(a) You might need to use harder. (b) Yup. But that was a few weeks ago, and they don't seem to intent on caring. So I decided to bitch, because I have bigger problems I'm procrastinating on (like wedging locked TLBs into an RTOS on PPC440GX that already has a page-table system overlaying its MMS...the problem is in the blocksize bits, and how the block growth is unmanageably saltatory...and you never know how big they'll be because some depend on the size of your.text and.data areas, which of course might as well be a runtime variable, which the low-end hardware designers are gonna fucking hate...so you can see how it would be like a day off to repeat-bitch about an OSS mailer bug online wherever it's the slightest bit apropos...)
And, if they can find a way to put these things in sequence, they can fan them out into the neighborhoods around the CO, to get you the high UDSL rate for sustained burst, but at worse ping.
And, if this really is something that Cable can't duplicate, then it's worth $billions, and they might just do it.
But, it's pretty silly to think that there's anything a randomly twisted copper pair with nicks and bimetallic connectors can do to compete with coax that coax companies couldn't pick up and do better.
So this might as well be pretending that 12-gbps laser communications means you'll get gigabit line-of-sight to your house (as long as you don't look 14.2 degrees east of north ever again).
Ah, no, I think the Sprint collections department can send the gig to the credit bureau 30 days after sending out the first collections notice or the documentation I would request in a dispute.
Which is why the woman's behavior is so sinister. Her whole attitude was to convince me to let the 30 days lapse, which would just exponentiate the pressure on me to pay the debt regardless of its verity just to clear it up.
Collectors, both internal and external, do not care why you pay, so long as you pay, because they get paid when you pay.
What's surprising is that after decades of development of that business model, they've never managed to improve the quality of debt they're buying, because every time I've been sent to collections it's due to paperwork fuckups. The collectors losing money on my ability to clear those up without paying a nickel should be the ones beating up the service companies to improve the precision of their internal management processes.
But what the fuck do they know about cost reduction and capital efficiency? They're mouth-breathing franchisees who prowl deadbeats for a living...
I've had problems running both Firefox and Thunderbird lately. They manifest when I try to open a folder in Thunderbird. Thunderbird just dies. I open it, try again, it dies. Repeat ad infinitum. Open it, kill Firefox, try again, folder opens, go on with life.
You'd think this sort of thing (a) wouldn't happen and (b) would have been caught before a release.
Yes, Rico is a dog. Rico is also a border collie, the "asian kid" of dogs.
Trust me. Not only don't beagles ever know more than three words (their name, "come", and "ball" or "bone", which translates to "any toy you see first"), but you have to say it three times in succession in command voice before they even acknowledge you are making your own sounds.
My hypothesis is that border collies were bred for instant reaction to a shepherd's instructions, while beagles were bred to ignore the rest of the noise in the pack until they have followed their current scent trail, pushed through the brush and the mass of hounds working other trails, and located the actual, breathing rabbit.
Which isn't to say that beagles are not trainable to competition calibre, but that lady who won the obedience trials with her beagle operates in the same vein as someone who tries to win an open-class drag race in a semi. It's way more work to do the mods than your average entry.
The bill itself would have been verification, since they have fiat power to decide I "used the service"; the problem is, while I had used the service, I'd already got another of their CS reps to tell me my balance was $0. So it's entirely internal to them whether they honor that when creating this "verification of said debt". And they have fiat power to decide whether I'm actually disputing the bill. The lie I was told was designed to keep me from doing anything for 30 days, wherupon they'd sell the debt to an external collection agency and clock my credit rating. I wish I'd been on the line long enough (she was the one who flat hung up on me) to demand an employee number. I'd be altering her employment status right now if I had.
Cable-mediated Broadband won't drop its price until either:
A) Something competitive comes along (Sprint Broadband Direct, a fixed line-of-sight microwave service, stopped accepting new customers 2-3 years ago; it is not competitive in the pool of new BB users. DirectPC, a satellite service, is more complicated (being asymmetric and requiring both a dish and telephone line) and slower, so it is not competitive in the pool of BB users. DSL, a phone-line service, is slower, so it is not competitive).
B) The rate of increase of the user base begins to reverse in some subset of the users. Then the price drop will be purely retention. But, barring (A) above, there's really no reason for this to happen.
