Many of us in radio are quite familiar with Mr. Dunifer's history. Here are some of the more notorious examples:
Back in the early 90's, Free Radio Berkeley advertised radio transmitter kits for sale and was unable to ship them on time, leaving many paying customers hanging for months without any feedback. In response to the inevitable complaints, rather than apologize or politely explain unforeseen circumstances, Mr. Dunifer tells them to kiss my ass.
Around the same timeframe, FRB announces that they have been "invited" to Lollapalooza to set up booths and give demonstrations of pirate radio. I put the word invited in quotes because FRB got turned away at the gate at Lollapalooza at many tour locations. Blame it on poor planning by FRB, communications/coordination problems with Lollapalooza sponsors, or the whole thing inevitably degrading into a say-you're-with-FRB-and-you-get-into-Lollapalooza- for-free scam.
In 1998, after three years of tilting at windmills filing appeals in federal courts, Stephen Dunifer's own pirate radio station is shut down. The judge granted the U.S. Attorney's motion for summary judgement, and issued a permanent injunction.
What's ironic, and maudlin about the whole affair, is if Mr. Dunifer had not blatantly violated FCC rules, he would have been eligible to submit an application for a Lower Power FM (LPFM) license, which the FCC has begun granting again. Even if Mr. Dunifer is himself ineligible, he could have used this opportunity to encourage and support others in applying for such licenses. However, you won't see Mr. Dunifer or FRB doing this. They would rather play with their own toys by their own rules, and society be damned.
... might I suggest you start smoking cool, refreshing marijuana? "It gets you high and a 'bye' from the draft!"
Nice try, but it probably won't work. A current example of why it won't is that the Iowa National Guard elected to deploy troops that had tested positive for drugs, including methamphetamines. Their commanding officers concluded that they had only used drugs to avoid deployment to Iraq, and their avoidance of service would punish those in their unit that stayed clean. Furthermore, these offenders will face a worst-of-both-worlds scenario, where they will deploy for combat service AND they will be punished once they get home. Whether their discharges will be adminstrative, or as a result of a conviction from court martial, that will be a heck of a thing to explain to a future employer.
If the U.S. is in such need of warm bodies for a future national emergency, they would very likely overlook current drug use, unless there was evidence of habitual use, such as a record of convictions or serious medical problems. Such a draftee would be given the same offer given to smokers. You will go cold turkey for Uncle Sam! In the case of drugs, if you use them again while on active duty, you will face prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). If convicted, you will have a serious criminal record that will follow you into civilian life. If the Iowa Guard example above is any indication, you will be given an opportunity to avoid prosecution by dying for your country first.
As soon as we make email taxable, it becomes a potential source of revenue for the government. Eventually, to help make yet another pork filled budget meet, they would raise the tax on the email; entire bureaurcracies would form around the taxation of email, which would also need their own chunk of the budget.. The entire thing would become yet another yoke around our necks.
What a brilliant solution for stopping spammers. Now pull the other leg, please.
Indeed. The history of taxation has shown that "miniscule" taxes have a way of being ratcheted up to signficant amounts, and taxes designed to solve specific problems will far outlast those original problems. Examples:
The 3% Excise Tax on telephone service was enacted in 1898 to fund the Spanish-American War. This was before the U.S. had an income tax, and telephone service was considered a "luxury" item at the time. This tax persists to this day despite repeated efforts to repeal it.
When the U.S. enacted an Income Tax in 1913, politicians explained that it was only targetted at the "richest few" and was only "several percent." The personal deduction, in current dollars, was about $40,000. The first raises in the rates were justified to pay off World War I debt, but the rates persisted, and increased, long past any debt payoff. Today, nearly everyone, all the way down to the working poor, pays a substantial chunk of their income as taxes.
In response to a need to ration rubber during World War II, or to maintain local roadways, many communities enacted a Wheel Tax on automobiles. These taxes have persisted long past the end of World War II, and are often siphoned off of any road maintenance budgets in order to meet shortfalls in general revenue. These taxes are not going away anytime soon, and are rapidly increasing in the face of recent budget shortfalls.
Based on the above history, it's a reasonable prediction to assume that any so-called SPAM tax will far outlive the original problem (which will likely be dealt with properly by technical innovation, anyway).
... the larger the sample size, even if it is from a self-selected sample, the better the data...
