I think this might have been my reply: "I appreciate your concern for my well-being, but perhaps *you* should think of the money you'll save your employer by avoiding the inevitable chargebacks if you don't cancel my account as I've asked?"
I refuse to put anything with "Norton" in the title on anything I own now. It's a real shame too, because back in the 80's when Peter Norton was running the show, the Norton Utilities package was something I'd recommend for everyone with a PC-compatible.
One thing you can try is to write to their customer services (using pen and paper!).
That's a good suggestion in general, not just when trying to cancel a service. A couple of years back, I had the infamous "dirty disk" problem with the Thomson DVD drive in my Xbox and was getting nowhere with the CSRs on the phone. I got annoyed and sent Microsoft a very calm and polite letter explaining the situation and that I would no longer be purchasing any games for the unit. Not long after that I got a nice phone call, and a couple of days later a postage-paid box arrived for me to send the unit in for a no-charge repair.
I also got a free case of pork rinds from another company when I wrote to them to let them know about a bad bag I had gotten from a vending machine. That one wasn't even a complaint - more like a "you should know this so you can fix it", but they apparently took such things seriously.
I don't really believe lying to the customer service monkey about who you are just to accomplish the desired task is going to land you in jail any time soon.
Agreed, but it may complicate things in the rare case where the situation escalates and ends up in a courtroom.
I'll agree that the card fees are ridiculous, but unfortunately it's something that the merchants have unthinkingly done to themselves (and us) by allowing everyone to become too dependent on convenient and easily obtained credit issued by someone outside their organization and thus outside their control. It's unusual nowadays to find a merchant that doesn't accept some form of major credit card.
I haven't the first idea what a workable solution to the problem would be.
A telephone mic may do the trick for you. They have a litle suction cup that attaches to the handset and picks up the signal from the speaker. Since your voice is also being fed back to the earpiece, it picks up both sides of the conversation. They're usually designed for regular handsets, but if the earpiece speaker is strong enough and I'd think it would work with a cell phone as well.
Assuming you're in the US, if you want to be able to use that recording as proof in any kind of legal proceeding you'll need to be *really* sure you're adhering to the law if either you or they are in a state that requires the consent of all parties to record a conversation. This site has a pretty good overview of what the laws are for the various states, and for recording in general.
There's more work to cancelling an account than most non-admins realise.
Perhaps, but it's a routine part of your daily business and it's ludicrous to expect a customer to pay an extra fee for that any more than they should be expected to pay a fee to cover the work of handling the payables and receivables that apply to them.
If the cancellation process is designed such that it requires a long time with a lot of manual intervention and thus incurs a lot of extra costs, it's the fault of the seller, not the customer.
Not only is it a shady business overall, the individuals involved are generally some of the most unethical people you'll meet. Your best bet when dealing with them (in the US, anyway) is to have a good grasp of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a recorder for your telephone, and an unwillingness to talk to them *at all* unless they agree to recording the conversations.
Catching a serial killer is obviously useful to society, but even a blind squirrel finds an occasional nut. The point was that there's no guarantee that the government will do anything when given the power to watch everyone, but will almost certainly harass people for activities that are technically illegal but not really detrimental to society. There have been cases in the United States (Warren v. District of Columbia, for example) where the police have had knowledge that a violent crime was *in progress* yet did nothing, and the courts have consistently held that the government has no duty to protect anyone and is not responsible for anyone's safety.
If the police are not going to be made to bear such legal responsibility, then I'd prefer they not be watching me. Where I live, I'm much better able to protect myself from just about anyone that might want to do me harm than the police are.
You created the despot bogeyman as a justification for your gun over your mantelpiece. A sufficiently evil despot to make that threat credible is not a pushover. You can't have it both ways.
I'm not asking for it both ways. I'm simply saying that I think your original thesis that an armed populace is ineffective in the face of modern military technology is wrong, particularly when dealing with a fiercely individualistic society such as that found in most of the US. We can argue about this for days without either of us changing the other's mind, so I'd offer that we just shake hands, agree to disagree, and leave it at that.
