Okay, okay, so I get the benefits. I just don't see this as being a very logical and easy to manage protocol. Perhaps I've just cut my teeth on IPv4 and shudder to think of having to adjust to completely new standard, but I seriously can't see myself ever looking at an IPv6 address and going "oh, that's just our gateway. or... oh no, that's somebody in Romania." It also truly scares me to even think that all IP's will now be routable. As if containing/restricting offending network traffic wasn't tough enough for a intermediate level network engineer. Forgive me if I resist, but there also seems to be a lack of "here's what the world will be like as a system's admin with IPv6" info out there. I forsee this being a long ways off, regardless of whether we run out of IPv4 address and prices get jacked up on everyone.
I had BPL(Current.net) as of a year or so ago here in Cincinnati and it definitely had a long way to go. At first it was amazing for torrenting as I could upload/download at a symmetrical 3-4 megs. I thought for sure they were a strong answer to capped upload cable. Then somebody moved in to our neighbordhood who was actually doing some serious P2P hosting and drove the entire neighborhood's max speeds down to sub 1.5 megs max, even causing packet loss on their switches. After months of free service, back and forth troubleshooting with their network engineers in NY who I got on first name basis with, they finally said there was nothing they could do. They didn't have the power to limit this person's activity and any sort of back side reconfiguration they tried had no effect either. How QoS couldn't be done on their system for an offending user who they had warned multiple times is beyond me, but I also found out that their shared runs are only 6 megs. While they sell tiered speeds(1, 2, and 3 megs), it only took one user to bring down the whole neighborhood of roughly 30-50 users. There was also some very weird issue with lag in games caused by unexplicable packet delay. The technology they were using was so new that not even their top engineers could figure it out, even though they admitted it was an issue. Finally, your modem has to be plugged in close to your main breaker box to get a full 3 megs. In apartment buildings, this is naturally hard to achieve. I can only imagine bad wiring, bad breaker boxes, etc imposes further noise/signal problems.
but high customer service cost certainly will. I hate to spew cynicism here buuttt....
Call center customer support is simply a recurring sunk cost for ISP's. You're assumption that Comcast will staff more call center support people when people swamp the lines to call and protest is assuming that making their customers happy is their top priority. Obviously we know that's not the case...
If their customers were to successfully overload their call center out of spite, they'd simply drop an initial on-hold message in their "if you're experiencing slow bittorrent or P2P downloads, please hangup and visit www.whycomcastisreallysuperawesome.com for more information."
Of course, if that doesn't get rid of most people, you'll simply be sitting on hold that much longer only to finally get through to someone that you'll quickly realize hates their job(especially that day). Complaining to them will similarly get you no where as they were already listening to irrate customers all day and your incessant flood of complaints just made their job that much crappier. So goes dealing with a telecom monopoly...
Yeah, like that's going to happen. The United Nations is supposedly meant to be independent from the US, but in reality is just a puppet organization held up by the US. The United States wields power and influence in the UN through sheer economic power. Without US support, the UN usually has no teeth. The same could apply to ICANN. Just look at the department currently in charge of overseeing ICANN. The US is clearly not the only country that has this kind of power though, so their total control of ICANN in its current incarnation is suspect. Given the diplomatic pressure of late, I don't believe the US has a choice in the matter. If the US wants their internet presence to remain dominant world wide, they have to cede control to an independent entity. Otherwise the US risks a zoned/segmented internet that could cripple world trade activity and hurt their ever cherished economic dominance. I think the Department of Commerce is quite capable of recognizing this.
Even though the United Nations may be heavily dependent upon the US, the legitimacy of its policies/decisions still reflect other countries around the world and usually have a better reception. The same can be said about an independent ICANN, although it remains to be seen if having NO political oversight is really a good idea. Absent some sort of oversight, I could see corruption/bribery becoming a very prevolent problem.
You had competition from the kind of people who play World of Warcraft? Says another guy posting on slashdot. Brings to mind the old cliche. Birds of a feather...
