like to game in my spare time and using one of the 5 year old video cards supported by open source drivers is not a viable alternative for me, unless I'm playing five year old games. In the case of WoW there is no alternative and probably won't be for a very long time, if ever, because of the sheer amount and diversity of talents required to develop an MMORPG (think "content".) You just end up with stuff like WorldForge, where the code is kinda there and the content is almost nonexistant.
Personally I don't see the big deal anyway. All I'm making use of is the Windows API anyway, and it doesn't give any money to Microsoft to do so. Sure, it keeps me off the cutting edge of gaming if a new game comes out and uses features Cedega doesn't emulate, but personally I can live with that as it's a lot less hassle for me than dual booting. Cedega has worked remarkably well for me for the past two years playing WoW and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had problems that made the game actually unplayable. Even then they were all fixed within a couple of days at the most. I don't think it's been any worse than when I ran Windows; the only difference is back then the whole OS would stop working instead of just WoW.:-)
I'm all for freedom but that also means I have the freedom to use things that you may not like. As long as nobody forces me to do this then I don't see the problem. Nobody forced me to buy WoW; I did it of my own free will. I don't feel that my rights have been taken away because I can't get the source code to it, either. If I don't like it I can simply stop using it. My life, my money, my choice.
Re:Marry Had a Little Lamb
on
Scanjet Music
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· Score: 1
I can do some Xmas songs too including "Good King Wenceslas". I used to freak people by playing stuff like that on the phone.
Speaking as someone who isn't really a hardcore gamer and who has tried several other MMOs before WoW, I think what really makes WoW successful is that you CAN play as a non-hardcore gamer and not feel like you're being left behind. I can put in an hour or two a night, maybe a two or three nights a weeek, and see real progress. Plus they didn't kill the solo game (well, at least not until you get close to 60), so it's possible to hop on for an hour and bang out some solo quests even if none of my guild mates are around or available.
My only real complaint about WoW these days is that that I don't like the endgame. I have a 60 human mage on Cenarius that I don't play anymore, because I found it boring to spend 3-4 hours of my night 2-3 nights a week running MC. At that point the fights are mostly coreographed by the people running the raid, reducing gameplay to nothing more than hitting the right keys at the right times. And there's very little reward; the mobs mostly drop only epic class items, so if it isn't your turn to get one you get nothing...there aren't even money or vendor fodder drops to offset the several gold of armor damage you take from the raid, meaning each raid is a loss if you didn't get loot.
I know a lot of people enjoy the raids, and that's cool, but I'm more of a "small group of people I know well" kind of guy. In fact my guild used to be just that before we had to merge with a larger guild so that we actually COULD raid MC. I'm glad to hear they're adding some new high-end, smaller-group instances in the new expansion.
In my case I just left my level 60 and started a troll mage on Alleria with another group of friends. I've enjoyed the tons of new content I've found playing as Horde. When this character gets to to 60 (he's 42 now) I'll probably just go make another, and leave this one with the human mage to be played again after the expansion raises the level cap to 70. There's still plenty of content I haven't seen yet to keep me occupied for at least another couple of characters.:)
That's funny, because there is something about people who talk incessantly about The Apprentice and Desperate Housewives that makes me want to punch them. Sorry, but not watching television is as valid a choice as spending your life watching fake people do fake things and getting lobotomized by car ads and "reality" programming.
While I certainly have no issue with people making a choice to not watch TV, the feeling I picked up from that statement was that it was the WAY many people tend to say it that's annoying. It seems like whenever I hear someone say they don't watch TV there is a definite sense that the person feels that not watching TV somehow automatically makes them superior.
