but orchestrated neglegence like that can't just happen without around 10,000 employees knowing about it.
They may know about it but they don't know what it is. Take any task and divide it into its components. Then separate the authority for each of those components into a different department. Then surround each different department with paperwork which they use to charge for their hours or verify a work order. Then make the intersystem storage and communication of this paperwork a real PITA. 10000 workers see it as business as usual. On any given day you'll probably hear an employee of BellSouth (or any other company) swear something similar to,"This is the absolutely stupidest way to get this done. Why do they make us do this?"
So yes. Orchestrated negligence is used as a business tactic all the time. Anyone on the inside who manages to figure it out is sternly instructed to get back to work, maybe even cited for insubordination.
Odd. Ten years ago the land line was standard and people were debating whether or not they really needed a cell phone.
Re:Natural disasters on demand!
on
Artificial Tornadoes
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
it would be a major violation of Federal laws, including The Constitution
Funny how that pesky Constitution gets in the way when we want to help victims of a massive disaster but it's never much of a problem when we want to suck the money out of their wallets from behind closed doors.
You didn't make anything. You spent $480/hour for the privelege of buying at their store and, in this special case, they were kind enough to refund your money. Don't be deluded.
I was at the bank the other day. I walk up to the teller to take care of my transactions and, after she accesses my account, she says,"Oh. You live at such-and-such address? I used to live in that building as well."
WAIT.
How much do I want unprivileged people (bank tellers, rebate processors, anyone) to know where I live? I don't know where they live. Lord only knows who works in those institutions.
Secondly, nobody involved in the rebate process has any interest in ensuring you get your money - they already have yours. You are basically at your mercy. There is only the market pressure of bad customer experience, which is a relatively weak force - and it means that you need to go out of your way to ensure that you get what is owed to you. If you tried the same tricks on your Best Buy Financing payments that they use on your rebate checks, you'd watch as they destroyed your credit rating
Sounds like employment:
Nobody involved in the performance review process has any interest in ensuring you get a reasonable raise--they already have theirs. You are basically at their mercy. There is only the pressure of you flat out leaving, which is completely suicidal option--and, in the US, it means you'll probably end up homeless within a few months (depending upon your level of savings). If you tried the same tricks on your employer that they use on you then you would watch as they escorted you out the door.
So it's really a government backdoor ploy to get access to Internet records by allowing the companies to move into a position where they'll be legally required to keep those records?
Interesting move. Another example that government is a sack of shit.
I'm not sure about the legislation part. I'm not real happy about giving my politicians any more excuses to jack my paycheck anymore than they already do.
"If I go to the airport, I can buy a coach standby ticket or a first-class ticket," Smith said. "In the shipping business, I can get two-day air or six-day ground."
Or when I go to the library the librarian can charge me an additional fee to use the encyclopedias. Or when he goes to Washington he have his lobbying group slip a few extra G-notes to the proper politicians to have his pet legislation prioritized. Or when enough websites have been scammed in then the next thing will be to start charging users,"Is your 3 megabit connection too slow when loading Slashdot? For an extra fee of $15/mo. we will allow you to prioritize any 5 domains!" It'll be just like returning to the good old days of minute by minute access charges. Always watching the clock wondering if the extra access charge might be worth it and counting the pennies left in the piggy bank to see if there's enough for your son to be able to afford class textbooks, lunch money, and decent network access. Maybe he'll just have to suffer with 20 minute load times for a 3 mb document.
Of all the low-down dirty extortionist ideas ever hatched. No one's stopping him from using QoS routing right now but what he's proposing is pure opportunistic greed. I suppose it doesn't matter to him--he makes enough money that he can afford to throw away an extra $200/mo. should policies like this ever become commonplace. As for the masses: Let them eat cake!
I like reading the forum posts to keep track of the prevailing popular opinions and sometimes to add my own point of view. In this case, after clicking Read More, the first thing I did was search for pine.
