When so many people on Slashdot are touched by the loss of the shuttle and wishing the astronauts and their families well, why make nasty remarks to the people who call their thoughts and good wishes "prayer"? I find it hard to believe that this poster's Karma got raised for a hurtful post aimed at sad people who wanted to be helpful.
Because sites tend to offer a very different, even if overlapping, set of options. So, even if (for example) British Air flies the route you want, their flights might not show up on one site, and be at the top of the list in another.
What works for me is to find a good price or two searching online, then take these to a real, in-person agent and say can you get me something like this or better....and the in-person agent can often do better!
I am going to go back to using the "Preview" button when Slashdot goes back to loading at reasonable speed. Until then, thank you for being able to read my typing.
I too have a fine business model, and inspired by the TMA I plan to go to court to protect my rights against the government.
My business model is to mug people and take their wallets. Look around the country and you will see that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people are trying to make a living using this very model.
Thank goodness we now have a pro-business court system that will step in on behalf of muggers everywhere.
The current opt out list is optional. They follow it anyway.
I am on that list, and I still get four or five calls a day. Are you saying I would be getting more if I weren't on the opt out list?
For a while, setting my phone to reject calls from "Private" numbers blocked them. That worked for about 6 months--now they have all found some technical fix that lets them through. I predict the same will happen for the "Zapper".
I ask every telemarketer to put me on the don't call list, which they are required to do. Their latest trick is to reply, "Please hold so that you can discuss this with my supervisor." Translation: getting on the don't-call list will cost you an extra 10 minutes of frustration.
Local news recently was that Harvard started a program to provide "research assistant" jobs to its own recent MBAs who couldn't get jobs. Poor things, having to pig along on $90,000 year...So if Harvard MBAs aren't falling into jobs, I imagine the rest aren't.
Let me rephrase my point and say that those MBAs who do have jobs in your company would love to find a way to get your job done cheaper.
Unless you have tenure/a union/civil service, your job is secure exactly as long as your boss can't find somebody cheaper to do your job. If your salary is high, somebody just out of college is cheaper. If you have benefits, somebody without benefits is cheaper. If you anticipate a pension in 10 years, somebody who doesn't anticipate a pension in 10 years is cheaper. I'm not talking just about IT here.
Think about it. The MBA programs of 1000 universities are churning out cute little guys in suits whose ticket to the good life is figuring out how to squeeze out enough "new" money to justify their own million-dollar salary. Did you think benefits and pensions would escape their notice?
Getting up into management is one solution, but my feeling was it meant giving up the work I love (nerdy work) to do work I hate. Being so doggone good they don't want to lose you is one solution, that's the one that we all hope we can use. Some of us will succeed there and some...will not.
There are people who really know how to do this--the university you're connected to will have a "development office" of people who work full-time raising money. Talk to them first because 1) they know how to do it, 2) you will need to coordinate with them so you don't step on each others' toes, and 3) you might be able to convince them that a camp-scholarship program will give them good publicity too.
My amateur experience: many little local groups (Rotary or whatever) will give you $100 for a good cause if you ask them nicely and thank them publicly--more if you get somebody who is in the group to ask them for you. We had a local women's college club that liked to interview high school seniors each year and give a $500 scholarship to the most creative and entrepreneurial. HTH--Good luck!
Benefactor of mankind--thank you!
on
Tetris AI System
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Now I can set up computer #1 to play an infinite, obsessive game of Tetris on computer #2, leaving me free at last to sit down at computer #3 and get some work done. The $200 for webcam and other hardware is cheap for an invention like this, with the revolutionary potential of the wheel, or fire, or even pizza delivery.
This is excellent advice. The biggest problem you have to fear is getting the two languages confused.
At the risk of being flamed for the simplicity of this idea, you might also consider keeping your two sets of class notes in two different colors. Then if you are trying to remember which language uses which kind of loop, you might be able to shut your eyes and try to visualize the page where you wrote it down...
If you can write a real letter instead of a form letter--do it! There was a November story in the NY Times about how this excuse was used to toss hundreds of thousands of Sierra Club people's letters into the garbage. Registration (free) is required, so let me just quote for you the relevant bit:
"... the [Clinton-era] Forest Service actually relied on public comment when it developed its "roadless rule," intended to protect 58 million acres of undeveloped national forest from most commercial logging and road building. It drew 1.6 million comments, the most ever in the history of federal rule-making. Almost all the comments -- 95 percent -- supported the protections but wanted the plan to go even further, which it eventually did.
