Seatbelts are mandatory where I live.My auto insurance carrier uses this to justify inserting a clause in my policy that says that if I or any passenger am/are not wearing a seat belt in an accident, the claim is not covered.
They don't just mean my (coverage limit so low premium so high I simply reject it) bodily injury coverage. It includes property damage, collision coverage, and liability coverage.
ID is now required so that airlines can cross-check against the politcally-motivated, secret, error-ridden watch lists of people who are from unpopular countries filled with little brown people.
I've resorted to using a username-based catch-all. lists-*@mydomain.tld is used for all the "make up on the fly" stuff, and the addresses I had out that turn into spam get dropped into the bit bucket on my hosting service'sserver.
I had the full catch-all enabled for a while and it worked fine, until some spammer in Brasil started sending me hundreds of thousands of spams a week. It got so bad when I was processing with SpamAssassin on the hosting service's server that spamd dumped core and the provider closed my account for a time; and processing using spamd locally got to be too big a processor drain at home, too. So now anything that doesn't come to knownusername-*@mydomain.tld gets sent directly to/dev/null.
That doesn't eliminate every spam, but it's cut the volume of garbage that I actually have to download and process here at the house way, way down to just a few hundred a week.
It would be nice if these kinds of things would get administrators' attention. I don't have high hopes.
Personally, I get anywhere between one thousand and one hundred thousand spams a week directed at my domain from some asshat in Brazil. They come addressed to user1@mydomain.com, user2@mydomain.com, etc., in alphabetical order. Tens of thousands of them. And that's just the Brazilian stuff. That doesn't include the mortgage ads, 419 scams, porn ads, and advertisements that will help me make my wife's penis larger.
Since I'm the only person who uses my domain, and I don't read Portuguese anyway, these are nothing but a drain on my bandwidth and resources, even if I were inclined to buy penis enlargement cream for my wife.
And since I use a hosting service I can't implement a connection-level block because I don't have root on the box. Implementing SpamAssassin on the hosting server brings their box to its knees (I know because I've done it and they shut down my account); instead, I have to dedicate one of my own boxes to scanning all this shit -after- downloading it. My box does virtually nothing else.
And since my domain is my last name, I can't exactly change it easily.
SMTP is broken. It has outlived its usefulness, and it is past time for it to die. Born in an era when the internet was a far safer place, patches and scanning placed on top of it to stop spam do nothing to put the burden of sending mail where it belongs: on the sender. While tools like SpamAssassin, SpamBouncer and RBLs help us to avoid seeing the crap in our inboxes, they remain kludges that still eat up our processor time, bandwidth, infrastructure and money.
But all my work in call centers has taught me that stupid people will always exist, and that some of them can never be taught to behave properly. This means that any schmuck with enough money and enough time and some basic Google literacy can set up a broken copy of $YOUR_FAVORITE_SMTPD on $YOUR_FAVORITE_OS and become the latest spew.
Proposals exist (Dr. Dan Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 is one of several) to shift the burden of storage and processing from the receiver to the sender. All well and good, but nobody's bothered writing a bunch of cross-platform implementations that everybody will actually switch to, and that Microsoft won't be able to embrace and extend.
So where does that leave us mere mortals, except to use the hypersonic planet-smashing axe to kill the maggot-laying fly?
On the other hand, there are other approaches just as destructive.
I run an outbound SMTP server for my own personal use, in part because my ISP's SMTP server sucks.
At times, it could take 30 or more minutes to relay an email to myself.
One of the problems with this is that apparently I got listed on some kind of dial-up user block list, and my mother's ISP blocks those users from sending to its users.
My wife and I went through IVF with the best in North Texas. In the words of our obstetrician, "The Doody's can get a rock pregnant."
One of the things that I find interesting in looking at their statistics is that the number of embryos they implant every year has gone down. My wife and I did three cycles, two in 2001 and one in 2002. In each instance, they implanted two embryos. (Our first cycle failed, our second resulted in one baby and one miscarriage, and our third attempt resulted in a pair of fraternal twins.)
