Cingular as such was never CDMA, but Ameritech Cellular, which became Cingular, was CDMA for digital before the great SBC consolidation, when they then re-built the network to do TDMA. I live in SE Michigan, and have had a friend in the Ameritech/Cingular switching center since before digital was deployed around here.
I've just recently switched to a Cingular National using a GAIT SonyEricsson T62u phone. I haven';t had a chance to test the extended calling yet, but I now get calls in areas that the TDMA phone wouldn't work. Mind you, this is by roaming on to ATT, but it is included in my minutes. It just messes with mobile-to-mobile figures when I do that.
One interesting wrinkle in the Detroit area. The GSM coverage for Cingular seems to be a bit thin, so they have this interesting arrangement with ATT. When they are running out of channel space in a thin area, they hand off incoming calls to ATT to handle. Other than producing a strange call record, this is treated as a local call for mobile-to-mobile purposes. I get a 248/FollowMe line on my bill when this happens. Also, they have feature transparency wuith ATT so my text messaging works the same.
They made me pay out the rest of the contract even without the phone, and would not give me a deal on a new phone.
I'd be rather surprised if any carrier behaved differently on that point. The purpose of the two-year contract is to 'repay' them in service for supplementing the cost of the phone. Most 'deals' on a phone are the carrier eating the cost of phone up front and getting it back from you over time. Get the insurance if you can't risk the phone going missing.
For good customer relations, some carriers will let you out of a contract if you move to an area where they do not offer service. Generally this has to be at least six months later, though, or you risk being thought of as suckering them.
However: do you know how to repair your car? How about the electrical wiring in your house? Your plumbing? Garbage disposal or washing machine? How about the central air, or the oil heater?
I make a point of understanding any technology that I depend on with any sort of regularity. True, I don't know how to repair everything I deal with, but I know enough to keep myself from getting taken by unethical repair outfits. I can swap out plugs, switches and sockets on the house electrics.
Some things I do myself, some things I hire out, but I do make a point of knowing what is going on. The sad thing is, most people don't seem to bother. I'm not sure quite what to make of it all.
Just paying attention can sometimes have a big pay-off. I once overheard some mechanics discussing a particular type of air filter for cars. The bit that got me was that I could avoid changing it out every few months, just clean it every other year or so. For me, that was enough savings to justify the purchase. The increased gas milage was a bonus.
Maybe the problem is that ignorance in daily life is just not expensive enough.
On printers, I learned to avoid re-cycled cartridges. The off-brands were fine if new. This is in lasers. I was just given a color ink jet to fiddle with. After all the various stories here on ink jet issues, I'll limit myself to color printing only on it. The laser can handle the rest.
Re:Concerns - answered in follow up to article
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 1
3)The logic associated with the tyre scenario. The association of the vehicle number and the tyre would not be stored on the tag. There is no space, and Read/Write tags are much more expensive (and larger). Easy to overwrite also. So for your big brother is watching scenario, you would need to replace every lamp-post on every highway with a signal generator, have assess to the database that cross-references your vehicle ID with the tag ids, and be able to monitor all of the signal generators in real-time to see what was happening.
Bury RFID readers in the various road-surface sensors (traffic lights, congestion and speed loops, etc.) as you replace them. Maximum sensor saturation of 20 or so tags per second when a massively multi-tired truck rolls over the sensor. Not the finest resolution, but if you are hunting for someone using the RFID tag in a tire, you can track them fairly closely in most cities with enough traffic to rate smart lights. If the data volume is too high for central parsing, just have enough intelligence in the readers to say "Alert on IDs xxxxx,yyyy and zzzzz."
The possibility of having RFIDs in my shoes is quite disturbing. I don't want to be tracked everywhere I go.
Unless made extremely illegal (summary executions, anyone?) expect to see mail-order gadget catalogs selling home RFID tag locators. (Radar detectors seem to manage to still exist.) They will likely be fairly cheap as they do not need to actually decode the tag signal, just react to it with an indicator. A strength dial lets you scan a whole item quickly, and you can turn it down to find specific locations on items that test positive. For tags located in hard-to-deal-with spots, a small two-angle sound generator that can resonate at the frequencies that RFID components are likely to sensitive to, to shake the bits apart. For most things, however, a pin will probably be sufficient. At least for consumer goods, this will be an addressible problem, after all, there is money to be made in deactivation!