While pine has the option to launch external apps for custom content I don't subscribe to that group. If a file is sent to me I'd much rather save it to the HD so that I can dissect it from there.
Want to send me an HTML e-mail? DON'T. It's stupid. Send a link to a page if you must or, preferably, use a LART and rewrite the e-mail in plain text.
Imagine a world where the most prominent communication platform is speech or plain text. Oh the horror. One wonders how man managed to not die out prior to 1995.
Nerves are necessary to signal muscles. The face has so many fine muscles. It's much more complicated than an arm of even a hand. Until something like the reconstruction process from The Fifth Element comes out I will continue to assert that a face transplant is an unnecessary PR stunt when compared with available plastic surgery techniques.
I also speak with over 25 years of personal experience in plastic surgery with respect to burns ranging from topical to severe enough to mutilate the underlying bone structure.
it is a practice that's probably as old as commerce itself
I agree. It is a quantifiable characteristic. At one time the electronics industry was at an acceptable level. When I was a young child I had an electronic basketball game. Four directions, one shoot button, and players small red blips on a screen. For all practical purposes it was a solid state device. If I played it for five or six hours at a time, though, every once in a while it would lock up and I'd have to turn it off and back on. If the battery was getting weak this would happen more often. Early Atari and Colecovision game systems were similar. They worked but, if played for 10-12 hours at a time, they might start to exhibit bugs. As operating systems gained complexity the level of acceptable bugs and the frequency with which an application or even the whole system would crash was adjusted accordingly.
After 1990, however, is when quality went WAY down. Coding was a mature enough field by then. There is no excuse for the crap that came out of the proprietary software (and hardware) makers after 1990. It happened abnormally quickly. By 1995 with the commercialization of the internet well underway quality was at an all-time low--and the people still bought it (mostly because tax dollars were being thrown into it like water over Niagara Falls but that's an entirely separate scam rant). Software quality is no longer at an acceptable level. Most software which is sold, for a price, is somewhere between alpha and beta stages and the consumers are used as the beta testers--and they pay for it. Linux users are beta testers as well but at least we don't have to shell out hard earned cash for the privelege of doing someone else's troubleshooting work for them.
I'm not asking for zero bugs. I'm asking for an acceptable cost:quality ratio. Quality is a combination of bugs, features, size, and speed. After enduring 10 years of completely piss poor quality from Microsoft I don't think they'll ever be able to salvage their reputation.
Personally I'd like to see Microsoft (and most proprietary software companies) get their asses handed to them on a silver platter. With them gone OSS could get some decent funding. With decent funding and a polished product I'd voluntarily pay $50/year for something like Debian Sid.
You missed the part back around 1990 when software producers quit producing quality software and began foisting code which would barely pass as beta-test quality onto consumers--and then doubled the price. The current situation is not acceptable and has not been acceptable for 15 years.
At one time companies actually hired people to break software. Then the stock market investors figured out that the profit margin would be higher if they just sell the beta code and let the consumer deal with it. Alpha and beta testing is currently run on a skeleton crew with a skeleton budget for one purpose... someone else's profit. That's what makes it a scam.
Woe to you when the day comes that someone ridicules whatever it is that gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. At the end of the day everyone is working on something which is arguably useless and anachronistic. Time to wake up and face reality. Life is pointless.
I think you're jealous because you're being forced to admit that you couldn't figure it out even if you wanted to.
You remind me of a fellow who was convinced that he was superior to everyone else due to hard work, dedication, and skill. His eyes were so tightly shut that, one day, when he reached around to pat himself on the back for his own superiority he ended up grabbing his pecker and masturbating until he shot himself in the eye. Can you believe it? He was so completely oblivious to the way things work that, when he thought he was congratulating himself, he was really just masturbating. I guess it worked for him, though, because he felt better for it and continued to walk around feeling superior to everyone else. He never noticed the big wad dripping from his face, though, because he was, as I've said, so completely oblivious to the entire world.
