How quickly will all of these vendors conform to Earthlink's new technology and make the needed changes in their automated systems?
Why should they bother? I don't see any "Here's how to send to Earthlink" RFC. Suppose I order something online and request an email confirmation, delivery status, etc. and then I reject all those messages. Whose fault is that. The business? NO! They sent the message as requested. Making matters worse I may in one step be requesting a receipt from the business and delivery updates from a separate shipping company. Of course people will most likely start bitching at the company - "where's my receipt?" and rejecting those responses as well.
I hate spam, too (I reject 55% of general inbound mail to my server) but I don't think this is the ultimate solution.
The answer to solving SPAM resides in the current mechanisms used for the actual transmission and delivery
Here, here! If the biggies (Earthlink, AOL, Hotmail, MSN, etc.) enforced best practices, for example reject all mail where the EHLO is not FQDN, resolvable and the primary name of the sending machine (per the RFCs) and verified by DNS check to match the connecting IP there would be a massive cleanup of misconfigured mailservers and the rest of us could add the same rejections. This has to be done by the big guys. Unfortunately operators of smaller domains have no clout in requesting repair of BigCo's screwed up server but if lots of their mail got rejected they would fix the problems (marketing or the CEO would make sure of it).
Strict adherance to best practices would go a long way toward denying the vermin the dark hiding places they crave and force them into the light where they can be squashed.
Probably because you don't have screaming customers. It's one thing to filter mail for you or a small group of understanding people. It's quite another to deal with a large customer base.
One batch wants all the newsletters from {fill in favorite hobby/group} but that mass mailer is blacklisted because they got an unscrubbed list from an unrelated client.
Meanwhile the small business person is afraid that they really might miss the "BIG $1,000,000 ORDER!!!"
A friend of mine is researching anti-spam for her company. Of course the PHBs require no false positives, quarantine everything evil for review, customize on a per user basis, etc. Outsourcing this to an ASP will probably cost them $15k+/year.
What is AOL rejecting? Something like 1 billion messages every day and that only represents a fraction of the spam they get. Even a false positive of 1 per thousand rejects means 1,000,000 legit emails rejected every day. They have to be very careful.
It's way easier blaming the spammers than explaining why you rejected the legit message a customer/boss needed.
Then again look at the source...big companies who don't believe the RFCs apply to them anyway (postmaster is a required address that must go to a live person not an autoresponder but just try to reach postmaster at aol/hotmail/yahoo).
Check your local area - I'm quite happy with my local ISP, lmi.net. They are very geek friendly (run a server? no problem. NAT? we don't care. Blocked ports? no. Static IP? that's all we offer...) but without customers the locals will disappear.
If you don't have a local ISP that meets your needs try Pair (pair.com host of Tom's Hardware, Perl Review, etc.) or Hurricane Electric (he.net). I don't use either but have heard some good comments about both.
One thing that the big ISPs could do is exert technical pressure to help deny spammers the ability to hide. I would love to see them reject all mail in which the HELO greeting is not fully qualified and resolvable (as required by the RFCs). Same thing everywhere else a domain appears in an SMTP conversation. This would force a mass cleanup of incorrectly configured mailservers and I would be able once again to include that as a requirement on my server.
Although perhaps exceeding the requirements of the RFCs, they might also consider refusing mail if the HELO/EHLO does not resolve back to the connecting IP.
In addition, they could publish via DNS info records or ?? the IPs of all their outbound mail servers (no MX won't work - that's only for inbound mail). It would be great to be able to bounce all mail "from" someone at yahoo/hotmail/aol/etc. unless the connection came from a mailserver associated with that email address (sure, for some people the mail may have been legitimately relayed before arriving at their site but that has never been the case for my servers).
These issues have been so widely discussed on Slashdot that you should have been able to follow a few of the links and do somesearch. For privacy/copyright/patent/piracy issues start reading through and following links from this starter list:
Before running off to change everything how about just getting people to follow the rules we have.
For example one requirement of the SMTP RFCs is that everywhere a domain appears in an SMTP conversation it must be fully qualified AND it must resolve. Unfortunately that requirement is rather widely ignored. Just set your mailserver to reject EHLO/HELO greetings that don't conform and you will bounce lots of spam as well as tons of legit email.
