That's a boiler plate in the financial world in other forms of communications. Basically, the litteral meaning is an request that to the reader to forget you ever saw a document you weren't supposed to see in the first place, since tacking action based on information you didn't legally obtain is usually a path that leads to legal trouble for the sender.
Of course, such a request will always be honored by moral players, and always be ignored by immoral players. Such is life...
WEP may be broken, but it requires "a day's worth of traffic" in order for the key to be solved for, and furthermore a continued physical proximity to the network in order to gather the data. So, a WEP hack is not trivial...
So yes, "You'd be safer with no WEP and higher-level encryption", but you'd be even more safe if you were to run both WEP and the higher-level encryption. Imagine the hacker's reaction when they finally figure out your WEP key just to end up with encrypted VPN traffic.
Your argument is akin to saying that deadbolts aren't worth using because a thief could just bring a battering ram... however, at least it requires anybody breaking in to bring a battering ram which makes doing a stealth operation just a bit harder.
One major flaw I see in telling people to enable WEP on their WiFi is the first question I'm sure to get back is "How do I do that?" and, well, the instructions for doing that are different for each and every item on their network.
What's more annoying is that people think the "passphrase" they type into their router a the WiFi key rather than what it usually really is, the random seed from which their router generates the actual keys. They type their passphrase into their other devices when they're supposed to type a key value, and then they wonder why it doesn't work anymore when it was working just fine before they tried this security stuff.
I've had friends who I thought were tech savvy get tripped up over this stuff. I blame the router-makers for not providing software that makes this a whole lot more of a user-friendly experience. We as the IT industry are badly failing at this... and having a lot of open WiFi points will just make our other headaches such as spam and viruses worse in the end. This really needs to be addressed for the good of the Internet.
If you own a soap box, it's your right to stand on it and say what you want. However, if you don't have a soap box, nobody's required to give you one and you can't just take somebody else's.
We're allowed to post on Slashdot because OSDN has invited us all here as their guests. They didn't have to do that, they're just being nice to us.
My point is that the "right to free speech" doesn't translate into a reason why pirate radio should be allowed to operate. If you want to provide rock radio to a community that doesn't have a rock radio station, you're going to have to do it as a business because broadcast radio costs money to produce.
My point is even if the pirate radio station went legal as a web stream, the copyright interests would still come knocking for their royalties and that'd put the kid who's just playing songs out of his CD collection out of business too. You can't just create a "radio station" unless you're able to come up with the content to fill your broadcast day.
The right of freedom of speech is important, but I hate to see it being cheapened by people who invoke it when it just isn't valid. Far too often, the people who are yelling that they have the right to free speech are in fact in a situation where that right just doesn't cover what they wanted to do.
The crap part, is since that it's such a small town, there's no amount of advertising that would make up for the FCC fees alone. Therefore, Mariposa, CA is stuck with a country music station.
This story is just another one that ends up frustrating me in the end. Thank you, FCC. You properly ended up making free speech available and accessible to the upper class.
If the FCC didn't shut him down, ASCAP/BMI would have chased after him for mechanical royalty fees for the music he played.
The right to free speech doesn't mean everybody's entitled to a soap box to stand on, and the freedom of the press belongs to the people who own a printing press.
In this case, it just turns out that the corporate interests had the resources to dot all the I's and cross all the T's on their application... and take advantage of the fact that the public group missed the chance they had to turn in their Class D license for a LPFM1 license that would have blocked this move.
Failing to do that when the LPFM classes were created basically left this station exposed. Any non-commerical interest could have taken their license away simply by proposing an LPFM1 station on their channel. The commerical stations didn't exactly want any LPFM1 station to form there... so they pulled out their mapping software and created a plan that got upgrades for all of them and locked-out the posiblity of there being a 104.5 FM where KMIH stands and submitted it.
The FCC's mode as a bureaucracy kicks in, and has to approve this plan because Class D's that are under 100 watts have no protection from competiting plans.
KMIH has been an exception to the FCC rules since 1978, when after being backed by NPR and universities operating larger stations in the dedicated "educational band" from 88.1 to 91.9 got the minimum power requirement for any station in that band to keep its primary status to be 100 watts. KMIH was lucky to have survived this timeframe... dozens of similar stations got bumped out of the band when larger stations filed for upgrades leaving the smaller station with nowhere to go other than out of business.
