The ACLU is highly unlikely to get involved in the speech cases organizations like The Fire do. http://www.thefire.org/index.php
The perception that the ACLU will not defend or take "right" cases is grounded in fact, this & their failure to support the 2nd, and their continuing support of government sanctioned racism & sexism has led them to rightly be considered left wing shills.
This might not have gotten investigated at all except for the choice of relays they used: US ARMY Information Center, a US Court Administrative Office, and less importantly a couple corporations with money (Ford, Unisys, Amoco).
Not for spammers: Choosing a US military installation to route your spam through is a good way to get the attention of the federal government.
AOL might have surrendered pop-up ads for the most part, but they have ads attached to every other thing, including scrolling text ads in their chatrooms. Even the "click here to talk to a support" has an ad on it so they can market to you while you get help.
I remember reading somewhere that 80%-90% of web traffic is generated at about 20 sites on the net. If that is actually true (and given how much traffic is sent to places like Yahoo/Google/MSN I believe it's possible) it's plain to see that there will be bottlenecks. Perhaps the data would assist in finding them more quickly and updating those routes.
Municipalities don't want obedience, they want money. The parking-meter scam is but one method.
The scam in my city is "street cleaning days". In the 20 years I've lived here I've seen an actual street cleaning machine on my block only once. Yet up to 60% of the parking spaces will be unavilable on any given day due to street cleaning revenue enhancement. The might as well just issue a parking permit, charge $200 for it and be done with it. It would be cheaper for those of us whom work nights.
The first thing I do when I launch Opera is go to the default folder and "Launch All Pages In This Folder". It loads the 10 sites I use every day all at once. On dialup it would choke if I tried to do that.
When I had dialup I was always trying to load pages in the background while I read another page so that I didn't have to wait. I've always run proxy filters, and when I had dialup I would surf with images off a lot more than I do now.
The SBC Yahoo install CD comes with something called "Broadjump Client". The description of it was close enough for me to call it spyware. The operation of ViewPoint media player bunded with AOL (and a few others they bundle with 9.0 including a full remote root kit) could very well be dubbed spyware *(and the later a trojan).
So if Earthlink bundles something, it doesn't surprise me - several other ISP's are.
Of course, you have to beware of programs that autoupdate as well. Many programs will scan free of it when you first install them, but let them phone home once and you'll see they just delay installing their spyware till later.
For most of the programs that do this, open source alternatives exist. If anything will drive adoption it's going to be malicious closed source code.
TV Turnoff week in the middle of the Stanley Cup Playoffs?? I think NOT! One of the few things left on the TV that a man can enjoy. The rest is pure misandry, propaganda, political correctness, and stories about puppies & celebrities (*same thing).
Perhaps they decided that it would be counter to their interest in selling hardware encryption appliances which do the same thing. Why release software that can do the job of something you can *sell* hardware for?
The government doesn't protect from you fire. They might put you out (later!) if you light up, but you'll pay for any damage, and you certainly won't be protected. Firefighters arrive after the fire starts. You can only protect yourself. The insurance lottery and smoke detectors is how you do so. The fire department... no. They might protect you from a form of flashover if your neighbor burns, but what if you don't have any neighbors and in fact have a carefully tended firebreak, as I do? Should you pay for fire "protection" then?
Many of the communities here charge the business for the expense of putting out the fire. So not only do you pay to have the service if you don't use it, you pay actual cost if you use it as well.
Call in to your CC company, say "I didn't make these charges, blah"... Visa rep sees they're for porn and immediately lets you chargeback. Of course, they don't want to inconvenience the "poor" customer, so they don't invalidate the card. This raises a question: If you didn't make those charges, who did, scumbag?
Back in the early 90's I had a roommate that made a mess of 1-900 sex line calls. Now I'm not one to care as long as they get paid for. So I took the bill to him and asked him "Hey, Dave, did you make these calls?" He looks at it, tells me "No". Okay, I figure the landlady had some people in the house working on our place all week, maybe they did while we were out. This is a pretty substantial bill, more than $500, so I proceed to call each & every one of these companies to dispute the charges. I'm on the phone all morning. Not a problem getting them removed until I get to one that has recorded the entire phone conversation. Dave identifies himself as "Bob" in the call and from the minute or two I heard of it it was a gay incest fantasy line. I tell them, no, I don't recognize the voice, but they still wont remove the charge.