According to Dr. Kevin, the technology they use has improved so much that they get as good or better results (~ 50% success) with one or two embryos, yet have a lower incidence of more-than-twins multiple births. Triplets and higher of course are dangerous to the mother as well as the babies, and have a higher incidence of complications and negative outcomes.
The site is newly designed, and it turns out they do -not- have a picture of the "endocrynology library," better known as the whack-off room. If you need to use it, bring your own magazine because the selection sucks.
What can you expect to pay? The doctor's fees are deceptive. Fees can run to about $6,000 for the doctor's and lab services, but that doesn't include the medication. In our case, we figured the cash cost of the entire procedure including medication and needles at about $15,000.
Insurance typically does not pay for invitro or other infertility services beyond diagnosis, because it is considered not medically necessary. In our case, however, we have insurance coverage from a very large company that chose to cover the procedure. That's the only reason we could afford to drop $45k on it.
It is extrememly time-consuming, but if you can't do it the cheap old-fashioned way, it's worth it.
Unionization may be a good idea for technology workers in theory, especially for folks like call center employees and hourly coders.
It is illegal to terminate or discriminate against an employee trying to organize. The problem, of course, is that there are lots of reasons to fire people.
> They recently sold the mall and coporate
> headquarters and are building a new headquarters a
> few miles away.
A few miles away? Try on top of what used to be the safest and best public housing project in the city, directly across the street.
The city actually tried to sell the prime downtown real estate to Tandy without bothering to find everyone who lived in the subsidized low-income project alternative housing. They offered top of the waiting list, but a waiting list doesn't help when you're homeless and sitting in the rain because the city could make a quick few million bucks.
It took the threat of a lawsuit to stop the city from outing the residents onto the streets. Instead, now Tandy has given them all computers (virtually no cost to Tandy of course) and the city had to find them housing.
But the whole mess really stank.
You can find the alternative newspaper coverage [Fort Worth Weekly] (later backed by the big-time rag, but the big-time rag's search isn't as good) by using their archives and search function. The key string is "Ripley Arnold."
It's well known in some circles that using processor-specific optimized code causes the processor to heat up.
I have two AMD Athlon MP 2000+'s in on a Tyan Tiger MPX motherboard, and a gig of ram, in a full-tower case with four intake fans -- one on the bottom front, one on the side middle over the cards, and two in the middle back under the power supply. The exhaust fan is the PS, of course.
When running Windows 2000 on this machine, the operating temp as reported by the BIOS runs between 50c and 60c.
When I run Gentoo Linux, set up from a stage1 install and compiled specifically for the Athlon MP, the machine crashes as the temperature rises to 75c.
I'm using the retail processors that came with the fan. It's plain that they're installed correctly, but the thermal pad on the bottom (even with the adhesive backing removed properly) isn't capable of dissapating the heat.
Does this mean I'm prohibited by warranty terms from running optimized code? AMD really needs to answer this question. If they want to they could easily come up with a recommended list of approved grease, or contract with someone to sell "official grease" for situations like mine.
> Why do only former employees report this sort of
> thing?
I worked at a newspaper once. In my state, it is legal to carry a concealed firearm if you are licensed to do so. An employer or business may prohibit even licenced holders from carrying their weapons on the premises, and this newspaper does.
My supervisor didn't have such a license, because she found it too restrictive to bother with, in part because she couldn't take her weapon into bars. Instead, she worked a couple of nights a month as a volunteer patrol officer and was certified and licensed as a peace officer in Texas (having had a previous career as a full-time police officer). As a peace officer, she could carry her weapon anywhere, anytime she wanted to. That included bars, restaurants, and her place of regular employment, despite the no-guns policy.
The employer's representative had a meeting with her and they let her know in no uncertain terms that, under the law, while they couldn't prevent her from bringing her weapon to work, there were lots of reasons to fire people.
As a consequence, she left her weapon in the car when she came to work.
People who work for telemarketers typically aren't well paid, aren't in it because they love it, and do have families to support and bills that way outstrip their meager incomes, especially in bust economies where unemployment is rising.
It is illegal to fire people for whistle-blowing under state and federal whistle-blowing statues. A person so terminated can recover in a number of ways. Regrettably, most people aren't aware of their rights and even if they are aware of them, do not know how or do not have the money to invoke and protect them.
