See, customers weren't happy with Dell's outsorced support to India, so Dell adjusted. They didn't just say "Hah, screw you customer. Take a dive off a bridge!" Dell did exactly what it should. It tried a new system to maximize profits (minimize costs, whatever), but in this case it didn't work too well. Oh well. Live, learn, correct the problems and try new ideas. But in the end they still want to make their support work for the customer, because the customer IS profit.
That is such a short-sighted view, it is quite obvious you aren't any kind of buisness owner. "No service" most certainly is NOT a good way to minimize costs, unless of course your user base doesn't really want service when they buy your product. But in that case you wouldn't have a call center to begin with.
If a business sets up a service center it is because to get and KEEP their customers they need support. Simply pissing people off just makes them leave. I must ask, do you even have a job at all?
Where I work I program, but I also do support from time to time. Customers can and WILL ditch our product if we don't give them good enough support. It has happened before, and we've had to bitch at support guys to shape up or else.
It is true that any company will try to minimize costs, even on support. But that basically means doing the minimum the customer wants/needs, not just blowing them off totally. That thinking just makes you go bankrupt, and that isn't a very good way to maximize profits is it?
Good god, how your post got modded as insightful I can't understand. Must be all the code monkeys around here taking the party line of "Business evil! EVIL!."
Anyhow,/rant mode off. Just had to get that off my mind.
Only because US citizens, in general, haven't kept up their end of the deal.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, or something of the sort. Once we loose the 2nd... kerplop, no recourse left but to do what the politicos want. But it seems you pretty much understand this already. Too bad more people don't.
Had the Founding Fathers been able to foresee the capabilities of electronic surveillance, they would have codified Privacy into the Bill of Rights. Instead, they did what they could, focusing on late-18th century concerns.
Too true. However I think the real showing of genius is that these people knew all too well that they couldn't think of everything. Which is what is so great about the US Constitution. They didn't try to think of every possible right we should have, so instead they thought of all the powers the gov't should have, and reserved EVERYTHING else for the people, and the states where necessary.
So I would actually say the Constitution does indeed guarantee individual privacy (to the extent that it doesn't cause harm to others), because it does not explicitly give anti-privacy powers to the government.
The reason watches with moving hands are so successful is that same reason that even in modern glass cockpit aircraft the "old style" mechanical displays are rendered on screen: they are extremely fast and easy to read.
You know, this is so very true, yet I hadn't really thought of it. The same goes for skydiving altimeters. There are a few digital models, but when I bought mine I would only consider analog because it was just so much easier to read. And when you are falling at ~1000ft every 5 seconds a quick glance is all you are going to get. So I can just plan my opening altitude ahead of time and note that position on the altimeter. While in the air I can, with one quick glance, tell if I am near, or even past, that mark and react accordingly. No need to process numbers or figure my rate of descent.
I could care less what the temp is on my wrist. Nor what the time is in Japan. Not only that but most digital watches are fugly, and frankly my watch is as much a piece of jewelry as it is a time telling device. Anyhow, I like the old Unix maxim: do one thing, do it well. And for telling time, a well-crafted analog watch does just that.
sadly, like most other politicians... he wants to push privatization and expand corporate control as much as possible
How can I put this kindly? What the hell are you on? I've yet to see a politician that actually wants to push privitization. My god, if only such a world existed. I've no clue where you get your impressions, but just about every politico around wants the gov't to usurp more and more control so they get all the money and get to tell you where to shove it when you complain.
I would kindly suggest you open your eyes and close your ears for a moment. The mayor might *say* he wants to put things in the private sector, but every action will take more and more control away from citizens and give it to the gov't (and this includes gov't funded "private" industry. Don't let the "private" label fool you. If a company/industry gets massive gov't subsidies and preferrential treatment it isn't private, it is just gov't ownership obscured).
