I blame the managers. Bad managers encourage that kind of behaviour by ignoring how many issues a tech solves and how much they help the customer and instead just looking at average call time and threatening to fire anyone who's stats aren't good enough.
your scenario still doesn't entirely explain the users who make up completely fictional scenarios and pretend they're logging in to windows and will talk about what they're "seeing" the whole time when they're sitting in front of a dead box with sparks shooting out the back.
Oh the clueless you can work around but people really do lie and lie intentionally. For example many people will simply lie when asked the old "is it plugged in, could you plug it out and plug it in for me" hence the tips from other users above for getting people to check that without actually explicitly using those words.
Arrogance combined with cluelessness combined with a large helping of pride leads to lies, lots and lots of lies.
The most memorable example for me was when I was working part time as a tote at a race track during college. There was some significant "technical problem" which was delaying the races. I was up in the cash room and the manger was on the phone to the control room asking what was wrong.
She asked me to carry down a TV so I grab one of the dusty old little ones and carry it down thinking one of the displays must have burned out or something. I got down to the room and the woman who was in the control room was on the phone to some tech support drone wherever the company outsourced these things to. Turned out she'd told my manager there was something wrong with the "monitor" which had somehow translated to "TV".
I look at the screen and bouncing slowly around over everything there's a big grey box. It covers half the screen and the only way it could make more of a point that it's there is if it was flashing in many colours. "Current monitor resolution not supported 1200*1600"
At first I assumed she'd read this to the tech on the other end and there's something deeper wrong so I don't do anything I just hang around and listen for a few moments and it becomes very clear that she has not read this error to the tech, it's as if she has a massive blind spot where the error is.
This isn't a little error like you get in windows whenever it wants to tell you about something and which users get used to clicking right through... no this is a fairly unusual big grey box being generated by the monitor itself.
I can hear the tech asking if she can see any errors or messeges, and she says "no"....(WHAT THE FUCK?)
All the while the clock is ticking and costing the track quite a lot of money per minute.
I tactfully hint that perhaps I being a computer nerd and a third year comp sci student who's worked tech support in the past might be able to help but she's one of those territorial types and won't allow me to talk to the tech so that I can at least read the error to him. (You know all know someone like her:she may not have a clue how to do her job, she may not have any idea at all what she's doing but it's within HER domain)
So while she's being talked through how to let him remote in(useless in that situation I know) I lean in, change the resolution to 800*640 . The monitor goes blank for a moment and she assumes I've broken everything. Then it blinks back and is working again (now though some of her icons are off the edge of the screen and she starts panicing again until I arrange the icons so they're all on the screen. Now whenever I'm at an event and hear an announcement about "technical problems" I assume that it's really some trivial crap like that.
And if I ever work phone support again I will assume everything, absolutely everything the person on the other end tells me is a blatant lie.
Is it plugged in? yes? LIER! It it turned on? yes? LIER! Can you see any messeges on the screen? no? LIER!
A system where 49% of the population can have their views utterly utterly ignored as long as 51% of the population disagree is broken.
It seems to me the system is not the problem, and if you all feel so passionately about the issue you should be debating it, educating people on your viewpoint and rallying more support for it.
Well when it comes to drugs if he has a university job or indeed pretty much any government job he's risking getting fired.
the way it was written it implied that if your grandfather drank beer then he somehow became more resistant and passed that on rather than simply not being the guy who dies of liver failure and never became your grandfather.
If you live in an apartment most of your walls are shared with other apartments so any heat lost through them will heat other apartments.
The little house on the prairie on the other hand either has to have thick thick insulation in every wall and tripple glazed windows or else it will lose a lot of heat to the outside air.
Transport:
In a big city public transport can be economic and efficient and you normally don't have to go far to get what you need.
The denizens of the little house on the prairie on the other hand need to drive 20 miles to the nearest big town whenever they need anything they can't whittle.
Yes a city with 10,000,000 people covering 100 square miles will have more of an impact than a tiny community of farmers covering 100 square miles but each individual in that little rustic community has probably tens or even hundreds of times the ecological impact of any one person in that city of 10 million and uses many times the energy.
