We were hit by the "refinance your credit card debt" calls at work frequently. They would call our numbers and ask us to call them back - sometimes we would get multiple calls in one week from the same person at the same callback number, but they would give a different name for themselves and their "company" each time. There was no opt-out mechanism.
I would call them back to ask why they were calling (or even who they were calling for as they never asked for anyone by name). Their response would be one of
Immediate hangup
Insist they were looking for me (while never stating my name (even though it was on the voicemail greeting))
Pretend they couldn't hear me (and then hang up)
Asking me to stop yelling at them (and then hang up)
And of course, none of those times did they ever give a company name when they answered the phone.
A few times I called and asked them to stop calling. That didn't work, either. The response to that would be one of
We didn't call you
We will stop calling you
We don't have a list
We will remove you from the list but it will take time
Someone who isn't here is the only person who can take names off the list
Then I decided to try a more active approach. A few times I called them to waste their time and money. Toll-free service costs per minute for the company buying it. I would call them and talk really slow. Some times I called and pretended to be interested in their service, giving incomplete information to lead them along and keep them on the phone.
Whether any of that made any difference I will never know. They did eventually give up and haven't called me for some time now. Which means I cost them money, every time they called me and every time I called them.
... one of the franchises licenses Dire Straits music for their game. And not just Money for Nothing, I want Tunnel of Love, Brothers in Arms, and Sultans of Swing. And of course Romeo and Juliet, while we're at it.
The system for toll-free numbers (which are usually the source and return numbers for this crap) is based on "Responsible Organizations" selling toll-free numbers and service to people or companies. The RespOrgs are in no way required to share information on who is paying for what number with anyone, anytime, anywhere, for any reason (the only exception if a warrant is issued). By the time any kind of interest is expressed in the identity behind a toll-free number, the RespOrg who sold it has already told the owner - who responds by moving the same number to a different RespOrg. From there the game of whack-a-mole continues, in a way not all that different from how spammers move their domains from one bad registrar to another to avoid revealing their identifying information.
In short, its great that the FTC shut down a robocalling enterprise. However in the grand scheme of robocalling and spam-calling, the action is a knee-jerk reaction that isn't worth much of anything - at least as long as there is no way for consumers to find out who is really harrassing them.
NIH funding - which covers most of the research published my American researchers in Nature - now requires that work funded by NIH money is also submitted to an open journal, even if it is also accepted to a top-shelf journal. This applies to all new grants and all renewed grants from the NIH, so the impact of Nature's subscription fees is slowly being grandfathered out with regards to new research.
Back in the mid-90s one of the less popular BIOS companies released a GUI BIOS for select motherboards. It didn't exactly change the way the world worked, and I don't see any reason to suspect this one would have that ability either. Convincing people that low-level changes should require a mouse when it didn't before won't be easy...
Many former 2nd-world countries are scaling up their high tech production of... just about everything. Just one example, my current blackberry was made in Hungary; but of course there are many many other similar examples of electronics coming from your favorite former soviet bloc country.
Or the internet. She has her own personal phone book of handwritten names, addresses, and phone numbers. It also has all kinds of additional data that isn't in the white pages like birthdays and anniversaries. She updates it whenever someone moves, and she knows which people in that phone book know other numbers so if she needs a new number for someone she can get it easily.
The editor mentioned that the Nature article for this news item was not paywalled. It is worth noting that this is the case because this is a Nature news article, not a Nature research article. Had this been original research it would have still be paywalled.
What is even more surprising is brazen device profiling, where you are forced to buy a data plan, even though the quality is bad, just because you have a "smartphone".
In the US, if you are on a GSM carrier - where you can swap your SIM card to another phone to change phones (rather than having to go in to a store) - you can essentially pair any phone with any plan. I am using a blackberry on a GSM network right now with no data plan, because I bought the phone through an alternate channel (rather than through the provider). Hence they had no opportunity to force me into a new data-plan-based contract.
On the other hand, other networks have a lock on how you activate a phone. Even if you buy your phone second-hand you still have to take it to their store to activate it; where they are free to say "we'll activate it only if you sign this (contract)".
In the one ticket that actually involved radar - which I took a plea bargain on and have never returned to that county since - I had physics on my side for an argument in front of a judge. And if they hadn't offered me the deal I would have gone back to show that it was not possible for my sub-80hp car to accelerate to the cited speed in the existing space (as he pulled me over just after an intersection where I had come to a complete stop).