Like the cockroaches they are, spammers rely on hiding in shadows. If legit mail-server operators stuck to the RFCs detecting, filtering and tracking the shady ones out would be easier.
No, it's not perfect, but at least I could do things like check the EHLO against the connecting IP to see if the other server is lying.
I would be absolutely delighted if AOL, Earthlink, Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN and other large mail handlers started being very RFC picky in what they allow. This would force a mass cleanup of non-compliant servers and would make my job a lot easier.
...you're on the right track. It appears you have learned the first lessons, grasshopper. You have apparently avoided the siren call of every consumer good well enough to save some money and you have started young. It is tough to overestimate the value of both of those.
My wife and several friends are fans of Rob Black (formerly on CNET radio until they ceased broadcast operations). I started to recommend some books but then noticed all of the ones I planned to mention plus many more were on his book list.
Start with "Beat the Street". Take a look at "Rich Dad, Poor Dad".
If you want something really chewy read "Intelligent Investor" - a classic but a dense and technical read.
In a former job we totally hammered an app on our internal lan and got many times the requests rate we would need in the real world.
Fat, dumb and happy we figured that the real world couldn't hammer us as hard as we could internally. Wrong! Slow connections require maintaining connection resources much longer than on an internal network where the response can be created and dispensed with almost instantly.
Maintaining all those simultaneous connections depleted our resources and the app went into full meltdown mere seconds after being released on the public servers.
We beat a hasty retreat to the old code, licked our wounds, and learned a valuable lesson.
I'm sick of all this puffery like domestic engineer (housewife), sanitation technician (garbageman), administrative assistant (secretary).
According to dictionary.com a system is "A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole." Sounds pretty accurate and all-encompasing to me.
If you can't be proud of the work you do without changing its name you have a lot bigger problems than your job title.
You mention that you are both working long hours. Do a detailed analysis of your post-child finances and compare that with your wants/needs. You may find that having one of you stay home is quite viable.
I remember watching a show where they had a couple where both parents worked - I think one even had two jobs. They got on that treadmill and didn't think they could stop and still cover their expenses.
When an expert reviewed the situation they found that she could quit. The IRS was taking a huge chunk of the incremental income and all the extra expenses made necessary by both of them working (more car usage, clothing expense, child care, housekeeping, eating out, etc.) ate what was left.
The wife on that show broke down in tears - both in joy that she could finally stay home with their kid like she wanted and anger/sadness that they hadn't known that she could have all along.
This all depends on you and your wife's wants and needs of course. Just don't assume you both have to work to make ends meet.
Congrats and kudos on getting that little tax-deduction cranked out just before the Dec 31 deadline (you get the deduction for the whole year). I'm hoping my wife and I will be in a similar situation soon so I'm keeping an eye on the advice.
I first read about this in "Science Magazine" but in that article they were using cow manure and at times the farmer was making nearly as much from the electricity as from the milk. You can search on Google but here's one article
IANAL. That being said, In California, section 498 of the Penal Code makes theft of utility services illegal. Whether the law would apply in an individual case seems to depend on lots of things (who owns the router/bridge, who knew about the access, "intent", etc.) but it appears that you could get into criminal trouble.
I used to work at a campus police department. We had regular problems with a street-person cranking up his boom-box in a campus parking structure late at night and annoying all the neighbors. After numberous warnings the officers just started arresting him for theft of electricity for plugging into the campus owned outlet in the structure. No, it wasn't locked - it is just an outlet. That doesn't make it legal to run a cord from it over to your apartment.
Another consideration - what if you use an "open" wireless point. Would you be offended to find the owner of that access point was logging all your traffic and using it for whatever purpose he chose? You "plugged" into someone else's network so I don't think you have any expectation of privacy.
Here's the law (partial - there's lots more boring stuff) on theft of utilities. (Yes, telecommunication is included in the definition of utility):
Any person who, with intent to obtain for himself or herself utility services without paying the full lawful charge therefor, or with intent to enable another person to do so, or with intent to deprive any utility of any part of the full lawful charge for utility services it provides, commits, authorizes, solicits, aids, or abets any of the following shall be guilty of a misdemeanor:
(1) Diverts or causes to be diverted utility services, by any means whatsoever.
