Dragoon421's "EB" store and the one in the article are individual stores not indicative of the entire company.
Actually, they provably are.
If this had been an abberration, then EB heaquarters could have fulfilled their duty by providing the victim with restitution and then some to apologize. A spare gamecube and a handful of games probably would have turned this woman into a fan for life -- at the very least, it would have shown a jury you weren't trying to profit by receiving stolen property. It goes without saying that the punishment against the store manager and franchise owner should have been Draconian to say the least.
Instead, EB headquarters endorsed the local manager's decision to deal in stolen property. Therefore, the crime attaches to them and they should be sitting at the defendant's table.
More importantly, as a man with several children, nieces and nephews, the words "EB" and "thief" have forever been linked in my mind.
Way to go, guys. You took a small local problem and turned it into a national embarrassment. Brilliant.
Wow, that's genuinely surprising considering previous statements by Ballmer, et al. Again, I'm not picking an argument, just wondering what stuff that might be?
The crisis point you're looking for is the invention of the telegraph, which allowed "real-time" information across vast distances for the first time in history.
It led to a massive explosion of "micromanagement" by the bosses back in headquarters who understood little or nothing of conditions on the ground faced by the front line. Local managers who previously had enough authority and "slack" to carve profitable operations suddenly faced unprecendented meddling by ambitious "newbies" who neither spoke the local language nor even tried to understand the local conditions.
When something went right, some schmuck at headquarters took credit for it. When it went wrong, as it almost invariably did, failures were blamed entirely on local personnel.
Not a few of the fall guys wrote long, detailed, bitter postmortems. Look 'em up.
How about we get all the illegal aliens out of the country and lock down the borders.
Got a map handy? Maybe a globe? A copy of a RISK game board would do.
Look at our Northern border. Damn. Stretches thousands of miles, doesn't it? Did you know that since there are no natural obstacles, like say, a horrific uncrossable chasm, any schmuck with a pair of hiking boots can just walk right in?
Now look South. Yep, that big long blue line is the Rio Grande, one of our natural borders to the South. Guess what? You can wade across the bloody thing. The biggest natural obstacle to entering the US is the Southwestern desert of Arizona and New Mexico.
Why do I think that a bunch of Arab terrorists might be familiar with living in desert conditions?
By the way, the War on Drugs has been trying, with fairly serious military hardware, to "seal the border" for years, which of course is why no one could possibly buy anything illicit in a heartland city like St. Louis.
The US is not Japan, a nation with fairly stiff natural borders. Hell, we're not even Armenia.
Say it with me. We could have an army of sleepless "Squiddies" from "The Matrix" patrolling the North, and an army of Terminators and HKs patrolling the South (Yeah, I know, Reese thinks the HKs are easy to dust)...
... and we still would not have a prayer of "sealing the borders."
I must own over a hundred DVDs, and not once have I had a DVD go bad or otherwise become unusable.
You've been fortunate. I had movers brtualize a box containing -- guess what -- my DVDs. Those little plastic discs aren't exactly made out of kevlar.
Have you ever heard of "insurance?" You make backups just in case something bad happens.
But more importantly, it really is a matter of law. We have the right to make backups, and the various industries have been doing their damndest to erode that right. You need to keep in mind that the reason we give corporations tax breaks and other legal favors is that they all swore in their corporate charters to benefit society as a whole.
Yeah, they did. Look it up. It's black-letter boilerplate in every corporate charter. It's the whole reason we allow corporations to exist in the first place. We shield them from legal liability and reduce their tax burden, and in return, they are supposed to benefit us all.
If there's one bullshit meme I wish I could stomp out tomorrow, it's that nonsense that corporations have no responsibility except to their bottom line. I remember when Icann, Pickens and their ilk started that nonsense back in the 70's and the first time they said it, they got laughed out of the room.
Never thought I'd see the day when I had to convince someone they had a right to do what they wished with their own property.
I also saw the video, and while Dudley's clearly being obnoxious, the officer lacks the social skills needed for the job.
But that's not what disturbs me about this tape.
What disturbs me about this tape is an large armed man wearing a uniform smashing a small girl into the ground like he's having some WWF flashback.
The girl is predictably, understandably upset, and could have easily been restrained without harm. Your average high school literature teacher could have coped with this without breaking a sweat.
