Suppose a Verizon customer moves to Qworst and takes his number, which is part of the Verizon pool. He cancels his Verizon service.
How does Verizon know not to reissue that number?
If the guy flat cancels his Qworst service, do they notify Verizon that the number is now available for reissue?
That's what the number portablity database is all about. First off, the guy does not directly call Verizon to cancel... if he does, he loses his number so he'd better not do that. Instead, Qwest sends the Verizon the notifcation through the number portability system that they've just won over this customer, so they'd like the xxx-yyy-zzzz number rerouted to their system at entry point A. That's how Verizon finds out he canceled them, and how Verizon knows that they have to keep that number marked off in their database as one they can't issue.
When the guy leaves Qwest, if takes that number to another carrier, that new carrier can make the number portability magic happen again. This time, the number portability database realizes that they've already got the number on the exceptions list look where it's going and see that they need to notify Qwest that they've lost the customer, and changing the routing table accordingly so that when a new call comes in through Verizon the new redirect is issued.
If he leaves Qwest by calling them directly, then Qwest has to inform the number portability system that they lost the customer, and the number reverts back to the owner of the exchange, so in this case Verizon is told they're the ones who get to reassign the number.
The same is true in many US areas as well. The key thing being that waiting period where the police hold the item and don't know what to do with it. At which point, it becomes abandoned property and ownership transfers to the local government because the real owner didn't come forward and/or can't be found.
Number portablity doesn't quite work that way. In the case of "normal" (not toll free or extra fee) area codes, providers own the exchanges, and what number portablity requires is that the provider who owns the exchange must forward the number to the new provider's system when a subscriber says they want to move.
However, that new provider only has the number for as long as they have that customer. If that customer cancels without going through the number portablity process again, however, that number reverts back to the company that owns the exchange. Since number portablity only works when the same person is on both sides of the transaction, that's not a workaround.
Nope, it just says that if somebody comes to them waiving a police report that says that the item was stolen from them, eBay's likely to pull that auction out of an abundance of caution because they're not quite sure what's really going on, and they'd rather turn away a valid sale than risk an invalid sale soiling their credibilty.
Sure, some things slip through the cracks, but when Verizon stands up and asserts themselves, eBay will always cave until their lawyers can definitively tell them Verizon's full of it.
The telco is sometimes fine with simple moving of random local numbers, but you can't exactly "sell" a number that way because you can't promise that the telco is going to go along with it until you ask.
The difference is, domain registrars allow you to effect a transfer by changing the contact infomation in a way that changes completely the person or entity the domain services belongs to, phone companies do not allow phone service to be transfered the same way, and the number comes with the phone service.
They have been all along. This is the concept of a "golden" number, the ability to request your number's last four digits so you're sure it spells the word you want it to. The phone company charges a monthly fee for this service... however, if the word you want has already been randomly assigned in all the exchanges local to you, you're just plain out of luck.
Also to note, most "golden" numbers are in the toll free, pay service, or choke switch ranges where the golden number service is included in the main definition of the service. However, toll free and pay services are costly phone services to operate, and very
The right to transfer your golden number? Nope. What you have to do is transfer the legal entity that owns the golden number... usually that means creating a spinoff company that inherits the phone service as one of its "obligations", and then sell that company. Thing is, businesses can create spinoff companies... people can't create a spinoff of themselves, kids don't count.
You can't buy 1-800-BUY-STUFF because only 1-800-BUY-STUFF Inc. owns that number, and that's not transferable. However, you can buy either the license to 1-800-BUY-STUFF's image, and as part of that deal you get to tell 1-800-BUY-STUFF Inc. where to direct that number for the duration of the license. Or, you could just buy 1-800-BUY-STUFF Inc. outright, and then merge it with your company, and then tell the phone company to move the 1-800-BUY-STUFF phone service to your headquarters instead of the old building that you're going to sell.
That's why a business can find a way to get the phone service into the hands of a spinoff company and then sell that spinoff, but it's hard for an individual to make the same moves...