We're not talking just skin here, but muscles, arteries and veins too
That's what the article would have you believe. Do you really believe that they were able to reattach every little vein and artery one by one? Most of the veins and arteries in your face are less than 1 mm wide and their pattern is more uniquely identifying than the back of your eye. They're not labelled "vein" or "artery" either and the different types of vessels have specific internal features which make them incompatible. It's not like they have arrows imprinted on them to show flow direction. For every vessel which they've reattached there's a 50/50 chance the patient will end up with an ugly mass of varicose veins popping out of their cheek looking worse than severe acne.
Muscles are the same way. How many muscles are in the face? How many tendons, ligaments, and nerves does it take to coordinate all of them? You can't just stick two nerves together and expect them to magically work like an electrical wire. It's nearly impossible that they were reattached in a manner which could provide a better overall result than PMMA, cartilege gel, and skin grafts using the patient as their own donor.
It's much more likely that "muscles, arteries, and veins" is padding for the press release. The story wouldn't sound as good without them, and technically the doctors are hoping that the veins and arteries grow back together, so within editorial license it's acceptable to say. Right. After reading the forum posts it's apparent that the PR spin works for people who aren't deeply familiar with surgery or anatomy.
Heart transplants work because the heart keeps its rhythm even outside the body and, if I remember correctly, there is one, maybe a small handful of, nerve(s) which serve for biofeedback control. The face is not this autonomously developed nor is it this simplified.
Debt is not accumulated. Debt is inherited. The federal debt to the Federal Reserve is a real debt. The priority to pay it off is low. The interest accumulating from that debt is rising. The debt is borne by the people through taxes. The Federal Government has sold the taxpaying majority into inescapable debt. This is managed through a pyramid scheme of wages and taxes. Up to a take home pay of $43k/year an individual is constantly seeking systems (clipping coupons, sale hunting, roommates, selling drugs, whatever) to help them keep up with the daily cost of living. Only above a take home pay of $43k/year is the daily cost of living sufficiently covered such that real investment potential is realized. Yes, a great majority of people live on incomes well below this level--and every single one of them is either astronomically frugal (not to be expected of anyone considering the wealth of this nation) or living paycheck to paycheck and constantly in danger of falling into debt. This is through no fault of their own. Again, considering the wealth of this nation, this situation is completely unacceptable.
The bankruptcy system is not designed to help anyone. It's designed to legally lock people into a system which can continually track them.
Combine the two and you have a taxpaying population of indentured servants. Go ahead and argue. You're wrong.
It's possible that the person you're debating with has a ridiculously irresponsible son who ran up debts buying ice cream and donuts. That's always the default argument. Pointing out a few irresponsible people does not justify the system of exploitation.
who aren't tech savvy would expect that the 911 service would have worked
911 does work. Dial and a remote operator picks up. The cases where 911 are needed and the caller doesn't know their location cannot be even a significant percentage of all 911 calls. Red herring poster child cases, maybe. Maybe you have some empirical data to justify why tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars are being spent dicking around with this issue? As long as you have a dialtone you have 911. 911 was never meant to be an all-inclusive automatic emergency button. The fact that it is expected to be one is further evidence that American society is in denial about the natural reality that this still is a live at your own risk world.
Do you go around test dialing 911 on every phone you use to make sure it works?
Mostly I wish 911 would go away completely and permanently. The whole argument of "the sky may fall and you may need 911" or "the sky has fallen and some people have needed 911" doesn't justify the administrative and legislative headache, not to mention the potential abuses, cost, pork, and lobbying money required by the system. Has anyone computed the total cost of ownership for 911? I was much happier when I had a list of emergency phone numbers posted on the refrigerator or as a sticker on the phone. Look. No more 911 and no more lobbyist problem in the current situation. See how easily this could be solved?
I draw the line at personal responsibility. No where have I ever seen a VoIP salesman claim that VoIP provides full, uninterruptable 911 service. If someone needs full uninterruptable 911 service then they should know enough to ask about it.
