| Credit card industry tries to hook young people
All major banking institutions pay big money to colleges and universities for on-campus recruiting rights, offering students low initial interest rates and/or other sweetheart deals if they accept a credit card. The rest of us get solicitations through our phone or the mails.Seductive sales campaigns focus on high school graduates and for all kinds of items that TV, movies or society has told them they want, need, should have because they deserve it and others have, so why don't they? Car dealers offer "one-time sales events" to first-time wage earners, high-end electronic stores give 90-day-same-as-cash deals and guarantee that no one will be turned down, furniture showrooms offer newlyweds "no payments 'til next year," cell phones, Internet providers, cable companies, satellite dish outfits all make it sound as if you can't have a decent life without their help.All this has given birth to an additional parasite - the debt-consolidation, paycheck-cashing, payday-loan, instant-refinancing-of-your-car (and you get to keep your car - 'til they come to take it away) industry.Public schools teach kids how to drive, play sports, fit a condom, take birth control pills, find an abortionist or fill out a job application at McDonald's.
Senior Scene
Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays. BEGINNER SCRAPBOOKING: 1-2:30 p.m. Mondays. $2 per 1½-hour session. Call COA. Bridge: 1-4 p.m. Mondays. fuel assistance applications: Noon-2 p.m. Tuesday. pace fuel assistance information: 10:45-11:15 a.m. Dec. 5. MARIA CONNOR LIAISON TO REP. JOHN QUINN: 11-12:30 p.m. Dec. 7. podiatrist: 10-11:30 a.m. Dec. 11. Call for appointment. Ham dinner: 11:30 a.m. Dec. 12. Entertainment by Harpoon Harmonizers, secretary of elder affairs speaker. parkinson's support group: 1-3 p.m. Dec. 13. blood pressure clinic: 9-10:30 a.m. Dec. 14. Donation. grandparents raising grandchildren: 6 p.m. Dec. 18. WIDOWED PERSONS: Support group: Dec. 7, 21: First group, 8:30-11:30 a.m.; 10 a.m.-noon, Second group, 10 a.m.-noon.
SABEW Best in Business Journalism Contest Adds Online Division, Plus ...
The registration deadline is February 1, 2008. The contest is for work published in calendar 2007. The Best in Business contest has three main components. The GENERAL EXCELLENCE competition honors outstanding daily newspaper business sections, weekly business newspapers, business web sites and business magazines. The NEWS competition honors outstanding stories published by the business news media. The ONLINE competition honors outstanding business journalism on the web. There also is a student competition. New this year are three categories for business magazines: outstanding magazine cover stories are judged through a new category in the news contest, while general excellence for business magazines is judged through new categories in the general excellence contest and online contests.
Two-Factor Authentication and One-Time Password from Billion Electric
The BiGuard OTP is a chip-based, 6-digit numeric PIN token to be used in combination with a password for a strong two-factor authentication. This solution provides single password authentication for remote VPN, LAN and web access through the use of an ASAS back-end server. Each BiGuard OTP token is unique and has been assigned an Electronic Serial Number (ESN) and identification seed, so that the authentication cannot be reproduced. The car key-sized token is portable, offering total mobility and maximum flexibility for remote network access.
Key features include:
* Dynamic One-Time Password
* Event-based Algorithm Token
* Strong Two-factor Authentication
* Easy installation and management
* Car key-sized for extreme mobility
* One-click easy-to-use system
* Compatible with BiGuard SSL VPN series equipment
The traditional user login method is to simply enter a fixed static password.
The 41st Parameter Expands Management Team and Reports Record Growth
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Feb. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- The 41st Parameter, the leading provider of Internet Fraud Management solutions, today announced two additions to its management teams and reported another year of record growth. Technology industry veteran Anne Wolf has been named Chief Marketing Officer, and former McAfee EVP Parveen Jain, Ph.D., has been appointed to the company's Board of Directors. (Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080229/LAF082-a) (Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080229/LAF082-b) .
