in some cases, even routing to other tier 1 providers through Level3
Is there any public corroboration for this? From what I've seen, it certainy appears that Cogent is taking advantage of hot potato routing to make their peers take care of global routing for them, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that they have been using their peers for transit to other networks.
This is what SSL is for. As long as you login from a page retrieved over SSL, you have reasonable assurance that the site in question is legitimate. Unless, of course, you do something stupid like ignore browser warnings about common name mismatches and untrusted CAs. Or worse, turn off invalid SSL certificate warnings (yes, people really do this - don't get me started).
Actually, TV advertising is a huge part of the typical Fortune 500 advertising budget. Putting your name on a stadium costs a couple million dollars a year. Putting 30-second commercials on prime-time network television throughout the year can cost in the hundreds of millions.
However, you're right that advertising is the reason broadcast media remain free (as in beer) and football tickets aren't twice as expensive. That doesn't mean we don't don't pay for them though - the cost is just hidden in the form of higher retail prices for brand name merchandise.
Netcom did the same thing around that time, but they took a very underhanded approach to it. I was really into Ultima Online in those days, so I was spending a lot of time online during peak hours. After a while, I noticed that my connection was being dropped way too much, no matter which of the several local APs I dialed into. Customer service kept insisting there was no problem on their end, so it must be a dirty line or something on my end, until I finally (several months later) got a guy on the line who told me what was really happening.
As it turns out, I had exceeded their unpublished cap of 100 hours/month, so my account was flagged. I still could dial up, but any time the modem pool I was dialed into ran out of connections, I got dropped to free up a line for the next incoming connection. This despite them having signed me up with promises of unlimited service. I fired off a few nastygrams and promptly switched providers (to ATT Worldnet as fate would have it, but they only lasted about 2 weeks before I dropped them and switched long distance providers out of spite).
in which case he would be constantly dropping and resubscribing to the same provider. Whether it's good or bad (for him) presumably would be a matter of whether the provider charges a connection fee or offers a free introductory period.
It's unbelievable that Verisign...could let their Root Certificate Authority expire, then force its users to [import] the new certificate.
Well, Verisign didn't have much choice in the matter, since all certificates are required to have an expiration date. Every other trusted CA certificate, including Verisign's replacement, is going to expire at some point, potentially causing similar problems (most likely not on the same scale though, as Verisign has become the defacto standard root CA).
I really don't see the relation to the bogus Microsoft code signing certs, as that was a failure by Verisign to confirm the identity of the requestor, whereas the current issue is a matter of the inevitable expiration of a signing certificate. This is not a problem with Verisign's practices or implementation; it's a problem with PKI itself.
Ok, I started on this page, which was linked in the story. I found this link, which is presented as a link to registration in the section labeled "How can I get x$ to start playing?". Interestingly, this link is to an outside domain, nf4.newsfutures.com. More interestingly, nf4.newsfutures.com presents a self-issued SSL certificate with a common name of www.snakeoil.dom and issuing CA of Snake Oil CA.
Ok, so I start to think this is all an elaborate hoax. However, when I click through the link at the top of the left-side navigation bar labeled Trading Account(s), I get sent to a Technology Review registration page, after which I am asked for a trading name in order to setup a trading account. It appears that it is not a hox after all.
So WTF is this link to nf4.newsfutures.com? It's obviously not a placeholder, as it points to an existing domain with a joke certificate. I don't get it.
I believe the tax situation would be the same whether SwiftView gave the money directly to charity or to Michael, who then forwarded it to charity, as long as the auction specifically stated that proceeds would go to charity. If the auction didn't mention charity and Michael unilaterally donated the proceeds after the fact, then Michael would deduct the full amount, but since the donation was known up front, SwiftView was bidding in a charitable benefit auction, meaning they can deduct the excess of their winning bid over the FMV of the check.
The only way I can think of in which Michael would come out ahead financially would be if he were successfully to argue that the check has inherent novelty value that raises its FMV above the $500 face value. In this case, he would deduct the estimated FMV of the check, which if it were high enough would offset the value of the copy of Visual Studio he received.
In any event, it appears that SwiftView gave the money directly to the charity. See this post by a guy who works there.
Actually, I believe the tax situation would be as follows:
Michael Chaney reports income from Microsoft in the amount of ($500 + FMV of Visual Studio 6 - $35).
Michael takes a $500 deduction for his donation of the check to charity.
SwiftView pays $7,000 for the check, of which it deducts $6,500 ($7,000 - $500 FMV of property received) as a charitable contribution.
Michael, then, ends up owing additional taxes in the amount of ((FMV of VS6 - $35) * Michael's marginal tax rate), assuming he actually followed the letter of the law and reported the income.