There was no luck involved. I would have been willing to plead my case in front of a judge and I could have easily demonstrated that my car was not even remotely capable of that speed in that point in space. However when the plea bargain was offered (offered at least in part due to my spotless record) I took it because I did not want to have to go back to that county to have my case heard by a judge (they did not offer a hearing the day I went there).
That is why they also let you just mail the ticket in with your fine and so on
The biggest problem with that option of course is that you are (at least in every case I have seen) pleading guilty, no contest, when you do that. It is the equivalent of "go directly to jail, do not pass go" for traffic offenses. Unless you were pulled over for a burnt out license plate light or other such extremely minor citation you would be very foolish to opt for that.
The point is to get you to pay the fine, with the least amount of administration cost.
I can say I certainly had one experience that mirrored that. I showed up to contest the ticket and they offered me a lesser charge at a lower cost, with no reporting to my insurance. I paid the lower fine just to be done with it, and never again set foot in that county.
I should have instead showed that their radar was absurdly inaccurate and that my sub-80hp car could not have managed the necessary acceleration for their citation if it was going downhill with a tailwind under those conditions. But since I was not allowed to plead in front of a judge that day I instead took the plea bargain, wrote them a check, and got the hell out of Dodge.
The state where I had my tickets did not use the points system at the time (not sure if they do at this time either). However they did nonetheless have offenses strictly categorized as being reported or not to your insurance. It was rather hokey but it was livable.
And then to make it even more of a hodgepodge different counties handled tickets dramatically different. For neither of my tickets was I ever in front of a judge.
The first one I did meet with a DA in a courtroom, where he offered the plea deal. My choices were essentially
Take the plea bargain and be done with it
Ignore the plea bargain and pay the fine in person and take full guilt (worst possible choice)
Refuse the plea and come back again some time later for an actual trial
So essentially there was no chance to see a judge that day, and the county was so far away from my home that I didn't want to go back later. So I took the plea, paid the fine, and never went to that county again. That county actually agreed to also lower the speed that I was allegedly going by 6 mph, which reduced the cost of the offense. While I was convinced I was innocent of the charge, and could prove beyond any doubt that my car was not capable of the speed alleged in the place cited, I was more interested in not paying higher insurance costs, and not returning to that county. So I took the plea.
The second one was a very different experience. I was cited for some obscure offense for goofing off at a stoplight (not actually speeding). Nonetheless I was told that the offense as cited would count against me with my insurance company. So I went in to plead my case on the day listed (this was a busier county and they said "any of these three Wednesdays will be OK at this time in this place"). I met with someone who was neither a DA nor a representative of the court; however he had the authority to make a deal for traffic violations. He then said in order to get a plea bargain I would have to pay a higher fine and then not be cited in that county over some time period. I paid the higher fine and then moved to a different state a few weeks later.
By my experience you don't get to see any information on the radar until you show up to contest your ticket. At which point so much time has passed that you can't really be sure that the allegation hasn't been tampered with anyways.
Nonetheless fighting speeding tickets isn't that hard. In all my years of driving I have been issued tickets twice. Both times I went to court at the appointed time to contest the charge (two different counties of the same state, a few years apart). Both times because my record was clean I was offered a plea bargain - with "probationary" terms where they agreed not to report the violation as long as I was not pulled over in their county again for X number of months (or years I don't remember now). Either way I paid the plea bargain fine (one case lower another case higher than the citation) and was not pulled over again in the issuing county. For that matter, one of those counties I have never returned to since...
Is that even real? Most cars from that era I remember hearing about got a solid 8 MPG...
That is in part because most cars from the 70s were running on tremendously inefficient engines - and were rather heavy. The car in question was quite light, and ran on a 4 cylinder Honda engine.
In other words, while many of the Detroit engineers were still looped up on dope and not concerned about terrible mileage, the government managed to find someone with the foresight to build an efficient (and safe) car.
That said, I used to drive a car that was built in Dearborn Michigan in 1978 that got a solid 20mpg. Not bad for a car with a carb.
computer-related degrees despite never having written a line of code.
Previously we complained about
computer-related degrees despite not knowing how to troubleshoot a hardware problem or even turn a computer on
So in other words, educators responded to complaints by changing curriculum. We now have some computer-related degrees that have programming as an optional trait rather than a required trait.
