Why not, there are ones that will work for free. Isn't that the whole point of this?
From TFA:
When the US government on Thursday began publishing captured Iraqi government documents on the Internet, Shahda eagerly began to translate the files into English and publish them on a conservative website.
"I feel a sense of duty," said Shahda, a native of Lebanon who supports President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. "I think it's a duty for people who know Arabic to translate the documents."
I'm not sure I see why it's bad or "cheap" that the phone saves contact information to the SIM card. In fact my fancy, shmancy Nokia 6600 requires some special shenanigans to move contacts to the card if, for example, I wanted to switch to another phone. Apparently it gets confusing if you move your contacts to the card because the phone will continue to save new contacts to its internal memory and you need to keep track of that.
I have a Nokia 6610, and while I don't know if the interface is the same, here's what you do. First of all, note as you scroll through your phone list some entries will show a tiny SIM card icon in the upper-right corner of the screen telling you the contact is stored on the card. Move all other entries off the internal memory to the SIM. On my SIM, names cannot be longer than 13 characters. My phone always saved the contact on the SIM when I first got it, but if I wrote a contact's name longer than the limit it would get saved automatically on the internal memory instead. Also, your SIM may not support email address or screename saving for contacts.
Now to disable the internal memory...
From the main start screen hit 'Names' (probably the right soft-key)
Go to 'Settings'
Choose 'Memory in Use'
Choose 'SIM Card' (default is 'Phone and SIM')
There. Now all new phone book entries will be stored on the SIM card.
It seems as though GSM is a step in the right direction because T-Mobile, Cingular, and ATT branded phones are basically interchangeable.
Except T-Mobile generally stocks the European models of handsets, which have 900mhz band instead of 850mhz. So a T-Mobile phone usually does not include the right radio transmitter to work on Cingular. This is why T-Mobile stocked the Sony-Ericsson T610, but Cingular had the T616. But the Cingular phones have 850mhz and 1900mhz so they can be used on T-Mobile.
Considering that this was an unwarranted invasion of her private life, I hope she sued their asses off for unlawful termination, or whatever it happens to be called where she lives.
That doesn't seem to be much of an option anymore. Many states are now "at will" employment which means pretty much they can fire you if they don't like the color of your shoelaces.
This is a pretty easy case for them anyway. Ignoring the "who can afford to stay in court the longest arguement", all the company would have had to say is that her employment indirectly associates her adult entertainmant business with their company and damages their reputation in the community. The End.
The American government has an annual budget exceeding $2.0 trillion, yet that same government cannot seem to buy top-notch translators graduating from the academic pentagon...
That's right. They'll spend $12 for a hammer but not even $2 for a translator!
What happens is this: at the end of the day, the store (often from the store, but sometimes it's done from the corporate office) and the credit provider perform a process called Settlement, where they compare a log of the credit card transactions for the day. The retailer does not get paid for the credit card sales until the transactions are reconciled.
Keeping card data for Settlement makes sense. But once the company gets 'Settle 000' back why do they need the data then? The refund process should still require the card unless they are returning the product before settlement. Otherwise, what dictates how long they keep it on file? Many stores have return policies of 30-90 days.
The reason has always been customer convienence. It's quite often a person returning an item is not the same one as the person who bought it, and doesn't have the purchasing card with them. Wal-Mart used to be this way, now anyone can return an item. They also stopped allowing purchases made by card to be refunded as cash (to prevent underhanded cash advances on credit cards). Customers don't care as much about security, because it's not a visible part of their shopping experience. But trouble getting items returned is.
Not true, most credit card transaction receipts include only the first and last 4 digits of the credit card number. The rest usually consists of *'s or X's.
Not quite. It varies state by state.
They recently passed laws in Kansas banning CC machines that printed the full CC number. They all X-out all but the last 4 or 5 digits. But that is only on the customer's reciept (since many people lose/throw them away). The reciept you sign and that gets stored in the register until the till gets turned over many times has the full CC info on it still at many places I go. I think this is most likely when the POS and CC processing are not all one system (the small tickertape processing machine operations, like restarants). The little slip Wal-Mart and other major retail systems print out for the cashier to stash do not have the CC number on them.
KinderStart charges that Google without warning in March 2005 penalized the site in its search rankings, sparking a "cataclysmic" 70 percent fall in its audience -- and a resulting 80 percent decline in revenue.
Do they have any actual evidence Google maliciously lowered the site's listing in search results?