True, but this requires forethought and preplanning, while price stickers can be exchanged on a moment's notice after realizing that there's a $4.99 item three feet away from the $15.99 item in your hand. Also, inspection will reveal barcode tampering whereas an exchanged price sticker could be attributed to employee error.
I understand how self-checkout lines work. I was referring to this part of the article:
On the horizon, the consultants say, is the day when every product is tagged with an RFID, or radio frequency identification chip, instead of a bar code. The chips, which don't have to be scanned, would allow shoppers to leave the store without checking out at all and get the bill on their credit card or store account.
That's probably now far off the mark. I remember when they put a talking Coke machine in my high school cafeteria back in the mid-80s. I don't remember exactly what it spouted off, but it was something on the order of "Hi, I'm a talking Coke machine! I see you have inserted fifty cents. Please make your selection now. I'm sorry, that item is sold out. Please make your selection now. Thank you for using the Talking Coke Machine. Don't forget your change." Almost immediately, people started putting their hand over the speaker to muffle it. Within the week, it was vandalized with a paper clip and spoke no more.
Still I am old enough to remember when barcodes first came in use. I can't prove it but for me checkout time seems to have increase.
You realize, of course, that the main benefit of POS barcode scanners isn't checkout speed, it's inventory management. Stores now make a single entry in a database for each product on the shelves rather than individually tagging every item. In addition to the labor savings, this also increases the accuracy of pricing and eliminates the old trick of peeling a price sticker off of a cheap item and attaching it to a more expensive item. Also, while retailers still need to take physical inventory periodically, they now have a good estimate at hand year-round. (Allegedly) faster checkouts are just a nice bonus.
Excatly how is this self checkout system going to cope with items without an RFID tag or a broken one?
I don't get the auto-checkout thing. How do they determine who I am when I walk out of the store with my cart full of crap? Sure, they can put RFID on my credit cards, but how do they determine which of the several I carry should be charged? What if I'm carrying a stolen card? How do they distinguish between my cart and the cart pushed by the guy next to me? Are they going to install shielded exit tunnels into which one person at a time is permitted to prevent interference?
Insist that your next PC is fully equipped with a legally licensed operating system preinstalled by the dealer. Demand the accompanying CD, and Certificates of Authenticity. Otherwise, who knows what you're leaving yourself open to?
I thought Microsoft gave OEMs incentives (e.g. lower prices) if they didn't distribute Windows CDs with their machines, as part of their effort to stamp out "casual piracy"...
That's because of the inverse theory. Firstborn children tend to be healthier and thus grow taller because a family typically has a fixed pool of money from which to provide for their children. Firstborns get the benefit of that entire pool during their early childhood, but when additional children are born into the family, that pool must then be divided amongst all children in the family, reducing the amount spent on any individual child. Later-born children, then, are more likely to suffer from malnutrition, parental neglect, etc. in their critical early years.
I haven't had to talk to a telemarketer in years as they (or their dialer thingys) are trained to hang up when a machine answers the phone
Most of them are, but I've been getting calls lately from autodialers that play prerecorded messages to my machine, so I occasionally come home to a machine full of "Ummm, hi. This is Bob from Capital Mortgage. I've been reviewing your account and it looks like you're due for a rate reduction... blah blah blah." While I have to confess a certain admiration of the technique of crafting messages so that they sound like they were left by a real humanoid, I don't appreciate them filling up my machine with this crap.
On the bright side, they usually leave an 800 number at the end, so at least I can call them up on their dime to tell whoever answers to go fuck themselves.
You work, you get $2.25/hr (or whatever the boss is nice enough to pay you). So in most places, the staff are very dependant on your tips.
Also, don't forget that minimum tax withholding for waiters in the US is calculated on base salary plus a percentage of the waiter's gross sales (used to be 8%; not sure what it is now). This makes that $2.25 even smaller; when I waited tables, 2 weeks of full-time work would net me a $20-$30 paycheck. It also means that if you fail to tip your waiter you're actually costing him money because he's paying tax on income he never receives.
Indeed. The Tropicana in Las Vegas used to have a chicken trained to play tic-tac-toe, with cash prizes for anybody who could beat it. I didn't see it when I was just out there for Defcon though, so maybe the novelty wore thin.
Slashdot Mirror
in some cases, even routing to other tier 1 providers through Level3
Is there any public corroboration for this? From what I've seen, it certainy appears that Cogent is taking advantage of hot potato routing to make their peers take care of global routing for them, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that they have been using their peers for transit to other networks.
This is what SSL is for. As long as you login from a page retrieved over SSL, you have reasonable assurance that the site in question is legitimate. Unless, of course, you do something stupid like ignore browser warnings about common name mismatches and untrusted CAs. Or worse, turn off invalid SSL certificate warnings (yes, people really do this - don't get me started).
