He wasn't charged with fraud because it wouldn't stick. As much as some people would like "oh noes he lied, that means he committed fraud" to be true, the actual definition is a wee bit more complex.
And the great regulators we have who let cell phone companies get away with false advertising and pretty much everything else.
You see, they aren't going to market this as "BlackBerry 8820, GPS crippled edition", they're going to sell it as an 8820. And then charge you $10 per month to use the GPS.
Just like every other cell phone carrier in the USA has ripped out some features in most of their phones so they can sell some fucking "monthly service" that is vastly inferior to what is built into an uncrippled phone. In each and every single case, the cell phone companies do not make it clear that you're not actually getting the phone on the cell phone manufacturer's website, but a cripple version.
I think it's hilarious that I've been called a right wing shill and a ndp hack in response to the same post. Apparently mouthbreathing nutters like yourself can only go "OMG!@!1 diffrant oppinionz! HESS A [insert whatever here]" Great job! Were you on the debate team in middle school?
Also remember, the population of Vancouver, Victoria, and the next 3 largest cities in BC total 2.8 million. That's 65% of the entire population of the province, with Vancouver comprising 2.1 million of the total alone. I'm pretty sure the recycling program exists THERE.
That's great. Vancouver and Victoria have a bunch of places to drop your stuff off. But large areas have nothing for hundreds of km. If you exclude greater Vancouver and Victoria, the rest of the province have a whopping 16 stations.
This "oh, Vancouver and Victoria have it, fuck the rest of the province" mentality pisses me off. Let me put this in numbers you can understand - cities with over 50,000 people don't have a place to return stuff. That's hardly an effective system in mind - even if someone in Vancouver has one 20 minutes away from their house. If I'm forced to have to pay for something, it would be really nice be able to fucking use it.
Just in case people don't understand how big BC is - it's 357,216 square miles - think California, Nevada and Oregon put together (which total ~366,000 square miles) And while it's population is only 4,352,798, it's still a lot of people.
The BC government plans to cover all that with only 70 locations to turn in materials. Right, whatever.
This is nothing more than blatant thievery by the BC government and "Encorp", the company administering the whole process.
Cisco's reputation has been slowly been suffering in the last few years and this is a huge leap in the wrong direction. Don't get me wrong - most Cisco stuff is still pretty damn good - but there are fairly reasonable alternatives nowadays and a significant amount of their stuff sells because their customers are running all / mostly Cisco infrastructure or someone recommended Cisco.
Putting their name on shitty consumer level DSL routers and 4 port switches isn't going help in the recommendation department - some of you know that purchasing decisions can be easily affected by some person who isn't all that technical (I saw Cisco phones on 24, they must be great!, etc)" Of course, that works the other way too. I've seen people reject proposals w/ 3com because some shitty 3com branded consumer level lemon caused them aggravation at home. 3com isn't top of the line, but it was pretty damn good a few years ago. One Cisco gets their first lemon product - and they will, because consumer equipment is cheap crap mass produced by peasant labour - that will leave a lasting bad taste in the mouths of the people who will make future decisions. And while Cisco consumer stuff might be a bit better than the other crap on the market, "not being as bad as ___________" is a really crappy goal to strive for (and when your competitors suck, it doesn't make a great advertising slogan either)
I don't expect prices to go anywhere but up either - when Cisco started putting their name all over Linksys boxes, the prices went through the roof (unmanaged, stock 16 port switches for $300+?). Same shit, but twice(+) the money. Not cool. People aren't stupid, they will eventually catch on.
I bet some consultant asshole and some fucking buzzwords had something to do with this. "Standardized Branding" ftw.
The students or the cooperations? I kinda would have thought that Universities would do everything in their power to aid thei students en masse.
Hardly. Their policy at http://www.dmca.ku.edu/ states that... University officials reserve the right to access, examine, intercept, monitor and copy the files and/or sessions of any user Copyright apparantly doesn't mean a damn thing to them.
This is typical slashdot behavior. Take everything out of context so everybody can get riled up about it. Sure the front page says 'copyrighted material', you think they'd put the full legalese on the frontpage or just a blurb saying "Its Bad, mkay"? But if anybody would take the time to actually *READ* the subject at hand, you would find this paragraph:
And if you would take the time to actually read http://www.dmca.ku.edu/, you'd see the following. University officials reserve the right to access, examine, intercept, monitor and copy the files and/or sessions of any user Isn't that nice? Under the same "agreement", they can rifle through the contents or your hard drives and copy your files for shits and giggles. Looks like these people are really concerned about copyright.
