I did something similar awhile back. Router was open, dhcp was normal, no WEP, and all ports but http and the VPN were closed. For http, the server would redirect to an internal page showing a rotating collection of goatse type images and the text "Please go violate somebody else's network."
To actually connect to anything useful, one would first connect to the VPN (with the valid key), giving a much better encryption than WEP and the amusement of having any leechers getting goatse'd
I wonder about businesspeople crossing the border with laptops from work. What if the laptops contain private company information, or even client information. How about trade secrets?
Yes, in most cases agents wouldn't bother with this, but all it takes is once.
Hmmm, it might have interesting results. Maybe you could allow profiled ads so that ads for things you like (electronics, perhaps funny ads) could be shown, while skipping the annoying McDonalds or tampax ads. Better yet, let people share "ad-lists" wherein you can rate the ads and then share them with people of similar mind... some commercials are actually pretty damn funny, enough so that people collect them and send them off to friends online.
I'll just wait until my victims are in front of the billboard advertising Subway burgers and then blow them into kibbles. A few well placed meaty chunkss and perhaps a little arterial spray near the picture of some dude chomping on a sub should add to the overall effect of the ad, no? If that doesn't get your attention, perhaps pile up a few dismembered heads near the ad for McDonalds chicken nuggets.
I'll just wait until my victims are in front of the billboard advertising McDonalds burgers and then blow them into kibbles. A few well placed meaty chunkss and perhaps a little arterial spray near the picture of some dude chomping on a burger should add to the overall effect of the ad, no?
I'm guessing that this generated image was a result of enlargment/viagara ads.
All-in-all, the plants look cooler than the other ads, but I think a video showing the plant 'growing' with spam would be more interesting than the stills
There should perhaps be a master index. You can't just hard-code them into the law because the words themselves change, such as the title of a popular movie (for example, a decade ago "Harry Potter" wouldn't be in such big demand), and unscrupulous webmasters do tend to take advantage of this. Perhaps what they need is a page where you can check your own site to see if it passes various tests, but as a law it's still pretty stupid in itself.
I've running across links to porn when searching for things such as mummification (school project way back when webcrawler was cool, it came up with bondage sites) or searches for popular things such as software or recent movies. It is still very common for unscrupulous websites to farm thousands of common keywords in order to get up a front-page which will redirect you to:
a) Their product
b) Their ads
c) Their spyware
What has really been pissing me off lately is when looking up common programming issues or error messages I get links to dozens of sites that just link to common, or link to parts of the actual result I am looking for - stolen from a legit site - but no usable answer.
I don't know that a law is the right fix for this, but yeah I could see some of the less scrupulous sites putting up "barbie+pony+furby" metatags and farming for banner views/clicks, and perhaps some repercussions should be available.
How many people actually pay cash nowadays? When I hit the bank machine or a teller that has 'cash back' I usually grab an extra $20, but in most cases the majority of my expenditures are either credit or debit. From my understanding, debit also costs the merchant, which is why some will charge an extra fee (25c, etc) on the debit machine when it is used to cover costs. Of course, with Visa, this is not allowed (the merchant cannot pass along an extra charge for using Visa). If you're running a shop that has pretty thin margins then sometime Visa might just not be a good choice.
What surprises me is how many merchants do not seem to know the rules that come along with accepting Visa, some of the commonly broken ones including:
a) No passing the buck to the consumer (aka no charging an extra 3% for credit-card purchases, or offering 3% discount for cash which is actually the same when you inflate the margins 3%)
b) No minimum purchase (and I believe no max except what the card will handle). Commonly broken as many merchants don't realize the difference between Visa/Debit. Also subject to major annoyances such as some dude paying credit for a $0.30 package of gum
c) The card is acceptable for all items (from my understanding) showing the Visa logo means you must accept Visa, and you can't pick and choose the ones that give more profit. I've had issues with this one a lot, such as being told I cannot pay for lottery tickets or other low-margin items with Visa even in combination with other items. One exception is a 'split' business such as a car dealership, where one part (such as the garage) accepts Visa but the other (the dealership) doesn't. Although the dealership might run some charges such as downpayment, etc through the garage Visa for convenience, they generally won't and aren't required to accept it for the larger purchase in the dealership itself (sneaky). Quite dissappointing for me as I really wanted the points on my last vehicle purchase, but I can understand how a 2-3%+ surcharge would such on a large purchase like that.