Besides, there are lots of reasons to fire people.
Audiobooks are not cheap to produce. In a decent quality production, you need a performer with a reasonable voice in a quiet studio reading for hours upon hours on end.
Many of us are familiar with the works of Robert Jordan. The 9th book in the Wheel of Time series,
Winter's Heart, is about 25 hours in length (20 CD's in the unabridged version). A fantastic, first-rate performance.
To produce that, you had to pay the performer for 3.2 working days, and that's just for the bits you actually use. Let's add in the cost of mixing, second takes, plus the time it takes the performers to prepare for the work. You don't simply hand someone a script and expect them to put on a professional production sight unseen, and given the quality of most audiobook productions (and I've listened to many), I can't believe for a second that there's no prep time paid for.
I can easily imagine having to pay each of the performers for three or four weeks work to do this one production, and it very well might be longer considering the size of this book.
You simply can not get the kind of quality that makes for an enjoyable listening experience with a volunteer mom recording WAV files onto her PC with a Compaq built-in-the-monitor microphone.
If you want good-sounding audio, you're going to have to pay for it.
With landline LECs (local exchange carriers), the necessary equipment and programming issues can be resolved at the switch level, where it's invisible to the customers and therefore cheaper to deal with.
I have a relative who works at a large cell phone company. At this company, they not only have to install back-end programming at the switch and call routing level, but they also have to install software in customers' handsets.
Why is that a big deal?
Older phones that customers have come to rely on, and that they understand how to operate, must be replaced. While this only affects handsets that have to have their number changed (your old handset works great until you switch numbers), it's still a hassle for both the company and the customer:
The company must trade a new phone to the customer at no charge. Since the phones are subsidized already, this only raises the loss the company takes on each handset it sells.
Since the handset must be replaced, the customer has to go to a local store and actually physically trade the handset back. A typical trip to a store at this company can take three hours. Customers don't like that.
The customer must also remember to copy each item in their built-in phone book because there's no mechanism to move it from one handset to another. If they forget, their phone book is gone.
The customer must then learn how to add numbers to the phone book and operate the new handset. Some of the handsets, like the Samsung N100, have unresolved ideosyncratic problems with them (like, sometimes when you terminate a call, the handset hard-locks such that only removing and replacing the battery will resolve it, which isn't a fun operation when you use a leather case like most folks do). The customers get confused and then call customer service for help.
The incoming customer service calls place a larger load on their support infrastructure. The company I'm talking about is apparently looking at going back to mandatory overtime. While they pay well for it, being required to work 50 or 60 hours a week or being threatened with losing your job gets old after several weeks, because it seriously cuts into family time.
Each incoming call to the customer service center costs an average of something like $10 to service, even if it's a 10-second call. Since the company has already replaced the handset, a money-loser, and pissed off the customer by having to do so, also a Bad Thing, increasing call volumes also cost the company money without any compensating new revenue.
While it's true that it will benefit the customer to have number portability in place, even without the lock of the number on the customer that's now gone over the number, there is no real benefit to the company. Everybody will be doing it so there's not even any competative advantage.
Cell phone companies are simply looking out for their revenue streams (as good public companies should) because number portability is nothing but a money loser for them. In a business that's still mostly in the red anyway, it's no wonder.
It's interesting to note that the spyware-free Kaaza Lite's webpage slams you with four popups and at least one window that dances across your screen, advertising casinos, Ebay, the University of Phoenix, and some "you're the millionth visitor!" nonsense.
I once worked at a large cell phone company where, instead of spreading money around to us mere mortals or dropping it to the bottom line (because the company was, at the time, bleeding green), they bought mirrors.
That's right. Mirrors.
These mirrors were placed on the desks in the call center next to every computer, and on them were printed the words, "They hear what you see!"
I'm very tall, compared to most ordinary people. In my standard working position, I couldn't see exactly what the wizards who dreamed up this nonsense thought I should see.
"They can hear my nipples?" I asked my supervisor.
Basically any company with a big enough apparatus wants to control its public image, and it can't do that if its rank-and-file representatives are speaking when they're not spoken to.
