Yea...I have to agree. I have access to the card numbers where I work, and I know off the top of my head the other 4 people who could call up any number they wanted to. There are only two here who could even generate a list like that, me and my opposite number in accounting.
Definitely seems fishy. What the hell are they doing with their cc numbers there?
That happens a lot actually. They don't pay carriers very much, and it's a pretty sucky job. It can take 'em a week to figure out they're supposed to be throwing a paper to your house, and then another week to figure out they're NOT.
We recycle a lot of paper, but we don't recycle it BACK INTO THE PRINTER. If nothing else, those high capacity laser printers have a tendency to jam on paper that's already been printed on, and if some motherf***er calls me at 3:30 in the morning because his motherf***ing toppers didn't get printed because some moron loaded the printer with crap paper, trying to save 5 bucks, I would be homicidal.
It's such a major screwup, it's hard for me to see how it couldn't have been done at least partly on purpose. How the hell did all those credit card numbers make it to hardcopy?
Most times people leave the bundle toppers on top of the bundle when they toss 'em outta the truck at the drop point...Like, for example, your local gas station, grocery store, doughnut shop, whatever.
Honestly, and I work in the business, I can't even imagine one. We store all that data, but there is no commonly run report that prints it out. There isn't any point in it.
If you pay by credit card with autopay, or similar, when your subscription is up, the system charges your card. It goes straight to the bank. It's not even a special job...Purely automated. The $$$ amount shows up on the batch report the next day, along with your name and subscriber ID and NOT your credit card number, because it would just be one more thing you don't need to look at on an already crowded report.
At the same time, if someone is paying by check, as opposed to having the money automatically debited from their account every day, we don't KEEP the routing number...Why would anyone? We just keep the check authorization number. With that, you can get the routing number if you need it, for whatever reason, later.
Circulation and accounting are connected like two wrestling squid. Every night a whole series of jobs are run referencing all kinds of billing information to determine whose subscriptions are paid up to the point where they qualify to get a paper in the morning. So all the customer card/account numbers are processed by the circulation side, and sent in cash batches to accounting.
So you see there is a financial subset inside circulation that deals with that billing info, which is why they have access to it. The reason it doesn't go straight to accounting is because, in most papers, accounting deals almost exclusively with advertising revenue and billing, which is a lot more complex than 15 bucks a month, or whatever the news subscription rate is, which gets billed automatically.
All that being said, it took some kinda dumbass to dump that info out on the toppers, and a whole crew of dumbasses down the line to attach that information to the paper. Most places don't put anything like personal information on the toppers for papers they're distributing, so it should have been obvious to anyone that there had been a mistake...There are a LOT of people who should have noticed something was wrong.
Eh. I'd rather someone who could do his job without what he believes interfering with it at all.
Far better to have a professional doing a professional job, than have a zealot who may get erratic if he views his beliefs to be under attack. Emotion is the enemy of prescision.
It's a good question. I think empathy is a strongly intuistic skill, whereas the ability to constructively analyse your experience with other people is an analytic skill.
Functional Autistic people become competent at understanding what other people expect when they say certain things, and predicting future behavior from what they consider to be meaningless sentences. So a strongly analytical geek would be in a similar boat...They have the ability to predict bad responses based on experience, but they'll never understand the reasons behind the bad responses, because they're not wired to see the subtext.
Intuitive people at the opposite end of the spectrum may understand what someone is feeling, but lack any ability to make predictions about their future behavior from that.
That would seem to explain why people who have functional social skills don't seem to be too far on one side or the other...Because both sets of skills are necesarry for quality social interaction.
I think it goes straight to my point: Empathy and Experience with other people. If you can't read their mood, you sure as hell can't manipulate it, and you can't really analyse either, because you have no insight into their motivations.
The thing that you miss is empathy and awareness of other people. Geeks are notoriously crappy at that. You need to be able to tell what someone else is thinking and feeling in order to communicate with them on anything more than a superficial level.
In the situation you're talking about, having to sit and chat sports scores with someone, you think that person gives a damn either? You think he's not thinking, "I could try explaining what I do for a living to this pasty pencilneck, but whats the point?" You think his idea of a dream evening out is talking to YOU? No way. He'd rather be out doing something else too, even if not the same things as you.
But a person with social skills will do the meaningless chatter thing anyway because that's something you've gotta do in society sometimes...especially if you've got a female, because they thrive on that stuff. Getting all arrogant and all "I'm too good to talk to mere mortals" like a lot of geeks do is a good way to never get invited to a party again...at least not a party where there are females.
