It's amazing how many of these sorts of anecdotal stories come up whenever a story like this is posted.
Maybe that would be because they happen fairly often? See my post elsewhere in this TFH regarding the red-haired woman. There are scum in the world, and they get around. Besides, the incidents tend to be very memorable to the people involved. It doesn't take all that many scum to provide a whole lot of stories over each of their lifetimes.
When I lived in CA, that was the state law also. (it might have changed after a few Republican governors) Whatever the price on the shelf was, they legally had to sell it to you for that price.
I wonder if anyone has ever tried to use that for one of my pet peeves -- items priced at ".50 cents" etc.
My old boss used to say, "The customer isn't always right -- but they are always a customer."
That reminds me of how I wound up working for Radio Shack in the first place. I'd applied for a tech job in the repair center, but everyone had to fill out the same personality evaluation thing. I answered the question "T/F: The customer is always right" with "False. See me for reason," and explained that the customer isn't always right, and in fact they may well be dead wrong and know it, but they will spend a lot more money if you treat them as though you believe they're right. The district manger wouldn't hire me as a tech -- he insisted he wanted me in sales.
So what happens when we have a society where only the X% of customers who are the most profitable for the store are permitted to shop there?
When I worked for Radio Shack, we had a customer who bought a laptop computer (a very high-priced item at the time, this was back in about 1990). The sales ticket said, printed right on it, that returns were not accepted after 30 days. A couple of months later, the customer came back and returned the computer. He "didn't like it." It was clear that he did like it -- from the wear on the case, he'd been travelling with it, and from the wear on the keyboard, typing all the time. The manager, who had sold it to him originally, pointed out the 30 day policy and refused to accept the return. The guy went to District and threw a fit, and the district manager insisted that we take it back. That cost our store manager a big chunk of his pay for that week, when they charged the commission on that laptop against his sales.
We looked over the laptop... from the look of the files on it, the guy had taken it with him on a month+ trip to Europe, then he brought it back for a full refund.
People like that deserve whatever they can be smacked with -- criminal charges for fraud being a good first step.
Then there was the red-haired woman... nobody ever knew her name, we just called other Radio Shacks to tell them the red-haired woman was in the area again. She always tried to "return" various small items that she had no receipts for, claiming she got them as gifts. They included things such as expensive phonograph cartridges (yeah, that dates my story!)... basically, anything that could be easily pocketed and walked off with. In one case she tried to "return" a game cartridge for a CoCo which I knew for a fact was stolen, because it was from our store, out of our demo CoCo... I'd played that thing so many times myself, I knew every scuff in the label, and neither my boss nor I (only two people there since it had vanished) had sold it. While she was arguing with the person on duty about her "returns" her three kids were spreading out through the store to steal more stuff.
And no, calling the cops wasn't an option. This was in Long Beach, CA... you'd be lucky if they sent someone out three hours later, and maybe not until the next day. It took them over an hour, once, to respond to a reported break-in in our store. The Long Beach PD was a basket case for multiple reasons, and certainly no help to merchants with stores full of shoplifters.
The sad thing is that retailers use scumbags like that as an excuse to marginalize all customers they make less than the maximum profit on, such as people who only buy sale items. From the look of the original article, that is only going to get worse.
Take convenience stores and gas stations, for instance. In Virginia, when you pay for your gas they say "thank you" and you feel like they really mean it. In upstate New York, they mutter "thank you" and you're both satisfied with the business transaction. In Massachusetts, you feel like you got lucky they didn't throw your change in your face.
I have actually had a waitress in MA chase me outside a restaurant and throw the tip at me. Of course, that might have been because I left her a one penny tip for world-record shitty service, reaching new depths in bad.
One of my pet peeves: The sales clerks who come up to me, say "Are you all set?" and walk away -- generally when I'm trying to find something that isn't where it should be, looking for the price on something that isn't marked, or in the pet shop needing someone to catch me a fish.
Children in the US are generally raised to feel that saying "no" is rude -- to the point of saying "yes" and throwing subtle hints that it means "no" in social situations when the correct answer would be a flat-out "no" or promising to do things, then weaseling out of them later, because they feel it would be rude to refuse outright. Smart sales people know this, and always present questions where a "yes" answer will lead to further sales.
The default answer to "Are you all set?" (which translates to "You don't need any help, right?") is of course "yes", which allows the lazy sales clerk to get right back to whatever important goofing off they were doing at the time. They know what they're doing, and it baffles me that their managers don't put a stop to it. It does not improve the customers' feelings about a store, let alone their likelihood of finding or buying what they're looking for, to have someone say "I don't want to help you, just give me an excuse not to."
I worked for Radio Shack 10+ years ago when it was one of the pushiest hard-sell shops in the business. I quit because I didn't agree with their policies and sales tactics, especially granting credit to low-income people and then pushing them to buy flashy-looking products that were utter crap. They trained store staff intensively in how to sell, and it worked. You don't sell by saying "give me an excuse not to help you," you sell by not giving the customer a yes-or-no option but saying "How can I help you?" and getting them engaged with you. Joe Hourly might not give a flying whistle, but his boss's bonus is based on store sales, so why he allows that kind of behavior escapes me entirely. Just changing one phrase -- changing from "Are you all set?" to "How can I help you?" will make a difference in sales, not to mention in customer satisfaction.
I've been reading through the working group papers. It looks to me like the whole thing was written by the goddamn spammers themselves. They want to make it virtually impossible for anyone outside of law enforcement agencies (and we know how good they are at stopping spam) from getting whois information.
We need better whois information, not less of it. We need it available to more people. We need more openness, not more secrecy. Openness cleans up problems -- secrecy nurtures them. Nor is it limited to spam and network abuse.