But the Bush administration delayed putting the rule into effect and sought more comments, receiving 726,000. Of those, it said that only 52,000, or 7 percent, were "original," meaning that the administration discounted 93 percent of the comments. The rule is now being challenged in court."
There's a very, very big irony here, since it's the Bush team that just got caught with their pants sending out deceptive Astroturf....
All form letters are not created equal.
Suppose Group A and Group B both hate snowmobiles. Both groups pay somebody to write a letter blasting snowmobiles, and post it on their website. 500 members of each group click "Submit" to sign the letter and send it.
"Informative astroturf": Group A's form sends 500 emails to a Congressional committee. This is like sending a petition with 500 signatures. It is not meant to trick the committee in any way--just to show the level of suppport.
"Deceptive Astroturf": Group B's form sends 500 signed emails to 500 different local papers as "Letters to the Editor." This is meant to trick the paper into giving free space instead of paying for ad space. It is meant to trick readers into thinking somebody from a local town wrote the letter--that's what propagandists call the "Plain Folks" trick.
Nobody is saying that the Republicans are the first group, or the only group, to try deceptive astroturf. But I think big, well-funded groups should be held to a higher standard than this. If nothing else, they could afford to pay those little papers for the space to air their views.
As Paul Boutin points out in his blog, the NYT fails to mention that this is a story of nerds, webloggers, and message board people who caught some well-funded people doing stuff they never planned to get called on. (The first news story was Mike Magee's over in the Inquirer, and the Inquirer has been all over this story, including some very funny screenshots of the fine prizes Republicans earn by sending those letters pretending you wrote them yourself.)
Boutin's Slate article has the dirt and is funny to boot.
Be very aware that your input may be tossed on the garbage heap if they decide it's a form letter and not "original." That's what happened to hundreds of thousands of anti-snowmobile comments, according to this New York times story, by Katharine Seelye. Registration (free) is required, so let me just quote for you the relevant bit:
"... the [Clinton-era] Forest Service actually relied on public comment when it developed its "roadless rule," intended to protect 58 million acres of undeveloped national forest from most commercial logging and road building. It drew 1.6 million comments, the most ever in the history of federal rule-making. Almost all the comments -- 95 percent -- supported the protections but wanted the plan to go even further, which it eventually did.
But the Bush administration delayed putting the rule into effect and sought more comments, receiving 726,000. Of those, it said that only 52,000, or 7 percent, were "original," meaning that the administration discounted 93 percent of the comments. The rule is now being challenged in court."
There's a very, very big irony here. The Bush team just got caught with their pants down by bloggers and others including Mike Magee at the Inquirer. It turns out they were sending out massive fake form emails to papers around the country, and bribing folks to sign their own names to them with "GOPoints" they could trade for prizes.
Another big irony: this story has been riding Blogdex for a week--a long techno-duel of marketing droids versus nerds armed mainly with Google. And the nerds won! Probably the only place you couldn't follow the action was here on Slashdot, the story was rejected three times. So the Superbowl is a better example of news that matters?
No, he's not a marketing droid, he's just an enthusiast. It's true that marketing droids work hard to imitate enthusiasts, in this case the assumption is false.
OTOH--I am not a Segways-on-sidewalks enthusiast! The platform is wide enough to take up more than half any sidewalk I know about. Segways go more than twice as fast as a normal pedestrian. And although the quoted weight of a Segway keeps going down--when I first read about it, it was more than 80 lbs--that sure doesn't include the weight of the person riding it.
Okay, young ones, get ready for one of those "when you're my age" rants!
When your cute little toddlers start to become young adults, they will be looking up to you to see what it means to be a grown-up. A lot of high-school kids have big conflicts with parents based at least in part on the idea that parents sold out their youthful dreams for cash--maybe just for survival. Teenagers don't want to look forward to a future that looks like that.
Most of the kids of science/engineer families we knew came through those years relatively happy and sane. We also knew lots of families who had lots more money than we did whose kids were angry and confused because 1) they didn't want to end up as stressed-out as their parents but 2) they couldn't picture survival without the fat salaries those parents were bringing home. Yes, I do know some wealthy folks who love their jobs, and their kids tend to turn out okay too. But (relative) poverty worked darn well for us, and for most of the faculty families we know.
I'll skip the part of the rant that talks about walking a mile to kindergarten past snowbanks up over my head....
