I agree with you in spirit. But social niceties have no place in matters of law. For humanitarian reasons Verizon should waive the fee. However, they have no legal obligation to do so. They are within their rights to enforce the contract.
If I were to die right now my wife would still have to pay on our car, college loans, etc. Nobody waives your debts when you die. That's why they refer to your assets after you expire as your estate, so that liens can be placed against it and the creditors you leave behind can collect their due.
I agree that Verizon is taking their "early termination" clause to a ridiculous extreme. The purpose of an early termination fee is that it is a penalty which makes it difficult for you to switch carriers, and clearly the deceased has other reasons for dropping service. But still - the contract is valid and binding even after death.
The collecting agency is asking that its professional members donate to its Legislative Fund for the Arts, which appears to be a lobbying campaign meant to convince Congress that artists should not have the choice of licensing their works under a copyleft license.
I'd like to see what their legal argument would be. Basically they're lobbying to make a particular kind of legal contract they disagree with illegal.
Ooo, no - that's not a slippery slope at all. I'm sure lawyers all over the continent will sit still for that! I can't see how that would cause a problem ever!! *hah*
Hell, even the bad lawyers would fight having that for a precedent. Harder than the good guys I'd guess - tricky contracts are where a good bit of their bread and butter comes from. If the law began placing restrictions on what sorts of contracts you could make...well, that would have a lot of other interesting implications.
I believe this is one of the rare moments where NYCL has missed the point. In fact, the only one I've ever seen now that I think about it..
This isn't about money. Here, read this bit again:
One commentator suggests the RIAA should at this juncture just say, 'Thanks Jammie, we've had all we can get out of you and caused you enough grief -- pay us $1 and we'll forget about it.' Actually doing that would be a lot less costly and more reasonable that what they appear to have in mind.
It's right there if you read it a second time. "...more reasonable that what they appear to have in mind."
They are not out to be reasonable. What they wish to do is to rob this poor woman not of her money but of her time, her life. One minute at a time, whatever the cost. They don't want to bankrupt her. They don't want $54,000. They want to make an example out of her. Doesn't matter if they have to spend hundreds of thousands to drag this thing out. The money isn't the point. The entire music industry is balanced on the head of a pin and these people are just that terrified that the gravy train is coming to an end. It is fear and wild reaction on a level that is hard to understand. That's why the response seems unreasonable. Because it is. On purpose. The modern day legal equivalent of these guys.
It has taken me 40 years on this planet to eventually figure out the fact that some people simply do not think in a reasonable fashion. It's hard when you base your life on rationality to think in an irrational manner. You see someone doing something you cannot understand and you apply your own yardsticks to it. And fail, because nothing you can come up with fits.
These people have different motives than I could ever have - it is alien thinking. But once you know that people differ wildly from each other, you know that some people will simply be unfathomable. This is one of those times.
To access the content inside, however, you'll need the playkey, which is delivered to the buyer of a digital media file and lives within "tamper-protected circuit" inside some device
A "tamper-protected circuit". Oh boy! When did we invent these??
You'd think the IEEE, of all groups, would know better than to suggest something that stupid.
It doesn't matter how clever you think you are - if you can build it, someone can unbuild it. It's really just that simple. How many times have we seen this before? Someone says "aha this time, THIS TIME, it is absolutely unhackable!" And then two weeks later some teenager from the Netherlands puts the keymaker on P2P.
The best part - my favorite part - is that some idiot in the *AA will believe them. Sink a metric crapload of money into the company that has "the fix", and then get burned. Again.
I love watching this idiot's dream dry up over and over. It makes me grin when the stupid and the greedy get what's coming to them.
He's spot on. He could have phrased it more delicately, but honestly you could use a little shaking up.
That's what your job has evolved into, and that is the pay. Arm twisting will accomplish nothing for you except a quick trip to the street. They're broke. You've already said so. That's why they're laying off all the people you've replaced and have no budget for staff.
You try to go oil drilling with these guys and you won't get a thing except a fresh new bullseye on your back.
My advice? Talk them into a title change only. Emphasize you're not digging for a raise, but you'd like something to reflect your new duties. Get your new impressive title, then bust ass for the next 3 months to get settled in with your new title. Then get your ass to careerbuilder and craigslist and use your new fancy title to negotiate a better job. These guys are garden variety passive aggressives PHBs that will continue to dump on you until you break. Ditch them.