(2) Prevents any utility meter, or other device used in determining the charge for utility services, from accurately performing its measuring function by tampering or by any other means.
(3) Tampers with any property owned by or used by the utility to provide utility services.
(4) Makes or causes to be made any connection with or reconnection with property owned or used by the utility to provide utility services without the authorization or consent of the utility.
(5) Uses or receives the direct benefit of all or a portion of utility services with knowledge or reason to believe that the diversion, tampering, or unauthorized connection existed at the time of that use, or that the use or receipt was otherwise without the authorization or consent of the utility.
(c) In any prosecution under this section, the presence of any of the following objects, circumstances, or conditions on premises controlled by the customer or by the person using or receiving the direct benefit of all or a portion of utility services obtained in violation of this section shall permit an inference that the customer or person intended to and did violate this section:
(1) Any instrument, apparatus, or device primarily designed to be used to obtain utility services without paying the full lawful charge therefor.
(2) Any meter that has been altered, tampered with, or bypassed so as to cause no measurement or inaccurate measurement of utility services.
I have a couple of the PALight flashlights (blue and white). They are nice due to the very dim always-on setting so they can be found in the dark. They also run on 9V batteries which is ideal for me since once a year I go around and change the 9V batteries in my smoke detectors, water alarm, alarm-clock backup, etc. The batteries still have substantial life left and the PALlight about the only place I can use them. Of course the batteries last so long that it's almost impossible to use up even my used batteries. The PALlights also feature a couple of brightness modes and a strobe mode.
For a head lamp I use the Princeton-TEK 3led light (stays in my networking bag for peering behind computers under desks) but if I were to buy today I would get the Zipka since it fits in a tiny space with not in use.
I've kept a white photon micro-light on my keyring for years but there are many acceptable alternative keychain lights now.
I'm not sure what was being asked or what the poster means by "legal". Sure, it lots of places spam is legal (for now). In those where it is illegal I don't believe that somehow getting an email from a third party without any agreement tracable back to the owner of the email makes it legal.
If the company is asking for people to voluntarily submit their own email address then it's a different story.
Of course as the owner of a few domains I can create email addresses at will and could scam the hell out of this on behalf of my local school.
Note, the privacy policy mentions special rules for children under 13 which is about the age of the typical 8th grader. Coincidence?
Where I live in California I don't need to worry about the water heater freezing. When I bought the place the furnace was not working well and even without insulation I rarely ever used the furnace (of course I also don't tend to get cold so even though it got as low as 48F at night I was OK). Now that I'm married that's not an option but with the insulation the house rarely gets down to 60 even though we don't use the heater at night (and rarely during the day).
I'm interested in the newer style instant water heaters like the Takagi or Noritake but I would need bigger gas lines and don't want to rip out the concrete garage floor just for that.
I will change the water heater soon but the new ones don't fit in the space (all that insulation makes them bigger).
The laundry equipment did just die so we switched from electric to gas dryer and got a front-load washer. That has had a noticible impact on the utility bill.
I don't accept that argument. It's the veil behind which every slimy company hides: things we want do do we do - things we don't want to do are "technologically difficult/expensive/impossible/etc."
If Sprint accepts inserts then they need to accept deletes (unless the person in question is independently a Sprint contact but that's still easy to maintain). We're not talking about customers and billing info - we're talking about spam lists.
If it's "too hard" to get me back off the spam list then DON'T PUT ME THE HELL ON IT!
You may be interested in How Buildings Learn - it's about how buildings are altered and adapt to changes (new occupants, new uses, new environment, new technology) over time.
Yeah, I had that crazy idea when I built my house, too. I'd fix it up and that would be that. It just ain't going to happen.
My place is a plain old post-war home that is about 55 years old and is structurally fine but I have had to do many upgrades to it. With maintenance it should last a very long time but at some point it will probably be more economical to flatten it and build something new.
