It's perfectly valid to have an email address at a TLD, though some email address format validators don't know that, and of course if you want a _real_ address of that form, you need to know the CC TLD administrators. Back in the early more-cooperative days, friends of mine ran the first Internet services on a small Caribbean island, and the TLD ran from a home in Berkeley. Several of their friends had addresses of that form. I don't know if Vince ever gave everybody on the island an email address under the CCTLD, but it was a small enough place he could have (either for account-holders only or mail-forwarding for everybody.)
1 - You are not a lawyer either. 2 - If you use an address that belongs to a real person, it's rude, and you should be careful not to do that. It's extremely rude if you're actually impersonating them (e.g. sending letters to the editor of a newspaper) or signing them up at some spammer site, but it's generally rude anyway. However, president@whitehouse.gov and billgates@microsoft.com aren't real people's addresses. 3 - This is the more interesting case (but you still shouldn't do it):
If you use a reserved domain like example.com, that's proper.
If you use a non-existent top-level domain, you're potentially causing a DNS hit to the root DNS servers, though usually ISP DNS servers will reject it.
If you use a non-existent second-level domain in an existing TLD, you'll hit the DNS servers for that TLD (e.g. com or de), which are heavily loaded, mostly with bogus requests, and you really shouldn't do that on purpose.
If you use a domain name that resolves to 127.0.0.1, you've added a bit of load to their DNS server, but they're having a good time so it's no problem, and the traffic won't go anywhere that bothers anybody.
If you use a nonexisting username on an existing domain, their message will hit the SMTP server, which will waste a bit of its time and bandwidth rejecting it (unless the server is misconfigured or an MX forwarder, in which case it'll waste more time with a bouncegram later.)
If you use a real person's name on a real domain, they'll get mail, and if you use a service-address name like postmaster@, they'll also get mail.
If you use an email address on a honeypot server, you're giving it grist for the mill and good for you.
If you use an email address on a known spammer's server, like optinrealbig.com, and the person you gave the address to is a spammer, good for you. But if the person you gave the address to _isn't_ a spammer, you're encouraging them to send mail to someone who'll abuse them.
The really annoying cases are when the person you gave the address to is a spammer who does dictionary-attacks. One of my customers had their own mail server, but used us for MX service, and spammers have started spamming MX addresses rather than direct addresses because MX servers usually don't have spam filters - so when some miscreant dictionary-attacked them, our server started to forward N million spams, mixed in with a small number of messages from their real customers (some of whom used our mail servers for their outgoing email, and some of whom used the MX when their direct SMTP server fell over and died trying to process the dictionary attack.) Ugly stuff.
You're three characters too long - x@cc is also legal, where cc is a country-code top-level domain. They're hard to get (:-), but back in the old days a friend of mine started internet services on a Caribbean island, and another friend ran the TLD out of his home in Berkeley, so several usual suspects got that kind of email address. I don't know if he gave an email address to everyone on the island (either direct accounts or forwarder), but he could have done that, plus or minus some resolution for duplicate names.
By the way, "$" is a legal username, so $@cc could work. Lot of naive valid-address checkers reject x@cc, and more of them reject $@cc.
Dodgeit.com is a similar service, but doesn't have all the graphical clutter or ads, so it's much faster to use. The front page has a link you can click if you want to make a donation, but otherwise it doesn't bug you. While Mailinator says they delete the account after a couple hours, it looks like the messages may stick around for an arbitrarily long time until the operator does garbage collection, and dodgeit's the same way. So don't use it for anything real private - but also don't use it for anything you'll mind losing if you don't pick it up quickly.
I've used dodgeit for a number of online newspaper registrations and such. The two problems I run into are that many of them don't let more than one person use a given address (e.g. nytimes@dodgeit.com is taken already), and many newspapers use realcities.com to handle their registration, so it's easiest to use a consistent address for them.
A couple of years ago, example.com handling changed - it now exists to give you warning messages. In the past, the name was reserved by IANA, and listed in whois as being reserved, but it didn't resolve to an IP address. There's now an IP address (192.0.34.166), which resolves as example.com and www.example.com, and it doesn't have an SMTP server, but does have a web server which tells you
You have reached this web page by typing "example.com", "example.net", or "example.org" into your web browser.
These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration. See RFC 2606, Section 3.
And there are a lot more stories about nursing home staff who are underpaid, undertrained, and so understaffed they don't have enough time for everything they need to get done, much less time to be attentive to the residents and/or patients (depending on the type of place.)
