And even if they do search your bag and find boxes and boxes of stuff you sell in your store which is not on the reciept thats absolutely useless unless they actually saw you pick it up from the shelf in their store and watched you walk all the way to door with it and if they've done that then checking the receipts is pointless anyway.
A while ago I bought some records and the cashier forgot to remove the security strip, the alarm went off when I walked out of the store but I didn't pay any attention to it.
In the next shop I was in it set the alarms off there too but they just used their machine to wipe the strip on the CD's for me.
The alarm is there to alert the store that some shoplifting might be going on, it's not an instruction for people to stop what they're doing and go in search of a security guard to validate your goods. You have no obligation whatsoever to take any notice of the alarm.
Many years ago I was arrested and got a caution rather than being charged with anything, this hasn't prevented me visiting the US afterwards at all on the no visa thing. I suspect the only real checks they have on this is the box you tick on the form asking if you're a criminal which no one ever ticks.
They certainly don't do it here in England and I would be disgusted to see it introduced in any store. No one except the police has any right to search me or my bags.
Right on ! I remember watching a special on the news only last week showcasing the amazing reconstruction of New Orleans, how everyone had put aside their differences and come together to rebuild not just their lives but the very city they once lived in. I remember how the entire nation stood behind them, shoulder to shoulder supporting this mass community effort with money and assistance and finally I remember the long panning shots showing how the city had been reborn like a phoneix from the mud, where once stood street upon street of rubble and detrius now stood gleaming new homes, where once sullen faced folk skulked amongst the decay now happy smiling people welcomed tourists and opened their houses to visitors coming to see the magnificent restoration for themselves.
You really couldn't have chosen a better example, way to go America !
The point still stands, if you've chosen to go to a restaurant where smoking is permitted rather than to one in which it's banned then you have no right to complain when people smoke regardless of any effect it has on you.
Quite right, I took GCSE's a couple of years after they were introduced and they were rubbish. Any subject which could get away with it was based as much as possible on 'course work' which you were supposed to do in your 'spare time' outside of school and a lot of the actual exams were multiple choice.
Course work is a horrible way of awarding grades, to start with I didn't really have that much spare time after school to be investigating the location of shoe shops in Redditch even if I hadn't have found the whole thing unutterably boring. Almost all my course work projects were knocked out in the last couple days before the deadlines and based on mixture of total nonsense and anything vaguely impressive looking any of my friends had done.
For example the Computer Science coursework called for us to write some sort of program and document it, I copied the games program which came with the computer labs RM Nimbus, changed the colours of the snake in Snake and added some sound effects to another game. Almost the entire class then copied this just with different colours and sound effects. In other classes the English teachers would actually rewrite peoples essays for them.
Despite the coursework being either complete crap or completely plagarised I was able to get pretty good grades ( all above a C and mostly A's and B's ) even for exams in subjects I hadn't even revised for since in many of papers it was possible to deduce answers to a lot of the questions based on information in the other questions and there being a lot of easy multiple choice sections.
Interestingly the only subject I did fail in was French where you did actually have to be able to speak some French for the exam.
In order to do maths A-Levels we had to do a lot of calculus etc after school in order to catch up on what had been left out of the O Levels.
I think it's pretty clear that exams across the board are getting easier and easier when almost 5 times as many people now manage to achieve the top grade as used to. I also don't think making the exams easier will especially help attract people to Science, not least because they probably wont be aware of the easier exams until they've been on the course for 2 years and take the exams. I'd be surprised if many kids analyse the relative likely grades they can expect from a particular subject and are more likely to simply pick subjects they are interested in.
One reason kids may not be picking science courses in England is that all the interesting parts, experiments and such like are being stripped out thanks to health and safety concerns and cost cutting. It may also be the case that the teachers in these subjects are doing a good enough job of interesting the students in the subject.
There's no calculus in GCSE's, at least not when I did them in '87. Instead we had to have extra lessons after school to learn calculus so we could go on to the A-Level maths course the next year.
Well, logically they would have better prices and don't care about DRM, since they don't have to pay the artists or promotion costs of the music. Shocker. But they do have to pay, they pay a statutary licence fee which the RIAA is supposed to collect and pass on to the artist. This fee was originally negotiated with the RIAA but now they have decided they're simply not going to accept the money and complain about "piracy" instead.