Which brings us to the correlary of social skills: Having zero social skills == never having sex without first paying your partner. If you can't be bothered to attempt to relate to other people, of if you think that lying and bsing are the only skills worth having, you are sadly misatken.
Don't portray it like I'm just insensitive and don't understand what it's like...I have both empathy and personal experience to fall back on.
But confronting everyone who thoughtlessly uses a word that you find offensive isn't the answer. The people who didn't mean anything by it will feel like shitheads, and people generally don't like feeling like shitheads, which beeeds resentment. And the ones who did mean something by it will laugh and get up in your face, and you won't have solved anything. There are better fights to fight than just making sure everyone uses nice words all the time.
People generally throw off on the christian guilds, imho, and Blizz discourages them as well. One thing about them though, is they tend not to organize on general chat, which probably has something to do with Blizz stepping on this particular group.
Blah blah. Right or wrong, "Gay" and "Fag" are common parlance of annoyance and insult with the younger set. I myself was quite enamored of the word "Bitch" which I applied impartially to men, women, and machinery. It's offensive to some people, but when it's in common use as a general purpose insult, you're just going to have to get over it, and wait for the fad to change.
That's a nice way of putting it. As a longtime gamer, I can say with assurance that there is a LARGE segment of the MMORPG player population who would not react with maturity and tolerance...I'm not saying that they're bad people, or that they'd necesarrily act that way irl, but when you add in anonymity and the kind of sexual purience you get out of highschoolers (who tend not to react well to stuff like that because they haven't really grown into their sexual identities bla blah), you're bound to get some ugly scenes.
Here is more information on subpoenas. Basically you have to show up at court, regardless, but once you get there you can argue for the reason why you shouldn't have to provide the stuff they say you should provide. If the judge thinks you're full of it, he/she can cite you for contempt, which has a variety of penalties, including fines and/or jail time. Otherwise, he/she can rule that the subpoena is invalid, and say that you don't have to comply.
Most motherboards have a jumper setting that prohibits BIOS flashing. I always set mine, just to make me think a few times before I go ahead and update my bios.
Really, there is no reason why that can't default to "on"...Anyone who's going to need to flash a bios ought to be savvy enough to pull a jumper off a motherboard.
Yea, the "seven second delay". Theres a guy sitting up in the feed room with his hand over a big red button, and if something goes awry he slaps the button and they have to try and recover from the previous queue. They have it in radio too.
Depends on the keying structure. I work on an old MPE/iX machine that uses flat table crap (I'm babysitting the POS atm, in fact), and the difficulty would arise if the tables were keyed with third or fourth tables that weren't included in the backup, or were included on a different tape...This crap happens all the time, and generally you just have to "know" that those things are connected in that way. So you could end up with a SSN and a name, but no way to connect them.
Or, depending, you could end up with a 300 character long string of integers and no way to tell where the SSN began/ended. If the item stored before/after it was a date, you'd be good, but if it was some weirdass key, you might have no idea.
One of the great things about paper + computers would be the ability to assign each piece of paper a unique serial number, and then be able to run an audit on the pieces of paper later to see which ones were misplaced, or to find extras. You could also make them sequential, polling site specific, very easy to audit.
I will tell you FLAT OUT that the government would shoot the first CEO to tell them that they couldn't show the "Launch Nuclear Ballistic Missile" code because it was proprietary.
End of story. Code that is that/this important to our government should NEVER be held by a private individual.
Because the Dems in Alaska have zero power. Most states have to give at least lip service to the minority party, but in Alaska they'd be more likely to agree to that request if it came from the Alaskan Independence Party.
Yea, one of my favorite things was hacking the poorly defended mobile spawn base. Good times. My absolute favorite thing was hacking the Galaxy transport and crashing it into something...Preferably some of that damn artillery.
So true. I left because leveling up CR was such a nightmare. Assemble a team, get team to location, try vainly to get teams weapons pointed in the right direction, fail to inject any strategy, give up and try to kill as many as possible in the hopes for CR points.
I think that maybe they need to add a much larger death penalty. I play WoW now, and one of the battlegrounds, (AV) has the exact same problem. People die, spawn, die, spawn, die, spawn, and eventually wear down the other side through superior INDIVIDUAL skill.
When you can come back instantly, or nearly so, your team basically has an infinite supply of people, so the most efficient attack is always going to be the overwhelming mob. If you have a much larger death penalty (5 minute rez, or something like that) you have to develop some strategy. Maybe add some limits to the spawn points...Like only so many spawns per minute or something. Of course, that punishes the good players more than the bad players.
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Yea...I have to agree. I have access to the card numbers where I work, and I know off the top of my head the other 4 people who could call up any number they wanted to. There are only two here who could even generate a list like that, me and my opposite number in accounting.
