Despite all the griping and moaning over this story, there are times when I wish a former employer of mine had been organized. However, unlike the parent company, this 50,000 employee subsidiary did not have a union. What we did have was about 10,000 call center employees (not management), who were coerced into overtime -- a mandatory 10-20 hours a week (do it or get fired) that went on for years on end. I worked there from 2/99 to 6/00, and with the exception of about four weeks, had mandatory overtime requirements every week. Other longer-term employees had told me that the requirements had been in place since 1996. My contacts still at the company tell me it hasn't let up yet, despite promises by management.
While the company did comply with rules for overtime pay, the fact that it went on for years non-stop reached well past the point of abuse. For a company that says it respected the rights of workers, and espoused allowing employees a balance of personal and professional lives, it sure didn't seem that way when you could take two paid vacation days in a week and still have to work your 20 hours overtime.
And while it was official company policy that the company cooperate with any legal attempts by employees to organize, at least where I live, there are lots of reasons to fire people. It's also interesting to note that the company chose locations for its call centers in weak employee-rights states... Texas, Tennessee, Kansas, etc.
Not all unions are good. Not all of them are bad. And sometimes they can provide protection against abuses by employers.
I've had to avail myself of other employment avenues over the past couple weeks. I was terminated from my A+/Network+ teaching job in February, and since then I've landed one contract that was cancelled (and I didn't get paid for what I did work).
With a background in network design and implementation, security (firewalls and permissions design), NT/2K networking, and Linux implementation and administration, and enough certification paper to bury a 10 story building, you'd think I could land SOMETHING.
This dot-com market glut crap is real, even for those of us who are not marginally skilled and who are just unlucky. With Web-based job hunting places sprouting ads for nobody but headhunters, the chances of your resume (out of 20,000 submitted) getting looked at are miniscule, even if you can shit gold code.
Life sucks if you're out of work in this biz, gang. Those of you who have jobs ought to count your blessings, because the market just isn't there for hopping around every six months anymore.
Pendantic, yes. Silly, yes. But headlines like this one really get my panties in a wad. Not just Slashdot -- the BBC did it too. What's wrong here?
The title of the television programme is Doctor Who. Not Dr. Who. Not Dr Who. Not Doctor Who? Not Dr Who?
The name of the lead character, played by a number of very fine actors, is The Doctor. Not Doctor Who, Dr. Who, Dr Who, Dr Who?, or any other choice of abbreviations you wish you use.
Call me silly. Call me stupid. It's just another example of the decline of linguistic accuracy, both in everyday society and on the Internet.
So what about an unnamed provider who ran such an unreliable mail server that I finally decided to run my own, only to find:
That TCP and UDP ports 53 were firewalled
That they used strange 10.x.x.x internal routing that nobody could/would describe to me
That they periodically portscanned my IP block
And that when I inquired about the above three items, I was threatened with being TOSsed.
I've never seen a TOS that gives the provider the right to scan my network, and I find it incredible that I got harassed for inquiring about how their obviously non-standard routing worked.
Your rights online at school are basically like your rights in person at school: Especially at well-funded institutions with lots more money than you, you have none. Just like public high school, you are not free to think or say what you wish, even if (as NOT in this case) it's off campus, because they'll expel you or harass you or cause all sorts of misery.
Those of you who have listened to Howard Stern recently are aware of the kid in the northeast who got suspended for writing an erotic song about his English teacher. It didn't matter that he wrote and recorded it outside of school, and himself never brought it to school. No, although his friends brought it to school without his permission, the author still got harassed about it. (All I can say is that many freshman boys are hot for their teachers. Fact of life. If you don't like it, teach second grade.)
There is a basic equation I learned when a school newspaper I ran was censored, and I distributed the story across the street from the school as a handbill produced at private expense: student + school == no rights period
It never ceases to amaze me that many companies -- particularly larger ones (my own experience was with Sprint PCS), say they promote employee growth and then don't.
In my case, I was looking to move from call center flunkie doing technical support for voicemail (a job I took because I needed a paycheck, doing what it took to earn a living) into the sort of IT position for which I was much more suited, both in terms of experience and temperment.
I couldn't get so much as an interview for an internal promotion, and my requests for use of the company's training materials were turned down because the "request is not related to job functionality." Correct. I had already learned everything I needed to know to do my particular job.
Here's the funny part: My annual review with the company was excellent; my merit raise was higher than average, and in fact, my manager RAISED the raise suggested by my direct supervisor.
