Even with a full coverage insurance policy, you are not fully protected against loss in the event that your car is totaled in an accident. Instead, you will be paid for the car’s actual depreciated value. This may leave you with a significant difference between the vehicle’s value and the amount left to pay on your car loan. Gap insurance will pay the “gap” amount between those two values on your loan. The policy, which could save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars, may you in the event of theft or accidents.
 

Sometimes gap insurance is built into a lease.  Ford Motor Company’s Red Carpet Lease, for example, builds the cost of the additional protection in your contract. However, with that particular lease, you are required to make payments until the company receives the full payout, including the gap amount.
 

Loan contracts are not as progressive when it comes to protecting you from the expense gap.

Insurance companies offering gap insurance won’t necessarily notify you of its availability. In fact, some of the major insurance companies don’t offer the protection at all.

If you want gap insurance, make certain to discuss it with your carrier before making the new car purchase. Typically, the protection is not offered at all for pre-owned car purchases or after the new car purchase has been made.
 

Make sure you ask your carrier detailed questions so you know exactly what coverage you are getting. Not all gap coverage is equal. For example, some carriers have a cap on the payout, while others will exclude finance charges, late fees and mileage charges. Some companies offer a new vehicle replacement plan, which will provide you with a new car, regardless of the cost, if your new car is totaled within ninety days of purchase.
 

Gap insurance will cost anywhere from two to five percent of the total premium cost of comprehensive and collision coverage. Be aware that if the dealer sells you a policy, it will generally be more expensive than the average insurance carrier.
 

By Darryl James

What does this mean? Lets say that you have a blog which covers auto news.  If you wanted to make this content available to other sites to use dynamically, they could subscribe to your RSS feed (assuming your blog can output that) and get instant updates.

Individuals can also subscribe to RSS feeds on many browsers now.  It used to be that you required a separate program called an aggregator, which would check feeds and display updates.  But now many browsers such as Firefox and Safari have incorporated aggregators right into the browser.

Firefox can create “live bookmarks” to keep track of RSS feeds.  On RSS pages you will see a orange live bookmark icon appear next to the domain name.  Clicking on this icon will allow you to set a live bookmark on this page.  The live bookmark will then give you a separate menu which lists each article in the RSS feed.  You can check the menu on your browser at any time to see dynamically updated content.  Many news organizations, such as AP, Reuters, The NY Times, and Washington Post now have RSS feeds.

In addition, web portals such as Yahoo! and Google now now allow you to configure your personal home page to incorporate rss feeds.  This means that you can customize your personal home page to include live news feeds from what ever your favorite news sources are (provided they have an RSS feed).

RSS can enhance your online experience significantly by giving your easier access to your preferred stream of media.  It means that we are moving towards an internet where you can completely customize your experience to recieve the information you want.

Posted in Internet | No Comments »

Tuesday, March 7th, 2006

By now, most of us have been exposed to the world of high-speed internet access at our jobs. In fact, those moments when we were initially amazed by its lightening-fast speed and immediate page-loads have long-since passed, and such instantaneous results have quickly become our standardSo it should come as no surprise that consumers are tiring of dial-up service on their home computers. Your personal e-mail account takes two-minutes to load at home? Unacceptable. Does it take you 10-minutes to find a new recipe on the 15-minute-meal section on your favorite cooking website? Not worth the effort. You might just as well order a pizza on-line, if only, it didn’t feel another hunger pang every… second… it.. took… your… dial-up…connection…to.. looooad.

Standard phone systems use a system called circuit switching which is generally very reliable but inefficient. VoIP uses a technology called packet-switching which sends digital data over the information superhighway in a much more efficient manner. This efficiency translates into a lower cost for the consumer. However, there are a few downsides to VoIP technology.

VoIP is not as reliable as standard telephone systems. Internet connections regularly go down for an short intervals. It is a fact of life we have come to expect. If your DSL goes down for an hour, no one panics. However, if your phone line stops working for an hour, we start to fear that World War III has started.

Phone lines will operate during power failures. VoIP is reliant on AC power to drive modems, routers, and other devices it requires. So you would be able to use your phone (unless it is a fancy cordless phone which won’t work without power) during a power outage or similar emergency. In this era where everyone owns a cell phone though, this may not be that much of an issue.

Since the technology is still relatively new, VoIP is still somewhat buggy. Static, delays, and distortion are common complaints.

There are numerous advantages to VoIP though. Since it is far more efficient than standard telephone lines, the costs of maintaining a line are lower. This is particularly true if one makes a lot of long distance calls. In addition, with certain services, you can take your phone with you on trips, plug it into a broadband port, and recieve calls. Also, it is easier to take your phone number with you when you move.

It certainly seems that VoIP is the technology of the future. Once service providers are able to iron all the bugs out of the system, it seems inevitable that VoIP will become the dominant technology of voice communication.

But just as Americans are becoming increasingly comfortable turning to the net as their source for music, CD’s, clothes, and even groceries, another group of people are hoping to exploit that comfort.
Scammers and con artists are increasingly turning to the net to make a quick buck or looking for mine personal information from overly-trusting, unsuspecting consumers. While there is no way to guarantee you won’t become a victim of on-line scam, there are several steps you can take to protect yourself:

1. Protect your identity. Nearly 10 millions Americans have their identity stolen every year. Though this number seems staggering, there are steps you can take from becoming a statistic. Avoid giving out personal information like your social security number, credit card number or bank account information unless you know exactly who you are dealing with.Several on-line scams involve e-mails or pop-up ads asking you to “verify” your personal information. As a rule, you should be very skeptical of these notices; no matter how “official” they look. Most banks and financial institutions would not attempt to contact you via e-mail or through a pop-up advertisement. If you aren’t sure if an e-mail or pop-up is legitimate or not, call your financial institution over the phone, don’t e-mail them by hitting the reply button. Report any scam e-mails spam@uce.gov.
2. Shop safely. Don’t provide any personal information such as your address or credit card number unless you are on a secure, encrypted site, which encodes your information, making it more difficult for hackers to access. Look for a picture of a “lock on the bottom right-hand corner of your browser, or a URL which begins with “https,” (The “s” stands for secure.)
3. Pay with a credit card. Under the Fair Credit Billing Act, consumers may dispute unauthorized charges. In most cases, the credit card company will suspend the charge as well as any interest charges as it is investigating the claim. If it is found to be an unauthorized charge, you are legally liable for only the first $50 of the charge. (Some credit card companies provide additional coverage.)

By following a few simple steps you can help reduce your risk of being the victim of an on-line scam, and help ensure that your on-line shopping experience is safe and pleasurable.

By David Plowman

But with the powerful positive opportunities of the web, comes an equally powerful flip-side. Just as you can watch the world though your computer, the world can watch you.

While some tout the internet’s anonymity, you aren’t as anonymous as you think you are.      Several consumer sites will ask you for personal information such as you name, address, phone and e-mail address. Other sites will attach “cookies” to your computer that track every site you visit and report the information back to on-line retailers and marketers.

But there are ways to protect your privacy on-line. When traveling through cyberspace, protect your safety and privacy the same way you would when traveling though the real, “3-D world.”