Given your need to throw the "welfare state" into this argument I can see that you will probably never agree with what I have to say. How the hell is that remotely relavant to this discussion?
Your position requires that the 70 year old is oblivious to the requirements of the technology. My counterpoint is that human beings don't make it to 70 if they're blissfully ignorant of the technology which they rely on--unless there's a welfare state supporting that ignorance.
And people no longer have that expectation because 911 is damn near universal in the United States
This isn't about 911 availability. This is about being aware of the conditions which allow you to live. By age 5 you've probably realized that you can't turn on the light bulb unless it's plugged in. By age 70 one hopes that's it's immediately obvious that electricity and a network connection are required for a VoIP telephone. By age 70 one hopes that they know how to call for help. What about all the 70 year olds who don't have a telephone? What of the ones who have telephones but only corded ones and maybe they fall? What of the ones who have cordless phones but they dropped it out of reach when they fell? The 911 argument based on the needs of a hypothetical 70 year old doesn't end until we all have emergency call buttons embedded in our palms.
Given the fact that in many cases you could port your existing number (that presumably had E-911 service) to the VoIP service it seems pretty harsh to blame the consumer
Why is it mandatory to assign blame to the VoIP provider? What about "no blame"? It's a live at your own risk world. It's perfectly reasonable to expect, if a consumer has VoIP service, that they are well aware of the limitations of that service.
The ethical considerations is that the doctors participating in this are using it as a PR/media stunt. With current existing tissue engineering and plastic surgery technologies it is not necessary to perform a face transplant and subject the recipient to long-term immunosuppressants.
The ethical problem is with the doctor. Existing technologies are sufficient to reconstruct the face without the need for immunosuppressants for the rest of the recipient's life.
Transplanting a face is a PR stunt and MAYBE an academic exercise. It should not be standard treatment procedure. The article, by citing "10,000 burn patients in the UK", is trying to trump this sort of thing up to standard procedure.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you have another phone with pulse capability other than the modem?
So yes. Orchestrated negligence is used as a business tactic all the time. Anyone on the inside who manages to figure it out is sternly instructed to get back to work, maybe even cited for insubordination.
You didn't make anything. You spent $480/hour for the privelege of buying at their store and, in this special case, they were kind enough to refund your money. Don't be deluded.
Agreed. And here's why.
I was at the bank the other day. I walk up to the teller to take care of my transactions and, after she accesses my account, she says,"Oh. You live at such-and-such address? I used to live in that building as well."
WAIT.
How much do I want unprivileged people (bank tellers, rebate processors, anyone) to know where I live? I don't know where they live. Lord only knows who works in those institutions.
Nobody involved in the performance review process has any interest in ensuring you get a reasonable raise--they already have theirs. You are basically at their mercy. There is only the pressure of you flat out leaving, which is completely suicidal option--and, in the US, it means you'll probably end up homeless within a few months (depending upon your level of savings). If you tried the same tricks on your employer that they use on you then you would watch as they escorted you out the door.
Everything they release is beta (if that). They just don't call it beta so you still pay money for it.
So it's really a government backdoor ploy to get access to Internet records by allowing the companies to move into a position where they'll be legally required to keep those records?
Interesting move. Another example that government is a sack of shit.
It's been long enough. You should've been modded insightful by now.
Quite nice.
:)
I'm not sure about the legislation part. I'm not real happy about giving my politicians any more excuses to jack my paycheck anymore than they already do.
But still quite nice.
Of all the low-down dirty extortionist ideas ever hatched. No one's stopping him from using QoS routing right now but what he's proposing is pure opportunistic greed. I suppose it doesn't matter to him--he makes enough money that he can afford to throw away an extra $200/mo. should policies like this ever become commonplace. As for the masses: Let them eat cake!
I like reading the forum posts to keep track of the prevailing popular opinions and sometimes to add my own point of view. In this case, after clicking Read More, the first thing I did was search for pine.