d) Signatures aren't always required. In fact I believe you can skip the signature, but if you get a chargeback for a non-signed bill you're screwed.
e) Chargebacks can happen, and they can suck for merchants as the client tends to be preferred. Not quite so much a problem for a 7-11 unless you've got a stolen card being used, but rather uncool when you just sold a $1000 item to some guy on ebay. On the other hand direct Visa can sometimes be a little nicer than paypal (oh, the horror stories), and generally easier/faster to accept than debit or other methods .
To the parent: The above comments aren't really aimed at you, but the do help show why Visa acceptance/rules can sometimes be unpleasant for the retailer and/or generally not correctly followed or understood by either party. Please feel free to add/correct 'em
Of all my expenses, rent (or now, mortgage) is something I wish could have been billed to my card.
Explanation: Credit cards are just as safe as cash so long as you pay them off at the due-date, and in my case I get points which I can use to travel. If my rent/mortgage (one of the biggest recurring expenses) was on there I'd probably be sitting somewhere sunny right now. And for those that have the 1-2% cards (1% of your yearly expenses back as cash) you could be getting $200-500 bucks back a year.
BUT there are some parts where this story falls apart. First and most glaringly, almost any consumer would realize that an agreement for a discounted first year, with a higher rate following it means you're locked in for more than a year. He says his grandparents were members for "about a year" which, in the traditional construction means not a year (otherwise he would have said "over a year.")
Actually, it's about 1 year 1 month or so now. The supposed contract period is three years
I haven't tried to get that far in the Telus world (I don't want to look for a valid address or phone number for the ordering form, but they certainly don't seem to be hiding the fact that you're signing up for a contract.
That's on a website, over a year later. There was nothing along those lines with the paper documentation at the time.
Proof is on Telus's side. Proof says that GPs knew they were entering into an agreement, that they enjoyed the agreement for some time, that they had no problem with the agreement.
Yes, there was an agreement for the service, which was paid for during the previous time it was rendered. There wasn't an agreement to enter into a contract, not was it mentioned up-front or in documentation at the time of sign-up.
Then we never entered into an agreement even though at some point we HAD to say GIVE US A MODEM SO WE CAN USE YOUR INTERNET FOR THIS PRICE FOR THIS LONG OR ELSE YOU WOULDN'T SEND US THE MODEM."
How strange. I guess I must have imagined that I had Telus service up to about two months ago, for less than three years, with a modem, which I didn't have a three-year contract for, which I cancelled without these type of issues. The issue at hand is not whether they signed up for service, but whether they agreed to be locked in for three years, which they didn't.
Now your arguement is probably going to be "Well, if there was a deal presented for the first year they must have been informed of a contract." Well, I just signed up for a different ISP. There is no contract with them either, and I got a free month + extra credits etc... it's called incentives to become a customer. Sadly, it seems that companies like Telus are now swapping incentives for a "loyalty" department which threatens fees for cancellation.
And if you think ISP's don't cross the lines of legality and morality... perhaps you should investigate some of the interesting goings on with AOL customers trying to unsubscribe, or the wiretaps at AT&T. Big companies will now happily cheat and lie if they think they can get away with it, so yes this is an increasingly disturbing trend.
Not sure about that particular DVD, but some of the ones I own (see: Shrek 2) have lengthy unskippable advertisements at the start. Depending on protection, it's also annoying to copy them on many regular systems because of protections, which means you can't make a backup or format-shift to take it with you on your laptop, etc.
Actually, the funny thing is that I used to love Telus and hate Shaw. About 5-6 years ago (or however long it was when Shaw was still hooked up with Roger's video) I had a Shaw account and the speed was crappy+unpredictable (massive variation depending on local area usage, no controls), the billing process was incredibly screwed up ('credits' never seemed to show up on the bill), and the phone system sucked.