Sprint PCS squelched one such representative who was participating in alt.cellular.sprintpcs. Over the four or five months she hung out in the newsgroup (as a publicly known SPCS employee, but not representing the company in any official capacity), she made a number of customers happy by offering solutions to their problems, or offering ways that they could get Customer Care to take care of their problems without calling the President's office or escalating to a supervisor. Her respect in the newsgroup was very high.
When she left the newsgroup, here is what she said.
It's telling. Especially telling is the 40+ responses she got.
Big companies can't deal with the Internet. It's too new, too public, and too uncontrolled. Despite all of our whining about corporate control and ICANN's UDRP and copyright and DMCA, the fact remains that the Internet scares the crap out of large multinationals.
Once upon a time, every plane I got onto had an AirFone on it (or some other competitor), and charged like $1/min for use, but was safe to use while the plane was in the air.
When I took an AA flight from SAT to ORD last week, there were little stickers on all of them that said "Service disabled effective March 31, 2002."
It seems like the already-existing equipment is a better alternative than spending the money building out yet another network, plus rolling out yet another round of handsets, if for no other reason than the charges are going to wind up being about the same.
American Gods is also available on audio cassette from Harper Audio. It runs unabridged at 20 hours in length on 14 cassettes. I do books by audio exclusively now (because of my work), and found this to be not only an excellent book, but also an excellent production.
If you're not familiar with this book, I will make a suggestion: Make sure you get at least half way through before you decide to quit. You won't regret it.
You can pick this up on Amazon, from your local library, or from your local audiobook store if you have one.
Why is anyone surprised that the process was rigged? This isn't Florida, guys. ICANN doesn't even make a pretense of being representative. This is not new, and it is no shock that ICANN has gone crony.
> They should not be turned into roaming, vibrating billboards, especially since the
owners of the devices will be forced to read the advertisements.
But they will be.
There are some who believe that public events venues shouldn't be named for corporations. San Francisco's Candlestick Park was so renamed, but the new San Antonio stadium hasn't ever had a proper name, being only "SBC Arena."
Corporations do not see any reason to not plaster their names and logos on everything they can, and that is starting to include my inbox, no matter what kind of device I use.
Heck, not too long ago there was a proposal floating around San Antonio to rename a shrine of the Texas Revolution (1836) to The American Airlines Alamo.
Billboards, busses, taxicab signage are old news. Product placements in movies, sporting events, and now the names of public places are now becoming standard, with no way for your average individual to opt out. It doesn't matter to the people who dream these things up that we might not want them, or that they might not be annoying. Why is dropping their logo onto my desktop any different? AOL does it with virtually every piece of software I install now.
Maybe PDAs and cell phones shouldn't be a roaming billboard, but what marketer wouldn't love a prime piece of real estate on something someone must look at -- and often -- to get work done? What makes anyone think they won't find a way? It's easy enough: Corp X buys the right from Telco Y to send Customer Z an unlimited number of text messages at no cost to Customer Z, so cost-shifting isn't an issue. The only new thing is delivery.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't just mean my (coverage limit so low premium so high I simply reject it) bodily injury coverage. It includes property damage, collision coverage, and liability coverage.
I've seen the clause enforced as well.
ID is now required so that airlines can cross-check against the politcally-motivated, secret, error-ridden watch lists of people who are from unpopular countries filled with little brown people.
"Follow the money."
At least since Los Angeles in 1984 (which is as long as I've been following it), it hasn't been about sport or competition or peace.
It's been about bribery, profits, and raking in the dough.
So does any of this surprise us?
I had the full catch-all enabled for a while and it worked fine, until some spammer in Brasil started sending me hundreds of thousands of spams a week. It got so bad when I was processing with SpamAssassin on the hosting service's server that spamd dumped core and the provider closed my account for a time; and processing using spamd locally got to be too big a processor drain at home, too. So now anything that doesn't come to knownusername-*@mydomain.tld gets sent directly to /dev/null.
That doesn't eliminate every spam, but it's cut the volume of garbage that I actually have to download and process here at the house way, way down to just a few hundred a week.
Any other way and I'm simply overrun.