Anyway, I see where you're coming from and I agree with you with everything except for the homeless part - they can only really help themselves. Again, just my humble opinion:)
I'll be the first to agree there's a lot of room for debate on that subject, and actually I'm not really informed enough on it to have a concrete opinion yet. I'm currently a bit preoccupied with the apparent attempt by the current administration to destroy the middle class, but that's a rant for another time.:)
Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo
on
Ma Bell is Back
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Back in 1996, at my first ISP job, we had a bank of 30 actual physical modems hooked up to 30 POTS lines over a 300 pair cable into the owner's basement (ahh, those were the days!) One day all of a sudden 3/4 of the modem bank suddenly disconnected. On a hunch we walked one block over to the subdivision's junction box, and sure enough someone had backhoed the underground cable to that box. There was a poor Ameritech employee sitting there with a massive bundle of broken 600-pair cable on his lap with a soldering iron and some of those little crimp-on splicers. My boss took some digital photos of it...I should check and see if he still has them.
Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The CLEC i used to work at tests its generators every Monday morning for about an hour. It's noisy as HELL. Sounds like a jet engine.
I don't like the thought of cell towers going out during an extended blackout, but I can see why they don't have generators. Not only is there the noise issue but there are also space issues in some cases, plus the fact that generally one company owns the tower and others lease space, and I imagine the landlords are not keen on the idea of having to maintain and administer a shared generator system for every tower.
There might just be a market here for someone with a lot of time and money...setting up central backup power centers and hooking cell towers up to a backup power grid. You'd have to deal with a lot of red tape and probably a lot of crap from the local power companies though.
I'm willing to bet that the people you do find "OD'd and alive in the street" are people with other problems and had they not OD'd on drugs they would've found something else to mess themselves up with. Should we outlaw spraypaint and rubber glue too? The point I'm trying to make here is that people who abuse drugs in this way are doing it for a reason: they're trying to mask out other problems in their lives, and they're going to find some way to do it until that root problem is treated. Often times that problem is economic (ie, being poor.) We could probably do a lot more to cure the "drug problem" in this country if we took all those billions of dollars we pour into trying (and utterly failing, btw) to stop the drugs and instead put that money towards helping the poor and homeless.
Now I'm not of the opinion that ALL drugs should be legalized, but I think if a particular drug can be shown to not have a strong physical addiction effect then it should be legal. Weed for example is mostly a psychological addiction (though there are some minor physical withdrawl symptoms, particularly regarding sleep patterns), so I see no reason to outlaw that. I'm not personally familiar with the addictive properties of any other drugs so I won't comment on them here but I'm sure others will.
The stereotypical "stoner" is just that: a stereotype. Sure, there are people like that (I know one or two myself), but they are the exception rather than the norm and should be treated as such. The reason they seem so prevelent is that they're the only pot users anyone ever NOTICES. I think many people out there would be quite surprised to learn just how many of the people in their life smoke a little pot now and then, because (and here's the shocker) the pot use HAS NO NEGATIVE EFFECTS ON THEIR LIFESTYLE. They go to work, they pay their taxes, and are generally productive members of society. If they can't afford pot for a while, they just don't smoke any (or smoke with your friends...pot users are very generous people:)). They certainly don't rape, kill or steal to support their habit. If there's quite literally no victim (not even "society at large") then where is the crime? Please don't tell me "they're hurting themselves by putting the pot in their system", because there are plenty of arguably more dangerous things you can legally put into your system (eg, alcohol).
What's funniest of all is that the people who ACTUALLY cancel never say so...they just leave. The ones that keep saying they're quitting just stick around making everyone else wish they would.:)
What probably worries the MPAA is that eventually the people who ARE in the business of selling the programs will figure out that they can cut the networks out of the picture entirely and just sell straight to the customer over the Internet. It's pretty much the same effect the Internet has had on the music industry and for that matter pretty much everything other industry that it has run up against.
The ones who should really be scared are the TV stations, because this will just be one more reason not to watch broadcast TV. The cable and sat operators can just jack up their subscription prices to offset any losses.
Trying to run an all-software PVR (like MythTV) at HDTV resolution definitely requires more than 2 GHz. I'm considering upgrading exactly for this reason. This doesn't affect many users right now but it certainly will in the coming years, especially when the mandatory shutdown of the NTSC signals happens and HDTV becomes the norm instead of the exception.