If we wanted to, we could start operating a bunch more of those fission reactors; they don't necessarily make economic sense given current market prices, but those markets probably don't accurately capture the consequences of other forms of energy production, and fission is certainly still energy positive (and it is probably energy positive to pull uranium out the sea).
Fission or fusion. Don't need either of them. I think nuclear fuels make perfect sense to run submarines, but for consumer use they are unnecessary. Algae biodiesel could supply our entire energy need. And has the added advantage of not making radioactive waste.
Don't get me wrong - if fusion pans out that would be fantastic. I did the math once and figured that you'd need about two olympic sized pools worth of water to separate into hydrogen to fuse into helium to handle north america's energy needs for a year. That would be magnificent. But the best source of power anywhere nearby is the sun.
But - I wouldn't call it a defense of lawyers so much as a defense of humanity in general, of which lawyers (presumably) are a subset. We all like to get paid. Food and shelter are awesome, and we'll all occasionally do something "morally flexible" to achieve it. I have. I'll admit that.
It's just when lawyers do something morally flexible, it looks like what these SCO guys are doing. There is nothing mysterious about it.
How far would you go for fifty million bucks?
There is a long list of despicable things I'd do for that kind of cash. You too, most likely.
That's my point pretty much. They were offered a lot of cash to do something lousy. So surprise surprise, being human beings - they did it.
And again - these guys are lawyers. They often times have a peculiar view of morality. A significant number of lawyers equate legality with morality. If it is in the law to allow people to do something, then it is right to do it. You and I probably don't look at the world that way, but a fair number of lawyers do. It's in their training. The law is what is right. Therefore, if the law allows you to do something - that something is right. Like the endless SCO lawsuit. It's perfectly legal, therefore it must be right. Lawyer thinking. This is why there aren't many saints in that profession.
I would think about changing my line of work if I was assigned SCO versus the World.
Nah. What you've got there are lawyers who are getting paid. Doesn't matter if what they are doing is wrong and hopeless. Look at a lawyer's paycheck. For that, Sisyphus would probably wake up cheerful and show up for a day's work with a smile.
This is just lawyers being lawyers for the most part. Sure you get some good ones every so often, like Ray Beckerman. People who actually get into the field because they wish to be superheroes. But 99.9% of the world - regardless of their job - just want to get paid.
And you and I are probably no different. I've worked on software projects that were doomed. How about you? I worked on a project once for 3 years that I knew 6 months in was going to wind up in a box on a shelf. Did I care? Hell no. I was making a paycheck during the dot bomb. Plenty of my coder friends weren't.
Once SCO finally runs out of cash these guys will move on. Some of them will wind up working for Save the Puppies, some for the RIAA. Both will sleep well that night. It's just a job.
Oh, one more thing. The SCO lawyers didn't lose. They did what Microsoft (via BayStar) paid them to do. Defame Linux. I'm sure the instructions went like this. "Make it drag out as long as you can. Sew fear and doubt. Never surrender!" Fifty million bucks buys a lot of moral flexibility. And these are lawyers, which is a profession that isn't overly burdened with saints.
And on their resume for their next job they can say that they spearheaded an impossible effort. They moved market share towards their customer and away from an open source project that has a nebulous cloud of people working on it. They attacked a ghost, did it for a decade, and did that with a tenacity that would make a pit bull proud.
There are many places where someone with that kind of determination and moral flexibility would be most welcome. I expect a lot of these resumes to wind up on the desks of BP's HR department sometime in the near future.
"...third-party influentials and industry leaders like Cisco tell us regularly that our focus and investment continues to surpass others."
Focus and investment. Notice "results" aren't on that list.
As a side note, I'd also like to add that lately BP has had a huge focus and investment on cleaning up oil spills. More so than any other oil company. But still - nobody loves them this week. Wonder why?
Not the loss of life, obviously. But there is an economic statement under all of this that is good news, somewhat.
If China has to try that hard to be competitive, and is now beginning to have their workers demand either more money or death - this might be the beginning of the end for outsourcing. If things are truly that bad in China to where people are willing to kill themselves in protest then they must surely be at the limits of their capacity. All they can do from here is make concessions to their workers and become less globally competitive.
It is a shame people had to die to make the point though. But it is a point worth making.
