That's just it though, there wasn't a surcharge in the contract for the phone, they provided the phone to you in exchange for an agreement to do business with them for two years. The ETF is their way to recover a portion of what they paid for your phone since you are breaking your side of the contract. You never pay for the phone if you keep the contract. The fee for service is the same if you brought your own phone or used one they purchase for you, just you have to sign a contract if you want them to buy one for you. In many cases, (I know Verizon does this, I don't know AT&Ts verbiage) the ETF does go down as the contract progresses.
Similiarly, if I join the plan with a phone I already own, there should be no ETF. That is not the case though.
What carrier is that true with? I was not aware of any carrier that requires a contract let alone an ETF if you bring you have your own phone. Verizon will even sell you a phone at either a less subsidized 1 year contract rate or at market price for what they call the month to month rate. In the case of month to month (or bringing your own phone) you simply pay for service and there is absolutely no ETF as there is no contract.
Well, as you mentioned, many carriers will give you a discount or other promotional to try to get you to sign another contract if you are out of contract and a good customer. I know on Verizon I managed to get an extra 100 minutes a month for a year after I had waited about 2 months from the end of my previous contract before getting a new phone. It's also worth pointing out that unless you have need of a new phone, it might not be worth binding yourself to the carrier again. Sure if you need a phone, it would be worth it to get them to contribute and if you leave, you would simply be paying part of the price of the phone, but if you don't need the new phone and end up wanting to change carriers then you are still spending money you didn't need to.
That said, yeah, if you are happy with your carrier (I love my experience with Verizon Wireless thus far.) then there really isn't that much reason not to take the upgrade whenever it is available and you would actually benefit from the new phone, which if you are someone like me, I always can make better use of the new. I'm not sure what I'll end up doing now that they removed the unlimited data though, it might make me not get the new phone as I would probably lose my unlimited data rate that I currently have.
The contract is such that the phone is provided to you in exchange for two years of service with them. If you back out prior to the two years of service, the ETF is, in part, a means of recouping their investment since the cost of the handset will have diminished over time. Basically, if you leave the contract, then you aren't entitled to the phone because you didn't fulfill your commitment for getting the phone. This is why in many cases smartphone contracts have a higher ETF.
Maybe I'm not understanding what was originally being described, but I thought this thread started with an example that if a customer indicates they wish to cancel then AT&T won't try to keep it. If AT&T was terminating I'd agree with you, but in this case it is the customer leaving.
The termination fee is something they are contractually entitled to and in many cases covers the real cost of the phone in part. To use your example, it would be like the bank giving you the house when they foreclose, since the property they funded the purchase of is still yours.
Yeah, but there are oh so many assumptions that make SETI such a poor idea in the first place. How powerful of a transmitter would be required for SETI to pick up a signal? How long would it take for the signal to reach us? What is to say that another advanced civilization would use something even remotely resembling radio to communicate over distance instead of something like quantum entanglement? Even if there is other life out there, the chances of SETI actually finding it or even being capable of detecting it are so insignificant as to make burning your money a substantially better investment.
Well you assume that firing the customer can't be done with respect. There is no excuse to treat a customer poorly, but there is every reason to honor their request and let them out of their commitment hands down if they ask when they aren't profitable for you. Sometimes the best way to serve a customer well is to allow them to cut off ties politely. Keep in mind that AT&T is taking a loss by waiving the termination fee as there is a good chance that they had paid out for a phone at the start of the contract.
Honestly, I think the fact that AT&T eats the termination fee just to get them out the door is actually good customer service. If they really wanted to, they could stick it to the customer and try to recover their costs by charging the fee they are entitled to, but they don't since they simply want the business relationship ended. As MBC1977 mentioned below, you don't have a right to have a company do business with you if they don't make money. It is only good business to decide who is more of a drain on resources than it is worth and seek to end those relationships.
Yeah, that really hits the nail on the head. My experience with outsourcing has been that about 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 depending on the place will be solid coders. The rest make passable grunt coders if you have a professional developer reviewing what they do and correcting their mistakes. Outsourcing seems to work best as a labor multiplier for a solid local developer/designer/architect.