Higher-priced independent living places usually do better at it, but they're essentially doing a hotel's job (and often run by hotel chains such as Marriott), but lower-end places and places that need more nursing care are usually a tough job situation.
My mother used to live in a retirement home, because she can't see well enough to drive. The section she was in was basically an apartment building with a cafeteria and weekly maid service. She decided to move back into an apartment, mainly for cost reasons, and spend part of the difference on more taxis. One thing that was universal, whether you needed it or not, was that you had to check in daily so they knew you were okay and not lying on the floor with a broken hip, which happens a lot to old people.
My mother-in-law is living in a retirement home. She's not very mobile, and needs people to help with a few things, and living in her apartment got too hard and too dangerous, because the "I've fallen and I can't get up" problem is really serious if you can't get up (she can't), plus it's hard to find cooks who'll stay around for more than a few months (that seems to be a very temporary job for most people who do it.) And she doesn't want to move up to the frozen north to live with us.
The last place she lived had an Alzheimers wing. We didn't see those people very often, but they do wander off and get lost, and some are in worse shape than others. My grandfather spent about four years seriously senile in a nursing home, and needed a lot of reminding and help to do things; my grandmother was in the same room, clearheaded to the end but in bad physical shape. They didn't really like the place, but that had a lot to do with institutional cooking and inattentive nursing staff, and the other place they'd tried wasn't much better.
A passport, at least in a semi-free society, isn't a government document granting you permission to leave or permission to travel.
It's a request from your government to other governments to please treat you nicely because you're their citizen or subject, and in particular it's a request to let you travel through their country. It usually includes a committement to accept you back if the other government wants to kick you out. Many countries have rules about checking passports when you get on international airplanes or boats because the airline/boatline doesn't want to have to take you back if you're refused entry.
So if Free Enterprise Space Stations Inc. wants to be rude to visitors who've paid a very large sum of money for a ride and insist that they have their papers in order before they take the trip, well, they can do that, and government passports might be useful. It's more likely that you'd need a working Visa card than a visa, however - the papers-in-order bit is more likely to apply to government-run (i.e. military-run) space stations.
That was the magazine article's author's figure, not Bigelow's. Remember that these "hotels" only make sense if they're in orbit, and that probably means a lot higher than 62 miles if they want to be somewhere stable for long enough to make back their investment. Mir hung out around 195 miles; ISS is at 400km. So 200-mile-high club is probably about right.
Browsers don't always bother checking DNS expiration times and rechecking the address when they time out. This used to be less of an issue on IE because Windows used to bluescreen several times a day (:-) but these days it can be a problem.
I work in Silicon Valley, so I've seen a lot of friends at startups. One thing that happens as they grow is that they hire "professional" HR bureaucrats, usually when the company hits about 200 people. That's when most of them cancel the every-Friday-afternoon beer party out of worries about liability for something or other, and start acquiring bureaucratic rules for one thing and another. Eventually there's a purchasing department that's different from the over-worked office-manager surrogate-mother type who got hired to run operations when the company hit about 10 people. The ping-pong table comes and goes, depending on the level of overcrowding of office space (unless you're in a building tall enough to have elevators, in which case there's often space for it next to the top-and-a-halfth-story elevator machinery room.)
At that point, you need to start working hard to preserve corporate culture and prevent bureaucrats from draining the life out of it. Next thing you know they'll stop paying to bring in dinner when you're working late every night, even if it is only pizza and bad Chinese, and if they're especially stupid, they'll replace the Peet's Coffee with Costco stuff.
If your company is heading down the tubes, you want to make sure you're in the position that for regular services that you care about, like your cellphone, DSL/cable, etc., that you're paying for them and getting reimbursed, rather than the company paying for them and they'll disappear abruptly if Bad Things happen. Cell Phone Number portability might make that easier, but it might make it harder, if your company owns the phone number. Major travel expenses are the opposite - you want them on the company credit card, so if they tank you're not stuck for the money.
A decade or so ago, one of my friends had the recommendation that you should always have your own email, independent of your employers, so you've got continuity and people can reach you even if your job situation changes - especially so you've got an email account for your resume. It was good advice, as I found out six months later when I got laid off:-) These days, of course, the idea of not having independent connectivity and half a dozen email accounts seems old-fashioned, but back then it was important. I haven't done that with my cellphone (I suck at doing regular paperwork, and I've had the company-provided phone number for almost 10 years, and we're a quasi-stable company though we do keep laying people off.)