Attachments: check.
Address book: check.
Managed folders: check.
Menu-driven interface: check.
Configurability: check.
Full headers: check.
No bloat: check.
Secure: check.
While pine has the option to launch external apps for custom content I don't subscribe to that group. If a file is sent to me I'd much rather save it to the HD so that I can dissect it from there.
Want to send me an HTML e-mail? DON'T. It's stupid. Send a link to a page if you must or, preferably, use a LART and rewrite the e-mail in plain text.
Imagine a world where the most prominent communication platform is speech or plain text. Oh the horror. One wonders how man managed to not die out prior to 1995.
Nerves are necessary to signal muscles. The face has so many fine muscles. It's much more complicated than an arm of even a hand. Until something like the reconstruction process from The Fifth Element comes out I will continue to assert that a face transplant is an unnecessary PR stunt when compared with available plastic surgery techniques.
I also speak with over 25 years of personal experience in plastic surgery with respect to burns ranging from topical to severe enough to mutilate the underlying bone structure.
After 1990, however, is when quality went WAY down. Coding was a mature enough field by then. There is no excuse for the crap that came out of the proprietary software (and hardware) makers after 1990. It happened abnormally quickly. By 1995 with the commercialization of the internet well underway quality was at an all-time low--and the people still bought it (mostly because tax dollars were being thrown into it like water over Niagara Falls but that's an entirely separate scam rant). Software quality is no longer at an acceptable level. Most software which is sold, for a price, is somewhere between alpha and beta stages and the consumers are used as the beta testers--and they pay for it. Linux users are beta testers as well but at least we don't have to shell out hard earned cash for the privelege of doing someone else's troubleshooting work for them.
I'm not asking for zero bugs. I'm asking for an acceptable cost:quality ratio. Quality is a combination of bugs, features, size, and speed. After enduring 10 years of completely piss poor quality from Microsoft I don't think they'll ever be able to salvage their reputation.
Personally I'd like to see Microsoft (and most proprietary software companies) get their asses handed to them on a silver platter. With them gone OSS could get some decent funding. With decent funding and a polished product I'd voluntarily pay $50/year for something like Debian Sid.
You missed the part back around 1990 when software producers quit producing quality software and began foisting code which would barely pass as beta-test quality onto consumers--and then doubled the price. The current situation is not acceptable and has not been acceptable for 15 years.
At one time companies actually hired people to break software. Then the stock market investors figured out that the profit margin would be higher if they just sell the beta code and let the consumer deal with it. Alpha and beta testing is currently run on a skeleton crew with a skeleton budget for one purpose... someone else's profit. That's what makes it a scam.
Woe to you when the day comes that someone ridicules whatever it is that gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. At the end of the day everyone is working on something which is arguably useless and anachronistic. Time to wake up and face reality. Life is pointless.
I think you're jealous because you're being forced to admit that you couldn't figure it out even if you wanted to.
I have a question for you. It will give you a chance to redeem yourself.
Does the federal deficit exist? Note: This is not the trade deficit.
1 point. Yes or no.
You remind me of a fellow who was convinced that he was superior to everyone else due to hard work, dedication, and skill. His eyes were so tightly shut that, one day, when he reached around to pat himself on the back for his own superiority he ended up grabbing his pecker and masturbating until he shot himself in the eye. Can you believe it? He was so completely oblivious to the way things work that, when he thought he was congratulating himself, he was really just masturbating. I guess it worked for him, though, because he felt better for it and continued to walk around feeling superior to everyone else. He never noticed the big wad dripping from his face, though, because he was, as I've said, so completely oblivious to the entire world.
Come back when you have something real to say.
Muscles are the same way. How many muscles are in the face? How many tendons, ligaments, and nerves does it take to coordinate all of them? You can't just stick two nerves together and expect them to magically work like an electrical wire. It's nearly impossible that they were reattached in a manner which could provide a better overall result than PMMA, cartilege gel, and skin grafts using the patient as their own donor.