Media producers aren't in love with the idea of copyrights, they're in love with money. They just promote the concept of copyright when it benefits them to gain more money. If somehow copyrights were getting in the way of them getting paid, you'd see their lobbyists 24-7 trying to do away with them.
Business is in business to make money. Think of a large business as an amoeba that assimilates money. It doesn't have a conscience, just a rudimentary intelligence that drives it to move towards the money and acquire it. That's why they do these moves that are seemingly at cross purposes, like backing copyright and then ignoring copyright. Money is the underlying motive. Whatever gets a business more cash is good, much in the same way an amoeba gets food. Ethics don't enter into it - that's reserved for higher life forms.
So even if the performance benefits aren't that great it may increase the life of the car/machine.
If that's the case then it it'll never make it to market. Nobody would sell them. Cars that fall apart (forcing you to buy a new car) are more profitable in the long run.
Seriously - how the crap can anyone point to the patent system and say that it promotes innovation?
Small company might run afoul of a larger one, so it finds another larger one to partner with. Sort of a mutually-assured-destruction patent scenario. The product doesn't change a single bit. It still infringes on whatever Apple patents it may have infringed upon. It just has a new benefactor that Apple knows it cannot beat in a patent war.
Software patents are so broken it's insane. When will we finally ditch the whole idea?
If that's indeed the case, then why not simply put the MBR,/boot,/bin, and/usr on the SSD, then mount stuff like/home,/tmp, swap, and the like onto a spindle disk? No algorithm needed, thus no overhead needed to run it, etc.
This sounds like a good way to go.
...only if you want to blow out the SSD wear-limits.
Read "Flash SSD Application from Hell - the Rogue Data Recorder". And keep in mind it was written in 07 - things are better than that now. You might die of old age before your SSD does, depending on your setup.
Now in the case of "hidden cores", what's the risk? Do you even know? Do you know what kind of flaw would lead them to legitimately disable a core? Is that one core unable to tolerate the same clock speed as the others? Is it functionaly broken such that it will return incorrect results for some operations?
Ever written any assembly?
I promise you, if a single instruction had a single bit out of place - the whole house of cards would come tumbling down. FAST.
If you run the thing with a good stress test for a day and it doesn't blue screen - you're golden. I think the odds of a cpu core being actually physically broken and somehow not crashing the system are roughly equivalent to being struck dead by lightning while holding a winning Megamillions ticket. During a blue moon in December on the day they release Duke Nukem Forever.
I have never understood how school districts think.
The reason why you're confused is because you are aiming too high. Think back to your childhood. How many of the teachers that you can remember would you say were smart? Not too many, right? I can think of two or three full-on idiots, a psychopath or two - you name it. The cream of the crop usually don't wind up teaching fourth graders.
Before people blast me - not all teachers and school admins and the like are idiots.
I can think of a few genuinely brilliant and wonderful people I met throughout my school career. People who do the job because they love children, love the potential, and love steering young people towards productive lives. But you'd have to be crazy to think everyone in a public school is like that.
A friend of mine drifted back into town a few months ago and stopped by for a visit. Hadn't seen him in ten years. He is now a hands-shaking alcoholic. What's his job? Substitute teacher. Par for the course.
So to answer your question, school jobs are excellent places for whackos to hide. Follow the rules exactly, practice your random insanity, get your summers off. That's why you get this odd sort of dichotomy of paranoia over lawsuits vs. idiotic punishable behavior. Stupid people can follow rules, but also continue be stupid. That's why those rules are in place, like zero tolerance rules. No room for judgment because the judgment of the people enforcing the rules is usually critically flawed.
What you're describing isn't my bad idea, it's your bad managers. If they miss their estimates by orders of magnitude it's not your problem. Or mine. It's theirs.
Your managers need to do their due diligence.
In my case I have good managers. They get solid specs from the customer, consult us engineers about the details...then we hammer out a schedule collectively. It's never off by much since we collaborate.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you in spirit. But social niceties have no place in matters of law. For humanitarian reasons Verizon should waive the fee. However, they have no legal obligation to do so. They are within their rights to enforce the contract.
If I were to die right now my wife would still have to pay on our car, college loans, etc. Nobody waives your debts when you die. That's why they refer to your assets after you expire as your estate, so that liens can be placed against it and the creditors you leave behind can collect their due.
I agree that Verizon is taking their "early termination" clause to a ridiculous extreme. The purpose of an early termination fee is that it is a penalty which makes it difficult for you to switch carriers, and clearly the deceased has other reasons for dropping service. But still - the contract is valid and binding even after death.