Definitely seems fishy. What the hell are they doing with their cc numbers there?
That happens a lot actually. They don't pay carriers very much, and it's a pretty sucky job. It can take 'em a week to figure out they're supposed to be throwing a paper to your house, and then another week to figure out they're NOT.
it's called magnetic tape, and DVD backup.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that, in the print media conglomerate that I work for, you will NEVER see hardcopy credit card numbers.
We recycle a lot of paper, but we don't recycle it BACK INTO THE PRINTER. If nothing else, those high capacity laser printers have a tendency to jam on paper that's already been printed on, and if some motherf***er calls me at 3:30 in the morning because his motherf***ing toppers didn't get printed because some moron loaded the printer with crap paper, trying to save 5 bucks, I would be homicidal.
It's such a major screwup, it's hard for me to see how it couldn't have been done at least partly on purpose. How the hell did all those credit card numbers make it to hardcopy?
Most times people leave the bundle toppers on top of the bundle when they toss 'em outta the truck at the drop point...Like, for example, your local gas station, grocery store, doughnut shop, whatever.
Lot of people could have seen 'em
Honestly, and I work in the business, I can't even imagine one. We store all that data, but there is no commonly run report that prints it out. There isn't any point in it.
If you pay by credit card with autopay, or similar, when your subscription is up, the system charges your card. It goes straight to the bank. It's not even a special job...Purely automated. The $$$ amount shows up on the batch report the next day, along with your name and subscriber ID and NOT your credit card number, because it would just be one more thing you don't need to look at on an already crowded report.
At the same time, if someone is paying by check, as opposed to having the money automatically debited from their account every day, we don't KEEP the routing number...Why would anyone? We just keep the check authorization number. With that, you can get the routing number if you need it, for whatever reason, later.
Circulation and accounting are connected like two wrestling squid. Every night a whole series of jobs are run referencing all kinds of billing information to determine whose subscriptions are paid up to the point where they qualify to get a paper in the morning. So all the customer card/account numbers are processed by the circulation side, and sent in cash batches to accounting.
So you see there is a financial subset inside circulation that deals with that billing info, which is why they have access to it. The reason it doesn't go straight to accounting is because, in most papers, accounting deals almost exclusively with advertising revenue and billing, which is a lot more complex than 15 bucks a month, or whatever the news subscription rate is, which gets billed automatically.
All that being said, it took some kinda dumbass to dump that info out on the toppers, and a whole crew of dumbasses down the line to attach that information to the paper. Most places don't put anything like personal information on the toppers for papers they're distributing, so it should have been obvious to anyone that there had been a mistake...There are a LOT of people who should have noticed something was wrong.
Eh. I'd rather someone who could do his job without what he believes interfering with it at all.
Far better to have a professional doing a professional job, than have a zealot who may get erratic if he views his beliefs to be under attack. Emotion is the enemy of prescision.
It's a good question. I think empathy is a strongly intuistic skill, whereas the ability to constructively analyse your experience with other people is an analytic skill.
Functional Autistic people become competent at understanding what other people expect when they say certain things, and predicting future behavior from what they consider to be meaningless sentences. So a strongly analytical geek would be in a similar boat...They have the ability to predict bad responses based on experience, but they'll never understand the reasons behind the bad responses, because they're not wired to see the subtext.
Intuitive people at the opposite end of the spectrum may understand what someone is feeling, but lack any ability to make predictions about their future behavior from that.
That would seem to explain why people who have functional social skills don't seem to be too far on one side or the other...Because both sets of skills are necesarry for quality social interaction.
I think it goes straight to my point: Empathy and Experience with other people. If you can't read their mood, you sure as hell can't manipulate it, and you can't really analyse either, because you have no insight into their motivations.
The thing that you miss is empathy and awareness of other people. Geeks are notoriously crappy at that. You need to be able to tell what someone else is thinking and feeling in order to communicate with them on anything more than a superficial level.
In the situation you're talking about, having to sit and chat sports scores with someone, you think that person gives a damn either? You think he's not thinking, "I could try explaining what I do for a living to this pasty pencilneck, but whats the point?" You think his idea of a dream evening out is talking to YOU? No way. He'd rather be out doing something else too, even if not the same things as you.
But a person with social skills will do the meaningless chatter thing anyway because that's something you've gotta do in society sometimes...especially if you've got a female, because they thrive on that stuff. Getting all arrogant and all "I'm too good to talk to mere mortals" like a lot of geeks do is a good way to never get invited to a party again...at least not a party where there are females.