You seem to have this idea that just because we use a lot of internal combustion engines now that somehow we're stuck with them. double, tripple, quadruple the price of oil and within a short time there's going to be a lot less internal combustion engines and a lot more electric motors.
We can't do most of the things we're doing now if oil is not plentiful and cheap, that's the point.
Ok lets run through the list:
Generate power? The power grid doesn't give a fuck about oil. oil is 1% of the power grid. Sure some of the trains which carry some of the coal are run on oil products but electric powered rail isn't exactly a new idea and we have a great deal of options for how to transport such things.
General transportation? Yep, this one will be hit hard by expensive oil, america will have to follow after japan with electric powered cars and smaller vehicles. Jet travel is gonna get a lot more expensive. Shipping is going to have to go a lot more nuclear.
And this is the utterly central point you are missing:
There is enough money to be had to satisfy even the wildest dreams of every investment banker and fund manager if they invest in the right things before peak oil. The problems you predict are all based on everyone wandering blindly forward and nobody being capitalist and investing lots of money in nuclear power, factories which produce electric engines, shipping companies which use alternative fuels and local producers of goods.
The entire doomsday scenario is based on people failing to be greedy. It's based on them intentionally pissing money down the drain in some "dr evil" style plot to destroy the world rather than being capitalist and putting there money wherever it will get the best return. And you can't seem to understand this.
If you know that the oil companies are over reporting their oil reserves then so do fund managers and commodity traders(getting the scoop on this kind of info and making a financial killing as a result is their entire job). You have no secret info.
But sure. The world is about to end. You know if you short the stock of the oil companies just before everyone realizes that you were right all along and their stock nose dives you could make an absolute killing. You could then cash in that money quickly before everyone realizes that money is worthless and in the few days that are left buy all the supplies you'd need to outfit your bunker/fortress and set yourself up as a king in the future wasteland.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, some religious cults practiced sacred prostitution as an instrument to recruit new converts. Among them was the alleged cult Children of God, also known as The Family, who called this practice "Flirty Fishing". They later abolished the practice due to the growing AIDS epidemic.
To the extent that people who's ancestors drank beer are much more able to deal with alcohol than those who's ancestors didn't.
That sounds far too lamarckian.
So make that.
To the extent that people who's ancestors drank a lot of beer and survived are much more able to deal with alcohol than those who's ancestors were never exposed to alcohol.
Surely it would be better to target all malware writers who silently install ANY software on your computer and use your bandwidth without your knowledge.
Is it really better if it's an FTP server the malware installs rather than a bittorrent client?
In other news properties in the game of monopoly are to be rent controlled. Infractions shall be a matter for civil court and anyone who actually does manage to build a monopoly shall be subject to unfair trading practices legislation.
oh for gods sake. I'm not talking about just keeping existing fields pumping. the existance of tar sands or the econimcs of them becoming economic to extract oil from does not do anything to existing fields. I'm refering to massive quantities of lower quality sources of oil like tar sands. It costs more to extract the oil but there's a lot more oil there.
A lot of things which were economic to run while oil was cheaper become less and less economic to run and usage drops off.
If you're a really good virus writer, I mean really really good you can make a lot of money.
If you're good at finding exploits you can make good money selling them to the highest bidder through third parties who check the exploit to make sure it works and who hold the cash in escrow(they take a cut just like ebay).
Some trivial problems you can brute force sure but most of the interesting problems will leave you sitting waiting till the heat death of the universe before you'll see any output.
Slashdot Mirror
I blame the managers.
Bad managers encourage that kind of behaviour by ignoring how many issues a tech solves and how much they help the customer and instead just looking at average call time and threatening to fire anyone who's stats aren't good enough.
your scenario still doesn't entirely explain the users who make up completely fictional scenarios and pretend they're logging in to windows and will talk about what they're "seeing" the whole time when they're sitting in front of a dead box with sparks shooting out the back.
Oh the clueless you can work around but people really do lie and lie intentionally.
For example many people will simply lie when asked the old "is it plugged in, could you plug it out and plug it in for me" hence the tips from other users above for getting people to check that without actually explicitly using those words.
Arrogance combined with cluelessness combined with a large helping of pride leads to lies, lots and lots of lies.
