When I went to work for Radio Shack, it was around Christmas. I said specifically to the guy hiring me, "Don't hire me if this is just for a Christmas job, I'm looking for something longer term." Well, it was the same basic system you describe. You were expected to behave like a predator with the customer fulfilling the role of prey. No matter how tiny a piece of merchandise they were buying, you had to hustle them for a service agreement.
After Christmas, they didn't fire me, they just cut back my hours to zero. Radio Shack sucks as a place to work or to shop... unfortunately if you need little electronic bits and pieces in a hurry its usually the only place that comes to mind...
Geeks are not politically irrelevant for...
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 2
...being geeks. Only geeks who believe in freedom are politically irrelevant.
But then, any group of people in the modern day US who believe in freedom are politically irrelevant.
I'm glad you brought that up, it is a sickening example of organizations using junk science to curry favor with the current political mess we have in Washington. It's sort of like the way people were sent to insane asylums in the Soviet Union if they published books which were critical of the communist system...
First of all, I'd like to preface this with a point for those who don't know much about the Entertainment Software Ratings Board's Rating System. M means, "Mature" and is intended to be the video game equivalent of R. The Adults Only rating is AO, and I've never seen it applied to a software product, though I have seen unrated software that it could be applied to.
The truth is, fairly recently, Montgomery Ward and Sears buckled to the pressure from Joe Lieberman and the others and stopped carrying M rated games all together. Walmart and K-Mart cannot afford to ignore the orders of the man who will be the next vice president of the United States. America hasn't been a free country or had an effective Bill of Rights for quite a long time now, claiming First Amendment protection is a good way to get beaten by police or shot. No one is going to go to the wall over a few video games (well, except me maybe, but considering I don't care for modern polygonal games, maybe not.)
I will admit that American's cavalier attitude towards the First Amendment rights they used to have bothers me. If you know the whole story behind this, it is similar to the infamous Smith & Wesson gun control deal, in which Smith & Wesson agreed to do things that the government couldn't get legislatively. Lieberman and Brownback wanted (and still want) the same type of deal. They want M rated games off the shelves of every major retailer in the country, so they will be impossible to purchase. This is because they have been completely unable to accomplish this through either legislative or judicial means. By not doing this, Wal Mart and K-Mart are in fact standing up to the senators who signed the letter (I have no illusions, they don't want to lose sales, its not because they want to defend Free Expression. However, I still consider it somewhat admirable, even though I expect that they will ultimately buckle to this pressure.) and the senators are not happy about this. Neither American law nor American judicial precedent are on their side in this matter, but this new tactic may work for the latest attempted power grab by the government. I don't really think this is about video games, really, it is about testing the limits of governments power to intimidate people into surrendering their rights. Just as it didn't start with video games, it won't stop with video games, I can assure you of that. It's also not about carding, it's about banning, the wholesale elimination of any video game meant for people age 17 or over from the American market. Yes, it's true that the letter said:
The meeting came on the day nine U.S. senators sent a letter to top executives at Target, Best Buy, Circuit City and Kmart encouraging them to pull the games off their shelves or prevent their sale to anyone younger than 17.--Discount retailers resist efforts to limit sales of violent video games
but the emphasis was clearly on pulling the games from the shelves and keeping them out of anyone's hands, no matter how old the customer.
The situation is not quite as bad as the 1950's comic book witch hunt, which for many years restricted the content of comic books to stuff which would be considered safe by even the most fretful and overprotective mother.
I do consider it serious though. I think people who are not currently in the thrall of one form of fascism or another will see that the First Amendment, across the board, is at one of its lowest points in the history of the Republic. Not because of this, this is merely one symptom of a larger problem. Ironically, as our popular "reality" TV shows (such as "Survivor") become increasingly about real sadism directed at real people, stuff which is purely fictional is more harshly criticized than it has been since the 50's. People are so eager to give up their First Amendment rights these days.
It took two wars to get us out of the nightmare we created for ourselves in the 50's, I hope it won't take anything to that drastic to get us out of our current national flirtation with authoritarianism.
Perhaps they should change immigration law so that if you are to be taxed, you're given the right to vote, too!
I think that's a really good idea. Unfortunately I also think that, given the choice, politicians would much rather levy taxes on people who can't vote against them.:-(
Still, if the only way they were legally alowed to tax people is if they had the right to vote... a lot of people would get citizenship on the fast track!!:-)
No Taxation without Representation! Maybe it would work as a pro-naturalization slogan...
I remember reading about miners back in the "good old days" before unions. One of the tricks employers would use would be to set the anglo's versus the irish, the irish versus the italians, etc.
