This has to be the stupidest bit of hype I have ever seen or heard of. Hey! want to be invisible? Go stand in front of a movie screen. As long as your viewer is absolutely right next to the projector looking at you, well then, you will seem invisible... at least as long as you cover yourself with projection screen beads!
So what else is new. Any little kid who ever played with a home movie knows this. Yet the story has circulated and recirculated the web for a year now.
Give it up.
Gentlemen, there is absolutely nothing to prevent the car ompanies from leasing you the software to run your cars, providing it under license, and requiring a continuing monthly fee to have it updated to the latest, most correct version. It is going to happen in just a couple years, believe me.
The Jim Jones Kool-Aid they mix it with will be (1) "safety for soccer moms and soccer kiddies" for soccer mom minivans, (2) "continually improved emission controls" for the tree-huggers. and (3) "hot performance item that only rich guys have" for the young dude crowd.
After all, would you want your wife driving an "unsafe car"? Do you want to pollute when there are easy upgrades to bring teh pollution down? Don't you want the hottest performing Mustang? Why aren't you willing to pay that "little extra" necessary to keep the system software up to date?
When the dealers hear the idea they will love it, since it locks you into their system and guarantees the dealers a continuing income stream.
The warranties will be revised to say "we are only valid as long as you operate your car with the latest vesion of software".
California will require continuing software updates and will not permit you to register your car unless your engine software is up to date. Why? Because the car companies will swear they are constantly refining the pollution controls and can guarantee continually reduced emissions (as long as everyone pays the monthly fee and goes into their dealer every couple months!).
No, guys, its going to happen and happen soon. Don't think that everyone from toaster manufacturers to wristwatch manufacturers to car manufacturers are not slavering at the idea of a continuing income stream for constant upgrades.
All they have to do is wait for the other corporations, like the record business and Microsoft, to mentally turn us all into pay-per-view, pay-per-ride, pay-per-smell, pay-per-look, pay-per-sip, pay-per-breath people.
So let me tell you how it is going to start. First, a new high performance car/engine is going to come out, bought by young guys. They are going to make some special "super-cool" program in which the young guys come in to the shop every couple months to get a revised OS downloaded to their cars. Free coffee, key chains, watches, all the suckie trinkets that young guys fall for who are out hustling women and like to believe they are playas. Hell, it may even be free... initially.
Every cool hip young white dude is going to want the latest "performance" versions for his new engine, won't he? After all, he always checks out the latest drivers for his video card, doesn't he? His hot car (like a Harley) is just a big penis extension anyway.
Aw, the car companies will start talking advance curves, valve timings, omega factors, brake horsepower curves, improved shift curves, gamma cutoffs and other hokey nonsense and he will fall right over for it. I can see it now: fancy web site discussing the data, how they gathered it and evaluated it, and how they have revised the softare, all done in black and gun metal colors. Brief bios on the engineers developing the improved software make him feel like some NASA astronaut! Man! he'll feel like some kind of fancy pilot/engineer/astronaut/cool dude at the cutting edge, a regular "early adopter"!
And once the young guy is hooked on new car software as a high ticket, high status performance item (that gets him oodles of babes, of course), everyone else will fall into line.
Think, Gentlemen, think! Modern technology is a two-edged sword. They want to make random offers to all and sundry with no repercussions. Use their indifference and lack of proper managment against them. Use their business systems and software usage against them!
When you start receiving repeated offers from a fax marketer, determine who the company really is, play along to get them to send a for-real offer via fax, then fax them a rejection of their offer and fax them a counteroffer to "evaluate future fax advertising materials". for $500.00 per each junk advertising fax you receive in the future.
Note specifically in your counteroffer fax that you are responding to their initial fax offer and their faxed followup for-real offer. Throw in a few terms and conditions like: liquidated damages of $2500 (or the maximum your local small claims court will give), net 30 billing, the name you will bill them under (such as "Advertising Evaluation Services Company"), and MOST IMPORTANT: TELL THEM THAT THEY CAN ACCEPT YOUR COUNTEROFFER BY SENDING ANOTHER FAX ADVERTISEMENT FOR THEIR GOODS AND SERVICES TO YOUR FAX NUMBER, THE SAME ONE THEY HAVE ALREADY BEEN USING. Otherwise (you tell them) they no longer have your permission to use your computer and computer supplies (such as fax paper and toner) by sending advertisements to your fax number.
Now, when you receive their next fax, do exactly what you said you would do in your counteroffer: take a look at it, then prepare a bill for your time and send it to their billing office. They may pay it right away, especially if it looks official, you use some business-like name and provide a nice classy professional description of your services. If they do not pay, after a couple months file suit in small claims court for the maximum small claims amount allowed, typically $2000-5000 or so. (assuming, of course, your faxed counteroffer had a per-occurence liquidated damages clause of whatever that maximum is.
So what happens? They may pay automatically. If not, you file suit in small claims. By the time they realize that they have made an offer (the initial fax and/or the followup fax), received a counter offer (your fax back to them with your rejection and your modified terms) and have accepted the counteroffer (when they kept sending you advertisements), it will be too late. You will have hardcopies of their initial offer, your counteroffer, and copies of the faxes you received in response to your counteroffer. If I were a small claims judge, I would see this as a slam dunk case in your favor, and would be laughing hysterically in chambers afterward when I ordered them to cough up the cash. Of course, it only works if the company is local or regional and therefore amenable to small claims.