Google is not necessarily directly responsible for every downgrade of a Pagerank. The system is supposed to work based on how many people choose to link to a site. Therefore, falling Pagerank is simply a symptom of falling site popularity, although this would be a circular effect (the lower you are in the results display the fewer people will click you anyway). But that's not Google's fault. It's simply that most consumers are too lazy to read all results throughly before clicking one.
Given that it's just an advertising trap, the problem could be that (gasp!) consumers have figured out this site simply has no real information, and it's falling in popularity becuase there aren't as many suckers to reel in at this point. In other words, the whole site's business model has gone through it's half-life, they're on the downward slope of their cash-cow.
"Google does not generally inform Web sites that they have been penalized nor does it explain in detail why the Web site was penalized," the lawsuit said.
So? Who said they have to? Google's not a public utility or branch of the government last time I checked. If you don't like where you fall in search results, market yourself, improve your site, or go home crying to mommy.
The suit was filed the same day a federal judge denied a U.S. government request that Google be ordered to hand over a sample of keywords customers use to search the Internet while requiring the company to produce some Web addresses indexed in its system.
I don't see any relation between these two events. But if the editor wanted a couple more inches of article...
Interesting side note: When I worked in dial-up tech support I got a call from a customer who had a page up in their personal webspace. The page was about childhood abuse (or maybe eduaction, I can't remember) anyway. This person was an author of a couple books and her site was in the top ten results for this topic on Google for awhile. It had recently fallen to the second page I believe. They were calling us because they somehow thought we were responsible and wanted us to put the customers page back up to the third result when searching Google for the topic of the customer's expertise. Also, the site was not coming up when clicking the page link in Google.
The reason the site didn't come up anymore was the customer had their page up on a personal webspace (so the URL was htt p://home.isp.com/~username) but the customer had set up the page before her ISP had been bought out by us. So the google search result had the old ISP's domain (and we'd stopped forwarding from that domain to ours after a few years). I had to talk with them for a very long time about how the order of results are decided on Google (even showing them the "miserable failure" googlebomb to illustrate how results can be tampered with). My recommndations in the end were to get a proper domain name for their site and try to contact google to get the exiting result's URL corrected.
If Google made it a little more clear about how Pagerank works (without disclosing all their proprietary info, just a survey of information) to the public lawsuits like this wouldn't be possible, and they would get less hatemail from political parties/celebrities taking things personally.
Reports that 'Blu-ray discs don't look right on my HDTV' could result in consumers' switching allegiances to the competing HD DVD standard or postponing purchases of next-generation optical players altogether.
What would switching to HD-DVD accomplish? They're doing the same thing with analog signals.
I think consumers will be postponing purchases anyway because they'd rather wait for the format war to end.
I've said it before, but I can't understand why the government needs this data when they already have search results from MSN, Yahoo, and AOL.
Probably because they went through the data from MSN, Yahoo, and AOL and found nothing to build their case with. It's kinda like the search for WMD. They look almost everywhere for something and don't find it. But rather than admit they were wrong they think this can only mean one thing; they were right and what they're looking for must be in the one place they haven't been able to look yet. Therefore they must gain access at all costs and any attempt to block them only further proves they are right and makes them more anxious to get in.
Eventually we're going to bump into limits yet again with the coax cabling, so why not still go forth with the fiberoptic plans?
Because by then the current board members will have retired and the current CEO/CFO will not have to find a way to keep the stockholders happy while all the company's revenues go into network upgrades. The next boss can deal with that.
It's just another ISP corporate "make money without spending it" hoax. You see these once every few years. A major telco/cable conglomerate/backbone operator/ect talks about using some old'n'busted tech to deliver a faster than pie in the sky internet connection. Almost all the initial information is from the marketting dept of the company that is selling the idea (not from engineers or anyone who could really explain how these fabulous data speeds will be accomplished).
Stock Market laps it up like candy. Thinks Company X is going to become the new King of Content Delivery (because, you KNOW all the company's competitors and going to sit on their hands and have their kiesters handed to them by Company X).
Then there will be delays of getting the project actually going. Maybe even some slight downplaying of actual speeds of conetnt delivery.
At some point someone with a PhD in physics or a heavy EE background gets ahold of the actual method of content delivery and point out it simply isn't possible in the real world because of interfereance, older lines than they used in the lab, ect.
Marketting dept for technology company downplays statement made by PhD/EE. Slashdot crowd made up of people who know WAY too much about the national power grid and enough about radio spectrum to work at the FCC pop up to defend the scientist's statements.
More backpedaling of speeds for new service. Marketting direction of new tech starts to veer slightly into the "will allow service in areas not currently reachable by standard broadband providers" direction.
