You'll get a total of two types[:] (liars who give you (nothing or fakes)), or (idiots who actually give you this info).
"nothing or fakes" as in, they're either lying and saying they have no online accounts, or they're lying by giving fake account information.
Sometimes I think it would be easier if everyone were required to use parenthesis(es?) to group things when they talk. Or maybe we could just get everyone to stop spelling "you" as just a u? I'm going to go cry in a corner now...
I did let Jiffy Lube replace my air filters once... but it had been two years and I already knew they were quite clogged. I'm glad I did, too; my A/C started working again as a result, just in time for the summer:)
But I think what we should learn from our two experiences is "know your car". If you know what your car needs you won't get ripped off by people trying to sell you on extra things.
I do like the rock-chip-repair guys that hang out in the Jiffy Lube lines (at least they do in Utah). They put it through your insurance company, and once the guy just did it for free for me because I had already gotten four or five rock chips repaired by him relatively recently. Yay for legitimate businessmen! If only there were more of them in the world...
But that's not what most people are (were) seeing.
I have read several accounts where the person receiving the call got through to a human and specifically either a) informed the company it was a cell phone and therefore illegal to cold-call, or b) asked the company to remove the number from their list. In either of these cases, federal law requires the calling company to stop calling the customer; calling back three to five times in the next twelve hours does not meet that criteria.
That would make sense if they were calling the same number several months apart. Calling just hours apart, though, as happened to many people, does not fit that theory.
I had a (legit) marketing company tell me I was getting a free watch (for somehow making it through the first round of the [a?] drawing) and three free magazines, so she had me pick three of six or seven magazines. After I picked she mumbled something about how I just needed to subscribe to one of them to get the magazines.
I refused, because I didn't really want them in the first place; I was then informed I would only qualify to get the free watch if I subscribed.
I've never understood why these companies can get away with giving people things in exchange for money but still call the things "free". I guess if you don't actually lie (if the words themselves are true) it's legit?
Somehow I'm not surprised I didn't win the second round of the drawing.
I sent in a report about this scam several weeks before you sent yours in. They sent me a letter saying "Thanks for your information. We have received many other complaints and we are currently investigating the matter." I provided caller ID information (bogus though it was) and a URL of a website I found where people had been looking in to the same number. I also referenced a few similar calls my sister-in-law had received.
For example, I got these calls when I had a 2002 Civic, but the car wasn't under my name; I kept getting the calls after I returned the car to my parents and bought myself a 2009 Civic Hybrid... there's no way that's out of warranty already;) I tried getting someone on the line (to mess with them) after that, but all I got was a perpetually ringing line. Nobody ever answered.
I'm not on the DNC registry either, but cell phones are supposed to be taboo for legit marketing companies; the only telemarketing calls I've ever gotten on my cell (I don't have a landline) were from robodialers for this scam. And I got dozens of calls.
It's not just Apple that charges such a large amount for better parts. Dell (whose computers you can easily upgrade on your own) has prices on upgrade parts that are much higher than retail.
For example, a base model Vostro desktop lists the Core 2 Duo E8600 as an upgrade (over the Celeron 450) for $330; the E8600 can be bought for $267.99 with free shipping. Dell lists their 21.5" HD monitors for $260; I recently bought two Samsung 21.5" HD monitors for $189.99 each (with free shipping, and there are rebates available). Dell will upgrade your baseline Vostro from 1GB to 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 for $112; it's not hard to find 4GB kits for anywhere between $40.99 and $76.99, depending on what brand you prefer. On the same machine Dell will upgrade your 80GB hard drive to a 1TB 7200RPM hard drive for $330; Seagate 1TB drives can be had for as little as $89.99.
(Those aren't affiliate links, don't worry:P)
If you were to get those upgrades, Dell's markup over retail prices is as much as $400, and they pay OEM price, not retail. (To be fair, the hard drive I linked above to is OEM, not retail.)
These days, I see very little reason to buy a desktop from Dell (or Apple or whoever) unless you're buying a laptop - and even then, you shouldn't have the vendor upgrade your RAM. I bought 4GB RAM for my laptop for $20 (after rebate), where Dell would have charged me $200. (Ironically, the RAM was marketed as "for Macs", despite being standard DDR2 SODIMM.)
As a humorous side note, if you want Dell to preconfigure RAID on a pair of 1TB drives, they'll do RAID-0 for $350 or RAID-1 for $250... same hardware, different price. Fun fun fun.
