I don't think that changing the storage medium of the accounting info - in your example, taking the Postits and putting them in a spreadsheet - and then destroying the original stuff constitutes "destroying evidence".
Say I run a small video rental store. Since I'm poor, I keep track of the rentals on a legal pad - name, transaction amount, and movie(s). I get lots of business, so I buy a computer and put all the info from the legal pads into a spreadsheet or some transaction-recording program. I then destroy the legal pads I have used to save storage space (by burning, shredding, launching into the sun in a missile, whatever).
If these records were then subpoenaed for some reason - say Jack Thompson draws a link between people who watch the Doom movie and people who commit violent crimes, and so the court wants my records of who rented Doom - noone would say I have destroyed evidence; in fact I have *preserved* the records, and made them more accessible in the process!
So destroying your Postits after you have recorded the information contained on the in a spreadsheet does not constitute destruction of evidence.
I had a decent-sized box of legos, but a friend of mine had an entire *loft* full of legos. Literally. It was a ten foot by ten foot soft-floored (think trampoline but not bouncy) loft-like area with legos at least a foot deep. We'd climb up to it by way of a ladder. They had so many legos that they would almost always superglue the stuff they built.
My dad bought one in 1994 (133MHz PI, 2GB hard drive, 64MB ram... rocked back then;). In '97ish he bought a new one and I got the hand-me-down. I put win2k on that old thing, and took it to school with me in my backpack between my textbooks (I used to ride my bike to the bus stop). Remember running MSVC++ 6 at 800x600?:D
I used it until about 2002. Overall it lasted eight years... I doubt my nice shiny new Dell will last me that long (I plan to replace it before then anyway). I only stopped using it because it fell apart - literally. I treated it so roughly it started coming apart at the seams.
But when I was shopping for a new laptop a few months ago, I couldn't justify the higher price for a Thinkpad. They were almost as bad as the Macbooks I looked at (price-wise, I mean), and the Dells I've had have lasted four yearsish (my upgrade cycle anyway) so I went the "cheaper for more" route.
You think this is funny... I actually called Dell to see if I could get my laptop without Windows. Unfortunately it was one of those outsourced CS reps and he 1) couldn't understand me, and 2) could not fathom a reason I would want a laptop with no OS, despite my quite concise explanation along the lines of "I already have my own Windows XP Professional license" (yes, it's legal) and that I therefore did not want to pay for another copy of Windows. He didn't quite understand, explaining to me that a laptop doesn't work without its operating system...
Next he tried explaining to me that there was no extra charge for Windows on my order.
Hmm. I'll not bother relating to you the ten minutes I spent trying to make him see that of course there wasn't an extra charge - it was included in the system price!
Eventually he transferred me to his supervisor, but she wasn't any better.
In the end I gave up; my system came with WinXP Home, and I promptly reformatted.
If you're wondering why I attempted this, it's because of that story that was slashdotted several months ago about some German guy who actually succeeded with this endeavor. I was just trying to see if it'd work in the US... Guess it doesn't.
Business models are overpriced? I beg to differ. I configured an Inspiron E1505 (home/home office) and an Inspiron 6400 (small business) with essentially identical specs; the 6400 was $300 cheaper. Needless to say, I bought the 6400.
I hear *tons* of horror stories about Dell's customer service... My short experience was far from a horror story.
I ordered my laptop without checking the screen resolution (a big no-no, I know, but it just didn't occur to me). So when I got it, I was surprised to find that my max resolution was 1280x960.
I called Dell's customer service to ask if I could return it and purchase a laptop with a higher screen resolution (1680x1050, the highest they offer on a 15" laptop). Obviously, I was expecting to pay the difference in price, or get the first purchase refunded and then pay the second purchase price.
The lady I spoke with said she'd see what she could do and call me back.
She called the next morning saying she arranged an unlike exchange - Not only did she get the laptop exchanged for free (So I got a $100 upgrade for free), I was able to keep the first laptop until I recieved the second one so I didn't have to go a week or so without a computer.
So... Not *all* Dell Customer Service stories are horror.
As for your "Dells suck" sort of comment (that your only Dell had a hard drive that died), you can't claim that Apples never fail (or that they fail only after a long time) - a friend of mine worked at an Apple store, he spent most of his days repairing macbooks.
