Protection plans are a moddified form of gambling. You're betting the thing you bought is going to fail within a certain timeframe after the manufacturer's warrenty is up. The store is putting up a replacement item if you win.
Now, think about this for a second. I recently bought a new mouse at Best Buy for $29.95. They wanted $9.95 for the protection plan. Let's think about this.
The mouse comes with a one year replacement guarentee from the maker, so the plan would have covered years 2 and 3 of the mouse's life...
So, in order for the store to lose money on this bet, 1/3 of the mice must fail within the 2nd or 3rd years of life (first year failures are the maker's problem even under the plan) and that's assuming the price of the mouse remains the same. We all know the selling price of tech products go down...
It is very rare that these things pay off. If you took the $9.95 you save for saying "NO!" to these things every time this is offered to yo and put it in an interest-bearing bank account, you'll have enough money to replace gadgets that aren't even broken.
This whole thing exposes a weakness in the EULA. To put a contract in the box without presenting it to you before purchase and not giving you a way to say "No, I refuse" would result in an illegal contract... they can't thrust a license on you without you having a chance to say no.
If Toshiba wraps their own policy that you must return the whole unit, not the individual (Windows) part for a refund, then they must accept the whole unit without a restocking fee because again, this restriction was not disclosed to you before you made the purchase decision. The way to protest this would be to have people each buy one Toshiba laptop, open up the box to discover the bag with this policy on it, then walk back into the store saying you desire the full refund the cellophane bag promises. After a couple Best Buy stores discover that every Toshiba laptop they have is going to have to be sold as an open box item, Best Buy will tell Toshiba they have to come up with a better solution to this problem.
If the store has a contradictory restocking fee policy that they refuse to waive, Toshiba's got a problem here. They promised you a "full refund", and the store won't give one to you. If they can't live up to the "quid pro quo" on the cellophane bag, then the contract is invalid, and you get to open up the bag and discover the Microsoft EULA which sends this whole problem back to square one.
Bottom line: Contractal terms inside of product packaging will eventually fail, and the solution is to put the EULA outside of the retail box. Of course, how's Microsoft gonna handle that PR hit?
Yes, but your local CompUSA dweeb doesn't have access to the infomation.
The flowchart here is that Microsoft says if you do not accept the EULA, take it back to your store. You take it back the store, and they say "no way". Microsoft didn't violate the EULA, the store did.
The limit is one watt of "effective radiated power" or ERP. What this means is that the wattage measured is not the power supply going into the antenna, or even what is actually coming out of the transmitter, it is what is observed when you place a meter at the strongest point in the system. In the case of the Pringles can, that's the mouth of the can.
When you take an omnidirectional antenna and make it directional, you are redirecting the power that was going to go backwards and sideways to going forward. You don't get to average out the measurements for the areas that you're sending zero to, your ERP is the power in the direction that you're broadcasting to.
Why is the FCC not cracking down on this? Too much work, and nobody really harmed when somebody does this. However, if your Pringles can network is interfering with your neighbor's 2.4 GHz phone, they can call you in if they want.
Using unlicenced spectrum space in such a way really should be illegal. Just because the FCC doesn't require a license to user those frequencies doesn't mean you have the right to do whatever you want with it.
A lot of mod'ed WiFi setups tend to be illegal. Yeah, there are laws Pringles-can setup, they're just not enforced because you're not bothering anybody. What's illegal about it? There's a limit on how much signal power a single device can send in any given direction on the unlicensed bands. That law is there to prevent their from being 900MHz headphones with a signal strong enough to be heard a mile away... that would mean that people a mile away or more would have to deal with the interference this one device puts out, and it'd likely put out an unsafe ammount of cancer-causing RF signal into the immedate area too.
Covering the area with a carrier signal, even when there are no active users in the immediate area, is nothing short than wasting bandwidth that could and should be used by other things.
Yep, so all you need to do is to get that 10's of Billions in VC to pay for the equipment, with the promise that over the next 20 years the profits from the fiber lines will pay off the original investment. Afterall, Internet usage doubles every year... right?
Go visit the local bankruptcy court. They'll be happy to introduce you to the rightful owners of some of the dark fiber, banks who gave loans to the late-90s telcos that didn't quite make it.
The banks would gladly sell that fiber to any entity willing to make a reasonable offer. They've got an asset that's meaningless to them and nobody's placing bids on anyway... they'll be happy to sell it for less than cost.
That's like football team making a 20 yard pass play. Usually that's celebrated, but if because of penalties the play was 3rd down and 27 yards, the big play still doesn't make the first down, and the coach still orders a punt on 4th and 7.