Quite true, because I simply cannot afford getting that 40% of my salary back that I used to have before this asshole took power and did nothing while the economy slammed into an iceberg.
No I don't think the election was rigged, but I do think that people in this country are incredibly naive. The top two issues for Bush supported were "Morals" and "Iraq." In other words the GOP has convinced them that if Kerry won then we'd be eaten by wolves and sodomized by packs of roaming gays.
I'm shopping around for a new country to call home. This one has gone absolutely crazy.
Pretty lossy for MPEG-2 but not if they're making non-standard DVDs using MPEG-4. I just encoded my DVD of Kill Bill 2 to my media server at 1.2 Mb/sec using XviD and it's pretty much indistinguishable from the original DVD.
In this case however I'm betting they're doing absolutely minimal bitrate MPEG-2 encoding, because people will almost certainly complain if they can't play the DVDs they make on a regular player. So it probably looks like a VHS recording. But many people don't mind that; they're used to VHS tapes now and really just want DVD-R for the durability and smaller form factor.
I think they're on something a little stronger than pot. Think about it...if they were smoking pot, they would have sat around and TALKED about suing IBM for five billion dollars, then giggled a lot and continued to sit around and until they decided to make a taco bell run and ended up forgetting all about IBM.:)
Quite true, and if I'm not mistaken they are not even supposed to legally use them as identification. Hell even if a company asks for my SSN and my mother's maiden name someone could find out that information with just a tiny bit of effort.
First of all when it was first invented the equipment needed to fake it was rather expensive and probably not many people knew how to do it (security through obscurity!) Now there are dozens of CLECs selling cheap PRIs, and you can even set up a simple VoIP PBX at home using Asterisk. In this respect it is a similar to all the fuss about copying CDs and DVDs: it was always possible, but when burners cost thousands of dollars not many people could afford to do it.
Second, for your average day-to-day use of just wanting to know who's calling it's good enough. Debt collectors aside, if I pick up the phone and find out my buddy just spoofed caller ID to play a trick on me it's no big deal. But you really don't want to use it as the sole form of authentication for anything critical, especially if money is involved. Fortunately I have yet to run across a bank or credit card phone system that goes by caller ID alone.
Every credit card I've activated required me to also enter some other form of identification, usually my SSN. If your CC company only requires you to call from your home phone# to activate, I'd strongly suggest another credit card company. And if your neighbor's kids have your SSN or other private information, well, I'll you figure out how to best deal with that one.:)
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You were using J2EE in 1987?
Yeah the authentication thing is annoying. You can call customer service and have them do it though; in fact, I recently swapped cable modems (my old one got brain damaged during a power outage), and after going through the trouble of setting up a windows machine connected right to the cable modem the INSTALLATION SOFTWARE DIDN'T WORK. At first it just kept timing out during the final step, and then it started throwing back HTTP errors from their installation server and told me to call customer service to get configured. I vaguely recall that when I originally had the service installed about a year and a half ago the installer had the exact same problem and had to call in to get my service turned up. A self-service installation system that (apparently) never actually works and requires a call to a customer service rep anyway. Brilliant.
I sympathize with those stuck with Comcast. Even if I wanted DSL (and I hate SBC about as much as i hate Comcast) the infrastructure in the city is absolutely horrible. Before I had the cable I had a T1 to my employer (an ISP), and that damn thing was down almost EVERY month. If it rained, it went down because their cables are about as water tight as paper towel, and I was told by more than one repair person that they were having trouble locating working cable pairs (I'm pretty sure we're still using copper strung by Alexander Graham Bell himself...). Even more annoying was that on more than one occasion it went down because someone nearby got a new phone line and they decided to reuse one my T1's cable pairs for that. So you can see why I don't consider DSL a viable option. At least the cable has only gone down a couple of times and never because of bad or loose wires.