Yet they wouldn't let me out of the call position. When the stress of the inbound call line flaked me out, I pleaded to be moved to a non-call job, even with a pay cut, even if that meant pushing a broom and cleaning toilets. "Well," they said, "it's a call center."
Unable to retain me, I left the company, bitter and disappointed about their promise of offering growth and opportunity (in a company with 50,000+ employees!) that translated into being pigeonholed into taking calls for the rest of whatever life I chose to spend with them.
While this particular case was extreme, I've seen promises of growth in other companies as well, and have never once seen them deliver. I wonder if the whole idea of "growth opportunity" is nothing but a b*llsh*t ploy designed to recruit, and then we hope we can string 'em along long enough to make our money off the OJT we did.
It all goes back to the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.
In this case, it's the RIAA and MPAA. Napster is most likely to wither and die in their fight not because the RIAA may or may not have a better legal case, but because the money will run out. 2600's fight against the MPAA may fall victim to the same problem, even with the support of the EFF.
This is not new.
Several years ago, a case out of (I believe California) called MAI vs. Peak Electronics wound up being granted review by the Supreme Court of the United States.
MAI's claim against Peak was that Peak violated MAI's copyright because the act of turning MAI's computer on made a copy of data contained into ROM, and that making this copy without a license was a violation of MAI's copyright. Never mind that the copy was required for the operation of the computer -- the whole point was to squash an independent service provider and force repairs to go only to MAI-approved repair outfits. Customers had a license to make a copy, and authorized repair centers had that same right... but Peak, as an unauthorized repair center (read competition), did not.
Peak had to settle (they lost, essentially) because the money ran out. They couldn't file the necessary briefs with the Supreme Court because they didn't have the cash to pay the lawyers.
It's the Golden Rule. It doesn't matter that the law is a bad law, or that the copyright owners are money-grubbing b*st*rds whose only interest is in lining their own pockets. It's that they have the money, and we do not.
... to consider that most peoples' interest are pretty narrow: The price of electricity, the price of gas, where their next paycheck will come from. Maybe they worry about taking their kids to the doctor when they get sick. Other than that, they don't really care about much.
... and when they came for me, there was no one left to complain.
... and also, in some ways, predictible.
It has been my experience, both personally and through observation, that our school systems -- and often our parents -- are poorly equipped to handle children who are more than moderately intelligent. The one-size-fits-all method of education is clearly a failure, and while we've been working for a while on the lower end (special education for learning-disabled students, for example), there is generally little in the way of inexpensive (read publicly funded) educational alternatives for very intelligent children.
So if your child masters educational concepts quickly, and then can't handle all the repetition and is bored to tears by having to repeat the same concept 200 times over the next two weeks, well... look out, because there's a very good chance she's bored to tears in school, and the school is unequipped to teach her in an effective manner.
And if you're unable to pay for her education yourself... well... look out.
Situations like this -- over-reaction on the part of (clueless) school officials to something that isn't really all that big a deal -- will continue to occur until they are educated about the needs of above-average students, and until there is a place to put those students that can teach them how to use their talents.
And that day will be a long day coming, because normal-looking children don't make good posters.
... of the same marketing problems that killed OS/2.
OS/2 Warp 3 and 4, for their times, were vastly superior to any comparably-priced microcomputer operating system. Remember that the competition, at the time, was Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.
But IBM's failure to effectively market their superior product is what killed it, not Microsoft.
The funny part is that in looking at the specifications for this product, I don't see that it will run applications designed for Win9x. Maybe I'm missing something here, but it looks like this runs DOS, Windows 16-bit, and OS/2 16- and 32-bit applications. All well and good, but I've got a lot of money invested in my 32-bit Windows applications, now, and even the availability of StarOffice for this platform isn't going to entice me into converting.
What that omission a marketing decision, or an engineering decision?
Once upon a time I ran a system whose name was rnbwpnt.lonestar.org. I now no longer remember the !bangpath.
For a time, I gated newsgroups wholesale into FidoNet. Oh what an annoying setup I had. I registered Gigo (serial number 7), Jason Fesler's wonderful gateway package.
Later, for a very short time, I ran a gateway for all of Region 19, which I shut down abruptly because of the political insanity that was Fido.