I once was on a project which had 40 hours a week of scheduled meetings (it was about four large companies teaming to bid on a government project.) While we were working long hours out of town, it _was_ really quite liberating, because it was obvious to everybody that with the full work week scheduled for meetings, nobody would get any actual work done, so it was ok to blow off any meeting where you weren't _really_ essential, except the 15-minute status&announcements meeting first thing every morning.
Sure, cell phones are a necessary tool and a standard part of modern life, but it's possible to perceive them as a perk, because they're something you want to have.
Pagers on the other hand, are obviously a boring business tool, an annoying thing you're carrying around because the company wants to be able to tell you when to hop to it and do stuff for them. (That's not always true for things like Blackberrys and such, but pretty much.) If the company wants you on that kind of a leash, they can pay for it (plus pagers are really cheap these days anyway.)
Sure, back before cell phones it was actually personally useful to have a pager because my wife could also reach me when I was out, but they're basically a drag.
Don't sweat the small stuff, but make sure that your boss knows that this kind of disrespect is unprofessional and bad for morale, and make sure the CIO knows the cost of voucher processing that's going to be involved for reimbursing business phone calls and cell minutes and roaming charges and other nickel&dime crap.
If I were an official full-time virtual office employee, the company would pay for a second phone line and probably for broadband, and wouldn't provide me with a desk at the office. I'm not, and they don't , but they also don't pay for my car on the rare occasions that I drive to the office.
Back when I was supporting a group that really needed hands-on support, we had crappy little shared-cubicle desks with too much noise; now that I'm supporting a group of remote folks, working from home, our local office moved to a much better building, so the desk I don't go to is much nicer and a bit closer.
They used to pay for cell phones directly, including mine. They now make you get your own, and you can voucher business use up to some reasonable amount - back before we did vouchering on the web, the cost of processing a paper voucher was about the same as my typical monthly phone bill if I wasn't roaming much. My managers have let me keep the same phone with them paying for it directly, as long as I don't do anything that changes the contract too much (e.g. getting a 408 phone number instead of 415 might cause it to fall off the grandfathering list, and I'm not sure if changing to GSM would or not, but bumping the number of minutes up or down was no problem.) That'll probably all change when Cingular finishes buying AT&T Wireless.
VOIP means that anywhere in the world with decent Internet connectivity is a local call away from you - at most it costs the 2-3 cents/minute that US local telcos charge to deliver calls, and sometimes not even that much, especially if you've got a VOIP phone.
A free service that has a much higher cost is Deaf Relay Service - in the past you could use a TDD to call the relay operator, who'd make a voice phone call to a hearing person, but now they support Internet-based relaying as well - so they've been getting a huge amount of abuse from Nigerian 419 spammers and other scams. (You can find the Slashdot discussions about it yourself.)
I've had a Nigerian 419 spammer call my cell phone using deaf relay; really annoying.
Hi, Brad - A couple of people have mentioned small distributions, including Puppy Linux, Feather Linux, Peanut Linux, etc. that can fit on a USB, in most cases a now-obsolete 64KB USB. That should let you boot quickly (better with USB2.0, of course) and have the main applications as well as your LAN going.
Puppy is designed to load itself into RAMdisk and not need to run from the boot media - I don't know for sure if that lets the hard drives or CDROM shut down, but you can probably tweak the Power Management utilities to make that happen. The LiveCD is about 50MB, so it won't take long to download.
Somebody's selling a slightly faster Thinkpad 390 on Ebay for $50:-)
As far as USB1.1 slowness goes, it's a tradeoff - the bus is limited to 12 Mbps, aka 1.5MB/sec, which is 8X CD speed, so it's no barn-burner, but there's no disk drive latency either. A typical disk read has seek+rotation time somewhere over 5ms on desktop drives, and more like 10-15ms on a laptop drive, so if you transfer 15KB of data at 10MB/sec, that's at least 6.5ms or 11.5 or 16.5 . On the USB drive, it'll take you about 10ms. If you're doing big reads, then yeah, the hard drive wins, but if you're doing small fragmented reads, the USB is faster. So programs may take a few seconds to start up, but once they're running, they're mostly running pretty fast.