The fact is that tastes and technology change. When I moved in the place had knob and tube wiring and no insulation at all. I rewired (hint: use 20 amp, not 15, and run plenty of circuits - I have every one of my 7 outlets in the kitchen on its own breaker - no problem with overloads here). I had insulation put in. The plumbing was updated to copper years before I moved in.
At some point I will need a new furnace (40+ years old) and a new water heater (16+ years old) and will look into the new energy-efficient technology for those.
The point is that the house was pretty much state-of-the art when built but as things wear out or technology changes then the place gets upgraded to newer standards. What's next? Who knows? I could have pulled lots of cat 5 and then wanted cat 6 or fiber. A friend did a full network wiring during a remodel and never used it - by the time she was done she and her husband had switched to wireless. Even my nice wiring upgrade may become obsolete with DC feeds and smart controls. Someday I may be using fuel cells and heating the place with the waste heat. I don't know. Stonehenge has lasted a long time but it doesn't have any modern upgrades.
Enjoy your house. Pick your battles^h^h^h^h^h^h^h upgrades. Don't drive yourself crazy pursuing perfection.
"Arent said her bill's language could use some fine-tuning, included (sic) providing e-mailers reasonable time to comply with requests for removal."
It seems to me that in this connected electronic world the maximum "reasonable time" for removal would be the amount of time it takes to add someone.
If you plan to share the data with your "partners" then you should be damn certain that you have a mechanism in place to effect removals from all associated databases just as fast.
This would of course only apply to time of message origination - you can't unregister on Monday and then sue on Tuesday for receiving a mail sent on Sunday but stuck in an intermediate server.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should they bother? I don't see any "Here's how to send to Earthlink" RFC. Suppose I order something online and request an email confirmation, delivery status, etc. and then I reject all those messages. Whose fault is that. The business? NO! They sent the message as requested. Making matters worse I may in one step be requesting a receipt from the business and delivery updates from a separate shipping company. Of course people will most likely start bitching at the company - "where's my receipt?" and rejecting those responses as well.
I hate spam, too (I reject 55% of general inbound mail to my server) but I don't think this is the ultimate solution.
The answer to solving SPAM resides in the current mechanisms used for the actual transmission and delivery
Here, here! If the biggies (Earthlink, AOL, Hotmail, MSN, etc.) enforced best practices, for example reject all mail where the EHLO is not FQDN, resolvable and the primary name of the sending machine (per the RFCs) and verified by DNS check to match the connecting IP there would be a massive cleanup of misconfigured mailservers and the rest of us could add the same rejections. This has to be done by the big guys. Unfortunately operators of smaller domains have no clout in requesting repair of BigCo's screwed up server but if lots of their mail got rejected they would fix the problems (marketing or the CEO would make sure of it).
Strict adherance to best practices would go a long way toward denying the vermin the dark hiding places they crave and force them into the light where they can be squashed.
Since you want us to use Google for you, how about the top sponsored link: http://www.lightwedge.com/
It's a flat LED illuminated sheet you lay on the page you are reading so the light doesn't shine on your partner.
Probably because you don't have screaming customers. It's one thing to filter mail for you or a small group of understanding people. It's quite another to deal with a large customer base.
One batch wants all the newsletters from {fill in favorite hobby/group} but that mass mailer is blacklisted because they got an unscrubbed list from an unrelated client.
Meanwhile the small business person is afraid that they really might miss the "BIG $1,000,000 ORDER!!!"
A friend of mine is researching anti-spam for her company. Of course the PHBs require no false positives, quarantine everything evil for review, customize on a per user basis, etc. Outsourcing this to an ASP will probably cost them $15k+/year.
What is AOL rejecting? Something like 1 billion messages every day and that only represents a fraction of the spam they get. Even a false positive of 1 per thousand rejects means 1,000,000 legit emails rejected every day. They have to be very careful.
It's way easier blaming the spammers than explaining why you rejected the legit message a customer/boss needed.
Then again look at the source...big companies who don't believe the RFCs apply to them anyway (postmaster is a required address that must go to a live person not an autoresponder but just try to reach postmaster at aol/hotmail/yahoo).
