These people are a collection agency, and as such they're exempt from telemarketing call rules. I had a situation with these same people at one point in the past - they were calling my cell phone daily, but with a live person instead of a recording. After telling them to "fuck off" for two weeks, and still getting the calls, I explained that if they continued to call I would start deducting $10 per call from my debt for my phone use and work time, but if they'd stop calling my cell then I might consider starting to pay the debt they were trying to collect. The calls stopped immediately.
BTW - it's exceptionally likely that you phoned them from your cell at some point - that's almost always how they acquire cell numbers. The problem is that they can now propogate that phone number along with all their other records of you. Unless I'm mistaken, that means they can include your cell # when reporting to credit reporting groups... Which would mean that every company with access to your credit record (all current debts and credit sources, etc) will have your cell #.
Here in the US that's the Earned Income Credit. It's possible for a parent of a child to work for roughly minimum wage, total about $16,000 a year income, pay $600 in federal taxes through withholding, then get back $3000.
j
No, "CD Quality" is largely a marketing term that translates as "Gee it sounds really good" and little more.
Why don't you go record a "CD Quality" mp3 or ogg file from an FM broadcast, and let me know if it sounds like a CD, or like an FM broadcast... I'll wait...:^)
I, too, have been bothered by the tendency among listeners as well as hardware/software designers to present "CD Quality" as though it were the Holy Grail of desktop audio. I am right now trying to locate some really clean 96khz or 192khz 24-bit PCM audio sources for use in subjective testing of different formats - CD-equivalent PCM (44khz 16bit) vs MP3 vs Vorbis vs FLAC.
FLAC, btw, supports up to 32bit samples (up to 24 for most software) and up to ~1GHz sampling rate, so using it to store music 'ripped' from a CD or sampled from a DAT soundboard recording is hardly a test of what the format can achieve...
You will probably find, with a little looking, that most cell carriers support retrieval of mail from POP3 (and IMAP) and delivery to the phone.
For example, with T-Mobile in US, I've configured the T-Zones (gprs) service to periodically poll my linux box for POP3 email on a user name I created, and I have my email set to redirect a handful of sources to that account. (important stuff I don't want to wait for) Whenever mail reaches that account, the service messages my cell that I have mail, (includes basic headers) and the built-in browser (WAP, nothing special) lets me retrieve and view it.
For T-Mobile, this will work with about 80% of their current phone models, not needing email support on the handset or "3G" buzzword. (Nokia 3390 and Samsung R225 DON'T support it, lacking even a WAP browser)
I know that the same effect is possible with Nextel and with ATT Wireless (at least their GSM service) and believe it is offered by Verizon and Sprint on their CDMA as well.
You DON'T need a fancy J2ME supporting phone, let alone a laptop or PDA. Those will offer other, more flexible options, but are not required. All you need is the willingness and know-how to look into what the service already offers, and leverage it.
BTW, IIRC the Nextel service also offers a voice reading email aloud, although I doubt it is more than servicable quality on anything but basic messages.
j
disclaimer - I DO sell cell-phones, but am not employed by any of the carriers, so am unlikely to profit in the least if someone reads this and decides they must have this service. I mention T-Mobile because that's the service I currently use, and so am most familiar with.
"...working to keep it close to Cg, but it won't be 100% compatible."
Of course. Just like Hotmail/MSN versus email, MS HTML vs standard HTML, and so on.
Very slick move, marketing-wise. Cg is essentially Nvidia right now, DX9 is anyone who wants to play ball with MS, and of course all the players in the 3D video market do.
So MS takes Cg, remakes it in their own image, adds a few things, twists a few things so they're not quite the same, and rolls it.
Now it's 'part of the operating system', right? And tight into the.net framework it seems. Just like DRM is intended to be.
DX10 will diverge a bit more, probably without offering any significant differences beyond what the hardware adds, I'd bet. But within 2 years, I'd bet that it will not be possible to run a 'modern' 3D game on a machine that doesn't have DRM.
My 8-year-old son was completely introverted at age 2, still didn't speak. His mother (my ex, we'll kindly just identify her as 'the other end of the curve':^) was insistent on identification/diagnosis/testing. After lots of idiocy (cat scans, eegs, genetic testing, etc) he is now doing fairly well on Concerta, a time-release form of Methylphenidate almost identical to Ritalin SR ('sustained release') except it lasts for about 12 hours, whereas SR apparently peters out around 8.