No, the more random and representative the sample, the better the data. It is quite possible to have a very large sample size, but one that is still extremely skewed and non-representative. One of the most striking examples of this was the 1936 Literary Digest poll which had a sample size of 2,000,000 respondents and incorrectly predicted that Alf Landon would defeat Franklin Roosevelt in that year's presidental election by 57 to 43 percent. Of course, FDR defeated Landon, as correctly predicted by a George Gallup poll with a much smaller, but much more random and representative, sample of 300,000.
One obvious example of the unreliability of the self-reported reliability data in Consumer Reports is the often widely varying results from identical sibling models made on the same assembly line differing only in "brand engineering" of labels, grills, etc. This is most acute when one model wears a foreign make (e.g., Mitsubishi or Toyota) and another one wears a domestic make (e.g., Chrysler or Chevrolet).
A runner up for a fount is a vintage Parker 51. The areometric ones (produced from 1948-1970ish) are generally regarded as the best fountain pen ever. They can typically be had for under $100.
I can enthusiastically endorse this classic from the past. It's also my Slashdot nickname. These pens were made in the tens of millions, and are virtually indestructible, so it is quite easy to find serviceable examples as many as 30, 40, or even 50 years old. Users will rave about them in much the same way as owners of the original VW Beetle, or (more apropos for Slashdot) the architects and users of the MIT Incompatible Timesharing System, for their elegance in design, reliability, and simplicity.
I own many pens, but my Parker 51, bought in 1997 for about $50 from an antique pen dealer, is the one that usually winds up in my pocket, or is reached for when I need something to write with. Features of this pen include:
Made of very durable, modern lucite plastic
Modern barrel design with hooded nib (combining both style and function as the hood keeps the ink wet on the nib)
Simple, rugged aerometic filler in the Mark II version (basically a built-in eyedropper made of a flexible material known as "Pli-Glass"); Just dip the point in a bottle of ink, squeeze the bulb 4 times, wipe off the point, and keep writing.
A collector feed to buffer ink to prevent skipping and uneven flow.
A fair number of them, in various barrel colors and cap metals, can be found for sale at any given time on EBay.
It seems to me that people *need* a certain amount of flexibility in the law.. Something this rigid is bound to fail...it simply goes too far against human nature.
Indeed. In fact, this is not the first time that such a rigid enforcement scheme has been proposed in the UK. Others have pointed out the folly, and very real risks, of trying to enforce arbitrary speed limits at all times, regardless of traffic conditions.
If you are going to reference the above article, you should also reference the reply letters to the editor for that article, both from former telemarketers, and from their victims.
At the end of the article, VeriSign claims in its court filings that if it loses this case and sets a precedent for others who have been defrauded out of their domains, it'll be "the end of the Internet".
Verisign, in its apparent megalomania, seems to be confusing itself with the entire Internet, and like the sovereign of a nation, considers itself entitled to some kind of "sovereign immunity" where the rules that apply to others do not apply to it. Such special pleading (that it can't be punished without hurting society) is not convincing.
Furthermore, its appeals to sympathy ring about as hollow as:
"Please don't punish me for killing my parents, I'm already suffering enough as an orphan!"
or even:
"If you put me in jail, I won't be able to recover the money I've stolen!"
These reviews are done periodically and cover reams and reams of documents that can't simply be glanced at and passed through - they must be studied down to the individual words used. No doubt it takes quite a while.
I am reminded of a speaker at a public seminar, a retired USAF officer, who described the obstacles to reviewing and downgrading information. He stated that it literally is a case of warehouses full of file boxes, with outer markings no more meaningful than "XYZ Agency Working Papers, 1975-1978, Vol. 1 of 335", that must be gone through page by page, line by line, word for word. There simply isn't the money or manpower in government to do it more quickly.
He whimsically offered himself to the government as a records reviewer at a modest salary ($20 an hour, I think), both for the extra income, and the historical edification and refreshed memories the reading would provide.
There was also a (I think) 60 Minutes piece about the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) and the problems they would face with routine, time-based declassification. The oldest classified artifact they possess dates back to World War I. It was recently reviewed, and determined to still be classified as it still represented sensitive information about U.S. intelligence-gathering methods.
Furthermore, it must be emphasized that this problem transcends specific administrations and party politics. The Clinton Administration attempted to reform the matter by imposing mandatory, time-based, downgrading, but after further consideration, decided that it would be unworkable.
The US military has called up some 150,000 reservists in the last several months. Presumably most of these people had civilian jobs before being called up, and most of their employers would need to fill their shoes with temporary workers. I'm just guessing, but I'd think that every ten reservists pulled out of the economy would open up at least five temporary jobs.