The reason I've used AllOfMp3 is because they have pretty exhaustive catalouge of music which I can download in the format of my choice, unencumbered by DRM, for a reasonable price. For a full CD quality album I think it's around 7GBP. The 5GBP difference between that and the price I'd pay in the shop seems perfectly reasonable now there is no longer any cost of producing the actual CD and all it's attendant packaging and delivery costs. AllOfMp3 is in fact a brillant service.
First of all drugs can be harmful to some people, in some circumstances, but for every victim of drugs there are hundreds of people who enjoy using the same substance and do not become a victim to it. Most people enjoy a drink but very few are alcoholics. The money these healthy people spend on drugs should easily outweigh the money required to rehabilitate and treat the unfortunate victims.
However even if that wasn't the case legalisation is still a better option than the current climate of criminalisation for a number of reasons:
1) Drugs supplied by criminals are a key source of income and power for criminal gangs and fuel criminal activity in other areas.
2) Drugs supplied by criminals have only the level of quality control the criminal gangs think they can get away with. Normal health and safety regulations could be applied to drugs only if they're not criminalised.
3) Drugs are in widespread distribution already, anyone who wants to try a drug can do so very easily so legalisation is not going to have a significant effect on the number of new users. For example at most club nights around here a conservative estimate would be 40% of the people there are on Ecstasy which you can buy within 30seconds of walking in the door - not just some clubs, ALL clubs !
4) The vast majority of drug users are not, otherwise, criminals and would not, ideally, want to fund criminal activity but the criminal nature of drugs does introduce people to a criminal underworld.
5) Legalised, quality controlled drugs you could buy at a shop would be vastly preferable to 99% of users cutting out the criminals profits almost completely. With no large profits to share around people would not take criminal risks and the criminal gangs would be largely very small scale operations.
Most of the users I know seem to take it by sticking on their tongues, the theory being that it can dissolve through your tongue into your bloodstream more easily than it can in your stomach. I don't know if there's any real truth to that though.
This is a very silly argument. First of all LSD will not kill you no matter how much of it you take, I'm not even sure it works that well if you just eat it.
However, even if it was amazingly toxic and legal and you decided to lace someones cornflakes with it in order to kill them it wouldn't make any difference at all whether LSD was legal or illegal. You'd still have a dead body and suspicious set of circumstances which would most likely be investigated by the police, with LSD being legal the police would have more chance of proving it was you that bought it but thats about the only difference it's legal status would make.
Without wishing to appear racist, most of the fraudsters were Asians who perhaps aren't fully aware of how people in a civilised country are supposed to behave but this just makes it all the more important to ensure that postal and electronic voting are very carefully considered for their security before being put into full use.
I'm not a physicist either, a socio-political historian in fact, but it seems to me you must be correct.
If everything else that we know of is allowed to have this property of mass then it's simply discriminatory to deny this essential property to probably our most valuable particle. It certainly makes me question the underlying agenda being employed by these scientists and indeed it seems some of their most basic assumptions must be both somewhat predujical and unfounded to create a paradigm which can lead to this perceived disharmony within the view of the universe that they impose on society at large.
Cool, I'd love a FPS version of The "Real" World. As well as all the normal weapons for wasting people quickly I'd also like some options to take my time over it, things like rusty hacksaws, scalpels, ropes, acid baths.
First of all the biblical flood covered the entire Earth to the a depth higher than the highest mountains so whatever happened in the American North West was certainly not a biblical flood.
Secondly, do you seriously believe the flood mentioned in the bible was referring to a flood in the American North West which must have been completely unknown to anyone connected to the writing the bible ?
Thirdly, you have to expect a little flooding at the end of an ice age.
Yes, if anyone owning, or part owning, a company is liable for any mistakes that company makes then no one is ever going to invest money in companies.
It was the invention of the limited liability company which has driven basically all of the worlds and societies progress since it was invented 2 or 3 hundred years ago.
Speaking as a Brit I find it easier to understand Indian accented English than I do with some of the American variations of English I have encountered on some of the American helpdesks I used to have to deal with a few years ago so I think it's really just a question of perspective, there's nothing inherently less intelligible about Indian accents than there are American.
Well said, I have had numerous bad experiences with call centres and regardless of where the staff are actually located the same factors come into play which determine the quality of the service you recieve.
Any company intending to set up a call centre needs to make the following decisions
1) Do I employ people who understand the business we're engaged in or the cheapest person we can find.
