I would urge Yahoo to change the terms of service to allow survivors access to email of those who die. It's good public relations. All Yahoo should need is a copy of the death certificate or some other paperwork to release the emails.
The other possibility is they are stonewalling because the Dept. of Defense fears or knows there is sensitive info in those emails and doesn't want it released. And Yahoo can't talk about it. If that's the case then the emails should be turned over to DoD and censored as needed and the rest returned to the family.
No one quite knows the exact point when high-tech marketing went wrong.
I do. About two seconds after the words 'high-tech' and 'marketing' were merged in the acorn sized brain of a marketer. Due to their limited storage capacity any relevant technical information was squeezed out and replaced with marketing slogans. He/She/It thus completely divorced from reality was provided with the ability to create a marketing strategy unecumbered by facts.
"NASA announced that they will enter, in cooperation with Caltech, a 50ft robot in the Rose Bowl Parade - unfortunately it will be made entirely of flowers
It looks like a giant flower covered robot Barney. It will induce nausea and vomiting as it sings Disney's "It's a Small World After All" along the entire parade route.
Too keep them from eating your food simply have them stock the larder with things only you will eat like sour cream herring or fruitcake ( though it's been rumored that fruitcake has been banned from orbit because it can survive reentry and used as a kinetic energy weapon. Or better yet put something unidentifiable in the food stores. As the esteemed philosopher George Carlin would say "Could be meat. Could be cake? It's meatcake!"
I know it's morbid curiosity, but I wonder if this disaster has affected the communication systems used for call centers in India. Do they use satellite? undersea cables? Do they come from the east or the west? (I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment) Even if the lines are not physically affected I suspect the traffic on them has skyrocketed.
As time goes by the destructive force of earthquakes, volcanoes and storms are unlikely to change, but what has changed and changing is the increasing number of people that can be affected by such events.
It'll be days before we know the true cost in human lives not to mention economically. The estimates of dead keep going up, but I wouldn't be surprised if it goes down. One can only hope. With so many people living on the edge in Southeast Asia, literally, it'll be a long time before many of the areas recover.
They want you to wear tin foil hats. It enhances the ability of the orbital mind control lasers to control you. The only sure protection is to shove your head up your ass.
Well, that explains alot. It explains why people run red lights, why people use ambulances and fire trucks on emergency runs to get into and out traffic, and why the fuck people driving SUV's don't pay attention while talking on their goddamn cell phones. It has mutated the DNA in their brains into one giant asshole.
My brother-in-law Chad is grateful there were no jokes at his expense this time around. We couldn't decide if he was a pregnant Chad, a swinging door Chad, or a dangling Chad. Only my sister would know that one. Well, all I can say is DieBold,Die!
With the right technology and connections learners of minority languages can help each other learn and maintain their skills when no one else is available.
Environmentalism (as opposed to conservation) has deteriorated into a religion
That's Ok. Conservatism has been taken over by religion. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. George W. Bush is arguably the most religious president in history. I'll bet I can point to more conservative churches than you can point to environmentalist churches.
They can't possibly be conservatives anyway. Why? They don't seem to be conserving energy or resources or nature or government.
sit back and watch the zealot fireworks show.
The only people that are bigger zealots than the Bush administration are Israel's gov't. at #2 and Al Qaeda at #1. And boy oh boy are they putting on a helluva fireworks show! Environmentalists are a distant #4.
If Ursula were dead, she'd be spinning in her grave. I wonder how much energy could be generated by dead authors turning in their graves by Hollywood destroying their works. Asimov (I Robot), Heinlein (The Puppet Masters), Dick (Total Recall), Herbert (Dune miniseries) could probably generate enough energy to power a small city. Maybe Hollywood could reduce our dependence on foreign oil by churning out more awful adaptations of great novels by dead authors. We'll never run out of dead authors nor Hollywood's perverse zeal for trashing great works.
A thousand scientists say the sky is falling. It must be true!
If it weren't for global warming, the Earth wouldn't have come out of the last ice age 12,000 years ago and raised the sea level a few hundred feet. Global warming keeps the Earth from becoming one big iceball. And if it weren't for human additions to global warming, we wouldn't be able to drill for oil in the Arctic in the coming decade or two. Gotta have gas for my Ford Expedition even if I have to pay $1.65 or more a gallon for it. And if the sea rises some more who really needs Holland and a bunch of dykes anyway? Let them all move to Germania or Belgium. They'll probably freeze anyway when the melting polar and Greenland ice disrupts the Gulf Stream and prevents warm water from getting to Europe.
It sounds more convincing than say a thousand chicken little say the sky is falling. I've heard the scientific boys cry wolf one to many times and I don't care any more. They like the Cassandra reporters are ignored. I've read enough to be convinced that humans have added to global warming. But beating people over the head with arguments like this only serve to alienate those who need to be persuaded.