You see, the internet and fax machines permit them to go make offers like crazy, throwing trash terms and advertisements at everyone heedlessly. They do not check up on who is sending the offers out, whether illegally to blocked numbers or not. They just don't care. Their management systems are not tight and things (like obeying the law and actually reading your counteroffer) fall between the cracks.
The process I describe above, as long as you respond to their faxes, as long as you tell them very plainly exactly what you are going to do and how you will bill them, etc, and as long as you keep paper copies of all the faxes you receive from them and send to them, cannot be considered as fraud. Believe me, if they catch on only after paying several of your bills, they will feel like utter fools, but there is no judge in the land who would find your actions to be fraudulent or criminal if you were quite upfront. Indeed, most would gleefully realize how you finessed the fax monsters and order them to pay up immediately in small claims.
NOTE: I am not your attorney. If you want an attorney, hire one. If you are interested in this idea, take it to your local attorney and get his opinion.
Educate yourself. Read "Underground History fo American Education" and understand the corporate goals behind American compulsory education. It all falls into place.
John Henry Gatto, the author, taught for 31 years in the NYC school system, was named teacher of the year and is a brilliant historian and scholar.
I am still working my way through this book (free online at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m) and am amazed at how it all comes together.
Our system of factory education was originally created in Germany by the Prussians to totally regiment their culture. It was designed to do that. Read Gatto, by God, read the history of compulsory education and the educrats and and the scales will fall from your eyes. Find it at:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
For a shorter piece, an essay that was published in Harpers in 2001, go to this link:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm
So why are students failing? They are supposed to. The built-in systemic goal of modern mas compulsory education is to create an unthinking, uneducated, obedient mass of socially constructed worker bees. It is not an accident. Why is copulsory government schooling mindless? It is intended to be mindless. Why do kids with any brain go crazy in the hothouse atmosphere of factory high schools? Because any right-thinking human being would go crazy! The problem isn't students not wanting to learn, but schools wanting to teach kids things that clearly do not serve students' best interests, but the interests of the Machine.
Regrettably, we have forgotten this, although the elitist theorists of education who set the system up were quite blunt about it back in 1850, 1880, 1900, 1920. They spoke of using government schooling to limit the curiosity and independence of children in order to better fit them their assigned industrial tasks.
If you want to understand the roots, the history, the development of the system, go read Gatto at
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m.
What Jack Valenti has created with the DMCA and with the other changes to copyright law are legal weapons. Some of them are weapons that only a wealthy person can use, others are weapons we all can use. Complaining that Valenti shouldn't have made such a weapon is not going to change things much---unless, of course the weapon is turned against the very folks who invented it.
Three big changes in traditional law have occurred in the last ten years: (1) the cases that have held online and software agreements binding, (2) the elimination of the profit motive for copyright suits, and (3) the criminalization of unauthorized decryption. All have been upheld by conservative courts. All are necessary to drive a massive worldwide software and entertainment economy. None are limited only for big guys to use.
So *use* them:
In your personal life: Encrypt all your email, make the password known (or easily broken). When an employer breaks the encryption, he is criminally liable under the DMCA. If he tries to sue evidence gathered from breaking the encryption, have the evidence barred as tainted. Remember, nothing in the DMCA is limited to music, only to work protectable by copyright.
Protection against the R eye AA: Valenti says the DMCA is sacrosanct. So be it. Create a P2P protocol that is legally linked to an agreement that pledges no copyright suits against each other. Hell, have the session initiating step include sending the entire agreement and the acknowledgement step as sending back the string "yes, I agree completely".
When Valenti hires a computer PI firm to dig up evidence (or has his in house programmers search it out) by communicating on the network his boys are bound by the agreement. Would I let my PI's investigate for Valenti if the P2P protocol agreement said my company would be responsible for any infringement suits initiated as a result of my P2P use? Hell no!
Another tool: Create websites that check to see if incoming WWW traffic is from the R eye AA. If so, generate a special web agreement that commits the R eye AA (and their employer, if they are R eye AA officers) not to sue for infringement and to indemnify you for any infringement claims, or any other damn provisions you can come up with. To the rest of the world the terms always appear perfectly innocuous. To the person coming from the R eye AA they are specially generated and deadly.
Set up a "honey pot" offering to provide free decryption software, to reverse engineer R eye AA products, to crack Adobe password protection, whatever. Bring it to the R eye AA's attention. When their sleuths come sniffing, make sure the click through agreement obligates them to pay you treble damages for any infringement claim they may bring against you.
Alternative honey pot: set up teaser web pages that purport to show how Joe Doakes, the vice president of Big Corp, has been engaged in fraud and collusion with hardware manufacturers. The Google-indexed page says "click on the enter button for more juicy details."
Be very suggestive, but not libelous. Send an anonymous email to Joe Doakes recommending that he really ought to go check out the web site. The Ts&Cs obligate him to all kinds of intellectual property infringement indemnification provisions. Bingo, as an officer he has the power to obligate the corporation and you just got all their software free. So what is the evidence of fraud and collusion? What are the gory details? Nada!
The possibilities are endless. Use against them the very weapons, the monstrously powerful weapons, that they persuaded the courts and the Congress to create.
Gentlemen, if they are coming at you with an AC130 and guys are dancing the funky chicken all around you, you don't go plinking back at them with an AK. The weapon is there. Start thinking how to use it. Go out for beers with an intellectual property attorney. Come up with "what ifs", throw them against the wall and see what sticks. Offensively, defensively, I don't care how you use it, just use it!