After noting dozens of screens of ISP diversions, I decided to reply directly to the posting.
I live in Southeast Michigan. SBC had a calling area I could drive out of in 15 minutes in any direction. For people within an hours travel time, it was cheaper to drive if I planned to talk for over half an hour.
Then I heard of Talk America, a reseller. They offered me an initial rate about $10/month higher than SBC, but with my choice of all features except privacy mangler, and, most importantly, a reasonable calling area. All but one of my friends is a toll call under the SBC scheme. In the month before converting to Talk America, I logged four minutes on my land phone. Now I log hundreds of minutes a month, getting more value than I ever got from SBC.
I had been using cellular, but that limited me to nights and weekends because of the minute volume. Getting a cellular plan with enough minutes would have involved a jump of far more than the land-line cost.
Now I can call friends in places like Warren and Ann Arbor and not worry about the cost. Any time of day. If I knew anyone in Howell (just at the edge of the 517 area code) I could call them at no charge. For me, that is the biggie, the rest of the features are a bonus. The no-charge calling area is the best thing for contacting non-local friends.
There were some initial setup issues, but those got fixed. I never did get my referal credits but if that's the worst problem I have with them I'm doing well.
I really hate this. I bought a "Low end" ($100)DVD player 3 months ago to replace the nice DVD player that got nailed by lightning.
My question: Have you invested in protective electronics for your video gear? In addition to my computer gear, all my video gear hides behind surge supressors. A good surge supressor can cost over $100, but when faced with the loss of thousands invested in gadgets, I regard it as cheap insurance.
I've also had to explain to people from time to time that the fact that thier supressor melted was a good thing. The last act of a determined protector.
I wouldn't mind my significant other getting Borg-style implants. They obviously did wonders for Jeri Ryan's career.
I've actually met Jeri Ryan at an SF convention. If she had implants at the time, they were not that impressive. By her comments, the 7 effect was accomplished with a wonderbra and a corset, and was not terribly comfortable.
I haven't seen her in anything post-Voyager, so I have no way of knowing if she has upgraded her superstructure in the mean time.
On friday the thirteenth the unimaginable will happen! All of the AIX machines in the world will become Illegal, oh the humanity. Hundreds of previously upstanding companys will be running illeagal warz!
I'm more worried about Saturday the 14th, when a swamp monster will rise out of the bathtub, speaking swamp monster, while the subtitles say "Excuse me, but have you seen the SCO source code that is supposedly in the Linux kernel?" to the screaming girl.
I got the impression that it was aimed for small groups of people working on a common project, at least it could be very useful for that purpose
I'd been hoping that someone would write something like this for a while. A friend and I have assorted projects we tinker with and this would be a less-complicated means of swapping web page files, software logs, source code, core dumps, etc than we are currently using.
Nonono... the business plan is:
1. Sue IBM.
2. Irritate the dinosaur.
3. Get bought by dinosaur.
That last should read:
3. Find yourself being scraped off the bottom of the dinosaurs foot.
Wasting spammer CPU cycles as a deterrent.
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
I've said this before. The idea of unencrypted connections needs to go away. If e-mail could be converted over to an all-encrypted traffic pattern, this would add a load to spammer systems. You could post an address with a public key, all based on open protocols to allow porting to lots of systems, and anyone wanting to send you a message has to encrypt using that key. This can be PGP-style 'encrypt the symmetric key' or make them use the heavier public key method on the message text. This would be minimal for most people, at a few seconds per message. Legitimate large mailers would just have to deal with the overhead. Spammers would be in a pickle. Instead of messages per second the throughput changes to seconds per message.
This would have some incidental benefits relating to nosy people in the transmission chain. The thing that would be the biggest problem is that, at some point, for this to work, systems would have to start rejecting unencrypted messages. This would create some problems initially, but then there is no technical solution that will not require changes within the users field of view.
This solution imposes a time cost on everyone, but for most end-users the time cost is minimal and can be hidden from them during reading by mailers that background-decrypt while the first message in the session is being displayed. Sending messages just adds a few seconds from the end-user viewpoint (unless sending to a personal mailing list) and most people send far less than they recieve. Spammers have no way to hide the time cost because they recieve almost nothing in comparison to the sending volume.
If you'll excuse me, I have to reboot so I can change my resolution now.
