It's been a long time since I heard the term, probably late 90's or somewhere in that timeframe. At the time I was in the banking business and there were various services that were launching with the idea of aggregating bank accounts, rolling up loan offers into portals, etc. The term "disintermediation" was used as a label for what happened to you if you let someone else capture your customer's attention and just treat you like a supplier. I'm sure there were other uses at the time, and later.
"The term "disintermediation" was used as a label for what happened to you if you let someone else capture your customer's attention and just treat you like a supplier."
Banks, along with selling their own products, act as middlemen to sell other types of product (e.g. insurance). The only disintermediation I can think of in relation to retail banks, is the move for people to buy things like insurance from (i) web sites, who may kick back some of the commission that would otherwise go to the bank, or (ii) insurers who sell direct through their own channels.
That's beyond the contract, so the price is subject to change. I don't have a problem with that. There isn't much I can sign up for today where I know what the price will be two years out. My mortgage qualifies, and that's about it.
In my experience with these things (although I haven't tried with Cox), month 25 is usually when prices go back down, because that's when they might lose you to a competitor.
Three hours seems extreme. I live in Manhattan and can get to LGA in under an hour on a public bus, or by taxi in 35-45 minutes, and a taxi to JFK might take an hour but certainly not three.
You could read this as a cautionary tale about the difficulty in launching a social networking service: Even with $1.6 million cash (earmarked for a development project in Pakistan) and 500,000 mobile phone subscriber records (stolen from the incumbent telecom), their free service couldn't reach 5% market penetration and was shut down when it ran out of money.
The federal Animal Welfare Act specifically does not apply to farm animals, and many state statutes also make specific exceptions for agricultural operations.
The Guardian's UK stylesheet calls for this treatment of acronyms that are pronounced as a word -- people say "Icann", not "Eye See Aye En En" -- which does seem odd but may be acceptable as a regionalism.
Some take the distinction further: only if it forms an actual word, like PATRIOT Act, is it an acronym. If it's pronounced but not a word, like NATO, it's an abbreviation.
Intriguingly, 349 of the largest Bitcoin transactions ever are all part of an interconnected and obfuscated web of exchanges between November 2010 and August 2012, involving at least 430,000 BTC.
Disintermediation typically refers to "cutting out the middleman", not introducing additional middlemen.
Cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disintermediation