Arguments from authority can be effective but 99 time out of a 100 they aren't.
A thousand people is NOT a massive layoff. Sucks to be them regardless. A massive layoff would be in the tens of thousands.
I can imagine a new AOL commercial. Instead of thousands of clueless AOLusers standing outside their offices, I see thousands of former AOL employees wanting their jobs back.
Personally I'd like to see all call center jobs replaced by AI IVR's.
I for one would welcome our new AI Call Center Overlords!
as many as 50 percent of the IT operational jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades
Half the IT jobs in the US are already gone! Or are they saying half of what is left is going. Well, there goes my hope of a second dot.com bubble. Darn!
Tulsa, Oklahoma is a call center mecca. There are 80 plus call centers here. Some are small but most employ hundreds. It's about the only thing left after all the other industries imploded (oil, aviation, telecommunications). These jobs typically pay $8-$10/hr which isn't a bad wage for someone with only a high school education. The work itself is another matter.
They are cubicle sweathshops. Poor training coupled with the most micromanaged industry in the known Universe creates a highly stressed work environment where employment is measured in months. Turnover is high but they can always turn around and get a job at another call center for a few more months. With so many people out of work from formerly high paying jobs they have a ready supply of desperate workers.
The best selling point for outsourcing to Oklahoma is that it's like an emerging third world country, but here at home. It's mostly rural with pockets of high technology. The cost of living is low. It's in the central time zone so they only have to get up an hour earlier to take calls from the East coast and stay two hours later to take calls from the West coast. And most people have a high school education. And best of all they speak English even if it has an Okie twang to it.
It's ironic that some are paranoid that their purchases are tracked electronically, but that others are also paranoid that their votes cannot be tracked electronically.
Move along. These aren't the votes you are looking for.
I wish I had a patent for filing software patents. That way anyone filing for a software patent would be infringing on my patent and I could sue them if they didn't pay me royalties for filing their patent.
Och. Tha mi duilich. Gabh mo leisgeul. Chan eil me a' tuigsinn agus chan eil fhios agam. Tha mi ag ionnsachadh Beurla. Ciamar a channas tu pàiste anns a' Bheurla?
I had no problems with AT&T Wireless. I did, however, have a big problem with Crapular, er ah Cingular, and refused to become one of their customers. I ported my number to SprintPCS. I know they have the 2nd worst customer service, but they had what I needed, and I know how to work their call center system. Alas, Verizon doesn't service my state so I couldn't pick them. It's interesting that Verizon used to be GTE, perhaps the worst telephone company to have ever existed. But they merged with Nynex and apparently have a good reputation now. Well, US Worst, er US West, er no now Qwest had the most horror stories that I heard for a landline phone company and Cingular the worst for a cell phone company.
To paraphrase George Orwell's Animal Farm: "All phone companies are evil. Some are more evil than others."
since CO2 levels leaped up 2 ppm in the past two years as global warming becomes more of a reality.
Umnuh...If it weren't for methane (from cow farts), C02, and water vapor in the air, Earth would be frozen solid. Global warming IS a reality. Would you really have us go back to a
Snowball Earth. The global environment is experiencing dramatic change, much of it influenced by human activity. Any problems will take care of itself if humans don't work to make it sustainable for themselves. And the cockroaches at last will achieve ascendancy.
Despite Wal-Mart destroying small town businesses and lowering people's wages, I think they should be given a big hand and puttin' the smack on the record labels.
Note. Most of this is pretty boring except for the last bit.
I was lucky enough to visit Swizterland this summer. Spent most of my time around Geneva. Saw the
CERN visitor center, and saw the very first web server, a NeXT cube. Waited too late to get reservations in time to get the full tour. Anyway, this whole business of the cows eating trees to clear the mountain views sounds a bit odd. I really doubt the Swiss are that stupid. We went and saw the Matterhorn and the only thing that obscured the view was clouds. It finally cleared up enough so we could see 90% of the mountain. Zermatt was like a big Disney attraction with lots of Japanese tourists.
I visited Gruyere and saw the castle and the H.R. Giger Museum.. He's one sick puppy. Had a beer at his Giger Bar. That was cool. Gruyere is of course famous for it's cheese. We took the took the tour of the cheese factory at the base of the mountain. We had an electronic device that we could punch in a number and hear the narration for each station. Our narrator was Cherry the Cow.She informed us when drinking her milk you could taste EVERYTHING she's ever eaten.
Thank God we don't drink dog's milk or we'd be able taste everything they've ever eaten or excreted and eaten or vomited and eaten or drank out of the toilet.
Slashdot Mirror
I would urge Yahoo to change the terms of service to allow survivors access to email of those who die. It's good public relations. All Yahoo should need is a copy of the death certificate or some other paperwork to release the emails.