With what, exactly? If you already have enough resistance such that your military can't deal with it, then the odds are not good that those people that are resisting are just going to say, "Okay!" when you tell them to join your side and begin killing and maiming their friends and family just to keep yourself in power. I suppose you could look outside your own borders for troops, but you then run a very real risk of your hired army being loyal to someone other than yourself.
You can do that to a few neighborhoods/towns, but it's not going to work on the scale of a country the size of the US, nor with the percentage of the population that's armed. The US military and civil police forces are just not big enough, and won't have the same motivation to fight that the oppressed population will.
He won't necessarily be able to eliminate everyone, obviously, but go back to what I said about attrition being a hard road to travel for the occupying force. All it takes is the loss of 1-2 men every few houses for it to start making a big difference. And as others will no doubt mention, let's look at how the US forces are doing in Iraq, and the projection by the military leadership that in order to maintain real control of the country, they'd need at least half a million men to do it right. Now, let's compare the percentage of the armed population in Iraq with that of the US and see how well they do.
I might also note that an old lady in Atlanta recently managed to do reasonably well by herself against the cops that broke into her house before she was shot down.
That's the *real* reason that television set design changed in the late 60's to avoid X-ray emissions. They knew the ban would be coming in 35-40 years.:-)
Technology has moved on to the extent that a handgun or rifle does not help you overthrow a tyrannical regime who are armed with tanks and apache helicopters.
Yeah, it does, because you don't occupy a residential area with tanks and Apaches unless you're interested in only killing everyone there, which is pointless if you're a despot seizing power. You occupy the area by sending police or troops door to door and methodically securing the area. When 6-7 people come busting into your house to arrest you or to take away your weapons, then that AR-15 or shotgun that you used only for plinking down at the local range will most assuredly come in handy, and will be most effective, particularly if it's police with only Kevlar vests to protect them. The number of police officers and troops is definitely limited, and would suffer staggering losses given the number of armed households in the US.
There is no legal expectation of privacy in public.
Yes, that's true. In the US, there's also no legal expectation of help from the government if someone decides they want to beat you to death in the middle of the street, and practically no legal recourse if the government knows that you're going to get beat to death and does nothing to prevent it.
Without some kind of legal guarantee that the government is going to do anything useful with the information, why give them the power to watch you in public 24x7? There is still the probability that the government will abuse that power at some point, and the gains are not likely to be worth it IMHO.
A far more interesting article would be one that attempts to discover or explain why certain engineers and organizations refuse to use them, or, for that matter, why they refuse to learn them in the first place.
In my experience, the article you suggest could be summed up in just one sentence:
"Our quarterly numbers are dependent on getting code out the door, and it's far more important to management to hit those quarterly numbers than to guarantee quality."
A "present" is particularly admirable when you give it to someone who really needs it and you don't expect anything at all, including publicity.
Then just give the gift to the person in need without saying anything about it, instead of splashing it all over the internet knowing that it will be controversial. Posting about it is inviting publicity, i.e. page hits, i.e. advertising revenue.
I actually learned something from your site, as opposed to merely being annoyed as I am with so many sites that exist only to extol the superiority of their authors' opinions and denigrate those who disagree with them.
Or put another way, the porn industry has a business model that is more resilent to outside influences beyond their control without having to buy off politicians. Yeah, you don't players in the porn scene that are multi-millionaires to the degree of someone like Tom Cruise, but in general they seem to do well when compared with the average American.
It's also interesting in that the porn industry sees by far the most copyright infringement, but seems to care about it a lot less than the **AA does. Even with all that copying going on, they still somehow are able to make quite a bit of money without whining about it and suing people left and right.
My biggest revelation was realizing that WP's "Reveal Codes" function was actually a symptom of WP's design being brain damaged. One shouldn't need Reveal Codes to see why your document is fubar.
Unless you were using WP on DOS where you didn't have a WYSIWYG display. "Reveal Codes" was in the Windows version of WP simply because so many people were coming from DOS and were used to it, but I agree that it's largely unnecessary now.
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I think this might have been my reply: "I appreciate your concern for my well-being, but perhaps *you* should think of the money you'll save your employer by avoiding the inevitable chargebacks if you don't cancel my account as I've asked?"