2) Do we allow the staff to use their own initative when speaking to the customers and rely on their knowledge of the businesss or do with give the cheapest people we could find a script
3) Do allow our staff to take as long as is necessary, including time after the call has finished ( to update records of conversation, make enquiries etc ) to resolve the problem or do we assume that all problems can be fixed in 2.35 minutes and 10 seconds is plenty of time to get ready for the next call
4) Do we reward those staff who help our customers most and learn from their techniques or do we reward those staff who have the most calls
5) Do we expose our staff to the other departments in our business so they gain an understanding of them and build relationships with people there who can sort out customers problems or do we keep them locked in a basement and communicate to them in barked commands
6) Do we allow our staff the leeway to take decisions as to how to deal with a problem and provide a good resolution for the customer or do we encourage them to concede no ground, admit no failure and re-route the call to random departments or drop it when the heat goes up
Those places which make the right decisions may cost more to run but from a customers point of view are vastly preferable to deal with. Since a call centre is now probably my only exposure to any particular company ( apart from the actual service or whatever they're providing me ) then the performance of that call centre is a very important factor in choosing where to do business. It's nice that people are finally starting to realise that.
If you see doing your duty as something to be grim faced about then buster, you gotta problem.
It's obvious our offspring should be trained from an early age for the maximum benefit of society, whether they are happy or not in their allotted roles is only relevant in how far this effects their usefulness. Rear them to expect very little kindness and comfort and they will be satisfied in many circumstances under which a more cossetted or molly coddled child would founder.
Our industry drives our nation and provides for our society and our industry needs its Captains. Captains without the necessary training and dedication to the job in the hand will simple sink at the first sign of a storm taking all hands down with them, or worse yet turn back and cower in the safe waters of the harbour rather than fulfilling their duty discovering, mapping and conquering new lands to secure and exploit for the good of society.
I can't see how some wishy washy ideal of letting people float about with any real idea of what they're doing picking up bits and pieces of half digested knowledge they may never use is at all useful to the ideal I have outlined above.
The earlier we can spot a youngsters potential role in life the sooner we can begin training them to fulfil it, in it's heyday the British Navy employed captains of a mere 20 or 21 years old who would be in command of dozens of men to do as they saw fit in dangerous waters for the good of the Empire and the Queen. How many of todays young men would falter at a similar challenge ?
Slashdot Mirror
And even if they do search your bag and find boxes and boxes of stuff you sell in your store which is not on the reciept thats absolutely useless unless they actually saw you pick it up from the shelf in their store and watched you walk all the way to door with it and if they've done that then checking the receipts is pointless anyway.
A while ago I bought some records and the cashier forgot to remove the security strip, the alarm went off when I walked out of the store but I didn't pay any attention to it.
In the next shop I was in it set the alarms off there too but they just used their machine to wipe the strip on the CD's for me.
The alarm is there to alert the store that some shoplifting might be going on, it's not an instruction for people to stop what they're doing and go in search of a security guard to validate your goods. You have no obligation whatsoever to take any notice of the alarm.
Many years ago I was arrested and got a caution rather than being charged with anything, this hasn't prevented me visiting the US afterwards at all on the no visa thing. I suspect the only real checks they have on this is the box you tick on the form asking if you're a criminal which no one ever ticks.
They certainly don't do it here in England and I would be disgusted to see it introduced in any store. No one except the police has any right to search me or my bags.
I'm not being funny but why would you need Open Office on a mail server or whatever ?
Right on ! I remember watching a special on the news only last week showcasing the amazing reconstruction of New Orleans, how everyone had put aside their differences and come together to rebuild not just their lives but the very city they once lived in. I remember how the entire nation stood behind them, shoulder to shoulder supporting this mass community effort with money and assistance and finally I remember the long panning shots showing how the city had been reborn like a phoneix from the mud, where once stood street upon street of rubble and detrius now stood gleaming new homes, where once sullen faced folk skulked amongst the decay now happy smiling people welcomed tourists and opened their houses to visitors coming to see the magnificent restoration for themselves.
You really couldn't have chosen a better example, way to go America !
The point still stands, if you've chosen to go to a restaurant where smoking is permitted rather than to one in which it's banned then you have no right to complain when people smoke regardless of any effect it has on you.
Have you tried
"Hi, I am ze plumber. I haf com to examine ze pipework, ver can I place my tooool ? It is ver huge and I can't keep it in here much longer"
FBI: EvilKenny72, you own a website containing illegal content, we'd like to talk to you right now.
EvilKenny72: I Russian, hah hah good lucks with your prosecutions Yankie.
Why yes, he does. But you don't want to know what's in it.