Instead, 220 lb Officer Friendly decided his only recourse was to beat this girl down. He's lucky he didn't break her neck.
Does anyone know if there were ever any consequences for this assault?
Just had a box in the office go down. Turns out the power supply went and took the motherboard with it.
A couple months before I'd added a wifi card to the box because the boss didn't like the way the network cable looked.
Boom. Windows product activation came up. I had to get on the phone and fight for a new license number.
Anyone else worry about what Windows product activation will do to the "swap it and see" technician?
What these people mean to say is "You have a strong influence over your own reality, and you tend to shape your life based on how you perceive it."
For example, I know one guy from an upper-middle class background. He's had plenty of opportunities, good parents, good education, etc. He's no movie star, but his looks certainly wouldn't count against him.
His problem is that he sees the absolutely bleakest intepretation of ay given event. A want ad for a dream job is Fate taunting him. A woman smiles at him and he's already experiencing the agony of a horrible breakup. The sun shines and he calculates the increased risk of skin cancer. If it rains, he's probably going to hydroplane out of control and die in a horrible car crash on the way home.
Needless to say, he botches job interviews, connects romantically mostly with head cases, and finds more and more people forget to return his phone calls.
This of course confirms his view of the world, prompting even more depression and the cycle spirals downward.
This is what most rational people mean by "creating your own reality." People who are generally friendly, confident and pleasantly outgoing tend to find more romantic and business opportunities than those who are generally morose, depressed and unpleasant.
To put it a mroe geek way, who would you rather work with -- Marvin the Paranoid Android or R2? Even though R2 is a far less powerful machine?
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but at some point we just have to have some level of trust in other people.
Except that you're not understanding the implications of group psychology, "groupthink." Most people in the world tend to separate into "groups." Once they do, a mindset develops of "one of us" or "one of them."
For example -- We're geeks, they're lusers.
Several studies have been done about this, and it seems almost any distinction, no matter how trivial, will do. "Part of our company, not part of our company" works great for this.
Once you're "one of us," all of "them" start to lose their humanity in your eyes. You tend to stop thinking of them as people and your empathy for them goes WAY down. Your feelings of superiority as one of The Elect go way up.
This is one reason why police departments tend to forget "protect and serve" and start thinking in terms of "us vs. the civilians."
The executives at Tivo long ago quit thinking of you as a person. You don't exist as a fellow human being in their eyes. You're a "viewer." They know what's best for your data, and anything they do with it is right, proper and moral BY DEFINITION in their eyes. After all, they're the clever and successful Tivo entreprenuers, you're the grubby, beer-guzzling, trailer-park-dwelling TV viewer.
You don't even need to introduce the concept of greed to see how horrendous abuses could begin.
The bottom line: You absolutely cannot trust anybody with any of your information, even when the information is pretty much worthless. If you do have to trust them with it, abusing it had better be a federal offense, and even then problems and incidents will still come up.
Oh, Absolutely. I've personally just got a shipment of a dozen of these rare old boxes just in from Chekoslahungary, so check out my new auction here. Here's your chance to own a piece of history...
"Yeah, I hate complicated stuff. Finishing up my master's in EE damn near killed me, and you wouldn't believe how complicated THAT got. Of course, now I can get a real job that doesn't involve wearing a nametag."
What's next? Submit your work to a business which does the grading?
Um... Hate to break this to you... but that's already a common practice for a number of academic achievement/aptitude tests. Open up the paper in any large college town and you'll find ads for test graders, must have MA, starting pay $10/hr.
Yet another geek who thought History class wasn't worth his time...
Do yourself a favor. Google "J. Edgar Hoover" and then "Nixon." Read about it for awhile. If you still think the FBI is staffed entirely by Mulder, Scully and Starling, Google, oh pulling one notorious name out of the air, "Pinkerton," and pay close attention to how they often co-opted law enforcement.
The Short Version: The Founding Fathers gave law enforcement very limited powers for extremely good reason.
It's rarely (sic) that you get it so "in your face" as you do it in maths. There's no historical relativity, no real defense. They were smarter than you, plain and simple.
Let's suppose that an angel appeared to your mother before you were born and asked her what gifts God should give to her child.
She, like all mothers, responds, "Please just let my child be healthy."
"Done," says the Angel, "but come on, surely you would like more for your child than that."
"Well," says your mother, "let my child be smarter than most."
