8. Rebates. If you have good credit, you will qualify for special offer cards that either give "reward points" or even cold hard cash for making purchases. The bank is basically giving you a share of the merchant fees they collect from the store for being such a low-risk credit customer. Getting 1% cash for every card purchase you make during the year can add up to real money quickly, and cost you nothing assuming you pay all the balances on time and make sure that the card doesn't hit you with a membership fee. Even if it's not a lot of money, it's still more money than you'd have if you had spent cash.
If you have advanced knowledge of what Best Buy will put on sale 2 weeks from now, you can buy that item today from them at the higher price, and then claim the 110% price protection offer they make to get an additional 10% of the discount. In fact, you can do the same to Circuit City using Best Buy's sale, or vice-versa because Circuit City has the same "price protection" policy.
Therefore, they don't want you to be able to see their price drops coming... and that's why sale info is top secret until the day the sale goes into effect, at which point it's public info.
These are not Best Buy's prices, yet. They will be on the day after Thanksgiving, if everything goes according to present plans. Today's prices are displayed in their stores... but these future prices don't become public info until newspapers go out on Turkey Day.
Yes, but when Best Buy sends its people out, they usually enter the competitor's stores while they're open... this is Best Buy trying to keep information that belongs in the back room locked in the back room. Their future moves are trade secrets.
They most certainly could if the book was marked "ADVANCED PREVIEW COPY-- NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION". Reviewers have a tradition of not reviewing material until its been released, even though they're invited to see advanced screenings. In the Fat Wallet case, what they're dealing with is leaked information that isn't intended to become public until a week from Thursday... the stores still have a right to change their ads at this point.
Google only allows you to go 100 pages deep in your search result, so who cares what the number of returns is is in the hundreds of thousands, you're never gonna see those low-ranked returns anyway.
In fact, you shouldn't. What matters most is not how many returns you get for your search, but how good the first page of returns are at being what you had in mind. The object of the search game is for the #1 hit to be what you wanted and everything else not to matter.
Teach your kids that "don't talk to strangers" applies online as well. (Oh, and be sure to tell them what a stranger is. When I was a child I met a girl who though "Stranger" was simply a synonym "pedophile". I told her it meant anyone she didn't know and she didn't believe me).
The thing is, demonizing "strangers" doesn't quite do the trick. Afterall, a police officer you've never met before is also a "stranger", but one who the kid should be running towards, not away from. Most "strangers" are actually good people that that they haven't met yet, but there are a few not-so-good people out there in the world too.
It's the people who really don't belong at a place that kids need to be scared of, the people who do belong to a place are usually good people there to help. If the kid is lost in a store, they should go towards the people wearing the store's uniforms, they're the ones that can help. At the playground, the kids that they don't know are strangers, but they're other kids that they could be friends with... it's the 29 year old who's there without a kid that doesn't belong at the playground, that's the kind stranger to be worried about.
That's not the way modern households work. Life gets a lot easier when theres one computer and one TV per occupant... no more fighting over resources during the busy hours.
The fact that it's hard to regulate usage is no reason to be a luddite. Kids who have access to the Internet and good TV will have a whole lot better chances in school, and getting into college.
BTW, once they're 18 and get into college, there's gonna be no content-based firewall between them and the Internet. Everything that was off-limits will suddenly open to them. If you're still blocking anything when they're 17... you're in trouble. The kids who go from totally restricted to totally unresticted have never had good freshman years.
When I was a teenager, I made many lifelong friends in the Teen Trivia chat rooms on the Prodigy Interactive Service. Since the rooms were more about playing trivia games than meeting people, perverts didn't really have much of a chance to get very far without being found out and being booted from the service. The fact that in order to have a main Prodigy account reqired billing information also kept the chatrooms on the overall service in check as well.
Of course, the Prodigy Interactive Service never turned a profit, and in the fall of 1999 it was shutdown as the company focused on their ISP which was at the time called Prodigy Internet. AOL's still left standing, but from what I've seen their chat and forum areas aren't anything like what they were in online's "glory days."
Are there any safe-for-teens chat environments left standing?
The worst ones I've seen are ones that require you to have gone back in time in order to have enough experience with the software they want you to use:
"Requirements: 5 years experience with Windows 2000..."
MS is basically daring the EU to try to punish it, because they can't without hurting themselves. If MS were to pull out of Europe, the damage would be huge.