For heaven's sake, the grade school/high school propaganda/social engineering bandwagon pulled out of town ages ago. The MPAA isn't starting this, it has been going full steam for decades at least.
Don't believe me? So go search the internet for "lesson plans" together with "homosexual" or "lesbian" or "transsexual" or "ecology" or "GLEN" "animal rights" or "immigration" or "zionism" or "Israel" or "civil rights" or "hate speech" and you will find thousands of propaganda sites just stuffed with free propaganda plans (social morality sermons, really) to reengineer kids' thinking.
You can spot the moralizing propaganda a mile away. A typical one-sided and awful scenario is followed by essays, roleplaying and discussion, all calculated to engineer the students' beliefs and thoughts along the correct social paths.
A typical example by a MADD group might be as follows:
"Jimmie was just run over and left for dead in the street by Bob, a teen drunk driver. Have your students roleplay a meeting between Jimmie's mom and Bob. Have them write an essay about what they could do to stop drunk driving."
If the teacher is ever challenged by parents for preaching her morals and religion to their kids instead of sticking to Math or Spanish or whatever, the teacher has plausible deniability, since:
(1) someone else wrote the lesson plan [yeah, but she selected it!],
(2) the NEA approved it [they love any left wing cause], and
(3) she didn't tell the students what to think, they came up with it all on their own [yeah, right, after she presented them with a transparently one-sided scenario calculated to sway the students in one direction].
It all started 100-150 years ago when manufacturers and social engineers wanted to create a docile working class of factory drones.
Go to this website and learn why you are taught the way you are and why you are deliberately taught not to think:
"The Underground History of American Education" at
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
When you train your replacement, start thinking about all the stuff you won't be able to buy anymore as an unemployed engineer.
Hey, kids! I have a neat idea! Try the same "training you own replacement" thing with all the stores whose products you will no longer be able to buy!
Go to your favorite store and tell them "I lost my job to offshoring and can't buy widgets at your store anymore. I do like your widgets, though and want to continue buying them."
"I will buy a couple more widgets from you if you will help me train your replacement".
"So would you please tell me your source of widgets, the different widget manufacturers you deal with, and the terms of your widget purchase contracts? Tell me how you store your widgets, at what humidity level and who the best widget repairman is."
"I will take that 'training' information down the street to your competitor. You see, he has promised to make widgets for me for one-half of what you charge (which I CAN afford) if only you will give him the information."
"You see, Mr. Widget Seller, I've bought widgets from you for years. After all those sales you owe me some loyalty."
Now, boys and girls, you tell me what moral duty that businessman has to you (other than to kick you in the keister for being a fool).
The moral of the story? You are no different than that businessman selling widgets. Your secret skills and knowledge in your head is all you have to sell. Like the Widget Seller's business knowledge, your expertise has value to you ONLY because it is NOT generally available to the public. So don't ever give anything away for free. The secrets you have in your head are the only thing that makes you worthwhile to your employer. Share them with no one. If he want you to write code, write it. If he asks you to train others to write code for him in your place, tell him to stuff it--which is just what the Widget Seller would say to you if you pulled the above moron replacement training argument on him.
Lying on resumes? You mean telling a falsehood in order to make a sale--in this case a sale of yourself? Business does it all the time. There is a huge legal loophole for business lying called "mere puffery".
He needs to start thinking like skilled craftsmen did 100 years ago: all you have is you skills and your trade secrets, your tricks of the trade. When they ask you to train you replacement, they are asking you to give away the accumulated talents and knowledge that give you a profitable margin in the workplace.
Let me ask you this. Does an employer give away his customer lists? Does he give away his sales training materials? Does he share his code that operates 20% faster? No!
"But it would make the world economy more efficient if you shared that information with everyone!" you say.
"It would be better for your loyal customers, sir, because they could get their work done by other, cheaper people!"
Obviously you employer would consider giving away his business knowledge to others as ridiculous. "Of COURSE it would make the market place more efficient," he would say. "But why do I want to make it more efficient!"
Tell your friend that he is a skilled craftsman who has a handful of talents to sell, and if he gives them away, he will be educating his competition for free. If the only use his employer has for him at this point is training his competitors (i.e. his replacement) then he should quit.
"But I don't want to hurt my customer!" he says. Well, kid, you are not hurting your client, your BOSS is hurting them by firing YOU.
If you really want to help your customer, go right to them and offer to work directly for them! Tell them your employer is preparing to fire you and you would like to work for them directly. If they say "no dice", then screw 'em. If they say "we agreed never to hire employees away from your current empoyer" then tell them "tough luck. Foolish move on your part."
Kids, your employer does not care, but he is hoping to prey upon YOUR care--for your clients, for your reputation, for your friends you are leaving behind, hell, for whatever he can--to get you to throw away what last shreds of self respect you have.
What in the hell has gotten into Americans that they think there is a duty, moral or otherwise, to train their own replacement.
"Give me access to their standards of living" you say. Hear! hear!
An Indian or Bangladeshi can hire an entire family of four--man, woman, and two children--work all damn four of them, and it only costs a couple grand a year.
Forget Social Security, forget workmens comp, forget social safety net, forget child labor and forget public schools for the kids. Hell, 30 years ago you could buy a temporary wife for $200-250 (if that), and she would work her a$$ off both in and out of the sack.