Quite right, I took GCSE's a couple of years after they were introduced and they were rubbish. Any subject which could get away with it was based as much as possible on 'course work' which you were supposed to do in your 'spare time' outside of school and a lot of the actual exams were multiple choice.
Course work is a horrible way of awarding grades, to start with I didn't really have that much spare time after school to be investigating the location of shoe shops in Redditch even if I hadn't have found the whole thing unutterably boring. Almost all my course work projects were knocked out in the last couple days before the deadlines and based on mixture of total nonsense and anything vaguely impressive looking any of my friends had done.
For example the Computer Science coursework called for us to write some sort of program and document it, I copied the games program which came with the computer labs RM Nimbus, changed the colours of the snake in Snake and added some sound effects to another game. Almost the entire class then copied this just with different colours and sound effects. In other classes the English teachers would actually rewrite peoples essays for them.
Despite the coursework being either complete crap or completely plagarised I was able to get pretty good grades ( all above a C and mostly A's and B's ) even for exams in subjects I hadn't even revised for since in many of papers it was possible to deduce answers to a lot of the questions based on information in the other questions and there being a lot of easy multiple choice sections.
Interestingly the only subject I did fail in was French where you did actually have to be able to speak some French for the exam.
In order to do maths A-Levels we had to do a lot of calculus etc after school in order to catch up on what had been left out of the O Levels.
I think it's pretty clear that exams across the board are getting easier and easier when almost 5 times as many people now manage to achieve the top grade as used to. I also don't think making the exams easier will especially help attract people to Science, not least because they probably wont be aware of the easier exams until they've been on the course for 2 years and take the exams. I'd be surprised if many kids analyse the relative likely grades they can expect from a particular subject and are more likely to simply pick subjects they are interested in.
One reason kids may not be picking science courses in England is that all the interesting parts, experiments and such like are being stripped out thanks to health and safety concerns and cost cutting. It may also be the case that the teachers in these subjects are doing a good enough job of interesting the students in the subject.
There's no calculus in GCSE's, at least not when I did them in '87. Instead we had to have extra lessons after school to learn calculus so we could go on to the A-Level maths course the next year.
The reason I've used AllOfMp3 is because they have pretty exhaustive catalouge of music which I can download in the format of my choice, unencumbered by DRM, for a reasonable price. For a full CD quality album I think it's around 7GBP. The 5GBP difference between that and the price I'd pay in the shop seems perfectly reasonable now there is no longer any cost of producing the actual CD and all it's attendant packaging and delivery costs. AllOfMp3 is in fact a brillant service.
First of all drugs can be harmful to some people, in some circumstances, but for every victim of drugs there are hundreds of people who enjoy using the same substance and do not become a victim to it. Most people enjoy a drink but very few are alcoholics. The money these healthy people spend on drugs should easily outweigh the money required to rehabilitate and treat the unfortunate victims.
However even if that wasn't the case legalisation is still a better option than the current climate of criminalisation for a number of reasons:
1) Drugs supplied by criminals are a key source of income and power for criminal gangs and fuel criminal activity in other areas.
2) Drugs supplied by criminals have only the level of quality control the criminal gangs think they can get away with. Normal health and safety regulations could be applied to drugs only if they're not criminalised.
3) Drugs are in widespread distribution already, anyone who wants to try a drug can do so very easily so legalisation is not going to have a significant effect on the number of new users. For example at most club nights around here a conservative estimate would be 40% of the people there are on Ecstasy which you can buy within 30seconds of walking in the door - not just some clubs, ALL clubs !
4) The vast majority of drug users are not, otherwise, criminals and would not, ideally, want to fund criminal activity but the criminal nature of drugs does introduce people to a criminal underworld.
5) Legalised, quality controlled drugs you could buy at a shop would be vastly preferable to 99% of users cutting out the criminals profits almost completely. With no large profits to share around people would not take criminal risks and the criminal gangs would be largely very small scale operations.
Most of the users I know seem to take it by sticking on their tongues, the theory being that it can dissolve through your tongue into your bloodstream more easily than it can in your stomach. I don't know if there's any real truth to that though.
This is a very silly argument. First of all LSD will not kill you no matter how much of it you take, I'm not even sure it works that well if you just eat it.
However, even if it was amazingly toxic and legal and you decided to lace someones cornflakes with it in order to kill them it wouldn't make any difference at all whether LSD was legal or illegal. You'd still have a dead body and suspicious set of circumstances which would most likely be investigated by the police, with LSD being legal the police would have more chance of proving it was you that bought it but thats about the only difference it's legal status would make.