This worked out well for the mine owners, because it kept the workers from organizing for their own benefit by creating artificial (or aggravating pre-existing) antagonisms.
I would really like to see a law passed that would make anyone who has lived here for more than, say, 3 years automatically become a citizen. No tests, no degrading investigations of your personal life, just a rubber stamp and "you're a citizen."
I think you would find congressional support for H-1B visas would dry up if such a law was passed... on the other hand, you would gain the right to vote so you could do something about that.
I just don't like the fact that a considerable number of Americans (people who have set enough roots down here to be considered such, people who've lived here for enough time that I don't consider them visitors) don't have the right to vote or affect the government in any way.
Doesn't it ever bother you that the next president or senator from your state will be elected without you having any say in the matter?
There should be almost no restrictions on people who immigrate to this country becoming citizens. My wife is Thai, the process we have had to go through to get her her temporary green card was a nightmare, and she still isn't a citizen.
So, I'm very much in favor of an increase in immigration and especially an increase in naturalization, I would just like to see it tied to the possibility of citizenship. (My wife's cousin is getting in on an H-1B herself.)
It is true that people (including people in unions) can be duped into believing that increased immigration is bad for workers. That doesn't mean unions are by their nature anti-immigrant, it simply means that propaganda has worked.
As an IT worker, I'm a bit tired of a lot of these obnoxious new laws that are passed, like the DMCA or UCITA, whereas tech workers seem powerless to influence the legal system. If tech workers organized, they could change that.
Hmm... I notice a hostility to unions on this board. It basically seems to be based on the idea that "Unions are corrupt."
Unions don't have to be corrupt, they are simply a way for people to group together for a common goal. There are good unions and bad unions, a union is just a political organization designed to serve a group of workers.
The leader's of the industries, in groups like the BSA, RIAA, MPAA certainly have no problem banding together for common goals, why should the worker's feel they are better served by not organizing?
In the American system, people are more powerful when they are organized into lobbies and special interest groups, and I've yet to see a way to change it. Even campaign finance reform can't alter these groups ability to influence the votes of their members. (I'm a political realist, campaign finance reform is probably not going to happen, anyway.)
A union is like a political party, whether it is good or bad depends on what kind of leaders are voted in. The right to have a union, like the right to be part of a political party, is a good thing. In fact, it is part of our constitutional freedom of assembly.
H-1B visas are not as good for foriegn workers, giving them the option of citizenship would be. Unfortunately, there's this huge hostility to increased citizenship based on xenophobic grandstanding by politicians.
This is a shame, because it isn't good for Americans in general to have a class of people living here who don't have the same rights as the rest of us.
A labor shortage is... an inability to find workers who will work unlimited unpaid overtime for extremely low wages.
H-1B visas are... a way to create a class of workers who don't have the same constitutional rights (or what's left of them) as the average American citizen and will be beholden to the companies that hire them not only for their job but for their continued residence in the US.
Technology workers are... a group of working class people who are foolishly squandering their powerful position in the labor market by not unionizing.
I'm voting Libertarian. I think Al Gore would be a disaster, for this reason:
The entertainment industry is pumping millions of dollars into the war chests of both major political parties, vastly outspending both technology startups and individual artists. That could make it difficult for those "little guys" to get their messages across to legislators.
According to figures from the Center for Responsive Politics, the Democrats have collected $5.8 million from the television, movie, and music industries, ranking it fourth on the campaign donation list. That figure outpaces the Republicans by $2.1 million, which ranks the entertainment industry eleventh.
--Wired: D.C. Awash in Entertainment Cash
However, according to current law, disabling Macrovision is a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Macrovision is an access control device, and circumventing it is illegal no matter how trivial it is. There will be selective enforcement (these are laws designed to allow a reign of terror, not designed for consitent enforcement), a few high profile show trials in which some victim is sacrificed to American "Justice" to satisfy the great god of the MPAA's profits.
Ok, I think the problem here is terminology. On the one hand, I think that what waider meant by editorial independence is that the editorial functions and reporting functions of Slashdot ought to be kept separate (independent) from each other. However, when he refers to "Slashdot keeping it's editorial independence after it has been acquired by Andover," what was meant was that Andover's editorial policies would not be imposed on Slashdot's editorial policy, that the corporate PR department at Andover would not dictate editorial policy to Slashdot.
Personally, I agree that Slashdot's advocacy of Free Software would be more effective if a Pro-Free Software bias were kept out of articles and restricted to editorials. It's not my call to make though, and I don't claim to be the best person to make decisions on this. (I'm too much of a zealot myself to criticize others for their zealotry.)