This is why life insurance is vitally important.
Actually it does.
The collecting agency is asking that its professional members donate to its Legislative Fund for the Arts, which appears to be a lobbying campaign meant to convince Congress that artists should not have the choice of licensing their works under a copyleft license.
I'd like to see what their legal argument would be. Basically they're lobbying to make a particular kind of legal contract they disagree with illegal.
Ooo, no - that's not a slippery slope at all. I'm sure lawyers all over the continent will sit still for that! I can't see how that would cause a problem ever!! *hah*
Hell, even the bad lawyers would fight having that for a precedent. Harder than the good guys I'd guess - tricky contracts are where a good bit of their bread and butter comes from. If the law began placing restrictions on what sorts of contracts you could make...well, that would have a lot of other interesting implications.
Stop it stop it stop it stop it already!!!
Quit remaking classics.
What makes a classic good is that it takes you to a new place. Logan's Run was mindblowing when I saw it. The remake can never be.
You want to rule the world? Make a good original movie.
I believe this is one of the rare moments where NYCL has missed the point. In fact, the only one I've ever seen now that I think about it..
This isn't about money. Here, read this bit again:
One commentator suggests the RIAA should at this juncture just say, 'Thanks Jammie, we've had all we can get out of you and caused you enough grief -- pay us $1 and we'll forget about it.' Actually doing that would be a lot less costly and more reasonable that what they appear to have in mind.
It's right there if you read it a second time. "...more reasonable that what they appear to have in mind."
They are not out to be reasonable. What they wish to do is to rob this poor woman not of her money but of her time, her life. One minute at a time, whatever the cost. They don't want to bankrupt her. They don't want $54,000. They want to make an example out of her. Doesn't matter if they have to spend hundreds of thousands to drag this thing out. The money isn't the point. The entire music industry is balanced on the head of a pin and these people are just that terrified that the gravy train is coming to an end. It is fear and wild reaction on a level that is hard to understand. That's why the response seems unreasonable. Because it is. On purpose. The modern day legal equivalent of these guys.
It has taken me 40 years on this planet to eventually figure out the fact that some people simply do not think in a reasonable fashion. It's hard when you base your life on rationality to think in an irrational manner. You see someone doing something you cannot understand and you apply your own yardsticks to it. And fail, because nothing you can come up with fits.
These people have different motives than I could ever have - it is alien thinking. But once you know that people differ wildly from each other, you know that some people will simply be unfathomable. This is one of those times.
Segmentation Fault (core dumped)
To access the content inside, however, you'll need the playkey, which is delivered to the buyer of a digital media file and lives within "tamper-protected circuit" inside some device
A "tamper-protected circuit". Oh boy! When did we invent these??
You'd think the IEEE, of all groups, would know better than to suggest something that stupid.
It doesn't matter how clever you think you are - if you can build it, someone can unbuild it. It's really just that simple. How many times have we seen this before? Someone says "aha this time, THIS TIME, it is absolutely unhackable!" And then two weeks later some teenager from the Netherlands puts the keymaker on P2P.
The best part - my favorite part - is that some idiot in the *AA will believe them. Sink a metric crapload of money into the company that has "the fix", and then get burned. Again.
I love watching this idiot's dream dry up over and over. It makes me grin when the stupid and the greedy get what's coming to them.
He's spot on. He could have phrased it more delicately, but honestly you could use a little shaking up.
That's what your job has evolved into, and that is the pay. Arm twisting will accomplish nothing for you except a quick trip to the street. They're broke. You've already said so. That's why they're laying off all the people you've replaced and have no budget for staff.
You try to go oil drilling with these guys and you won't get a thing except a fresh new bullseye on your back.
My advice? Talk them into a title change only. Emphasize you're not digging for a raise, but you'd like something to reflect your new duties. Get your new impressive title, then bust ass for the next 3 months to get settled in with your new title. Then get your ass to careerbuilder and craigslist and use your new fancy title to negotiate a better job. These guys are garden variety passive aggressives PHBs that will continue to dump on you until you break. Ditch them.
If we wanted to, we could start operating a bunch more of those fission reactors; they don't necessarily make economic sense given current market prices, but those markets probably don't accurately capture the consequences of other forms of energy production, and fission is certainly still energy positive (and it is probably energy positive to pull uranium out the sea).
