It's not the CDSs that are toxic, it's the CDOs.

coffee makers would get more money for the waste coffee ground, and therefore if at all, the coffee would get cheaper

Wake up (pun intended).

If the demand for biofuel is strong enough and the coffee maker gets more for waste coffee ground than it gets for selling coffee to drink, the coffee maker won't bother making the coffee to drink and will sell straight to biodiesel buyer. Thus, price for drinking coffee will go up and you'll have to pay as much as the biodiesel customer for it (if not more).

While in principle I agree with that, what are they supposed to do? They are quoting you a price for a service they don't provide themselves.

Precisely! You are supposed to have your own service (which looks like USPS's own, i.e. it offers the same WSDL in case of a web service) and include it as a fall-back option if USPS starts failing too many times. Then, it's really a no-issue because you have several different options from a business perspective:

• make your service offer a "free shipping special" - then get USPS to give you a credit when you actually ship with them. If you can't get them to do it, be ready to absorb cost.
• make your service offer an approximation of a USPS rate - you can make the logic as accurate or as crude as your development resources allow (from maintaining shipping tables, through some statistical approximation based on existing orders, through a simple formula you devise, to a constant cost). Then get USPS to give you a credit for the difference, if there is one.

Ideally, in terms of your own infrastructure or design, your shipping cost services should be abstracted away from vendor-specific APIs so your core sales workflow code calls your own API, which then you implement in various ways. E.g. you end up with 1. UPS, 2. DHL, 3. USPS, 4. your own service). Alternatively, you end up with #1, #2 and #3 only but #3 is designed in such a way that #4 kicks in to replace #3 while #3 continues misbehaving.

This is not too complex, especially if you go for a simpler case, i.e. a formula-based approach.

Of course, from a business perspective, you are facing the decision of whether you're willing to accept some potential loss on a difference in estimated and actual shipping cost while the problem persists or whether you're willing to loose all those orders during the outage.

However, since the carrier is the service provider who failed here, you should be able to justify and negotiate passing on some of that shipping cost difference onto them.

This example is one good reason to (at least) make the blacklist completely public and transparent. Well, I wouldn't be so sure about that. You see, IWF's filtering system, originally called CleanFeed and introduced initially by BT (British Telecom), was reverse-engineered in 2005. By reverse-engineered, I mean a guy from Cambridge ran a scan outside of the UK and inside the UK and because CleanFeed would serve a fake "not found" page if on the list. This way, he was able to essentially discover the list without it being disclosed. The point here is that this essentially creates (in IWF's own words) "an oracle to locate illegal child abuse websites". I'm not saying that makes censorship conducted by big businesses or government okay, I'm just saying that transparency of the censored list, in today's age of automation (just google for example for all the one-click flash-baed movie downloading apps), it won't even take "specialist knowledge" to access the stuff, once the URLs are known. Disclaimer: I am not advocating for censorship and in fact think that IWF should be put out of existence by passing laws that make it illegal to censor internet traffic by ISPs.

They are afraid of him. The guy has some really good songs that they never wanted to see the light of day.