Good. I hope this is a smokescreen. I sure don't want any more of my, or the rest of us US tax payers', dollars going to NASA. I'd much rather keep my money and let private firms start making big leaps in space exploration. NASA has something of a tendency to kill off private space ventures anyhow, so move them the f**k out of the way and lets get the wild-west style frontier explorers up into space.
I certainly wouldn't mind a national space program staying alive for the sole purpose of giving us a national presence on the moon, mars, etc. I just don't want the gov't space program to be the heavily-funded only game game town that it is currently.
Now all we need is a corkscrew that doesn't leave floaty bits in the wine and we're all set.
Actually, because of that problem and the failure rate of cork for sealing wine bottles, many winemakers are switching to screw caps for their wine. And more power to 'em. I hate getting cork in my wine.
Stupid dumb public. And they bitch like hell when we try and keep their asses in High School all the way through until grade 12.
Probably because public school is basically a large daycare apparatus.
I learned 2 things in my pre-college school days:
1) High-school is a total waste of time
2) If you cannot learn on your own, outside of the school environment, you are doomed (or maybe you can just become the next generation of teacher, who knows)
If you really want to blame someone for public ignorance and irrationality regarding nuclear technology, blame the media. They are the ones hyping up the bad things that happen (nuclear power, guns, drugs, etc...) and skew public attitude toward irrational panic-striken outcry against anything and everything. Taking even college level basic physics won't protect you against the barrage of negative press nuclear power gets, unless you are concerned enough to verify their BS stories with sources and do some background research (not too likely to be done by most of the population).
It is only really Orwellian in that this is the gov't doing this. If an airline wanted to take fingerprints as a prerequisite to you getting on one of their planes I'd say more power to them. But when the gov't forces them to do all of this, and replaces their staff with gov't goons... it looks rather much like the governmental loons are just preparing for their total control over the sheeple.
An inch at a time.
What I really like is Brazil's answer to this: they are now stopping and fingerprinting and photographing all US visitors. Tit-for-tat, the way it should be. And it wouldn't at all stop me from visting Brazil, just as it probably won't stop many Brazilians from coming here.
This is a rather geeky site, so I'll put this into terms you can most likely understand...
Lets say you are in calculus class (nevermind right now if you know calc like the back of your hand. Pretend this is the first day of class). For homework your teacher gives you 10 problems... 6 simple review, 3 actual calc problems to get you going, and 1 problem that is said to be unsolvable.
When you go home do you throw out everything but the last unsolvable problem then go head long into trying to solve it? Fuck no, if you aren't that good at math you try a few of those review problems, then if things are going well you hit those 3 harder ones... then if you are really feeling good you look over that last unsolvable problem just to see why it is unsolvable.
So tell me, when millions of lives are at stake (instead of just your math grade), why would you take on the hardest problem first? Why would anybody just skip over the lesser tyrants of the world and start a world war with a nuclear power that probably has more troops than your whole country has citizens?
You CAN currently sell yourself into slavery. Sure you might not be called a slave, but you sign a contract to get a job that has certain requirements. You can sign over and agree to do just about anything short of kill a person (or sell your own organs). And I have no problem with that whatsoever. If you want to sign a contract that says you are x's slave for y amount of time, so be it. I wouldn't do such a thing, but short of coercion or threats of force, I have no problem with anybody else doing just that.
Also, anybody can refuse anything at any time. A poor person would only accept the money because it seemed worth more to them than whatever body part is being bought. Again, where is the problem with this? How is more difficult for a poor person to refuse? You mean to tell me that rich people offering to buy from poor people is inherantly unfair? So rich should only buy from rich, and I guess poor can only buy from poor? By what logic?
And if the rich are keeping the poor on the lower rung just to harvest organs than lets do something about THAT problem. But the problem wouldn't be with being able to sell your organs. The problem would be with rich people using some sort of force or threat to keep the poor poor and keep the organs coming for cheap.
I seriously just don't understand folks that want to regulate and ban everything simply because it can be abused. Punish the abuser! PUNISH THE ABUSER!