Getting my initial connection with Shaw a few months ago, I wasn't entirely impressed with their system for scheduling a setup (you're supposed to wait for them, and they missed me twice), but I got past the initial steps their actual technician was extremely polite, informative, and helpful. Heck, he even gave me his cell number as he understood I had to get to work and he wasn't sure about the initial connection. Since setup, my Shaw billing has been correct (got my credits), and the service has been reliable and fast. When I moved after my first month they transferred my connection without issues (or charges) and the only weirdness was that there were two lines in my new place and we had to figure out the one for cable (apparently there was a dish at one time too)
Now forwarding to Telus. Initial setup was really good. In the last few years the service has noticably started to suck. When I moved my business-grade account to a new address, they screwed up the install date. Then, they lost the records. Then they setup they connection, and 3-4 days later completely disconnected me when they got the order to disconnect the previous account late. Another 3-4 days wait-time to get back up, speed issues, and billing headaches make me view Telus as a sinking ship.
In short, it seems that ISP suckage varies greatly from time-to-time, and the concept of being locked in for 3 years to a company which can go from good to complete shit is not a good concept. For the moment I'd recommend Shaw, but be careful if you live around student dorms etc as the bandwidth leeches tend to pull from cable's overall performance:-)
Did I mention that the ISP is also the local telco, and thus holds the account on the landline (which they have attached to the DSL account). Currently there aren't any real alternatives other than a somewhat unpredictable VOIP system from another provider that I'm not about to saddle my non-technical grandparents with...
However, given that they have refused to remove the internet portion from billing to Visa and do direct-billing, this still might be an issue to be taken up with the credit-card companies.
First of all, it's not my account, it's my grandparents' account, not mine. Secondly, if you have a supplied modem it must be returned at the end of service, but if you buy one they credit the cost to your bill and you still get to keep it (which I recommend, last time I bought I modem I got the credit and due to a deal at the time a $50 gift certificate at Future Shop). In other words, in one or another, the DSL modem is also free
Third, the terms were not described very well in this case. Maybe they did happen to explain it to you, but in this case it wasn't explained. The modem documentation didn't have anything mentioning the fee, and the OCA screens were also generic at that point in time (maybe they've since changed). Given that the modem does come with various documentation etc, how hard would it be to have the paperwork provided outlining the 'contract' to be signed at either the time Telus supplied the modem (or if buying, at the point of purchase). This is what has happened with my cellphone contract, and was back when Shaw was/w Roger's (the contract was for modem rental then, not TOS).
Fourth, there's been a lot of doublespeak on the phone, and reps contradicting each other. In the early calls, they were told they could switch to "high-speed lite" (cheaper, slower, but probably fine for their needs) but they would have to be locked in for another three years starting again. A subsequent rep said that wouldn't involve a lock-in, and when they were discussing it and he pulled up their file, he suddenly had to "leave and call them back." Seems that the file is flagged, as nobody has recieved a call from any reps nor the manager call that was promised.
As for making a change to my mobile or long distance service, yup done both lots. The difference is that my mobile phone has a signed contract, given to me for reading at the time I got the phone, and outlining the terms. I am also able to change the plans etc on my phone without having to restart the contract from scratch or any similar stupidity. As for long distance, when I did have a landline I was free to come and go as I pleased from any given plan, and never once did I have to sign anything for changing plans nor was I locked in to a term.
I notice that you have not suggested paying the $10 more per month that you saved. I noticed that you aren't suggesting you pay for the modem you have been 'renting'. When you were saving money each month over a Telus subscriber like me I'm guessing you never once considered Telus dubious.
So again, though this isn't my account, but I was present when it was setup. Given the lack of notification at that time, and given the current track record of call-backs and/or contradictory doublespeak from the managers and phone reps, I don't give a damn about the discount so long as the terms are presented in a straightforward and honest manner, which they haven't been in this case up to this point.