One early assessment claimed he would never learn to speak, and wanted to teach him sign language! He now, at 8, has a better grasp of English grammar and vocabulary than I observe in the average slashdotter. (duck'n'run:^) He was tentatively diagnosed 'severely retarded', Williams Syndrome, and others, but his final diagnosis is officially PDD-NOS. Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified. It basically means he has many characteristics of or similar to Autism, but it isn't classical Autism, or anything else they've bothered to devise a specific name for. His ADHD diagnosis is considered to be subsumed in the PDD-NOS. He is also extremely bright, helped me (really helped) build his computer a year ago, and has installed his own software since he was 6. Investigating strange packets on my firewall last month I found him playing Internet Backgammon, and apparently winning rather often.
That all said, I have a bit to say on the other side of things. I still have daily journals that my second and third grade teachers had to fill out (school decision) and were daily countersigned by my parents and weekly by the school headmaster. I was never diagnosed with anything except being 'gifted'. (IQ tests, for what little I feel they are worth, placed me in the 160's) The journal from 2nd grade has a particularly telling comment that repeats in slight variation - I "had a very good day, only disrupted the class five times"...
I went to a Friend's school (Quaker, south New Jersey, not my family's religion) as a young child in the mid-70s, and whether the staff, the school philosophy, or some other factor was different, they seemed quite willing and able to adapt and deal with me very well.
My son currently attends public school, and they have threatened several times to suspend him for disruption of class, (Special Ed, no less) singing in the cafeteria (!!!) and other similarly ludicrous 'offenses'. If I were financially able to I would pull him out of there in a heartbeat, and either find a suitable environment to foster REAL education, or home school. (home not really an option, as I'm a single father barely eking by right now) Unfortunately I've been unable to leverage payment for this from the school district, and cannot fund it myself.
The upshot is (after all this 'typical' rambling:^) that I see that the Concerta helps him, but I feel that largely it helps him to meet their expectations of him. Yes, he is learning far more effectively now than without the drug, but I strongly believe that the right educational situation could help him far more in the big picture than the drug. Unfortunately the vast majority of educational institutions (and I include universities in this) are not properly oriented nor educated to handle a student who is extremely bright, extremely inquisitive, AND extremely easily bored.
For myself, I was largely a straight-A student until mid-highschool, at which point social/emotional factors caused me to plummet. (I began to realize just how different I was, and was treated) I bear the distinction of being (AFAIK) the only student EVER to fail out of a particular well-respected engineering college TWICE. (no names) Three semesters of college calculus in 5 weeks posed no problem at all. Far simpler coursework, dragged out over 4 months, and I was incapable of staying interested enough to bother.
My personal recommendation, for what it may be worth in your individual situation, is to find a doctor (if yours is not) willing to work with you in assessing non-classroom effects of Ritalin usage in your child. If (as seems frequently the case) it turns out that the drug is counter-productive overall, then try to use the doctor against the school to leverage a better educational environment at their expense, which is often provided for in the special education laws of many states.
I had a school district, whose budget had been voted down for a $52k overage, tell me they were completely terminating my son's special program (at age 5) which suspiciously cost them $49k per year at the time. (one-to-one ABA work 6 hours per day - search for Applied Behavioral Analysis and Ivar Lovaas, or read "Behavioral Intervention for Young Children with Autism" by 'Catherine Maurice') When we arrived at the CST meeting with a lawyer, after demanding that the principal and superintendent attend, we got every single thing we asked for, unquestioned.
I STRONGLY recommend the book "Negotiating the Special Education Maze", which is invaluable for determining what you can potentially achieve when you face/meet/work with a child study team at school. Work together with a professional (doctor and/or teacher) who you trust, and who has the time and interest to really get to know your child, and try to decide what will best serve YOUR child. Then, armed with this plan and some knowledge of the system (IE from the aforementioned book) and possibly a lawyer (I've attended two child study team meetings with a lawyer in tow) set about accomplishing it. Most schools WILL fight you, I suspect because they inherently MUST believe in the system they are a part of, but the system does, more and more of late, have provisions for getting what a 'professional' has deemed the child needs.