And on top of that, what is a "computer-related degree" anyways? CSci would seem to fit that; how about Computer Engineering? Or an IS Management degree?
This is the biggest pile of horse-shit I've ever seen. All the fanbois should lose their shirts on this one. Apple is a BIT PLAYER that only accounts for a SINGLE-DIGIT percentage of the computer industry. Microsoft is pretty much everything else. Are you fucking kidding me?!?
It's like saying that the Mom & Pop grocery store on the corner is as large (or larger) than General Electric. Give me a fucking break.
This particular metric - which might not really be well described by its name in this case - is concerned with the total consumer investment in each. It really doesn't reflect at all how "large" the companies are, and certainly has almost nothing to do with the number of customers they each have or how they penetrate their markets.
I grabbed the free "classic rockstar downloads" from rockstar.com (GTA I and II, in particular) some time ago for my PC. Since then they have sent me weekly updates on the progress of red dead revolver / red dead redemption as they progressed along. Yet in all of that advertising they never seemed to care that I ended up on their lists after downloading PC games, and they were singing the praises of games that are at this moment not slated to ever see a PC release.
So you mean they chose MBA students to test the applicability of a device for students' use? They should have considered using real graduate students instead. As a grad student myself, I can say that the only way I would consider a kindle or ipad for my own use is if someone gave it to me for free...
No getting around it though: Ink is still expensive, particularly if you have to use that inkjet printer for black-and-white text pages."
Which only supports what I already knew - I save money by buying toner for my old laserjet 4 and using it for all my greyscale printing. I can buy refurbished or refilled toner cartridges for this old workhorse by the truckload for pennies and the print quality is more than acceptable for my greyscale needs.
Yep, when I hear them confirm what I already knew about that, it makes me want to buy an inkjet... pretty much never. I rarely have a true need for color printing in my everyday life.
I would suggest you check with your local university or public research institution to see who is involved in fields that interest you. You may be able to catch a talk where they say something like "I have found XYZ but I don't have a way to monitor or experiment on BCD", where you may be able to find an angle that you can assist with.
If you read into the history of Medtronic (and the pacemaker itself) you'll find that their beginnings weren't too far from what I just described - an inventor with an interest working with a physician researcher with a need.
Slashdot Mirror
Parent comment should logically have been moderated "Funny", somehow it was instead moderated "Insightful".
I would call them back to ask why they were calling (or even who they were calling for as they never asked for anyone by name). Their response would be one of
And of course, none of those times did they ever give a company name when they answered the phone.
A few times I called and asked them to stop calling. That didn't work, either. The response to that would be one of
Then I decided to try a more active approach. A few times I called them to waste their time and money. Toll-free service costs per minute for the company buying it. I would call them and talk really slow. Some times I called and pretended to be interested in their service, giving incomplete information to lead them along and keep them on the phone.
Whether any of that made any difference I will never know. They did eventually give up and haven't called me for some time now. Which means I cost them money, every time they called me and every time I called them.
... one of the franchises licenses Dire Straits music for their game. And not just Money for Nothing, I want Tunnel of Love, Brothers in Arms, and Sultans of Swing. And of course Romeo and Juliet, while we're at it.
The system for toll-free numbers (which are usually the source and return numbers for this crap) is based on "Responsible Organizations" selling toll-free numbers and service to people or companies. The RespOrgs are in no way required to share information on who is paying for what number with anyone, anytime, anywhere, for any reason (the only exception if a warrant is issued). By the time any kind of interest is expressed in the identity behind a toll-free number, the RespOrg who sold it has already told the owner - who responds by moving the same number to a different RespOrg. From there the game of whack-a-mole continues, in a way not all that different from how spammers move their domains from one bad registrar to another to avoid revealing their identifying information.
In short, its great that the FTC shut down a robocalling enterprise. However in the grand scheme of robocalling and spam-calling, the action is a knee-jerk reaction that isn't worth much of anything - at least as long as there is no way for consumers to find out who is really harrassing them.
NIH funding - which covers most of the research published my American researchers in Nature - now requires that work funded by NIH money is also submitted to an open journal, even if it is also accepted to a top-shelf journal. This applies to all new grants and all renewed grants from the NIH, so the impact of Nature's subscription fees is slowly being grandfathered out with regards to new research.
