I knew one very sneaky IT helpdesk manager who made an arrangement. The CEO and top executives would never have to call the general helpdesk number - they got a special executive support number where the lines were always clear, the techs wore suits, and they would even jump in a car and travel across town to do deskside support if the execs so desired.
And then the manager linked the executive support budget to the general helpdesk budget in such a way so that the one was a subset of the other.
So whenever cuts to the helpdesk were threatened, the first thing he would say to the CIO would be "I am all about cutting unnecessary costs. And we have this one small group which only handles a quarter as many tickets per technician as our main group. We could fold that back into the central team and save scads of money. Of course, it would mean the CEO would have to call the general support number."
And then the proposed budget cuts would mysteriously disappear, never to be talked about again.
Worked for years, right up until an exec took enough notice to figure out the scam and yanked the exec-desk right out of the Helpdesk budget and into its own little leaf on the org chart. Of course, the sneaky manager had not gained his reputation from only having one string to his bow...
Has it been the case recently that prisoners were allowed to make/take phone calls whenever they wanted?
No, really, I'm actually curious about this.
Is it an infringement on the rights of association to put a bloody big prison wall up between prisoners and those wanting to associate with them? No, it just makes getting in to talk to them harder. Likewise, making phone calls more inconvenient doesn't prevent the association, merely makes it less likely to be exercised as often or as casually.
Of course, if you have a better idea than a big US company, in China you're encouraged to build a huge factory and make enormous profits. In the US you're sued.:)
Better - make an app which uses the webcam in a smartphone to instantly determine if a ticket is a probable winner and beep/flash/something. I bet you could make a lot more than $600 a day if the analysis phase dropped from 45 seconds per card to 1.
Ooh, even better than that - equip a bunch of people with cheap smartphones with your app. They go out, collect the tickets the phone beeps at, and bring them to you (or your representative) for cash. After 24 hours or so, the app self-erases (or replaces its guts with a fake random number generator to "predict" winners), and if they don't bring their tickets in within that time after visiting you, they get cut off and you disappear (and the app self-erases at the 48-hour mark). Another bunch of people then cash the cards in at unrelated places, and give you 3/4 of the money back in return for being allowed to keep on doing it.
The only issue would be that newsagents and other vendors of the cards might start to wonder why winning cards are turning up in batches, even if it's never the same person with a fistful of winners. Or, if they're cashed in via a central lottery location, you'd need to make sure you didn't send in a big box of winning cards all at once with your name on it.
I wonder - given the physical time needed to cash a set of cards out at a kiosk without raising timewasting attention (like cashing in 100 $5 cards at once), would it even be usefully profitable to drive from cash-out point to cash-out point across the country? Is there a plausible cover story you could use to explain why you had a zillion $2, $5, and $10 winners in your hand, that reliably didn't end up with the cash-out agent asking for ID or phoning the lottery commission or the cops?
Is there anyone out there who buys genuine winning tickets for slightly less than the cash value? Who isn't likely to break your knees if your arrangement goes south?
How about mandating that the first option can only be sold as "3Mbps or more" instead of "10Mpbs or less"? Makes comparisons a lot fairer, I would imagine: 3Mbps/unlimited vs 10Mbps/100G.
How about free internet to basic bandwidth levels (revised every couple of years), with ISPs providing faster links, dedicated servers, local software archives etc as sweeteners?
Hell, there are cities where you get killed if you wind up in the wrong 'hood.
That'd be an interesting addition to urban GPS maps. "Do not drive through the red areas marked on the map at all. Enter your gang name to display additional safe and unsafe areas for you."
Come to Australia. If you break down while taking a 4WD across the desert, you might be walking for a month before you see anything more technological than a fencepost - and that's if you know how to live off the land. If not... well, I'm sure we can rent the truck out to the next tourist.
I think I could take a reduction in shill sites as the cost of all advertising being made illegal...
Mmm, advertising-free planet...