However, it is also crucial to acheive a self-sustaining reaction, something not yet done
It is crucial to achieve a controlled and/or contained self-sustaining reaction. If they ever get a self-sustaining reaction then it's also important that it be kept within tolerable limits. I've always wondered what would happen if some private individual manages to start a tappable fusion reaction, but isn't able to control it. You might think this unrealistic but I do remember reading a true story where a kid was able to create a homegrown breeder reactor, but luckily it didn't get too out of control or give off large amounts of radiation (he got in trouble, but was also later hired on with a research group I believe)
Around here I've found that you usually have two choices: DSL or cable. Where cable is controlled by the local cableco, and DSL is either through the local Telco or somebody else who buys access to their lines.
Of course, in many cases the telco tends to be more accessible to rural areas (no cable TV, no cable internet), and the really rural areas often have weird ways of getting access such as airwave (wireless) or sattelite.
I found that 2.6.17, with the improved IO handlers, definately added a performance boost to my machines. The main headaches I've had with testing have revolved around X.org 7.x being quite a bit different from previous versions (more componentized) and issues with getting it to work with the NVidia stub (you need to tell it where to find the new lib location), etc.
However, all-in-all I've found that running Debian/testing has gone pretty well, and Debian/stable+backports has worked pretty well too. I'll be looking forward to when the features in testing happily merge back into stable.
Oh, and hopefully the rather-cool FPS Nexuiz will merge into stable as well, as it's pretty impressive to see something like that ending up open-source and available in the standard repositories (it's available in testing+ right now). It's also the first OSS app that's really given my graphics card a run for its money.
I would like to see a per-capita or per-connection statistic for this. I notice that Canada isn't up there on that list, but they do have a lesser population than China/USA (though probably more than many of the others), and alternately a pretty high ratio of connectivity per household/business.
How about a graph of "# of known connections in country vs amount of spam). If country X is only contributing 2% of the spam, but they've got 2% of the overall population and only 25% of that is connected... it shows a little more how the local control on such things may be a bit... lax.
Well I'm here in Canada, and we're apparently not even in the top-10 for spam, so there's a good chance that the local political/corporate environment affects the internet. Not that I've heard of us having big anti-spam laws here (and I do remember hearing about some big spammers living down east), but perhaps the ISP's are more vigilant.
I know that at one point I had been messing around with my proxy settings and that allowed it to be abused as an open relay. Consequently, there were about 1-2 days where some bastard(s) used it to send spam. About 2-3 days after that (after I'd caught it and shut it down, partly because of/.'s warnings that they detected me as an open relay) I had my connection borked by my ISP because they had received complaints. All it took was a phone-call to explain that the situation had been fixed and things were back up and running. I think they watched it for recurrence for awhile after that but I had no hassles.
So at the least, it seems that "Telus" in Canada does do something about the open relays. Unfortunately they seem to suffer from suckage lately for other reasons, but at least they're trying to keep their network 'clean' from usual misuse and abuse of spammers et al.
I cancelled the insurance on my home. One year later other than saving $550 I have not had a single problem. I wasn't robbed, it didn't burn down, and no hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes hit me either...
Last time I checked, flood protection didn't cause your taps to leak, your lightbulbs to burn out, and your cable to cut in and out... in the PC realm bad antivirus software can do a lot of things along those lines.
Insurance has a specific purpose which is different from an antivirus. In fact, the parent's description of using a backup instead is closer to 'insurance' than an anti-virus program, replacing stuff if the worst happens. Yes, you can run an antivirus program, and if you're not paying attention and being careful you still might find yourself in the dumps (which is why for big corps, sometimes incremental backups are best), but oftimes the price of running many antivirus programs is just as much a loss of productivity. I know from experience, as our last corporate AV program tended on some machines to cause program or outright system crashes (not to mention slowness and resource consumption)... which is much of antivirus programs are intended to prevent.
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I did something similar awhile back. Router was open, dhcp was normal, no WEP, and all ports but http and the VPN were closed. For http, the server would redirect to an internal page showing a rotating collection of goatse type images and the text "Please go violate somebody else's network."