OK, it only has a 6GB disk in it, so you might rather spend the money on a new 20GB disk for $50-75 on EBay, or a smaller disk for ~$30. Or you could spend $75 on a DVD/CD drive on EBay and run Knoppix, with your current USB stick as a home directory:-) You can also get a PCMCIA hard drive (eBay prices look like $20 for Viper 340MB), but I don't think those are bootable so you'd probably need to boot from floppy - think of it as a cheap slow USB stick:-)
Yes, the article said the best deal the guy could find was ~$130. The guy wasn't looking anywhere near hard enough. He didn't say that he currently _had_ a memory stick, but the price of 256MB of flash in whatever format is pretty similar to lower-priced 20GB disks, and 40GB disk is similar to 512MB flash. There are some Linux distros that'll do fine in 128MB (for small values of "fine", but that seems to be ok for this guy.)
Sure, it's great to use free Wi-Fi when it's available. But commercial Wi-Fi support would let them also use it whenever they can see a commercial hotspot, for a fee that's not at all that excessive compared to 56kbps Inmarsat - typically $5-10/day.
I'm surprised that most large ports don't already have arrangements for that sort of thing...
Is it possible to design better slashdotting bait than that? Even screenshots of a new Linux release or an MPEG of Natalie Portman making hot grits is unlikely to get hit much faster.
Back in the mid 80s, computers were a bit larger than they are today. (No, not PCs, _real_ computers.) Disk drives were the size of washing machines and cost $35000 for 256 MB. Our VAX had four of them, giving us a Gigabyte of storage, but unfortunately the shipping people had handled them like washing machines, and one of them had a dented corner. Totally useless. Worse, we had bought everything direct from DEC to avoid problems, but apparently the shipping wasn't part of "everything", because our shipping bureaucrats insisted on doing it themselves. Took forever to get the thing replaced.
A friend of mine had a more dramatic but overall better experience with an IBM mainframe. There were two devices (I forget if these were washing-machine size or refrigerator size), and the machines arrived on a Saturday so she went in to have it delivered and signed for. They opened the truck ramp onto the loading dock, and she escorted one of the drivers to the lab with one of the computers. They got back and found that the other driver had moved the truck, in spite of the fact that the ramp had had the other computer sitting on it, so it had fallen three feet down onto concrete. Needless to say, she was concerned, and when the truckers wanted her to sign for the equipment, she refused, and she ended up talking to a sales VP at IBM, which is not a bad trick for a Saturday. He told her to accept it and mark it as damaged, and they'd take care of it (which, being IBM, they did.) The driver indicated "damaged in shipment" on the forms - she crossed it out and wrote "Dropped off loading dock".
Slashdot Mirror
It's perfectly valid to have an email address at a TLD, though some email address format validators don't know that, and of course if you want a _real_ address of that form, you need to know the CC TLD administrators. Back in the early more-cooperative days, friends of mine ran the first Internet services on a small Caribbean island, and the TLD ran from a home in Berkeley. Several of their friends had addresses of that form. I don't know if Vince ever gave everybody on the island an email address under the CCTLD, but it was a small enough place he could have (either for account-holders only or mail-forwarding for everybody.)
The zip code for that part of DC is 20006, so I'll sometimes use that instead of 90210, at sites that insist on validating.
2 - If you use an address that belongs to a real person, it's rude, and you should be careful not to do that. It's extremely rude if you're actually impersonating them (e.g. sending letters to the editor of a newspaper) or signing them up at some spammer site, but it's generally rude anyway. However, president@whitehouse.gov and billgates@microsoft.com aren't real people's addresses.
3 - This is the more interesting case (but you still shouldn't do it):
- If you use a reserved domain like example.com, that's proper.
- If you use a non-existent top-level domain, you're potentially causing a DNS hit to the root DNS servers, though usually ISP DNS servers will reject it.
- If you use a non-existent second-level domain in an existing TLD, you'll hit the DNS servers for that TLD (e.g. com or de), which are heavily loaded, mostly with bogus requests, and you really shouldn't do that on purpose.
- If you use a domain name that resolves to 127.0.0.1, you've added a bit of load to their DNS server, but they're having a good time so it's no problem, and the traffic won't go anywhere that bothers anybody.
- If you use a nonexisting username on an existing domain, their message will hit the SMTP server, which will waste a bit of its time and bandwidth rejecting it (unless the server is misconfigured or an MX forwarder, in which case it'll waste more time with a bouncegram later.)
- If you use a real person's name on a real domain, they'll get mail, and if you use a service-address name like postmaster@, they'll also get mail.
- If you use an email address on a honeypot server, you're giving it grist for the mill and good for you.