Good idea, but still not a good enough idea to make the cost of doing it viable.
My city here has a similar deal with the local cable company. When they upgrade the cable system (which by contract must be done by Feb. 11, 2003... something they appear to be about to default on!) they are also to construct a fiber network connecting all of the city's schools, civic offices, libraries, police stations, and fire stations.
In theory, if they connected the proper equipment at every site, and ordered up a fast internet connection from Verizon (who has a CO that just happens to be located next door to City Hall!) all of the city sites could have blazing fast Internet, and an even faster connection to each other.
But the city doesn't have the people or budget to do such a thing. So, we're gonna end up getting a load of dark fiber that won't be used in the forseeable future.
Your whole post is based on a false assumption. The phone companies don't own all the dark fiber. Much of it belongs to the estate of the defunct dot-com-era telcos, and the creditors of those would love to have somebody buy out those dark fiber assets.
The problem is, it really does cost money to operate and maintain fiber. If you worked out the cost of setting up your own fiber network, and then operating maintaining it all yourself, it would simply not be worth it to your business. Yeah, the fibers themselves are there just waiting to be picked up cheap, but the equipment to light them up isn't there and isn't cheap.
Unrestricted bandwidth exists, it just costs more. Nobody's willing to pay that price, so they offer cut-rate bandwidth with restrictions to lower its value.
Operating fiber lines is not cheap. The energy it takes to power the light beams has a noticible cost. The mistake that a lot of the boom-era telecom companies made was laying down more fiber lines than they'd ever need, and then running out of cash before they could afford the equipment to light them up.
The major telcos didn't go around buying up the unused fiber to let it sit dormant. It's sitting dormant because nobody wanted to buy the fiber assets of the bankrupt boom-era companies.
If you want to supply the rest of the equipment to light up the lines, I'm sure the bankruptcy courts and/or creditors of the defunct companies would be glad to hear your proposal to buy assets which right now are valued at near-zero because nobody's willing to take them. The problem is, the telecom market is so bad off there's no takers.
Anybody can be the certifying authority for such a network. All the certificate would basically say is "Really Important Mail Group says that these people run a good server." So long as that group reliably decertifies spammers, their e-signature will be worth something.
The only way to work this system in is to say, "Fine, spammers, send all the mail you want on SMTP/POP3... nobody's using that protocol set anymore."
When the standard for e-mail is dramatically reworked to rebalance the resources involved so that the sender has to pay for more than the receiver, spam will quickly go away.
The cable industry is between a rock and a hard place. They have to buy wholesale from content industry (your friends at the NAB and MPAA) and then try to sell it to consumers while still having a little profit to keep for themselves.
The fact is, cable rates going up is not the greed of the cable companies... AT&T Broadband would have gone bankrupt if not for Comcast scooping them up at a discount and Aldephia was a scam. These companies are being forced to raise rates because the wholesale cost of what they're selling is being driven up.
FUD'ing the TiVo became the cool thing to do every after the WSJ published the "My TiVo thinks I'm gay..." story and absolutely every media outlet on the world picked it up. Proof that most local news reporters don't think for themselves, they copy off of each other's homework.
Companies think that their FCC licenses are property, when really they can be retracted by the government for any reason, or no reason at all.
IMO, the FCC should be required to revoke the license of the station doing the worst job of serving the public in each city during each renewal period so that one new entrant can buy their way in each cycle.
Yes. And that's the POINT! Wide open WiFi access, even if it's intentional, is stil a dumb idea.
If I walk up to your WiFi router and start sending Spam through your mail relay, your ISP is going to shut you down, or you'll find yourself in a blackhole list.
If I trigger a DDOS attack from your WiFi point, the FBI is going to trace the trail right back to you. If you tell the man "Somebody else was using my free WiFi access, would you like to use it too?" he'll not trust you and slap on the cuffs.
If you're going to intentionally open up free internet access, that's fine... but put limits on your users. Make them identify themselves to you, so you can identify them to the authorities if they do anything illegal with your connection.
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Protection plans are a moddified form of gambling. You're betting the thing you bought is going to fail within a certain timeframe after the manufacturer's warrenty is up. The store is putting up a replacement item if you win.
Now, think about this for a second. I recently bought a new mouse at Best Buy for $29.95. They wanted $9.95 for the protection plan. Let's think about this.
The mouse comes with a one year replacement guarentee from the maker, so the plan would have covered years 2 and 3 of the mouse's life...