C) They decide to be kind to their customers. Don't make me laugh.
D) They decide to try to mine the last-few segment of the population. Depending on the breakpoints in their infrastructure expansion, they may already have written this segment off.
Update: I didn't find anything about the law saying that all charges should be zero, but I did find this link that suggested cell-phone companies should waive activation and monthly fees for service that basically never works. Which was encouraging.
I also looked back through my records (a note on a log of the call on my PDA phone) to find the employee ID of the original Sprint person who verified that my balance would be $0, back in March. Which was encouraging and actionable.
So I called Sprint back, and 4 reps and one supe later, I got my entire bill zeroed, and a promise of paper documentation.
Total time spent: 3 hours, 15 minutes; about 2:30 of that on the phone itself, about half of that on hold or dealing with menus.
Number of Sprint people encountered: 11. Two of whom were basically nonresponsive to the point of dead air or gibberish, and one of whom was deliberately lying to me to make me wait 30 days so this mess would hit my credit report.
Number of Sprint people who have told me my balance should be zero but they didn't have the power to do it: 3. Number who claimed they had the power to do it and were doing it but lied: 2. Percentage who may have got it done: 9%.
We'll see in about 30 days when that confirmation arrives. If it does. They also said they'd sent me 3 bills, not 1. So they don't know how to use the mail either.
I predict that regardless of whether the confirmation arrives, I'll receive another collections notice, and there's a 50-50 chance that the delays will result in this being reported to a credit bureau. Which should be a crime punishable by prison time.
I missed a chance to Frist Pots this thread because I was on the phone (my nice T-Mobile service) with (suckass) Sprint customer service for over an hour explaining to them that their bill for $260 which arrived 3 months after I cancelled my service was illegal becauae I cancelled my service within the 14-day grace period for cellular services, according to federal law.
I got them to remove the charges for cancellation fees because they admitted I had cancelled within 14 days, and the "late fees" because I had never seen any bills from them, ever, until this one, but I could not get them to back off of the first-month cell service and the activation fee.
I still believe that I should not have to pay those, and I was going to do some research, but maybe a kind Slashdotter already knows whether or not I actually owe the 1st month plus activation even though I cancelled within 14 days. I'd rather keep my $96 out of their sorry hands, to the point I'm willing to pay a lawyer $500 to do it. If the terrible quality of the phone service and their customer service makes a difference, that info would help.
The phone service was such that 75% of stationary and 100% of moving calls dropped before I hung up. The customer service was (and is) such that I was assured I would owe $0 on cancellation, and checked it twice; and of course they billed me $260 three months late, lied about sending two prior bills, lied when saying they were zeroing my account this afternoon (then I called again to get another rep to double check, and yes, nobody had done a thing), then tried to collect the late fees. The first person I talked to today (the liar) basically blurted out the lie and hung up on me the instant I registered my complaint. One person of the 5 that I talked to was actually polite and apologetic for her own mistakes (which were minor and understandable). Half of them were unintelligible half of the time. And not one of them was 100% sure about the reasoning for anything that occurred with my account.
They did all seem to think their job was to get me to pay whatever they could convince me I owed, rather than what I legally owed, though. I bet if I call tomorrow and repeat the process I get a different result. Especially if I have proof I don't owe them anything.
So the problem has gone from simple quality of customer service to flat-out fraud.
This despite the fact that cellular service is exploding in America, with minutes growing at about a 40% annual rate and both customer counts and revenues growing at 10-20%. Or maybe because of it, they think they can get away with anything.
Does anyone want a 4 GB mp3 player just because it's narrower, thinner, and lighter than its 20-GB predecessor?
Get me a 10-GB mp3-playing PalmOS-running am/fm-radio tuning cell phone that doesn't need Sprint service (which sucks no matter what the guy in the raincoat says), and I'll buy it before lunch today even if it's a thousand bucks with a 2-year contract.
It's only a matter of time before buses have face recognition and shoes all have RFID tags in the soles, and then your only option will be to stay in your house and order everything off the inter- oops, they'll track your purchases via credit card number.
Credit card number? They're watching every keystroke and click, bubba.