And you wonder why they can "get by" on $22K per year? Hell, you could buy and sell human beings for that kind of salary in India.
As the prime minister (president? dictator? strongman? whatever) of Nigeria said only a few weeks ago, Nigeria has over 150 languages, LANGUAGES, mind you NOT DIALECTS.
How the hell can you call yourself a country, a society or a nation when there are over 150 mutually unintelligible ways of communicating, each one supporting typically a few thousand speakers, and the vast majority not even written down!
God bless 'em, aboriginals need all the help they can get.
Educate yourselves. There are several common lies that you are fed by the news media.
First, that AIDS is a massive problem in Africa. It isn't. The "crisis" is a product of completely bogus UN computer models, whcih are regularly diddled with when folks begin to figure out.
Second, that second-hand smoke kills more than a few (if that many) people per year. It doesn't. The results come from fraudulent meta-analyses.
Third, that silicone breast implants cause cancer. They don't, but they do pay tons of litigators.
Fourth, that record industry sales have dropped. They haven't. They have gone up.
Fifth, that AIDS is any kind of serious threat to non-doper non-junkie heterosexuals. It never has been.
And sixth, (as I am increasingly discovering) there is no looming global warming disaster.
In each of the above examples the so-called scientific evidence advances a political agenda, delivers billions in grant money to various agencies and researchers, and creates scientific reputations (and streams of cash) overnight.
Wake up folks. Stop letting Slashdot get hijacked by bogus political interests and screwy science. We have anough of this crap on other sites.
The goal is to maximize profits. You cannot maximize profits until you make the price of every item equal to the maximum amount each individual shopper will spend. This is what the lotalty tags enable. And the data mining, gentlemen, has only just begun!
The new Price for groceries is not really a "price" in the sense of some dollar value on a hang tag, but the maximum value one can extract through bargaining.
Does the data show that you are poor? Have no car? Buy only essentials? Well then, our computer tells us you likely live right around the corner in the elderly housing unit and cannot travel to another store.
You, my elderly friend, get the MSRP for mustard that is on the condiment shelf. You will not get your prices automatically reduced by some meaningless "instant savings coupons" or "loyal customer rebate" that we generate and print on your bill at the register.
On the other hand, if you buy ten bottles of Courvoisier a year and spend $500 per week, baby, we are going to suck up to you big time. We are going to grovel, and print out cents-off, heck DOLLARS-off coupons like crazy whenever you check out.
In short, the price on the rack or shelf is going to be meaningless. Every food item will be automatically "bargained for" by the computer which will mark it up or down according to your class. Your food bills will be determined more and more according to your social class, how much air you breath and floor space you take up versus dollars you spend. Do they want to know your name? Hell no! They just want to know whether to put your warm bodies in the class of "poverty-stricken and immobile, charge them whatever you want" (since our stats have determined that they have to buy here regardless) or the class of "treat them like their poop doesn't stink, since each visit earns us $500". Or any of the million subgroups and intermediate categories the computer will determine.
The loyalty tag system destroys destroys the notion of a "price" for anything, now that they have the power to offer cryptic savings at the cash register for whatever reasons they want.
So won't people get p1ssed off, you say? Apparently not. Think of the comments made by the girl above in this thread who got unbelievable savings for her baby formula purchases. I could be right behind her in line buying a case of formula for my niece visiting from Toledo, and (1) I would NOT get the rebate, and (2) I would never, EVER know that SHE got it. So what would be my basis for complaining?
If any customers did start noticing and complaining ("why did she get it for $1.25 and it cost me $1.50"), then I would prevent obvious comparisons by offering the preferred customers some "loyal customer discount" at the bottom.
Now, go one more level: have an intelligent price sticker at every product on every shelf that gives the MSRP for all to see and ALSO has a little scanner plate to give you (my valued shopper friend) your "Loyal Customer Price Experience" when you run your RFID tag over it. At this point, the notion of a "price" for anything has completely evaporated.
Your "personal sales experience--tailored just for you!" will be a personal cash extraction process in which you never know what others are truly charged and never have cause to complain.
You can own an entire indian family for $1000 per year. Husband, wife, two-three kids. They all work for you--all day--and live in a hovel out back. For $22,000 you live like a king. Of course your meals cost 50 cents. The people who make your meals make $400-$500 per year.
India, like Africa, is founded on a deep and utterly degrading exploitation that Western Europe has never experienced. The professional classes there see it every day, wallow in it, and turn their eyes away from it. We can compete with the Indians as long as we are willing to drive wages for those below us down to $100 per year, watch them live and die in squalor, and in general, reengineer our society back to levels of exploitation never before considered tolerable in any Christian country anywhere.
Gentlemen, I have been there. I have stepped over dead bodies in the streets of Calcutta and Chittagong. I have seen women whoring themseves to pay off their husbands' debts of as little as $200 to $300. I have seen women bought and sold over there for $100, and happy to BE sold when they were released from sexual bondage with a $500 dollar bonus. I have seen children of four and five who were deliberately mutilated by removing fingers, hands, eyes, and feet, to make them more "attractive" as beggars.
Look at the Indian programmer next to you. They all know this. They have walked past these children each day. They know this happens, and they have done and will do nothing about it. They are Hindu and Muslim, Jains and Sikhs, Brahmins and Untouchables (yes, they still exist and are still untouchable!) and their cultures accept poverty, squalor, and exploitation as a natural part of life.