Even just making non-specifically-requested advertising illegal would be wonderful. Any ad which wasn't individually and specifically manually requested by a given person would be illegal to inflict on that person. All broadcast ads - instantly illegal. All ads in public spaces - illegal. All advertising in magazines - illegal. All advertising on websites which wasn't specifically clicked to activate or link to - illegal. You could still have brochures and ads and all that stuff, but people would have to actually ask for it, click to it, open a box in your waiting room marked "advertising", buy/acquire/opt-in to advertising-only publications (yes, they exist!), etc. No more shilling, astroturfing, or most forms of guerrilla/gonzo advertising either. FANTASTIC.
There would probably also have to be fairly strong laws regarding what counted as advertising and what was merely information about a product or service.
Why exempt the guards' phones when they're within the prison and (presumably) on the clock? Record and audit them like any others, additionally recording which registered phone made what conversations. Should cut down on guards renting their phones to prisoners, guard-phone SIMS being copied and given to prisoners, and guards' phones being stolen.
Guard wants to make a personal call on their break, well, the recording system deletes calls after howevermany weeks or months. Or they can step outside the prison and use an external cell tower. Or they can use a landline in the break room. Or they can wait until after their shift. Or someone can set up a nonmonitored microcell in a noise-damped Faraday room off (or being) the guards' break room and patch that through the prison PABX. People don't actually need to be 100% connected 24/7.
Good point. I daresay there will come a time when prisoners are simply plugged into a virtual world for their term, where all the social interactions are geared towards rehabilitation. And a hospital bed or sleep cube takes up less space than a prison cell and amenities.
Of course, there are those who will go crazy interacting with no-one but plastic-brained Sims for years, those who manipulate the Simworld into chaos and anarchy just for something to do, and those who are so crippled by the artificial experience that they wouldn't be able to handle the real world when released. Or simply those who curl up in a corner and refuse to move, since there is no point in trying to achieve anything in Simworld.
Is it so strange that it might be slightly more difficult to contact someone who is imprisoned - ie forcibly removed from society? A couple extra dollars on a phone call seems not that much, considering that it wasn't that long ago the only method of real-time contact was to physically travel to the prison. And letters still work just as well as they always did.
Perhaps making contact with an imprisoned person is deliberately more expensive/difficult so that non-imprisoned people are implicitly encouraged to shift more of their social interaction away from the prisoner and towards people who have not been deemed criminals. This not only encourages them to form more and deeper social bonds with people who are less likely to be criminals, but weakens the existing social bonds (and therefore social power) of people more likely to be criminals.
OK, yes, it also weakens bonds all around between prisoners and people outside, and this is not always a good thing, particularly when the outside folks have so few resources they are unable to regularly overcome the deliberate (if low) barriers to socialising with prisoners.
Solution: make cellphone charges apply to the callers, not the recipients. That way, the responsibility for charges is in the hands of the people who pay the bill, not the hands of ten thousand random telemarketers.
Y'know, the way other countries already do it.
I know the argument for doing it this way is that callers shouldn't be charged more for calling a cell phone over a landline, but why not? It's added convenience and more likely to get a specific person, so charge away. To get the functionality without charging callers, a landline can be auto-forwarded to a cell phone - the caller pays the cost to call the landline and the person who owns the landline (and therefore presumably set the auto-forward) pays the cost of the call from the landline to the cellphone.
Simple. Obvious. Already implemented elsewhere to great success. No wonder the US telcos don't want it.
I like it. Of course, if the guards are in on it, there's no reason their SIM cards (or copies) couldn't find their way to prisoners, who would then be able to phone out.
Perhaps if the conversations going through those microcells were recorded for (say) a month, the destination numbers scrutinized, and passive voice recognition used on the stream coming from the registered phone, this might cut down on it a bit. At least until someone starts bribing the auditors...
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I knew one very sneaky IT helpdesk manager who made an arrangement. The CEO and top executives would never have to call the general helpdesk number - they got a special executive support number where the lines were always clear, the techs wore suits, and they would even jump in a car and travel across town to do deskside support if the execs so desired.
And then the manager linked the executive support budget to the general helpdesk budget in such a way so that the one was a subset of the other.