Thinkpads were good, about ten years ago, but now they're too expensive for the average user - because they include things like fingerprint scanners that most home users don't need (heck, most businesses don't need them either). HPs are too fragile for anything but the most casual use (my dad dropped an HP from two feet above carpet and the screen broke), and since then he's been buying Dells and has had no problems, except after the (read: his) expected laptop lifespan has passed (for him it's four years).
And macbooks... they're stable, sure, but $600? That's too steep a premium for me. And from what I've seen and heard, they aren't any better durability-wise than the Dell I bought recently.
Competitively priced? I configured two laptops, one from Dell and one from Apple, and I ended up paying $600 less for an almost identically spec'ed Dell (yeah, windows instead of OSX, but you say they don't charge extra for OSX, which probably isn't true anyway)... the Dell is actually slightly better. How is that "competitively priced"?
It's also how people find themselves running to Quick Loan or Check City every two weeks. They don't just live paycheck to paycheck - they live from next week's paycheck to the one three weeks from now. There's a nice side effect of those cash joints - they lower the property value of the surrounding neighborhoods:(
I'm not "in" this industry, but a friend of mine spent a long while using Cinelerra (http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Cinelerra). He said it doesn't do nearly everything that Premiere can, but it is open source.
I went with Cingular because Verizon's service plans didn't look as appealing and according to the coverage maps Cingular had better coverage in the areas I frequent. I'll look in to having them disable my ability to IM/use the internet... but that still leaves me with a useless right menu button when I'm on the main screen:/
I'd like to hack it to un-break Bluetooth, but I'm completely unfamiliar with how I'd go about it.
Someone mentioned the phones with the camera button on the side... me too.
My Samsung c417 has the same kind of thing... but it's worse.
The right "menu" button is set (and unchangeable) to "IM" (I don't use AIM so this is worthless to me, and if I did I'd use it on the computer, not on my phone).
The center button (between the four directional keys) opens the browser, also not changeable. Just connecting tends to cost a few cents. The first few months I had the phone I was paying 25 cents or so each month for accidental browser connections - each less than a few seconds. Lots of things can be locked - Address book, recent calls, texts, photos, Audio, etc, but wouldn't it be useful to be able to lock things that actually cost money?
Related to that, most of the menus have the first option "Buy/Shop for x" whether it's games or ringtones or whatever. This cannot be disabled or locked. This contributed to those 25 cents I used to pay every month.
Bluetooth. I must say I was misled. I asked the salesperson if the phone had bluetooth - I wanted to be able to put my own ringtones on the phone, and copy photos off it, or whatever - and I was told it does. It does... but only for headsets. Computers can't even see the phone at all. I don't want to spend $70 for a bluetooth headset, so that once-desired feature is permanently turned off.
They also told me it was similar to the RAZR. I assumed too much based on that. The only similarity is the slim profile. Everything else isn't as good - much lower resolution, less space for photos and/or ringtones, and lower battery life (if I recall correctly).
I guess the only positive note is that I got it for free (with the obligatory two-year contract) the day before it was supposed to be publicly released. The commercials for it that aired on TV usually priced it at $30 with contract...
Moral of the story: read the specs yourself before buying.
Yes, however her employers are not Mormons. In fact only one of her co-workers is Mormon, and he isn't what you would call an average member of the church. So being in Utah is pretty much irrelevant in this case;)
I worked at a DirecTV call center several years ago. When creating new accounts, we were not allowed to run credit checks without the new customer's consent. It wasn't a huge deal; we just required a $50 deposit (effectively paying their first bill in advance to prove they could pay for the service) if they either refused or their credit was too low. We did need their SSN to process it, of course, but it was voluntary.
I hope you're not making the mistake of thinking everyone discriminates like this. My wife and I were married on February 17; she interviewed with a pharmaceutical company early in February for a position as a chemist, and she specifically told them she was about to get married and she'd be needing a week or two off this summer for a honeymoon (I'm in school, we couldn't leave just yet). Correct me if I'm wrong, but of all the people likely to get pregnant soon (from an employer's perspective), a 21 year old Mormon newlywed is up there on the list... Yet they hired her.
Not every company is *that* worried about their potential employees and/or their profits.
There's of course nothing wrong with wanting to not be a suspect... but the police don't just assume that any prints found at the scene - especially in a public place - are relevant to the crime. Yes, they look them up, and you may get a call or visit asking what you were doing there, etc. But is that really an inconvenience?
