Nope, these aren't cell phones. Your standard Wal-Mart $35 900 MHZ landline phone (with a base receiver plugged into a landline). These are the ones you can term as a "cordless" phone.
Now as for cell phones, those are in use too, but the only problem with that is kinda weak signals. We've talked to the various cell providers time and again (this is US, so there's abut 5 major providers using as many different types of networks), but nothing has come out of it.
BTW, the most popular cell phone on campus now seems to be Nextel with the Direct Connect feature (everytime I hear someone's chirp, I reach for mine.) Must have something to do with how colege students love to use chatrooms and instant messenger.
Now if they'd only make other colege activities portable...
Tell that to the students at the college I work at (as telco admin). None of them want to be limited to their room by a wire for phone calls, so they all bring either a 900 MHZ or 2.4 GHZ phone (the cheaper, the better, so most are 900 MHZ). Now, at 120 students per hall, with 3 halls in close proximity to each other, there's a hell of a lot of students complaining to us that they're hearing other people's calls from time to time, and they want us to fix it.
I can't. Not much else I can say except to try getting a newer 2.4 GHZ phone to try to transfer some of the load from the 900 MHZ channels, or else use the landline. Yes, a cordless phone is a great benefit.
But the issue at hand is far from "FUD" and "No problem exists".
Digital successors to the VCR that eliminate the frustration of recording television programs have crossed a popularity threshold, raising alarm among advertisers and TV executives who see the devices as a threat to the economics of commercial television.
Digital video recorders, or DVR's, make it so easy to program and play back shows -- they do away with videotapes by storing 30 hours or more on a hard disk -- that their owners often choose to watch what is on the machine rather than what is on TV. Ignoring the networks' painstakingly planned schedules, they watch prime-time programs late at night and late-night programs before dinner, often oblivious to the channel on which it originally appeared.
Advertisement
They also see fewer than half the commercials they used to, compressing hourlong shows into 40 minutes as they fast-forward through the advertisements that the television industry has long depended on to pay for its programming and profits.
One in five people who own a DVR like TiVo or ReplayTV say they never watch any commercials, according to a recent survey from Memphis-based NextResearch.
Numbers like that have provoked gloomy pronouncements from industry executives. Some even come close to accusing habitual ad skippers of theft.
"The free television that we've all enjoyed for so many years is based on us watching these commercials," said Jamie C. Kellner, chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. "There's no Santa Claus. If you don't watch the commercials, someone's going to have to pay for television and it's going to be you."
But such admonishments appear unlikely to sway DVR owners. By recording the shows they know they want to see, many say they have escaped the scourge of channel-surfing and the empty sense of wasted time so often associated with watching TV. Although sales of DVR's are still small compared with those of other home entertainment devices like DVD players, analysts say the remarkable enthusiasm they inspire makes their broad adoption only a matter of time.
"I can do e-mail and I can go on the Internet but I've never been able to program the VCR," said Kay Friedman, 66, of Morton Grove, Ill., a TiVo owner who takes special delight in waiting until 9:20 to watch "The Practice" on Sundays so she can skip through the commercials even as it records. "I'm hooked."
Dismissed until recently as too expensive and complex for the average consumer to set up, DVR's are now a fixture in more than a million United States households -- about 1 percent of the total -- a number expected to grow to 50 million over the next five years, according to Forrester Research. Fueling the growth are cable and satellite companies, who plan to build DVR features into their set-top boxes, greatly simplifying the set-up process. Cox Communications, Time Warner and Charter Communications have already announced plans to make these services available to consumers later this year.
TiVo, which markets its own DVR and licenses its service to others, costs $300 to $400, plus a $12.95 monthly fee. Sonicblue's ReplayTV 4000 costs $699 for 40 hours up to $1,999 for 320 hours of storage; the company said it expected sales to increase when it introduces a lower-priced machine later this year.