A random example... I saw some very convincing looking information from what appeared to be a grassroots organization on an issue I was somewhat interested in. (arguing against a pollution cleanup) Just out of curiousity, I did a whois on the domain, and found out that it was owend by the company that did the polluting... the "grass" was astroturf.
So people can spam me all they like, they can abuse the resources I depend on, they can attack my servers, they can do whatever they feel like, and with their domain registration information kept an ironclad secret by this new proposal, I can't do a damn thing about it. Oh, wonderful.
Or maybe it was written by the lawyers. One of the criticisms of the current policy by the working group is that it permits person-to-person contact without any lawyers involved. Yes, they actually said that. Gee, how terrible... you can get in touch with the guy who's got unauthorized copies of your stuff and ask him to take it down, and settle things on friendly terms, without having to pay a lawyer a few hundred dollars to write a letter to say exactly the same thing. Maybe we should all be required to have lawyers walking around with us so that they can pass on anything we might want to say to someone we meet? And lawyers don't like being called "mouthpieces"? Feh!
Leviticus 11:20 All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you.
My Bible (New American Standard) has "all the winged insects that walk on all fours are detestable to you." One would have to assume that only covers a few species of butterflies, since most other insects have six legs.
The problem is the ISPs want to own your IP address and they use the shortage in IPV4 to retain control.
Why does this seem like the charge of the tinfoil hat brigade?
What a nefarious plot! The techies who route Internet data want to be able to assign the numbers they need to route it!
Saying that the ISPs want to own my IP address is like saying the phone company wants to own my port number on their switches. Duh! An IP address isn't a phone number, or anything close to it. This is a very bad analogy, but a domain name is more like a phone number. A phone number can be associated with any one of many different actual phone connections. Likewise, a domain name can be associated with any one of many different IP addresses. The whole point of the DNS system is to have portable addresses (domain names) which are independant of IP addresses. What this lazy, litigious oxygen-thief wants to do is basically break the entire routing system, and he's got some damnfool judge who thinks the Internet is something to catch Interfish with to agree with him. Letting an ignorant fool like that make decisions about how the Internet should be managed is like having some random net user making legal rulings. If you don't know wtf the situation involves, as it is clear that this judge didn't, then find someone who does.
Someone needs to whack the bloody fool of a judge with a clue-by-four. Maybe with a copy of The Internet for Dummies. For the love of Kibo, at least send him a link to How Stuff Works.
No doubt a great deal of his concern is also over having to re-write a bunch of their application code to accomodate the new formats, in addition to lowering the level of obscure knowledge future competition needs to succeed.
They want the new formats available to them -- code rewrites and all -- they just don't want us, the people whose tax money is paying for it, to have access to them, so that they can resell us our own data. Can you say "corporate welfare"?
Because the government should not compete with the private sector. It's a simple enough principle, if there's something that the private sector is willing to do for-profit, then the government simply should not compete with them.
When Accu-Weather establishes their own network of thousands of automated and manned data collection stations, when they launch their own weather satellites, when they buy some of the world's fastest supercomputers and write global weather modelling software for them, when they set up hundreds of radar stations, and when they get a time machine to gather weather records from a hundred years before the company was founded, then they might have the right to deny information critical to life, safety, and livelihood to anyone other than their paying customers.
But since we, the taxpayers, own all of that, no private company -- not Accu-Weather, not anyone -- has the right to restrict the benefits of those taxpayer-owned resources to themselves.
Accu-Weather was not the first private weather company. If a system such as they want, where some or all data is limited to distribution solely to existing corporations, then Accu-Weather would never have been born. A grad student named Joel Myers wouldn't have had access to the data he needed to start making forecasts for local ski areas, and eventually expand that to a worldwide weather service. Of course, that scenario is exactly in Accu-Weather's best interest. Remember, while it's in our interest, as consumers, to have open competition in any given market and a wide array of choices, it is in the interest of the companies in that market to reduce competition and to raise the highest possible barriers to entry into that market, to protect their own position. That's what this is all about.
So you have surface reporting stations. Great. And no doubt a distributed computing system could, if sufficient experts could be found to write the models, replace the NWS's supercomputers.
But what about upper air observations? How about satellite data? How about over a hundred years of historical records? How about doppler radar? How about, in other words, all of the things that you can't get from looking out the window?
They'd be damned hard to replace with a volunteer network. The existing taxpayer-owned system has billions of dollars of infrastructure. The big issue is that Accu-Weather and their cronies want that taxpayer-owned infrastructure to benefit not the taxpayers, but only themselves.
In Microsoft's defense, they at least created new products (Word, Excel, Access) that did not exist...
Um... you think that word processors, spreadsheets, and databases originated with Microsoft?
Just what exactly were people using back in the Apple II days, then? I have some remarkable memories... I guess they were hallucinations... I seem to remember things like VisiCalc, VisiFile, etc., back around 1980, over a year before the IBM PC even existed, and long before anyone noticed an obscure little company called Microsoft.
Innovation? Let's go back a ways... Microsoft didn't write MS-DOS; they bought a system called QDOS and renamed it. QDOS, in turn, wasn't all that original; it had a lot in common (not sure if at the source level) with CP/M, the most popular OS at the time. CP/M, in turn, wasn't very original either -- it was basically a microcomputer port of TOPS-10, though somewhat less user-hostile, or at least user-annoying. (anyone who remembers PIP, report to the old geeks' home immediately!)
No matter what their PR flaks say, Microsoft has never been about innovation. They're all about finding other people's innovation, buying it, copying it, or stealing it (Stacker, anyone?), and bundling it into their own products. Whether or not this may create value is another flamewar entirely... but Microsoft does not, and never has "created new products." That's not their business model.