To actually connect to anything useful, one would first connect to the VPN (with the valid key), giving a much better encryption than WEP and the amusement of having any leechers getting goatse'd
I wonder about businesspeople crossing the border with laptops from work. What if the laptops contain private company information, or even client information. How about trade secrets?
Yes, in most cases agents wouldn't bother with this, but all it takes is once.
Hmmm, it might have interesting results. Maybe you could allow profiled ads so that ads for things you like (electronics, perhaps funny ads) could be shown, while skipping the annoying McDonalds or tampax ads. Better yet, let people share "ad-lists" wherein you can rate the ads and then share them with people of similar mind... some commercials are actually pretty damn funny, enough so that people collect them and send them off to friends online.
I'll just wait until my victims are in front of the billboard advertising Subway burgers and then blow them into kibbles. A few well placed meaty chunkss and perhaps a little arterial spray near the picture of some dude chomping on a sub should add to the overall effect of the ad, no? If that doesn't get your attention, perhaps pile up a few dismembered heads near the ad for McDonalds chicken nuggets.
Damn thing skipped from the "Billboards" article to this one. Sort for the mispost :-(
I'll just wait until my victims are in front of the billboard advertising McDonalds burgers and then blow them into kibbles. A few well placed meaty chunkss and perhaps a little arterial spray near the picture of some dude chomping on a burger should add to the overall effect of the ad, no?
I'm guessing that this generated image was a result of enlargment/viagara ads.
All-in-all, the plants look cooler than the other ads, but I think a video showing the plant 'growing' with spam would be more interesting than the stills
True, but many people are not farming the $2.99 subscription, they are farming for the 10,000 clicks/views at $0.03/each on the banner ads.
I tend to see more of those with movie names or common troubleshooting terms, but it's getting more common and/or annoying.
There should perhaps be a master index. You can't just hard-code them into the law because the words themselves change, such as the title of a popular movie (for example, a decade ago "Harry Potter" wouldn't be in such big demand), and unscrupulous webmasters do tend to take advantage of this. Perhaps what they need is a page where you can check your own site to see if it passes various tests, but as a law it's still pretty stupid in itself.
I've running across links to porn when searching for things such as mummification (school project way back when webcrawler was cool, it came up with bondage sites) or searches for popular things such as software or recent movies. It is still very common for unscrupulous websites to farm thousands of common keywords in order to get up a front-page which will redirect you to:
a) Their product
b) Their ads
c) Their spyware
What has really been pissing me off lately is when looking up common programming issues or error messages I get links to dozens of sites that just link to common, or link to parts of the actual result I am looking for - stolen from a legit site - but no usable answer.
I don't know that a law is the right fix for this, but yeah I could see some of the less scrupulous sites putting up "barbie+pony+furby" metatags and farming for banner views/clicks, and perhaps some repercussions should be available.
How many people actually pay cash nowadays? When I hit the bank machine or a teller that has 'cash back' I usually grab an extra $20, but in most cases the majority of my expenditures are either credit or debit. From my understanding, debit also costs the merchant, which is why some will charge an extra fee (25c, etc) on the debit machine when it is used to cover costs. Of course, with Visa, this is not allowed (the merchant cannot pass along an extra charge for using Visa). If you're running a shop that has pretty thin margins then sometime Visa might just not be a good choice.
What surprises me is how many merchants do not seem to know the rules that come along with accepting Visa, some of the commonly broken ones including:
a) No passing the buck to the consumer (aka no charging an extra 3% for credit-card purchases, or offering 3% discount for cash which is actually the same when you inflate the margins 3%)
b) No minimum purchase (and I believe no max except what the card will handle). Commonly broken as many merchants don't realize the difference between Visa/Debit. Also subject to major annoyances such as some dude paying credit for a $0.30 package of gum
c) The card is acceptable for all items (from my understanding) showing the Visa logo means you must accept Visa, and you can't pick and choose the ones that give more profit. I've had issues with this one a lot, such as being told I cannot pay for lottery tickets or other low-margin items with Visa even in combination with other items. One exception is a 'split' business such as a car dealership, where one part (such as the garage) accepts Visa but the other (the dealership) doesn't. Although the dealership might run some charges such as downpayment, etc through the garage Visa for convenience, they generally won't and aren't required to accept it for the larger purchase in the dealership itself (sneaky). Quite dissappointing for me as I really wanted the points on my last vehicle purchase, but I can understand how a 2-3%+ surcharge would such on a large purchase like that.