The television industry has known about DVR's for years, of course. But as the popularity of the digital technology begins to undermine many of the basic assumptions that have governed the television business for decades, broadcasters, cable programmers and advertisers are scrambling both to resist and to adapt to people who can rearrange schedules and skip commercials at the press of a button.
"You start losing marginal dollars when people who you thought you were buying are not viewing," said Daniel Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers. "This is not just a theoretical problem that might be happening somewhere down the line. This is happening now."
Some advertisers are re-evaluating their buying strategies and demanding new ways of measuring audiences. Steve Sternberg, director of audience analysis for the advertising firm Magna Global USA, circulated a memo recently that asked, "If an advertiser buys `NYPD Blue' on Tuesday night, and 10 percent of its audience watches it on Friday after midnight, should that audience be given equal value as the `live' prime- time audience?"
There is an important distinction, Mr. Sternberg said, between "zipping and zapping": "When people switch channels, they are going from something to something else. There are losses for one channel, but gains for another. With fast-forwarding there are only losses."
Others are trying to turn the technology to their advantage. Coca-Cola has paid for advertising that appears on the screen of a ReplayTV user when a viewer pauses a program for more than a few minutes. Last week, Best Buy announced that it would embed electronic tags visible only to TiVo users in 30-second commercials featuring the singer Sheryl Crow it is running on MTV. Viewers can click on an icon to see 12 additional minutes of the Best Buy "advertainment," while TiVo records the continuing MTV programming so they can watch it later.
"We need to start to understand how we're going to have to reach our consumers with this new technology," said Mollie Weston, a product manager for Best Buy's image advertising. "It is going to force us to put advertisements out there that people are actually going to choose to watch."
Indeed, advertisers take heart in data from TiVo that showed its viewers fast-forwarding through this year's Super Bowl and using the instant replay function for the Britney Spears Pepsi commercial more than any other segment besides the winning field goal.
Because DVR's are connected by a phone or high-speed Internet line from a viewer's home to a central server to get program schedules, some advertisers envision downloading commercials aimed at individual people based on information from databases compiled through other sources. Members of Purina pet clubs might get pet food commercials, for instance, while the owner of a BMW lease that is about to expire might get an advertisement on the automaker's new convertible.
"There's a lot of things that are going to start to change," said Ira Sussman, director of research for Initiative Media North America, an advertising buyer whose clients include Maybelline and Home Depot. "We're going to have to start thinking more about the importance of product placement within programs, placing more relevant, highly targeted messages. But we see it as a glass half full."
His research reflected a less rosy picture for the television networks, however. "We've found people recording programs and watching them on their own time are often not realizing what network they're coming from anymore," Mr. Sussman said. "That's a real brand equity that might be lost on the networks' part, if you're trying to put something next to `Friends' but no one's watching `Friends' live."
Much of the television industry's response to the new technology so far has focused on a lawsuit that seeks to ban the sale of the newest version of ReplayTV, which allows its customers to set it up to skip commercials on playback automatically, without even requiring them to fast-forward. The machine also allows its owners to send shows to each other over the Internet.
A group of media companies including Viacom Inc., the NBC television network, the Walt Disney Company, AOL Time Warner Inc. and Twentieth Century Fox has asked a federal court in Los Angeles to stop Sonicblue from selling the device, saying it contributes to copyright infringement. To win, they need to prove that the machine is fundamentally different from the VCR, whose distribution was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1984 after a similar challenge by the entertainment industry.
Lawyers for the companies now argue that the court's endorsement of consumers' right to "time shift" television programming in the 1984 case was based on the assumption that copyright holders would not suffer significant financial damage as a result. Over the protests of privacy advocates, they are demanding detailed information about which shows ReplayTV owners record and which commercials they skip.
Sonicblue's chief executive, Ken Potashner, concedes that on average ReplayTV users skip more than half the commercials. But he says it is up to the networks and advertisers to come up with creative ways to persuade viewers to watch. The ReplayTV machine records all the commercials, and users must choose to set it to skip them automatically on playback. They can always reset it if they choose.