Check your local area - I'm quite happy with my local ISP, lmi.net. They are very geek friendly (run a server? no problem. NAT? we don't care. Blocked ports? no. Static IP? that's all we offer...) but without customers the locals will disappear.
If you don't have a local ISP that meets your needs try Pair (pair.com host of Tom's Hardware, Perl Review, etc.) or Hurricane Electric (he.net). I don't use either but have heard some good comments about both.
One thing that the big ISPs could do is exert technical pressure to help deny spammers the ability to hide. I would love to see them reject all mail in which the HELO greeting is not fully qualified and resolvable (as required by the RFCs). Same thing everywhere else a domain appears in an SMTP conversation. This would force a mass cleanup of incorrectly configured mailservers and I would be able once again to include that as a requirement on my server.
Although perhaps exceeding the requirements of the RFCs, they might also consider refusing mail if the HELO/EHLO does not resolve back to the connecting IP.
In addition, they could publish via DNS info records or ?? the IPs of all their outbound mail servers (no MX won't work - that's only for inbound mail). It would be great to be able to bounce all mail "from" someone at yahoo/hotmail/aol/etc. unless the connection came from a mailserver associated with that email address (sure, for some people the mail may have been legitimately relayed before arriving at their site but that has never been the case for my servers).
These issues have been so widely discussed on Slashdot that you should have been able to follow a few of the links and do somesearch. For privacy/copyright/patent/piracy issues start reading through and following links from this starter list:
EFF
Lawrence Lessig
EPIC
Consumer's Union
Forbes (search for articles on copyright, patents, or intellectual property
Eldred
Before running off to change everything how about just getting people to follow the rules we have.
For example one requirement of the SMTP RFCs is that everywhere a domain appears in an SMTP conversation it must be fully qualified AND it must resolve. Unfortunately that requirement is rather widely ignored. Just set your mailserver to reject EHLO/HELO greetings that don't conform and you will bounce lots of spam as well as tons of legit email.
Like the cockroaches they are, spammers rely on hiding in shadows. If legit mail-server operators stuck to the RFCs detecting, filtering and tracking the shady ones out would be easier.
No, it's not perfect, but at least I could do things like check the EHLO against the connecting IP to see if the other server is lying.
I would be absolutely delighted if AOL, Earthlink, Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN and other large mail handlers started being very RFC picky in what they allow. This would force a mass cleanup of non-compliant servers and would make my job a lot easier.
Forgot this one from my original post: the Peep War strategy game.
...you're on the right track. It appears you have learned the first lessons, grasshopper. You have apparently avoided the siren call of every consumer good well enough to save some money and you have started young. It is tough to overestimate the value of both of those.
My wife and several friends are fans of Rob Black (formerly on CNET radio until they ceased broadcast operations). I started to recommend some books but then noticed all of the ones I planned to mention plus many more were on his book list.
Start with "Beat the Street". Take a look at "Rich Dad, Poor Dad".
If you want something really chewy read "Intelligent Investor" - a classic but a dense and technical read.
Corning is going to make glass clear
Chevron is going to make gasoline inflammable
and
Debeers is going to make diamonds hard.
Pretty keen of Novell to jump in and "make" Linux what it already is.
In a former job we totally hammered an app on our internal lan and got many times the requests rate we would need in the real world.
Fat, dumb and happy we figured that the real world couldn't hammer us as hard as we could internally. Wrong! Slow connections require maintaining connection resources much longer than on an internal network where the response can be created and dispensed with almost instantly.
Maintaining all those simultaneous connections depleted our resources and the app went into full meltdown mere seconds after being released on the public servers.
We beat a hasty retreat to the old code, licked our wounds, and learned a valuable lesson.
Then I would have a lot bigger problems than my job title.
System Administrator.
I'm sick of all this puffery like domestic engineer (housewife), sanitation technician (garbageman), administrative assistant (secretary).
According to dictionary.com a system is "A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole." Sounds pretty accurate and all-encompasing to me.
If you can't be proud of the work you do without changing its name you have a lot bigger problems than your job title.
You mention that you are both working long hours. Do a detailed analysis of your post-child finances and compare that with your wants/needs. You may find that having one of you stay home is quite viable.