The thing is, the phone number cannot be sold alone. If the car dealership was willing to sell that dealership, the phone service that the dealership has can be transfered as part of the transaction... but from the phone company's view it hasn't. Acme Auto Parts Inc. owned the number before, Acme Auto Parts Inc. still does... it's just that AAP Inc. changed owners.
They are. No sales of stolen property are ever valid. A clueless person who buys stolen property at a thief's yard sale not knowing the seller stole it still is in possession of stolen property.
That item can be taken from the unwitting buyer by the police and returned to the rightful owner, the person it was stolen from. If the buyer wants their money back, they have to sue the thief, which is usually a fruitless effort.
So, eBay's role is that whenever they realize that property's stolen, they've gotta kill the auction in order to maintain buyer confidence in their marketplace. They don't want transactions that aren't going to work happening over their system, simply because that'd undermine the trust people have in their system.
To paraphrase: "One input box to rule them all. One submit button to find it. One search engine to rule the world and on the Internet bind it."
Take a good look at the AltaVista.com and AllTheWeb.com web interfaces. They sure smell a lot like Google right now. It's very possible that this is just the first skrimish in the search wars... Yahoo may be the company's portal brand, but will their Google-killer product actually be launched under one of the other search engine brands they now own?
Number portablity doesn't mean number transferablity. In order to get "your number" to move from Provider X to Provider Y, you have to show proof to Provider Y that you do in fact hold that number at Provider Y... if you go into Radio Shack with your buddy's phone bill and even with your buddy saying it's okay, you can't get his old number on your new cell phone.
So, there's nothing to sell on eBay. If you can't give it away even when you try, you can't sell it either.
Eh, Slurp has been out for years, it's the been the crawler for Inktomi all along. What changed today was that Yahoo replaced Google results with Inktomi results, therefore drawing a lot more attention to what up until now had been an also-ran compared to Google.
I wouldn't call Lycos completely out of search, they own Hotbot.com, which at this point is the smoothest way to jump between the four out of the five major search engines left standing with AltaVista being the only holdout.
There really isn't a reference point for what "pure Inktomi" is anymore, if there ever was. Inktomi.com has never been a search engine, just the marketing info for the company that sells its search service to others who do the marketing.
I get the feeling that every Inktomi using site is using a slightly diferent sort order formula at this point, so that they don't all look exactly the same. Such a scheme might also frustrate link spammers, as it might be possible to climb to the top of one Inktomi result screen by cheating, but it'd be nearly impossible to cheat your way to the top of all of them.
With Yahoo owning Inktomi and Overture, and Overture in turn owning both Alta Vista and AllTheWeb, this was a move that everybody could see coming. I even wrote about it about a month ago in my little blog.
In short, Yahoo's been on a quiet buying spree. Without attracting too much attention, they've aquired enough resources so that they no longer have any need to buy anything from Google, it's all available in-house.
So, Yahoo's out to take back its role as the #1 search site that Google took from it. Google for the first time in a while has a serious threat that's going to force it to improve just at at time where the result quality is starting to slip... this should be fun to watch.
We've gotta get Darl to sit down with all of SCO's money at a poker table... doesn't matter what cards he gets, he'll put all his money in on the first hand as a bluff...
How about this... Google is the biggest major user of Linux who is still profitable post-bubble. We don't know exactly how profitable because they're not public yet, but we know they have to be looking good to be thinking about an IPO.
Somebody's gotta take Darl to Vegas sometime and sit him down at a high stakes table. If he was willing to bet on having a user lawsuit today, who knows if we can talk him into calling "hit" on a 20 in BlackJack...
This year there was a tax increase to 5.3%. The 5.85 option is a checkbox for those who wish to be charitable to the state. But still, for the most part, the taxable income number at the start of the MA forms matches exactly the one you figured out for the IRS, and then the few state quirks are added or subtracted.
That's an old story. This year's version actually allows you to install the software on multiple PCs in a household in the license terms, most likely as a reaction to last year's scandal.
Your rich uncle had better give you a cheap car. Any combination of gifts greater than $10,000 from one person to the same other person in the same year creates a taxable event, the gift tax.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose a Verizon customer moves to Qworst and takes his number, which is part of the Verizon pool. He cancels his Verizon service.