- If you use an email address on a known spammer's server, like optinrealbig.com, and the person you gave the address to is a spammer, good for you. But if the person you gave the address to _isn't_ a spammer, you're encouraging them to send mail to someone who'll abuse them.
The really annoying cases are when the person you gave the address to is a spammer who does dictionary-attacks. One of my customers had their own mail server, but used us for MX service, and spammers have started spamming MX addresses rather than direct addresses because MX servers usually don't have spam filters - so when some miscreant dictionary-attacked them, our server started to forward N million spams, mixed in with a small number of messages from their real customers (some of whom used our mail servers for their outgoing email, and some of whom used the MX when their direct SMTP server fell over and died trying to process the dictionary attack.) Ugly stuff.By the way, "$" is a legal username, so $@cc could work. Lot of naive valid-address checkers reject x@cc, and more of them reject $@cc.
I've used dodgeit for a number of online newspaper registrations and such. The two problems I run into are that many of them don't let more than one person use a given address (e.g. nytimes@dodgeit.com is taken already), and many newspapers use realcities.com to handle their registration, so it's easiest to use a consistent address for them.
Higher-priced independent living places usually do better at it, but they're essentially doing a hotel's job (and often run by hotel chains such as Marriott), but lower-end places and places that need more nursing care are usually a tough job situation.
My mother-in-law is living in a retirement home. She's not very mobile, and needs people to help with a few things, and living in her apartment got too hard and too dangerous, because the "I've fallen and I can't get up" problem is really serious if you can't get up (she can't), plus it's hard to find cooks who'll stay around for more than a few months (that seems to be a very temporary job for most people who do it.) And she doesn't want to move up to the frozen north to live with us.
The last place she lived had an Alzheimers wing. We didn't see those people very often, but they do wander off and get lost, and some are in worse shape than others. My grandfather spent about four years seriously senile in a nursing home, and needed a lot of reminding and help to do things; my grandmother was in the same room, clearheaded to the end but in bad physical shape. They didn't really like the place, but that had a lot to do with institutional cooking and inattentive nursing staff, and the other place they'd tried wasn't much better.
It's a request from your government to other governments to please treat you nicely because you're their citizen or subject, and in particular it's a request to let you travel through their country. It usually includes a committement to accept you back if the other government wants to kick you out. Many countries have rules about checking passports when you get on international airplanes or boats because the airline/boatline doesn't want to have to take you back if you're refused entry.
So if Free Enterprise Space Stations Inc. wants to be rude to visitors who've paid a very large sum of money for a ride and insist that they have their papers in order before they take the trip, well, they can do that, and government passports might be useful. It's more likely that you'd need a working Visa card than a visa, however - the papers-in-order bit is more likely to apply to government-run (i.e. military-run) space stations.
That was the magazine article's author's figure, not Bigelow's. Remember that these "hotels" only make sense if they're in orbit, and that probably means a lot higher than 62 miles if they want to be somewhere stable for long enough to make back their investment. Mir hung out around 195 miles; ISS is at 400km. So 200-mile-high club is probably about right.
Browsers don't always bother checking DNS expiration times and rechecking the address when they time out. This used to be less of an issue on IE because Windows used to bluescreen several times a day (:-) but these days it can be a problem.
At that point, you need to start working hard to preserve corporate culture and prevent bureaucrats from draining the life out of it. Next thing you know they'll stop paying to bring in dinner when you're working late every night, even if it is only pizza and bad Chinese, and if they're especially stupid, they'll replace the Peet's Coffee with Costco stuff.
A decade or so ago, one of my friends had the recommendation that you should always have your own email, independent of your employers, so you've got continuity and people can reach you even if your job situation changes - especially so you've got an email account for your resume. It was good advice, as I found out six months later when I got laid off :-) These days, of course, the idea of not having independent connectivity and half a dozen email accounts seems old-fashioned, but back then it was important. I haven't done that with my cellphone (I suck at doing regular paperwork, and I've had the company-provided phone number for almost 10 years, and we're a quasi-stable company though we do keep laying people off.)
I once was on a project which had 40 hours a week of scheduled meetings (it was about four large companies teaming to bid on a government project.) While we were working long hours out of town, it _was_ really quite liberating, because it was obvious to everybody that with the full work week scheduled for meetings, nobody would get any actual work done, so it was ok to blow off any meeting where you weren't _really_ essential, except the 15-minute status&announcements meeting first thing every morning.