Anyway, band comes over to practice and I'm singing in the PA as Dave walks in. I'm pretty pissed because he lied to me. If he just would have owned up and paid it I would never have told a soul. So I greet Dave over the PA as this: "Bob! Bobby! Bob-a-rino! Bobby Bo Bina Bo! Robert! Robbie Roberto! Hows it hanging?" Everyone in the room knows what is going on, watched him turn beet red. On the downside, he skipped without paying off the rest of the calls so I got stung for around $70. On the plus side, I got a much better roommate a week later.
That is pretty much what happened when Ashcroft was prosecuting cases in Missouri. He would go after small book/video stores. He wasn't going to go after General Motors (who owns a controlling interest in a company that distributes hardcore pay per view material in hotel rooms.) He knew he couldn't win even against the small guys, but he would seize their assets over and over again and hold onto their inventory for a period of time (long enough for them to have to reorder it) to disrupt their business and cost them tons of legal fees till they went bankrupt. He would let them get it back, seize it again... He did eventually bring several of them to trial (and I don't remember him winning though I believe a couple of the stores closed from all of the disruption of their business). Temporary injunctions also work well for business disruption.
I've always thought that this trait in Ashcroft could be put to good use by telling him most spam is advertising pornography and a good portion of it ends up in the in-boxes of kids and teens. Try to get him to go after spammers instead through the back door. Unfortunately that has not happened.
To me it's all kind of silly. Porn wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry with exceptional growth rates if people didn't want it. It also wouldn't be the money maker it is without the internet there to let people shop in relative privacy. It's worked out fantastic for the sellers of sex toys as well, eliminating the barrier to entry for customers that would be averse to buying the double ended... at a retail outlet.
Given his prior history if I hosted a site that sold scat films or beastiality I would probably try to move it off-shore.
The fact that IBM used Computerland as their distrubtion outlet back in 1982 sorta debunks your whole thing about 'biggest computer store chain' and Radio Shack. There were growing retail operations and they weren't generic stores like Rat Shack.
IBM had other reasons. Namely, Radio Shack was directly competing with them in the computer market. From the TRS-80 Models, to Tandy 1000's. Radio Shack had even opened up "Tandy Computer Centers" to distribute PC's directly in competition with IBM. (And at some point later Compaqs were also sold there.)
For IBM not to want someone competing with them to be pitching their products makes perfect sense. So of course IBM will find a different retail outlet.
Some of us hit that point a long time ago. We turn off advertising on the web, we take off/cover up the brand names on products in our homes so we don't have to see the obnoxious logos staring us in the face every day.
It's bad enough I have to deal with billboards polluting the landscape where I drive, but I don't want it in my house. The first thing I did when I bought my truck was to remove the dealership logo sticker and license plate cover logos.
The office supply store sells tape that comes about 20 different colors. For $10 you get a kit to cover up the logo on any common colored product. Silver items are still difficult though.
I think going after the sites that spam loads it's images from is a great way to go after spammers. Most of them use the img src tag with a uniqe ID (usually the email address of the person) to retrieve the images so they know when a person received it. No hit, might have hit a blackhole and they have no way of knowing.
This doesn't appear to be what they are doing though. They appear to be going after the link the person clicks on to buy. Still waste the spammers time, but I can see this getting abused if the system is automated -- or even if it isn't.
A draft letter purportedly circulated by Bill Lockyer to fellow state attorneys general characterizes P2P software as a "dangerous product" and describes the failure of technology makers to warn consumers of those dangers as a deceptive trade practice.
By the standard he is using you could just as easily sue Microsoft for "deceptive trade practices" for enabling P2P networks to distribute files in a LAN or WAN. As a P2P software developer and distributor, we believe you have the ability and responsibility to better educate consumers about these known risks, and to design your software in a manner that minimizes the risks. We view with grave concern reports that at least some P2P software developers may be adding features deliberately designed to hinder law enforcement in its prosecution of crimes using P2P software. Companies that engage in such conduct, and fail to meet the important responsibilities referenced above, harm the interests of consumers in our States.