I learned a lot from my experience in Fido. I made some friends who are still with me today. I found romance because of a connection made in FidoNet (wow); I learned to edit messages and to > quote properly. I wrote for FidoNews, and developed a specification for a text-based nodelist that never took off. I learned the Artful Insult thanks to the not-so-gentle-moderation of Ed Cleary in POLITICS. I even got to try my hand at moderating some large (INTERUSER) and not-so-large (SIP_SURVIVOR) echos. I quit drinking.
Wow.
I guess, mostly of nostalgia, I'm still a member of FidoNet. Yes, mail only, but still 24CM. I could have put my BBS back up, and considered it for a time after I found my Remote Access registration key a year or so ago, but nobody called it in 1993, before the popular rise of the Internet; why would anyone call it now?
So onward I plod, receiving my echomail... all 10k/day of it.
Given the level of detail in the article, it's actually difficult to make a prediction one way or the other about this particular suggestion -- that the tank and the capsule will hit each other.
The explosives (?) that would be used to detach the tank from the capsule would introduce a difference of both velocity and trajectory between the two objects, which will grow exponentially as the flight proceeds. For example, if you can fashion a charge that will project the tank away from the capsule, you might have a shot at surviving.
That is, of course, assuming you're not consumed in fire prior to liftoff, that your rocket stays stable in its trajectory once you've launched (and doesn't flip over and start heading downward with 12,000 pounds of thrust or explode Challenger-like in a cool ball of flame with little streaming bits of hot metal falling back to the ground), that you aren't crushed by the g-force going up, that you don't suffocate as your capsule decompresses and/or you run out of oxygen in your tank, that your vehicle isn't burned to a Mir crisp on re-entry, that your deceleration chute deploys properly, and that it's big enough to slow you enough so that you're not simply 5,000 pouds of falling steel heading for a rather rude and sudden stop down near the ground.
It will be interesting to see, in the longer term, how these types of schemes are affected by fair use claims like RIAA vs. Napster and DVD Cabal vs. 2600. I.e., will it be permissable for content owners to go ahead and encrypt/restrict their content in such a way as to prevent fair use?
My bet: Until/unless we can develop some friendly-faced people who do not look like me, but instead look like everyday people, the public and the courts (as well as the legislatures) will continue to think of those of us pushing for freer access as just a bunch of thugs wanting to bring down the order of things as it's know today.
The Good Guys did a fantastic job of this sort of thing -- lining up friendly-faced plaintiffs -- in case like ACLU v Reno (the Communications Decency Act case), but I have yet to hear about such a diverse and socially respectable group of plaintiffs assembled for a challenge to the DCMA.
I work 20-30 hours a week finding a job that will employ me 40 hours a week. And in this "new economy," I find only employment opportunities that are way above my experience (but not necessarily my skill) level. So, left out in the cold, I seem to be left with only technical support paying $10/hr. Which I've been doing for five years.
What booming economy?
Slashdot Mirror
While the company did comply with rules for overtime pay, the fact that it went on for years non-stop reached well past the point of abuse. For a company that says it respected the rights of workers, and espoused allowing employees a balance of personal and professional lives, it sure didn't seem that way when you could take two paid vacation days in a week and still have to work your 20 hours overtime.
And while it was official company policy that the company cooperate with any legal attempts by employees to organize, at least where I live, there are lots of reasons to fire people. It's also interesting to note that the company chose locations for its call centers in weak employee-rights states ... Texas, Tennessee, Kansas, etc.
Not all unions are good. Not all of them are bad. And sometimes they can provide protection against abuses by employers.
With a background in network design and implementation, security (firewalls and permissions design), NT/2K networking, and Linux implementation and administration, and enough certification paper to bury a 10 story building, you'd think I could land SOMETHING.
But no.
I start tonight delivering pizza for Domino's.
This dot-com market glut crap is real, even for those of us who are not marginally skilled and who are just unlucky. With Web-based job hunting places sprouting ads for nobody but headhunters, the chances of your resume (out of 20,000 submitted) getting looked at are miniscule, even if you can shit gold code.
Life sucks if you're out of work in this biz, gang. Those of you who have jobs ought to count your blessings, because the market just isn't there for hopping around every six months anymore.
The title of the television programme is Doctor Who. Not Dr. Who. Not Dr Who. Not Doctor Who? Not Dr Who?
The name of the lead character, played by a number of very fine actors, is The Doctor. Not Doctor Who, Dr. Who, Dr Who, Dr Who?, or any other choice of abbreviations you wish you use.