It works because their targeted clientele is usually the type that's homeless and sleeping on the streets. These people wake up everyday and in between sessions of pan handling for money talk to one another in passing to see where they can score something that day. The places they get stuff from tends to move around fairly often. Sure, it's not rocket science to realize that if a meth head can figure out where to get drugs, than surely the local cop can. But think about it, if a cop hung out by every pair of shoes he saw hanging in the ghetto, he'd be likely to waste a lot of time. Plus, he's not a narcotics person(and likely isn't armed enough for the job). Whatever he knows about drug dealing usually moves up the chain to the DEA, ATF, or Sherrif's department. I'd bet what he knows of these moving dens is often not a big enough fish for them to waste their time. They're not cook houses, they're the last point of distribution so it's questionable how much stuff they have in there and whether it's worth risking life, limb and a search warrant to bust in on the party. Essentially, a crack den getting busted in the ghetto isn't tax payer worthy headlines. So then do shoes work as an advertising medium? Apparently or they wouldn't be doing it without fear and with such consistency. I also doubt false positives would confuse an addict because a new pair of shoes on a street you wander every day would stick out like a sore thumb. Feeding their addiction is what they live every day for at this point so I bet this is something they keep track of.
I wonder if you get the pervasiveness of illegal drugs in this country. They're everywhere, and in urban areas, they're easier to get than milk and eggs. I live in the city and volunteer in inner city neighborhoods. It amazes me how far off common wisdom is for people living in the burbs on what is actually happening in poorer neighborhoods.
Finally, symbolism can obviously mean whoever to whatever. Just because I wear a blue bandana doesn't mean I'm in the crypts. But for the people that notice it most, it does(whether or not they believe it). So maybe some college kids thought it'd be funny to toss some shoes over a wire(to be like they're in hood, right?).
Microsoft hasn't even fully embraced 64-bit yet. All of their desktop applications are 32-bit. Exchange 2007 was their first big step, but it was like throwing a pebble in the ocean. No one is switching that sea of desktops and laptops to a 64-bit OS anytime soon. Running 32-bit apps with WoW compatibility is simply painful. Currently, I'm running Outlook 2007 in Vista x64(Dell D830 laptop) at work and that bloated POS doubles its already awful memory footprint. Running just a few 32-bit apps in a 64 bit OS pretty much negates the additional memory you get with 4 gigs of memory.
That's correct. It's code for a crack/meth dealing house being nearby as they are constantly moving around. I lived in a Cincinnati inner suburb and there was this run down rental row house on a street which is actually in a pretty nice outer city neighborhood(Oakley). I remember jogging by and thinking that really looks like a meth den. They always had all sorts of random crap all over their porch just like they were moving in. Next time I was by they had hung up shoes right out front on a tree and then another pair nearby on the wires. They were there for about 2 months when I finally called the cincinnati police to ask them if they were aware that the place had a meth/crack den calling card hanging out front. Surprisingly, according to them no one had noticed or called about it at that poin. This was a pretty high traffic through side street too. Within a month or so the house was empty. So no, it's not something people do to be cool or funny, it really is a drug dealer hanging those up(usually the worst kind).
1. Teach a man how to fish
2. Lend him a crapload of money under the condition that he buys the fishing boat, fishing equipment and fuel from you
3. Wait until man can't pay off the debt due to disastrous interest rates, and invoke the default clauses such as taking ownership of his business, and diverting the fish to a Western market
4. Profit! This is flamebaite but I'll bite anyway. Describing the whole entire
"western way" as manipulative and advantageous is downright insulting. The world learned the hard lesson of what happens when you screw a country over by indebting them. Afer World War 1 it set the perfect stage in Germany for Hitler and subsequently World War 2. While westerners may be viewed as shrewd and dishonest through some cultural norms, we are generally of good intent although far from perfect. If people from other parts expect the western world to be indebted to helping the world's poorest, they should at least give us the benefit of the doubt we are not doing it for profit.
On my Windows machines crashes are a daily occurance on good days so half a dozen crashes doesn't exactly scare me. This has to be an exageration of the fact. I have rolled out, one by one, hundreds of XP boxes and a dozen or so Vista boxes. Actually seeing one crashing that often means something is seriously fkd. Usually either your apps suck or your hardware is flakey. I'd bet the latter any day of the week.
