do the world a favor and skip a couple hours of TV and make a telemarketing firm's life hell.
You know what would be awesome? If somebody were to set up a phone bank to which we could forward telemarketing calls to tie up the agents' time without having to actually stay on the phone feigning interest. It wouldn't have to be too fancy - just a basic IVR that did something like this:
Joe Blow: Hello?
Telemarketer: Hello! My name is Jim and I'm...
Joe Blow: Oh, hi Jim. Can you hold on a sec? I want to forward you to my other phone because I don't like to keep this line tied up. It'll just take a sec.
Telemarketer: Uh, sure, no problem.
[forward to 555-whatever] [ring ring] IVR: Thanks for waiting - I really need to keep that other line open. So what can I do for you?
Telemarketer: Oh, uh, as I was saying, my name is Jim and I'm calling on behalf of...
IVR: Oh, oops - can you hold on a second? Somebody's at the door. Be right back, thanks!
Telemarketer: Oh, um... ok
...[random delay between 1 and 5 minutes]... IVR: Sorry, I'm back. My neighbor Shirley is looking for her dogs again. Ha ha ha ha ha.
Telemarketer: Oh, no problem sir. So, as I was saying, I'm calling on behalf of The Human Fund. We see that you donated...
IVR: Oh, crap. I have to get the roast out of the oven. Can you hold on a sec again? Sorry - thanks!
Telemarketer: Uhhh, ok I guess...
...[random delay]...
...and so on. Surely such a service wouldn't be too terribly expensive or difficult to run these days, would it?
For the love of God, why do people insist on build entire websites in Flash? Sure, it's pretty and shiny, but it also breaks navigation, as anybody who's ever made the mistake of hitting the back button from 4 levels deep into a Flash-only site knows all too well. And good luck bookmarking an internal page for future reference, or God forbid, trying to explain to somebody else how to get to said internal page, especially if the idiot designer decided to make his links shaped like bunnies and rainbows because standard buttons with text labels are just too utilitarian.
This is why people learned to hate Flash-heavy sites. Flash is fine if used appropriately, but site navigation belongs in standard HTML that provides a predictable user experience.
Good movies don't have to cost that. The problem is that nobody watches them, most people want to see the most expensive brain-dead CGI fest that can be made.
The Ice Storm is a very good movie. It had a budget of $18 million. Critics at Rotten Tomatoes give it 75%+. Yet it failed, because people prefer to watch overpriced shit.
People also want to see movies starring A-list celebrities, and made by/with expensive directors, producers, scripts and scores.
Take your $18 million movie and add in two stars, correspondingly high-end producer and director, a script based on a popular franchise and a world-class score, perhaps with an original song by a top pop star, and you're well over $100 million, even if you cut everything else to the bone. Add in the CGI fest and you're easily over $200M.
And what's up with their $100 "promotioal" price, and the claim that "an empty 500 GB Seagate hard drive usually sells for $140"? It took me all of 20 seconds to find a 500 GB Seagate on Newegg for $54.99 with free shipping.
Or create an army of your clones and send them to rob a few banks, then kill each other off, thus framing you for multiple counts of bank robbery, murder and violation of human cloning proscription.
They gave us a $40 discount on the laptop, and charged us for the optimization, "so it will show as a sale for the optimization"
Presumably this is because the sales staff have their performance measured based largely on their ratio of add-on sales to total unit sales. Typically these things apply not only to the floor sales staff, but also bubble up to their supervisors, the shift managers, the store manager and the district manager, which tends to make such contrivances endemic to the organization. This way everybody in the chain gets credit for whatever sales incentives are in place while shifting the discount to a less-noticed line item in the management reports.
There was something posted a couple months ago about very similar schemes being practiced at either Staples or Office Depot.
As long as you don't take part in the settlement, you can still sue them individually.
Actually, as with most class action settlements, everybody is opted in by default, and you must explicitly opt out in order to retain your rights to sue on your own. Didn't hear about the settlement in time to file a claim or opt out? Gee, that's a shame.
Here's a bit by Schneier on how to recognize plaintext. Basically, plaintext looks like plaintext, either because it's intelligible lanugage, or because it matches the characteristics of a standard document format (headers, layout, etc.)
How one would go about programming a computer to recognize plaintext, I have no idea, but presumably somebody smarter than me has worked it out.
Never happen. All it takes is one accident after the cuts, and all fingers point back to the Congressmen who championed the cost cutting bill. No politician worth his salt will put himself in the position to be the target of a statement like this:
We at the FAA told the Congressional committee that we couldn't afford to reduce staffing levels without impacting the safety of the air transport system. They bulled ahead in spite of our clear and repeated warnings, and now we have the proof of our words - a tragic midair collision of two commercial aircraft resulting from inadequate staffing of the ATC system necessitated by the budget cuts mandated in the Make Government More Efficient Act.