Sure, all of Europe could convert to Linux... but they'd be forced to. As a result, a lot of hardware would have to be replaced and a lot of software would have to be replaced. Banning Windows would be quite the expensive proposition, and MS could damage the whole EU economy by threatening to walk... Bully Bill will get his way.
For those of you who haven't turned on CSPAN2 today, the Senate is in the middle of a fillibuster. Nothing's going to get done until the Democrats let the disputed judges be aproved, the or the Republicans agree to end debate without a vote. In geek terms... they're trapped in a loop.
Once this stalemate clears, there's not much time left in the legislative year. We're a couple weeks away from Thanksgiving, then a couple weeks away from the Holiday Recess and at that point it's over for anything but the most extreme of emergencies. This bill made it from a lobbiest's computer to the Senatorial hopper, but there's just not enough time for it to make it through comittee to the floor.
Sure, this bill could get attached to something else on the floor, but that could already have happened without it being filed formally. Besides, this kind of bill is going to get approved without some sort of fight... even if it escapes the Senate it'll still need to go to the House.
In short, this is a non-event. There's no way we're going to see it passed this legislative year, and this step will have to be repeated if they want to pass it next legislative year.
I think the problem lies in that businesses use standard formats inside their "proprietary" system, meaning once the "outer layer" encryption and protection is broken, the hracker sees everything in plaintext. Clearly, in using a chip that is the base chip for other cheap digital cams, once the hacker reverse enginered the USB pin scrambling, the game was pretty much over as the rest was just a matter of following the tech docs for the chip.
If Ritz had bothered to comission a modifed version of the chip that didn't have its documentation published, they would have made the hacking harder. If furthermore, that modified chip didn't use any "known" graphics format, but one they developed themselves by adding a few nonsensical elements to an open source image compressing program. Then on top of that used a standard encryption scheme... they'd be virtually immune to a brute force attack.
Even if a hacker discovered the key to unlock the top level code, they'd not believe that they had it because the resulting "plaintext" still wouldn't look like any image file they had heard of.
Of course, this would make the whole project more expensive... but at least it wouldn't be so easy to hack...
A "one time use" camera is sold under the theory that you'll eventually turn it in to get the pictures out, at which point the reusable parts are salvaged and not returned to you, but used to make another "one time use" camera. Clearly, Ritz is giving you the camera under the theory that you'll give it back to them.
But here's the question... is there any fine print that requires people to return the cameras? Otherwise, it'd be perfectly legal to buy the camera for it's "one time use" price, and take it apart for the clearly more valuable parts...
Subpoenas to a person typically just ask for the person to show up in the courtroom so they can be called as a witness. (Which, in the case of a foriegner such as Linus isn't so easy to get sometimes...) SCO's lawyers will likely ask the court to let them treat Linus and Richard as hostile witnesses, which is to say that they want to be able to use cross-examination rules instead of direct-examination rules while questioning them.
What questions does SCO have in mind? Who knows... I just get the feeling most of them will be met with "I object!" coming from the IBM table instead of answers...
There is another solution... a few key members of the band could threaten to boycott events where such tapes are being sold. School officials are often quick to cave when enough students threaten to no-show an event (agreeing to take whatever detrimental effect to the grade might have been tied to it if there is a "band class") to the point that it would create a public embarassment.
My high school had too limited a supply of tickets because they had planned to hold a graduation in too small a tent to accomidate large families for every graduate in a community where fair-weather ceremonies were traditionally held at a football statium with more than enough seats. Rumors of a possible graduation ceremony without most of the graduates in attendance (since the school had already announced real diplomas would be available in the school office the Monday afterwards, another change from previous years) forced the administration into paying for a tent rental that would be canceled.
MSN.com and the related Microsoft web content sites are known senders of pop-up and pop-under ads. Is Microsoft going to give up this practice too, or will they block some of their own sponsors?
That law isn't that simple. The law would need to define what is a voice communication service, and of course everybody would want to be an untaxed data communication service...
News Corp. is all over the map when it comes to the content spectrum. It owns some of the trashiest media outlets known to man, but it also owns some of the most respected including Fox News and Sky News. You have to judge each operation on its own, and in some cases within each operation there's distinctly different personalities too.
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8. Rebates. If you have good credit, you will qualify for special offer cards that either give "reward points" or even cold hard cash for making purchases. The bank is basically giving you a share of the merchant fees they collect from the store for being such a low-risk credit customer. Getting 1% cash for every card purchase you make during the year can add up to real money quickly, and cost you nothing assuming you pay all the balances on time and make sure that the card doesn't hit you with a membership fee. Even if it's not a lot of money, it's still more money than you'd have if you had spent cash.