Hmmm... When I set up my X server, I define all the resolutions I might want ahead of time, then I can cycle through them with a multi-key sequence.
After that I think I'll swap videocards, and just sit back and watch as XDM tries to restart X every second for hours at a time...
Well, if you actually use a graphic mode boot you deserve that one. If it is critical that the user get a GUI, that should be done in the appropriate profile script after a text log-in. If X barfs on a video problem, the script can check for an errorlevel and not log out as you might normally want to do. I flinch when I see a graphic login screen as I know that I'm in for one whale of a headache if a video problem develops.
Then I'll spend a week trying to get TV-out on my video card to work, and end up throwing my computer through the window instead.
Now I can understand the frustration here, but when you go out of the Windows world, you have to put up with this sort of thing. Only a relatively few companies see fit to offer non-windows options for thier hardware.
Here is the solution to spam. Require every email sever to have a digital signature.
Almost, but not quite. A good solution is something that badly needs to be done anyway. The concept of the clear-text connection needs very badly to go away. All net connections should be encrypted at the end points.
As a start, all e-mail should be encrypted with public-key systems. You can publish your public key with your e-mail address using some agreed-upon format. The point of this is taking an idea from HashCash (link up the page a ways) of imposing a cost in CPU cycles for sending a message. Except for very large mailing lists, such overhead would be minimal for individuals, even on ancient computers, but the volumes of a spammer would make for a crushing cpu load. I can spare a few seconds to encrypt mail I send, I can easily spare a few seconds per message for decryption of mail I get. Even if I send dozens of messages a day, the overhead for anything but a file attachment would be almost unnoticeable. Until some end-to-end encrypted replacement for mail transfer agents becomes available, this could be routed through the existing infrastructure by using new mail clients.
Large mailing lists would have a problem, but even the largest of legitimate lists is dwarfed by even small-time spammers for volume, so I think something like this is the way to go.
The one critical pont is that the encryption used would have to be free, in both senses, to allow for porting to old or scarce systems. This also adds benefits about people nosing about for e-mail contents when they shouldn't be.
I live in Canada and one day discovered that my wife had been playing both region 0 and region 1 DVDs in her TiBook. One day, she asked me why her laptop was now locked into region 1.
I'm confused. Region 0 is a misnomer of sorts, it essentially means all-region. It should not be necessary to re-set your drive to read a "Region 0" disc. Now if you are switching from region 1 to 2 and back, then you have a problem. If the software is switching around from 1 and 0, the author should be lashed with a wet noodle.
It's time that the region system was abandoned by player manufacturers, it's a fucking sales millstone.
That's not an option they have unless the DVD Consortium is willing to modify the contracts the manufacturers have to sign, or courts are willing to void the part of the contracts that requires region control.
Did they make it clear it was a default that needed to be changed? Or did the users think it was like your ATM password, which is unchangeable?
You mean there still systems that don't allow changes? I can change my debit card PIN at the web site for the bank. I can change my credit union ATM PIN at any Star Network ATM.
As for voice mail, all the systems I've ever used go through a first-time setup where you are asked to choose a new passcode as part of the whole mailbox setup. Now if someone is fool enough to re-enter the default...
The problem here is the system says the word. This could then be recorded and played back in an instant. The tone and timbre could also be easily changed instantly with any PC equipped with an SB Live! (or comparable) thus thwarting any attempt by the system to determine if the replayed word is, in fact, the same as when the system said it.
You could do this on a number where you had a computer hooked up to the phone line. Since the exploit under discussion involves scamming using a voice mail recording, having the system request a semi-random word would put a serious dent in this kind of fraud. And if you have access to the line to get a computer to find and respond to the challenge word, why not just answer and authorize?
First off, in Micigan, we relate distances in miles, not minutes. 30 minutes for us could be 50 miles.
I do live in Michigan, Detroit area, and travel is almost exclusively expressed as a function of time, rather than distance. If someone gives me a distance figure, I find myself translating it to travel time. "How far is it?" "About 45 minutes."
Off-topic, but I'm sick of seeing this Darwin contender defended.
The jury decided McDonalds should pay one day worth of coffee sales in punitive damages.
And thus is stupidity rewarded.
Hot coffee is not hard to deal with. Every morning on the way to work, I stop at a 7-Eleven. I see people who consider the coffee too hot. They buy it anway. The solution? They grab a few chips of ice from the pop section.