So, in order for the store to lose money on this bet, 1/3 of the mice must fail within the 2nd or 3rd years of life (first year failures are the maker's problem even under the plan) and that's assuming the price of the mouse remains the same. We all know the selling price of tech products go down...
It is very rare that these things pay off. If you took the $9.95 you save for saying "NO!" to these things every time this is offered to yo and put it in an interest-bearing bank account, you'll have enough money to replace gadgets that aren't even broken.
Brilliant, the IIS was doomed from the word go.
Internet Information Server (IIS) has doomed from the get go. Can we talk about the International Space Station (ISS) in this thread instead?
The IIS Roles in trouble...
Bell has still not determined the pricing model
Uhm... so they don't know how to make money from this yet? Okay, this isn't gonna last.
This whole thing exposes a weakness in the EULA. To put a contract in the box without presenting it to you before purchase and not giving you a way to say "No, I refuse" would result in an illegal contract... they can't thrust a license on you without you having a chance to say no.
If Toshiba wraps their own policy that you must return the whole unit, not the individual (Windows) part for a refund, then they must accept the whole unit without a restocking fee because again, this restriction was not disclosed to you before you made the purchase decision. The way to protest this would be to have people each buy one Toshiba laptop, open up the box to discover the bag with this policy on it, then walk back into the store saying you desire the full refund the cellophane bag promises. After a couple Best Buy stores discover that every Toshiba laptop they have is going to have to be sold as an open box item, Best Buy will tell Toshiba they have to come up with a better solution to this problem.
If the store has a contradictory restocking fee policy that they refuse to waive, Toshiba's got a problem here. They promised you a "full refund", and the store won't give one to you. If they can't live up to the "quid pro quo" on the cellophane bag, then the contract is invalid, and you get to open up the bag and discover the Microsoft EULA which sends this whole problem back to square one.
Bottom line: Contractal terms inside of product packaging will eventually fail, and the solution is to put the EULA outside of the retail box. Of course, how's Microsoft gonna handle that PR hit?
Yes, but your local CompUSA dweeb doesn't have access to the infomation.
The flowchart here is that Microsoft says if you do not accept the EULA, take it back to your store. You take it back the store, and they say "no way". Microsoft didn't violate the EULA, the store did.
The limit is one watt of "effective radiated power" or ERP. What this means is that the wattage measured is not the power supply going into the antenna, or even what is actually coming out of the transmitter, it is what is observed when you place a meter at the strongest point in the system. In the case of the Pringles can, that's the mouth of the can.
When you take an omnidirectional antenna and make it directional, you are redirecting the power that was going to go backwards and sideways to going forward. You don't get to average out the measurements for the areas that you're sending zero to, your ERP is the power in the direction that you're broadcasting to.
Why is the FCC not cracking down on this? Too much work, and nobody really harmed when somebody does this. However, if your Pringles can network is interfering with your neighbor's 2.4 GHz phone, they can call you in if they want.
Using unlicenced spectrum space in such a way really should be illegal. Just because the FCC doesn't require a license to user those frequencies doesn't mean you have the right to do whatever you want with it.
A lot of mod'ed WiFi setups tend to be illegal. Yeah, there are laws Pringles-can setup, they're just not enforced because you're not bothering anybody. What's illegal about it? There's a limit on how much signal power a single device can send in any given direction on the unlicensed bands. That law is there to prevent their from being 900MHz headphones with a signal strong enough to be heard a mile away... that would mean that people a mile away or more would have to deal with the interference this one device puts out, and it'd likely put out an unsafe ammount of cancer-causing RF signal into the immedate area too.
Covering the area with a carrier signal, even when there are no active users in the immediate area, is nothing short than wasting bandwidth that could and should be used by other things.
Yep, so all you need to do is to get that 10's of Billions in VC to pay for the equipment, with the promise that over the next 20 years the profits from the fiber lines will pay off the original investment. Afterall, Internet usage doubles every year... right?
Oops. We've made this mistake alrady.
Go visit the local bankruptcy court. They'll be happy to introduce you to the rightful owners of some of the dark fiber, banks who gave loans to the late-90s telcos that didn't quite make it. The banks would gladly sell that fiber to any entity willing to make a reasonable offer. They've got an asset that's meaningless to them and nobody's placing bids on anyway... they'll be happy to sell it for less than cost.
That's like football team making a 20 yard pass play. Usually that's celebrated, but if because of penalties the play was 3rd down and 27 yards, the big play still doesn't make the first down, and the coach still orders a punt on 4th and 7.
