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Verizon Denies DSL Because of Subscriber's Name
mikek2 writes "When retired Philadelphia-area doctor and Vietnam veteran Dr. Herman I. Libshitz went to upgrade his dial-up connection to Verizon DSL, he was informed they wouldn't complete the order because his last name contained an expletive. Repeated calls to several levels of management at Verizon failed to resolve the problem, with several managers suggesting he change his last name. It all worked out in the end, after the Philadelphia Enquirer intervened."
Next time someone will claim that monopolies' power over the market does not negate the very mechanism that is supposed to implement the market, refer him to this.
Then punch him in the face.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
In the end he changed his name to "Harold I. Libshitz" and everything finally went through.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
People who have odd names (it seems especially prevalent in the Jewish community) are at a serious disadvantage in the culture that considers the name odd. This is the reason that the most famous Lipshitz ever changed his name to Ralph Lauren.
So, let me see if I have this straight: Verizon wanted someone to change their last name in order to get DSL, and that person didn't do it??? What, are you going to get a cablemodem or something? Just change your name, already. This is internet connectivity we're talking about here. It's important. It isn't like you haven't been getting libshitz for yoru name all your life, anyway.
http://xkcd.com/386/
It has everything to do with the EMAIL ADDRESS he apparently wasn't willing to change. They wouldn't grant him the address he requested. All he had to do was pick another email address and he would have been fine. I'm sorry, but you are not entitled to any email address you want.
They gladly gave him DSL. What they didn't do was allow a username/email address with 'shit' in it and he insisted since that was part of his name. I'm glad he got his way in the end, but he wasn't being denied the service itself.
I can't even get dial up and had to wait until my neighbors had wireless to steal it.
-- John Fuckinson
It has everything to do with the EMAIL ADDRESS he apparently wasn't willing to change. They wouldn't grant him the address he requested. All he had to do was pick another email address and he would have been fine. I'm sorry, but you are not entitled to any email address you want.
Are you serious? Why in the hell should he have to -- IT'S HIS NAME. It's on his birth certificate, his Social Security card, his drivers license. It's probably in the phone book, and on every check he's ever written. And now he can't use his OWN LEGAL NAME that he has had since birth for his e-mail address because it "contains an expletive?" It's not even like he's some anarchistic goofball who somehow managed to legally change his surname to "Shit" in an attempt to be cute or radical -- it's his family name, borne by his ancestors, and it just happens to contain that four-letter sequence in the middle of the name. And, what, he can't use it because somewhere, somehow there might be some handful of insanely moralistic wackos who would be offended by it?
I'm sorry, but this is just about the most ridiculous thing I've heard of in my life. And, given what I've witnessed in my half century on this planet, that's really saying something.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
- Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare
Of course that quote would have serious humour ramifications with a name like "Libshitz". Shakespeare was however cognizant of the political ramification of mere words and, alas, names. My theory that bad and stupid people primarily get into management positions has once again proven to be correct.
Good thing he didn't live in Dildo, Newfoundland Dildo, Newfoundland
Good thing he didn't live here
I hate printers.
Or Fucking, Austria.
Does Verizon also refuse email addresses to those who have such last names like: Takeshita, Fukuoka (common Japanese names), Dikshit (common Indian name). There must be more unfortunate names.
The "National Enquirer" is a notorious scandal sheet.
The "Philadelphia Inquirer" is a respectable daily newspaper.
I just felt the need to point that out.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Speaking of names that have bad connotations... plz fix our newspaper's name to its correct spelling of Philadelphia INquirer rather then ENquirer. (we have our many flaws here, but our newspaper is at least mildly legitimate)
There's nothing inherently liberal or socialist about objecting to monopoly power. Monopolies destroy the market mechanisms vital for capitalism to work.
Pointing out the obvious:
The headline and summary aren't really accurate to the linked article.
Has anyone considered the impact this sort of thing has on Slashdot's credibility?
Maybe I'm looking at it through rose colored glasses, but I used to like reading through all the summaries and linked articles on Slashdot. Now it seems like in the last 8-12 months, more and more headlines and their accompanying sumamries are deliberately misleading and inflammatory. I skim the RSS headlines and have found myself assuming that any headline that says "Microsft does X", "Comcast now doing Y", "Verizon did Z" etc. is probably off the mark and just nother boy crying wolf. It seems that I'm right about hald the time; which is about 45% more then I should be.
Most of these "inaccuracies" seem to pander to various anti-insert-company-here sentiments - ie., Verizon has been shown to have done a bunch of shady shit regarding spying or Comcast with it's throttling/filtering/P2P blocking or whatever, so now they do something stupid and it gets twisted into something much larger and more sinister.