Assuming it is freshly prepared, hot food should be capable of damaging burns when served. If I'm not in danger of a burn, I question if it has been properly cooked. If I can't wait for it to cool, I cut it up to increase the surface area. I blow on it. I deal with the heat.
I have never been hit with any kind of import tax, and I regularly get stuff from outside the US. What really surprised me was UPS sending me an import bill of $0.00 for a $1200 DVD player (at the time, there was exactly ONE place on the planet to get modded players, as far as I was able to tell). Researching this, I discovered references in customs documents to a $2000 exemption on imports for personal use.
I don't know if this is still the case, but I continue to get small items every month and haven't been taxed yet.
But what the poater meant was that the media is in fact identical, it's just the packaging that's different
If I recall correctly, consumer CD burners, a box for your living room, are made so that they will only burn to specially-coded CDs, the ones marked for music. With most such burners, if you try to use data CDs, the device refuses to record. As is expected, there are manypages that list hacks or how to find hacks for getting around this problem. (Just two off a quick search on Google.)
No to defend the idea, but as each ID is to be unique:
I think that if you can disable the tag easily they are fine. But the real issue is when the manufactures start embedding them into the packaging themselves, which can't be removed easily. As if the plastic of a DVD case, wrapper of a piece of candy, in the soles of your shoe. The main purpose is so they can't be removed; so having them removable is defeating the whole purpose of having them. For example we will use a candy bar. The tag is embedded into the wrapper. You leave the store and pay for that item. You put it in your pocket to eat it later, and leave. You go to another store to purchase another item. You walk through checkout and that same candy bar gets rescanned and you get charged again. You could rewrap the candy. But how practical is that? You now have go to stores with nothing on you. Every item you have might still have the tag in it somewhere and set off the checkout scanners and you have to pay again.
For items purchased elsewhere:
Register: Scanned Tag 756392
StoreComp: Item not in store inventory, ignore.
For that candy bar you bought yesterday and left in your pocket when you go to the same store:
Register: Scanned Tag 756392
StoreComp: Item previously purchased, ignore.
That would be all negated if there were a way to kill the tags.
Even if the tags remain active, stores have an incentive to use them to avoid false customer-theft accusations. The accused customer could always demand the item be traced by the manufacturer, and woe to the store that finds out it was purchased across town after accusing a customer of shoplifting.
As inventory tracking is a good thing for merchants, items would be scanned upon arrival for both tracking and checkout-error avoidance.
(this actually happened to me, although I'd used a DEBIT card, big mistake NEVER use a debit card in an online transaction)
The problem is less using a debit card on-line (which I do) as having a debit card on a live checking account. This is a form of suicidal insanity. Having a debit card on the same account that drives your household finances is a bad idea.
When I finally was driven to get a debit card, I got a bank account at a completely different bank than normal and use it just for the debit card and small-value checks (newspaper carrier payments and such). If someone scams that account, the worst they can do is empty out my next planned purchase funds.
My main account does not have a debit card, and it never will if I have any say in the matter. The only card on that account is an ATM card and without the PIN it has limited abuse value. (Mind you, I had to fight with them on that, they wanted sooooo badly to issue a debit card that they only caved in when I said I'd close the account if they issued one.)
Slashdot Mirror
I've just recently switched to a Cingular National using a GAIT SonyEricsson T62u phone. I haven';t had a chance to test the extended calling yet, but I now get calls in areas that the TDMA phone wouldn't work. Mind you, this is by roaming on to ATT, but it is included in my minutes. It just messes with mobile-to-mobile figures when I do that.
One interesting wrinkle in the Detroit area. The GSM coverage for Cingular seems to be a bit thin, so they have this interesting arrangement with ATT. When they are running out of channel space in a thin area, they hand off incoming calls to ATT to handle. Other than producing a strange call record, this is treated as a local call for mobile-to-mobile purposes. I get a 248/FollowMe line on my bill when this happens. Also, they have feature transparency wuith ATT so my text messaging works the same.
For good customer relations, some carriers will let you out of a contract if you move to an area where they do not offer service. Generally this has to be at least six months later, though, or you risk being thought of as suckering them.
Some things I do myself, some things I hire out, but I do make a point of knowing what is going on. The sad thing is, most people don't seem to bother. I'm not sure quite what to make of it all.