Because there, apparently, wasn't any evidence (other than the roommate's apparent repetition of rumors) that he had been changing grades.
Say we start spreading rumors on the internet that MobyDisk has been changing grades on his school's computer system. Let's say your roommate (or best friend, girlfriend, teacher, whoever) hears the rumor, believes it, tells other people, and, of course, connects your screen name with your real name.
Do you want the police knocking on your door for this?
So you're saying you have ieTab installed in Firefox in Linux, and it loads IE through Wine?
Please, share with us how you set that up.
(I am, of course, not talking about using IE through Wine. Having to use Firefox through Wine just to use ieTab sort of defeats the purpose of running Linux, doesn't it? The whole idea here is to make people use Firefox all the time and just hide from them the fact that some sites are rendered with IE. If they have to do something *different* for some sites - run Firefox in Wine - then we've defeated the purpose of the exercise.)
I was simply responding to my parent post's comment that someone could earn money by supporting ieTab for RHEL. Since there is no IE in RHEL (barring something like Wine), that would be a lot more difficult than simply installing ieTab on RHEL machines.
Smart kids are usually generous. They'll often help the slower kids on their own time - staying after class or after school even to help slower kids (I did it myself a few times for friends).
I don't think it's much of an issue.
Obviously, if our 11-year-old astrophysicist is in the class, there could be problems, but that's not really the point;)
I was (and am) the opposite. I'll read just about anything - until you mentioned "It's required for such-and-such class." Then I won't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
It isn't really a conscious decision; I just never get around to reading anything that's required.
Contrast that with books I choose to read - I've read the Wheel of Time four or five times, and I've read a wide variety of other sci-fi and fantasy novels (Harry Potter excepted). I also occasionally read John Grisham-, Stephen King-, or Dan Brown-type books.
That's why the solution isn't to stratify students, it's to make classes a little smaller (~15 students per class), make sure they're fairly well mixed with respect to the average intelligence of the students in the class, and for the love of all that is digital do not teach at the rate of the slowest learner. That's one of the biggest issues with the current system - it's not that we need to stratify, it's that we need to challenge the students more. It doesn't do anyone any good to only challenge the dumb ones.
Not only that, but they're set up to recognize "guessing which answer the teacher wants" instead of "learning the material". Looking back, the teachers I learned the most from were the ones who didn't mind being corrected by students, but nowadays kids can get in trouble for that sort of thing.
I'm sadly reminded of the "Independent Thought Alarm" from the Simpsons.
Even university programs have this problem. I took a networking class last September whose course material was only tangentially a test on whether you knew networking. The primary skill determined by the course labwork was whether or not you had mastered Python sufficiently. (Did you know that Python will silently fail to cast a string-containing-an-int to an int without any warnings, even when it causes bad, bad behavior, and even though Python pretends it's dynamically typed? I didn't know until I had wasted eight hours debugging my networking program only to find that the bug in the teacher's code and was due to checking an int against a string-containing-the-same-int instead of explicitly casting it first.)
Yes, it helps to know Python. But rather than teach me TCP/IP networking, it made the task much more difficult.
Um... </rant>
So yeah. School systems need to be reoriented to encourage and test for actual learning, instead of whether you can read the teacher's mind.
I think whether this sort of incentive works well depends heavily on the individual. Financial incentives wouldn't have worked out for you; they would have done me a world of good.
Why? I would have learned how to actually work hard, instead of cruising by on as little effort as possible. It's a problem I'm still working to overcome, post-college-graduation. I graduated by a hair's width, but it would have been avoided had I worked harder earlier in college. I knew this, intellectually, at the time, but there had never been an incentive to get good grades instead of mediocre grades before college, so I couldn't work up enough will to actually care about getting good grades in college. By then it was an entrenched pattern.
(There were incentives to not get bad grades - my parents once banned me from the computer for an entire summer for getting a D. But that didn't make me get As, it made me get low Bs.)
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No, no, you grouped the expression wrong.
You'll get a total of two types[:] (liars who give you (nothing or fakes)), or (idiots who actually give you this info).
"nothing or fakes" as in, they're either lying and saying they have no online accounts, or they're lying by giving fake account information.
Sometimes I think it would be easier if everyone were required to use parenthesis(es?) to group things when they talk. Or maybe we could just get everyone to stop spelling "you" as just a u? I'm going to go cry in a corner now...