"Of course," says the Angel, blithely giving you an IQ of 101. "But wouldn't you like more? I am, after all, an Angel and can grant quite a bit."
"Well," says your Mother, afraid to push her luck, "let my child be one out of a thousand."
The Angel smiles as if at a small child and says "Wouldn't one in a million be better?"
"Yes," says your Mother, scarcely believing her luck, "yes, let me child be one in a million. One in ten million," she blurts out impulsively, and then immediately cows a bit, fearing she's asked too much.
"Yes," says the Angel, "I think we can do one in ten million," as he ascends to Heaven. Your mother can't believe her fortunes. Her child will be the smartest person in ten million.
Which means there are about 25 people in the US alone Right Now who can intellectually make you their bitch, another dozen or two in Europe, while India and China have so many they could field a soccer league and not pick you for any teams.
And throughout all recorded history?
And suppose the Angel had made you the smartest throughout History? The responsibility would probably have crushed you like a bug.
At least, thinking of it this way helps me keep my ego in what little tatters are left.
While it's unfortunate that Apple didn't have a battery replacement/warranty program when those two gentlemen made their movie, that is no longer an issue now.
Do you honestly believe Apple would be replacing batteries at all right now had these two gentlemen not gotten nationwide press?
hard problems ... human factors
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Did it ever occur to you that maybe the "human factors" are a "hard problem?"
I know a man who smoked two packs a day for 80 years. Never a hint of cancer.
So, there you go, proof poitive that lung cancer doesn't come from smoking.
My wife, despite a lifetime of reading in poor light and heavy computer use, can still count the rings around Saturn without a telescope.
So, there you go, proof positive that my so-called need for glasses is all in my head and Bausch and Lomb is scamming me.
Myself, I've walked away from two catastrophic car accidents in my life, so I can tell you for fact certain that no one ever died from being hit by a car.
Science and Schlock walk into a Hollywood pitch meeting.
Science: The Universe is basically comprehensible and mostly observable. We're going to offer you the chance to flog the living hell out of the data for a few generations until you finally understand what you're looking at. Of course, this won't be tedious. Here, listen to Carl Sagan talk about how we are "billions and billions of star-stuff."
Schlock: I got witches, ghosts, werewolves, jedis, vampires, superheroes, damsels in distress, and action heroes whose clips never run out of bullets. Oh, and breasts, I got breasts too. I got wish-fulfillment like you wouldn't believe.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they provably are.
If this had been an abberration, then EB heaquarters could have fulfilled their duty by providing the victim with restitution and then some to apologize. A spare gamecube and a handful of games probably would have turned this woman into a fan for life -- at the very least, it would have shown a jury you weren't trying to profit by receiving stolen property. It goes without saying that the punishment against the store manager and franchise owner should have been Draconian to say the least.
Instead, EB headquarters endorsed the local manager's decision to deal in stolen property. Therefore, the crime attaches to them and they should be sitting at the defendant's table.
More importantly, as a man with several children, nieces and nephews, the words "EB" and "thief" have forever been linked in my mind.
Way to go, guys. You took a small local problem and turned it into a national embarrassment. Brilliant.
Wow, that's genuinely surprising considering previous statements by Ballmer, et al. Again, I'm not picking an argument, just wondering what stuff that might be?
Which programs has Microsoft GPL'ed?
It led to a massive explosion of "micromanagement" by the bosses back in headquarters who understood little or nothing of conditions on the ground faced by the front line. Local managers who previously had enough authority and "slack" to carve profitable operations suddenly faced unprecendented meddling by ambitious "newbies" who neither spoke the local language nor even tried to understand the local conditions.
When something went right, some schmuck at headquarters took credit for it. When it went wrong, as it almost invariably did, failures were blamed entirely on local personnel.
Not a few of the fall guys wrote long, detailed, bitter postmortems. Look 'em up.
Got a map handy? Maybe a globe? A copy of a RISK game board would do.
Look at our Northern border. Damn. Stretches thousands of miles, doesn't it? Did you know that since there are no natural obstacles, like say, a horrific uncrossable chasm, any schmuck with a pair of hiking boots can just walk right in?
Now look South. Yep, that big long blue line is the Rio Grande, one of our natural borders to the South. Guess what? You can wade across the bloody thing. The biggest natural obstacle to entering the US is the Southwestern desert of Arizona and New Mexico.