Just paying attention can sometimes have a big pay-off. I once overheard some mechanics discussing a particular type of air filter for cars. The bit that got me was that I could avoid changing it out every few months, just clean it every other year or so. For me, that was enough savings to justify the purchase. The increased gas milage was a bonus.
Maybe the problem is that ignorance in daily life is just not expensive enough.
On printers, I learned to avoid re-cycled cartridges. The off-brands were fine if new. This is in lasers. I was just given a color ink jet to fiddle with. After all the various stories here on ink jet issues, I'll limit myself to color printing only on it. The laser can handle the rest.
After noting dozens of screens of ISP diversions, I decided to reply directly to the posting.
I live in Southeast Michigan. SBC had a calling area I could drive out of in 15 minutes in any direction. For people within an hours travel time, it was cheaper to drive if I planned to talk for over half an hour.
Then I heard of Talk America, a reseller. They offered me an initial rate about $10/month higher than SBC, but with my choice of all features except privacy mangler, and, most importantly, a reasonable calling area. All but one of my friends is a toll call under the SBC scheme. In the month before converting to Talk America, I logged four minutes on my land phone. Now I log hundreds of minutes a month, getting more value than I ever got from SBC.
I had been using cellular, but that limited me to nights and weekends because of the minute volume. Getting a cellular plan with enough minutes would have involved a jump of far more than the land-line cost.
Now I can call friends in places like Warren and Ann Arbor and not worry about the cost. Any time of day. If I knew anyone in Howell (just at the edge of the 517 area code) I could call them at no charge. For me, that is the biggie, the rest of the features are a bonus. The no-charge calling area is the best thing for contacting non-local friends.
There were some initial setup issues, but those got fixed. I never did get my referal credits but if that's the worst problem I have with them I'm doing well.
I've also had to explain to people from time to time that the fact that thier supressor melted was a good thing. The last act of a determined protector.
I haven't seen her in anything post-Voyager, so I have no way of knowing if she has upgraded her superstructure in the mean time.
That last should read:
3. Find yourself being scraped off the bottom of the dinosaurs foot.
I've said this before. The idea of unencrypted connections needs to go away. If e-mail could be converted over to an all-encrypted traffic pattern, this would add a load to spammer systems. You could post an address with a public key, all based on open protocols to allow porting to lots of systems, and anyone wanting to send you a message has to encrypt using that key. This can be PGP-style 'encrypt the symmetric key' or make them use the heavier public key method on the message text. This would be minimal for most people, at a few seconds per message. Legitimate large mailers would just have to deal with the overhead. Spammers would be in a pickle. Instead of messages per second the throughput changes to seconds per message.
This would have some incidental benefits relating to nosy people in the transmission chain. The thing that would be the biggest problem is that, at some point, for this to work, systems would have to start rejecting unencrypted messages. This would create some problems initially, but then there is no technical solution that will not require changes within the users field of view.
This solution imposes a time cost on everyone, but for most end-users the time cost is minimal and can be hidden from them during reading by mailers that background-decrypt while the first message in the session is being displayed. Sending messages just adds a few seconds from the end-user viewpoint (unless sending to a personal mailing list) and most people send far less than they recieve. Spammers have no way to hide the time cost because they recieve almost nothing in comparison to the sending volume.
Hmmm... When I set up my X server, I define all the resolutions I might want ahead of time, then I can cycle through them with a multi-key sequence.
Well, if you actually use a graphic mode boot you deserve that one. If it is critical that the user get a GUI, that should be done in the appropriate profile script after a text log-in. If X barfs on a video problem, the script can check for an errorlevel and not log out as you might normally want to do. I flinch when I see a graphic login screen as I know that I'm in for one whale of a headache if a video problem develops.
Now I can understand the frustration here, but when you go out of the Windows world, you have to put up with this sort of thing. Only a relatively few companies see fit to offer non-windows options for thier hardware.
Almost, but not quite. A good solution is something that badly needs to be done anyway. The concept of the clear-text connection needs very badly to go away. All net connections should be encrypted at the end points.