KMIH didn't meet its match until the 1990s when finally a larger station came forward with a plan that bumped them off their allocation. The FCC, however, was nice to them... they were given a gift in the form of being allowed to start a Class D allocation at 104.5. That represented an FCC rule being waived for them... Class D stations don't belong outside of the educational space. But, it came with a catch. Being a non-compliant grandfathered station, they were still stuck with "secondary status" which means any application for primary status would be able to bump them out of existance. The only thing that protected this station was the fact that the surronding 104.5 FM stations were owned by different owners, and none of them could really upgrade themselves without crashing into another commerical user who'd most definitely object.
Now, when LPFM came out... there was a chance for KMIH to get themselves out of the doghouse. They could have simply filed the paperwork to convert their Class D license into an LPFM1. It turns out, they were fully compliant already and they wouldn't have had to change their technical operations at all to change status, but it'd gain them the chance to become a primary user of the space they were hanging onto so that nobody could knock them out of it. They likely didn't do that because they didn't see this kind of problem coming, or if anybody raised the posiblity they weren't able to get the school to pay the legal fees to get the paperwork done.
So, when the surronding 104.5 FMs were able to create a plan that benefited all of them but left KMIH with no place to hide, KMIH's lease on life expired.
When you've got a secondary allocation, you've got to beware of those things possibly happening... clearly this high school operation wasn't and that turned out to be their undoing.
If the station received its license on the basis of its promise to serve Fooville, why should it be allowed to move to a nearby major market?
Because they can claim that Fooville is already recieving a "primary local service" from several other radio stations, so even though they were the closest station to Fooville and got their allocation in the early days by promising to serve Fooville, Fooville doesn't really need them anymore. Therefore, they want to move to Barville and provide a new "primary local serice" to them since they seem so underserved.
The fact that the real motivation is that a new setup in Barville will give them a whole lot better signal in Capitol City, which is where they've really been trying to aim themselves at all along, is something that they can easily leave out of the FCC applications.
The fact is, "primary local service" is a joke these days, and have been that way for a long long time. The laws of market economics have basically taken over. If there's an ad market to support a community than the market exists, otherwise it gets folded into the nearest market that is large enough to qualify.
Afterall, ad sales is really what local service is all about in broadcasting these days. Community calendars are being left to the local newspaper, which more and more is now just some localized inserts into an otherwise regional newspaper. (In some cases, it's one title with a regional section... in other cases it's 5 co-owned papers with different titles that have their own front page, but share any story that applies to the whole area or is purely a "feature" story.)
If the local radio market really was that viable... than MegaCorp wouldn't be able to justify coming up with enough money to get the local owner to part with his station.
You can't exactly fault Clear Channel for reaching over and picking up a picking up a penny that was on the ground right in front of them.
It was a chance for Clear Channel to make money, and all they had do is to shove another station right out of their way. The smaller station's lease on life was subject to there being no other request to use their space by a larger station... the moment one showed up they were dead. Well, Clear Channel was smart enough to come up with that bigger allocation, so there they go.
Yep, it's the kind of action that gets Clear Channel its well-deserved reputation as a bully, but having not done so would have had Wall Street yelling at them for not making money when they clearly had a chance to do so.
This station has been lucky to be alive since 1978. In 1978, the minimum power requirement to be in the protected educational band from 88.1 to 91.9 got raised to 100 watts. KMIH was on 90.1 and far short of that...
They were allowed to get by until the 1990s when the FCC ordered them to move to 104.5. But even that was a secondary allocation that has no standing to block primary requests like the one that just popped up.
What they should have done was the moment that LPFM came out converted their station from a Class D license to an LPFM1 class license that would have locked them into a primary status on that channel, which would have caused the commerical station's plan to get denied due to interfering with a primary user. Instead, however, they're a secondary user whose signal interfering with this about-to-be-approved primary user is just going to have to get out of the way.
The only way to have blocked this proposal was to have seen it possibly coming in the future and having taken the action to protect their station before it hit. Instead, they were seen by the commerical stations as being weak prey, and were dead the moment that the commercial interests had worked out a plan that gave them upgrades at the expense of KMIH.