Except if they gave us the boxes that means they'd have to buy them, which means they'd end up paying $1000 each for them to Haliburton or some company owned by them.
Sure they both use a single 6 MHz channel, but if you look at HDTV stations they're all assigned channels in the UHF band. The VHF band will be completely empty and can be repurposed once the old analog signals go dark. Now as to whether or not that will go down as originally planned remains to be seen, but it IS the plan, at least.
At least the UK gets it in high def. No way to get that here in the States except to download it, because there is no SCIFI-HD.
Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis are handled similarly. Both are on hiatus in the US until April, but there are already 3-4 new eps of each show available for download because they're showing on SkyOne...again, in HD. Wish I could get SkyOne.
A bit harsh but it did need to be said.
:-)
It really bothers me to see someone complain about someone else using non-free software without offering a workable alternative. It especially bothers me when the target happens to be the binary Nvidia drivers. I like to game in my spare time and using one of the 5 year old video cards supported by open source drivers is not a viable alternative for me, unless I'm playing five year old games. In the case of WoW there is no alternative and probably won't be for a very long time, if ever, because of the sheer amount and diversity of talents required to develop an MMORPG (think "content".) You just end up with stuff like WorldForge, where the code is kinda there and the content is almost nonexistant.
Personally I don't see the big deal anyway. All I'm making use of is the Windows API anyway, and it doesn't give any money to Microsoft to do so. Sure, it keeps me off the cutting edge of gaming if a new game comes out and uses features Cedega doesn't emulate, but personally I can live with that as it's a lot less hassle for me than dual booting. Cedega has worked remarkably well for me for the past two years playing WoW and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had problems that made the game actually unplayable. Even then they were all fixed within a couple of days at the most. I don't think it's been any worse than when I ran Windows; the only difference is back then the whole OS would stop working instead of just WoW.
I'm all for freedom but that also means I have the freedom to use things that you may not like. As long as nobody forces me to do this then I don't see the problem. Nobody forced me to buy WoW; I did it of my own free will. I don't feel that my rights have been taken away because I can't get the source code to it, either. If I don't like it I can simply stop using it. My life, my money, my choice.
I can do some Xmas songs too including "Good King Wenceslas". I used to freak people by playing stuff like that on the phone.
Speaking as someone who isn't really a hardcore gamer and who has tried several other MMOs before WoW, I think what really makes WoW successful is that you CAN play as a non-hardcore gamer and not feel like you're being left behind. I can put in an hour or two a night, maybe a two or three nights a weeek, and see real progress. Plus they didn't kill the solo game (well, at least not until you get close to 60), so it's possible to hop on for an hour and bang out some solo quests even if none of my guild mates are around or available.
:)
My only real complaint about WoW these days is that that I don't like the endgame. I have a 60 human mage on Cenarius that I don't play anymore, because I found it boring to spend 3-4 hours of my night 2-3 nights a week running MC. At that point the fights are mostly coreographed by the people running the raid, reducing gameplay to nothing more than hitting the right keys at the right times. And there's very little reward; the mobs mostly drop only epic class items, so if it isn't your turn to get one you get nothing...there aren't even money or vendor fodder drops to offset the several gold of armor damage you take from the raid, meaning each raid is a loss if you didn't get loot.
I know a lot of people enjoy the raids, and that's cool, but I'm more of a "small group of people I know well" kind of guy. In fact my guild used to be just that before we had to merge with a larger guild so that we actually COULD raid MC. I'm glad to hear they're adding some new high-end, smaller-group instances in the new expansion.
In my case I just left my level 60 and started a troll mage on Alleria with another group of friends. I've enjoyed the tons of new content I've found playing as Horde. When this character gets to to 60 (he's 42 now) I'll probably just go make another, and leave this one with the human mage to be played again after the expansion raises the level cap to 70. There's still plenty of content I haven't seen yet to keep me occupied for at least another couple of characters.