Personally, I get anywhere between one thousand and one hundred thousand spams a week directed at my domain from some asshat in Brazil. They come addressed to user1@mydomain.com, user2@mydomain.com, etc., in alphabetical order. Tens of thousands of them. And that's just the Brazilian stuff. That doesn't include the mortgage ads, 419 scams, porn ads, and advertisements that will help me make my wife's penis larger.
Since I'm the only person who uses my domain, and I don't read Portuguese anyway, these are nothing but a drain on my bandwidth and resources, even if I were inclined to buy penis enlargement cream for my wife.
And since I use a hosting service I can't implement a connection-level block because I don't have root on the box. Implementing SpamAssassin on the hosting server brings their box to its knees (I know because I've done it and they shut down my account); instead, I have to dedicate one of my own boxes to scanning all this shit -after- downloading it. My box does virtually nothing else.
And since my domain is my last name, I can't exactly change it easily.
SMTP is broken. It has outlived its usefulness, and it is past time for it to die. Born in an era when the internet was a far safer place, patches and scanning placed on top of it to stop spam do nothing to put the burden of sending mail where it belongs: on the sender. While tools like SpamAssassin, SpamBouncer and RBLs help us to avoid seeing the crap in our inboxes, they remain kludges that still eat up our processor time, bandwidth, infrastructure and money.
But all my work in call centers has taught me that stupid people will always exist, and that some of them can never be taught to behave properly. This means that any schmuck with enough money and enough time and some basic Google literacy can set up a broken copy of $YOUR_FAVORITE_SMTPD on $YOUR_FAVORITE_OS and become the latest spew.
Proposals exist (Dr. Dan Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 is one of several) to shift the burden of storage and processing from the receiver to the sender. All well and good, but nobody's bothered writing a bunch of cross-platform implementations that everybody will actually switch to, and that Microsoft won't be able to embrace and extend.
So where does that leave us mere mortals, except to use the hypersonic planet-smashing axe to kill the maggot-laying fly?
Who might have the money and the balls to sue Amazon first, asking for a declaratory judgement that the one-click patent is invalid?
On the other hand, there are other approaches just as destructive.
I run an outbound SMTP server for my own personal use, in part because my ISP's SMTP server sucks.
At times, it could take 30 or more minutes to relay an email to myself.
One of the problems with this is that apparently I got listed on some kind of dial-up user block list, and my mother's ISP blocks those users from sending to its users.
The downside is that my mother's ISP also blocks my ISP's SMTP server.
Isn't that useful.
One of the things that I find interesting in looking at their statistics is that the number of embryos they implant every year has gone down. My wife and I did three cycles, two in 2001 and one in 2002. In each instance, they implanted two embryos. (Our first cycle failed, our second resulted in one baby and one miscarriage, and our third attempt resulted in a pair of fraternal twins.)
According to Dr. Kevin, the technology they use has improved so much that they get as good or better results (~ 50% success) with one or two embryos, yet have a lower incidence of more-than-twins multiple births. Triplets and higher of course are dangerous to the mother as well as the babies, and have a higher incidence of complications and negative outcomes.
The site is newly designed, and it turns out they do -not- have a picture of the "endocrynology library," better known as the whack-off room. If you need to use it, bring your own magazine because the selection sucks.
What can you expect to pay? The doctor's fees are deceptive. Fees can run to about $6,000 for the doctor's and lab services, but that doesn't include the medication. In our case, we figured the cash cost of the entire procedure including medication and needles at about $15,000.
Insurance typically does not pay for invitro or other infertility services beyond diagnosis, because it is considered not medically necessary. In our case, however, we have insurance coverage from a very large company that chose to cover the procedure. That's the only reason we could afford to drop $45k on it.
It is extrememly time-consuming, but if you can't do it the cheap old-fashioned way, it's worth it.
It this really the image these people want to project?
Too bad I'm not an SCO shareholder. Maybe I could sue SCO management for permitting such stupid childishness on company time.
It is illegal to terminate or discriminate against an employee trying to organize. The problem, of course, is that there are lots of reasons to fire people.
> headquarters and are building a new headquarters a
> few miles away.
A few miles away? Try on top of what used to be the safest and best public housing project in the city, directly across the street.
