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There's a Sucker Converted Every Minute
Ponca City, We love you writes "Once the US converts from analog to digital broadcasting next February, those who receive their signals over the air will need a converter box for older, non-digital models. Government-approved converter boxes sell for $60 or less and a government-issued $40 rebate coupon is available for the asking but that hasn't stopped companies like the Ohio-based Universal TechTronics from offering supposedly free converter boxes. The gimmick: the box is free, as long as you pay $88 for a five-year warranty, plus $9.30 shipping. Universal TechTronics seems to specialize in 'high-tech' products of questionable value, marketing the Cool Surge portable air cooler, 'a work of engineering genius from the China coast so advanced that no windows, vents, or freon are needed' that uses the same energy as a 60-watt light bulb. It works by blowing a stream of air over two ice packs that you have previously frozen in your freezer. What's the best tech scam you've heard of lately?"
"We have to filter P2P to solve network congestion"--Bell Canada.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
DVD rewinders.
The "free" digital TV box gimmick is not necessarily a scam. Comparing a box with a 5 year warranty to one with a 1 year warranty is not a fair comparison. It's gimmicky pricing to make people think they're getting a great deal. A scam, on the other hand, requires deception to secure an unfair or unlawful gain. In this case, the user is getting a 5 year warranty rather than the typical 1 year warranty, so it is understandable the overall cost should be higher, meaning it's not an unfair or unlawful gain.
(It could be argued that warranties aren't worth the paper they're written on. If a warranty is not workable, that's the part you can call a scam, not the gimmicky pricing.)
I've seem some scams recently, but the most amazing has to be Kinoki Foot Pads. Let's ignore the fact that my understanding is the word "kinoki" is meaningless and the characters they use in the ad don't even read "kinoki".
I'm used to all sorts of pseudo science in TV ads, but this one is downright amazing. Did you know tree roots are used to dispose of chemicals, and that my feet are actually tree roots? I'm so glad someone told me. I especially love the list of conditions that these things can cure. Even if they weren't fake and actually would detoxify you, I seriously doubt it would even touch many of those conditions. I seem to remember reading someone wrapped carrots with the pads just to prove that anything will make them blacken from "toxins".
The ad id just amazing. I was dumbfounded the first time I saw it. Diet pill ads look like something out of the Mayo Clinic in comparison.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
"It works by blowing a stream of air over two ice packs that you have previously frozen in your freezer." means = "no freon"?
Well, then I'm also selling water-free water for places that have water shortages. Just add 1 cup of water to the device and you will have an entire cup of water that you can drink!
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The real tech scam: you have to upgrade your PC every two years to run the latest and greatest versions of Windows and Office.
My blog
no. CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere without "destroying" anything. plant a tree, that tree takes in CO2, water, nutrients and with light can synthesize organic compounds locked up in the tree its self. no magical violations of laws of physics required.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
You don't need techobabble to put one over on people ...
Just look at the erpackaging of crap loans and blessing them with AAA ratings, and the proposal to bail out those who participated in the scam.
Time was, the three biggest lies were "The check is in the mail", "I'll still love you in the morning", and "I won't come in your mouth."
Now its "Mission Accomplished!", "Housing prices never go down," and "Jebus loves you- gimme money!"
Do you mean other than those $60 converter boxs and $40 Government coupons that expire in less than 80 days after people receive them? The coupons are a great deal for the importers and sellers, but in reality the customer ends up paying about whet they would if there were no coupon program, perhaps more when you realize they pay sales tax on the entire ticket price. In a world where I can buy a DVD player in a local store for $29 or less, these much simpler converter boxes should not be costing $60.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Vista comes with a First Person Shooter?
Let me guess - you score points by killing penguins with thrown chairs, you buy armour by making campaign contributions, and you power up by eating up all the ram chips lying around.
Well, the cell phone antenna booster "stickers" were probably the single best tech scam. It combined laughably ineffective "technology" with the always successful price-so-low-it-doesn't-matter-if-they-don't-work.
More recently, I'm still astounded by the number of "BOOST YOUR MPG!" schemes that involve additives or random crap shoved in your air intake. I especially love the accusations from promoters that the auto manufacturers are in it with the oil companies. GM and Ford are both facing a very real possibility of chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the word is that Cerberus is quietly readying a giant hammer of doom over at Chrysler. If all it took was a $2 piece of metal to get 9 more mpg out of a Malibu, don't you think they'd have done it by now? See the cell phone boosters for the basic premise: if you only charge $40 for one of these things, people won't be too pissed when they find out that it doesn't work.