d) Signatures aren't always required. In fact I believe you can skip the signature, but if you get a chargeback for a non-signed bill you're screwed.
e) Chargebacks can happen, and they can suck for merchants as the client tends to be preferred. Not quite so much a problem for a 7-11 unless you've got a stolen card being used, but rather uncool when you just sold a $1000 item to some guy on ebay. On the other hand direct Visa can sometimes be a little nicer than paypal (oh, the horror stories), and generally easier/faster to accept than debit or other methods
.
To the parent: The above comments aren't really aimed at you, but the do help show why Visa acceptance/rules can sometimes be unpleasant for the retailer and/or generally not correctly followed or understood by either party. Please feel free to add/correct 'em
Of all my expenses, rent (or now, mortgage) is something I wish could have been billed to my card.
Explanation: Credit cards are just as safe as cash so long as you pay them off at the due-date, and in my case I get points which I can use to travel. If my rent/mortgage (one of the biggest recurring expenses) was on there I'd probably be sitting somewhere sunny right now. And for those that have the 1-2% cards (1% of your yearly expenses back as cash) you could be getting $200-500 bucks back a year.
BUT there are some parts where this story falls apart. First and most glaringly, almost any consumer would realize that an agreement for a discounted first year, with a higher rate following it means you're locked in for more than a year. He says his grandparents were members for "about a year" which, in the traditional construction means not a year (otherwise he would have said "over a year.")
Actually, it's about 1 year 1 month or so now. The supposed contract period is three years
I haven't tried to get that far in the Telus world (I don't want to look for a valid address or phone number for the ordering form, but they certainly don't seem to be hiding the fact that you're signing up for a contract.
That's on a website, over a year later. There was nothing along those lines with the paper documentation at the time.
Proof is on Telus's side. Proof says that GPs knew they were entering into an agreement, that they enjoyed the agreement for some time, that they had no problem with the agreement.
Yes, there was an agreement for the service, which was paid for during the previous time it was rendered. There wasn't an agreement to enter into a contract, not was it mentioned up-front or in documentation at the time of sign-up.
Then we never entered into an agreement even though at some point we HAD to say GIVE US A MODEM SO WE CAN USE YOUR INTERNET FOR THIS PRICE FOR THIS LONG OR ELSE YOU WOULDN'T SEND US THE MODEM."
How strange. I guess I must have imagined that I had Telus service up to about two months ago, for less than three years, with a modem, which I didn't have a three-year contract for, which I cancelled without these type of issues. The issue at hand is not whether they signed up for service, but whether they agreed to be locked in for three years, which they didn't.
Now your arguement is probably going to be "Well, if there was a deal presented for the first year they must have been informed of a contract." Well, I just signed up for a different ISP. There is no contract with them either, and I got a free month + extra credits etc... it's called incentives to become a customer. Sadly, it seems that companies like Telus are now swapping incentives for a "loyalty" department which threatens fees for cancellation.
And if you think ISP's don't cross the lines of legality and morality... perhaps you should investigate some of the interesting goings on with AOL customers trying to unsubscribe, or the wiretaps at AT&T. Big companies will now happily cheat and lie if they think they can get away with it, so yes this is an increasingly disturbing trend.
Not sure about that particular DVD, but some of the ones I own (see: Shrek 2) have lengthy unskippable advertisements at the start. Depending on protection, it's also annoying to copy them on many regular systems because of protections, which means you can't make a backup or format-shift to take it with you on your laptop, etc.