If you can eliminate just 20 factory workers making $20k each in the United States, that's a yearly saving of $400k-$500k, based on their benefits, etc.
Yeah, but if you can eliminate the same number of pointy-haired bosses, we'd save a lot more. I say, let's export their jobs to Mexico or China. Also, let's hire pointy-haired bosses who speak no English, that's way they'll be a lot less annoying.
Wow, Congratulations for being able to assert yourself! We're all impressed...:-|
Sorry, I wasn't trying to impress you--just re-visiting the only part of that stupid interaction that gave me some tiny satisfaction.
You should have then wasted HIS time by acting interested, but with a lot of questions...you should have definitely stayed on the phone so you could get as much information as possible to report them.
Yes but--your suggestions involve wasting more of my time. My preferred methods are 1) hang up when the long pause after my "hello" suggests it's an autodial machine, and 2) respond to greetings of "How are you today?" with "Please put me on your don't call list," then hang up.
Right after the November election, somebody called doing a "poll" about how I voted and what I thought about Bush, etc. The operator was very smooth, went through a whole lot of questions about the economy, terrorism, etc.
Then, smooth as silk, he continued, "Now, let's talk about some of your financial options in today's market."
I realized he had just scammed me out of about 5 minutes of my time, trying to set up a friendly relationship, so he could sell me investment advice. Grrrr!
"This conversation just ended," I said, and slammed the phone down. The next "pollster" who call will get that response at the beginning of the conversation.
It's true that Segway is putting out a massive publicity blitz, but I think the assumption by many of us here that Phillip Torrone is working for Segway was wrong. He does have some financial stake in promoting the Segway, however--the Amazon links on his website to Segway products. But lots of people, as he points out, put Amazon links on their blogs.
I have no objection to Phillip Torrone turning an honest dollar on his website, or linking to that website from a story posted to Slashdot. I do strongly object to seeing on Slashdot yet another technical-content-free puff piece about Segway.
Is Phillip Torrone a paid publicist for Segway? Google-able info suggests he is not. This AdAge article names New York PR giant Burson-Marsteller as the power behind the huge Segway PR blitz (they also work for Botox.) Torrone's business email is at an ad agency called Fallon , whose client list includes BMW and PBS but not Segway.
Does Phillip Torrone have an undisclosed financial interest in promoting Segway and his BookOfSeg website on Slashdot? Google-able info suggests he does.
His website prominently features its Segway store with purchase links that presumably pay him commission.
I have no objection to Phillip Torrone turning an honest dollar on his website. What I do object to is seeing on Slashdot publicity stories that don't mention the author's financial interest in selling you the product being so lavishly praised.
Remember that phony "I switched from Mac" "user" who turned out to be a publicity shill for Microsoft? She must have started a trend.
Dear editors: blatant PR for a tech toy does not qualify as a "Science" story. Okay, Segway has some cool Slashdotty features:
It could work well inside a closed environment like a big warehouse.
The inventor Dean Kamen has done other good things.
But the Segway gets my goat for the following reasons:
Incredible hype before, during, and after release.
Sneaky lobbying campaign to get these big kahunas onto sidewalks, so that pedestrians are giving up both space and safety to enhance Segway profits.
Retail buyers will lose out big time in liability suits, not to mention that their Segways are going to get kicked off sidewalks around the country as other city governments, like San Francisco, realize how mad they make pedestrians.
This slashvertisement is just one of a series of marketing ploys from Segway fans--their sales must really suck.
Just last week, Reuters bought and CNN published as a front page story this Amazon/Segway press release. Reuters must not employ any of those hard-driving investigative reporters we loved in old 30s movies.
For example the "story" "reports"
"pre-orders already place the high-tech scooter in the top half percent of sales" Yeah? Each Segway costs $5000, while the average Amazon item costs maybe $50. So if Amazon sells 100 Segways in a month, it's in the same percentile as a book that sold 10,000 copies in the same month--that's pretty impressive sales for a book, pretty lousy sales for an item that got the publicity buzz Segway did, an item featured on Amazon's front page.
"It's selling better than many of our digital cameras" Yeah? And is Amazon the only retailer selling digital cameras, the way it is the only retailer selling Segways? In fact, do you know anybody who would go to Amazon to buy a digital camera?
"Frazier declined to provide actual pre-sale numbers" I am sure the carefully phrased hype provided is much closer to what CNN readers care about.
