Glossary

This glossary is not to insult someone's intelligence. We realize that the majority of our users are familiar with the majority of the terms below. However some terms are more specific than others and since we use them thoughout the site we thought it would be to everyone's advantage to link to their brief explanations here.

SIM card

SIM card (sometimes called a smart chip in the US) is a little yellow chip that goes inside a GSM phone. It it the "brains" of your phone, when you put your SIM card in another compatible phone, the new phone aquires your cell phone number and some settings. For example you can transfer your phone book from your old phone to the new one. However for that you will need to keep your phone book in the SIM card as opposed to internal phone memory. You can change in your phone's settings where the numbers in your phone book are stored (in internal phone memory or SIM card).

Spam

SPAM is unsolicited email sent to multiple recepients without their consent. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in a number of jurisdictions.Every email provider or Internet service provider employs some sort of spam filters to block a lot of spam from entering your inbox. Normally those filters use a scoring system to decide whether or not a particular message is spam. Messages containing certain words, URLs, being addressed to multiple recepients, being sent from certain addresses and a variety of other factors contribute to a spam score. Messages with a high spam score get blocked and are not delivered into your inbox. Each email provider decides what spam filter to use and how strict it should be. There is no perfect spam filter. More lenient filters will allow more spam into your inbox. More strict ones will accidentally block legitimate emails from your friends, companies you deal with, etc. Most email providers give users an interface to manage their spam filters on some level.

CIS

Commonwealth of Independent States. A confederation of 11 former Soviet republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. CIS was created after the dissolution of USSR

Cut and paste

Select (or highlight) the text (or number or address) in the source document or file. Then copy it by pressing "Ctrl" key and without releasing, press "C" key simultaneously. Then click in the destination document or file at the spot where you want this text, number, or address. Then paste it by pressing "Ctrl" key and without releasing press "V" key.

USCIS

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (until recently Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS). I don't know how much of my taxpayer's money went into this name change, and what was the intended purpose of it, but nothing in this organization has changed to the better. Same ridiculous hold times on the phone, same overworked understaffed personnel, same obscure and often contradicting instructions.

Glossary

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