Now. If my co-worker gets murdered in our office, my fingerprints are going to be all over the place. Do you think that worries me? Of course not. Police don't base stuff solely on fingerprint evidence - in fact if it's somewhere you go regularly - like your own office - the presence of your fingerprints offers no indication whatsoever that you were involved in the crime.
No system is perfect. There will be mistakes, or whatever, but that's why we have juries. Doubt if you will, but I believe that even if I were for some reason suspected for a crime, the best course of action would be full cooperation without any anger or whatever. I'd bet that in and of itself would buy you a lot of trust with the guys investigating the crime.
I've already read comments mocking those in the "if you have nothing to hide..." crowd, but (imho) generally speaking it's true. If you have nothing to hide, it really won't matter whether someone has your fingerprints on file. The chance you'll be investigated for a crime you have no knowledge of is, I think, very slim, and if (when, if you prefer) you do get investigated for something like that, they'll leave you alone once they realize you're not involved.
Paranoia gets you nowhere; I say, if a company wants your fingerprints to work for them, suck it up or work somewhere else. Stop whining about it.
And how would you suggest they check to see whether you've lost this right?
They can't just ask; a criminal won't care about lying. (It's like anti-gun laws... the only people they hurt are people who don't break the law. If a guy wants a gun to hold up a convenience store, he won't care whether the gun is legal or not.) They have to check against something.
So they're doing exactly what you want them to do - except you haven't realized that in order to do so, they have to verify you have not lost this right.
And before you say "well just let them check my ID", you know as well as any that IDs can be faked. Fingerprints, on the other hand, are very difficult to fake - short of burning them off. On top of that, I'm willing to bet there are plenty of fingerprints in police databases from crime scenes that have not been matched to anyone, so they're not just checking for your criminal record, they're making sure you're not just good enough to not get caught.
I don't get why people are so afraid of people seeing their fingerprints. What are they going to do, plant them at a crime scene? Now *that's* paranoid.
Slashdot Mirror
Do I get royalties on this?
I don't think that changing the storage medium of the accounting info - in your example, taking the Postits and putting them in a spreadsheet - and then destroying the original stuff constitutes "destroying evidence".
Say I run a small video rental store. Since I'm poor, I keep track of the rentals on a legal pad - name, transaction amount, and movie(s). I get lots of business, so I buy a computer and put all the info from the legal pads into a spreadsheet or some transaction-recording program. I then destroy the legal pads I have used to save storage space (by burning, shredding, launching into the sun in a missile, whatever).
If these records were then subpoenaed for some reason - say Jack Thompson draws a link between people who watch the Doom movie and people who commit violent crimes, and so the court wants my records of who rented Doom - noone would say I have destroyed evidence; in fact I have *preserved* the records, and made them more accessible in the process!
So destroying your Postits after you have recorded the information contained on the in a spreadsheet does not constitute destruction of evidence.
I had a decent-sized box of legos, but a friend of mine had an entire *loft* full of legos. Literally. It was a ten foot by ten foot soft-floored (think trampoline but not bouncy) loft-like area with legos at least a foot deep. We'd climb up to it by way of a ladder. They had so many legos that they would almost always superglue the stuff they built.
Sounds more like the new pet food to me (Kibbles & Bits)...
No, I don't have a pet.
I will say this about Thinkpads:
;). In '97ish he bought a new one and I got the hand-me-down. I put win2k on that old thing, and took it to school with me in my backpack between my textbooks (I used to ride my bike to the bus stop). Remember running MSVC++ 6 at 800x600? :D
My dad bought one in 1994 (133MHz PI, 2GB hard drive, 64MB ram... rocked back then
I used it until about 2002. Overall it lasted eight years... I doubt my nice shiny new Dell will last me that long (I plan to replace it before then anyway). I only stopped using it because it fell apart - literally. I treated it so roughly it started coming apart at the seams.
But when I was shopping for a new laptop a few months ago, I couldn't justify the higher price for a Thinkpad. They were almost as bad as the Macbooks I looked at (price-wise, I mean), and the Dells I've had have lasted four yearsish (my upgrade cycle anyway) so I went the "cheaper for more" route.
