AST was the Stream group of which I was a part. There were some good people in the group, but there were a lot of punters and idiots, too.
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Orwellian Tech Support
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Something about this article said "bogus" to me
Negative. This article is absolutely accurate.
I don't know if other outsource companies do this, but Stream uses the title "mentor" for its second-level people (the tech support guy's tech support).
I worked at Stream, and I can personally confirm that it is completely accurate in describing what life is like there. The metric for success is NOT "Did you solve problems for the customers today?" but rather "How many calls did you take today?" Nothing else matters. It was particularly bad in our group, because The Customer was really fastidious about checking over our shoulders. This meant that punters would be caught much quicker than average, but it also meant that we had two sets of almost mutually contradictory objectives: "Solve Problems!" and "Get off that phone NOW!!"
Perhaps the most revealing story I can tell is the one about the staff meeting where our manager's boss was meeting with our manager and every tech on our team. Our manager was standing behind the Boss when a tech asked a Yes-or-No question of the Boss. Our manager immediately started wagging his head "No" and frowning, as though he thought it was a stupid question. In the next instant, the Boss said "Yes" and proceeded to expand on that answer. Almost simultaneously, our manager switched from a frowning "No" to a smiling "Sure!", wagging his head up and down instead.
It was one of the most amazing brown-nosing performances I've ever witnessed.
I can't tell you how happy I am not to be trapped in that dead-end job anymore, but if I absolutely had no other choice, I'd do it again. There's a lot of pressure, but no one ever asks you to take work home or work extra hours.
Before POTS can go completly away we would first need to get rid of at least fax machines and dialup.
We need to do more than that. I looked at a house this week that still had a rotary phone: not because the phone system in the area couldn't handle touch-tone, but because the homeowner - an elderly woman - didn't care for newfangled flibberty-jibbets.
The vast majority of people will have to *want* to ditch traditional phone systems before they finally do get ditched. Taco's got geek blinders on if he doesn't realize that early adopters are just that: early.
Actually, I just remembered a Republican/Texan boondoggle that got killed: the SuperCollider. IIRC, that thing was rammed through by the Texas delegation (with GOP "conservative" Phil Gramm blazing the way), only to get killed a few years later, in an astonishing turnaround. I think it got killed as a punishment to the guys that shoved it through, didn't it?
Still, that's just one boondoggle in the last several decades that somehow got killed; usually, that never happens.
Just remember that this was your opinion when a Democrat president continues this program in 8 years.
Cynicism cuts both ways. I don't doubt that this boondoggle's motivation includes a hefty dollop of political scheming, but Democrats are at the very least the equals of any GOPer when it comes to the pursuit of political gain at the expense of tax dollars: they both say "There's plenty more where that came from!"
From what little bit I studied the Bible, it is commonly accepted that all of the gospels were written long enough after the death of Christ that not one of them could have been a first hand account by anyone alive at the time.
This turns out not to be the case. In the first place, you would have to say (on the basis of zero evidence) that John was a liar, since he explicitly claims to have been an eyewitness. In the second place, this late dating of the gospels is only "commonly accepted" by people who refuse to believe even the possibility that the content of the gospels is true: hardly an impartial audience.
More importantly, there is evidence to demonstrate that these naysayers don't know what they are talking about: namely, references to a parody of Matthew that was written by Gamaliel no later than 70AD.
Well, he couldn't have written a parody of a non-existent document. And he wouldn't have written a parody of a document that no one took seriously. And it would have been pointless to write a parody of a book so new that no one had heard of it. So it's entirely reasonable to suggest that Matthew wrote his gospel no later than 60AD. So in fact there is no reason whatever to pretend that it wasn't written by an eyewitness.
Now, with respect to Bible books as being universally firsthand accounts - that, of course, is a given: Moses, after all, lived millennia after the events recorded in the early chapters of Genesis; and as you rightly say, this fact doesn't mean that Genesis isn't true.
I can't believe I'm reading a Slashdot poster who actually appears to understand that baptism replaces circumcision as the initiatory rite into the covenant.
The problems with "opt out" lawsuits are that they put the burden on me to extract myself from being legally represented by attorneys that I did not hire in a legal action that I did not initiate over a dispute that does not involve me, and that I become legally bound by the results of the lawsuit. Why should I have to go to the trouble of following "opt out" instructions (printed in small print) to the letter in order to avoid this sort of nonsense? I didn't have a problem with my mortgage company (to use one personal example). I didn't have a problem with my credit card company (to use another).