It's "because" not "cause".
it's "a liar " not "i liar".
That would just make them try to get rid of it even sooner and preclude all possibilities of reading it.
I was looking at it thinking it was wrong, on the bright side it gives the slashdot pedants something to feel smug about.
Boring story:
The most memorable example for me was when I was working part time as a tote at a race track during college.
There was some significant "technical problem" which was delaying the races.
I was up in the cash room and the manger was on the phone to the control room asking what was wrong.
She asked me to carry down a TV so I grab one of the dusty old little ones and carry it down thinking one of the displays must have burned out or something.
I got down to the room and the woman who was in the control room was on the phone to some tech support drone wherever the company outsourced these things to.
Turned out she'd told my manager there was something wrong with the "monitor" which had somehow translated to "TV".
I look at the screen and bouncing slowly around over everything there's a big grey box.
It covers half the screen and the only way it could make more of a point that it's there is if it was flashing in many colours.
"Current monitor resolution not supported 1200*1600"
At first I assumed she'd read this to the tech on the other end and there's something deeper wrong so I don't do anything I just hang around and listen for a few moments and it becomes very clear that she has not read this error to the tech, it's as if she has a massive blind spot where the error is.
This isn't a little error like you get in windows whenever it wants to tell you about something and which users get used to clicking right through... no this is a fairly unusual big grey box being generated by the monitor itself.
I can hear the tech asking if she can see any errors or messeges, and she says "no" ....(WHAT THE FUCK?)
All the while the clock is ticking and costing the track quite a lot of money per minute.
I tactfully hint that perhaps I being a computer nerd and a third year comp sci student who's worked tech support in the past might be able to help but she's one of those territorial types and won't allow me to talk to the tech so that I can at least read the error to him.
(You know all know someone like her:she may not have a clue how to do her job, she may not have any idea at all what she's doing but it's within HER domain)
So while she's being talked through how to let him remote in(useless in that situation I know) I lean in, change the resolution to 800*640 .
The monitor goes blank for a moment and she assumes I've broken everything.
Then it blinks back and is working again (now though some of her icons are off the edge of the screen and she starts panicing again until I arrange the icons so they're all on the screen.
Now whenever I'm at an event and hear an announcement about "technical problems" I assume that it's really some trivial crap like that.
And if I ever work phone support again I will assume everything, absolutely everything the person on the other end tells me is a blatant lie.
Is it plugged in? yes? LIER!
It it turned on? yes? LIER!
Can you see any messeges on the screen? no? LIER!
Why do they lie!??!?
The DDT one really was a political thing rather than a health thing.
malaria is a very nasty disease.
If it's such easy work with such high pay why don't you do some courses on photography and become a wedding photographer?
Passed?
No.
Considered?
Discussed?
Yes.
A system where 49% of the population can have their views utterly utterly ignored as long as 51% of the population disagree is broken.
It seems to me the system is not the problem, and if you all feel so passionately about the issue you should be debating it, educating people on your viewpoint and rallying more support for it.
Well when it comes to drugs if he has a university job or indeed pretty much any government job he's risking getting fired.
the way it was written it implied that if your grandfather drank beer then he somehow became more resistant and passed that on rather than simply not being the guy who dies of liver failure and never became your grandfather.
Cities really are far more efficient per person.
Example:
Heating appartments.
If you live in an apartment most of your walls are shared with other apartments so any heat lost through them will heat other apartments.
The little house on the prairie on the other hand either has to have thick thick insulation in every wall and tripple glazed windows or else it will lose a lot of heat to the outside air.
Transport:
In a big city public transport can be economic and efficient and you normally don't have to go far to get what you need.
The denizens of the little house on the prairie on the other hand need to drive 20 miles to the nearest big town whenever they need anything they can't whittle.
Yes a city with 10,000,000 people covering 100 square miles will have more of an impact than a tiny community of farmers covering 100 square miles but each individual in that little rustic community has probably tens or even hundreds of times the ecological impact of any one person in that city of 10 million and uses many times the energy.
You seem to have this idea that just because we use a lot of internal combustion engines now that somehow we're stuck with them.
double, tripple, quadruple the price of oil and within a short time there's going to be a lot less internal combustion engines and a lot more electric motors.