You think this is funny... I actually called Dell to see if I could get my laptop without Windows. Unfortunately it was one of those outsourced CS reps and he 1) couldn't understand me, and 2) could not fathom a reason I would want a laptop with no OS, despite my quite concise explanation along the lines of "I already have my own Windows XP Professional license" (yes, it's legal) and that I therefore did not want to pay for another copy of Windows. He didn't quite understand, explaining to me that a laptop doesn't work without its operating system...
Next he tried explaining to me that there was no extra charge for Windows on my order.
Hmm. I'll not bother relating to you the ten minutes I spent trying to make him see that of course there wasn't an extra charge - it was included in the system price!
Eventually he transferred me to his supervisor, but she wasn't any better.
In the end I gave up; my system came with WinXP Home, and I promptly reformatted.
If you're wondering why I attempted this, it's because of that story that was slashdotted several months ago about some German guy who actually succeeded with this endeavor. I was just trying to see if it'd work in the US... Guess it doesn't.
Business models are overpriced? I beg to differ. I configured an Inspiron E1505 (home/home office) and an Inspiron 6400 (small business) with essentially identical specs; the 6400 was $300 cheaper. Needless to say, I bought the 6400.
I hear *tons* of horror stories about Dell's customer service... My short experience was far from a horror story.
I ordered my laptop without checking the screen resolution (a big no-no, I know, but it just didn't occur to me). So when I got it, I was surprised to find that my max resolution was 1280x960.
I called Dell's customer service to ask if I could return it and purchase a laptop with a higher screen resolution (1680x1050, the highest they offer on a 15" laptop). Obviously, I was expecting to pay the difference in price, or get the first purchase refunded and then pay the second purchase price.
The lady I spoke with said she'd see what she could do and call me back.
She called the next morning saying she arranged an unlike exchange - Not only did she get the laptop exchanged for free (So I got a $100 upgrade for free), I was able to keep the first laptop until I recieved the second one so I didn't have to go a week or so without a computer.
So... Not *all* Dell Customer Service stories are horror.
As for your "Dells suck" sort of comment (that your only Dell had a hard drive that died), you can't claim that Apples never fail (or that they fail only after a long time) - a friend of mine worked at an Apple store, he spent most of his days repairing macbooks.
Thinkpads were good, about ten years ago, but now they're too expensive for the average user - because they include things like fingerprint scanners that most home users don't need (heck, most businesses don't need them either). HPs are too fragile for anything but the most casual use (my dad dropped an HP from two feet above carpet and the screen broke), and since then he's been buying Dells and has had no problems, except after the (read: his) expected laptop lifespan has passed (for him it's four years).
And macbooks... they're stable, sure, but $600? That's too steep a premium for me. And from what I've seen and heard, they aren't any better durability-wise than the Dell I bought recently.
Competitively priced? I configured two laptops, one from Dell and one from Apple, and I ended up paying $600 less for an almost identically spec'ed Dell (yeah, windows instead of OSX, but you say they don't charge extra for OSX, which probably isn't true anyway)... the Dell is actually slightly better. How is that "competitively priced"?
It's also how people find themselves running to Quick Loan or Check City every two weeks. They don't just live paycheck to paycheck - they live from next week's paycheck to the one three weeks from now. There's a nice side effect of those cash joints - they lower the property value of the surrounding neighborhoods :(
Nope, sorry, looks like it's a Linux-only application.
http://cvs.cinelerra.org/getting_cinelerra.php
I'm not "in" this industry, but a friend of mine spent a long while using Cinelerra (http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Cinelerra). He said it doesn't do nearly everything that Premiere can, but it is open source.
I went with Cingular because Verizon's service plans didn't look as appealing and according to the coverage maps Cingular had better coverage in the areas I frequent. I'll look in to having them disable my ability to IM/use the internet... but that still leaves me with a useless right menu button when I'm on the main screen :/
I'd like to hack it to un-break Bluetooth, but I'm completely unfamiliar with how I'd go about it.
Someone mentioned the phones with the camera button on the side... me too.
My Samsung c417 has the same kind of thing... but it's worse.
The right "menu" button is set (and unchangeable) to "IM" (I don't use AIM so this is worthless to me, and if I did I'd use it on the computer, not on my phone).
The center button (between the four directional keys) opens the browser, also not changeable. Just connecting tends to cost a few cents. The first few months I had the phone I was paying 25 cents or so each month for accidental browser connections - each less than a few seconds. Lots of things can be locked - Address book, recent calls, texts, photos, Audio, etc, but wouldn't it be useful to be able to lock things that actually cost money?