Actually, TV advertising is a huge part of the typical Fortune 500 advertising budget. Putting your name on a stadium costs a couple million dollars a year. Putting 30-second commercials on prime-time network television throughout the year can cost in the hundreds of millions.
However, you're right that advertising is the reason broadcast media remain free (as in beer) and football tickets aren't twice as expensive. That doesn't mean we don't don't pay for them though - the cost is just hidden in the form of higher retail prices for brand name merchandise.
Netcom did the same thing around that time, but they took a very underhanded approach to it. I was really into Ultima Online in those days, so I was spending a lot of time online during peak hours. After a while, I noticed that my connection was being dropped way too much, no matter which of the several local APs I dialed into. Customer service kept insisting there was no problem on their end, so it must be a dirty line or something on my end, until I finally (several months later) got a guy on the line who told me what was really happening.
As it turns out, I had exceeded their unpublished cap of 100 hours/month, so my account was flagged. I still could dial up, but any time the modem pool I was dialed into ran out of connections, I got dropped to free up a line for the next incoming connection. This despite them having signed me up with promises of unlimited service. I fired off a few nastygrams and promptly switched providers (to ATT Worldnet as fate would have it, but they only lasted about 2 weeks before I dropped them and switched long distance providers out of spite).
sub switch_providers{
}
in which case he would be constantly dropping and resubscribing to the same provider. Whether it's good or bad (for him) presumably would be a matter of whether the provider charges a connection fee or offers a free introductory period.
It's unbelievable that Verisign...could let their Root Certificate Authority expire, then force its users to [import] the new certificate.
Well, Verisign didn't have much choice in the matter, since all certificates are required to have an expiration date. Every other trusted CA certificate, including Verisign's replacement, is going to expire at some point, potentially causing similar problems (most likely not on the same scale though, as Verisign has become the defacto standard root CA).
I really don't see the relation to the bogus Microsoft code signing certs, as that was a failure by Verisign to confirm the identity of the requestor, whereas the current issue is a matter of the inevitable expiration of a signing certificate. This is not a problem with Verisign's practices or implementation; it's a problem with PKI itself.
Hmm... Michael Bolton's "Vintage" is RIAA Safe. Whew; that's a relief!
Ok, I started on this page, which was linked in the story. I found this link, which is presented as a link to registration in the section labeled "How can I get x$ to start playing?". Interestingly, this link is to an outside domain, nf4.newsfutures.com. More interestingly, nf4.newsfutures.com presents a self-issued SSL certificate with a common name of www.snakeoil.dom and issuing CA of Snake Oil CA.
Ok, so I start to think this is all an elaborate hoax. However, when I click through the link at the top of the left-side navigation bar labeled Trading Account(s), I get sent to a Technology Review registration page, after which I am asked for a trading name in order to setup a trading account. It appears that it is not a hox after all.
So WTF is this link to nf4.newsfutures.com? It's obviously not a placeholder, as it points to an existing domain with a joke certificate. I don't get it.
I believe the tax situation would be the same whether SwiftView gave the money directly to charity or to Michael, who then forwarded it to charity, as long as the auction specifically stated that proceeds would go to charity. If the auction didn't mention charity and Michael unilaterally donated the proceeds after the fact, then Michael would deduct the full amount, but since the donation was known up front, SwiftView was bidding in a charitable benefit auction, meaning they can deduct the excess of their winning bid over the FMV of the check.
The only way I can think of in which Michael would come out ahead financially would be if he were successfully to argue that the check has inherent novelty value that raises its FMV above the $500 face value. In this case, he would deduct the estimated FMV of the check, which if it were high enough would offset the value of the copy of Visual Studio he received.
In any event, it appears that SwiftView gave the money directly to the charity. See this post by a guy who works there.
But they still can send death threats and such via Hotmail, whose X-Originating-Ip: header would lead investigating authorities straight to your door.
Hotmail was migrated to W2K a couple years ago. They made a pretty big deal of it at the time, as I recall.
It is, however, very similar to a registered trademark of theirs.
- Michael Chaney reports income from Microsoft in the amount of ($500 + FMV of Visual Studio 6 - $35).
- Michael takes a $500 deduction for his donation of the check to charity.
- SwiftView pays $7,000 for the check, of which it deducts $6,500 ($7,000 - $500 FMV of property received) as a charitable contribution.
Michael, then, ends up owing additional taxes in the amount of ((FMV of VS6 - $35) * Michael's marginal tax rate), assuming he actually followed the letter of the law and reported the income.True, but this requires forethought and preplanning, while price stickers can be exchanged on a moment's notice after realizing that there's a $4.99 item three feet away from the $15.99 item in your hand. Also, inspection will reveal barcode tampering whereas an exchanged price sticker could be attributed to employee error.