We can't do most of the things we're doing now if oil is not plentiful and cheap, that's the point.
Ok lets run through the list:
Generate power?
The power grid doesn't give a fuck about oil. oil is 1% of the power grid.
Sure some of the trains which carry some of the coal are run on oil products but electric powered rail isn't exactly a new idea and we have a great deal of options for how to transport such things.
General transportation?
Yep, this one will be hit hard by expensive oil, america will have to follow after japan with electric powered cars and smaller vehicles.
Jet travel is gonna get a lot more expensive.
Shipping is going to have to go a lot more nuclear.
And this is the utterly central point you are missing:
There is enough money to be had to satisfy even the wildest dreams of every investment banker and fund manager if they invest in the right things before peak oil.
The problems you predict are all based on everyone wandering blindly forward and nobody being capitalist and investing lots of money in nuclear power, factories which produce electric engines, shipping companies which use alternative fuels and local producers of goods.
The entire doomsday scenario is based on people failing to be greedy.
It's based on them intentionally pissing money down the drain in some "dr evil" style plot to destroy the world rather than being capitalist and putting there money wherever it will get the best return.
And you can't seem to understand this.
If you know that the oil companies are over reporting their oil reserves then so do fund managers and commodity traders(getting the scoop on this kind of info and making a financial killing as a result is their entire job).
You have no secret info.
But sure.
The world is about to end.
You know if you short the stock of the oil companies just before everyone realizes that you were right all along and their stock nose dives you could make an absolute killing.
You could then cash in that money quickly before everyone realizes that money is worthless and in the few days that are left buy all the supplies you'd need to outfit your bunker/fortress and set yourself up as a king in the future wasteland.
Copyright?
You've been hanging around on slashdot too long.
People get sued, not shot over downloading mp3's.
the names of the illegal things now?
Heroin, cocaine, meth, marijuana, ecstasy etc etc etc...
We must poison the addicts to death so they can't poison themselves to death.
The sad thing is that they still haven't learned.
Look at the current drug policies.
They're utterly self defeating and create a situation which makes the problems they're supposed to address worse.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, some religious cults practiced sacred prostitution as an instrument to recruit new converts. Among them was the alleged cult Children of God, also known as The Family, who called this practice "Flirty Fishing". They later abolished the practice due to the growing AIDS epidemic.
Actually:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_prostitution
The current generation of religious nutters seem to be all about avoiding sex but not all religions are like that.
To the extent that people who's ancestors drank beer are much more able to deal with alcohol than those who's ancestors didn't.
That sounds far too lamarckian.
So make that.
To the extent that people who's ancestors drank a lot of beer and survived are much more able to deal with alcohol than those who's ancestors were never exposed to alcohol.
Why the focus on P2P?
Surely it would be better to target all malware writers who silently install ANY software on your computer and use your bandwidth without your knowledge.
Is it really better if it's an FTP server the malware installs rather than a bittorrent client?
Let he who is without copyright infringement cast the first takedown notice.
Do you think you'll ever get over the trauma? :D
In other news properties in the game of monopoly are to be rent controlled.
Infractions shall be a matter for civil court and anyone who actually does manage to build a monopoly shall be subject to unfair trading practices legislation.
oh for gods sake.
I'm not talking about just keeping existing fields pumping. the existance of tar sands or the econimcs of them becoming economic to extract oil from does not do anything to existing fields.
I'm refering to massive quantities of lower quality sources of oil like tar sands.
It costs more to extract the oil but there's a lot more oil there.
A lot of things which were economic to run while oil was cheaper become less and less economic to run and usage drops off.
A child could understand this.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_economics.html
The relatives of dead crack dealers can get death benefits.
The crack dealers themselves can get a regular paycheck(though it's crappy pay since crack dealing isn't a high skill job).
If you're a really good virus writer, I mean really really good you can make a lot of money.
If you're good at finding exploits you can make good money selling them to the highest bidder through third parties who check the exploit to make sure it works and who hold the cash in escrow(they take a cut just like ebay).
Crime does pay despite the contrary claims.
Some trivial problems you can brute force sure but most of the interesting problems will leave you sitting waiting till the heat death of the universe before you'll see any output.