What got left out of the "news story" is also interesting. There is no mention of the financial stake that Amazon has in pumping up Segway sales by releasing phony hype aimed at making the product look more popular than it is. Jeff Marshall at Mercury News has some interesting background on the financial ties involved
Some Reuters Clark Kent may have added one note of reality in the final sentence: "in San Francisco
a debate is raging over whether the human transporter should be allowed on that city's streets. " That debate stopped raging a week before this press release came out. According to the Dec. 20 SF Chronicle , after extensive public discussion 9 of 11 supervisors have voted to ban the Segway, enough to overturn the mayor's veto if he decides to try one.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I am not a praying type myself.
What works for me is to find a good price or two searching online, then take these to a real, in-person agent and say can you get me something like this or better....and the in-person agent can often do better!
I am going to go back to using the "Preview" button when Slashdot goes back to loading at reasonable speed. Until then, thank you for being able to read my typing.
My business model is to mug people and take their wallets. Look around the country and you will see that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people are trying to make a living using this very model.
Thank goodness we now have a pro-business court system that will step in on behalf of muggers everywhere.
I am on that list, and I still get four or five calls a day. Are you saying I would be getting more if I weren't on the opt out list?
For a while, setting my phone to reject calls from "Private" numbers blocked them. That worked for about 6 months--now they have all found some technical fix that lets them through. I predict the same will happen for the "Zapper".
I ask every telemarketer to put me on the don't call list, which they are required to do. Their latest trick is to reply, "Please hold so that you can discuss this with my supervisor." Translation: getting on the don't-call list will cost you an extra 10 minutes of frustration.
Let me rephrase my point and say that those MBAs who do have jobs in your company would love to find a way to get your job done cheaper.
Think about it. The MBA programs of 1000 universities are churning out cute little guys in suits whose ticket to the good life is figuring out how to squeeze out enough "new" money to justify their own million-dollar salary. Did you think benefits and pensions would escape their notice?
Getting up into management is one solution, but my feeling was it meant giving up the work I love (nerdy work) to do work I hate. Being so doggone good they don't want to lose you is one solution, that's the one that we all hope we can use. Some of us will succeed there and some...will not.
Sorry, just my grumpy $.02.
My amateur experience: many little local groups (Rotary or whatever) will give you $100 for a good cause if you ask them nicely and thank them publicly--more if you get somebody who is in the group to ask them for you. We had a local women's college club that liked to interview high school seniors each year and give a $500 scholarship to the most creative and entrepreneurial. HTH--Good luck!
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
At the risk of being flamed for the simplicity of this idea, you might also consider keeping your two sets of class notes in two different colors. Then if you are trying to remember which language uses which kind of loop, you might be able to shut your eyes and try to visualize the page where you wrote it down...
"Informative astroturf": Group A's form sends 500 emails to a Congressional committee. This is like sending a petition with 500 signatures. It is not meant to trick the committee in any way--just to show the level of suppport.
"Deceptive Astroturf": Group B's form sends 500 signed emails to 500 different local papers as "Letters to the Editor." This is meant to trick the paper into giving free space instead of paying for ad space. It is meant to trick readers into thinking somebody from a local town wrote the letter--that's what propagandists call the "Plain Folks" trick.
Nobody is saying that the Republicans are the first group, or the only group, to try deceptive astroturf. But I think big, well-funded groups should be held to a higher standard than this. If nothing else, they could afford to pay those little papers for the space to air their views.
Boutin's Slate article has the dirt and is funny to boot.
There's a very, very big irony here. The Bush team just got caught with their pants down by bloggers and others including Mike Magee at the Inquirer. It turns out they were sending out massive fake form emails to papers around the country, and bribing folks to sign their own names to them with "GOPoints" they could trade for prizes.
That story is now crossing over to the mainstream press with articles in Monday's New York Times. and (more intelligently) Paul Boutin's Slate article.
Another big irony: this story has been riding Blogdex for a week--a long techno-duel of marketing droids versus nerds armed mainly with Google. And the nerds won! Probably the only place you couldn't follow the action was here on Slashdot, the story was rejected three times. So the Superbowl is a better example of news that matters?
Inquirer article with screenshots of prizes you get for spamming your local paper.
OTOH--I am not a Segways-on-sidewalks enthusiast! The platform is wide enough to take up more than half any sidewalk I know about. Segways go more than twice as fast as a normal pedestrian. And although the quoted weight of a Segway keeps going down--when I first read about it, it was more than 80 lbs--that sure doesn't include the weight of the person riding it.