Actually, it probably would be more like coupons for $50 off a retail purchase of Windows 7. Meanwhile, the plaintiffs' lawyers, having successfully consolidated the various claims into a class action, would receive several million in cash under the terms of the settlement.
It's actually usually an internal control imposed by the auditors as an anti-fraud measure. The idea is that individuals with certain levels of access and responsibility sometimes are in a position to defraud their employer and cover it up by cooking the books. It can be extremely difficult to uncover such a scheme if the employee is always at their desk. By forcing everybody to take vacation, the company makes it much more likely that any such schemes will be uncovered while another person is doing the thief's job.
I hadn't heard of being forced to take your leave at specific times on short notice, but that would make the control more effective by limiting the ability to hide things from the guy who covers the job while the thief is away. That being the case, it's not surprising that the companies with such policies include banks.
However, a person of the 18th century wouldn't have any context in which to evaluate the relative planet-shrinking abilities of cars vs. planes. Ballpark it at 500 miles per day for a car vs. 10,000 miles per day for a plane. To a Parisian commoner of that era, that's a matter of being able to travel to Turin vs. Tokyo, both of which are just names of far away places to him, if he's even heard of them.
For comparative purposes, imagine that somebody from the future were to show a modern Earthican two forms of space travel - one that could take you to Polaris (430 light years) in a day, and one that could take you to the Orion Nebula (1,500 ly). Sure, if you know the distances it's obvious that one's faster than the other, but what does that mean to you? Both are so far from anything you know, and so far beyond any distance that you ever imagined travelling, that the difference is meaningless to you.
airspeed of an unladen European swallow in furlongs per fortnight
Google also provides top-ranked sites where this is calculated, but W|A gives a definite answer along with assumptions.
However, changing the query to "airspeed of an unladen African swallow in furlongs per fortnight" returns this:
Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
...but removing the unit conversion from the query:"airspeed of an unladen African swallow" returns this:
there is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African swallow (even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant)
Slashdot Mirror
do the world a favor and skip a couple hours of TV and make a telemarketing firm's life hell.
You know what would be awesome? If somebody were to set up a phone bank to which we could forward telemarketing calls to tie up the agents' time without having to actually stay on the phone feigning interest. It wouldn't have to be too fancy - just a basic IVR that did something like this:
...[random delay between 1 and 5 minutes]...
...[random delay]...
...and so on. Surely such a service wouldn't be too terribly expensive or difficult to run these days, would it?
Joe Blow: Hello?
Telemarketer: Hello! My name is Jim and I'm...
Joe Blow: Oh, hi Jim. Can you hold on a sec? I want to forward you to my other phone because I don't like to keep this line tied up. It'll just take a sec.
Telemarketer: Uh, sure, no problem.
[forward to 555-whatever]
[ring ring]
IVR: Thanks for waiting - I really need to keep that other line open. So what can I do for you?
Telemarketer: Oh, uh, as I was saying, my name is Jim and I'm calling on behalf of...
IVR: Oh, oops - can you hold on a second? Somebody's at the door. Be right back, thanks!
Telemarketer: Oh, um... ok
IVR: Sorry, I'm back. My neighbor Shirley is looking for her dogs again. Ha ha ha ha ha.
Telemarketer: Oh, no problem sir. So, as I was saying, I'm calling on behalf of The Human Fund. We see that you donated...
IVR: Oh, crap. I have to get the roast out of the oven. Can you hold on a sec again? Sorry - thanks!
Telemarketer: Uhhh, ok I guess...
For the love of God, why do people insist on build entire websites in Flash? Sure, it's pretty and shiny, but it also breaks navigation, as anybody who's ever made the mistake of hitting the back button from 4 levels deep into a Flash-only site knows all too well. And good luck bookmarking an internal page for future reference, or God forbid, trying to explain to somebody else how to get to said internal page, especially if the idiot designer decided to make his links shaped like bunnies and rainbows because standard buttons with text labels are just too utilitarian.
This is why people learned to hate Flash-heavy sites. Flash is fine if used appropriately, but site navigation belongs in standard HTML that provides a predictable user experience.
Why don't they just cut to the chase and load the drive with 20 different trojans instead?
I don't think it would work very well with those flopping around inside the case.
Good movies don't have to cost that. The problem is that nobody watches them, most people want to see the most expensive brain-dead CGI fest that can be made.
The Ice Storm is a very good movie. It had a budget of $18 million. Critics at Rotten Tomatoes give it 75%+. Yet it failed, because people prefer to watch overpriced shit.
People also want to see movies starring A-list celebrities, and made by/with expensive directors, producers, scripts and scores.