Which brings us to the correlary of social skills: Having zero social skills == never having sex without first paying your partner. If you can't be bothered to attempt to relate to other people, of if you think that lying and bsing are the only skills worth having, you are sadly misatken.
Don't portray it like I'm just insensitive and don't understand what it's like...I have both empathy and personal experience to fall back on.
But confronting everyone who thoughtlessly uses a word that you find offensive isn't the answer. The people who didn't mean anything by it will feel like shitheads, and people generally don't like feeling like shitheads, which beeeds resentment. And the ones who did mean something by it will laugh and get up in your face, and you won't have solved anything. There are better fights to fight than just making sure everyone uses nice words all the time.
That stuff is caught by the profanity filter, like most other obscenity. If you don't want to hear it, keep the filter on.
People generally throw off on the christian guilds, imho, and Blizz discourages them as well. One thing about them though, is they tend not to organize on general chat, which probably has something to do with Blizz stepping on this particular group.
Blah blah. Right or wrong, "Gay" and "Fag" are common parlance of annoyance and insult with the younger set. I myself was quite enamored of the word "Bitch" which I applied impartially to men, women, and machinery. It's offensive to some people, but when it's in common use as a general purpose insult, you're just going to have to get over it, and wait for the fad to change.
That's a nice way of putting it. As a longtime gamer, I can say with assurance that there is a LARGE segment of the MMORPG player population who would not react with maturity and tolerance...I'm not saying that they're bad people, or that they'd necesarrily act that way irl, but when you add in anonymity and the kind of sexual purience you get out of highschoolers (who tend not to react well to stuff like that because they haven't really grown into their sexual identities bla blah), you're bound to get some ugly scenes.
Here is more information on subpoenas. Basically you have to show up at court, regardless, but once you get there you can argue for the reason why you shouldn't have to provide the stuff they say you should provide. If the judge thinks you're full of it, he/she can cite you for contempt, which has a variety of penalties, including fines and/or jail time. Otherwise, he/she can rule that the subpoena is invalid, and say that you don't have to comply.
Most motherboards have a jumper setting that prohibits BIOS flashing. I always set mine, just to make me think a few times before I go ahead and update my bios.
Really, there is no reason why that can't default to "on"...Anyone who's going to need to flash a bios ought to be savvy enough to pull a jumper off a motherboard.
Yea, the "seven second delay". Theres a guy sitting up in the feed room with his hand over a big red button, and if something goes awry he slaps the button and they have to try and recover from the previous queue. They have it in radio too.
Depends on the keying structure. I work on an old MPE/iX machine that uses flat table crap (I'm babysitting the POS atm, in fact), and the difficulty would arise if the tables were keyed with third or fourth tables that weren't included in the backup, or were included on a different tape...This crap happens all the time, and generally you just have to "know" that those things are connected in that way. So you could end up with a SSN and a name, but no way to connect them.
Or, depending, you could end up with a 300 character long string of integers and no way to tell where the SSN began/ended. If the item stored before/after it was a date, you'd be good, but if it was some weirdass key, you might have no idea.
One of the great things about paper + computers would be the ability to assign each piece of paper a unique serial number, and then be able to run an audit on the pieces of paper later to see which ones were misplaced, or to find extras. You could also make them sequential, polling site specific, very easy to audit.
That would be the best of both worlds.
I will tell you FLAT OUT that the government would shoot the first CEO to tell them that they couldn't show the "Launch Nuclear Ballistic Missile" code because it was proprietary.
End of story. Code that is that/this important to our government should NEVER be held by a private individual.
Because the Dems in Alaska have zero power. Most states have to give at least lip service to the minority party, but in Alaska they'd be more likely to agree to that request if it came from the Alaskan Independence Party.
Yea, one of my favorite things was hacking the poorly defended mobile spawn base. Good times. My absolute favorite thing was hacking the Galaxy transport and crashing it into something...Preferably some of that damn artillery.
So true. I left because leveling up CR was such a nightmare. Assemble a team, get team to location, try vainly to get teams weapons pointed in the right direction, fail to inject any strategy, give up and try to kill as many as possible in the hopes for CR points.
I think that maybe they need to add a much larger death penalty. I play WoW now, and one of the battlegrounds, (AV) has the exact same problem. People die, spawn, die, spawn, die, spawn, and eventually wear down the other side through superior INDIVIDUAL skill.
When you can come back instantly, or nearly so, your team basically has an infinite supply of people, so the most efficient attack is always going to be the overwhelming mob. If you have a much larger death penalty (5 minute rez, or something like that) you have to develop some strategy. Maybe add some limits to the spawn points...Like only so many spawns per minute or something. Of course, that punishes the good players more than the bad players.