Back in the mid-90s one of the less popular BIOS companies released a GUI BIOS for select motherboards. It didn't exactly change the way the world worked, and I don't see any reason to suspect this one would have that ability either. Convincing people that low-level changes should require a mouse when it didn't before won't be easy...
Many former 2nd-world countries are scaling up their high tech production of ... just about everything. Just one example, my current blackberry was made in Hungary; but of course there are many many other similar examples of electronics coming from your favorite former soviet bloc country.
Or the internet. She has her own personal phone book of handwritten names, addresses, and phone numbers. It also has all kinds of additional data that isn't in the white pages like birthdays and anniversaries. She updates it whenever someone moves, and she knows which people in that phone book know other numbers so if she needs a new number for someone she can get it easily.
The editor mentioned that the Nature article for this news item was not paywalled. It is worth noting that this is the case because this is a Nature news article, not a Nature research article. Had this been original research it would have still be paywalled.
What is even more surprising is brazen device profiling, where you are forced to buy a data plan, even though the quality is bad, just because you have a "smartphone".
In the US, if you are on a GSM carrier - where you can swap your SIM card to another phone to change phones (rather than having to go in to a store) - you can essentially pair any phone with any plan. I am using a blackberry on a GSM network right now with no data plan, because I bought the phone through an alternate channel (rather than through the provider). Hence they had no opportunity to force me into a new data-plan-based contract.
On the other hand, other networks have a lock on how you activate a phone. Even if you buy your phone second-hand you still have to take it to their store to activate it; where they are free to say "we'll activate it only if you sign this (contract)".
You got lucky.
No.
In the one ticket that actually involved radar - which I took a plea bargain on and have never returned to that county since - I had physics on my side for an argument in front of a judge. And if they hadn't offered me the deal I would have gone back to show that it was not possible for my sub-80hp car to accelerate to the cited speed in the existing space (as he pulled me over just after an intersection where I had come to a complete stop).
There was no luck involved. I would have been willing to plead my case in front of a judge and I could have easily demonstrated that my car was not even remotely capable of that speed in that point in space. However when the plea bargain was offered (offered at least in part due to my spotless record) I took it because I did not want to have to go back to that county to have my case heard by a judge (they did not offer a hearing the day I went there).
That is why they also let you just mail the ticket in with your fine and so on
The biggest problem with that option of course is that you are (at least in every case I have seen) pleading guilty, no contest, when you do that. It is the equivalent of "go directly to jail, do not pass go" for traffic offenses. Unless you were pulled over for a burnt out license plate light or other such extremely minor citation you would be very foolish to opt for that.
The point is to get you to pay the fine, with the least amount of administration cost.
I can say I certainly had one experience that mirrored that. I showed up to contest the ticket and they offered me a lesser charge at a lower cost, with no reporting to my insurance. I paid the lower fine just to be done with it, and never again set foot in that county.
I should have instead showed that their radar was absurdly inaccurate and that my sub-80hp car could not have managed the necessary acceleration for their citation if it was going downhill with a tailwind under those conditions. But since I was not allowed to plead in front of a judge that day I instead took the plea bargain, wrote them a check, and got the hell out of Dodge.
And then to make it even more of a hodgepodge different counties handled tickets dramatically different. For neither of my tickets was I ever in front of a judge.
The first one I did meet with a DA in a courtroom, where he offered the plea deal. My choices were essentially
So essentially there was no chance to see a judge that day, and the county was so far away from my home that I didn't want to go back later. So I took the plea, paid the fine, and never went to that county again. That county actually agreed to also lower the speed that I was allegedly going by 6 mph, which reduced the cost of the offense. While I was convinced I was innocent of the charge, and could prove beyond any doubt that my car was not capable of the speed alleged in the place cited, I was more interested in not paying higher insurance costs, and not returning to that county. So I took the plea.
The second one was a very different experience. I was cited for some obscure offense for goofing off at a stoplight (not actually speeding). Nonetheless I was told that the offense as cited would count against me with my insurance company. So I went in to plead my case on the day listed (this was a busier county and they said "any of these three Wednesdays will be OK at this time in this place"). I met with someone who was neither a DA nor a representative of the court; however he had the authority to make a deal for traffic violations. He then said in order to get a plea bargain I would have to pay a higher fine and then not be cited in that county over some time period. I paid the higher fine and then moved to a different state a few weeks later.