Companies who have not yet publically committed to using tech start to back out. In the others unfortunately, corporate inertia takes over. Whoever greenlighted the project doesn't want to try and back out and look stupid for having wasted plenty of company money at this point.
New tech has limited rollout, shows to be the flop we knew it was the whole time. You never hear about the new tech in the media again and it becomes one of those fringe technologes only seen in rural regions. Perhaps eventually phased out as traditional broadband service (Cable/DSL) are pushed into the region.
A few years pass and major Telcos/Cablecos grouse about the cost of last mile hookups and getting ot that last few % of homes in the middle of nowhere. Stock is tanking on high network infastructure costs gobbling revenue.
But then a company no one's ever heard of pops up with the idea of...
There are a lot of crappy pages out there. If a page doesn't make it through the HTML validator why should anyone expect a browser to render it? Are your pages at work valid? What's the point of standards-compliant rendering engines if they all allow exceptions to the standard to be rendered?
The point is that the majority of pages on the internet are not standards complaint, so a browser that does not allow any wiggle room will not be able to render much of the World Wide Web.
And web browser that can not render most of the Web is worthless to most people.
The average consumer does not know what HTML, XML, CSS, ect are. If a page is on the Internet, they assume it should display correctly, and if it doesn't, it's generally a problem with the browser or their ISP.
There was also a secret police not allied with the Gestapo, because the watchers needed to be afraid of someone as well. These were completely secret police who answered only to Hitler and/or Goering.
Damn. Even the Nazis understood and practiced checks & balances better than us.
The bill defines the phrase 'extremely violent video game' as 'a video game in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being.
Easy.
GTA becomes GTU. Grand Theft UFO. Now everyone's an alien!
Can you imagine the backlash as suddenly no companies can get support, or no users can buy a computer with Windows installed?
Support, maybe. But it just sounds like a great excuse to pirate Windows to me. "I had to steal it, there isn't any way to buy it in the whole E.U., and I wanted to!"
Slashdot Mirror
Like a translator would work for $2.
Why not, there are ones that will work for free. Isn't that the whole point of this?
From TFA:
When the US government on Thursday began publishing captured Iraqi government documents on the Internet, Shahda eagerly began to translate the files into English and publish them on a conservative website.
"I feel a sense of duty," said Shahda, a native of Lebanon who supports President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. "I think it's a duty for people who know Arabic to translate the documents."
He's not getting paid.
I have a Nokia 6610, and while I don't know if the interface is the same, here's what you do. First of all, note as you scroll through your phone list some entries will show a tiny SIM card icon in the upper-right corner of the screen telling you the contact is stored on the card. Move all other entries off the internal memory to the SIM. On my SIM, names cannot be longer than 13 characters. My phone always saved the contact on the SIM when I first got it, but if I wrote a contact's name longer than the limit it would get saved automatically on the internal memory instead. Also, your SIM may not support email address or screename saving for contacts.
Now to disable the internal memory...
There. Now all new phone book entries will be stored on the SIM card.
It seems as though GSM is a step in the right direction because T-Mobile, Cingular, and ATT branded phones are basically interchangeable.
Except T-Mobile generally stocks the European models of handsets, which have 900mhz band instead of 850mhz. So a T-Mobile phone usually does not include the right radio transmitter to work on Cingular. This is why T-Mobile stocked the Sony-Ericsson T610, but Cingular had the T616. But the Cingular phones have 850mhz and 1900mhz so they can be used on T-Mobile.
I would prefer person-* to man-everything when refering to something totally generic like.. I dunno.. Time?
Everyone knows time is male. It is Father Time after all.
Considering that this was an unwarranted invasion of her private life, I hope she sued their asses off for unlawful termination, or whatever it happens to be called where she lives.
That doesn't seem to be much of an option anymore. Many states are now "at will" employment which means pretty much they can fire you if they don't like the color of your shoelaces.
This is a pretty easy case for them anyway. Ignoring the "who can afford to stay in court the longest arguement", all the company would have had to say is that her employment indirectly associates her adult entertainmant business with their company and damages their reputation in the community. The End.
Sure! You'll fit right in with our board of directors!
The American government has an annual budget exceeding $2.0 trillion, yet that same government cannot seem to buy top-notch translators graduating from the academic pentagon...
That's right. They'll spend $12 for a hammer but not even $2 for a translator!
What happens is this: at the end of the day, the store (often from the store, but sometimes it's done from the corporate office) and the credit provider perform a process called Settlement, where they compare a log of the credit card transactions for the day. The retailer does not get paid for the credit card sales until the transactions are reconciled.