"What are they going to attack next, the mute button?" Mr. Potashner said. "We've provided an efficiency improvement for a consumer who is compelled to skip a commercial. What they should do is work with us."
A victory in the companies' case against Sonicblue will not stave off the fundamental shift in culture undermining their business, industry analysts say. Consumers have embraced digital technology that allows them the greatest flexibility in the way they shop, communicate and consume all kinds of media -- and it is not likely to be different in TV.
"We've trained people that you can buy things at 3 in the morning in the nude on the Internet and make a call to anyone from anywhere on a cellphone, and the idea that CBS is going to determine when I watch `CSI' flies in the face of that trend," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. "TV networks are going to have to figure out how to make money from a TV viewer that is not nailed to the chair waiting for the commercial to end."
If it is good enough, even dedicated DVR owners can still be tempted to watch live television, complete with its inconvenient interludes. Chad Little, a ReplayTV owner who started a Web site called Planetreplay.com, where viewers can trade with each other, regularly records about 10 shows, including "Junkyard Wars," and "Everybody Loves Raymond." Sometimes he makes an exception:
"Buffy," Mr. Little said, referring to the vampire slayer. "There's times I'll watch it straight through with commercials and everything."
A couple years ago, I took a programming class at a local community college. The whole class got failing grades for the first few assignments, even though the program did what it was supposed to do and had 4 lines of comments per routine.
Turns out no one got any higher than a C until they made a whole page of comments for each line of code. On top of that, the teacher demanded the code be printed out.... I remember that I ended up turning in a 100 page document once, whereas the program was only about 90 lines.
I think that's a little too much commenting, but he still said more comments needed to be made. I understand where he was coming from (he used to program in Cobol, and this was in 1998, when everyone was scrambling for patching uncommented Y2K code), but there's such a thing as overcommenting.
Text of Article below, for those without accounts:
Hackers posing as employees of the Ford Motor Credit Company have in recent months harvested a trove of 13,000 credit reports -- a virtual one-stop shop for fraud and identity theft -- with data on consumers in affluent neighborhoods across the country.
The company said in a letter to the victims that computer intruders used an authorization code from Ford Credit to get the credit reports from Experian, one of three major reporting agencies.
Advertisement
"I've never seen anything of this size," a spokesman for Experian, Donald Girard, said. "Privacy is the hallmark of our business. We're extraordinarily concerned about the privacy issue here, and the trust factor."
The inquiries gave the intruders access to each victim's personal and financial information, including address, Social Security number, bank and credit card accounts and ratings of creditworthiness, which can be used to identify the best targets.
"This is not just a credit card number; this is the whole kazoo," said Richard Power, the editorial director for the Computer Security Institute, an industry trade group. A criminal could use the data to make credit card charges or even open bank and credit card accounts in the victim's name.
Thefts of credit records, Mr. Power said, are far more common than is reported. "The unique thing about this one," he said, "is that it has surfaced." The theft was first reported yesterday by The Boston Globe and The Detroit News.
Statistics on identity theft are hard to come by, with estimates ranging as high as 700,000 cases a year. Betsy Broder, the assistant director for planning and information of the Federal Trade Commission, said the commission received 86,000 complaints of identity theft last year.
Representatives of Ford Credit said they did not know how the hackers acquired the code, which was used by the company's office in Grand Rapids, Mich. The intruders focused on addresses in affluent neighborhoods, often in numeric sequence, said Rich Van Leeuwen, executive vice president at Ford Credit.
The company said it had sent letters via certified mail to all 13,000 people, urging them to contact Experian and the two other credit reporting giants, Equifax and TransUnion, and to report any evidence of abuse to the F.B.I.
The company has also worked with Experian to set up a phone line to let victims get their credit reports and help them resolve discrepancies.