Changing too rapidly, or too randomly, is as dangerous to an organism as not adapting fast enough
As in cases of cancer, mutation, and other such things. We want our bodies to adapt, but not necessarily mutate (and I don't mean in the X-men way)
Actually, the funny thing is that I used to love Telus and hate Shaw. About 5-6 years ago (or however long it was when Shaw was still hooked up with Roger's video) I had a Shaw account and the speed was crappy+unpredictable (massive variation depending on local area usage, no controls), the billing process was incredibly screwed up ('credits' never seemed to show up on the bill), and the phone system sucked.
:-)
Getting my initial connection with Shaw a few months ago, I wasn't entirely impressed with their system for scheduling a setup (you're supposed to wait for them, and they missed me twice), but I got past the initial steps their actual technician was extremely polite, informative, and helpful. Heck, he even gave me his cell number as he understood I had to get to work and he wasn't sure about the initial connection. Since setup, my Shaw billing has been correct (got my credits), and the service has been reliable and fast. When I moved after my first month they transferred my connection without issues (or charges) and the only weirdness was that there were two lines in my new place and we had to figure out the one for cable (apparently there was a dish at one time too)
Now forwarding to Telus. Initial setup was really good. In the last few years the service has noticably started to suck. When I moved my business-grade account to a new address, they screwed up the install date. Then, they lost the records. Then they setup they connection, and 3-4 days later completely disconnected me when they got the order to disconnect the previous account late. Another 3-4 days wait-time to get back up, speed issues, and billing headaches make me view Telus as a sinking ship.
In short, it seems that ISP suckage varies greatly from time-to-time, and the concept of being locked in for 3 years to a company which can go from good to complete shit is not a good concept. For the moment I'd recommend Shaw, but be careful if you live around student dorms etc as the bandwidth leeches tend to pull from cable's overall performance
Did I mention that the ISP is also the local telco, and thus holds the account on the landline (which they have attached to the DSL account). Currently there aren't any real alternatives other than a somewhat unpredictable VOIP system from another provider that I'm not about to saddle my non-technical grandparents with...
However, given that they have refused to remove the internet portion from billing to Visa and do direct-billing, this still might be an issue to be taken up with the credit-card companies.
First of all, it's not my account, it's my grandparents' account, not mine. Secondly, if you have a supplied modem it must be returned at the end of service, but if you buy one they credit the cost to your bill and you still get to keep it (which I recommend, last time I bought I modem I got the credit and due to a deal at the time a $50 gift certificate at Future Shop). In other words, in one or another, the DSL modem is also free
/w Roger's (the contract was for modem rental then, not TOS).
Third, the terms were not described very well in this case. Maybe they did happen to explain it to you, but in this case it wasn't explained. The modem documentation didn't have anything mentioning the fee, and the OCA screens were also generic at that point in time (maybe they've since changed). Given that the modem does come with various documentation etc, how hard would it be to have the paperwork provided outlining the 'contract' to be signed at either the time Telus supplied the modem (or if buying, at the point of purchase). This is what has happened with my cellphone contract, and was back when Shaw was
Fourth, there's been a lot of doublespeak on the phone, and reps contradicting each other. In the early calls, they were told they could switch to "high-speed lite" (cheaper, slower, but probably fine for their needs) but they would have to be locked in for another three years starting again. A subsequent rep said that wouldn't involve a lock-in, and when they were discussing it and he pulled up their file, he suddenly had to "leave and call them back." Seems that the file is flagged, as nobody has recieved a call from any reps nor the manager call that was promised.
As for making a change to my mobile or long distance service, yup done both lots. The difference is that my mobile phone has a signed contract, given to me for reading at the time I got the phone, and outlining the terms. I am also able to change the plans etc on my phone without having to restart the contract from scratch or any similar stupidity. As for long distance, when I did have a landline I was free to come and go as I pleased from any given plan, and never once did I have to sign anything for changing plans nor was I locked in to a term.
I notice that you have not suggested paying the $10 more per month that you saved. I noticed that you aren't suggesting you pay for the modem you have been 'renting'. When you were saving money each month over a Telus subscriber like me I'm guessing you never once considered Telus dubious.
So again, though this isn't my account, but I was present when it was setup. Given the lack of notification at that time, and given the current track record of call-backs and/or contradictory doublespeak from the managers and phone reps, I don't give a damn about the discount so long as the terms are presented in a straightforward and honest manner, which they haven't been in this case up to this point.