How does Verizon know not to reissue that number?
If the guy flat cancels his Qworst service, do they notify Verizon that the number is now available for reissue?
That's what the number portablity database is all about. First off, the guy does not directly call Verizon to cancel... if he does, he loses his number so he'd better not do that. Instead, Qwest sends the Verizon the notifcation through the number portability system that they've just won over this customer, so they'd like the xxx-yyy-zzzz number rerouted to their system at entry point A. That's how Verizon finds out he canceled them, and how Verizon knows that they have to keep that number marked off in their database as one they can't issue.
When the guy leaves Qwest, if takes that number to another carrier, that new carrier can make the number portability magic happen again. This time, the number portability database realizes that they've already got the number on the exceptions list look where it's going and see that they need to notify Qwest that they've lost the customer, and changing the routing table accordingly so that when a new call comes in through Verizon the new redirect is issued.
If he leaves Qwest by calling them directly, then Qwest has to inform the number portability system that they lost the customer, and the number reverts back to the owner of the exchange, so in this case Verizon is told they're the ones who get to reassign the number.
10 cents a minute is a very high rate to pay for local or in-state calling. There's the profit margin on that service. :)
The same is true in many US areas as well. The key thing being that waiting period where the police hold the item and don't know what to do with it. At which point, it becomes abandoned property and ownership transfers to the local government because the real owner didn't come forward and/or can't be found.
I'm guessing that eBay allowed that to happen because nobody from OSDN stood up to say "No, you can't do that..."
Number portablity doesn't quite work that way. In the case of "normal" (not toll free or extra fee) area codes, providers own the exchanges, and what number portablity requires is that the provider who owns the exchange must forward the number to the new provider's system when a subscriber says they want to move.
However, that new provider only has the number for as long as they have that customer. If that customer cancels without going through the number portablity process again, however, that number reverts back to the company that owns the exchange. Since number portablity only works when the same person is on both sides of the transaction, that's not a workaround.
Nope, it just says that if somebody comes to them waiving a police report that says that the item was stolen from them, eBay's likely to pull that auction out of an abundance of caution because they're not quite sure what's really going on, and they'd rather turn away a valid sale than risk an invalid sale soiling their credibilty.
Sure, some things slip through the cracks, but when Verizon stands up and asserts themselves, eBay will always cave until their lawyers can definitively tell them Verizon's full of it.
The telco is sometimes fine with simple moving of random local numbers, but you can't exactly "sell" a number that way because you can't promise that the telco is going to go along with it until you ask.
The difference is, domain registrars allow you to effect a transfer by changing the contact infomation in a way that changes completely the person or entity the domain services belongs to, phone companies do not allow phone service to be transfered the same way, and the number comes with the phone service.
They have been all along. This is the concept of a "golden" number, the ability to request your number's last four digits so you're sure it spells the word you want it to. The phone company charges a monthly fee for this service... however, if the word you want has already been randomly assigned in all the exchanges local to you, you're just plain out of luck.
Also to note, most "golden" numbers are in the toll free, pay service, or choke switch ranges where the golden number service is included in the main definition of the service. However, toll free and pay services are costly phone services to operate, and very
The right to transfer your golden number? Nope. What you have to do is transfer the legal entity that owns the golden number... usually that means creating a spinoff company that inherits the phone service as one of its "obligations", and then sell that company. Thing is, businesses can create spinoff companies... people can't create a spinoff of themselves, kids don't count.
Extending your hypothetical...
You can't buy 1-800-BUY-STUFF because only 1-800-BUY-STUFF Inc. owns that number, and that's not transferable. However, you can buy either the license to 1-800-BUY-STUFF's image, and as part of that deal you get to tell 1-800-BUY-STUFF Inc. where to direct that number for the duration of the license. Or, you could just buy 1-800-BUY-STUFF Inc. outright, and then merge it with your company, and then tell the phone company to move the 1-800-BUY-STUFF phone service to your headquarters instead of the old building that you're going to sell.
That's why a business can find a way to get the phone service into the hands of a spinoff company and then sell that spinoff, but it's hard for an individual to make the same moves...