There are many MLM schemes that differentiate themselves from the regular Amway crowd by pitching websites that MAKE YOU MONEY. I was actually approached by two different classmates about five years ago regarding the scheme, and it was so comically bad to anyone with any kind of tech knowledge that you couldn't help but laugh. Picture MLM combined with an Amazon-style referral bonus for online purchases. Now charge someone $400 to participate, and charge extra for adding basic things to their company website. Now make sure the websites resemble GeoCities circa 1997. Now we're talking!
My other favorite is the speaker scam, which someone tried to pull on me about two weeks ago (I hadn't heard of these for years). It's not really a tech scam, just your basic grift that happens to involve technology: an "installer" got an extra set of speakers/surround sound system/plasma TV accidentally loaded in his van for a big install job. Last time this happened, his boss reamed him a new one for not noticing in the first place, then sold them and kept the cash himself. Installer figures he'd "cut out the middleman" and you look like the kind of guy who knows good equipment. Usually they're selling actual speakers or receiver (the plasma scams generally involved an oven door in a box with a window), and they often have some custom-made audio magazine with their brand of speaker on the cover and a great review inside. You end up buying $20 worth of garbage for $200. Dogg Digital and Kirsch were the big names in the white van speaker scam years ago. Google them for an entertaining and depressing look at human nature.
The freezer removes heat from the icepack and dumps it into the room (plus extra, because of the work done). Then you take the icepack out of the freezer, put it in the "room cooling" device, where it takes heat from the room and puts it back into the icepack. Net result, your room is hotter than it was before. In order to get a net cooling effect, you have to dump the heat into a separate system that you don't care about (like outside). That's why air conditioners have vents to the outside.
Retailers love to offer 5 year extended warranty because of the Bathtub Curve.
Basically if a product does n't fail within one year then the probability it failing within five year years is very very low.
This curve applies very well to consumer electronics with the added advantage that they depreciate in value quickly too.
That type of cooler is called an evaporative or swamp cooloer. It's no air conditioner, but it can be effective in some cases and is definitely not a tech scam.
"Even when I say nothing it's a beautiful use of negative space." - Indelible, "Fire In Which You Burn"
You want a tech scam? Have it: Just type Car runs on water in Google; Sit back and enjoy! http://www.runningcaronwater.com/?gclid=COnhtJPKqZQCFRZZiAod_mOtzw http://www.runcarbywater.com/ http://www.youralternativefuelsite.com/?gclid=CLyItLbKqZQCFQwxiQodyUlR0A http://www.runcaronwaterkit.com/?kk=142 http://hybridfuelreview.info/?id=B227023 http://savemorefuel.info/?t202id=9163299&t202kw=car%20runs%20on%20water http://www.waterfuelx.com/?hop=tracassoc&gclid=CJne49_KqZQCFQL8iAodz2TG0Q http://www.trustmymechanic.com/run-your-car-on-water.html?gclid=CNjKkujKqZQCFSBciAodV1U90A http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/354/C8115/ http://www.squidoo.com/carrunsonwater http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5EMoLMzB-Y http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/car-runs-on-water-inventor-to-be-kidnapped-by-exxon-177716.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-fuelled_car http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=84561 http://www.easywatercar.com/2books.htm
Check this out: when I was working as a film-developing monkey for a large drugstore chain, we had a computer dedicated to downloading pictures from a VERY well-known maker of disposable cameras. One day, the tech had to come in to upgrade the computer so that it could dowload pictures from bluetooth devices. The tech opened up the computer and explained to me that he had to remove a piece of "epoxy"(which was a small blob of harmless rubber cement on the mainboard) which clearly obstructed nothing ad served no purpose whatsoever. Then, he put in a driver CD to enable bluetooth functionality. It was absurd! Why crack the box open at all? My guess was to rationalize an obscene price by making a simple driver install an illusion of a "ZOMG hardware surgery performed by a engineer".
Absurd.
Be carefull about moving the radiator portion of the fidge outside. A heat pump has to work harder the more against the gradient the tempature differential you are tring to create is. The compressor system in your fridge is designed to run lots of short cycles, where as the AC unit on your house is designed for few longer cycles.
If you fridge can't pump much heat because its trying to exhaust the heat into an 90F+ world and its going to be running constantly. It might not last long in that configuration.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
One thing that can make extended warranties worthwhile is that the cost to repair a broken item is much higher to you than it is to the company offering the warranty. For instance, if you have a laptop and something on the logic board breaks, you can easily spend $400 finding a replacement logic board. However the company making the machine really spends less than $200 on it (probably far less than that). The issue is that they are the only source of replacement parts, the whole vendor lock-in problem.
I've learned my lesson, and now buy extended warranties on laptops. The extended warranty on my Macbook has more than paid for itself already, and in the end got me an upgrade to a model released a year and a half after I bought mine. Hopefully I don't need to use the warranty again, but it's very nice knowing I don't have to worry about it. Plus, while it might be cheaper to repair some things on your own, you really need to value your time on getting something fixed. How long does it take to find the parts, a place to fix it etc. How long will your item be out of commission. It's quite convenient to call one number and get a box to return the item in the next day.