I don't suppose I would have as much problem with these lawsuits if they were "opt in", because then the plaintiffs arguably can be identified as people with a grievance. As it stands, "opt out" is nothing more than a nifty way for lawyers to fatten the size of their own paychecks. It's disgusting.
Well, then let's take a look at what the original poster said:
You CANNNOT buy a laptop from anywhere (except used) without a manditory copy of Windows XP installed on it... Pretty sad... paying all that Micro$oft tax and all.
This gentleman pretty categorically denied even the possibility of obtaining a new laptop without a Microsoft OS. I demonstrated that this is not the case. That was my point.
your link points to a firm that's trying to survive as a "niche" business
Which has nothing to do with the OP's point. He said it wasn't possible. It is. The fact that it's a niche market is irrelevant in the present context.
Until the top 10 "name brand" systems (like Toshiba, IBM, HP, Dell, etc.) all offer *any* of their computers with or without an OS pre-loaded on them, and offer choices like Linux or BSD as well as Windows - I'd say it still holds generally true you're stuck buying Windows bundled with your new system.
This is a different assertion than that of the OP, and since you say that it's "generally" true, I'd "generally" agree with you;-) although Wal-Mart perhaps could change that, if they started selling Lindows laptops. Other than that - you *can* get a computer without Windows, but you frequently have to look extra hard. FWIW, you can buy a Dell Precision workstation with Red Hat pre-loaded on it today, and you can do it over the web in the same way that you would do it if it was going to have Windows installed. I suspect that you'd still be paying the Microsoft tax; the price is really no different for these boxes than for a Win-box. (Of course, the OP was talking about laptops, so this doesn't really apply).
Perhaps you ought to visit this page and see whether that's true or not. Run any of those systems through their configurator, and you'll come to the page where you get to select the Linux distro (even dual-bootable with FreeBSD) that you like.
It's not that you can't do it; it's that most people won't do it that is the problem.
Earlier this year I finally tossed out an LCD TI calculator that I bought in approximately 1978. It had the original batteries in it. The case was cracked, but the thing still worked, 25 years later. On more than one occasion I had discovered the thing in a drawer with the power accidentally left on, but the batteries still managed to survive. Throwing it out was painful after 25 years; it was like shooting my dog.:-(
the only way I'd believe it is with hard, solid proof.
And what might that be? Get god to look me in the eye and say "UnrefinedLayman, I do exist. Watch me smite someone!"
And what if it is not God's character to do so? What if he doesn't behave that way?
Your answer is flippant, but the fact remains that on average when people say they want "cold, hard, facts", they already have pre-conceived notions of how God ("if he really exists," they think) ought to act. Then they presume to stand in judgment of him, by denying his existence, simply because he doesn't act they way that they think he ought to act.
On the one hand, it's gross hubris, because we've already decided what kind of God we're willing to believe in, consdescendingly detaching that from any serious consideration of what God is really like: "God had better jump like Hop Sing, or I'll have nothing to do with him!" What arrogance!
On the other hand, the attitude that "I'll only believe in God if he meets my conditions" is also wholly ignorant: God exists as who he is whether he meets your "standards" or not. We don't get to decide what the definition of "is" is.
I suggest that perhaps you have concocted a fanciful idea of what you think God ought to be like, and because your non-existent imagined "God" doesn't say "How high?" when you say "Jump", you conclude that he doesn't exist.
The real God doesn't come a-running like some Step-n-fetch when UnrefinedLayman (or Dictator For Life) starts howling.
I have no reason to believe it
That's up for debate, but granting it for the sake of argument: neither do you have any reason to disbelieve it. Right?
Well, for (a) we have the following: conjecture, speculation, unsubstantiated claims.
Hogwash. The evidence is all around you. Part of the evidence *is* you.
For (b), if we have even the barest logical reason for believing it
And we don't. Game over.
Your math illustration is defective. Timmy is obviously the atheist, who has nothing on which to base his ridiculous views. So he begs, borrows, or steals oranges from Jimmy the Christian theist, labels his oranges "grapefruit", and then starts selling them. The fact that he calls his fruit something other than what they are doesn't change the fact that they are still oranges. Unfortunately, he happens to attend a particular government school where the teachers and most of the students are perfectly willing to believe that oranges are really grapefruit, so he has a huge potential market.
I believe he said Christianity not "Christians". I know a rather good number of people who claim to be Christians, but seem to be quite oblivious to what saying such a thing would entail.
If he had said "Christendom" rather than "Christianity" there would be no argument here. Christendom as a civilization is dead, but Christianity is anything but dead.