I understand how self-checkout lines work. I was referring to this part of the article:
On the horizon, the consultants say, is the day when every product is tagged with an RFID, or radio frequency identification chip, instead of a bar code. The chips, which don't have to be scanned, would allow shoppers to leave the store without checking out at all and get the bill on their credit card or store account.
In DC, we still get the unintelligible humanoid rendering.
...*
.....esda*
*...ed.......shayyyyy
*nex....ation
*...ed...ine shayyy gro...*
*nex....ation medica.....enter*
*...ed line shaaaaay gro...*
That's probably now far off the mark. I remember when they put a talking Coke machine in my high school cafeteria back in the mid-80s. I don't remember exactly what it spouted off, but it was something on the order of "Hi, I'm a talking Coke machine! I see you have inserted fifty cents. Please make your selection now. I'm sorry, that item is sold out. Please make your selection now. Thank you for using the Talking Coke Machine. Don't forget your change." Almost immediately, people started putting their hand over the speaker to muffle it. Within the week, it was vandalized with a paper clip and spoke no more.
Still I am old enough to remember when barcodes first came in use. I can't prove it but for me checkout time seems to have increase.
You realize, of course, that the main benefit of POS barcode scanners isn't checkout speed, it's inventory management. Stores now make a single entry in a database for each product on the shelves rather than individually tagging every item. In addition to the labor savings, this also increases the accuracy of pricing and eliminates the old trick of peeling a price sticker off of a cheap item and attaching it to a more expensive item. Also, while retailers still need to take physical inventory periodically, they now have a good estimate at hand year-round. (Allegedly) faster checkouts are just a nice bonus.
Excatly how is this self checkout system going to cope with items without an RFID tag or a broken one?
I don't get the auto-checkout thing. How do they determine who I am when I walk out of the store with my cart full of crap? Sure, they can put RFID on my credit cards, but how do they determine which of the several I carry should be charged? What if I'm carrying a stolen card? How do they distinguish between my cart and the cart pushed by the guy next to me? Are they going to install shielded exit tunnels into which one person at a time is permitted to prevent interference?
Hmmmm. That naked-pc link is interesting:
Insist that your next PC is fully equipped with a legally licensed operating system preinstalled by the dealer. Demand the accompanying CD, and Certificates of Authenticity. Otherwise, who knows what you're leaving yourself open to?
I thought Microsoft gave OEMs incentives (e.g. lower prices) if they didn't distribute Windows CDs with their machines, as part of their effort to stamp out "casual piracy"...
That's because of the inverse theory. Firstborn children tend to be healthier and thus grow taller because a family typically has a fixed pool of money from which to provide for their children. Firstborns get the benefit of that entire pool during their early childhood, but when additional children are born into the family, that pool must then be divided amongst all children in the family, reducing the amount spent on any individual child. Later-born children, then, are more likely to suffer from malnutrition, parental neglect, etc. in their critical early years.
I haven't had to talk to a telemarketer in years as they (or their dialer thingys) are trained to hang up when a machine answers the phone
Most of them are, but I've been getting calls lately from autodialers that play prerecorded messages to my machine, so I occasionally come home to a machine full of "Ummm, hi. This is Bob from Capital Mortgage. I've been reviewing your account and it looks like you're due for a rate reduction... blah blah blah." While I have to confess a certain admiration of the technique of crafting messages so that they sound like they were left by a real humanoid, I don't appreciate them filling up my machine with this crap.
On the bright side, they usually leave an 800 number at the end, so at least I can call them up on their dime to tell whoever answers to go fuck themselves.
I'd rather have an early Cray system. Park it in front of the TV and you can get rid of the Barcalounger.
You work, you get $2.25/hr (or whatever the boss is nice enough to pay you). So in most places, the staff are very dependant on your tips.
Also, don't forget that minimum tax withholding for waiters in the US is calculated on base salary plus a percentage of the waiter's gross sales (used to be 8%; not sure what it is now). This makes that $2.25 even smaller; when I waited tables, 2 weeks of full-time work would net me a $20-$30 paycheck. It also means that if you fail to tip your waiter you're actually costing him money because he's paying tax on income he never receives.
Indeed. The Tropicana in Las Vegas used to have a chicken trained to play tic-tac-toe, with cash prizes for anybody who could beat it. I didn't see it when I was just out there for Defcon though, so maybe the novelty wore thin.
I never checked to see which center mine go to but I'm in Vancouver, WA if anyone knows off the top of their head.
Ummmm...couldn't you just examine the address label on one of your return envelopes?