This is not Japan, a first world monoculture in which everyone is treated the same and there is no one to exploit. This is the third world, with a thin veneer of civilization over an inflamed suppurating wound of humanity. No unemployment pay. No social security. No safety net. No doctor. No lawyer. No reading. No writing. No clean water. No clean water or soil standards. Gentlemen, India makes Mexico look like a worker's paradise.
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This has to be the stupidest bit of hype I have ever seen or heard of. Hey! want to be invisible? Go stand in front of a movie screen. As long as your viewer is absolutely right next to the projector looking at you, well then, you will seem invisible ... at least as long as you cover yourself with projection screen beads!
So what else is new. Any little kid who ever played with a home movie knows this. Yet the story has circulated and recirculated the web for a year now.
Give it up.
Gentlemen, there is absolutely nothing to prevent the car ompanies from leasing you the software to run your cars, providing it under license, and requiring a continuing monthly fee to have it updated to the latest, most correct version. It is going to happen in just a couple years, believe me.
... initially.
The Jim Jones Kool-Aid they mix it with will be (1) "safety for soccer moms and soccer kiddies" for soccer mom minivans, (2) "continually improved emission controls" for the tree-huggers. and (3) "hot performance item that only rich guys have" for the young dude crowd.
After all, would you want your wife driving an "unsafe car"? Do you want to pollute when there are easy upgrades to bring teh pollution down? Don't you want the hottest performing Mustang? Why aren't you willing to pay that "little extra" necessary to keep the system software up to date?
When the dealers hear the idea they will love it, since it locks you into their system and guarantees the dealers a continuing income stream.
The warranties will be revised to say "we are only valid as long as you operate your car with the latest vesion of software".
California will require continuing software updates and will not permit you to register your car unless your engine software is up to date. Why? Because the car companies will swear they are constantly refining the pollution controls and can guarantee continually reduced emissions (as long as everyone pays the monthly fee and goes into their dealer every couple months!).
No, guys, its going to happen and happen soon. Don't think that everyone from toaster manufacturers to wristwatch manufacturers to car manufacturers are not slavering at the idea of a continuing income stream for constant upgrades.
All they have to do is wait for the other corporations, like the record business and Microsoft, to mentally turn us all into pay-per-view, pay-per-ride, pay-per-smell, pay-per-look, pay-per-sip, pay-per-breath people.
So let me tell you how it is going to start. First, a new high performance car/engine is going to come out, bought by young guys. They are going to make some special "super-cool" program in which the young guys come in to the shop every couple months to get a revised OS downloaded to their cars. Free coffee, key chains, watches, all the suckie trinkets that young guys fall for who are out hustling women and like to believe they are playas. Hell, it may even be free
Every cool hip young white dude is going to want the latest "performance" versions for his new engine, won't he? After all, he always checks out the latest drivers for his video card, doesn't he? His hot car (like a Harley) is just a big penis extension anyway.
Aw, the car companies will start talking advance curves, valve timings, omega factors, brake horsepower curves, improved shift curves, gamma cutoffs and other hokey nonsense and he will fall right over for it. I can see it now: fancy web site discussing the data, how they gathered it and evaluated it, and how they have revised the softare, all done in black and gun metal colors. Brief bios on the engineers developing the improved software make him feel like some NASA astronaut! Man! he'll feel like some kind of fancy pilot/engineer/astronaut/cool dude at the cutting edge, a regular "early adopter"!
And once the young guy is hooked on new car software as a high ticket, high status performance item (that gets him oodles of babes, of course), everyone else will fall into line.
Selah.
What are you getting cranky about? Sound like my Grampa.
Look, the reason your Disney shares are dropping is because Mike Eisner can't make a decent product.
Sending little Italian girls to prison for downloading "It's a Small World After All" ain't gonna raise the price of your shares.
When you start receiving repeated offers from a fax marketer, determine who the company really is, play along to get them to send a for-real offer via fax, then fax them a rejection of their offer and fax them a counteroffer to "evaluate future fax advertising materials". for $500.00 per each junk advertising fax you receive in the future.
Note specifically in your counteroffer fax that you are responding to their initial fax offer and their faxed followup for-real offer. Throw in a few terms and conditions like: liquidated damages of $2500 (or the maximum your local small claims court will give), net 30 billing, the name you will bill them under (such as "Advertising Evaluation Services Company"), and MOST IMPORTANT: TELL THEM THAT THEY CAN ACCEPT YOUR COUNTEROFFER BY SENDING ANOTHER FAX ADVERTISEMENT FOR THEIR GOODS AND SERVICES TO YOUR FAX NUMBER, THE SAME ONE THEY HAVE ALREADY BEEN USING. Otherwise (you tell them) they no longer have your permission to use your computer and computer supplies (such as fax paper and toner) by sending advertisements to your fax number.
Now, when you receive their next fax, do exactly what you said you would do in your counteroffer: take a look at it, then prepare a bill for your time and send it to their billing office. They may pay it right away, especially if it looks official, you use some business-like name and provide a nice classy professional description of your services. If they do not pay, after a couple months file suit in small claims court for the maximum small claims amount allowed, typically $2000-5000 or so. (assuming, of course, your faxed counteroffer had a per-occurence liquidated damages clause of whatever that maximum is.