It is widely recognized that P2P file-sharing software currently is used almost exclusively to disseminate pornography, and to illegally trade copyrighted music, movies, software and video games. File-sharing software also is increasingly becoming a means to disseminate computer worms and viruses.
By the standard this guy is using, every single copy of Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP is an unfair trade practice set up with law enforcement evading equipment (IPSEC, VPN..)and Microsoft (and the Linux Samba team for that matter) have failed to adequately warn people of the dangers.
You could also go after anyone who runs an email server by that standard. I mean, my god man, the SMTP standard doesn't even confirm who you are! Email is dangerous! Tons of people get viruses and worms, they weren't warned when they downloaded the message! Or anyone with an email client that gives access to newsgroups or lets you download files. Or anyone who runs a webserver or an FTP server (the files *could* contain anything!)
Ahh, I love America...Land of the lawsuit.
Would he go away if we put a 200 page disclaimer on bootup?
The legal system only collects damages for a handful of the total number of people who are injured by doctors. Note: I did not say auto accidents, work accidents. I am limiting this to doctors negligence, abuse, and maltreatment.
Those are very real issues. When a routine medical procedure is botched and the result is a lifetime of pain, disability, lost earnings, and severely reduced quality of life/and or loss of life someone has to be held to account. Some things are Monday morning quarterbacking, most things are pretty cut and dry if all of the facts are in.
In all honestly, doctors aren't sued enough for the harm that they do cause. You know why? It's very hard to win, and just like with LEO there is a code of silence about mistakes. Did they happen to leave a few parts behind? Operate on the wrong body part? Nick a disc while they were in there that will cause you lifelong pain? Give you the wrong drug (Happens several thousand times every single day in our hospitals.) or the wrong amount of the drug in question?
That doesn't even get into abuse, which also happens. Patient difficult complaining of pain hitting nurse button over and over again? Take away morphine drip "That will teach him" --. Then we have nursing homes where the elderly are basically warehoused and if they are lucky only neglected. Then we have doctors that simply deny pain management and proper treatment to those with severe injuries or refer them away after taking their cash. Far worse goes on day to day in the health care industry, everything from doctors and nurses shorting patients of drugs to resell/use them themselves. Massive overbilling for procedures that didn't occur and other out and out fraud. Reccommending treatments/test/referrals purely to enrich buddies with no medicinal value whatsoever. There has to be a place to deal with these kinds of problems as well, and quite frankly the criminal system wont do it. That leaves us with the civil courts.
Neither is perfect, and often removing 'spyware' from apps cripples the apps. Spybot S&D has a bad habit of finding spyware in some computer OEM default installs.
That's because some (unnamed because I would rather not deal with their legal staff, they are a major brand.) computer makers OEM OS installs come with: spyware, GUID insertion in emails & browser urls & in certain kinds of documents printed and otherwise, root kits and other hidden remote administration tools, spyware & adware installed at the factory.
Now maybe they did what they did at the FBI's request or some other draconian big brother agency - but it's still damn impolite.
The *FOURTH* time I went through security an agent finally managed to find the source of my problem: An anti-theft tag placed in some obscure fold of the wallet.
As it turns out, the guy at the store responsible for putting the anti-theft tags in things has a reputation for being able to hide them very well.
Many items come from the warehouse with 4-5 tags in them in different places. I bought a bottle of aspirin the other day that not only had them on the underside of the label, it had one on the inside of the box, one on the outside of the box, and one under the cap. Excessive for a mere $3 bottle of aspirin.
This is why professional shoplifters go through the trouble of sewing in foil lined pockets & pouches in their clothing. Once these systems are in place, the security tends to rely on them. It stops some of the amateurs, but professionals can come in and rob the place blind. They never set off an alarm and the first the store is aware of it is when an entire shelf of goods is missing.
The telecom companies are less progressive than any local government. They've made trillions of dollars over the years overcharging for analog lines and are fighting desperately to preserve their monopoly.
I'm from Missouri, home of SBC's (then Southwestern Bell) "We're sorry we invinted several non-existant charges and charged you for years...If you let us keep it we will use it to wire up fiber to the home.." That was 1992-1993? What fiber?
Sorry guys, no fiber here! Either do it, or give the people of Missouri their money back + all the years of interest.