Wow, must have been on a mad reply streak or somesuch. You did indeed mention passwords in the parent to my reply, so I can only hope I was meaning to respond to somebody else.
Cheers.
I think you are looking at this in the wrong way. Instead of scaning your retina as a password to get money from an ATM, you would be scanning in place of inserting your ATM card. In this case, you scan your retina, the ATM knows who you are and what account is yours, and then you enter your password/PIN to actually gain access to your account.
And if this were the case it seems in some ways like a better system than the current card/PIN system. I can't misplace my eyes, nor can someone else easily copy them. It is possible of course, but it would certainly be harder than copying a card.
How would allowing the sale of biometric information or organs allow the wealthy to prey upon the poverty striken?
The current organ donor rules are ridiculous. Sure it sucks that a rich guy could buy his way to a new liver even after he drank his last one useless, but it is MY liver/spleen/kidney/arm/hand/whatever... if I damned well want to sell it to the rich guy, totally of my own choosing, why shouldn't I be able to? What business is it of anyones who I sell my organs to? And how does being poor make you automatically given to doing whatever a rich guy wants?
Quite frankly if a poor person thinks that their next meal, better shelter, etc. is worth more than their kideny, why not let them sell? Everyone has to make choices that will permanently affect lives, not just the poor.
Ummm, you do realize that is how our country is _supposed_ to be acting right now, don't you? We live in a Democratic REPUBLIC, where we have democracy to decide things/elect representatives. But we also have a Bill of Rights and a Constitution that dictate EXACTLY what powers our government has. Anything not explicitly given to the gov't politicos in those documents is none of their god-damned business.
The simple fact is that we've not kept our "representatives" in check, so now they do whatever they want. I'd wager if you asked the House or Senate to cite the specific Constitutional text that gives them power to make X law or Y regulation, 90% of the time it couldn't be done.
The real problem in America is we are fat, rich, and lazy. Nothing like those 3 to keep people from standing up for their rights.
And the difference is what again? You just described exactly what I did, and what the original parent post did.
It appears you are simply letting the fact that the RIAA are a bunch of anti-fair-use assholes affect your judgement here. In my example all the [evil corp] does is create a gadget (ie. record/edit/promote some music tracks), and UPS handles the delivery (sort of how iTunes delivers prepackaged music). So again I ask, what is the difference, other than [evil corp] being in this case the RIAA?
It really seems to me that the entire point of this "test" was to flaunt his new SCSI drives. I suppose some people feel the need to justify their purchases to a large audience in order to feel they didn't get a bum deal. Well done I say! Enjoy your badass drives and rest assured all the geeks from here to Babylon are impressed.
So the record companies have no physical product to produce, they don't have to pay for the software, or the bandwidth, and they make 80% of the money for doing essentially nothing.
Oh I know! In fact, this reminds me of those damned crooks at [evil corp]. I order something from them, pay $50 for it, and UPS only sees... what, $2, $3.50 max? I mean, UPS packs, ships, and verifies delivery of everything I ordered. Yet [evil corp] is getting over 90% of the money. And for what? [Evil corp] didn't have to buy planes and trucks to deliver their wares. They didn't even pay for the boxes or the shipping labels. They did NEXT TO NOTHING... except produce the gadgets I ordered.
The only thing about all of those linked stories is... they aren't American citizens being held in Guantanamo. However you feel about their detention in Cuba (of all places!), it really has no relevance to the post about due process. Non-American citizens have no inherant rights to a speedy (or any) trial in America.
I would certainly agree to this. Adding more features to further refine a search would be a great addition to google. All I was trying to point out was that perhaps most people want to buy a transmission, not learn how to tweak theirs, so that is why those sites are coming up higher in the ranks. But if google had a way to refine the search to DIY mod type pages or just manufacturers pages it would only serve to help us all.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, BTW, if you think I am just talking out of my ass, here is some proof of concept, so to speak.
Dell brings some support back to the US.