Sure, but most of these reservists come from the ranks of police officers, prison guards, pilots, nurses...
In short, individuals with specialized skills working in positions that require significant amounts of training and experience (i.e., not something that a temp worker could pick up immediately). Furthermore, many of these jobs have always had shortages due to their demanding nature and relatively low compensation (not everyone wants to be a prison guard or a nurse, for example).
"Pension"? What's that? "Benefits"? What are those? Oh, right, those things that some floozy from Human Resources at FooCorp says FooCorp will provide for me 40 years from now. As if anyone thinks FooCorp will still exist in 10 years, let alone 40.
Obviously you're not familiar with how pension funds work, or how they are guaranteed by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). This is a government corporation that protects "defined benefit" pensions in much the same way that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) protects bank accounts.
Basically, if you have a defined benefit (as opposed to defined contribution like IRA or 401K) pension plan (also known as an ERISA plan; ERISA stands for "Employee Retirement Income Security Act"), you will either get that pension benefit from your employer's pension fund, or the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation will take over if the fund goes insolvent (up to a maximum of about $42,000 a year).
And such a guarantee will likely not be necessary. Please be assured that pension funds are kept separate from the executive's golf/prostitute/liquor petty cash fund. At most company's, pension funds are VERY carefully invested and monitored (people can go to JAIL if they are not), and are designed to survive the companies that they are associated with.
American Gramaphone is one of the last, great, financially successful independent labels
By constrast, most of the other major labels are in a "tailspin," with record sales down 10% since last year
Mannheim Steamroller has dominated the Christmas album business. Their latest album, "Christmas Extraordinaire," was the #1 Christmas album last year, and the #2 holiday album overall in 2002 and 2001
Their customer base is older, and more likely to buy CD's than "rip and burn" music off of the Internet
Part of their business success comes from "value-added" packaging, such as bundling their CD's in "gift packs" with scented candles, hot chocolate, even extra two-sided DVD's with the album and videos in surround sound (a feature only now being adopted by major labels) and mass-marketing those value-added packages to non-traditional outlets, not just record stores
For some discussion of the reasons why, see
this post from Google Groups.
The basic answer is that most telephone service is through a digital switch with all of the calling control (or "supervision") via "out-of-band signaling," not in-band tones. In essence, Telezappers no longer work for the same reasons that "blue boxes" and 2600 Hz "Captain Crunch" whistles don't work anymore.
Re:Could a suit *actually* increase performance?
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
·
· Score: 1
Correction, the study had one group in military dress uniforms, and the other in *flight suits*. The group in *flight suits* performed better in the role of simulated pilot, performing such tasks as spotting and ranging enemy aircraft and ground artillery at a distance.
The lesson of the study would be that clothing appropriate for the job (e.g., a flight suit instead of a dress, jacket-and-tie, uniform in a hot, cramped cockpit for extended periods of time) motivates the wearer to be more productive. In this study, those who were wearing *flight suits* felt more like pilots, and thus were able to achieve greater productivity.
There was a great thread on this subject on Usenet about 5 years ago in the newsgroup comp.software-eng entitled Do I Really Need a Supervisor?. An individual involved in designing and implementing real-time avionics systems came to the conclusion that his middle management were wastes of space doing negative work and that he felt he could probably do the entire project, including scheduling and budgeting, without them.
The consensus of the followups was that a good manager is one that gets you the resources you need, shields you from the bureaucratic BS from higher-ups and the customers, and allows you get the work done. A bad manager is one that interferes with the work, doesn't defend your side of things to upper management, and/or doesn't know the limits of his expertise. Even worse, a bad manager may only care about personal empire-building, wasting the organization's energy to further his own political agendas. There is also a meaningful distinction between "manager" and "technical leader," and most projects need some of both.
Slashdot Mirror
The following Usenet articles were nominated by me to Google (usenet-timeline@google.com):
Introduction of Stupid People's Court
First mention of David Letterman
First mention of Conan O'Brien
Announcement of Conan O'Brien's selection as new host of NBC's Late Night
First mention of Richard Depew's Automatic Retroactive Minimal Moderation (ARMM)
First Draft of ARMM Proposal
Usenet Olympics
What's ironic, and maudlin about the whole affair, is if Mr. Dunifer had not blatantly violated FCC rules, he would have been eligible to submit an application for a Lower Power FM (LPFM) license, which the FCC has begun granting again. Even if Mr. Dunifer is himself ineligible, he could have used this opportunity to encourage and support others in applying for such licenses. However, you won't see Mr. Dunifer or FRB doing this. They would rather play with their own toys by their own rules, and society be damned.