Paul Boutin just wrote up Doctorow's novel in this story.
When your cute little toddlers start to become young adults, they will be looking up to you to see what it means to be a grown-up. A lot of high-school kids have big conflicts with parents based at least in part on the idea that parents sold out their youthful dreams for cash--maybe just for survival. Teenagers don't want to look forward to a future that looks like that.
Most of the kids of science/engineer families we knew came through those years relatively happy and sane. We also knew lots of families who had lots more money than we did whose kids were angry and confused because 1) they didn't want to end up as stressed-out as their parents but 2) they couldn't picture survival without the fat salaries those parents were bringing home. Yes, I do know some wealthy folks who love their jobs, and their kids tend to turn out okay too. But (relative) poverty worked darn well for us, and for most of the faculty families we know.
I'll skip the part of the rant that talks about walking a mile to kindergarten past snowbanks up over my head....
Yeah, but if you can eliminate the same number of pointy-haired bosses, we'd save a lot more. I say, let's export their jobs to Mexico or China. Also, let's hire pointy-haired bosses who speak no English, that's way they'll be a lot less annoying.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to impress you--just re-visiting the only part of that stupid interaction that gave me some tiny satisfaction.
You should have then wasted HIS time by acting interested, but with a lot of questions...you should have definitely stayed on the phone so you could get as much information as possible to report them.
Yes but--your suggestions involve wasting more of my time. My preferred methods are 1) hang up when the long pause after my "hello" suggests it's an autodial machine, and 2) respond to greetings of "How are you today?" with "Please put me on your don't call list," then hang up.
Then, smooth as silk, he continued, "Now, let's talk about some of your financial options in today's market."
I realized he had just scammed me out of about 5 minutes of my time, trying to set up a friendly relationship, so he could sell me investment advice. Grrrr!
"This conversation just ended," I said, and slammed the phone down. The next "pollster" who call will get that response at the beginning of the conversation.
Woo hoo. Dance, monkey-boy, dance.
I have no objection to Phillip Torrone turning an honest dollar on his website, or linking to that website from a story posted to Slashdot. I do strongly object to seeing on Slashdot yet another technical-content-free puff piece about Segway.
Does Phillip Torrone have an undisclosed financial interest in promoting Segway and his BookOfSeg website on Slashdot? Google-able info suggests he does.
- His website prominently features its Segway store with purchase links that presumably pay him commission.
-
The front page of the Segway chat group links to "Another great article by Phillip Torrone aka 'pt'" , one of 333 posts he had already made there, this one and probably many others clicking through to his "BookOfSeg site.
I have no objection to Phillip Torrone turning an honest dollar on his website. What I do object to is seeing on Slashdot publicity stories that don't mention the author's financial interest in selling you the product being so lavishly praised.- The technology behind Segway is cool.
- It could work well inside a closed environment like a big warehouse.
- The inventor Dean Kamen has done other good things.
But the Segway gets my goat for the following reasons:Just last week, Reuters bought and CNN published as a front page story this Amazon /Segway press release. Reuters must not employ any of those hard-driving investigative reporters we loved in old 30s movies.
For example the "story" "reports"
- "pre-orders already place the high-tech scooter in the top half percent of sales" Yeah? Each Segway costs $5000, while the average Amazon item costs maybe $50. So if Amazon sells 100 Segways in a month, it's in the same percentile as a book that sold 10,000 copies in the same month--that's pretty impressive sales for a book, pretty lousy sales for an item that got the publicity buzz Segway did, an item featured on Amazon's front page.
- "It's selling better than many of our digital cameras" Yeah? And is Amazon the only retailer selling digital cameras, the way it is the only retailer selling Segways? In fact, do you know anybody who would go to Amazon to buy a digital camera?
- "Frazier declined to provide actual pre-sale numbers" I am sure the carefully phrased hype provided is much closer to what CNN readers care about.
What got left out of the "news story" is also interesting. There is no mention of the financial stake that Amazon has in pumping up Segway sales by releasing phony hype aimed at making the product look more popular than it is. Jeff Marshall at Mercury News has some interesting background on the financial ties involvedSome Reuters Clark Kent may have added one note of reality in the final sentence: "in San Francisco a debate is raging over whether the human transporter should be allowed on that city's streets. " That debate stopped raging a week before this press release came out. According to the Dec. 20 SF Chronicle , after extensive public discussion 9 of 11 supervisors have voted to ban the Segway, enough to overturn the mayor's veto if he decides to try one.