I've always suspected that the telcos took a huge cut of third party billing. Which of course is why they make it possible, don't call attention to it in billing and play the ignoramus when it comes to the basically fraudulent nature of the whole situation.

The cell carriers are better about removing the charges and refunding multiple months of charges (well, at least 2-3) as well as being able to block them. Qwest was always terrible on our commercial accounts about refunding crammed charges and claimed they couldn't block them.

I'm glad to see the FTC do this and I think they should go so far as to actually ban the practice outright, at least as practiced. If they can do it the default should be "blocked" as a billing status on all accounts. Third party billers with a high degree of fraud complaints should be banned and their names forwarded to the FTC for criminal prosecution.

On the flip side, it seems so lucrative and low risk I wonder how I could get in on the action.

you need to learn how to read BADLY.

Wouldn't it be better to learn to read well, than to learn how to read badly?

And it would be good also to learn to write well. Your prior post is utterly incomprehensible.

Most developers only use JavaScript because it's their only realistic option on the client side for web-based applications. It's kind of like the QWERTY standard: you have to use it because avoiding it is made difficult by entrenchment.

I don't know if better tools (IDE's, interpreters, lint-er's, etc.) could make it more tolerable, but most of us have had a crappy experience with JavaScript in browsers, and this has damaged its reputation such that unless something comes along that repairs its reputation on a wide scale, server-side JavaScript is a tough sell. You can't just make it good, you have to show the world it's good and that their shitty browser experience was the browser's fault and not JavaScript.

The browser only seems to give one of two unhelpful errors: "object not found" or "is not an object'.

As far as the language, I don't like its non-WYSIWYG typing model. It has too many nulls, nils, NaN's, Nuns, or whatnot that drive one crazy. I prefer a typing model where every value is or is treated like a string and is readily displayable. No damned hidden types/modes. (Some say Null is needed for RDBMS compatibility, but I've almost never needed such, and the API can use the string "[null]" or the like if null detection is really needed by an app.)

And it has too many "kinds" of data structures; these may be delimited or enclosed with square brackets, curly braces, parenthesis, and whatnot. Too many similar kinds of collections. Just make everything a dynamic ordered tree rather than have similar but not quite the same species of structures. Lisp at least got that part right.

And don't overload "+" to mean both addition and concatenation. Slap the bastard who put that "cute" feature in.

Oh, and literals starting with "0" are interpreted as octal. Cute Marie, real cute. That feature almost got me fired from a contract once because the customer didn't believe such a design flaw could exist in a common language, thinking it was my fault. There's probably only 7 JavaScript programmers who use lots of octal literals; why the hell did you ignore the other 99.999%? Were you targeting cephalopod coders?

And JS lacks typical string- and date-handling functions. Lots of octal-friendly shit and no fucking strings; must be cephalopods.

Sadly, I really enjoy writing code for Zope. ZPT is a great way to integrate functionality to legit HTML, writing Python modules for Zope is incredibly powerful and even without them, the Python scripts and SQL functions built-in are very nice and easy to use.

I said sadly because its not nearly as well supported as that bastard child of the web, PHP. Zope gives Python an API wrapper that makes it easier to write large applications in than pure Twisted for instance, or PERL CGI on Apache even IMHO but its hard to find others who are accustomed to it so it can't be recommended here.

Interesting response: http://blog.codinghorror.com/p...

Although personally I still avoid PHP whenever possible.

Better ... http://blog.codinghorror.com/p...

That's like complaining about the 640K barrier in Microsoft's operating systems.

Yeah, who the hell needs more than that?

Part of my understanding is that a 501(c)3 is a public, mutual benefit corporation where all assets are actually owned by the public, should push come to shove.

I'm sorry, but you're confused -- that's not correct at all. The assets of a 501(c)3 have to be transferred to another exempt organization if the organization shuts down, but they are in no way owned by the public. We had that baked into our articles of incorporation but I'm not sure if that's a requirement.

501(c)3s can include religious corporations and public-benefit nonprofit corporations. A public corporation is something completely different, a corporation set up by a government; for example, some state universities are set up this way. A mutual-benefit corporation, which includes some co-ops, insurance companies, and other groups set up to benefit their members, cannot be a 501(c)3.

but the IRS's definition of a charity requires that you be serving a distinct, disadvantaged group of people.

No. 501(c)3 organizations can include churches in rich neighborhoods, symphony orchestras, museums, and plenty of other groups which do not serve "disadvantaged" groups.

PHP is the language for web programming, just as C/C++ is the language for system programming.

People have been hating on C since at least the 1980s. It's still here. People have been hating on PHP since 2000 or so. It's still here.

If someone was able to predict the future that well, they'd be buying out Warren Buffett instead of answering questions on slashdot.

Perl does seem to be on a downward popularity spiral. Whether it merits that or not would turn into a heated debate, so I'm only stating that from the perspective of having enough usage momentum to provide sufficient shop staffing options and support in the future.

PHP would be my rough best guess, if you want a dynamic language in the same general family as Perl. PHP is a bit clunky, but has huge current usage and has not shown any signs of slowing down. IF it started dying tomorrow due to some newfangled language or gizmo, it would take decades to fully kill.

Python and Ruby have failed to fully catch on mainstream, and the "white space" issue still haunts their growth. It just agitates enough developers to keep them down. (I'm not putting a value judgement on the white-space thing here, only looking at perceptions.) Plus, their communities seem to overdue "clever abstraction" coding, at least in terms of what the market prefers. They suffer part of what Lisp does, in terms of market perceptions and reactions to high coding abstraction. The market likes mid-brow languages, not high-brow.

C# is still too tied to Microsoft's fortune, despite having OSS clones. If MS sinks, it may take the clones with it out of industry support/momentum fear (not necessarily language merit).

And Java is currently haunted by Oracle's Big Lawyer ways.

I've done a couple of projects with engineering companies including one at a power plant. From what I've seen, the thing that tends to lead from air gapping to lack of airgapping is support.

The engineering companies don't have the IT infrastructure experience or skills in their engineering practice. They hired me to do basic stuff like SAN setup, switch configuration, VMware, etc.

The engineering company is required to provide support for their subsystem for a period of a couple of years and this includes everything IT related. Their office is hundreds of miles from the plant so problems with the IT environment require them to fly someone out. This is expensive, the guy who goes out has limited troubleshooting and they turn to me.

But they don't want to pay for my services on site, so ultimately they end up ungapping the environment so it can be supported with less cost. They have some security -- VPN only and possibly other restrictions which limit VPN connectivity, but they break the air gap.

They could maintain the air gap, but it would cost money -- support and travel costs, etc.

Ideally the engineering company would make IT systems part of their practice, but I think a lot of engineers have an "I'm an engineer" mentality which makes them they're good at everything, so they see this as unnecessary. They could negotiate with the plant to engage their IT resources, but that would cost them money.

One of the pictures seemed to show a poster with odds for some kind of gambling game. Maybe some kind of issue with licensing or maybe even some kind of organized crime problem?

Oh, did the USA get rid of its right to secret trials and requests for information on citizens without court orders?

When your government watches everything you do, you act differently. Its repression of a different kind, but its certainly there.

You really are on a crusade with those links, aren't you? You're not aware that the US violates more citizen's rights than Cuba ever could? Incarcerates more of its citizens? Denies more of its citizens access to decent health care or education?

Cuba could certainly improve, but the USA is not in a position of moral authority to dictate such improvements.