Related to that, most of the menus have the first option "Buy/Shop for x" whether it's games or ringtones or whatever. This cannot be disabled or locked. This contributed to those 25 cents I used to pay every month.
Bluetooth. I must say I was misled. I asked the salesperson if the phone had bluetooth - I wanted to be able to put my own ringtones on the phone, and copy photos off it, or whatever - and I was told it does. It does... but only for headsets. Computers can't even see the phone at all. I don't want to spend $70 for a bluetooth headset, so that once-desired feature is permanently turned off.
They also told me it was similar to the RAZR. I assumed too much based on that. The only similarity is the slim profile. Everything else isn't as good - much lower resolution, less space for photos and/or ringtones, and lower battery life (if I recall correctly).
I guess the only positive note is that I got it for free (with the obligatory two-year contract) the day before it was supposed to be publicly released. The commercials for it that aired on TV usually priced it at $30 with contract...
Moral of the story: read the specs yourself before buying.
Then maybe you shouldn't apply to work for them ;)
I'm pretty sure if you get convicted of embezzling funds or whatever you have to give back whatever is left of it...
Yes, however her employers are not Mormons. In fact only one of her co-workers is Mormon, and he isn't what you would call an average member of the church. So being in Utah is pretty much irrelevant in this case ;)
I worked at a DirecTV call center several years ago. When creating new accounts, we were not allowed to run credit checks without the new customer's consent. It wasn't a huge deal; we just required a $50 deposit (effectively paying their first bill in advance to prove they could pay for the service) if they either refused or their credit was too low. We did need their SSN to process it, of course, but it was voluntary.
I hope you're not making the mistake of thinking everyone discriminates like this. My wife and I were married on February 17; she interviewed with a pharmaceutical company early in February for a position as a chemist, and she specifically told them she was about to get married and she'd be needing a week or two off this summer for a honeymoon (I'm in school, we couldn't leave just yet). Correct me if I'm wrong, but of all the people likely to get pregnant soon (from an employer's perspective), a 21 year old Mormon newlywed is up there on the list... Yet they hired her. Not every company is *that* worried about their potential employees and/or their profits.
There's of course nothing wrong with wanting to not be a suspect... but the police don't just assume that any prints found at the scene - especially in a public place - are relevant to the crime. Yes, they look them up, and you may get a call or visit asking what you were doing there, etc. But is that really an inconvenience? Now. If my co-worker gets murdered in our office, my fingerprints are going to be all over the place. Do you think that worries me? Of course not. Police don't base stuff solely on fingerprint evidence - in fact if it's somewhere you go regularly - like your own office - the presence of your fingerprints offers no indication whatsoever that you were involved in the crime. No system is perfect. There will be mistakes, or whatever, but that's why we have juries. Doubt if you will, but I believe that even if I were for some reason suspected for a crime, the best course of action would be full cooperation without any anger or whatever. I'd bet that in and of itself would buy you a lot of trust with the guys investigating the crime. I've already read comments mocking those in the "if you have nothing to hide..." crowd, but (imho) generally speaking it's true. If you have nothing to hide, it really won't matter whether someone has your fingerprints on file. The chance you'll be investigated for a crime you have no knowledge of is, I think, very slim, and if (when, if you prefer) you do get investigated for something like that, they'll leave you alone once they realize you're not involved. Paranoia gets you nowhere; I say, if a company wants your fingerprints to work for them, suck it up or work somewhere else. Stop whining about it.
And how would you suggest they check to see whether you've lost this right?
They can't just ask; a criminal won't care about lying. (It's like anti-gun laws... the only people they hurt are people who don't break the law. If a guy wants a gun to hold up a convenience store, he won't care whether the gun is legal or not.) They have to check against something.
So they're doing exactly what you want them to do - except you haven't realized that in order to do so, they have to verify you have not lost this right.
And before you say "well just let them check my ID", you know as well as any that IDs can be faked. Fingerprints, on the other hand, are very difficult to fake - short of burning them off. On top of that, I'm willing to bet there are plenty of fingerprints in police databases from crime scenes that have not been matched to anyone, so they're not just checking for your criminal record, they're making sure you're not just good enough to not get caught.
I don't get why people are so afraid of people seeing their fingerprints. What are they going to do, plant them at a crime scene? Now *that's* paranoid.