I don't know why you're modded Troll; I found your post rather insightful.
What if that's exactly the sort of thing they want in a candidate - outspoken, daring, opinionated, and knows how to hide his identity!
That's how I learned my dad's password when I was a kid (1995ish).
He still hasn't changed it.
I did let Jiffy Lube replace my air filters once... but it had been two years and I already knew they were quite clogged. I'm glad I did, too; my A/C started working again as a result, just in time for the summer :)
But I think what we should learn from our two experiences is "know your car". If you know what your car needs you won't get ripped off by people trying to sell you on extra things.
I do like the rock-chip-repair guys that hang out in the Jiffy Lube lines (at least they do in Utah). They put it through your insurance company, and once the guy just did it for free for me because I had already gotten four or five rock chips repaired by him relatively recently. Yay for legitimate businessmen! If only there were more of them in the world...
But that's not what most people are (were) seeing.
I have read several accounts where the person receiving the call got through to a human and specifically either a) informed the company it was a cell phone and therefore illegal to cold-call, or b) asked the company to remove the number from their list. In either of these cases, federal law requires the calling company to stop calling the customer; calling back three to five times in the next twelve hours does not meet that criteria.
I like how Jiffy Lube wanted to sell me $10 wal-mart wiper blades for $40.
That would make sense if they were calling the same number several months apart. Calling just hours apart, though, as happened to many people, does not fit that theory.
I had a (legit) marketing company tell me I was getting a free watch (for somehow making it through the first round of the [a?] drawing) and three free magazines, so she had me pick three of six or seven magazines. After I picked she mumbled something about how I just needed to subscribe to one of them to get the magazines.
I refused, because I didn't really want them in the first place; I was then informed I would only qualify to get the free watch if I subscribed.
I've never understood why these companies can get away with giving people things in exchange for money but still call the things "free". I guess if you don't actually lie (if the words themselves are true) it's legit?
Somehow I'm not surprised I didn't win the second round of the drawing.
I sent in a report about this scam several weeks before you sent yours in. They sent me a letter saying "Thanks for your information. We have received many other complaints and we are currently investigating the matter." I provided caller ID information (bogus though it was) and a URL of a website I found where people had been looking in to the same number. I also referenced a few similar calls my sister-in-law had received.
So... your report probably was incomplete :P
For me it wasn't just my second second notice, it was my fifth or sixth "second and final" notice. (I never got a first notice...)
They didn't know, they just guessed.
For example, I got these calls when I had a 2002 Civic, but the car wasn't under my name; I kept getting the calls after I returned the car to my parents and bought myself a 2009 Civic Hybrid... there's no way that's out of warranty already ;) I tried getting someone on the line (to mess with them) after that, but all I got was a perpetually ringing line. Nobody ever answered.
I'm not on the DNC registry either, but cell phones are supposed to be taboo for legit marketing companies; the only telemarketing calls I've ever gotten on my cell (I don't have a landline) were from robodialers for this scam. And I got dozens of calls.
It's not just Apple that charges such a large amount for better parts. Dell (whose computers you can easily upgrade on your own) has prices on upgrade parts that are much higher than retail.
For example, a base model Vostro desktop lists the Core 2 Duo E8600 as an upgrade (over the Celeron 450) for $330; the E8600 can be bought for $267.99 with free shipping. Dell lists their 21.5" HD monitors for $260; I recently bought two Samsung 21.5" HD monitors for $189.99 each (with free shipping, and there are rebates available). Dell will upgrade your baseline Vostro from 1GB to 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 for $112; it's not hard to find 4GB kits for anywhere between $40.99 and $76.99, depending on what brand you prefer. On the same machine Dell will upgrade your 80GB hard drive to a 1TB 7200RPM hard drive for $330; Seagate 1TB drives can be had for as little as $89.99.
(Those aren't affiliate links, don't worry :P)
If you were to get those upgrades, Dell's markup over retail prices is as much as $400, and they pay OEM price, not retail. (To be fair, the hard drive I linked above to is OEM, not retail.)
These days, I see very little reason to buy a desktop from Dell (or Apple or whoever) unless you're buying a laptop - and even then, you shouldn't have the vendor upgrade your RAM. I bought 4GB RAM for my laptop for $20 (after rebate), where Dell would have charged me $200. (Ironically, the RAM was marketed as "for Macs", despite being standard DDR2 SODIMM.)