Work with someone you trust, decide what your child needs, and never give up fighting for it. Do NOT fight the diagnosis, as that is what gives you leverage with the school, just fight the treatment if you feel it's inappropriate. If your home and financial situations allow, consider the possibility of a well-investigated private school with small classes, or home schooling. My personal feeling is that home schooling, being one-to-one, offers the greatest educational potential, but lacks in developing social skills, and will NOT prepare a student for dealing with the transition to a 'traditional' environment come college.
Above all, make sure that your daughter is always aware of your approval of her as an individual, and of her accomplishments whatever they may be. THAT I honestly feel is the most important factor in raising a child to a well-rounded, intelligent, caring adult.
j
mod me up, mod me down, I don't care - I am not a number!:^)
Few of the first few generations of desktop computers had fans, many didn't have heatsinks. What's the big deal anyway? Everybody bitching about "Apple First" "Apple NOT First", "Apple Invented" yadayadayada. The original statement did NOT claim apple "Invented" heatsinks and such, just pointed out that they were an early and explicitly intended quiet system.
For myself, in the last month I've updated to Zalman power supply and Zalman Athlon cooler, and together with Seagate HD my system is nearly silent. (Geforce3 cooling is loudest, except highest-speed CD/DVD access) Three weeks ago I could (No Lie!) hear my computer from any room in my home. Today I can barely hear it sitting with it next to my knee.
The simple point is that you CAN build a machine which is NOT based on slower, cooler, outdated technology, without feeling like you have a wind-tunnel under your desk. Most ordinary consumers find this fact surprising (they have come to expect noise from their system) and promising. (Few really WANT all the noise)
Anybody wanting a nearly silent system can achieve it WITHOUT necessarily sacrificing speed or power, with a few judicious (and noticably more expensive, but not painfully so) component choices. (Like avoiding/removing Maxtor drives:^)
GSM and CDMA are the current contenders in the US, with VERY few GSM handsets offering analog (AMPS) capability. Verizon and Sprint are CDMA, T-Mobile (nee VoiceStream) is GSM. Cingular and AT&T are currently migrating from TDMA to GSM, I recommend avoiding them in their TDMA markets. (I sell these things, all carriers in the Philadelphia market, where both are currently TDMA, but AT&T migrates next month)
Nextel uses iDEN, standing alone. Good digital voice service, minimal data capabilities right now, but coverage density on par with the others. (mid-atlantic area, at least)
AMPS towers are no longer being maintained/built TTBOMK, but they still provide considerably more coverage geographically in the eastern US (don't know elsewhere) than any of the digital services.
If you can find a GSM/AMPS handset (and a carrier that will support both, or just GSM and emergency use on AMPS) then you will probably be well served. Otherwise look to Verizon's CDMA/AMPS network. Sprint has similar coverage, on a different frequency from Verizon [of course!] but their customer service and support practices are atrocious. (Like often $3 per customer service call, and shutting off service 2-3 days after activation!) If passing a credit check is a problem, see Sprint, otherwise move on.
If multinational roaming is in the cards, GSM is probably the only contender, (check gsmworld.com for lots of info) and more than half of the current T-Mobile handsets handle it. (3 motorola, 2 samsung)
Candidates rarely seem to be held accountable for the actions of their fanatic minions...
I don't know how it works where you live, but here in New Jersey they paper every telephone pole and half the street corners with signs for 2-3 weeks before an election, then leave half of them until they recycle on the spot... (or some prison work-crew cleaning roadside litter collects them)
So I guess we choose a candidate to oppose and send tons of spam in their name, right?:^)
I for one will be filtering and dumping any email with "vote" and "elect" anywhere in the headers.
Perhaps the judge should compel disclosure of the contents of the defendants' hard drives, IE Sprint and their emailing contractor... Seems much more useful than the recipient's drive... j
Actually, it was the OED itself. During its creation (which spanned quite a few decades, iirc) a request was sent out for contributions of supporting quotations, and by far the most prolific contributor was a US surgeon (Dr William Minor) confined to a British asylum for a bout of 'temporary insanity' during which he murdered a total stranger in London. The editors of the OED didn't know, for several years, that this was the case, until one of them arranged to visit the good doctor, and found upon arrival that things were not quite what they had believed...