With NWS data and forecasts limited to only established corporations, rather than entrepreneurs and the private citizens who pay for them, the number of corporations providing that service will tend to shrink due to mergers, buy-outs, business failures, etc. That happens in just about every industry, and weather data and forecasting will be no exception. People would be dependant on a very few sources of weather information with no checks or balances.
Now imagine that one of those corporations provides the weather forecasts to the state of Florida. One day, their forecast shows them that there will be a hard freeze in a couple of days, which will severely damage the Florida orange crops. A few of the top-level people in that corporation delay that forecast for half a day or so, so that they have time to call their brokers and invest in frozen orange juice futures. I think you can take it from there.
There are some things so critical to the public good that the public has, over the past few hundred years, determined that it is in our best interest to jointly contribute to maintaining those services for ourselves, via our proxy, the government. (despite what some people, and a lot of politicians, forget, that is what a democratic government is: the proxy of the citizens, and the equivalent of a condo association hiring a guy to mow the lawns)
Firefighting, for instance, is one of them. We've had plenty of experience with privately run firefighting services, back in the 18th and 19th century. We found out they didn't work. They only extinguished fires in property owned by their subscribers... which meant that small fires became major conflagrations by the time they reached the house of someone who could afford to pay a fire company. It was finally realized that, for the good of the entire city (except maybe for the marshmallow vendors) it was necessary to have a centralized fire service that responded to any fire before it could spread.
Employees in general theoretically have the best interests of their employers at heart. In the case of a public service such as the NWS, those employers are us, the citizens. In the case of a private service, those employers are the corporate officers and stockholders. When it comes to things that people's lives, safety, and livelihoods depend on, I am very reluctant to trust that service solely to people whose concern is not for the public good, not for my safety, not for a level playing field for all businesses, but solely for how much money they can gain.
And remember: Accu-Weather and the others don't want the National Weather Service privatized or abolished. They would collapse overnight if it was, because they utterly depend on its data. They want distribution of that taxpayer-funded data to be limited solely to them. They're perfectly happy with the NWS the way it is, so long as they are the only ones who can benefit from it.
So a government monopoly on weather services benefits us how exactly?
This is not about a government monopoly on weather services. The government has been providing this information for decades. It is, in fact, the very data that private weather services use to base their forecasts on. Accu-Weather and other corporations do not want to stop the government from producing this data -- they want to limit the government to providing it only to corporations, not to private citizens, so that they can resell the information that we taxpayers have already paid for back to us at a profit.
In addition, this would prevent some other entrepreneurial meteorology graduate student from using that data to make forecasts for local ski areas and eventually starting a weather company of his own... which is how Joel Myers (Barry's brother) started Accu-Weather. This has nothing to do with a government monopoly on anything, and everything to do with protecting a few large companies from competition.
Whenever taxpayers subsidize a service that could be provided in the marketplace, that subsidy undermines the development of true competition for that service.
The private weather companies are not asking the National Weather Service to get out of the weather data collection and weather forecasting area. Those companies absolutely depend on the thousands of hourly observations collected by the NWS, on the computer forecast models generated by their supercomputers, etc. What those companies are demanding is that the NWS provide this data -- which we the taxpayers have already paid for -- only to the corporations, not to the taxpayers.
Any time Accu-Weather wants to pay to establish a network of thousands of observation stations to get the weather data they depend on, buy a few of the world's largest supercomputers and develop their own software to run models, launch satellites to track global weather, etc., then they are entirely within their rights to make that data available only to their customers. But we pay for those stations, for those supercomputers, for those satellites, and all the rest -- the very services that Accu-Weather and other corporations depend on to generate their own forecasts -- and we have every right to the data generated from them in any and every format that the National Weather Service -- the people employed by the taxpayers to do the job -- wants to give it to us, their employers, in.
Known good doesn't matter if they're known useless.
Then why do you spammers go to great lengths to dodge around every attempt we make to avoid your deluge of sludge? Isn't the mere fact that someone filters out emails with the phrase "penis enlargement" in them just possibly a clue that the person is not a likely buyer of penis enlargement pills?
Yet you persist. You find new tricks. You use fake "personal" emails... fake bounce messages... using images to replace keywords... irrelevant words to fool filters... false subjects, false senders, false headers, false everything... and, of course, using "remove" addresses for validation.
Yeah, you really don't want to spam people who don't want your sludge. Right. Go tell it to Satan.
First-class mail rates significantly subsidize the cost of bulk mail.
Nope, it's the other way around. Bulk snail costs the postal service very little to process. It's delivered to the sending post office sorted by zip code and pre-coded; basically, all the system has to do is truck it where it's going and put it in the right bag. Your last birthday card, on the other hand, had to be picked up from the snailbox by a carrier, its address deciphered, bar-coded, sorted by destination, etc. For doing all of that, basically everything but the hauling and final delivery, they get a discount of a whopping six cents -- 30.9 cents instead of 37 cents. Bulk mail supports first class, not the other way around.
1) EFF aggregates list of spam-unfriendly addresses.
2) Spammer submits prospect addresses to EFF.
3) EFF returns list minus spam-unfriendly addresses.
4) Spammer compares cleaned list to original list
5) Spammer now has a list of known good addresses
For residential users, who do not pay a per-GB bandwidth transfer fee, spam costs nothing more than time just like telemarketers.
Where does that residential user's ISP get the money to buy the hardware and bandwidth to handle all that spam? The 4 out of 5 emails that their customers would do anything to avoid? Someone has to pay for it. Two words: end users. Just because you don't pay per GB for bandwidth doesn't mean you're not paying for it. It all gets worked into the monthly bill.