See, customers weren't happy with Dell's outsorced support to India, so Dell adjusted. They didn't just say "Hah, screw you customer. Take a dive off a bridge!" Dell did exactly what it should. It tried a new system to maximize profits (minimize costs, whatever), but in this case it didn't work too well. Oh well. Live, learn, correct the problems and try new ideas. But in the end they still want to make their support work for the customer, because the customer IS profit.
That is such a short-sighted view, it is quite obvious you aren't any kind of buisness owner. "No service" most certainly is NOT a good way to minimize costs, unless of course your user base doesn't really want service when they buy your product. But in that case you wouldn't have a call center to begin with.
/rant mode off. Just had to get that off my mind.
If a business sets up a service center it is because to get and KEEP their customers they need support. Simply pissing people off just makes them leave. I must ask, do you even have a job at all?
Where I work I program, but I also do support from time to time. Customers can and WILL ditch our product if we don't give them good enough support. It has happened before, and we've had to bitch at support guys to shape up or else.
It is true that any company will try to minimize costs, even on support. But that basically means doing the minimum the customer wants/needs, not just blowing them off totally. That thinking just makes you go bankrupt, and that isn't a very good way to maximize profits is it?
Good god, how your post got modded as insightful I can't understand. Must be all the code monkeys around here taking the party line of "Business evil! EVIL!."
Anyhow,
Only because US citizens, in general, haven't kept up their end of the deal. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, or something of the sort. Once we loose the 2nd... kerplop, no recourse left but to do what the politicos want. But it seems you pretty much understand this already. Too bad more people don't.
Too true. However I think the real showing of genius is that these people knew all too well that they couldn't think of everything. Which is what is so great about the US Constitution. They didn't try to think of every possible right we should have, so instead they thought of all the powers the gov't should have, and reserved EVERYTHING else for the people, and the states where necessary.
So I would actually say the Constitution does indeed guarantee individual privacy (to the extent that it doesn't cause harm to others), because it does not explicitly give anti-privacy powers to the government.
The reason watches with moving hands are so successful is that same reason that even in modern glass cockpit aircraft the "old style" mechanical displays are rendered on screen: they are extremely fast and easy to read.
You know, this is so very true, yet I hadn't really thought of it. The same goes for skydiving altimeters. There are a few digital models, but when I bought mine I would only consider analog because it was just so much easier to read. And when you are falling at ~1000ft every 5 seconds a quick glance is all you are going to get. So I can just plan my opening altitude ahead of time and note that position on the altimeter. While in the air I can, with one quick glance, tell if I am near, or even past, that mark and react accordingly. No need to process numbers or figure my rate of descent.
What about floppy disks? I'd be happy if I never had to mess with slow, low-density, prone to failure magnetic POS again.
is tell the time! At my current location.
I could care less what the temp is on my wrist. Nor what the time is in Japan. Not only that but most digital watches are fugly, and frankly my watch is as much a piece of jewelry as it is a time telling device. Anyhow, I like the old Unix maxim: do one thing, do it well. And for telling time, a well-crafted analog watch does just that.
sadly, like most other politicians... he wants to push privatization and expand corporate control as much as possible
How can I put this kindly? What the hell are you on? I've yet to see a politician that actually wants to push privitization. My god, if only such a world existed. I've no clue where you get your impressions, but just about every politico around wants the gov't to usurp more and more control so they get all the money and get to tell you where to shove it when you complain.
I would kindly suggest you open your eyes and close your ears for a moment. The mayor might *say* he wants to put things in the private sector, but every action will take more and more control away from citizens and give it to the gov't (and this includes gov't funded "private" industry. Don't let the "private" label fool you. If a company/industry gets massive gov't subsidies and preferrential treatment it isn't private, it is just gov't ownership obscured).
"Never get into a land war in Asia..."
/.
But only slightly less well-known:
Never get into an economics/free-trade argument on
The BS gets piled pretty thick around here sometimes.