The book, "The Professor and the Madman" was actually quite an interesting read.
j
Slashdot Mirror
"Our mouse has only one button, so there's no confusion which button you have to press!" ???
Ah, the good old days... [snort]
j
These people are a collection agency, and as such they're exempt from telemarketing call rules. I had a situation with these same people at one point in the past - they were calling my cell phone daily, but with a live person instead of a recording. After telling them to "fuck off" for two weeks, and still getting the calls, I explained that if they continued to call I would start deducting $10 per call from my debt for my phone use and work time, but if they'd stop calling my cell then I might consider starting to pay the debt they were trying to collect. The calls stopped immediately.
BTW - it's exceptionally likely that you phoned them from your cell at some point - that's almost always how they acquire cell numbers. The problem is that they can now propogate that phone number along with all their other records of you. Unless I'm mistaken, that means they can include your cell # when reporting to credit reporting groups... Which would mean that every company with access to your credit record (all current debts and credit sources, etc) will have your cell #.
j
Yep, fantastic. (except for the "For Academy Consideration" banner now and then :)
I WILL be buying the release, but not until the big one in November.
Following the posted 'announcement' link:
"The connection was refused when attempting to contact h21007.www2.hp.com"
So much for HP servers...
j
Here in the US that's the Earned Income Credit. It's possible for a parent of a child to work for roughly minimum wage, total about $16,000 a year income, pay $600 in federal taxes through withholding, then get back $3000. j
Why don't you go record a "CD Quality" mp3 or ogg file from an FM broadcast, and let me know if it sounds like a CD, or like an FM broadcast... I'll wait... :^)
I, too, have been bothered by the tendency among listeners as well as hardware/software designers to present "CD Quality" as though it were the Holy Grail of desktop audio. I am right now trying to locate some really clean 96khz or 192khz 24-bit PCM audio sources for use in subjective testing of different formats - CD-equivalent PCM (44khz 16bit) vs MP3 vs Vorbis vs FLAC.
FLAC, btw, supports up to 32bit samples (up to 24 for most software) and up to ~1GHz sampling rate, so using it to store music 'ripped' from a CD or sampled from a DAT soundboard recording is hardly a test of what the format can achieve...
j
For T-Mobile, this will work with about 80% of their current phone models, not needing email support on the handset or "3G" buzzword. (Nokia 3390 and Samsung R225 DON'T support it, lacking even a WAP browser)
I know that the same effect is possible with Nextel and with ATT Wireless (at least their GSM service) and believe it is offered by Verizon and Sprint on their CDMA as well.
You DON'T need a fancy J2ME supporting phone, let alone a laptop or PDA. Those will offer other, more flexible options, but are not required. All you need is the willingness and know-how to look into what the service already offers, and leverage it.
BTW, IIRC the Nextel service also offers a voice reading email aloud, although I doubt it is more than servicable quality on anything but basic messages.
j
disclaimer - I DO sell cell-phones, but am not employed by any of the carriers, so am unlikely to profit in the least if someone reads this and decides they must have this service. I mention T-Mobile because that's the service I currently use, and so am most familiar with.
Very slick move, marketing-wise. Cg is essentially Nvidia right now, DX9 is anyone who wants to play ball with MS, and of course all the players in the 3D video market do.
So MS takes Cg, remakes it in their own image, adds a few things, twists a few things so they're not quite the same, and rolls it.
Now it's 'part of the operating system', right? And tight into the .net framework it seems. Just like DRM is intended to be.
DX10 will diverge a bit more, probably without offering any significant differences beyond what the hardware adds, I'd bet. But within 2 years, I'd bet that it will not be possible to run a 'modern' 3D game on a machine that doesn't have DRM.
And keep in mind what C# really is...
My 8-year-old son was completely introverted at age 2, still didn't speak. His mother (my ex, we'll kindly just identify her as 'the other end of the curve' :^) was insistent on identification/diagnosis/testing. After lots of idiocy (cat scans, eegs, genetic testing, etc) he is now doing fairly well on Concerta, a time-release form of Methylphenidate almost identical to Ritalin SR ('sustained release') except it lasts for about 12 hours, whereas SR apparently peters out around 8.