I refuse to put anything with "Norton" in the title on anything I own now. It's a real shame too, because back in the 80's when Peter Norton was running the show, the Norton Utilities package was something I'd recommend for everyone with a PC-compatible.
One thing you can try is to write to their customer services (using pen and paper!).
That's a good suggestion in general, not just when trying to cancel a service. A couple of years back, I had the infamous "dirty disk" problem with the Thomson DVD drive in my Xbox and was getting nowhere with the CSRs on the phone. I got annoyed and sent Microsoft a very calm and polite letter explaining the situation and that I would no longer be purchasing any games for the unit. Not long after that I got a nice phone call, and a couple of days later a postage-paid box arrived for me to send the unit in for a no-charge repair.
I also got a free case of pork rinds from another company when I wrote to them to let them know about a bad bag I had gotten from a vending machine. That one wasn't even a complaint - more like a "you should know this so you can fix it", but they apparently took such things seriously.
I don't really believe lying to the customer service monkey about who you are just to accomplish the desired task is going to land you in jail any time soon.
Agreed, but it may complicate things in the rare case where the situation escalates and ends up in a courtroom.
I'll agree that the card fees are ridiculous, but unfortunately it's something that the merchants have unthinkingly done to themselves (and us) by allowing everyone to become too dependent on convenient and easily obtained credit issued by someone outside their organization and thus outside their control. It's unusual nowadays to find a merchant that doesn't accept some form of major credit card.
I haven't the first idea what a workable solution to the problem would be.
A telephone mic may do the trick for you. They have a litle suction cup that attaches to the handset and picks up the signal from the speaker. Since your voice is also being fed back to the earpiece, it picks up both sides of the conversation. They're usually designed for regular handsets, but if the earpiece speaker is strong enough and I'd think it would work with a cell phone as well.
Assuming you're in the US, if you want to be able to use that recording as proof in any kind of legal proceeding you'll need to be *really* sure you're adhering to the law if either you or they are in a state that requires the consent of all parties to record a conversation. This site has a pretty good overview of what the laws are for the various states, and for recording in general.
Yeah - my phones cop an attitude and mute themselves when I start getting uppity towards them. Damn disrespectful household applicances....
There's more work to cancelling an account than most non-admins realise.
Perhaps, but it's a routine part of your daily business and it's ludicrous to expect a customer to pay an extra fee for that any more than they should be expected to pay a fee to cover the work of handling the payables and receivables that apply to them.
If the cancellation process is designed such that it requires a long time with a lot of manual intervention and thus incurs a lot of extra costs, it's the fault of the seller, not the customer.
Not only is it a shady business overall, the individuals involved are generally some of the most unethical people you'll meet. Your best bet when dealing with them (in the US, anyway) is to have a good grasp of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a recorder for your telephone, and an unwillingness to talk to them *at all* unless they agree to recording the conversations.
Catching a serial killer is obviously useful to society, but even a blind squirrel finds an occasional nut. The point was that there's no guarantee that the government will do anything when given the power to watch everyone, but will almost certainly harass people for activities that are technically illegal but not really detrimental to society. There have been cases in the United States (Warren v. District of Columbia, for example) where the police have had knowledge that a violent crime was *in progress* yet did nothing, and the courts have consistently held that the government has no duty to protect anyone and is not responsible for anyone's safety.
If the police are not going to be made to bear such legal responsibility, then I'd prefer they not be watching me. Where I live, I'm much better able to protect myself from just about anyone that might want to do me harm than the police are.
You created the despot bogeyman as a justification for your gun over your mantelpiece. A sufficiently evil despot to make that threat credible is not a pushover. You can't have it both ways.
I'm not asking for it both ways. I'm simply saying that I think your original thesis that an armed populace is ineffective in the face of modern military technology is wrong, particularly when dealing with a fiercely individualistic society such as that found in most of the US. We can argue about this for days without either of us changing the other's mind, so I'd offer that we just shake hands, agree to disagree, and leave it at that.
A despot would increase them till they were.