I support developers testing the limits of XP every day. On their Dell D820 laptops they will run two 1 gig VMWare Workstation dev environments off of external eSata drives via their PC Express card eSata adapter. Running simultaneously Outlook 2007, Communicator 2007(read bloated), streaming media with winamp, browsing the web(firefox), and finally using heavier microsoft intranet apps like Sharepoint. These power users easily use every bit of their 4gb of memory and fill up their 120gb internal HD's with random programs and media. they have local admin rights and know just enough to be dangerous when customizing their OS. Yet, if they have a reoccuring crash, they will instantly complain to me about it because I will offer to build a replacement laptop and let them swap out, minimizing their dev downtime. This is a very, very rare occurrence, and when it does happen it's usually bad hardware(hard drives almost always).
Furthermore, I just got a D830 for myself(one of three) and we chose to install Windows Vista x64. It tooks some time to locate all the proper drivers but I've been using it for 3 weeks now and it hasn't crashed once.
I'm no Microsoft fan by any means as I support plenty of their woefully half-baked, re-branded garbage in my company's environment. But I can' help but view these OS bashing claims of infamy as largely people who prefer alternative OS's and are frustrated by MS's dominance in the area of available apps. Windows XP and Vista are simply not that unstable.
Rebates are a mix of creative retail economics. First off, everyone needs to differentiate between rebates from manufacturers and rebates from the retail store. Best Buy likes to often times supplement mfg rebates to create really good deals(after rebate). This is where the problems start.
Mfg rebates are absolutely terrible. The manufacturer themselves generally outsource the whole entire rebate process to a 3rd party. The manufacturer pays a set amount for a company to take care of cashing in all the rebates. This amount is conjured from various metrics, but the point is that it's a set amount and the manufacturers are released of these complicated financial obligations with a one time charge. Now the 3rd party has this set amount paid to them by the manufacturer and is effectively obligated to fulfill rebates. The mfg's have therefore washed their hands and this obscure 3rd party has nothing to lose by f'ing up rebates(oops, lost it... or, misread the postmark date? we're human, it happens.) Every dime they don't dish is more money for them. Meanwhile, Best Buy gets most the angry customers(not the mfg). Just try contacting the third party rebate cashiers sometime. You're in for some serious frustration if you can actually figure out how to get a hold of a human being. On the other hand, Best Buy does a hell of a good job honoring rebates. Even in my experience, I've even gotten back a number of rebates that are sent out past the postmark date before. They have a real reason to care about keeping their customers happy. This new system is just them making it even easier to fulfill these.
The problem is, it's not going to fix the manfuacturers rebate problem. Theres too many party involved to pin blame on any of them, and since the retail joints inevitably get the angry customers and class-action lawsuits, what do these mfg's care? Rebates aren't going anywhere. They're great for profit-now-expense-later creative accounting/financials for all of these publicly traded companies.
What do people with ruined credit do then? Walk?
on
High-Tech RepoMan
·
· Score: 1
"Bottom line: if your credit is so bad that you have to agree to install any kind of automated device to track you or force you to pay, you shouldn't be buying a car. "
So they're going to ride the bus in Nowhere, West Virginia? People blow up their credit all the time. How can they fix it when any sane creditor won't touch them? This is what they have to turn to. You have to effectively pay the price to prove that you are credit worthy again and that you won't screw all creditors over again like you have been doing. Everyone just assumes these bad credit outfits exist to feed on the less fortunate. Not at all, they're meeting a absolute need! If they weren't around, a lot of people would be completely screwed. As for the accusation flying on here about shady outfits selling rolling heaps, that sucks.
Bottom line: Don't screw up your credit that bad as in: Blow up your credit cards and never save a dime only to get laid off or fired and probably not find a job after 6 months of collecting unemployment. If you are financially wise, you won't have to deal with this dillemma unless you get terminally ill and have huge medical bills(in which case you'll haver much bigger things to worry about).
Red-squigglies and word processors are blamed for the degradation in the overall quality of English writing in college.
When people typed out papers on a type-writer, you could only use so much white-out before you ended up having to type everything out again. It was well worth your time to carefully plan out what you were going to say, via multiple drafts, and then carefully type it all out. Now students just spew it out in a word processor, crafting it slightly as it comes to them, run spell/grammer check, email it to the prof or submit it online, and they're done. This makes for some very poor qaulity papers, and defeats the point of making students do the paper in general; that is to critically think in depth about the subject.
Professors who are supporting the use of these automated essay checking tools are also opening a can of worms. Making it easier for professors to grade papers may make the quality of feedback and explanations suffer. After all, we pay enough for college as it is. Professors shouldn't be focused on grading, they should be focused on conveying the material effectively and getting students to absorb it.