Spam is not a matter of 20 mails a week, it is a matter of hundreds a day and rising. A friend of mine whose email address was compromised by being listed on his college website recently had to abandon that address, and try to contact everyone who knew him to give them his new one, because he was getting 500+ spams a day: over 99% of his email.
The cost of sending snail mail keeps it to a reasonable level. It also means that it is generally very tightly targeted. For example, I subscribe to a gardening magazine, so I get seed catalogs. I do not even have a penis, so I have very little use for penis enlargement pills, let alone fake Viagra and pictures of naked women (with or without horses involved). But because there is effectively no cost to the spammer, I am bombarded with advertisements for all of the above.
You, sir, are clearly a filthy stinking spamming scumbag, or a troll, or both. However, for benefit of the lurkers out there who might actually be misled by your lies, I'll take some time to refute them:
Spam is fundamentally identical to telemarketing and direct postal mail.
Spam is nothing like telemarketing or direct postal mail. It is fundamentally identical to telemarketing to your cell phone where you have to pay for airtime. It is telemarketers calling collect and no option to hang up, postage due junk mail with no choice to refuse to pay.
The money telemarketers pay for those calls goes to the companies that carry the network traffic, namely the local and/or long distance phone companies. The telemarketer pays for the network resources they use.
The cost of handling bulk mail is less than what the Post Office charges to send it. The profits the Post Office makes from the bulk mailers pay for the hardspace "network" resources for everyone else.
Spammers do not pay for the resources they use. I've seen recent figures as high as 4 out of 5 emails sent are spam. To look at it another way, this means that if your ISP allocates $10,000 of their revenues to buy some new mailservers, then you, their customer, are only getting the benefit of $2,000 worth of new hardware; the other $8,000 is spent to deliver spam. Since that money is coming from you and other subscribers, then your ISP either has to raise your rates or not give you the increase in service they otherwise would have. If $1 a month out of your bill goes for hardware upgrades, you're getting 20 cents worth and the rest is going to deliver spam.
Spam in no way subsidizes the Internet. The spammers are not paying for the resources they use. They are forcing other people to pay to handle traffic that they do not want. They are forcing every ISP out there, from the big backbone providers to SouthPodunkNet, to shoulder the cost of their advertising. The only money a spammer pays to actually support the network is the cost of a cheap dialup account somewhere. All the rest is paid to other scum for things like lists of email addresses, access to innocent people's hijacked computers, etc. But he is using 10^6 or more of the network resources as everyone else.
When you give your email to a website operator, and that website operator sells it, that money is what keeps your content cheap or free.
Very, very, very few addresses used for spam are those given voluntarily to a website operator. In fact, out of the hundreds of email addresses I've used with various websites and companies, I've gotten spam at exactly one: the one I gave to iBill. The vast majority of addresses used by spammers are extracted from web pages, forum posts, domain registration information, and just about anywhere else.
I watch spammers' spiders scanning domains that I host... and not one of them has paid a penny to me, or to my clients, for any addresses they find. The only person paying anything to anyone is me, for the bandwidth they're using in order to gather those addresses, and my clients, who (like all end users) are the ones who end up paying in the end.
Then there are the dictionary spams. Some hijacked computers in Brazil have been bombarding one of my domains all day with spam to random non-existant addresses, trying to find some that get through. People who don't even exist certainly didn't give their email addresses to anyone!
As it happens, I'm the webmaster as well as host for a site with a fair bit of free content, so I think I am in a position to know something of the economics of it. It works like this:
Neither I nor my client has ever received a single penny from a spammer. This particular client happens to have a mailing list (extremely opt-in, and protected like the vault at Fort Knox) for a newsletter. If he should wish to sell it to a spam list vendor, just how much would a list of under a hu
I disagree with the idea that "there is a large chunk of the population that is simply never going to be interested in video games." I think it's simply that they have not yet found the right game, probably because nobody has created that game yet. There are people who are not interested in movies, too, but they're a minority. Remember, this is a whole new market compared to other forms of entertainment. The game industry is still trying to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.
While I'm waiting for you to get modded down as the troll (or neanderthal) you are, I'm bored enough to reply to entertain the lurkers.
So, if that's what women gamers are "really" like, what am I? My MMORPG experience has been primarily Shadowbane and DAoC (RR5). I lived for PK. And no, not my own team. My favorite games of all time include StarCraft, Civilization, MOO2, WarCraft, and Age of Empires. (yes, I have a Napoleon complex) Lately, I've been playing Conqueror a lot. (free web wargame, check it out) I enjoy FPS's but, sadly, I can't compete with teenage reflexes and/or aimbots. About the only games I won't play at least once are card games (except Solitaire when I'm on the phone), flying games (no fun without expensive controllers), and anything that says "The Sims" on it or involves other people but has no way to gank them.
Oh, and not only do I know how to turn on the computer but I build them (including both of my current game machines) and not only can I post on forums, I'm a decent Perl coder and could write a forum system if I needed one.
You, I suspect, will discard this entire description as anomalous data. Your mind is made up and you won't be confused by little things like reality. If a data point fits your preconceptions, you keep it to support them; if it doesn't fit into your existing worldview, you throw it away. I can imagine you, in the middle of a room full of thousands of women hunched over their keyboards in white-knuckle UT deathmatches, finding some reason to say they don't count at all.
I suspect you think the average woman acts the way you describe because either a) you ignore any instances of women not acting that way, or b) women who don't act that way (that is, who are normal, ordinary people) want nothing to do with someone like you.
Slashdot Mirror
It's amazing how many of these sorts of anecdotal stories come up whenever a story like this is posted.