One thing to know...
If you have advanced knowledge of what Best Buy will put on sale 2 weeks from now, you can buy that item today from them at the higher price, and then claim the 110% price protection offer they make to get an additional 10% of the discount. In fact, you can do the same to Circuit City using Best Buy's sale, or vice-versa because Circuit City has the same "price protection" policy.
Therefore, they don't want you to be able to see their price drops coming... and that's why sale info is top secret until the day the sale goes into effect, at which point it's public info.
These are not Best Buy's prices, yet. They will be on the day after Thanksgiving, if everything goes according to present plans. Today's prices are displayed in their stores... but these future prices don't become public info until newspapers go out on Turkey Day.
Yes, but when Best Buy sends its people out, they usually enter the competitor's stores while they're open... this is Best Buy trying to keep information that belongs in the back room locked in the back room. Their future moves are trade secrets.
Wonderful idea... miss out on all of the one-day loss leader offers and therefore pay more when you have to buy similar items later for gift-giving...
They most certainly could if the book was marked "ADVANCED PREVIEW COPY-- NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION". Reviewers have a tradition of not reviewing material until its been released, even though they're invited to see advanced screenings. In the Fat Wallet case, what they're dealing with is leaked information that isn't intended to become public until a week from Thursday... the stores still have a right to change their ads at this point.
Google only allows you to go 100 pages deep in your search result, so who cares what the number of returns is is in the hundreds of thousands, you're never gonna see those low-ranked returns anyway.
In fact, you shouldn't. What matters most is not how many returns you get for your search, but how good the first page of returns are at being what you had in mind. The object of the search game is for the #1 hit to be what you wanted and everything else not to matter.
Teach your kids that "don't talk to strangers" applies online as well. (Oh, and be sure to tell them what a stranger is. When I was a child I met a girl who though "Stranger" was simply a synonym "pedophile". I told her it meant anyone she didn't know and she didn't believe me).
The thing is, demonizing "strangers" doesn't quite do the trick. Afterall, a police officer you've never met before is also a "stranger", but one who the kid should be running towards, not away from. Most "strangers" are actually good people that that they haven't met yet, but there are a few not-so-good people out there in the world too.
It's the people who really don't belong at a place that kids need to be scared of, the people who do belong to a place are usually good people there to help. If the kid is lost in a store, they should go towards the people wearing the store's uniforms, they're the ones that can help. At the playground, the kids that they don't know are strangers, but they're other kids that they could be friends with... it's the 29 year old who's there without a kid that doesn't belong at the playground, that's the kind stranger to be worried about.
That's not the way modern households work. Life gets a lot easier when theres one computer and one TV per occupant... no more fighting over resources during the busy hours. The fact that it's hard to regulate usage is no reason to be a luddite. Kids who have access to the Internet and good TV will have a whole lot better chances in school, and getting into college. BTW, once they're 18 and get into college, there's gonna be no content-based firewall between them and the Internet. Everything that was off-limits will suddenly open to them. If you're still blocking anything when they're 17... you're in trouble. The kids who go from totally restricted to totally unresticted have never had good freshman years.
When I was a teenager, I made many lifelong friends in the Teen Trivia chat rooms on the Prodigy Interactive Service. Since the rooms were more about playing trivia games than meeting people, perverts didn't really have much of a chance to get very far without being found out and being booted from the service. The fact that in order to have a main Prodigy account reqired billing information also kept the chatrooms on the overall service in check as well.
Of course, the Prodigy Interactive Service never turned a profit, and in the fall of 1999 it was shutdown as the company focused on their ISP which was at the time called Prodigy Internet. AOL's still left standing, but from what I've seen their chat and forum areas aren't anything like what they were in online's "glory days."
Are there any safe-for-teens chat environments left standing?
If you went forward in time to 2005, you'd still have to travel backwards in time get a postmark on your resume by the deadline...
The worst ones I've seen are ones that require you to have gone back in time in order to have enough experience with the software they want you to use:
"Requirements: 5 years experience with Windows 2000..."
First "security issue" where Microsoft doesn't allow the patch to be exported to Europe...
Just on a technical note, how do you figure the hardware would have to be replaced?
You wanna take a business critcal system and totally swap out the software without having an extra piece of hardware involved?
New operating system equates to new hardware more often than you think...
MS is basically daring the EU to try to punish it, because they can't without hurting themselves. If MS were to pull out of Europe, the damage would be huge.