Everything is becoming so standardized and automated in this country, people are forgetting the point of academia in general. To teach and to learn. No computer can do that for us.
I work at Best Buy and I've shopped at them long before I started working there. I have always shopped online, but sometimes the rebate deals Best Buy offers simply can't be beat. It's not entirely true that their competitors offer cheaper prices, normally they don't(and they also have lots of rebates). Online retail is a mixed bag. I will often times price shop for things online and end up going with the rebate offer because it is a significantly better deal.
Truth be told, rebates are a financial trick for manufacturers and retail. It allows them to push surplus at a heavy discount, without immediately taking a hit to their earnings etc. It encourages greater cash flow(which is HUGE) and allows them to manipulate the numbers slightly for their shareholders to see. Problem is, the actual clearing centers are most likely outsourced by the companies behind all this. I also believe they probably have a deal where the center guarantess a certain clearance rate(hence the f'd up situation we're all in now). I have no doubt in my mind that the companies are probably paying a set sum to these clearance companies(based on their monthly sales, etc) and whatever it ends up being over or under is the clearance houses problem or benefit. This explains why we never see those rebates when we clearly sent them out correctly.
True, you can pursue them and go after people to get your money, but time is money, and who should have to spend their precious free time hounding a company that clearly owes them money? It's the fault of the companies behind this system, not necessarily Best Buy.
Best Buy is taking a very noble step here, as it is unlikely their competitors will do that same. At the same time, I have no doubt in my mind this has to do with lawsuits. In Ohio, Best Buy was being sued for all sorts of things. Everything from their service plans being a rip off, to rebates not being paid out in time. I honestly believe Best Buy did not have evil intentions to rip off consumers, but rather an interest in innovating on ways to maximize how much volume they can move through their stores. Anymore, electronics are becoming commodity items(Best Buy makes almost 0 profit on desktop computers, for instance). The only way for them to stay competitive is be an electronics Wal-Mart of sorts. Push so much volume you can strong arm your suppliers into lowering their prices for you.
Credit bureaus themselves have become a very helpful tool for a lot of smaller business. Even if we were to say, ban, credit bureaus, that would just neccessitate the need for less players and bigger corporations in the financial and insurance markets. They would keep their own datamarts, and would be one of the few that had the resources ot do it. Now we're talking about high barriers to market entries. Oligopolies would emerge, and next thing you know we'll be getting our phone calls routed to India when we realize our information has been seriously compromised(a la tech support). The separate credit reporting agencies that exist are unfortunately more efficient and fair than would exist otherwise. Perhaps misguided or overzealous, but at least they allow some industry competitiveness.
This debate is going to be a good one because it brings something that the average citizen in our country has long been ignoring. Ignorance is bliss it would seem. We are in the information age and everyone needs to understand that the consequences to this are very high. Being geeks, industry watchers, and hobbiests, we read about security breaches all the time(and are aware of even more scary facts relating to it). At least now its out in the open for the average Joe Schmoe to worry about(and even Paris Hilton). The non-technically inclined, computer illiterate need to listen up too.
If you ask me, this debate has been a long time coming. We need to define some standards on how these massive amounts of highly sensitive data are maintained, distributed, and resold on federal level. For starters, we certainly need a better method of absolutely identifying people making it harder to "steal" an identity. Social security numbers have long since seen their day. Biometrics anyone?
Wait, aren't we due to have a global ice age? It's supposed to happen the day after tomorrow if I'm not mistaken. According to environmentalist experts in Hollywood, it's more real than you think. Better move to Mexico everyone.
>> Unfortunately, most people don't have the money to fund lobbiests in Washington or fatten the pockets of legislators to sway toward consumer rights.
...and that just says it all. Comments and thinking like this are the reason lobbiests and fat pocketed legislators exist. Rather than Americans owning up to the government that represents them and that they have the opportunity to influence, they blame everything around them. No one takes responsibility for anything anymore. It's always somebody else's fault, or it is simply just out of their control. Nevermind you can vote(unlike a lot of other places in the world).
Sure, realistically we're all very much at the mercy of circumstance, but never forget it was someone making comments just like yours that let it get this way.