The other possibility is they are stonewalling because the Dept. of Defense fears or knows there is sensitive info in those emails and doesn't want it released. And Yahoo can't talk about it. If that's the case then the emails should be turned over to DoD and censored as needed and the rest returned to the family.
Anyone can understand English so long as you speak loudly and slowly enough. Time and time again, American tourists have proven this the world over.
No one quite knows the exact point when high-tech marketing went wrong.
I do. About two seconds after the words 'high-tech' and 'marketing' were merged in the acorn sized brain of a marketer. Due to their limited storage capacity any relevant technical information was squeezed out and replaced with marketing slogans. He/She/It thus completely divorced from reality was provided with the ability to create a marketing strategy unecumbered by facts.
"NASA announced that they will enter, in cooperation with Caltech, a 50ft robot in the Rose Bowl Parade - unfortunately it will be made entirely of flowers
It looks like a giant flower covered robot Barney. It will induce nausea and vomiting as it sings Disney's "It's a Small World After All" along the entire parade route.
Too keep them from eating your food simply have them stock the larder with things only you will eat like sour cream herring or fruitcake ( though it's been rumored that fruitcake has been banned from orbit because it can survive reentry and used as a kinetic energy weapon. Or better yet put something unidentifiable in the food stores. As the esteemed philosopher George Carlin would say "Could be meat. Could be cake? It's meatcake!"
"Are you going to eat that?"
I know it's morbid curiosity, but I wonder if this disaster has affected the communication systems used for call centers in India. Do they use satellite? undersea cables? Do they come from the east or the west? (I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment) Even if the lines are not physically affected I suspect the traffic on them has skyrocketed.
As time goes by the destructive force of earthquakes, volcanoes and storms are unlikely to change, but what has changed and changing is the increasing number of people that can be affected by such events.
It'll be days before we know the true cost in human lives not to mention economically. The estimates of dead keep going up, but I wouldn't be surprised if it goes down. One can only hope. With so many people living on the edge in Southeast Asia, literally, it'll be a long time before many of the areas recover.
They want you to wear tin foil hats. It enhances the ability of the orbital mind control lasers to control you. The only sure protection is to shove your head up your ass.
I for one welcome our new RFID overlords.
study linking cell phone use to DNA Damage.
Well, that explains alot. It explains why people run red lights, why people use ambulances and fire trucks on emergency runs to get into and out traffic, and why the fuck people driving SUV's don't pay attention while talking on their goddamn cell phones. It has mutated the DNA in their brains into one giant asshole.
My brother-in-law Chad is grateful there were no jokes at his expense this time around. We couldn't decide if he was a pregnant Chad, a swinging door Chad, or a dangling Chad. Only my sister would know that one. Well, all I can say is DieBold,Die!
'The disc will present itself as a CD-ROM to PCs, a Mac CD-ROM to Mac computers, a VCD to DVD players and CDDA disc to audio CD players.
I for one welcome our new XCP Overlords.
With the right technology and connections learners of minority languages can help each other learn and maintain their skills when no one else is available.
Environmentalism (as opposed to conservation) has deteriorated into a religion
That's Ok. Conservatism has been taken over by religion. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. George W. Bush is arguably the most religious president in history. I'll bet I can point to more conservative churches than you can point to environmentalist churches.
They can't possibly be conservatives anyway. Why? They don't seem to be conserving energy or resources or nature or government.
sit back and watch the zealot fireworks show.
The only people that are bigger zealots than the Bush administration are Israel's gov't. at #2 and Al Qaeda at #1. And boy oh boy are they putting on a helluva fireworks show! Environmentalists are a distant #4.
If Ursula were dead, she'd be spinning in her grave. I wonder how much energy could be generated by dead authors turning in their graves by Hollywood destroying their works. Asimov (I Robot), Heinlein (The Puppet Masters), Dick (Total Recall), Herbert (Dune miniseries) could probably generate enough energy to power a small city. Maybe Hollywood could reduce our dependence on foreign oil by churning out more awful adaptations of great novels by dead authors. We'll never run out of dead authors nor Hollywood's perverse zeal for trashing great works.
A thousand scientists say the sky is falling. It must be true!
If it weren't for global warming, the Earth wouldn't have come out of the last ice age 12,000 years ago and raised the sea level a few hundred feet. Global warming keeps the Earth from becoming one big iceball. And if it weren't for human additions to global warming, we wouldn't be able to drill for oil in the Arctic in the coming decade or two. Gotta have gas for my Ford Expedition even if I have to pay $1.65 or more a gallon for it. And if the sea rises some more who really needs Holland and a bunch of dykes anyway? Let them all move to Germania or Belgium. They'll probably freeze anyway when the melting polar and Greenland ice disrupts the Gulf Stream and prevents warm water from getting to Europe.