However, I don't think that Commander Taco was promising that when he said Slashdot would maintain editorial independence after the Andover purchase.
You are confusing "editorally independant" with "non-biased reporting."
Editorial independance: "Andover will not encourage me to quash stories that are unfavorable to them or to editorialize in their favor when I feel differently."
Non-biased reporting: "I will refrain from advocacy when reporting stories."
I see Slashdot as a very political site, I can even remember a Presidential endorsement recently. I don't expect non-biased coverage of the things I read here, but fortunately I am a believer in Free Software so the advocacy doesn't bother me.
I put DeCSS in the HTML source of some of my pages as a comment. No linking involved, I wonder if the MPAA will try to go after that if it becomes widespread.
If they do, can I sue them under the DMCA for using "view source" to crack my heavy duty source code encryption?
"Hey, My page is encrypted man, only people I inform are supposed to be able to use 'view source' to decrypt it."
Evidence suggests that the Playstation2 isn't going to be a good product, but that Sony will leverage its oligopoly to make sure it sells anyhow. Reports on this everything-box from Japan are not encouraging if you are a Sony fan (which I'm not, fortunately).
It, and its games, will still make money for a while.
However, I'm not expecting it to dominate the game industry the way Nintendo did. More like Atari, total monopoly and then total crash with not much of a video game industry at all for a while.
Video games are one of these things that people will only buy if they are good, as Time/Warner found out when they drove Atari into the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
http://slashdot.org/co mments.pl?sid=00/09/07/1658220&cid=341
I'll raise my kids the way my parents raised me.
By the way, I'll never take any comment you make, on any issue seriously.
It's fascists like you that are ruining this country.
Bah, and I was one of the ones defending Walmart and K-Mart, scumbag...
After Christmas, they didn't fire me, they just cut back my hours to zero. Radio Shack sucks as a place to work or to shop... unfortunately if you need little electronic bits and pieces in a hurry its usually the only place that comes to mind...
But then, any group of people in the modern day US who believe in freedom are politically irrelevant.
Statement linking media violence to violence in kids draws criticism
I'm glad you brought that up, it is a sickening example of organizations using junk science to curry favor with the current political mess we have in Washington. It's sort of like the way people were sent to insane asylums in the Soviet Union if they published books which were critical of the communist system...
The truth is, fairly recently, Montgomery Ward and Sears buckled to the pressure from Joe Lieberman and the others and stopped carrying M rated games all together. Walmart and K-Mart cannot afford to ignore the orders of the man who will be the next vice president of the United States. America hasn't been a free country or had an effective Bill of Rights for quite a long time now, claiming First Amendment protection is a good way to get beaten by police or shot. No one is going to go to the wall over a few video games (well, except me maybe, but considering I don't care for modern polygonal games, maybe not.)
I will admit that American's cavalier attitude towards the First Amendment rights they used to have bothers me. If you know the whole story behind this, it is similar to the infamous Smith & Wesson gun control deal, in which Smith & Wesson agreed to do things that the government couldn't get legislatively. Lieberman and Brownback wanted (and still want) the same type of deal. They want M rated games off the shelves of every major retailer in the country, so they will be impossible to purchase. This is because they have been completely unable to accomplish this through either legislative or judicial means. By not doing this, Wal Mart and K-Mart are in fact standing up to the senators who signed the letter (I have no illusions, they don't want to lose sales, its not because they want to defend Free Expression. However, I still consider it somewhat admirable, even though I expect that they will ultimately buckle to this pressure.) and the senators are not happy about this. Neither American law nor American judicial precedent are on their side in this matter, but this new tactic may work for the latest attempted power grab by the government. I don't really think this is about video games, really, it is about testing the limits of governments power to intimidate people into surrendering their rights. Just as it didn't start with video games, it won't stop with video games, I can assure you of that. It's also not about carding, it's about banning, the wholesale elimination of any video game meant for people age 17 or over from the American market. Yes, it's true that the letter said:
but the emphasis was clearly on pulling the games from the shelves and keeping them out of anyone's hands, no matter how old the customer.The situation is not quite as bad as the 1950's comic book witch hunt, which for many years restricted the content of comic books to stuff which would be considered safe by even the most fretful and overprotective mother.
I do consider it serious though. I think people who are not currently in the thrall of one form of fascism or another will see that the First Amendment, across the board, is at one of its lowest points in the history of the Republic. Not because of this, this is merely one symptom of a larger problem. Ironically, as our popular "reality" TV shows (such as "Survivor") become increasingly about real sadism directed at real people, stuff which is purely fictional is more harshly criticized than it has been since the 50's. People are so eager to give up their First Amendment rights these days.