The city actually tried to sell the prime downtown real estate to Tandy without bothering to find everyone who lived in the subsidized low-income project alternative housing. They offered top of the waiting list, but a waiting list doesn't help when you're homeless and sitting in the rain because the city could make a quick few million bucks.
It took the threat of a lawsuit to stop the city from outing the residents onto the streets. Instead, now Tandy has given them all computers (virtually no cost to Tandy of course) and the city had to find them housing.
But the whole mess really stank.
You can find the alternative newspaper coverage [Fort Worth Weekly] (later backed by the big-time rag, but the big-time rag's search isn't as good) by using their archives and search function. The key string is "Ripley Arnold."
I have two AMD Athlon MP 2000+'s in on a Tyan Tiger MPX motherboard, and a gig of ram, in a full-tower case with four intake fans -- one on the bottom front, one on the side middle over the cards, and two in the middle back under the power supply. The exhaust fan is the PS, of course.
When running Windows 2000 on this machine, the operating temp as reported by the BIOS runs between 50c and 60c.
When I run Gentoo Linux, set up from a stage1 install and compiled specifically for the Athlon MP, the machine crashes as the temperature rises to 75c.
I'm using the retail processors that came with the fan. It's plain that they're installed correctly, but the thermal pad on the bottom (even with the adhesive backing removed properly) isn't capable of dissapating the heat.
Does this mean I'm prohibited by warranty terms from running optimized code? AMD really needs to answer this question. If they want to they could easily come up with a recommended list of approved grease, or contract with someone to sell "official grease" for situations like mine.
> thing?
I worked at a newspaper once. In my state, it is legal to carry a concealed firearm if you are licensed to do so. An employer or business may prohibit even licenced holders from carrying their weapons on the premises, and this newspaper does.
My supervisor didn't have such a license, because she found it too restrictive to bother with, in part because she couldn't take her weapon into bars. Instead, she worked a couple of nights a month as a volunteer patrol officer and was certified and licensed as a peace officer in Texas (having had a previous career as a full-time police officer). As a peace officer, she could carry her weapon anywhere, anytime she wanted to. That included bars, restaurants, and her place of regular employment, despite the no-guns policy.
The employer's representative had a meeting with her and they let her know in no uncertain terms that, under the law, while they couldn't prevent her from bringing her weapon to work, there were lots of reasons to fire people.
As a consequence, she left her weapon in the car when she came to work.
People who work for telemarketers typically aren't well paid, aren't in it because they love it, and do have families to support and bills that way outstrip their meager incomes, especially in bust economies where unemployment is rising.
It is illegal to fire people for whistle-blowing under state and federal whistle-blowing statues. A person so terminated can recover in a number of ways. Regrettably, most people aren't aware of their rights and even if they are aware of them, do not know how or do not have the money to invoke and protect them.
Besides, there are lots of reasons to fire people.
Many of us are familiar with the works of Robert Jordan. The 9th book in the Wheel of Time series, Winter's Heart, is about 25 hours in length (20 CD's in the unabridged version). A fantastic, first-rate performance.
To produce that, you had to pay the performer for 3.2 working days, and that's just for the bits you actually use. Let's add in the cost of mixing, second takes, plus the time it takes the performers to prepare for the work. You don't simply hand someone a script and expect them to put on a professional production sight unseen, and given the quality of most audiobook productions (and I've listened to many), I can't believe for a second that there's no prep time paid for.
I can easily imagine having to pay each of the performers for three or four weeks work to do this one production, and it very well might be longer considering the size of this book.
You simply can not get the kind of quality that makes for an enjoyable listening experience with a volunteer mom recording WAV files onto her PC with a Compaq built-in-the-monitor microphone.
If you want good-sounding audio, you're going to have to pay for it.
I have a relative who works at a large cell phone company. At this company, they not only have to install back-end programming at the switch and call routing level, but they also have to install software in customers' handsets.
Why is that a big deal?