Posturing and peddling myths, these prison enthusiasts are blind to ...
Ten years later, anyone with a shred of liberal fibre in their body has learned better the hard way. After 37 crime, justice and police bills, the prison population has risen by 20,500 to 81,500, and now the government is proudly planning - yes, deliberately - to imprison another 10,500. Here is Jack Straw proclaiming three new prefabricated titan superprisons. Titans! My, they sound tough. These new PFI prisons will cost another £2.7bn by 2014. Consider the disastrous message here. This proclaims the government doesn't expect any of its social programmes to have any good impact on crime. On the contrary, things will get worse. The 10,500 extra young men imprisoned in 2014 will be Labour's children, arrived in school in 1997. Young offenders will have been born under Labour and yet more not fewer of them will "need" to be locked away than under the Tories.
Swipe and ride: CTA taking credit cards
Like so many fast food restaurants, grocery stores and New York City's transit system before it, the Chicago Transit Authority is now trotting out credit-card friendly vending machines allowing riders to use their plastic to buy a ride. On Monday, CTA officials announced they were installing 60 new express farecard vending machines allowing riders to use credit cards to buy and add value to CTA fare cards. .
US embargo of Cuba to stay in force after Castro quits
It would betray my conscience to take up a responsibility that requires mobility and total commitment that I am not in physical condition to offer." Western leaders responded by calling for democratic reforms in Cuba but John Negroponte, the deputy US Secretary of State, confirmed that the US would not be lifting its embargo, saying: "I can’t imagine that happening anytime soon." Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential hopeful, later issued a statement however saying that the US should consider easing the trade embargo if progress was made. "If the Cuban leadership begins opening Cuba to meaningful democratic change, the United States must be prepared to begin taking steps to normalise relations and to ease the embargo of the last five decades," he said.
Exclusive | Columbia lands Spirit Airlines
Columbia's airport hasn't landed a new airline since Allegiant Air pulled its service in January 2007, less than a month after starting Columbia-to-Tampa service. The last low-cost carrier to serve Columbia was the now-defunct Independence Air. Independence forced Delta and US Airways, Columbia's two largest carriers, to lower their fares. But Independence went out of business in 2006, and fares out of Columbia almost immediately went back up. Trippler said Columbia's travelers should have confidence in Spirit airlines staying power. "This airline has been attacked by just about everybody but they haven't been run out of town," he said. "Nobody can run Spirit out of town except the people who fly out of Columbia."Spirit was founded in Detroit in 1980 as a charter service.
Study finds high levels of stain-resistance ingredient in Conasauga ...
DALTON, Ga. — Five years after federal regulators began seeking changes in the makeup of a chemical used to produce carpet stain repellent, researchers have found “staggeringly high" amounts of the EPA advisory board-labeled “likely carcinogen" in the Conasauga River. Former University of Georgia professor Aaron Fisk, who oversaw a graduate student study measuring amounts of the chemical in rivers in 2006 and 2007, said levels of perfluorooctanoic acid and its compounds in the Conasauga were among the highest ever measured in water at a nonspill location. “These levels are staggeringly high," he said. “Nobody should be eating fish in that Loopers Bend area." .
The Mortage Bust and Online Ads
The subprime mortgage implosion is spreading its radioactive dust on everything from homeowners to ratings agencies. One industry that may be forgotten is online advertising. Yes, online ads, that hot growth business that has shot Google into the stock market stratosphere may be next to report the mortgage industry fallout. Oppenheimer Co. analyst Sandeep Aggarwall figures the financial industry accounted for $2.7 billion or 16% of all internet advertising last year. And while he still expects that number to climb in 2007 and 2008 he has lately trimmed his estimates of that growth. He estimates the mortgage sector in particular accounted for 3% of Google's revenues, 4% of Yahoo and 45% at Bankrate Inc. Bad news too for Barry Diller's InterActive Corp., which owns mortgage site Lendingtree.com.
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