That's funny, because there is something about people who talk incessantly about The Apprentice and Desperate Housewives that makes me want to punch them. Sorry, but not watching television is as valid a choice as spending your life watching fake people do fake things and getting lobotomized by car ads and "reality" programming.
While I certainly have no issue with people making a choice to not watch TV, the feeling I picked up from that statement was that it was the WAY many people tend to say it that's annoying. It seems like whenever I hear someone say they don't watch TV there is a definite sense that the person feels that not watching TV somehow automatically makes them superior.
Anyway, I see where you're coming from and I agree with you with everything except for the homeless part - they can only really help themselves. Again, just my humble opinion :)
:)
I'll be the first to agree there's a lot of room for debate on that subject, and actually I'm not really informed enough on it to have a concrete opinion yet. I'm currently a bit preoccupied with the apparent attempt by the current administration to destroy the middle class, but that's a rant for another time.
Back in 1996, at my first ISP job, we had a bank of 30 actual physical modems hooked up to 30 POTS lines over a 300 pair cable into the owner's basement (ahh, those were the days!) One day all of a sudden 3/4 of the modem bank suddenly disconnected. On a hunch we walked one block over to the subdivision's junction box, and sure enough someone had backhoed the underground cable to that box. There was a poor Ameritech employee sitting there with a massive bundle of broken 600-pair cable on his lap with a soldering iron and some of those little crimp-on splicers. My boss took some digital photos of it...I should check and see if he still has them.
The CLEC i used to work at tests its generators every Monday morning for about an hour. It's noisy as HELL. Sounds like a jet engine.
I don't like the thought of cell towers going out during an extended blackout, but I can see why they don't have generators. Not only is there the noise issue but there are also space issues in some cases, plus the fact that generally one company owns the tower and others lease space, and I imagine the landlords are not keen on the idea of having to maintain and administer a shared generator system for every tower.
There might just be a market here for someone with a lot of time and money...setting up central backup power centers and hooking cell towers up to a backup power grid. You'd have to deal with a lot of red tape and probably a lot of crap from the local power companies though.
It's 48VDC on hook, about 9VDC talk and a whopping 90VDC while ringing. See http://cactus.eas.asu.edu/partha/Columns/12-17-POT S.htm for information.
I've bumped against the connections for a ringing line while working in a wiring closet before, and it's quite painful.
I'm willing to bet that the people you do find "OD'd and alive in the street" are people with other problems and had they not OD'd on drugs they would've found something else to mess themselves up with. Should we outlaw spraypaint and rubber glue too? The point I'm trying to make here is that people who abuse drugs in this way are doing it for a reason: they're trying to mask out other problems in their lives, and they're going to find some way to do it until that root problem is treated. Often times that problem is economic (ie, being poor.) We could probably do a lot more to cure the "drug problem" in this country if we took all those billions of dollars we pour into trying (and utterly failing, btw) to stop the drugs and instead put that money towards helping the poor and homeless.
:)). They certainly don't rape, kill or steal to support their habit. If there's quite literally no victim (not even "society at large") then where is the crime? Please don't tell me "they're hurting themselves by putting the pot in their system", because there are plenty of arguably more dangerous things you can legally put into your system (eg, alcohol).
Now I'm not of the opinion that ALL drugs should be legalized, but I think if a particular drug can be shown to not have a strong physical addiction effect then it should be legal. Weed for example is mostly a psychological addiction (though there are some minor physical withdrawl symptoms, particularly regarding sleep patterns), so I see no reason to outlaw that. I'm not personally familiar with the addictive properties of any other drugs so I won't comment on them here but I'm sure others will.