Older phones that customers have come to rely on, and that they understand how to operate, must be replaced. While this only affects handsets that have to have their number changed (your old handset works great until you switch numbers), it's still a hassle for both the company and the customer:
While it's true that it will benefit the customer to have number portability in place, even without the lock of the number on the customer that's now gone over the number, there is no real benefit to the company. Everybody will be doing it so there's not even any competative advantage.
Cell phone companies are simply looking out for their revenue streams (as good public companies should) because number portability is nothing but a money loser for them. In a business that's still mostly in the red anyway, it's no wonder.
rw
... you insensitive clod!
It's interesting to note that the spyware-free Kaaza Lite's webpage slams you with four popups and at least one window that dances across your screen, advertising casinos, Ebay, the University of Phoenix, and some "you're the millionth visitor!" nonsense.
That's right. Mirrors.
These mirrors were placed on the desks in the call center next to every computer, and on them were printed the words, "They hear what you see!"
I'm very tall, compared to most ordinary people. In my standard working position, I couldn't see exactly what the wizards who dreamed up this nonsense thought I should see.
"They can hear my nipples?" I asked my supervisor.
Basically any company with a big enough apparatus wants to control its public image, and it can't do that if its rank-and-file representatives are speaking when they're not spoken to.
Sprint PCS squelched one such representative who was participating in alt.cellular.sprintpcs. Over the four or five months she hung out in the newsgroup (as a publicly known SPCS employee, but not representing the company in any official capacity), she made a number of customers happy by offering solutions to their problems, or offering ways that they could get Customer Care to take care of their problems without calling the President's office or escalating to a supervisor. Her respect in the newsgroup was very high.
When she left the newsgroup, here is what she said.
It's telling. Especially telling is the 40+ responses she got.
Big companies can't deal with the Internet. It's too new, too public, and too uncontrolled. Despite all of our whining about corporate control and ICANN's UDRP and copyright and DMCA, the fact remains that the Internet scares the crap out of large multinationals.
And that won't change any time soon.
Where's the Music EULA? How am I supposed to know how many times and on how many machines I'm allowed to play this stuff?
Once upon a time, every plane I got onto had an AirFone on it (or some other competitor), and charged like $1/min for use, but was safe to use while the plane was in the air.
When I took an AA flight from SAT to ORD last week, there were little stickers on all of them that said "Service disabled effective March 31, 2002."
It seems like the already-existing equipment is a better alternative than spending the money building out yet another network, plus rolling out yet another round of handsets, if for no other reason than the charges are going to wind up being about the same.
What gives with yet another silly competitor?
> 2. Squishy - Less privacy more fair use
Except that with Palladium, you'll have less privacy and less fair use, because the hardware will have identifiers built on.
If you're not familiar with this book, I will make a suggestion: Make sure you get at least half way through before you decide to quit. You won't regret it.
You can pick this up on Amazon, from your local library, or from your local audiobook store if you have one.
Why is anyone surprised that the process was rigged? This isn't Florida, guys. ICANN doesn't even make a pretense of being representative. This is not new, and it is no shock that ICANN has gone crony.
owners of the devices will be forced to read the advertisements.
But they will be.
There are some who believe that public events venues shouldn't be named for corporations. San Francisco's Candlestick Park was so renamed, but the new San Antonio stadium hasn't ever had a proper name, being only "SBC Arena."
Corporations do not see any reason to not plaster their names and logos on everything they can, and that is starting to include my inbox, no matter what kind of device I use.
Heck, not too long ago there was a proposal floating around San Antonio to rename a shrine of the Texas Revolution (1836) to The American Airlines Alamo.
Billboards, busses, taxicab signage are old news. Product placements in movies, sporting events, and now the names of public places are now becoming standard, with no way for your average individual to opt out. It doesn't matter to the people who dream these things up that we might not want them, or that they might not be annoying. Why is dropping their logo onto my desktop any different? AOL does it with virtually every piece of software I install now.
Maybe PDAs and cell phones shouldn't be a roaming billboard, but what marketer wouldn't love a prime piece of real estate on something someone must look at -- and often -- to get work done? What makes anyone think they won't find a way? It's easy enough: Corp X buys the right from Telco Y to send Customer Z an unlimited number of text messages at no cost to Customer Z, so cost-shifting isn't an issue. The only new thing is delivery.