So what happens? They may pay automatically. If not, you file suit in small claims. By the time they realize that they have made an offer (the initial fax and/or the followup fax), received a counter offer (your fax back to them with your rejection and your modified terms) and have accepted the counteroffer (when they kept sending you advertisements), it will be too late. You will have hardcopies of their initial offer, your counteroffer, and copies of the faxes you received in response to your counteroffer. If I were a small claims judge, I would see this as a slam dunk case in your favor, and would be laughing hysterically in chambers afterward when I ordered them to cough up the cash. Of course, it only works if the company is local or regional and therefore amenable to small claims.
You see, the internet and fax machines permit them to go make offers like crazy, throwing trash terms and advertisements at everyone heedlessly. They do not check up on who is sending the offers out, whether illegally to blocked numbers or not. They just don't care. Their management systems are not tight and things (like obeying the law and actually reading your counteroffer) fall between the cracks.
The process I describe above, as long as you respond to their faxes, as long as you tell them very plainly exactly what you are going to do and how you will bill them, etc, and as long as you keep paper copies of all the faxes you receive from them and send to them, cannot be considered as fraud. Believe me, if they catch on only after paying several of your bills, they will feel like utter fools, but there is no judge in the land who would find your actions to be fraudulent or criminal if you were quite upfront. Indeed, most would gleefully realize how you finessed the fax monsters and order them to pay up immediately in small claims.
NOTE: I am not your attorney. If you want an attorney, hire one. If you are interested in this idea, take it to your local attorney and get his opinion.
John Henry Gatto, the author, taught for 31 years in the NYC school system, was named teacher of the year and is a brilliant historian and scholar.
I am still working my way through this book (free online at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m) and am amazed at how it all comes together.
Our system of factory education was originally created in Germany by the Prussians to totally regiment their culture. It was designed to do that. Read Gatto, by God, read the history of compulsory education and the educrats and and the scales will fall from your eyes. Find it at:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
For a shorter piece, an essay that was published in Harpers in 2001, go to this link:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm
So why are students failing? They are supposed to. The built-in systemic goal of modern mas compulsory education is to create an unthinking, uneducated, obedient mass of socially constructed worker bees. It is not an accident. Why is copulsory government schooling mindless? It is intended to be mindless. Why do kids with any brain go crazy in the hothouse atmosphere of factory high schools? Because any right-thinking human being would go crazy! The problem isn't students not wanting to learn, but schools wanting to teach kids things that clearly do not serve students' best interests, but the interests of the Machine.
Regrettably, we have forgotten this, although the elitist theorists of education who set the system up were quite blunt about it back in 1850, 1880, 1900, 1920. They spoke of using government schooling to limit the curiosity and independence of children in order to better fit them their assigned industrial tasks.
If you want to understand the roots, the history, the development of the system, go read Gatto at
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m.
Three big changes in traditional law have occurred in the last ten years: (1) the cases that have held online and software agreements binding, (2) the elimination of the profit motive for copyright suits, and (3) the criminalization of unauthorized decryption. All have been upheld by conservative courts. All are necessary to drive a massive worldwide software and entertainment economy. None are limited only for big guys to use.
So *use* them:
In your personal life: Encrypt all your email, make the password known (or easily broken). When an employer breaks the encryption, he is criminally liable under the DMCA. If he tries to sue evidence gathered from breaking the encryption, have the evidence barred as tainted. Remember, nothing in the DMCA is limited to music, only to work protectable by copyright.
Protection against the R eye AA: Valenti says the DMCA is sacrosanct. So be it. Create a P2P protocol that is legally linked to an agreement that pledges no copyright suits against each other. Hell, have the session initiating step include sending the entire agreement and the acknowledgement step as sending back the string "yes, I agree completely".
When Valenti hires a computer PI firm to dig up evidence (or has his in house programmers search it out) by communicating on the network his boys are bound by the agreement. Would I let my PI's investigate for Valenti if the P2P protocol agreement said my company would be responsible for any infringement suits initiated as a result of my P2P use? Hell no!
Another tool: Create websites that check to see if incoming WWW traffic is from the R eye AA. If so, generate a special web agreement that commits the R eye AA (and their employer, if they are R eye AA officers) not to sue for infringement and to indemnify you for any infringement claims, or any other damn provisions you can come up with. To the rest of the world the terms always appear perfectly innocuous. To the person coming from the R eye AA they are specially generated and deadly.
Set up a "honey pot" offering to provide free decryption software, to reverse engineer R eye AA products, to crack Adobe password protection, whatever. Bring it to the R eye AA's attention. When their sleuths come sniffing, make sure the click through agreement obligates them to pay you treble damages for any infringement claim they may bring against you.
Alternative honey pot: set up teaser web pages that purport to show how Joe Doakes, the vice president of Big Corp, has been engaged in fraud and collusion with hardware manufacturers. The Google-indexed page says "click on the enter button for more juicy details."
Be very suggestive, but not libelous. Send an anonymous email to Joe Doakes recommending that he really ought to go check out the web site. The Ts&Cs obligate him to all kinds of intellectual property infringement indemnification provisions. Bingo, as an officer he has the power to obligate the corporation and you just got all their software free. So what is the evidence of fraud and collusion? What are the gory details? Nada!
The possibilities are endless. Use against them the very weapons, the monstrously powerful weapons, that they persuaded the courts and the Congress to create.
Gentlemen, if they are coming at you with an AC130 and guys are dancing the funky chicken all around you, you don't go plinking back at them with an AK. The weapon is there. Start thinking how to use it. Go out for beers with an intellectual property attorney. Come up with "what ifs", throw them against the wall and see what sticks. Offensively, defensively, I don't care how you use it, just use it!