Neither Ford Credit nor Experian has determined how many people have reported fraudulent charges or other problems. Mr. Girard said that Experian had received 2,700 calls since the letters started going out this month. Although the unauthorized inquiries began in April 2001, Ford first heard about the problem in February, Mr. Van Leeuwen said. Only 400 of the 13,000 victims were customers of Ford Credit, he said.
Dawn M. Clenney, a special agent at the F.B.I. office in Detroit, said that she could not comment, except to say, "We're on the case."
Mr. Girard, the Experian spokesman, said the company would work with the F.B.I. to catch and prosecute the intruders. "It just shows that today, even big companies can be victimized," he said. "it's a never-ending struggle against the bad guys."
There are a few problems wrong with that statement.
1) It's been stated that the planes were flying above maximum speeds. The first plane was going at 350 MPH, and the second at 400 MPH. I highly doubt that buildings anywhere get hit daily by 350 MPH winds. (The strongest hurricane is about 150 MPH, I doubt a cyclone or twister is much higher than that)
2) It wasn't just the airplanes IMPACT that brought down the WTC. Read the article. Granted, there was plenty of structural damage done to the buildings from the impact (so much so that I think they would have closed the buildings while a stability assessment could be done.) But, as the article says, 2000F fires can easily melt steel supports in the floor and the central and external cores. That is the major contributor to the collapse.
PS1 can't do DVDs, but can do CD's. But, why even use that, when you can use your computer CD player (and why use that when you can rip it all to MP3!)
Assuming he has no other way to play DVD's (computer is a weak thing, and he only has a PS1), most DVD players will play audio CD's. So, in short, no need for the CD player.
Speakers: Don't use your computer speakers if you're strapped for space... just route it into your stereo AUX in.
Re:It does what it should do
on
Resident Evil
·
· Score: 1
Shut up, Ebert! (to paraphrase Eddie Jones, The Official, from SciFi channel's The Invisible Man)
I hear the secrets that you keep
When you're talking in your sleep
Re:80% have service: How many are wired?
on
Broadband Obstacles
·
· Score: 2
I was just giving the benefit of a doubt (Is that the right way it goes?) that web traffic over 2-way satellite is bearable. I know that the latency for gaming and any kind of instant live connection is unusable (there's only so fast light can travel... then slow that down by conversions on each end and satelite conversion in the middle, and you get much slower).
The thing is, they'll sell it as faster than modem, and that it may be... I know in my area, I was almost about to go with it, because I was JUST out of reach of DSL, and the local cable company is dragging its heels about putting in cable modem.
The article states that 80% of the US is served broadband acrosss the US. However, that 80% is mostly the sattelite broadband, I'd wager.
I'd like to know how much percentage is wired. Sattelite broadband (I'm talking 2 way here) is usually costing the customer upwards of $500 for initial equipment (versus $150 for other services) and $60/month (versus $40 for other services). Installer prices are about the same, if not slightly higher.
With these differences, it's no wonder people choose wired over sattelite.
Read the words "mostly optional" with some skepticism. There is a point in the game where you are forced to play blitzball for about 5 minutes. It seems to be largely derived on football, with a little soccer and basketball mixed in.
One thing I don't understand: in the beginning movies, blitzball is played 3-dimensional. In the minigames, you are forced to play it 2 dimensional.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup.... make sure to watch out for bandits trying to make off with Metamucil fiber supplements!
Nope, these aren't cell phones. Your standard Wal-Mart $35 900 MHZ landline phone (with a base receiver plugged into a landline). These are the ones you can term as a "cordless" phone.
Now as for cell phones, those are in use too, but the only problem with that is kinda weak signals. We've talked to the various cell providers time and again (this is US, so there's abut 5 major providers using as many different types of networks), but nothing has come out of it.