Take your $18 million movie and add in two stars, correspondingly high-end producer and director, a script based on a popular franchise and a world-class score, perhaps with an original song by a top pop star, and you're well over $100 million, even if you cut everything else to the bone. Add in the CGI fest and you're easily over $200M.
And what's up with their $100 "promotioal" price, and the claim that "an empty 500 GB Seagate hard drive usually sells for $140"? It took me all of 20 seconds to find a 500 GB Seagate on Newegg for $54.99 with free shipping.
Or create an army of your clones and send them to rob a few banks, then kill each other off, thus framing you for multiple counts of bank robbery, murder and violation of human cloning proscription.
Boy, are you in trouble, buddy.
They gave us a $40 discount on the laptop, and charged us for the optimization, "so it will show as a sale for the optimization"
Presumably this is because the sales staff have their performance measured based largely on their ratio of add-on sales to total unit sales. Typically these things apply not only to the floor sales staff, but also bubble up to their supervisors, the shift managers, the store manager and the district manager, which tends to make such contrivances endemic to the organization. This way everybody in the chain gets credit for whatever sales incentives are in place while shifting the discount to a less-noticed line item in the management reports.
There was something posted a couple months ago about very similar schemes being practiced at either Staples or Office Depot.
As long as you don't take part in the settlement, you can still sue them individually.
Actually, as with most class action settlements, everybody is opted in by default, and you must explicitly opt out in order to retain your rights to sue on your own. Didn't hear about the settlement in time to file a claim or opt out? Gee, that's a shame.
From the table at the bottom of the official settlement page:
Here's a bit by Schneier on how to recognize plaintext. Basically, plaintext looks like plaintext, either because it's intelligible lanugage, or because it matches the characteristics of a standard document format (headers, layout, etc.)
How one would go about programming a computer to recognize plaintext, I have no idea, but presumably somebody smarter than me has worked it out.
We at the FAA told the Congressional committee that we couldn't afford to reduce staffing levels without impacting the safety of the air transport system. They bulled ahead in spite of our clear and repeated warnings, and now we have the proof of our words - a tragic midair collision of two commercial aircraft resulting from inadequate staffing of the ATC system necessitated by the budget cuts mandated in the Make Government More Efficient Act.
Actually, it probably would be more like coupons for $50 off a retail purchase of Windows 7. Meanwhile, the plaintiffs' lawyers, having successfully consolidated the various claims into a class action, would receive several million in cash under the terms of the settlement.
Loost. Duh.
It's actually usually an internal control imposed by the auditors as an anti-fraud measure. The idea is that individuals with certain levels of access and responsibility sometimes are in a position to defraud their employer and cover it up by cooking the books. It can be extremely difficult to uncover such a scheme if the employee is always at their desk. By forcing everybody to take vacation, the company makes it much more likely that any such schemes will be uncovered while another person is doing the thief's job.
I hadn't heard of being forced to take your leave at specific times on short notice, but that would make the control more effective by limiting the ability to hide things from the guy who covers the job while the thief is away. That being the case, it's not surprising that the companies with such policies include banks.
"Don K"?
Right - this is called a trusted path.
Could be worse. Try <Left Shift><Right Shift><Alt><Esc>.
However, a person of the 18th century wouldn't have any context in which to evaluate the relative planet-shrinking abilities of cars vs. planes. Ballpark it at 500 miles per day for a car vs. 10,000 miles per day for a plane. To a Parisian commoner of that era, that's a matter of being able to travel to Turin vs. Tokyo, both of which are just names of far away places to him, if he's even heard of them.
For comparative purposes, imagine that somebody from the future were to show a modern Earthican two forms of space travel - one that could take you to Polaris (430 light years) in a day, and one that could take you to the Orion Nebula (1,500 ly). Sure, if you know the distances it's obvious that one's faster than the other, but what does that mean to you? Both are so far from anything you know, and so far beyond any distance that you ever imagined travelling, that the difference is meaningless to you.
airspeed of an unladen European swallow in furlongs per fortnight
Google also provides top-ranked sites where this is calculated, but W|A gives a definite answer along with assumptions.
However, changing the query to "airspeed of an unladen African swallow in furlongs per fortnight" returns this:
Hmmmm...
Heh. I was just watching that episode on DVD last week.
If they can figure out how to work them.
Ok, so now that we've established the reward, what's the risk?
CAPS FILTER OFF FOR THE DAY?
This thing. (See The April Fool - 2nd from the bottom of the list.)
I'm confused now, though. A lot of people seem to think the achievement is for posting in the story about achievements rather than this one.
I thought they meant the actual April Fools story, so I posted a useless comment over there. Oh well. I guess I'm covered either way now.
I have nothing relevant to say. I'm just whoring for the April Fool achievement.