Personally I love the Tri-city (Albany, Schenectady, Troy) area, though I almost hesitate to call Schenectady a city these days. It's really more of a sprawling suburban landscape. Lots of good networking and opportunities if you know where and how to look. Moving a little further upstate and west though, yeah, things can fall off pretty quick.
Interesting, I found wikipedia to be a better link. It appears that the IEEE changed over to using Gigabyte to refer to the metric definition in 2000 though JEDEC still considers a Gigabyte in terms of memory to be the binary version. I was unfamiliar with the Gigibyte terminology since I work mostly in software and deal with memory addressing much more than anything else. It is also worth noting that while IEC came up with and NIST, CIPM and IEEE have endorced the GiB symbol, it is mentioned as having seen limited acceptance in the broad market. I never even heard of the term while going to one of the top 20 ranked comp sci schools in the US from 2002 to 2006.
That all said, I was still apparently wrong as the telecom and networking industry has apparently traditionally used the SI interpretation for bandwidth, so it would still be 1,000,000,000 bytes on a network as well, just not in memory or disk space when you take in to consideration the working definition rather than the standard definition.
Oh, I missed that you should also send it to the court itself.
Case No. BC304565 Judge Kenneth R. Freeman Department 64 of the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles 111 North Hill Street, Los Angeles, California 90012
It is worth noting that you can object to the proposed settlement's terms by sending notice of your objection to the lead class council and Ticketmaster's lead council.
Lead Class Council: Robert J Stein III, Esq W. Michael Hensley. Esq Alvarado Smith, APC 1 MacArthur Place, Suite 200 Santa Ana, CA 92707
Steven P. Blonder, Esq Much Shelist Denenberg Ament & Rubenstein, P.C. 191 North Wacker Dr. Suite 1800 Chicago, IL 60606
Ticketmaster Council: Jeff E. Scott, Esq Greenberg Traurig, LLP 2450 Colorado Ave, Suite 400E Santa Monica, CA 90404
Gail Lees Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, LLP 333 South Grand Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90071
Actually, lots of people DID stop using land lines when cell phones came along. Perhaps not everyone, but the numbers are growing fairly quickly. Even many "land lines" are now simply VoIP. I would challenge that a minority of people probably have true PSTN land lines at this point.
That said, it is signficantly different from the e-mail example and the other examples you gave as e-mail serves a different purpose from postal mail and while true that many of the things postal mail did are now better done with e-mail, there are still needs for postal mail. Similarly an axe is useful in situations where a chainsaw isn't and a broom is useful in situations where a vacuum isn't. The same can't be said about land lines as everything that can be done with a land line can be done with a cell phone or a VoIP phone and that is why they are dieing.
Or you could take an e-mail, pgp it, print the file, put it in an envelope, mail it, the recipient could then open it, scan and OCR it and then decrypt it... or I could just send a plain text e-mail with a link to go to an SSL protected website with the actual message and require authentication to get at it. (Granted the authentication mechanism would still have to be preconfigured, likely by mail.
While I am pretty sure you were joking, he said the unit of measure is binary, not that the count is represented as binary. In case anyone got confused by it, he is referring to the fact that 1GB on an SD card is 1000000000 bytes where as over a network, 1GB is 1024MB or 1073741824 bytes.
I believe that was cavreader's point. China has the same problems as America, the difference is that in China, the corporations ARE the government where as in the US, the corporations have to keep buying the government and it is at least theoretically possible to change that equation. There are enough of a vocal idiot minority in the Occupy movement that think socialism is a good idea and don't see it is just making the current problem permanent instead of fixing it.
How then do you prevent the user from circumventing the application and using their db permissions to misbehave directly if the user should only be able to do certain things in certain situations? To say blanketly that the only correct approach to security is to implement it at the db level is naive as there are many situations where it is not desirable that the user have any permission to the DB other than through the application. It would be nice if it was possible to have a combined security that would only allow the user to have permission while going through the application, but that is also notoriously difficult (if not impossible) to implement in many situations or on certain platforms.