So whenever cuts to the helpdesk were threatened, the first thing he would say to the CIO would be "I am all about cutting unnecessary costs. And we have this one small group which only handles a quarter as many tickets per technician as our main group. We could fold that back into the central team and save scads of money. Of course, it would mean the CEO would have to call the general support number."
And then the proposed budget cuts would mysteriously disappear, never to be talked about again.
Worked for years, right up until an exec took enough notice to figure out the scam and yanked the exec-desk right out of the Helpdesk budget and into its own little leaf on the org chart. Of course, the sneaky manager had not gained his reputation from only having one string to his bow...
The name is not linked to a politically viable product.
Yeah, they'd have to use an iron-clad justification like "We felt like it."
Sony is also demanding "A bajillion kajillion dollars, all the chocolate in the world, and a pony."
Has it been the case recently that prisoners were allowed to make/take phone calls whenever they wanted?
No, really, I'm actually curious about this.
Is it an infringement on the rights of association to put a bloody big prison wall up between prisoners and those wanting to associate with them? No, it just makes getting in to talk to them harder. Likewise, making phone calls more inconvenient doesn't prevent the association, merely makes it less likely to be exercised as often or as casually.
This was all done at TRIUMF
I'm making a note here...
Yeah, but who are you going to get to prosecute them.
Wikileaks. :)
Of course, if you have a better idea than a big US company, in China you're encouraged to build a huge factory and make enormous profits. In the US you're sued. :)
Or figured out ways to reduce that 45 seconds to near-nil.
Better - make an app which uses the webcam in a smartphone to instantly determine if a ticket is a probable winner and beep/flash/something. I bet you could make a lot more than $600 a day if the analysis phase dropped from 45 seconds per card to 1.
Ooh, even better than that - equip a bunch of people with cheap smartphones with your app. They go out, collect the tickets the phone beeps at, and bring them to you (or your representative) for cash. After 24 hours or so, the app self-erases (or replaces its guts with a fake random number generator to "predict" winners), and if they don't bring their tickets in within that time after visiting you, they get cut off and you disappear (and the app self-erases at the 48-hour mark). Another bunch of people then cash the cards in at unrelated places, and give you 3/4 of the money back in return for being allowed to keep on doing it.
The only issue would be that newsagents and other vendors of the cards might start to wonder why winning cards are turning up in batches, even if it's never the same person with a fistful of winners. Or, if they're cashed in via a central lottery location, you'd need to make sure you didn't send in a big box of winning cards all at once with your name on it.
I wonder - given the physical time needed to cash a set of cards out at a kiosk without raising timewasting attention (like cashing in 100 $5 cards at once), would it even be usefully profitable to drive from cash-out point to cash-out point across the country? Is there a plausible cover story you could use to explain why you had a zillion $2, $5, and $10 winners in your hand, that reliably didn't end up with the cash-out agent asking for ID or phoning the lottery commission or the cops?
Is there anyone out there who buys genuine winning tickets for slightly less than the cash value? Who isn't likely to break your knees if your arrangement goes south?
I'ma gonna drive-by-EMP the local church, yee-haw!
"Yeah, I got a NotGeorge. It's on the mantelpiece along with the Grammy."
Not everyone in the world thinks there's a huge difference between the governments of the US and China...
The Oval Office. Getting in is your problem. :)
How about mandating that the first option can only be sold as "3Mbps or more" instead of "10Mpbs or less"? Makes comparisons a lot fairer, I would imagine: 3Mbps/unlimited vs 10Mbps/100G.
How about free internet to basic bandwidth levels (revised every couple of years), with ISPs providing faster links, dedicated servers, local software archives etc as sweeteners?
Hell, there are cities where you get killed if you wind up in the wrong 'hood.
That'd be an interesting addition to urban GPS maps. "Do not drive through the red areas marked on the map at all. Enter your gang name to display additional safe and unsafe areas for you."
Come to Australia. If you break down while taking a 4WD across the desert, you might be walking for a month before you see anything more technological than a fencepost - and that's if you know how to live off the land. If not... well, I'm sure we can rent the truck out to the next tourist.