By my experience you don't get to see any information on the radar until you show up to contest your ticket. At which point so much time has passed that you can't really be sure that the allegation hasn't been tampered with anyways.
...
Nonetheless fighting speeding tickets isn't that hard. In all my years of driving I have been issued tickets twice. Both times I went to court at the appointed time to contest the charge (two different counties of the same state, a few years apart). Both times because my record was clean I was offered a plea bargain - with "probationary" terms where they agreed not to report the violation as long as I was not pulled over in their county again for X number of months (or years I don't remember now). Either way I paid the plea bargain fine (one case lower another case higher than the citation) and was not pulled over again in the issuing county. For that matter, one of those counties I have never returned to since
Mine only gets liquid MPG
Some of us live in cold enough places where the fuel freezes nearly solid and then our MPG becomes solid...
Is that even real? Most cars from that era I remember hearing about got a solid 8 MPG...
That is in part because most cars from the 70s were running on tremendously inefficient engines - and were rather heavy. The car in question was quite light, and ran on a 4 cylinder Honda engine.
In other words, while many of the Detroit engineers were still looped up on dope and not concerned about terrible mileage, the government managed to find someone with the foresight to build an efficient (and safe) car.
That said, I used to drive a car that was built in Dearborn Michigan in 1978 that got a solid 20mpg. Not bad for a car with a carb.
computer-related degrees despite never having written a line of code.
Previously we complained about
computer-related degrees despite not knowing how to troubleshoot a hardware problem or even turn a computer on
So in other words, educators responded to complaints by changing curriculum. We now have some computer-related degrees that have programming as an optional trait rather than a required trait.
And on top of that, what is a "computer-related degree" anyways? CSci would seem to fit that; how about Computer Engineering? Or an IS Management degree?
This is the biggest pile of horse-shit I've ever seen. All the fanbois should lose their shirts on this one. Apple is a BIT PLAYER that only accounts for a SINGLE-DIGIT percentage of the computer industry. Microsoft is pretty much everything else. Are you fucking kidding me?!?
It's like saying that the Mom & Pop grocery store on the corner is as large (or larger) than General Electric. Give me a fucking break.
This particular metric - which might not really be well described by its name in this case - is concerned with the total consumer investment in each. It really doesn't reflect at all how "large" the companies are, and certainly has almost nothing to do with the number of customers they each have or how they penetrate their markets.
You can access the actual research paper through this pubmed (national institutes of health) link. You may need to access it through your local university library to get further than the abstract. If you follow through as far as the link from the publisher (Wiley Interscience) you'll see that the paper was actually accepted and published online back in February.
The tried and true method of doing things that is known to work outdid the new shiny?
Amazing......
If you were an MBA student you probably would find that amazing.
I grabbed the free "classic rockstar downloads" from rockstar.com (GTA I and II, in particular) some time ago for my PC. Since then they have sent me weekly updates on the progress of red dead revolver / red dead redemption as they progressed along. Yet in all of that advertising they never seemed to care that I ended up on their lists after downloading PC games, and they were singing the praises of games that are at this moment not slated to ever see a PC release.
So you mean they chose MBA students to test the applicability of a device for students' use? They should have considered using real graduate students instead. As a grad student myself, I can say that the only way I would consider a kindle or ipad for my own use is if someone gave it to me for free...
No getting around it though: Ink is still expensive, particularly if you have to use that inkjet printer for black-and-white text pages."
Which only supports what I already knew - I save money by buying toner for my old laserjet 4 and using it for all my greyscale printing. I can buy refurbished or refilled toner cartridges for this old workhorse by the truckload for pennies and the print quality is more than acceptable for my greyscale needs.
... pretty much never. I rarely have a true need for color printing in my everyday life.
Yep, when I hear them confirm what I already knew about that, it makes me want to buy an inkjet
Wait, you mean there have been newer and faster processors released since then? So Mordac really has been hiding something from me...
I would suggest you check with your local university or public research institution to see who is involved in fields that interest you. You may be able to catch a talk where they say something like "I have found XYZ but I don't have a way to monitor or experiment on BCD", where you may be able to find an angle that you can assist with.
If you read into the history of Medtronic (and the pacemaker itself) you'll find that their beginnings weren't too far from what I just described - an inventor with an interest working with a physician researcher with a need.