As a start, all e-mail should be encrypted with public-key systems. You can publish your public key with your e-mail address using some agreed-upon format. The point of this is taking an idea from HashCash (link up the page a ways) of imposing a cost in CPU cycles for sending a message. Except for very large mailing lists, such overhead would be minimal for individuals, even on ancient computers, but the volumes of a spammer would make for a crushing cpu load. I can spare a few seconds to encrypt mail I send, I can easily spare a few seconds per message for decryption of mail I get. Even if I send dozens of messages a day, the overhead for anything but a file attachment would be almost unnoticeable. Until some end-to-end encrypted replacement for mail transfer agents becomes available, this could be routed through the existing infrastructure by using new mail clients.
Large mailing lists would have a problem, but even the largest of legitimate lists is dwarfed by even small-time spammers for volume, so I think something like this is the way to go.
The one critical pont is that the encryption used would have to be free, in both senses, to allow for porting to old or scarce systems. This also adds benefits about people nosing about for e-mail contents when they shouldn't be.
I'm confused. Region 0 is a misnomer of sorts, it essentially means all-region. It should not be necessary to re-set your drive to read a "Region 0" disc. Now if you are switching from region 1 to 2 and back, then you have a problem. If the software is switching around from 1 and 0, the author should be lashed with a wet noodle.
That's not an option they have unless the DVD Consortium is willing to modify the contracts the manufacturers have to sign, or courts are willing to void the part of the contracts that requires region control.
You mean there still systems that don't allow changes? I can change my debit card PIN at the web site for the bank. I can change my credit union ATM PIN at any Star Network ATM.
As for voice mail, all the systems I've ever used go through a first-time setup where you are asked to choose a new passcode as part of the whole mailbox setup. Now if someone is fool enough to re-enter the default...
You could do this on a number where you had a computer hooked up to the phone line. Since the exploit under discussion involves scamming using a voice mail recording, having the system request a semi-random word would put a serious dent in this kind of fraud. And if you have access to the line to get a computer to find and respond to the challenge word, why not just answer and authorize?
I do live in Michigan, Detroit area, and travel is almost exclusively expressed as a function of time, rather than distance. If someone gives me a distance figure, I find myself translating it to travel time. "How far is it?" "About 45 minutes."
I know, waaaaay off-topic.
Off-topic, but I'm sick of seeing this Darwin contender defended.
The jury decided McDonalds should pay one day worth of coffee sales in punitive damages.
And thus is stupidity rewarded.
Hot coffee is not hard to deal with. Every morning on the way to work, I stop at a 7-Eleven. I see people who consider the coffee too hot. They buy it anway. The solution? They grab a few chips of ice from the pop section.
Assuming it is freshly prepared, hot food should be capable of damaging burns when served. If I'm not in danger of a burn, I question if it has been properly cooked. If I can't wait for it to cool, I cut it up to increase the surface area. I blow on it. I deal with the heat.
Hmmm...
I have never been hit with any kind of import tax, and I regularly get stuff from outside the US. What really surprised me was UPS sending me an import bill of $0.00 for a $1200 DVD player (at the time, there was exactly ONE place on the planet to get modded players, as far as I was able to tell). Researching this, I discovered references in customs documents to a $2000 exemption on imports for personal use.
I don't know if this is still the case, but I continue to get small items every month and haven't been taxed yet.
For items purchased elsewhere:
Register: Scanned Tag 756392
StoreComp: Item not in store inventory, ignore.
For that candy bar you bought yesterday and left in your pocket when you go to the same store:
Register: Scanned Tag 756392
StoreComp: Item previously purchased, ignore.
Even if the tags remain active, stores have an incentive to use them to avoid false customer-theft accusations. The accused customer could always demand the item be traced by the manufacturer, and woe to the store that finds out it was purchased across town after accusing a customer of shoplifting.
As inventory tracking is a good thing for merchants, items would be scanned upon arrival for both tracking and checkout-error avoidance.
Wouldn't this be better refered to as The Mark in the Beast? (Failure during submission, apologies if it appears twice.)
When I finally was driven to get a debit card, I got a bank account at a completely different bank than normal and use it just for the debit card and small-value checks (newspaper carrier payments and such). If someone scams that account, the worst they can do is empty out my next planned purchase funds.
My main account does not have a debit card, and it never will if I have any say in the matter. The only card on that account is an ATM card and without the PIN it has limited abuse value. (Mind you, I had to fight with them on that, they wanted sooooo badly to issue a debit card that they only caved in when I said I'd close the account if they issued one.)