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Probably because it's too complicated to figure just off the top of their heads, or because they haven't determined your alignment and class.

According to the 4th ed. FC&C Salesmaster's Manual, the taxes on a $40 calling plan is 2d10+2 percent for all classes and alignments of customer.

However, the rules get tricky when adding the data and text plans. If you add those and the customer is any Lawful alignment, or your class is Apple Cultist, the monthly fees and taxes are a d20+30 per month.

If you're Neutral, sales should charge 2d10+2 percent of the total purchase in fees, plus a flat setup fee of 3d20, and whatever the local tax rate is (see Table 13-4.7, "Telecommunication Tax Rates of Municipalities, Provinces, Kingdoms, Shires and Deities").

If your alignment is Chaotic, or you have the Late Bills or Frequent Support Caller flaws, or your class is Go Phoner, your fees are (3d20)d20+(d20)d6, plus (2d20)d20 percent taxes, plus 2d6 in franchise fees, plus 3d20+d6 setup.

If you're identified as Chaotic Hard-to-Please alignment, the Salesmaster may simply escalate fees and taxes and make up complex usage rules (2Gb bandwidth cap except on Fridays and the alternating days of the third week of every fourth month, when it's 256k, for example) until the customer gives up.

However, if sales can't determine your alignment or class - if you're a new customer, for example, or your billing and prior plan history isn't available -Âthey will probably refuse to answer your questions. If a customer immediately submits, they get Apple Cultist treatment. If a customer questions the refusal but eventually submits, they get Chaotic treatment.

If a customer is an insistent questioner, the Salesmaster considers the player in combat and gives the player d6-2 rounds to flee before calling security (see U.S. Government's "Monster and Enforcement Officer Bestiary," table 2.1-1, "Rented Muscle").

arXiv has become the repository for junk that couldn't pass peer review. Wake me up when we see a published journal article.

It is available, but it is obtuse. A nice place to find such information is OpenSecrets.org

And the accountability? It's with you. With me. With our neighbors and fellow slashdotters. We are a Democratic Republic, we are supposed to keep our elected officials in check by removing them or not re-electing them when they become corrupt or simply stop representing our interests, which means one of two things is in play here:

1) The American people, generally, support wiretapping without oversight and don't want to see telecoms punished even if their support of the program was illegal

or, more likely:

2) The American people do not fully educate themselves on these sorts of matters and don't have a full grasp of the implications involved in allowing it. They have abdicated their responsibility of oversight of the government.

We are a lazy and selfish people, my friend. It's going to take some serious suffering on our parts to change that.

Spam? Spit? What's next? Spam in Everday Reading Material?

"I'm getting sick of the SPERM in the morning paper."

Until intellectual property law is forced to conform to the same expectations that private property has, it will never have universal legitimacy in the culture the way that physical property has (except with thieves and Socialists; I repeat myself...)

A modest proposal:

1) Outlaw implied contracts. When I buy a movie, CD, program, etc., unless I sign something in writing, prior to the purchase, any "contract" should be null and void, and any effort to enforce it should be criminal activity.

2) Copyright infringement by sharing copyrighted data is treated as theft, with goods valued for the purpose of assessment under existing property laws at current market value. Copyright infringement by accident, like posting a single picture you weren't supposed to on your site is not a crime at all or at the worst gets you a slap on the wrist.

3) Copyright holders cannot restrict how any one copy of their work is used by buyers, except to make them respect the artificial scarcity of copyright law. Meaning, if I want to resell iPhones with jail-broken OSs and tons of apps, Apple cannot legally interfere with my customers' enjoyment of their iPhone and its OS anymore than Honda could interfere with my customers if I were selling modified racing civics (except to cut off their warranty).

They haven't even passed their unconstitutional law. And here you are already defeating it. You're supposed to give them a few minutes of satisfaction.

What the organization really needs is some time to find out what sorts of things break when you aren't around to poke at them. For the next month they have the benefit of your knowledge, should they need it, but you won't be able to do stuff. This will allow existing staff members to learn to cover gaps while you are still around in case of an emergency.