Keeping card data for Settlement makes sense. But once the company gets 'Settle 000' back why do they need the data then? The refund process should still require the card unless they are returning the product before settlement. Otherwise, what dictates how long they keep it on file? Many stores have return policies of 30-90 days.
The reason has always been customer convienence. It's quite often a person returning an item is not the same one as the person who bought it, and doesn't have the purchasing card with them. Wal-Mart used to be this way, now anyone can return an item. They also stopped allowing purchases made by card to be refunded as cash (to prevent underhanded cash advances on credit cards). Customers don't care as much about security, because it's not a visible part of their shopping experience. But trouble getting items returned is.
Not true, most credit card transaction receipts include only the first and last 4 digits of the credit card number. The rest usually consists of *'s or X's.
Not quite. It varies state by state.
They recently passed laws in Kansas banning CC machines that printed the full CC number. They all X-out all but the last 4 or 5 digits. But that is only on the customer's reciept (since many people lose/throw them away). The reciept you sign and that gets stored in the register until the till gets turned over many times has the full CC info on it still at many places I go. I think this is most likely when the POS and CC processing are not all one system (the small tickertape processing machine operations, like restarants). The little slip Wal-Mart and other major retail systems print out for the cashier to stash do not have the CC number on them.
KinderStart charges that Google without warning in March 2005 penalized the site in its search rankings, sparking a "cataclysmic" 70 percent fall in its audience -- and a resulting 80 percent decline in revenue.
Do they have any actual evidence Google maliciously lowered the site's listing in search results?
Google is not necessarily directly responsible for every downgrade of a Pagerank. The system is supposed to work based on how many people choose to link to a site. Therefore, falling Pagerank is simply a symptom of falling site popularity, although this would be a circular effect (the lower you are in the results display the fewer people will click you anyway). But that's not Google's fault. It's simply that most consumers are too lazy to read all results throughly before clicking one.
Given that it's just an advertising trap, the problem could be that (gasp!) consumers have figured out this site simply has no real information, and it's falling in popularity becuase there aren't as many suckers to reel in at this point. In other words, the whole site's business model has gone through it's half-life, they're on the downward slope of their cash-cow.
"Google does not generally inform Web sites that they have been penalized nor does it explain in detail why the Web site was penalized," the lawsuit said.
So?
Who said they have to?
Google's not a public utility or branch of the government last time I checked. If you don't like where you fall in search results, market yourself, improve your site, or go home crying to mommy.
The suit was filed the same day a federal judge denied a U.S. government request that Google be ordered to hand over a sample of keywords customers use to search the Internet while requiring the company to produce some Web addresses indexed in its system.
I don't see any relation between these two events. But if the editor wanted a couple more inches of article...
Interesting side note: When I worked in dial-up tech support I got a call from a customer who had a page up in their personal webspace. The page was about childhood abuse (or maybe eduaction, I can't remember) anyway. This person was an author of a couple books and her site was in the top ten results for this topic on Google for awhile. It had recently fallen to the second page I believe. They were calling us because they somehow thought we were responsible and wanted us to put the customers page back up to the third result when searching Google for the topic of the customer's expertise. Also, the site was not coming up when clicking the page link in Google.
The reason the site didn't come up anymore was the customer had their page up on a personal webspace (so the URL was htt p://home.isp.com/~username) but the customer had set up the page before her ISP had been bought out by us. So the google search result had the old ISP's domain (and we'd stopped forwarding from that domain to ours after a few years). I had to talk with them for a very long time about how the order of results are decided on Google (even showing them the "miserable failure" googlebomb to illustrate how results can be tampered with). My recommndations in the end were to get a proper domain name for their site and try to contact google to get the exiting result's URL corrected.
If Google made it a little more clear about how Pagerank works (without disclosing all their proprietary info, just a survey of information) to the public lawsuits like this wouldn't be possible, and they would get less hatemail from political parties/celebrities taking things personally.
"... Apple betrayed our country!! They played on hour fears!!!!"
Wow, he must be pretty stupid to say something like that when he up for re-election on Apple's board of directors.
3) Brand recognition. If you stop selling ipod/itunes songs in france, will the french still think of Apple as cool ? Mmmh, maybee, maybee not...
No, it will be more desireable. The Apple will be the forbidden fruit!
Reports that 'Blu-ray discs don't look right on my HDTV' could result in consumers' switching allegiances to the competing HD DVD standard or postponing purchases of next-generation optical players altogether.
What would switching to HD-DVD accomplish? They're doing the same thing with analog signals.
I think consumers will be postponing purchases anyway because they'd rather wait for the format war to end.
Am I trolling or being insightful, or both?
Paranoia will be the judge.
Antivirus software companies write viruses...