BTW, the most popular cell phone on campus now seems to be Nextel with the Direct Connect feature (everytime I hear someone's chirp, I reach for mine.) Must have something to do with how colege students love to use chatrooms and instant messenger.
Now if they'd only make other colege activities portable...
FUD? No problem exists?
Tell that to the students at the college I work at (as telco admin). None of them want to be limited to their room by a wire for phone calls, so they all bring either a 900 MHZ or 2.4 GHZ phone (the cheaper, the better, so most are 900 MHZ). Now, at 120 students per hall, with 3 halls in close proximity to each other, there's a hell of a lot of students complaining to us that they're hearing other people's calls from time to time, and they want us to fix it.
I can't. Not much else I can say except to try getting a newer 2.4 GHZ phone to try to transfer some of the load from the 900 MHZ channels, or else use the landline. Yes, a cordless phone is a great benefit.
But the issue at hand is far from "FUD" and "No problem exists".
Somebody has been reading a little too much UserFriendly
From NYT: (Text of article)
Digital successors to the VCR that eliminate the frustration of recording television programs have crossed a popularity threshold, raising alarm among advertisers and TV executives who see the devices as a threat to the economics of commercial television.
Digital video recorders, or DVR's, make it so easy to program and play back shows -- they do away with videotapes by storing 30 hours or more on a hard disk -- that their owners often choose to watch what is on the machine rather than what is on TV. Ignoring the networks' painstakingly planned schedules, they watch prime-time programs late at night and late-night programs before dinner, often oblivious to the channel on which it originally appeared.
Advertisement
They also see fewer than half the commercials they used to, compressing hourlong shows into 40 minutes as they fast-forward through the advertisements that the television industry has long depended on to pay for its programming and profits.
One in five people who own a DVR like TiVo or ReplayTV say they never watch any commercials, according to a recent survey from Memphis-based NextResearch.
Numbers like that have provoked gloomy pronouncements from industry executives. Some even come close to accusing habitual ad skippers of theft.
"The free television that we've all enjoyed for so many years is based on us watching these commercials," said Jamie C. Kellner, chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. "There's no Santa Claus. If you don't watch the commercials, someone's going to have to pay for television and it's going to be you."
But such admonishments appear unlikely to sway DVR owners. By recording the shows they know they want to see, many say they have escaped the scourge of channel-surfing and the empty sense of wasted time so often associated with watching TV. Although sales of DVR's are still small compared with those of other home entertainment devices like DVD players, analysts say the remarkable enthusiasm they inspire makes their broad adoption only a matter of time.
"I can do e-mail and I can go on the Internet but I've never been able to program the VCR," said Kay Friedman, 66, of Morton Grove, Ill., a TiVo owner who takes special delight in waiting until 9:20 to watch "The Practice" on Sundays so she can skip through the commercials even as it records. "I'm hooked."
Dismissed until recently as too expensive and complex for the average consumer to set up, DVR's are now a fixture in more than a million United States households -- about 1 percent of the total -- a number expected to grow to 50 million over the next five years, according to Forrester Research. Fueling the growth are cable and satellite companies, who plan to build DVR features into their set-top boxes, greatly simplifying the set-up process. Cox Communications, Time Warner and Charter Communications have already announced plans to make these services available to consumers later this year.
TiVo, which markets its own DVR and licenses its service to others, costs $300 to $400, plus a $12.95 monthly fee. Sonicblue's ReplayTV 4000 costs $699 for 40 hours up to $1,999 for 320 hours of storage; the company said it expected sales to increase when it introduces a lower-priced machine later this year.
The television industry has known about DVR's for years, of course. But as the popularity of the digital technology begins to undermine many of the basic assumptions that have governed the television business for decades, broadcasters, cable programmers and advertisers are scrambling both to resist and to adapt to people who can rearrange schedules and skip commercials at the press of a button.
"You start losing marginal dollars when people who you thought you were buying are not viewing," said Daniel Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers. "This is not just a theoretical problem that might be happening somewhere down the line. This is happening now."