It took two wars to get us out of the nightmare we created for ourselves in the 50's, I hope it won't take anything to that drastic to get us out of our current national flirtation with authoritarianism.
Still, if the only way they were legally alowed to tax people is if they had the right to vote... a lot of people would get citizenship on the fast track!! :-)
No Taxation without Representation! Maybe it would work as a pro-naturalization slogan...
This worked out well for the mine owners, because it kept the workers from organizing for their own benefit by creating artificial (or aggravating pre-existing) antagonisms.
Now we have H1B, same song different dance.
I think you would find congressional support for H-1B visas would dry up if such a law was passed... on the other hand, you would gain the right to vote so you could do something about that.
I just don't like the fact that a considerable number of Americans (people who have set enough roots down here to be considered such, people who've lived here for enough time that I don't consider them visitors) don't have the right to vote or affect the government in any way.
Doesn't it ever bother you that the next president or senator from your state will be elected without you having any say in the matter?
There should be almost no restrictions on people who immigrate to this country becoming citizens. My wife is Thai, the process we have had to go through to get her her temporary green card was a nightmare, and she still isn't a citizen.
So, I'm very much in favor of an increase in immigration and especially an increase in naturalization, I would just like to see it tied to the possibility of citizenship. (My wife's cousin is getting in on an H-1B herself.)
It is true that people (including people in unions) can be duped into believing that increased immigration is bad for workers. That doesn't mean unions are by their nature anti-immigrant, it simply means that propaganda has worked.
As an IT worker, I'm a bit tired of a lot of these obnoxious new laws that are passed, like the DMCA or UCITA, whereas tech workers seem powerless to influence the legal system. If tech workers organized, they could change that.
Unions don't have to be corrupt, they are simply a way for people to group together for a common goal. There are good unions and bad unions, a union is just a political organization designed to serve a group of workers.
The leader's of the industries, in groups like the BSA, RIAA, MPAA certainly have no problem banding together for common goals, why should the worker's feel they are better served by not organizing?
In the American system, people are more powerful when they are organized into lobbies and special interest groups, and I've yet to see a way to change it. Even campaign finance reform can't alter these groups ability to influence the votes of their members. (I'm a political realist, campaign finance reform is probably not going to happen, anyway.)
A union is like a political party, whether it is good or bad depends on what kind of leaders are voted in. The right to have a union, like the right to be part of a political party, is a good thing. In fact, it is part of our constitutional freedom of assembly.
When the recording artists got the "work for hire" clause that the RIAA foisted on them repealed, they did it by unionizing, even if they didn't call it that. How will tech workers affect things like DMCA without organizing?
I wonder how many people who are hostile to unions were able to get a college education because their families were in one?
If unions are "commie" how do you explain Solidarity?
This is a shame, because it isn't good for Americans in general to have a class of people living here who don't have the same rights as the rest of us.
H-1B visas are... a way to create a class of workers who don't have the same constitutional rights (or what's left of them) as the average American citizen and will be beholden to the companies that hire them not only for their job but for their continued residence in the US.
Technology workers are... a group of working class people who are foolishly squandering their powerful position in the labor market by not unionizing.
Personally, I agree that Slashdot's advocacy of Free Software would be more effective if a Pro-Free Software bias were kept out of articles and restricted to editorials. It's not my call to make though, and I don't claim to be the best person to make decisions on this. (I'm too much of a zealot myself to criticize others for their zealotry.)
However, I don't think that Commander Taco was promising that when he said Slashdot would maintain editorial independence after the Andover purchase.
Editorial independance: "Andover will not encourage me to quash stories that are unfavorable to them or to editorialize in their favor when I feel differently."
Non-biased reporting: "I will refrain from advocacy when reporting stories."
I see Slashdot as a very political site, I can even remember a Presidential endorsement recently. I don't expect non-biased coverage of the things I read here, but fortunately I am a believer in Free Software so the advocacy doesn't bother me.
Pigdog Journal DeCSS Distribution Center
If they do, can I sue them under the DMCA for using "view source" to crack my heavy duty source code encryption?
"Hey, My page is encrypted man, only people I inform are supposed to be able to use 'view source' to decrypt it."
It, and its games, will still make money for a while.
However, I'm not expecting it to dominate the game industry the way Nintendo did. More like Atari, total monopoly and then total crash with not much of a video game industry at all for a while.
Video games are one of these things that people will only buy if they are good, as Time/Warner found out when they drove Atari into the ground.
Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Bill 1999
I admit, I don't understand why the Austrlian parliament would do this.