The stereotypical "stoner" is just that: a stereotype. Sure, there are people like that (I know one or two myself), but they are the exception rather than the norm and should be treated as such. The reason they seem so prevelent is that they're the only pot users anyone ever NOTICES. I think many people out there would be quite surprised to learn just how many of the people in their life smoke a little pot now and then, because (and here's the shocker) the pot use HAS NO NEGATIVE EFFECTS ON THEIR LIFESTYLE. They go to work, they pay their taxes, and are generally productive members of society. If they can't afford pot for a while, they just don't smoke any (or smoke with your friends...pot users are very generous people
You mean like the annoying "Eat Beef" song on those latest Boston Market commercials?
What's funniest of all is that the people who ACTUALLY cancel never say so...they just leave. The ones that keep saying they're quitting just stick around making everyone else wish they would. :)
What probably worries the MPAA is that eventually the people who ARE in the business of selling the programs will figure out that they can cut the networks out of the picture entirely and just sell straight to the customer over the Internet. It's pretty much the same effect the Internet has had on the music industry and for that matter pretty much everything other industry that it has run up against.
The ones who should really be scared are the TV stations, because this will just be one more reason not to watch broadcast TV. The cable and sat operators can just jack up their subscription prices to offset any losses.
Trying to run an all-software PVR (like MythTV) at HDTV resolution definitely requires more than 2 GHz. I'm considering upgrading exactly for this reason.
This doesn't affect many users right now but it certainly will in the coming years, especially when the mandatory shutdown of the NTSC signals happens and HDTV becomes the norm instead of the exception.
> list just isn't that fast
:)
More to the point, electrons just aren't that fast. Using light would make quite a bit of difference, hence the work on optical computing.
Quite true, because I simply cannot afford getting that 40% of my salary back that I used to have before this asshole took power and did nothing while the economy slammed into an iceberg.
No I don't think the election was rigged, but I do think that people in this country are incredibly naive. The top two issues for Bush supported were "Morals" and "Iraq." In other words the GOP has convinced them that if Kerry won then we'd be eaten by wolves and sodomized by packs of roaming gays.
I'm shopping around for a new country to call home. This one has gone absolutely crazy.
Pretty lossy for MPEG-2 but not if they're making non-standard DVDs using MPEG-4. I just encoded my DVD of Kill Bill 2 to my media server at 1.2 Mb/sec using XviD and it's pretty much indistinguishable from the original DVD.
In this case however I'm betting they're doing absolutely minimal bitrate MPEG-2 encoding, because people will almost certainly complain if they can't play the DVDs they make on a regular player. So it probably looks like a VHS recording. But many people don't mind that; they're used to VHS tapes now and really just want DVD-R for the durability and smaller form factor.
I think they're on something a little stronger than pot. Think about it...if they were smoking pot, they would have sat around and TALKED about suing IBM for five billion dollars, then giggled a lot and continued to sit around and until they decided to make a taco bell run and ended up forgetting all about IBM. :)
Quite true, and if I'm not mistaken they are not even supposed to legally use them as identification.
Hell even if a company asks for my SSN and my mother's maiden name someone could find out that information with just a tiny bit of effort.
For a couple of reasons.
First of all when it was first invented the equipment needed to fake it was rather expensive and probably not many people knew how to do it (security through obscurity!) Now there are dozens of CLECs selling cheap PRIs, and you can even set up a simple VoIP PBX at home using Asterisk. In this respect it is a similar to all the fuss about copying CDs and DVDs: it was always possible, but when burners cost thousands of dollars not many people could afford to do it.
Second, for your average day-to-day use of just wanting to know who's calling it's good enough. Debt collectors aside, if I pick up the phone and find out my buddy just spoofed caller ID to play a trick on me it's no big deal. But you really don't want to use it as the sole form of authentication for anything critical, especially if money is involved. Fortunately I have yet to run across a bank or credit card phone system that goes by caller ID alone.
Every credit card I've activated required me to also enter some other form of identification, usually my SSN. If your CC company only requires you to call from your home phone# to activate, I'd strongly suggest another credit card company. And if your neighbor's kids have your SSN or other private information, well, I'll you figure out how to best deal with that one. :)