There's simply no way this girl got up there without a very convincing fake ID. None. They have a whole crew of people dedicated to verifying ID's and signing waivers in these kinds of productions. She falsified her age because she was hammered, no doubt about it.
So now the question is, does the crew have a scanned copy of her license(most likely) and what does this do for their defense in regards to contractual law and their responsiblity to obey criminal law? Too bad we'll never really know the outcome as it is likely the case will be dropped or moved to an out of court settlement once both sides show their cards.
Re: American society being f'd up So many older Americans act so naive about teenage kids. Kids getting out of high school already have been there and done that with most sexual feats I haven't even attempted. Why do you think STD's are running rampant amongst young people right now? Half are country is living in the dark, refusing to face the fact that sexual promiscuity is no longer a dirty little secret amonst teenagers. Then there daughter goes topless and suddenly we gotta sue. It wasn't her that was embarassed, it was her parents. Too top it all off, there's guarunteed to be plenty worse she has done. She was free of parental control, no doubt drinking, with friends, on spring break where people screwing around is the main focus. She prolly had sex with 2 or 3 different dudes, contracted HPV and a nasty case of syphallis as she's on birth control and is too drunk and dumb to realize she still needs to use a condom. Yeah, she'll be going to church alright. You think girls wanting to get attention from guys flashing aren't going to do other desperate things for attention from guys? Get a grip people! She's 17... immature, but not brain dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, okay, so I get the benefits. I just don't see this as being a very logical and easy to manage protocol. Perhaps I've just cut my teeth on IPv4 and shudder to think of having to adjust to completely new standard, but I seriously can't see myself ever looking at an IPv6 address and going "oh, that's just our gateway. or... oh no, that's somebody in Romania." It also truly scares me to even think that all IP's will now be routable. As if containing/restricting offending network traffic wasn't tough enough for a intermediate level network engineer. Forgive me if I resist, but there also seems to be a lack of "here's what the world will be like as a system's admin with IPv6" info out there. I forsee this being a long ways off, regardless of whether we run out of IPv4 address and prices get jacked up on everyone.
I had BPL(Current.net) as of a year or so ago here in Cincinnati and it definitely had a long way to go. At first it was amazing for torrenting as I could upload/download at a symmetrical 3-4 megs. I thought for sure they were a strong answer to capped upload cable. Then somebody moved in to our neighbordhood who was actually doing some serious P2P hosting and drove the entire neighborhood's max speeds down to sub 1.5 megs max, even causing packet loss on their switches. After months of free service, back and forth troubleshooting with their network engineers in NY who I got on first name basis with, they finally said there was nothing they could do. They didn't have the power to limit this person's activity and any sort of back side reconfiguration they tried had no effect either. How QoS couldn't be done on their system for an offending user who they had warned multiple times is beyond me, but I also found out that their shared runs are only 6 megs. While they sell tiered speeds(1, 2, and 3 megs), it only took one user to bring down the whole neighborhood of roughly 30-50 users. There was also some very weird issue with lag in games caused by unexplicable packet delay. The technology they were using was so new that not even their top engineers could figure it out, even though they admitted it was an issue. Finally, your modem has to be plugged in close to your main breaker box to get a full 3 megs. In apartment buildings, this is naturally hard to achieve. I can only imagine bad wiring, bad breaker boxes, etc imposes further noise/signal problems.
If their customers were to successfully overload their call center out of spite, they'd simply drop an initial on-hold message in their "if you're experiencing slow bittorrent or P2P downloads, please hangup and visit www.whycomcastisreallysuperawesome.com for more information."
Of course, if that doesn't get rid of most people, you'll simply be sitting on hold that much longer only to finally get through to someone that you'll quickly realize hates their job(especially that day). Complaining to them will similarly get you no where as they were already listening to irrate customers all day and your incessant flood of complaints just made their job that much crappier. So goes dealing with a telecom monopoly...