Phil
Once the tree dies, its carbon goes right back into the air.
Is spontaneous combustion a big problem for trees in you area?
Fnord.
There's an old unit of measurement for heat transfer called 'tons'. You don't see it around much anymore, due to the switch to units like btu.hr or kWh. But it would be really useful to bring it back for things such as this.
"1 ton" is the amount of heat needed to melt 1 ton of ice in a 24 hour period,or about 3.5kWh.
Your typical car air-conditioner, or big-ish room A/C, has a cooling capacity of about 2.5 tons.
The reason a ton is useful is that people know how fast ice melts. They know (roughly) that a ton is a heckuva lot of ice. When you tell them your A/C is a "2 ton unit" they can then get an idea of how much energy is used - a lot more than just mentioning a figure in kW.
Sooooooo....How much ice is in those cooling blocks? A kilo or two?The only possible real effect is that it might temporarily de-humidify the air in your room a little due to condensation on the ice blocks, giving the impression that it is "somewhat" cooler.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
These audiophile things offend me. I realize some people like to mess with their hardware to make it look pretty in their eyes (ricers, for example) but to claim such "behind-the-scenes" hardware mods do anything except drain the bank accounts of the ignorant is beyond the pale and simply a scam perpetrated by those who know better.
I don't believe you.
Yes it's a well-known bug in XP that the code get tired after several weeks of use because there's a qi-leak.
Now, why not take that weak shit to the park? Maybe the squirrels will believe it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
...laser rot? You could buy a green Magic Marker for about $20, paint the edges of your CDs with it, and not worry about the laser rotting the bits off.
Or the $400 Denon Cat5 cable only last week?
And there was a $10 gadget heavily advertised in general-interest magazines in the Seventies, especially Sunday supplements, that was designed to LOOK as if you could pirate cable TV with it. You just hooked it up to the antenna terminals on your TV and presto, you would get "the same type of programs you'd get on cable" -- i.e., sports, movies, news -- but you wouldn't have to pay monthly bills "because you're not getting cable!" What it was, was a rabbit-ears antenna with a plastic disk in the middle shaped like a dish antenna.
The prose in the ad was a masterpiece of subtlety. There was not a single misstatement of fact in it, but innumerable people read as a pitch for something like the pirate HBO setups that were in the news then.
rj
Specifically, swamp coolers work because of the energy (heat) absorbed in the phase change from liquid water to vapour. Changing a litre of liquid water to vapour, with no temperature change, requires that siginificant energy must be added to the system.
Another way to look at it, is that a given quantity of liquid water has the same specific heat as a much cooler quantity of vapour.
Jeremy
Boy, you got that right.
I worked on the HVAC design of a big modern house in the Dallas/Ft Worth suburbs (summer design temperature 105F/40C). It had a Great Room with a 12 ft high, 60 ft long glass window (the entire wall, floor to ceiling) facing West, overlooking a reflecting pool. (not much reflief from the hot afternoon sun in that layout) The building had lots of windows, skylights, glass elevator, glass stairs, even some glass floors. Interesting design, but about 3 times the A/C you would otherwise expect for a house that size.
To be fair, it didn't inefficiently pump the heat to the hot outside air, but had a system of water-source heat pumps using ground-tempered water pumped in a closed loop through about sixteen 150 ft deep wells. (the architect refused to have visible condensing units for cooling or gas vents/chimneys for heating)
You seem to be misreading my point, coward -- I use Windows every day, at work and home (where it runs under Parallels on my Macbook.) Lots of great software runs under it, the benefits are tangible and positive.
Vista, however, was marketed as a speedy, pretty *new* O/S. I'd expected a redesigned kernel to do better than it actually does.
I've been programming and using computers since teletype days (jr. high anyways.) That O/Sen require so much horsepower bothers me so. The Vista upgrade at work ran too slow on my core2duo Dell laptop, so I downgraded to XP, sadly. Yes, even OS X runs slower than I'd like. There's always Linux for compute-intensive jobs, however.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Q: What's the best tech scam you've heard of lately? A: Windows Vista.
Have you requested your free converter box from Uncle Sam yet? I certainly have! And no, I don't receive over-the-air television ... I've got DirecTV and I'm quite happy with it. But with the coupons, I can get a couple of free boxes with power supplies and RF modulators in them ... quite nice for various geek projects! One of them will probably be fitted as a simple RF modulator appliance so my son can play video games on his TV which only has an antenna input. The other ... who knows? Who cares? It's free! (More accurately, it's already paid for; it doesn't even begin to make up for the thousands of dollars the government steals from me each year.)