Maybe that would be because they happen fairly often? See my post elsewhere in this TFH regarding the red-haired woman. There are scum in the world, and they get around. Besides, the incidents tend to be very memorable to the people involved. It doesn't take all that many scum to provide a whole lot of stories over each of their lifetimes.
When I lived in CA, that was the state law also. (it might have changed after a few Republican governors) Whatever the price on the shelf was, they legally had to sell it to you for that price.
I wonder if anyone has ever tried to use that for one of my pet peeves -- items priced at ".50 cents" etc.
My old boss used to say, "The customer isn't always right -- but they are always a customer."
That reminds me of how I wound up working for Radio Shack in the first place. I'd applied for a tech job in the repair center, but everyone had to fill out the same personality evaluation thing. I answered the question "T/F: The customer is always right" with "False. See me for reason," and explained that the customer isn't always right, and in fact they may well be dead wrong and know it, but they will spend a lot more money if you treat them as though you believe they're right. The district manger wouldn't hire me as a tech -- he insisted he wanted me in sales.
So what happens when we have a society where only the X% of customers who are the most profitable for the store are permitted to shop there?
When I worked for Radio Shack, we had a customer who bought a laptop computer (a very high-priced item at the time, this was back in about 1990). The sales ticket said, printed right on it, that returns were not accepted after 30 days. A couple of months later, the customer came back and returned the computer. He "didn't like it." It was clear that he did like it -- from the wear on the case, he'd been travelling with it, and from the wear on the keyboard, typing all the time. The manager, who had sold it to him originally, pointed out the 30 day policy and refused to accept the return. The guy went to District and threw a fit, and the district manager insisted that we take it back. That cost our store manager a big chunk of his pay for that week, when they charged the commission on that laptop against his sales.
... from the look of the files on it, the guy had taken it with him on a month+ trip to Europe, then he brought it back for a full refund.
... nobody ever knew her name, we just called other Radio Shacks to tell them the red-haired woman was in the area again. She always tried to "return" various small items that she had no receipts for, claiming she got them as gifts. They included things such as expensive phonograph cartridges (yeah, that dates my story!) ... basically, anything that could be easily pocketed and walked off with. In one case she tried to "return" a game cartridge for a CoCo which I knew for a fact was stolen, because it was from our store, out of our demo CoCo ... I'd played that thing so many times myself, I knew every scuff in the label, and neither my boss nor I (only two people there since it had vanished) had sold it. While she was arguing with the person on duty about her "returns" her three kids were spreading out through the store to steal more stuff.
... you'd be lucky if they sent someone out three hours later, and maybe not until the next day. It took them over an hour, once, to respond to a reported break-in in our store. The Long Beach PD was a basket case for multiple reasons, and certainly no help to merchants with stores full of shoplifters.
We looked over the laptop
People like that deserve whatever they can be smacked with -- criminal charges for fraud being a good first step.
Then there was the red-haired woman
And no, calling the cops wasn't an option. This was in Long Beach, CA
The sad thing is that retailers use scumbags like that as an excuse to marginalize all customers they make less than the maximum profit on, such as people who only buy sale items. From the look of the original article, that is only going to get worse.
It's regional.
Take convenience stores and gas stations, for instance. In Virginia, when you pay for your gas they say "thank you" and you feel like they really mean it. In upstate New York, they mutter "thank you" and you're both satisfied with the business transaction. In Massachusetts, you feel like you got lucky they didn't throw your change in your face.
I have actually had a waitress in MA chase me outside a restaurant and throw the tip at me. Of course, that might have been because I left her a one penny tip for world-record shitty service, reaching new depths in bad.
One of my pet peeves: The sales clerks who come up to me, say "Are you all set?" and walk away -- generally when I'm trying to find something that isn't where it should be, looking for the price on something that isn't marked, or in the pet shop needing someone to catch me a fish.
Children in the US are generally raised to feel that saying "no" is rude -- to the point of saying "yes" and throwing subtle hints that it means "no" in social situations when the correct answer would be a flat-out "no" or promising to do things, then weaseling out of them later, because they feel it would be rude to refuse outright. Smart sales people know this, and always present questions where a "yes" answer will lead to further sales.
The default answer to "Are you all set?" (which translates to "You don't need any help, right?") is of course "yes", which allows the lazy sales clerk to get right back to whatever important goofing off they were doing at the time. They know what they're doing, and it baffles me that their managers don't put a stop to it. It does not improve the customers' feelings about a store, let alone their likelihood of finding or buying what they're looking for, to have someone say "I don't want to help you, just give me an excuse not to."
I worked for Radio Shack 10+ years ago when it was one of the pushiest hard-sell shops in the business. I quit because I didn't agree with their policies and sales tactics, especially granting credit to low-income people and then pushing them to buy flashy-looking products that were utter crap. They trained store staff intensively in how to sell, and it worked. You don't sell by saying "give me an excuse not to help you," you sell by not giving the customer a yes-or-no option but saying "How can I help you?" and getting them engaged with you. Joe Hourly might not give a flying whistle, but his boss's bonus is based on store sales, so why he allows that kind of behavior escapes me entirely. Just changing one phrase -- changing from "Are you all set?" to "How can I help you?" will make a difference in sales, not to mention in customer satisfaction.
My nearest Best Buy is in Crossgates Mall
... the mall that had a guy arrested for wearing a "Give Peace a Chance" T-shirt.
Ah, Crossgates
I've been reading through the working group papers. It looks to me like the whole thing was written by the goddamn spammers themselves. They want to make it virtually impossible for anyone outside of law enforcement agencies (and we know how good they are at stopping spam) from getting whois information.