Microsoft codes venerabilities into Windows, then patches in the next major version of Windows, coding different venerabilities into it...
Congressmen ignore their constituents once they get elected...
More at 11.
Digital audio sounds terrible.
So yes, there is still a viable market for CDs.
Good thing CD's aren't digital audio...
I've said it before, but I can't understand why the government needs this data when they already have search results from MSN, Yahoo, and AOL.
Probably because they went through the data from MSN, Yahoo, and AOL and found nothing to build their case with. It's kinda like the search for WMD. They look almost everywhere for something and don't find it. But rather than admit they were wrong they think this can only mean one thing; they were right and what they're looking for must be in the one place they haven't been able to look yet. Therefore they must gain access at all costs and any attempt to block them only further proves they are right and makes them more anxious to get in.
What about...
"In Soviet America, the Government watches YOU."
Oh, wait...
.
.
.
And just for silliness:
In Soviet American Sousveillance House of Mirrors, you watch the Government watch you watch the Government watch YOU!
Eventually we're going to bump into limits yet again with the coax cabling, so why not still go forth with the fiberoptic plans?
Because by then the current board members will have retired and the current CEO/CFO will not have to find a way to keep the stockholders happy while all the company's revenues go into network upgrades. The next boss can deal with that.
It's just another ISP corporate "make money without spending it" hoax. You see these once every few years. A major telco/cable conglomerate/backbone operator/ect talks about using some old'n'busted tech to deliver a faster than pie in the sky internet connection. Almost all the initial information is from the marketting dept of the company that is selling the idea (not from engineers or anyone who could really explain how these fabulous data speeds will be accomplished).
Stock Market laps it up like candy. Thinks Company X is going to become the new King of Content Delivery (because, you KNOW all the company's competitors and going to sit on their hands and have their kiesters handed to them by Company X).
Then there will be delays of getting the project actually going. Maybe even some slight downplaying of actual speeds of conetnt delivery.
At some point someone with a PhD in physics or a heavy EE background gets ahold of the actual method of content delivery and point out it simply isn't possible in the real world because of interfereance, older lines than they used in the lab, ect.
Marketting dept for technology company downplays statement made by PhD/EE. Slashdot crowd made up of people who know WAY too much about the national power grid and enough about radio spectrum to work at the FCC pop up to defend the scientist's statements.
More backpedaling of speeds for new service. Marketting direction of new tech starts to veer slightly into the "will allow service in areas not currently reachable by standard broadband providers" direction.
Companies who have not yet publically committed to using tech start to back out. In the others unfortunately, corporate inertia takes over. Whoever greenlighted the project doesn't want to try and back out and look stupid for having wasted plenty of company money at this point.
New tech has limited rollout, shows to be the flop we knew it was the whole time. You never hear about the new tech in the media again and it becomes one of those fringe technologes only seen in rural regions. Perhaps eventually phased out as traditional broadband service (Cable/DSL) are pushed into the region.
A few years pass and major Telcos/Cablecos grouse about the cost of last mile hookups and getting ot that last few % of homes in the middle of nowhere. Stock is tanking on high network infastructure costs gobbling revenue.
But then a company no one's ever heard of pops up with the idea of...
There are a lot of crappy pages out there. If a page doesn't make it through the HTML validator why should anyone expect a browser to render it? Are your pages at work valid? What's the point of standards-compliant rendering engines if they all allow exceptions to the standard to be rendered?
The point is that the majority of pages on the internet are not standards complaint, so a browser that does not allow any wiggle room will not be able to render much of the World Wide Web.
And web browser that can not render most of the Web is worthless to most people.
The average consumer does not know what HTML, XML, CSS, ect are. If a page is on the Internet, they assume it should display correctly, and if it doesn't, it's generally a problem with the browser or their ISP.
There was also a secret police not allied with the Gestapo, because the watchers needed to be afraid of someone as well. These were completely secret police who answered only to Hitler and/or Goering.
Damn. Even the Nazis understood and practiced checks & balances better than us.
[ducking]
The bill defines the phrase 'extremely violent video game' as 'a video game in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being.
Easy.
GTA becomes GTU. Grand Theft UFO. Now everyone's an alien!
Hudson: "Game over man... Game over!"
This whole article reeks of fanboi-ism.
I think it reeks of C|NoJournalism. And I expect nothing more from them.
Can you imagine the backlash as suddenly no companies can get support, or no users can buy a computer with Windows installed?
Support, maybe. But it just sounds like a great excuse to pirate Windows to me. "I had to steal it, there isn't any way to buy it in the whole E.U., and I wanted to!"