Yes, Verizon is moronic for not allowing customer serivce people a little latitude or for having simplistic filtering, but nowhere did I read they denied DSL. They did deny an email address though. Verizon should also probably work on dealing with people-telling someone to misspell their name in order to avoid some stupid email address name filter misses the point. BUT, everything I read suggests that he would have been ok with an email address like DrHermanIL@XXX; not that he should he have to do that though.
If Slashdot's motto was something like "It's not news, it's Slashdot", I'd make a little one line post about how the headline and linked article disagree. But with a motto of "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters", I'd expect accuracy and a little less hysteria and/or pandering.
He actually posted first. Take a look at the post ID. 24454787 versus 24454791.
ics
Back in the early days of the WWW, I was doing IT for a small business whose name was RTS Executive Services. Their phone number was 1-800-RTS-EXEC, so they wanted their website to match: www.rtsexec.com, but that lead to a "sex" in the middle of the domain name and I can't tell you the number of customers we had who couldn't access the website because the blocking software they installed on their computers to stop their kids from accessing porn had determined that our website must be porn too.
I don't live all that far from Fucking. It's a tiny, tiny village and they can not afford to replace the signs that get stolen... mostly by tourists from the UK.
So when you go to fucking, please just the pictures of the Fucking Signs and do not steal the fucking signs.
Really.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Here's a personal story about profanity and a content company... My user name for my cable account is an expletive describing my feelings about the cable company. What's interesting though, is that apparently I'm not the only one who feels this way about the company, since 'fuckyourogers' has been taken and I've had to add numbers on the end of it.
What's even MORE interesting though have been my attempts to get technical support on my account. But during my somewhat angry registration process I didn't hit any snags where the cable company thought my username was inappropriate.
Funny how life works...
I have nothing compelling to say
Keep the people focused on the trivial and they won't notice the important stuff.
It works so well we don't realize that it's being done a lot of the time. And it's not just the US - here in the UK it's just as bad if not worse.
The whole concept of 'swearwords', IMHO is terribly outdated anyway. As someone else mentioned above, while these select words are considered taboo, their synonyms are not. Why is it okay to say 'crap' or 'poo' and not 'shit'? They mean the exact same thing. I can only imagine it was taboo to say 'shit' in public because of what it meant, but no-one seems to care about that any more. Everyone remembers it's a taboo word, but not why.
Petty officialdom is no different than it has ever been. There's nothing new about bureaucrats rigidly implementing regulations and claiming that there is no way to make an exception in cases where the rules are patently inapplicable. "The computer made me do it" is just a variant on "Sir, we cannot do anything about it because of our policy."
But I don't think this would have been a problem five decades ago because the word "shit" was truly taboo... because nobody would have been willing to admit that they noticed the English-language vulgarities lurking within a name like Libshitz.
It couldn't have been done by computer, because no executive would have been willing to dictate such words in a specification that an (almost-certainly female) secretary would have to listen to, no secretary would have been willing to type them up, and, very likely, coders would have been unwilling to key them in.
Sure, in those days people might change the spelling of their surname from "Fuchs" to "Fewkes" but nobody would ever dare way why!
(Come to think of it, did Bible translations start using the phrase "gopher wood" in place of "shittim wood?")
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I can only guess what the owners of Pen Island especially if they need a therapist
Monopolies destroy the market mechanisms vital for capitalism to work.
Unfortunately for many theories and schools of economics, it turns out that capitalism destroys the market mechanisms supposedly vital for capitalism to work.
The markets - and capitalism - go on working all right, but not along the lines of Adam Smith's fairy-tale "hidden hand". Oh no.
Free markets go either of two ways. Either they remain entirely free and unregulated, in which case they sooner or later evolve into "robber baron" markets dominated by players like Microsoft and IBM. Or else governments step in to regulate them, in a process that soon comes to resemble the Ptolemaic system of astronomy - adjustments to adjustments to adjustments, while the whole thing becomes steadily less stable and credible.
Our current system is a compromise between raw capitalism and socialism. You can argue that it has the strengths of both, or the weaknesses of both, or both. One aspect that has recently hit the headlines is the tendency to privatise profits and nationalise losses, thus giving rich speculators a free run at even greater wealth.
Well, if you were an influential politician, what kind of friends would you have - rich ones or poor ones?
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Are we REALLY that stupid? Apparently so!