... I saw some very convincing looking information from what appeared to be a grassroots organization on an issue I was somewhat interested in. (arguing against a pollution cleanup) Just out of curiousity, I did a whois on the domain, and found out that it was owend by the company that did the polluting ... the "grass" was astroturf.
... you can get in touch with the guy who's got unauthorized copies of your stuff and ask him to take it down, and settle things on friendly terms, without having to pay a lawyer a few hundred dollars to write a letter to say exactly the same thing. Maybe we should all be required to have lawyers walking around with us so that they can pass on anything we might want to say to someone we meet? And lawyers don't like being called "mouthpieces"? Feh!
We need better whois information, not less of it. We need it available to more people. We need more openness, not more secrecy. Openness cleans up problems -- secrecy nurtures them. Nor is it limited to spam and network abuse.
A random example
So people can spam me all they like, they can abuse the resources I depend on, they can attack my servers, they can do whatever they feel like, and with their domain registration information kept an ironclad secret by this new proposal, I can't do a damn thing about it. Oh, wonderful.
Or maybe it was written by the lawyers. One of the criticisms of the current policy by the working group is that it permits person-to-person contact without any lawyers involved. Yes, they actually said that. Gee, how terrible
Leviticus 11:20 All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you.
My Bible (New American Standard) has "all the winged insects that walk on all fours are detestable to you." One would have to assume that only covers a few species of butterflies, since most other insects have six legs.
The problem is the ISPs want to own your IP address and they use the shortage in IPV4 to retain control.
Why does this seem like the charge of the tinfoil hat brigade?
What a nefarious plot! The techies who route Internet data want to be able to assign the numbers they need to route it!
Saying that the ISPs want to own my IP address is like saying the phone company wants to own my port number on their switches. Duh! An IP address isn't a phone number, or anything close to it. This is a very bad analogy, but a domain name is more like a phone number. A phone number can be associated with any one of many different actual phone connections. Likewise, a domain name can be associated with any one of many different IP addresses. The whole point of the DNS system is to have portable addresses (domain names) which are independant of IP addresses. What this lazy, litigious oxygen-thief wants to do is basically break the entire routing system, and he's got some damnfool judge who thinks the Internet is something to catch Interfish with to agree with him. Letting an ignorant fool like that make decisions about how the Internet should be managed is like having some random net user making legal rulings. If you don't know wtf the situation involves, as it is clear that this judge didn't, then find someone who does.
Someone needs to whack the bloody fool of a judge with a clue-by-four. Maybe with a copy of The Internet for Dummies. For the love of Kibo, at least send him a link to How Stuff Works.
I'm a circa 1980 geek. :-)
No doubt a great deal of his concern is also over having to re-write a bunch of their application code to accomodate the new formats, in addition to lowering the level of obscure knowledge future competition needs to succeed.
They want the new formats available to them -- code rewrites and all -- they just don't want us, the people whose tax money is paying for it, to have access to them, so that they can resell us our own data. Can you say "corporate welfare"?
Because the government should not compete with the private sector. It's a simple enough principle, if there's something that the private sector is willing to do for-profit, then the government simply should not compete with them.
When Accu-Weather establishes their own network of thousands of automated and manned data collection stations, when they launch their own weather satellites, when they buy some of the world's fastest supercomputers and write global weather modelling software for them, when they set up hundreds of radar stations, and when they get a time machine to gather weather records from a hundred years before the company was founded, then they might have the right to deny information critical to life, safety, and livelihood to anyone other than their paying customers.
But since we, the taxpayers, own all of that, no private company -- not Accu-Weather, not anyone -- has the right to restrict the benefits of those taxpayer-owned resources to themselves.
Accu-Weather was not the first private weather company. If a system such as they want, where some or all data is limited to distribution solely to existing corporations, then Accu-Weather would never have been born. A grad student named Joel Myers wouldn't have had access to the data he needed to start making forecasts for local ski areas, and eventually expand that to a worldwide weather service. Of course, that scenario is exactly in Accu-Weather's best interest. Remember, while it's in our interest, as consumers, to have open competition in any given market and a wide array of choices, it is in the interest of the companies in that market to reduce competition and to raise the highest possible barriers to entry into that market, to protect their own position. That's what this is all about.
So you have surface reporting stations. Great. And no doubt a distributed computing system could, if sufficient experts could be found to write the models, replace the NWS's supercomputers.
But what about upper air observations? How about satellite data? How about over a hundred years of historical records? How about doppler radar? How about, in other words, all of the things that you can't get from looking out the window?
They'd be damned hard to replace with a volunteer network. The existing taxpayer-owned system has billions of dollars of infrastructure. The big issue is that Accu-Weather and their cronies want that taxpayer-owned infrastructure to benefit not the taxpayers, but only themselves.
In Microsoft's defense, they at least created new products (Word, Excel, Access) that did not exist...
... you think that word processors, spreadsheets, and databases originated with Microsoft?
... I guess they were hallucinations ... I seem to remember things like VisiCalc, VisiFile, etc., back around 1980, over a year before the IBM PC even existed, and long before anyone noticed an obscure little company called Microsoft.
... Microsoft didn't write MS-DOS; they bought a system called QDOS and renamed it. QDOS, in turn, wasn't all that original; it had a lot in common (not sure if at the source level) with CP/M, the most popular OS at the time. CP/M, in turn, wasn't very original either -- it was basically a microcomputer port of TOPS-10, though somewhat less user-hostile, or at least user-annoying. (anyone who remembers PIP, report to the old geeks' home immediately!)
... but Microsoft does not, and never has "created new products." That's not their business model.