Objecting after the plan was filed is too little, too late. Their life on borrowed time is now over.
Because that "free space" is most likely in the 88.1 to 91.9 FM educational band in which the commercial station can't move into, but the high school's station most certainly can.
Small-signal educational stations have been put on notice that if they've got a Class D license in the commerical section of the FM band, they'd better get their act together and move into the educational band or at least admit they're small-timers ad step down to an LPFM license. This school did neither... and now the station-owners of the other 104.5 FM stations in the area have come up with a plan that pretends that the high school station doesn't exist. Guess what, since the high school never got relicensed as LPFM, they're a "secondary user" of their channel that could be squeezed out by anybody filing a primary use request... so for the purpose of this new filing by the commercial stations they don't exist.
Class D stations are hanging on by a grandfather clause at this point. The FCC is handing out no more new Class D allocations, and all Class D stations have been demoted in status such that if any higher-class stations (which include all commercial stations, since Class D's are by definition non-commercial) gets an allocation that interferes with them, the Class D must cease operations.
In short, Class D is in a phase-out period... stations in the Class D status need to get themselves moved into the dedicated educational slice of the FM band from 88.1 to 91.9, or convert their license to being LPFM station (possibly with lower power than they had before) in order to regain primary status so that nobody else can stomp on their turf.
This poor high school hasn't acted, and now the bulldozer of several stations re-aligining themselves on "their frequency" is coming in to knock them down. Sure, changing frequencies or converting to LPFM isn't a free thing to do, but it was part of their obligations as a broadcaster to keep up with the changes in the FM band. They did nothing, and if they can't afford to get themselves onto a safe channel then that's there problem. They clearly had a chance to do so when LPFM came out, and they passed...
Trying to relocate a radio station such that it better covers a major metro area rather than covering the subberbs on the fringe of the city is a regular event in the radio biz. The FCC originally wanted to hand out radio allocations so that small communities had stations all to themselves, but this policy has more or less outlived its usefulness as small town ad markets simply just don't exist. A station needs to be either allowed to play ball in its nearby major market, or it most likely is being rented out or sold to a 24/7 national interest which doesn't serve the small market very well anyway.
Yes, but the business that tries to cut costs by using USPS in place of UPS/FedEx is running a big risk, because their competitors can ship faster and more reliably than they can.
Running behind the market standard that everybody else is using is a differentiator in the marketplace. Just because there's a 48-way tie on an issue doesn't mean it's meaningless... all 48 need to keep themselves up at that level or they'd be at a huge disadvantage.
Stay with the pack...
on
Why I.T. Matters
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There might not be much of a reason to have the latest and greatest in technology. But, here in 2004, if your business hasn't figured out how customers can send you orders over the WWW yet, you're lucky to still be around.
If your competitor has better inventory accounting or demand prediction than you do, they're going to be able function better than you do, and eventually that deficit will come back to haunt you.
Being on the cutting edge gives you the risk of being burned by bad tech... but falling behind the curve is a certain path towards failure.
If a part-time legislature is constantly backlogged with the important issues like a budget, then there's no way for them to pass trivial laws nobody really asked for.
Another key factor is that part-time legislatures in general are paid less for their services, requiring nearly every member of the state legislature to hold a "real job" during the off season.
This is a case in point right here... this bill is not likely to even be considered by the House, and even if it does pass there Arnold's gonna veto it. It's such a dead bill, why'd the Senate waste taxpayer time and money going through the motions?
Nothing's more private than a face-to-face cash transaction... unless you're there to take possession of the item, then you have to tell them where to send it to.
There is such a system right now. They're called prepaid credit cards. They're marketed in several different ways. Some convenience stores sell them right next to the prepaid cell phone cards targetting them at the people who can't get real credit cards because they've ruined their own credit history already. They're also seen at Simon-owned malls around the nation as what they're selling instead of selling traditional mall gift certificates now. Parents are pitched such cards as a way to establish a hard-limit on their children's spending. The prepaid cards are backed by either the Visa or MasterCard networks to create near-universal acceptance by merchants who won't even care that they're not traditional credit cards.