Why do I think that a bunch of Arab terrorists might be familiar with living in desert conditions?
By the way, the War on Drugs has been trying, with fairly serious military hardware, to "seal the border" for years, which of course is why no one could possibly buy anything illicit in a heartland city like St. Louis.
The US is not Japan, a nation with fairly stiff natural borders. Hell, we're not even Armenia.
Say it with me. We could have an army of sleepless "Squiddies" from "The Matrix" patrolling the North, and an army of Terminators and HKs patrolling the South (Yeah, I know, Reese thinks the HKs are easy to dust) ...
How about if I just say "AMEN?"
You've been fortunate. I had movers brtualize a box containing -- guess what -- my DVDs. Those little plastic discs aren't exactly made out of kevlar.
Have you ever heard of "insurance?" You make backups just in case something bad happens.
But more importantly, it really is a matter of law. We have the right to make backups, and the various industries have been doing their damndest to erode that right. You need to keep in mind that the reason we give corporations tax breaks and other legal favors is that they all swore in their corporate charters to benefit society as a whole.
Yeah, they did. Look it up. It's black-letter boilerplate in every corporate charter. It's the whole reason we allow corporations to exist in the first place. We shield them from legal liability and reduce their tax burden, and in return, they are supposed to benefit us all.
If there's one bullshit meme I wish I could stomp out tomorrow, it's that nonsense that corporations have no responsibility except to their bottom line. I remember when Icann, Pickens and their ilk started that nonsense back in the 70's and the first time they said it, they got laughed out of the room.
Never thought I'd see the day when I had to convince someone they had a right to do what they wished with their own property.
But that's not what disturbs me about this tape.
What disturbs me about this tape is an large armed man wearing a uniform smashing a small girl into the ground like he's having some WWF flashback.
The girl is predictably, understandably upset, and could have easily been restrained without harm. Your average high school literature teacher could have coped with this without breaking a sweat.
Instead, 220 lb Officer Friendly decided his only recourse was to beat this girl down. He's lucky he didn't break her neck.
Does anyone know if there were ever any consequences for this assault?
Boom. Windows product activation came up. I had to get on the phone and fight for a new license number.
Anyone else worry about what Windows product activation will do to the "swap it and see" technician?
As my eye caught the first glimpse of that headline, for a split-second I thought I was about to read the Disney had just bought NASA...
Go ahead, mod me -1: Troll
Yep. Those people definitely need to be beaten witha clue stick.
What these people mean to say is "You have a strong influence over your own reality, and you tend to shape your life based on how you perceive it."
For example, I know one guy from an upper-middle class background. He's had plenty of opportunities, good parents, good education, etc. He's no movie star, but his looks certainly wouldn't count against him.
His problem is that he sees the absolutely bleakest intepretation of ay given event. A want ad for a dream job is Fate taunting him. A woman smiles at him and he's already experiencing the agony of a horrible breakup. The sun shines and he calculates the increased risk of skin cancer. If it rains, he's probably going to hydroplane out of control and die in a horrible car crash on the way home.
Needless to say, he botches job interviews, connects romantically mostly with head cases, and finds more and more people forget to return his phone calls.
This of course confirms his view of the world, prompting even more depression and the cycle spirals downward.
This is what most rational people mean by "creating your own reality." People who are generally friendly, confident and pleasantly outgoing tend to find more romantic and business opportunities than those who are generally morose, depressed and unpleasant.
To put it a mroe geek way, who would you rather work with -- Marvin the Paranoid Android or R2? Even though R2 is a far less powerful machine?
Except that you're not understanding the implications of group psychology, "groupthink." Most people in the world tend to separate into "groups." Once they do, a mindset develops of "one of us" or "one of them."
For example -- We're geeks, they're lusers.
Several studies have been done about this, and it seems almost any distinction, no matter how trivial, will do. "Part of our company, not part of our company" works great for this.
Once you're "one of us," all of "them" start to lose their humanity in your eyes. You tend to stop thinking of them as people and your empathy for them goes WAY down. Your feelings of superiority as one of The Elect go way up.
This is one reason why police departments tend to forget "protect and serve" and start thinking in terms of "us vs. the civilians."