>The numbers on the back of the car are not going away. A lot of arrests result from citizens reporting plate numbers. They are also necessary for reporting gross polluters. And, finally, a cop on foot with no gear can still remember one.
RFID built into the chassis, and a city-wide tracking system (think lo-jack or a mod of the metricom/ricochet networking system), could be quite a bit more useful. All you'd need is cross-streets and a cellie, and you could say "the blue Impala at 4th and Figeroa just a minute ago". No need to be in position (or conscious) to catch the plate. Which any decent perp would have covered with the tail of a shirt slammed in the trunk anyway.
Oh, and if you're thinking of complaining about privacy, remember, driving is a privilege, not a right, and your rights to be unidentified and not followed around while doing it are nil. So if you want to go somewhere anonymously, take the bus or walk there.
Most talk about passing on the right on 2-lane, not interstate.
However, at least here in Arizona, there is a way to get busted for this.
1. The sign when you enter the state says to keep right except to pass. 2. Signs apply to you whenever you're on that roadway and another sign hasn't altered the directive. 3. There is no sign saying you can keep to the left, ever.
So if they wanted to, cops could start writing that ticket for everyone on the I-10 who isn't in the right lane except to pass, including people just commuting from Tempe to Glendale.
P.S. It's not illegal to drive barefoot anywhere, either.
Slashdot Mirror
(a) You might need to use harder. .text and .data areas, which of course might as well be a runtime variable, which the low-end hardware designers are gonna fucking hate...so you can see how it would be like a day off to repeat-bitch about an OSS mailer bug online wherever it's the slightest bit apropos...)
(b) Yup. But that was a few weeks ago, and they don't seem to intent on caring. So I decided to bitch, because I have bigger problems I'm procrastinating on (like wedging locked TLBs into an RTOS on PPC440GX that already has a page-table system overlaying its MMS...the problem is in the blocksize bits, and how the block growth is unmanageably saltatory...and you never know how big they'll be because some depend on the size of your
I was thinking about that.
And, if they can find a way to put these things in sequence, they can fan them out into the neighborhoods around the CO, to get you the high UDSL rate for sustained burst, but at worse ping.
And, if this really is something that Cable can't duplicate, then it's worth $billions, and they might just do it.
But, it's pretty silly to think that there's anything a randomly twisted copper pair with nicks and bimetallic connectors can do to compete with coax that coax companies couldn't pick up and do better.
So this might as well be pretending that 12-gbps laser communications means you'll get gigabit line-of-sight to your house (as long as you don't look 14.2 degrees east of north ever again).
Ah, no, I think the Sprint collections department can send the gig to the credit bureau 30 days after sending out the first collections notice or the documentation I would request in a dispute.
Which is why the woman's behavior is so sinister. Her whole attitude was to convince me to let the 30 days lapse, which would just exponentiate the pressure on me to pay the debt regardless of its verity just to clear it up.
Collectors, both internal and external, do not care why you pay, so long as you pay, because they get paid when you pay.
What's surprising is that after decades of development of that business model, they've never managed to improve the quality of debt they're buying, because every time I've been sent to collections it's due to paperwork fuckups. The collectors losing money on my ability to clear those up without paying a nickel should be the ones beating up the service companies to improve the precision of their internal management processes.
But what the fuck do they know about cost reduction and capital efficiency? They're mouth-breathing franchisees who prowl deadbeats for a living...
I've had problems running both Firefox and Thunderbird lately. They manifest when I try to open a folder in Thunderbird. Thunderbird just dies. I open it, try again, it dies. Repeat ad infinitum. Open it, kill Firefox, try again, folder opens, go on with life.
You'd think this sort of thing (a) wouldn't happen and (b) would have been caught before a release.
Read it again. You may be starting with Java from scratch, but you clearly knew something about it, or you might as well have tried Snobol.
When the MIT Media Lab puts up a webpage about a display, and it's all text, you know there's some suck built right in.
Yes, Rico is a dog. Rico is also a border collie, the "asian kid" of dogs.
Trust me. Not only don't beagles ever know more than three words (their name, "come", and "ball" or "bone", which translates to "any toy you see first"), but you have to say it three times in succession in command voice before they even acknowledge you are making your own sounds.