Even that, disgraceful though it is, is nothing to some of the election fraud that seems to go on in some areas of Birmingham http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/4 406575.stm
Without wishing to appear racist, most of the fraudsters were Asians who perhaps aren't fully aware of how people in a civilised country are supposed to behave but this just makes it all the more important to ensure that postal and electronic voting are very carefully considered for their security before being put into full use.
I'm not a physicist either, a socio-political historian in fact, but it seems to me you must be correct.
If everything else that we know of is allowed to have this property of mass then it's simply discriminatory to deny this essential property to probably our most valuable particle. It certainly makes me question the underlying agenda being employed by these scientists and indeed it seems some of their most basic assumptions must be both somewhat predujical and unfounded to create a paradigm which can lead to this perceived disharmony within the view of the universe that they impose on society at large.
Cool, I'd love a FPS version of The "Real" World. As well as all the normal weapons for wasting people quickly I'd also like some options to take my time over it, things like rusty hacksaws, scalpels, ropes, acid baths.
First of all the biblical flood covered the entire Earth to the a depth higher than the highest mountains so whatever happened in the American North West was certainly not a biblical flood.
Secondly, do you seriously believe the flood mentioned in the bible was referring to a flood in the American North West which must have been completely unknown to anyone connected to the writing the bible ?
Thirdly, you have to expect a little flooding at the end of an ice age.
Yes, if anyone owning, or part owning, a company is liable for any mistakes that company makes then no one is ever going to invest money in companies.
It was the invention of the limited liability company which has driven basically all of the worlds and societies progress since it was invented 2 or 3 hundred years ago.
Speaking as a Brit I find it easier to understand Indian accented English than I do with some of the American variations of English I have encountered on some of the American helpdesks I used to have to deal with a few years ago so I think it's really just a question of perspective, there's nothing inherently less intelligible about Indian accents than there are American.
Well said, I have had numerous bad experiences with call centres and regardless of where the staff are actually located the same factors come into play which determine the quality of the service you recieve.
Any company intending to set up a call centre needs to make the following decisions
1) Do I employ people who understand the business we're engaged in or the cheapest person we can find.
2) Do we allow the staff to use their own initative when speaking to the customers and rely on their knowledge of the businesss or do with give the cheapest people we could find a script
3) Do allow our staff to take as long as is necessary, including time after the call has finished ( to update records of conversation, make enquiries etc ) to resolve the problem or do we assume that all problems can be fixed in 2.35 minutes and 10 seconds is plenty of time to get ready for the next call
4) Do we reward those staff who help our customers most and learn from their techniques or do we reward those staff who have the most calls
5) Do we expose our staff to the other departments in our business so they gain an understanding of them and build relationships with people there who can sort out customers problems or do we keep them locked in a basement and communicate to them in barked commands
6) Do we allow our staff the leeway to take decisions as to how to deal with a problem and provide a good resolution for the customer or do we encourage them to concede no ground, admit no failure and re-route the call to random departments or drop it when the heat goes up
Those places which make the right decisions may cost more to run but from a customers point of view are vastly preferable to deal with. Since a call centre is now probably my only exposure to any particular company ( apart from the actual service or whatever they're providing me ) then the performance of that call centre is a very important factor in choosing where to do business. It's nice that people are finally starting to realise that.
Right, so then no one forms a company to do anything at all, no capital can be raised and nothing gets done.
If you see doing your duty as something to be grim faced about then buster, you gotta problem.
It's obvious our offspring should be trained from an early age for the maximum benefit of society, whether they are happy or not in their allotted roles is only relevant in how far this effects their usefulness. Rear them to expect very little kindness and comfort and they will be satisfied in many circumstances under which a more cossetted or molly coddled child would founder.
Our industry drives our nation and provides for our society and our industry needs its Captains. Captains without the necessary training and dedication to the job in the hand will simple sink at the first sign of a storm taking all hands down with them, or worse yet turn back and cower in the safe waters of the harbour rather than fulfilling their duty discovering, mapping and conquering new lands to secure and exploit for the good of society.
I can't see how some wishy washy ideal of letting people float about with any real idea of what they're doing picking up bits and pieces of half digested knowledge they may never use is at all useful to the ideal I have outlined above.
The earlier we can spot a youngsters potential role in life the sooner we can begin training them to fulfil it, in it's heyday the British Navy employed captains of a mere 20 or 21 years old who would be in command of dozens of men to do as they saw fit in dangerous waters for the good of the Empire and the Queen. How many of todays young men would falter at a similar challenge ?