Um
Just what exactly were people using back in the Apple II days, then? I have some remarkable memories
Innovation? Let's go back a ways
No matter what their PR flaks say, Microsoft has never been about innovation. They're all about finding other people's innovation, buying it, copying it, or stealing it (Stacker, anyone?), and bundling it into their own products. Whether or not this may create value is another flamewar entirely
Imagine the following scenario . . .
... which meant that small fires became major conflagrations by the time they reached the house of someone who could afford to pay a fire company. It was finally realized that, for the good of the entire city (except maybe for the marshmallow vendors) it was necessary to have a centralized fire service that responded to any fire before it could spread.
With NWS data and forecasts limited to only established corporations, rather than entrepreneurs and the private citizens who pay for them, the number of corporations providing that service will tend to shrink due to mergers, buy-outs, business failures, etc. That happens in just about every industry, and weather data and forecasting will be no exception. People would be dependant on a very few sources of weather information with no checks or balances.
Now imagine that one of those corporations provides the weather forecasts to the state of Florida. One day, their forecast shows them that there will be a hard freeze in a couple of days, which will severely damage the Florida orange crops. A few of the top-level people in that corporation delay that forecast for half a day or so, so that they have time to call their brokers and invest in frozen orange juice futures. I think you can take it from there.
There are some things so critical to the public good that the public has, over the past few hundred years, determined that it is in our best interest to jointly contribute to maintaining those services for ourselves, via our proxy, the government. (despite what some people, and a lot of politicians, forget, that is what a democratic government is: the proxy of the citizens, and the equivalent of a condo association hiring a guy to mow the lawns)
Firefighting, for instance, is one of them. We've had plenty of experience with privately run firefighting services, back in the 18th and 19th century. We found out they didn't work. They only extinguished fires in property owned by their subscribers
Employees in general theoretically have the best interests of their employers at heart. In the case of a public service such as the NWS, those employers are us, the citizens. In the case of a private service, those employers are the corporate officers and stockholders. When it comes to things that people's lives, safety, and livelihoods depend on, I am very reluctant to trust that service solely to people whose concern is not for the public good, not for my safety, not for a level playing field for all businesses, but solely for how much money they can gain.
And remember: Accu-Weather and the others don't want the National Weather Service privatized or abolished. They would collapse overnight if it was, because they utterly depend on its data. They want distribution of that taxpayer-funded data to be limited solely to them. They're perfectly happy with the NWS the way it is, so long as they are the only ones who can benefit from it.
So a government monopoly on weather services benefits us how exactly?
... which is how Joel Myers (Barry's brother) started Accu-Weather. This has nothing to do with a government monopoly on anything, and everything to do with protecting a few large companies from competition.
This is not about a government monopoly on weather services. The government has been providing this information for decades. It is, in fact, the very data that private weather services use to base their forecasts on. Accu-Weather and other corporations do not want to stop the government from producing this data -- they want to limit the government to providing it only to corporations, not to private citizens, so that they can resell the information that we taxpayers have already paid for back to us at a profit.
In addition, this would prevent some other entrepreneurial meteorology graduate student from using that data to make forecasts for local ski areas and eventually starting a weather company of his own
Whenever taxpayers subsidize a service that could be provided in the marketplace, that subsidy undermines the development of true competition for that service.
The private weather companies are not asking the National Weather Service to get out of the weather data collection and weather forecasting area. Those companies absolutely depend on the thousands of hourly observations collected by the NWS, on the computer forecast models generated by their supercomputers, etc. What those companies are demanding is that the NWS provide this data -- which we the taxpayers have already paid for -- only to the corporations, not to the taxpayers.
Any time Accu-Weather wants to pay to establish a network of thousands of observation stations to get the weather data they depend on, buy a few of the world's largest supercomputers and develop their own software to run models, launch satellites to track global weather, etc., then they are entirely within their rights to make that data available only to their customers. But we pay for those stations, for those supercomputers, for those satellites, and all the rest -- the very services that Accu-Weather and other corporations depend on to generate their own forecasts -- and we have every right to the data generated from them in any and every format that the National Weather Service -- the people employed by the taxpayers to do the job -- wants to give it to us, their employers, in.
Known good doesn't matter if they're known useless.
... fake bounce messages ... using images to replace keywords ... irrelevant words to fool filters ... false subjects, false senders, false headers, false everything ... and, of course, using "remove" addresses for validation.
Then why do you spammers go to great lengths to dodge around every attempt we make to avoid your deluge of sludge? Isn't the mere fact that someone filters out emails with the phrase "penis enlargement" in them just possibly a clue that the person is not a likely buyer of penis enlargement pills?
Yet you persist. You find new tricks. You use fake "personal" emails
Yeah, you really don't want to spam people who don't want your sludge. Right. Go tell it to Satan.
First-class mail rates significantly subsidize the cost of bulk mail.
Nope, it's the other way around. Bulk snail costs the postal service very little to process. It's delivered to the sending post office sorted by zip code and pre-coded; basically, all the system has to do is truck it where it's going and put it in the right bag. Your last birthday card, on the other hand, had to be picked up from the snailbox by a carrier, its address deciphered, bar-coded, sorted by destination, etc. For doing all of that, basically everything but the hauling and final delivery, they get a discount of a whopping six cents -- 30.9 cents instead of 37 cents. Bulk mail supports first class, not the other way around.
1) EFF aggregates list of spam-unfriendly addresses. 2) Spammer submits prospect addresses to EFF. 3) EFF returns list minus spam-unfriendly addresses. 4) Spammer compares cleaned list to original list 5) Spammer now has a list of known good addresses
For residential users, who do not pay a per-GB bandwidth transfer fee, spam costs nothing more than time just like telemarketers.