Don't believe me? So go search the internet for "lesson plans" together with "homosexual" or "lesbian" or "transsexual" or "ecology" or "GLEN" "animal rights" or "immigration" or "zionism" or "Israel" or "civil rights" or "hate speech" and you will find thousands of propaganda sites just stuffed with free propaganda plans (social morality sermons, really) to reengineer kids' thinking.
You can spot the moralizing propaganda a mile away. A typical one-sided and awful scenario is followed by essays, roleplaying and discussion, all calculated to engineer the students' beliefs and thoughts along the correct social paths.
A typical example by a MADD group might be as follows:
"Jimmie was just run over and left for dead in the street by Bob, a teen drunk driver. Have your students roleplay a meeting between Jimmie's mom and Bob. Have them write an essay about what they could do to stop drunk driving."
If the teacher is ever challenged by parents for preaching her morals and religion to their kids instead of sticking to Math or Spanish or whatever, the teacher has plausible deniability, since:
(1) someone else wrote the lesson plan [yeah, but she selected it!],
(2) the NEA approved it [they love any left wing cause], and
(3) she didn't tell the students what to think, they came up with it all on their own [yeah, right, after she presented them with a transparently one-sided scenario calculated to sway the students in one direction].
It all started 100-150 years ago when manufacturers and social engineers wanted to create a docile working class of factory drones.
Go to this website and learn why you are taught the way you are and why you are deliberately taught not to think:
"The Underground History of American Education" at
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.ht m
Amen, Brother.
When you train your replacement, start thinking about all the stuff you won't be able to buy anymore as an unemployed engineer.
Hey, kids! I have a neat idea! Try the same "training you own replacement" thing with all the stores whose products you will no longer be able to buy!
Go to your favorite store and tell them "I lost my job to offshoring and can't buy widgets at your store anymore. I do like your widgets, though and want to continue buying them."
"I will buy a couple more widgets from you if you will help me train your replacement".
"So would you please tell me your source of widgets, the different widget manufacturers you deal with, and the terms of your widget purchase contracts? Tell me how you store your widgets, at what humidity level and who the best widget repairman is."
"I will take that 'training' information down the street to your competitor. You see, he has promised to make widgets for me for one-half of what you charge (which I CAN afford) if only you will give him the information."
"You see, Mr. Widget Seller, I've bought widgets from you for years. After all those sales you owe me some loyalty."
Now, boys and girls, you tell me what moral duty that businessman has to you (other than to kick you in the keister for being a fool).
The moral of the story? You are no different than that businessman selling widgets. Your secret skills and knowledge in your head is all you have to sell. Like the Widget Seller's business knowledge, your expertise has value to you ONLY because it is NOT generally available to the public. So don't ever give anything away for free. The secrets you have in your head are the only thing that makes you worthwhile to your employer. Share them with no one. If he want you to write code, write it. If he asks you to train others to write code for him in your place, tell him to stuff it--which is just what the Widget Seller would say to you if you pulled the above moron replacement training argument on him.
Lying on resumes? You mean telling a falsehood in order to make a sale--in this case a sale of yourself? Business does it all the time. There is a huge legal loophole for business lying called "mere puffery".
He needs to start thinking like skilled craftsmen did 100 years ago: all you have is you skills and your trade secrets, your tricks of the trade. When they ask you to train you replacement, they are asking you to give away the accumulated talents and knowledge that give you a profitable margin in the workplace.
Let me ask you this. Does an employer give away his customer lists? Does he give away his sales training materials? Does he share his code that operates 20% faster? No!
"But it would make the world economy more efficient if you shared that information with everyone!" you say.
"It would be better for your loyal customers, sir, because they could get their work done by other, cheaper people!"
Obviously you employer would consider giving away his business knowledge to others as ridiculous. "Of COURSE it would make the market place more efficient," he would say. "But why do I want to make it more efficient!"
Tell your friend that he is a skilled craftsman who has a handful of talents to sell, and if he gives them away, he will be educating his competition for free. If the only use his employer has for him at this point is training his competitors (i.e. his replacement) then he should quit.
"But I don't want to hurt my customer!" he says. Well, kid, you are not hurting your client, your BOSS is hurting them by firing YOU.
If you really want to help your customer, go right to them and offer to work directly for them! Tell them your employer is preparing to fire you and you would like to work for them directly. If they say "no dice", then screw 'em. If they say "we agreed never to hire employees away from your current empoyer" then tell them "tough luck. Foolish move on your part."
Kids, your employer does not care, but he is hoping to prey upon YOUR care--for your clients, for your reputation, for your friends you are leaving behind, hell, for whatever he can--to get you to throw away what last shreds of self respect you have.
What in the hell has gotten into Americans that they think there is a duty, moral or otherwise, to train their own replacement.
"Give me access to their standards of living" you say. Hear! hear!
An Indian or Bangladeshi can hire an entire family of four--man, woman, and two children--work all damn four of them, and it only costs a couple grand a year.
Forget Social Security, forget workmens comp, forget social safety net, forget child labor and forget public schools for the kids. Hell, 30 years ago you could buy a temporary wife for $200-250 (if that), and she would work her a$$ off both in and out of the sack.
And you wonder why they can "get by" on $22K per year? Hell, you could buy and sell human beings for that kind of salary in India.