One early assessment claimed he would never learn to speak, and wanted to teach him sign language! He now, at 8, has a better grasp of English grammar and vocabulary than I observe in the average slashdotter. (duck'n'run :^) He was tentatively diagnosed 'severely retarded', Williams Syndrome, and others, but his final diagnosis is officially PDD-NOS. Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified. It basically means he has many characteristics of or similar to Autism, but it isn't classical Autism, or anything else they've bothered to devise a specific name for. His ADHD diagnosis is considered to be subsumed in the PDD-NOS. He is also extremely bright, helped me (really helped) build his computer a year ago, and has installed his own software since he was 6. Investigating strange packets on my firewall last month I found him playing Internet Backgammon, and apparently winning rather often.
That all said, I have a bit to say on the other side of things. I still have daily journals that my second and third grade teachers had to fill out (school decision) and were daily countersigned by my parents and weekly by the school headmaster. I was never diagnosed with anything except being 'gifted'. (IQ tests, for what little I feel they are worth, placed me in the 160's) The journal from 2nd grade has a particularly telling comment that repeats in slight variation - I "had a very good day, only disrupted the class five times"...
I went to a Friend's school (Quaker, south New Jersey, not my family's religion) as a young child in the mid-70s, and whether the staff, the school philosophy, or some other factor was different, they seemed quite willing and able to adapt and deal with me very well.
My son currently attends public school, and they have threatened several times to suspend him for disruption of class, (Special Ed, no less) singing in the cafeteria (!!!) and other similarly ludicrous 'offenses'. If I were financially able to I would pull him out of there in a heartbeat, and either find a suitable environment to foster REAL education, or home school. (home not really an option, as I'm a single father barely eking by right now) Unfortunately I've been unable to leverage payment for this from the school district, and cannot fund it myself.
The upshot is (after all this 'typical' rambling :^) that I see that the Concerta helps him, but I feel that largely it helps him to meet their expectations of him. Yes, he is learning far more effectively now than without the drug, but I strongly believe that the right educational situation could help him far more in the big picture than the drug. Unfortunately the vast majority of educational institutions (and I include universities in this) are not properly oriented nor educated to handle a student who is extremely bright, extremely inquisitive, AND extremely easily bored.
For myself, I was largely a straight-A student until mid-highschool, at which point social/emotional factors caused me to plummet. (I began to realize just how different I was, and was treated) I bear the distinction of being (AFAIK) the only student EVER to fail out of a particular well-respected engineering college TWICE. (no names) Three semesters of college calculus in 5 weeks posed no problem at all. Far simpler coursework, dragged out over 4 months, and I was incapable of staying interested enough to bother.
My personal recommendation, for what it may be worth in your individual situation, is to find a doctor (if yours is not) willing to work with you in assessing non-classroom effects of Ritalin usage in your child. If (as seems frequently the case) it turns out that the drug is counter-productive overall, then try to use the doctor against the school to leverage a better educational environment at their expense, which is often provided for in the special education laws of many states.
I had a school district, whose budget had been voted down for a $52k overage, tell me they were completely terminating my son's special program (at age 5) which suspiciously cost them $49k per year at the time. (one-to-one ABA work 6 hours per day - search for Applied Behavioral Analysis and Ivar Lovaas, or read "Behavioral Intervention for Young Children with Autism" by 'Catherine Maurice') When we arrived at the CST meeting with a lawyer, after demanding that the principal and superintendent attend, we got every single thing we asked for, unquestioned.
I STRONGLY recommend the book "Negotiating the Special Education Maze", which is invaluable for determining what you can potentially achieve when you face/meet/work with a child study team at school. Work together with a professional (doctor and/or teacher) who you trust, and who has the time and interest to really get to know your child, and try to decide what will best serve YOUR child. Then, armed with this plan and some knowledge of the system (IE from the aforementioned book) and possibly a lawyer (I've attended two child study team meetings with a lawyer in tow) set about accomplishing it. Most schools WILL fight you, I suspect because they inherently MUST believe in the system they are a part of, but the system does, more and more of late, have provisions for getting what a 'professional' has deemed the child needs.