... might I suggest you start smoking cool, refreshing marijuana? "It gets you high and a 'bye' from the draft!"
Nice try, but it probably won't work. A current example of why it won't is that the Iowa National Guard elected to deploy troops that had tested positive for drugs, including methamphetamines. Their commanding officers concluded that they had only used drugs to avoid deployment to Iraq, and their avoidance of service would punish those in their unit that stayed clean. Furthermore, these offenders will face a worst-of-both-worlds scenario, where they will deploy for combat service AND they will be punished once they get home. Whether their discharges will be adminstrative, or as a result of a conviction from court martial, that will be a heck of a thing to explain to a future employer.
If the U.S. is in such need of warm bodies for a future national emergency, they would very likely overlook current drug use, unless there was evidence of habitual use, such as a record of convictions or serious medical problems. Such a draftee would be given the same offer given to smokers. You will go cold turkey for Uncle Sam! In the case of drugs, if you use them again while on active duty, you will face prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). If convicted, you will have a serious criminal record that will follow you into civilian life. If the Iowa Guard example above is any indication, you will be given an opportunity to avoid prosecution by dying for your country first.
What a brilliant solution for stopping spammers. Now pull the other leg, please.
Indeed. The history of taxation has shown that "miniscule" taxes have a way of being ratcheted up to signficant amounts, and taxes designed to solve specific problems will far outlast those original problems. Examples:
Based on the above history, it's a reasonable prediction to assume that any so-called SPAM tax will far outlive the original problem (which will likely be dealt with properly by technical innovation, anyway).
... the larger the sample size, even if it is from a self-selected sample, the better the data ...
No, the more random and representative the sample, the better the data. It is quite possible to have a very large sample size, but one that is still extremely skewed and non-representative. One of the most striking examples of this was the 1936 Literary Digest poll which had a sample size of 2,000,000 respondents and incorrectly predicted that Alf Landon would defeat Franklin Roosevelt in that year's presidental election by 57 to 43 percent. Of course, FDR defeated Landon, as correctly predicted by a George Gallup poll with a much smaller, but much more random and representative, sample of 300,000.
One obvious example of the unreliability of the self-reported reliability data in Consumer Reports is the often widely varying results from identical sibling models made on the same assembly line differing only in "brand engineering" of labels, grills, etc. This is most acute when one model wears a foreign make (e.g., Mitsubishi or Toyota) and another one wears a domestic make (e.g., Chrysler or Chevrolet).
I can enthusiastically endorse this classic from the past. It's also my Slashdot nickname. These pens were made in the tens of millions, and are virtually indestructible, so it is quite easy to find serviceable examples as many as 30, 40, or even 50 years old. Users will rave about them in much the same way as owners of the original VW Beetle, or (more apropos for Slashdot) the architects and users of the MIT Incompatible Timesharing System, for their elegance in design, reliability, and simplicity.
I own many pens, but my Parker 51, bought in 1997 for about $50 from an antique pen dealer, is the one that usually winds up in my pocket, or is reached for when I need something to write with. Features of this pen include:
- Made of very durable, modern lucite plastic
- Modern barrel design with hooded nib (combining both style and function as the hood keeps the ink wet on the nib)
- Simple, rugged aerometic filler in the Mark II version (basically a built-in eyedropper made of a flexible material known as "Pli-Glass"); Just dip the point in a bottle of ink, squeeze the bulb 4 times, wipe off the point, and keep writing.
- A collector feed to buffer ink to prevent skipping and uneven flow.
A fair number of them, in various barrel colors and cap metals, can be found for sale at any given time on EBay.It seems to me that people *need* a certain amount of flexibility in the law.. Something this rigid is bound to fail...it simply goes too far against human nature.
Indeed. In fact, this is not the first time that such a rigid enforcement scheme has been proposed in the UK. Others have pointed out the folly, and very real risks, of trying to enforce arbitrary speed limits at all times, regardless of traffic conditions.
According to this article...
If you are going to reference the above article, you should also reference the reply letters to the editor for that article, both from former telemarketers, and from their victims.
At the end of the article, VeriSign claims in its court filings that if it loses this case and sets a precedent for others who have been defrauded out of their domains, it'll be "the end of the Internet".