The thing is, the phone number cannot be sold alone. If the car dealership was willing to sell that dealership, the phone service that the dealership has can be transfered as part of the transaction... but from the phone company's view it hasn't. Acme Auto Parts Inc. owned the number before, Acme Auto Parts Inc. still does... it's just that AAP Inc. changed owners.
They are. No sales of stolen property are ever valid. A clueless person who buys stolen property at a thief's yard sale not knowing the seller stole it still is in possession of stolen property.
That item can be taken from the unwitting buyer by the police and returned to the rightful owner, the person it was stolen from. If the buyer wants their money back, they have to sue the thief, which is usually a fruitless effort.
So, eBay's role is that whenever they realize that property's stolen, they've gotta kill the auction in order to maintain buyer confidence in their marketplace. They don't want transactions that aren't going to work happening over their system, simply because that'd undermine the trust people have in their system.
To paraphrase: "One input box to rule them all. One submit button to find it. One search engine to rule the world and on the Internet bind it."
Take a good look at the AltaVista.com and AllTheWeb.com web interfaces. They sure smell a lot like Google right now. It's very possible that this is just the first skrimish in the search wars... Yahoo may be the company's portal brand, but will their Google-killer product actually be launched under one of the other search engine brands they now own?
Number portablity doesn't mean number transferablity. In order to get "your number" to move from Provider X to Provider Y, you have to show proof to Provider Y that you do in fact hold that number at Provider Y... if you go into Radio Shack with your buddy's phone bill and even with your buddy saying it's okay, you can't get his old number on your new cell phone.
So, there's nothing to sell on eBay. If you can't give it away even when you try, you can't sell it either.
Eh, Slurp has been out for years, it's the been the crawler for Inktomi all along. What changed today was that Yahoo replaced Google results with Inktomi results, therefore drawing a lot more attention to what up until now had been an also-ran compared to Google.
I wouldn't call Lycos completely out of search, they own Hotbot.com, which at this point is the smoothest way to jump between the four out of the five major search engines left standing with AltaVista being the only holdout.
There really isn't a reference point for what "pure Inktomi" is anymore, if there ever was. Inktomi.com has never been a search engine, just the marketing info for the company that sells its search service to others who do the marketing.
I get the feeling that every Inktomi using site is using a slightly diferent sort order formula at this point, so that they don't all look exactly the same. Such a scheme might also frustrate link spammers, as it might be possible to climb to the top of one Inktomi result screen by cheating, but it'd be nearly impossible to cheat your way to the top of all of them.
With Yahoo owning Inktomi and Overture, and Overture in turn owning both Alta Vista and AllTheWeb, this was a move that everybody could see coming. I even wrote about it about a month ago in my little blog.
In short, Yahoo's been on a quiet buying spree. Without attracting too much attention, they've aquired enough resources so that they no longer have any need to buy anything from Google, it's all available in-house.
So, Yahoo's out to take back its role as the #1 search site that Google took from it. Google for the first time in a while has a serious threat that's going to force it to improve just at at time where the result quality is starting to slip... this should be fun to watch.
I take it you haven't been reading at -1...
We've gotta get Darl to sit down with all of SCO's money at a poker table... doesn't matter what cards he gets, he'll put all his money in on the first hand as a bluff...
How about this... Google is the biggest major user of Linux who is still profitable post-bubble. We don't know exactly how profitable because they're not public yet, but we know they have to be looking good to be thinking about an IPO.
Somebody's gotta take Darl to Vegas sometime and sit him down at a high stakes table. If he was willing to bet on having a user lawsuit today, who knows if we can talk him into calling "hit" on a 20 in BlackJack...
This year there was a tax increase to 5.3%. The 5.85 option is a checkbox for those who wish to be charitable to the state. But still, for the most part, the taxable income number at the start of the MA forms matches exactly the one you figured out for the IRS, and then the few state quirks are added or subtracted.
That's an old story. This year's version actually allows you to install the software on multiple PCs in a household in the license terms, most likely as a reaction to last year's scandal.
Your rich uncle had better give you a cheap car. Any combination of gifts greater than $10,000 from one person to the same other person in the same year creates a taxable event, the gift tax.