Work with someone you trust, decide what your child needs, and never give up fighting for it. Do NOT fight the diagnosis, as that is what gives you leverage with the school, just fight the treatment if you feel it's inappropriate. If your home and financial situations allow, consider the possibility of a well-investigated private school with small classes, or home schooling. My personal feeling is that home schooling, being one-to-one, offers the greatest educational potential, but lacks in developing social skills, and will NOT prepare a student for dealing with the transition to a 'traditional' environment come college.
Above all, make sure that your daughter is always aware of your approval of her as an individual, and of her accomplishments whatever they may be. THAT I honestly feel is the most important factor in raising a child to a well-rounded, intelligent, caring adult.
:^)
j
mod me up, mod me down, I don't care - I am not a number!
Few of the first few generations of desktop computers had fans, many didn't have heatsinks. What's the big deal anyway? Everybody bitching about "Apple First" "Apple NOT First", "Apple Invented" yadayadayada. The original statement did NOT claim apple "Invented" heatsinks and such, just pointed out that they were an early and explicitly intended quiet system.
For myself, in the last month I've updated to Zalman power supply and Zalman Athlon cooler, and together with Seagate HD my system is nearly silent. (Geforce3 cooling is loudest, except highest-speed CD/DVD access) Three weeks ago I could (No Lie!) hear my computer from any room in my home. Today I can barely hear it sitting with it next to my knee.
The simple point is that you CAN build a machine which is NOT based on slower, cooler, outdated technology, without feeling like you have a wind-tunnel under your desk. Most ordinary consumers find this fact surprising (they have come to expect noise from their system) and promising. (Few really WANT all the noise)
Anybody wanting a nearly silent system can achieve it WITHOUT necessarily sacrificing speed or power, with a few judicious (and noticably more expensive, but not painfully so) component choices. (Like avoiding/removing Maxtor drives :^)
j
GSM and CDMA are the current contenders in the US, with VERY few GSM handsets offering analog (AMPS) capability. Verizon and Sprint are CDMA, T-Mobile (nee VoiceStream) is GSM. Cingular and AT&T are currently migrating from TDMA to GSM, I recommend avoiding them in their TDMA markets. (I sell these things, all carriers in the Philadelphia market, where both are currently TDMA, but AT&T migrates next month)
Nextel uses iDEN, standing alone. Good digital voice service, minimal data capabilities right now, but coverage density on par with the others. (mid-atlantic area, at least)
AMPS towers are no longer being maintained/built TTBOMK, but they still provide considerably more coverage geographically in the eastern US (don't know elsewhere) than any of the digital services.
If you can find a GSM/AMPS handset (and a carrier that will support both, or just GSM and emergency use on AMPS) then you will probably be well served. Otherwise look to Verizon's CDMA/AMPS network. Sprint has similar coverage, on a different frequency from Verizon [of course!] but their customer service and support practices are atrocious. (Like often $3 per customer service call, and shutting off service 2-3 days after activation!) If passing a credit check is a problem, see Sprint, otherwise move on.
If multinational roaming is in the cards, GSM is probably the only contender, (check gsmworld.com for lots of info) and more than half of the current T-Mobile handsets handle it. (3 motorola, 2 samsung)
j
Candidates rarely seem to be held accountable for the actions of their fanatic minions... :^)
I don't know how it works where you live, but here in New Jersey they paper every telephone pole and half the street corners with signs for 2-3 weeks before an election, then leave half of them until they recycle on the spot... (or some prison work-crew cleaning roadside litter collects them)
So I guess we choose a candidate to oppose and send tons of spam in their name, right?
I for one will be filtering and dumping any email with "vote" and "elect" anywhere in the headers.
j
Can we get Wine working, and run Windows programs on a Microsoft box? :^)
Perhaps the judge should compel disclosure of the contents of the defendants' hard drives, IE Sprint and their emailing contractor... Seems much more useful than the recipient's drive...
j
Actually, it was the OED itself. During its creation (which spanned quite a few decades, iirc) a request was sent out for contributions of supporting quotations, and by far the most prolific contributor was a US surgeon (Dr William Minor) confined to a British asylum for a bout of 'temporary insanity' during which he murdered a total stranger in London. The editors of the OED didn't know, for several years, that this was the case, until one of them arranged to visit the good doctor, and found upon arrival that things were not quite what they had believed... The book, "The Professor and the Madman" was actually quite an interesting read. j