Good. I hope this is a smokescreen. I sure don't want any more of my, or the rest of us US tax payers', dollars going to NASA. I'd much rather keep my money and let private firms start making big leaps in space exploration. NASA has something of a tendency to kill off private space ventures anyhow, so move them the f**k out of the way and lets get the wild-west style frontier explorers up into space.
I certainly wouldn't mind a national space program staying alive for the sole purpose of giving us a national presence on the moon, mars, etc. I just don't want the gov't space program to be the heavily-funded only game game town that it is currently.
Now all we need is a corkscrew that doesn't leave floaty bits in the wine and we're all set.
Actually, because of that problem and the failure rate of cork for sealing wine bottles, many winemakers are switching to screw caps for their wine. And more power to 'em. I hate getting cork in my wine.
Stupid dumb public. And they bitch like hell when we try and keep their asses in High School all the way through until grade 12.
Probably because public school is basically a large daycare apparatus.
I learned 2 things in my pre-college school days: 1) High-school is a total waste of time 2) If you cannot learn on your own, outside of the school environment, you are doomed (or maybe you can just become the next generation of teacher, who knows)
If you really want to blame someone for public ignorance and irrationality regarding nuclear technology, blame the media. They are the ones hyping up the bad things that happen (nuclear power, guns, drugs, etc...) and skew public attitude toward irrational panic-striken outcry against anything and everything. Taking even college level basic physics won't protect you against the barrage of negative press nuclear power gets, unless you are concerned enough to verify their BS stories with sources and do some background research (not too likely to be done by most of the population).
It is only really Orwellian in that this is the gov't doing this. If an airline wanted to take fingerprints as a prerequisite to you getting on one of their planes I'd say more power to them. But when the gov't forces them to do all of this, and replaces their staff with gov't goons... it looks rather much like the governmental loons are just preparing for their total control over the sheeple. An inch at a time.
What I really like is Brazil's answer to this: they are now stopping and fingerprinting and photographing all US visitors. Tit-for-tat, the way it should be. And it wouldn't at all stop me from visting Brazil, just as it probably won't stop many Brazilians from coming here.
This is a rather geeky site, so I'll put this into terms you can most likely understand...
Lets say you are in calculus class (nevermind right now if you know calc like the back of your hand. Pretend this is the first day of class). For homework your teacher gives you 10 problems... 6 simple review, 3 actual calc problems to get you going, and 1 problem that is said to be unsolvable.
When you go home do you throw out everything but the last unsolvable problem then go head long into trying to solve it? Fuck no, if you aren't that good at math you try a few of those review problems, then if things are going well you hit those 3 harder ones... then if you are really feeling good you look over that last unsolvable problem just to see why it is unsolvable.
So tell me, when millions of lives are at stake (instead of just your math grade), why would you take on the hardest problem first? Why would anybody just skip over the lesser tyrants of the world and start a world war with a nuclear power that probably has more troops than your whole country has citizens?
You CAN currently sell yourself into slavery. Sure you might not be called a slave, but you sign a contract to get a job that has certain requirements. You can sign over and agree to do just about anything short of kill a person (or sell your own organs). And I have no problem with that whatsoever. If you want to sign a contract that says you are x's slave for y amount of time, so be it. I wouldn't do such a thing, but short of coercion or threats of force, I have no problem with anybody else doing just that.
Also, anybody can refuse anything at any time. A poor person would only accept the money because it seemed worth more to them than whatever body part is being bought. Again, where is the problem with this? How is more difficult for a poor person to refuse? You mean to tell me that rich people offering to buy from poor people is inherantly unfair? So rich should only buy from rich, and I guess poor can only buy from poor? By what logic?
And if the rich are keeping the poor on the lower rung just to harvest organs than lets do something about THAT problem. But the problem wouldn't be with being able to sell your organs. The problem would be with rich people using some sort of force or threat to keep the poor poor and keep the organs coming for cheap.