Call me silly. Call me stupid. It's just another example of the decline of linguistic accuracy, both in everyday society and on the Internet.
And I reserve the right to hate it.
I've never seen a TOS that gives the provider the right to scan my network, and I find it incredible that I got harassed for inquiring about how their obviously non-standard routing worked.
I dumped em and haven't looked back.
Your rights online at school are basically like your rights in person at school: Especially at well-funded institutions with lots more money than you, you have none. Just like public high school, you are not free to think or say what you wish, even if (as NOT in this case) it's off campus, because they'll expel you or harass you or cause all sorts of misery.
Those of you who have listened to Howard Stern recently are aware of the kid in the northeast who got suspended for writing an erotic song about his English teacher. It didn't matter that he wrote and recorded it outside of school, and himself never brought it to school. No, although his friends brought it to school without his permission, the author still got harassed about it. (All I can say is that many freshman boys are hot for their teachers. Fact of life. If you don't like it, teach second grade.)
There is a basic equation I learned when a school newspaper I ran was censored, and I distributed the story across the street from the school as a handbill produced at private expense: student + school == no rights period
In my case, I was looking to move from call center flunkie doing technical support for voicemail (a job I took because I needed a paycheck, doing what it took to earn a living) into the sort of IT position for which I was much more suited, both in terms of experience and temperment.
I couldn't get so much as an interview for an internal promotion, and my requests for use of the company's training materials were turned down because the "request is not related to job functionality." Correct. I had already learned everything I needed to know to do my particular job.
Here's the funny part: My annual review with the company was excellent; my merit raise was higher than average, and in fact, my manager RAISED the raise suggested by my direct supervisor.
Yet they wouldn't let me out of the call position. When the stress of the inbound call line flaked me out, I pleaded to be moved to a non-call job, even with a pay cut, even if that meant pushing a broom and cleaning toilets. "Well," they said, "it's a call center."
Unable to retain me, I left the company, bitter and disappointed about their promise of offering growth and opportunity (in a company with 50,000+ employees!) that translated into being pigeonholed into taking calls for the rest of whatever life I chose to spend with them.
While this particular case was extreme, I've seen promises of growth in other companies as well, and have never once seen them deliver. I wonder if the whole idea of "growth opportunity" is nothing but a b*llsh*t ploy designed to recruit, and then we hope we can string 'em along long enough to make our money off the OJT we did.
It all goes back to the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.
... but Peak, as an unauthorized repair center (read competition), did not.
In this case, it's the RIAA and MPAA. Napster is most likely to wither and die in their fight not because the RIAA may or may not have a better legal case, but because the money will run out. 2600's fight against the MPAA may fall victim to the same problem, even with the support of the EFF.
This is not new.
Several years ago, a case out of (I believe California) called MAI vs. Peak Electronics wound up being granted review by the Supreme Court of the United States.
MAI's claim against Peak was that Peak violated MAI's copyright because the act of turning MAI's computer on made a copy of data contained into ROM, and that making this copy without a license was a violation of MAI's copyright. Never mind that the copy was required for the operation of the computer -- the whole point was to squash an independent service provider and force repairs to go only to MAI-approved repair outfits. Customers had a license to make a copy, and authorized repair centers had that same right
Peak had to settle (they lost, essentially) because the money ran out. They couldn't file the necessary briefs with the Supreme Court because they didn't have the cash to pay the lawyers.
It's the Golden Rule. It doesn't matter that the law is a bad law, or that the copyright owners are money-grubbing b*st*rds whose only interest is in lining their own pockets. It's that they have the money, and we do not.
... to consider that most peoples' interest are pretty narrow: The price of electricity, the price of gas, where their next paycheck will come from. Maybe they worry about taking their kids to the doctor when they get sick. Other than that, they don't really care about much.
... and when they came for me, there was no one left to complain.
... and also, in some ways, predictible. It has been my experience, both personally and through observation, that our school systems -- and often our parents -- are poorly equipped to handle children who are more than moderately intelligent. The one-size-fits-all method of education is clearly a failure, and while we've been working for a while on the lower end (special education for learning-disabled students, for example), there is generally little in the way of inexpensive (read publicly funded) educational alternatives for very intelligent children. So if your child masters educational concepts quickly, and then can't handle all the repetition and is bored to tears by having to repeat the same concept 200 times over the next two weeks, well ... look out, because there's a very good chance she's bored to tears in school, and the school is unequipped to teach her in an effective manner.