Competitive? Ha. At least the government as slow as it moves can complete a fiber network. The phone company isn't going to get any sympathy here. Hell, SBC hasn't even started! 10 years from now they will still be talking about their "just around the corner" same song and dance and no results.
Okay, SBC -- Show me. Do it. You promised it 10 years ago, I want it hooked up to my house and everyone else in my neighborhood by the end of next month. You want to be competitive? That's competitive. Until then -- save your "unfair playing field" whine. Stealing billions from your customers is a pretty "unlevel" advantage as well.
Re:What about water conservation??
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 1
Grey Water toilet is a great idea until you find out you have a main break in your area and they shut your water off and it will be off for 5-8 days due to weather/whatever excuse.
In which case, the 3-5 gallons in your toilet would have come in handy. (There is, of course, 30-60 gallons in the water heater if it is prolonged...)
So if you want to use a system like that, make sure you set aside some containers filled with fresh water in case of an emergency where your water is off. That being said, grey water toilet is a great idea.
About accents... it occurs to me that some people probably respond poorly to indian accents on the tech-support line for one or more of these three reasons:
1)They are racist. 2)They hear a non-american answer the phone and think that an outsourced employee is less able than a non-outsourced one. 3)They hear a non-american answer the phone and think of the negative economic connotations associated with outsourcing.
4) I can't understand a goddamn word they're saying.
I had a problem getting DSL hooked up with the major telco here, no line sync, hardware problem on telcos end... I called repair & support, they transferred me to India via VoIP. It's not that the guy on the other end was clueless, he may or may not have been, but I had to repeat everything to him 4 times, he had to repeat everything to me 3-4 times just to be able to make out anything. Now it's hard enough to understand some of these accents, but when it's done in a highly compressed format on top of it that is choppy -- and I know that is a bottom line decision -- it's impossible.
The impression this left with me was highly negative. My opinion of the local telco is still in the dumps. My impression of Indian tech support is right up there with Compaq. My impression of VoIP's abilities is now pretty low as well. They had one shot to make that first impression a good one and they blew it.
Slashdot Mirror
The ACLU is highly unlikely to get involved in the speech cases organizations like The Fire do. http://www.thefire.org/index.php
The perception that the ACLU will not defend or take "right" cases is grounded in fact, this & their failure to support the 2nd, and their continuing support of government sanctioned racism & sexism has led them to rightly be considered left wing shills.
This might not have gotten investigated at all except for the choice of relays they used: US ARMY Information Center, a US Court Administrative Office, and less importantly a couple corporations with money (Ford, Unisys, Amoco).
Not for spammers: Choosing a US military installation to route your spam through is a good way to get the attention of the federal government.
AOL might have surrendered pop-up ads for the most part, but they have ads attached to every other thing, including scrolling text ads in their chatrooms. Even the "click here to talk to a support" has an ad on it so they can market to you while you get help.
Example
Of Floating Graphic At Tiger Direct It's apparently a javascript function.
I remember reading somewhere that 80%-90% of web traffic is generated at about 20 sites on the net. If that is actually true (and given how much traffic is sent to places like Yahoo/Google/MSN I believe it's possible) it's plain to see that there will be bottlenecks. Perhaps the data would assist in finding them more quickly and updating those routes.
In another 5 years maybe they will allow people to use a standard newsreader instead of their built in horrible news client.
Municipalities don't want obedience, they want money. The parking-meter scam is but one method.
The scam in my city is "street cleaning days". In the 20 years I've lived here I've seen an actual street cleaning machine on my block only once. Yet up to 60% of the parking spaces will be unavilable on any given day due to street cleaning revenue enhancement. The might as well just issue a parking permit, charge $200 for it and be done with it. It would be cheaper for those of us whom work nights.
The first thing I do when I launch Opera is go to the default folder and "Launch All Pages In This Folder". It loads the 10 sites I use every day all at once. On dialup it would choke if I tried to do that.
When I had dialup I was always trying to load pages in the background while I read another page so that I didn't have to wait. I've always run proxy filters, and when I had dialup I would surf with images off a lot more than I do now.
The SBC Yahoo install CD comes with something called "Broadjump Client". The description of it was close enough for me to call it spyware. The operation of ViewPoint media player bunded with AOL (and a few others they bundle with 9.0 including a full remote root kit) could very well be dubbed spyware *(and the later a trojan).