It works because their targeted clientele is usually the type that's homeless and sleeping on the streets. These people wake up everyday and in between sessions of pan handling for money talk to one another in passing to see where they can score something that day. The places they get stuff from tends to move around fairly often. Sure, it's not rocket science to realize that if a meth head can figure out where to get drugs, than surely the local cop can. But think about it, if a cop hung out by every pair of shoes he saw hanging in the ghetto, he'd be likely to waste a lot of time. Plus, he's not a narcotics person(and likely isn't armed enough for the job). Whatever he knows about drug dealing usually moves up the chain to the DEA, ATF, or Sherrif's department. I'd bet what he knows of these moving dens is often not a big enough fish for them to waste their time. They're not cook houses, they're the last point of distribution so it's questionable how much stuff they have in there and whether it's worth risking life, limb and a search warrant to bust in on the party. Essentially, a crack den getting busted in the ghetto isn't tax payer worthy headlines. So then do shoes work as an advertising medium? Apparently or they wouldn't be doing it without fear and with such consistency. I also doubt false positives would confuse an addict because a new pair of shoes on a street you wander every day would stick out like a sore thumb. Feeding their addiction is what they live every day for at this point so I bet this is something they keep track of. I wonder if you get the pervasiveness of illegal drugs in this country. They're everywhere, and in urban areas, they're easier to get than milk and eggs. I live in the city and volunteer in inner city neighborhoods. It amazes me how far off common wisdom is for people living in the burbs on what is actually happening in poorer neighborhoods. Finally, symbolism can obviously mean whoever to whatever. Just because I wear a blue bandana doesn't mean I'm in the crypts. But for the people that notice it most, it does(whether or not they believe it). So maybe some college kids thought it'd be funny to toss some shoes over a wire(to be like they're in hood, right?).
Microsoft hasn't even fully embraced 64-bit yet. All of their desktop applications are 32-bit. Exchange 2007 was their first big step, but it was like throwing a pebble in the ocean. No one is switching that sea of desktops and laptops to a 64-bit OS anytime soon. Running 32-bit apps with WoW compatibility is simply painful. Currently, I'm running Outlook 2007 in Vista x64(Dell D830 laptop) at work and that bloated POS doubles its already awful memory footprint. Running just a few 32-bit apps in a 64 bit OS pretty much negates the additional memory you get with 4 gigs of memory.
That's correct. It's code for a crack/meth dealing house being nearby as they are constantly moving around. I lived in a Cincinnati inner suburb and there was this run down rental row house on a street which is actually in a pretty nice outer city neighborhood(Oakley). I remember jogging by and thinking that really looks like a meth den. They always had all sorts of random crap all over their porch just like they were moving in. Next time I was by they had hung up shoes right out front on a tree and then another pair nearby on the wires. They were there for about 2 months when I finally called the cincinnati police to ask them if they were aware that the place had a meth/crack den calling card hanging out front. Surprisingly, according to them no one had noticed or called about it at that poin. This was a pretty high traffic through side street too. Within a month or so the house was empty. So no, it's not something people do to be cool or funny, it really is a drug dealer hanging those up(usually the worst kind).
I support developers testing the limits of XP every day. On their Dell D820 laptops they will run two 1 gig VMWare Workstation dev environments off of external eSata drives via their PC Express card eSata adapter. Running simultaneously Outlook 2007, Communicator 2007(read bloated), streaming media with winamp, browsing the web(firefox), and finally using heavier microsoft intranet apps like Sharepoint. These power users easily use every bit of their 4gb of memory and fill up their 120gb internal HD's with random programs and media. they have local admin rights and know just enough to be dangerous when customizing their OS. Yet, if they have a reoccuring crash, they will instantly complain to me about it because I will offer to build a replacement laptop and let them swap out, minimizing their dev downtime. This is a very, very rare occurrence, and when it does happen it's usually bad hardware(hard drives almost always).
Furthermore, I just got a D830 for myself(one of three) and we chose to install Windows Vista x64. It tooks some time to locate all the proper drivers but I've been using it for 3 weeks now and it hasn't crashed once.
I'm no Microsoft fan by any means as I support plenty of their woefully half-baked, re-branded garbage in my company's environment. But I can' help but view these OS bashing claims of infamy as largely people who prefer alternative OS's and are frustrated by MS's dominance in the area of available apps. Windows XP and Vista are simply not that unstable.