As a humorous side note, if you want Dell to preconfigure RAID on a pair of 1TB drives, they'll do RAID-0 for $350 or RAID-1 for $250... same hardware, different price. Fun fun fun.
Because there, apparently, wasn't any evidence (other than the roommate's apparent repetition of rumors) that he had been changing grades.
Say we start spreading rumors on the internet that MobyDisk has been changing grades on his school's computer system. Let's say your roommate (or best friend, girlfriend, teacher, whoever) hears the rumor, believes it, tells other people, and, of course, connects your screen name with your real name.
Do you want the police knocking on your door for this?
I often wish we could mod things "+1 Sad but True".
So you're saying you have ieTab installed in Firefox in Linux, and it loads IE through Wine?
Please, share with us how you set that up.
(I am, of course, not talking about using IE through Wine. Having to use Firefox through Wine just to use ieTab sort of defeats the purpose of running Linux, doesn't it? The whole idea here is to make people use Firefox all the time and just hide from them the fact that some sites are rendered with IE. If they have to do something *different* for some sites - run Firefox in Wine - then we've defeated the purpose of the exercise.)
I was simply responding to my parent post's comment that someone could earn money by supporting ieTab for RHEL. Since there is no IE in RHEL (barring something like Wine), that would be a lot more difficult than simply installing ieTab on RHEL machines.
offtopic: you can, it just won't show in the preview.
ieTab doesn't work in Linux because there's no IE to load in the tab in Linux. That's all ieTab does...
Smart kids are usually generous. They'll often help the slower kids on their own time - staying after class or after school even to help slower kids (I did it myself a few times for friends).
I don't think it's much of an issue.
Obviously, if our 11-year-old astrophysicist is in the class, there could be problems, but that's not really the point ;)
I was (and am) the opposite. I'll read just about anything - until you mentioned "It's required for such-and-such class." Then I won't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
It isn't really a conscious decision; I just never get around to reading anything that's required.
Contrast that with books I choose to read - I've read the Wheel of Time four or five times, and I've read a wide variety of other sci-fi and fantasy novels (Harry Potter excepted). I also occasionally read John Grisham-, Stephen King-, or Dan Brown-type books.
That's why the solution isn't to stratify students, it's to make classes a little smaller (~15 students per class), make sure they're fairly well mixed with respect to the average intelligence of the students in the class, and for the love of all that is digital do not teach at the rate of the slowest learner. That's one of the biggest issues with the current system - it's not that we need to stratify, it's that we need to challenge the students more. It doesn't do anyone any good to only challenge the dumb ones.
Not only that, but they're set up to recognize "guessing which answer the teacher wants" instead of "learning the material". Looking back, the teachers I learned the most from were the ones who didn't mind being corrected by students, but nowadays kids can get in trouble for that sort of thing.
I'm sadly reminded of the "Independent Thought Alarm" from the Simpsons.
Even university programs have this problem. I took a networking class last September whose course material was only tangentially a test on whether you knew networking. The primary skill determined by the course labwork was whether or not you had mastered Python sufficiently. (Did you know that Python will silently fail to cast a string-containing-an-int to an int without any warnings, even when it causes bad, bad behavior, and even though Python pretends it's dynamically typed? I didn't know until I had wasted eight hours debugging my networking program only to find that the bug in the teacher's code and was due to checking an int against a string-containing-the-same-int instead of explicitly casting it first.)
Yes, it helps to know Python. But rather than teach me TCP/IP networking, it made the task much more difficult.
Um... </rant>
So yeah. School systems need to be reoriented to encourage and test for actual learning, instead of whether you can read the teacher's mind.
I think whether this sort of incentive works well depends heavily on the individual. Financial incentives wouldn't have worked out for you; they would have done me a world of good.
Why? I would have learned how to actually work hard, instead of cruising by on as little effort as possible. It's a problem I'm still working to overcome, post-college-graduation. I graduated by a hair's width, but it would have been avoided had I worked harder earlier in college. I knew this, intellectually, at the time, but there had never been an incentive to get good grades instead of mediocre grades before college, so I couldn't work up enough will to actually care about getting good grades in college. By then it was an entrenched pattern.
(There were incentives to not get bad grades - my parents once banned me from the computer for an entire summer for getting a D. But that didn't make me get As, it made me get low Bs.)