Fission or fusion. Don't need either of them. I think nuclear fuels make perfect sense to run submarines, but for consumer use they are unnecessary. Algae biodiesel could supply our entire energy need. And has the added advantage of not making radioactive waste.
Don't get me wrong - if fusion pans out that would be fantastic. I did the math once and figured that you'd need about two olympic sized pools worth of water to separate into hydrogen to fuse into helium to handle north america's energy needs for a year. That would be magnificent. But the best source of power anywhere nearby is the sun.
Here, read this.
Also pretty great.
I would love to see something good that would move us away from the current paradigm of coal and oil.
Oh, it's full of jabs actually.
But - I wouldn't call it a defense of lawyers so much as a defense of humanity in general, of which lawyers (presumably) are a subset. We all like to get paid. Food and shelter are awesome, and we'll all occasionally do something "morally flexible" to achieve it. I have. I'll admit that.
It's just when lawyers do something morally flexible, it looks like what these SCO guys are doing. There is nothing mysterious about it.
How far would you go for fifty million bucks?
There is a long list of despicable things I'd do for that kind of cash. You too, most likely.
That's my point pretty much. They were offered a lot of cash to do something lousy. So surprise surprise, being human beings - they did it.
And again - these guys are lawyers. They often times have a peculiar view of morality. A significant number of lawyers equate legality with morality. If it is in the law to allow people to do something, then it is right to do it. You and I probably don't look at the world that way, but a fair number of lawyers do. It's in their training. The law is what is right. Therefore, if the law allows you to do something - that something is right. Like the endless SCO lawsuit. It's perfectly legal, therefore it must be right. Lawyer thinking. This is why there aren't many saints in that profession.
I would think about changing my line of work if I was assigned SCO versus the World.
Nah. What you've got there are lawyers who are getting paid. Doesn't matter if what they are doing is wrong and hopeless. Look at a lawyer's paycheck. For that, Sisyphus would probably wake up cheerful and show up for a day's work with a smile.
This is just lawyers being lawyers for the most part. Sure you get some good ones every so often, like Ray Beckerman. People who actually get into the field because they wish to be superheroes. But 99.9% of the world - regardless of their job - just want to get paid.
And you and I are probably no different. I've worked on software projects that were doomed. How about you? I worked on a project once for 3 years that I knew 6 months in was going to wind up in a box on a shelf. Did I care? Hell no. I was making a paycheck during the dot bomb. Plenty of my coder friends weren't.
Once SCO finally runs out of cash these guys will move on. Some of them will wind up working for Save the Puppies, some for the RIAA. Both will sleep well that night. It's just a job.
Oh, one more thing. The SCO lawyers didn't lose. They did what Microsoft (via BayStar) paid them to do. Defame Linux. I'm sure the instructions went like this. "Make it drag out as long as you can. Sew fear and doubt. Never surrender!" Fifty million bucks buys a lot of moral flexibility. And these are lawyers, which is a profession that isn't overly burdened with saints.
And on their resume for their next job they can say that they spearheaded an impossible effort. They moved market share towards their customer and away from an open source project that has a nebulous cloud of people working on it. They attacked a ghost, did it for a decade, and did that with a tenacity that would make a pit bull proud.
There are many places where someone with that kind of determination and moral flexibility would be most welcome. I expect a lot of these resumes to wind up on the desks of BP's HR department sometime in the near future.
Nice zero content marketingspeak there:
"...third-party influentials and industry leaders like Cisco tell us regularly that our focus and investment continues to surpass others."
Focus and investment. Notice "results" aren't on that list.
As a side note, I'd also like to add that lately BP has had a huge focus and investment on cleaning up oil spills. More so than any other oil company. But still - nobody loves them this week. Wonder why?
Guess which one I'd choose. I'll give you a hint: I have a mortgage.
Not the loss of life, obviously. But there is an economic statement under all of this that is good news, somewhat.
If China has to try that hard to be competitive, and is now beginning to have their workers demand either more money or death - this might be the beginning of the end for outsourcing. If things are truly that bad in China to where people are willing to kill themselves in protest then they must surely be at the limits of their capacity. All they can do from here is make concessions to their workers and become less globally competitive.
It is a shame people had to die to make the point though. But it is a point worth making.