Some advertisers are re-evaluating their buying strategies and demanding new ways of measuring audiences. Steve Sternberg, director of audience analysis for the advertising firm Magna Global USA, circulated a memo recently that asked, "If an advertiser buys `NYPD Blue' on Tuesday night, and 10 percent of its audience watches it on Friday after midnight, should that audience be given equal value as the `live' prime- time audience?"
There is an important distinction, Mr. Sternberg said, between "zipping and zapping": "When people switch channels, they are going from something to something else. There are losses for one channel, but gains for another. With fast-forwarding there are only losses."
Others are trying to turn the technology to their advantage. Coca-Cola has paid for advertising that appears on the screen of a ReplayTV user when a viewer pauses a program for more than a few minutes. Last week, Best Buy announced that it would embed electronic tags visible only to TiVo users in 30-second commercials featuring the singer Sheryl Crow it is running on MTV. Viewers can click on an icon to see 12 additional minutes of the Best Buy "advertainment," while TiVo records the continuing MTV programming so they can watch it later.
"We need to start to understand how we're going to have to reach our consumers with this new technology," said Mollie Weston, a product manager for Best Buy's image advertising. "It is going to force us to put advertisements out there that people are actually going to choose to watch."
Indeed, advertisers take heart in data from TiVo that showed its viewers fast-forwarding through this year's Super Bowl and using the instant replay function for the Britney Spears Pepsi commercial more than any other segment besides the winning field goal.
Because DVR's are connected by a phone or high-speed Internet line from a viewer's home to a central server to get program schedules, some advertisers envision downloading commercials aimed at individual people based on information from databases compiled through other sources. Members of Purina pet clubs might get pet food commercials, for instance, while the owner of a BMW lease that is about to expire might get an advertisement on the automaker's new convertible.
"There's a lot of things that are going to start to change," said Ira Sussman, director of research for Initiative Media North America, an advertising buyer whose clients include Maybelline and Home Depot. "We're going to have to start thinking more about the importance of product placement within programs, placing more relevant, highly targeted messages. But we see it as a glass half full."
His research reflected a less rosy picture for the television networks, however. "We've found people recording programs and watching them on their own time are often not realizing what network they're coming from anymore," Mr. Sussman said. "That's a real brand equity that might be lost on the networks' part, if you're trying to put something next to `Friends' but no one's watching `Friends' live."
Much of the television industry's response to the new technology so far has focused on a lawsuit that seeks to ban the sale of the newest version of ReplayTV, which allows its customers to set it up to skip commercials on playback automatically, without even requiring them to fast-forward. The machine also allows its owners to send shows to each other over the Internet.
A group of media companies including Viacom Inc., the NBC television network, the Walt Disney Company, AOL Time Warner Inc. and Twentieth Century Fox has asked a federal court in Los Angeles to stop Sonicblue from selling the device, saying it contributes to copyright infringement. To win, they need to prove that the machine is fundamentally different from the VCR, whose distribution was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1984 after a similar challenge by the entertainment industry.
Lawyers for the companies now argue that the court's endorsement of consumers' right to "time shift" television programming in the 1984 case was based on the assumption that copyright holders would not suffer significant financial damage as a result. Over the protests of privacy advocates, they are demanding detailed information about which shows ReplayTV owners record and which commercials they skip.
Sonicblue's chief executive, Ken Potashner, concedes that on average ReplayTV users skip more than half the commercials. But he says it is up to the networks and advertisers to come up with creative ways to persuade viewers to watch. The ReplayTV machine records all the commercials, and users must choose to set it to skip them automatically on playback. They can always reset it if they choose.
"What are they going to attack next, the mute button?" Mr. Potashner said. "We've provided an efficiency improvement for a consumer who is compelled to skip a commercial. What they should do is work with us."