The executives at Tivo long ago quit thinking of you as a person. You don't exist as a fellow human being in their eyes. You're a "viewer." They know what's best for your data, and anything they do with it is right, proper and moral BY DEFINITION in their eyes. After all, they're the clever and successful Tivo entreprenuers, you're the grubby, beer-guzzling, trailer-park-dwelling TV viewer.
You don't even need to introduce the concept of greed to see how horrendous abuses could begin.
The bottom line: You absolutely cannot trust anybody with any of your information, even when the information is pretty much worthless. If you do have to trust them with it, abusing it had better be a federal offense, and even then problems and incidents will still come up.
Buzz and Woody would freak if they knew Andy was actually a script kiddie...
Oh, Absolutely. I've personally just got a shipment of a dozen of these rare old boxes just in from Chekoslahungary, so check out my new auction here. Here's your chance to own a piece of history...
And what will they do when it's a required "core" course?
* tilting head in confusion *
You say that like it's a bad thing...
"Yeah, I hate complicated stuff. Finishing up my master's in EE damn near killed me, and you wouldn't believe how complicated THAT got. Of course, now I can get a real job that doesn't involve wearing a nametag."
Um... Hate to break this to you... but that's already a common practice for a number of academic achievement/aptitude tests. Open up the paper in any large college town and you'll find ads for test graders, must have MA, starting pay $10/hr.
Yet another geek who thought History class wasn't worth his time...
Do yourself a favor. Google "J. Edgar Hoover" and then "Nixon." Read about it for awhile. If you still think the FBI is staffed entirely by Mulder, Scully and Starling, Google, oh pulling one notorious name out of the air, "Pinkerton," and pay close attention to how they often co-opted law enforcement.
The Short Version: The Founding Fathers gave law enforcement very limited powers for extremely good reason.
Let's suppose that an angel appeared to your mother before you were born and asked her what gifts God should give to her child.
She, like all mothers, responds, "Please just let my child be healthy."
"Done," says the Angel, "but come on, surely you would like more for your child than that."
"Well," says your mother, "let my child be smarter than most."
"Of course," says the Angel, blithely giving you an IQ of 101. "But wouldn't you like more? I am, after all, an Angel and can grant quite a bit."
"Well," says your Mother, afraid to push her luck, "let my child be one out of a thousand."
The Angel smiles as if at a small child and says "Wouldn't one in a million be better?"
"Yes," says your Mother, scarcely believing her luck, "yes, let me child be one in a million. One in ten million," she blurts out impulsively, and then immediately cows a bit, fearing she's asked too much.
"Yes," says the Angel, "I think we can do one in ten million," as he ascends to Heaven. Your mother can't believe her fortunes. Her child will be the smartest person in ten million.
Which means there are about 25 people in the US alone Right Now who can intellectually make you their bitch, another dozen or two in Europe, while India and China have so many they could field a soccer league and not pick you for any teams.
And throughout all recorded history?
And suppose the Angel had made you the smartest throughout History? The responsibility would probably have crushed you like a bug.
At least, thinking of it this way helps me keep my ego in what little tatters are left.
Do you honestly believe Apple would be replacing batteries at all right now had these two gentlemen not gotten nationwide press?
Did it ever occur to you that maybe the "human factors" are a "hard problem?"
I know a man who smoked two packs a day for 80 years. Never a hint of cancer.
So, there you go, proof poitive that lung cancer doesn't come from smoking.
My wife, despite a lifetime of reading in poor light and heavy computer use, can still count the rings around Saturn without a telescope.
So, there you go, proof positive that my so-called need for glasses is all in my head and Bausch and Lomb is scamming me.
Myself, I've walked away from two catastrophic car accidents in my life, so I can tell you for fact certain that no one ever died from being hit by a car.
Perhaps a review of basic statistics is in order.
Science and Schlock walk into a Hollywood pitch meeting.
Science: The Universe is basically comprehensible and mostly observable. We're going to offer you the chance to flog the living hell out of the data for a few generations until you finally understand what you're looking at. Of course, this won't be tedious. Here, listen to Carl Sagan talk about how we are "billions and billions of star-stuff."
Schlock: I got witches, ghosts, werewolves, jedis, vampires, superheroes, damsels in distress, and action heroes whose clips never run out of bullets. Oh, and breasts, I got breasts too. I got wish-fulfillment like you wouldn't believe.
Now tell me, which show are you going to watch?