Good idea, but still not a good enough idea to make the cost of doing it viable.
My city here has a similar deal with the local cable company. When they upgrade the cable system (which by contract must be done by Feb. 11, 2003... something they appear to be about to default on!) they are also to construct a fiber network connecting all of the city's schools, civic offices, libraries, police stations, and fire stations.
In theory, if they connected the proper equipment at every site, and ordered up a fast internet connection from Verizon (who has a CO that just happens to be located next door to City Hall!) all of the city sites could have blazing fast Internet, and an even faster connection to each other.
But the city doesn't have the people or budget to do such a thing. So, we're gonna end up getting a load of dark fiber that won't be used in the forseeable future.
Your whole post is based on a false assumption. The phone companies don't own all the dark fiber. Much of it belongs to the estate of the defunct dot-com-era telcos, and the creditors of those would love to have somebody buy out those dark fiber assets. The problem is, it really does cost money to operate and maintain fiber. If you worked out the cost of setting up your own fiber network, and then operating maintaining it all yourself, it would simply not be worth it to your business. Yeah, the fibers themselves are there just waiting to be picked up cheap, but the equipment to light them up isn't there and isn't cheap.
Unrestricted bandwidth exists, it just costs more. Nobody's willing to pay that price, so they offer cut-rate bandwidth with restrictions to lower its value.
Operating fiber lines is not cheap. The energy it takes to power the light beams has a noticible cost. The mistake that a lot of the boom-era telecom companies made was laying down more fiber lines than they'd ever need, and then running out of cash before they could afford the equipment to light them up.
The major telcos didn't go around buying up the unused fiber to let it sit dormant. It's sitting dormant because nobody wanted to buy the fiber assets of the bankrupt boom-era companies.
If you want to supply the rest of the equipment to light up the lines, I'm sure the bankruptcy courts and/or creditors of the defunct companies would be glad to hear your proposal to buy assets which right now are valued at near-zero because nobody's willing to take them. The problem is, the telecom market is so bad off there's no takers.
Try selling that one to grandma...
Anybody can be the certifying authority for such a network. All the certificate would basically say is "Really Important Mail Group says that these people run a good server." So long as that group reliably decertifies spammers, their e-signature will be worth something.
The only way to work this system in is to say, "Fine, spammers, send all the mail you want on SMTP/POP3... nobody's using that protocol set anymore."
When the standard for e-mail is dramatically reworked to rebalance the resources involved so that the sender has to pay for more than the receiver, spam will quickly go away.
The cable industry is between a rock and a hard place. They have to buy wholesale from content industry (your friends at the NAB and MPAA) and then try to sell it to consumers while still having a little profit to keep for themselves. The fact is, cable rates going up is not the greed of the cable companies... AT&T Broadband would have gone bankrupt if not for Comcast scooping them up at a discount and Aldephia was a scam. These companies are being forced to raise rates because the wholesale cost of what they're selling is being driven up.
FUD'ing the TiVo became the cool thing to do every after the WSJ published the "My TiVo thinks I'm gay..." story and absolutely every media outlet on the world picked it up. Proof that most local news reporters don't think for themselves, they copy off of each other's homework.
Companies think that their FCC licenses are property, when really they can be retracted by the government for any reason, or no reason at all. IMO, the FCC should be required to revoke the license of the station doing the worst job of serving the public in each city during each renewal period so that one new entrant can buy their way in each cycle.
One thing if this was an RFTA post, but you didn't even read the summary!
They only give the laptops back if they fail to finish the honors program. Only students who drop out or transfer elsewhere have to give it back.
It's not a rental. They keep it so long as they finish the program, it's only if they drop out that they have to give it back.
Just remember not to leave prints on the lost access port...
I have a private (as secured as it can be) wireless network, not a "service". Someone who breaks into it is a thief, not a "user".
You are not the problem. Carry on.
Yes. And that's the POINT! Wide open WiFi access, even if it's intentional, is stil a dumb idea.
If I walk up to your WiFi router and start sending Spam through your mail relay, your ISP is going to shut you down, or you'll find yourself in a blackhole list.
If I trigger a DDOS attack from your WiFi point, the FBI is going to trace the trail right back to you. If you tell the man "Somebody else was using my free WiFi access, would you like to use it too?" he'll not trust you and slap on the cuffs.
If you're going to intentionally open up free internet access, that's fine... but put limits on your users. Make them identify themselves to you, so you can identify them to the authorities if they do anything illegal with your connection.