This sounds like the logical fallacies of "Special Pleading" or "Appeals to Sympathy."
Verisign, in its apparent megalomania, seems to be confusing itself with the entire Internet, and like the sovereign of a nation, considers itself entitled to some kind of "sovereign immunity" where the rules that apply to others do not apply to it. Such special pleading (that it can't be punished without hurting society) is not convincing.
Furthermore, its appeals to sympathy ring about as hollow as:
"Please don't punish me for killing my parents, I'm already suffering enough as an orphan!"
or even:
"If you put me in jail, I won't be able to recover the money I've stolen!"
I am reminded of a speaker at a public seminar, a retired USAF officer, who described the obstacles to reviewing and downgrading information. He stated that it literally is a case of warehouses full of file boxes, with outer markings no more meaningful than "XYZ Agency Working Papers, 1975-1978, Vol. 1 of 335", that must be gone through page by page, line by line, word for word. There simply isn't the money or manpower in government to do it more quickly.
He whimsically offered himself to the government as a records reviewer at a modest salary ($20 an hour, I think), both for the extra income, and the historical edification and refreshed memories the reading would provide.
There was also a (I think) 60 Minutes piece about the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) and the problems they would face with routine, time-based declassification. The oldest classified artifact they possess dates back to World War I. It was recently reviewed, and determined to still be classified as it still represented sensitive information about U.S. intelligence-gathering methods.
Furthermore, it must be emphasized that this problem transcends specific administrations and party politics. The Clinton Administration attempted to reform the matter by imposing mandatory, time-based, downgrading, but after further consideration, decided that it would be unworkable.
Sure, but most of these reservists come from the ranks of police officers, prison guards, pilots, nurses...
In short, individuals with specialized skills working in positions that require significant amounts of training and experience (i.e., not something that a temp worker could pick up immediately). Furthermore, many of these jobs have always had shortages due to their demanding nature and relatively low compensation (not everyone wants to be a prison guard or a nurse, for example).
Obviously you're not familiar with how pension funds work, or how they are guaranteed by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). This is a government corporation that protects "defined benefit" pensions in much the same way that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) protects bank accounts.
Basically, if you have a defined benefit (as opposed to defined contribution like IRA or 401K) pension plan (also known as an ERISA plan; ERISA stands for "Employee Retirement Income Security Act"), you will either get that pension benefit from your employer's pension fund, or the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation will take over if the fund goes insolvent (up to a maximum of about $42,000 a year).
For more information, see PBGC's List of Frequently Asked Questions
And such a guarantee will likely not be necessary. Please be assured that pension funds are kept separate from the executive's golf/prostitute/liquor petty cash fund. At most company's, pension funds are VERY carefully invested and monitored (people can go to JAIL if they are not), and are designed to survive the companies that they are associated with.
For some discussion of the reasons why, see this post from Google Groups. The basic answer is that most telephone service is through a digital switch with all of the calling control (or "supervision") via "out-of-band signaling," not in-band tones. In essence, Telezappers no longer work for the same reasons that "blue boxes" and 2600 Hz "Captain Crunch" whistles don't work anymore.
Correction, the study had one group in military dress uniforms, and the other in *flight suits*. The group in *flight suits* performed better in the role of simulated pilot, performing such tasks as spotting and ranging enemy aircraft and ground artillery at a distance.
The lesson of the study would be that clothing appropriate for the job (e.g., a flight suit instead of a dress, jacket-and-tie, uniform in a hot, cramped cockpit for extended periods of time) motivates the wearer to be more productive. In this study, those who were wearing *flight suits* felt more like pilots, and thus were able to achieve greater productivity.
There was a great thread on this subject on Usenet about 5 years ago in the newsgroup comp.software-eng entitled Do I Really Need a Supervisor?. An individual involved in designing and implementing real-time avionics systems came to the conclusion that his middle management were wastes of space doing negative work and that he felt he could probably do the entire project, including scheduling and budgeting, without them.
The consensus of the followups was that a good manager is one that gets you the resources you need, shields you from the bureaucratic BS from higher-ups and the customers, and allows you get the work done. A bad manager is one that interferes with the work, doesn't defend your side of things to upper management, and/or doesn't know the limits of his expertise. Even worse, a bad manager may only care about personal empire-building, wasting the organization's energy to further his own political agendas. There is also a meaningful distinction between "manager" and "technical leader," and most projects need some of both.