I'm sure the school will make an effort to notify future students ahead of time. On the other hand, a one strike policy is trivially easy to abuse. It takes only a few people to send out a few dmca letters each and have the entire residential network shut down. Oh... and "tax payers" is one word, you fuckwad.
AnyDVD runs in the background and has an option to strip that shit out. Also kills pretty much every video protection out there. Install, leave running and never touch it again. Combine it w/ DVD Shrink or whatever your favorite ripping app is, and you've got your solution. You can also re-author in DVD shrink and just get the movie stream - sounds like you don't care about the dvd extras in Dumbo and just ripping the movie usually puts you under the 4.7 gb limit. AnyDVD does have a DVD ripper, but the DVD Shrink one gives you a bit more control.
Once you have the vobs, burn copies and let your hellspawns scratch the hell out of them on the wood floor, feed them to the dog or dunk them in the toilet.
Microsoft says the study is not representative of what it's hearing from its customers.
Microsoft owes me a new keyboard:( Between that and "The next version of Office will be worth the wait!" or "Longhorn will be out in Q4 2005, we promise!", I sprayed coke all over my monitor and keyboard...
Software assurance lately hasn't really been worth a damn to businesses. There are more than a few legacy apps that don't work in Vista and few businesses are switching. I know of at least one Microsoft Vista call center that is staying on XP for call logging and business stuff (they give a second pc to techs to play with / walk customers through stuff)
Office 2007 might look different with its magical little orb, but you'd have a real hard time justifying the purchase if you had to pay for an upgrade in a medium sized office at $250+ a seat. Getting it for "free" makes it slightly more attractive, but the downside of retraining employees is still scary for a bunch of businesses - especially when the 2007 file format pack is a pretty small install.
Oh, I agree completely. I was without a phone for over a year now. I have gone back (a bit) to the dark side - I have one from work, but I don't pay for it and virtually never use it.
I now realize I'm a stupid backwards hick that actually looks at his bills before paying them every month. I also realize that I should kill my children and castrate myself to eliminate my defective genes. I understand that people who actually care about a meager incorrect ~$100 charge on a monthly bill are clearly a drain on society and are Too Poor To Live. Good citizens should be able to freely (and silently) give an extra $100 to their cell phone company (for shits and giggles) whenever it is demanded - even if it is during a financially stressful time such as college. Thanks for opening my eyes.
It was dozens of calls a month. Calls to fix errors and calls to ask why the promised changes weren't done. As for switching? Not many alternatives, and I didn't want to get screwed by an ETF.
That would be less than minimum wage, i.e. really not worth your time! Yeah, great, I guess I'll let any company just fuck me in the ass only a little.
Because I had Sprint and had to call in almost every single month - repeatedly - because their billing system would make "mistakes" and their incompetent CSRs would not actually do what they promised they would to fix it. I started tracking the amount refunded near the end of the contract. Well over $150 in "corrections" in about 6 months (this was on 2 lines, but still). I know someone who had a $2800 bill once when their cell phone plan switched "accidentally" from unlimited data to
And if you can't get a 'tard who is complaining because his dumbass kid made a long call to another state off the phone quickly, you suck as a CSR. A dose of reality is all that is needed. CSRs are also allowed to give a few bucks off in cases like that as a sign of goodwill / get the hell off my phone. The calls are infrequent and the cost to the company is so low that even giving 80% off will result in profit.
Yeah, it just isn't worth dealing with customers and resolving their billing errors either. Just close the account and send the bill to collections, regardless of whether it is correct or not. Much easier that way.
And if you have to ask your manager who makes up something on the spot to answer a question, clearly the customer isn't the only one who hasn't read the RTFM. Some people are needy, whiny shitheads, but not everyone who calls a bunch is just doing it to fuck around.
Slashdot Mirror
Next time I go to a small company to do updates, I'll be sure to bring along a windows server to do updates.
Nice... It also works on 2003 server.
and if they don't offer it - a "I lost my credit card" call works really well.
IANAL
Clearly. I found the "criminal intent" bit cute - perhaps you should brush up a bit on the law before posting.
He wasn't charged with fraud because it wouldn't stick.