Rebates are a mix of creative retail economics. First off, everyone needs to differentiate between rebates from manufacturers and rebates from the retail store. Best Buy likes to often times supplement mfg rebates to create really good deals(after rebate). This is where the problems start. Mfg rebates are absolutely terrible. The manufacturer themselves generally outsource the whole entire rebate process to a 3rd party. The manufacturer pays a set amount for a company to take care of cashing in all the rebates. This amount is conjured from various metrics, but the point is that it's a set amount and the manufacturers are released of these complicated financial obligations with a one time charge. Now the 3rd party has this set amount paid to them by the manufacturer and is effectively obligated to fulfill rebates. The mfg's have therefore washed their hands and this obscure 3rd party has nothing to lose by f'ing up rebates(oops, lost it... or, misread the postmark date? we're human, it happens.) Every dime they don't dish is more money for them. Meanwhile, Best Buy gets most the angry customers(not the mfg). Just try contacting the third party rebate cashiers sometime. You're in for some serious frustration if you can actually figure out how to get a hold of a human being. On the other hand, Best Buy does a hell of a good job honoring rebates. Even in my experience, I've even gotten back a number of rebates that are sent out past the postmark date before. They have a real reason to care about keeping their customers happy. This new system is just them making it even easier to fulfill these. The problem is, it's not going to fix the manfuacturers rebate problem. Theres too many party involved to pin blame on any of them, and since the retail joints inevitably get the angry customers and class-action lawsuits, what do these mfg's care? Rebates aren't going anywhere. They're great for profit-now-expense-later creative accounting/financials for all of these publicly traded companies.
"Bottom line: if your credit is so bad that you have to agree to install any kind of automated device to track you or force you to pay, you shouldn't be buying a car. " So they're going to ride the bus in Nowhere, West Virginia? People blow up their credit all the time. How can they fix it when any sane creditor won't touch them? This is what they have to turn to. You have to effectively pay the price to prove that you are credit worthy again and that you won't screw all creditors over again like you have been doing. Everyone just assumes these bad credit outfits exist to feed on the less fortunate. Not at all, they're meeting a absolute need! If they weren't around, a lot of people would be completely screwed. As for the accusation flying on here about shady outfits selling rolling heaps, that sucks. Bottom line: Don't screw up your credit that bad as in: Blow up your credit cards and never save a dime only to get laid off or fired and probably not find a job after 6 months of collecting unemployment. If you are financially wise, you won't have to deal with this dillemma unless you get terminally ill and have huge medical bills(in which case you'll haver much bigger things to worry about).
Red-squigglies and word processors are blamed for the degradation in the overall quality of English writing in college. When people typed out papers on a type-writer, you could only use so much white-out before you ended up having to type everything out again. It was well worth your time to carefully plan out what you were going to say, via multiple drafts, and then carefully type it all out. Now students just spew it out in a word processor, crafting it slightly as it comes to them, run spell/grammer check, email it to the prof or submit it online, and they're done. This makes for some very poor qaulity papers, and defeats the point of making students do the paper in general; that is to critically think in depth about the subject. Professors who are supporting the use of these automated essay checking tools are also opening a can of worms. Making it easier for professors to grade papers may make the quality of feedback and explanations suffer. After all, we pay enough for college as it is. Professors shouldn't be focused on grading, they should be focused on conveying the material effectively and getting students to absorb it. Everything is becoming so standardized and automated in this country, people are forgetting the point of academia in general. To teach and to learn. No computer can do that for us.
I work at Best Buy and I've shopped at them long before I started working there. I have always shopped online, but sometimes the rebate deals Best Buy offers simply can't be beat. It's not entirely true that their competitors offer cheaper prices, normally they don't(and they also have lots of rebates). Online retail is a mixed bag. I will often times price shop for things online and end up going with the rebate offer because it is a significantly better deal. Truth be told, rebates are a financial trick for manufacturers and retail. It allows them to push surplus at a heavy discount, without immediately taking a hit to their earnings etc. It encourages greater cash flow(which is HUGE) and allows them to manipulate the numbers slightly for their shareholders to see. Problem is, the actual clearing centers are most likely outsourced by the companies behind all this. I also believe they probably have a deal where the center guarantess a certain clearance rate(hence the f'd up situation we're all in now). I have no doubt in my mind that the companies are probably paying a set sum to these clearance companies(based on their monthly sales, etc) and whatever it ends up being over or under is the clearance houses problem or benefit. This explains why we never see those rebates when we clearly sent them out correctly. True, you can pursue them and go after people to get your money, but time is money, and who should have to spend their precious free time hounding a company that clearly owes them money? It's the fault of the companies behind this system, not necessarily Best Buy. Best Buy is taking a very noble step here, as it is unlikely their competitors will do that same. At the same time, I have no doubt in my mind this has to do with lawsuits. In Ohio, Best Buy was being sued for all sorts of things. Everything from their service plans being a rip off, to rebates not being paid out in time. I honestly believe Best Buy did not have evil intentions to rip off consumers, but rather an interest in innovating on ways to maximize how much volume they can move through their stores. Anymore, electronics are becoming commodity items(Best Buy makes almost 0 profit on desktop computers, for instance). The only way for them to stay competitive is be an electronics Wal-Mart of sorts. Push so much volume you can strong arm your suppliers into lowering their prices for you.