A victory in the companies' case against Sonicblue will not stave off the fundamental shift in culture undermining their business, industry analysts say. Consumers have embraced digital technology that allows them the greatest flexibility in the way they shop, communicate and consume all kinds of media -- and it is not likely to be different in TV.
"We've trained people that you can buy things at 3 in the morning in the nude on the Internet and make a call to anyone from anywhere on a cellphone, and the idea that CBS is going to determine when I watch `CSI' flies in the face of that trend," said Josh Bernoff, an analyst with Forrester Research. "TV networks are going to have to figure out how to make money from a TV viewer that is not nailed to the chair waiting for the commercial to end."
If it is good enough, even dedicated DVR owners can still be tempted to watch live television, complete with its inconvenient interludes. Chad Little, a ReplayTV owner who started a Web site called Planetreplay.com, where viewers can trade with each other, regularly records about 10 shows, including "Junkyard Wars," and "Everybody Loves Raymond." Sometimes he makes an exception:
"Buffy," Mr. Little said, referring to the vampire slayer. "There's times I'll watch it straight through with commercials and everything."
Her name is Nora Satie, and she was also in a later episode, "The Drumhead", where she went on a witch hunt onboard Enterprise.
Yes, I am my own "asshole modgeek".
A couple years ago, I took a programming class at a local community college. The whole class got failing grades for the first few assignments, even though the program did what it was supposed to do and had 4 lines of comments per routine.
Turns out no one got any higher than a C until they made a whole page of comments for each line of code. On top of that, the teacher demanded the code be printed out.... I remember that I ended up turning in a 100 page document once, whereas the program was only about 90 lines.
I think that's a little too much commenting, but he still said more comments needed to be made. I understand where he was coming from (he used to program in Cobol, and this was in 1998, when everyone was scrambling for patching uncommented Y2K code), but there's such a thing as overcommenting.
Text of Article below, for those without accounts:
Hackers posing as employees of the Ford Motor Credit Company have in recent months harvested a trove of 13,000 credit reports -- a virtual one-stop shop for fraud and identity theft -- with data on consumers in affluent neighborhoods across the country.
The company said in a letter to the victims that computer intruders used an authorization code from Ford Credit to get the credit reports from Experian, one of three major reporting agencies.
Advertisement
"I've never seen anything of this size," a spokesman for Experian, Donald Girard, said. "Privacy is the hallmark of our business. We're extraordinarily concerned about the privacy issue here, and the trust factor."
The inquiries gave the intruders access to each victim's personal and financial information, including address, Social Security number, bank and credit card accounts and ratings of creditworthiness, which can be used to identify the best targets.
"This is not just a credit card number; this is the whole kazoo," said Richard Power, the editorial director for the Computer Security Institute, an industry trade group. A criminal could use the data to make credit card charges or even open bank and credit card accounts in the victim's name.
Thefts of credit records, Mr. Power said, are far more common than is reported. "The unique thing about this one," he said, "is that it has surfaced." The theft was first reported yesterday by The Boston Globe and The Detroit News.
Statistics on identity theft are hard to come by, with estimates ranging as high as 700,000 cases a year. Betsy Broder, the assistant director for planning and information of the Federal Trade Commission, said the commission received 86,000 complaints of identity theft last year.
Representatives of Ford Credit said they did not know how the hackers acquired the code, which was used by the company's office in Grand Rapids, Mich. The intruders focused on addresses in affluent neighborhoods, often in numeric sequence, said Rich Van Leeuwen, executive vice president at Ford Credit.
The company said it had sent letters via certified mail to all 13,000 people, urging them to contact Experian and the two other credit reporting giants, Equifax and TransUnion, and to report any evidence of abuse to the F.B.I.
The company has also worked with Experian to set up a phone line to let victims get their credit reports and help them resolve discrepancies.
