Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:other people's money (Score 0) 413

You haven't this plan in action. It's full of fraud & abuse. I used to manage an apartment complex and at the urging of the landlord to have a full building to help his bottom line & costs; we allowed a family to move in that I had misgivings about, the elderly lady that filled out the application looked great on paper but a wheelchair bound 82 year old woman moving into an apartment with her daughter & granddaughter didn't quite fit. As time went on it unraveled, the daughter didn't work and hadn't for years, the granddaughter was mentally challenged. Between them they had at least 8 different cell phones, at that point I quit trying to keep track of numbers, it seems each agency they visited for benefits (welfare, food stamps, government clinics, etc.) handed them a cell phone and a certain number of minutes each month, apparently there was no check & balance to combine minutes on a single phone or if they already were receiving Lifeline service. They finally had a cell phone turned into a landline, about a month before they couldn't keep up the rent payment and moved elsewhere, that was also about the time I got out of the managing business after I starting seeing the landlord's standards drop to "Have they got money?" to keep the building full. I still go to the barber shop and several apartments are now empty and next to the for rent sign is a for sale sign. I know a gentleman who has a Lifeline phone, he refers to it as "Line 2" and uses his smart phone as his Line 1. He is working full time and owns the house he lives in outright, but still has a Lifeline phone, I have no idea how he did that. Adding broadband to this program can only bring about more waste, fraud & abuse. I could possibly see where it might be useful for families that have children under 18, but I'm certain that my 2 examples above would be happy to take the service, I wonder if the gentleman will have a second broadband service routed to his home?

Comment A car analogy for those interested (Score 1) 368

I'm starting a car company, our cars will be well built, stylish, full of popular bells & whistles that the public will like & uber expensive...Oh one tiny catch...you have to buy your gas at the dealership, air your low tires at the dealership, in fact everything is so proprietary that you will need to use the dealership for everything; and if you don't not only is your warranty void, we reserve the right to prosecute you...but of course our fanbois will come out in droves to defend us & line up for days when the next years model comes out.

Comment My Take (Score 1) 591

I am not in favor of capitol punishment and here are my reasons which have taken a good part of my adult life to figure out: 1. The state can & will make mistakes. Someone once said let 100 guilty men go free, instead of killing 1 innocent man. 2. If the person is innocent of the crime, they have the rest of their natural lives to exonerate themselves. If they can show malice in the trial or sentencing then they may have recourse against the state or the individual who sent them to prison. 3. If they are guilty, they have to wake up every day and knowing the person looking back at them in the mirror is guilty. That may be worse than the release of death.... 4. Life without parole is a perfectly acceptable sentence, they will no longer be a menace in society. 5. I do not have a citation, but in my home state according to a newspaper article, since 1972 we have put to death 4 people. In that time 15 I believe have died on death row before they faced the chair or the needle, so effectively they had life without parole. 6. No need to comment, I have spent over 3 decades thinking on and reading about capitol punishment. I now simply state my point and walk away, feel free to take it, leave it or dismiss it.

Comment Re:Honestly ... (Score 2) 342

Yes the balls can be rigged but after speaking with some lottery folks years ago, they go to great lengths to insure there's no tampering with the balls. The state lottery decided to do their first ever live draw remotely and I was assigned there doing first aid/security (I was in the National Guard) The lottery security guy was explaining how they had several sets of balls. All sets were weighed before and after the draw and had to be within a very narrow window of weight both before & after. the draw set is also chosen randomly and before and after the draw each ball is weighed to make sure there is no tampering as well as the set holder without the balls. So about 15 minutes prior the sets were weighed, one was chosen each ball was weighed and the set holder was weighed. The draw was done live and immediately after the everything was reweighed and passed. This was 20 years ago so the methods may have improved or changed. I don't play much but I think the big money is still ping pong balls, now the small every 5-10 minute is RNG I guess.

Comment Re:Dynasties (Score 1) 676

I was born during the Johnson Administration and was not eligible to vote until Reagan was in office. I have made the decision that for the rest of my life I will not vote for a President who has the same last name as any President who has held office since my birth. If I remember American history correctly, our founding fathers voted against dynasties with muskets and several of the foreign states we have been at odds with in the past 60 years are dynasties although they are voted in democratically (when there is only one party it's pretty easy) and we do have the sham of two parties that are simply 2 different dynasties taking turns screwing the American public. So any Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, or Obama that runs will NOT get my vote, although there might be an exception for a Johnson, as Gary Johnson is not related to Lyndon Johnson and is not part of the two party dynasty.

Comment Re:Somehow I'm reminded of Kirk (Score 1) 114

Same thing was done to Troi in TNG when she tested for full Commander. The no-win forced her to choose a crewmate to die to save the ship in a holodeck simulation. She failed until she realized someone had to die. Of course the person she ordered protested but eventually went off to their "death" for the greater good. Back to the subject: Kudos to him for thinking outside the box, very creative, hopefully it will be channeled in a positive direction.

Comment Re: call the library ? (Score 1) 246

The problem with these sorts of incidents is that on the unlikely chance it had been an actual terrorist attack, the police could be sued if they wasted any time at all. That would include calling the closed library.