As the prime minister (president? dictator? strongman? whatever) of Nigeria said only a few weeks ago, Nigeria has over 150 languages, LANGUAGES, mind you NOT DIALECTS. How the hell can you call yourself a country, a society or a nation when there are over 150 mutually unintelligible ways of communicating, each one supporting typically a few thousand speakers, and the vast majority not even written down! God bless 'em, aboriginals need all the help they can get.
Educate yourselves. There are several common lies that you are fed by the news media.
First, that AIDS is a massive problem in Africa. It isn't. The "crisis" is a product of completely bogus UN computer models, whcih are regularly diddled with when folks begin to figure out.
Second, that second-hand smoke kills more than a few (if that many) people per year. It doesn't. The results come from fraudulent meta-analyses.
Third, that silicone breast implants cause cancer. They don't, but they do pay tons of litigators.
Fourth, that record industry sales have dropped. They haven't. They have gone up.
Fifth, that AIDS is any kind of serious threat to non-doper non-junkie heterosexuals. It never has been.
And sixth, (as I am increasingly discovering) there is no looming global warming disaster.
In each of the above examples the so-called scientific evidence advances a political agenda, delivers billions in grant money to various agencies and researchers, and creates scientific reputations (and streams of cash) overnight.
Wake up folks. Stop letting Slashdot get hijacked by bogus political interests and screwy science. We have anough of this crap on other sites.
The goal is to maximize profits. You cannot maximize profits until you make the price of every item equal to the maximum amount each individual shopper will spend. This is what the lotalty tags enable. And the data mining, gentlemen, has only just begun!
The new Price for groceries is not really a "price" in the sense of some dollar value on a hang tag, but the maximum value one can extract through bargaining.
Does the data show that you are poor? Have no car? Buy only essentials? Well then, our computer tells us you likely live right around the corner in the elderly housing unit and cannot travel to another store.
You, my elderly friend, get the MSRP for mustard that is on the condiment shelf. You will not get your prices automatically reduced by some meaningless "instant savings coupons" or "loyal customer rebate" that we generate and print on your bill at the register.
On the other hand, if you buy ten bottles of Courvoisier a year and spend $500 per week, baby, we are going to suck up to you big time. We are going to grovel, and print out cents-off, heck DOLLARS-off coupons like crazy whenever you check out.
In short, the price on the rack or shelf is going to be meaningless. Every food item will be automatically "bargained for" by the computer which will mark it up or down according to your class. Your food bills will be determined more and more according to your social class, how much air you breath and floor space you take up versus dollars you spend. Do they want to know your name? Hell no! They just want to know whether to put your warm bodies in the class of "poverty-stricken and immobile, charge them whatever you want" (since our stats have determined that they have to buy here regardless) or the class of "treat them like their poop doesn't stink, since each visit earns us $500". Or any of the million subgroups and intermediate categories the computer will determine.
The loyalty tag system destroys destroys the notion of a "price" for anything, now that they have the power to offer cryptic savings at the cash register for whatever reasons they want.
So won't people get p1ssed off, you say? Apparently not. Think of the comments made by the girl above in this thread who got unbelievable savings for her baby formula purchases. I could be right behind her in line buying a case of formula for my niece visiting from Toledo, and (1) I would NOT get the rebate, and (2) I would never, EVER know that SHE got it. So what would be my basis for complaining?
If any customers did start noticing and complaining ("why did she get it for $1.25 and it cost me $1.50"), then I would prevent obvious comparisons by offering the preferred customers some "loyal customer discount" at the bottom.
Now, go one more level: have an intelligent price sticker at every product on every shelf that gives the MSRP for all to see and ALSO has a little scanner plate to give you (my valued shopper friend) your "Loyal Customer Price Experience" when you run your RFID tag over it. At this point, the notion of a "price" for anything has completely evaporated.
Your "personal sales experience--tailored just for you!" will be a personal cash extraction process in which you never know what others are truly charged and never have cause to complain.
India, like Africa, is founded on a deep and utterly degrading exploitation that Western Europe has never experienced. The professional classes there see it every day, wallow in it, and turn their eyes away from it. We can compete with the Indians as long as we are willing to drive wages for those below us down to $100 per year, watch them live and die in squalor, and in general, reengineer our society back to levels of exploitation never before considered tolerable in any Christian country anywhere.
Gentlemen, I have been there. I have stepped over dead bodies in the streets of Calcutta and Chittagong. I have seen women whoring themseves to pay off their husbands' debts of as little as $200 to $300. I have seen women bought and sold over there for $100, and happy to BE sold when they were released from sexual bondage with a $500 dollar bonus. I have seen children of four and five who were deliberately mutilated by removing fingers, hands, eyes, and feet, to make them more "attractive" as beggars.
Look at the Indian programmer next to you. They all know this. They have walked past these children each day. They know this happens, and they have done and will do nothing about it. They are Hindu and Muslim, Jains and Sikhs, Brahmins and Untouchables (yes, they still exist and are still untouchable!) and their cultures accept poverty, squalor, and exploitation as a natural part of life.
This is not Japan, a first world monoculture in which everyone is treated the same and there is no one to exploit. This is the third world, with a thin veneer of civilization over an inflamed suppurating wound of humanity. No unemployment pay. No social security. No safety net. No doctor. No lawyer. No reading. No writing. No clean water. No clean water or soil standards. Gentlemen, India makes Mexico look like a worker's paradise.