My hypothesis is that border collies were bred for instant reaction to a shepherd's instructions, while beagles were bred to ignore the rest of the noise in the pack until they have followed their current scent trail, pushed through the brush and the mass of hounds working other trails, and located the actual, breathing rabbit.
Which isn't to say that beagles are not trainable to competition calibre, but that lady who won the obedience trials with her beagle operates in the same vein as someone who tries to win an open-class drag race in a semi. It's way more work to do the mods than your average entry.
You learn a new language whenever it is already being used on a project you didn't initiate.
If you initiate the project, you likely set its requirements based on your understanding of (or predicted improvement in) a language you already know.
If this isn't you, you're no hacker.
The bill itself would have been verification, since they have fiat power to decide I "used the service"; the problem is, while I had used the service, I'd already got another of their CS reps to tell me my balance was $0. So it's entirely internal to them whether they honor that when creating this "verification of said debt". And they have fiat power to decide whether I'm actually disputing the bill. The lie I was told was designed to keep me from doing anything for 30 days, wherupon they'd sell the debt to an external collection agency and clock my credit rating. I wish I'd been on the line long enough (she was the one who flat hung up on me) to demand an employee number. I'd be altering her employment status right now if I had.
Wiki admins are irritated that a widespread net meme is showing up in their sandboxes?
Heh.
All your nigritude are ultramarine to us
MODERATORS, TO YOUR PLUS SIGNS!!!
.
.
.
.
.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
lameness filter fodder
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Cable-mediated Broadband won't drop its price until either:
A) Something competitive comes along (Sprint Broadband Direct, a fixed line-of-sight microwave service, stopped accepting new customers 2-3 years ago; it is not competitive in the pool of new BB users. DirectPC, a satellite service, is more complicated (being asymmetric and requiring both a dish and telephone line) and slower, so it is not competitive in the pool of BB users. DSL, a phone-line service, is slower, so it is not competitive).
B) The rate of increase of the user base begins to reverse in some subset of the users. Then the price drop will be purely retention. But, barring (A) above, there's really no reason for this to happen.
C) They decide to be kind to their customers. Don't make me laugh.
D) They decide to try to mine the last-few segment of the population. Depending on the breakpoints in their infrastructure expansion, they may already have written this segment off.
(read parent for original story)
Update: I didn't find anything about the law saying that all charges should be zero, but I did find this link that suggested cell-phone companies should waive activation and monthly fees for service that basically never works. Which was encouraging.
I also looked back through my records (a note on a log of the call on my PDA phone) to find the employee ID of the original Sprint person who verified that my balance would be $0, back in March. Which was encouraging and actionable.
So I called Sprint back, and 4 reps and one supe later, I got my entire bill zeroed, and a promise of paper documentation.
Total time spent: 3 hours, 15 minutes; about 2:30 of that on the phone itself, about half of that on hold or dealing with menus.
Number of Sprint people encountered: 11. Two of whom were basically nonresponsive to the point of dead air or gibberish, and one of whom was deliberately lying to me to make me wait 30 days so this mess would hit my credit report.
Number of Sprint people who have told me my balance should be zero but they didn't have the power to do it: 3. Number who claimed they had the power to do it and were doing it but lied: 2. Percentage who may have got it done: 9%.
We'll see in about 30 days when that confirmation arrives. If it does. They also said they'd sent me 3 bills, not 1. So they don't know how to use the mail either.
I predict that regardless of whether the confirmation arrives, I'll receive another collections notice, and there's a 50-50 chance that the delays will result in this being reported to a credit bureau. Which should be a crime punishable by prison time.
I missed a chance to Frist Pots this thread because I was on the phone (my nice T-Mobile service) with (suckass) Sprint customer service for over an hour explaining to them that their bill for $260 which arrived 3 months after I cancelled my service was illegal becauae I cancelled my service within the 14-day grace period for cellular services, according to federal law.
I got them to remove the charges for cancellation fees because they admitted I had cancelled within 14 days, and the "late fees" because I had never seen any bills from them, ever, until this one, but I could not get them to back off of the first-month cell service and the activation fee.