I seriously just don't understand folks that want to regulate and ban everything simply because it can be abused. Punish the abuser! PUNISH THE ABUSER!
Wow, must have been on a mad reply streak or somesuch. You did indeed mention passwords in the parent to my reply, so I can only hope I was meaning to respond to somebody else. Cheers.
I think you are looking at this in the wrong way. Instead of scaning your retina as a password to get money from an ATM, you would be scanning in place of inserting your ATM card. In this case, you scan your retina, the ATM knows who you are and what account is yours, and then you enter your password/PIN to actually gain access to your account. And if this were the case it seems in some ways like a better system than the current card/PIN system. I can't misplace my eyes, nor can someone else easily copy them. It is possible of course, but it would certainly be harder than copying a card.
How would allowing the sale of biometric information or organs allow the wealthy to prey upon the poverty striken?
The current organ donor rules are ridiculous. Sure it sucks that a rich guy could buy his way to a new liver even after he drank his last one useless, but it is MY liver/spleen/kidney/arm/hand/whatever... if I damned well want to sell it to the rich guy, totally of my own choosing, why shouldn't I be able to? What business is it of anyones who I sell my organs to? And how does being poor make you automatically given to doing whatever a rich guy wants?
Quite frankly if a poor person thinks that their next meal, better shelter, etc. is worth more than their kideny, why not let them sell? Everyone has to make choices that will permanently affect lives, not just the poor.
Ummm, you do realize that is how our country is _supposed_ to be acting right now, don't you? We live in a Democratic REPUBLIC, where we have democracy to decide things/elect representatives. But we also have a Bill of Rights and a Constitution that dictate EXACTLY what powers our government has. Anything not explicitly given to the gov't politicos in those documents is none of their god-damned business.
The simple fact is that we've not kept our "representatives" in check, so now they do whatever they want. I'd wager if you asked the House or Senate to cite the specific Constitutional text that gives them power to make X law or Y regulation, 90% of the time it couldn't be done.
The real problem in America is we are fat, rich, and lazy. Nothing like those 3 to keep people from standing up for their rights.
And the difference is what again? You just described exactly what I did, and what the original parent post did.
It appears you are simply letting the fact that the RIAA are a bunch of anti-fair-use assholes affect your judgement here. In my example all the [evil corp] does is create a gadget (ie. record/edit/promote some music tracks), and UPS handles the delivery (sort of how iTunes delivers prepackaged music). So again I ask, what is the difference, other than [evil corp] being in this case the RIAA?
It really seems to me that the entire point of this "test" was to flaunt his new SCSI drives. I suppose some people feel the need to justify their purchases to a large audience in order to feel they didn't get a bum deal. Well done I say! Enjoy your badass drives and rest assured all the geeks from here to Babylon are impressed.
So the record companies have no physical product to produce, they don't have to pay for the software, or the bandwidth, and they make 80% of the money for doing essentially nothing.
Oh I know! In fact, this reminds me of those damned crooks at [evil corp]. I order something from them, pay $50 for it, and UPS only sees... what, $2, $3.50 max? I mean, UPS packs, ships, and verifies delivery of everything I ordered. Yet [evil corp] is getting over 90% of the money. And for what? [Evil corp] didn't have to buy planes and trucks to deliver their wares. They didn't even pay for the boxes or the shipping labels. They did NEXT TO NOTHING... except produce the gadgets I ordered.
The only thing about all of those linked stories is... they aren't American citizens being held in Guantanamo. However you feel about their detention in Cuba (of all places!), it really has no relevance to the post about due process. Non-American citizens have no inherant rights to a speedy (or any) trial in America.
I would certainly agree to this. Adding more features to further refine a search would be a great addition to google. All I was trying to point out was that perhaps most people want to buy a transmission, not learn how to tweak theirs, so that is why those sites are coming up higher in the ranks. But if google had a way to refine the search to DIY mod type pages or just manufacturers pages it would only serve to help us all.