So if Earthlink bundles something, it doesn't surprise me - several other ISP's are.
Of course, you have to beware of programs that autoupdate as well. Many programs will scan free of it when you first install them, but let them phone home once and you'll see they just delay installing their spyware till later.
For most of the programs that do this, open source alternatives exist. If anything will drive adoption it's going to be malicious closed source code.
and for a major ISP, customer trust is worth more than spyware revenues.
That never stopped AOL.
TV Turnoff week in the middle of the Stanley Cup Playoffs?? I think NOT! One of the few things left on the TV that a man can enjoy. The rest is pure misandry, propaganda, political correctness, and stories about puppies & celebrities (*same thing).
Perhaps they decided that it would be counter to their interest in selling hardware encryption appliances which do the same thing. Why release software that can do the job of something you can *sell* hardware for?
The government doesn't protect from you fire. They might put you out (later!) if you light up, but you'll pay for any damage, and you certainly won't be protected. Firefighters arrive after the fire starts. You can only protect yourself. The insurance lottery and smoke detectors is how you do so. The fire department... no. They might protect you from a form of flashover if your neighbor burns, but what if you don't have any neighbors and in fact have a carefully tended firebreak, as I do? Should you pay for fire "protection" then?
Many of the communities here charge the business for the expense of putting out the fire. So not only do you pay to have the service if you don't use it, you pay actual cost if you use it as well.
Call in to your CC company, say "I didn't make these charges, blah"... Visa rep sees they're for porn and immediately lets you chargeback. Of course, they don't want to inconvenience the "poor" customer, so they don't invalidate the card. This raises a question: If you didn't make those charges, who did, scumbag?
Back in the early 90's I had a roommate that made a mess of 1-900 sex line calls. Now I'm not one to care as long as they get paid for. So I took the bill to him and asked him "Hey, Dave, did you make these calls?" He looks at it, tells me "No". Okay, I figure the landlady had some people in the house working on our place all week, maybe they did while we were out. This is a pretty substantial bill, more than $500, so I proceed to call each & every one of these companies to dispute the charges. I'm on the phone all morning. Not a problem getting them removed until I get to one that has recorded the entire phone conversation. Dave identifies himself as "Bob" in the call and from the minute or two I heard of it it was a gay incest fantasy line.
I tell them, no, I don't recognize the voice, but they still wont remove the charge.
Anyway, band comes over to practice and I'm singing in the PA as Dave walks in. I'm pretty pissed because he lied to me. If he just would have owned up and paid it I would never have told a soul. So I greet Dave over the PA as this: "Bob! Bobby! Bob-a-rino! Bobby Bo Bina Bo! Robert! Robbie Roberto! Hows it hanging?" Everyone in the room knows what is going on, watched him turn beet red. On the downside, he skipped without paying off the rest of the calls so I got stung for around $70. On the plus side, I got a much better roommate a week later.
That is pretty much what happened when Ashcroft was prosecuting cases in Missouri. He would go after small book/video stores. He wasn't going to go after General Motors (who owns a controlling interest in a company that distributes hardcore pay per view material in hotel rooms.) He knew he couldn't win even against the small guys, but he would seize their assets over and over again and hold onto their inventory for a period of time (long enough for them to have to reorder it) to disrupt their business and cost them tons of legal fees till they went bankrupt. He would let them get it back, seize it again... He did eventually bring several of them to trial (and I don't remember him winning though I believe a couple of the stores closed from all of the disruption of their business). Temporary injunctions also work well for business disruption.
... at a retail outlet.
I've always thought that this trait in Ashcroft could be put to good use by telling him most spam is advertising pornography and a good portion of it ends up in the in-boxes of kids and teens. Try to get him to go after spammers instead through the back door. Unfortunately that has not happened.
To me it's all kind of silly. Porn wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry with exceptional growth rates if people didn't want it. It also wouldn't be the money maker it is without the internet there to let people shop in relative privacy. It's worked out fantastic for the sellers of sex toys as well, eliminating the barrier to entry for customers that would be averse to buying the double ended
Given his prior history if I hosted a site that sold scat films or beastiality I would probably try to move it off-shore.