Pagers on the other hand, are obviously a boring business tool, an annoying thing you're carrying around because the company wants to be able to tell you when to hop to it and do stuff for them. (That's not always true for things like Blackberrys and such, but pretty much.) If the company wants you on that kind of a leash, they can pay for it (plus pagers are really cheap these days anyway.)
Sure, back before cell phones it was actually personally useful to have a pager because my wife could also reach me when I was out, but they're basically a drag.
If I were an official full-time virtual office employee, the company would pay for a second phone line and probably for broadband, and wouldn't provide me with a desk at the office. I'm not, and they don't , but they also don't pay for my car on the rare occasions that I drive to the office.
Back when I was supporting a group that really needed hands-on support, we had crappy little shared-cubicle desks with too much noise; now that I'm supporting a group of remote folks, working from home, our local office moved to a much better building, so the desk I don't go to is much nicer and a bit closer.
They used to pay for cell phones directly, including mine. They now make you get your own, and you can voucher business use up to some reasonable amount - back before we did vouchering on the web, the cost of processing a paper voucher was about the same as my typical monthly phone bill if I wasn't roaming much. My managers have let me keep the same phone with them paying for it directly, as long as I don't do anything that changes the contract too much (e.g. getting a 408 phone number instead of 415 might cause it to fall off the grandfathering list, and I'm not sure if changing to GSM would or not, but bumping the number of minutes up or down was no problem.) That'll probably all change when Cingular finishes buying AT&T Wireless.
Get your colors straight, man!
A free service that has a much higher cost is Deaf Relay Service - in the past you could use a TDD to call the relay operator, who'd make a voice phone call to a hearing person, but now they support Internet-based relaying as well - so they've been getting a huge amount of abuse from Nigerian 419 spammers and other scams. (You can find the Slashdot discussions about it yourself.)
I've had a Nigerian 419 spammer call my cell phone using deaf relay; really annoying.
Puppy is designed to load itself into RAMdisk and not need to run from the boot media - I don't know for sure if that lets the hard drives or CDROM shut down, but you can probably tweak the Power Management utilities to make that happen. The LiveCD is about 50MB, so it won't take long to download.
As far as USB1.1 slowness goes, it's a tradeoff - the bus is limited to 12 Mbps, aka 1.5MB/sec, which is 8X CD speed, so it's no barn-burner, but there's no disk drive latency either. A typical disk read has seek+rotation time somewhere over 5ms on desktop drives, and more like 10-15ms on a laptop drive, so if you transfer 15KB of data at 10MB/sec, that's at least 6.5ms or 11.5 or 16.5 . On the USB drive, it'll take you about 10ms. If you're doing big reads, then yeah, the hard drive wins, but if you're doing small fragmented reads, the USB is faster. So programs may take a few seconds to start up, but once they're running, they're mostly running pretty fast.
Yes, the article said the best deal the guy could find was ~$130. The guy wasn't looking anywhere near hard enough. He didn't say that he currently _had_ a memory stick, but the price of 256MB of flash in whatever format is pretty similar to lower-priced 20GB disks, and 40GB disk is similar to 512MB flash. There are some Linux distros that'll do fine in 128MB (for small values of "fine", but that seems to be ok for this guy.)
But commercial Wi-Fi support would let them also use it whenever they can see a commercial hotspot, for a fee that's not at all that excessive compared to 56kbps Inmarsat - typically $5-10/day.
I'm surprised that most large ports don't already have arrangements for that sort of thing...
Is it possible to design better slashdotting bait than that? Even screenshots of a new Linux release or an MPEG of Natalie Portman making hot grits is unlikely to get hit much faster.
A friend of mine had a more dramatic but overall better experience with an IBM mainframe. There were two devices (I forget if these were washing-machine size or refrigerator size), and the machines arrived on a Saturday so she went in to have it delivered and signed for. They opened the truck ramp onto the loading dock, and she escorted one of the drivers to the lab with one of the computers. They got back and found that the other driver had moved the truck, in spite of the fact that the ramp had had the other computer sitting on it, so it had fallen three feet down onto concrete. Needless to say, she was concerned, and when the truckers wanted her to sign for the equipment, she refused, and she ended up talking to a sales VP at IBM, which is not a bad trick for a Saturday. He told her to accept it and mark it as damaged, and they'd take care of it (which, being IBM, they did.) The driver indicated "damaged in shipment" on the forms - she crossed it out and wrote "Dropped off loading dock".