In Japan, it's nearly impossible to order something from a restaurant if it isn't on the menu. (I say nearly, because I haven't been to every restaurant in Japan, so this only applies to EVERY SINGLE restaurant I've been to in Japan) IF, on the menu is a ham sandwich and a cheese sandwich, and you try to order a ham and cheese sandwich, they will look at you funny and/or tell you that it is not available to order this item. This example, of course is fictitious, but a real life example was at an "italian" restaurant I went to in Japan. (Most of them are pretty good, but this one was not!) I wanted spaghetti with italian sausage. Not on the menu. So I ordered spaghetti with sauce and the sausage as two items that WERE on the menu. I thought I had successfully solved the problem. Nope! Failure: The two orders came out SEPARATELY at COMPLETELY different times. It was considered an appetizer and came out first... people started eating from it and was gone before my spaghetti with sauce arrived. I didn't know how to say anything but "Dame!" which would have been very rude so I said nothing. I was defeated.
And every time I see human minds get trumped by a script or something in software, I get offended. Perhaps it's odd that I, as a "technology professional" would be offended by technology, but I am. But then again, I would consider this to be a clear misapplication of technology and I find that equally offensive. To this day, I prefer going through a checkout line run by humans rather than the 'self checkout' lines where you scan and pay for your stuff by yourself. Humans are still better than machines... for now... and only when humans aren't acting like machines.
Unfortunately for many theories and schools of economics, it turns out that capitalism destroys the market mechanisms supposedly vital for capitalism to work
I took a class in high school called 'social justice', which was ran by a very liberal teacher who said that communism works -- but only on a small scale and only if nobody cheats.
It turns out he was right. But that goes for any theory of economics.
Capitalism, socialism, it doesn't matter what system you use. The fact is that turn out that none of the theories and schools of economics work the way that economists theorize them. In the end, there will always be those who will find out how to abuse the system and those people will abuse it.
In the end, the only way to make any system work is to punish the cheaters.
My blog
It's a couple of things... one they don't want the notoriety, two they don't have store in fucking to sell the signs in, and three they aren't that interested in the whole enterprise. My suggestion of Fucking Sign vending machine was greeted with odd looks.
There was a kid from a neighboring town who wanted to sell T-Shirts but I don't think that ever got approved either.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Theft isn't as much of a problem any more, they've welded the Fucking signs to the posts.
So, what you're saying is that Fucking tourists from the UK visit and then steal the Fucking signs. Since the Fucking village is so small, they can't afford to replace the Fucking signs.
And what you're asking is, then, for the Fucking tourists to keep their Fucking hands off the Fucking signs? Sounds Fucking good to me.
My blog
I was told that experts-exchange.com used to be expertsexchange.com. At the time I had a bit of a laugh and dismissed it as a good story. However, Wikipedia confirms it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experts_exchange#History. So in all, I reckon that must be one of the more famous examples of an embarrassing domain name.
My favorite name is the Chicago Cubs player Kosuke Fukudome. MLB won't let you put "cubs suck" on official merchandize, but you can get "Fuk u do me" (minus the spaces) with no problem. Plus, his number is 1, which could be interpreted as extending the one figure salute.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
No, just the opposite. It used to be all innuendo. Now there's a lot more outright swearing instead. Chaucer and Shakespeare are packed with innuendo, though much of it modern audiences don't get.
As for poor Uranus, I think you can blame Stephen Spielburg (E.T.) for elevating that joke out of elementary school.
All markets are regulated.
The free market does not exist and idealistically never has existed.
Somebody enforces and writes the rules by which the markets run; which INCLUDES fundamental things like ownership, law enforcement, a legal system...
Even the most free markets-- the black markets are defined by law (indirectly) and how those laws are enforced.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This is a clbuttic problem with automated censorship.
I agreed with your entire post, until this line at the end.
You are assuming a correlation that just isn't there.
To get a system to work, you want to reduce crime, and contrary to right wing beliefs, being hard on criminals doesn't deter people noticeably. Making easier available alternatives to crime works. Having meaningful rehabilitation of criminals works to prevent recidivism. But punishment doesn't really help -- it only causes criminals to go to greater lengths not to be caught.
Indeed, but then it's not punishment that is doing something good, but separation.
Punishment's only purpose is slaking people's thirst for vengeance. A harsher punishment doesn't reduce the amount of crime -- that's a false belief. If anything, it causes criminals to take more desperate measures not to get caught. If prison is a horrible place, people will do more to stay out of it, up to and including arson or killing witnesses or police. But not including staying lawful. Getting caught is something that happens to others, not oneself.