That's the problem with this whole thing: the police can't afford to verify the calls and have to treat all of them as real.

Scenario goes like this: 911 call comes in 911 dispatcher verifies location and forwards dispatch info to local police Local police flag this up to SWAT for immediate response WHILE AND AT THE SAME TIME calling the library for verification Local police discover it's a prank and notify SWAT en-route so that when they arrive, they're expecting everything to be fine and just do a once-over with a single uniformed officer instead of a full SWAT deployment.

Nobody gets sued, nobody gets harmed, and the SWAT team is ready for redeployment much faster than otherwise (plus, they have MUCH less paperwork to fill out).

911 operator gets no answer as the library IS CLOSED DID YOU MISS THAT PART? I was a first responder who backed up the local SWAT team a few times, both real & false alarms. These guys take everything, including their training mock scenarios very seriously. I got shot (training rounds still hurt like a mother-) for showing up late at a mock hostage scenario at a local sports stadium once. The bad guys took control of the announcers booth, and were holding the PA guy hostage. It was funny hearing the bad guys demand a million dollars and a helicopter on the 50 yard line over the PA and insulting the SWAT team the whole time. I can only imagine what someone outside was thinking if they heard that.

Comment Both sides of the field (Score 1) 127

I used to work in the telecommunications field before I moved to IT (not a big change, but I digress) I started as a field worker, house to house doing the physical repair work. I was often warned "this caller is a real ass" by our dispatcher which I found it meant they managed to escalate the call to a real supervisor. Almost without exception when I showed up knocking on the door, they were always sweet & polite. The reason: I was a real body was standing there to help them, not read a script. After years of doing that, I briefly left the field looking elsewhere and when that idea fizzled I went back to telecommunications but decided to take my knowledge into the call center, thinking better hours, no bad weather and nearly the same pay. After training, I lasted about 3 weeks on the phone, forced to read from a script when I knew exactly what needed to be done to fix the issue, forced to use only IE, at times intentionally not telling a user the whole truth (we were not allowed to tell users that service would be interrupted for 6-8 hours overnight for upgrade work), working overnight didn't help either....drunks, bullies, and general asses calling. I had enough and had a connection to get into IT and took it.

Comment Re:Aren't these already compromised cards? (Score 1) 269

But of course, the person who is stealing your credit card info is most likely your waiter, and they have a minute or two with your card over at the POS to copy down the CVV manually.

And this is why the United States needs to move to EMV (Chip & Pin) like the rest of the world. Rather than the waiter taking your card away, they bring you a hand-held terminal, which you then take and perform the last portion of the contract yourself, with the card never leaving your hands.

Funny, my new Chip & PIN card came in the mail from one of my CC last week...still no word on the PIN yet, perhaps I need to contact them directly & no it is not my current bank...

Comment No different than Chicago Fire really (Score 1) 145

In October 2012 I was on vacation visiting an old Army buddy. He is a firefighter/paramedic and happened to be on duty the night Chicago Fire premiered. As a former firefighter/EMT myself, he invited me to the station to watch with his shift. Within 2 minutes we were all howling and how ridiculously bad the show was written. One of the guys was online chatting with some of the other firefighter/paramedics who were watching at home. I think they hit almost every stereotype they could fit in that first episode. I still watch Chicago Fire when my schedule allows, and still shake my head at how badly the show is written. I actually watch for the plot lines that aren't wrapped around fire/EMS situations. True it's fluff but that's what I will expect from CSI:Cyber, terrible hacker/computer writing, maybe a believable personal plot that will all be fluff. My police friends have the same complaints about Chicago Police too, but that's another story...

Comment Re: Take your space (Score 1) 290

Welcome to Europe! If you scream assault you will be laughed at. I am currently immigrating to the Netherlands, there are bike lanes all over the country, they are bike lanes not for anything else. My first time there, being a tourist I stopped on a bike lane to take a photo...the man who ran me over never apologized he just hit me and continued on...my Bride and in-laws politely informed me I was wrong and photos should be taken off the bike path. They also were snickering as I was picking myself up after being hit.

Comment Mother Nature Wins...Every time (Score 1) 560

Call me a skeptic. Mother Nature will do what she damn well pleases with this planet and doesn't give a rip about us humans. 99.5% of all life on this planet has gone extinct and the other .5% will including us. A good old fashioned volcanic eruption like Mt. Tambora in 1815 will cause "climate change". That was called the year without a summer in 1816. I am not so vain as to think we can do anything to this planet that she will even notice, short of a full and total nuclear exchange. Even then I'm certain that a portion of the ocean life won't even notice that anything has happened and will continue to live, evolve & go extinct as Mother Nature sees fit. As time marches on we will see cooling cycles and warming cycles and a year to year comparison is irrelevant, or as relevant as comparing sports teams team stats year after year. Rules changes and personnel changes will alter the numbers significantly. For those of you still firmly on the "global warming" bandwagon then read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... or this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... either one will confirm your belief or refute your belief.

Slashdot Top Deals

If all else fails, lower your standards.

Working...