The catch? The transaction fees on these things are horrendous. Anybody who has the credit history to qualify and the personal resolve to not charge things they can't pay off is better off getting a real credit card... those are free to have, free to use, and also contribute good notes to your credit history for your future credit requests.
If you want to avoid giving your name for tin foil hat purposes, at least you have the option to get a nameless credit card. However, you're going to pay extra for that privledge.
When it comes down to it, credit's a tool that's most certainly worth using. If you have a good-looking credit record built up at this point, there are lenders willing to let you hold on to their money for close to a year right now with near-zero interest.
True, it's a tool that lets the rich gets richer. However, if you're not so poor that you've spent money you can't repay in the past, you're considered rich enough to get to keep using that tool.
I think at the end of the day Rush and Ralph would get together and swap copies if that ever started happening.
If you're in the business of being a political pundit, you want to read everything you can so you can talk about it. You need to see the opinions you disagree with too so you can start thinking of the ways to call those people wrong.
One thing the whole FICO-based credit system has working in its favor is that it is very truely blind. The decision maker doesn't get to look at you physically at all, it's not even a person anymore. Simply put, if the prediction formula gives you enough points you're accepted, and if it doesn't you're declined. Race, age, gender, religion, sexuality... who cares.
Of course, the system isn't perfect, it's subject to GIGO just like any other computer system. However, compared to human decision making, it's a whole lot of a more fair process on the whole.
I'd actually wish my Comcast would block file sharing ports on my local cable modem service. Somebody's sending our network SMB packets I have no interest in hearing... sure, a firewall can stop that, but I'd rather they not come in the wire in the first place.
Sometimes one person's bug is another person's feature.
They'll never do this. As much money is dangled in front of them, there's a bigger trap door.
Right now, ISPs stay out of the RIAA/MPAA lawsuit fights because they are common carriers. The moment they stop being able to claim that by giving disadvantages to those who they choose to spite, the RIAA/MPAA will demand that the P2P client of the week be spited as well...
That's just too much of a headache for them. They don't want to become liable for their user's usage. They'd rather that users keep using without them being bothered. They're not going to open themselves up to such exposure.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a boiler plate in the financial world in other forms of communications. Basically, the litteral meaning is an request that to the reader to forget you ever saw a document you weren't supposed to see in the first place, since tacking action based on information you didn't legally obtain is usually a path that leads to legal trouble for the sender. Of course, such a request will always be honored by moral players, and always be ignored by immoral players. Such is life...
WEP may be broken, but it requires "a day's worth of traffic" in order for the key to be solved for, and furthermore a continued physical proximity to the network in order to gather the data. So, a WEP hack is not trivial...
So yes, "You'd be safer with no WEP and higher-level encryption", but you'd be even more safe if you were to run both WEP and the higher-level encryption. Imagine the hacker's reaction when they finally figure out your WEP key just to end up with encrypted VPN traffic.
Your argument is akin to saying that deadbolts aren't worth using because a thief could just bring a battering ram... however, at least it requires anybody breaking in to bring a battering ram which makes doing a stealth operation just a bit harder.
Mind linking to the comment I stole? Oh, what... there isn't one....
One major flaw I see in telling people to enable WEP on their WiFi is the first question I'm sure to get back is "How do I do that?" and, well, the instructions for doing that are different for each and every item on their network.
What's more annoying is that people think the "passphrase" they type into their router a the WiFi key rather than what it usually really is, the random seed from which their router generates the actual keys. They type their passphrase into their other devices when they're supposed to type a key value, and then they wonder why it doesn't work anymore when it was working just fine before they tried this security stuff.
I've had friends who I thought were tech savvy get tripped up over this stuff. I blame the router-makers for not providing software that makes this a whole lot more of a user-friendly experience. We as the IT industry are badly failing at this... and having a lot of open WiFi points will just make our other headaches such as spam and viruses worse in the end. This really needs to be addressed for the good of the Internet.
If you own a soap box, it's your right to stand on it and say what you want. However, if you don't have a soap box, nobody's required to give you one and you can't just take somebody else's.
We're allowed to post on Slashdot because OSDN has invited us all here as their guests. They didn't have to do that, they're just being nice to us.