(b) There is no god, and religion is an institution that has its roots in superstition and social control
One has to make the most likely choice given the evidence at hand. Most logical, lucid people who discount that which cannot be proven find themselves coming to logical conclusions.
So, on the basis of exactly *what* "evidence" (remember, you said "given the evidence at hand") have you concluded that "(b) There is no god..."?
how many years after Jesus's death were they written?
It's highly unlikely that John lived 100 years after Christ's death and resurrection. At the very outside, you could guess the end of the 1st century.
Very recently there was a bit of news that studies of the Talmud had discovered a note to the effect that Gamaliel (major rabbi, from the 1st century) wrote a parody of the gospel of Matthew. If this is true, then it helps in dating at least that gospel significantly. Gamaliel died in approx. 70 AD, so this parody had to be written before then - which means the gospel of Matthew was written before then. Plus, because it was a parody, the gospel had to have been widely known - otherwise, no one would have gotten the joke. This strongly suggests that Matthew wrote his gospel even earlier - at least a decade, anyway.
You have an unsupportably narrow definition of hypocrisy.
Okay - in what is regrettably an uncommonly rare occurrence on Slashdot, I'll grant that I have been mistaken. But even by a broader definition, I still don't think that Bennett warrants the label. The regular definition is that a hypocrite is someone who pretends to a virtue that he doesn't actually possess. In Bennett's case, he's a gambler - but the Roman Catholic Church - of which he is a member - doesn't condemn gambling (think: Knights of Columbus bingo).
I'm not questioning or denying that the incident has really made Bennett look bad. It certainly has. But I don't think there's any legitimate way to say that he's a hypocrite. He hasn't to my knowledge pretended to be anything other than a practicing Catholic, and his gambling doesn't change that.
I am sure that he believes gambling is not a moral behavior.
Unless you've got some documentary evidence you'd care to share, this is totally unwarranted, when there *are* reports indicating he has never publicly condemned gambling.
In his position he cannot hector others' harmless vices while having any himself and be clear of hypocrisy.
Please identify a "harmless vice" he has criticized.
A vice is a vice because it's immoral.
No - at least, certainly not in Bennett's Catholic view of the world. Smoking is widely regarded as a vice, but only uptight Baptist fundies consider it to be a sin; Catholics certainly do not. A vice may be immoral, but if it is, in the Catholic view then it's a sin and not just a vice. Smoking is a vice in that it's a "bad habit"; gambling is a vice in that it's a "bad habit".
I'll concede that I was much too strict in my use and understanding of "hypocrisy" - but even on a broader sense, I'm afraid I'm not convinced that Bennett's gambling lowers him to the level of the hypocrite.
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By your logic the Treasury can reclaim any rare coins by buying it back at face value.
Or they can just declare possession of them to be illegal, and confiscate them - just like FDR did with gold coins.
Fortunately, a lot of people ignored this larcenous decree, or we would not have $20 St. Gaudens coins around!
AST was the Stream group of which I was a part. There were some good people in the group, but there were a lot of punters and idiots, too.
Negative. This article is absolutely accurate.
I don't know if other outsource companies do this, but Stream uses the title "mentor" for its second-level people (the tech support guy's tech support).
I worked at Stream, and I can personally confirm that it is completely accurate in describing what life is like there. The metric for success is NOT "Did you solve problems for the customers today?" but rather "How many calls did you take today?" Nothing else matters. It was particularly bad in our group, because The Customer was really fastidious about checking over our shoulders. This meant that punters would be caught much quicker than average, but it also meant that we had two sets of almost mutually contradictory objectives: "Solve Problems!" and "Get off that phone NOW!!"
Perhaps the most revealing story I can tell is the one about the staff meeting where our manager's boss was meeting with our manager and every tech on our team. Our manager was standing behind the Boss when a tech asked a Yes-or-No question of the Boss. Our manager immediately started wagging his head "No" and frowning, as though he thought it was a stupid question. In the next instant, the Boss said "Yes" and proceeded to expand on that answer. Almost simultaneously, our manager switched from a frowning "No" to a smiling "Sure!", wagging his head up and down instead.
It was one of the most amazing brown-nosing performances I've ever witnessed.
I can't tell you how happy I am not to be trapped in that dead-end job anymore, but if I absolutely had no other choice, I'd do it again. There's a lot of pressure, but no one ever asks you to take work home or work extra hours.
We need to do more than that. I looked at a house this week that still had a rotary phone: not because the phone system in the area couldn't handle touch-tone, but because the homeowner - an elderly woman - didn't care for newfangled flibberty-jibbets.