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[ Yes, people really are that stupid. ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Treating easily replicated digital bits exactly the same as tangible commodities, by (relatively) newly written laws and by industry practice, creating a purely artificial scarcity business model.
Digital copying is a huge game changing tech advancement, and society has fallen flat on dealing with it. It is one of the few "star trek" level tech advances in the past few generations, yet we can see that business society has freaked out, it made a lot of the older practices virtually unneeded, and wants both to be able to use this tech freely for themselves, and also to be able to restrict it to others, entirely in their favor following the old and now obsolete so called "laws" of supply and demand as they might pertain to such products today. There is the potential for unlimited and "so close to free it doesn't matter" supply now, so they are trying to restrict it through DRM and laws and lawsuits such as they can still extract the same (or more) level of profits "per unit" as when back in the day they had to actually publish a dead trees book or stamp out a vinyl album, etc.
What will we be seeing when we can do such replication as easy with tangible objects, if we can't even embrace and adapt to digital copies? This effort is not only ill conceived it should be *embarassing* to humanity in general, why it is even contemplated. We all should be enjoying the big freedom to freely share and share alike and have a huge expensive burden of transferring knowledge and culture from each of us and to all of us removed from our backs so we can concentrate on the next tech hurdles that could ultimately lead to humans being able to universally exist without a huge amount of drudgery and dangerous labor. Isn't that some sort of goal anyway?
It won't happen all at once, but every time we lick a major tech problem, like we have with copies of this or that chunk of knowledge or culture, why should we -or even allow- go out of our way to create an additional problem just to perpetuate the old problem, which has been solved now? This is illogical and makes no long view historical sense. Unless we want the space aliens to start calling this the planet of the buggywhip traders (part of the embarrassing part)
disclaimer: all I can do is not be hypocritical about it. I have a ton of digital stuff on the net over the past decade, if anyone thinks it might be useful (stop laffing!), take a copy share a copy, go for it. I work ag in meatspace, I encourage everyone who is so inclined to get seeds and "grow their own copies", use open pollinated so you can share copy making potential, go for it, feed yourself and the planet as cheaply and nutritiously as possible, leading to all free someday when the tech gets better. I seek no DRM restrictions or patents or any of that other nonsense on your ability or desire to produce your own food, even if that means I might theoretically make less, I'll be much happier once everyone is fed for cheap or free, and will go on to do something else. And that's the best I think I can do right now with voluntary sharing.
I used it for about 4 hours
Stop.
Back in the fricking' BETA, Vista would run fairly sluggishly for the first day or so, as it indexed every file you've got. Then, it ran more or less at a constant speed.
If you want to give Vista a test, give it at LEAST a week.
Now, it runs great, and uses about 2/3 the ram that was being consumed by Vista
Wait... you know enough to check the RAM, but not enough to do a google search for Vista using too much ram?.
(Hint: Vista is your memory manager. Why should it waste cycles loading and un-loading files so you can have "free" ram when it can just, you know, keep some in memory until a program actually asks for the space?)
The Clarins Expertise 3P spray ranks up there in the top bracket on my list of tech scams. http://www.strangeharvest.com/mt/archive/the_harvest/spray_on_magnet_1.php Here's some of the juice on the spray... "An ultra-sheer screen mist containing a pioneering combination of plant extracts capable of protecting the skin from the accelerated-ageing effects of all indoor and outdoor air pollution but most significantly, the effects of Artificial Electromagnetic Waves." Apparently the British government didn't take too kindly to the marketing of the product.
Then, he put in a driver CD to enable bluetooth functionality. It was absurd! Why crack the box open at all? My guess was to rationalize an obscene price by making a simple driver install an illusion of a "ZOMG hardware surgery performed by a engineer".
He would have to check if there was any hardware to install drivers for now wouldn't he?
Since you probably didn't bother to check if the price was reasonable either, nor if that which he needed to remove obstructed the slot he needed to stick the bluetooth card in, i'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
The reason a ton is useful is that people know how fast ice melts. They know (roughly) that a ton is a heckuva lot of ice. When you tell them your A/C is a "2 ton unit" they can then get an idea of how much energy is used - a lot more than just mentioning a figure in kW.
I have NO IDEA on how fast ice melt, and I am a physicist (*). I bet whatever you want the average joe on the street won't have an idea either. As for knowing a ton is huge... Well no shit sherlock. Does that help your average A/C unit buyer ? Not at all. On the other hand, 3.5 kwh means I know how much I will pay on my next electricity bill (which are not counted in tons). And that tell 95% of the world how much energy will the A/C unit consume. And I bet your average US consumer would be more happier knowing one A/C consume 3.5 kwh than 2 tons for the same aforementioned reason. Combine that with a clearly defined efficiency and you are all set.
(*) but I can talk to your hours long about boring forbidden transition n-sigma*
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