My point is that the "right to free speech" doesn't translate into a reason why pirate radio should be allowed to operate. If you want to provide rock radio to a community that doesn't have a rock radio station, you're going to have to do it as a business because broadcast radio costs money to produce.
My point is even if the pirate radio station went legal as a web stream, the copyright interests would still come knocking for their royalties and that'd put the kid who's just playing songs out of his CD collection out of business too. You can't just create a "radio station" unless you're able to come up with the content to fill your broadcast day.
The right of freedom of speech is important, but I hate to see it being cheapened by people who invoke it when it just isn't valid. Far too often, the people who are yelling that they have the right to free speech are in fact in a situation where that right just doesn't cover what they wanted to do.
The crap part, is since that it's such a small town, there's no amount of advertising that would make up for the FCC fees alone. Therefore, Mariposa, CA is stuck with a country music station.
This story is just another one that ends up frustrating me in the end. Thank you, FCC. You properly ended up making free speech available and accessible to the upper class.
If the FCC didn't shut him down, ASCAP/BMI would have chased after him for mechanical royalty fees for the music he played.
The right to free speech doesn't mean everybody's entitled to a soap box to stand on, and the freedom of the press belongs to the people who own a printing press.
In this case, it just turns out that the corporate interests had the resources to dot all the I's and cross all the T's on their application... and take advantage of the fact that the public group missed the chance they had to turn in their Class D license for a LPFM1 license that would have blocked this move.
Failing to do that when the LPFM classes were created basically left this station exposed. Any non-commerical interest could have taken their license away simply by proposing an LPFM1 station on their channel. The commerical stations didn't exactly want any LPFM1 station to form there... so they pulled out their mapping software and created a plan that got upgrades for all of them and locked-out the posiblity of there being a 104.5 FM where KMIH stands and submitted it.
The FCC's mode as a bureaucracy kicks in, and has to approve this plan because Class D's that are under 100 watts have no protection from competiting plans.
KMIH has been an exception to the FCC rules since 1978, when after being backed by NPR and universities operating larger stations in the dedicated "educational band" from 88.1 to 91.9 got the minimum power requirement for any station in that band to keep its primary status to be 100 watts. KMIH was lucky to have survived this timeframe... dozens of similar stations got bumped out of the band when larger stations filed for upgrades leaving the smaller station with nowhere to go other than out of business.
KMIH didn't meet its match until the 1990s when finally a larger station came forward with a plan that bumped them off their allocation. The FCC, however, was nice to them... they were given a gift in the form of being allowed to start a Class D allocation at 104.5. That represented an FCC rule being waived for them... Class D stations don't belong outside of the educational space. But, it came with a catch. Being a non-compliant grandfathered station, they were still stuck with "secondary status" which means any application for primary status would be able to bump them out of existance. The only thing that protected this station was the fact that the surronding 104.5 FM stations were owned by different owners, and none of them could really upgrade themselves without crashing into another commerical user who'd most definitely object.
Now, when LPFM came out... there was a chance for KMIH to get themselves out of the doghouse. They could have simply filed the paperwork to convert their Class D license into an LPFM1. It turns out, they were fully compliant already and they wouldn't have had to change their technical operations at all to change status, but it'd gain them the chance to become a primary user of the space they were hanging onto so that nobody could knock them out of it. They likely didn't do that because they didn't see this kind of problem coming, or if anybody raised the posiblity they weren't able to get the school to pay the legal fees to get the paperwork done.
So, when the surronding 104.5 FMs were able to create a plan that benefited all of them but left KMIH with no place to hide, KMIH's lease on life expired.
When you've got a secondary allocation, you've got to beware of those things possibly happening... clearly this high school operation wasn't and that turned out to be their undoing.
If the station received its license on the basis of its promise to serve Fooville, why should it be allowed to move to a nearby major market?
Because they can claim that Fooville is already recieving a "primary local service" from several other radio stations, so even though they were the closest station to Fooville and got their allocation in the early days by promising to serve Fooville, Fooville doesn't really need them anymore. Therefore, they want to move to Barville and provide a new "primary local serice" to them since they seem so underserved.
The fact that the real motivation is that a new setup in Barville will give them a whole lot better signal in Capitol City, which is where they've really been trying to aim themselves at all along, is something that they can easily leave out of the FCC applications.
