Category: Just Stupid (page 12 of 12)

“I think you’ll hear the president say very clearly that he will not tolerate price gouging,” McClellan said.

CNN.com – Bush orders gasoline price probe – Apr 25, 2006.

I don’t really dislike the oil companies making money, and except for it hurting my pocket I don’t even know if the oil companies are doing anything illegal. If they made “normal” profits would anyone be upset with them or would people be upset with the source of oil again?

Tonight I stopped to fill up my gas tank. My fuel gauge is broken on my car (yeah, have to get it fixed). It shows how much gas I have based on how the car “feels” and it had been a while since the last fill up. Per the manufacturer I fill it with premium gas. I drive an SUV so some more pain for that.

A little math here: premium at the Mobil station was $3.459 per gallon (saying $3.46 is way too straight forward), I filled up 14.671 gallons, rounded comes out to $50.75.

Last year we had hurricane Katrina as the excuse. But the real problem here is that gas is driven by supply and demand. Congress wont even make oil company executives swear to tell the truth. What will President Bush do, put Dick Cheney in charge of investigating the oil companies?

Oil companies are (probably) not breaking any laws, they get a pass from the government on whatever they want. Why should they build more infrastructure in or around the U.S.? We have laws that limit that, we have regulations (good or bad) which make it hard to do. Why ruin a good thing when congress and the administration make it easier to rake in the dough than create new infrastructure?

Except for politicians making pointless noise, I expect prices to keep going up.

Recently the maker of the StarForce apparently threatened to sue an author on Boing Boing for talking about his bad experience with their copy protection driver scam. This made me laugh since I removed a game partly because it installed StarForce drivers.

For Christmas my brother Alek got me the Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood video game. Normally this would be a good match since I enjoy playing first person shooters. The game looked okay but they got many little things wrong. The cinematic cut scenes were awful. I was frequently somewhere far from where the people talking in the scene were. And my character was frozen in place while a conversation was going on. I found the game play to be a little stifled.

But what really turned me off was the copy protection system. After I installed and tried to run the game, I got a message stating that I had to reboot in order to activate the driver. Driver? I had installed a game not a piece of hardware. Why did they need a driver?

The driver was part of the StarForce copy protection scam. From the web site for “StarForce Drivers Removal” the text says

Some versions of StarForce Copy Protection will install dedicated drivers on your PC. Those drivers are necessary for the StarForce specific CD/DVD checking procedure, only. They do not include any hidden functionality. The drivers are active only at execution of the protected application. StarForce constantly improves their drivers to keep them compatible with the latest versions of Windows operating systems.

See http://www.onlinesecurity-on.com/protect.phtml?c=55 for more information. Google is your friend.

The underlining in the text is mine, but that statement is just nonsense. The real reason they install the drivers is to interfere with your system should you have the CD in the drive when you try to use a CD-ROM burner. So even if you are not running the game the drivers run and interfere with your system as the game publisher feels appropriate.

I installed a game. Looking at the back of the box I see that they do sorta warn the user with some disclaimer. Now I normally dislike that I need to keep the CD in the drive when I play the game but I do it. Call of Duty 2 and F.E.A.R. are like that. But AFAIK no drivers are installed and those two games are great.

Windows XP Pro (any version of Windows really) is an unstable environment. And at no time did I see any problems with my system that I could point to the StarForce drivers and say “Them! They hurt my box!” But installing drivers needlessly is just plain stupid. If Ubisoft wants to check the CD by running code when I actually play their game, well I think that’s rude but okay. But to have their drivers installed and running when I am not even playing their game? Nuts.

I removed the game and the drivers and in the future will check the game before I buy. I will look at the back of the game for this warning and not buy it. Game publishers who use this protection scam seriously do not get it. Game piracy may be a problem but people who pirate games get around all the protection. Installing drivers just hurts the end user. This is a game, not launch-the-missiles-now software.

This one irked me too much and I have to share.

Lily and I are on vacation this week so we’re sleeping late and getting the kids fed and bathed after 8am. Vacation: it’s all good. Around 8:45am today I heard my cell phone ring. I was busy wrestling with my son, so I let it go to voice mail.

15 minutes later I checked the voice mail. It was marked "Urgent". Here’s what I heard.

"Yeah this message is for Jack Someone, my name is the John Doe and it is extremely important that I speak to you as soon as possible regarding your case that I’m handling.

My firm has been retained to have a -fuzzy sounds like- criminal issue for the sheriff to repossess your Name-Brand Car and before any other charges that are pending against you are filed or any subpoenas for depositions issued to family, friends, relatives, or business associates that may be familiar with the current status of this collateral, I’d like to give you the chance to avoid this.

My contact number is 1-800-555-5555 extension 665 and I’ll hold service pending immediate contact. Also it’s purported that John Dembowski may be driving this vehicle."

Names and details changed, in case you don’t realize it.

Gee, that sounded just like a collection agent. I worked with Jack Someone in the past, I have no idea why they were calling me or how my cell phone number came in their possession. I even knew the last part was just to get a rise out of me and call back, even if they did get my first name wrong. The prudent thing would be to just deleted the message; if someone had something real to say to me they’d used registered mail.

Even knowing that, I called.

John: Hello? Me: Is this John Doe?

John: Yes it is.

Me: You just called me, regarding Jack Someone.

John: Yes, yes I did.

Me: I don’t know where you got that information but I am not driving Jack’s car, and I don’t know what this is about.

John: Well, that is what he is putting out there. Have you had any contact with him?

Me: I worked with Jack two years ago at ACME Sprockets.

John: I want you to listen very carefully, I am going to ask-

Me: I want you to listen to me very carefully, I am hanging up now.

And I hung up. He called my cell phone less than a minute later.

John: I want to ask-

Me: John if you call me back again I am going to report you to the authorities.

And promptly hung up again.

I misplaced Jack’s number so I instead called a mutual friend. He conferenced in Jack and we chatted. Jack is a good guy and he was very apologetic. He asked if I could send him the details, so I sent him an e-mail as above and included a MP3 of the message I got.

I wonder what the success rate on using tactics like that are? For some people just sounding authoritative works. If they can get you to lie (what little I said was truthful and accurate), they can work that. They want to get you to do their work for them and if that means annoying some people to get to someone, they do it.

The positive result for them is getting the person dodging them to contact them. So on that score, John Doe did his job well. Jack contacted the original company that sent the job to John Doe.

Next time I will just delete the damn message.

I am sure that there are ethical, effective, collection professionals somewhere. I am equally sure that under the right conditions (say, on an episode of MythBusters) pigs really can fly.