Credit bureaus themselves have become a very helpful tool for a lot of smaller business. Even if we were to say, ban, credit bureaus, that would just neccessitate the need for less players and bigger corporations in the financial and insurance markets. They would keep their own datamarts, and would be one of the few that had the resources ot do it. Now we're talking about high barriers to market entries. Oligopolies would emerge, and next thing you know we'll be getting our phone calls routed to India when we realize our information has been seriously compromised(a la tech support). The separate credit reporting agencies that exist are unfortunately more efficient and fair than would exist otherwise. Perhaps misguided or overzealous, but at least they allow some industry competitiveness. This debate is going to be a good one because it brings something that the average citizen in our country has long been ignoring. Ignorance is bliss it would seem. We are in the information age and everyone needs to understand that the consequences to this are very high. Being geeks, industry watchers, and hobbiests, we read about security breaches all the time(and are aware of even more scary facts relating to it). At least now its out in the open for the average Joe Schmoe to worry about(and even Paris Hilton). The non-technically inclined, computer illiterate need to listen up too. If you ask me, this debate has been a long time coming. We need to define some standards on how these massive amounts of highly sensitive data are maintained, distributed, and resold on federal level. For starters, we certainly need a better method of absolutely identifying people making it harder to "steal" an identity. Social security numbers have long since seen their day. Biometrics anyone?
Wait, aren't we due to have a global ice age? It's supposed to happen the day after tomorrow if I'm not mistaken. According to environmentalist experts in Hollywood, it's more real than you think. Better move to Mexico everyone.
>> Unfortunately, most people don't have the money to fund lobbiests in Washington or fatten the pockets of legislators to sway toward consumer rights.
...and that just says it all. Comments and thinking like this are the reason lobbiests and fat pocketed legislators exist. Rather than Americans owning up to the government that represents them and that they have the opportunity to influence, they blame everything around them. No one takes responsibility for anything anymore. It's always somebody else's fault, or it is simply just out of their control. Nevermind you can vote(unlike a lot of other places in the world).
Sure, realistically we're all very much at the mercy of circumstance, but never forget it was someone making comments just like yours that let it get this way.
Google has a porn filtering engine built in. It has always come off to me as being very effective.
There's simply no way this girl got up there without a very convincing fake ID. None. They have a whole crew of people dedicated to verifying ID's and signing waivers in these kinds of productions. She falsified her age because she was hammered, no doubt about it.
So now the question is, does the crew have a scanned copy of her license(most likely) and what does this do for their defense in regards to contractual law and their responsiblity to obey criminal law? Too bad we'll never really know the outcome as it is likely the case will be dropped or moved to an out of court settlement once both sides show their cards.
Re: American society being f'd up
So many older Americans act so naive about teenage kids. Kids getting out of high school already have been there and done that with most sexual feats I haven't even attempted. Why do you think STD's are running rampant amongst young people right now? Half are country is living in the dark, refusing to face the fact that sexual promiscuity is no longer a dirty little secret amonst teenagers. Then there daughter goes topless and suddenly we gotta sue. It wasn't her that was embarassed, it was her parents. Too top it all off, there's guarunteed to be plenty worse she has done. She was free of parental control, no doubt drinking, with friends, on spring break where people screwing around is the main focus. She prolly had sex with 2 or 3 different dudes, contracted HPV and a nasty case of syphallis as she's on birth control and is too drunk and dumb to realize she still needs to use a condom. Yeah, she'll be going to church alright. You think girls wanting to get attention from guys flashing aren't going to do other desperate things for attention from guys? Get a grip people! She's 17... immature, but not brain dead.