I still believe that I should not have to pay those, and I was going to do some research, but maybe a kind Slashdotter already knows whether or not I actually owe the 1st month plus activation even though I cancelled within 14 days. I'd rather keep my $96 out of their sorry hands, to the point I'm willing to pay a lawyer $500 to do it. If the terrible quality of the phone service and their customer service makes a difference, that info would help.
The phone service was such that 75% of stationary and 100% of moving calls dropped before I hung up. The customer service was (and is) such that I was assured I would owe $0 on cancellation, and checked it twice; and of course they billed me $260 three months late, lied about sending two prior bills, lied when saying they were zeroing my account this afternoon (then I called again to get another rep to double check, and yes, nobody had done a thing), then tried to collect the late fees. The first person I talked to today (the liar) basically blurted out the lie and hung up on me the instant I registered my complaint. One person of the 5 that I talked to was actually polite and apologetic for her own mistakes (which were minor and understandable). Half of them were unintelligible half of the time. And not one of them was 100% sure about the reasoning for anything that occurred with my account.
They did all seem to think their job was to get me to pay whatever they could convince me I owed, rather than what I legally owed, though. I bet if I call tomorrow and repeat the process I get a different result. Especially if I have proof I don't owe them anything.
So the problem has gone from simple quality of customer service to flat-out fraud.
This despite the fact that cellular service is exploding in America, with minutes growing at about a 40% annual rate and both customer counts and revenues growing at 10-20%. Or maybe because of it, they think they can get away with anything.
Hasn't anyone ever noticed that
Go back through the threads and read at +5, nested, and tell me you won't learn something.
Partly for this reason I've never sold a hard drive, and now I think I never will.
I'm quite certain I was grepping for to-do's in unfinished code long before anyone even cared Microsoft was too big for its own good.
I was gonna mod you down, but I prefer to mock you instead.
The Monkees were the '60s, not the '80s, you total noob.
What would you like to do?
[ ] Install and configure a non-default DNS server?
[ ] Surf the web for Pr0n now!
[Back][Next][Finish][Cancel]
Does anyone want a 4 GB mp3 player just because it's narrower, thinner, and lighter than its 20-GB predecessor?
Get me a 10-GB mp3-playing PalmOS-running am/fm-radio tuning cell phone that doesn't need Sprint service (which sucks no matter what the guy in the raincoat says), and I'll buy it before lunch today even if it's a thousand bucks with a 2-year contract.
It's only a matter of time before buses have face recognition and shoes all have RFID tags in the soles, and then your only option will be to stay in your house and order everything off the inter- oops, they'll track your purchases via credit card number.
Credit card number? They're watching every keystroke and click, bubba.
>The numbers on the back of the car are not going away. A lot of arrests result from citizens reporting plate numbers. They are also necessary for reporting gross polluters. And, finally, a cop on foot with no gear can still remember one.
RFID built into the chassis, and a city-wide tracking system (think lo-jack or a mod of the metricom/ricochet networking system), could be quite a bit more useful. All you'd need is cross-streets and a cellie, and you could say "the blue Impala at 4th and Figeroa just a minute ago". No need to be in position (or conscious) to catch the plate. Which any decent perp would have covered with the tail of a shirt slammed in the trunk anyway.
Oh, and if you're thinking of complaining about privacy, remember, driving is a privilege, not a right, and your rights to be unidentified and not followed around while doing it are nil. So if you want to go somewhere anonymously, take the bus or walk there.
"They aren't making any more land."
Unless they buy more disk space, that is...
So, does anyone know what CA is going to do in 3-5 years when that first digit rolls over?
Just roll it to letters? Add another digit? Change colors? RFID tags? Barcodes?
Personally, I'd like to get rid of the big, ugly numbers and replace them with something small and concealed.
Uh, not.
Check your local laws.
Most talk about passing on the right on 2-lane, not interstate.
However, at least here in Arizona, there is a way to get busted for this.
1. The sign when you enter the state says to keep right except to pass.
2. Signs apply to you whenever you're on that roadway and another sign hasn't altered the directive.
3. There is no sign saying you can keep to the left, ever.
So if they wanted to, cops could start writing that ticket for everyone on the I-10 who isn't in the right lane except to pass, including people just commuting from Tempe to Glendale.
P.S. It's not illegal to drive barefoot anywhere, either.