It sounds more convincing than say a thousand chicken little say the sky is falling. I've heard the scientific boys cry wolf one to many times and I don't care any more. They like the Cassandra reporters are ignored. I've read enough to be convinced that humans have added to global warming. But beating people over the head with arguments like this only serve to alienate those who need to be persuaded. Arguments from authority can be effective but 99 time out of a 100 they aren't.
A thousand people is NOT a massive layoff. Sucks to be them regardless. A massive layoff would be in the tens of thousands.
I can imagine a new AOL commercial. Instead of thousands of clueless AOLusers standing outside their offices, I see thousands of former AOL employees wanting their jobs back.
Personally I'd like to see all call center jobs replaced by AI IVR's.
I for one would welcome our new AI Call Center Overlords!
as many as 50 percent of the IT operational jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades
Half the IT jobs in the US are already gone! Or are they saying half of what is left is going. Well, there goes my hope of a second dot.com bubble. Darn!
Tulsa, Oklahoma is a call center mecca. There are 80 plus call centers here. Some are small but most employ hundreds. It's about the only thing left after all the other industries imploded (oil, aviation, telecommunications). These jobs typically pay $8-$10/hr which isn't a bad wage for someone with only a high school education. The work itself is another matter.
They are cubicle sweathshops. Poor training coupled with the most micromanaged industry in the known Universe creates a highly stressed work environment where employment is measured in months. Turnover is high but they can always turn around and get a job at another call center for a few more months. With so many people out of work from formerly high paying jobs they have a ready supply of desperate workers.
The best selling point for outsourcing to Oklahoma is that it's like an emerging third world country, but here at home. It's mostly rural with pockets of high technology. The cost of living is low. It's in the central time zone so they only have to get up an hour earlier to take calls from the East coast and stay two hours later to take calls from the West coast. And most people have a high school education. And best of all they speak English even if it has an Okie twang to it.
It's ironic that some are paranoid that their purchases are tracked electronically, but that others are also paranoid that their votes cannot be tracked electronically.
Move along. These aren't the votes you are looking for.
I wish I had a patent for filing software patents. That way anyone filing for a software patent would be infringing on my patent and I could sue them if they didn't pay me royalties for filing their patent.
Och. Tha mi duilich. Gabh mo leisgeul. Chan eil me a' tuigsinn agus chan eil fhios agam. Tha mi ag ionnsachadh Beurla. Ciamar a channas tu pàiste anns a' Bheurla?
Pòg mo thon.
AOL will not sue themselves. After all AIM is loaded with their own unwanted advertising and popups.
I had no problems with AT&T Wireless. I did, however, have a big problem with Crapular, er ah Cingular, and refused to become one of their customers. I ported my number to SprintPCS. I know they have the 2nd worst customer service, but they had what I needed, and I know how to work their call center system. Alas, Verizon doesn't service my state so I couldn't pick them. It's interesting that Verizon used to be GTE, perhaps the worst telephone company to have ever existed. But they merged with Nynex and apparently have a good reputation now. Well, US Worst, er US West, er no now Qwest had the most horror stories that I heard for a landline phone company and Cingular the worst for a cell phone company.
To paraphrase George Orwell's Animal Farm: "All phone companies are evil. Some are more evil than others."
since CO2 levels leaped up 2 ppm in the past two years as global warming becomes more of a reality.
Umnuh...If it weren't for methane (from cow farts), C02, and water vapor in the air, Earth would be frozen solid. Global warming IS a reality. Would you really have us go back to a Snowball Earth. The global environment is experiencing dramatic change, much of it influenced by human activity. Any problems will take care of itself if humans don't work to make it sustainable for themselves. And the cockroaches at last will achieve ascendancy.
Despite Wal-Mart destroying small town businesses and lowering people's wages, I think they should be given a big hand and puttin' the smack on the record labels.
I was lucky enough to visit Swizterland this summer. Spent most of my time around Geneva. Saw the CERN visitor center, and saw the very first web server, a NeXT cube. Waited too late to get reservations in time to get the full tour. Anyway, this whole business of the cows eating trees to clear the mountain views sounds a bit odd. I really doubt the Swiss are that stupid. We went and saw the Matterhorn and the only thing that obscured the view was clouds. It finally cleared up enough so we could see 90% of the mountain. Zermatt was like a big Disney attraction with lots of Japanese tourists.
I visited Gruyere and saw the castle and the H.R. Giger Museum.. He's one sick puppy. Had a beer at his Giger Bar. That was cool. Gruyere is of course famous for it's cheese. We took the took the tour of the cheese factory at the base of the mountain. We had an electronic device that we could punch in a number and hear the narration for each station. Our narrator was Cherry the Cow. She informed us when drinking her milk you could taste EVERYTHING she's ever eaten.
Thank God we don't drink dog's milk or we'd be able taste everything they've ever eaten or excreted and eaten or vomited and eaten or drank out of the toilet.