The fact is, "primary local service" is a joke these days, and have been that way for a long long time. The laws of market economics have basically taken over. If there's an ad market to support a community than the market exists, otherwise it gets folded into the nearest market that is large enough to qualify.
Afterall, ad sales is really what local service is all about in broadcasting these days. Community calendars are being left to the local newspaper, which more and more is now just some localized inserts into an otherwise regional newspaper. (In some cases, it's one title with a regional section... in other cases it's 5 co-owned papers with different titles that have their own front page, but share any story that applies to the whole area or is purely a "feature" story.)
If the local radio market really was that viable... than MegaCorp wouldn't be able to justify coming up with enough money to get the local owner to part with his station.
You can't exactly fault Clear Channel for reaching over and picking up a picking up a penny that was on the ground right in front of them.
It was a chance for Clear Channel to make money, and all they had do is to shove another station right out of their way. The smaller station's lease on life was subject to there being no other request to use their space by a larger station... the moment one showed up they were dead. Well, Clear Channel was smart enough to come up with that bigger allocation, so there they go.
Yep, it's the kind of action that gets Clear Channel its well-deserved reputation as a bully, but having not done so would have had Wall Street yelling at them for not making money when they clearly had a chance to do so.
This station has been lucky to be alive since 1978. In 1978, the minimum power requirement to be in the protected educational band from 88.1 to 91.9 got raised to 100 watts. KMIH was on 90.1 and far short of that...
They were allowed to get by until the 1990s when the FCC ordered them to move to 104.5. But even that was a secondary allocation that has no standing to block primary requests like the one that just popped up.
What they should have done was the moment that LPFM came out converted their station from a Class D license to an LPFM1 class license that would have locked them into a primary status on that channel, which would have caused the commerical station's plan to get denied due to interfering with a primary user. Instead, however, they're a secondary user whose signal interfering with this about-to-be-approved primary user is just going to have to get out of the way.
The only way to have blocked this proposal was to have seen it possibly coming in the future and having taken the action to protect their station before it hit. Instead, they were seen by the commerical stations as being weak prey, and were dead the moment that the commercial interests had worked out a plan that gave them upgrades at the expense of KMIH.
Objecting after the plan was filed is too little, too late. Their life on borrowed time is now over.
Because that "free space" is most likely in the 88.1 to 91.9 FM educational band in which the commercial station can't move into, but the high school's station most certainly can.
Small-signal educational stations have been put on notice that if they've got a Class D license in the commerical section of the FM band, they'd better get their act together and move into the educational band or at least admit they're small-timers ad step down to an LPFM license. This school did neither... and now the station-owners of the other 104.5 FM stations in the area have come up with a plan that pretends that the high school station doesn't exist. Guess what, since the high school never got relicensed as LPFM, they're a "secondary user" of their channel that could be squeezed out by anybody filing a primary use request... so for the purpose of this new filing by the commercial stations they don't exist.
Class D stations are hanging on by a grandfather clause at this point. The FCC is handing out no more new Class D allocations, and all Class D stations have been demoted in status such that if any higher-class stations (which include all commercial stations, since Class D's are by definition non-commercial) gets an allocation that interferes with them, the Class D must cease operations.
In short, Class D is in a phase-out period... stations in the Class D status need to get themselves moved into the dedicated educational slice of the FM band from 88.1 to 91.9, or convert their license to being LPFM station (possibly with lower power than they had before) in order to regain primary status so that nobody else can stomp on their turf.
This poor high school hasn't acted, and now the bulldozer of several stations re-aligining themselves on "their frequency" is coming in to knock them down. Sure, changing frequencies or converting to LPFM isn't a free thing to do, but it was part of their obligations as a broadcaster to keep up with the changes in the FM band. They did nothing, and if they can't afford to get themselves onto a safe channel then that's there problem. They clearly had a chance to do so when LPFM came out, and they passed...
Trying to relocate a radio station such that it better covers a major metro area rather than covering the subberbs on the fringe of the city is a regular event in the radio biz. The FCC originally wanted to hand out radio allocations so that small communities had stations all to themselves, but this policy has more or less outlived its usefulness as small town ad markets simply just don't exist. A station needs to be either allowed to play ball in its nearby major market, or it most likely is being rented out or sold to a 24/7 national interest which doesn't serve the small market very well anyway.