You are leaving. The company is far less interested in what you can do for them in your last few weeks than they are in learning how to live without you. That basically requires that they cut you out of the loop as soon as possible.

If I were living in China, I'd be wary (and probably afraid) of speaking out against gov't censorship and control of the Internet.

um, being able to take the 'Boom' out of the sonic boom would mean supersonic transport will be a reasonable option.

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has found that our solar system is not round but is "dented" by the local interstellar magnetic field of deep space, space experts said on Monday. The data was gathered by the craft on its 30-year journey into the edge of the solar system when it crossed into a sweeping region called the termination shock, they said. It showed that the southern hemisphere of the solar system's heliosphere is being pushed in or "dented." Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to enter this region of the solar system behind Voyager 1, which entered the northern region of the heliosheath in December 2004.
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN1044867120071211

jammag writes "It's time for GNU/Linux advocates to quit casting Microsoft as the Great Satan, opines Bruce Byfield, a leading GNU/Linux pundit. "Things were different ten years ago...Back then, the community was fragile," he writes. But now, FOSS thrives in data centers everywhere. However, "over the years, we've developed a culture of hate, where bashing Microsoft proves our membership in the club. We've come to count on this opposition as a central part of our identity." Give it up, Byfield writes: "If you value FOSS, there are aspects you should be promoting — not the taunts more suitable to a high school locker room.""
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3711871

mrspin writes "Vuze, an online video application that uses the peer-to-peer protocol BitTorrent, has petitioned the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to restrict Internet traffic throttling by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Vuze has been keenly aware of Comcast and the "bandwidth shaping" issue. Vuze filed its "Petition for Rulemaking" (PDF) to urge the FCC to adopt regulations limiting Internet traffic throttling, a practice by which ISPs block or slow the speed at which Internet content, including video files, can be uploaded or downloaded. As readers may remember, back in May, Slashdot discussed the issue of packet shaping and how ISPs threaten to spoil online video."

Hugh Pickens writes "Bruce Schneier has a story on Wired about the new official standard for random-number generators the NIST released this year that will likely be followed by software and hardware developers around the world. There are four different approved techniques (pdf), called DRBGs, or 'Deterministic Random Bit Generators' based on existing cryptographic primitives. One is based on hash functions, one on HMAC, one on block ciphers and one on elliptic curves. The generator based on elliptic curves called Dual_EC_DRBG has been championed by the NSA and contains a weakness that can only be described as a backdoor. In a presentation at the CRYPTO 2007 conference (pdf) in August, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson showed that there are constants in the standard used to define the algorithm's elliptic curve that have a relationship with a second, secret set of numbers that can act as a kind of skeleton key. If you know the secret numbers, you can completely break any instantiation of Dual_EC_DRBG."

wgoodman writes "I work at a small company as the sole geek. It's been a few years now and I'm forced to actually use some of the vacation time that I've built up otherwise I lose it. Since I'll be gone for a few weeks with no cell phone and only intermittent internet access not to mention nearly constant drunkenness, what precautions and steps to avoid things going south in my absence do you recommend? I've scripted as much as i can of the day to day stuff, got a lackey to swap backup tapes, and given my boss contact info on the equipment that we have support contracts with. What am I forgetting?"

As you may recall, Microsoft's OOXML did not get enough votes to be approved the first time around in ISO/IEC — notwithstanding the fact that many countries joined the Document Format and Languages committee in the months before voting closed, almost all of whom voted to approve OOXML. Unfortunately, many of these countries also traded up to "P" level membership at the last minute to get more influence. Now, the collateral damage is setting in. At least 50% of P members must vote (up, down or abstain) on every standard at each ballot — and none of the new members are bothering to vote, despite repeated pleas from the committee chair. Not a single ballot has passed since the OOXML vote closed, and In his words, the committee has "ground to a halt." Sad to say, there's no end in sight for this (formerly) very busy and influential standards committee.
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20071016092352827