And if you're unable to pay for her education yourself ... well ... look out.
Situations like this -- over-reaction on the part of (clueless) school officials to something that isn't really all that big a deal -- will continue to occur until they are educated about the needs of above-average students, and until there is a place to put those students that can teach them how to use their talents.
And that day will be a long day coming, because normal-looking children don't make good posters.
... of the same marketing problems that killed OS/2.
OS/2 Warp 3 and 4, for their times, were vastly superior to any comparably-priced microcomputer operating system. Remember that the competition, at the time, was Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.
But IBM's failure to effectively market their superior product is what killed it, not Microsoft.
The funny part is that in looking at the specifications for this product, I don't see that it will run applications designed for Win9x. Maybe I'm missing something here, but it looks like this runs DOS, Windows 16-bit, and OS/2 16- and 32-bit applications. All well and good, but I've got a lot of money invested in my 32-bit Windows applications, now, and even the availability of StarOffice for this platform isn't going to entice me into converting.
What that omission a marketing decision, or an engineering decision?
For a time, I gated newsgroups wholesale into FidoNet. Oh what an annoying setup I had. I registered Gigo (serial number 7), Jason Fesler's wonderful gateway package.
Later, for a very short time, I ran a gateway for all of Region 19, which I shut down abruptly because of the political insanity that was Fido.
I learned a lot from my experience in Fido. I made some friends who are still with me today. I found romance because of a connection made in FidoNet (wow); I learned to edit messages and to > quote properly. I wrote for FidoNews, and developed a specification for a text-based nodelist that never took off. I learned the Artful Insult thanks to the not-so-gentle-moderation of Ed Cleary in POLITICS. I even got to try my hand at moderating some large (INTERUSER) and not-so-large (SIP_SURVIVOR) echos. I quit drinking.
Wow.
I guess, mostly of nostalgia, I'm still a member of FidoNet. Yes, mail only, but still 24CM. I could have put my BBS back up, and considered it for a time after I found my Remote Access registration key a year or so ago, but nobody called it in 1993, before the popular rise of the Internet; why would anyone call it now?
So onward I plod, receiving my echomail ... all 10k/day of it.
Still, I wouldn't trade it for the world.
Given the level of detail in the article, it's actually difficult to make a prediction one way or the other about this particular suggestion -- that the tank and the capsule will hit each other.
The explosives (?) that would be used to detach the tank from the capsule would introduce a difference of both velocity and trajectory between the two objects, which will grow exponentially as the flight proceeds. For example, if you can fashion a charge that will project the tank away from the capsule, you might have a shot at surviving.
That is, of course, assuming you're not consumed in fire prior to liftoff, that your rocket stays stable in its trajectory once you've launched (and doesn't flip over and start heading downward with 12,000 pounds of thrust or explode Challenger-like in a cool ball of flame with little streaming bits of hot metal falling back to the ground), that you aren't crushed by the g-force going up, that you don't suffocate as your capsule decompresses and/or you run out of oxygen in your tank, that your vehicle isn't burned to a Mir crisp on re-entry, that your deceleration chute deploys properly, and that it's big enough to slow you enough so that you're not simply 5,000 pouds of falling steel heading for a rather rude and sudden stop down near the ground.
Interesting story. I ain't climbing on.
It will be interesting to see, in the longer term, how these types of schemes are affected by fair use claims like RIAA vs. Napster and DVD Cabal vs. 2600. I.e., will it be permissable for content owners to go ahead and encrypt/restrict their content in such a way as to prevent fair use? My bet: Until/unless we can develop some friendly-faced people who do not look like me, but instead look like everyday people, the public and the courts (as well as the legislatures) will continue to think of those of us pushing for freer access as just a bunch of thugs wanting to bring down the order of things as it's know today. The Good Guys did a fantastic job of this sort of thing -- lining up friendly-faced plaintiffs -- in case like ACLU v Reno (the Communications Decency Act case), but I have yet to hear about such a diverse and socially respectable group of plaintiffs assembled for a challenge to the DCMA.
I work 20-30 hours a week finding a job that will employ me 40 hours a week. And in this "new economy," I find only employment opportunities that are way above my experience (but not necessarily my skill) level. So, left out in the cold, I seem to be left with only technical support paying $10/hr. Which I've been doing for five years. What booming economy?