I'm glad you have options but I don't. In my area, I don't even have a range of DSL options to choose from. I have Verizon DSL at unusably slow speeds for an exorbitant price or Time Warner Cable at a less exorbitant price. No internet isn't an option so I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. I'm slaved to their whim really and I don't see any alternative short of moving (which is probably overkill, though when I next move, I know I would look for someplace that offered internet I approved of.)
Actually 1080i is 1080 resolution but updated in fields of 540 so the effective visual resolution is lowered, but not all the way to 540. I think most estimates say somewhere around 850 to 875 lines is the perceived optical resolution, though with proper deinterlacing a 1080i image could effectively be turned in to a 1080p image as it just displays odd then even lines while the other line remains the same. The reason why interlacing was used was to decrease the necessary scan speed to keep an image updated (this mostly comes from CRT tech where phosphors were illuminated by a scanning electron beam. The image would fade as the beam traveled, so covering every other line and then hitting the others would keep a more consistent screen brightness with a slower scan. Similarly, it could somewhat help deal with frame buffering on earlier LCD and plasma sets, though those limitations are more or less irrelevant now which is why almost everything is either 720p or 1080p, though i is still supported since it is trivial to support interlaced display on a progressive capable setup by simply only writing odd or even lines to the frame buffer.
Most high level IT professionals are already salaried and exempt or are consultants. This legislation would not impact either group. In fact relatively few people in IT outside of the help desk level are hourly from my experience.
My impression was more that he was indicating that nobody could truly be God fearing and behave that way even if they claim they are (as many politicians do).
Overtime pay is also called time and a half. Basically it means if they want you to work more than your scheduled hours they have to pay more than they would normally pay. My understanding is that this would remove that requirement and make it so that they would just have to pay more at the hourly rate. I would be 50 hours standard pay instead of 40 standard and 10 overtime.
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That's just it though, there wasn't a surcharge in the contract for the phone, they provided the phone to you in exchange for an agreement to do business with them for two years. The ETF is their way to recover a portion of what they paid for your phone since you are breaking your side of the contract. You never pay for the phone if you keep the contract. The fee for service is the same if you brought your own phone or used one they purchase for you, just you have to sign a contract if you want them to buy one for you. In many cases, (I know Verizon does this, I don't know AT&Ts verbiage) the ETF does go down as the contract progresses.
Similiarly, if I join the plan with a phone I already own, there should be no ETF. That is not the case though.
What carrier is that true with? I was not aware of any carrier that requires a contract let alone an ETF if you bring you have your own phone. Verizon will even sell you a phone at either a less subsidized 1 year contract rate or at market price for what they call the month to month rate. In the case of month to month (or bringing your own phone) you simply pay for service and there is absolutely no ETF as there is no contract.
Well, as you mentioned, many carriers will give you a discount or other promotional to try to get you to sign another contract if you are out of contract and a good customer. I know on Verizon I managed to get an extra 100 minutes a month for a year after I had waited about 2 months from the end of my previous contract before getting a new phone. It's also worth pointing out that unless you have need of a new phone, it might not be worth binding yourself to the carrier again. Sure if you need a phone, it would be worth it to get them to contribute and if you leave, you would simply be paying part of the price of the phone, but if you don't need the new phone and end up wanting to change carriers then you are still spending money you didn't need to.
That said, yeah, if you are happy with your carrier (I love my experience with Verizon Wireless thus far.) then there really isn't that much reason not to take the upgrade whenever it is available and you would actually benefit from the new phone, which if you are someone like me, I always can make better use of the new. I'm not sure what I'll end up doing now that they removed the unlimited data though, it might make me not get the new phone as I would probably lose my unlimited data rate that I currently have.
The contract is such that the phone is provided to you in exchange for two years of service with them. If you back out prior to the two years of service, the ETF is, in part, a means of recouping their investment since the cost of the handset will have diminished over time. Basically, if you leave the contract, then you aren't entitled to the phone because you didn't fulfill your commitment for getting the phone. This is why in many cases smartphone contracts have a higher ETF.