Yes, but the business that tries to cut costs by using USPS in place of UPS/FedEx is running a big risk, because their competitors can ship faster and more reliably than they can.
Running behind the market standard that everybody else is using is a differentiator in the marketplace. Just because there's a 48-way tie on an issue doesn't mean it's meaningless... all 48 need to keep themselves up at that level or they'd be at a huge disadvantage.
There might not be much of a reason to have the latest and greatest in technology. But, here in 2004, if your business hasn't figured out how customers can send you orders over the WWW yet, you're lucky to still be around.
If your competitor has better inventory accounting or demand prediction than you do, they're going to be able function better than you do, and eventually that deficit will come back to haunt you.
Being on the cutting edge gives you the risk of being burned by bad tech... but falling behind the curve is a certain path towards failure.
If a part-time legislature is constantly backlogged with the important issues like a budget, then there's no way for them to pass trivial laws nobody really asked for.
Another key factor is that part-time legislatures in general are paid less for their services, requiring nearly every member of the state legislature to hold a "real job" during the off season.
This is a case in point right here... this bill is not likely to even be considered by the House, and even if it does pass there Arnold's gonna veto it. It's such a dead bill, why'd the Senate waste taxpayer time and money going through the motions?
Nothing's more private than a face-to-face cash transaction... unless you're there to take possession of the item, then you have to tell them where to send it to.
There is such a system right now. They're called prepaid credit cards. They're marketed in several different ways. Some convenience stores sell them right next to the prepaid cell phone cards targetting them at the people who can't get real credit cards because they've ruined their own credit history already. They're also seen at Simon-owned malls around the nation as what they're selling instead of selling traditional mall gift certificates now. Parents are pitched such cards as a way to establish a hard-limit on their children's spending. The prepaid cards are backed by either the Visa or MasterCard networks to create near-universal acceptance by merchants who won't even care that they're not traditional credit cards.
The catch? The transaction fees on these things are horrendous. Anybody who has the credit history to qualify and the personal resolve to not charge things they can't pay off is better off getting a real credit card... those are free to have, free to use, and also contribute good notes to your credit history for your future credit requests.
If you want to avoid giving your name for tin foil hat purposes, at least you have the option to get a nameless credit card. However, you're going to pay extra for that privledge.
When it comes down to it, credit's a tool that's most certainly worth using. If you have a good-looking credit record built up at this point, there are lenders willing to let you hold on to their money for close to a year right now with near-zero interest.
True, it's a tool that lets the rich gets richer. However, if you're not so poor that you've spent money you can't repay in the past, you're considered rich enough to get to keep using that tool.
I think at the end of the day Rush and Ralph would get together and swap copies if that ever started happening.
If you're in the business of being a political pundit, you want to read everything you can so you can talk about it. You need to see the opinions you disagree with too so you can start thinking of the ways to call those people wrong.
One thing the whole FICO-based credit system has working in its favor is that it is very truely blind. The decision maker doesn't get to look at you physically at all, it's not even a person anymore. Simply put, if the prediction formula gives you enough points you're accepted, and if it doesn't you're declined. Race, age, gender, religion, sexuality... who cares.
Of course, the system isn't perfect, it's subject to GIGO just like any other computer system. However, compared to human decision making, it's a whole lot of a more fair process on the whole.
I'd actually wish my Comcast would block file sharing ports on my local cable modem service. Somebody's sending our network SMB packets I have no interest in hearing... sure, a firewall can stop that, but I'd rather they not come in the wire in the first place.
Sometimes one person's bug is another person's feature.
That'd solve nothing. Bouncing packets through extra hops to hide their identity will delay them just as much as the ISP would be...
They'll never do this. As much money is dangled in front of them, there's a bigger trap door.
Right now, ISPs stay out of the RIAA/MPAA lawsuit fights because they are common carriers. The moment they stop being able to claim that by giving disadvantages to those who they choose to spite, the RIAA/MPAA will demand that the P2P client of the week be spited as well...
That's just too much of a headache for them. They don't want to become liable for their user's usage. They'd rather that users keep using without them being bothered. They're not going to open themselves up to such exposure.