Sure, all of Europe could convert to Linux... but they'd be forced to. As a result, a lot of hardware would have to be replaced and a lot of software would have to be replaced. Banning Windows would be quite the expensive proposition, and MS could damage the whole EU economy by threatening to walk... Bully Bill will get his way.
For those of you who haven't turned on CSPAN2 today, the Senate is in the middle of a fillibuster. Nothing's going to get done until the Democrats let the disputed judges be aproved, the or the Republicans agree to end debate without a vote. In geek terms... they're trapped in a loop.
Once this stalemate clears, there's not much time left in the legislative year. We're a couple weeks away from Thanksgiving, then a couple weeks away from the Holiday Recess and at that point it's over for anything but the most extreme of emergencies. This bill made it from a lobbiest's computer to the Senatorial hopper, but there's just not enough time for it to make it through comittee to the floor.
Sure, this bill could get attached to something else on the floor, but that could already have happened without it being filed formally. Besides, this kind of bill is going to get approved without some sort of fight... even if it escapes the Senate it'll still need to go to the House.
In short, this is a non-event. There's no way we're going to see it passed this legislative year, and this step will have to be repeated if they want to pass it next legislative year.
I think the problem lies in that businesses use standard formats inside their "proprietary" system, meaning once the "outer layer" encryption and protection is broken, the hracker sees everything in plaintext. Clearly, in using a chip that is the base chip for other cheap digital cams, once the hacker reverse enginered the USB pin scrambling, the game was pretty much over as the rest was just a matter of following the tech docs for the chip.
If Ritz had bothered to comission a modifed version of the chip that didn't have its documentation published, they would have made the hacking harder. If furthermore, that modified chip didn't use any "known" graphics format, but one they developed themselves by adding a few nonsensical elements to an open source image compressing program. Then on top of that used a standard encryption scheme... they'd be virtually immune to a brute force attack.
Even if a hacker discovered the key to unlock the top level code, they'd not believe that they had it because the resulting "plaintext" still wouldn't look like any image file they had heard of.
Of course, this would make the whole project more expensive... but at least it wouldn't be so easy to hack...
A "one time use" camera is sold under the theory that you'll eventually turn it in to get the pictures out, at which point the reusable parts are salvaged and not returned to you, but used to make another "one time use" camera. Clearly, Ritz is giving you the camera under the theory that you'll give it back to them.
But here's the question... is there any fine print that requires people to return the cameras? Otherwise, it'd be perfectly legal to buy the camera for it's "one time use" price, and take it apart for the clearly more valuable parts...
Subpoenas to a person typically just ask for the person to show up in the courtroom so they can be called as a witness. (Which, in the case of a foriegner such as Linus isn't so easy to get sometimes...) SCO's lawyers will likely ask the court to let them treat Linus and Richard as hostile witnesses, which is to say that they want to be able to use cross-examination rules instead of direct-examination rules while questioning them.
What questions does SCO have in mind? Who knows... I just get the feeling most of them will be met with "I object!" coming from the IBM table instead of answers...
There is another solution... a few key members of the band could threaten to boycott events where such tapes are being sold. School officials are often quick to cave when enough students threaten to no-show an event (agreeing to take whatever detrimental effect to the grade might have been tied to it if there is a "band class") to the point that it would create a public embarassment. My high school had too limited a supply of tickets because they had planned to hold a graduation in too small a tent to accomidate large families for every graduate in a community where fair-weather ceremonies were traditionally held at a football statium with more than enough seats. Rumors of a possible graduation ceremony without most of the graduates in attendance (since the school had already announced real diplomas would be available in the school office the Monday afterwards, another change from previous years) forced the administration into paying for a tent rental that would be canceled.
MSN.com and the related Microsoft web content sites are known senders of pop-up and pop-under ads. Is Microsoft going to give up this practice too, or will they block some of their own sponsors?
That law isn't that simple. The law would need to define what is a voice communication service, and of course everybody would want to be an untaxed data communication service...
It's the difference between opt-out and opt-in. If Belkin's routers shipped with this "feature" disabled, who in their right mind would turn it on?
Don't believe everything you hear on NPR, especially if it comes from Matt Groening...
News Corp. is all over the map when it comes to the content spectrum. It owns some of the trashiest media outlets known to man, but it also owns some of the most respected including Fox News and Sky News. You have to judge each operation on its own, and in some cases within each operation there's distinctly different personalities too.