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New York State has given Verizon Wireless a million new reasons understand that the word “unlimited” when used in advertising should mean what it means elsewhere in polite society.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced yesterday that his office had beaten a $1 million “agreement” out of Verizon Wireless that will see the carrier compensate 13,000 customers it had summarily disconnected from their “unlimited” plans because they had taken the word to mean what it means.

From a statement issued by Cuomo’s office:

The settlement follows a nine-month investigation into the marketing of NationalAccess and BroadbandAccess plans for wireless access to the internet for laptop computer users. Attorney General’s investigation found that Verizon Wireless prominently marketed these plans as “Unlimited,” without disclosing that common usages such as downloading movies or playing games online were prohibited. The company also cut off heavy internet users for exceeding an undisclosed cap of usage per month. As a result, customers misled by the company’s claims, enrolled in its Unlimited plans, only to have their accounts abruptly terminated for excessive use, leaving them without internet services and unable to obtain refunds.

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As for Verizon’s take on the matter? Well, it’s priceless:

“We are pleased to have cooperated with the New York Attorney General and to have voluntarily reached this agreement,” a company spokesman told Associated Press. “When this was brought to our attention, we understood that advertising for our NationalAccess and BroadbandAccess services could provide more clarity.”

Corporate spokespeople earn good salaries to spout such nonsense, of course, but even by that standard we should take a moment to count up all the lies in this statement.

1. Verizon is pleased by this outcome. … Bet they had a big office party.

2. The settlement was voluntary. … Yes, in the time-honored way that criminals voluntarily confess after the cops show them the bloody glove (OK, this doesn’t always work, but still …).

3. Verizon only understood the problem after it was brought to their attention. … He meant after it was brought to their attention 13,000 times and the subpoenas started to fly, so maybe I’m being harsh on that one.

4. And the real whopper: What we’re talking about here is a lack of “clarity” in the advertising, nothing more. … You’d think a multibillion-dollar company could afford a dictionary.

A

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What do you get when you select prosecutors by their skill and experience, and make your cases based on evidence and law?

From 1993 to 2001, prosecutors in Manhattan convicted some three dozen terrorists through guilty pleas and in six major trials.

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The pre-9/11 cases brought in Manhattan, said Peter S. Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, “reflected U.S. attorneys and federal prosecutors at their best, using their discretion, bringing cases when they had strong cases and declining to bring them when they were weak.”

What do you get when you select federal prosecutors for willingness to go after Democrats and pick your cases to score political points?

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the government’s track record has been decidedly spottier, and its failure to obtain a single conviction on Monday in its terrorism-financing prosecution of what was once the nation’s largest Islamic charity was another in a series of missteps and setbacks.

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William Neal, a juror in the Holy Land case, complained that the government’s evidence “was pieced together over the course of a decade — a phone call this year, a message another year.”

Instead of trying to prove that the defendants knew they were supporting terrorists, Mr. Neal said, prosecutors “danced around the wire transfers by showing us videos of little kids in bomb belts and people singing about Hamas, things that didn’t directly relate to the case.”

The Bush Justice Department, keeping us safer though incompetence.

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I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who’s seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career.

And he often writes to me in response to something I might’ve written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.

His response: It is not bad at all. It’s absolutely horrifying.

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don’t spend enough time outdoors and don’t get any real exercise and therefore can’t, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.

No, my friend takes it all a full step — or rather, leap — further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

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De ministeries van VROM en Financiën hebben het MNP gevraagd een aantal maatregelen die in Belastingplan 2008 zijn opgenomen door te rekenen op milieueffecten. Het gaat met name om maatregelen in de sector verkeer zoals de belasting op vliegtickets en het vergroenen van de autobelastingen. De maatregelen zorgen in 2020 voor een vermindering de Nederlandse CO₂-emissies van 0,1 tot 0,5 miljoen ton. De verkeersgerelateerde CO₂-emissies in 2020 nemen hierdoor met maximaal 1% af, de nationale CO₂-emissies in 2020 met maximaal 0,2%. Het effect van het belastingplan op de CO₂-emissies is daarmee gering te noemen.

De overheid had dit doorberekend op 30%, dus dat dit op 18 september aan Wouter Bos overhandigde rapport verder de media niet heeft gehaald, is denk ik geen verrassing.

Coming Friday, together with the new OS X 10.5, Leopard, Apple will also release a new mobile computer, the iBook nano, and pictures have been leaked online!

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Funny huh? We knew something was a tad too familiar with those Sony DSC-T2 Cyber-shot cameras announced yesterday. Now, Engadget Japanese reveals why. Those pictures are official, un-doctored press shots from both Apple and Sony. The former (and we mean former) comes courtesy of archive.org since it’s been supplanted by Apple’s new nano. Of course, Apple’s no saint in these matters either. Flattery at its finest, eh? Sony, like.no.other.

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there are quite a few customers are finding their “Orange Box” games have been deactivated by Valve because they bought them from a seller that wasn’t authorized to do business with US customers.

Yet another example where the “global market” is only something companies are allowed to enjoy. Yet another example where activation screws the honest customer and lets pirates get a better product.

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Something seems to have gone horribly wrong in an untold number of IT departments on Wednesday after Microsoft installed a resource-hogging search application on machines company-wide, even though administrators had configured systems not to use the program.

“The admins at my place were in a flap this morning because Windows Desktop Search 3.01 had suddenly started installing itself on desktops throughout the company,” a Reg reader by the name of Rob informs us. “The trouble is that once installed, the indexer kicks in and slows the machines down.”

The blogosphere is buzzing with similar reports, as evidenced by postings here, here and here.

“I’m slighly pissed of [sic] at M$ right now,” an admin in charge of 3,000 PCs wrote in a comment to the first aforementioned link. “All the clients have slowed to a crawl, and the file servers are having problems with the load.”

A Microsoft spokeswoman said she was looking in to the reports.

According to Reg tipster Rob, Window Server Update Services forced Windows Desktop Services 3.01 on the fleet of machines even though admins had configured their system to install updates only for existing programs and the search program wasn’t installed on any machines (well, until then, anyway).