I remember watching a show where they had a couple where both parents worked - I think one even had two jobs. They got on that treadmill and didn't think they could stop and still cover their expenses.
When an expert reviewed the situation they found that she could quit. The IRS was taking a huge chunk of the incremental income and all the extra expenses made necessary by both of them working (more car usage, clothing expense, child care, housekeeping, eating out, etc.) ate what was left.
The wife on that show broke down in tears - both in joy that she could finally stay home with their kid like she wanted and anger/sadness that they hadn't known that she could have all along.
This all depends on you and your wife's wants and needs of course. Just don't assume you both have to work to make ends meet.
Congrats and kudos on getting that little tax-deduction cranked out just before the Dec 31 deadline (you get the deduction for the whole year). I'm hoping my wife and I will be in a similar situation soon so I'm keeping an eye on the advice.
I first read about this in "Science Magazine" but in that article they were using cow manure and at times the farmer was making nearly as much from the electricity as from the milk. You can search on Google but here's one article
IANAL. That being said, In California, section 498 of the Penal Code makes theft of utility services illegal. Whether the law would apply in an individual case seems to depend on lots of things (who owns the router/bridge, who knew about the access, "intent", etc.) but it appears that you could get into criminal trouble.
I used to work at a campus police department. We had regular problems with a street-person cranking up his boom-box in a campus parking structure late at night and annoying all the neighbors. After numberous warnings the officers just started arresting him for theft of electricity for plugging into the campus owned outlet in the structure. No, it wasn't locked - it is just an outlet. That doesn't make it legal to run a cord from it over to your apartment.
Another consideration - what if you use an "open" wireless point. Would you be offended to find the owner of that access point was logging all your traffic and using it for whatever purpose he chose? You "plugged" into someone else's network so I don't think you have any expectation of privacy.
Here's the law (partial - there's lots more boring stuff) on theft of utilities. (Yes, telecommunication is included in the definition of utility):
Any person who, with intent to obtain for himself or herself
utility services without paying the full lawful charge therefor, or
with intent to enable another person to do so, or with intent to
deprive any utility of any part of the full lawful charge for utility
services it provides, commits, authorizes, solicits, aids, or abets
any of the following shall be guilty of a misdemeanor:
(1) Diverts or causes to be diverted utility services, by any
means whatsoever.
(2) Prevents any utility meter, or other device used in
determining the charge for utility services, from accurately
performing its measuring function by tampering or by any other means.
(3) Tampers with any property owned by or used by the utility to
provide utility services.
(4) Makes or causes to be made any connection with or reconnection
with property owned or used by the utility to provide utility
services without the authorization or consent of the utility.
(5) Uses or receives the direct benefit of all or a portion of
utility services with knowledge or reason to believe that the
diversion, tampering, or unauthorized connection existed at the time
of that use, or that the use or receipt was otherwise without the
authorization or consent of the utility.
(c) In any prosecution under this section, the presence of any of
the following objects, circumstances, or conditions on premises
controlled by the customer or by the person using or receiving the
direct benefit of all or a portion of utility services obtained in
violation of this section shall permit an inference that the customer
or person intended to and did violate this section:
(1) Any instrument, apparatus, or device primarily designed to be
used to obtain utility services without paying the full lawful charge
therefor.
(2) Any meter that has been altered, tampered with, or bypassed so
as to cause no measurement or inaccurate measurement of utility
services.
WOW! /.'s target advertising is brilliant.
As I read this topic on overtime the banner ad has links for:
Time Card/Overtime Calculator Software" to help you track it,
Woodley and McGillivary overtime lawyers and
Edwards and George overtime lawyers to help you sue for it and
Career Builders to help you find a new job when you are done with the lawyers.
Yeah, but you look like a pervert every time you charge the thing :)
I have a couple of the PALight flashlights (blue and white). They are nice due to the very dim always-on setting so they can be found in the dark. They also run on 9V batteries which is ideal for me since once a year I go around and change the 9V batteries in my smoke detectors, water alarm, alarm-clock backup, etc. The batteries still have substantial life left and the PALlight about the only place I can use them. Of course the batteries last so long that it's almost impossible to use up even my used batteries. The PALlights also feature a couple of brightness modes and a strobe mode.