Maybe I'm not understanding what was originally being described, but I thought this thread started with an example that if a customer indicates they wish to cancel then AT&T won't try to keep it. If AT&T was terminating I'd agree with you, but in this case it is the customer leaving.
The termination fee is something they are contractually entitled to and in many cases covers the real cost of the phone in part. To use your example, it would be like the bank giving you the house when they foreclose, since the property they funded the purchase of is still yours.
Yeah, but there are oh so many assumptions that make SETI such a poor idea in the first place. How powerful of a transmitter would be required for SETI to pick up a signal? How long would it take for the signal to reach us? What is to say that another advanced civilization would use something even remotely resembling radio to communicate over distance instead of something like quantum entanglement? Even if there is other life out there, the chances of SETI actually finding it or even being capable of detecting it are so insignificant as to make burning your money a substantially better investment.
Well you assume that firing the customer can't be done with respect. There is no excuse to treat a customer poorly, but there is every reason to honor their request and let them out of their commitment hands down if they ask when they aren't profitable for you. Sometimes the best way to serve a customer well is to allow them to cut off ties politely. Keep in mind that AT&T is taking a loss by waiving the termination fee as there is a good chance that they had paid out for a phone at the start of the contract.
Honestly, I think the fact that AT&T eats the termination fee just to get them out the door is actually good customer service. If they really wanted to, they could stick it to the customer and try to recover their costs by charging the fee they are entitled to, but they don't since they simply want the business relationship ended. As MBC1977 mentioned below, you don't have a right to have a company do business with you if they don't make money. It is only good business to decide who is more of a drain on resources than it is worth and seek to end those relationships.
Yeah, that really hits the nail on the head. My experience with outsourcing has been that about 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 depending on the place will be solid coders. The rest make passable grunt coders if you have a professional developer reviewing what they do and correcting their mistakes. Outsourcing seems to work best as a labor multiplier for a solid local developer/designer/architect.
Personally I love the Tri-city (Albany, Schenectady, Troy) area, though I almost hesitate to call Schenectady a city these days. It's really more of a sprawling suburban landscape. Lots of good networking and opportunities if you know where and how to look. Moving a little further upstate and west though, yeah, things can fall off pretty quick.
Interesting, I found wikipedia to be a better link. It appears that the IEEE changed over to using Gigabyte to refer to the metric definition in 2000 though JEDEC still considers a Gigabyte in terms of memory to be the binary version. I was unfamiliar with the Gigibyte terminology since I work mostly in software and deal with memory addressing much more than anything else. It is also worth noting that while IEC came up with and NIST, CIPM and IEEE have endorced the GiB symbol, it is mentioned as having seen limited acceptance in the broad market. I never even heard of the term while going to one of the top 20 ranked comp sci schools in the US from 2002 to 2006.
That all said, I was still apparently wrong as the telecom and networking industry has apparently traditionally used the SI interpretation for bandwidth, so it would still be 1,000,000,000 bytes on a network as well, just not in memory or disk space when you take in to consideration the working definition rather than the standard definition.
Oh, I missed that you should also send it to the court itself.
Case No. BC304565
Judge Kenneth R. Freeman
Department 64 of the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles
111 North Hill Street, Los Angeles, California 90012
It is worth noting that you can object to the proposed settlement's terms by sending notice of your objection to the lead class council and Ticketmaster's lead council.
Lead Class Council:
Robert J Stein III, Esq
W. Michael Hensley. Esq
Alvarado Smith, APC
1 MacArthur Place, Suite 200
Santa Ana, CA 92707
Steven P. Blonder, Esq
Much Shelist Denenberg Ament & Rubenstein, P.C.