As much as some people would like "oh noes he lied, that means he committed fraud" to be true, the actual definition is a wee bit more complex.
And the great regulators we have who let cell phone companies get away with false advertising and pretty much everything else.
You see, they aren't going to market this as "BlackBerry 8820, GPS crippled edition", they're going to sell it as an 8820.
And then charge you $10 per month to use the GPS.
Just like every other cell phone carrier in the USA has ripped out some features in most of their phones so they can sell some fucking "monthly service" that is vastly inferior to what is built into an uncrippled phone.
In each and every single case, the cell phone companies do not make it clear that you're not actually getting the phone on the cell phone manufacturer's website, but a cripple version.
I think it's hilarious that I've been called a right wing shill and a ndp hack in response to the same post.
Apparently mouthbreathing nutters like yourself can only go "OMG!@!1 diffrant oppinionz! HESS A [insert whatever here]"
Great job! Were you on the debate team in middle school?
Also remember, the population of Vancouver, Victoria, and the next 3 largest cities in BC total 2.8 million. That's 65% of the entire population of the province, with Vancouver comprising 2.1 million of the total alone. I'm pretty sure the recycling program exists THERE.
That's great. Vancouver and Victoria have a bunch of places to drop your stuff off. But large areas have nothing for hundreds of km. If you exclude greater Vancouver and Victoria, the rest of the province have a whopping 16 stations.
This "oh, Vancouver and Victoria have it, fuck the rest of the province" mentality pisses me off. Let me put this in numbers you can understand - cities with over 50,000 people don't have a place to return stuff. That's hardly an effective system in mind - even if someone in Vancouver has one 20 minutes away from their house. If I'm forced to have to pay for something, it would be really nice be able to fucking use it.
If I had to pay for it and didn't even have the option, I'd say it is fairly significant...
Just in case people don't understand how big BC is - it's 357,216 square miles - think California, Nevada and Oregon put together (which total ~366,000 square miles)
And while it's population is only 4,352,798, it's still a lot of people.
The BC government plans to cover all that with only 70 locations to turn in materials.
Right, whatever.
This is nothing more than blatant thievery by the BC government and "Encorp", the company administering the whole process.
Cisco's reputation has been slowly been suffering in the last few years and this is a huge leap in the wrong direction.
Don't get me wrong - most Cisco stuff is still pretty damn good - but there are fairly reasonable alternatives nowadays and a significant amount of their stuff sells because their customers are running all / mostly Cisco infrastructure or someone recommended Cisco.
Putting their name on shitty consumer level DSL routers and 4 port switches isn't going help in the recommendation department - some of you know that purchasing decisions can be easily affected by some person who isn't all that technical (I saw Cisco phones on 24, they must be great!, etc)"
Of course, that works the other way too. I've seen people reject proposals w/ 3com because some shitty 3com branded consumer level lemon caused them aggravation at home. 3com isn't top of the line, but it was pretty damn good a few years ago.
One Cisco gets their first lemon product - and they will, because consumer equipment is cheap crap mass produced by peasant labour - that will leave a lasting bad taste in the mouths of the people who will make future decisions. And while Cisco consumer stuff might be a bit better than the other crap on the market, "not being as bad as ___________" is a really crappy goal to strive for (and when your competitors suck, it doesn't make a great advertising slogan either)
I don't expect prices to go anywhere but up either - when Cisco started putting their name all over Linksys boxes, the prices went through the roof (unmanaged, stock 16 port switches for $300+?). Same shit, but twice(+) the money. Not cool. People aren't stupid, they will eventually catch on.
I bet some consultant asshole and some fucking buzzwords had something to do with this.
"Standardized Branding" ftw.
The students or the cooperations? I kinda would have thought that Universities would do everything in their power to aid thei students en masse.
Hardly. Their policy at http://www.dmca.ku.edu/ states that...
University officials reserve the right to access, examine, intercept, monitor and copy the files and/or sessions of any user
Copyright apparantly doesn't mean a damn thing to them.
This is typical slashdot behavior. Take everything out of context so everybody can get riled up about it. Sure the front page says 'copyrighted material', you think they'd put the full legalese on the frontpage or just a blurb saying "Its Bad, mkay"?
But if anybody would take the time to actually *READ* the subject at hand, you would find this paragraph:
And if you would take the time to actually read http://www.dmca.ku.edu/, you'd see the following.