For a head lamp I use the Princeton-TEK 3led light (stays in my networking bag for peering behind computers under desks) but if I were to buy today I would get the Zipka since it fits in a tiny space with not in use.
I've kept a white photon micro-light on my keyring for years but there are many acceptable alternative keychain lights now.
I'm not sure what was being asked or what the poster means by "legal". Sure, it lots of places spam is legal (for now). In those where it is illegal I don't believe that somehow getting an email from a third party without any agreement tracable back to the owner of the email makes it legal.
If the company is asking for people to voluntarily submit their own email address then it's a different story.
Of course as the owner of a few domains I can create email addresses at will and could scam the hell out of this on behalf of my local school.
Note, the privacy policy mentions special rules for children under 13 which is about the age of the typical 8th grader. Coincidence?
Where I live in California I don't need to worry about the water heater freezing. When I bought the place the furnace was not working well and even without insulation I rarely ever used the furnace (of course I also don't tend to get cold so even though it got as low as 48F at night I was OK). Now that I'm married that's not an option but with the insulation the house rarely gets down to 60 even though we don't use the heater at night (and rarely during the day).
I'm interested in the newer style instant water heaters like the Takagi or Noritake but I would need bigger gas lines and don't want to rip out the concrete garage floor just for that.
I will change the water heater soon but the new ones don't fit in the space (all that insulation makes them bigger).
The laundry equipment did just die so we switched from electric to gas dryer and got a front-load washer. That has had a noticible impact on the utility bill.
I don't accept that argument. It's the veil behind which every slimy company hides: things we want do do we do - things we don't want to do are "technologically difficult/expensive/impossible/etc."
If Sprint accepts inserts then they need to accept deletes (unless the person in question is independently a Sprint contact but that's still easy to maintain). We're not talking about customers and billing info - we're talking about spam lists.
If it's "too hard" to get me back off the spam list then DON'T PUT ME THE HELL ON IT!
You may be interested in How Buildings Learn - it's about how buildings are altered and adapt to changes (new occupants, new uses, new environment, new technology) over time.
Yeah, I had that crazy idea when I built my house, too. I'd fix it up and that would be that. It just ain't going to happen.
My place is a plain old post-war home that is about 55 years old and is structurally fine but I have had to do many upgrades to it. With maintenance it should last a very long time but at some point it will probably be more economical to flatten it and build something new.
The fact is that tastes and technology change. When I moved in the place had knob and tube wiring and no insulation at all. I rewired (hint: use 20 amp, not 15, and run plenty of circuits - I have every one of my 7 outlets in the kitchen on its own breaker - no problem with overloads here). I had insulation put in. The plumbing was updated to copper years before I moved in.
At some point I will need a new furnace (40+ years old) and a new water heater (16+ years old) and will look into the new energy-efficient technology for those.
The point is that the house was pretty much state-of-the art when built but as things wear out or technology changes then the place gets upgraded to newer standards. What's next? Who knows? I could have pulled lots of cat 5 and then wanted cat 6 or fiber. A friend did a full network wiring during a remodel and never used it - by the time she was done she and her husband had switched to wireless. Even my nice wiring upgrade may become obsolete with DC feeds and smart controls. Someday I may be using fuel cells and heating the place with the waste heat. I don't know. Stonehenge has lasted a long time but it doesn't have any modern upgrades.
Enjoy your house. Pick your battles^h^h^h^h^h^h^h upgrades. Don't drive yourself crazy pursuing perfection.
"Arent said her bill's language could use some fine-tuning, included (sic) providing e-mailers reasonable time to comply with requests for removal."
It seems to me that in this connected electronic world the maximum "reasonable time" for removal would be the amount of time it takes to add someone.
If you plan to share the data with your "partners" then you should be damn certain that you have a mechanism in place to effect removals from all associated databases just as fast.
This would of course only apply to time of message origination - you can't unregister on Monday and then sue on Tuesday for receiving a mail sent on Sunday but stuck in an intermediate server.