The fact that IBM used Computerland as their distrubtion outlet back in 1982 sorta debunks your whole thing about 'biggest computer store chain' and Radio Shack. There were growing retail operations and they weren't generic stores like Rat Shack.
IBM had other reasons. Namely, Radio Shack was directly competing with them in the computer market. From the TRS-80 Models, to Tandy 1000's. Radio Shack had even opened up "Tandy Computer Centers" to distribute PC's directly in competition with IBM. (And at some point later Compaqs were also sold there.)
For IBM not to want someone competing with them to be pitching their products makes perfect sense. So of course IBM will find a different retail outlet.
Some of us hit that point a long time ago. We turn off advertising on the web, we take off/cover up the brand names on products in our homes so we don't have to see the obnoxious logos staring us in the face every day.
It's bad enough I have to deal with billboards polluting the landscape where I drive, but I don't want it in my house. The first thing I did when I bought my truck was to remove the dealership logo sticker and license plate cover logos.
The office supply store sells tape that comes about 20 different colors. For $10 you get a kit to cover up the logo on any common colored product. Silver items are still difficult though.
The more interesting story about AOL today is this one:
AOL_Crooks
I think going after the sites that spam loads it's images from is a great way to go after spammers. Most of them use the img src tag with a uniqe ID (usually the email address of the person) to retrieve the images so they know when a person received it. No hit, might have hit a blackhole and they have no way of knowing.
This doesn't appear to be what they are doing though. They appear to be going after the link the person clicks on to buy. Still waste the spammers time, but I can see this getting abused if the system is automated -- or even if it isn't.
A draft letter purportedly circulated by Bill Lockyer to fellow state attorneys general characterizes P2P software as a "dangerous product" and describes the failure of technology makers to warn consumers of those dangers as a deceptive trade practice.
By the standard he is using you could just as easily sue Microsoft for "deceptive trade practices" for enabling P2P networks to distribute files in a LAN or WAN. As a P2P software developer and distributor, we believe you have the ability and responsibility to better educate consumers about these known risks, and to design your software in a manner that minimizes the risks. We view with grave concern reports that at least some P2P software developers may be adding features deliberately designed to hinder law enforcement in its prosecution of crimes using P2P software. Companies that engage in such conduct, and fail to meet the important responsibilities referenced above, harm the interests of consumers in our States.
It is widely recognized that P2P file-sharing software currently is used almost exclusively to disseminate pornography, and to illegally trade copyrighted music, movies, software and video games. File-sharing software also is increasingly becoming a means to disseminate computer worms and viruses.
By the standard this guy is using, every single copy of Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP is an unfair trade practice set up with law enforcement evading equipment (IPSEC, VPN..)and Microsoft (and the Linux Samba team for that matter) have failed to adequately warn people of the dangers.
You could also go after anyone who runs an email server by that standard. I mean, my god man, the SMTP standard doesn't even confirm who you are! Email is dangerous! Tons of people get viruses and worms, they weren't warned when they downloaded the message! Or anyone with an email client that gives access to newsgroups or lets you download files. Or anyone who runs a webserver or an FTP server (the files *could* contain anything!)
Ahh, I love America...Land of the lawsuit.
Would he go away if we put a 200 page disclaimer on bootup?
The legal system only collects damages for a handful of the total number of people who are injured by doctors. Note: I did not say auto accidents, work accidents. I am limiting this to doctors negligence, abuse, and maltreatment.
Those are very real issues. When a routine medical procedure is botched and the result is a lifetime of pain, disability, lost earnings, and severely reduced quality of life/and or loss of life someone has to be held to account. Some things are Monday morning quarterbacking, most things are pretty cut and dry if all of the facts are in.
In all honestly, doctors aren't sued enough for the harm that they do cause. You know why? It's very hard to win, and just like with LEO there is a code of silence about mistakes. Did they happen to leave a few parts behind? Operate on the wrong body part? Nick a disc while they were in there that will cause you lifelong pain? Give you the wrong drug (Happens several thousand times every single day in our hospitals.) or the wrong amount of the drug in question?