It's much more likely that "muscles, arteries, and veins" is padding for the press release. The story wouldn't sound as good without them, and technically the doctors are hoping that the veins and arteries grow back together, so within editorial license it's acceptable to say. Right. After reading the forum posts it's apparent that the PR spin works for people who aren't deeply familiar with surgery or anatomy.
Heart transplants work because the heart keeps its rhythm even outside the body and, if I remember correctly, there is one, maybe a small handful of, nerve(s) which serve for biofeedback control. The face is not this autonomously developed nor is it this simplified.
Score parent -1 naive.
Debt is not accumulated. Debt is inherited. The federal debt to the Federal Reserve is a real debt. The priority to pay it off is low. The interest accumulating from that debt is rising. The debt is borne by the people through taxes. The Federal Government has sold the taxpaying majority into inescapable debt. This is managed through a pyramid scheme of wages and taxes. Up to a take home pay of $43k/year an individual is constantly seeking systems (clipping coupons, sale hunting, roommates, selling drugs, whatever) to help them keep up with the daily cost of living. Only above a take home pay of $43k/year is the daily cost of living sufficiently covered such that real investment potential is realized. Yes, a great majority of people live on incomes well below this level--and every single one of them is either astronomically frugal (not to be expected of anyone considering the wealth of this nation) or living paycheck to paycheck and constantly in danger of falling into debt. This is through no fault of their own. Again, considering the wealth of this nation, this situation is completely unacceptable.
The bankruptcy system is not designed to help anyone. It's designed to legally lock people into a system which can continually track them.
Combine the two and you have a taxpaying population of indentured servants. Go ahead and argue. You're wrong.
It's possible that the person you're debating with has a ridiculously irresponsible son who ran up debts buying ice cream and donuts. That's always the default argument. Pointing out a few irresponsible people does not justify the system of exploitation.
Mostly I wish 911 would go away completely and permanently. The whole argument of "the sky may fall and you may need 911" or "the sky has fallen and some people have needed 911" doesn't justify the administrative and legislative headache, not to mention the potential abuses, cost, pork, and lobbying money required by the system. Has anyone computed the total cost of ownership for 911? I was much happier when I had a list of emergency phone numbers posted on the refrigerator or as a sticker on the phone. Look. No more 911 and no more lobbyist problem in the current situation. See how easily this could be solved?
I draw the line at personal responsibility. No where have I ever seen a VoIP salesman claim that VoIP provides full, uninterruptable 911 service. If someone needs full uninterruptable 911 service then they should know enough to ask about it.
This isn't about 911 availability. This is about being aware of the conditions which allow you to live. By age 5 you've probably realized that you can't turn on the light bulb unless it's plugged in. By age 70 one hopes that's it's immediately obvious that electricity and a network connection are required for a VoIP telephone. By age 70 one hopes that they know how to call for help. What about all the 70 year olds who don't have a telephone? What of the ones who have telephones but only corded ones and maybe they fall? What of the ones who have cordless phones but they dropped it out of reach when they fell? The 911 argument based on the needs of a hypothetical 70 year old doesn't end until we all have emergency call buttons embedded in our palms.
Why is it mandatory to assign blame to the VoIP provider? What about "no blame"? It's a live at your own risk world. It's perfectly reasonable to expect, if a consumer has VoIP service, that they are well aware of the limitations of that service.
The ethical considerations is that the doctors participating in this are using it as a PR/media stunt. With current existing tissue engineering and plastic surgery technologies it is not necessary to perform a face transplant and subject the recipient to long-term immunosuppressants.
The ethical problem is with the doctor. Existing technologies are sufficient to reconstruct the face without the need for immunosuppressants for the rest of the recipient's life.
Transplanting a face is a PR stunt and MAYBE an academic exercise. It should not be standard treatment procedure. The article, by citing "10,000 burn patients in the UK", is trying to trump this sort of thing up to standard procedure.