I just looked at the back of my Bank of America Visa logo'd Debit ATM card and I have a Pulse logo. BoA is one of the larger (largest?) banks in the US... I would think many others would carry that logo as well?

While this is not an edorsement of cable VOIP over POTS I did want to point out that my cable providors EMTA actually has a battery backup built into it and lasts for quite some time when the power goes off. I assume (probably incorrectly?) that they have backup power at their 'Central Office' end of things. Rarely does the power go off here for more than an hour or so and if it does it is likely the result of a hurricane or some other natural disaster and physical damage to the infrastructure is likely. To tell the truth, I only picked up the land line service because it the package saved me money by bundling. FWIW its nice to have a land line but I rarely use it except for my alarm system. My cell phone for personal and my Packet8 VOIP phone for my company gets most of my talk time.

I suspect, and this is from when I was a cop in a former life, most folks who are on probation (which you would be if you have to comply with the orders of the court in this situation), almost always no alcohol consumption is a part of the terms of your probation. Even if your offense has nothing to do with alcohol, its just part of the gig. I guess the thought is - if you're not intoxicated (or at least under the influence) you may make better decisions and likely you're not hanging out in places like bars where 'bad people' are.

I don't know that I totally agree with it, it just is part of the gig. I guess another way to look at it probation is almost like being in jail without the guards, steel bars and bad food (well maybe not the last one, I guess). You still have the system up your ass.

I think they're referring to premium SMS messages, not phone calls. Those are not always a phone number - often shorter (like These folks).

I have seen ads to text 90999 with the word Haiti in the body to donate the the Red Cross for example. I never have actually used one of those donation methods, but the "phone number," if you will, is only 5 digits rather than a full 10 (for North America). And the program could potentially send that message (if embedded into is programming) without additional user intervention if the user chose to allow it to do so upon installation.

If they're offering access for iPhone - how are they doing it? I would assume via Microsoft ActiveSync? If so, that is natively supported by Android (and is how I connect to Microsoft Exchange). Is there another way iPhone supports MS Exchange?

I have a ~$1500 i7 Dell laptop - and that was being conservative on my config - larger battery, larger drive and more RAM would have easily pushed me to $2k.... New job, didn't want to ask for too much to start. :)

That was my exact reaction - the only thing that would have made the story better is if the site would have had ads on it....

This is a non-story rather an advertisement to the slashdot community for volunteers. While the project may (or may not be) noble or valuable and all that, if this guy wants this so bad - have him do it!, don't ask us to do it for him for free.

Just sayin'.

My mail filtering gateway runs on a FreeBSD 8.0 jail with ClamAV 0.95.3 installed from Ports. It relays the messages to our real mail server, still running Debian (Lenny, but the Squeeze repositiores are still providing 0.94). Since I've moved all the mail checking software to the FreeBSD mailgw (amavis, spamassassin, clamav etc), my mail services are alive and kicking. I do however keep some other Clamavs running in Debian Squid servers with HAVP and that worries me a bit.

We can file with paper, or we can file with our computers, or we can have a tax preparation service file for us. Those quaint forms are entirely necessary for people without computers. Yes, I know it's amazing to most on slashdot that there are people without computers, but I know quite a few of them.

make it work when the internet goes out?

I agree, but it still stands that you can't have civilization without government, and you can't have government without taxes.

A nice picture here: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/iceland-volcano-plume.html Check also the official UK advisory with 'affected area' maps http://metoffice.com/aviation/vaac/vaacuk_vag.html

Asking an honest question, but I would think that registering a domain to do illegal activities would constitute abuse?

They made quite a nice profit.

It is indeed. Companies that support open source projects make money in other venues, often supported at their base by the very non-profit open source that they support.

Other companies buy up projects to kill them. After all, it's also hard to pay employees for your very expensive database when a more-or-less free one does a more-or-less good job.