That doesn't even get into abuse, which also happens. Patient difficult complaining of pain hitting nurse button over and over again? Take away morphine drip "That will teach him" --. Then we have nursing homes where the elderly are basically warehoused and if they are lucky only neglected. Then we have doctors that simply deny pain management and proper treatment to those with severe injuries or refer them away after taking their cash. Far worse goes on day to day in the health care industry, everything from doctors and nurses shorting patients of drugs to resell/use them themselves. Massive overbilling for procedures that didn't occur and other out and out fraud. Reccommending treatments/test/referrals purely to enrich buddies with no medicinal value whatsoever. There has to be a place to deal with these kinds of problems as well, and quite frankly the criminal system wont do it. That leaves us with the civil courts.
Neither is perfect, and often removing 'spyware' from apps cripples the apps. Spybot S&D has a bad habit of finding spyware in some computer OEM default installs.
That's because some (unnamed because I would rather not deal with their legal staff, they are a major brand.) computer makers OEM OS installs come with: spyware, GUID insertion in emails & browser urls & in certain kinds of documents printed and otherwise, root kits and other hidden remote administration tools, spyware & adware installed at the factory.
Now maybe they did what they did at the FBI's request or some other draconian big brother agency - but it's still damn impolite.
The *FOURTH* time I went through security an agent finally managed to find the source of my problem: An anti-theft tag placed in some obscure fold of the wallet.
As it turns out, the guy at the store responsible for putting the anti-theft tags in things has a reputation for being able to hide them very well.
Many items come from the warehouse with 4-5 tags in them in different places. I bought a bottle of aspirin the other day that not only had them on the underside of the label, it had one on the inside of the box, one on the outside of the box, and one under the cap. Excessive for a mere $3 bottle of aspirin.
This is why professional shoplifters go through the trouble of sewing in foil lined pockets & pouches in their clothing. Once these systems are in place, the security tends to rely on them. It stops some of the amateurs, but professionals can come in and rob the place blind. They never set off an alarm and the first the store is aware of it is when an entire shelf of goods is missing.
The telecom companies are less progressive than any local government. They've made trillions of dollars over the years overcharging for analog lines and are fighting desperately to preserve their monopoly.
I'm from Missouri, home of SBC's (then Southwestern Bell) "We're sorry we invinted several non-existant charges and charged you for years...If you let us keep it we will use it to wire up fiber to the home.." That was 1992-1993? What fiber?
Sorry guys, no fiber here! Either do it, or give the people of Missouri their money back + all the years of interest.
Competitive? Ha. At least the government as slow as it moves can complete a fiber network. The phone company isn't going to get any sympathy here. Hell, SBC hasn't even started! 10 years from now they will still be talking about their "just around the corner" same song and dance and no results.
Okay, SBC -- Show me. Do it. You promised it 10 years ago, I want it hooked up to my house and everyone else in my neighborhood by the end of next month. You want to be competitive? That's competitive. Until then -- save your "unfair playing field" whine. Stealing billions from your customers is a pretty "unlevel" advantage as well.
Grey Water toilet is a great idea until you find out you have a main break in your area and they shut your water off and it will be off for 5-8 days due to weather/whatever excuse.
In which case, the 3-5 gallons in your toilet would have come in handy. (There is, of course, 30-60 gallons in the water heater if it is prolonged...)
So if you want to use a system like that, make sure you set aside some containers filled with fresh water in case of an emergency where your water is off. That being said, grey water toilet is a great idea.
About accents... it occurs to me that some people probably respond poorly to indian accents on the tech-support line for one or more of these three reasons:
1)They are racist.
2)They hear a non-american answer the phone and think that an outsourced employee is less able than a non-outsourced one.
3)They hear a non-american answer the phone and think of the negative economic connotations associated with outsourcing.
4) I can't understand a goddamn word they're saying.
I had a problem getting DSL hooked up with the major telco here, no line sync, hardware problem on telcos end... I called repair & support, they transferred me to India via VoIP. It's not that the guy on the other end was clueless, he may or may not have been, but I had to repeat everything to him 4 times, he had to repeat everything to me 3-4 times just to be able to make out anything. Now it's hard enough to understand some of these accents, but when it's done in a highly compressed format on top of it that is choppy -- and I know that is a bottom line decision -- it's impossible.
The impression this left with me was highly negative. My opinion of the local telco is still in the dumps. My impression of Indian tech support is right up there with Compaq. My impression of VoIP's abilities is now pretty low as well. They had one shot to make that first impression a good one and they blew it.