The vast majority of people will have to *want* to ditch traditional phone systems before they finally do get ditched. Taco's got geek blinders on if he doesn't realize that early adopters are just that: early.
Still, that's just one boondoggle in the last several decades that somehow got killed; usually, that never happens.
Cynicism cuts both ways. I don't doubt that this boondoggle's motivation includes a hefty dollop of political scheming, but Democrats are at the very least the equals of any GOPer when it comes to the pursuit of political gain at the expense of tax dollars: they both say "There's plenty more where that came from!"
This turns out not to be the case. In the first place, you would have to say (on the basis of zero evidence) that John was a liar, since he explicitly claims to have been an eyewitness. In the second place, this late dating of the gospels is only "commonly accepted" by people who refuse to believe even the possibility that the content of the gospels is true: hardly an impartial audience.
More importantly, there is evidence to demonstrate that these naysayers don't know what they are talking about: namely, references to a parody of Matthew that was written by Gamaliel no later than 70AD.
Well, he couldn't have written a parody of a non-existent document. And he wouldn't have written a parody of a document that no one took seriously. And it would have been pointless to write a parody of a book so new that no one had heard of it. So it's entirely reasonable to suggest that Matthew wrote his gospel no later than 60AD. So in fact there is no reason whatever to pretend that it wasn't written by an eyewitness.
Now, with respect to Bible books as being universally firsthand accounts - that, of course, is a given: Moses, after all, lived millennia after the events recorded in the early chapters of Genesis; and as you rightly say, this fact doesn't mean that Genesis isn't true.
Shocking. Thank you.
I don't suppose I would have as much problem with these lawsuits if they were "opt in", because then the plaintiffs arguably can be identified as people with a grievance. As it stands, "opt out" is nothing more than a nifty way for lawyers to fatten the size of their own paychecks. It's disgusting.
Well, then let's take a look at what the original poster said:
You CANNNOT buy a laptop from anywhere (except used) without a manditory copy of Windows XP installed on it... Pretty sad... paying all that Micro$oft tax and all.
This gentleman pretty categorically denied even the possibility of obtaining a new laptop without a Microsoft OS. I demonstrated that this is not the case. That was my point.
your link points to a firm that's trying to survive as a "niche" business
Which has nothing to do with the OP's point. He said it wasn't possible. It is. The fact that it's a niche market is irrelevant in the present context.
Until the top 10 "name brand" systems (like Toshiba, IBM, HP, Dell, etc.) all offer *any* of their computers with or without an OS pre-loaded on them, and offer choices like Linux or BSD as well as Windows - I'd say it still holds generally true you're stuck buying Windows bundled with your new system.
This is a different assertion than that of the OP, and since you say that it's "generally" true, I'd "generally" agree with you ;-) although Wal-Mart perhaps could change that, if they started selling Lindows laptops. Other than that - you *can* get a computer without Windows, but you frequently have to look extra hard. FWIW, you can buy a Dell Precision workstation with Red Hat pre-loaded on it today, and you can do it over the web in the same way that you would do it if it was going to have Windows installed. I suspect that you'd still be paying the Microsoft tax; the price is really no different for these boxes than for a Win-box. (Of course, the OP was talking about laptops, so this doesn't really apply).
It's not that you can't do it; it's that most people won't do it that is the problem.
Earlier this year I finally tossed out an LCD TI calculator that I bought in approximately 1978. It had the original batteries in it. The case was cracked, but the thing still worked, 25 years later. On more than one occasion I had discovered the thing in a drawer with the power accidentally left on, but the batteries still managed to survive. Throwing it out was painful after 25 years; it was like shooting my dog. :-(
yes, i am a leftwing whiner
Realizing that you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery.
That's a joke, son. ;-)
And what might that be? Get god to look me in the eye and say "UnrefinedLayman, I do exist. Watch me smite someone!"
And what if it is not God's character to do so? What if he doesn't behave that way?
Your answer is flippant, but the fact remains that on average when people say they want "cold, hard, facts", they already have pre-conceived notions of how God ("if he really exists," they think) ought to act. Then they presume to stand in judgment of him, by denying his existence, simply because he doesn't act they way that they think he ought to act.
On the one hand, it's gross hubris, because we've already decided what kind of God we're willing to believe in, consdescendingly detaching that from any serious consideration of what God is really like: "God had better jump like Hop Sing, or I'll have nothing to do with him!" What arrogance!