With what, exactly? If you already have enough resistance such that your military can't deal with it, then the odds are not good that those people that are resisting are just going to say, "Okay!" when you tell them to join your side and begin killing and maiming their friends and family just to keep yourself in power. I suppose you could look outside your own borders for troops, but you then run a very real risk of your hired army being loyal to someone other than yourself.
You can do that to a few neighborhoods/towns, but it's not going to work on the scale of a country the size of the US, nor with the percentage of the population that's armed. The US military and civil police forces are just not big enough, and won't have the same motivation to fight that the oppressed population will.
He won't necessarily be able to eliminate everyone, obviously, but go back to what I said about attrition being a hard road to travel for the occupying force. All it takes is the loss of 1-2 men every few houses for it to start making a big difference. And as others will no doubt mention, let's look at how the US forces are doing in Iraq, and the projection by the military leadership that in order to maintain real control of the country, they'd need at least half a million men to do it right. Now, let's compare the percentage of the armed population in Iraq with that of the US and see how well they do.
I might also note that an old lady in Atlanta recently managed to do reasonably well by herself against the cops that broke into her house before she was shot down.
That's the *real* reason that television set design changed in the late 60's to avoid X-ray emissions. They knew the ban would be coming in 35-40 years. :-)
Technology has moved on to the extent that a handgun or rifle does not help you overthrow a tyrannical regime who are armed with tanks and apache helicopters.
Yeah, it does, because you don't occupy a residential area with tanks and Apaches unless you're interested in only killing everyone there, which is pointless if you're a despot seizing power. You occupy the area by sending police or troops door to door and methodically securing the area. When 6-7 people come busting into your house to arrest you or to take away your weapons, then that AR-15 or shotgun that you used only for plinking down at the local range will most assuredly come in handy, and will be most effective, particularly if it's police with only Kevlar vests to protect them. The number of police officers and troops is definitely limited, and would suffer staggering losses given the number of armed households in the US.
There is no legal expectation of privacy in public.
Yes, that's true. In the US, there's also no legal expectation of help from the government if someone decides they want to beat you to death in the middle of the street, and practically no legal recourse if the government knows that you're going to get beat to death and does nothing to prevent it.
Without some kind of legal guarantee that the government is going to do anything useful with the information, why give them the power to watch you in public 24x7? There is still the probability that the government will abuse that power at some point, and the gains are not likely to be worth it IMHO.
Not just PICs, but in general chips with a Harvard architecture don't run into these kinds of issues very often.
A far more interesting article would be one that attempts to discover or explain why certain engineers and organizations refuse to use them, or, for that matter, why they refuse to learn them in the first place.
In my experience, the article you suggest could be summed up in just one sentence:
"Our quarterly numbers are dependent on getting code out the door, and it's far more important to management to hit those quarterly numbers than to guarantee quality."
Ubiquiti Networks sells Atheros-based Mini-PCI cards that may fit your criteria, and the company has been quite good to deal with in my experience.
A "present" is particularly admirable when you give it to someone who really needs it and you don't expect anything at all, including publicity.
Then just give the gift to the person in need without saying anything about it, instead of splashing it all over the internet knowing that it will be controversial. Posting about it is inviting publicity, i.e. page hits, i.e. advertising revenue.
I actually learned something from your site, as opposed to merely being annoyed as I am with so many sites that exist only to extol the superiority of their authors' opinions and denigrate those who disagree with them.
:-)
Plus, the buildings are pretty.
Or put another way, the porn industry has a business model that is more resilent to outside influences beyond their control without having to buy off politicians. Yeah, you don't players in the porn scene that are multi-millionaires to the degree of someone like Tom Cruise, but in general they seem to do well when compared with the average American.
It's also interesting in that the porn industry sees by far the most copyright infringement, but seems to care about it a lot less than the **AA does. Even with all that copying going on, they still somehow are able to make quite a bit of money without whining about it and suing people left and right.
My biggest revelation was realizing that WP's "Reveal Codes" function was actually a symptom of WP's design being brain damaged. One shouldn't need Reveal Codes to see why your document is fubar.
Unless you were using WP on DOS where you didn't have a WYSIWYG display. "Reveal Codes" was in the Windows version of WP simply because so many people were coming from DOS and were used to it, but I agree that it's largely unnecessary now.