191 North Wacker Dr.
Suite 1800
Chicago, IL 60606
Ticketmaster Council:
Jeff E. Scott, Esq
Greenberg Traurig, LLP
2450 Colorado Ave, Suite 400E
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Gail Lees
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, LLP
333 South Grand Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90071
Actually, lots of people DID stop using land lines when cell phones came along. Perhaps not everyone, but the numbers are growing fairly quickly. Even many "land lines" are now simply VoIP. I would challenge that a minority of people probably have true PSTN land lines at this point.
That said, it is signficantly different from the e-mail example and the other examples you gave as e-mail serves a different purpose from postal mail and while true that many of the things postal mail did are now better done with e-mail, there are still needs for postal mail. Similarly an axe is useful in situations where a chainsaw isn't and a broom is useful in situations where a vacuum isn't. The same can't be said about land lines as everything that can be done with a land line can be done with a cell phone or a VoIP phone and that is why they are dieing.
Or you could take an e-mail, pgp it, print the file, put it in an envelope, mail it, the recipient could then open it, scan and OCR it and then decrypt it... or I could just send a plain text e-mail with a link to go to an SSL protected website with the actual message and require authentication to get at it. (Granted the authentication mechanism would still have to be preconfigured, likely by mail.
Is it black?
While I am pretty sure you were joking, he said the unit of measure is binary, not that the count is represented as binary. In case anyone got confused by it, he is referring to the fact that 1GB on an SD card is 1000000000 bytes where as over a network, 1GB is 1024MB or 1073741824 bytes.
I believe that was cavreader's point. China has the same problems as America, the difference is that in China, the corporations ARE the government where as in the US, the corporations have to keep buying the government and it is at least theoretically possible to change that equation. There are enough of a vocal idiot minority in the Occupy movement that think socialism is a good idea and don't see it is just making the current problem permanent instead of fixing it.
How then do you prevent the user from circumventing the application and using their db permissions to misbehave directly if the user should only be able to do certain things in certain situations? To say blanketly that the only correct approach to security is to implement it at the db level is naive as there are many situations where it is not desirable that the user have any permission to the DB other than through the application. It would be nice if it was possible to have a combined security that would only allow the user to have permission while going through the application, but that is also notoriously difficult (if not impossible) to implement in many situations or on certain platforms.
I'm glad you have options but I don't. In my area, I don't even have a range of DSL options to choose from. I have Verizon DSL at unusably slow speeds for an exorbitant price or Time Warner Cable at a less exorbitant price. No internet isn't an option so I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. I'm slaved to their whim really and I don't see any alternative short of moving (which is probably overkill, though when I next move, I know I would look for someplace that offered internet I approved of.)
Actually 1080i is 1080 resolution but updated in fields of 540 so the effective visual resolution is lowered, but not all the way to 540. I think most estimates say somewhere around 850 to 875 lines is the perceived optical resolution, though with proper deinterlacing a 1080i image could effectively be turned in to a 1080p image as it just displays odd then even lines while the other line remains the same. The reason why interlacing was used was to decrease the necessary scan speed to keep an image updated (this mostly comes from CRT tech where phosphors were illuminated by a scanning electron beam. The image would fade as the beam traveled, so covering every other line and then hitting the others would keep a more consistent screen brightness with a slower scan. Similarly, it could somewhat help deal with frame buffering on earlier LCD and plasma sets, though those limitations are more or less irrelevant now which is why almost everything is either 720p or 1080p, though i is still supported since it is trivial to support interlaced display on a progressive capable setup by simply only writing odd or even lines to the frame buffer.
Most high level IT professionals are already salaried and exempt or are consultants. This legislation would not impact either group. In fact relatively few people in IT outside of the help desk level are hourly from my experience.
My impression was more that he was indicating that nobody could truly be God fearing and behave that way even if they claim they are (as many politicians do).
Overtime pay is also called time and a half. Basically it means if they want you to work more than your scheduled hours they have to pay more than they would normally pay. My understanding is that this would remove that requirement and make it so that they would just have to pay more at the hourly rate. I would be 50 hours standard pay instead of 40 standard and 10 overtime.
I think you may have missed his implied /s as I think some of it may have been lost in cultural translation.