Well, so far I'm on day 4 of the 24-48 period in which the superviser was supposed to call me back.
However, it is also crucial to acheive a self-sustaining reaction, something not yet done
It is crucial to achieve a controlled and/or contained self-sustaining reaction. If they ever get a self-sustaining reaction then it's also important that it be kept within tolerable limits. I've always wondered what would happen if some private individual manages to start a tappable fusion reaction, but isn't able to control it. You might think this unrealistic but I do remember reading a true story where a kid was able to create a homegrown breeder reactor, but luckily it didn't get too out of control or give off large amounts of radiation (he got in trouble, but was also later hired on with a research group I believe)
Around here I've found that you usually have two choices: DSL or cable. Where cable is controlled by the local cableco, and DSL is either through the local Telco or somebody else who buys access to their lines.
Of course, in many cases the telco tends to be more accessible to rural areas (no cable TV, no cable internet), and the really rural areas often have weird ways of getting access such as airwave (wireless) or sattelite.
I found that 2.6.17, with the improved IO handlers, definately added a performance boost to my machines. The main headaches I've had with testing have revolved around X.org 7.x being quite a bit different from previous versions (more componentized) and issues with getting it to work with the NVidia stub (you need to tell it where to find the new lib location), etc.
However, all-in-all I've found that running Debian/testing has gone pretty well, and Debian/stable+backports has worked pretty well too. I'll be looking forward to when the features in testing happily merge back into stable.
Oh, and hopefully the rather-cool FPS Nexuiz will merge into stable as well, as it's pretty impressive to see something like that ending up open-source and available in the standard repositories (it's available in testing+ right now). It's also the first OSS app that's really given my graphics card a run for its money.
I would like to see a per-capita or per-connection statistic for this. I notice that Canada isn't up there on that list, but they do have a lesser population than China/USA (though probably more than many of the others), and alternately a pretty high ratio of connectivity per household/business.
How about a graph of "# of known connections in country vs amount of spam). If country X is only contributing 2% of the spam, but they've got 2% of the overall population and only 25% of that is connected... it shows a little more how the local control on such things may be a bit... lax.
Well I'm here in Canada, and we're apparently not even in the top-10 for spam, so there's a good chance that the local political/corporate environment affects the internet. Not that I've heard of us having big anti-spam laws here (and I do remember hearing about some big spammers living down east), but perhaps the ISP's are more vigilant.
/.'s warnings that they detected me as an open relay) I had my connection borked by my ISP because they had received complaints. All it took was a phone-call to explain that the situation had been fixed and things were back up and running. I think they watched it for recurrence for awhile after that but I had no hassles.
I know that at one point I had been messing around with my proxy settings and that allowed it to be abused as an open relay. Consequently, there were about 1-2 days where some bastard(s) used it to send spam. About 2-3 days after that (after I'd caught it and shut it down, partly because of
So at the least, it seems that "Telus" in Canada does do something about the open relays. Unfortunately they seem to suffer from suckage lately for other reasons, but at least they're trying to keep their network 'clean' from usual misuse and abuse of spammers et al.
I cancelled the insurance on my home. One year later other than saving $550 I have not had a single problem. I wasn't robbed, it didn't burn down, and no hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes hit me either...
Last time I checked, flood protection didn't cause your taps to leak, your lightbulbs to burn out, and your cable to cut in and out... in the PC realm bad antivirus software can do a lot of things along those lines.
Insurance has a specific purpose which is different from an antivirus. In fact, the parent's description of using a backup instead is closer to 'insurance' than an anti-virus program, replacing stuff if the worst happens. Yes, you can run an antivirus program, and if you're not paying attention and being careful you still might find yourself in the dumps (which is why for big corps, sometimes incremental backups are best), but oftimes the price of running many antivirus programs is just as much a loss of productivity. I know from experience, as our last corporate AV program tended on some machines to cause program or outright system crashes (not to mention slowness and resource consumption)... which is much of antivirus programs are intended to prevent.