I was just going to say - we're trusting what Conroy says now? Pfft.
I think I could take a reduction in shill sites as the cost of all advertising being made illegal...
Mmm, advertising-free planet...
Even just making non-specifically-requested advertising illegal would be wonderful. Any ad which wasn't individually and specifically manually requested by a given person would be illegal to inflict on that person. All broadcast ads - instantly illegal. All ads in public spaces - illegal. All advertising in magazines - illegal. All advertising on websites which wasn't specifically clicked to activate or link to - illegal. You could still have brochures and ads and all that stuff, but people would have to actually ask for it, click to it, open a box in your waiting room marked "advertising", buy/acquire/opt-in to advertising-only publications (yes, they exist!), etc. No more shilling, astroturfing, or most forms of guerrilla/gonzo advertising either. FANTASTIC.
There would probably also have to be fairly strong laws regarding what counted as advertising and what was merely information about a product or service.
Why exempt the guards' phones when they're within the prison and (presumably) on the clock? Record and audit them like any others, additionally recording which registered phone made what conversations. Should cut down on guards renting their phones to prisoners, guard-phone SIMS being copied and given to prisoners, and guards' phones being stolen.
Guard wants to make a personal call on their break, well, the recording system deletes calls after howevermany weeks or months. Or they can step outside the prison and use an external cell tower. Or they can use a landline in the break room. Or they can wait until after their shift. Or someone can set up a nonmonitored microcell in a noise-damped Faraday room off (or being) the guards' break room and patch that through the prison PABX. People don't actually need to be 100% connected 24/7.
Good point. I daresay there will come a time when prisoners are simply plugged into a virtual world for their term, where all the social interactions are geared towards rehabilitation. And a hospital bed or sleep cube takes up less space than a prison cell and amenities.
Of course, there are those who will go crazy interacting with no-one but plastic-brained Sims for years, those who manipulate the Simworld into chaos and anarchy just for something to do, and those who are so crippled by the artificial experience that they wouldn't be able to handle the real world when released. Or simply those who curl up in a corner and refuse to move, since there is no point in trying to achieve anything in Simworld.
Is it so strange that it might be slightly more difficult to contact someone who is imprisoned - ie forcibly removed from society? A couple extra dollars on a phone call seems not that much, considering that it wasn't that long ago the only method of real-time contact was to physically travel to the prison. And letters still work just as well as they always did.
Perhaps making contact with an imprisoned person is deliberately more expensive/difficult so that non-imprisoned people are implicitly encouraged to shift more of their social interaction away from the prisoner and towards people who have not been deemed criminals. This not only encourages them to form more and deeper social bonds with people who are less likely to be criminals, but weakens the existing social bonds (and therefore social power) of people more likely to be criminals.
OK, yes, it also weakens bonds all around between prisoners and people outside, and this is not always a good thing, particularly when the outside folks have so few resources they are unable to regularly overcome the deliberate (if low) barriers to socialising with prisoners.
Solution: make cellphone charges apply to the callers, not the recipients. That way, the responsibility for charges is in the hands of the people who pay the bill, not the hands of ten thousand random telemarketers.
Y'know, the way other countries already do it.
I know the argument for doing it this way is that callers shouldn't be charged more for calling a cell phone over a landline, but why not? It's added convenience and more likely to get a specific person, so charge away. To get the functionality without charging callers, a landline can be auto-forwarded to a cell phone - the caller pays the cost to call the landline and the person who owns the landline (and therefore presumably set the auto-forward) pays the cost of the call from the landline to the cellphone.
Simple. Obvious. Already implemented elsewhere to great success. No wonder the US telcos don't want it.
I like it. Of course, if the guards are in on it, there's no reason their SIM cards (or copies) couldn't find their way to prisoners, who would then be able to phone out.
Perhaps if the conversations going through those microcells were recorded for (say) a month, the destination numbers scrutinized, and passive voice recognition used on the stream coming from the registered phone, this might cut down on it a bit. At least until someone starts bribing the auditors...