University officials reserve the right to access, examine, intercept, monitor and copy the files and/or sessions of any user
Isn't that nice? Under the same "agreement", they can rifle through the contents or your hard drives and copy your files for shits and giggles. Looks like these people are really concerned about copyright.
I'm sure the school will make an effort to notify future students ahead of time.
On the other hand, a one strike policy is trivially easy to abuse. It takes only a few people to send out a few dmca letters each and have the entire residential network shut down.
Oh... and "tax payers" is one word, you fuckwad.
Although I don't want to sound glib, we are talking about the University of Kansas.
Not exactly MIT if you know what I mean...
AnyDVD runs in the background and has an option to strip that shit out. Also kills pretty much every video protection out there. Install, leave running and never touch it again.
Combine it w/ DVD Shrink or whatever your favorite ripping app is, and you've got your solution.
You can also re-author in DVD shrink and just get the movie stream - sounds like you don't care about the dvd extras in Dumbo and just ripping the movie usually puts you under the 4.7 gb limit.
AnyDVD does have a DVD ripper, but the DVD Shrink one gives you a bit more control.
Once you have the vobs, burn copies and let your hellspawns scratch the hell out of them on the wood floor, feed them to the dog or dunk them in the toilet.
Windows only, but simple.
Microsoft says the study is not representative of what it's hearing from its customers.
:(
Microsoft owes me a new keyboard
Between that and "The next version of Office will be worth the wait!" or "Longhorn will be out in Q4 2005, we promise!", I sprayed coke all over my monitor and keyboard...
Software assurance lately hasn't really been worth a damn to businesses. There are more than a few legacy apps that don't work in Vista and few businesses are switching. I know of at least one Microsoft Vista call center that is staying on XP for call logging and business stuff (they give a second pc to techs to play with / walk customers through stuff)
Office 2007 might look different with its magical little orb, but you'd have a real hard time justifying the purchase if you had to pay for an upgrade in a medium sized office at $250+ a seat. Getting it for "free" makes it slightly more attractive, but the downside of retraining employees is still scary for a bunch of businesses - especially when the 2007 file format pack is a pretty small install.
Oh, I agree completely.
I was without a phone for over a year now.
I have gone back (a bit) to the dark side - I have one from work, but I don't pay for it and virtually never use it.
I now realize I'm a stupid backwards hick that actually looks at his bills before paying them every month. I also realize that I should kill my children and castrate myself to eliminate my defective genes.
I understand that people who actually care about a meager incorrect ~$100 charge on a monthly bill are clearly a drain on society and are Too Poor To Live.
Good citizens should be able to freely (and silently) give an extra $100 to their cell phone company (for shits and giggles) whenever it is demanded - even if it is during a financially stressful time such as college.
Thanks for opening my eyes.
Except, you fuckwit, you can't - because of mandatory arbitration.
It was dozens of calls a month. Calls to fix errors and calls to ask why the promised changes weren't done. As for switching? Not many alternatives, and I didn't want to get screwed by an ETF.
That would be less than minimum wage, i.e. really not worth your time!
Yeah, great, I guess I'll let any company just fuck me in the ass only a little.
Because I had Sprint and had to call in almost every single month - repeatedly - because their billing system would make "mistakes" and their incompetent CSRs would not actually do what they promised they would to fix it.
I started tracking the amount refunded near the end of the contract. Well over $150 in "corrections" in about 6 months (this was on 2 lines, but still). I know someone who had a $2800 bill once when their cell phone plan switched "accidentally" from unlimited data to
And if you can't get a 'tard who is complaining because his dumbass kid made a long call to another state off the phone quickly, you suck as a CSR. A dose of reality is all that is needed. CSRs are also allowed to give a few bucks off in cases like that as a sign of goodwill / get the hell off my phone. The calls are infrequent and the cost to the company is so low that even giving 80% off will result in profit.
$200 "early termination" fees.
In addition to the incorrect bill, which you'll pay or have sent to collections (and pay)...
Now they just send your bill to a collections agency.
Yeah, it just isn't worth dealing with customers and resolving their billing errors either.
Just close the account and send the bill to collections, regardless of whether it is correct or not.
Much easier that way.
And if you have to ask your manager who makes up something on the spot to answer a question, clearly the customer isn't the only one who hasn't read the RTFM.
Some people are needy, whiny shitheads, but not everyone who calls a bunch is just doing it to fuck around.