Neither Ford Credit nor Experian has determined how many people have reported fraudulent charges or other problems. Mr. Girard said that Experian had received 2,700 calls since the letters started going out this month. Although the unauthorized inquiries began in April 2001, Ford first heard about the problem in February, Mr. Van Leeuwen said. Only 400 of the 13,000 victims were customers of Ford Credit, he said.
Dawn M. Clenney, a special agent at the F.B.I. office in Detroit, said that she could not comment, except to say, "We're on the case."
Mr. Girard, the Experian spokesman, said the company would work with the F.B.I. to catch and prosecute the intruders. "It just shows that today, even big companies can be victimized," he said. "it's a never-ending struggle against the bad guys."
1) It's been stated that the planes were flying above maximum speeds. The first plane was going at 350 MPH, and the second at 400 MPH. I highly doubt that buildings anywhere get hit daily by 350 MPH winds. (The strongest hurricane is about 150 MPH, I doubt a cyclone or twister is much higher than that)
2) It wasn't just the airplanes IMPACT that brought down the WTC. Read the article. Granted, there was plenty of structural damage done to the buildings from the impact (so much so that I think they would have closed the buildings while a stability assessment could be done.) But, as the article says, 2000F fires can easily melt steel supports in the floor and the central and external cores. That is the major contributor to the collapse.
PS1 can't do DVDs, but can do CD's. But, why even use that, when you can use your computer CD player (and why use that when you can rip it all to MP3!)
Assuming he has no other way to play DVD's (computer is a weak thing, and he only has a PS1), most DVD players will play audio CD's. So, in short, no need for the CD player.
Speakers: Don't use your computer speakers if you're strapped for space... just route it into your stereo AUX in.
Shut up, Ebert! (to paraphrase Eddie Jones, The Official, from SciFi channel's The Invisible Man)
Hey Cringely, when are you gonna put some passive repeaters on these babies?
Wait a minute, that's not her face, that's her..... (looks up) Oh.
(Now she's gonna kill me... http://www.fent.net/archive_strange_letters.html )
I hear the secrets that you keep
When you're talking in your sleep
I was just giving the benefit of a doubt (Is that the right way it goes?) that web traffic over 2-way satellite is bearable. I know that the latency for gaming and any kind of instant live connection is unusable (there's only so fast light can travel... then slow that down by conversions on each end and satelite conversion in the middle, and you get much slower).
The thing is, they'll sell it as faster than modem, and that it may be... I know in my area, I was almost about to go with it, because I was JUST out of reach of DSL, and the local cable company is dragging its heels about putting in cable modem.
The article states that 80% of the US is served broadband acrosss the US. However, that 80% is mostly the sattelite broadband, I'd wager.
I'd like to know how much percentage is wired. Sattelite broadband (I'm talking 2 way here) is usually costing the customer upwards of $500 for initial equipment (versus $150 for other services) and $60/month (versus $40 for other services). Installer prices are about the same, if not slightly higher.
With these differences, it's no wonder people choose wired over sattelite.
Got to Pricewatch, and do a search for Floppy Drives 5.25. I see about 5 places offering drives for about $5-10 US.
Chain Of Command, parts 1 and 2
Season 6
Irradiate the terrorist?
So, what was the sense in naming one of their SNES games "Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest"? Redundancy?
Tuner Card?
Read the words "mostly optional" with some skepticism. There is a point in the game where you are forced to play blitzball for about 5 minutes. It seems to be largely derived on football, with a little soccer and basketball mixed in.
One thing I don't understand: in the beginning movies, blitzball is played 3-dimensional. In the minigames, you are forced to play it 2 dimensional.
First decent boss battle: SinSpawn Gui. (I reached it at about 11 hours in, and I've been going a little slow.)
I have to say, the battle and animations seem to rival the Battle at Junon sequence from FF7.
I looked at the ad on top of the page, and saw a picture of a monk... for perlmonks.org
(OK, OK, so I saw that ad a couple days ago also, but I thought it was an odd coincidence that clicking into the story would also have that ad.)