On the other hand, the attitude that "I'll only believe in God if he meets my conditions" is also wholly ignorant: God exists as who he is whether he meets your "standards" or not. We don't get to decide what the definition of "is" is.
I suggest that perhaps you have concocted a fanciful idea of what you think God ought to be like, and because your non-existent imagined "God" doesn't say "How high?" when you say "Jump", you conclude that he doesn't exist.
The real God doesn't come a-running like some Step-n-fetch when UnrefinedLayman (or Dictator For Life) starts howling.
I have no reason to believe it
That's up for debate, but granting it for the sake of argument: neither do you have any reason to disbelieve it. Right?
Obviously not. But you are the one claiming that God doesn't exist, not me. Are you able to justify your claim or not?
I need the hard solid proof
Tell me what would satisfy you. I'm insanely curious.
Meanwhile, since you insist that you have said what you meant, you still haven't presented the evidence for your claim that there is no God.
Hogwash. The evidence is all around you. Part of the evidence *is* you.
For (b), if we have even the barest logical reason for believing it
And we don't. Game over.
Your math illustration is defective. Timmy is obviously the atheist, who has nothing on which to base his ridiculous views. So he begs, borrows, or steals oranges from Jimmy the Christian theist, labels his oranges "grapefruit", and then starts selling them. The fact that he calls his fruit something other than what they are doesn't change the fact that they are still oranges. Unfortunately, he happens to attend a particular government school where the teachers and most of the students are perfectly willing to believe that oranges are really grapefruit, so he has a huge potential market.
If he had said "Christendom" rather than "Christianity" there would be no argument here. Christendom as a civilization is dead, but Christianity is anything but dead.
Then perhaps the OP should say what he means if he is going to be flailing about wildly with Occam's Razor.
On the side, what do you mean "lack of evidence"? There is plenty of evidence. What's lacking are honest interpretations of the evidence.
More than one billion Christians all over the world beg to differ.
One has to make the most likely choice given the evidence at hand. Most logical, lucid people who discount that which cannot be proven find themselves coming to logical conclusions.
So, on the basis of exactly *what* "evidence" (remember, you said "given the evidence at hand") have you concluded that "(b) There is no god..."?
Dude. Gilligan pre-dated Star Trek by 2 years.
It's highly unlikely that John lived 100 years after Christ's death and resurrection. At the very outside, you could guess the end of the 1st century.
Very recently there was a bit of news that studies of the Talmud had discovered a note to the effect that Gamaliel (major rabbi, from the 1st century) wrote a parody of the gospel of Matthew. If this is true, then it helps in dating at least that gospel significantly. Gamaliel died in approx. 70 AD, so this parody had to be written before then - which means the gospel of Matthew was written before then. Plus, because it was a parody, the gospel had to have been widely known - otherwise, no one would have gotten the joke. This strongly suggests that Matthew wrote his gospel even earlier - at least a decade, anyway.
Perhaps you need to upgrade or re-configure your copy of lynx ;-) Try hitting the backspace key: instant history list.
Okay - in what is regrettably an uncommonly rare occurrence on Slashdot, I'll grant that I have been mistaken. But even by a broader definition, I still don't think that Bennett warrants the label. The regular definition is that a hypocrite is someone who pretends to a virtue that he doesn't actually possess. In Bennett's case, he's a gambler - but the Roman Catholic Church - of which he is a member - doesn't condemn gambling (think: Knights of Columbus bingo).
I'm not questioning or denying that the incident has really made Bennett look bad. It certainly has. But I don't think there's any legitimate way to say that he's a hypocrite. He hasn't to my knowledge pretended to be anything other than a practicing Catholic, and his gambling doesn't change that.
I am sure that he believes gambling is not a moral behavior.
Unless you've got some documentary evidence you'd care to share, this is totally unwarranted, when there *are* reports indicating he has never publicly condemned gambling.
In his position he cannot hector others' harmless vices while having any himself and be clear of hypocrisy.
Please identify a "harmless vice" he has criticized.
A vice is a vice because it's immoral.
No - at least, certainly not in Bennett's Catholic view of the world. Smoking is widely regarded as a vice, but only uptight Baptist fundies consider it to be a sin; Catholics certainly do not. A vice may be immoral, but if it is, in the Catholic view then it's a sin and not just a vice. Smoking is a vice in that it's a "bad habit"; gambling is a vice in that it's a "bad habit".
I'll concede that I was much too strict in my use and understanding of "hypocrisy" - but even on a broader sense, I'm afraid I'm not convinced that Bennett's gambling lowers him to the level of the hypocrite.