Media producers aren't in love with the idea of copyrights, they're in love with money. They just promote the concept of copyright when it benefits them to gain more money. If somehow copyrights were getting in the way of them getting paid, you'd see their lobbyists 24-7 trying to do away with them.
Business is in business to make money. Think of a large business as an amoeba that assimilates money. It doesn't have a conscience, just a rudimentary intelligence that drives it to move towards the money and acquire it. That's why they do these moves that are seemingly at cross purposes, like backing copyright and then ignoring copyright. Money is the underlying motive. Whatever gets a business more cash is good, much in the same way an amoeba gets food. Ethics don't enter into it - that's reserved for higher life forms.
Has the fish?!?
So even if the performance benefits aren't that great it may increase the life of the car/machine.
If that's the case then it it'll never make it to market. Nobody would sell them. Cars that fall apart (forcing you to buy a new car) are more profitable in the long run.
This is news we needed 20 years ago. SSD is going to replace mechanical HD over the next couple of years making the whole vibration issue irrelevant.
Ah well better late than never I guess.
Seriously - how the crap can anyone point to the patent system and say that it promotes innovation?
Small company might run afoul of a larger one, so it finds another larger one to partner with. Sort of a mutually-assured-destruction patent scenario. The product doesn't change a single bit. It still infringes on whatever Apple patents it may have infringed upon. It just has a new benefactor that Apple knows it cannot beat in a patent war.
Software patents are so broken it's insane. When will we finally ditch the whole idea?
I never really got why religion was so hard set against moral relativism. That makes it clear, and it only took you a single sentence. Groovy.
If that's indeed the case, then why not simply put the MBR, /boot, /bin, and /usr on the SSD, then mount stuff like /home, /tmp, swap, and the like onto a spindle disk? No algorithm needed, thus no overhead needed to run it, etc.
This sounds like a good way to go.
Thanks to wear leveling, your HDD would probably wear out first. This guy did the math.
Read "Flash SSD Application from Hell - the Rogue Data Recorder". And keep in mind it was written in 07 - things are better than that now. You might die of old age before your SSD does, depending on your setup.
Now in the case of "hidden cores", what's the risk? Do you even know? Do you know what kind of flaw would lead them to legitimately disable a core? Is that one core unable to tolerate the same clock speed as the others? Is it functionaly broken such that it will return incorrect results for some operations?
Ever written any assembly?
I promise you, if a single instruction had a single bit out of place - the whole house of cards would come tumbling down. FAST.
If you run the thing with a good stress test for a day and it doesn't blue screen - you're golden. I think the odds of a cpu core being actually physically broken and somehow not crashing the system are roughly equivalent to being struck dead by lightning while holding a winning Megamillions ticket. During a blue moon in December on the day they release Duke Nukem Forever.
They had the stupid thing taken apart, but the article doesn't mention the CPU used or the amount of ram/flash on it.
Both are trivial to find unless the manufacturer took a file and removed the markings from the chips.
I have never understood how school districts think.
The reason why you're confused is because you are aiming too high. Think back to your childhood. How many of the teachers that you can remember would you say were smart? Not too many, right? I can think of two or three full-on idiots, a psychopath or two - you name it. The cream of the crop usually don't wind up teaching fourth graders.
Before people blast me - not all teachers and school admins and the like are idiots.
I can think of a few genuinely brilliant and wonderful people I met throughout my school career. People who do the job because they love children, love the potential, and love steering young people towards productive lives. But you'd have to be crazy to think everyone in a public school is like that.
A friend of mine drifted back into town a few months ago and stopped by for a visit. Hadn't seen him in ten years. He is now a hands-shaking alcoholic. What's his job? Substitute teacher. Par for the course.
So to answer your question, school jobs are excellent places for whackos to hide. Follow the rules exactly, practice your random insanity, get your summers off. That's why you get this odd sort of dichotomy of paranoia over lawsuits vs. idiotic punishable behavior. Stupid people can follow rules, but also continue be stupid. That's why those rules are in place, like zero tolerance rules. No room for judgment because the judgment of the people enforcing the rules is usually critically flawed.
What you're describing isn't my bad idea, it's your bad managers. If they miss their estimates by orders of magnitude it's not your problem. Or mine. It's theirs.
Your managers need to do their due diligence.
In my case I have good managers. They get solid specs from the customer, consult us engineers about the details...then we hammer out a schedule collectively. It's never off by much since we collaborate.