Where does that residential user's ISP get the money to buy the hardware and bandwidth to handle all that spam? The 4 out of 5 emails that their customers would do anything to avoid? Someone has to pay for it. Two words: end users. Just because you don't pay per GB for bandwidth doesn't mean you're not paying for it. It all gets worked into the monthly bill.
Spam is not a matter of 20 mails a week, it is a matter of hundreds a day and rising. A friend of mine whose email address was compromised by being listed on his college website recently had to abandon that address, and try to contact everyone who knew him to give them his new one, because he was getting 500+ spams a day: over 99% of his email.
The cost of sending snail mail keeps it to a reasonable level. It also means that it is generally very tightly targeted. For example, I subscribe to a gardening magazine, so I get seed catalogs. I do not even have a penis, so I have very little use for penis enlargement pills, let alone fake Viagra and pictures of naked women (with or without horses involved). But because there is effectively no cost to the spammer, I am bombarded with advertisements for all of the above.
You, sir, are clearly a filthy stinking spamming scumbag, or a troll, or both. However, for benefit of the lurkers out there who might actually be misled by your lies, I'll take some time to refute them:
... and not one of them has paid a penny to me, or to my clients, for any addresses they find. The only person paying anything to anyone is me, for the bandwidth they're using in order to gather those addresses, and my clients, who (like all end users) are the ones who end up paying in the end.
Spam is fundamentally identical to telemarketing and direct postal mail.
Spam is nothing like telemarketing or direct postal mail. It is fundamentally identical to telemarketing to your cell phone where you have to pay for airtime. It is telemarketers calling collect and no option to hang up, postage due junk mail with no choice to refuse to pay.
The money telemarketers pay for those calls goes to the companies that carry the network traffic, namely the local and/or long distance phone companies. The telemarketer pays for the network resources they use.
The cost of handling bulk mail is less than what the Post Office charges to send it. The profits the Post Office makes from the bulk mailers pay for the hardspace "network" resources for everyone else.
Spammers do not pay for the resources they use. I've seen recent figures as high as 4 out of 5 emails sent are spam. To look at it another way, this means that if your ISP allocates $10,000 of their revenues to buy some new mailservers, then you, their customer, are only getting the benefit of $2,000 worth of new hardware; the other $8,000 is spent to deliver spam. Since that money is coming from you and other subscribers, then your ISP either has to raise your rates or not give you the increase in service they otherwise would have. If $1 a month out of your bill goes for hardware upgrades, you're getting 20 cents worth and the rest is going to deliver spam.
Spam in no way subsidizes the Internet. The spammers are not paying for the resources they use. They are forcing other people to pay to handle traffic that they do not want. They are forcing every ISP out there, from the big backbone providers to SouthPodunkNet, to shoulder the cost of their advertising. The only money a spammer pays to actually support the network is the cost of a cheap dialup account somewhere. All the rest is paid to other scum for things like lists of email addresses, access to innocent people's hijacked computers, etc. But he is using 10^6 or more of the network resources as everyone else.
When you give your email to a website operator, and that website operator sells it, that money is what keeps your content cheap or free.
Very, very, very few addresses used for spam are those given voluntarily to a website operator. In fact, out of the hundreds of email addresses I've used with various websites and companies, I've gotten spam at exactly one: the one I gave to iBill. The vast majority of addresses used by spammers are extracted from web pages, forum posts, domain registration information, and just about anywhere else.
I watch spammers' spiders scanning domains that I host
Then there are the dictionary spams. Some hijacked computers in Brazil have been bombarding one of my domains all day with spam to random non-existant addresses, trying to find some that get through. People who don't even exist certainly didn't give their email addresses to anyone!
As it happens, I'm the webmaster as well as host for a site with a fair bit of free content, so I think I am in a position to know something of the economics of it. It works like this:
Neither I nor my client has ever received a single penny from a spammer. This particular client happens to have a mailing list (extremely opt-in, and protected like the vault at Fort Knox) for a newsletter. If he should wish to sell it to a spam list vendor, just how much would a list of under a hu
I disagree with the idea that "there is a large chunk of the population that is simply never going to be interested in video games." I think it's simply that they have not yet found the right game, probably because nobody has created that game yet. There are people who are not interested in movies, too, but they're a minority. Remember, this is a whole new market compared to other forms of entertainment. The game industry is still trying to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.
While I'm waiting for you to get modded down as the troll (or neanderthal) you are, I'm bored enough to reply to entertain the lurkers.
So, if that's what women gamers are "really" like, what am I? My MMORPG experience has been primarily Shadowbane and DAoC (RR5). I lived for PK. And no, not my own team. My favorite games of all time include StarCraft, Civilization, MOO2, WarCraft, and Age of Empires. (yes, I have a Napoleon complex) Lately, I've been playing Conqueror a lot. (free web wargame, check it out) I enjoy FPS's but, sadly, I can't compete with teenage reflexes and/or aimbots. About the only games I won't play at least once are card games (except Solitaire when I'm on the phone), flying games (no fun without expensive controllers), and anything that says "The Sims" on it or involves other people but has no way to gank them.
Oh, and not only do I know how to turn on the computer but I build them (including both of my current game machines) and not only can I post on forums, I'm a decent Perl coder and could write a forum system if I needed one.
You, I suspect, will discard this entire description as anomalous data. Your mind is made up and you won't be confused by little things like reality. If a data point fits your preconceptions, you keep it to support them; if it doesn't fit into your existing worldview, you throw it away. I can imagine you, in the middle of a room full of thousands of women hunched over their keyboards in white-knuckle UT deathmatches, finding some reason to say they don't count at all.
I suspect you think the average woman acts the way you describe because either a) you ignore any instances of women not acting that way, or b) women who don't act that way (that is, who are normal, ordinary people) want nothing to do with someone like you.